Dashboard Elvis is Dead, page 20
Hey man, we’re on the Love Tractor list, says Baz to the door attendant. It’s under Stone. There’s four, but one’s already in.
Wristbands are strapped, identifying us as – for the purpose of tonight – VIPs. It prompts the same buzz of excitement I had at my first-ever concert, at the Razzle Rodeo Club in Phoenix nearly seven years earlier.
Up here, says Andi.
And instead of being out front in the stalls of this cavernous shell, we head to stage right.
Hi, we’re Love Tractor. It’s great to be here in New York City, at the famous Radio City Music Hall.
The band’s singer is from the south, although not Texas.
Athens, Georgia, confirms Andi. Same as the B-52s. And REM, she adds.
And they are good. Very good. Although I spend more time snapping the audience, which is gradually growing in anticipation of the headliners. And then something remarkable happens. I remember Delphine shuddering once and saying that someone had just walked over her grave. That’s exactly how I feel right then.
Thanks. This is a song we love. I hope we can do it justice, says the singer. And he strums familiar chords.
I’ve never heard any Love Tractor songs before tonight, but then, those lyrics…
Love hearts on the glass, dripping condensation
Your wild imagination, my lowered expectation
A habit hard to break, becomes an obligation
Think of better times, but just leave me on my own
He sings them serenely. And I can’t believe it. Immediately I’m back there in Phoenix. Brandy screaming. Matt covered in blood. The polaroid on my wall.
A sad situation, a desperate generation
(An independent state of mind)
And we’re different now. Opposite directions
(An independent state of mind)
The words still reach right into my soul. Andi can’t understand why I’m suddenly crying. Why I am so upset.
I’m not, I tell her.
But she doesn’t believe me. She leads me backstage to a quieter space. She kisses my cheek and wipes the tears from my face with her sleeve. We hear the appreciative cheers as the band finish their support slot. The four members of Love Tractor squeeze past us. One of them sees me.
You okay, miss? he asks.
Yeah, she’s just a bit… says Andi on my behalf. Tailing off because she’s not exactly sure what I’m just a bit of.
It’s fine, I say through the sobs. Feeling tiny and foolish, like a little child who’s dropped her lollipop in the dirt.
We don’t normally make our audience cry, says the singer.
I look up. He’s smiling. I smile too to reassure him and Andi that I really am fine.
That song, ‘Independent State of Mind’, I say. It means a lot to me. I just wasn’t expecting to hear it tonight.
Ah, says the singer. We love that song too. The Hyptones. Great bunch of guys. We met them here in the city. Couldn’t understand a word they said, mind you. He smiles. Shame what happened to them. Such a brilliant song, he says.
What do you mean? I ask.
Uh, the thing in Phoenix, and the breakdown, he says. I’m Mike, by the way. Mike Richmond.
He extends a hand, which he has politely wiped on his T-shirt first.
Jude, I respond. And this is Andi. She’s in a band too.
Really? That’s great, says Mike.
He ushers us into a packed dressing room, where I recognize the headliners from the scattered merchandise that’s lying around.
Great set, guys, says a beautiful woman with an extraordinary mane of bright-red hair. It’s Kate Pierson. I’ll later be introduced to her after I fail to take a surreptitious photograph.
Cheers, Kate, says Mike.
The B-52s are getting ready to go on. Love Tractor sign T-shirts and programs and posters that bear their name.
I was there that night, I say to Mike. In Phoenix.
Jeez. Really? he says. He looks amazed. Wait there a second, he says.
He goes to a bag and rifles around in it. He brings out a magazine. The Face, from May earlier this year. Its glossy cover is folded and torn. The gurning cover star is the actor Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis in a new biopic. Mike from Love Tractor hands it to me, just as an older man smoking a cigar draws him away.
I flick through the contents, not sure what he intends me to find. It’s a British publication and most of the features involve people I’ve never heard of. But there’s one about Mike Tyson and a model, and one that interests me about Robert Mapplethorpe. And then, right at the end, there it is.
