Lucking Out - James Wolcott [71]
Later, Tina and I even went on a couple of movie dates, one of the art-house choices being Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends, a homosexual-pickup social Darwinist morality tale about a carnival worker (played by Fassbinder himself, without his Fu Manchu mustache and usual gunnysack slouch) who wins the lottery and attracts a new host of buddies who proceed to peck him until their vulture beaks have picked him clean and he dies in the subway, a couple of punks (the old-definition no-good kind) stopping by to rummage through his pockets. A feel-bad diagram of sexual-economic predation that made The Boys in the Band look candy-hearted, Fox and His Friends was one of the world’s worst movie-date ideas for any male-female pairing and proof that ulterior motives weren’t working any levers when it came to movie selection. Unlike some others, who gnawed the insides of their wrists over the unfairness of it all (why him? why not me?), I wasn’t jealous of Chris, even when Tina stage-whispered to him one night in front of CBGB’s about something special being on the menu later that night, and she didn’t mean food. Unlike some bandmate boyfriends one could mention from the underground scene, Chris was so obviously not a snake-weasel-leech piece of future deadbeat material, bitching over his favorite coke spoon being missing or some other domestic crisis staged on a floor mattress where sheets were optional. Moreover, Tina had sisters who were datable, not that I ever did.
It turned out that the Heads were sharing a loft on Chrystie Street that I visited with my then girlfriend. Reaching Chrystie Street, south of CBGB’s and pointed toward Chinatown, was not a stroll undertaken in the midnight hours without all of one’s bat faculties primed. The bordering Roosevelt Park was well stocked with furtive hands ready to reach out for a rude gimme, and the nearby remaining Bowery flophouses, these remnants of the Depression with their last-stop Dreiserian stale aroma of defeat and spiritual malnutrition, drew panhandlers and derelicts to those cheerless streets looking for drink money if all the indoor cots were taken. The area also featured what Byrne would describe as the skankiest hookers in New York, though of course that’s a subjective evaluation. But I had never been invited to an artist’s loft before and was a total Heads convert when the invite came.
Loft living then wasn’t the luxury alternative that it later became with the rise of SoHo and gentrification with a vengeance in Tribeca and beyond, as lofts became synonymous with airy storage units of flooding sunlight, gleaming bowling-alley hardwood floors, and quirkily amusing, slayingly chic art pieces chosen and arranged just so as tribal taste trophies, a photo layout of a setup perfect to raise a super-race of test-tube babies. Loft living in the mid-seventies was still in its pioneer post-factory, rat-haven phase, the elevators lowering and lifting like a large, groaning apprehension (as if operated by Marley’s chain-hanging ghost from A Christmas Carol), the thick-piped plumbing still in its early Soviet phase, these industrial garrets too hot in summer, too cold in winter, but spacious enough to carry a bowling-alley echo. What I remember of the Heads’ loft was the purposeful clutter of instruments, amps, tape recorders, and reading materials strategically stacked, with a rope hung down the middle to divide Tina and Chris’s personal digs from David’s, reminiscent of It Happened One Night without the curvy shadow-play peep show. Although they were artists from an art school living in an art loft, they weren’t slumming, trying noble poverty on for size; they were making their place in the outdoor urinal of downtown as hardily as any glue-head fleeing the czarist oppression of Queens.
Even so, what wasn’t clear from the Heads’ fledgling performances was how much infantry stamina and pilot altitude potential they possessed, or whether they were future sugar dispensers, their encore cover of the bubblegum hit “1, 2, 3 Red Light” raising