The Story of Junk (4 page)

“Oh,” he said when we met, squinting through wire-rimmed glasses. “I already know you.”

This made me nervous. I squinted back. I was pretty sure Mr. Leather was gay—Big Guy was—but a lot of the time that didn't matter. “Did I sleep with you or something?” I asked.

“No, not that,” he said with a laugh. “We used to work together. You don't remember?”

I didn't. He named a restaurant I'd worked at years before, a piano bar on Bleecker Street. He'd been a waiter there, his first job in New York. He liked me right away, he said. But he also thought I was scary.

“I'm not scary,” I said defensively.

“No, no,” he said quickly. “To me it was part of your charm.”

I don't know why I didn't remember him. He seemed like the sort of person who would stay in my mind, the sort with a predilection for morbid travesty. He carried wallet-sized photos of himself modeling his favorite trash: macho motorcyclists, country bumpkins, tarts with big hair, sequined gowns, and hairy chests, all disheveled, some bloody. Posing was his hobby. He liked the look of pools of blood. Otherwise he was just another guy with a straw up his nose and a pocket full of Valium.

Big Guy was a bartender in the restaurant where I was cooking. Most of the time he was on the day shift, which made our living arrangement feasible. He slept when I worked and I worked when he slept. When he wanted to dry out, he'd load up on Valium and go to sea, then come back to work at the bar. On one of his returns, the day shift was filled and he had to join the crew on mine.

We worked six nights a week, five to three. I was the service chef, the grill girl, the expediter, and a prep, and when the sauté, fry, and cold-kitchen cooks were busy, I opened oysters, too. Big Guy worked the service bar. We were busy.

Just before work, he'd go to his dealer, a woman named Spider, or Web, I can't remember (we never met), and bought a little weight, which he measured into tenths and half-tenths of a gram he'd give me to hold till later. Friends pretending to pay for drinks slipped him money up front and, when they thought no one was looking, came back to the kitchen to see me. I passed them the drugs according to amounts Big Guy scrawled on cocktail napkins when I went to the bar on my breaks. I was usually cranked on speed and couldn't get through a night without a few Stolis. I pretended to be making sure the customers were happy with their food, but whenever I cruised the floor, it was more to get away from the kitchen's heat and noise. Besides, there was a party going on and I didn't want to miss it. In those days, making the scene was more important than making money. That came later.

This was not the sort of restaurant that earns a food critic's stars. This was the kind where the stars hang out, more like a private club. It was the size of a hotel dining room but much plainer, a big white whale of a room off Washington Square that had once been a Chinese restaurant. The entire room was hung with paintings and other works of art by the better-known clientele, who had sizable running tabs. This arrangement guaranteed the place a steady group of regulars whom the owner could count on to keep business at a boom. “Where the artists go, the world follows,” he would tell me. “Always watch the artists.”

Everyone called him by his nickname, Sticky. He earned it. This was a man who would have an employee arrested for stealing, then go down to the Tombs in the middle of the night to bail the guy out. He loaned money fearlessly and never believed the worst about anyone. Once you had him for a friend, he stuck by you. The restaurant had a name but no one ever used it. It was always, simply, “Sticky's.”

Sticky was tall and shapelessly built on a long lanky frame. He had a prominently hooked nose and stringy black hair that fell over his eyes, two chestnuts. In the winter, he wore a raggedy boatneck sweater with a blue shirt under it. In the summer, he took the sweater off. Most nights, he sat on a stool between the bar and the dining room and decided who was hip enough to come in. If he didn't know you or understand your look, he'd say, “It'll be a few minutes,” and leave you standing there. Sometimes, he'd tell you straight out to go somewhere else and lock a velvet rope against you. Other times, he'd have Lucky, the manager, get rid of the undesirables. The next night they'd be back. Sticky knew they would be. Eventually, he'd let them in, and either they liked what they saw or they'd weed themselves out.