‘Ballad of the Band – the Tragic Story of The Hyptones,’ by David F. Ross.
I take in the pictures first. There’s a color shot of the band on the set of a TV show. There’s a picture of the ‘Independent State of Mind’ record sleeve. A ticket stub from the night of the Razzle Rodeo Club concert. And then, on the final page of the feature, there’s a blurred polaroid shot taken from inside the venue. I’m scanning the text for any references but before I reach the end…
Sorry about that, says Mike from Love Tractor. Promoters, man. Every question sounds like a threat, y’know? He laughs. Do you want some? He was just asking about sugars for the coffee, but it felt like he was offering to break my legs.
This article, that’s me, I stutter, pointing at the photograph.
Wow! Really? That’s incredible, says Mike. Look, I’m gonna go catch the band. You can keep the magazine, he says, handing me a bright-yellow B-52s Cosmic Thing tour T-shirt.
Good luck with your band, he says to Andi before heading back to the stage.
I study every word of the story on the train home. I’m referred to, but obviously not named in the text. It chills me to see it all written down. The night Brandy and Matt’s future changed. The night the guitarist’s – Jamie Hewitt is his name – future changed. And me at the center of it all. Would I be here now, in New York, if we hadn’t heard their song on the radio? I unfold the T-shirt and pull it on over my coat. Andi merely smiles. She knows little of my past.
I am wearing this yellow T-shirt, faded and holed though it is from five years of washing and moth consumption, when I next encounter Hennessey. I can’t be sure it’s him. But that makes no difference since he immediately knows it’s me.
Fuck, Jude! The patron saint of lost causes. How the hell are ya? he says cheerily.
I see his dirty green-and-white scarf. He lifts a jaunty cap pulled to one side, and there are feathers in his filthy hair. I half expect a pigeon to fly out like it was part of a vaudevillian magic act. His face is smeared black. His eyes, once smiling, are different; from then, and to each other. He looks dreadful. At least twenty pounds lighter, and he didn’t have that to spare. Ragged clothes hang from his fragile frame. When he stands, I can see bony ribs through a child’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt stretched tightly over them.
He is in a bad place, literally and figuratively. I come across him sleeping rough in the shadows of an abandoned gas station on Avenue B and 2nd, down on the Lower East Side. He is sheltered under a sheet of corrugated metal bent out from the shed that I’m here to photograph. A plastic bag full of personal paraphernalia that has been doubling as a pillow contains the little dashboard Elvis Presley. I’m amazed he still has it. It’s missing a lower leg. It hasn’t brought him the luck I’d hoped it would.
What ya doin’ way down here? he says, articulating the exact words that I’m thinking.
I’m here on a shoot, I tell him, and as I breathe in, I catch his rotten smell. I work hard not to gag.
Yeah? he says. All the way here to take me picture?
He smiles and it looks painful. Teeth missing and rotten. Faint Irish brogue dripping out past bloody gums. He looks and sounds like the singer from that band he liked; the one who sang ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’, which he played constantly on the cassette player I got him for his birthday. I start to ask him how he’s been but catch myself. Instead…
So, what you up to, J? asks Hennessey.
He speaks slowly. High or exhausted? It’s hard to tell.
Working, I say.
He’s surprised at this.
Capturing the Alphabet City vibe and specifically the 2B Art Space before it disappears, I tell him.
Motherfuckers, he snarls.
He’s most likely referring to the developers planning to demolish the casual, relaxed buzz of creativity that exists inside the old industrial warehouse. Fires burn in metal drums tended to by those warming their hands over them. There’s the woodpecker tap-tapping of a sculptor’s hammer as he chisels a concrete block. I notice the blowtorch of a young smith scorching a steel sheet. The 2B attracts rebels and rule breakers, artists and poets, sculptors, and anarchists. It’s also an occasional home to the Bowery ‘bums’, who now include Hennessey in their growing number. The juxtaposition of the arty and the displaced, with a commercial wrecking ball imminent, is an angle the Village Voice will be expecting from me. It’s a good story. A good new gig for me. Pictures and words. I salve my conscience with what I’ve taken from Janet Delaney. I’m not an observer sitting on the sidelines. I live here. I’m on the inside of the picture. I’m on the side of my subject.
