The Bohemia train stops off in North Brooklyn, once upon a time. Spin out beyond the metal turnstiles, and it’s a nuclear playground of factories and giant children. The Korean grocery store on the corner is all filled up with vegan beef jerky and organic cigarettes. Party fliers and rolling papers line up and pay for their beer. Then they walk out to a tree-lined sidewalk, stopping to chat with one another, and disappear now and again, weaving in and out of lofted art communes and shaded Anarchist collectives. The twin galleries in the middle of the street both feature pop surrealism, and around the corner, the socialist café is eternally going out of business. Up and down the road, at all hours of the day, skinny maidens on skateboards roll by wearing sunglasses and big candy headphones. And every night, at 3AM, monumental garbage trucks storm the same street at 120 miles per hour. Here, on this happy block, in a converted paper factory, next to a gangster motorcycle store, lived my love, Nicholas Bent.
Nico was a noise musician, a runaway. He’d been all over the country with his dirty dog and his skinny black jeans, jumping rails and hopping trains, not stopping for anyone. He ate shit and sold it too, a survivor and a hater. I loved Nico like a pigeon loves the street. I held him up with my high-heeled wage, bought him cigarettes and coffee, and when that failed to keep him up, bought him Adderall and coke. We made red the nights, screaming lullabies, tossing instruments, and loving voraciously. I gave him a recording studio in my bedroom, and a house full of friends and weeds. Because what I adored most about Nico was his big dreams that he’d talk me into, till I was with him.
Nico lost his mind.
We lived in a little half-sized house in the basement of that communal perfection. I, in a pile of philosophy books and sex toys; he, with his crates of records and analog recording equipment. We’d sit together for days at a time in that tiny, smelly room, like the 13.5 floor of John Malkovich, permanently bent over each other, making tons of art, whatever.
“That’s so John Cage,” he’d tell me, about the doodle I’d be scratching on my denim skirt. “No, it’s totally Marquis de Sade,” I’d retort. I didn’t listen to much John Cage. He didn’t read much of anything that was written before Allen Ginsberg.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah?”
And then we’d start making some collage: spray juice and house paint onto scrap wood stolen from the dumpsters of Chinese factories. Screw on magazine cut-outs with murderous drill guns. Nico loved collages of girl-bodies, no head, usually just tits and odd parts. I used to get mad at him about that. Said it wasn’t feminist. And then we’d argue, and get pissed at each other, and pretend we cared so much, about the politics of the matter, the aesthetics of the thing. We’d never finish, and sooner or later it’d become another casualty in my room, rotting creatively. And we’d be stuck having to keep looking at it all the time, waiting for inspiration.
The day Nico died, I was listening to John Cage, his String Quartet in Four Parts. I was up to the fourth part, “Quodlibet,” when my old girl Carla from back in those days texted me to let me know:
Nico passed last night. Jumped off the roof. Sorry for your loss. Please come by house for police report.
I looked down at the cracked screen of my Nokia. Fuck; he what? And I couldn’t see or hear anymore. The rubbed out numbers on my keypad were like the rubbed out signs in the subway tunnels, the time Nico and I got lost searching for mole people, afraid they’d invade if we didn’t pre-empt our introductions.
——
Nico and I met kissing, in between the subway and the tunnel walls. I was drunk and he was drunk, and I guess we were both curious and impatient with the train and what not, so we ran into each other, mouth-first, as a train roared by, nearly killing us.
I was dressed up as a tiger for Halloween, with a tail and ears, and a ripped spandex outfit that was supposed to resemble stripes, but looked more like Edward Scissorhand’s teething toy. My best friend Karmen had allegedly spent the whole day making my costume. She had decided ages ago that she was going to be Princess Jasmine that year (she was a different Disney princess every year) and so had asked me in mid-September if I would be a cartoon character along with her, and accompany her to this party that our mutual friend was throwing. I was having a cinema-triggered fling with Catwoman and Halle Barry at that time, and told her that’s what I wanted to be. She said that since she was taking a class on sewing and costume-making at the School of Visual Arts, she would be delighted to make my costume for me and have it count as one of her school projects. So I said cool, why not.
On Halloween night, about an hour before the party, I went over to Karmen’s loft on the Lower East Side, and there she was, still snipping away on the floor, in her lovely Jasmine dress.
“What’s that?” I asked her about all the fur on the floor.
“Um…that’s part of your costume.”
“Oh. What part?”
“That’s like the stuffing.”
“Stuffing?”
It turned out Karmen had decided that since she was Jasmine, it would make more sense for me to be Raja, her pet tiger, which was close enough to Catwoman, since tigers are like big cats.
To add insult to scrap, she had also purchased several tubes of orange body paint for me to put on -
“Underneath the costume! Like lotion,” she nodded and reassured, “And then you can have all the colors of a real tiger!”
Except that the colors were somewhat reversed. And only the stripes had fur. I was hesitant.
“Put the costume on!”
I pawed anxiously at my scarce costume, wondering if all the essential parts would be covered. Jasmine smiled and skipped happily into the bathroom. And so it was that half an hour later, I ended up at a crowded Halloween bimbo-fest, full of happy whores and hellish nurses, in my own slutty nightmare of spandex and polyester fur.
We fit right in, and there were boys who didn’t seem to object. They crowded around Karmen as custom dictates, cooking in an angry soup of their own testosterone, warding each other off with their monkey scents. And as their anxious jokes began to spill over the pot, they realized that I was the only other female there to catch each drop, like a good pet tiger, licking them dry and keeping their egos in tact. So some of them became very grateful for me.
Luke, my ex-boyfriend, among the surveyors, eyed my costume suspiciously, then patted me on my semi-naked ass.
“Nice tail.”
“Thanks.”
By the time Karmen was incoherently drunk, which was fortunately not too long a time into the party, I had become thoroughly embarrassed and was quite stably entrenched in my second-class status of excruciating boredom.
…to be continued…
