Well, we certainly can’t have a murder without Freeze. And you can’t understand the larger story, unless you understand his story.
Freeze was three very different people, who lived, at various times, three completely different lives.
When I first became acquainted with him, he was a very talented and fiercely well-read young man. Rather quiet. He had a boyfriend for many years, a dog named Pickle, and a thriving hat business.
He was equally at home discussing Duchampsian ideology and Melrose Place plotlines. He could quote freely from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” and most anything by Camille Paglia. He had framed Schiaparelli prints hanging in his room, and he loved nothing more than to spend hours with me rhapsodizing over, say, Babe Paley’s neck or the Duchess of Windsor’s evolving hairstyles.
If I mentioned that I was just a fool for the decorative art nouveau ironwork I saw in Paris, he would look up from his sewing machine and murmur: “Oh, the subway station at Rue du Faubourg! Just divine! There are three books over there on the subject.”
He was always dressed to the hilt, to the ABSOLUTE NINES, with a shock of bleached white hair; a menacing, Mephistophelian goatee; and any number of pierced and painted body parts. He made all his own clothes—marvelous little deconstructed pieces that were very much in demand.
So there he was, a witty little hat maker and dress designer, in a rather unenviable position: he was locked away in a bedroom at the home of Drag Terrorist Bella Bolski—forced into indentured servitude—running up saucy little frocks for Bella—sunrise, sunset—all day, every day, in exchange for room and board.
Now, that Bella, boy, she was a work of art … I really do need to digress here and tell you a little something about her.
He/she would wake up early every morning and bounce out of bed, humming a happy song. Then she’d skip to work, pausing only to hug bunny rabbits and kiss little babies. She was a happy-go-lucky girl, and her coworkers enjoyed her sparkling sense of humor. Yes, everybody loved the daytime version of Bella Bolski, the adorable imp.
But as the sun went down, and night began to fall, she underwent a mysterious transformation. Her brow furrowed. Her smile turned upside down. With each layer of foundation that she slathered upon her face, another layer of armor was bolted into place. By the time the world saw this towering diva, she was lurking in the dark corners of one of Peter’s clubs, growling at the patrons. By the end of the evening, you could find her standing at the exit, like a looming gargoyle, barking, “Where the hell do you think you’re going? You aren’t going anywhere!”
And nobody dared. When Bella hosted a party, SHE TOOK HER DUTIES SERIOUSLY.
Why did she swing so maniacally from happiness to despair? Was her wig on too tight? Were her eyelashes too heavy? I contacted a prominent transvestite psychoanalyst on the matter, and Dr. Drag insisted Miss Bolski exhibited a definite case of borderline personality disorder. “Really.” He emphasized, “IT’S NOT COCAINE. No siree, THAT’S NOT BELLA’S PROBLEM AT ALL. Bella doesn’t touch the stuff. It’s all in her head. NO COCAINE UP HER SCHNOZZ.”
Well, that’s what he said, anyway.
So. She had a regular sweatshop going in her apartment. Five or six lost souls, all working toward a common goal: the Beautification of Bella vis-à-vis that evening’s outfit. There was Freeze on the sewing machine, her brother manning the wig station (“Bigger, I said! More volume, goddamnit!”), a faghag running errands and freshening drinks, and usually a random fan (terrified, really, poor thing) who’s only job was to play “I’m Every Woman” by Whitney Houston over and over and over again.
All this, so that when she went out at night and sat in her dark corner, growling at the patrons, she looked flawless.
I loved the daytime Bella. And the nighttime monster was such a fascinating read, I couldn’t put her down!
So that’s how I knew Freeze. Toiling away at someone else’s dreams. It was just like Rumpelstiltskin. Freeze was the fair maiden, forced to weave the impossible on a dusty old spinning wheel, while the evil old troll stomped about making demands.
He was a sad sort of creature. Funny, but remote. And you always wanted to hug him. Well, not exactly hug him—after all, he was a fussy old queen—but maybe touch his shoulder quickly as a gesture of sincerity and ask him: What were HIS dreams? What were HIS goals?
His dreams and goals were realized soon enough. Picture it: 1994, the year of the club kids’ last shout. Disco 2000 is on autopilot due to Michael’s growing heroin habit. Everybody, it seems, is bored … restless … addicted. The time is ripe for a takeover. Can’t you feel it? Clubland is looking for the Next Big Thrill. That’s when Freeze Number 2 came along. SuperFreeze. FrankenFreeze. The fulfillment and embodiment of all those pent-up frustrations he must have harbored while working in that back room.
It happened like this:
Typically, we would all end up back at Bella’s after a night out—against our better judgment, against our wills, actually. We were held prisoner at Bella’s every night for an after-hours “party.”
Party?! Woo-hoo!
Well, I imagine kibitzing with a roomful of brain-damaged halibut would have been more fun than one of Bella’s parties. It was always the same:
Nobody was allowed to talk. AT ALL. It made Bella tense.
Whitney told us how she was every woman several times.
And the cocaine supply dwindled until it was gone and we were fiending and tense, with full beards coming through our makeup.
But you couldn’t leave. You weren’t allowed. Days would pass. Popes would change, and still you would be huddled in that room—with Whitney reiterating time and again how it’s all in her.
Am I making my case clear? These were NOT fun parties.
But there we were again. It was January 1994.
Freeze joined us, which was a welcome change, and he had two friends from Boston with him.
One of them was a palsied old lesbian named Mavis,* and honey, she was on a mission.
She wanted to UNDERSTAND the CLUB SCENE. REALLY GET TO THE BOTTOM OF IT. FIGURE IT OUT. BECAUSE THAT’S WHO SHE WAS. “I’M MAVIS. GOOD TO MEET YOU! I’M A PROBLEM SOLVER. IT’S WHAT I DO. AND I WANT TO UNDERSTAND THIS CLUB KID THING. DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THESE ‘CLUB KIDS’”?
Well, bells went off, lights were flashing, and a hail of confetti rained down on her. This was her lucky day.
“Darling! Hello! You must sit right here, next to me, because do I have some stories for you! I’m James St. James. I’m a Clarifier, that’s what I do. It all began in third grade when my teacher said to me, ‘Jimmy,’ she said, ‘you’re really going places’—oh, wait, will you get me a line first, dear, we’re going to be here a while … we’re out? Already? WHY WE’VE ONLY BEEN TRAPPED IN THIS AIRLESS COFFIN FOR THREE DAYS! Oh dear … What … shall … we … do …? Hmmmm. Oh, I’ve got an idea! Mavis, would you be a dear and run to the bodega on the corner and get one? two? no three bags, I think, of their finest cocaine? Anyway, so there I was—me and Bianca in the bathroom at BAM—oh dear, no. One of those fiends must have stolen all my money. NEVER TRUST A DRAG QUEEN! But, I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a bag of cocaine today. Anyway, I was telling you about my first time on Oprah …”
Over thirty if she was a day.
Days later, when Bella finally granted us all parole, Mavis and I had truly bonded.
She was a strange bird, to be sure—but, listen to this—what a plan!—you know me: always thinking, my brain never sleeps, so try this one on for size:
We came up with a wonderful Life Plan for Mavis. She was going to invest all her life’s savings in a bunch of cocaine. She would quit the job she loved—managing a health food store in Boston—sell her house, move to New York, AND SHE AND FREEZE WOULD BECOME DRUG DEALERS!
I would show them the ropes, of course, and introduce them around and get them on guest lists—that sort of thing. Sometimes I rent myself out as an Image Enhancer. Lucrative side gig.
“Baby, I can make you both stars!” That’s how I put it. And they were sold. “You two are going to be, hold on to your hats, CLUB KID DRUG DEALERS! Oh, you’ll make a fortune. They all do. AND FUN! Woo Doggie! You’ll have the time of your lives. You’ll look back on it for the rest of your lives!”
Here Mavis interjected. Very seriously, she took my hand, looked into my eyes, and said: “I’VE GOT A REALLY GOOD FEELING ABOUT THIS. THIS IS WHAT I’VE ALWAYS DREAMED OF. AND NOTHING WILL GO WRONG, BECAUSE I’M A BUSINESSPERSON. THAT’S WHAT I DO. I KNOW NUMBERS AND MARKETING. That’s what’s missing in the club scene: A TOGETHER, ORGANIZED, BUSINESS-SAVVY DRUG DEALER.”
Pause.
Really let that sink in. Because I am going to hammer home the irony here. Oh, I wish we could cut to sometime next year. It’s delicious. It’s hysterical. But no.
Anyway.
I looked at Freeze. Visions of happy drug addicts danced in his eyes as he contemplated WHAT HE WAS GOING TO WEAR when his clients, no, make that his fans, came to him for a bump of cocaine.
“Yes. Hmmm. Good idea.”
Of course, I was just chattering like a magpie. I was all loopy from lack of sleep. I didn’t even know what I was saying. I certainly didn’t expect her to actually go through with it …
But about, oh, a month or so later, there she was in her new New York apartment and she turned to me and said:
“Should I wear the polka-dot spandex dress or this tailored suit with the big shoulder pads to really let them know I mean business— I mean, this is my debut. I have to look just right …”
“Oh, the shoulder pads. Definitely the shoulder pads. They’ll love them at Limelight. Trust me.”
She had taken thirteen thousand dollars out of the bank. Her life savings. Ten years of work. Her rainy-day fund.
“No more rainy days for you! From here on in it’s Sunshine and Lollipops!”
There was more coke than we knew what to do with. Enough to keep Bella quiet for … weeks. And Special K … and Rohypnol for when you want to come down … and Valium for when you get cranky … and heroin for Freeze … And what else? A little GHB. Some pot.
Then I turned to her and clutched her shaky little hand: “I have a good idea. You should let me carry the drugs around. I’m a star, the guards won’t touch me. Of course, you trust me, right?”
“Oh sure. Of course. My God—JAMES, I CAN FEEL IT—YOU AND I ARE SO MUCH ALIKE. I FEEL LIKE I FOUND A BROTHER!”
I looked at this funny old coke freak with her spiky lesbian hair and her big watery eyes that looked so eager and happy, and I thought, “Oh well. I guess I can do this.”
So, out of the goodness of my heart, because I am a good person, really, I decided that we WOULD be two peas in a pod, if that’s what she wanted. And, by God, I was going to show her the time of her dreary little life.
These would be the best three months she will ever experience.
Because that’s what I gave it. Three months. Then crash and burn. We had already done fifteen or so grams to celebrate the opening of our joint business adventure.
“LOSS LEADER,” she rationalized.
“Oh, and Mavis, will you front me a bit for tonight? I’ll call my accountant in the morning and she’ll wire the money. I’m good for it. I’m James St. James.”
“WHATEVER YOU WANT HONEY. AND TAKE AN EXTRA GRAM ON ME.”
She went to the safe and extracted the goods.
“BUT WAIT FOR MAMA. I’M GOING TO MATCH YOU BUMP FOR BUMP. LINE FOR LINE. WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER.”
Oh, greater men than you have tried and failed to keep up with me, honey! But, hmmm … something tells me … yes … you just might have it in you. Yes, I see the love in your face, it shows when it’s gliding up the nose.
I looked at her again, in a new light.
“Mavis, you just might discover a whole new side of yourself. I think this will be a voyage of self-discovery for you.”
She hugged me tight—“Oh, I hope so.”
Freeze was in the next room, moussing his new sideburns. They were razor sharp—RAR!—and he dyed his hair FIRE ENGINE RED.
Now if he can just … get … the eyebrows … exactly right …
Not faggy, you see. But arched, like this.
And it will only take another hour to pencil in this goatee.
As I left the room, I heard him humming “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy:
Gangway world, get off of my runway, …
This time boys, I’m taking the bows!
Oh, I think we were all going to learn a lot about each other in the coming months.
And so we went out—each of us soaring miles above the earth, lifted by the drugs—but buoyed by the realization of all our hopes and dreams.
Mavis was going to be popular! famous! loved! And applauded for her business skills!
Freeze was going to be in the center from now on. No more backseat living for him! He was about to explode.
And me … well, I had a new sister … who cared a GREAT DEAL FOR ME … a sister with thirteen thousand dollars of fun in MY pocket.
Of course, it all went off beautifully, as planned.
The kids at Limelight really did love her—“Where on earth did you find this one, James?” they all asked.
“She was working at a grocery store in Boston. Isn’t that fabulous?”
“GENIUS!”
At one point, a pink-haired nobody leaned over to her: “Mavis, I just worship your outfit. Those shoulder pads are so retro-aggro-chic!”
“Very butch, Miss Thing,” somebody else chimed in.
