But Enough About Me (10 page)

The more I was exposed to the gloss of New Yorkers and famous folk, the more boorish Ritchie's behavior seemed. Once I started settling in at
Rolling Stone,
Ritchie had an expiration date on his forehead. The final straw was the company Christmas party, which was held at Nell's, the legendary nightclub that I had hungrily read about in my college dorm room whenever my issue of
Interview
arrived. By 1989, the club was a tad past its prime, but not to me.

I had only been on staff for a couple of weeks and still didn't know anybody that well. “Maybe I should stay home,” I fretted to my parents.

“Oh, just go,” said my mother. “You can network.”

“I'll bring Ritchie,” I said. “That will make me feel better.” My mother raised her eyebrows at my father.

Ritchie wanted to drive into the city rather than take a more sensible train. He arrived at my house two hours late and wearing his favorite “party” trousers, which were modified parachute pants. “I told you to wear jeans,” I said.

“What, this isn't good enough for your New York friends?” Lately, I got a lot of those remarks.

“No, no, it's fine,” I said.

I caught my breath when we walked through the door. There were the velvet couches and the crystal chandeliers, just as I had seen in so many pictures! And there was queenly Nell, with her cap of glossy bobbed hair, kissing cheeks and calling “Hello, darling” over the throbbing De La Soul music. Nell, who made everyone, no matter how famous, pay five dollars to get in! I was in Nell's, hangout of Mick Jagger and David Bowie!

“They once turned away Cher at the door,” I explained to Ritchie.

“She's a slut,” Ritchie pithily observed.

We walked around, taking it all in. “Nell used to dance naked on the tables,” I said.

Ritchie chortled. “Huh,” he said with a leer. “I wish she'd do that now.”

A lush buffet was spread luxuriously around the bar, and the waitstaff, all British, passed around endless trays of champagne.
Rolling Stone
often featured entertainment at their parties—one year, it was said, the actual Rolling Stones played—but not on that particular evening. Still, the holiday bash was appropriately extravagant.

I shouldered my way through the crowd toward one of my fellow assistants, a funny, affable guy named Chris. He was standing with a group of the younger editors.

“Hey,” I said happily.

Ritchie came up behind me. “Where the white women at?” he hollered. This, a quote from
Blazing Saddles,
always got the festivities rolling at our Jersey parties. Everyone gave him a pained courtesy smile. I watched as Chris gamely tried to engage Ritchie, who was draining his fourth glass of “free” champagne. Why did I ever think he was a cheekily dangerous bad boy?

Five glasses, six glasses, eight glasses, ten. “Maybe we should go,” I said. “And you should stop with the champagne, because you have to drive home.”

“I'm a great drunk driver,” he said. “You know that. When I've had a few, I put all my concentration into it, so I'm more careful.” He made his way over to one of the plush velvet couches, where he did a somersault and tore his parachute pants.

Nell, who had been talking to Yoko Ono, came rushing over. “Hey,” she said. “Don't do that.”

I broke it off with Ritchie that night as his car idled in my parents' driveway. (“What?” he said, his high spirits deflating abruptly. “What?”) I missed him for a few weeks and contemplated calling him whenever I had an awkward moment at work, but once I saw him in a different light, it was over. And my recovery was sped along because at
Rolling Stone,
there was always a party going on somewhere.

Every night after work, I joined the conga line of employees who rolled out of the office for drinks, and then dinner, and then off to the front of the line to see Eleventh Dream Day or Jesus and Mary Chain.

The daytime wasn't off-limits, either. I watched with envy as some of the editors stumbled in, loud and red-faced, after a boozy lunch. After hours, the bathrooms were once a popular place to Hoover up coke (helpful for making deadlines), and I surprised a couple of revelers more than once. One night, a staffer, relieving himself in the john, looked down and noticed a neat mound of white powder on top of the urinal. Ah, he thought. Somebody had a party and hastily ran off. He looked around to make sure he was alone. All clear! He licked his finger, dipped it in the pile, and rubbed it vigorously on his gums. It was Ajax.

