Tuesday Nights in 1980 (13 page)

This is it, this is it, this is it.

Lucy woke up
the next morning, in Jamie's bed, to a feeling of extreme hollowness. Where was she? What had last night meant? Where had that feeling—the energy of newness, the blissful tug of communal movement, the
absence of any worry—
gone, and how could she get it back? Now she was all headache and smeared makeup and fear. Jamie's slender back was turned to her: the back of someone she did not know at all, on the other side of an unfamiliar bed. A witchy tapestry hung above them; on it sperm-like shapes spawned and multiplied around some Indian goddess. There was a torn Blondie poster on the wall to her left, and a line of nails strung with Jamie's bounteous necklaces. A tube of deodorant on the dresser. A box of Tampax and a lipstick kiss on the mirror. These things comforted her only slightly: this was the stuff of girls everywhere. But the panic returned when she thought about what she would do now, awake and alone in the city that was supposed to be her home. She thought she might wait for Jamie to wake up—maybe they would make breakfast?—but she also had the feeling that it might be hours before Jamie woke up, and that someone like Jamie probably didn't make or eat breakfast at all. Plus, the broken stove.

She quietly slid out of the bed, gathered herself, splashed water on her face from the pink, rusty sink. Before she went downstairs and out into the world, she crept back into Jamie's room to grab her little white purse from the night before. She emptied it and filled it with her own things: her stupid green wallet and her cherry ChapStick and then, for good measure, one of Jamie's cigarettes, which she pulled from the pack on the dresser: a tiny, precious scroll. Just borrowing, she told herself. Borrowing from her new friend.

Outside, New York
was being New York. The hot asphalt was steaming, the little dogs were being toted or followed by their eccentrically dressed masters, the clothes were bright and skimpy, the smell was sewer and candied nuts, the newspapers were cracking open at the café tables, the sunglasses were enormous, the scrawls on the walls seemed to vibrate. Lucy wandered down the avenue, in search of nothing and everything.

What she found: fire escapes zigzagging like lightning bolts on the sides of every building, painted over so many times that their surfaces resembled blistering human skin; a group of men in the park wearing orange and white singing the same low song, over and over; a burping black suitcase on Avenue A, revealing a bright red bra; a car radio blasting Mexican horns, its owner flicking his tongue out to reveal gold-covered teeth; sidewalk grates opening and slamming like the lids of boxes, offering glimpses of a whole other dark world below this whole dark world; a spiky, spray-painted crown on a red wall; an abandoned lot, home to a rusted tricycle, a large bird, a sleeping man wearing a ripped plaid jumpsuit, and miraculously, a swatch of morning glories that had just now yawned open.

Lucy had no reference point for this landscape. It was entirely new to her, and so she could not place it within herself. It moved upward instead of out. It moved outward instead of in. It was only the middle of the morning and already it was a circus of catcalls and coffee smells and crazy sounds. Was she frightened by it? Disgusted? Terrified? Intrigued? All of these things. She wanted nothing more than to call her mother. She wanted anything but to call her mother. She was both desperate and open. Her mind filled and emptied; she didn't know it, but she was already bracing herself, becoming immune. Through her flat shoes, she felt the city's hot concrete. Her hot concrete. She could walk everywhere. She did.

There were problems
with living in New York that were not problems anywhere else in the world. Lucy had only thought of her move here as a singular large-scale risk, an enormous leap of trust that required the bravery everyone back home had questioned. Lucy had never considered the wicked guilt of doing nothing in a city constructed around always doing
something
, or the ordeal of subway tokens, or the carrying of many, many plastic bags that dug into your hands like blades, or the clothes one had to buy in order to feel even remotely comfortable existing among the real New Yorkers, who seemed to know exactly what to wear at all times—when to bring an umbrella, when you were supposed to switch to boots. The skirt she had imagined did not exist, she found, and even if it had it wouldn't be
right.
The right skirt, in New York City in 1979, would not be pleated or formal. In fact it probably wouldn't be a skirt at all but some version of the tight leggings she saw Jamie and the other girls wearing, tight leggings with large shirts, almost to the knees. She would need much more than new clothes to become a New Yorker anyway, she saw during those first days and weeks in the city. She would need to change entirely, and not in any of the ways she had expected.