Mavis tittered. Flattered that these club kids would actually acknowledge her! Little Mavis, who this time last month was an aging spinster …
But let’s not dwell on the past.
It’s all about RIGHT NOW.
“Oh, and right now, I think you ought to give Loretta Hogg—the drag queen over there with the pig snout—SHE’S VERY FAMOUS—I think you ought to give her a gram.”
“Oh. Right. Right. Loretta Hogg. Remember that: very famous. Deserves a gram. Of course she does. Whatever you say. I trust you.”
“Oh, and over there—that drag queen?—she’s very famous too. The one with the four arms and the walrus tusks. A LEGENDARY LEGEND. Never pays for drugs …”
“But, wait …”
“LOSS LEADERS, MAVIS. Don’t you know anything? Keep the stars happy and everyone else will follow. That’s the rule. Always keep the people on top happy and you co-opt their fabulousness through association. You’ll see.”
“OK.”
“And I’ll need another gram to get through this. She’s such a bore!”
“I thought she was famous … A legendary legend?”
I threw my arms up in disgust.
“Looks like we’re going to have to break out the old flash cards. Remedial Nightclubbing 101, Spring session! OK, very slowly … yes, she’s fabulous, Mavis, but that doesn’t make her an interesting person.”
“A green transvestite with four arms and walrus tusks isn’t interesting?”
“Maybe at your little granola factory that passes for interesting. But this is the tippy-top, Mavis. You’re at the red-hot center of the coolest club in the world. You can’t get any higher than this, baby.”
Was I laying it on too thick? What would she say when she learned the truth?—that even the most fabulous club kid is still rated somewhere between Don Knotts and Regis Philbin on the register of international hip.
“Truth is, Mavis, most of the people at the top are real nightmares. Monsters. Not worthy of you at all. They aren’t real people like you and me. They’ve been corrupted. Why there’s one, his name is Michael Alig—well, you stay away from him. Trust me on this one; he will take advantage of you, Mavis. And I’m only telling you this because I love you. But Michael will try to lure you away from me—he’ll tell you lies about me, I know he will—just to cause trouble. He does that every day before breakfast. Every day he wakes up and says ‘How can I cause trouble for James?’ He’s evil. Pure Evil.”
Intuitively, he was right there. By my side. His antennae were tingling. He knew something was up.
“Why, Michael, I was just talking about you!”
“Of course you were, James. What else do you ever talk about? Hmmm. Who’s your interesting new friend here?”
I pretended to find a fascinating new way to fold cocktail napkins.
La La La.
“Well, if James is going to be SO RUDE—Hi. I’m Michael Alig. Welcome to my club.”
Mavis’s mouth dropped.
“OK! OK! OK!” I screamed, “Michael this is Mavis. Mavis this is Michael. Yea. Yea. Yea. He is the king of all we survey. But, Michael, Mavis picked corn for a deli in Massachusetts. She’s my new superstar. Oh. And she’s also a drug dealer.”
“AHA! I understand perfectly.” And he shot me a look which said that he … understood…. Perfectly.
“Now, Mavis, don’t you listen to a word James says. He’s a bitter old has-been. He has no power here. Take it from me …”
And he threw a few dozen drink tickets at her and escorted her to the bar.
“I’m the one you should be talking to. It’s all about me. James used to be someone … When were you famous, James? The fifties?”
I could see the wheels spinning. They were shooting off sparks, they were going so fast.
“You know you’re absolutely wonderful,” he continued. “We’re going to get along like two peas in a pod. Yes. You know I have this little magazine, Project X, have you heard about it?”
Mavis suffered a mild stroke, which pleased Michael to no end.
“You would be perfect for a feature we’re doing on the new ‘IT GIRLS.’ Of course, we’d have to set up a photo shoot for next week …”
I couldn’t take it anymore.
“GODDAMNIT, JUST GIVE HIM A VIAL OF COKE AND A VIAL OF K—Michael, it’s been wonderful spending time with you. It always is. But, look! Oh My God! Isn’t that Michael Musto over there? He looks thirsty. Maybe he’ll finally be your friend if you go talk to him right now.”
“Don’t think I don’t see right through you, James St. James.” And he took his drugs and scampered off.
I took Mavis into a stall.
“You are in league with the devil, woman. I’m telling you the truth. Yes, Michael can be dazzling. But it’s just surface shine, dear. He doesn’t have a soul. Or a heart. Please don’t trust him, whatever you do. Yes, he can do a few things for you. BUT YE GODS, at what price? He will bleed you dry and toss your withered corpse aside. He’s done it before.”
I shook her violently, trying to impart the urgency of my message.
“I know you need to make money—but is that really what you’re all about? I thought this was about helping each other, being there for each other, A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY, MAVIS, that we make together. It’s about FAMILY. Weren’t we all going to get an apartment together? Michael isn’t one of us. He’s a scheming, manipulative monster—only out for himself. You shouldn’t even talk to him.”
“DON’T WORRY,” said a suddenly confident Mavis, “I CAN HANDLE MICHAEL ALIG. But he is a fascinating case study. I want to talk to him. Get inside his head. He’s a businessman. I can tell. Just like me. I bet if we put our heads together…. But don’t worry. He can’t pull anything over on me. I’M SMARTER THAN MICHAEL ALIG. I WAS THIRD IN MY CLASS AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY. HE’LL NEVER CON ME.”
Please.
PLEASE!
PLEASE LET ME SKIP AHEAD A YEAR. Just six months! You’ll love it. Of course, you already know that no good can come of any of this. So please, let me just show you a quick picture—Thanksgiving, maybe—when Mavis and Michael are thrown out of Tavern On The Green for smoking crack under the table …
Oh. OK. But just you wait.
We’ll put the Mavis saga on pause there, and rejoin Freeze in the chapel of the Limelight. The dead center of the chapel to be precise. Surrounded by a large group of clubgoers hanging on his every word.
Freeze was delighted to discover how amusing he was—how everybody, suddenly got his eclectic brand of humor. The witticisms fairly tripped off his tongue and were greeted with gales of laughter from charmed freaks everywhere.
He was the life of the party—his sideburns were a hit! Why on earth had he languished at Bella’s beck and call all those years? Why wasn’t he here all that time, with people who appreciated him for who he was?
The man beneath the chaps. The real Freeze. These earnest and caring drag queens saw the real him.
He, too, had given away and consumed most of his drugs. Passing out bumps to the little people was such fun. And he used the drug-filled straw—with your bump on it—as a pointer, to stab and drive home the punch lines to his fascinating stories, so that in order to do your bump you had to listen to the whole story and chase the straw around with your nose for half an hour.
Freeze just babbled on while your bump hovered just out of reach, always one step ahead of your nose …
If you didn’t know that’s what was happening, it was a very funny sight to walk in on, indeed. Freeze in the middle of a crowd, surrounded by what looked like a dozen little kangaroos bobbing their heads in unison. Bobbing and weaving, chasing the straw.
Yes, Freeze was quite a mess that night. I’m not sure whether or not he knew what he was doing then. Torturing people by withholding their bumps.
But soon enough it would take on a sadistic quality. He learned the art of making people dance for their dinner, seeing how long he could make them suffer, while he looked more and more fucked up. That way, you could never say: “Freeze, you’re fucking with me” because being a mess means it’s never your fault.
You’re the crazy one.
“James, you’re paranoid. Of course you can have a bump. I’m giving it to you right now. GOD. YOU ARE SO IMPATIENT. I’m just feeling my X.”
It was an infuriating game.
But Bella had probably been doing it to him for years.
“Let him have his moment.”
That became my mantra in the coming months.
There was a party afterward, at Mavis’s new place. A rip-roaring wingding, as far removed from anything at Bella’s as we could get. And it was filled with Very Important Drag Queens. Movers and Shakers. Tippy-top, each and every last one of them. Not a hanger-on in the bunch. No sir.
So of course there was a blizzard, a never-ending, complimentary blizzard for your nasal enjoyment.
I saw Mavis get tense near the end, when the abacus in her head started adding it all up.
She and Freeze retreated to the bedroom to count up the night’s grosses.
She had her little ledger and her little Cross pen. This was all going to be accounted for. This was all going to be legit. She went to college for this.
Hmmm …
The night’s profits …
Why, it says here …?
That can’t be right!…
I don’t understand.
It says here, we LOST $2,000!
How did that happen?
“I owe you seventy-five dollars,” I offered, “and we did that bump in the stall …”
“NO. NO. NO. IT’S NOT YOU, JAMES. I trust you. But somehow we’re in the hole.”
We all stared at each other blankly, uncomprehending. That’s strange. I remember lots of transactions. I saw her hand out, why, dozens of vials and bags!
“It must have been Michael,” I concluded, “I told you not to trust him.”
“No that’s not it. I think we just gave too much away.”
“Gurgle snerf,” Freeze said in agreement (although between you and me, giving away too much was never Freeze’s problem in those days).
“Well, yes and no,” little old helpful me put in his two cents. “Now, Mavis, it was your first night. Of course, you had to make a splash. Now everyone knows you. They like you. They saw how generous you are. And more importantly, THEY SAMPLED YOUR WARES. They know now that they’re dealing with quality. You HAVE TO GIVE A LOT AWAY in the beginning, to spread the word, to build a name … to build a solid reputation … for good drugs dealt to you with a smile. Service with a smile.”
Oh ha ha ha ha.
(You see that’s actually a very clever pun. Pause here to let it register. “Services” is drag slang for cocaine, as in: “I need some services here, Miss Thing!” So: Services with a smile. They should make T-shirts! I am so good …)
“You’re right” she agreed, “You are always so right. Establish ourselves. Let everybody sample it so they know how really good this shit is …”
“And it is good shit, Mavis.”
“Yea.”
“Really good shit.”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s some amazing shit.”
“Do you want a line?”
“I’d love one—you’re a doll.”
Freeze had passed out on the couch, upside down and contorted like a pretzel.
Mavis and I did some more coke and I congratulated her on a marvelous debut, and then we had a
really
long
talk
about the importance of balancing your checkbook. Then after two or three hours, it veered into something about “prioritizing invoices”—I couldn’t quite follow—she was clearly excited by it, though. She was screaming and leaping about the room, digging through drawers, drawing me “diagrams” that were incredibly detailed and accurate squiggle lines that missed the page entirely and were written on Freeze’s silk pirate shirt.
“Whoops!” she laughed. We both laughed.
“Special K must be kicking in. Motor skills—GONE!”
Hmmm. I may have met my match in this one.
Imagine, I meet a crop duster from Ohio, and she can keep up with James St. James. Bump for bump.
She was good.
Now if we could just get her to stop shaking like that, and get her off the floor. “No, Mavis, you didn’t lose a gram!”
Or did you?
Maybe I should check.
Just to be safe.
So we crawled around and picked at the carpet, until suddenly it was night and it was already time to start getting ready.
How did that happen?
The whole day just slipped away like so many bags of cocaine.
Freeze needed a solid three hours to get ready, and when we woke him up he leapt off the couch and ran to the sewing machine.
“I was just having the most marvelous dream. All about fluorescent armbands …”
“Oh goodness. Yes. It’s all about the fluorescent armbands for spring. Absolutely.”
What in the HELL was a fluorescent armband?
That’s ridiculous!
“Get me a light!” he pointed to his lighter, sitting right next to him. There was an odd, imperious tone to his voice—one I had never heard before.
“Of course, darling.”
Well, it turns out, in case you haven’t guessed: fluorescent armbands are … bands … that go around your arms … around your biceps …
And they’re fluorescent …
Always on the cutting edge, that Freezer.
He put on a completely different pair of identical chaps … moussed, THEN GELLED his sideburns this time … penciled in his goatee, then BLENDED each line …
A trademark look was forming here …
Superhero Leather Fag.
He spent four hours getting ready, and he looked exactly the same as when he woke up.
Drug addicts are so funny that way. Just spinning around, lost in their own little world. Doing so much, accomplishing so little.
But, we’ll think about that later. Right now, I needed another bump, and then I was teaching Mavis all about the history of the ficus.
A funny thing happened that night when we went out. When we got to the door of Club USA, the doorman, the toughest in New York, said: “You must be Myrtle. I mean Mavis. You canned tomatoes in New Mexico, didn’t you? And now you’re the new IT Girl.” He looked her up and down. “That’s a witty interpretation of spandex—go right in.”
Who’d have thunk it?
And there were many joyful reunions for Freeze. All night long, he found REALLY GOOD FRIENDS, and once again he was at the top of his game—the new Tallulah Bankhead! And I mean that literally. Tossing off the bons mots, while face down in the toilet. Now that I think about it, he even sounded like her: smug, imperious, pampered, slurred.
