Seventh Avenue South Read online

  Seventh Avenue South

  Duncan MacLeod

  Copyright © 2020 Duncan MacLeod

  All rights reserved

  FOREWORD

  In 1986, before 5150 began, Ethan lived in New York City, where his habit of making bad choices began. Thank you to all the weird and wonderful people -- you know who you are -- who made 1980s Manhattan the most creative, awe-inspiring place on the planet.

  PART ONE

  PREPPY

  It’s May 23, 1986 - the first day of the rest of my life. I graduated today. I’m moving to New York City the summer before I start at Columbia. How does a penniless eighteen-year old get from a dorm at boarding school to an apartment in the Village? It’s all about who you know. So I will have to back up a couple of years to get you, dear reader, to my graduation and beyond.

  My first friend at boarding school was Miriam, a day student. At assembly on our first day she sat in front of me. Her hair was nearly to her waist, so she joined her fingers at the base of her scalp and lifted her hair up and over the back of her auditorium chair. The resulting pile of hair landed in my lap. She apologized. I said something funny. We bonded instantly. Miriam was a day student. Her family lived in a huge, beautiful house in the toney part of Watertown near the Mt. Auburn Cemetery. She introduced me to her tall, tow-headed boyfriend Jack. He was a genius, almost a savant when it came to music. He, Miriam, and their friend Brennan formed a band called “Your Parents.” They had unrealized plans to open their own nightclub called “The Basement” so that they could put up a poster saying, “Your Parents are playing in The Basement.”

  My friendship with Miriam, Jack and Brennan solidified throughout sophomore year. Brennan was out of the closet. He dressed in outrageous fur coats, lizard skin pants, chunky Famolare boots, and a jaunty cap. He was so gay and so fashion forward, it scared me. I was in the closet and anything that threatened to pry the door open made me afraid. But Brennan was funny, sweet, and he made me lots of mix tapes. I owed him and everyone the truth about my own homosexuality, but I was still too scared. It troubled me. Miriam picked up on it when I refused to wear an extra pair of her gloves in an ice storm because they were “ladies’ gloves.”

  “Ethan, I need you to know right now, clothing doesn’t really have a gender. If I look sharp in your sweater, I’ll wear it. If you look good in my summer dress, you should wear it. Now put these damn gloves on before you get frostbite!” This was a liberating philosophy. As the school year progressed, I wore increasingly stranger and stranger clothing from the dollar-a-pound in Porter Square. I didn’t wear a dress, but I definitely wore some women’s sweaters under my grey and orange sharkskin trench coat. I was still afraid of being gay.

  When I went home to California for the summer after my sophomore year, my mother could see something was wrong.

  “Honey, you know if you ever want to see a counselor, I’ll pay for it. No questions asked.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”

  It was a trap. “Why? Why do you want to see a counselor? What’s wrong?”

  “I’d prefer to talk about it with the counselor, no questions asked.”

  It was too late. She wouldn’t let up until finally, in exasperation, I promised to tell her why after one hour of silence.

  “Mom, I’m gay.”

  “What did I do wrong? I thought I was a good parent!” She made it about herself, as narcissists are wont to do.

  The relief of letting that truth out to the scariest possible person in my life was so great, it caused a vacuum to form in my brain. Instead of answering her, I passed out. When I came to, her first words were, “promise me you won’t wear a dress!”

  “I can’t promise that.” I said it to piss her off. It worked.

  I took an awful job that summer working at an amusement park, selling juices in self-reflexive containers, i.e. the grape juice was served in a purple plastic bunch of grapes. I used some of my earnings to buy Japanese pressings of New Wave albums at the Tower Records in Mountain View. But the rest I saved and put away in a savings account when I got back to Boston. Working at the amusement park, I wanted to be with so many men who worked there, especially the buff bodybuilder security guards. I tried to catch their eye in the changing room, but I was invisible to them. I was jailbait; they stayed away from me and probably were straight anyway. I was never going to get laid. I still thought I was a catch, but Marriott’s Great America wasn’t a good place to meet people.

  I wrote Miriam a letter telling her I was gay. I sent Brennan a postcard because it seemed funny. Brennan sent back an enigmatic letter that just said, “Come home to Gretchen who lives in the trees.”

