New York in the early 90’s

New York City in the early 90s was a place that I called home, but whenever I was there, the effect was somewhat like a mildly disastrous flood. I would come home to my other home in Los Angeles, to dry out the mildew and rotting places in order to return, somewhat smaller around the edges and seemingly fresh and new. Floods are actually good things, they wash the earth and the animals are safe on the ark, and all your possessions turn to mud, but that wasn’t such a terrible loss. I was dry as dust and needed it anyway.

I was knee deep in Maker’s Mark and lemony Absolut, or gargantuan glasses of red wine, filled and refilled, staining my mouth a deep purple and making my laugh louder and my gestures more obnoxious, my arms flailing out into the air, made dangerous by the ever present cigarette in my hand. It is an ugly thing, to watch a woman not yet 26 try to present herself as Margo Channing wherever she went. Playing clubs then was a riot, as I would wake up literally while I was onstage, and then meet with the girl comic so close to me then, after the shows at the bar, and we would drink endless bottles of merlot as she told me the history of her men. There were dumb crushes for me too, which kept me in the city even on the hottest, muggiest weekends, because then the Wherehouse slipdresses I wore made sense with no socks and Nikes, and all of them lived below 14th St.

Making my way downtown, I would superstitiously walk past the Chelsea Hotel, where my dear friend lives now, in hopes I would one day make that my permanent residence. Still, I hang onto these dreams, that I could surround myself with the art on the walls used to pay rent and the ghosts of Sid and Nancy, my heroes in relationship – my Romeo and Juliet. I went often to the house where a becoming famous art rock band lived. We would all sleep in the same bed, and comic books and porn lay strewn about the floor with new, yet to be mastered tracks playing on the cheap speakers. We’d dine at 2 am, high above St. Mark’s Place, but of course, who could eat at all, with all those drugs in your system?

I adored the bass player who wore t-shirts of girls who looked like me. He said that he wanted to have me on his heart, as I had captured it, yet he never kissed me, except for one time, when everyone had left the table to do more drugs and I forced it out of him.

I didn’t enjoy the drugs or the drinking, nor the certain death of the hangover experienced every morning. What I sought so fervently was oblivion. I merely wanted to be washed away by a killer tsunami, and the flood was a disappointing return for the investment I had made with my brain cells. Seriously, I used to be ferociously smart, and my mind was a labyrinth of ideas, facts, knowledge, imagination which drugs and alcohol have created impenetrable walls within, so there are faraway locales in my head, lovely tourist attractions, impressive archives of thought and information to which I once had access to that I shall never visit again.

The last night with that band, was at the ever white hotel I’d stay at in midtown. We did coke all night, and I piled my hair up high on my head hoping that I could sustain that cocaine rush for more than fifteen minutes at a time. We were all hopping and bouncing off the walls, but no one could get it together enough to go buy a pack of cigarettes, so we had to order them from room service. The drugs were running out as fast as the darkness of the night, and the severity of the sky, going lighter and lighter, as the lows became lower and lower was unbearably cruel.

I left them all there in the hotel room, laying about beautifully strewn, almost like an ad for D&G, throwing myself into a towncar at 7am, not having been to bed for several days already. I kept my eyes shut tight for the entire ride to JFK, opening them once, only to find myself in the middle of one of the cemeteries in Queens. The driver had taken a shortcut, and I thought I was dead and being driven to my grave. That was the last time I did those kinds of drugs, and the last time I would see that band, or that version of New York.

I still loved them, and the city, all of it, that illusory idea of living in a poor substitute for Max’s Kansas City day in and day out. Being with the band, being an artist myself, high and low on drugs and love, but then you open your eyes, and you are in a graveyard, and I wasn’t ready for the ultimate downtown of death quite yet.

I wrote this because someone asked me to elaborate on my list of things that I love, one of them being NYC in the early ’90s. I love the memory of those days, and the lesson that lies are lies, whether you choose to believe them or not, and that a lie does not change its inherent truth merely because you want it to, badly, so badly. The band is doing great, the members have split off to tremendously successful solo efforts, and the apartment they lived in is occupied by other young hipsters I will probably never know. New York is still the best place, and I’d still like to live at the Chelsea Hotel, and I wish that I could love those people I loved so much then, but I realize that I didn’t know them at all, none of us knew each other, for we were merely players in each other’s oblivion, and therefore we’d not recognize each other today walking past each other in the street, with our feet firmly planted on the dry ground.