Mavis, too, made quite a splash. She was enthralled by the freak show and wanted to REALLY GET TO KNOW each and every little cowboy and fairy princess that traipsed past.
And the freaks responded to her, in kind. They looked at her like she was, well, let’s call a spade a spade— like she was a grocery bagger from the A&P in Minnesota.
Which she was.
So she gaped at them and they gaped at her. She was the oddest thing they’d ever seen. That hair! Was she serious?
But one thing I’ll say on the club kids’ behalf—they are nothing if not open-minded. And Mavis was so drop-dead normal looking, she could have been from Mars.
And, again, who’d have figured? I was right! By keeping the “superstars” happy with free drugs, they managed to become rather high-profile themselves. It got to the point where no party could start without them. They were as indispensable as drink tickets and disco balls.
And grasshopper Freeze had learned well the Lessons of Divadom from Bella.
His entrances became precisely and dramatically timed.
He learned that for every party there is that one glorious moment— when all the right people have arrived and found their optimum posing space … and they are saying all the right things … and the energy level rises … and the glamour and the excitement bubble up into a frothy, heady, undeniable crescendo of chic.
When it’s right, you can feel it from the tip of your heel to the top of your wig.
Freeze discovered the trick of arriving just scant moments AFTER the peak SHOULD HAVE OCCURED, but somehow fizzled … and then, while everybody wants to scratch their heads in confusion (but just can’t muss that ’do), and while they look around in disappointment to see what went wrong … Suddenly
KAPOW!
The Dynamic Duo breeze into the room, wearing their space-age headphones (de rigueur for the modern drug-dealing team), and there is a great whoop of joy—“Oh! THAT’S what was missing!”
Mavis and Freeze!
They gave away lots.
And consumed copious amounts themselves.
So they simultaneously lost much money through their hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, and, in so doing, they earned a loyal legion of wanna-bes who more than compensated. They paid cash to be included in all the fun.
So they then started making money—an inordinate amount of money, a sinful amount of money.
And when the money keeps coming in, when the geyser is gushing, who can count each and every droplet? It would be petty to do so.
“Can I borrow these boots, Freeze, dear?” I asked one starry night.
“Only if I’m not wearing my chaps, dear.”
I put them on anyway, and in the toe was a wad of three thousand dollars.
“Well, hello!”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Where’d that come from?”
We were forever finding wads and eightballs and little expensive things they had just plum forgotten about. It made getting dressed so much more interesting … every outfit was a little Cracker Jack box just waiting to be opened and mined for fun.
And just look at them! Why, they even look different! Success and money and power can do marvelous things!
They say that God is in the details, and FREEZE WAS GOD at this point.
He began using bronzer, ALL OVER, a two-hour application requiring multiple blending drones—whoever was at hand: “Could you please, in that bowl over there, stir together two-thirds Estée Lauder Super Tan with one-fifth Dior Instant Glow, chill, then add four spritzes of Hawaiian Tropic? Now, at twenty-minute intervals, apply and blend (evenly, now) from the forearm to the wrist. Three times.” This is repeated on each body segment, until EVERY INCH has that marvelous Chef Boyardee glow that we all covet.
And Mavis, with her new stylish shag, is no longer content wearing dreary old power suits. She has perfected the age old: “Oh NO! Pat’s closes in ten minutes! Quick, tell the salesgirl I need two silver somethings, and damn the expense!”
That way, later on, when a compliment comes your way, you can languidly acknowledge it like so:
“Oh this? You really like it? I only had ten minutes to throw it together! Can you believe? But I guess it does work, hmmm?”
That’s class.
Weeks passed quickly.
We went out every night—dressed to the teeth. Or dressed to the dentures in Mavis’s case. Bless her heart.
I’ve got to hand it to her though, she was a quick learner.
And as Pop Art Drug Dealers, they looked fabulous while providing an invaluable service. People loved them.
And from there it only got bigger. A feeding frenzy hit clubland; Mavis and Freeze fever!
Mavis dyed her hair purple!
(But strangely, on her, it just looked … normal. Style seemed to just slip off her.)
So they were “IT.”
Worshipped. Adored.
Crowds followed them.
Boys threw themselves at Freeze, girls at Mavis. Both were ecstatic. Why hadn’t they even noticed their stunning sexual appeal before?
Bella was furious that Freeze and I had become so close. And that he had unofficially moved into Mavis’s.
I was spending most of my time there, too.
My tab was rising, I owed them almost five thousand dollars, but didn’t give it a second thought—we were having such fun. We did so much cocaine, asteroids were falling out of our noses.
It turns out Mavis was an endlessly fascinating woman. We spent days exploring the intricacies of each other’s minds.
I don’t remember drawing any conclusions, though.
But I have dozens of pie charts that explain it all, if you care to look.
It all seemed so deeply profound and urgent at the time. Oh well.
Freeze would get so disgusted with us.
He would pass out for fourteen or fifteen hours at a time. When he woke up and came into the living room, Mavis and I would still be having the EXACT SAME CONVERSATION AS WHEN HE LEFT. Word for word.
“I just LOVE Oreos …”
“Oh. Oreos. Yes. But not DoubleStuf …”
“Well, it’s just too much filling, don’t you think?”
“Definitely. But now the original … Oreos … are just wonderful.”
“Yes. I love a good Oreo now and again.”
FOR HOURS! Until Freeze would just start throwing things.
What he didn’t understand though, was it was all about THE SUBTEXT of those conversations. The subtext spoke volumes.
Usually on the third consecutive day of massive drug consumption and no sleep, I hit my stride.
That’s when I LOOKED MY BEST—like a slightly crazed supermodel.
And I was shockingly articulate …
AND FUNNY!
I had them rolling in the aisles at the Limelight!
Peeing their pants at Robots!
Like the time I took the vacuum cleaner to the club—because “it looked dusty”—and pretended to be the cleaning woman!…
Sheer hilarity!
“That Michael sure makes me work for my hosting fee!” I told everyone on my coffee break. Then I start vacuuming again.
Sometimes I’d ride a broomstick around all night, or spontaneously go-go in my jockstrap.
And when I played “Nearer My God to Thee” on a dozen beer bottles—well, I brought down the house.
Now on the fourth day, things can start getting a little dicey.
Emotions are running high—who knew there were so many reasons to just start sobbing? And You and Rational Thought parted ways some time ago—probably before the three peyote buttons, but definitely after you sucked off the crack dealer on the corner.
Yes, the fourth day is tricky. Let me warn you: there are traps and pitfalls along the way. Like when you decide that it’s finally time to have that heart to heart with your roommate and discuss all the things you dislike about him.
Hold off on it. Don’t do it.
Day Four is full of red herrings to trip you up. It sounds like a good idea. Of course, honesty is the best policy, and communication is so important, and I know that toothpaste thing really bothers you, but—
TRUST ME ON THIS ONE:
Day Four is not the time to have that conversation.
In fact, any conversation is fraught with potential danger. Lurking behind every syllable could be a double meaning—“Just what EXACTLY did you mean when you said it looked like it might rain? Are you reverting to cliché to comment on my supposed ‘lack of insight’? Is this really about that boy I slept with three years ago?”
Many people get into very violent fights over very trivial things on this day. Watch yourself. You may be more irrational than you think.
Sometimes Day Four is the perfect time to clean your closet. Again, trust me. I know it looks dull. But once you get into it, it will become an all-encompassing, never-ending Sisyphean task. But, it’s a feel-good trip down memory lane, and you will cry when you find that little pink miniskirt that makes you look just like Belinda Carlisle (A SKINNY BELINDA! A SKINNY BELINDA! I didn’t mean anything by that!).
And if maybe you just happen to crawl inside the closet and shut the door and wait for the bad things to go away …?
WELL GOOD FOR YOU. That’s the most sensible idea you’ve had since Tuesday when you cut out all those pictures of Linda Evangelista and glued them to your wall in a swirly pattern. You’ll never regret that move, no siree.
I believe it was on a fourth or fifth day of unbridled depravity that we fell so low, even I am ashamed of my actions.
We had long since passed the point of mindless chatter. That was days ago— when we still liked each other, and we could still combine vowels and consonants to form WORDS. By now, we had taken to clattering quietly, each in our own corner—Jennytalia, Mavis, and me—watching the dust bunnies, between each carefully doled out bumplet of cocaine. I mean, we subsided on whiffs of hints of lint. And you had better really NEED that granule of lint— you had better have a doctor’s note saying it was a medical emergency, a matter of life and death … because it was almost gone, and Mavis was feeling a bit persnickety.
We all looked like hell. Both Mavis and I had that “gravy skin face.” And Jenny was stunning, as usual, but an odd shade of greige.
I know, I know—we should have stopped all this madcap hilarity a few days ago, when everyone we’ve ever known left us in disgust. They called us “gross” and “greedy.” But like ants and rubbertree plants, we had high hopes and determination coming out of our ears. Uh, noses. We were going to ride this one out! Never say die! It’s not over till it’s over!
And it was almost over.
Occasionally, I tried for a bit of levity, but my performance of “I’m a Little Teapot” was met with stony, irritated glares. This I interpreted as peevishly withheld applause. At any other time, my wildly inventive “spout” usually rates at least a gush, or a deep, scraping bow of respect.
Jenny did what Jenny does after days of drug taking: she got on the floor and began searching for long-lost bits or bags of cocaine.
Normally, we would lift her up by the scruff of her neck and tell her to … just… stop it.
But, hey, maybe she was on to something this time. Maybe there really WAS a long-lost gram between the cushions, or behind the bookshelf. It happened all the time!
Suddenly, Jenny wasn’t so crazy after all.
In fact, now that you mention it, we all remembered putting a stash aside for emergencies. But was that yesterday? Or last month?
Our search became more frantic as we convinced ourselves that there WAS INDEED a treasure trove of cocaine somewhere, somewhere within our reach.
We searched the furniture—in fact we dismantled it and ripped open the upholstery. Then we stacked every piece in the corner of the room.
We systematically covered EVERY INCH of that apartment, and with each passing hour, we only grew more hell-bent on finding the now-legendary eightball.
We drained the waterbed, and inspected it underneath and inside.
We ripped the linings out of jackets.
We checked each ice cube for a frozen treat in its center.
We emptied cereal boxes, went through the neighbors’ trash, and even strip-searched each other—“ I never trusted either one of you!”
Just as Mavis was about to get under the sink, dismantle the pipes, and begin roto-rooting—
Jenny became convinced that she distinctly remembered it had dropped behind the radiator.
Hmmm … yes … why, by cracky! I think she’s right. In fact I know that’s where it is.
“Yea! Yea!” agreed Mav. “It fell off the windowsill, behind the radiator! Of course!”
Jenny had the skinniest arm, so she tried first to reach down that narrow space between the radiator and the wall. The radiator was hot, and it burned her arm, severely, BUT NO MATTER, she … just … couldn’t … quite reach.
“Get a wire hanger. Bend it like so.”
She suffered a few more burns, but even the wire hook didn’t work.
“I think I feel it though!”
Well… what if Mavis and I pulled at the radiator, really hard, and leaned it a bit more forward?
That could work.
So we sweated and huffed and wheezed and pulled with all our might … Our hands were hot, our faces were filthy, but, By God, we moved it an inch more out.
“There it is!” She made a stab at something, but—
“OH NO!”
There was a crack between the wall and the floor, behind the radiator, and she MIGHT HAVE PUSHED OUR SALVATION INTO THE WALLS!
There was only one thing to do:
Rip the radiator off the floor.
With a hammer, a screwdriver, and a crowbar—the three of us CLEARED THAT OBSTACLE out of the way. YES SIR! GOOD JOB!
I’m not making any of this up.
NOW: without that pesky old hot thing to slow us down, we could get on with our mission. All of us, flat-faced on the floor, with matches and later a penlight, peered into the crevice between the wall and floor.
“Why, Jenny, you’re right.”
That DID look like a Baggie.
Over there.
So we tried again, with the bad luck hanger—but, “Damn You, James!”—it only served to push it (whatever it was), underneath the floorboards.
YEP. YOU GUESSED IT.
With the trusty crowbar in hand, we began tearing up the floorboards in Mavis’s living room.
We had taken off a good two or three rows—when Freeze walked in.
Picture this: the furniture was slashed and all neatly stacked in the western corner of the room. There was no bed. All food products had been emptied into one pile on the kitchen floor. Every piece of clothing was destroyed. The entire neighborhood’s garbage was all right there, in the bedroom.
