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GUNS

They Shoot You When You Least Expect It

My job was to hold the guns.

Open the desk, while security placed the gun (or the knife, or the mace) belonging to the just-scanned customer inside. Then I would take the entrance fee from the customer, they’d be issued half a ticket (the other half went on the weapon), and they’d be allowed to enter.

Not everyone had a gun, but some did. Some had an entourage instead. David Johansen of the New York Dolls and Nile Rodgers of Chic were regulars. They didn’t have guns, they had lots of “friends.”

Actually, my real job besides holding the guns was to be jailbait eye candy as customers crossed the threshhold of the adult playground of the East Village after hours club owned by my friend’s mother. I was seventeen going on eighteen.

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I was a well-spoken, petite Jewish white girl from suburban New Jersey and my security pals were two big, tall black men from New York, NY. One was a tall, hatted, moonlighting session musician, and the other, I thought of him as a big, fat, nasty cocaine monster who had girls blow him in exchange for drugs.

A tall, skinny white guy who was an American doppleganger for Mick Jagger managed the place and would periodically circle back to the front to collect the cash and make sure there was no visible funny business going on in the entryway.

On my breaks, I would prowl the dim-lit three floors of the club, marvelling at how cool everyone was in their leather and denim and how lucky I was to be there. Coke, the white kind, flowed freely, often not even covertly. A common scene was to see patrons snorting off low tables. My iron rule was never to buy it, a decision which served me well. I had a crush on Zane, one of the bartenders, whose roommate ended up overdosing on heroin later that year. There were a few incidents like this, someone else gone every few months. Somehow, death and glamour and the angular lines of youth all intermingled in this place and in New York City at large; it was the tempo of the times. It was 1981, on the cusp of AIDS, before sex as well as drugs seeped into the wider consciousness as a prospective death sentence.

When I wasn’t at my friend’s mother’s East Village den of iniquity, I lived with her, my friend Allison, her brother Simon, and her chubby, cranky, discontented grandmother who had hair like a Brillo pad, and whose voice, usually conveying a nasty epithet, sounded like a Brillo pad would sound if it could constantly whine and complain. “You think phone calls are free, you don’t pay for nothing,” she’d harp at me. I didn’t know in New York you paid for local calls because in New Jersey they were free. She could have just asked me to pay the bill.

Allison lived in a loft in the West Village, which used to be a factory; we spent many happy hours laughing about everything with absolutely no privacy because our voices echoed up to the vaulted ceiling and around the balcony, which used to be a foreman’s perch to view the workers, and now served as a bedroom. We had a fair few spooky experiences as well, including when jewelry appeared out of thin air and landed in Allison’s hands; the place was definitely full of ghosts.

Allison’s mother, Melody, was like a ghost around the house as well — often hidden, rarely there. She spent a lot of time sleeping in the day or working away on her two nightclubs or with her much younger, dopey musician boyfriend, a tall, dull, long-haired man named Robie who I suspected had more talent for picking wealthy women than playing music. Melody was a blousy 40-ish bleached blonde who favored dramatic black flowing garments and a distinct fruity, floral perfume — years later, when I smelled it on someone else in a different city on a different continent, the memories of her and what she did to me came flooding back with one inhale.

Allison didn’t wear perfume. She had long brown hair, but she wasn’t a girly girl. She was no-nonsense, straightforward, and solidly built. We’d met at a drama camp/summer stock place for teens in New England. My parents had corralled me into skipping drama school that autumn, so I was at a loose end, and so was Allison. She was looking to join the military soon and, in the meantime, had invited me to live with her family.

Daytimes in the week, I waitressed at a horrific corporate lunch chain in midtown, wearing a faux tuxedo and serving hamburger lunches to conservative office workers. The place was always hiring because as soon as someone was a week away from getting tenure to join the union they’d be fired. Being seventeen, I was sure I would be the exception.

I first met Leif at Melody’s loft. He was Simon’s piano teacher. Leif was the keyboard player in a metal band of the millisecond and the touring keyboardist in what turned out to be a one-hit wonder rock outfit — even today, I still hear that track occasionally in a bar. It’s got a stomping beat, like somebody trying to ram a door down. It haunts me still, that persistent song, like the ghosts in that loft did then.

