shipwrecked at the maritime

I’d moved to New York City on a whim— the onslaught of a casual suggestion from a friend that had somehow manifested into me dragging two overstuffed suitcases down Mulberry Street. Jenna and I had gone to high school together, but she’d left California as soon as she could, and come to NYU. She was never truly a Californian, never reveled in the lazy days and cool, slow nights that had the rest of America fascinated. Jenna liked the rush rush of the big city, the transitory nature of New York that kept everything constantly swirling in motion.
During one of our sporadic catch-up conversations, she suggested I should find a magazine internship in New York City for the summer and come live with her. May came and went, and in lieu of more concrete plans, I bought a ticket to New York City, flying out one day after school ended. When Jenna initially asked me to move to New York, she hastened to mention that she would be working fourteen-hour days, and would return home exhausted, barely able to utter a “good night” in my direction before retreating to bed. Consequently, I was left to prowl the city myself, comforted solely by the other lone faces on the New York streets, and their hard, stagnant expressions.
I tried to learn New York every way I could— from the reviews and features in The Village Voice, from the notoriously self-indulgent Page Six and its mocking sister, Gawker.com, even from a fold out subway map I’d been given for free in Washington Square Park. I read about the city in the words of the greats in a “Reporting NYC” class at NYU, where we saw the red light, blue light of Delaney’s New York, listened keenly to Sontag and found the city hidden between the lines of Didion’s “Los Angeles Notebook.”
Jenna found a converted loft in the heart of Little Italy, and, throughout the summer, the smell of vodka fettuccini from the Da Nico restaurant below us constantly wafted through our living room. We spent the summer tired from the sticky heat, sometimes visiting museums and movie theatres to indulge in a few precious hours of air conditioning. On weekends, the streets of Little Italy were blocked off, and tourists flooded through them, examining fake Louis Vuittons and buying gelato from waddling Italian grandmothers. Downstairs, a mix of noisy Italians and tourists crowded around the entrance to Da Nico’s. An elderly woman, who watched the proceedings with a sinister distance, sat at her usual table, drinking a never-ending glass of white wine.
There were four of us who lived in the loft: Jenna, Kate, Dominique and I. Kate was hardly ever home; she usually spent her weekdays at her boyfriend’s house and her weekends at her family’s summer home in the Hamptons. When she was home, she would try to create new outfits out of the clothes that littered her bedroom floor, model them in front of the bathroom mirror, and then jut her hip and ask if anyone wanted to pitch in for sushi. I saw Dominique more often, and, sometimes, on sluggish Saturday afternoons, the two of us would sit on our red windowsill, legs hanging over the sides, smoking Marlboro Lights and looking out at the street below us. But Dominique too had her own overly dramaticized life, which mostly revolved around an aspiring film director named Anders.
Dominique was raised on the Upper East Side, and from her privileged upbringing, had appropriated a jaded view of basically everything. She spoke in strings of cynicism, a New York language I was forced to learn quickly, even though I still walked around the city with wide eyes. Out of all the ordinary things about New York that scared me in those early June days, the most disarming was that people avoided eye contact when passing one another in the street. In California, people liked to smile; once in a while, they’d throw out a good morning or a rhetorical how are you. But in New York, once someone spotted a figure in the distance, their eyes darted towards the sidewalk and remained glued there until the person passed.
Dominique was an expert at walking in the city. She never looked at anyone or anything, unless she was on Spring Street, where she would examine the display windows of every flagship designer store, and say things like, “Does Marc Jacobs really expect people to go into his store with that dress in the window?”
The first few days in New York dragged on, a strange feeling in a city fueled by insomnia and motion. I wandered up and down the streets of Nolita, sometimes studying the faces of conversing people trapped inside tiny cafes, or crouching near the sidewalk to catch glimpses of basement bars and stores. It seemed that New York had run out of places to put things, and so they stored them as high and as low as they could. My favorite stop was a self-indulgent video store on Elizabeth Street called Cinema Nolita, where the movies were organized by director’s last name and the shelves hung suspended from the ceiling by aluminum wires. My first lonely night in the city, I walked up Mulberry Street, looking longingly at Gatsby’s, with its bright orange sign, and the Mulberry Street Bar, wishing there was a crowd nestled in a back corner that I was supposed to meet.