  Claudia’s letter was much more robust. It was magic markers, doodles, a long Ivanhoe-esque description of the skin forming on her hot cocoa, a very good drawing of her Marimekko bathing suit, and a lot of encouraging words.

  In Fall of 1984, I started my second year as a boarding student. I was out to Miriam and Brennan about my gayness. I didn’t tell a lot of other people because I was so afraid of what they would think, and I had to live with them, shower with them, and sleep in the same room as them.

  I had this magical belief that now that I had told a few people, life would be easier. School was easy. I got straight A’s like I always did. But life wasn’t easy. I thought I was the only gay person in Boston besides Brennan. Brennan didn’t love me, and I didn’t love him. We were friends. I was in love with a senior Deadhead named George. He was completely inappropriate for me. He knew I existed but didn’t seem to care much. Every time I saw him, my heart ached. I have no idea what his heart did, but I projected my self-loathing onto him and pictured him thinking I was a creepy ugly fag.

  Junior year was the year I figured out that I was ugly and unworthy of love. I was a Smiths song.

  But back to my graduation day and move to New York. Like I said, it’s all about who you know. I was friends with Fleur Short. Fleur was a connector – someone who knew everyone. In 1984 and 1985, she frequented all the night clubs. Fleur met Donnie on the third floor of Danceteria. His striking looks made him photograph like a supermodel. He applied makeup to become a gothic bat cave ghoul. He teased his hair with white Aquanet, cooking it in a crimping iron until it rose up then cascaded from his scalp like a black fountain of crow feathers. Throughout my junior year, Fleur and I spent countless hours in the darkroom deciding which picture of Donnie was the very best. My favorite was from the time he bleached his hair white and stood atop a pile of bricks and rubble left over from a burned-out building in Alphabet City. I knew his face better than my own even though we’d never met.

  Before Fleur graduated, she invited me to her parent’s house in Manhattan for Thanksgiving. Fleur had a convertible sports car, a 1976 Porsche 914, that took 95 at 95. Even though it was tiny, there was nowhere on the island of Manhattan to park it. When we got there, we drove in circles on the Upper East Side searching for a spot. At midnight, we gave up and headed downtown, our unpacked bags still in the trunk. Downtown there were garages that charged usurious rent for a spot, but Fleur had money. She took me to Danceteria. Everyone was overflowing with attitude. I was a preppy geek in a furry cardigan. Nobody noticed me. It was so cool. I cowered on a fleabag sofa and studied the fashion that surrounded me. I asked one girl where she got her nose pierced. She turned to me and glared. I was a locust that splattered her windshield. She turned back to doing nothing. That was what everyone called “New York Attitude”. It was scary.

  Fleur was a social butterfly. She attempted to introduce me to a dozen new wave fashion plates, but nobody cared. They weren’t sophisticated enough to see beneath my geeky exterior.

  After Danceteria, we drove to the East Village. We had pancake
s at 103 2nd Avenue until the sun came up. We drove back to her parents on 63rd and Madison. Parking was still nonexistent. We circled dozens of blocks 5, 10, 20 times. It was 8:00 in the morning when Fleur gave up and drove into a parking garage. It was $60.00/hour to park there. It was the only choice.

  Upstairs, Fleur’s mom had her hands on her hips.

  “Fleur, Ethan, I’m surprised at you. You had me worried half to death.”

  “Mom, can we talk about this after we sleep? I have a good explanation.”

  It was clear that Mrs. Short was itching to fight. “Young lady, you can’t just waltz in here after a night of debauchery and pretend like it’s okay!”

  Fleur grabbed my hand and dragged me into her bedroom. She slammed the door. When her mother knocked, Fleur turned up the volume on her Cure LP. When we woke up in the afternoon, we took photos on the terrace. It had a great view of Midtown and Lower Manhattan. The guest bathroom had a toilet built like a throne, with a rectangular lid. The walls and vanity were mirrored so you could see yourself take a shit on the throne from every conceivable angle. That was my first taste of New York, and I wanted a platterful.