To Rudy Giuliani, the newly elected Republican Mayor, the 2B is just another scary, unregulated piece of the city to be wiped away in his relentless clean-up campaign. Another place of authenticity deemed too dangerous and unprofitable to be permitted to exist. Like a lazy, disobedient student, not currently reaching full potential. I reconsider my brief and begin snapping my former bedmate against the wild, guerrilla graffiti backdrop. Hennessey poses as best he can until I tell him not to. He calls out to a downtrodden colleague; a fellow panhandler in a wheelchair who, hand out and without introduction, angrily yells back:
How’s about some dough, Joe?
This is Avery, says Hennessey. Don’t mind him, he calls everybody Joe.
Hi, Avery, I say. Can I take your picture?
He grunts. His hand extends further. I pull out five bucks and snap while he adjusts himself. Urine drips a trail from the underside of his chair as he rolls away from us.
Poor fucker, says Hennessey, without irony. Walked off the platform at Lafayette. Train was slowing so it didn’t kill him. Better for him if it had. Lost his legs and stuck in that chair. And now he’s not allowed to pan down there anymore.
Jesus, Hennessey, I say, not able to stop myself any longer. That’s brutal.
He’s at the crackpipe, too. It’s tough for him, he says.
And you? I ask.
I’m off the junk now. I got the needle phobia. Not just AIDS. From way back, he says. Besides, I’ve got too much livin’ to do. He tries to laugh but it degenerates into a guttural cough that sounds like his insides erupting.
What the fuck happened to you, Hennessey? I whisper.
He continues the cough and then winces. Whatever’s going on inside of him isn’t trivial.
The weed, man. Caused me a few problems up in the projects after you left. He tries to laugh again, as if it’s nothing really. It was me own doin’, I guess, he says.
The gangs? I ask.
This time just a rueful smile.
No. Me uncle. And me brutal fucken cousins.
He shakes his head.
They ran the blocks. Said I was bringing the ’hood down. Drawing heat from the cops. So, they hobbled me. Couldn’t pay for the treatment. Apartment had gone when I got out of the rehab. He shrugs. This street ain’t so bad, he says. Some good people here. We look out for each other. I sleep in the back of the 2B when it gets too cold, an’ they serve us soup there. Good, good people here, he repeats. He sighs. Dunno what’ll happen to us soon.
Your eye? I inquire. He smiles. I snap him up close.
A punch. A hefty left hook, he says. Pupil’s fucken dilated. I can’t see out of it good … but hasn’t done David Bowie any harm, yeah? Pull up a chair, he says, kicking over a small, rusting oil drum for me.
He slumps back down, grimacing. He has nowhere to be. All the time in the world. So, I tell him my tale. Just two old friends catching up…
In the years since I last saw Hennessey, I’ve moved in the opposite social direction from him. Up in the world. I now feel like a real native New Yorker. Monique’s Italian bought some of my pictures, along with Monique’s art, and together we self-funded a small gallery showing in the West Village. A few paid pieces in the East Village Eye resulted in offers to freelance for the Voice. My writing, limited though it was, supported my photographs. My articles drew the occasional favorable comment. Eventually, I could afford to give up the diner, although I retained a promoted position at Bloomingdales. But Andi and I moved out of the Bushwick loft. The locale was rapidly descending into gangland turf wars. Old sneakers dangled on power lines over every street, signaling the location of a crack house or a prime drug-dealing spot. And it was becoming harder to ignore the Italian’s often-violent visitors. But that wasn’t the catalyst. There was a major falling-out with Monique. She was frequently wired; she’d become increasingly paranoid and hateful with it.
What you doin’ with her, girlfriend? she’d say to me, referring to the relationship I had with Andi.
