Just Kids [51]
“We?”
“Of course,” he said. “You can work here too. It will be our space. You can start drawing again.”
“The first drawing will be of Pigman,” I said. “We owe him a lot. And don’t worry about the money. We’ll get it.”
Not long after, I found a twenty-six-volume set of the complete Henry James for next to nothing. It was in perfect condition. I knew a customer at Scribner’s who would want it. The tissue guards were intact, the gravures fresh-looking, and there was no foxing on the pages. I cleared over one hundred dollars. Slipping five twenty-dollar bills in a sock, I tied a ribbon around it and gave it to Robert. He opened it, saying, “I don’t know how you do it.”
Robert gave the money to Pigman, and set to cleaning out the front half of the loft. It was a big job. I would stop in after work and he would be standing knee-deep in the center of Pigman’s incomprehensible debris: dusty fluorescent tubing, rolls of insulation, racks of expired canned goods, half-empty bottles of unidentified cleaning fluids, vacuum cleaner bags, stacks of bent venetian blinds, moldy boxes spilling over with decades of tax forms, and bundles of stained National Geographics tied with red-and-white string, which I snapped up to braid for bracelets.
He cleared, scrubbed, and painted the space. We borrowed buckets from the hotel, filled them with water, and carted them over. When we were finished, we stood together in silence, imagining the possibilities. We’d never had so much light. Even after he cleaned and painted half the large windows black, light still flooded in. We scavenged for a mattress, worktables, and chairs. I mopped the floor with water boiled with eucalyptus on our hot plate.
The first things Robert brought over from the Chelsea were our portfolios.
Things were picking up at Max’s. I stopped being so judgmental and got in the swing of things. Somehow I was accepted, though I never really fit in. Christmas was coming and there was a pervasive melancholy, as if everyone simultaneously remembered they had nowhere to go.
Even here, in the land of the so-called drag queens, Wayne County, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis were not to be categorized so lightly. They were performance artists, actresses, and comediennes. Wayne was witty, Candy was pretty, and Holly had drama, but I put my money on Jackie Curtis. In my mind, she had the most potential. She would successfully manipulate a whole conversation just to deliver one of Bette Davis’s killer lines. And she knew how to wear a housedress. With all her makeup she was a seventies version of a thirties starlet. Glitter on her eyelids. Glitter in the hair. Glitter face powder. I hated glitter and sitting with Jackie meant going home speckled all over.
Right before the holidays Jackie seemed distraught. I ordered her a snowball, a coveted unaffordable treat. It was a mound of devil’s food cake filled with vanilla ice cream and covered with shredded coconut. She sat there eating it, plopping large glitter tears in the melting ice cream. Candy Darling slinked in next to her, dipping her lacquered fingernail into the dish, offering a bit of comfort with her soothing voice.
There was something especially poignant about Jackie and Candy as they embraced the imagined life of the actress. They both had aspects of Mildred Rogers, the coarse illiterate waitress in Of Human Bondage. Candy had Kim Novak’s looks and Jackie had the delivery. Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn’t live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.
“Pioneers without a frontier,” as Andy Warhol would say.
It snowed on Christmas night. We walked to Times Square to see the white billboard proclaiming WAR IS OVER! If you want it. Happy Christmas