Scream (17 page)

Many times it wasn't. But he said, “Oh, gee, that's great!” about everything.

On the one hand, acting happy and positive and upbeat is good. On the other, he had at least as many enemies for being nice as other people did who were nasty, mean, vitriolic, and gossiping.

He wanted to appear like an onion, many layers but all exactly the same; you can peel an onion and you never get down to anything different. There is no substratum.

But you could tell that he was more complicated than that. Inside there was a suffering, lonely entity.

Conversely, I have met people who wanted to appear complex and multilayered but who really were like an onion. As layer after layer fell away, there was no difference, no matter how intimate we became: their surface was the same as their depths.

i buy an apartment

I
n 1987 I had money for the first time, so I bought an apartment. I had saved and saved and finally had forty grand, enough to pay the deposit on an apartment under two hundred thousand.

It was a one-bedroom basement apartment, dark and overpriced, but it had a large garden. I was determined to have a garden, not a terrace. I wanted to be able to open the door for the dogs and I wanted to plant things. Note to reader: if you want to do that you should not live in New York City.

I had enough money—barely—to buy the place, from the success I had had. My success was not from
Slaves of New York
(book advance: thirty-five hundred dollars) and not from Andy Warhol's acquiring of the movie rights (purchase price: five thousand dollars). At the time when Andy said he wanted to make
Slaves of New York
into a movie, he said I could have five thousand dollars or choose one of his paintings.

“But Andy,” I said, “what I really need is a place to live! I don't have anywhere to live and I can't find an apartment. You have a lot of different property in New York City, can't you let me stay in one?”

But he said no.

“Okay, I will take the five thousand dollars,” I said. Because what was I going to do, with nowhere to live, walk around the streets of New York carrying a Warhol under my arm?

But I had saved money in a myriad of ways: the stories I sold to
The New Yorker,
two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, becoming the Alfred Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton (a paid salary position), and so on, but mostly by virtue of never buying anything and never spending anything. (And some money Merchant Ivory paid for the movie rights after Andy died. Who knows how much they had to pay Andy's estate for the rights he had previously bought from me?) So finally I was able to buy an apartment and I threw all my stuff in there, still in boxes, half unpacked, and then left for my book tour.

First I went home to see my mother. “I wish there was a way I could make copies of these phonograph records,” I said. “If only there was some way I could get them on tape.” You see, back then we had records, and tapes. Cassette tapes. I had a tape player but no record player. My mother had a record player but no speakers. I wanted my childhood music—Marais and Miranda, for one, South African folk singers who sang, “the baboon climbed the hill.” But there was no way to get the tunes heard, or to move them from one format to another.

You go to different places on a tour: the first time it's fun, the second time it's not so much fun, and by the third time, forget it. This was only my second time out, though, so I was still enjoying myself. It was for my third book,
A Cannibal in Manhattan
. (There hadn't been any budget for a tour for
American Dad.
)

This trip went west to Denver, where I stayed in a hotel with ducks that paraded through the lobby every morning, either leaving or arriving at the fountain. And it was at a reading in Denver where I randomly began complaining to the audience about my first-grade teacher, who then happened to walk through the door. It was at a bookstore in the Haight district of San Francisco where the booksellers asked me to sign a copy for Robin Williams, who had prepaid but wasn't able to make the event. But it was in L.A. when my publicist came up to me in the lobby as I was leaving. “Look, I don't know how to say this without getting you all upset, but I got a call from your neighbor,” she said.

“My neighbor? Who is that?” I don't know if I had even met my new neighbors—I hadn't even stayed in my new apartment yet. “How did he get ahold of you?”

“He tracked me down through the publishing company. He was trying to find you. There's been a break-in. A robbery in your apartment.”

“Oh no! What happened?”

“I'm sorry. According to your neighbor Jerry Mack, the police say your place is trashed. It's bad. They found some of your stuff in the alley, and they put it back inside.”

