Trying to Float (10 page)

KING OF THE NIGHT

AT THE HOTEL,
I was spending a lot of time with Dahlia and her family. Visiting Dahlia and her mom one day, I noticed that Artie wasn't in his room. When he returned, he had difficulty talking. Dahlia and her mother were concerned.

Over the next months, Artie was required to take certain medicines, and though he would continue to drink from his flask (when Dahlia and her mother weren't home), he was limited as to what he could put in his mouth. But whatever problems he was having and however concerned others might be, he never seemed to worry.

In truth, Artie was not a guy who worried about much. For something to worry him meant that it was tougher than he was, and nothing was tougher than Artie.

One day when he could no longer speak, he went across the street to the art supply store and bought a small blackboard, and threw it around his neck. When he wanted to say some
thing, he would scribble on the board in colored chalk. His speech became multicolored poetry.

When he slept, which he did a lot, Hammie would crawl onto his chest. I would sit next to them.

Soon people started dropping by the apartment. People I'd never seen before. Some of them caused a lot of talk in the building, so I guessed they were famous.

A few days after Artie died, Hammie died too.

A few days after that, this came out in
The New York Times
.

In the glittery, manic, often ostentatiously naughty 1970s and '80s, Arthur Weinstein was king of the night. His kingdom was a new breed of nightclubs that transcended disco balls, tired formulas and strobe lights to become ultra-hip destinations for those deemed worthy of entering. . . .

Mr. Weinstein opened illegal after-hours clubs downtown that mixed the fashionable and the young and artistic. The kids had radically odd colors of hair, and the coat-checker was a transvestite. . . .

Mr. Weinstein had another success with the World, a Lower East Side club—this one legal—distinguished by chandeliers, rotting rococo sofas, cherry syrup lights and a V.I.P. room where Stolichnaya—and perhaps other ­substances—flowed limitlessly. A former fashion photographer, he designed dazzling lighting systems for many other clubs, including the Limelight and the Tunnel. . . .

His wife, Colleen, said he died last Wednesday in Manhattan at the age of 60. The cause, she said, was head and neck cancer. A friend, Steve Lewis, posted a message on the Web saying Mr. Weinstein had died of “beauty.”

When Dahlia and Colleen asked me if I wanted anything from Artie's belongings, I said no. I didn't need anything. I already had the obituary, folded and sticking out of my back pocket. Just like Artie.

THE STUDIO

AFTER SCHOOL, I
often ended up at my mom's studio. While she was painting, I would sit on the floor and watch her fill pots with beeswax, melt it down, and then mix in pigments. She would pour the hot, colorful wax onto a wood panel, and create abstract patterns. If she didn't like the print, she would blowtorch the panel until it was smooth again. Many of the patterns were inspired by things she had seen on her travels to the most obscure and difficult parts of the world, such as Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia. Her studio, like our apartment, was filled with curiosities that she had brought back from these places.

My mom had all kinds of art supplies, from watercolors to welding materials. Sometimes, I'd pull out a big pad of paper and start to draw. I would usually draw figures of pretty girls my age. Nothing special except for the fact that I liked these girls, and, more important, I made sure they liked me. My mom said she used to draw the same figures at my age.

In the studio one day, I noticed an African sculpture.

When I was a baby and would wake up early in the morning, my mother or father would take me outside. On the weekends, one of the few places open early was the flea market on Twenty-fifth Street and Sixth Avenue. It was housed in a two-level parking garage. Each floor was divided into booths, each one approximately the size of one parking space. Every weekend my parents and I would descend through the black plastic tarp that covered the entrance to the garage. On the other side, we were greeted by hundreds of people prepping tables and bargaining noisily. My parents would split off, one of them holding me, and wander around the treasures and the junk. One of my dad's favorite stands was filled with African sculptures, some so caked in mud, cloth, and shells that I couldn't tell whether they were human or animal, male or female.

My parents and I got to know the Malians who operated the stand, and a number of them would visit us in our apartment, sitting for hours drinking tea and talking about West Africa. One of them told me that these African objects were used to remind people of their link to places seen and unseen, the worlds of animals, ancestors, and gods.