And there we were: sopping, stinking, blackened, and crazed. Face down on a ripped-up floor. Next to an upside-down, nonfunctioning radiator.
“What in the hell is going on here?”
He wasn’t angry, yet. Just baffled beyond belief. We tried to play it down—real casual-like— we didn’t want to look desperate …
“Oh, not much. How was your day?”
He wasn’t biting.
Finally we had to tell him of our quest and its consequences.
I went to go get a beer to help calm him down. When—
On top of the refrigerator
I saw
a plate.
Not just any old plate. But a plate with an Everest-sized mountain of cocaine on it.
“Uh … guys?” I held it up.
“Oh yeah—I forgot all about that.” Mavis said, as a matter of course … just as blithe as Miss Danner herself.
So we dug right in, and got all tense again, and didn’t talk to each other for a number of days. Except to periodically look at one another with disgust and say: “I can’t believe what a fiend you turned into there.”
That was the spring of ’94, a legendary binge that began in February and ended in July. I only weighed about twenty-seven pounds … But those were SOME TWENTY-SEVEN POUNDS, I tell you! Each and every one of them STYLISH TO A FAULT! TWENTY-SEVEN pounds of fabulosity!
I took a lot of acid that spring, as well, and throughout the month of April, I thought I was a space spider—of course, of course— and so I shaved off my eyebrows, pierced some things, dyed my hair green, then chopped bits and hunks of it off until there were four otherworldly antennae leaping from my head.
Because that’s how space spiders styled themselves in 1994. And my patented Spider Dance never failed to slay them after hours.
Ah, youth! Such folly!
The nightly after-hours at Mavis’s took on a quasi-mythical quality.
Every night Freeze and I dredged up a new “star” for Mavis to meet. We really did bring in a stellar mix. She got to meet some fascinating people, hard-to-meet people, A-listers.
And Mavis and I worked exceedingly well as a hostessing team.
We took turns, bouncing up and down, taking care of everybody’s particular needs.
One of us would dazzle the crowd with witty banter and sophisticated anecdotes, and the other would, you know, make sure the ashtrays were emptied and there were enough free lines on the table.
We were a team! 50-50!
I really looked forward to these parties.
And the craziness at her house only intensified in the coming months. People came at all hours, in all conditions, and stayed for days. They came alone, or with entire flotillas. There was an armless drag queen wearing a floral bikini who spent a great deal of time shivering behind Mavis’s potted ferns. I remember one occasion when I suddenly realized that I’d spent two whole days describing my bloody stool to the Mexican delivery boy who didn’t speak a word of English, but nevertheless, he had so much fun he quit his job and became a club kid.
Of course eventually things started getting dangerous, too much rickrack. And people started stealing, you know, little things like eightballs and boyfriends. And there were fights and mishaps. Ugliness was everywhere.
Then …
One day, Freeze accidentally sold a vial of K to a Latin King gang member who thought it was cocaine, and consequently this gang member fell into a K-hole.
A simple enough mistake. Happens quite frequently. I, personally, look forward to it. (K-holes, I mean.) But gang members are a notoriously humorless lot of people, and supposedly there was now a contract out on Freeze’s life.
Now, really. A stern talking-to might have been in order. A bit of labeling advice, perhaps. But death? Because of a drug mix-up?
That’s just silly. Things like that don’t happen. Not in clubland.
Anyway.
On the night in question, Freeze was at my apartment packing up drugs for the evening. He did it there because the super at Mavis’s building was getting suspicious of all the traffic in and out of her apartment.
Mavis and I were kickin’ like chicken at her place, waiting for the goodies to get back. The buzzer rang, and through the intercom an adorable dealer named Cookie-Puss said he was coming up, and it was “very serious business.”
Now don’t get me wrong. I love Cookie-Puss to death. I think the world of him. He’s gorgeous. The face of an angel. Salt of the earth. Don’t have a bad thing to say about him.
But I didn’t have my face on. I looked a mite craggy. And I just didn’t have the energy to compensate for a weather-beaten face by being witty. So I went into the bedroom. And pretended to be asleep.
Well, the door burst open, Mavis screamed, and all hell broke loose.
Cookie-Puss was not alone. Someone else was with him, and this someone pulled a gun on Mavis. “WHERE THE FUCK IS FREEZE? WHERE’S THE CASH? WHERE ARE THE DRUGS?”
Pickle, the dog, began barking loudly, and the gun was turned on Pickle. “SHUT THE DOG UP OR HE DIES TOO!”
Cookie-Puss, bless his heart, took Pickle into the bedroom, where I was pretending to be asleep.
“Oh, hi honey.” I smiled and yawned, ignoring the hoo-ha in the other room, “How are you?”
“Oh, hi James. Sorry about this. Do me a favor: shut the fuck up. Shut the dog up. Don’t come out of the fucking room and whatever you do, don’t look at my friend. If he thinks you’ll recognize him, he’ll have to kill you.”
“OK. But how are you?”
“Fine. Fine. Yourself?”
“Good.”
“You look good.”
“Thanks.”
I heard crashing plates in the next room.
“WHERE THE FUCK IS FREEZE? THAT ASSHOLE ISDEAD, DO YOU HEAR ME? WHEN WE FIND HIM, HE’S DEAD!”
Where the fuck was Freeze, indeed. He was due back twenty minutes ago. In fact he was probably on his way up the steps right now. That boy has the worst sense of timing… Wouldn’t that be just like him to walk in right now?
The whole situation seemed more comical than deadly. Pickle and I giggled over Mavis’s plight in the next room.
Cookie-Puss came back in the room and blew me a kiss.
“Sorry about this, James. See you later?”
“Don’T worry about it, honey.”
He smiled and I got hard. He stole the phone and warned us both not to leave the apartment or call for help or they’d come back and kill us.
I sat thinking about how sweet Cookie-Puss was for caring about me so much … I wondered if his friend was as cute as he was … How nice that he didn’t want me to die … What a good husband Cookie-Puss would make… We could go around knocking off drug dealers together … I’d be his moll.
Mavis was slightly hysterical when I went to check on her. She was holding her neck. Apparently Cookie’s hot little friend had tried to choke her and had played with her boobs, or something equally odd. I mean, who would play with Mavis’s boobs?
“What did they take?”
“All they got were a few rolls of pennies and three grams of coke,” she sobbed.
“Shit. I really wanted a bump of coke. You don’t have any? I hope Freeze gets back soon.”
Inexplicably, she threw a glass at me.
Post-traumatic stress, probably.
“FUCK YOU, JAMES!” she howled. “I WAS JUST FELT UP AT GUNPOINT, MY HOUSE WAS BROKEN INTO, BUT LET’S WORRY ABOUT GETTING YOU A FUCKING BUMP! I AM SO SICK OF YOUR ATTITUDE, I COULD STRANGLE YOU!”
Then she ran to her bedroom to cry.
I think she’d been doing a lot of speed lately, too.
Freeze came home and seemed rather blasé about his death sentence. “What are ya gonna do?” He didn’t think the Latin Kings were really after him. He figured Cookie-Puss got a little too sketched out on crack and concocted the whole story as an excuse to rob them.
Freeze must have been out of his mind, too. Would my sweetheart do something like that?
Daylight—Avenue C.
I ran into Cookie-Puss, lovely little Cookie-Puss…. He was looking a little haggard.
“J-J-James! H-h-how are you? W-w-want s-s-some c-c-coke?”
“No thank you. How are you, though?”
“G-g-great. Sorry about the other night. They really wanted to kill Freeze. I tri-tried to protect him, y’know. Th-th-that’s why I was there. To protect him.”
“Sure, honey. That was sweet. Maybe I will do just one bump.”
We did it on the street corner.
“I’m going into rehab tomorrow,” he said. “Six months.”
“Good for you. I hope it works out.”
We said goodbye. When I saw him three weeks later, he looked very bad indeed. Almost not cute. There were scabs on his face. Circles under his eyes. His clothes were dirty.
“Hi, Cookie-Puss,” I said brightly. “My friend here needs some drugs. Can you help us out?”
“G-g-give me the money, quick. I’ll g-g-get it for you.”
My friend looked dubious.
“Don’t worry,” I assured him, “this is Cookie-Puss. A close friend of mine. Of course we can trust him!”
Cookie-Puss grabbed the money and ran.
“James, how do you know that person running off with my rent money?”
“Oh, he held me at gunpoint a few nights ago. Isn’t he cute?”
Needless to say, I never saw Cookie-Puss again.
And I never again felt comfortable at Mavis’s apartment, either. Her snippy manner, coupled with Freezes increasingly imperial attitude, were wearing thin. They seemed to have forgotten all about my piquant charm, and the beguiling physical presence that drew them to me in the first place. In short, I started to feel like I was on the way out.
I knew it to be true when, one night, quite unexpectedly, Michael showed up at one of our after-after hours. Something he NEVER DID.
This was when Michael was still just dabbling in drugs, and exaggerating their effects. Going to a party at nine o’clock in the morning was inconceivable, back then.
But there he was. The mighty King of Clubs. At lowly little Miss Mavis’s pad.
Both Mavis and Freeze were fluttering around him, fluffing his pillows, refreshing his drinks. You would have thought he was the freakin’ Queen Mother.
“No, no,” he mock protested, “just treat me like you treat everybody else. Like I’m one of the group.”
(Gag)
How dare he?
This was my territory and I bristled at the challenge his presence implied.
Now, usually Michael and I bounce off each other quite nicely—volleying back and forth at varying tempos, a few spikes here and there, the occasional slam.
There are certain stock stories we drag out on these occasions, stories that we believe enhance our images. Like the time I traded my car for a blowjob. Or the time Michael stole a city bus and had a party on it.
So it was in the beginning, but it soon became obvious that the stakes were much higher this time: it was an unspoken battle for the control of the room.
Back and forth it went, until all other conversations trailed off and everybody tuned in to this classic episode of The Michael & James Show.
We were neck and neck for hours, taking vicious potshots at each other, searing insults, blistering personal attacks …
He told everybody about my unruly shoulder hair. I countered with the story of how his butt fell inside out and he and Keoki had to push it back in with a pencil.
He talked about the time I chatted with DIANNE BRILL for twenty minutes with a giant snot bubble hanging from my nose.
“That’s nothing compared to your little poop problem at Club USA.”
“They have all sorts of wonderful acid peels now, James, that could get rid of that awful hamburger face of yours, honey, and then you wouldn’t have to be embarrassed to be seen in the daylight.”
And so on.
I could have held on. But just then, Bella, who still resented the fact that I wasn’t spending any time with her and Whitney anymore, walked in and linked arms with Michael. He had an ally. I was doomed. Humiliated. They brought out pictures of my old tube skirt-and-fez phase. They giggled over my floating eye and body odor. They speculated on my impending spinsterhood, and worried about my palsy. I don’t even remember the big finish, something to do with my wobbly eyeliner and lipstick on my teeth. I retreated to a corner in shame.
Michael won.
He showed he could not only keep up, but excel in this new milieu. He consumed massive quantities of drugs, the first time I’d ever seen him do so much and actually enjoy it. I felt sick to my stomach. I knew it was only a matter of time until he was Master of the Game.
I had lost serious ground. Michael had his foothold in Mavis and Freeze.
It can be rather disheartening to be best friends with a rattlesnake.
It’s the little moments that are so telling:
Michael and I had been admiring each other in the mirror for about an hour.
Suddenly he turned to me and screamed: “OH! OH! I have always wanted to do this!”
He grabbed an electric razor and waved it menacingly in my direction.
“Skrinkle?” Pause. “Darling?” Pause, eyes narrowed. “Do you trust me?”
“No, not one iota.”
“You don’t trust me to give you the most FABULOUS hairdo of all time?”
“No, Michael, I do not trust you on a boat, I do not trust you on a goat. I do not trust you here. I do not trust you there. I do not trust you anywhere.”
He was undeterred.
“My dear, you are going to look JUST GER-JIS! GRRRR-JIS,” and, without warning, he rammed the razor upside my head.
“OW!”
“SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT—SKROD LOD!” He laughed and hit me again at another angle, taking off a very large hunk of head with it.
Interesting.
“The AIDS look!” he announced.
“Chemo Glam!”
“A few bruises here, some yellow around the eyes …”
“Flesh-Eating Bacteria!”
“Nicole Brown Simpson!”
“You look fabulous!”
I looked horrific.
He appraised my new look, then kept at it—hacking at me here, leaving a bloody gash there, right upside the old medulla oblongata-la-da-doo. Little hopeful sprouts stuck out at one side, and there was a sickly patch of fur left tufted on top.