It was midnight by the time I got home to New York. I couldn't get in; the lock had been broken. I went to my new neighbor, who lived in the matching basement apartment next to mine, and waited for the locksmith. “Yup,” said Jerry. “It happened last night. I heard them. They ran. I found the stuff they dumped as they were running.”

“Please, once the locksmith has the door fixed, come inside with me. I'm scared.”

We went in.

It was exactly as I had left it—half-unpacked, with the boxes of clothes and other things—but nothing was missing or moved, except half a carton of orange juice from the fridge, now on the counter.

I guess the burglars were thirsty. “That's the stuff I found in the alley,” Jerry said, pointing to a pile. “All your music.”

It was a bunch of cassettes. They weren't mine. They must have been in the burglar's bag from a different robbery. “Look!” I said, reading the handwritten labels. “It's Marais and Miranda, the folksingers from South Africa!”

The tapes had all the songs I wanted.

a city of rich and poor

T
he eighties and early nineties were years of a lot of extravagance. Because there wasn't any real Internet yet, the magazines were very important. At that time, as well, the homeless situation in the city was bad. The streets, the subways, any doorway: someone was there, defecating, pushing a shopping cart full of rotting produce, opening the door to the bank for you and demanding money for the service. The mentally ill had been given antipsychotics and released from the asylums; they dumped or exchanged their pills for stuffed animals and small gray bananas. Nothing was renovated. It was not a rich white person's city. It was not the city it is today. It was falling apart. It was a city of the homeless. And the homeless were at home.

If you went in Grand Central Terminal, it was encrusted with a patina of eighty years of smoke, soot, grime; if you went in the toilets, if you tried to sit in the waiting room, you'd be hanging out with homeless people, because that's where they lived.

A magazine editor held a big Christmas party there. She invited the hip and rich and beautiful to come to Grand Central Terminal for a dinner, followed by a performance by a young, hip choreographer and dancer at the recently renovated Brooklyn Academy of Music. Nobody in those days went to Brooklyn; you couldn't get there, but that was the excitement of it. That day it was bad. It snowed and rained and flooded. But we managed to get there.

The waiting room had been cleared out. The waiting room was clean.

For the first time in decades it didn't stink of urine. There were no homeless people passed out on benches surrounded by piles of bags and things stuffed in stolen shopping carts. A glittering Christmas tree rose to the ceiling. Scented candles flickered on ornate candelabras. Fine linens covered long tables heaped with spiced nuts, bonbons, and baskets of flowers “by” Robert Isabell, a famous event planner of the 1980s who commanded hundreds of thousands of dollars for such a presentation.

The drenched and soaked guests entered this room: at any entrance, heavy red velvet ropes had been erected to block the regular commuters at Grand Central Terminal from coming in.

But most commuters didn't even use this waiting room. The people who used this waiting room—where they slept, where they lived—were the homeless. Tonight they were prevented from returning.

So, as the New York City Gay Men's Chorus sang, the homeless, in great stinking crowds, gathered at the ropes, pressing up in filthy rags, to look in at the attendees.

The homeless could be prevented from using the waiting room that one night.

But they could not be blocked from the restrooms. You went in that women's room in your evening gown, and—taking a bath in the sink next to yours, or passed out in a toilet stall—that's where they were.

I don't know if any of them even got a piece of cake.

Maybe a half million was spent there that night, maybe more.

It was a scene worthy of Dickens, but somehow nothing other than the glitz and glamour ever got written up by the press. A day or two later, it's all forgotten: just another party in New York City. And I still haven't figured out a novel to put that scene into.

how i met the kennedys

I
t was about 1961 or 1962 when John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Amherst College and people gathered to greet him as he walked through the campus. My father took me to see this man. He held me up in his arms, and as Kennedy came through he stopped and shook my hand and said hello. I remember this vividly because even at that age this man made a strong impression on me. I felt he liked me, that he had singled me out for special attention and there was even something—not sexual, but the man had a sexual charisma that even a tiny girl was aware of.

