“Un Aperitivo Col Diavolo”
The air was heavy with the cloying aroma of glazed nuts simmering in a artificial syrup. Ku'dam glowed in a frost of lights. And shoppers trundled along the boulevard bundled in furs. I wandered from bar to café with one drink bleeding into another, one drug morphing into the next, without finding a soul with whom I could tipple and commiserate. The loneliness was crippling. I drank prodigiously.
It was unrelenting. It bordered on the suicidal.
I had estranged myself, since moving to Europe, from the friends I had left behind and those I knew in Berlin. Christmas had come to mean no family, no friends, no feast. Christmas was an endless supply of wine and a galaxy of drugs.
By the time I settled into the last bar I would visit that Christmas eve, my brain spun with dizzy swirls and throbbing lines. My vision had skewed into flipping horizontal patterns. Everything was in fish-eyed perspective. I could no longer tell the difference between day or night.
“Money Dissolves in My Mouth”
Manhattan had peaked in the summer of nineteen eighty-seven. The Lower Eastside was a circus of openings and exhibitions. There was an abundance of money and yuppies. Parties and coke. Bad women and smack.
The battle cry in the squats on East Thirteenth Street was “DIE YUPPIE SCUM!!!”. But fuck that bullshit. Yuppies spent money. They bought us dinner. We couriered drugs. European tourists were our favorite targets. In the shade of the Tompkins Square Park bandshell, they approach and asked where to cop blow. Cocaine was cheap that summer. So we charged eighty, while it was only twenty, and pocketed the rest. Our foreign-born guests were always happy with the fat white bags of laxative we scored from the Puerto Ricans on Ludlow Street.
It was an undemanding life of unending night, even during daylight hours. I made the rounds of galleries; dance clubs; after-hours bars; all-night diners and, freak that I am, bondage clubs in the meat-packing district. I never knew where or with whom I might wake up. Some mornings I was on the floor of a plush loft with a neon-haired floozie naked in torn fishnets reeking of sweat and alcohol. On others, I was sprawled with limbs akimbo in the stairwell of a low-income housing project on Avenue D. It really didn’t matter because it would start all over again on a bench in the park.
Where did the money come from? No one knew.
But we ate, survived and had fun. Our gratification was in the company of each other. There was always a party, always an opening, with a case of wine and a tray of food.
Summer ended. The leaves withered. And our 'endless night' was over.
Of course, we still gathered in the park. And went to parties thrown by flatulent art-world frauds with more money than taste. We still ate on the Yuppie dime. And short-changed constipated Europeans. But it was all by rote, all routine. The inspired exuberance was gone.
Then Christmas came. Corpses turned up in the park. Some stewed and served in the shelters. There were rumors of a brandy-soaked pudding for desert. Derelicts were raped in the bandshell; brutal cluster-fucks illuminated by a halo of blinking holiday lights. Friends succumbed to the lure of heroin. I became a drunk.
And, as the illness of addiction took over, I watched my friends turn their backs on their own humanity:
Don't fuck up and o'd. That was the unspoken rule. Handle your shit. We ain't fuckin’ 'round wid’ no po' leese. So if you do fuck up, kiss your sorry ass goodbye. Ain't gonna be no last-minute miracles in the emergency room. We just gonna dump your ass in a lot and let you die. It's your last dance, pardner. Party over. The D.J. has left the building.
“Latex Skin Glows in the Dark”
I sat alone at a corner table, unnoticed by the others in the bar. Normally, I preferred anonymity in Berlin. Generally, the average German ignored me. This was because I was both a stranger and an American. We were Europe's equivalent of New York's vagrant 'euro-trash' population. Trust-fund backpackers and off-the-rack hipsters -- with their ridiculous claim of never setting foot on U.S. soil until the president of the United States was removed from office -- had turned the idea of an “American Expat” into a grotesque joke.
These people were awful. They needed to die in New York. They needed to die in Berlin. I tried to beat one of them to death one night. Long-haired P.C. Vegan asshole thought I was his art-commune's 'kitchen nigger'. Popped that muthafucka in the forehead with a soup ladle.