The price of New York caught up to me in those early days, and I began looking for a job. I’d worked in restaurants in the past, the most recent of which had been a sports bar where Chargers fans looked at me like the buffalo wings they had just ordered. I finally got a job through Peter, a DJ at Hiro, who I first met at a SoHo bar in the middle of the afternoon. Peter worked nights, which meant he spent his days drinking pints at the Bleeker Street Bar, just a few blocks down the street from me. He was usually leaning against the doorway, alternating between drags of his cigarette and sips of his Guinness. I bummed a cigarette from him that day; it was an American Spirit, and it left me lightheaded and disoriented. After a few awkward drags together, he introduced himself, and I stared in awe at my first New York friend, a slouching thirty-something whose eyes were glazing over as he spoke. After 15 years in New York, Peter had the shabby chic look down so well that he could pass for just plain shabby in his Diesel jeans and a strategically ripped “The Streets” shirt.
“The shirt was free,” he informed me.
He failed to mention that the concert tickets were impossible to get.
“If you need a job, go see Marcus at the Maritime Hotel,” Peter told me that day. “Tell him you know me.”
When I arrived at the hotel the next day and explained that I was looking for Marcus, the dark-haired hostess tapped her acrylics against the counter, and didn’t say anything. Instead, she stared at me blankly, as if she was being forced to talk to me by default.
“I think he’s in a meeting,” she said.
“I’m a friend of Peter’s,” I offered.
Her face softened and she flashed me a smile. “Oh, why didn’t you say so?” She spoke briefly into the phone, and then ushered me down a flight of stairs tucked behind the bar, and lead me to Marcus’ office, where he was drinking Lychee martinis with a seemingly underage waitress.
Marcus gave me the once-over. “Do you have a headshot?” he asked.
I looked at him, startled. A headshot?
“No, I’m out of those,” I said, in a tone that sounded more like a question.
He squinted his eyes at me and took another sip of his martini. “Well, why don’t you go upstairs and find Julie. She’ll get you set up with a tray and an uniform.”
When I said I was looking for Julie, the hostess explained she was probably having a drink at Hiro. I walked out the front door of the hotel and then down another flight of outdoor stairs, which led me to a pair of oversized French doors, adorned with Japanese fabric.
Nightlife in Manhattan had become like destination shopping. Feeling French? Stop in for éclairs at restaurant mogul Keith McNally’s Pastis. Craving the feel of sand under your stilettos? Bungalow 8’s beach bar comes complete with waves projected on high definition TV’s and mail order sand. The New York Metro website even proclaimed Bungalow 8 “too South Beach to actually be in South Beach.”
Perhaps that’s why the Maritime soared to popularity; its cruise ship mentality allows its patrons to take a trip around the world without even leaving its five star premises. If Los Angeles inspired Cabanas feels tired, Italy is right downstairs at La Bottega, which is complete with Campari trays and a selection of Italian beers, including Peroni and Moretti. And if that doesn’t feel exotic enough, Japan is nestled in the basement, with Matsuri and its “see-and-be-seen” counterpart, Hiro, the expansive Japanese-inspired club where Peter spun records on weekends. No wonder the hotel is often referred to as a multiplex of hotspots.
Julie, a thin blonde with stretched skin and pale lips, was sitting at Hiro’s bar, sipping on Long Island Iced Teas with a slick-haired man, clad in a suit and looking a bit like a displaced GQ model. Hiro’s décor was reminiscent of an ancient cruise ship, with nautical hints in every corner, but its subtlety was mostly in vain. The luminous faux portals carved out of La Bottega’s patio walls, not to mention the name of the hotel, easily alerted the clientele to the Maritime’s nautical obsession. I was even forced to wear a short navy-blue dress that Julie instantly decided needed altering. She pulled an oversized safety pin out of her purse and commanded, “Suck in.”