Years passed and I was made over by a beauty magazine to look like a rich person. That same evening a friend took me to the opening night of the ballet season and whisked me into the VIP or board members room. I was wearing a borrowed Oscar de la Renta suit, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis came up to me. She looked at me with a mix of amusement, curiosity, and bafflement. Then she took a tiny pair of spectacles from her handbag and put them on. She looked me up and down and shook hands with me. I did not know it or realize it at the time, but not only had I been perfectly groomed by the magazine staff to successfully resemble a rich socialite, which took ten hours, but I was also wearing the line from de la Renta that was not supposed to be ready for months and that no one was supposed to have access to yet. It was a big deal. Boaz, de la Renta's assistant, rushed over and started shouting at me, “Where did you get that suit! How did you get it!”

The magazine had dressed me in that suit and told me to go out in it for the night and have fun; it was part of the story I was writing. I did not know I was not meant to be wearing that suit. I did not know who Boaz was. “None of your business!” I said, giggling, although I put it much more politely, and I went back to chatting with Jackie O.

Another night, at a different friend's house, at a small dinner, I was seated next to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. She was very nice but you could see she could never make any new friends—she had only those she had grown up with—and I understood this perfectly. Who would she ever be able to trust? I was a writer, and besides, that evening I was not dressed to resemble a wealthy socialite.

Then, after another event, there was a small reception and John F. Kennedy Jr. was there, and my friend introduced us. He was good looking but a lot younger than me, and I felt way out of my league. Besides, I was very plain.

He, too, had an animal magnetism but not as interesting; it was the sexuality of the frat boy, not my thing. Of this famous family, three of the four are dead. (It seems curious to me that I met all of them, at different times and places and stages in my life, but also pointless.) It makes me think of Forrest Gump. But in my case, I'm spliced into photographs that exist only in my head. At a certain point, you get old, you realize, Hey! I met all these original Kennedys! And then you think, but what does it mean? Why? Finally I thought of an answer: I don't know.

socialites, art, and fashion

F
or a long time my life in New York was interesting to me. If, over a period of time, I would meet various socialites, I would think, Now I am meeting various socialites. And I would try to discern something about that breed.

I met Lee Radziwill once—not that she counts as one of the main or original John F. Kennedy family, but still. The most interesting thing about her was that she was so thin. She appeared to be a woman who had spent her entire life not eating, or consuming only enough calories to sustain life. I could not imagine this, a whole lifetime devoted to not eating. She had the look of doelike suffering and yet superiority, not just because of her social status, but because of her vast suffering. I am sure she suffered a great deal, but by the time you get to a certain age, you kind of realize everyone has suffered a great deal. You are not unique.

When you met Nancy Reagan in person you saw that she, too, had spent a lifetime not eating. The photos do add on pounds. Starved magazine editors, there are quite a number of those. I don't know how they do it because they go out to eat all the time, breakfast and lunch and dinner, and even if they go to the gym, most of their day is pretty inactive, and when you get older and your metabolism slows, the weight doesn't just come off easily once you have put it on.

And all of those women will probably tell you, “Oh, I eat.” But they can't be eating. They have the big heads and the toothpick limbs that could snap at any moment. Further, it is not fun. No matter what you look like, when you spend time with one of these women you not only feel fat but expect to be responsible for one of their twigs snapping off.

New York City trends change. When I first moved back to the city after college in the 1980s, you could somehow afford an apartment. SoHo was still a working neighborhood; inside the cast-iron buildings there were factories making buttons or pins; artists were living there illegally; and on the ground-floor levels small art galleries opened up—there were all these kids making art and dealers were showing it, and just by accident I found out you could head there on a Saturday night and there were openings happening, people spilling out from the galleries onto the otherwise deserted streets.