Swagger

Like a fledgling sea turtle released too soon into the wild, at age nineteen I inserted myself into the swift moving currents of diverse humanity in 1980’s New York.  Of course at the time I didn’t know this one critical fact – I had been the recipient of inadequate preparation.

Existing in a world quite far from this self-awareness, I thought I was more like Private Hudson in “Aliens,” the ‘original badass,’ strutting and showing off his hardware.  It was New York after all, and I was hyper, I slept little because there was so much to do but I had no idea where to begin.  My actual training for all this consisted of living as a reluctant mama’s boy in a rundown Art Deco building in Miami Beach, Florida.

So in reality, I was more like Gene Wilder in “Stir Crazy,” walking into prison with a fake limp, saying ‘yeah that’s right, we bad, we bad.’

But I had taken a lot of art classes at the local Community College.

I also had a couple of beers once at a Biscayne Bay pool party.

I’d hung out a few times at a Miami club called Fire and Ice.

I may have been off to a late start but I considered myself ready.

I was always grinning and ‘aw shucks’ and on the trains at all hours going to clubs like the Tunnel and Limelight.  Looking back, I can’t believe nothing ever happened to me.

Hell, if the present-day-me ran into this kid I’d want to mug him just to get that grin off his face.

OK, I was mugged, sorta, a year or so later when my sister Laura visited me and we were relieved of a backpack in a grab and run right next to Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park.  The take: a well-worn paperback copy of Shirley MacLaine’s “Out on a Limb” (not mine) and a box of tampons (also not mine).  And of course the backpack.

But back then I strutted, and in a paradoxically penniless way, I felt I owned the place; I had swagger.

I also didn’t know this at the time (ah, hindsight), but there was also this, I needed structure and order.  Planning.  I have been to some extent informed of my own opinions by my like or dislike of certain movies.  Perhaps I should have taken it as a hint that in the 1976 movie “Logan’s Run” I thought Michael York was a fool to leave that domed paradise.

Well, except for the whole euthanasia thing.

I loved that in the movie, one’s future is mapped out for him, no worries, and it was a purely antiseptic environment, meaning no bugs.  The clothes were cool, they had great tech and everyone was being watched, cared for.  And the weather was always predictable. What’s not to love?

I’m no enemy of the ACLU but I (for myself anyway) love the idea of being tracked and watched and I view this now-happening trend in today’s society with something less than apprehension.  Maybe it’s just the longing for another parent or the missing of the strict one I had recently lived with, I don’t know.  Something about the probable violation of my civil liberties made/makes me feel taken care of.

And it has always been there, like seeing the order represented by the rows of desks in 1960’s “The Apartment,” (aha, Shirley MacLaine again!) or when I saw that scene that showed the Borg version of Earth in “Star Trek: First Contact,” frankly that gave me a little thrill.  There was no green left and everything looked metallic and useful.  Cool!  Around that time I commented to somebody, “It would be great if the planet could be paved over.”

Yet strangely, whenever I see that Sherwin-Williams logo of the Earth covered with paint it makes me kind of sick.

I’d held off on watching Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” a movie that should have been right in my wheelhouse.  But why would I need to see it, when I lived in New York, the original Metropolis?

So I was young, a rube really, and I now had a rigid street grid playground with a lot of concrete and steel everywhere, no wonder I was elated.  I just lacked a guiding hand to help get me through all this.  That’s when I started using alcohol as a stabilizing influence, for I was really jumpy and all over the place.  That’s when I met my first and best New York friend, Susan.

The first time we met was over the phone, and over a couple of days we talked for hours before we ever met in person.  I met her through my brother, who I lived with and who was probably glad to see me latch on to somebody else for a change.  Emotionally immature as I was, I immediately saw Susan as a mentor.  She was an artist who had some amazing stories.

Well, I was in New York, ostensibly, to be an artist.

I met her one night at her home, a building called The Habitat, located in the East Twenties off Lex.

She had pink hair!  She was also a vegetarian who had a weakness for cigarettes and pizza.  She was obviously arty and used the word “amused” a lot.  I picked up on this right away because she was very amused by my Jimmy Stewartesque sense of wonder about everything New York. She would giggle endlessly at my commentary.

She’d created these 6 foot tall paintings on clear thick plastic of Raggedy Ann holding a pistol, and those, along with one plastic chair, a record player, a stuffed Raggedy Ann and a futon, seemed to be of all her belongings in that sixth floor apartment at The Habitat.

I beheld all of this the night I met her in June of ’87.

“Wow, oh gosh, wow,” I exclaimed as I walked around and looked at her art.  Side one of the Beastie Boys’ “License to Ill” was playing on her (also) pink plastic turntable.  She giggled and told me that if I liked all that I should walk into the kitchen and look to the left out the window.

