I woke up yesterday morning on St. Mark’s Place. It was the mid-eighties.
I was physically at home, sleeping in bed. Right before I opened my eyes, I dreamt I was walking down the steps of the old Trash and Vaudeville.
How did I know it was then, and not now? Trash and Vaudeville moved to 7th Street years ago, but I don’t think my dreaming brain considered it important.
If you’re unfamiliar with Trash, it was…or is…a clothing store in downtown Manhattan. It sold all the clothes you couldn’t find at Macy’s or Canal Jeans. We didn’t have the internet back then, so if you wanted something new to wear, you had to go to a store and buy it.
Trash is where the cool clothes were, waiting to be sprung from the rack and worn on the emaciated bodies of downtown residents. It was where you bought Doc Martens, before there were so many colors and styles.
The dream is short: I walk down those steps at a particular point in time of my life. I know it’s the eighties because I feel like my old self.
The self who believed in possibility.
Whoa. That thought’s a little dark, even for me.
It’s five a.m. and entirely too early to start contradicting myself. But I seem to exist in a perpetual state of contradiction, and here comes the self-talk, the well-intentioned idiot who exists in me amongst all the other aspects:
But you do believe in possibility. You’re producing more work than ever, you finally have a satisfying life, of course you believe in possibility…
All true. But there’s a difference between then and now: I must work for possibility. If I want an adventure, I’ve got to show up and claw my way towards it. Hope is a practice, not a state of being.
When I was young, I always had hope. I took it for granted I could change.
The dream makes sense. St. Mark’s has always been a portal for me. And for weeks now, I’ve been time traveling. The dream is just a part of it.
I’ve heard time is fluid, that it can bend. I thought time travel the stuff of science fiction, a genre which never held my interest. I didn’t know it could happen outside of fantasy life.
It can happen.
Why Trash, I wonder.
I spent a lot of time on St. Mark’s Place. But I rarely went into Trash because I could never afford to buy anything.
Except The Skirt.
One day, I wandered in. It always made me nervous to be in cool stores. My friend Robyn must have brought me there. She knew all about clothes. I don’t think I was courageous enough to enter alone. I felt like the Cool Police might happen over at any minute and tell me to go.
I started rifling through the racks.
When I found The Skirt, I knew I had to have it. It was the most rock-and-roll garment I’d ever seen.
Short. Tight. A combination of denim, black leather, and snakeskin. I bought it, even though it was fifty dollars, and I was in perpetual danger of not making rent.
I wore it to work all the time, at The Cat Club on 13th Street. It’s funny now, remembering how I felt. I can look back and say to myself, I tended bar at The Cat Club. I knew those girls from The Bad Lieutenant because I was the one who made them drinks as they pined after guys in the band.
The skirt had magical powers, which were: I am wearing the right thing.
I always paired it with a black leather belt and silver peace sign belt buckle. Lace-up, black leather, high heeled boots.
In my early years in New York, I worried I had a giant Rube from Virginia sticker on my forehead. But at The Cat Club, it was a different story.
I wore that skirt and belonged.
Let me tell you what: the mid-eighties in downtown New York City look very attractive indeed, especially now.
I don’t want to romanticize them because they were hard. Really hard. There was never enough money. I was always in danger of losing an apartment. I didn’t work one single job where I wasn’t sexually harassed, daily. I had friends dying of AIDS, one before her 30th birthday. I’d get tested every six months and was always worried.
But I could live in New York City, in Manhattan, and be poor. I don’t know how people move here anymore unless they have a trust fund.
I could look in the Village Voice for an apartment without paying a fee to a broker. I got a job at Kenny’s Castaways and worked up from cocktail waitress to bartender. Then I was good enough to work full time at The Cat Club.
I didn’t have to call myself a mixologist, the most pretentious job title ever invented. Being a bartender was good enough. We were gatekeepers of the night.
I am exhausted from modern life. I don’t want to deal with the internet anymore, or my dumb phone, or AI, or that fucker Donald Trump, or wars that never end, or needing followers on Instagram to be taken seriously (let’s hear it for an oxymoron.)
Back in my day, Americans knew their enemy, and it wasn’t each other.
We had the Cold War. It was better.
At first it was one night, then a weekend, then an entire week. I time traveled. I fell down a rabbit hole and observed myself falling.
I was both there and here. I swam in brackish water, the kind in which rockfish spawn. It was neither saline nor fresh. Times bled into each other.
I don’t know if I’m completely out of it yet. More importantly, I don’t know if I want to leave. I think I am transitioning out.
Unwillingly.
I respect my young self. I’m worried about what she thinks of this version of me, in glasses and pajamas, living just north of the city instead of Manhattan proper. I am mortified to stand in front of her as a suburbanite.
It’s not as dire as it looks, I tell her. Freedom is internal. I’ve got more than I ever imagined.
Young Me takes a drag from her Winston and rolls her eyes. She turns, going out the door to an after-hours.
I am less encumbered than most people my age because I didn’t have children. But it doesn’t mean I am free.
I am married, and he has two kids. The three of them are a bonus and boost to my life which I didn’t anticipate. I have a family.
The kids are both grown now. I genuinely like them, enjoy their company.
Luckily for everyone in my little family, we are all fans of autonomy and critics of obligation.
