Friends and Traitors Read online

  “Dealing with what, exactly?” I asked.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked.

  “We haven’t the slightest,” I said. “Some maudlin reason that involves my mother.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Why,” asked Baby. “What’s happened?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “No,” said Baby.

  “He’s dead,” said the swish man. “He’s really dead.”

  “Who’s dead?” I asked.

  “Andy Warhol,” said the man. “Andy’s really dead. He died this morning in a hospital.”

  MARCH 1987

  Adeline and Baby See Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

  Baby,” I was saying, “haven’t you ever noticed that Mormons have trouble closing their mouths? It’s because their ridiculous teeth are too big for their thin lips.”

  “I’ve never met a Mormon,” said Baby.

  “Oh Baby,” I said, “you must come out West. We’re lousy with Mormons.”

  We were walking back to Union Square after attending a screening at the Gramercy Theatre.

  We’d considered Wild Strawberries on a double bill with Autumn Sonata at the Thalia SoHo, and Angel Heart was playing at Movieland on 8th, but I’d seen the latter on a date with Kevin. After some argument, it fell to either Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn at the RKO Art Greenwich or A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors at the Gramercy.

  Baby argued for Wild Strawberries, saying, “Everything we see is so lowbrow. Can’t we watch an actual art film for once?” I convinced him otherwise, saying, “Horror films are the art films of the ’80s. The whole world is deluged with blood. The only valid films are about men who replace their hands with chainsaws or bladed claw gloves. Wild Strawberries is so tired, so passé, so borrrring. It’s the portrait of an old man dying.”

  I suspect that Baby disliked Dream Warriors, but he didn’t say. Myself, I found its denouement very powerful. Coming after two films in which Freddy Krueger has wreaked misery upon the dreams of countless teenagers, Dream Warriors suggests an internal escape from the series’ central idea. A group of suicidal kids discover that they too can shape their nighttime reveries, if only they give over to the concept of lucid dreaming. They experience differing degrees of success, but the underlying glue of their sleepy efforts is a transformation of their inadequate selves into hyper-evolved adolescent fantasies.

  Which is how it would be, don’t you think, if teenagers had to fight a monster from their dreams? They’d never imaginate practical solutions, but rather construct youthful responses best suited to the challenges of high school. In Dream Warriors, the group Poindexter actually rises from his semi-crippled state and starts shouting, “I AM THE WIZARD MASTER!” whilst green bolts of lightning fly from his hands.

  “We’ve got to find something else,” said Baby, after the film, passing the outskirts of Gramercy Park. “We need new hobbies.”

  “Shall we increase our attendance at parties?” I asked.

  “I’m tired of seeing the same forty people,” said Baby. “I need something new.”

  “What you need,” I said, “is a righteously good shagging. It ain’t English for a boy of your age to be without the taste of flesh. You could always engage with the mysterious world of human sexuality.”

  Through the locked gates, I stole a glimpse of the statue at the park’s center. Edwin Booth. I hadn’t yet made ingress, the park being private and requiring a key, so at that very moment I hadn’t the slightest of whom the statue offered a likeness. But imagine, darlings. Your brother shoots America’s favorite President at point-blank range and your eventual fate, through the tumults of society and fame, is perpetual memorialization within Manhattan’s most exclusive green space. Welcome to New York.

  “I’ve told you a thousand times,” said Baby. “I’m not like you. I can’t hop into bed with anyone who asks.”

  “Baby,” I said, “you are dangerously close to calling me a slut.”

  MARCH 1987

  84 Second Avenue

  I woke in the morn and washed away the night’s grime. My first class was one that I’d come to dread, an utter absurdity titled “History of Art: World Perspectives.”

  What proved the real drag was not the professor but my fellow students and their questions and earnest strivings. Being a freshwoman, I was trapped in the amber of Parsons’s storied Foundational year, imprisoned alongside the hoi polloi as they inebriated themselves with newly discovered freedoms and excesses.

