Art of Noise – Moments in Love
By the time Eric got home from work, Bruce was starting to peak.
Since Manhattan is such a tightly enclosed space, the neighborhoods tend to get recycled. What was once drug-ridden, needle-strewn types of neighborhoods you wouldn’t drive an armored car through quickly would eventually find favor with edgy (and perennially broke) creative types who would slowly but surely turn it into the next super-hip neighborhood and then the galleries and boutiques would move in, the rents would skyrocket, and the broke edgy types would have to go find another rat-infested death trap to take over. So it was, in the early 1980s, with Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Soho had already been colonized and priced out of reach, so developers and speculators were casting about, trying to find the next likely run-down neighborhood to go champagne supernova. One company decided to take a chance on a building in the terrifying Alphabet Town, a hotbed of heroin and urban decay named for the avenues that stretched east of First Avenue, Avenues A, B, and C. It was a small, desperately poor neighborhood, and nobody in their right mind ever went down there unless there were trying to score (so they could get out of their right mind). In the middle of this wasteland, one block east of Avenue B and one block south of Houston, stood a sturdy four-story brick building which had recently been refurbished into lofts by a developer hoping to be the first one in to a hot new neighborhood. They were the first ones in by a long shot – there was nothing even remotely appealing or habitable for many blocks in either direction. To lure the “right” type of people in, the rents were low, but not as low as they were in the neighboring buildings (many of which, abandoned squats, had absolutely no rent whatsoever). The idea was to lure young (white) creative types in until the balance of the neighborhood started to shift and then prices would soar as it became the next Soho and the developers would realize an enormous windfall. It was a risk, to be sure, both for the company that gambled on it and to the first tenants that moved in, but, for the right type of person, it was a great deal. And apparently, Bruce and Eric and I were the right type of people.
It was an odd set of circumstances that brought us together in that loft. Eric and I were best friends – soulmates, I’d even go so far as to say – and we had moved to the big bad city a couple of months earlier and were just starting to get established. Roommates for two years at Interlochen, we both felt – and, to some degree, still feel – a level of comfort and acceptance around each other that is rare. Eric was a classically handsome, somewhat beefy guy, but with the sweetest heart you could hope to find. Often accused of being a GQ kind of a guy (except for his, um, quirky fashion sense) and he did actually appear once as a model on those vaunted pages. The girls (and half the guys) used to go crazy for him at school, which got really annoying after a while, but he was such a good friend that I didn’t really mind. Much.
We had managed to secure steady jobs and were no longer quite the risk we were when we had first arrived off the turnip truck, so we were ready to upgrade to a real apartment – as compared to the sweltering 12x12 coffin we talked our way into upon first arriving. Bruce, a classmate of ours from the Interlochen Arts Academy, had also recently moved to the city, but he was in considerably different circumstances. I recognized him from school, but we had never spent any time together. Since Bruce and Eric were both a year younger than me, they had gotten to know each other as seniors while I was off being tortured at the University of Chicago. It was their friendship that allowed me and Eric a place to crash for the first couple of weeks while we found our own place.
Bruce was independently wealthy – although from horrific circumstances (his family had successfully sued the local power company after he nearly died grabbing an unmarked and unprotected high-voltage power line, which permanently fused the fingers of his right hand together). He had moved to the West Village and rented a small loft off Christopher Street to take in the wonders of the city. Slight of frame and light of hair, Bruce was outgoing and had a somewhat goofy sense of humor, and, although he had an inherent “band geek” vibe (he played French horn at Interlochen, but he was in the band, not the orchestra, which, in the peculiar class system at Interlochen, put you near the bottom of the social ladder (I suppose being in the band puts you at the bottom of the social ladder no matter where you go to school)), he was trying to overcome that image with expensive haircuts, sharp duds (lots of Bon Sur Ton and those logoed German wife-beaters that were popular among that crowd at that time) and a “sophisticated” (read: depraved) lifestyle. He spent his days shopping and his nights partying, and he lived the gloriously hedonistic lifestyle of gay urban world, which was just beginning to feel the chill of the long shadow cast by AIDS. Think a not-quite-so-catty Carson. By the time Eric and I were ready to find a new place, Bruce was ready to get some roommates and, for some reason, he agreed to move in with us and provide the secure financial anchor that every landlord craved. One possible reason he wanted to live with us came into sharper focus near the end of our year together when he tried to engineer a three-way seduction while we were all tripping, which led to an awkward night and a lot of bad feelings all around. But that was months later.