However, these were unusual circumstances. It was the holidays. I was alone in a foreign country. I missed my family. I missed the warmth of human friendship. And I missed the moist warmth of Holly-wreathed XXX-Mass pussy wrapped and ribboned under my Christmas tree.
“Tom of Finland Travels By Transparent Escalator”
I dozed off after my fourth glass of wine. Or maybe I blacked out. It was impossible to tell the difference. I was sipping a glass of putrid red one moment. And he was sitting across the table the next. I don't even remember closing my eyes. It happened that fast.
I was sitting quietly with my thoughts, lost in some Grosz-inspired jangle of vibrating lines, obviously influenced by the drunkards crowding the bar, when suddenly, after a momentary sensation of vertigo, there he was--a hawk-faced leprechaun with reddened jowls and two wisps of hair jutting over his brow like the dying tendrils of a dehydrated house-plant. They looked like the budding horns of a young goat. His shirt was an eye-aching yellow spotted with gobbling green PacMen.
I recovered consciousness during the tail end of some jabber about waiting tables in New York. “I'd go down to Christopher Street after work” he said, sounding like Don Knotts (with a brogue) in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken; “and have a beer at the Ramrod. You're an American. You look like a New Yorker. Ever been to the Ramrod?”
Did they dig this guy up from under the Paradise Garage and pull him out of a pink time-capsule stamped with a nineteen-seventies' smiley face?
I knew the Ramrod. I used to live on Grove Street in those days; a block over from Christopher. I'd come up out of the Sheridan Square subway station and Seventh Avenue would be mobbed with protesters disrupting principal photography on Cruising. Stone-wall was still fresh in people's minds.
At the time, I was friends with an off-broadway actress whose acting, so she said, was guided by the voices of a Semitic demoness named Lilith. She was the first woman she said. She was created out of the same earth as Adam. She was supposed to be his 'help mate' under his direct command. Lilith said:
“Fuck you and your daddy! Why should I help a muthafucka who can't even find my g-spot? Take out one of them ribs and make you a dumb bitch to pluck your apples!”
And split. That's why she's a demon. She was the first 'Badd Nigga' of record.
My friend was a dynamic if frightening performer – the sort who enjoyed covering herself in clay and blood and brandishing machetes. But you could always hear, just under the surface of her mind, the jaunty pipe-whistles of a Loony Tunes cartoon.
Anyway, she used to fuck Al Pacino in his trailer between set-ups so he wouldn't lose his mind playing a troubled stud-cop in campy leather gear with a yellow snot-rag hanging out of his back pocket.
“Kiss and tell...”
She wouldn't. But once her affair with Pacino was over, she began cross-dressing in leatherboy drag and hanging out on the docks. She'd always come back to my apartment with raccooned eyes, begging for food or drugs, banged up and bruised, smelling really bad. Little did I realize she was the prototype for a succession of sociopathic girlfriends I would have later in life.
The Ramrod was by the West Side Highway, across from the pier along the Hudson River. The building looked like it was once a drive-through burger joint in the 'fifties; the kind that serviced long-distance truckers. Apparently, it still did. The lot surrounding it was filled with motorcycles; all individually customized, all looking like the boudoir of an expensive whore: pink upholstery, rhinestone studding and flashing neon tubing. Not the kind of stripped-down putt-putts parked in front of the Angels' clubhouse on East Third Street.
The Ramrod was a little like Charlottenberg's scatological fun-house, Klo, without the obnoxious heterosexuals or infantile sense of humor. It was just infantile. The place was a urinal with a bar in the middle of the floor. Literally. Gangs of Tom of Finland leatherboys quaffed a few drafts at the rail; then, full bladdered, cracked open ampules under their noses, whiffing a delirious mix of amyl-nitrate, Lysol and ammonia-pungent piss, headed over to the porcelain trough built along the walls for some real mouth-opened wide fun and games.
“Ruby Slippers My Dear: Or Black People Before The Invention of Hiphop”
I lied and told the leprechaun I was a Canadian.
“Really? Where're you from? Vancouver? Toronto? Montreal?”
“Saskatoon.” Saskatoon is Canada's answer to the wheat fields of Kansas; all flatlands and infinite sky.
