Electroboy (17 page)

“What do most people call you?” I ask him.

“Just Jeffrey, I guess. Sometimes Jeff,” he answers. “Does anybody ever call you Andrew?”

“No, just Patrick,” I say. “My real close friends just call me Patrick.”

He stares at me.

“You should let your friends call you Patrick, too. Then you wouldn’t have to reprint your checkbook or passport, get new credit cards, monogram your picture frames or stationery or any of that kind of stuff,” I add.

“Go fuck yourself,” he yells.

I start laughing. Patrick turns on the television and starts flipping through the channels. He offers me a hit of coke, which I gladly accept, and it gets me going again. This time I feel refreshed. I’m wearing my new uniform—sweats and a T-shirt—and I feel clean and smell good. Smoking crack is like a sport. It should be an Olympic sport. I would be very good. But Patrick, I think, would be a gold medalist. He goes into the bedroom and changes into a pair of briefs and a T-shirt. He feeds Einstein and then gets on the phone with someone he calls Matt. Twenty minutes later Matt arrives at the apartment with more coke, and I insist on paying for it. He tells me to put away my money. I recognize Matt from some of the photographs. Patrick introduces me as a filmmaker friend from Paris. Matt is about thirty, a scaled-down version of Patrick, with short brown hair and sad-looking blue eyes. He’s obviously a regular visitor, as Einstein makes a big fuss over him. Patrick asks Matt to take Einstein out for a walk, and the two go running for the door. On the way out, Matt and Patrick look at each other and smile. I quickly decide to put my regular clothes back on and leave, but Patrick insists that I stay. “Don’t go—we’ll have fun,” he assures me. We’re going to smoke more coke when Matt and Einstein come back. He convinces me. When Matt returns in about fifteen minutes, he puts on Blondie again. We’re all getting high. “What do you do in Paris?” he asks me. Make films.
What kind of films? Mostly documentaries about fish. Flicks about fish? Yes, fish.
Poisson
. Matt laughs. Soon all three of us are sitting in our briefs. Tropical fish? Actually, all sorts of fish. Are there fish in the Seine? I laugh at the question. Matt seems puzzled and takes another hit of coke while Patrick and I laugh at him. Then Matt and Patrick start touching each other on the couch, and I go into the kitchen and start making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on toast. By the time I’m done, the two of them are in the bedroom, naked, sucking each other’s cocks. They’re boyfriends, is my guess. Also that there is no girlfriend for Patrick. Or she’s out of town with a touring company of
Cats
and she’s not coming home for a few years. I come back into the room eating my sandwich. They stop midsuck. Matt sits up and asks me how I met Patrick. Same way you probably did. The Parisian fish-documentary story was just a little joke. Move over. Three naked guys in a bedroom totally coked-up playing with one another in the middle of the day. Or night. Einstein’s confused. It’s dark, but that’s because the blinds are closed. It could be light. Patrick and Matt and I are smoking and the two of them are kissing and they look beautiful together and we all have four letters in our first names and we all have blue eyes but Patrick still has the biggest cock. I’m not sure if I should be watching or playing, but Patrick keeps pulling me closer to him and Matt and both of them start taking turns sucking my cock while I’m getting high. I wonder if anyone else is coming over to play.

Later Patrick decides to order in some Chinese food and asks what we want. I tell him anything he likes; I eat everything. I lie in bed with Matt and ask him if he’s okay with all this. Sure. He inhales a huge hit of coke and blows it into my mouth; I get extremely high from it. Patrick watches the whole thing from the phone. The food comes, and we put on our briefs. Dumplings with hot sesame oil, moo shoo pork with pancakes, shrimp with walnuts, Szechuan chicken and eggplant with garlic sauce—and Diet Coke. We don’t really eat much of it. But if I die in this apartment, I wouldn’t want to be the one to have to do the autopsy on me.

David Letterman is talking to Chevy Chase, so I know it’s after midnight, and still nobody has shot his load. Einstein’s been out only once since I arrived; it’s somebody’s turn to walk him. Don’t look at me. Ask the doorman or the concierge. All I know is that I need to be inside dimly lit enclosed spaces when I’m coked-up. Patrick throws on a pair of jeans and plays self-sacrificing dog walker. I end up with Matt in the bedroom—we’re naked in a matter of minutes and together in the shower before Patrick is back. I met him on the phone. Me too. Matt’s your real name? Yeah. Andy? Yeah; little boy’s name, huh?

