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Here is what the characters do in
Rent
to show us that they are creative: nothing. They do nothing. The “songwriter” spends fourteen seconds noodling on his guitar, sampling Puccini. The “filmmaker” shoots a lot of Super 8 footage of people he knows, which makes him about as much of an artist as everybody’s dad. Nobody is pasting up a poster or mimeographing a pamphlet. Vice President Quayle suits them just fine. A few of the dramatis personae have jobs, but this only makes them laughably contemptible corporate stooges. There is one character who actually works at her art, a newly-minted lesbian performance artist named Maureen whose ambition is portrayed as being as unseemly, rapacious, and untrustworthy as her elastic Kinsey placement. All of it evidence of a callous narcissism
(“She
needs someone to run the light board? Fucking bitch …
”). Right up there alongside the retrovirus and the forces of gentrification, Maureen is the villain of the piece. She should stop with these constant careerist attempts at being “interesting.” In addition to being unattractive, they’re unnecessary. An artist is something you are, not something you do.

I first encountered this Seussian syllogism in a used-book store, where I spent an extra thirty minutes fake-browsing just so I might continue to eavesdrop on the cashier, who was expounding to his friend about
Johnny Got His Gun
, Dalton Trumbo’s classic antiwar novel. The cashier had a theory about the book’s protagonist, Johnny, wounded and blinded and amputated to such an extent that, while sentient, he was little more than an unresponsive trunk of meat with a rich inner life. “So I asked myself: If this guy was Picasso, would he have been any less of an artist or less of a genius just because he couldn’t paint? And my thinking is no, he wouldn’t.” I lacked the bravery to challenge him more openly than a muttered “Oh, brother” from the stacks, choosing instead to ridicule and sell him out years later, here in print. But it’s the same reasoning: indolence as proof positive of prodigious gifts. You can arguably invent Cubism and be the very embodiment of Modernism if you get a kick out of that sort of thing. But you hardly
need
to, Armless Picasso. Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out.

And hanging out can be marvelous. But hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV—I hate to say it—none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won’t make you
Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

So when they sing in the anthem of the show (a lie, really. Every song in the show is an anthem, delivered with adolescent earnestness. It’s like being trapped in the humid pages of a teenager’s diary), when they sing in the
title
anthem of the show, “
We’re not gonna pay this year’s rent,
” followed by a kind of barked cheer of “
rent rent rent rent rent!,
” my only question is: Well,
why
aren’t you going to pay this year’s rent?

It seems that they’re not going to pay this year’s rent because rent is for losers and uncreative types. Rent is for Suits, while they are the last bastion of artistic purity. They have not sold out and yet their brilliance goes unacknowledged,
so fuck you, yuppie scum!

Jonathan Larson died the day before
Rent
opened. He went home from the dress rehearsal feeling poorly, made himself a pot of tea, and died on his kitchen floor. It is an achingly sad story; a waste of a huge talent and, by all accounts, a truly lovely guy. It is made all the more theatrically wrenching by the fact that the show went on to become a huge Pulitzer-garnering hit; the aging Calvero, Charlie Chaplin’s character in
Limelight
, expiring in the wings as Claire Bloom’s ballerina triumphs. I heard 9/11 jokes long before it felt okay to say that even though it was a terrible thing that he died and that, yes, AIDS is a devastating, horrible scourge to which I have lost many friends, and indeed New York was becoming far too expensive and criminally inhospitable to young people who tried to come here with dreams of making art, and how regrettable that the town’s vibrancy and authenticity
were being replaced by a culture-free, high-end-retail cluster-fuck of luxury condo buildings whose all-glass walls essentially require a populace that doesn’t own bookshelves or, consequently, books. A metropolis of streets once thriving with local businesses and services now consisting of nothing but Marc Jacobs store after Marc Jacobs store and cupcake purveyors (is there anything more blandly sweet, less evocative of this great city, and more
goyish
than any other baked good with the possible exception of Eucharist wafers than the cupcake?). And even though Jonathan Larson’s musical was meant in its own ham-fisted, undergraduate way to be a call to arms against this very turn of events, was it just me, or was this middlebrow lie a symptom posing as an antidote, like watching a sex-ed film narrated by gonorrhea? Were others also leaving the theater rooting for the landlords?