“Oh, you look fabulous!” he said, without even looking. He had returned to admire his own thick mane. He smiled as he languorously combed his lush, unspoiled locks.
I can be such a Clampett sometimes.
I put on my dress, took off my shoes, and decided to go barefoot.
I was hardcore—RAR! What a look!
Of course, by the end of the night, my feet were the bloody carrier stumps of various staphylococcal infections from standing in the knee-high goo found in improvised bathroom stalls and walking on shards of glass on the dance floor …
Fake scabs on my face, real ones on my head and feet… Where did reality stop and image begin?
My sick new Sick Look was surprisingly real.
I scratched a scab on my head, and an ear fell off.
And then we were off. Twelve of us freaks piled into a limousine, on our way to one of those newfangled “raves” you’ve no doubt been hearing about. A rave is when thousands of blissed-out teenagers gather together in unsupervised, and often illegal, surroundings, like a field or an empty warehouse. Then they dance the night away to that heathen techno music, and celebrate the glory of peace, love, and baggy pants. This particular rave was being held at a high school in Poughkeepsie.
Let me just say: I don’t believe Poughkeepsie was prepared.
It was still a two-hour drive, though. And that’s a long time to be trapped in a car with Michael, Mavis, and Freeze.
“You know I’ve always thought that we should open a theme restaurant,” Michael said, “and call it Café Auschwitz. Make it a big gray building with iron bars and barbed wire.”
Everybody laughed.
“And only one course on the menu—water,” added Freeze.
“Maybe a few finger sandwiches,” I offered. “With real fingers!”
Mavis raised her hand excitedly: “Oh, and waif supermodels in deconstructed clothes fighting over lettuce leaves, looking emaciated and gorgeous!”
“And you could stamp numbers on customers’ wrists when they come in.”
“We could have really hot skinhead busboys in Nazi uniforms!”
“Oh My God! Let’s do an ad for it in Project X. Get it to me by tomorrow morning.”
And we were there.
We tumbled out of the car in what I thought was rather grand fashion—a cyber-clown fantasy—and rolled toward the entrance.
The doorman, a truly awful person nicknamed Peter-Peter Boyfriend Stealer, who just scant hours earlier had been one of my best friends, took one look at the group of us CLUB KIDS, and me in particular, and ran heading for the hills. He leapfrogged over the crowd, knocking over poor, dear, sweet Lady Miss Kier in his haste to dissociate himself from freaks like us. Whatever corner we turned, he vaulted over bars, disappearing into impenetrable areas of the school…
That’s how embarrassing we were. Club kids were becoming passé.
My acid kicked in around then, and I got a little sad and paranoid.
I looked for a friendly face to reassure me. I saw Marlon, Keoki’s new boyfriend, and hoped for the best. “Hey, Marlon!” I yelled and made a lunge for him.
“Nobody here likes you, James,” he said, and ran the other direction.
Would you ever say something like that to someone on acid?
Well, thank goodness there were no great cliffs in Poughkeepsie, or I would have thrown myself off of one. And, fortunately for me, I suppose, Mavis and Freeze had just sold their last cyanide capsule.
I looked around for Michael, but he was rolling around on the floor with a new boy.
Daniel.
A sixteen-year-old boy named Daniel.
“Oh, James,” he gushed when he surfaced. “This is the one. He really understands me. He’s one of us!”
Daniel was wearing a leash and collar and Michael was walking him through the party on all fours. The boy was just adorable.
But as they were busy sucking face, I felt like a third wheel.
Next on my list of hopefuls was Mavis. But where was she?
She was having the time of her life when last I saw her—oh—and there she was now.
Mavis at a rave, well, that was a sight! “Ravin’ Mav!” we called her, scootin’ around the dance floor, like she had good sense.
The kids all did a double take when they saw her—“Granny at the Rave”—but she was surprisingly adept at picking up the lingo and sizing up the scene.
She’d flap her bony little arms like a chicken and blow her little jeweled whistle—nobody partied as hard as Mavis did! She would dance for days if we let her.
It was frustrating for me as her Spiritual Guide to just let her go. She was hopeless on her own; meeting all the wrong people, wasting her time on the dance floor. She should be in the back, schmoozing Lady Miss Kier, for God’s sake—there was work to be done!
But look at her.
She’s so happy. I bet this is the happiest she’s ever been. Ever. In her whole life. I’m probably the best thing that’s ever happened to her. Kier can wait. I noticed her edging into the shadows whenever I walked into the room. She probably had a zit or something and was embarrassed to see me.
But I was still all alone.
Gosh, it felt just awful to be unpopular!
I felt so awkward. What should I do with my hands? Should I sit, should I stand and dance in one place, keep moving?
I certainly didn’t want to give off any “loser vibes,” so I kept waving to nonexistent friends on the dance floor and mouthing Be right there! in the direction of the bar.
But then I heard:
“Girl? What are you doing?” and Freeze caught me. “There’s nobody out there! Who were you waving at?”
“Oh, that isn’t Michael? That looks just like Michael!” and I pointed to—quick, find someone—a fat black girl in the corner.
Whew! That was close!
“Girl, you need to slow down. As a friend, I’m just telling you. People are talking.”
Again with that! Would you EVER say that to someone on acid? Some friends! Freeze’s cruel streak was surfacing again. Better to just scream and run away sensibly than start a scene.
So Freeze, Marlon, and Peter were all against me. Michael found a new boy, we would not see him again for weeks. Mavis was useless and Lady Miss Kier had a zit and was hiding from me.
This was without a doubt the lowest, saddest moment of my life. Friendless in Poughkeepsie. Dancing alone on bloody stumps.
At least I looked amazing. I’ll give me that much.
Whoops. There goes my other ear. Did I just lose my other ear? Well, at least searching the ground for a lost ear was a viable solution to standing there looking like a doofus.
This new boy of Michael’s, Daniel, was soon a welcome addition to our little family. Delightfully subversive, willfully self-destructive, but with a pair of puppy dog eyes that you could happily fall into forever, he really was quite a charmer. Michael was sold on him by the end of the rave, when he started to cry at the thought of leaving Michael’s side. He ran away into the city quite often to visit.
I’m all misty just thinking about it now.
I’ll be honest.
I loved Daniel like I loved all of Michael’s boys: silently and with self-loathing.
I watched them together and wondered why I was always watching him, him. Them.
So I sat on the sidelines, as usual, and refused to take part in their snugglebunny games. They smoked crack and jerked off for hours on end, while Jenny, Mavis, and I had tedious conversations in the next room. Waiting, always waiting.
Michael would emerge periodically, huffing and puffing and red in the face and blue in the penis.
“He’s the one, James.” And later …
“He really understands me.”
It was a projection, of course. Michael needed to believe that someone could understand him, that there was someone else like him somewhere in the world, when it was obvious to me and all that he existed alone on a completely different plane than the rest of us.
Daniel wasn’t “the one.” He drifted out of our lives in due course, and was replaced by the next “one”—Bryan or Jeremy or Peter—I can’t remember.
But they were beautiful, they were all beautiful.
Big ears and harelips … skinny puppy boys with soft eyes and … authentic acne!
Little boys.
He ate them alive.
I dreamed of those little faces that would fit in the palms of our hands … quick breaths, in and out…
A kiss, awkward and unsure.
Blushing
Dizzy
Flushed with emotion
Trace each rib. Count each hair.
Afterward, watching them—their energy! Their earnestness! The way they attacked everything … They were boys, real boys.
I remember one boy, in particular. This is true:
Twelve years old—a runaway … and who could turn away from a face like that?
Skin so smooth. And beet-red cheeks.
Why, he didn’t look real. A little porcelain doll.
So Michael dressed him in drag.
“He looks just like Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby.” And he did.
A sexy little baby.
And the boy just loved it.
They would go to drag hustler bars and pick up old men for money. It was consensual I tell you—the boy loved it and got off on it.
“Go make Daddy some money.” And off he went.
But it was funny and sweet and all so innocent. The boy had his moment and when it was over, he went back home.
And what is wrong with that?
And they came to him, they really did.
Nice job, if you can get it, right?
Still I loved them all. Silently, but with the knowledge that they weren’t forever boys, that they would be gone and replaced again and again and I would never have a part of them. Once Michael had marked them, they were ruined for life. I could never have them and I would never know that feeling of being “the one,” and being understood.
That was for Michael to feel and for me to watch.
But back to the general misery and humiliation that I was enduring with Mavis and Freeze … They had to move—the robbery, the landlord, no radiator … so they found their own little corner of hell—an ugly apartment on Eleventh Street. I hated it from the moment I saw it.
Its feng shui was all off: the ceilings were too high, and, yes I’m aware that is usually an enviable condition in New York City apartments. Here though, it just looked wrong. The room itself was long and narrow and it gave you the unsettling effect of living in somebody’s hallway.
There were three bedrooms—each one smaller than the last—three doors lined up on the southern wall. One was a very large, spacious boudoir with a sunlit living area and a loft space for sleeping, one was your standard-size windowless New York bedroom, and the last was a hobbit’s broom closet.
Mavis took the football field, OF COURSE (power-mad dyke that she revealed herself to be), and Freeze was relegated to the Japanese prison hot box.
The middle room was for rent.
Was this power positioning?
Did this arrangement cause any tension?
You bet it did. There were internal power struggles daily: they were both just too out of their minds to communicate them.
Freeze was a cracked-out basehead by this time; he didn’t really mind the room itself… the smaller, the darker, the filthier—well, the happier he was. He could sit in the dark and paint Day-Glo happy faces on the walls to his heart’s content.
And Mavis was now a full-fledged speed freak, so nothing made her happier than pogo-dancing, UP AND DOWN, UP AND DOWN, for days at a time. She also found fulfillment in the construction of elaborate obstacle courses for her to run around.
Argh.
They were nasty sons-of-bitches, the whole lot of them. And there was a whole lot of them—people I didn’t know or care to know.
For some reason it began to bother them that they were giving me hundreds of dollars worth of free drugs every night. They acted as if I were doing something new, and it upset them. About the fourth or fifth time of the night when I asked for yet another gram, their lips would purse, their eyes would narrow into little slits, and it would take them A LONG TIME TO GET AROUND TO HANDING IT OVER.
I would have to jump up and down like a monkey, and poke them and prod them and remind them how fabulous I looked that night, and just generally JUMP THROUGH HOOPS.
It wasn’t fair at all. It was just damn rude, if you ask me.
Then, one morning, in the middle of a fabulous after-hours soirée, I asked for a teeny tiny little bottle.
And Freeze said:
“No.”
Hm? What? I didn’t quite catch that. And neither did you. WHAT WAS IT HE SAID AGAIN?
“No.”
The room stopped.
And that “snap, splat, gurgle” sound you just heard? Well, “snap” was my heart breaking, “splat” must have been my ego being squashed, and that “gurgle” sound could only be the life-force draining from my body—Yes: “snap, splat, gurgle,” all at once.
That was when the Black Hole of Calcutta opened up and swallowed me. Good thing, too, because I would hate to have had to sit there, politely, and act like I wasn’t humiliated. It would have been awful to have to make up some silly excuse as to why I was rushing out of the room, sobbing hysterically, throwing on a pair of tennis shoes, and going home.
Yea, I would have hated to go through that, boy.
How cruel. How rude. I mean, really, if you already owe five grand, what’s another twenty dollars among friends. But they absolutely humiliated me in front of some very celebrated junkies, and I was furious.
Oh, now is probably a good time to tell you about a little problem I have with shoes.
I know this will seem like a long and pointless digression. (OK, I know it seems like yet another long and pointless digression.)
But when I was just a wee lad, a suckling babe in my sweet mother’s arms (yes, we’re going back that far) I was pigeon-toed. Exceptionally so. Comically so. I was forced into wearing special shoes that had an iron bar that connected my feet together.
I’m told I hated them. That’s understandable, right? What child wouldn’t?
I would bang them against the bars of my crib, all night long, and scare the bejezus out of my mother, who thought we were being burgled.
I’m going somewhere with this. I promise.
To this day, I don’t like shoes. I hate shopping for them. I hate wearing them. It’s a throwback to those torturous days and nights when I was shackled like the baby Hannibal Lecter.
I’m happiest barefoot. In fact, I pay so little attention to footwear that I willfully lose more shoes than anyone I know.
And very often, I get confused and forget what shoes are mine and what shoes belong to, say, the person whose home I’m visiting.
But that’s just me.
It’s a psychological block that stems from a childhood trauma.
I DO NOT INTEND TO STEAL PEOPLE’S SHOES. It just happens.
