American on Purpose (11 page)

I
thought coke was a wonder drug. It let you drink as much as you wanted without passing out or blacking out. If you took some in the morning it would kill your hangover and set you right for a hard day’s work at a construction site. It cost sixty bucks a gram, which was expensive but didn’t seem unreasonable given its magical properties. Since Jamesy had a good coke contact, I bought my supply through him regularly. Anne liked it, too, and though we were far too Presbyterian to throw ourselves into penury and debauchery over a narcotic, we made sure we had some on hand most of the time. At this time, strange as it may seem, coke helped—I can only guess that my relationship with alcohol is so bizarre that at first the introduction of cocaine alleviated the negative effects. At least that’s what it felt like. It didn’t stay like that, of course, but that’s how it began.

I was happy for a time in New York. The energy and vitality of the city inspired me and helped me become confident, and the streets of the East Village seemed to be teeming with people who valued artistic expression and eccentricity. It felt dangerous
and welcoming at the same time. Every night at one a.m., lying in bed, I’d hear a woman sing the most beautiful operatic arias. She sounded like an angel floating between the sirens and over the tar rooftops. I later found out that she was an aspiring opera singer who worked in a local bar and on the way home at the end of her shift she would walk through the streets to her apartment singing at the top of her voice. She did it for protection, figuring that any lowlifes on the street who wanted to do her harm would think either that she was too crazy to approach or that she would attract too much attention. This delighted and impressed me. It seemed indicative of the beat of the locale—art as the best defense in a dangerous but exciting world.

Roswell, my actor/construction buddy, told me on the subway one day as we were heading uptown to work, that they were having open auditions at a local off-off Broadway theater. He knew the director and suggested I go.

“You’re funny, man. And different. You’ll get cast just because of that. No one else sounds like you.”

“But I’m not an actor.”

“Who gives a fuck? There’s a million nonactors in Hollywood making movies.”

I said I would go, for a laugh, but only if he would. He agreed.

On Saturday at eleven a.m. I went to a local bar on First between Ninth and Tenth streets called the Last Resort where the auditions were being held. I had passed the place, later to become the famous Coyote Ugly, many times before, since it was right next to Rosemarie’s, still the best pizza parlor in New York. (Forget about all that Ray’s bullshit.)

The Last Resort was a gay joint, so I hesitated for a moment, but I figured I could always bolt if I found myself in an unpleasant situation, so in I went, and knew immediately it was where I
should be. There must have been fifty or sixty stunning-looking girls sitting in rows, reading scripts. There were good-looking guys there, too, but that was no surprise—it was a gay bar. Roswell was a no-show, which pissed me off and made me feel terribly awkward, because I had never been to an audition before. I’d thought it would be like a job interview, so I had worn a suit, and the other actors eyed me suspiciously.

The auditions were being held in the back room, which doubled as a dark place for anonymous gay sex during the week and a genteel off-off Broadway theater on weekends. Woe betide you if you arrived on the wrong night, you might inadvertently have to sit through a horribly amateur performance of
Our Town
when all you wanted was a strange man’s penis up your arse.

I sat up at the bar and ordered a beer from the bartender, a very camp black dude named Stanley.

“My stars! That is an adorable accent. Where are you
from
, sugar?”

“Scotland.”

“Oh, I have always wanted to go there…. Where is it?”

Stanley was funny. He was from New Orleans and wanted to tell me
all about it
. I yakked it up with him for a while, but it seemed like the line of actors was taking forever to move, so I told him I was gonna go. He told me to hang on because he knew the director and was convinced that he would love me. He ran to the back room and came back a few minutes later, smiling triumphantly.

“You’re next.”

I was ushered in to meet a tall, thin, excitable creature in a purple Donny Osmond cap. He was sitting behind a small desk in the dark, smoky room, and next to him was a Peter Pan look-alike who was holding a notepad. He introduced himself as George Stephenson, the artistic director of the American Modern Dance Theater. He told me Peter Pan’s name but I forget what it was. I
said hi, and George asked me if I had prepared a piece. I didn’t understand what he meant.

“An audition piece. A scene from a play or a movie that you’ve memorized.”

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t know I had to do that.”