  Darlings, you’ll believe me when I say that in such a heady environment, your Adeline heard some very dubious questions being asked whilst even more dubious theories were floated. My fellow students sent me. They really sent me.

  But self, said I, you must be patient with these people and their striving. You are different than they. You have had advantages unknown to the plebs. You are an alumna of the Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences.

  Crossroads had originated as an outlandish educational experiment of the 1970s. Reeking of incense, peppermints, and a whole helluvalotta hashish, a group of educators and likeminded parents banded together in the shadow of the Vietnam War, seeking methods of instruction which would not grease the gears of the military–industrial complex with their children’s blood. The goal being development of the individual as an individual.

  By the time of wee Adeline’s arrival, the doped ambitions of the hippie era had given way to an increasing ’80s institutionalization. Culture clash as waves of cocaine, celebrity, and money washed over the student body. The liberal vision grew fainter, harder to explicate in the era of Unca Ronnie Reagan.

  Yet it remained a good school, saving me from parochial Pasadena oubliettes. The faculty avoided the pantomimes of Johnny Law, treating us like adults and encouraging our independent study. We were allowed to go idiotically idiosyncratic, running up and down the Alley, wild at heart. On Monday you’d smoke unnamable drugs, on Tuesday you’d read Dubliners, on Wednesday you’d play hooky, on Thursday you’d bake oatmeal cookies, on Friday you’d lie on a carpet beside Jim Hosney, listening to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

  The experience bestowed upon your humble narratress both the ill luck and good fortune of having passed through her late adolescent personality transformations loooooooong before receiving her high school diploma. A tough road to haul as she sat in classes beside newly-out dykes discovering the world’s injustice and grotesque boys who spent most of their lives drawing and redrawing and redrawing and redrawing and redrawing images of Batman being punched by Superman.

  At lunchtime, I called Kevin from a payphone on the third floor, asking if he wouldn’t like to meet. The lad said it sounded divine and suggested I come to his place after classes.

  He’d given me keys to his apartment at Second and 10th, diagonally across from the old church. I walked up the two flights of dirty stairs, fixated, as ever, by the dusty broken mosaic tiling.

  “Kevin?” I called out, stepping across his threshold. “Art thou home, sirrah?”

  The man wasn’t around to receive visitors, likely having jaunted downstairs to purchase his daily ration of cigarettes or some other inessentiality. I sat on the futon in what I suppose constituted his living room.

  He didn’t own a television, which was delightful as I can’t stand the dreadful stuff, and his walls were sparsely decorated with a few posters, the most prominent being a blood-red threesheet for Jules et Jim. There were books, the endless books and records that poured out of the bedroom, splashing up against the walls of the living room and its attached kitchen.

  When Kevin returned, he carried a brown paper bag, wherein he’d stashed a six pack. “I didn’t think you’d be here so soon,” he said. “Don’t you get out at seven?”

  “An off day, dear boy,” I said.

  “Want some Schlitz?” he asked. “It made Milwaukee famous.”

  We spent the next hour on his futon, each consuming three cans of the t
asteless rot. I couldn’t begin to tell what was said, either by he or I, but I do recall thinking about how strange life could be, about how one could end up in a crumby apartment with one’s boyfriend, a silly little fellow whom one hardly knew and how life expected one to pretend as if this was not the strangest of all possible worlds, as if one’s actions were perfectly normal.

  After some small while, my head was buzzing like the busiest bumblebee in Boston. Kevin climbed atop of me, tongue jutting into my mouth, his soft, unlabored hand on my stomach.

  “I’d love it, darling, but I simply can’t. It’s the New Moon.”

  “So what?” he asked, sighing with impatience, flopping beside me. “Who cares about astrology?”

  “The womb cares. It’s that time of the month, old sport,” I said. “It’s like the Red Sea down there. I’m bleeding like a dinosaur.”

  “I’m not afraid of blood,” he said.

  “Honey,” I said, “no one asked you to play Moses.”