Let me reiterate:
Sometimes I get confused when it comes to footwear. I panic and grab the first pair of somethings that I see, and I PUT THEM ON MY FEET. Then I leave without giving it a second thought. THAT’S NOT STEALING.
It’s delusional, catch-as-catch-can dressing.
Most everybody knows about this odd little peccadillo of mine. They know I don’t do it out of spite. And they still love me.
I’m in a fugue; I can’t help it.
A somnambulist’s fog.
I become Bizarro James; the mad shoe-stealing James.
But later, you can always come to me and talk it over with me and I’ll express my surprise, my shame, and my overall willingness to return the lifted item and do what I can to make up for any discomfort I’ve caused.
I’m that kind of guy.
All of this is leading to that fateful morning at Mavis’s, when I put on the wrong pair of tennis shoes.
A simple mistake.
Except I had been wearing patent leather thigh-high boots with seven-inch spikes, but, hey, after three days and twelve grams of Special K, who can tell the difference? In my panic, they really seemed like something I would have worn.
So I took them.
Was it really that wrong?
Was it worth ending a beautiful friendship over?
When I got home, I took two Rohypnols and was out for the count.
I didn’t hear the knocking at my door, or the screaming outside my window. I didn’t know about the rowdy crowd of angry friends who were trying to help the poor, shoeless Peter-Peter Boyfriend Stealer back at Mavis and Freezes.
But I did hear my window smash, and I felt a patent leather boot hit me on the head. I still have the bloodstains on my pillowcase and a disfiguring scar right there, on my temple …
MAVIS BROKE MY WINDOW, IN 30-DEGREE TEMPERATURE, WHEN I HAD NO HEAT IN MY APARTMENT, AND THREW A BOOT AT MY HEAD.
I heard peals of laughter and the sound of many feet running away.
It was the last straw.
It was so mean-spirited of her. So nasty and ill warranted.
It was officially the end of our sisterhood.
I mean, who knew Mavis had such a mean streak?
Who knew Freeze could get so petty and rude?
Well, I guess I did. I shouldn’t have been naïve. They fought all the time and their fights had always been fearsome, frightening, unexpected. They came out of the blue, and always, but always, occurred at the most unbelievably inappropriate times— baptisms, bar mitzvahs, sweet sixteens … wherever we happened to be that evening pushing their wares. They didn’t care. They were demons. Possessed.
I should have known they’d turn their anger on me someday.
But this! Breaking my window? Well!
It’s just like them.
One time, I will never forget it, this was when we first met, they were fighting over a minor clerical error in their bookkeeping. Freeze didn’t give a hoot. He was exhausted and all for just letting his generous nature and faulty mathematics slide for the night. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll get it back. I’ll just eat the difference out of tomorrow night.” Or the next night. No big deal. There was always more money out there to be made. He just wouldn’t get those new chaps he had his eye on.
But Mavis wouldn’t let it go. Oh no. She kept at him. Pecking away, trying to find out where that bag of coke went, and who owes what for how many grams of K.
Yada yada ya …
Skrinkle skroddle doo …
She could really get on a guy’s nerves. Especially when the heroin and the roofies were kicking in and he was feeling so lovely.
But then, just as his eyeballs began their blissful roll into the back of his head and his oh-so-heavy lids began fluttering to a close, just as the warmth of that evening’s leftover drugs began creeping through his limbs like a warm ray of sunshine—
Mavis pounced.
She beat him with her bony fists. “I want my fucking money, you lying, junkie, son-of-a-bitch!” She clawed at him, and pawed at him, and generally made quite a show of it.
This went on for about five minutes. He didn’t even wake up.
Then she froze in midmaul, and changed tactics. I could see a lightbulb go on over her head.
She climbed off of him with an icy, cool resolve.
She picked up the plate of glass from the glass-top table and held it high over her head (where she got the strength and the balance to do it, I’ll never know) but she just stood there, for about ten or fifteen minutes (or so it seemed at the time), with the glass gleaming wickedly in her eye and that terrifying expression on her ugly old mug of pure lesbian rage unbound.
Then she brought it down—
SLAM!
SMASH!
—into a thousand little shards, that we would never fully pick up or account for… our feet were, and would remain, bloody nubs again for months to come.
Wow. What a sight.
Now, let me back up for a minute and explain that Mavis—poor provincial, aesthetically challenged little Mavis—really only cared for three things in her whole entire life: her waterbed, her five-piece sofa sectional, and her piss-elegant glass-top table with the granite gargoyle legs.
Oh, how she loved showing off her beloved home furnishings—the fruits of her labor! Each one, lovingly handpicked, then paid for with her hard-earned grocery money. These sacred items—her bed, her sofa, and her table—symbolized her independence, her taste, and her past. Three things she was tragically, and inordinately, proud of.
So you see, for Mavis to smash her beloved glass-top table like that—well, you just can’t imagine what it must have taken! (Well, actually you probably can imagine: two grams of crystal meth over a four-day period, and one chronically irresponsible business partner, to be exact.)
But the raw emotion she had displayed! The sheer intensity! From whence had it come? In what dark corner of her soul had it been hiding and festering and waiting to show itself? How long had it sat, and counted the snubs and slights and personal affronts, before it chose to rise up and explode in indignant fury: “NO MORE! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO MORE!”
Hmm.
Well.
As interesting a question as that is, there was really no time to sit back and chew on theoretical rhetoric. In a flash, after the shattering glass just narrowly missed hitting him, Freeze leapt to his feet. His eyes were blazing and his arms were raised in what every gorilla would instantly recognize as the attack position of the alpha male defending his domain.
Hello, who was this new Freeze?
What happened to the old one?
Why, not just a moment ago he was nothing but a bump on a log. A lobotomized sea cow. An utterly useless waste of leg room. He couldn’t even fend off her puny little attack, much less retaliate with a counteroffensive of his own. I guess the K, the Rohypnol, and the heroin all decided to vacate his bloodstream at once, leaving Freeze suddenly stone cold sober and madder than a wet hen.
Look at his anger!
Look at his intensity!
Can it be measured? Can we gauge its depth and might? Can we chart it, plot it, figure it out, so that we can make sure that it never gets too far out of control?
The power of his emotions was staggering! Anything could have happened at that moment! Why, he could have killed someone!
In the months to come, I would see that look of rage again—many, many times again, once he became hooked on crack. But I never got used to it. And it always scared the beans out of me, every time I saw it.
So here now was my first glimpse of yet another version of Freeze.
I watched in mute horror as they slammed into each other with the force and fury of two Mack trucks colliding. My goodness, you might have thought the tectonic plates were shifting, or a herd of water buffalo was dashing through the East Village, such was the sound and the fury! Throw a kitten in a blender and you’ve got a pretty accurate description of what I was witnessing, ringside.
There was blood shed that day, and clumps of hair lost. An emotional hurdle was crossed, as well, and a precedent set.
A pattern was forming. It would happen again. And again.
After they moved into that awful, cursed Eleventh Street apartment.
—and Mavis began racing through her days like a rhesus monkey on a crack drip … shivering and shrieking and chattering away, for six or seven days. Hey, Mave! Thumbs up!
—and Freeze fell into his Freebase Free Fall (and was so happy for a time).
—when the bloom wore off the rose of their friendship …
—and the money got tighter …
They fought like this all the time. It became second nature to them. They fought until it was all they knew to do with one another. It was who they were now, what they had become: no longer Mavis and Freeze—friends helping friends—but two powerful, war-torn, politically divided, ideologically opposed mortal enemies, forever locked in the familiar box step of war. Loyalties were demanded. Sides had to be taken.
Their apartment crumbled beneath them. Or so I heard. I was still persona non grata. I imagine though, that dishes were broken. Furniture was destroyed. Nothing was ever repaired. No mess was ever cleaned up. A friendship was buried in the rubble.
I told you the place was cursed.
Then, suddenly, word spread through the clubs that they were on the verge of going out of business. It seemed the money was mysteriously all gone.
How could that be?
Well, you may recall that Mavis, too, fell pretty hard for the old Crack Rock and Pipe Combo. That, and, oh, the seven or eight OTHER cross-addictions that they had acquired together. I’m sure they don’t even remember how much fun they had going broke.
It was gone now, though.
And since they weren’t even speaking most days, they certainly weren’t coordinated most nights. A fundamentally unsound way to run your basic Mom-&-Pop-type drug cartel, don’t you think?
How was Freeze to know that Mavis overextended her credit with the supplier? And how was Mavis to know that Freeze left his whole kit and caboodle in a taxicab somewhere west of Brooklyn Heights? He lost all their money, all their drugs—in fact, he pretty much just lost it period. It was the beginning of the end for Freeze. Mavis, too. Neither one of them ever recovered from that deathblow.
Each one bottomed out separately and alone. Their friends had all been driven away long ago.
But where would they go? What would they do? If they weren’t drug dealers anymore, how would they still be fabulous? Who would take care of them now?
Then Mavis got an idea. She saw a way out. She saw her savior, her little ray of hope.
She saw Michael Alig.
Mavis, that crafty old coot, convinced Michael she was the answer to all his prayers. She was the roommate he’d been searching for all his life.
God bless her.
I always knew she’d go far! I always knew she’d surprise us all in the end! … My gal, Mav! … I knew it from the moment I laid eyes on her! “That girl’s going places!” I said. “That girl’s got style!”
Of course, Michael didn’t know of her financial woes, her crazy-ass crystal habit, or her propensity for mass destruction. He thought that maybe Mavis was the answer after all. Here was somebody who he hoped would look after him, cook up the rock for him, and maybe even do a bit of spring cleaning while she was at it.
Fat chance.
The Mavis that moved in with him was a bitter old drug addict who didn’t give a flip WHO he was or HOW MANY times he was on Geraldo. Or so she said. That was the old Mavis, the country bumpkin who would slobber over any old Barney Rubble in a wig and twin set. By this point in the game she had fully figured out the basic rules of social interaction, and she was a whole new Mav, a whole new bag of chips. Gone was the perky little apple-polisher of yore, and in her place was a gravel-voiced, world-weary femme du monde. I tell ya, liver and lemons couldn’t have tasted as bitter and as tart as our girl Mavis!
If you didn’t know her, you’d swear when you saw her out and about that she was a genuine, Old School member of the highest, bitchiest order! Yes siree. She had the part down pat. Why, if she had walked into the Limelight with Dianne Brill herself, I would not have been the least bit surprised. She was that good. To the manner born.
To Michael’s credit, once he figured it out, and realized that it would be HE who would be taking care of HER, he accepted his fate stoically. In fact, they even made a rather touching couple.
COUPLE OF MONSTERS!
HA!
I didn’t see her for at least a month after the devastating shoe incident. I only heard the daily rumors of her famous falling-out with Freeze, and her subsequent phoenixlike return to the top.
Then one day, I was walking down Thirtieth Street, past Michael’s apartment, I don’t know why. I was just pulled in that direction.
I didn’t particularly want to see either of them, but I wanted them to see me—maybe looking out the window, or driving past in a cab. I wanted them to miss me.
But, damnit, there she was, surrounded by an all new entourage—strange, hippielike girls. I didn’t recognize any of them. They were piling out of a van. I turned to run, hide, but it was too late.
“JAMES! DARLING! YOU LOOK FABULOUS! BIG KISS! BOTH CHEEKS! THAT HAIR! VERY JEAN SEBERG!”
Certainly not the reaction I expected, but hey, I rolled with it.
“Well, that outfit, Mavis, it’s very …”
“You like? It was SO FUNNY. We were all going out with Todd last Saturday, and he INSISTED on opening up his boutique and DRESSING THE WHOLE GANG—too adorable—then when we got to Bowery Bar, Eric made us all give an impromptu fashion show! Well, afterwards it would have been too heartbreaking to give back all those memories, SO I BOUGHT EVERYONE THEIR OWN LITTLE TODD OLDHAM OUTFIT!”
Her little group squealed in appreciation and gave Mavis a BIG KISS, BOTH CHEEKS, as we walked inside.
Six months ago she was a sharecropper in Marietta, suddenly she’s Betsy Bloomingdale?
“But, what? I’m trying to impress you? JAMES ST. JAMES? Enough about me, let’s talk about YOU! Your favorite subject! Done anything interesting lately, dear? I haven’t seen you out in AGES! But then, usually it’s just Michael and me at Bowery Bar. Very dull, you know, but the food is free—Eric thinks we add ambience …”
They get comp’ed FOOD? At Bowery Bar?
Such a thing is possible?
She pulled me aside.
“Eight days,” she whispered, “eight days on the fiercest crystal meth …!”