For some reason he thought this was adorable and funny, so he gave me a script and asked me to read through some lines with the Peter Pan dude, who was an aspiring actor as well as a full-time henchman. The play they were going to stage, by Lewis John Carlino, was called
Telemachus Clay
. It’s the story of a midwest farm boy who travels to Hollywood and finds redemption after adventures in debauchery. I read the part of Telemachus, and the Peter Pan look-alike read the part of the manipulative Hollywood agent. I don’t know how good I was, but I knew that Peter Pan was fucking awful. If this was the competition, I was in clover.

George thought so, too.

“I wanna cast you. I don’t know for what, but I want you in the production.”

“Great,” I said. “What’s the pay?”

Peter Pan snickered. George gave the earnest showbiz speech, variations of which I have heard many times since.

“There’s no pay. It’s off-off-Broadway and we don’t have any financing, but if it’s a hit—hey, who knows? Anyway, the exposure will be invaluable for your career.”

I didn’t see how being in a play would get me more carpentry work and said so to George.

He told me that if I wanted to be in show business, and he recommended that I should be, then people had to see what I could do. Talent agents and the like—they would all come to this production. That’s why there were so many young actors waiting outside.

I told him I couldn’t rehearse because I had a job.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “We rehearse weekends and
on weeknights before nine p.m. After that this room is booked for other activities.”

Peter Pan gave another creepy little chuckle.

I didn’t know what to do, so George gave me a copy of the play and said I should read it. He’d assemble his troupe at one p.m. the following day, Sunday, and would be really delighted if I turned up.

I said I’d think it over. I thanked him and left.

When I got there the next day I met the rest of the cast. They were an eager collection of young hopefuls, about six guys and six girls, all of us under the age of twenty-five. George told us he was going to “workshop some ideas” and “go through some exercises,” whatever that meant, and from there he would make his casting choices.

He had us improvise scenes he conjured up, which always seemed to end with guys fighting each other or making out with girls. If this was what being an actor was all about, I wanted the job. Fuck the pay.

Eventually, and rather unwisely in my opinion, George chose me to play the lead, the part of the midwestern farm boy, Telemachus. I told him that I couldn’t do a midwest accent and he said it didn’t matter because a Scottish accent would brand me theatrically as an innocent, the main quality the part required. I didn’t know whether to be insulted or grateful, but I accepted.

I went off to work at the construction site every morning at five a.m. with a breakfast bump of cocaine—by then it was like coffee to me—and I hammered and sawed until three-thirty. Then I took the subway home from Harlem, changed, grabbed a slice at Rosemarie’s, and rehearsed with the theater group every night till nine. Then I would toot a few lines and drink beer until I fell asleep, around midnight. Some nights I would go uptown to see Anne, who by then was working in an Irish bar we’ll just call O’Tooles,
because many of the chaps that I became friendly with there value their anonymity.

If I wanted to talk to Anne, this was my only chance, because otherwise, given our schedules, the only time we were together was in bed or for an hour or so on weekends. This wasn’t as bad as it sounds because at this point we’d started arguing a great deal. Anne felt I was getting up to nonsense with the girls in the cast, and that was partially true. I wasn’t actually sleeping with anyone but some of these improvised acting games were just an excuse for the cheap thrill of
frottage
and making out with someone you shouldn’t be making out with.

Anne was threatened by our unavailability to each other, so in order to placate her I started going to O’Tooles every night after rehearsals. Often she would be busy serving customers. It was an Irish bar, but an upscale one on the Upper East Side, so there was food and waitress service.

Inevitably I got to talking with the other members of staff who worked there, mostly Irish immigrants from Belfast and Derry. There were two brothers we’ll call Finn and Callum who ran the place, and they were an excellent font of tall tales about life and the troubles in Ireland. They were Catholic and I was Protestant but we all agreed that even though that shit carried heft in the old countries it had no place in the New World, so our relations were very cordial. We would sing each other’s sectarian songs while drunk, but I don’t recommend singing “The Sash My Father Wore” in an Irish bar in New York. Even if you do have the glassy-eyed permission of the owner, other patrons with less of an understanding of the New World rules may take offense.