  We went for a mosey. New York was still new enough that I could ambulate around the tiny blocks of the East Village, day in, day out, and never experience boredumb. The Schlitz had me blotto enough that as we passed the St. Mark’s Bar with its unflattering mural of the Rolling Stones, I sang out lyrics from a shitty radio song, doing my very finest male baritone: “ ’Cuz I know what it meaaaaans, to walk along the lonely street of dreaaaaaams, here I go again on my owwwwwwnnnn . . .”

  Kevin was mortified. I’d embarrassed him before the souses and dope pushers. He ushered us up 5th Street, turning left on Second Avenue, navigating around the piles of dogshit.

  “Do you see this?” he asked, pointing to a curtainless window on the second floor of an unremarkable building.

  A tuxedo jacket hung on a tailor’s dummy, beneath a drape of rotting plastic. The jacket’s style was ooollllllllld like shag carpeting, like it’d been sewn concurrent with the Nixon Administration. Beside the jacket, at the center of the window, hung an extinguished neon sign: DRESS SUITS FOR HIRE, the ITS broken and dangling at an extreme angle.

  “This is legend,” said Kevin. “No one’s really sure what happened. Something terrible. But it’s been like this for years. Someone told me that the woman who ran the tuxedo rental shop got raped and killed. You see all that dirt on the window? That’s dust from the police investigation, when they were looking for prints.”

  The ground floor was more empty glass, two doors on either side. Beside the right door, numbered #84, there was a sign, black glass with red lettering: MEN’S ENTRANCE DRESS SUITS TO HIRE.

  “I guess her family owns the building,” said Kevin. “They’ve left it like this. Some people say it’s haunted. Have you ever met Brown Tony? He said he saw a ghost up there.”

  That night, back at 31 Union Square West, our old Bank of the Metropolis, I was trying to fall asleep and listening to Baby’s breath. The only things in my head were the tuxedo and the neon sign.

  I bunked class and went to the library on 42nd Street. I hadn’t the slightest about research, so I asked a librarian for any instruction that she might offer. She suggested cross referencing the address in their card catalogue index of the Times. Which I did, darlings, but found absolutely nothing. I inquired again for more help. The librarian asked for the address and went away and returned and went away and returned. She handed me a piece of paper with the words NEW YORK TIMES written on it, and a date scribbled beneath the paper’s name. January 14th, 1974.

  The librarian sent me to the microfilm rooms. Another librarian, much ruder than the first, retrieved the appropriate microfilm and gave me a brief refresher on how to use the ridiculous machine.

  I scrolled through page after page, occasionally transfixed not by the articles but by period advertisements, until, by luck, I chanced upon the very brief article I sought. Page 37.

  METROPOLITAN BRIEFS

  From the Police Blotter:

  The nude body of a 40-year-old woman proprietor of a tailor shop that rents tuxedos on the Lower East Side was found bludgeoned to death. The victim was Helen Sopolsky of 84 Second Avenue, near Fifth Street, whose shop is one flight up from that address. The motive of the attack was not determined immediately . . .

  I returned to the first librarian.

  “Is this it, have you any more?” asked I.

  “That’s all I got,” she said. “You could check the other papers.”

  APRIL 1987

  Adeline Discovers Baby’s Employment Status

  I never inquired as to the activities in which Baby partook whilst I was out being a student of paramount performance, but your Girl Friday uncovered very definitive evidence that her best pal wasn’t, shall we say, having much of an active social life. Little things, like returning from school in the evening hours and finding Baby’s shoes unmoved from the previous night. A general wasted look of lethargy across his face.

  Not long after the 84 Second Ave Incident, matters shifted. I noticed telltale signs and signifiers of Baby experiencing life beyond our little hothouse.

  Many nights, Baby would be missing. Out in the world! When he did come home, long past midnight, he evaded questions about where he’d been, merely chanting, “Wandering. Hither and yon, yon and hither.”

  The abstract subterfuge worked me into a tizzy, desperately curious about Baby’s adventures in the Big Shitty.

  I resolved on a course of action. I decided that I’d wait for my next off-day, Thursday, when I typically left the suite at 1 pm, and hide across the street.