Click.
Of course.
I thought I heard a rattle! Why, she was just a big old Mexican jumping bean, clattering about. Her face was a death mask, skin stretched so tight it looked like it might snap off.
Crystal? Blech! And eight days? I don’t have enough to do in my life that I need to be up for eight days. And there is nobody fascinating enough to spend that much time with …
I mean—you have to draw the line somewhere! At some point you just have to say: “Enough!”
But it looked as if we were friends again.
In fact, I followed her back to Michael’s later that night and saw the sad reality of their life together. And it didn’t look to be all Bowery Bar and impromptu fashion shows to me.
Quickly:
There’s Michael and Mavis, living together in a pile of garbage …
Watch them move about, maneuvering from the bedroom, through the kitchen, to the living room. Hazardous going …
The kitchen has been ripped out. There is nothing but mortar, exposed wires, and piping. Sharp and rusty things lay about, inviting tetanus.
Somewhere a long time ago, in a moment of inspiration, when inspiration was still around, Michael had decided to COMPLETELY REMODEL his condominium—the same condominium he hadn’t paid mortgage on for three years. The same condominium that was in the process of being repossessed. But, ever the optimist, and always one for luxury, Michael ripped up the carpeting in the living room and buffed and sanded and lacquered the floors and—onward ho!—he completely rethought the kitchen.
French doors, of course, and new fixtures, new tiles; the sink should be over here, and the cabinets, well, the cabinets were altogether wrong.
Rip them right out. There and then.
And then—
Well, like I said, that was all a long time ago—when little things, like running water and refrigeration, mattered. The stove still worked, but then that was a perennial, a given, of course. How else would he cook up his cocaine? Those damn butane torches only lasted so long …
Look at Michael, will you? In his filthy old underwear—awful bouncing, bobbling things, falling all about—making us sick. He’s all blue and wet and cold to the touch. Portrait of Michael as Clam Dip.
And Mavis, percolating nicely, like popcorn on a skillet—she is all over the place, pacing and racing about, barking orders to somebody about something … something …
Jenny, frozen, on a table, looking out the window. Waiting for someone to come. We don’t know who, but somebody was bound to come along and cause problems. They always do.
So I was ordered to keep watch at the door. I was posted there to warn them of impending company—people who were probably on their way right now, as we speak, to disrupt their fun, break up their party.
I opened it up, to take a gander …
“Close the door! Close the door! What are you MAD, man? Through the keyhole! Look through the keyhole, for God’s sake!”
So I was on my knees, forced to look through the keyhole, for imaginary friends and foes.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen Michael in such a state. It’s hard to believe this is the same Michael who used to SCOLD me for indulging in a bit of cocaine now and again. Who would have thought he, of all people, would come to this? But, it makes for a rather gripping drama. Riveting stuff. It’s hard to keep my eye on the keyhole. Impossible, when—
Suddenly Jenny did what Jenny was sometimes prone to do in those days: she ran out of the house, in a blind panic, into the cold autumn night without a jacket. She was just lost in the sauce, poor dear. Of course, it broke the monotony and everybody ran after her to give her the attention she was demanding. She might end up at the Russian Tea Room or she might end up in a crack den, who knew? Jenny’s freak-outs were periodic, intense, and always anybody’s guess.
These incidents were important, in that they showed her and us that the drugs were secondary, that we were a family first and foremost, and we would be there for each other, always.
She wasn’t really craving butter beans that day in the trash can. She needed to know that we cared enough to drop the torch and find her a can opener … stop the madness and look for her shoes … thank her for her money and her support …
Give her a big kiss.
Another night, or maybe the same night.
Same situation, and same cast of characters: Michael, Mavis, Jenny, and me … others perhaps … Daniel? Peter-Peter Boyfriend Stealer? Who knows … Who can keep track …
Money—gone.
Drugs—gone.
Hope—dwindling.
Everybody! Empty your pockets! Give up that stash! Look again! Maybe you missed something the first three hundred times you checked. Still nothing? Who has a bank card? Checkbook?
How can it be? NOT ONE PERSON IN THIS ROOM HAS ANY MONEY LEFT? I find that hard to believe. Jenny, call your parents. Say you need … Books for school!
At three o’clock, Saturday morning?
Well, who can we call? Not Mr. Gatien. We’d already asked for “rent” three times this month.
Michael’s credit at the crack house had been exhausted. Michael’s CREDIT at the CRACK HOUSE was exhausted. And the club dealers were sick of us.
Uh. OK. Think.
Jewelry? Anybody have anything worth pawning?
Then.
An idea. The worst one of all.
The last idea at the bottom of the bottom barrel.
The antique grandfather clock. The one Peter gave as a Christmas present last year.
Who the hell needed that big old thing cluttering up the house? Who’d miss it? Wasn’t there a clock radio in Mavis’s room? That’s good enough for Michael.
Somebody, somewhere would pay dearly for such a treasure. Why, you could probably get seventy-five or a hundred dollars!
So Michael, still blue, still wet, with the crack pipe still in one hand—with the help of Mavis—dragged the clock from door to door in his apartment building, waking up tenants, to see if they wanted to buy a grandfather clock—as if it was all perfectly natural. Neighbors helping neighbors. Of course.
Michael had a little story prepared, about needing money for a plane ticket or something—but his neighbors were apparently used to Michael, and his three o’clock “emergencies.” At least this time he had bothered to put on a pair of pants.
Amazingly, some tenants actually gave him money. They always did. He could be very persistent, I suppose, or just riffling through the flour jar when their backs were turned and all … But he did pay them back. He put them on guest lists. He was famous. It was a funny story to tell your old college roommates when they called: That wacky club kid you read about in the gossip columns, you won’t believe what he did this time!
I don’t believe he ever sold the clock, but it’s a helluva story, huh?
You see, you can look at this little vignette and take it for what it is: a typical problem all drug addicts encounter, with an atypical solution due to the goods and means at Michael’s disposal.
Or you can look further and read into it a parable, an allegory maybe, a metaphor for how people and things were loved and discarded based upon their immediate value.
And maybe if we stretch it further, it could help us to understand how it was that Michael could agree to turn State’s evidence on Peter later on down the road. How he could sell out his best friend and mentor.
But, quickly, quickly, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
We have Michael and Mavis, together, as Grand Guignol.
Here we have Thanksgiving at Tavern On The Green, both of them under the lace tablecloth, taking quick hits off the crack stem. Here we have them being led out of the restaurant … shivering blurs, they were …
At hip little clubs, trendy restaurants, walking down the street … always, everywhere … lighting up their crack pipes, without regard to reputation or danger or possible legal retribution.
Until they were unrecognizable.
(“This is what I’ve always dreamed of,” Mavis had said nine months earlier, “Nothing could possibly go wrong …”)
Michael began having crack seizures.
Just for the attention, I was convinced of that.
Always at the MOST INAPPROPRIATE TIMES.
During MY PARTIES, or whenever I started having fun.
The phone would ring—DRAT!—and we would have to move the party once again to the St. Vincent’s waiting room. To jones and go through the motions of worrying about Michael, when we all knew perfectly well that Michael was indestructible.
Nothing could ever bring HIM down.
He would be released soon enough, and he would get right back on the roller coaster.
And certainly it was nothing major that signified his fall from grace. It was the little things, the ones I recognized from my own experience, that began adding up.
He stopped making nightly guest lists, an obsessive nine-year ritual that he dismissed without a passing thought.
He stopped returning messages, and when his answering machine broke, he just avoided answering the phone altogether. It was a relief actually, when the phone company turned it off for good.
He had two cats, one of them a long-haired Persian named Spikers—a pug-ugly little thing, really—with a smushed-up face that looked like it had been repeatedly hit with a frying pan. But Michael loved it and spoke to it in Skrinkle Skroddles, and saw to its every need. That ugly-ass cat ate steak tartare while Michael and Keoki lived on Sweetarts. Spikers needed to be brushed and cared for daily and when I saw him with matted and dreaded fur, pulling at his skin and raising sores—FILTHY, HUNGRY, PATHETIC—I knew Michael was sinking fast.
Keoki says he first noticed the irreversible signs of down-fall when he discovered Michael no longer took his teddy bear—Cozy Molly—to bed with him at night, and actually no longer even knew where the twenty-seven-year-old totem was.
In an article in the Daily News entitled “Fallen King of Clubs Still Aces With Mom,” written after the murder, Elka Alig says she was the last to know about Michael’s drug problem.
According to her she was SHOCKED to discover, in 1994, Michael’s spiraling drug habits.
Her first clue was when Michael “didn’t come to pick me up in a limousine” from the airport. She “knew something was wrong.”
Then she found all those empty vials in his apartment.
“They’re for my Lego,” he reportedly told her.
Funny, I remember things differently.
Michael was always quite open with Mom about his drug use. In fact, I remember in 1994, she arrived during a massive binge and didn’t bat an eyelash. We all carried on, business as usual.
“My baby looks so thin,” she said.
“It’s the damnedest thing, Elka,” I replied, “he eats and eats, you know, but every night when they pump his stomach, he loses all those nutrients.”
We all laughed.
“Are you at least taking your vitamins?”
“Well, Freeze cuts his cocaine with vitamin B12.” he answered. “Does that count?”
And we all laughed again, and I wheedled another bag out of Mavis.
“Would anybody care for a line of vitamins?”
I can quite easily recall her asking Michael to send her some “nose candy” many times over the years. I even remember her doing ecstasy with her son at the Limelight.
But later, Michael told me that she said that I was a bad influence on him. ME. On HIM.
That’s rich.
“My mother hates you. Every time she calls she asks if I still hang out with ‘that old witch.’”
OLD?
I think it stems from that visit, when she fell into her first K-hole.
I suppose I was rather glib about it.
She was crying when they carried her over to me at the Limelight.
“Oh, no,” Michael was saying, “I think she did Special K!”
She was disoriented. Couldn’t stand. Couldn’t talk. There was a look of terror on her face.
“Yep, that’s a K-hole.”
“What can we do?” Michael wailed.
I didn’t offer my standard speech that I used to soothe K victims (“I know everything is confusing right now, but in only twenty minutes—yada yada ya).
Instead, I think I felt her up, looking for her stash.
“Just prop her up against the bar, Michael. Oh, by the way, do you have any drink tickets?”
Oddly enough, it was Jennytalia to the rescue. In a rare burst of taking charge, Jenny sidled up to Elka and came up with a stunning plan: “I’ll meet you down in the hole and help bring you back. Michael, get her some cocaine to help break the high, and get me a half gram of K. I’m going down.”
So Jenny is Elka’s favorite, while I am the evil drug fiend.
Isn’t life funny?
So.
If my incisors seem a bit exposed, and if you get hit by an excited spray of spittle as I rush to relay this next part of the story—watching Michael fall into the very same spiral of drug addiction that he used against me so often—understand that it was wicked of me to enjoy it like I did, but there was some ironic justice to be had.
Yes, this was the summer and fall of 1995, when crack was le dernier cri—and all the most fashionable folk downtown carried butane torches and glass stems in their Prada bags.
This was around the time of those posh penthouse parties that Peter would throw at all the chic hotels in town. Oh, you didn’t know? You hadn’t heard? Well, they were just BEYOND, my dear. BEYOND ANY MEASURE … Hedonistic pleasure pits! Drug-fueled orgies of epic grandeur! “Excess” doesn’t even express! “Gluttony” is too kind!
Now, having said all that, I have to admit that I was never invited. Never. Not once. Oh, I suppose I would have been a buzzkill, a lone K-nut on a completely different wavelength altogether, stumbling about, looking to connect.
No, these parties were about freebasing. It’s serious business, this—a group activity in which concentration, and dedication to the matter at hand, are paramount.
No time for trivialities during the preparation and eventual consumption of said rock. Conversation is limited to the quiet but insistent bickering over the proper rate of stem rotation and torch intensity. It could go on for DAYS….
Clearly, I would have been out of place.
So all I know of those parties is what was told to me afterward: the naked games of charade, the tens of thousands of dollars worth of drugs spread out like a Roman banquet, the fort building with the fancy furniture, Peter, naked, patchless … with one wild eye … hiding behind the curtains—
Nope. I wasn’t there.
The cheese stands alone.
But Mavis and Freeze and Jenny and later the new kids, like Gitsie and even Angel, I suppose, were all invited. And made the scene. And developed a taste …
Crack was introduced to the club kids that summer, with such panache, such dazzling style, it seemed inconceivable that after a marvelous and worry-free binge, it might someday turn into, oh, Jenny in a garbage can, hacking at a can of butter beans. Who could ever imagine that it would change your personality, take away all that was good and decent in your life, including your morals, your friends, your furniture, your job … I saw it happen to everyone around me, but to no one more so than a certain spiky-haired lesbian tofu vendor from Massachusetts.