It was rumored that a few of the boys of the IRA would drink in the bar when on fund-raising trips to America, and although I drank with many Irish expats, I was not aware of anyone who was
openly affiliated with the IRA. Still, there was an incident that was something of a clue.

One night Roswell came with me to see Anne at O’Tooles. We brought a few grams of the old Bolivian marching powder with us and she took a line or two but couldn’t hang out with us, the place was too busy and she worked for tips. She put us in a back booth with Finn and Callum and a few other Irish transplants. It was one of those nights when the whiskey and coke were flowing like the fucking Mississippi, and after a spell somebody suggested we get out of the noisy shitheap full of drunken yuppies and go to a real bar. If Callum and Finn were offended they never let on, and after explaining to Anne that I was going out for a wee drink with the boys we all got in a taxi and headed over to Hell’s Kitchen.

My memory is sketchy as to what bar we ended up in but a few red-faced soldiers from the Six Counties were there that night. We toasted and drank and sang together, and as we were leaving to go back to O’Tooles we saw three or four ladies of the evening standing on a street corner.

With the cheery altruism of a drunk, I decided I was going to talk these girls out of their chosen profession, much to the amusement of Roswell and the assembled Irishmen, who insisted it couldn’t be done.

As I was chatting to the ladies, whom I remember as being giggly and delightful, their pimp interrupted. He was a very tall black guy who was dressed like Huggy Bear. He told me to leave his hos alone.

“Pay ’em and you can do what you like with ’em, but don’t be costing me money and interrupting my business.”

I told him what I thought of his business and how I felt the girls deserved a better class of employer. Things got a little heated between me and this fellow and we both knew it was gearing up
for a scrap, but before I could lay a finger on him he reached into his fur coat and brought out a shiny black handgun that seemed oddly large. He smashed me across the face with it and I fell to the ground, dazed and drunk, but through my fuzzy vision I saw him point it in my face. Then he pulled the hammer back with his thumb.

“
Well, well
,” I thought, “
this is it
.”

I don’t remember being afraid, only a bit sad, although the guy with the gun looked more scared than I was. His eyes were huge and I could see spittle at the edges of his mouth. I still dream about this, and in the dream I can see down the barrel of the gun to the waiting bullet. I don’t know if that is possible or it’s just a little garnish added by my imagination.

I heard someone speak in an Irish accent. For legal reasons, let’s say it wasn’t Finn.

“Hey, bucko. Look at me!”

The pimp glanced at the speaker. I can’t be sure of the exact words but the voice was strangely calm and sober, saying something like:

“Look at me. You know who we are. He’s with us.
You know who we are.
You pull the trigger and we will kill you and your mother and your father and your friends. We’ll kill your girls, your kids, and your dog and we’ll piss on the fuckin’ bodies. Now put your popgun away before you bring the fuckin’ Apocalypse on your house.”

The pimp made the right choice for us all. He pocketed the gun and took off. By the time we were in a taxi I had the makings of a stupendous black eye, which we all agreed was a fine trophy from a terrific night out.

T
he work on the site in Harlem was drawing to a close by the time
Telemachus Clay
premiered. Thankfully my eye had returned to normal by then, somewhat to the regret of Stanley, the bartender, who said it made me look dangerous and sexy. Anne, though, was not a fan of the black eye, or the story, and she was getting very tired of my drinking. I don’t blame her, I was getting a little tired of it myself, but what could I do? If I didn’t drink I would be worse—I’d be locked up in a psych ward, or so I believed. Anne never tried to get me to stop drinking, though, she was a Highland girl. It’s not like she was a stranger to whiskey and she snorted just as much coke as I did, which, in real cokehead terms, was not that much, I suppose. We were more drunks really.

Telemachus Clay
is not a great play, and the American Modern Dance Theater’s production did nothing to enhance its reputation. We had been rehearsing and working on our odd dancey show for months, and by the time it opened I was bored with the whole thing. The first night was fun, though. James and Susan came in from the burbs, Anne was there of course, and also Jamesy and his junkie
wife, Lucy—she had taken to talking to me a little more since she realized I was in a play. Roswell and a couple of guys from the construction site showed up. So did the painter Steven Campbell from Glasgow, who was causing quite a stir in the New York art world at the time. Anne had been friendly with him and his wife, Carol, at art school but it was a tricky social situation. Steven loathed cocaine and had absolutely no time for Jamesy, another classmate at the Glasgow School of Art, whom Steven dismissed as a worthless trendy. It was an unfair assessment, and Steven could be a pretty opinionated guy.

