Crazy Enough (17 page)

Nobody asked for IDs downtown, so I could go anywhere. There was no shortage of filthy good time hangs in Alphabet City, and The Alcatraz was my favorite. It was a rock 'n' roll bar on the corner of St. Mark's Place and Avenue A. The beautiful bartender there, Raff, became my best friend in New York, and she remains so to this day. Raff was also the raven-haired “Queen Vixen,” one of the singers in The Cycle Sluts From Hell, a female-fronted metal band that ruled the Lower East Side. Their hit single was “I Wish You Were a Beer,” and they toured with Motorhead. I couldn't believe she was my friend. Raff and I would drink and smoke and fuck and snort
whatever came across our faces. There were loud rock shows and sticky strip clubs, drag queens and dealers, bathroom three-ways and bar fights.

I had found my people.

That wasn't the case at school. While enjoying my lowlife, rock 'n' roll dirtbaggery, I started to feel out of place in the sensitive, bookish atmosphere of school. I wasn't any good at acting, nor did I have the slightest clue how to improve. The only acting I was any good at was my haughty who-gives-a-fuckness. My teachers there were some of the best, and I honestly wanted to do better, to be better, but I didn't get it. Despite all my bravado, I envied my classmates, those serious, gazelle-bodied actresses, clip-clopping their dainty golden hooves through the halls. I felt like a big, loud jackass among them.

But I could sing my big, loud jackass off, and that was the only thing going for me at the Academy. Someone at school told me that I was built for Broadway. I assumed that meant fat, but a good singer.

In 1989, though, the biggest shows were
Phantom of the Opera, Cats,
and
Les Miserables,
and boooring! The higher ups at school thought me a
perfect
candidate for that world. I could think of nothing more ridiculous. I wanted to do well at school, and make my dad proud, but, just like with crew, I felt myself being touted for being amazing at something I hated.

Suffice to say, I was not buying the whole Broadway angle. I wanted to be Joey Ramone, not Judy Garland. To my mind, those Broadway musicals were huge, garish pageants of lame. They were way too clean, pretty, and controlled with tidy, wind-up endings. And, from what I could tell, those singers weren't getting to do coke and fuck on pool tables, so it clearly wasn't for me.

Sadly, neither was being in a rock band. It never even occurred to me to try. Even though I was pretending to be all rock 'n' roll,
slamming shots and lines, crawling through the rock 'n' roll landscape of Alphabet City, I never considered myself
worthy
of being in a band. You had to be hot to be in a band. I wasn't hot or cool, or at-death's-door skinny, like all the beautifully wasted denizens of The Cat Club and CBGB were.

But in my new, yet familiar, community of misanthropes and freaks downtown, I settled easily into becoming completely fucked up again. I drank until four in the morning, did blow to keep going, and would have to sweat through my scenes and schoolwork. Every Wednesday was Tommy Gunn's night at Cat Club, where Raff's band played along with other punk and glam-rock bands. Some were god-awful, but everybody rules when everybody's wasted, so it was always a good time. Every Sunday was rock 'n' roll church at the Limelight, a rock club housed in a real church. Raff and I would sit in the attic VIP lounge under the spires, and laugh at the models and eyeliner pirates who would be keeling over from drink and AquaNet.

In the late eighties, early nineties, there was a trashy, junkie glam thing going on. The rock 'n' roll clubs were crawling with big, sprayed hair and torn-up tight black rags of denim or leather. Old-school rockers, self-styled like legendary punk rockers Iggy Pop, The Ramones, then Dead Boys, Lords of the New Church, they were giving way to a new school of flashy California glam like Motley Crue, Guns N' Roses, and LA pretty boy waste-oids. Fashionwise, it made for the perfect storm of street-hardened punk and kinda gay and fluffy. We called those boys “eyeliner pirates.” And they filled the Limelight every Sunday for our jeering entertainment, and the occasional men's room tonsil romp.

The VIP lounge at Limelight is where I first encountered Jägermeister and chicks.

The first girl I ever slept with was a dangerously young, fox-faced fibber named Dizzy. Her mom called her “Kippy,” though her real name was Karen Weitz. She could smoke cigarettes with her vagina at sixteen and could swing her Lilliputian, butter-cream body into any lap, party, or club she wanted, anytime. Dizz was always on the guest list, and was as full of shit as a girl that young and that beautiful could be. I adored her. I also adored Jägermeister, but that love affair ended badly.

“It's herbal,” Raff cackled as we slammed cold shots of the German syrup in the dark church attic strewn with cum-soaked couches and wannabes, “It's good for ya!”

That was the battle cry all night as more shots would arrive at our little corner. “You want some more? It's
herbal!
”

Jägermeister. The name means “Master of the Hunt,” and they aren't kidding. One can only assume the Germans called it that because the shit sneaks up on you and beats your brains out. The only other thing I know of that still hunts like that (besides date rapists) are Gila monsters.