I stuck to booze because it was all I could afford, and I drank a vat of it every night before catching the last bus to New Jersey, dozing during the ride home as the alcohol gave me raisin eyes and a cat tongue. During my garish nighttime carnivale at various East Village bars, the memory of Ritchie dropped cleanly away. Not that I had any other prospects. Typically, I would be approached in the following way:

 

SETTING
: King Tut's Wa-Wa Hut, a cramped bar on Avenue A. As I wait for a drink at the bar, I notice a lanky, dark-haired guy leaning woozily against the wall. He had all the totems of late-eighties hipsterhood: jeans with two perfect rips at the knee, the requisite drooping forelock à la Johnny Marr
of the Smiths, and one tastefully dangling earring on the “straight” left ear. His eyes were glittering slits, and he appeared to be wavering in and out of consciousness.

I stared at him. Well, you had to hand it to the guy. Why not cut right to the chase? Here was an admirably straightforward young man who had no patience for chitchat or the silly facade of buying drinks! I half-contemplated taking him up on his offer.

Even if I could get a date, I would have to break it to them at some point that I still lived at home with Mom and Dad. Although I was reluctant to be pried out of their house, the urge to go to a bar without having to catch the 11:20 bus to Jersey became too strong and I made the bold move of finding a studio apartment in Hoboken, the “mile-square city” made up entirely of kids from New Jersey who recently graduated college and couldn't quite make the move into Manhattan.

My last night at my folks' home was a mournful one. We had our usual Sunday dinner of steak and potatoes, which we traditionally ate in front of the TV so we could watch
60 Minutes.
(“Well,” my father would inevitably announce after the exposé du jour, “that certainly makes you think.”) Afterward, I snuggled into my bed with its crisp sheets (Sunday was laundry day) and lay staring into the darkness. No more Sunday dinners, I thought sadly.

I eased the transition by arranging to go on my first date that wouldn't end in a frantic scramble to catch the last bus. As a bonus, he actually hailed from New York, not New Jersey. His name was Josh, and he was a friend of a music publicist whom I knew who was intent on setting us up. He grew up on the Upper East Side, bouncing merrily in and out of prep schools.

“You'll love Josh,” she said. “He's so fun.” Fun. Red flag, ahoy. I smoothly ignored it, as it had been a six-month post-Ritchie dating drought.

“What does he do?” I had learned to ask that question first, like a true New Yorker.

She shrugged. “He's really rich. I think his grandfather invented waterproof fabric. He's trying to start a p.r. company for nightclubs, but most of the time he just sort of bops around.”

“Would you sleep with him?” I always asked that. Most of the time the answer was a stammered, “Well, no, he isn't really my type, but he's a super-nice guy and all the girls in my office think he's hilarious, and—” At which point I politely declined. I was constantly approached by well-meaning friends who wanted to pair me up with the asexual brother type in their workplace, the one who never had a girlfriend but was
so sweet
and
really very attractive,
a benign, pleasant druid with B cups who told corny jokes.

She laughed knowingly. “Actually, I did sleep with him,” she said. That seemed weird to me, but I kept silent. “I'll have him call you.”

He picked me up at my Hoboken apartment in a red Porsche. A more sophisticated woman would have rolled her eyes at this flagrant display of Sacagaweas, but for a suburban girl weaned on John Hughes movies and their emphasis on shiny sports sedans equaling the Good Life, this was exciting. Plus, where I came from, a date picked you up in a car. How else were you supposed to get to Fuddruckers?

Josh had curly blond hair, a dash of freckles on his nose, and, from what I could tell by the slant of his eyebrows over his Ray-Bans, a mischievous expression. “Hello,” he said familiarly and kissed my cheek. I jumped in the car and he stomped on the gas. “I thought we'd start with a drive through Central Park,” he shouted over the Scritti Politti tape he was playing.

We zoomed through the Holland Tunnel as he hollered some questions. “So! You're a rock writer!” he said. “Who have you interviewed lately!”

I launched into the story of my latest encounter: Earlier in the week, I had gone to John Waters's unexpectedly tasteful West Village apartment. He immediately took a Polaroid of me, which is his custom for everyone who passes through his door, and added it to a large photo album of gamely
smiling deliverymen holding bags of food, various friends, some celebrities, and a few confused repairmen. He was a dream interview, whether he was talking about his favorite scene in the campy movie
Anaconda,
“where the snake pukes Jon Voight,” or mentioning a recent book signing in which a fan pulled a bloody tampon out of herself to sign. Which he did.

