“Carlos and I had a few arrangements, is all.
Among them a little extra juice for making the trip upstairs.” He peels two hundred-dollar bills from a money clip and hands them to me. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“I guess not.” My eyes drift back toward the birdhouse.
“It’s called a vaporizer,” he explains. “My cousin sent me one from Los On-hell-eez. It’s like a health food thing. No tar — just pure THC. Just takes forever to heat up.” Danny pulls out a pack of Vantages and bangs it against his hand a couple of times before offering me one. I shake my head no.
My pager’s already buzzing again.
“I should get going.”
“The Candyman’s work is never done. But while I’ve got you here, let me run something else by you.
Another arrangement I had with Carlos. These skimpyass quarters are fine for the office,” he says, gesturing at the bag I’ve placed on his desk. “But for the weekend, I need a little weight. I know: They’ve already told you they don’t do weight.”
He’s right: Rico made it clear, during our time together, that transactions involving anything above and beyond the “gentleman’s quarter” are forbidden by papal decree. It’s the kind of modesty that keeps the Pontiff under the radar and out of jail. It’s also, he hinted, the reason why Carlos was fired.
“First day,” I say, holding up my hands in surrender.
“Sure,” Danny says, handing me a business card. “When you change your mind, there’s an extra five hundred dollars a week in it for you.”
• I MEET THE NEXT CUSTOMER at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Seventh Avenue. My first thought is: Who knew so many beautiful women smoked pot?
My next thought: She’s a he. Not a transvestite
… just, I have to admit, a very attractive man wearing skintight leather pants and black mascara.
He screams when he sees me. “Yah! Pleeeease tell me you’ve got the damn weed!” He stomps his foot impatiently while I take him through the standard script, but manages all the right answers.
Until we get to the part about the money.
“Fuuuuck!” He fumbles through his pockets, coming up with a condom and some lint.
“We’re done here,” I say, walking back toward the subway station.
He grabs my shoulder. I spin toward him, putting on what I hope is a scowl. I consider myself more lover than fighter, but I’m not about to get intimidated by a guy wearing eyeliner. “You’re violating my personal space,” I say.
“Follow me back to the crib. Kristof’s got the scratch.”
“Call again when you’re flush.” I turn again to leave.
“It’s right down the goddamn street. You know the Hotel Chelsea?”
I HAVE SEEN SID AND NANCY FOURTEEN TIMES.
Despite what you probably think, I’m not some crazyass obsessive fan. I mean, it’s a great movie, even if they got Johnny Rotten all wrong. A love story that isn’t full of shit, that recognizes the stupidity of it all — true love, impossible in the real world, only leads to pain.
But that’s not the reason I’ve seen it fourteen times. I’ve seen it fourteen times because it was the only movie Daphne owned, and we were usually too lazy, wasted, or horny to make it to the video store.
“Remind you of anyone we know?” she’d ask me each time after it ended. A question that should have been, let’s face it, a gigantic red flag, given that — sorry if I’m spoiling the ending for you — Sid winds up stabbing Nancy to death in a room at the Chelsea Hotel.
But then Daphne would sing Leonard Cohen: “I remember— you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed …”
At which point she would stop singing and reenact the scene — the TV was conveniently located in the bedroom. Thankfully, unlike the song or the movie, Daphne’s version always had a happy ending.
We used to talk about staying at the Chelsea for what I assumed would be a night of mind-blowing sex. Before she tried to kill me. Still, I kind of owe it to myself to see the place.
“In and out,” I say to Leatherpants. “And that’s not like, you know, a metaphor for anything. I’m serious.
You better not offer to blow me when we get there.”
He’s already racing down the street. “You know, for a drug dealer,” he yells over his shoulder, “you’re dressed like a real asshole.”
The hotel, a hundred years old, looks her age.
Not so much from the outside, but inside there’s an ongoing war between patchwork and decay. The smart money is on decay. But I still feel a tingle when I see the familiar lobby, nearly every square inch of wall space burnished by paintings whose placement and artistic value both seemed to have been chosen completely at random.
I follow Leatherpants — who by now has introduced himself as Nate — past the front desk toward the elevators. A guy in an expensive sweater, possibly cashmere, pressed slacks, and tassel loafers looks up from the floor he’s mopping.
He examines us through a pair of glasses hanging from a cord around his neck. He doesn’t look pleased.
“Hello, Herman!” says Nate, waving as he shoots past the guy onto the square-spiral case, ripping off three steps at a time. I jog after him, feeling Herman’s stare on my back. We don’t stop until we reach the fourth floor.
I’m not sure what I expected. Kind of a punk-rock Animal House, maybe. The peeling wallpaper and rusting pipes feel right, but the hallway is quiet and empty. It occurs to me that for the second time in my first three Meet-Ups, I’m violating the rule against following customers back to their rooms.
The police could be waiting for me. Or worse, I’m going to get jumped and rolled when I step through the door.
Nate bounds down the hallway like a manic jackalope, planting his feet in front of Room 411.
“Janis Joplin,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“This was Janis’s suite.”
Then he opens the door, sucking all of the fear and disappointment out of the air.
It’s backstage at a rock concert born in the imagination of a horny teenage boy: beer cans, bottles of Jack half-drunk, rock nymphettes halfclothed. Guns N’ Roses blasting from a box radio on the kitchenette’s counter. A topless blonde sways to the music on top of the guy she’s got pinned to the couch, hypnotizing him with tits too perfect to be real. A Eurotrash dude with a clove cigarette and a brown jacket that might be sewn from the skins of baby deer cheers on two brunettes in stretchy miniskirts, asses so sculpted they should be in a museum, as they face off in a dance that makes the Lambada look like the Virginia Reel. The part of my brain that isn’t gaping like a tourist wonders why I can’t see any panty lines.
“Is that you?” comes a voice from an attached bedroom. I turn toward it in time to see a perfect female silhouette framed in the doorway against the sunlight, a trucker’s mud flap come to life. Then she steps into the room, and there’s nothing left to remind me of a trucker. Her eyelids seem to open a fraction of an inch higher than they should, leaving extra space for her eyes — radioactive blue, lively and intelligent. High cheekbones softened by pillowy lips and auburn hair that cascades in waves down to the small of her back. A body whose long legs and curves would have been a genius plastic surgeon’s signature work had they not been entirely the real thing. She’s wearing a concert tee with three-quarter sleeves, white panties, and nothing else. She looks at me quizzically. “You’re not Nate.”
Nate’s across the room with the Euro-dude, who’s reaching for his wallet. “No,” I reply, scrambling for an opening line. But I’m too slow.
“Well then close the damn door,” she says. By the time I step inside and close the door behind me, Nate is greeting her with a kiss.
“There’s my angel,” he says, twirling her around like a dancer. “I was just securing your degeneracy of choice.” He pulls her close, slips a $100 bill into the band of her panties, and spins her into me. We realize at the