I craned my head around, and RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME was the Empire State Building, the top all lit up in white.  “Gosh!”  Another giggle emanated from the living room.

She was a great artsy paradox, a pink-loving girly-girl who loved Raggedy Ann but was also into hardcore music (Sealed with a Fist, Agent Orange) and hip hop and guns.  I never was clear on whether she had a gun herself but we would sometimes sit on the floor of the Barnes and Noble on Astor Place and pore over issues of “Guns and Ammo,” making loud comments to elicit reaction.

She was like a non-asshole really liberal version of Ted Nugent.

Also, she chain-smoked but was sober.  I would later rue my unwillingness to be mentored on that last bit.

And here’s the best part, she had the coolest job ever!  She worked for the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude downtown on Howard Street.

She had accompanied them to Paris back in ’85 when they wrapped the Pont-Neuf Bridge over the Seine.  I knew them from their work “Surrounded Islands,” when they had turned a few islands in Biscayne Bay into oversized Deco versions of sunny-side-up eggs.  That was in 1983, and the artists stayed in the Senator Hotel, where my mom managed.  One of the few things I brought with me to New York was a little swatch of pink plastic, a souvenir from the project, so I guess I was a fan.

Susan and I hung out in the four story walk-up that Christo and Jeanne-Claude owned, a 19^th century structure that had been used to house ammo for the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.  It was an always dark building with a tilted staircase that would greet the visitor upon entry. It ran all the way up to the fourth floor with no interruption.  Entryways to the different floors were on the left of the stairs. We’d have old style seltzer water bottle fights, running around from the apartment (she later moved into) to the storage room, which contained giant bolts of different colored plastic from old projects.

It was our home base from which we planned gallery and museum visits.

At night we’d hang out with her friends the McKenna brothers (3 of them) at the Horseshoe Bar or at the Ear Inn on Spring Street, usually sitting inside to escape the stench of garbage from sanitation trucks nearby.  The McKenna’s were cool and aloof, the oldest one rode a motorcycle.  Around these guys I felt young and dumb (even Rob, the youngest), and was aware of my naiveté.   Susan loved having platonic male friends and called all of us her “accessories.”

She guided me around when I needed something to do, some structure, and at the time I felt comfortable enough to stick to drinking wine coolers, which, of course, made her giggle.

After barhopping we’d sometimes head over to Tompkins Square Park and swing on the swings, dodging rats and junkies on the way in and out.  It seemed like the thing to do at one or two in the morning, and was just weird enough to be appealing to me.

As the summer kicked in I started sporting a black trench coat and a tiny ponytail.  I felt I was slowly assimilating.

One day we all trouped over to Central Park to sit on the lawn and listen to a free classical music concert.  We brought wine and cheese and I felt sophisticated, I had quickly recovered from an embarrassment at the deli we’d just come out of.  There I saw my first celebrity in New York, Billie Jean King, and standing just one aisle over I told a dumb lesbian joke that I’m sure she overheard.

Not because I was intolerant, I just wanted my friends to laugh with me and not at me.  Not good.

At the park I started to eat the little wheels of cheese, waxy rind and all.  I asked Susan why it tasted so weird, I’d never eaten anything other than blocks of cheddar back in Miami.  Well… we had a good time anyway, but to me all this was just evidence of my stuck-in-tourist status.

Susan had these little performance art quirks that I found appealing, like walking around on our hands and knees while everyone else was dancing at the Tunnel.

A few times she led me down Madison Avenue blindfolded, laughing hysterically at the reactions of pedestrians.  Hey, at least I knew I’d have a few stories for people at Pratt Institute, if I ever got in there.

Eventually I did make it in there and found I had diminishing time with my New Yorky friend.  I slowly traded the erratic structuring of my social life for the more traditional and rigid one of college.  It took a couple of years but I found that it was not for me.  It was not my kind of structure.  But by that time I had made additional friends and was a little older, a little steadier on my feet.  But I always remained friends with Susan, always remembering those days when I was but a fledgling rube.  I appreciated that her and her friends didn’t take advantage of me too much.

I survived my release into the wild, but barely, finally throwing off my liquid mentor (maybe Dexter Morgan would call it the ‘dark passenger’) and achieving a degree of real self confidence.  Still a fan of art and of artists, I flew out to New York in ’05 to see Christo and Jeanne Claude’s “The Gates” project with Susan.  And I do my own work now, regimented, structured yet colorful paintings of buildings and water towers.  But I still find I long for the world (except for the euthanasia part) of “Logan’s Run.”