But I can’t just run away from home when the mood strikes.
It started on June 1st, when I went to see Robert Burke Warren play. He does a thing called the Bowie Bash.
I did not understand why I was going. I have one person and one person only who I’ll watch do a Bowie cover, and that is Michael T.
Michael and I met in New York when I was 18 and he was 17, in the early, early days. I remember the first time I saw him.
He was a magical sprite. Energy zoomed up his body from the floor to the top of his beautiful head. He had the brightest smile in the room, a smile so full of joy it seemed impossible.
He seemed as happy to be at The Cat Club as I was, and I recognized him immediately.
Isn’t it funny? Every now and then we recognize someone before we even know their name.
He’s an utterly fabulous performer, and Michael T is also a Bowie scholar. He is certified by me, the World’s Biggest Bowie Snob. He has a band, Michael T and the Vanities, and let me tell you: Michael does Bowie.
Anyone else, no. Just no. That is all, I have spoken.
We go to the Bowie Bash, Secret Service and I, because it’s in Albany. His younger brother and wife live up there. We like them and haven’t seen them in a while. I figured we could go hear Robert play, check out this thing he’s doing, and combine it with an overnight at my brother-in-law’s house.
It was being held at The Linda, which is WAMC’s performance space in that neck of the woods.
It was very weird. There were seats, like in a real theatre. There was some room to stand but most everyone sat, which made sense, because:
EVERYONE WAS OLD.
Oh my god, I think. I am an old geezer going to the Bowie cover show. How could this have possibly happened to me?
The last time I saw Robert play was 1984.
He and I weren’t close, but we shared a close friend. The friend dragged me down to Pyramid to hear this band from Georgia called Wee Wee Pole.
The band was great. They were so good I forever remembered a song they did, with the chorus,
That’s Robert on bass.
It got stuck in my head and never left. I happen to have it on their cassette demo somewhere, in some 1984 pile.
The singer was unlike anyone I’d ever seen. He was a tall Black guy with a shorn head, and wore what I remember as a loin cloth onstage.
His name was RuPaul.
Look at me in 1984, witnessing the birth of a cultural phenomenon and not even knowing it.
Close to advertised curtain time (because old Bowie geezers need to be in bed at a reasonable hour) the show started.
And suddenly, none of that stuff mattered. I forgot all about being old, and my Bowie snobbery, and all about these petty little judgments I constantly make of myself and others.
When Robert walked onstage, I just sat there feeling like I was in a whirlpool.
He has gray hair now, but he’s still Robert.
Suddenly it was 1984 in the East Village, except it was also 2024 in Albany. And here he was onstage after having an illustrious career all over the world. And here I am in the audience again.
And we are both alive, which seems an extraordinary accomplishment.
I kept going in and out of time. Down the whirlpool I went, then spit back up to the surface.
Time does bend.
I leaned over to Secret Service and whispered,
“THIS IS SO WEIRD!”
Because it really was.
Robert and his band were extraordinary. He managed to respect Bowie’s vocals while making each song his own, and I’ve got to tell you: I saw Bowie three times, including Tin Machine. The band Robert put together was as good as any Bowie had. The arrangements were gorgeous.
Incredible.
I kept seeing Robert in 1984: in the club, in the apartment I shared with our friend. I kept seeing two people who barely knew each other then, as we are now.
Neither one of us faired too badly. He’s making music. I’m writing. Not too shabby.
But from the moment he came on, my footing was off.
I said hello to him briefly after the show. I’d forgotten how tall he was. We take a selfie, because it’s 2024.
I left quickly, too tongue-tied for much of a conversation.
Because irony rules my Universe, I was in the middle of editing my book.
It’s in three parts. The most difficult parts to write and edit exist in Part Two, which deal with my addiction years.
I’d just finished the Bowie chapter that day.
I had to turn in the draft by June 5th.
The next four days were filled with writing, writing, writing, while also falling in and out of time.
There was some weeping, weeping, weeping.
I finally said to Secret Service,
“I’m going to take a break and watch a movie.”
He said,
“Good idea.”
I go upstairs and look for a movie.
I am not my own friend. I choose 1917, a fantastic movie to see if you’re not in the middle of a nervous breakdown and/or time portal.
This weekend I tried to return to normal.
The book is in the hands of the editor I hired. There is nothing to edit.
I do things like:
Sleep. Walk. Laundry. Cook. Eat vegetables. Wash hair.
Robert wrote a book, so I read it. It’s called Perfectly Broken and is exquisitely written. I am so impressed at the way he lets a moment unfold.
However, it’s a novel about the eighties and nineties and relationships then and now.
For chrissake.
Out of the frying pan, into the fryer.
What does it all mean?
What is this thing called time?
What is the past?
How do I survive myself?
Do I like life enough to stay, to not run away from home?
Why is music always the portal?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
Where is that skirt? It isn’t possible I’ve gotten rid of it. Have I?
How could I.
The music in my head is Aladdin Sane. It plays again and again. I wake up to it and it’s all I hear, over and over.
Not a terrible soundtrack.
I keep listening.
I love this! Made me reflect back to my 1984. Would've loved to tell that 15 year old not to be so scared of everything and take more chances. You should be proud of yourself. You are a gifted writer. Can't wait to read your memoir!