Larson worked for years at a diner right around the corner from an apartment I once had. Restaurant work can be punishing and thankless toil, so he is to be applauded for plying his craft so steadfastly after what must have been long shifts on his feet. His is the story of almost every artist. Why, then, in transmuting his own struggle did he so completely drop the ball? (And to those of you who say that dumbing down and sugaring up is innate to musical theater, I say fuck you, homophobe. Go listen to the dark brilliance of
Pal Joey
or
Floyd Collins
and then come and talk to me.) Perhaps it is an added sense of identification that fuels my sense of betrayal. In photographs of Larson, with his heavy features and hooded eyes—the sweet and approachable face wishing like hell it could make the leap to handsome—I see my own.

And yet part of me understands fully. I’m an idiot but I’m not stupid. I get it that representation is reality’s more photogenic flip side. It’s best not to think too closely on what Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s
teeth must have actually been like. Or those windswept heroes in countless Romantic paintings, standing on their solitary crags, gazing out Byronically over the roiling sea. It’s all beautiful desolation and man-against-the-elements-emergence-of-the-Self-birth-of-the-Modern fabulous; for the first time in history, masters of their own fates, their minds steeled and alert in the bracing sea air. The canvas gives no hint, nor should it, of the challenging trek it must have taken to reach those wave-washed spits of land, nor the malodorous discomfort of those sodden, pre-Gore-Tex garments, the chafing cotton and the lead-heavy wool. And underneath all that soaked and salty clothing, the poet’s skin, an angry red canvas of papulae and chilblains.

The Myth of the Bohemian persists with good reason. Given the choice between a day spent giving oneself over to oil painting, or one spent in the confining grid of office cubicles, most folks would opt for the old fantasy of the carnal chaos of drop cloths, easels, turpentine, raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles holding drippy candle ends, and cavorting nude models, forgetting momentarily the lack of financial security and the necessary hours and hours of solitude spent fucking up over and over again.

I lived in Brooklyn a long time ago, with my best friend, Natalia, on the second floor of a small two-story coach house. The basement still had its red dirt floor from the nineteenth century. We were a block away from a jail, in the heart of the borough’s Penal District (not yet a real estate term, but just wait). Across from the stately courthouse was a beautiful stretch of century-old brownstones, a sagging and wearily voluptuous rock pile, every straight line worn down over the years to a gentle curve. The windows had ancient, flaking gold-foil letters for the offices of bail bondsmen and ambulance-chasing lawyers. On
the uninterrupted brick face of the westernmost side, an old wall advertisement touting divorces: $99! in an oddly cheerful font. During the day, the streets hummed with activity; a photogenic, Runyonesque bustle of lawyers, judges, perps, and private dicks, but at night, it was an absolute dead zone.

My neighbors directly across the street were a family of pitbull-owning drug dealers. Their fort was held down by a mother and her young son, Seymour, and adolescent daughter, Vickie, along with an intermittent cast of male characters. It was during these years and from this family that I learned, intimately, the words
maricón
and
pendejo
. Two doors down from them, a neon sign in a window advertised
DÉLICES DE SAIGON
, although in the four years that I lived there, I saw no signs of life from that building, delicious, Vietnamese, or otherwise. Directly beside us lived a reclusive Bakelite-radio enthusiast whose apartment was a hangout for a gaggle of boys from the nearby homeless shelter. We could hear him screaming at them ceaselessly through the bathroom wall.