  ✽✽✽

  As 1984 became 1985, the season turned bleak to match my ever-worsening mood. I flew home to see my mother. I was sad and despondent. I didn’t care about the nice Christmas tree she had put up, and I didn’t want to eat the nasty food she was preparing. She knew I was gay, but she didn’t have anything nice to say about it. She wasn’t stoked or relieved. She was ashamed. Her reaction made the sadness even worse. I went back to school with dirty laundry, and I didn’t wash it until I stunk so bad that my friends felt compelled to tell me about it. One of them gave me deodorant.

  The school had a therapist on staff, and I went to see her. I told her I was gay, that I was in love with somebody whom I barely knew, and that I hadn’t done my laundry for a long time. She asked me if I wanted to kill myself, and I answered truthfully, “No. I want to feel happy again.”

  This was the best answer, because otherwise I might have found myself in the psych ward, like some of my best friends at school. I was given no diagnosis, and no medicine, just the reassurance that this would pass. And it did get better. But I know now that was my first real depression.

  When I went home for Spring break, I found out that the school had contacted my mother and asked her if she wanted me hospitalized. Thankfully, she said no. In response to my brush with mental illness, she concluded that we needed to be closer together where she could keep an eye on me. She packed all our things and we drove to Boston in a Volkswagen Squareback. I finished Junior year as a boarding student and would attend senior year in the fall as a day student.

  At the beginning of summer, I took the train from South Station to New York. It was $25.00 round trip from Boston to New York. Fleur wanted me to see her tiny East Village apartment, meet her friends, and hang out with her at work.

  One sweltering night, we left Fleur’s apartment on 9th Street to walk to her bathroom attendant job at the Palladium on 14th. She could get me in for free as her guest. That was the only way I was seeing the inside of the Palladium because they were charging $50.00 per person just to go in.

  Down in the Kenny Scharf room, Fleur put on a cassette of Brennan’s music, “The Day Divine Died” (which was funny because Divine was still very much alive) and we waited until things got crowded enough that she could begin her shift. The ladies’ room was a meeting place, just as Klymaxx sang about. All the club kids came to Fleur’s bathroom in shifts. There was Andrew St. Andrews, Sister Dimension, Lady Bunny, Lady Miss Kier, Percival Laydown (AKA Miss Perceive), Miss Dude, Jessie Pike - they were the celebutantes. They ruled the club scene like nobles in the court at Versailles.

  Andrew St. Andrews was a sweet boy from the Midwest with candy floss hair in pigtails and an H.R. Pufnstuf lunchbox. He wore lacy pinafores and Mary Jane shoes. He was the most social animal I had ever met. He always used my first name when addressing me. “Ethan, you look fabulous. Ethan, can you be a love and tie this bow? It seems to have come undone; Ethan, be a love and refill my canteen with gin.” It made me feel important when he remembered my name. I was still a dorky preppy with no hope of reaching celebutante status. So, I was a eunuch cicisbeo in the cavalry of club kids.

  Some of the celebutantes became very famous, or infamous, and some remained obscure outside of New York club life. I probably never joined their ranks, but we knew each other on a first name basis and that kept me excited all summer and during my whole senior year.

  After a night of straight New Jersey couples fornicating in the stalls, Fleur packed up her Kiss lunchbox of makeup and breath mints and we headed down to Nightbirds on 2nd Avenue. The place to be that summer was 103. They had the Cowsills on the jukebox. The waiters were all handsome as fuck. And the waffles were perfect. Nightbirds was a runner-up. The 103 crowd was pretty and perfect. Fleur never felt pretty nor perfect after a shift; she felt comfortable at Nightbirds.

  We ordered warm chili salad and vanilla milkshakes. Then the most interesting hand in New York appeared, landing smack dab in the middle of the table. The hand wore a ring made from a black widow encased in fake amber. The wrist was tied with sparkling black fabric. Black fingernails reflected the fluorescent ceiling lamps. Above the wrist was a shirt sleeve that resembled a black silk stocking with runs. The hand was so cool, I couldn’t bring myself to look at anything else. A voice that sounded how I imagined Oscar Wilde would speak if he had a New Jersey accent said, “Fleur! Don’t you just love Nightbirds? So much more interesting than 103, don’t you think?”