She let Jamie bleach her hair in the sink. “
Hot, Idaho
,” Jamie said.

At a stall on St. Mark's Place, she had a man with big round pieces of wood in his earlobes pierce her nose with a silver hoop. “
Even hotter
.”

Based on an advertisement where an attractive, wholesome-looking girl held a glass of whiskey under the text:
SINCE WHEN DO YOU DRINK JIM BEAM? SINCE I DISCOVERED IT
'
S SO MIXABLE
, Lucy began ordering Jim Beam on the rocks, both wanting to be the wholesome girl who mixed it with something and wanting nothing to do with her.

She kept her eyes open for the artists in her book, but it seemed Jamie did not frequent the same locales that they would; she met, instead, a series of male suitors who were cleanly dressed and messily drunk, who were looking for a blonde like her to take their minds off their work. Jamie explained that she hated these assholes, too, but they were just another necessary evil in a place that ran on necessary evils. “
Plus
,” Jamie whispered, “
I find their blandness excessively interesting
.” Lucy got drinks bought for her—raspberry martinis were a thing—but always skirted out of the chunky, sweaty grasps of the men, often opting to go outside and look up and out at the buildings, to smoke one of her new cigarettes on a stoop and watch the city twinkle itself toward morning.

It wasn't long before she had spent all the money she'd saved, and she was ashamed to call her parents for more, not that they had any to send her. She ate hardly anything—bread and butter, candy bars, an apple—but even with her meager ways she could not afford the rent Jamie was asking for: $206, on the fifteenth of the month.

Although she had known she would need a job, she had not given thought to how she would get one, and, she began to see after a number of discouraging interviews, a job was not going to fall out of the sky like Jamie's apartment listing had. Each day during those first few weeks, as she climbed from the sweltering underground of the subway stations or taped up a blister she had gotten from walking around the city aimlessly, or felt like a fool in her silly-looking sneakers, slashed with neon yellow strips of plastic, which had seemed so advanced in Ketchum but horribly wrong now, she questioned her decision to come here. Each day she had countless moments where she thought she just couldn't hack it, where she longed for the wooden walls of her bedroom, Ketchum's clean air, an afternoon with nothing around her and nothing to do. On multiple occasions she found herself in tears in a phone booth or on a stoop, sometimes even in the dressing room of a clothing store whose clothes she couldn't afford, always with other people's hungry eyes on her, filled with a voyeurism linked to the deep need to see reflections of themselves in similar situations at other times; everyone knew there was nowhere to cry in New York.

It was in the middle of one of these lacrimal instances, in a midtown subway station, on her way home from a botched interview (at an independent bookstore, where apparently you had to know the authors and titles of every classic ever written, on command), dressed probably inappropriately in one of Jamie's shorter skirts, that Lucy saw her first New York City artist.

On the other side of the tracks, between the rusting pillars, a man crouched, then erupted like a star, then crouched again. A red stream of paint followed his hand wherever it moved, like magic. The man was small; whatever he was drawing was big. What he was drawing was still unclear; she moved closer to the tracks so she could see. A figure of sorts, an arm, a leg. The most confident lines in the world, rushing from his body like a song. Lucy wanted to watch him forever, this small, magical artist, but she felt the pressure-wind of her train coming to obscure her view and whisk her away.
But wait. This was it.
Yellow intrusion of train light.
But wait!
The man was just finishing. The train screeched and flashed in front of her. She jumped in, scurried to the window on the opposite side. The man was gone, just like that. What was left on the wall was a giant penis, a penis with arms and legs and a penis of his own, which was being sucked by another penis. Lucy made one enormous sound like a laugh.
A penis being sucked by another penis?!
She was the only one in the subway car, which she was grateful for, because she could let herself feel the heat from what she just saw: heat that ran from her heart to her stomach, whether for the artist or his vulgar image, she didn't need to know.