Once you got indoors, the apartment was essentially perfect. A lovely and cheerful place with folding wooden shutters, and a working fireplace clad in green slate to augment the feeble efforts of the old gas heater in the winter. In the summer, the windows on both sides were a fine substitute for air-conditioning. For the occasional heat wave—those stretches when the cool-down strategy of switching to menthols simply didn’t work, when one moved about the city irritable, aphasic with sleeplessness, and salty as a deer lick—there was a box fan, purchased at the nearby Abraham and Straus department store. I had been surprised to find that the thing actually came with directions, beyond “plug in and turn on.” The best way to cool a room, according to the ancient, pretech principles of cross-ventilation, is to place a fan facing out the window farthest away from you. This will force
the warm air from the apartment, while drawing air from the outside through the windows nearer by. I did it. It worked. I switched back to regular cigarettes.

Standing at the kitchen sink, we could look out the window at the huge plane and flowering chestnut trees in the surprisingly lush backyards of the whole block. And no plot was wilder or greener than the one directly beneath the kitchen window, an overgrown jungle at the back of an old single-room-occupancy
^*
rooming house. The house was as untamed as its garden. It appeared that the entire cubic volume of every room was filled with stuff, Collyer brothers–style: ironing boards, cardboard suitcases, electric toasters and fans, plastic bags cinched and bulging, laundry baskets swelling like wine barrels, all of it piled up, floor to ceiling, right to the windows. The most visible resident was an old alcoholic woman, not a day under seventy. Natalia and I had dubbed her “Madame Balzac” for some reason. (Why exactly has been erased by the years. I’ve only ever read one Balzac novel, but we were in our smart-ass twenties. I think it had something to do with our Madame’s habit of lobbing her garbage out of her windows into the yard. Perhaps a character did something similar in
Père Goriot?
Who can remember …) When not seated on the front stoop in a soiled, threadbare black
shift, drunkenly screaming “Fawkin’ niggah!” at anyone who walked by, Madame Balzac would spend her time climbing the fire escape in back from room to room, quite naked. Whatever the weather, there she would be, the aging flaps and dewlaps of her raddled skin shuddering up and down the rusty iron ladders.

On the ground floor below me was an office that did … what, exactly? Résumés, taxes? I can’t remember. What I do remember is the man whose office it was: Raul Rivas. That is his real name. Raul Rivas was knee-bucklingly handsome. Perhaps if my life had been different, had I been a hot girl with a driver’s license, say, I might have put on a tube top and gone outside to wash my car in slow motion, dousing the cherry-red hood of my automobile in a spew of water from a long hose and then working it up into a suggestive and creamy froth, while Raul Rivas watched me through the open office door, sweating through his white undershirt, just like Burt Lancaster in
The Killers…
but, I digress.

Once during the day—it must have been a weekend because I was at home—I could hear Raul Rivas having sex in the office downstairs. I skittered around the apartment like a cockroach on a frying pan, trying not to make noise while desperately looking for a knothole in the crappy floorboards. Eventually I just lay down flat against the tile of the kitchen floor, listening.

Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell. I was robbed in that neighborhood twice—once by a fellow who asked me for all my money and when I demurred, showed me the gun in the waistband of his trousers while suggesting that I reorganize my priorities, and the second time when I blithely walked into the Laundromat to find the poor young fellow who gave out quarters sitting there, glum, mute, and at gunpoint. I wasn’t remotely hurt in either instance (that honor was reserved for the tony West Village, where I had the shit beaten out of me
one night by some toughs who, in the process, roughed up my copy of
Dombey and Son
and took my wallet—a largely valueless quarry back in the days before I had a credit card—and had to confine their criminal activities to taking books out of the library in my name and never returning them), but still, there were days when it hardly seemed worth it to live in a horrible part of town just so I could go daily to a stupid, soul-crushing, low-paying job. Especially since, as deeply as I yearned to be creative, for years and years I was too scared to even try. So I did nothing. But here’s something I did do:

I paid my fucking rent.

It isn’t that I don’t sympathize with the lassitude. I understand it all too well. Creativity demands an ability to be with oneself at one’s least attractive, that sometimes it’s just easier not to do anything. Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always,
always
only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food. So truly, if you’re already getting laid and have managed to fall in with an attractive and like-minded group without the added indignity of diving face-first into a cesspool every single time you sit down to work, no one understands better than I do why one might not bother.