After Patrick returns, we start passing around the pipe again. I’m watching Patrick and Matt together and stroking my cock, and all of a sudden I can’t hold back any longer and it starts building and building until finally I just let it all go and shoot all over the two of them and all I can see in front of my eyes is a big pinwheel going in circles. For about three seconds my brain freezes and everything shuts off—just the pinwheel, no sound. And I feel this tremendous guilt for having spent the last twenty-four hours in this apartment for these three seconds and six spurts of cum. So I clean up a little, put my clothes on, and say good-bye to Patrick and Matt, who are entangled on the bed. Einstein follows me to the door and looks up at me. I go into the kitchen and feed him and leave.

My friends decide that I need to start dating again. They figure I’m successful, good-looking, and funny and should be in a relationship and put Allison in my past. Lucy, who has returned from Paris, turns out to be a well-intentioned and dedicated matchmaker, but she doesn’t understand that I’m incapable of connecting to anyone in a serious way. She tells me that she has the perfect woman for me and introduces me to a good friend of hers, an actress named Jane Fletcher, who works as a waitress at Elio’s on the Upper East Side. The first time I meet her, for drinks, I’m immediately impressed—she’s got a great smile, a wild laugh, and a quick
wit. I think she’s a bit nuts, too. We’re well matched. We start dating, nothing very serious at first, but we end up spending most of the summer together, going out to dinner and the movies and having sex. Unfortunately, although I don’t know it, I’m looking for a replacement for Allison and she seems like the right one. But the relationship runs into some trouble: first, she’s not Allison, and second, we’re both drinking too much. I’m also taking medication, and we’re both flying high around Manhattan.

It’s a Saturday, and I’ve spent a long day at Kostabi World getting a huge shipment of paintings out to a client in Japan in record time, and I’m not feeling too well. I’ve got a bad headache. When I get home, I take about five Advil with an Amstel Light and after about an hour I’m a little better. I’m looking forward to tonight because Jane has the night off from work and it’s been a few days since I’ve seen her. I call her and tell her I’m going to be a little late and jump into the shower. The water turns cold. Shit. I dry off. I throw on a pair of jeans and a white linen shirt and head crosstown at about 8:30
P.M.
Jane gives me a big hug and kiss when she sees me, and I wait in the living room while she’s getting ready. A pop station is playing in her bedroom and I’m reading
People
magazine. She’s putting on her makeup and offers me a drink; she’s having one herself, so I take a beer from the refrigerator. When she comes out of her bedroom, she’s still brushing her hair, wearing a pair of jeans and a tight black shirt and looking like she’s ready for a night out on the town. “How do I look, seriously?” she asks. “You look great,” I tell her. I’m attracted to her; she’s a lot of fun and really amusing. She thinks I’m incredibly wild and likes playing on the edge with me. By now, we’ve had a few drinks and we’re anxious to go out. We arrive at Punsch, the restaurant of the moment, on the Upper West Side. The owner, who knows me well, seats us and we order drinks. I start rambling about some of the difficulties I’m having with Lauren about keeping the film financed. “Honey, you’re going to have to talk to her about it,” she says. Jane has such glib solutions. I have never considered talking to Lauren about budget problems because she could outtalk me any day. Lauren would just persuade me that I have the money
and should just keep paying; it’s for a good cause, and anyhow, we’re almost done. The waiter comes, and we both order gravlax and the duck. I don’t know why we both have the same thing. He also brings us another round of drinks, and I order a bottle of wine. It’s getting more and more crowded in the restaurant, and very warm. It’s been pretty hot the entire week, and I’m thinking that maybe the air-conditioning isn’t working very well. Jane looks pretty buzzed; she tells me I do, too. We’re laughing at each other in our drunkenness. Alcohol is clearly fueling this relationship. Our dinner comes to the table and we eat ravenously and order another bottle of wine. I don’t think I can walk out of the restaurant now. Somehow I manage to pay the bill with my credit card, and I’m trying to think of where we can go next. “What do you want to do?” I ask her. But my mania steers the course; we stumble into a cab and go downtown without a specific destination. “Keep heading downtown,” I tell the driver. We pass by some bars that we nix and just open the window and breathe in the air and laugh at the last couple of hours. We’re having a blast. “Take us to Gansevoort Street in the West Village,” I tell the driver. He drops us off at Florent and it’s pretty crowded, but we don’t care. We’re fearless; we order an after-dinner drink and share two desserts, and I’m already starting to think about our next stop.