In a single year, more than a few of the regulars had “accidents.” First, a folksinging heartthrob of the 1960s, then an underground film star had fatal heart attacks shooting speedballs, cocaine and heroin, after a deeply drunken night at Sticky's. A drag-queen playwright overdosed on a combination of pills, whiskey, and heroin. Somebody else was murdered, no one knew under what circumstances. The fast life went by even quicker around here. We knew our time was borrowed, but nobody cared about that. What we couldn't borrow, we could always steal. It was in this atmosphere that the art of appropriation was born.

Sticky had two partners, Rico and Flint. Flint was balding, middle-aged, and had stomach cancer. Rico was plain nuts, a wiry Vietnam vet with a nervous twitch partially induced by cocaine psychosis. I didn't mind his jitters. Unlike the sour Flint, Rico had a happy-go-lucky demeanor, feverish, but I was attracted to heat. As Mr. Leather might say, that's why God put me to work in a kitchen.

Rico's quick hands and bad-boy intensity got my attention the moment we met. He had a typically Italian, smooth olive complexion, smoldering black eyes, and sweet lips—characteristics I felt outweighed his perceptible flaws. Other women must have felt the same way: he was married to a former nun, and several waitresses seemed to know him better than she did. I didn't think anyone we knew in common suspected I would ever have sex with him—too proud—but every now and then, when the mood would strike, I did.

Of course I did. It was all about cocaine and fucking the night away, sucking the powder off our more sensitive parts, confessing our transgressions in the world, relaying our horrors, our pleasures, fucking again. His war stories were a little farfetched but his long bony penis always seemed to wear a smile. It gave me a wonderful ride. He enjoyed it, too. The whole thing was our little secret.

Except Sticky and Flint knew all about it. They tolerated my dealing partly because of this affair, but mostly because they liked the action. Rico dealt cocaine out of the office; when he had to, he bought a little dope from me. The other two just wanted to keep him happy: one of Rico's customers was a C.I.A. agent, another was an assistant to the mayor, a couple of the others were serious gamblers; one looked exactly like a pimp, all black leather, dreadlocks, and silver. There were other, more anonymous dudes in T-shirts and jeans who beat a steady path through the kitchen to the office. We never talked about any of them on the service line. We were cool. We had to be. Some of these guys looked bad enough to shut us down, on their way to the john in particular. There was always a lot of bathroom action at Sticky's, especially in the Ladies. Both sexes used it, and not just to wash their hands.

The front of the house was always jumping. On weekends, people stood six deep at the bar, forced up against it by an enormous twisted metal sculpture just inside the door. Sometimes there were fights and the bartenders had to double as bouncers, leaping over the bar to hustle out the drunks. If the police appeared outside, no one ever invited them in. We knew how to take care of our own.

We took them to the office or the kitchen, where friends seeking relief from the boozy climes of their tables came to watch me work, mostly to get a free meal. The kitchen was almost as big as the dining room, and wide steps by my reach-in gave my audience a place to sit. Having them there put me off my pace sometimes, but this was hot, dirty work and having friends around made it tolerable. When I had a minute to step away from the stoves, I'd take them, one or two at a time, into the walk-in fridge for a snort. Here, among the lobsters and lettuces, the sides of beef, was my own little private club, my sanctified place in the world.

One night, just before Christmas, the kitchen doors go flying open and who comes waltzing through but this big galoot of a girl named Betty. She was dressed in black leather pants, a tightly laced bustier topped by a studded motorcycle jacket, and high leather boots. After two minutes in that hot kitchen, her face began to flush and her eyes turned to glass. The guys on the line thought she was sexy, but to me she looked ready to fall on her face.

Betty was a wild girl, always stoned on something she couldn't handle. She had some weird problem with her equilibrium and was always falling down and making you take care of her. I didn't have the patience.

She was only seventeen the first time I met her five years before and she was already wasted then; there weren't enough Quaaludes in the world, not for her. Someone at a party had talked me into giving her shelter for the night. It happened to be her first day in town. I took her home with two other friends who were looking for a place to crash. Betty slept on the floor of my apartment that night, dead drunk, woke up with her head in the fireplace. I pulled her out. She treated me like a big sister after that, found me crystal meth when there wasn't enough speed in the world. She always had interesting connections.