I did.
Within moments, Julie managed to “slutify” the dress, pinning together whatever fabric was not already stretched against my skin, and advised me that it would be in my best interest to invest in a push-up bra. She also handed me a navy blue and white striped sweater to wear when it rained. Then she shoved a metal Campari tray, a handful of navy blue pens with The Maritime Hotel imprinted on them in gold, and a wine opener at me, gave me an once-over, and shrugged in her friend’s direction. He took another drag of his cigarette.
Julie handed me a stack of forms to sign, and then explained the guidelines of being a part of the Maritime team.
“First, if you’re in work clothes, you enter through the garage. There’s a pad down there where you place your hand, and then, by recognizing your handprint, the security guard will let you in. We take a dollar out of your paycheck every day to pay for the employee cafeteria, which is downstairs in the basement, and you can eat whatever you want from the machines. We get a lot of celebrities in here. If you gawk at them, or bother them, that’s an instant fire. We’re not a fucking museum. Oh, and don’t up sell. It’s insulting,” Julie paused to take a sip of her drink.
“After you ring up drinks, you set out the glasses and fill them with ice if necessary. There’s low balls, high balls, up glasses, rocks glasses, beer glasses, shooters and shot glasses. You pour your own wine and champagne. You get paid $3 an hour, and you’re going to waive your overtime right, because shifts usually go over eight hours anyway. At the end of the night, you turn in all of your cash tips and credit card receipts. Then we pool them all together, take out taxes, tip out the bussers, bartenders, managers and maitre’d’s, and issue you a check. You can come get your checks between 4:30 and 5:30 on Fridays, in the main lobby. Any questions?”
It was 2004 — and I’d chosen the perfect time to stumble into “hipster heaven,” a term coined by New York Times style reporter Jesse McKinley, whose often biting and accurate remarks about neighborhood trends have brought both fame and shame to many venues, including the Maritime. Three weeks after I began working at the Maritime, The New York Times published McKinley’s “Packed Too Tight in Hipster Heaven,” an article that highlighted the “holier-than-you’ll-ever-be” Meatpacking District mantra. Rule one of the hipster handbook is that “a write-up in the Times destroys any semblance of cool,” according to taleoftwocities.org, an easier to swallow version of Gawker.com that covers both New York City and Los Angeles. As a result, it wasn’t long before many people began to gravitate towards a new neighborhood, where they could hover around a new velvet rope. Hipster heaven was swiftly becoming hipster hell.
The Maritime Hotel had notably the worst service in Manhattan, according to Bryant, a 33-year old bartender at the nearby Brass Monkey bar. It was easy to see why. From the beginning, it was a little unclear who’s serving whom at the Maritime.
June 17 — it was my first day as a cocktail waitress at the Maritime’s trendy outdoor restaurant, La Bottega. I trained with Michelle, a Scandinavian model whose look channeled Kate Moss’ heroin-addict inspired phase. A couple in their late forties, outfitted in light, neutral tones suitable for clinking crystal, flagged Michelle down as she walked by.
“We could do with some sparkling Pellegrino,” the man said pointedly.
“Oh me too,” Michelle replied in her thick Scandinavian accent. “The heat… it’s excruciating.”
From the beginning, La Bottega felt a little backwards. Apparently, here it was the B-listers (and by that I mean, bartenders and bouncers) who really called the shots. After I rang in a Capaniri— a jazzed up version of the mojito— Lydia, a too tall bartender in a white wife beater and black bra, gave me a look of disbelief.
“Do you think I have time to make that?” she asked.
The obvious answer was yes; at 5 o’clock, the bar was relatively empty. Manhattan’s high profile cocktail hour usually starts fashionably late.
“Tell them they can have a mojito and that’s it,” she said.