I’m obsessed with buying large quantities of cleaning products at the supermarket. Everything I can get my hands on: paper towels, sponges, bleach, laundry detergent, dishwashing liquid, scrubs, soaps, waxes, sprays, and oils. I hoard them in my kitchen cabinets in case I get snowed in for the next six months. Then I get to work. I put on my rubber gloves and scrub the entire bathroom until it sparkles—this can take an hour or longer. I move on to the next room, vacuuming dust from crevices, waxing floors, and polishing furniture. I set everything in its proper place. When it’s all done, I’m exhausted. I’m obsessed with counting the number of words on a written page, usually after I’ve read it, but sometimes I have
to count first. Sometimes this gets in the way of getting work done. When I leave my apartment, I check three or four times to be sure I’ve locked my door.

When I tell Dr. Kleinman about my obsessional cleaning and counting, he prescribes Anafranil, which puts a sudden end to most of the behavior within a matter of days. He still thinks Prozac is working well for me, although I tell him the combination of the two medications is making me feel like I’m moving faster and faster. I assume that means it’s working, because I’m not depressed. I’m invited to an art opening that’s happening in Los Angeles that very evening, and by 1:00
P.M.
I’m at the airport. I’m selling art faster than I ever have before and feel like I have this magic power of attracting people to me.

I arrange for an installation of Mark’s work at Charivari, the fashionable boutique on West 57th Street, which is great publicity for him. He paints the windows personally and exhibits some of his work in the store. I also make sure a $2,000 Dolce & Gabbana overcoat for me is worked into the deal. The next day Mark and I go to Cologne, where the Schulze Galerie is putting on a huge opening and exhibition for a few hundred people. It’s a wild party. Everybody is having a good time, getting drunk and singing together, when a German artist named Charlie Banana approaches Mark, looking for a fight. “Your work is crap,
faelscher!”
he shouts—the German word for “forger.” Although the next day Mark is telling people a humorous version of the story, the look of unease I read on his face tells me he’s been unsettled. We fly together to Tokyo to attend an exhibit at Galerie Sho, one of Mark’s biggest Japanese dealers. The Japanese are taken with Mark’s work because it’s so pop and so American. I’ve lined up a schedule of galleries to visit while in Tokyo. These are my first contacts in Tokyo, and my meetings with dealers are rather formal. My presentations are well prepared, and my pitch is the key to my sales success. When I promote Kostabi, I am confident when I tell them that he is the fastest-rising artist on the international scene. I call in at Art Collection House, a gallery I had contacted from New York, and sell them a huge program of Kostabi originals and lithographs
and arrange for an exhibition that Mark will attend within the next two months. I also meet with two American dealers who run a gallery for a wealthy Japanese woman who owns Marrs Gallery and is extremely secretive about her business; she ends up buying paintings from me, including one from my personal collection. I leave Tokyo with a nice profit and fly back to New York for a two-day layover.

I’ve invited my family out to dinner at Erminia, a dark and cozy Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side, to celebrate my success in Tokyo. I arrive about ten minutes late and see my parents, Nancy, and her husband seated at a table in the corner, already having a drink. I have to catch up. I order a vodka tonic. They all stand up to hug and kiss me. Nancy is pregnant and really looks big now, and I’ve only been gone for ten days. I’m carrying four shopping bags of gifts from Tokyo, and I put them underneath my chair. Everybody seems excited to hear about my latest adventure. I tell them about my sale to one of the biggest galleries in the country and the individual sale of a painting from my collection for my price of $40,000. Called
Lovers
, it was originally owned by Sylvester Stallone but later returned to Mark during a feud with him. I knew to grab this painting, which I took in exchange for one month of PR work when I began at Kostabi World. After we order dinner, I give everyone their gifts: a beautiful white linen Yamamoto shirt for my father, a black quilted silk vest for my mother, a big blouse for my pregnant sister, and a sweater for my brother-in-law. I think my family leaves this pleasant evening believing my life is on track.