A High School Party in Connecticut in 1985

I was pressed into service at the bar. J. had to go deal with something, I don’t know. Broken furniture and spilled beer. The line was long and the kids were thirsty. Maybe they just wanted vodka, scotch. Gin and tonics. I was pouring as fast as I could. Everyone I satisfied might just be satisfied with me. Kirsten came up to the front with her friend Kim. Kirsten with her radiant smile, her glasses. There was a trace of mischief in her face, I always thought, or maybe just thought in that moment and thought I’d always thought. She was beautiful but easy about it, unconflicted. Laughing at the world and everything in it, ‘specially me. So she was a powerful person. Intimidating.

“I’ll have a gin buck,” she told me with her grin. 

At once I knew she was fucking with me. She had to be. This is what happens. A girl like that and me. I was powerless to admit I didn’t know what the fuck that was. I didn’t have the strength to be so weak. I fumbled with the bottles, finding the gin and stroking it uselessly by the neck. A few awful moments passed. The line behind Kirsten and Kim stretched from the dining room into the hall.

“Ginger ale,” she said full of wisdom. Smiling her smile. “It’s gin and ginger ale.”

I muttered yeah yeahs in my humiliation. I made her drink. I made I don’t know for Kim. And I never spoke to her again. Today she lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Later we sat in the living room, seven or eight of us. The untiring inebriation of youth. We needed to go somewhere and do something. When you’re sixteen and drunk you have to take it somewhere. You can’t lean on a bar or watch TV. There’s sparks flying out your fingers.

We piled in the back of Sean’s pickup with a bat. Drove two miles to our math teacher’s house. His driveway was long and it twisted through the woods. Erik stood unsteady. Took a hard swing and bashed the mailbox off its wooden post. The violence was astonishing. The senseless malice. We saw the lights come on behind the trees. The poor put-upon teacher howling, running out the house. His son—our classmate—by his side. Flashlight beam zigzagging in the night. Go, go, go! Sean peeled out and we were gone down the hilly street, knocking against each other in the bed.

We got back and drank some more. In elated wonder at ourselves. Still it wasn’t enough.

We rode to the 7 Eleven in the strip mall near the house. Stormed in and took what we wanted of Ho-Hos and Funny Bones. The guy behind the counter was just a couple years older than us, some poor fuck who just wanted to disinfect the counters and make it through the night. We ridiculed him brazenly, to his face, behind his back. We came back an hour later for some more. He didn’t even look at us from behind the register. Ducked his head, pretending to be busy.

Mark said he fucked his girlfriend and J. said what’d you do with the condom and Mark took a drag off his Camel and he smiled and he said he flushed it.

"Good," said J.

In the cold, bleak light of the morning we took stock of the damage. Bottles, ashes, miscellaneous trash. Mysteriously an upstairs door was torn off its hinges. That was all apparently. 

The Entreprise - 60

At night more than ever I sought oblivion. At the time I would have called it freedom. 

Pam had a late-summer roof party and I got wasted and went to McDonald’s and got on the bus back uptown, drifted off and woke up at 120th and Adam Clayton Boulevard. Walking back down in the streetlights and the moonlight was like a dream of old New York. Beautiful buildings seemingly intact, preserved not by renovation but by some benign force. Walls bathed in yellow glow. Street life here and there, people on stoops, on the sidewalk in little groups.

Before long the steam pipes hissed and gurgled to signal the changing of the seasons. Alan said he got a deal on a new office space downtown by the river. We assumed this really meant the end. A skeleton crew to guide the enterprise into a quiet, thrifty failure in a cramped space in a bad part of town. Except it wasn’t a bad part of town when you think about it. The top of Tribeca, on the corner of Greenwich and Canal. In any other city the blocks and blocks of warehouses and secondhand shops would mean you got lost on the wrong side of the tracks. Here it was where movie stars renovated industrial spaces into massive homes. The kind of real estate that rich people buy even though it’s in a weird old building that was configured for button sewing or shoe manufacture. They pay whatever for it, they put up with the raw walls and haphazardly situated columns. The hideously high ceilings. The rich have the alchemical ability to transform these very drawbacks and inconveniences into symbols of status and privilege. Look at my gigantic loft with the renovated period flooring. The floor above us was the home of a jeweler. I recognized the name of my ophthalmologist on the buzzer in the lobby. He occupied the floor below us with his young family. Our space too was vast. Everyone got a desk by a window. There was a kitchen and a separate room with a mattress on the floor should anyone have a need for one reason or another. Andre set to work repairing ethernet cables and setting up the modem. Almost like we had a purpose.

Each morning I walked west down Canal from the station. Through Chinatown, past the watercolor calligraphers, the shops of knockoffs. The street was intimate; a distinct, self-sustaining community. A woman swept dust out of her store and returned the dustpan and broom to a store a few doors down. Businesses on top of each other and you don’t know what to buy or who to buy it from but hang around a while and someone’ll sell you something. Shops with “electronics” and “audio” in their names appeared to have nothing but fake shoes and bags.