Leif courted me with transplanted southern charm and (what were probably exaggerated) tales of the road. He told me he was twenty-five, and until I found his driver's license, I believed him. Even twenty-five was an older man to me. We got into all kinds of things, hanging out in studios all night, recording music, having all sorts of adventures. We spent time hanging and recording at a studio where his friend Joey worked, close to Studio 54, cocaine everywhere, laying down absolute trash tracks which sounded great when we were doing it and sounded execrable when we played it back at a later date.

The bouncer I thought of as the cocaine monster was awful about Leif, really scathing. “That boyfriend of yours, he’s King Pussy Licker, he’s licking every pussy in the club,” he’d say to me. I’d put it down to his mind most likely being in a continuous loop of drugs or pussy every second. The other guy, the musician, was equally awful in his own way. I told him I was dabbling in songwriting. “Write a song about a hooker,” he said to me. I think he was really surprised when I actually did, and it was decent. (Years later, when I was a music journalist, he found me and begged me to introduce him to people I knew, and I took great pleasure in letting his request hang indefinitely.)

I lived this life for a few months, starting some music theory classes, waitressing, dating Leif, laughing with Allison, and working at Allison’s mother’s after hours club on the weekend. Robie, Melody’s boyfriend, would slime up to the entryway desk where I was sitting and try to flirt with me, but he was one of many, profoundly uninteresting, thick-witted, and I knew better, even then, than to encourage him. I’d give him one-word answers and look the other way.

One early Sunday morning, Allison’s mother roared up to me at the club desk, her fruity bouquet preceding her heft. “You’re fired,” she managed to yell and hiss at the same time. “Why?” I asked. I was absolutely baffled.

“Mick says you stole fifty dollars,” Melody reported. “I did not,” I replied, because I hadn’t. There were no security cameras, there was no money marking, just Mick’s supposed word that he’d counted money and it was missing. And somehow, this supposed missing money was pinned on me.

Instantly, I lost my job. I had to collect my things from Allison’s mother’s loft. I lost the small, cool family I was beginning to open up to and the club family, too. I had nowhere to go, so I moved in with Leif, who I’d only been dating for a few months.

Many pleading phone conversations in daylight hours later, Allison’s mother arranged for me to do a polygraph test. The minute she offered, I jumped. “I’ll do it,” I cried, absolutely determined to prove I was innocent.

When the day arrived, I took the subway from Queens to a dirty midtown office containing Melody, Robie and Mick, all glowering at me in an intimidating manner, and a man administering the polygraph test. I had to be hooked up to something and wear headphones. Even without the test beginning, it was nerve-wracking. They all stared as he administered what turned out to feel like my second execution. “Did you steal five dollars?” he asked. “No,” I answered. “Ten?” “No.” At fifty, because I knew that was the amount they were looking for, I began to sweat, and my voice began to shake. “No,” I said, because I hadn’t stolen that amount, or any amount, at all. “Seventy-five?” he continued. “No,” I said, again.

When it was over, I was told to leave.

Later that day, Allison’s mother called me. “You failed the test,” she said to me. “When they got to fifty, the lines on the polygraph moved, and it proved you were lying. You stole the money.” She hung up. I never talked to her again. I never believed in the veracity of polygraph tests from that day on, either.

My relationship with Allison was wrecked. I tried to call her. “You stole money from my family,” she said, and nothing I could say would dissuade her. She wouldn’t see me, but later on, we talked on the phone after she’d come back from boot camp, rueing the day she’d joined, because they’d lied to her about what employment opportunities the military actually offered. Bullying, she said, was the norm.

I reflected then, as I do now, on what kind of woman could be so insecure as to waste an eighteen-year-old, the same age as her daughter, on the altar of her own jealousy. So her stupid numbknuckle boyfriend flirted badly with unwilling jailbait eye candy she herself had hired. So what? Or maybe the Mick lookalike stole the money or the cocaine monster used it to roll and snort lines. But if I had to bet my money (earned, not stolen), it would be on the blousy blonde.

I never thieved anything from these people. My only crimes were to be fascinated by their eccentric family life and fall by turns into infatuation, then despair, with their sleazy, glamorous nighttime bolthole, which in many ways crystallized the downtown New York music scene of the early 80’s into three floors of drug-imbued, wild-side hued craziness.

For that, I feel like they shot me in the back, turned around, and kept partying all night long.