I was working days at a “graphic service center” (an extremely specialized support service to the graphics industry that made high contrast, high quality photographic reproductions of graphic artwork at various sizes to meet certain printing and publishing specifications – an industry that has been entirely obliterated thanks to computers), so Eric, who was working afternoons and evenings, and Bruce went out apartment shopping with my blessing. A few days later, they found a place they were interested in, and arranged for me to take a look at it. Bruce was going to go down there in the evening, and Eric and I were to meet him there when Eric got done working. He came home from his shift at a fast-food pasta place, changed clothes, smoked a bowl, and the two of us head out into the night to meet Bruce.
Although it was quite a ways away (the apartment was, as stated, around Avenue B and Houston and we lived up at 23rd and 7th Ave, a few doors down from the notorious Hotel Chelsea), it was a nice night and we decided to walk. Eric had warned me that it wasn’t the best neighborhood, and walking down there would also give me a better sense of it than just popping up out of a subway hole somewhere. “Bad neighborhood” was kind of subjective, as pretty much every neighborhood in NYC looked pretty bad to me, coming out of the north woods of Michigan. Although, fortunately, I had just spent a year in Chicago’s notorious south side, so I was a bit more accustomed to gritty urbanism than I would’ve been if I had just fallen out of a tree into Manhattan.
We had made our way down to the Village, near CBGB’s, and were walking down to Houston. Sure enough, as advertised, the neighborhood looked shitty. Graffiti was sprayed across the boarded up windows of abandoned buildings and junkies were curled up and nodding out in the dark corners. I kept assuring myself that it was okay, this was just the way the city was, it wasn’t scary and depraved, it was edgy and cool. Eric and I chatted aimlessly, both of us listening more to our trouble radar than to each other. A sudden shout surprised me and I glanced across the street to see a large black man carrying a duffle bag and pointing at me. When I met his gaze, he dropped the bag and raced across the street, heading right for me. We stopped in our tracks, frozen, unsure what to do. He jumped between two parked cars up onto the curb and ran straight for me, clearly pissed off about something. Yelling incomprehensibly, he tried to kick me. I jumped back a step as his leg came flying towards me, his foot glancing harmlessly off my sturdy dancer’s thigh. Steadying himself, he glared at me, muttered something incomprehensible, and ran back across the street to pick up his bag and continue along his twisted trajectory.
Since arriving into Manhattan, I had been waiting for the bad thing to happen. Everybody said it was a big scary place where all sorts of pain and suffering went down – usually at the hands of others – and I had been sort of subconsciously waiting for my bad thing to happen, wondering how I’d survive it. Or if I would. Not long before that, I had been mugged in an elevator, and dutifully handed over my cash without a struggle, just like I had been told to do. As hoped, it worked, and my mugger slithered off the elevator with my $50 (all the money I had in the world at that moment), and I slunk back to my apartment, depressed but unharmed (later muggings would find me a little less acquiescent, more willing to negotiate, until the last attempt, in which I shoved the guy onto a parked car and quickly ran across a busy street before he could get up – stupid, perhaps, but much more New Yorky). Now I had actually been assaulted on the street by a crazy guy and survived. My adrenaline and reflexes got me (mostly) out of harm’s way, and I was oddly pleased to be able to carve that notch into my belt.
By the time we got down into Alphabet Town, Eric and I had stopped talking entirely, spending all of our energy and attention trying to look as much like irritated, hurrying assholes as possible (when in Rome…). The neighborhood, with its vacant lots and burned out shells of buildings, couldn’t have been much less welcoming, but all was forgotten when we opened the door to the apartment.
Taking up half of the third floor, the apartment opened from a long, narrow brick hallway into a large open loft, with a new kitchen and new bathroom, and new carpeting that almost actually fit the room (a couple of small rug ripples here and there never hurt anybody), and an entire wall of south-facing windows. Despite the realty mantra, we took the apartment. At that point in my life, I was much more interested in living in a great apartment in a dodgy part of town than in a sweatbox in the best neighborhood. Screw location.
The rent for the place was $850/month, with Eric and I responsible for $250 each and Bruce making up the difference. For his footing the bill, Bruce got the closest thing to a private room – a space at the end of the hall that he curtained off into his own private love nest – er, sex nest, anyway, not sure how much love was involved in those days. Eric and I hired a carpenter to come in and build us loft beds on the edge of the big main room. Eric won the coin toss and got his in the corner against the wall, I lost and got to build mine a few feet away from his, jutting out from the wall like a pleasant peninsula. A few judiciously placed tapestries, and our “rooms” were ready. Eric had the space to have a double bed sized platform built and put his desk under it so it really was like a little room. Me, I got shafted and had a single bed platform with just enough room underneath to throw my laundry. Any bigger and it would’ve cut too far into the main living area. Still, it was better than where I had just been living and I was excited to have really established myself in the city. A good job, a swell apartment, I had it going on, and could gleefully thumb my nose at those back home (hi, Mom!) that doubted my ability to survive in the city.