Mostly we hung out and went out for long, drinky lunches, the Argentine place down Greenwich or the Ear Bar most of the time, somewhere else if we got bored. If Alan wasn’t around we’d play guitar and sing. Erupt in mad fits of cursing. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he was around. One day I made a point to remember this time forever, to realize life would never be the same again, so weird and wonderful. It was hard, maybe impossible, to grasp it in the moment. But there’d come a day I’d look back and know.

Dappled sunlight shone on the sloping street, occupied for now by grills and folding tables and kids drawing in chalk. People sat drinking beer, most on the building side but some, like us, by the graveyard. There was a space allotted for music: mic stands, speakers, drums up on the sidewalk.

Right now a duo played: a sax player in a dandyish leopard-skin suit and fancy hat and a guitar player dressed normal. They were pretty good. When they were done I spotted the sax player hovering around the food table as I got a hot dog.

“Mind if I… grab a…?” he said uncertainly.

I said of course, of course. Though nothing was mine to give.

“Nice playing,” I said. And really meant it. You don’t always mean it when you tell someone nice playing. It feels good to say it and mean it.

He made one of those ass-backward acknowledgments, “Thanks much to you” or something. It was a bit weirder though. Like maybe, “What you said I appreciate.” Might have even ended with “my man.”

I stood there for a moment wondering whether he actually understood that I wanted to pay him a compliment. Then he spoke again.

“You just wait for the next band. There’ll be LOTS more people,” he declared, pointing. “And that’s a PROMISE.”

And the next band played and he was in it. And they weren’t quite as good actually. And there were exactly as many people as before.

Later we staggered down Canal in the cold rain to a party in a warehousy building in TriBeCa. It was a lesbian party – a dozen or so in the dimness of a vast, sparse apartment. Some were still celebrating Halloween, looking sort of demented in obscure, indistinct costumes while everyone around them was normal. It was decided that I had come as a man and everyone laughed. We drank some more, some punch with god knows what. There was a microphone and an amp set up for some reason and people would approach the mic and say things or sing off key a bit and step away fast, as though evading a calamity. I spoke to a short and wide-eyed woman named Catherine or something, who said she was 38 but looked like she was in her mid-twenties, and I kept telling her I couldn't believe it until she begged me to stop.

There was a desultory aspect to the party, and I can't even remember if there was music but there must have been, and it was dark like a cellar, yet the mood seemed happy. They were running and jumping on a big inflatable ball, rolling over it on their bellies and landing harshly on the floor on the other side. Gleefully flirting with injury.

The sound of a car door slamming. 

The sky above the hardware store.

An ad for coffee in a magazine.

A seagull on a saturated beam.

A couple of weeks ago at C.'s party I blacked out. Actually it was after her party but during it I could feel consciousness falter and slip away. I was drinking gin and tonic and vodka and tonic and I can hardly remember talking to anyone but I know I must have, S. I think, and G., and K. a bit and P. who was sitting in a chair by the bookcase looking morose.

G. and C. were there with C.'s sister, whose name I can't remember but who was beautiful, long straight brown hair and dark eyes and a small mouth with full  lips, her lower lip perpetually wet.

Everyone left and C. and H. and C. and I walked to Paddy's and this is when I lost it. I think I remember walking over there, dodging the trees in the sidewalk. We played pool of course. I was drinking whiskey but I'm not sure how the glass got in my hand. We played this couple over and over again. Once I looked over at H. He seemed to be looking down at me. He shook his head a little and smiled, amused, sipping his gin and tonic from the stirring straw. I wondered what he saw.

At one point C. and I were telling C. what shot to take and she hates that, and I know it, but she said OK to shut us up and then C. said hit it low, and that freaked her out. She was crying. She said you guys don't understand what that's like. I wanted her to stop crying, I wanted it to all be better. She wanted to leave but we convinced her to stay. I could not attenuate myself to the situation. I said come on, let's play again, and she was still pissed off. I wanted us to forget about this.

The woman in the couple bought me a drink. I think it might have been because I won a game but I think she might have bought me another one. Maybe more.

I think I remember leaving the bar – literally walking out the door – but nothing else. And I don't know how I got home, or how I remembered that K. had my keys and he was waiting for me to buzz my buzzer.

That's all I remember but the day after C. and C. reminded me about things. C. said he was laughing because I had a giant whiskey stain on my shirt that wouldn't dry. I was marked, extraordinarily, like Lady Macbeth. C. said he'd told me to go talk to the woman who was buying me drinks. Apparently I walked over to her at the bar. She was sitting with the guy. I stood and watched for a few moments. Stood there. And turned around and came right back. After we made C. cry she had comforted her, putting her arm around her and squeezing and saying who needs men anyway? We don't need men. At the end of the night she was grasping C.'s hands and kissing them as we left.

Hearing C. and C. tell me what happened gave me a key to this part of my consciousness and I could sort of remember what it felt like to inhabit that state. At the time I think it felt perfectly normal. I was not aware, of course, of the disintegration of my consciousness – how could I be? But I was present, responsive, engaged. And to have all that be disconnected from consciousness is terrifying.