It was a little hard to swallow, especially for a girl who had just traded in the easy living of San Diego for the magnetic pull of the big city.
The rule of New York neighborhoods is the seedier, the trendier, which explains why the Maritime’s W. 16th and 9th Avenue location, right in the heart of Manhattan’s devastatingly hip Meatpacking District, instantly made the hotel an “it” spot for A-listers and those who wanted to be near them. However, like any synthetic New York hotspot, the crowd usually fell into the latter category. Jonathan Segal, an investor in the Maritime’s neighbor, the P.M., lent his advice to The New York Times Sunday Edition, when he said, “If you want to make money, buy property where the prostitutes and miscreants are, hold onto it for 15 years and you’ll make a fortune.”
The Maritime opened in September 2003, trading in their miscreants for the likes of Matt Damon and Pharrell, who often held parties in the Maritime’s trademark private rooms. Still, late in the July nights, a straggling number of decked out prostitutes wandered the streets as last minute homage to a neighborhood that once belonged to male Cher imposters and the Hell’s Angels.
There were still some recognizable signs; the lingering smell of packed meat on Mondays, delivery day; the lone drag queen mesmerized by the limos and lines that have become Meatpacking trademarks; and the presence of watering holes that have yet to be outrun by the more “up-and-coming” locales, such as long time favorites Fat Cat and Hogs and Heifers, whose gritty names easily distinguish themselves from the new brand of meatpacking staples. However, as the district began to get increasingly overcrowded, even for Manhattan standards, these places also became popularized by the bridge and tunnel throngs, as spillover crowds from meatpacking hotspots found their way into local hangouts such as the Brass Monkey.
“People come to the Maritime if they can’t get into the SoHo House. And then if they can’t get into the Maritime, now they’re ending up [at the Brass Monkey],” Bryant said. This brand of patron, according to Bryant, usually has the attitude of a B-list celebrity without the cash. While the Brass Monkey used to be a local spot, famous for its wide array of beers and crowd of die-hard regulars, its close proximity to Meatpacking clubs has recently made it popular among a new, more transparent crowd.
“Wannabe celebrities are even worse than real ones, because they think if they act like an asshole, they’ll get treated better,” Bryant said. “You end up with snobby customers and bad tips. Those customers are the whole reason I didn’t work at a bar like the Maritime in the first place.” Bryant had lived in New York for years, and through them, had witnessed the general transformation of the Meatpacking District. Like the East Village or even Midtown, many New Yorkers believe that the its trademark energy faded years ago.
The Maritime consists of two outdoor cocktail lounges, La Bottega and Cabanas, the latter of which is an Amy Sacco original. Sacco is known for her ability to pump chi-chi into any Manhattan locale. She is also the mastermind behind the celebrity-laden Bungalow 8. Sacco’s name often drifted in and out of the conversations of velvet rope hopefuls, who talked about her with the casual affliction usually reserved for a friend or roommate. I can’t remember when I first heard her name, just that it was always there, lurking in the distance. Amy Sacco’s opening a new club, did you see that Amy Sacco is upstairs at Cabanas; I heard Amy Sacco’s moving to London…
Vanity Fair dubbed Sacco, a New Jersey native who worked her way up the restaurant ladder, from managing a small town restaurant at 13 to owning a number of New York City lounges, the “Queen of the Night” in a recent issue. Coincidently, Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter also plans to open his own restaurant soon, with the help of chief Maritime investor Sean McPherson and La Bottega chef John DeLucie. Judging from the success of Cabanas and other celebrity favorite Lot 61, Sacco is a good person to have on any aspiring restaurateur’s Rolodex.
At the time I worked there, La Bottega employed about 30 cocktail waitresses on the roster, which meant I often worked with different girls every night, most who were more concerned with strutting than serving. Three of us worked five days a week, Sheri, Renee and I, and the others cycled through at random, squeezing in shifts between auditions and go-sees. They all looked somewhat similar— all stick thin, with eyes and purses that seemed a little too large, and a face full of leftover makeup. There was only one manager who knew all of our names, a sandy-haired 29-year-old named David Dean. Unlike the other managers, who harbored a “don’t speak unless you’re spoken to” policy, David was relatively chatty.