Betty now claimed to have settled down some. She did seem happier than before. She was working two jobs, she said, a few days a week in a photo lab, a few nights in a sex dungeon. She told me she was living with Kit. “You know,” she said. “The musician.” I knew. Toast, Kit's band, had made a couple of records I liked. Their first had become a kind of local anthem of the streets and the new one had just hit the charts.

When Betty heard I had a source for China White, she started calling a few times a week. Every conversation went the same way. “Kit really wants to meet you,” she'd say again and again. According to Betty, Kit had no friends outside the rock scene. It would be good for Kit to have a friend like me. Someone like a sister.

The day came when Betty brought Kit over to Big Guy's. It happened to be my day off. Her band was making a new record and they were on their way to the studio. It was going to be a long night. Kit sat on a chair in the kitchen looking at the floor, her legs crossed in red jeans so tight I wondered if she'd sewn them on, a boat-neck green pullover falling off one shoulder. Her platinum hair was short and spiky, half-hidden beneath a purple kamikaze headband. That was her aesthetic—white-girl mid-western punk.

A few other friends were already there. They dressed as Betty did, in bondage black, but Kit wouldn't say boo to them. I couldn't tell if she was shy or just a snob. A half hour later, she stood up and walked to the door. “Nice to meet you,” she said, and left.

Betty called from the recording studio late that night. “Kit really likes you,” she began.

“Oh,” I replied. “I couldn't tell.”

“Well, she does. She thinks you're cool. She says if you want to, you can stop by the session.”

“I'd like that,” I said. I've always been a sucker for music.

Then she got to the point. “Can you maybe bring us anything over here?”

Big Guy was at the restaurant, near the studio. “I don't know,” I said. “I guess.”

Kit came out to meet me as soon as I arrived, drawing me into a lounge. She gave me a guided tour. “This was Jimi Hendrix's studio,” she told me, as if I didn't know. I looked around and tried to feel the vibe. The place had no personality whatever, just a few old posters on the wall. When I gave Kit the packet of dope, I saw her smile for the first time. Her teeth were capped, her round lips too small to hide a slight overbite. She was nice. Not a snob at all.

She introduced me to her band and their producer, the drummer from a heavyweight English rock group. He was coked to the gills. All of them were. Kit wanted the dope to smooth her out. The rest of them smoked pot. I stayed awhile and listened to them play, a girl singer named Sylph with a low drone of a voice and a red-haired bass player who pogo-hopped while she plucked. The only guy in the band was the drummer, a greaser with a nice sense of humor and the speed of a runaway train. Everyone called him Poop.

Next day, Betty phoned again and asked me to drop by Kit's apartment, which was around the corner from Big Guy's. It was late in the afternoon, just before I went to work. I climbed the six flights and knocked. The odor of cat spray greeted me at the door. Betty answered it. “Sorry for the mess,” she said as I entered the hall. “We're doing the laundry.”

The apartment didn't look lived in so much as run over—dirty dishes in the sink, furniture in disarray, broken floorboards. As I sat on a low couch in the living room, Kit appeared from somewhere at the back of the apartment. She had a guitar in her hand. Sunlight poured through the windows, a light breeze on its tail.

“Thanks for coming over,” she said, looking pleased. “That was real nice of you, stopping by last night. We wanted to give you something for it.”

“But you already paid me,” I reminded her. Sixty dollars it was. Cost.

“We bought you a bag of dope,” she told me. “It's no big deal, just a bag from the street.”

I didn't know what to say. “I'll get it,” Betty offered, and disappeared in the direction Kit had come from.

“We had a fight last night, after we got home,” Kit volunteered. She showed me a few hairline scars on her arm. They'd been fooling around after the session, Betty tickling her with a razor blade in some kind of punk-flavored massage. Kit was too stoned to feel anything. When Betty started drawing blood, Kit smashed her face with a hairbrush. I was horrified.

“Did you know Kit's an artist, too?” Betty called out as she reentered the room. She was pointing with her nose to the dragon painting, busting her seams with pride.

Kit's eyes narrowed. They looked so light, I could barely see them. “You don't have to shout,” she snapped.