“I'm from Dublin” he said. “I didn't know they had black people in Canada.”
“After pickin' cotton for all them white folks, we had to go somewhere. Couldn't very well walk back to Africa, could we? So it was Little Negroes on the Prairie. That's a Saskatoon joke.”
I made that up, too. I can't even blame my gay Canadian friend, Micheal, for that one. It's called Jeffin'. That's what you do to foolish white folks; dubious dinge queens like the leprechaun in front of me and otherwise. Willie Best made plenty of crinkly Jeffin' whitie in Hollywood.
Actually, I'm not from New York, either. I grew up in Connecticut, state of the now generally ignored U.S. Constitution. Black people populate that place, too. The obstreperous kind with crack pipes and guns.
“There must be black people in Ireland” I told him. “Otherwise, Sammy Davis, Jr., wouldn't know how to tap dance. Cromwell's European niggas clog-dancin' in Jamaica, y'know? Black people are everywhere. I even met a Black Czech chick once. Didn't speak a word of English. Only spoke Czech and Russian. Took me on a tour of Theresienstadt. Besides, my great grandfather was an Irishman.”
“No!”
“Yes. Except he was white. Said to himself there are no potatoes in Ireland, sailed to Saskatoon, married a black woman and bought a farm. I grew up just like Dorthy before she spun off to Oz and found those ruby slippers.”
“You're a Black-Canadian farm boy?!! Oh, this is too much!”
“ Why not? Haven't you ever listened to Negro Spirituals? The ones sung in the fields? Those songs were code for fuck the white man, throw down your hoe and chase that star to Canada. Check it out. Go Down Moses, Let My People Go: 'Harriett Tubman, hurry and get your black ass down to Alabama so these niggas can go pick snowflakes up in Canada!' My grandmother told me that.”
“Topography of a Phantom Shopping Mall”
Tito Puente and his orchestra followed Heino on the jukebox. That's what I loved about Berliners. Even they knew you couldn't get drunk without Puerto Rican music. I wondered if Puerto Ricans would listen to Shlager?
“What brings you to Berlin?” I asked the leprechaun. “Rotkohl with the family?”
“God, no!! What on earth is 'rotkohl'?”
“Red cabbage. It's a German Christmas favorite. Mit ganse und kartoffel.”
Frankly, I didn’t get it. Bondage, rubber and chunks of metal rumbling in a throbbing orifice I got. But wallowing in steaming piss?!! That was beyond me. What potty-manual did their parents read? The Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training your Cat?!!
My roommate on Grove, however, swore by it. He loved the leather freakazoids in dives like The Ramrod and The Toilet. That's why I'm familiar with those places. He told me about it.
Usually, in the morning. Over breakfast. In gruesome detail.
I used to see these characters all the time in the West Village. The air in Smiler's deli was rank with the odor of soggy pee-queens at four a.m.; forlornly ribboned Judy Garlands all pressed against the cashier's counter under the weight of multiple six-packs.
But that's a Christopher Street of an erased New York. That Christopher Street--the Christopher Street of Stonewall and Marsha Wallace, of Cruising and The Ramrod--disappeared along with Times Square, its peepshows, its hustlers and its tricks. How can a tv set and dvd player ever replace the lap-stiffening grandeur of Vanessa Del Rio on the screen of a Forty-second Street grind house?
The New York I knew was a co-mingling, a transcultural hybrid, of classes, races, religions, genders and generations. It was an open space without borders. A place of possibility. That space was erased. Avarice had turned the heart and mind of Manhattan into a simulacrum of itself. It had become a phantom city replicated on the broadway stage--the Theater of No Surprise.
It was no longer a matter of recognizing the shifting planes and queer angles in the urban sprawl—the Flâneur turning corners in the psychic cityscape; discovering strange new worlds. Those worlds – those psychic worlds -- don't exist in Manhattan anymore. There are only ghosts. Ghosts on the landscape. Ghosts fishhooked in the mind. This is why I left the U.S. My house was haunted. Money dissolved in my mouth.
The odd thing is I've become a ghost here, too....
For: Maresa Lippolis
©2007 Darius James