As soon as you start limping, it's pretty much game over. Before you know it, you're waking up naked in a Denny's bathroom with bruised brains, a phone number on your leg, and a thank-you note on your back, both written in barbecue sauce.

Raff was a beautiful badass. With her Cherokee cheekbones, big dark eyes, and a satin mane of long inky hair, she always looked like an album cover. Her recent ex-boyfriend was a tall, lanky, handsome, dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers fuckwit. Theirs was an ugly, public breakup. He hurt her, so I hated him, and wished him harm.

A few weeks before Raff and I discovered Jäger, her dumb-fuck ex
had thrown her belongings out of her fifth-floor apartment window. I got the tearful phone call and went right away to her place on Avenue B. Some of her stuff had fallen into a neighbor's yard, so I clambered over the fence between the buildings and found her jewelry box.

I was feeling around for her necklaces and rings in the scrubby grass when I heard a metallic
click
very close by.

“What the fock you doin' theya?” came a dry croak of a woman's voice.

“I'm just looking for my friend's stuff.” I froze on the ground.

Raff had been shining a flashlight from her yard over the fence.She called down to the voice in the dark. “My crazy ex threw my stuff out my window and some of it's in your yard, I'm sorry we woke you up.”

“Ya didn't wake me, I've had a gun on ya for ten minutes,” she chuckled. “Youz can look in the mawning, get the fuck outta my yad now.”

The fact that DumbFuck nearly got me killed was still fresh in my mind, weeks later, when Raff and I were hanging hard with the Master of the Hunt. We were stumbling out of a cab at her place, when she slurred, “God, every time I see that fuckin' bike . . .”
The fuckin' bike
was a motorcycle given to both Raff and DumbFuck, but he decided to keep it for himself. “I should fill the fucking tank with corn syrup, I swear.”

“Huh? This bike here?” I asked, before horse-kicking it against the brick wall of her building. I loved making her laugh, and her cackling echoed through the concrete night world we stood in, as I bounced the motorcycle back and forth between my cowboy boot and the wall. Later, we listed all his known diseases in bold, magic markery block letters across his apartment door. Served him right for breaking her heart and staying in the same building.

For a while, almost getting killed was just a footnote to a fun night. A turning point came when Raff and I stayed up all night at a friend's apartment. The friend was a huge cocaine dealer, and a really nice person. He was also very generous with his stuff, so we ended up doing our weight in coke. On this particular night, we stayed up passing around a grinder, talking that trembling, dry, desperate, coke drivel, and chain-smoking into the morning.

Limping home under God's fierce flashlight of bright sun, navigating through the packs of freshly washed, normal folk, I felt more hideous than I could ever recall. My eyes felt like they had been scooped out with a camping spork, rolled in cat litter, then shoved back into my skull. My skull that crawled with itchy little demons, chirping,
Loser! Loser! Loser!
I stayed home from school. Raff and I wept on the phone to each other. “I am never doing blow again. Ever.” She said, her sultry voice truly thrashed and hoarse, “God. Me neither. I am totally fucking up at school. We gotta stop.”

She did. I
sort of
did.

Sometime later, I was doing some day-drinking on a Sunday. Raff was working and we were going to hit the Limelight later on. But day-drinking can ruin your night, and this day was going that way fast.

I had made a quickie friend, one of those drug-fueled friendships that happen over bottles and lines, needles and pills. Chemical camaraderie that feels so real and life-affirming while you're getting completely fucked up, but fade as fast as a cherry high.

She was painfully thin, a stick bug in a tank top. She had hair like Chrissie Hynde and a laugh like Danny DeVito, and at one point, I think, I told her I loved her.

She tearfully told me about something bad that had happened to her, and I wept right back at her pretending to understand. She kept buying drinks and I kept drinking them.

The sun was still high in the sky when she clinked her glass against the fourth or fifth shot of Jack she had bought me. I downed it. She had also bought smokes and a slice of pizza. She was my soul mate.

I managed to say, “I gotta stop drinking, I'm going out tonight and I'm already fuckin' wasted!”

“Me, too! I'm going out later, too!” She blew smoke at me. “We should go to my place and take a nap.”

“I would totally die for you. Let's go.”

Somewhere in our zigzagging, drunken singing, arms slung over each other's shoulders path to her place, I heard her say something about lines.

Fuck, yeah. That'll be great! It'll take the drunk down a peg, and it means she has blow and will all night. My new best friend
rules
! I'll never do coke again
later.

Though my memory of her apartment is fuzzy at best, it stood out to me right away that the chick must have dough, or she was fucking someone rich. The apartment was pretty decent-sized and had real furniture in it. No milk crates with tapestries draped over them, no futon on the floor or mish-mash, thrown-away dressers. Nicer still was the familiar chop-scrape sound of razor to mirror.

Huzzah!

“Help yourself, I gotta pee.” She gestured to a powder-smeared rectangular mirror that sat on a low shelf. There was a decent heap of powder scraped out of a magazine-folded envelope, but only a tiny couple of lines set up for me. I took the razor and scraped the two lines to make one bigger and made a matching line next to it.