Best Decade in New York City

New York has been sodomizing me for the past decade, and it's only in the last year that it has started to feel good. I moved here in 1992 and I was like a young prison fish who hadn't been raped yet, but is certainly eager. The thing is, ever since the city began to have its way with me, I've been going insane for 10 years straight, but in a sort of middle-class way, if you know what I mean. For example, one of the times when I really screwed up?several substances had abused me terribly?and was on the verge of homelessness in 1994, I moved in with my parents in New Jersey for a year. See what I mean about the middle-classness of that?

Regardless, I'm the cause of all my torment and shouldn't blame any of my troubles on New York, but, you see, it's so easy to get in trouble in the five boroughs. That's the rub. There's 24 hours of trouble here in New York City. In other parts of the country, trouble goes to bed pretty early and you have to work a lot harder to find it.

Two years ago, I did spend some time in the Midwest, stationed there due to my usual economic straits?I was the Visiting Alcoholic Writing Professor at a Big University?and I managed to find the local trouble, and, let me tell you, trouble in a small town can be very unsettling. You run into people the next day and they yell at you in parking lots and threaten to kill you or they come to your little professorial cottage and bang on the door, while you hide in the bathroom and smoke marijuana an undergraduate has sold to you. I did get out of that town without any arrests, but I was pretty lucky. So that may shoot to hell my theory about New York being troublesome, but I think I was so good at getting in trouble in the Midwest because of all my years of practice in New York City.

Anyway, what I'd like to talk about today in this "Best of" issue is how things were for me when I first came here. Like most of my life, it was hell while it was going on, but I now look back on those early days rather fondly; you might even say they were the Best of...

No, I can't complete that phrase.

Please follow me back to 1992.

I was 28 and a strict vegetarian and very green environmentally and streetwise. For several years, I had been vehemently anti-New York. Too much pollution. Not enough nature. Too many social ills. Not enough solutions.

In those days, I was particularly against people eating meat and driving cars?colon cancer and constipation were my enemies, and I saw all automobiles as small individual fires that were overheating the planet. Furthermore, McDonald's was plowing under the Amazon to raise beef to clog colons and we needed those trees of the Amazon to combat the heating from the cars, and it was all one big maddening loop of insanity and I couldn't take it. I'd watch my father eat a roast beef sandwich and with my crazed perspective it was like witnessing Hiroshima. Why was the world so screwed up? Why did everyone do the wrong things all the time? I was also against sugar, dairy, eggs, white flour, antibiotics, caffeine, cigarettes?you name it, I was against it, and I was off drugs and alcohol since 1986. Clearly, I was on the verge of a major breakdown.

At the time, I was also already a failed writer. I had published a novel in 1989 that no one had read and was struggling to write another novel, but had nothing to say. I still don't have anything to say, but I've since learned that that's not really a problem. No one has anything to say, but we've got to do something when we're not sleeping. Anyway, I was unemployable?I had an Ivy League degree and a failed novel on my resume?and so for several years to support myself I drove a taxi in Princeton, making roughly five dollars an hour during 12-hour shifts. So for half the day I was helping to burn up the planet, and believe me that got on my nerves to no end! But I didn't have a choice?I couldn't seem to get a better job.

After a couple of years in the taxi, a friend of mine told me that I should go to graduate school. He said, wisely: "As long as you're in school you're not failing at life." So I applied to Columbia and got into the MFA program and resigned myself to taking classes in the city I loathed for being an environmental hellhole.

For the first month of classes I lived with my parents in northern New Jersey and commuted into the city, but then I took a three-day seminar with the writer Richard Price and he said that writers had to find something they were in love with to write about and that they had to hang out and do research.

I started combing the city, looking for a place to live, and during a bus ride down 2nd Ave. something crucial happened. The bus stopped at a red light and I looked out the window at a diner on the corner. In the diner was an ancient woman lifting a cup of coffee to her mouth and smoking a cigarette. As always, I was deeply assaulted by this kind of behavior. Right in front of my eyes, I was watching a fellow human being kill herself. I couldn't take it. Why were people so stupidly bent on self-destruction? And she was in a diner! Not a single thing on the menu was healthy, I was sure. Even the lettuce?iceberg?had no value. It was maddening. They might as well just start the people on chemotherapy while they serve them a cheeseburger was my attitude Then something in me snapped, and, I thought, "Oh, fuck it. Stop it already. It doesn't really matter! Just let the world kill itself, Ames. Give up!"

In that moment I may have heard the voice of God. People talk of white light experiences. This was one of them. But maybe in reverse. A black light experience. I didn't care anymore about the world, or rather I still cared, but I just had to let the world do what it was going to do and I adopted the morally weak position I've maintained to this day: heartbroken ambivalence. But it was very freeing. Somebody a lot smarter than me was going to have to save the world. I'll love the people I can and make a few others laugh, but in that moment on the bus I stopped thinking about the collected impacted colon of America. And I tell you, it was like my vision changed: The old lady in the window was now just an old lady enjoying a cup of coffee and a cigarette. My transformation was startlingly immediate.

And next thing you know, I went from being a vegetarian upset with the world to eating everything and anything. The way I felt about the old lady in the diner was how I now felt about myself. Unfortunately, I also started drinking booze again and then I was introduced to those terrible little white crumbs known as crack cocaine, and forget global warming, I nearly overheated my own brain. But amidst this renaissance of my own self-destruction, I was also running around Manhattan like a dervish?taking classes, working part-time jobs, having crazy girlfriends, spending hours, nights, days, years in trannie bars to research my second novel and then starting to write my second novel.

