New York Rant

I didn’t think about it much at all, a short call from a headhunter, a friend of so-and-so who had done me a kindness. Why not, I could find some time, always interesting to know about the job market, why not? As it happened, it turned out to be me she was after, serious as a heart attack, a big job in New York, right there in Greenwich Village.

“Can I buy you lunch this week and we can talk about it some more?” she asked.
I put down the phone and stared through the dirty window at the trees that surround my office. The rain had stopped, but the leaves were heavy and drooping.

New York City. Oh I know, it’s just a call, nothing real. But still, it’s impossible to contain the sense of the miraculous. It makes me drool over my future, this sudden turn, this arrival from the heavens. Oh the possibilities, the opening up of the humdrum, some music playing now, a symphony, a backdrop, a subtext, a final chance.

It’s the young man I see, manufactured from the memories that linger, like wisps of hair that need smoothing down, a wild energy of lust and hunger, fueled by ambition, by naked yearning. It makes my joints ache now and my teeth grate. And my heart, the crustiest of the organs, if it would beat a bit more fiercely, maybe the shell would burst, maybe the feelings would return for a redemptive encore.

It’s as if the memories could be predictive, when this feeling came over me. A needle drops into a groove cut so long ago, and it plays over and over until the whole thing cracks, broken. Let me put the pieces back together as I think of New York, the character of the concrete sidewalks, the sculptures of garbage at the curb, the shadow dances of sunlight as the heavens meet the steel arms reaching upwards, always upwards, on the ground and flying at the same time.

I have to think of New York after such a phone call, the astonishing freedom, the inventing of a life so long ago, my debauchery at night and my daytime impersonation, as if I were a person who belonged.

I was Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin and Louis Auchincloss on the upper east side, J.D. Salinger and David Ogilvy and Andy Warhol and Holly Golightly, every character in every New York novel and film, and every person who invented them — though no creations of my own remain to justify these inhabitations. A few drunken diary entries that nest on a shelf, great whines and whelps to the universe. Resentments over some missing angel visitation I had somehow expected, but which had never arrived to rescue me from the well of loneliness filled the hours that were left when my frantic rushing about slowed to a momentary repose.

Nevertheless, there I am, sitting on the stage at MoMA, delivering to the world some bloviation that I had in fact written, a pushy kid in his 20’s edging into a spotlight. Today at that age, I’d have a blog and sell a screenplay off the blog and have my own line of swag for hipsters in snowboard outfits with too much bling. But back then I wore a tie, and my drunken friend Tom with all the money in the world took me out to the Russian Tea Room to celebrate and we stumbled back downtown with daytime vodka hangovers to buy cocaine in a penthouse suite at the Chelsea Hotel.

And I’m with Robbie, ten years my junior, squiring me out on my thirtieth birthday to the Tavern on the Green. He was from Jersey and wanted to become a chef — he would after a couple of years at a hotshit culinary school. He was drawn to the festive pretention of the Tavern, the twinkly lights and the overpriced plates. Because it made him happy, so was I. High on life and a joint in the cab on the way over, I played dress-up with a kid who had never worn a suit, surrounded by expense accounts and blue hair and diamonds, and a waiter who winked at me, a wordless tribute to this successful hunter in the jungle filled with predators. I cannot remember the meal, but I do remember the glitter in Robbie’s eyes upon me. I cannot remember the fullness of my belly, only my heart. Were we in love? Is that what love was? Or was it simply his willingness to perform such a ritual just to please me?

Ah, the weekends and the summers at Sag Harbor with Linda, my ferocious beloved befuddled Linda — a compulsive star fucker with varicose veins, more often than not she had to be told who the celebrity was. “Oh look, it’s Jerry Cooney,” I said one afternoon after the beach, as we tapped cataloupes at Doug the Albino’s vegetable stand in Bridgehampton.

“Wow,” she’d say… and after the inevitable beat, “So, who’s Jerry Cooney,” and I’d tease her ignorance until she almost threw a melon at me. She went up to the boxer, of course, just like she had to speak one Saturday with Diana Vreeland at the bar in the Carlyle, where we were drinking martinis after a trip to the Whitney, and another time when I spied James Mason at a reception at Lincoln Center, and countless others. My favorite was her approach to Peter Pears in the Ginger Man where we had gone for a post opera snack, Pears had played Captain Vere in Billy Budd at the Met. She put a towel on her arm, grabbed the water pitcher and made her way around the table to Peter, who was 68 years old and either confused or charmed, I never knew, but Linda sat with him for 20 minutes.

I’m lined up along 17th Street early with the other queens on the very first morning of Barney’s annual sale, finding a divine couture Armani tux that lost me my American Express Card, that and the out-of-control trip to Italy, the house in Sag Harbor, and the new boyfriend Paul, he had such a great laugh, there is so much to remember. And so much to forget.

Do not regret the past, nor close the door to it —- this is a central wisdom for me now. All the glamour of my self destruction has been tidied up and I’m left with the half-true conviction that I’m all better now, that one more spin at the center of the universe will redeem me.

I turn away from the window and the trees and grab my coffee cub. There’s a meeting coming up and I must prepare.