“So how long have you lived in New York?” I asked him one day.
“Long enough,” David replied. “You?”
“I’ve only been here a week and a half, but I’d say the same thing.”
David laughed, and promised that New York, like the Maritime, would get less daunting with time.
“In a couple more months, you’ll be as jaded as the rest of us,” he said.
I wasn’t sure. Perhaps California gives any other city a lot to undo, but, at the time, I couldn’t imagine feeling anything but stranded— among the curving white awnings, faux portals and the tragically hip crowd that felt comfortable drinking cocktails in a hotel designed to look like a mix of luxury and The Love Boat. Maybe shipwrecked was a more accurate word.
It did help that I quickly became friends with Sheri and Renee. While they preferred to ignore the patrons, they were unusually friendly towards me. Not California friendly— there were no enveloping hugs or little girl giggles, but, they exhibited something I’d come to regard as New York friendly: a calculated but curious distance.
“Are you trying to be an actress?” Sheri, a sweet-faced blonde asked me, moments after I’d introduced myself. “I am. I have three regional commercials already.”
“No,” I said. “I go to school in San Diego. I’m just here for the summer.”
“So where do you live?” asked Renee, a dark-haired girl who studied fashion at NYU.
“Mulberry,” I said, “between Broom and Grand.”
“Little Italy, huh? Nice, that’ll do.”
“That’ll do?”
“Well, there are only like three acceptable places to live around here.”
Three? New York, with its slew of local pockets and hidden neighborhoods, only has three appropriate places to live?
“Well, basically anywhere downtown is good,” Sheri chimed in. “Like, SoHo, Nolita, Greenwich… those places are great. And then the Lower East Side is so up-and-coming, so that’s a good place too. I say anywhere below 22nd street. Anywhere above that is way too… tired.”
“Unless you can make it on the Upper East Side,” Renee said. “But you might need some help for that.”
As Dominique explained to me later, when New York girls get help, it means handouts, usually in the form of a couple thousand dollars from the wallet of a mid-life crisis-bearing stockbroker.
“I did it for awhile,” Sheri said. “He rented this great apartment for me right near Bloomingdales. But, those situations always get complicated.”
“Why, did his wife find out?”
“No, not really. It’s just—” Sheri leaned in, whispering. “I just couldn’t fuck him anymore. First of all, it never lasted nearly long enough, and then he had this potbelly that would bounce all around, and it just made me sick.”
Renee nodded sympathetically.
“Park Slope is good too,” she said to me.
From what I’d picked up, it’s never acceptable to go to Brooklyn, unless you’re going to Park Slope, Williamsburg or one of the two other Manhattan-alternatives, whose real estate was once affordable but had been climbing steadily towards the price tags on many downtown digs.
It seemed everyone had a different Maritime story. Renee had gotten the job through her ex-fiancé, who was a manager at Cabanas upstairs. Weeks after she began working at the Maritime, she found out her fiancé was sleeping with half of the Cabanas cocktail waitresses and trying unmercifully to sleep with the other half. Sheri had worked with Michelle six months ago at Coffee Shop, a trendy Union Square restaurant known for employing “the most beautiful girls in New York.” Coffee Shop, like the Maritime, attracted a particular brand of waitress, one that cared much less about making money than the possibility of finding fame, or at least a high profile sugar daddy.
“One of the girls I worked with slept with Donald Trump,” Sheri said proudly.