“He was saying that he doesn't like all the new drugs, like Ecstasy,” I shouted.

Josh smirked. “Why not?”

“He said that he was in England when the whole country was on it and it was scarier than the Summer of Love.”

“I happen to love the new drugs,” he shouted. “And, for that matter, the old drugs. In fact, I just did some fat rails before I picked you up.” I didn't want to ask what “rails” were, but judging from the way he nearly took out a jogger as he careened through the park, I guessed it was coke.

An hour later, I found myself in a nightclub, where Josh batted away my questions with charmingly evasive answers and hounded me to take some Ecstasy that he just happened to have in his pocket. “You should know about the things that you write,” he wheedled. He brandished a white pill. “Try it, you'll like it.”

Well, why not, I thought. At that point, I still didn't know whether I liked Josh. At least this might make the night more interesting. I wondered why my publicist pal thought we would be a good match. Already, I was learning how to entertain with anecdotes about my job. Hiding behind other people's punch lines was easier than divulging anything substantial about myself, and most people were content not to delve any deeper. Was I fun, too?

I grabbed the pill and swallowed it down. “That's better,” he said, grinning. Then he gulped two pills of his own. “They should kick in shortly,” he instructed. Then he leaned forward. “So. Rock Chick. Tell me about yourself.” He gave my shoulder a little shove. It was charming in a third-grade sort of way. “What's in the drawer of your bedside table?” Ah. I gathered that for the getting-to-know-you portion of our date, he wasn't going to take the conventional where-did-you-go-to-school approach but was trying
the less-traveled route in which seemingly insignificant questions produce a truer sense of what you're All About. I knew it well. I just wasn't able to deliver the flirty answer that was required of me. My bedside table contained cuticle cream, which I dutifully applied every night, and a collection of stories by Sarah Orne Jewett. Oh, and a letter from my grandma. “I know you meet some rough types in your job,” she wrote on a note card that had a bluebird with a letter in its beak, “but I know you are”—this part was underlined twice—“
my own sweet granddaughter.
”

Which was actually the case. Why was I in this club doing Ecstasy with Josh What's-his-name when my actual interests more accurately mirrored my grandma's? I was All About gardening and baking and films that featured indomitable middle-aged heroines who take tea on rainy afternoons in Cornwall.

Josh was staring at me expectantly. I supposed I should just get it over with and say that my bedside table contained the
Kama Sutra.
He noticed my troubled expression and smoothly switched gears. “What are you interested in? Let's hear it.” He was looking at me with radiant intensity. Maybe he wasn't as shallow as I thought.

“Well,” I began haltingly. “I guess you could say my interests are a bit esoteric.”

He put a reassuring hand on my arm. “That doesn't scare me,” he said warmly.

I cleared my throat. “Since you asked,” I said, “I guess lately I've been doing a lot of research on the death of Charlotte Brontë. There have been conflicting theories as to how she died.” I snuck a look at him. He still seemed alert. Okay, then. “She died in 1855, and her death was listed as something called phthisis, an archaic term for tuberculosis—remember, both of her sisters died of the disease.” He nodded. The music in the club began to throb more loudly. Why was I talking about Charlotte Brontë in a sticky-floored club on a Friday night? Normally I edited myself, keeping it quippy, light, and focused on the other person, but I found I couldn't stop. I just felt…safe. I would peel back the layers with Josh!

“Others say that she missed her sisters and willed herself to die,” I continued breathlessly. “Some Brontë scholars say that she contracted typhoid from her old servant, Tabby, or that she was pregnant, and had a bout of throwing up that was so violent, and relentless, that it killed her in short order.” Here was where I really got rolling, because Victorian-era diseases really turned my crank. “You could easily become gravely ill with a lot of vomiting, because you weren't able to keep fluids down, and it's not as if they could administer a drip back in the day. You know, Josh?” He nodded. Did he know? I found I didn't care.