It became too much for her to handle. It became too much for anyone to handle.
Mavis left town. January ’95.
She got out, God bless her, and tried to save herself by running blindly cross-country, looking to retrieve the soul that had been sucked out of her a year earlier.
I really miss that girl.
Meanwhile: Freeze.
He lost the apartment on Eleventh Street. He couldn’t keep a roommate long enough to collect rent. It was dank and dirty and oh, full of fish heads and crack smoke. It was loathsome to visit, and detestable to live in, I’m sure. The crowd of base-heads who filled the apartment night and day were of such repulsive stock that it turned an already uncomfortable apartment into a true house of horrors …
Freeze was sinking into the quicksand: having lost his apartment, his status as a dealer, and the legion of toadying yes-men that came with it, he lost the will to dress up, go out, and have fun. In fact, he lost the will to make money, look for a place to live … even eating was beside the point.
When faced with eviction, he merely shrugged and slid quietly out the door without bothering to pack up his belongings…. Gone forever were the dozens of pairs of identical chaps, the armbands, the little leather vests, the platform boots, gone, without even a backward glance.
Thus we see the emergence of Freeze Number 3.
Remember—from his humble beginnings as the meek and mild milquetoast in Bella’s back room, into his heyday as FrankenFreeze—we see now before us, Freeze Number 3, the fractured sum of that man.
Of course I took him in. I didn’t have much of a choice. That’s how it worked, for both Michael and me. Of course we had quite a racket going for a while there. Finding new drug dealers … tossing them back and forth to each other … We would shuck them, break them in, toss them back, and leave their empty shells on the barroom floor. But, of course, in the end we had to take responsibility for the destruction we caused. Of course we had to take custody of our dealers after we broke them. We both shared in the responsibility of housing and feeding them. Michael took care of Mavis long after she stopped taking care of him. I took in Freeze.
We would do the same for anyone, of course.
For better or worse, we were all family by this stage of the game, and like all families we were capable of monstrous acts of cruelty to each other. But ultimately, when all was said and done, we were each of us, all we had. In our own way we looked out for each other. You have to believe this, or I won’t allow you to read any further. After all we had been through together, we all truly loved each other. And the worse times got, the tighter the circle became.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Freeze drifted into my apartment, my happy new swinging singles pad, and before I realized what was happening, he had dug in his heels, chased off my other roommate, and turned it into a reasonable replica of his Eleventh Street shithole.
In no time at all, my new home was a mess.
A mess!
And this—coming from me!
Me!
Who, very often, can be found just sitting in a dumpster, perfectly happy.
Me!
Well, I was fine with it even when it took the better part of an hour to navigate through rough terrain and stinking debris, to get to my bedroom. But when we had to call in the city plow to pave the kitchen with rock salt, I must say that I gave him a mighty mean frown.
Baseheads are a filthy lot.
He stayed four months, during which time we weaned him off crack and tried to rid him of his long-standing heroin habit. Three weeks in Dallas with our friend Brooke, and he was clean as a whistle. But once he got back to the city, he jumped right back on the horse.
Of course, of course.
When I’d had my fill of Freeze, he left and began his wandering. He quickly adjusted to his new status. He moved quietly, like a stealth bomb, you hardly noticed him when he slipped into your entourage. Before you could blink, he had thoroughly insinuated himself into your life—running errands for you, making you zippy little outfits.
Cooking and cleaning and organizing.
Just as sweet as pie. Wish he had been like that for me. I might have let him stay.
He would sleep on a pile of rags if that’s all you had, and thank you gladly for the opportunity.
He was rarely sad, and if he was worried about his future, and where he would go next, he never showed it.
And when it was time to leave, he would smile sweetly, thank you politely, and walk out the door (but always, always, leaving a bag behind, on accident, so when he was desperate, trapped, alone, on the street—he could call and retrieve it—then once inside your door, he stayed until it was time again to leave).
Many people avoided him when they saw him coming.
Many of the same people who used to kiss his bronzed and plucked little butt.
He saw both sides of everybody’s worst side. From blatant ass kissing to the big chill in less than two moves.
Trust me, I know all about this: Once you’ve seen the absolute worst in everybody you’ve ever met, you sort of give up hope. Any good that you might see—well, you know better. You know what lurks beneath the surface, what’s right around the corner. You’ve seen the truth in everybody. Everybody.
So you accept that everyone is inherently capable of hurting you. They’re only out for themselves. You will end up hurt.
You can’t judge people in the same way that you once did—“this person is good”; “this person is bad”…
You embrace everyone, equally—
But now there is a protective barrier.
So that’s why Freeze would spend time with anyone. ANYONE. It didn’t matter if it was the Queen of Romania or the Prince of Port Authority.
He was himself, once removed. When he was presented with something good, he took it quickly—because he knew it wouldn’t last—and he steeled himself against the coming bad.
It’s not such a terrible way to live. It’s neither Heaven nor Hell. Because if you’re never really sad—you know too much to let life surprise you or to get to you—then, you’re also never really happy. That was the Purgatory Freeze faced as a street person, depending on his former fans to take care of him.
But I don’t think he was bitter about his fall. Impassive, maybe. Philosophical, probably. Bitter, no.
In fact: there was a strength and dignity to Freeze Number 3 that was admirable, truly. He faced the unknown each day—rejection, hunger, withdrawal—without flinching.
He was broken, to be sure, but his blatant refusal to pick himself up, dust himself off, and get on with it, to find a home, find a job, get a life—well, it was breathtaking in it’s audacity. He was, without a doubt, the most imperious vagrant you would see.
He expected to survive and, in fact, he did.
It was inevitable that he would end up with Michael. Mavis was gone from both of their lives, and with Michael’s spiraling heroin addiction, they were perfect together.
After spending the summer and fall of ’95 drifting from pillar to post, he landed at Michael’s condominium just in time for Michael’s eviction.
I mean, well, who forgets to pay their mortgage for three years?
And who else could get away with it for so long?
Peter was still willing to help. He offered to pay the back fees—but it was finally decided that it would be easier to just get another place. It would be cheaper in the long run.
So Michael and Freeze began house hunting together.
They clicked—tic toc.
And if you thought Michael and Mavis made a combustible pair, Michael and Freeze were nothing short of Hiroshima, mes amours.
Together, they brought out an oily quality in each other that usually was kept hidden.
Seeing them together, watching them work, made me shiver. They were like evil twins who spoke their own language.
And their syrupy sweet baby talk to one another, well it was just plain spooky.
Freeze, with a glue stick in one hand, a scrap of fur in the other: “Michael, Snooky, la-da-doo?”
Michael: “Yes, Freezeskers, lover-la-da?”
THAT, my friends, is the true heart of darkness. Speaking together in tongues—one mind, one goal.
I am reminded of a great quote by Stanislaw Lee: “I give you bitter pills, in a sugar coating. The pills are harmless—the poison’s in the sugar.”
Therein lies the basis of Michael and Freeze.
They had a systematic way of getting what they wanted, a sort of telepathy that instantaneously sized up potential victims, discreetly pointing out weak spots, Achilles’ heels, any jugular veins the other swindlers might have overlooked.
They worked successfully together. (If you define “successful” as: creepy, craven grifters, then, by golly, they were at the top of their class.)
But the free fall was gathering speed.
They found a loft they both liked, and Peter paid the deposit, and somehow they forgot and left both of Michael’s cats there alone in the empty loft for weeks before they moved in. When they decided against the loft after all, they remembered Miss Kitty and Spikers …
And ran back to fetch them.
Spikers was dead. Starved and frozen. Kitty was on death’s doorstep as well, but somehow pulled through. Only to run away two months later. And nobody missed her.
THAT MICHAEL FORGOT AT ALL, and left his beloved Spikers to starve to death, shows just HOW FAR GONE HE WAS AT THIS POINT.
He and Freeze together were trouble. They doubled the dosage, increased their powers, and yet subtracted the whole of their former selves.
Michael and Freeze eventually moved back into the old Riverbank apartment building on the West Side, where, years ago, Michael and Keoki and I had all lived as young and wacky neighbors. But those days were long gone. Michael was no longer … well … young anymore. There were still spurts of wackiness, but basically, it was sad watching that magical life force drain out of him because of the drugs.
Michael and Freeze hoped it might be a new beginning for them. A rebirth. They got a cute two-bedroom apartment, well cute until Michael got a hold of it. Michael’s taste was very Ethan Allen, if you know what I mean.
So.
It’s September and the stage is almost set for the much anticipated denouement of our little Greek tragedy. Things are happening quickly now. Dark forces are gathering. Fate is about to intercede and change everything forever. It’s coming. Soon. Soon. There still remains one element that is missing, but we’ll get to HIM soon enough. I promise.
For now, let us merely gaze at the great tableau frozen in front of us, as the curtain slowly falls on Act II. The dust has yet to settle from the Mavis Mess, and the lighting here is so faint and gloomy, it’s hard to make out what’s going on. Some of the characters’ actions are unclear.
We can certainly see the DEA circling about, trying to “blend in,” to great comic effect. Big ugly apes in pearls and lipstick, awkwardly carrying lunchboxes. Apparently, the powers that be want Peter Gatien’s head on a platter. And they’ll sacrifice anyone’s dignity to get it. There is a general sense of unease, almost paranoia, in the clubs these days. Many of the flashier people are crowded right off the stage. Others are relegated to the background. And then there’s Michael, shrouded in shadows, blowing smoke rings from his crack stem.
Michael is on his way out, can’t you feel it? Listen to the thunder of a thousand new hooves, a whole new generation of kids pushing and surging into the Limelight who don’t know, don’t care, don’t want to know or care about club kid looks and clubland etiquette. Sorry, Grandpa—they just want to dance. They just want KEOKI, the Superstar DJ, who has pushed his way out of Michael’s shadow, become a helluva DJ, and climbed into a lofty new position of power. It’s his turn to take his rightful place in our Pantheon of the Painfully Hip. Keoki has dyed his hair leopard, RAR! and has a dozen “assistants” help him pick out which pair of chaps to wear to that night’s gig.
But poor Michael is losing his touch, can’t you see it? He’s lost the will to go out and work the crowd, press some flesh, lure in those unsuspecting young pups into his lair. He has also lost his precious club kid magazine, Project X (it fell through the cracks, so to speak), and without that wacky bit of propaganda to fuel his fans’ ardor, he loses not only his puppet-master’s pulpit, but also a certain degree of validation.
The scene splinters.
Nothing seems fun anymore.
And amidst this chaotic disorder, amidst the clamor and clanging and changing of the guard, as the old once again despair to make way for the new—there, in the wings, waiting to make his appearance is the last element of our story. Yes! Over there! In the corner! Wandering onto our stage, coming into view, is one lone figure, one small figure, one terribly silly little drug dealer, all decked out in a pair of wings! Wings, of all things!
Here, now, pushing his way forward, up through the ranks, is a third-rate Mavis (if you know what I mean), demanding to be heard. This poor player wants his God-given privilege, as a Club Kid Superstar Drug Dealer, his right to strut and fret his hour upon the stage—then be heard no more.
Look, in the spotlight now, front and center: the most important, yet least interesting character of all—our aspiring corpse has wandered onto center stage!
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, without further ado, as the lights go down, allow me to quickly introduce to you, THE ONE, THE ONLY …
Angel Melendez.
I see that got Michael’s and Freeze’s attention! They seem to be looking toward the spotlight with undisguised greed. Notice them as they creep forward and circle their intended prey, all the while eyeing his large bag of pharmaceuticals, and the many pockets bulging with too much cash.
Tic-toc, see them smile and warmly greet and embrace Angel, as they lead him off the stage. And into the Riverbank. “Of course you can stay with us!”
Watch Michael and Freeze work to gain Angel’s trust.
And that is how our story begins.
But before the curtain falls, let me leave you with one question—ponder it as the events unfold, then riddle me this:
If one day, Mother Teresa was out weed whacking and accidentally chopped off Hitler’s head—WOULD THAT NECESSARILY BE SUCH A BAD THING?
I mean … if a person commits a crime, and no one cares—can we all just adjust our lip liner?
Look, I’m just being honest here. I think that the whole point of my story is that nobody ever implicated Dorothy in the double witch homicides of Oz because, well … you know…. She’s Judy Garland, for God’s sakes, and Louis B. Mayer forced her into a life of drugs at such a young age, poor thing …