same time — and with roughly equal levels of embarrassment — that I’m expected to remove the cash from her intimates. We attend to the transaction with a minimum of eye contact.
“At least my degeneracy is all-natural,” she says.
I remove the bag of weed from my pocket and hand it to her.
“Now come on, sugar,” Nate says, raising an eyebrow toward the couch. “Artificial has its charms. Wouldn’t you say so, Clem?” The guy on the couch seems to agree, his reply muffled by the blonde’s bodacious endowments.
“You’re a pig,” says the silhouette, returning with the weed to whatever magical lair she emerged from. Nate grins and follows, stopping only to punch me on the shoulder.
“You’re the man,” he tells me. “Stay and party. I’ll bet Kristof will share.”
Across the room, the two brunettes — Kristof’s apparent bounty — interlock their tongues in a passionate kiss. I look down at my pager. It is barely eleven o’clock in the morning.
“I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Well, come on by after,” he says, closing the bedroom door behind him. “The party never ends.”
Six hours later, having ditched my sports jacket on a nearby fire escape, I walk back into the Chelsea. The man in the maybe-cashmere sweater sits behind the front desk, clearly in his natural element. He is the master of this environment.
Whether by optical illusion or some other arrangement, the light in the room actually seems to bend toward him.
I smile, wave as I’d seen Nate do, say “Hello, Herman!” and make for the stairs.
“I don’t baleeve we’ve met,” Herman says. His voice is what you might call “New York Authentic,” nasal and low-pitched, and amplifies his already potent dominion over the lobby. “Yuh wuh heah earliah, wit’ Nate.”
“I was just headed back upstairs to see him,” I reply. But my feet have stopped moving and the staircase — another optical illusion — seems to be moving farther away from me.
“No yuh not. Not unless yuh been vetted wit’ me fihst.”
“I didn’t realize this was that kind of joint,” I reply, a lame attempt at vaudeville humor. Something about the accent. “You want to see my calling card?”
“Huh,” he snorts. “Yuh tink I don’t know yuh a drug dealah?”
Ouch. I cycle through my brain for a response until a bell goes off. It’s the elevator. We both turn toward the opening doors. The silhouette is slightly different, but I know immediately it’s the same girl.
She steps into the lobby. Her wavy hair is slicked back, still wet from a shower. She’s wearing a Catholic schoolgirl miniskirt, 18-eye Doc Martens, and an oversized leather jacket that probably belongs to Nate.
“Hi,” I say, a little too eagerly.
“Hi,” she replies, politely concealing her inability to place me. Her radioactive blues are stony red.
“When I was here earlier. This morning. Nate told me to stop by the party later.”
“The party ended hours ago.” Herman looks down when she says this, apparently deeply saddened by the news.
“I’m an idiot,” I suggest.
She looks me over. Now I’m wishing I were wearing something other than wool slacks and a button-down. “Probably,” she finally says. “But you’re coherent enough to have a drink with me, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” I say. “I pride myself on my coherence.”
Herman slinks back into the shadows behind the desk. I follow her down a corridor that connects the lobby to the Mexican restaurant next door, where mariachi music pipes in through tinny speakers and the waiters are dressed for a bullfight. We slide into a booth and order margaritas and cheese nachos.
Her name is K. Actually, it’s Katherine, but she adopted the initial because she thought it would help her get started as a professional model. Her first job took her from her native Northern California
—“Sunnyvale!” she chirps with an exaggeratedly fake smile — across the Pacific Ocean, where she spent three months doing catalog shoots in South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. “Amazing,” she says, “but incredibly lonely.” She met Nate during a return trip to San Francisco — he and Clem, the guy I’d seen getting dry-humped on the couch, formed half of an L.A. glam-rock revival band called Venomous Iris. A drunken hookup at a bar segued into a drunken weekend in Napa Valley and an invitation from Nate to follow him back to L.A., where he was scheduled to play a few dates on the Sunset Strip. He was tall and sexy and spoke English and what the fuck, following a band for a while would probably be fun. Clem told her from the start that Nate was a guitar god, and he hadn’t been lying: The band got signed to a deal and their first album, Love Vampire, won over a few influential reviewers who dug the fusion between GN’R and Bowie. Sales weren’t amazing, but they were promising enough to earn them a shot at a second album. Only the scene in L.A. was … you know, L.A. — not exactly conducive to getting shit done. They somehow hooked up with Kristof, who’d spent some time working for the record companies and also possibly as an international arms dealer, but we don’t talk about that, who offered to not only manage the band but bankroll a trip to New York City, because no distractions in New York, right?
That last part was sarcasm, K. assures me.
They moved into the Chelsea eight months ago.
Herman was thrilled to have them as guests, giving them the suite that had belonged to Janis because, as he told them, he truly believed in Nate’s ahtistic pahtental. Herman loves artists, K. explains. She thinks the paintings in the lobby are gifts he’s accepted over the years in lieu of rent.
We order a second round of margaritas. “How’s the album coming?” I ask.
“Ah,” she says with a sigh. “The album.”
One month into their stay at the Chelsea, Brett, the bass player, died of a brain aneurysm.
The grieving process went on for nearly two months before they met Brett’s replacement, Ralphie from Queens, during Thrash Day at CBGB.
Ralphie was good, probably better than Brett — very Les Claypool — but Brett was like mellow peacesign dude, while Ralphie is, you know, intense. The retooled Venomous Iris managed to record four songs before Ralphie punched Clem in the face, which, spend any time with Clem, is pretty much inevitable. Ralphie took off and the next three guys sucked. Scott, the drummer, got so fed up with the scene he quit and enrolled at Columbia — grad school in psychology. But Clem finally patched things up with Ralphie and they were going to start recording again as soon as Scott was done with finals. Nate thought the album — now they were calling it Hell’s Sweet Gravity — might be done by Christmas, but with all of the holiday parties, postparties, and postparty recovery time, it would be a major accomplishment not to mention a minor miracle if they were done by spring.
K. looks at me to gauge my interest. “Am I boring you yet?” she asks. I tell her she’s not and order another round of drinks to prove it.
In another bit of irony, what had been bad for the band had been good for K. A week into their stay, on the elevator — the Chelsea’s elevator is quite the scene — she met Ray Mondavi. He lived on the eighth floor, where he had a photography studio, and he offered to take a new set of modeling photos to help get her back into circulation. That wasn’t all he offered, but if you know Ray you know he just can’t help himself and no, nothing ever happened. He showed the pictures to John at Elite who booked her an ad on a billboard that had brought traffic on Broadway to a near halt and now John was claiming that she was at the top of the list for next year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
Not that she believes him — she knows all the stories — but shit, fingers crossed, right?
K. crosses her fingers, waving them at me like she’s casting a spell. “I am now officially finished with talking about me,” she says. “You’re up.”
Three margaritas are exactly enough to get me started on Daphne. “We’ll save my story for our next date,” I say, placing two twenties on the table to cover the tab.
“I’m not sure Nate would like that.” When she grins, I think of that movie with the cartoon rabbit.
I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way. I can see why K. would make an effective fashion model.
I rise to my feet to leave. Always leave them wanting more. But it doesn’t take me too long to recognize the flaw in my strategy: I have nowhere to go.
“You’re going home?” she asks, not quite innocently.
“Yeah, no, I don’t really have a home….”
“Oh …”
