Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

A fashion designer made me a purple dress with yellow buttons made from amphetamines. Blaine bit the buttons off one by one as we danced. The more stoned he got, the more open my dress fell.

We were coming in at exits and going out at entrances. Nighttime wasn’t just a dark thing anymore; it had actually acquired the light of morning — it seemed nothing to think of night as having a sunrise in it, or a noontime alarm. We used to drive all the way up to Park Avenue just to laugh at the bleary-eyed doormen. We caught early movies in the Times Square grind houses. Two-Trouser Sister. Panty Raid. Girls on Fire. We greeted sunrises on the tar beaches of Manhattan’s rooftops. We picked our friends up from the psych ward at Bellevue and drove them straight to Trader Vic’s.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

There had been a tic in my left eye. I tried to ignore it but it felt like one of Blaine’s clock hands, moving time around my face. I had been lovely once, Lara Liveman, midwestern girl, blond child of privilege, my father the owner of an automobile empire, my mother a Norwegian model. I am not afraid to say it — I’d had enough beauty to get taxi drivers fighting. But I could feel the late nights draining me. My teeth were turning a tinge darker from too much Benzedrine. My eyes were dull. Sometimes it seemed that they were even taking my hair color. An odd sensation, the life disappearing through the follicles, a sort of tingling.

Instead of working on my own art, I went to the hairdresser, twice, three times a week. Twenty-five dollars a time. I tipped her another fifteen and walked down the avenue, crying. I would get back to painting again. I was sure of it. All I needed was another day. Another hour.

The less work we did, the more valuable we thought we had become. I had been working toward abstract urban landscapes. A few collectors had been hovering at the edges. I just needed to find the stamina to finish. But instead of my studio, I stepped from the sunlight in Union Square into the comfortable dark of Max’s. All the bouncers knew me. A cocktail was placed on the table: a Manhattan first, washed down with a White Russian. I was airborne within minutes. I wandered around, chatted, flirted, laughed. Rock stars in the back room and artists in the front. Men in the women’s bathroom. Women in the men’s, smoking, talking, kissing, fucking. Trays of hash brownies carried around. Men snorting lines of coke through the carcasses of pens. Time was in jeopardy when I was at Max’s. People wore their watches with the faces turned against their skin. By the time dinner rolled around it could have been the next day. Sometimes it was three days later when I finally got out. The light hit my eyes when I opened the door onto Park Avenue South and Seventeenth Street. Occasionally Blaine was with me, more often he wasn’t, and there were times, quite honestly, I wasn’t sure.

The parties rolled on like rain. Down in the Village, the door of our dealer, Billy Lee, was always open. He was a tall, thin, handsome man. He had a set of dice that we used for sex games. There was a joke around that people came and went in Billy’s place, but mostly they came. His apartment was littered with stolen prescription pads, each script in triplicate with an individual BNDD number. He had stolen them from doctors’ offices on the Upper East Side; he used to go along the ground-floor offices on Park and Madison, kick the air conditioners in, and then crawl through the open window. We knew a doctor on the Lower East Side who would write the prescriptions. Billy was popping twenty pills a day. He said sometimes his heart felt as if it wrapped itself around his tongue. He had a thing for the waitresses at Max’s. The only one who eluded him was a blonde named Debbie. Sometimes I substituted for whichever waitress didn’t make it. Billy recited passages from Finnegans Wake in my ear. The father of fornicationists. He had learned twenty pages by heart. It sounded like a sort of jazz. Later I could hear his voice ringing in my ear.

In Blaine’s and my apartment, there were a few citations for loud music, once an arrest for possession, but it was a police raid that finally stalled us. A crashing through the door. The cops swarming around the place. Get to your feet. One of them bashed my ankle with a nightstick. I was too scared to scream. It was no ordinary raid. Billy was lifted from our couch, kicked to the floor, strip-searched in front of us. He was taken away in cuffs, part of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics sting. We got away with a warning: they were watching us, they said.

Blaine and I crawled around the city looking for a bump. Nobody we knew was selling. Max’s was closed for the night. The tough-eyed queers on Little West Twelfth Street wouldn’t let us into their clubs. There was a haze over Manhattan. We bought a bag on Houston but it turned out to be baking soda. We still stuffed it up our noses in case there was a small remnant of coke. We walked to the Bowery among the plainsong drunks and got smashed against a grocery store grate and robbed at knifepoint by three Filipino kids in lettered jackets.

We ended up in the doorway of an East Side pharmacy. Look what we’ve done to ourselves , said Blaine. Blood all over his shirt front. I couldn’t stop my eye from pulsing. I lay there, the wet of the ground seeping into my bones. Not even enough desire to weep.

An early-morning greaseball threw a quarter at our feet. E pluribus unum.

It was one of those moments from which I knew there would be no return. There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance. We sold the loft we owned in SoHo and bought the log cabin so far upstate that it would be a long walk back to Max’s ever again.

What Blaine had wanted was a year or two, maybe more, in the sticks. No distraction. To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn’t a hippie idea. Both of us had always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from the hippies. We were the edge, the definers. We developed our idea to live in the twenties, a Scott and Zelda going clean. We kept our antique car, even got it refurbished, the seats re-upholstered, the dashboard buffed. I cut my hair flapper-style. We loaded up on provisions: eggs, flour, milk, sugar, salt, honey, oregano, chili, and racks of cured meat that we hung from a nail in the ceiling. We wiped away the cobwebs and filled the cupboards with rice, grain, jams, marshmallows — we believed we’d eventually be that clean. Blaine had decided it was time to go back to canvas, to paint in the style of Thomas Benton, or John Steuart Curry. He wanted that moment of purity, regionalism. He was sick of the colleagues he’d gone to Cornell with, the Smithsons and the Turleys and the Matta-Clarks. They had done as much as they possibly could, he said, there was no going further for them. Their spiral jetties and split houses and pilfered garbage cans were passé.

Me too — I’d decided that I wanted the pulse of the trees in my work, the journey of grass, some dirt. I thought I might be able to capture water in some new and startling way.

We had painted the new landscapes separately — the pond, the kingfisher, the silence, the moon perched on the saddle of the trees, the slashes of redwings among the leaves. We had kicked the drugs. We had made love. It all went so well, so very very well, until our trip back to Manhattan.

A BLUE DAWN stretched in the room. Blaine lay like a stranded thing, all the way across the bed. Impossible to wake. Grinding his teeth in his sleep. A thinness to him, his cheekbones too pronounced, but he was not unhandsome: there were times he still reminded me of a polo player.