You’re becomin’ more white than nigger! Sheddin’ your skin, just like the rest. You Black … or you white? Ain’t nothin’ in between. No coffee-crème mulattos allowed in here, bitch. Pick a side, she challenged.
There was no coming back from the subsequent fight. That night, Andi and I were gone. A month after we left The Well, Monique was dead. Raped and murdered, and her body found discarded on waste ground on the edge of the Jackie Robinson Parkway. Monique had been caught transferring narcotics into Rikers Island. Alessandro was certain the Italian had ordered the sanction, convinced that she would rat him out as part of a plea bargain. It was made to look like a common assault. An unlucky hooker who picked the wrong john.
It occurred to me then that the free cab rides we enjoyed to and from the restaurant were trafficking more than just us. Monique was a sweet soul, it’s true, but always a little too easily drawn to the wild side.
Requiescat in pace, my darling.
We didn’t go to the funeral. That was five years ago, back in 1992.
Andi and I now live on East 1st Street, in the Bowery. We left Queens with next to nothing, but the junk stores and thrift shops of the Lower East Side provide ample opportunity to supplement our meagre possessions. The front door of the apartment opens into the tiny kitchen. The bathtub is in the kitchen too. Privacy is at a premium. Over to the left, a small living space looks out onto evening sunlight when the weather plays ball. In the space between is an elevated platform – the bed. We go outside and down the hall to use – or queue for – a little water-closet toilet which no-one deems it their responsibility to clean. There is no ventilating window either. It’s a quarter of the size of the Italian’s Bushwick loft and our building is a place of congregation for a squatting guild of artisans. But Andi likes it because of the area’s proximitous association with the Ramones and Blondie and Television and the CBGB’s fraternity. And I like it because I really like her. Emotionally and physically. The sex between us is invariably instigated by Andi, but always welcome. Despite an innate shyness, I become more adventurous on the occasions that she returns from rehearsals with a couple of wraps for us.
You blossom like a Texas flower on coke, she regularly tells me.
I live around here now, I say to Hennessy as I finish bringing him up to speed. Can I buy you a tea when I’m done? I ask him.
Sure, he says. If I’m still here.
And I’m not sure if he means in this location or this consciousness.
He leans closer.
Make me look cool, Jude, he pleads.
The dirty corrugations on his face are the equal of those he is surrounded by. He looks twenty years older than he is. I turn away because I don’t want to cry in front of him. I’ll weep for him later, and for Avery, and for every other poor soul facing eviction from the wasteland of the street. The only place they can call home. I spend the day prioritizing the inhabitants over their habitation, determined to pay tribute to their struggle.
Instead of a tea, I give him money and take off my old B-52s T-shirt, since he says how much he likes the color. I’m left in my bra and a thin jacket, but it’ll fit him better than the one he’s wearing. I promise I’ll return and that I’ll look out for him until Giuliani’s crackdown on the street people, the minor offenders and the squeegee men, forces them all to move on. My track record on maintaining past contacts isn’t good. But this is one commitment I intend to keep.
Here, he says as I’m about to leave. He hands me the dashboard Elvis. I’d just been lookin’ after him for ya, until the next time we met. It brought me luck, he says.
And seeing my puzzled expression, he adds…
He brought you back to me.
I return to Andi and spend a grateful night in the safe, warm cocoon between her thighs.
(Act ii) 1995–2001
My editors at the Village Voice anticipate a photo essay in line with the brief – which I provide. But rather than atmospheric images of the 2B art district, I offer photographs of thirteen men, their names chalked on boards held in front of them. I entitle the photos ‘Thirteen More Wanted Men’ as a tribute to the large, controversial mural created by Andy Warhol for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, next to where Hennessey and I had lived. Warhol’s brief then was to depict ‘something to do with New York’. I decide to use it as an influence to explore man’s place in a shrinking, changing world that prioritizes consumerism over humanism. I’m finding my voice, and its uniqueness is down to my personal connection to the subject. Janet Delaney taught me well. The text supports their struggle.