When she broke the bad news about the interview to Jamie—“Didn't go well, Jame. Should have paid better attention in English”
—
Jamie only scoffed.

“It's terrible, isn't it?” she said, while mixing a very dirty-looking martini in a mason jar. “Being a girl in New York? It's just the fucking worst.”

But Lucy wasn't sure yet. She wasn't sure if it was the worst or the very, very best.

During her fourth
week in the apartment, in the armpit nightmare that was early August in the city, Jamie invited people over: a crew of guys whose names all started with R. Immediately Lucy wondered if any of them were artists; immediately she found out that they were not. Ryan, whom Jamie had been sleeping with even though she confessed to Lucy that she thought he was “missing some brain cells,” had big arm muscles and a crooked nose. (“Not the only part of him that's crooked,” Jamie told her later.) He was talking about a movie he had gone to the night before, something about sharks that he'd seen while significantly high; he couldn't get the theme song out of his head. Rob, who was more beautiful than the rest when it came to his face, but who stood and was depressingly short, rolled his eyes in Ryan's direction as he talked, then gave Lucy a high five. Randy, a too-nice guy with a long ponytail and an army coat, said very slowly, between hits from a joint that was almost burning out, “Hey, Lucy, we heard you were looking for a job.”

Lucy smiled.

“Can I get a hit of that?” she said. She realized it was the first time since getting here that she felt confident enough to ask for something, not to wait for it to befall her, and as she sucked the smoke into her lungs she felt good, and alive, and she said to Randy, “What's the job?”

He told her it was at a bar. A bartender job.

Lucy looked, glassy-eyed, over at Jamie, who gave her a sad smile.

“Don't be an asshole, Ida,” Jamie said. “This city is built off of people doing things they don't wanna do.”

Jamie, Lucy had found out, worked as a massage therapist in the financial district. “The men get really tense,” she had said. “All that money, all that trading.” She had said the words
money
and
trading
as if she were running out of breath, and Lucy understood that Jamie's massages sometimes, if not always, ended up being more than just massages. Jamie also tended to work overtime, from her “home office,” and Lucy often heard the exchanges taking place: the
trading,
she assumed, then the
money
.

Lucy gulped. She felt simultaneously depressed and excited. She imagined herself in high heels, serving fancy people fancy cocktails. It would just be temporary. She could do it for a while—work on her feet until she got on her feet, so to speak. She pushed away an impulsive thought of her mother, what her mother might say about her working at a bar, which went something like:
You move all the way out there, so far from your mother, to . . .

Randy sighed. “Jamie, why you gotta knock my place of employment like that? It's an upstanding place. Right, Rob? Rob's there every night. Right, Rob?”

“I'll take it,” Lucy said quickly, sipping from a beer Jamie had handed her. “I mean, if Rob's there every night . . .” She winked at Rob in a way she figured was cute.

“There's a place where you can buy live snakes down on Canal,” Randy said, out of nowhere. “I was thinking about getting one.”

They all laughed, which made Lucy feel okay about things. Thinking about being part of a group of people sitting together and laughing. She imagined Randy with a snake around his neck, serving someone a raspberry martini.

And so Random
Randy, as Jamie and Lucy would start to call him because of his propensity to bring up totally irrelevant subjects at odd times, took her to the Eagle, an underground (both figuratively and literally) bar in the West Village. It was a kitschy, divey place, where the walls were made of fake stones, and there was the vague sense that the bar itself was tucked inside of a log cabin. Randy bent over a plug and a string of red chili pepper lights went on around the windows, though in the daylight you couldn't really see that they were on. The chili pepper lights made Lucy want to get back on a plane to Idaho, where she would be working for Randall, the lawyer, not Randy, the bartender. She agreed with her mother's imaginary critique: she did not move to New York City to work in a
bar.
But then again, what did she move to New York City to do? And what else was there? Randy intercepted her with an arm thrown around her waist, guiding her back behind the bar for what he called the “grand tour.”