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MUSIC. ART. THEATRE.

One day, we visited my mom’s sister, Titi Bobbie. She lived in the Barri Projects on Staten Island. Heavyset and strikingly beautiful, Titi Bobbie was a scream and I loved visiting her and my cousins Carole Ann and Louis. Louis was an athlete, and Carole stunning—Ann like her mother—loved music. She was also dating a guy from Queens whom I called, “Manny the Greek from Astoria.”

On this particular visit, Manny was talking about tickets he had to go see Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies” Tour, at Madison Square Garden. He was trying to get Carole Ann to go with him, but she was feeling sick from her period and just wanted to stay home and listen to Marvin Gaye.

“Take my little cousin,’ she said to Manny. “He’ll want to go.”

I looked up at Manny the Greek and smiled harder than I ever had before.

The next week, I went to meet him at his job at Lord &Taylor on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. We planned go to the Alice Cooper concert that evening, when his shift ended. He worked on the second floor in the men’s department and I was completely taken by the place. I remember when I first walked in, I was afraid to touch anything—cashmere sweaters, double-breasted suits, bottles of Fabergé men’s cologne. I had never before seen any place so fancy and upscale. We weren’t there very long, though, because Manny punched out a few minutes after I arrived, and we grabbed the subway to the show.

It was my first time at Madison Square Garden, and it was a real eye-opener. All the fans pouring into the venue looked glamorous in their pink and purple costumes and their striped top-hats and tails.

We made our way to our seats. The lights dimmed and suddenly a large white spotlight appeared and Alice emerged on stage. I was riveted. He had on a top hat and white leotards with leopard platform boots stretching up over his knees. On his face were spider eyes created with theatrical black greasepaint and mascara. He had a cane which he twirled around like a wand, pointing it at the audience as if he was about to flash something wondrous and magical at us. The stage production totally blew me away. The music was loud and hard. Alice and the band opened up the with “Hello, Hooray” and ripped through “School’s Out,” “I’m Eighteen,” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” then they encored with “Under My Wheels.” The show was incredible.

That was June 3, 1973, the last night of the “Billion Dollar Babies” tour in NYC, and my first rock concert. It changed my life forever. I already had the Killer album, but I didn’t have the previous records, Pretties for you, Easy Action, or Love it to Death. So, one day, I took the subway over to E. J. Korvettes on Bay Parkway, to get them all. I also started buying all the popular music publications like Circus, Rock Scene, Creem, and Rolling Stone.

During this same time, I had been visiting my dad in Manhattan on Saturdays. He worked for IBM on Astor Place. I spent those days futzing around the office, but one of the best things about the Saturday visits was the magazine stand right around the corner. That’s where I discovered The Village Voice and After Dark Magazine.

After Dark catered to up-and-coming artists, musicians, dancers, and actors. It featured the upscale photography of Martha Swope and Jack Mitchell. On the glossy pages there were beautiful, half-naked men, which is part of the reason I obsessively bought it.

But my new bible was The Village Voice. I dug through every single page of that newspaper. It listed everything that was happening in New York City: shows like Todd Rundgren’s Utopia Tour at Radio City Music Hall to Patti Smith at CBGB’s and the latest porn stars performing at XXX-male burlesque theaters in Times Square. I found everything I had always wanted: concerts, Broadway, movies, porn. Actually, I found myself.

I started ninth grade at an all-boys Catholic high school called Bishop Ford. During my first two years, I kept up my school work and attendance like my mom wanted, but effectively, I was leaving Brooklyn—a lot.

In 1974, I went to the Felt Forum to see Lou Reed. That same year, I saw an R&B revue there featuring the Spinners, Ashford & Simpson, and Graham Central Station. I also saw Aerosmith and David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs Tour at the Garden. I was driven, I was fixated on seeing everything—absorbing music, art, concerts, theatre—everything.

One day I decided to go see LaBelle at The Apollo Theatre in Harlem, and I didn’t tell my mother. In fact, I cut school to do it. It was not unusual for me to get home late, even on school nights. My mom and I had an understanding that getting home late was fine, as long as I kept up my grades—which I did. But I had never cut school before.

Patti LaBelle was gorgeous and gave a show-stopping performance at the Apollo—even at eight months pregnant. She worked that stage in the most electrifying way. Whenever I went to a concert, I never, ever stayed in my seat and it was no different at the Labelle show. I ran up to the front of the stage and danced out of control. I wanted to be as close to her as humanly possible.

Around midnight when the concert was over, I was heading back to Brooklyn on the B train and as we got closer to my stop, I suddenly saw my mother through the train window. She was standing in the doorway of our building in her housecoat, armed with a broom. I started getting nervous.

I was trembling as I stepped down the stairs to the sidewalk. Within moments, she furiously shook the broom at me.

“Where were you?” she screamed.

“I went to a concert—” I said.