Afterward we all went to the funky Pyramid Club on Avenue A and watched the trannys dancing on the bar and heard a new band called They Might Be Giants, who were onstage in the back room. Everyone was very nice about my performance in the play, even if they didn’t quite get why a midwestern farm boy prancing around a pretentious makeshift set meant to depict the debaucheries of Hollywood would speak with a Scottish accent. I told them it was because my character was an innocent, but they didn’t seem to get it. To be honest, neither did I.

Steven and I got to talking, and I liked him. He had come to New York on a Fulbright scholarship, which he told me was a big deal for a painter. He was about to have his first solo show at a place called the Barbara Toll Gallery and asked if I would come along because it would be nice to have someone around with my kind of midwestern accent. I said I’d be delighted.

Steven called me up on the day of his opening and asked me to meet him in some bar in the Bowery. He said it was important, that he was very nervous. It was only about four-thirty and I had just gotten home from work so I jumped into a cab, still in my overalls. When I got to the bar, a fashionable yuppie hellhole, he was perched on a stool at the end of a long counter.

“I’ve discovered something. Try this.”

He handed me a frosted glass containing a clear syrupy liquid. I sipped it. It was terrific, clear and clean, and it thumped you in the chest.

“What is it?”

“Stolichnaya. Genuine Russian vodka. The Soviets just started exporting it.”

“Hey, Comrade!” I yelled to the nervous male model/bartender who had been trying to figure out if my overalls were a fashion statement or not. He walked over and smiled thinly.

“Yes?” he said.

I pointed to the Stoli bottle behind him.

“Time to redistribute the fucking wealth!”

By the time we arrived at his opening we were pretty toasted and the whole New York art scene was already there, cooing over the giant canvases that Steven had painted. He completed one a week, commuting to his studio in Bed-Sty, Brooklyn, and from his SoHo loft Monday through Friday. Each day, he took the subway and ate the sandwich his wife made for him at lunchtime. He was a very cool guy.

At the gallery we propped ourselves against a wall as he gazed unbelievingly at the sight of his triumph. We watched his wife, Carol, a very down-to-earth Scottish woman with a fantastic shock of blond hair and extravagant black horn-rimmed glasses, small-talk with the rich and the fashionable. A weird-looking old fella in a bad wig came over and told Steven his canvases were astonishing. He droned on oddly for a while, then drifted off on the arm of some pterodactyl-like woman in a silk printed dress that clung to her bones.

“That guy thinks he’s Andy Warhol,” I said.

“That guy
is
Andy Warhol,” said Steven.

Anne and I would have dinner with Steven and Carol occasionally, but it was hard to find time, and they had just had their first child so they were kind of busy. Jamesy and I still occasionally worked together on carpentry and renovation jobs, but we didn’t see much of each other. I had started working on made-to-order loft beds for customers on the Upper East Side that I had met through Finn and Callum. Jamesy had decided he was going into the motorcycle business—bikes had always been a passion for him—and he wanted to open his own store. Plus, he was also busy dealing with whatever it was he had to deal with with Lucy.

Then Roswell started getting into smack, and I had very little patience for that scene, so things got pretty quiet for a while. Then Chad Moran came to town.

Chad is mad. Genuinely and certifiably. He’s smart and talented and kind and funny, he can be good fun to be around, but he’s full-tilt-batshit-tonto. When I ran into him in San Francisco in 2007, after not hearing about him for many years, I was genuinely astonished to discover that he was still alive.

Chad had fronted a successful pop group from Scotland called The Tonesters, a kind of Thompson Twins-esque funky group. Think Depeche Mode, but with humor and sex. The group also had a girl backup singer called Esther Okimbo. Esther’s family was originally from West Africa, but her father had had to flee due to some kind of political unrest and for some reason had chosen to raise his children in the tiny Scottish village of Auchinleck. Therefore Esther, while looking as African as anyone could, had a provincial country Scottish accent. It was an intriguing mix—Chad certainly thought so, considering he had left his wife for her. He and Esther had turned up in N.Y.C. from Scotland, keen to replicate their previous success in a bigger market.

