Last night, for a friend's birthday party, I went to a club owned by Jay-Z. The place was striking; it's what I imagine a club would look like if it were designed by a 12-year-old boy. Flat screen TVs everywhere—a large one behind the bar, smaller ones decorating the walls like picture frames, and even screens mounted on poles that could be manually turned to face any direction—all of them playing sports.
There were soft leather chairs suspended by twenty-foot metal poles that hung from the vaulted ceiling. When sitting in them you could move around in circles, as if you were the large end of a spoon being stirred around. (If you swung too violently, however, a man in a dark suit would touch you on the shoulder and politely ask you to refrain. If you sat in the chair with someone else, he would solemnly hold up a single finger and bring you a folding chair to sit in instead.)
The stairs were also equipped with chairs, which were essentially stair-shaped cushions that sat snugly on top, fitting together like jagged Legos. (The stair-chairs faced the giant TV, and by default, the bar, whose colorful liquor was illuminated from below.) Framed sports jerseys lined the walls, most of them signed by the famous men who'd sweat in them, and in the private room where the party was held, there was even a glass case showing the glittery belt of a championship wrestler. Our room also had a pool table, an intercom that pumped house music, and a collection of large, stiff red-and-black pillows stacked in orderly rows.
I didn't see any evidence of Girl in the club anywhere, not even as a sex object; the place seemed to be designed by prepubescent boys for prepubescent boys, ones who happen to have a lot of money. The price of an Amstel Light was impressive ($9) but almost seemed reasonable compared to the $15 gin-and-tonics, or the $45 caesar salad. Really! I mean that. $45. I learned by example and nursed the root beer I'd brought with me.
Whenever someone walks by on the red carpet, as long as they're not wearing a Tribeca Film Festival badge, they're showered with light and told to look right and left and straight ahead—yelled at, in fact. Sometimes I don't recognize the celebrity, but generally at least one of the photographers comes up with a believable-sounding name, and the rest of us scribble down notes. The other night, after we barraged an unfamiliar moon-faced blonde with our winking shutters, I turned to the photographer on my left and asked who we'd just documented. "I dunno," he shrugged. In fact, no one knew who she was, even after the PR person told us her name.
Tonight the stars were bigger, and the press pen smaller, and I got to witness a legion of professional adults practically tackling some sparkly people; it looked a little like what happens when a breadcrumb is thrown at a pack of hungry pigeons. I took turns watching the press and nosing my own lens in between bodies whenever possible.
It was the first night I've been able to watch the film following the red carpet parade. During the movie, I was lightly aware that the actors from the film were sitting among the rest of us, but it got weird when I walked out of the theater with the characters on either side of me, as if they'd hopped out of the picture and into 3-D. I still had movie brain, so it actually seemed to make a little bit of sense that Sir Ian McKellen was standing two feet away, when just moments before he was looming over me onscreen.
I don't make a very good member of the paparazzi, it turns out. The atmosphere is a little too chaotic, aggressive, and competitive, and the pictures I've been taking (famous heads against logo-stamped cardboard) aren't particularly interesting to me. I'd rather not impose, so I don't call out the celebrity names as they pass by, as my temporary peers do, trying to capture the subject's direct gaze. I miss the exchange of words and eye contact (when subjects are in view, my face is hidden by my lens), and I have a pronounced camera inferiority complex. (I treat my lovely Nikon D70 as if it were a disposable cardboard camera, shamefully trying to make it as inconspicuous as possible while it's in the company of its massive relatives.)
I also realized I'm not quite jaded enough to be paparazzi. (I thought there was a chance of that when a couple famous people walked by and I felt nothing, but it didn't last.) For example, I mentally lost my composure when Griffin Dunne strode by on the red carpet, but mostly because I was randomly carrying a copy of After Hours in my bag. (What are the chances of that? It's like I summoned him.) I really wanted to pull out the tape and show it to him (Hey Griffin, look what I happen to have! Isn't that crazy??), but I knew that in doing that I would out myself as a paparazzi imposter. Instead, I quietly stared at him through my inferior lens, my thoughts unfolding in silent exclamation marks.
Whenever the red carpet was empty, the other paparazzi would turn to each other and talk like friends, leaning against the rails of the press pen and guessing as to whether Jay-Z would make an appearance. I watched the door for him, and willed him to come. I thought it would be cool to see him in person, and even to take a flat, boring picture of him, but mostly I wanted to hear the paparazzi yell out his name, "Jay-Z! Jay-Z!" just like the television reporter in Jay-Z's song "Dope Man." He never showed, though.
I'd seen the abandoned subway car before, but since I'd last been there, Sean had figured out how to climb inside. We followed him to the edge of the East River and ducked underneath a torn chain-linked fence, the red wine in my plastic cup sloshing around and staining a couple of the large rocks below our feet. Sean kept reminding us that we needed to be quiet, and mentioned that he's been caught nine times before. He said the caretaker kind of hates him.
We hoisted ourselves through the front window and examined the car from the inside, admiring the pale green seats and unusual hand grips, made vintage by years of design evolution. It was hard to see our surroundings in the dark, so I took flash photos of the interior and looked at the LCD screen instead. From the window, we could see the bright and distant Statue of Liberty standing on the water, which seemed out of place from our isolated patch of rocks. I kept thinking the subway car might make a nice home for someone with relatively low standards, and I wondered why the place wasn't more popular with the homeless. It also occurred to me that it was roughly the same size and shape of my apartment.