  When the day came round, I left late, making a ridiculous excuse about being simply unable to find work that I needed for class. Once I was outside, I sat in the park, obscuring myself behind the Temperance fountain. An hour ticked away. Wherever was that boy?

  As I slowly surrendered to despair, Baby emerged from beneath the portico.

  I followed him across 14th Street, moving past the Palladium. What a gentle soul was Baby, unable to imagine himself victim of plotting and machinations, ambling along through the city, clueless, the same familiar gait as ever.

  He turned onto Third Avenue, past Disco Donuts, and then, to my everlasting astonishment, Baby walked beneath the marquee reading VARIETY PHOTOPLAYS, stopped at the ticket booth, and spoke with the person behind the glass.

  We’d passed the Variety a thousand times. I admired the soft pink and teal of its ancient neon marquee, and remained amused by the girlie posters that hung above the entrance and rested on its freestanding easels, but I could not imagine patronizing such an establishment. Yet there was Baby, nonchalant as a nun in November, strolling inside!

  I regained my composure. At the ticket booth, I spake with an evil-eyed fellow behind the glass. “One, please,” said I.

  “You sure you got the right place?” he asked.

  “Absolutely, old sport,” I said. “I’ve never been more certain.”

  “You don’t look much like the girls who come here,” he said.

  “That’s entirely all right,” I said. “I don’t expect I think much like them either.”

  I passed two dollars under the glass. He slid a ticket in my direction. Another man stood, smoking his stupid cigarette, by the open-framed doorway.

  “What’s on the bill?” I asked this second man, forcing myself not to stare at the unsanctified shape of his ears.

  “Girl, who knows?” he asked. “I don’t have a fucking clue.”

  Staircases on both walls of the lobby led to a balcony that ran atop the double theater doors. Considering the melancholic blue paint of the walls, I presumed that Baby would stick with the ground floor.

  Beyond the double doors, I entered an antechamber filled with ancient vending machines. I pushed through another doorway into a surprisingly well-lit theater. There weren’t many seats, perhaps 150 divided into three sections. The same blue paint.

  I darted into an aisle seat in the back row.

  The movie was pornographic. One white woman bent over, taken from behind by a white man, her
face rhythmically pressed into another white woman’s mons pubis. As the film was from the late 1960s, its image contained quite a bit of sociological content. Archaeological evidence of lost hairstyles, makeup, and body types. Scratches distorted the quality of projection, as if the print had rotated without end from the day of its release.

  When my eyes adjusted, oh reader, I could see the other patrons, and it became clear that the Variety was a suck and fuck theatre, the likes of which I’d only heard about in fond whispers of New York in its halcyon time before AIDS. Many men masturbated in their seats, a soft sound like a thousand ceiling fans. Groans rained from the balcony.

  There were two doors at the bottom of the theatre, on either side of the screen. Men moved in and out, often in pairs, often alone. I decided that it must be the bathrooms.

  But where was Baby?

  Mid-scene, the film changed. Gone was the pornography, up was a delightful black-and-white Western from the 1950s, starring Gregory Peck as a character named Jimmy Ringo. This film started on its third reel, somewhere in the middle. The audience, transfixed in various states of pleasure, paid no notice. The ceiling fans spun on.

  A would-be rube gunslinger attempted to start a gunfight with Jimmy Ringo, asking him to a settle an argument. “Why should I?” replied Gregory Peck. “I say Mac waters his whiskey,” said the rube. “Then you’re kinda dumb to be drinking here, aintcha?” said Gregory Peck. “Well, you ain’t very sociable, are ya?” asked the rube. Down at the far left, one man was bent over a row of seats, another man behind him grunting with every thrust, the front of his legs slapping against the first man’s buttocks.

  I’d grown so accustomed to the rivers of flesh flowing through the aisles that I didn’t hardly notice when an old man, perhaps sixty or seventy years of age, moved beside me. Only the sound of his unzipping pants roused me from the cinematic experience.

  Don’t you know that his penis was out?