I had never met Chad when we were both in Glasgow but I’d
heard about him. He had a reputation as an electrifying performer and an amazing front man for his band but was also known as being a dangerous and unpredictable lunatic. Not in a bad way, he wasn’t violent, but he was renowned for climbing up buildings or jumping out of cars or streaking whenever the fancy took him. He also disappeared from time to time. Once, a scheduled television performance in London had to be canceled when he went AWOL, only to surface a few days later in the locked ward of a mental hospital in Aberdeen—six hundred miles away. A drunken bender, a little bit of amphetamine sulphate, and lack of sleep had launched him into a temporary psychosis and he had been captured by the police as he “shot” imaginary monsters with a pretend gun in Aberdeen’s railway station, much to the alarm of respectable commuters. I could relate to Chad. I had been that nutty from time to time. I would have shot the killer ducks of Kelvingrove Park if I had been smart enough to hallucinate a weapon.

His band had done well, sold some records and filled some biggish theaters, but eventually the record company grew tired of Chad’s antics. That kind of behavior is applauded only if you are making really big money for these bastards.

He knew Anne from Glasgow and we met up with him and Esther in a bar on Sixth Street just after they came to town. Chad had just discovered Captain Morgan’s Old Jamaican Spiced Rum and was drinking a large bottle of it by the neck. The bar staff looked on apprehensively but were prudent enough not to interfere.

Chad explained to me that this rum tasted so good to him that he suspected that he
had been
Captain Morgan in a previous life—his last name was Moran, after all—and proposed that we drink the stuff until we fell down and talked like pirates all day. It sounded like a decent plan to me, so that’s just what we did.

Chad was fearless in his pursuit of a good time and I found it infectious, spellbinding even. I wanted to be around him. He made
me look like the sensible one. I only realized some years later that Chad was not crazier than me, just a few stops ahead of me on a train going nowhere.

We were inseparable for a while, Chad and I, drinking and carousing all over town. I became the drummer in his new band, also called The Tonesters, and although we never played a single gig or even rehearsed or were even alone in a room with musical instruments we had a few meetings at record company offices in Manhattan on the strength of Chad’s U.K. reputation. My other friends couldn’t stand him. Steven the artist had no time for that kind of nonsense, he was too serious and dour. Jamesy thought he was just another New York morality tale that was waiting for a bad end, and Roswell found him more frightening than the IRA guys from uptown.

Anne was not a big fan, either, even though for some reason that I have never been able to fathom, women loved Chad. He was rock-and-roll Rasputin, the mad sexy monk. Maybe it was because we were insane and drunk and funny and had accents, I’m not sure exactly what, but whenever I hung out with Chad, we were surrounded by girls looking for a party. They got one, too.

It wasn’t my friendship with Chad that ended my marriage to Anne—I did that with my behavior—but running around New York with him surely accelerated the process. At three o’clock one morning, after drinking and snorting coke in my Eleventh Street apartment, Chad and I decided to find out which one of us was the better fighter. So we left the apartment and jumped the chain-link fence into the yard of the elementary school that faced our building. Anne and Esther watched from the fire escape as Chad and I proceeded to good-naturedly knock the shit out of each other, eventually declaring a draw when we were both sufficiently bloodied.

When I got back to the apartment I was exhausted but not as exhausted as Anne. She had had enough, and not just of our
schoolyard brawl. She wanted to move back to Glasgow, where she thought we stood a chance of being a normal couple leading a conventional married life.

I realized she was right, that it would be the smart thing to do. Things did seem to be spiraling dangerously out of control in New York. My tourist visa had run out ages ago, and it would only take one arrest to have me deported and never allowed to return, and anyone with half a brain could see—even I could see—that an arrest was definitely in my immediate future. So after just over a year in the East Village, Anne and I gave away our stuff, said goodbye to our friends, and headed back to the old country.

Like many people who come to New York to live and then have to leave before they really want to, I spent the next three or four years with the vague feeling that there was a great party going on somewhere and I was not at it.