The object in my mom's studio brought me relief, for I began to think that I was not stuck in the cage of what others thought of me. I was connected to worlds that had nothing to do with school—my mother and father and our relatives, yes, but also to the people in the Chelsea and to their lives
and histories, real or imagined. I wanted to be the kid who would remind everyone else that they didn't have to stay in their cliques, for it seemed that even the most popular kids had conflicting thoughts about who they were.

I knew this because several of the same kids who ignored me when we were around other kids would approach me when we were alone. They found some comfort in telling me their problems, and I was happy just to be acknowledged.

Ana Penny, Greta's new best friend, was one such kid. She was slender and sweet with dark green eyes and strawberry blond hair; she could dance and sing, and she was always cast as the lead in the school musicals. She was (from the first day she stepped into nursery school to the day she would leave for college) adored.

Despite liking almost everyone, Ana could never bring herself to be friends with those whom her friends disliked. She bobbed up and down on the waves of other people's approval. And she hated herself for it, which made her tragic.

MY CROWD

MEREDITH PENNY, ANA'S
mother, made sure that nothing went wrong with her daughter's education. She did this by doing something which, for my parents, was unthinkable: she got involved in Ana's schools.

Meredith was a helicopter parent and hung out with those who were always involved with the school in some way: active in the PTA, raising money, organizing plays and musicals, always available to help other parents and teachers.

As a result of the influence she wielded, Meredith was able to guarantee that Ana was in the same classes as her friends with the best teachers in the school. The kids who had the misfortune to miss out on a parent like Meredith, and hadn't managed to make friends with one of their kids, ended up in classes taught by teachers who were nearing retirement, tenured and tired, and who were not yet looney enough to be fired.

We were the outcasts.

Within any social environment, there's a sort of pickup
game in which the captain of one team chooses her best friend, then the captain of the other team chooses hers, and then back and forth until the most desirable people have all been picked. There is nothing the undesirables can do but hope that they are not the last one picked.

It's one of the worst moments of anybody's life: you and some other unfortunate are the last two. One of you will be picked and the other will cry. The teacher says, “Hurry up! Just pick one!” and the captain gives in. “Fine . . . you,” she says.

Your heart leaps as you start forward, smugly grinning (a piece of spinach lodged in your teeth) . . . until the captain corrects you. You're not the one; he chose the other kid, the one with the broken foot.

In my elementary and middle schools, the only ones I got to know were the last ones chosen—the ones brought to the bottom by the undertow of rejection. Mom likes to tell the story of when she asked me why a certain boy was being picked on. I replied, “He's a nerd.” When Mom asked if I was one of the kids picking on the boy, I was astonished.

“Of course not. I'm a nerd too, and besides, he's a popular nerd.”

If you wanted to meet us, the outcasts, it was not difficult. We all sat together in the middle school cafeteria. Table 17.

—

One of the kids at my table was Noah. He was a tall boy, who distinguished himself by sticking his head into other
people's business—literally. Noah could not be within five feet of someone without feeling the need to touch his head against some part of their body.

Noah's habit was not taken well by the other students (or the teachers or the principal, who once found Noah wedged into his armpit), and people stopped talking to him. Soon parents attempted to have him removed from school. This seemed unfair, and I did what I could to keep him around.

One day, I took Noah aside. “Noah,” I said, his head resting atop my shoulder, “try to imagine that everyone is surrounded by a bubble, and if you pop the bubble, something terrible will happen to the person inside.”

Whether my little speech caused Noah to stop attaching his head to other people's bodies, I cannot say. But it stopped. And that, I thought, would be the end of it; the other kids would stop hating him, he wouldn't get kicked out of school, and I would have him off my back. A fine plan.

That was until Noah started licking people. I guess he thought that he could lick the bubble without popping it. From then on, he was “the Licker.”

Horatio was another boy at my table. Smart and funny, he had close-cropped grayish brown hair and a head that was much wider at the chin than at the forehead. An egg.

