“So this is what’s been missing,” I said out loud to the night.
Now the stately Corinne, in her loose caftan with its flowing hood, stood against the backdrop of the black sky above the river. When she raised her glass, her wide sleeve dangled from her white, dimpled elbow. Her face shone in the semidarkness.
“What’s your full name—your handle? I want to make this official.”
“Janet.”
“Janet? That’s it? Never mind...OK, here it is: To Janet the whore!”
After Corinne’s, I cut over to the Traveling Medicine Show, a saloon on Second Avenue and my old hangout. I had been avoiding it for a year—that is, until a week ago.
In the late sixties, we had a real St. Vitus dance going there, a whirling dervish of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Not only did I believe in magic then, I sought evidence, praying for signs, such as the supernatural handwriting that leisurely spelled God’s message to me, carving words in the sawdust across the barroom floor. Miracles of this kind only happened when I was whacked on methamphetamine, which was also when the divine order of things revealed itself, when inanimate objects gathered together to portend, when colors became backlit with the unseen rays of the moon, and jukebox tunes reverberated against the otherwise undetected, hollow sound of nothing. Crystal meth charged the circuits of my brain, leaping over synapses, chasing L-dopa down sleepy channels as sluggish as damned rivers until the banks of my mind flooded with revelation.
I did not fear this state, the drug-induced madness rightfully called “amphetamine psychosis”; I pursued it, guided by my own benign, urbane Charlie Manson, Michael McClaren.
Michael believed in crystal methedrine. Speed is to cocaine what heroin is to morphine—a very strong, very hard drug. But we cherished the tattered government brochure always circulating somewhere in the bar classifying methamphetamine as a psychedelic. This confirmed for us that it was a sacrament. After a few sleepless nights, I would grow preternaturally calm, and the high began to seem indefinite the way love does when it’s good. Michael administered lines of this powerful substance like a kind and watchful small-town doctor who runs a makeshift clinic full of locals come in for the cure. He believed and infected us with the belief that crystal methedrine could heal. We were all convinced. About this we were not cynics in the slightest degree.
Michael had invaded like a missionary from Greenwich Village in the spring of 1967, transforming a dreary Upper East Side singles parlor into what was for me a palace of the night. The corner saloon was lit by an eerie copper glow; the place oozed with drugs, and the small stage rang out with free music played by friends of Michael’s who dropped by to try out new material. The barroom walls were festooned with photographs of these local and world-famous regulars. There were mostly black-and-white head shots of the men, musicians, along with bartenders and drug dealers, all caught in deep and inscrutable contemplation, while the women were displayed in garish color: go-go dancers spinning their tassels on tabletops, or young uptown girls, myself included, wearing tiny bikinis and sunglasses, sprawled over the hoods of shiny cars.
Nothing checked, no restraint, unless it was Michael’s intriguing silences, especially intriguing because probably not a soul uptown or down consumed more speed than he did. And speed made most of us talk and talk in a shorthand of free association, broken sentences tumbling back and forth like flaming torches. But Michael stood out against the pack; he expressed himself in elaborate pantomime instead. He was always tacking something on the bulletin board with his staple gun, or spray-painting a lightbulb crimson red, or brushing his lips with the harmonica he never played, or tinkering with a mike onstage, or just running loose, a marvelous rhythm to his jerky step, the speed spinning him from wall to wall. All of us, his unabashed followers, loved to watch him. His long black hair streamed behind him. His skin was as white as candle wax, except for his flushed cheeks. His wide-set eyes were transparent ice blue, fixed with the vacant stare I once saw in a timber wolf’s eyes. You could almost hear his mind, as high as a whistle pitched for wildlife, and his mind drew us there night after night, all the young girls you could imagine, and the boys, too: we were enchanted.
That was the sixties, before male charisma got discredited. Sometime during the past year, while I was avoiding the place and trying to be a practicing radical feminist, the Traveling Medicine Show had turned seedy. Its lights were too bright now; the jukebox played the same numbers over and over, and Jimmy, the bartender, looked wearily at his watch. The place was changing back into just another local gin mill, but when I returned, all I could see was that Michael was still at his post where I’d left him the summer before. I reluctantly noticed he had acquired a slight potbelly, in spite of the fact that I was sure he continued to snort mountains of crystal meth (it was the daily quarts of rum and Coke, I guess). And the mortal growth of hair that poured out of his open work shirt, obliterating his once smooth chest, was thicker and ruder than before. But what mattered was that Michael was still there. The sight of my old hero and the stench of beer—old, sticky stale beer—lured me past the door.
I didn’t expect him to throw his arms around me after my year of pointed neglect, and sure enough, he went out of his way to shun me the first night back. He behaved as though I were a stranger all through the long evening, right up until last call. Even in decline, he had pride. You think you can just waltz in here after a year and expect me to fall all over you, bitch? But the truth is he had nothing better to do. The truth is he was happy to see me. I could tell from the way he immediately started stapling something to the bulletin board. Then he abruptly went and sat down at his long table, where he put his feet up on the neighboring chair and pulled open a copy of the Village Voice with a deliberate thrust of paper. He hid his face behind it, as if he had gone inside his house and slammed the door. All of this was for my benefit, I thought, but I wanted to make sure.
“I guess Michael isn’t talking to me,” I said to Jimmy. It was almost four by that time, and I was hanging on with both hands to the cool glass full of ice and booze and practically no soda.
“Of course he is. He’s real happy to see you,” Jimmy said, wiping the bar down with his wet, filthy towel.
“You could’ve fooled me,” I said.
“Oh, Janet, c’mon now, you’ve been away too long. This is how he always acts when he’s happy to see someone, you remember that much, don’t you?” he said.
A little while later, I noted with gratitude that Michael had switched to Penthouse, which he was reading with a half-smile on his face. A good sign. I walked over, careful not to stand too close. He looked up and smiled outright, as if I had just come through the door.
“Have a seat,” he said, getting up. “Want a drink?”
All of a sudden, after not having seen me for a year and then ignoring me all night, I was his guest.
He went over and got us both drinks, his a tumbler full of rum and Coke, and my umpteenth scotch and soda. When he came back, he sat down next to me and put his feet up again and stirred his drink with his long, graceful finger.
“You look like you could use a line,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m dying for a line. It’s been a year at least,” I said.
“How’d you stay awake?”
“I didn’t, really. I was walking around in a daze the whole time.”
“Here, I’ll put a little of this in your drink. It’s not the quickest way to get off, but it’ll do the trick.”
He took a square of tinfoil out of the breast pocket of his red shirt, a dark red that made his eyes look extremely light blue. Then he tapped some of the tinfoil’s contents,