“Where did you go to a concert?” she demanded.

I didn’t want to tell her it was all the way up in Harlem, so I told her I was at Madison Square Garden, where I’d seen Alice Cooper with Manny.

“And, by the way,” she snapped, as she tightened her grip on the broom. “How was school today?”

“Good,” I replied, trying to get past her to the stairs.

“You didn’t go to school today!” she screamed, raising the broom to my face.

Apparently, the principal at Bishop Ford had called her that day asking if I was sick because I hadn’t shown up.

Mom grounded me for two weeks and I vowed to never cut school again, or, if I did, to make sure she never found out about it.

The following year, 1975, I went to as many Broadway shows as I could. I saw Bette Midler in her Clams on the Half Shell Revue at The Minskoff Theatre. She performed with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and I sat in the front row, although I have no idea how I got front-row tickets. I brought my Panasonic cassette recorder with me, which I hid in my green knapsack. Then once the lights went down, I carefully pulled the recorder out and taped the whole show. Afterwards, I headed to the backstage door to meet her and get her autograph. I went to see her show about five or six more times.

I also went to the Broadway debut of The Rocky Horror Show at The Belasco Theater. Although the show didn’t do too well—it closed after forty-seven performances—I loved it. After the many times I went to the show, I was determined to get backstage to meet Tim Curry. With my friends Sunny Bak and Frank Tedi—both young paparazzi—I wondered how, as we waited by the stage door, do we maneuver ourselves in to meet Curry and take his picture? Sunny was a little startled at my plan.

“We can’t go backstage!” she said.

“Of course, we can!” I said with complete confidence. “We’re going backstage!”

When we finally got in, we saw Tim Curry heading out with a very young Meatloaf behind him. I approached them and told them how fantastic I thought they were and asked them to take a picture with me. I ended up seeing Rocky Horror at least a dozen more times. I also wound up “second-acting” it, which involved waiting for everyone to come outside during intermission for a smoke, then casually walking back in for the performance and grabbing any empty seat I could find.

I think I got that chutzpah from my mom, although I don’t know if she would agree. She always drummed that family credo into us: “You do for yourself!” and that fueled my independence.

I then went to the opening night of A Chorus Line. I had a $10 balcony seat which was just so awful that when the lights went down, I quickly looked around, and seeing an empty seat on the orchestra floor, ran to it and quietly climbed in. At intermission, when the lights went up, I turned my head and saw the famed underground actor Divine sitting in the next seat. It was astounding. I knew who he was from the John Waters films, but I couldn’t believe I was sitting next to him and he was all dolled up. Curiously, Divine would end up popping up at surprising moments in my life. I was so enchanted by his appearance, all I could do was stare at him that evening, and the odd thing was that I didn’t say anything—which wasn’t like me at all.

In the fall, I started at City-As-School. I was in eleventh grade and I’d had enough of Catholic schools. I had been attending them for ten years and I told my mom that I needed to do something different. It’s not that I felt Catholic school was bad, I was just really tired of it. It was very restrictive, and I wanted more freedom. It wasn’t that I planned to cut classes a lot or ditch school completely. I just needed more open-mindedness from my teachers and fellow students. Attending City-As-School also helped me in my quest to get out of Brooklyn and into Manhattan.

City-As-School was experimental, and classes weren’t held in a stuffy room inside a big, cement building. We were farmed out all over the city to work in internships and learn in more creative and imaginative ways—an approach that attracted innovative, artistic types of kids. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of those kids and we often had a class together at 100 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. We hung out on the front steps and he always had a black & white composition book with him in which he constantly doodled. He often showed me his amazing illustrations—they were abstract, childlike, very primitive. They looked like hieroglyphics—and they spoke to me. In fact, I remember seeing one of his best-known paintings—Famous Negro Athletes—in a very early form in one of those books. He would say to me, as he fanatically drew, “I’m gonna become famous!”

And he did. In fact, a number of years later, I visited him at 57 Great Jones Street in Manhattan. Andy Warhol had purchased that building for him to live and work in because he was completely under Warhol’s wing by then. Basquiat was having a Christmas party and even though we were off doing our own things at that point, we spotted each other on the street one day and he invited me to his holiday party.

When I rang the doorbell, and the door opened, wafts of pot smoke poured out, and Francesco Clemente was standing there. I gulped, trying not to gawk at him, and introduced myself, then maneuvered through the smoking, swaying crowd, all the way to the back. I found Jean Michel feverishly painting on a canvas. He was definitely high, and he instantly recognized me. It was clear he had been stoned for a while—his eyes were glazed, and his skin was ravaged from the constant picking that junkies tend to do. He then offered me one of his composition books, in memory of our many days sitting on the front stoop at school. But I said no. When someone is so out of their mind like he was at that moment, I just couldn’t accept his offer. Unfortunately, he was dead from an overdose only a few years later.