Both Michelle and Sheri had gotten fired for continuously not showing up to work, something the managers at the Maritime didn’t seem to mind, or notice. In the proceeding months, I learned that pooling tips, a Maritime policy, in Manhattan is actually illegal, and that somehow, our weekly checks didn’t actually reflected the amount of money we were making. Although the checks averaged out to about 250 a night, an informal polling of the waitress’ tips after a nine hour shift of serving fifteen dollar cocktails and overpriced champagne left a noticeable discrepancy. One night, after serving an entire engagement reception in my section (the private rooms had been double booked), I stared gloweringly at the $1,600 tip on the credit card receipt. That Friday, when I eagerly opened my check, it read the same amount as last week’s, give or take a few dollars. Somehow, Sheri and Renee never seemed to mind the money drained from our paychecks. Even in the last few days of the month, when I was counting ones hoping to make rent, Sheri would waltz in, pausing every few seconds to show off her new Dior sandals.
“It’s called investment shopping,” Tristan, a bartender at La Bottega, told me later over beers at Hogs and Heifers, the dive bar down the street from the Maritime, whose peanut shell crusted floor and assortment of hanging bras was a somewhat refreshing change from La Bottega.
I was instantly impressed. I’d been writing these girls off as deluded B-list wannabes, and they were actually smart enough to invest their money to their benefit.
“Their investments are their Chanels,” Tristan continued. “They rack up their credit cards on everything somehow associated with the velvet rope, their outfits, their breasts, bottles of Grey Goose, the whole bit.”
“So what happens?” I asked.
“Well, either they make it in modeling or designing or whatever, or they find a rich guy who’ll foot the bills. That’s just how it’s done.”
I sighed. “Maybe I should just work here,” I said, glancing around the tiny dive.
“Noora,” Tristan said, appalled. “We can go to places like this, but we can’t work at them.”
Tristan was a typical New York hipster, if that exists; he dressed appropriately metro, was inappropriately sarcastic and was undeniably attractive. I had the “cute” thing down— girlish giggles, wide eyes, the six-syllable “noooo” rolling off my tongue, but I felt that Tristan, like New York, needed something sexier, something I felt was out of my realm. I thought of the boys I’d left behind in San Diego— the frat boy with a heart of gold, the high school sweetheart whose number constantly appeared on my missed call list, but only past 2 a.m., the blue-eyed bartender who’d spent his entire life behind a red-lit bar in La Jolla. I wondered if Tristan and the Maritime were too much for me— if there was something more real and honest in the comfort of a Chelsea biker bar.
But by then, it was the beginning of July, and the idea of looking for a new job was too daunting, especially since I was only planning on staying for a couple months. Plus, there was something exhilarating about working at the Maritime, about being part of an illusive scene every night, about playing dress-up— something that also made me feel that if I left, I’d failed.
After a few weeks of work, I walked home happy for the first time, actually comforted by the New York night: the sticky air, the notorious orange door on Spring Street, the faint sounds of honking from Sixth Avenue, even the strains of karaoke coming from the Mulberry Street Bar. All of it felt awkwardly familiar. I could feel the night of New York on me, pressing into my sides, the July heat spinning me around. But, something still disconcerted me, and I felt uncomfortably out of control in this strange city. I didn’t know what scared me more— not fitting in, or discovering that the New York scene appealed to my own insecurities as well. I suppose it was the double-edged sword of exclusivity, something that became apparent to me when my friends from home came to visit for the weekend.
It was Saturday night, and La Bottega was packed to the brim— Diors in the coatroom and Armanis on the floor. The lounge was everything it promised it would be. The swish swish of skirts, hips pressed too close, knees knocking into one another. Groups of twos and threes instated in dark corners, dreamy eyed visitors posed as spectators by the sides, martini sippers and the men that paid for them stood idle by the bar, drinking in the scene. Beautiful girls, listless and lovely, clad in clothes they couldn’t afford.
My friends were instantly impressed by the Saturday night crowd; and, despite myself, I reveled in it. That’s the magic of trend; as much as we ridicule it, it’s a little like being at the popular lunch table in high school. We complained self-indulgently when sitting there, but knew that if we were three tables away, we’d be wondering what was being said.
“Do they have electric lemonades here?” Jennie asked me.
“Um, I’ll ask.”