  I gathered up courage and looked to the left of the hand, where I could make out the hem of a leather jacket ringed with safety pins and Bic lighter tops, and a pair of black tights with fake zebra fur sewn down the legs.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  The hand came towards my face and I realized I had to shake it. It was the coolest hand I had ever seen. I lifted my gaze. Painted in severe black makeup with pale white skin and gigantic teased hair was the striking beauty from Fleur’s photographs.

  “Hi, I’m Donnie.” I took his hand and smiled.

  “I’m Ethan. I’ve seen you a hundred times in the darkroom at school.”

  Donnie burst out laughing. “Oh my god! This is fantastic. You’re Ethan. Fleur has told me so much about you.”

  Without waiting to be invited, Donnie swooped into the seat across from me. “Don’t you love the milkshakes here?”

  I looked at mine. It was nothing special. “Yeah, it’s better than adequate.”

  “It’s fucking delicious. Have you had better?”

  “Of course, at 103.”

  Donnie smirked. “I don’t go to 103 much. It’s for superficial pretty boys.”

  Fleur interjected, “Donnie, you’re so pretty! You could go anywhere you want.”

  He waved her away. “Nightbirds doesn’t have fake people like 103. This is my breakfast joint. And besides, it’s cheaper.”

  Being in the electrifying presence of Donnie was almost too much to take. The fact that he asked and cared about my opinion meant I was important. I had that crazy feeling I got with certain people where I know we will be friends, but Donnie was way too cool to be my friend. I could never, ever, have a friend like him. I was and am a geek.

  “Fleur, Ethan, why don’t you come over to St. Mark’s with me. We can watch The Hunger.”

  “Sure!” I blurted out. Fleur shook her head.

  “I need to sleep.” She was burnt out after a night of patrolling mating couples in the ladies’ room stalls and handing out communal lipstick or stale breath mints.

  “Ethan, are you coming, at least?”

  I looked to Fleur for guidance. “I want to, but…”

  Fleur wanted nothing more than for me and Donnie to be friends. She wanted it from the moment she met him. She said, “Ethan, I’m going home, but you can call me from the payphone at Gem Spa and I’ll let you in.”

&nbs
p; And just like that, I was under Donnie’s wing. We walked to St. Mark’s and 1st. Donnie has this way of making a statement with a question “Don’t you think…?” or “What do you think of…?” It was hard for me to believe that the coolest man in New York gave a rat’s ass what I thought of anything. I was a dorky preppy. Sure, I was wearing thrift store clothes and creepers in a casual, relaxed but fashionable way. Yes, I had enough hair to tease it up a bit. But I was a loser. And now Donnie McMurdo was fascinated by my every word. And he laughed at my dry humor! I That’s the celebutante’s secret to success. Make everyone you meet feel important and funny. But Donnie had graduated way beyond celebutante status. He was too cool to be labeled like that. There was nothing like him, and never would be.

  Donnie brought me back to his shared basement studio apartment. It had once been a laundry room. To make it legal, the landlord had to put in a back door. It opened onto a huge empty space - something you never see in Manhattan.

  “Donnie, you have a yard! Do you ever have barbecues or grow anything?”

  He shook his head. “Why would I?”

  Before I could come up with an answer to such a difficult question, two of his roommates came back. This was their apartment, but they rented closet space to good friends.

  Doreen had bleached wavy hair and a permanent New York frown. Her brother, Bill, was a little taller. His hair was a natural light brown and his skin was slightly tan.

  “Doreen, Bill, this is Ethan.”

  “Hey.” I put my proffered hand away because in New York, you don’t shake hands if you’re cool.

  Doreen asked, “Is this the Ethan that Fleur never stops talking about? Oh brother, do you have some tall shoes to fill.”

  Donnie came to my defense. “She was right. He’s funny and sweet.” I smiled from a very deep place. Nobody in clubland had ever called me either of those things. Most of the non-celebutantes were too busy clawing their way upwards to help out or compliment a fellow clubgoer. That’s “attitude.” But real celebutantes, the important people, poured on the compliments. But “funny and sweet” were too generous for the likes of Andrew St. Andrews. It would always be something small like, “You look good in liquid eyeliner.” It still carried a shade of attitude.