Sometimes it's too crowded to read a book, because the necessary 8 inches in front of my face are already occupied by unfamiliar faces, hair, and shoulders. As an alternative, it's often possible to read other people's material. The other day, I found myself pressed at the backs of two strangers, my face poised over their touching shoulders like an anxious backseat passenger, and I read page 372 of Middlesex (hers) and page 123 of Please Kill Me (his). Newspapers are naturally more satisfying, since they're succinct enough to teach me something, and they offer choices.
I usually don't mind when the bodies of strangers hold me upright, like some sort of surfing marionette, as long as the trip is relatively brief. The forced intimacy is actually kind of amusing, mostly because (out of necessity and habit) we all choose to ignore it. Today I saw a tall, round Hasidic man and a short skinny black guy press their respective belly and chest firmly together out of rush hour desperation, each probably trying to pretend that it didn't make him uncomfortable. Of course, had the subway car been nearly empty, the very same interaction would've suggested a different meaning, or at least would've received more attention. Instead, few people seemed to notice, as there were unlikely couples smashed together all over the place.
Out of laziness, I'd been using a sticky note as a bookmark, because that was the closest thing to me when I needed to mark my place. It's purple, and for some reason, it resembles the shape of a house. The glue on the back of it runs right through the middle, so when you try to adhere it to something, the ends curl up on both sides and it falls to the floor. As a sticky note, it gets an F; as a bookmark, a C.
I finished the book I was reading while lying in bed last night. Once it had served its purpose, rather than putting the sticky note back in the book, I got up to throw it away. (Well, full disclosure: earlier that day I'd hidden some old gum in it during an "emergency," so it really needed to be thrown out.) When I walked into the kitchen, I realized the gas on the stove was turned on, and had been since I cooked dinner, four hours earlier. Which means, that had I not gotten out of bed to dispose of my gum-stuffed bookmark, I would've slept the entire night with gas snaking throughout my apartment like a curious ghost. I don't really know what the consequences would've been (the gas was only on 'low'), but I considered the possibility that I might've never woken up. In any case, it couldn't have been terribly healthy.
After a moment of relief, I lied awake in bed and imagined what today would've been like, had I died in my sleep. I don't mean in a morbid way, or even a sad way. I was just thinking—practically—how would the day go? When would my coworkers shift from thinking I was late to realizing something was wrong? (11:00? 12?) Is my apartment clean enough, so as to not be embarrassing? (Yes, I think so.) The deadbolt was locked, which means someone would have to break the door to get in. (That'd be a shame.) I tried to think of every detail that would make the day different, if I weren't present for it. Sometime during that process, I fell asleep.
Due to a minor misunderstanding, our plans to go to the park fell through, so we ended up in Q's backyard instead. It was important that we be outside, since it was the warmest day New York has experienced since October or so, the sky was blue, and the wind was absent. Even if I hadn't witnessed the same bleak winter weather as everyone else, I would've known that pleasant temperatures had only just arrived, merely by observing human behavior. The people on my street, for example, were skipping down the sidewalk as if they'd just been let out of prison by mistake.
Q's backyard is significant in that Q has a yard, and Q might be my only friend in New York whom I can say that about. It should be noted, however, that Q's yard is composed entirely of concrete, and that one fourth of it is claimed by a giant pile of rubble that the landlord has decided to build a low concrete wall around. (The concrete wall doesn't conceal or contain the rubble; it simply outlines it, like velvet rope encircling a piece of art.)
The front edge of the yard is made up of the backside of Q's brick building and a rusty fire escape, and the back boundary is demarcated by a rusty chain-link fence that has been peeled away in one corner. When standing in Q's yard, you aren't able to see anything resembling nature, unless you count the dead tree that stubbornly sticks out of Rubble Mountain.
I sat on a dirty plastic sunbathing chair, and Q half-dusted off the other one with a discarded shirt he found on the ground. Because Q and his roommates haven't yet readied their yard for spring, there are small piles of fragrant trash decorating the concrete, perhaps remnants left by whoever peeled back the fence.
We were sitting on the eastern side of the building, so the sun faded faster than it should've and prematurely sucked out the last bit of color from our surroundings. It took me a while to notice that, during one of the very first hours we'd absorbed of spring 2005, we'd chosen to sit in a place that resembled a jail cell.
M and C opened a record store-slash-café about a year ago. I was on the longish list of people M had asked to help think of a name for the store. (I don't think I gave her much to work with; I'm pretty terrible at that.) The process seemed rather long and complicated (no thanks to me), and I secretly hoped that it didn't mean that the venture was doomed.
Since then I've visited the store sporadically and have watched it evolve—from the beginning, when M lamented painting the bathroom with hot pink oil-based paint, to when she proudly hung her food license on the wall, to when the first burn welts grew out of her hands like hard-core badges. The store looks really good now, and every time I'm there, a new collection of shaggy, hip people bend over racks of vinyl and thumb through worn cardboard corners, or tap dance their fingers on pristine white laptops.
Yesterday Bryan and I sat in the front window and played Scrabble over coffee, while M sat next to us with her white laptop, volunteering to ask the online Miriam-Webster for assistance whenever one of us invented a word. The online Miriam-Webster has a feature that speaks the word out loud, so naturally M's "service" devolved into an exercise of her making the computer say surprise vulgar words in order to induce laughter. She let us pick apart a pink mint cupcake while Bryan and I did unorthodox things like help each other play the game by offering inter-team advice, or allowing almost-words to be counted. Also, we kept score but forgot to tally it.