In addition, he had a five-eleven frame, a distinguished belly, and a baritone. Taken together, Horatio was an imposing figure for a sixty-year-old man and a frightening one for a child
.

The oddest thing about Horatio was that whenever he got agitated, which was often, he would lie facedown on the floor, stiff as a living body could be. No matter what people said or did to coax him off the ground, he would not budge until his anxiety passed, which could be ten minutes, twenty minutes, or more. No one, including Horatio, could predict how long he would be down there.

Nor did it matter where he was when he went down. It could be in the middle of class. Unable to answer a question, he would take his place on the floor, stiffen his body, and stay there until the bell rang. I once heard a teacher describe this as “social rigor mortis.”

One day, my friend Maria was talking with Horatio, when she realized from the expression on his face that she might have hurt his feelings. “Horatio, don't plank! Please don't plank . . .” she started, but it was too late. Facedown on the floor, Horatio was gone.

Horatio, unsurprisingly, became known as “the Planker.”

The Planker lived near me, and we would get off the subway together at Twenty-third Street. There were often two or three boys waiting for him outside the station, and they would chase him down the street. The Planker was usually able to get inside his building before they caught him, but when he couldn't, they'd jostle him around.

There was no reason for them to harm the Planker; they did it because they thought he was odd and vulnerable and their instincts and upbringing made them hate the weak.
Watching this day after day, it was easy to conclude that boys were much closer on the evolutionary map to orangutans than they were to girls.

One Friday, the Planker had promised to come with me to get cupcakes at Billy's (a local cupcakery), when he was rushed upon by the primates while exiting the subway. He fled with the boys in pursuit as I watched angrily. One does not gorge oneself on cupcakes alone. No, this annoyance had to be dealt with.

The next Monday after school I took one of the boys aside and told him that if he continued to chase the Planker, he would have to “reckon with me.”

To my surprise, it worked.

Only years later did I learn that what scared them away was not my aggressive use of antique phrases, but my reputation (Greta loved to repeat the pool party story) for being homicidal. By the time it reached middle school, the story had twisted into:

“And then Nicolaia threw my little niece into the pool, and when my aunt cried out, Nicolaia pushed my aunt on top of the baby, screaming, ‘You take that, motherf#@ker!' ”

In addition to the Licker and the Planker at table 17, there was Maria. After being rejected by Janie and the incident with the Look, there was no one at the school who wanted to hang out with her, and she ended up at the table with the rest of us.

Maria was the one person who stuck with me through the
months in which I was not pregnant with Oscar's child. Maria had the biggest smile and a bigger heart.

The only other boy at the table was Joshua. He was the Planker's best friend, but unlike the Planker, who was a long fellow, Joshua was barely taller than Maria. But what Joshua lacked in height, he made up for in sarcasm.

My first encounter with Joshua was in the school gymnasium, where he lay on the ground, moaning and frothing. His head swiveled back and forth, cleaning up the loose dirt on the floor.

By the time the nurse arrived (a good twenty minutes after the attack), Joshua was still moaning and frothing. Witnesses helped the nurse diagnose Joshua with a case of made-a-snarky-remark-and-got-kicked-in-the-gonads disease.

We, however, came to appreciate Joshua's capacity to weep. That boy could weep in response to events that hardly bothered anyone else; he could weep loudly or softly, day or night, and always in earnest.

Scattered among the other kids, we had a fighting chance of pulling ourselves up to the middle of the social ladder, or at least to another rung. Grouped together at one table, we were finished: no one could look at me without thinking of the Planker, or look at Maria without being reminded that the girl next to her had attempted to drown a baby.

But in my mind we were a club of superheroes: Joshua had the power to flood cities with his tears; Noah's tongue could deafen or strangle enemies; Horatio could make a speedy
escape by lying on the floor; and Maria, small, could sneak up on people without them ever knowing it. I, though, had the greatest power of all: the ability to alienate people who had just met me.

Try as I might, I could not fight off my fondness for this gang and came to see myself as their protector—a sort of Professor X or Nick Fury, the mother of them all.