It wasn’t on the computer screen, and when I asked Steve, a bartender/ comedian/ actor/ ”I’m versatile”, he gave me the Maritime eye roll.
“Tell the girl that we only serve adult drinks here,” he said.
I returned to my friends, and explained to Jennie that we didn’t have the Blue Cucaro needed to make her drink and I’d be happy to get her a Bellini instead.
“Tristan winked at us from the bar,” Allison said, between sips of her Lychee martini. “I can’t believe you’re dating him. He is so cute.”
Later that night, I introduced my friends to Sheri and Renee, who were very excited to meet more Californians. According to them, I was too happy, and they wanted to see if all of California suffered from optimism.
Jennie glanced down at Sheri’s feet, and asked suddenly, “Are those Manolo’s?”
We all looked down at the black ribbon stilettos on Sheri’s size 5 feet.
“Yeah,” Sheri said. “I love Manolo’s. I’m like addicted.”
I thought of my tips from last week, the remnants of which could barely purchase a pair of Carrie Bradshaw inspired footwear, let alone leave enough for rent, or dinner. Despite Sheri’s off-putting attitude, in which she was completely unabashed about adhering to a world solely based on money, there was something admirable about her bluntness, even about these New York girls in general. They were surprisingly resilient. And unlike the blank friendliness of Californians, these girls were honest in their affections— as long as there wasn’t any cash involved. Maybe New York girls were more unforgiving, but they also felt more genuine.
Sheri never did “pity invites”, according to her, so when she grabbed my arm after my second week of work, and insisted I come with her to Lot 61 (her favorite New York club), I slipped out of my navy-blue dress and squeezed myself into something more city-appropriate.
I’d never seen a velvet rope like that in California. Hoards of girls, dressed far past the nines, stood impatiently in a long line that stretched around the sidewalk. Sheri sauntered up to the door with a strut designed for a movie star, not a Maritime waitress. The stocky, rough faced bouncer drew Sheri in and softly kissed her cheek. He lifted up the rope, to the dismay of the small crowd of six-feet tall women standing in the front of the line, and we filed in. As I glanced back at the envious partygoers, I felt uncannily powerful, a small but inappropriate rush of self-importance. I felt as if I’d just received a proverbial nod, a stamp of approval from the big city— an affirmation I didn’t even know I wanted.
Lot 61 became our Tuesdays, and Light our Wednesdays. I saw Jenna only occasionally, in the random moments we were both home, and at these encounters, we were usually surprised. We’d come to occupy different parts of the city, even while living in the same Mulberry Street apartment. She saw the bustle of the day— frantic 7 a.m. lines outside Starbucks, hurried business lunches on rooftop cafes, people making and breathing money. I lived the New York night. I watched people spend their money, their black American Express cards sliding across the tables, and saw both businessmen and bums take swigs from warm beer too late into the night. Near the end of my shift, Sheri would usually appear beside me with a plan for the rest of the night, to the dismay of her patrons, who were wildly waving their hands in the air for her attention.
The summer stretched on like that— a blurry pastiche of crowded clubs and long nights, that sometimes ended in my bed and sometimes in Tristan’s. California kept getting smaller and smaller on our “map of the U.S.” mug. Sometimes I leaned against the La Bottega walls, balancing my cocktail tray on my fingertip; and sometimes I slumped, exhausted from the weight of trying too hard. As the summer days began getting shorter, and August rolled into September, I realized the actualities of home, and it’s looming, floating presence.
Legendary rock critic Lester Bangs once wrote in a self-gratifying rant on California, “California has… managed to convince itself and at least part of the rest of the world that this “pleasure,” “happiness,” “contentment” stuff might actually be attainable on a day-to-day basis. All you have to do is sign an affidavit foreswearing forever any resistance to being a moron.” Perhaps there is something in the sun that made Californians contingent on simplicity. Or maybe California and New York weren’t so different after all, and New York was just less apologetic about the things that make cities, and people, tick.