I had decided, following Richard Price's advice, that in a perverse way I loved transsexuals and so I had to hang around them if I was going to write about them. I also rented a room in the apartment of a wonderful, mad eccentric and I combined him with two other mad eccentrics I knew and created the hero of that second novel. I loved these eccentrics, so, like the transsexuals, I wrote about them. I guiltily stole people's lives to make a life for myself?to write a second book, to be an author, to stop failing, I guess.

So it was a strange, exuberant time for me, a rebirth even as I was killing myself?a simultaneous imploding and exploding. Here's a diary entry I wrote while working the door at Fez, which captures something of that period:

February 10, 1993

I was hungover all day, but rallied in the afternoon. Philip Roth lectured at Columbia today. I asked him, "Why are we ashamed to be Jews and how can we get rid of it?" He didn't answer, just laughed. But I was serious. He said that he was excited by three cities: Newark, Prague and Jerusalem. He said that he was intimidated by people with conviction. Me too. I don't have conviction. He said, "Be ruthless, serve the writing, not the life..."

Last weekend: Friday night I was the bartender and waiter at a party in Turtle Bay for the former ambassador to England. Mayor Koch was there, gave me a penetrating homosexual look. I heard someone talking about Koch: "He's a terrible man, dividing the city, I listen to him on the radio still going on about Dinkins abandoning the Jews."

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was there for some reason. He wanted a whiskey, "one ice cube, mild." He still had a thin moustache, his face was jowly but he look dignified. I could almost recognize in him the young man he once was; I kept comparing him to the black and white vision of him in my mind from Gunga Din... When I brought him the drink, he said, "Thank you," with great dramatic emphasis, like I had saved his life, and then he said, "I'll put you in my will." I said, "I'll give you my name at the end of the party." He smiled at me, his eyes twinkled. When I went up to Mayor Koch to see what he wanted to drink, he extended his hand, he thought I was somebody at the party, I was wearing my blue blazer, but like a good servant I didn't extend my hand to meet his and said, "Would you like something to drink, Mr. Mayor?"

This middle-aged gay reporter started talking to me, it was a strange night, Koch, the reporter, and he said that young gay men were not as frightened about AIDS, and he added, "Sex is back in," and I said, "I never knew it completely went out." I was quick with the one-liners that night. Kept sneaking drinks for myself.

Saturday night I ran film at Madison Square Garden for Reuters and the Washington Post at the heavyweight championship fight; it was great. Backstage there were dogs in cages for the dog show the next day, and in the arena there were movie stars, sports stars, gangsters. Fans chanted "bullshit" after the quick knockout. Bowe was amazing: his long beautiful jab tipped at the end with muscle-like curled bright red glove. Bell tolled 10 times for Arthur Ashe.

Child star Macaulay Culkin came backstage to see the dogs in their cages. His hair coiffed, skin pale, very tiny, had private limo, looked at the dogs and smiled like a little boy. His father had a Hollywood ponytail, when they got in the car Macaulay sat up front and his parents in back, it was an odd reversal.

Went to press conference and watched Bowe with the circus of tv reporters. Saw MC Hammer and Joe Frazier?not walking too well; old boxers all damaged, their brains and balance loosened in their heads.

Then Sunday I worked the door here at the Fez for the Neal Cassady memorial radio broadcast, a pathetic sort of tribute with old men trying to recreate lost youth and madness for stylish dead 90s youth submissive in the audience. Snuck down a few times. Ginsberg was up on stage, trim, looking like a reformed congregation rabbi in his blue blazer and flowered tie and gray beard, and wise kindly bald dome, reading his poetry about young boys' hairless chests and buttocks; then Ginsberg's old lover, drunken Peter Orlovsky, showed up, fat, looking like an Archie Bunker crony, baseball hat, blazer, pocket bulging with pens. "I am a famous international poet," he said to me, so that I wouldn't ask him for the cover charge. His name wasn't on the comp list. I said, "I know who you are. Don't worry about the money. But for admission can you tell me about Neal Cassady?"

He was happy to talk, drunk, launched into a little monologue, "It was like the sun came into him and gave him energy. You don't see that kind of energy anymore, his arms, the biceps, the triceps, they were beautiful, strong, his belly was flat, and smiling, he was always smiling, always on, took the energy right from the sun..."

"What about Kerouac?"

"Too good for words. He lived to write. Not for fame and money, just to write, he died in his bathroom and wrote his last poem in his blood."

"Him and Elvis in the bathroom. Is it true that Kerouac screwed Neal over?"

"No, they loved each other. It wasn't a homosexual love. It was a love of souls. Man to man. You see, Jack loved Neal because Neal was a great cocksman and Jack was shy, a gentleman, he was like...like Victor Hugo and Neal was Rimbaud... and Jack gave Neal life, made him immortal."

Well, that's all to report. Look forward to being with E. tonight if she still wants to see me. I'll bring a bottle of wine.

?

So that was my life in those early days in New York. They were pretty good times; I'm glad I have my journals. And, like I said, at the start of this discussion, in the last year, I've begun to enjoy the screwing New York gives me, though I don't feel I've been too clear about this sodomy business, so let me clarify: New York is just too big, there's too much, and you can't take it all in, but it forces its way in regardless and makes you crazy. Something like that. Terribly cliched. But it's the best I can do. Anyway, I'm off the booze and the crack these days and so like Napoleon once said about rape, I just sit back and enjoy it. New York, that is.