There were things that happened

Jackie Curtis

In 1970, my apartment was four rooms on the 6^th floor of a building on 12^th Street and Avenue B overlooking a fried chicken joint everyone called Nodders, because junkies, whose habits made them crave sugar and salt, would hang out there during the day, nodding out over paper plates of fried chicken and cups of Coke.  The place didn’t have a bathroom because the owner, an old Greek guy who wore a white shirt and a white apron and a chef’s toque, got tired of dragging overdose cases out of the single stall and calling the cops.  He didn’t get rid of the nodders, however.  They made up more than half his business.

I furnished the place completely off the street.  One day I found an entire double bed – mattress, box spring, and metal frame – as I walked down East 9^th Street between Broadway and 3rd Avenue.  I drew the line at 3rd Avenue for street furniture.  I figured anything west of 3rd Avenue came from what amounted to the upper class region of the East Village; the stuff east of there was more likely to be lice or bedbug infested.  I picked up a small desk and a folding wooden chair on 11^th Street and Broadway in the trash outside the Strand bookstore.  A friend helped me carry an armless sofa from 13^th Street and 2nd Avenue, the one exception I made to my Third Avenue rule because it was covered with that kind of knobby nylon fabric they used on furniture for doctor’s waiting rooms and the heavily-trafficked lobbies of office buildings, and there was a sign for some kind of medical clinic on a building next door.  It felt like sitting on wooden bench, but it was clean and had only one wooden leg missing which was easily replaced by a stack of books from one of the dime-a-book boxes that lined the street outside the Strand.

I had the quilt they issued us at West Point that we called a Brown Boy, and I had sheets and a pillow, but I needed bathroom stuff like a shower curtain and a bath towel and bathmat, so one day after work at the Voice, I stopped at the big Mays department store on Union Square and found the housewares department, where I immediately lost myself in the aisles of choices for everything I needed.  It was November, and the store was oppressively hot and crowded.  A woman who worked in the department saw me wandering aimlessly around and took pity on me and helped me pick out the things I needed, and I headed gratefully out of the store onto 14^th Street and walked east.  I was carrying two large paper shopping bags and a copy of the New York Times and I had my Danish school bag over one shoulder as I turned down 2^nd Avenue in a light rain.  A block later, I was soaked, and one of the handles on a shopping bag had come loose, so I ducked under the awning outside Slugger Ann’s bar on the corner of 12^th Street to wait it out.  Just then, Jackie Curtis came walking up to the bar from her apartment down 12^th Street.  Jackie, a famous trans Warhol superstar, was wearing jeans and a heavy pea-coat and a gray fedora instead of her usual glamorous silver lame and lace and heels on this cold and rainy night.

I had an assignment from Esquire to write a story along with my Voice compatriot Blair Sabol called “The Politics of Fashion.”  We pitched it to one of the assistant editors, Tom Hedley, who handled counterculture and rock and roll stuff for the magazine, as a take-out on how everyone was wearing clothes reflecting their identities, or the identities of whoever they wanted to be at that moment.  Blair and I split up who we were going to interview, and I picked Jackie as one of my subjects.  I had already met her and had begun interviewing her, along with Little Richard and James Brown and a street pimp I met up on 125^th Street.  It turned out that Slugger Ann was Jackie’s grandmother, so taking pity on my bedraggled state, she suggested a drink and we went inside.

We were standing at the bar drinking beers served by Jackie’s grandmother when I felt my forehead starting to sweat and I got lightheaded and had to sit down.  It would turn out that I had come down with a bad case of the flu, and after an hour or so of being ministered to by Jackie and her grandmother – hot tea and Irish whiskey was prescribed and imbibed – Jackie went out on 2^nd Avenue and hailed a cab and we rode down to my building and she helped me upstairs with all my bathroom stuff.  I was staggering by the time we reached the 6^th floor.  Jackie hung the shower curtain and got out one of the towels and I took a very hot shower and got straight into bed.

I sweated myself through the flu over the next couple of days.  A girlfriend from East 81^st Street brought chicken soup from Ratner’s Deli on 2^nd Avenue, and Jackie came by with a bottle of Irish whiskey her grandmother insisted would put me back on my feet in no time, but only if I added enough sugar to the hot tea I mixed it with.  We spent one interesting afternoon, Jackie and my southern belle girlfriend from East 81^st Street and I, listening to Jackie do a reading of a play she had been writing, “Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit.” 

As I recall, Jackie put on the play, in which she starred, at La Mama theater on East 4^th Street.  I took my uptown girlfriend to the premier.  The play had at least two dozen manic costume changes in the largely cross-dressing cast, which included John Vaccaro of the Playhouse of the Ridiculous theater who directed.  I struggled to remember what the play was about, so I looked it up and found this review from Newsweek, of all places: “Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit is seeing an explosion of pure theatrical energy unconfined by any effete ideas of form, content, structure, or even rationality. It is an insanely intense, high-velocity, high-decibel circus, costume ball, and scarifying super-ritual in which transvestism, scatology, obscenity, camp, self-assertion, self-deprecation, gallows humor, cloacal humor, sick humor, healthy humor, and cutting, soaring song all blast off through the tiny, backless-benched theater.”  My uptown girlfriend, who grew up in a family that had some serious holdings in the tobacco business in North Carolina, even managed to laugh at some of the bawdy jokes, although she opined on the street afterwards that it had been better the night Jackie played all the roles herself in my apartment.

A couple of weeks later, I was working in my cubicle in the Voice office on University Place when Jackie called and asked if I had any plans for Thanksgiving.  When I told her no, she invited me to a dinner being given by the owner of an art gallery she knew through Warhol.  We splurged and took a cab up to a gigantic penthouse apartment on Gracie Square, right on the East River somewhere in the mid-80’s on the Upper East Side.  Jackie was begowned for the evening in a floor-length something-or-another made out of black velvet to which she had sewn glittery crystals and bits of tin foil that had been meticulously folded, origami-style, into figures of flying birds and wild animals.  Did I mention Jackie was fond of amphetamine?  Well, use your imagination to form a mental image of an outfit that was a perfect example of why we picked Jackie for the Esquire story.

The dinner was served in a long dining room with a wall of windows overlooking the river.  On the other wall was a large painting by Jackson Pollock.  The apartment, which must have been a couple thousand square feet on its public floor with bedrooms upstairs and I don’t know how many square feet of terraces, was like being inside the Museum of Modern Art.  There were Warhols, of course, and pop-art Rosenquists and a couple of gigantic geometric Stellas and a Rothko or two and sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and others.  At one point in the evening, I opened a door at the far end of the massive living room and walked into a windowless space the interior surfaces of which – walls, ceiling, even the two doors – were entirely covered with the flat-black boxes and found object art of Louise Nevelson.  Tiny hidden spotlights turned the place into a kind of dark chapel. 

The dinner had been for about 20, and afterwards other guests began arriving in small groups and pairs.  For some reason, I have a distinct memory of the pants one guy was wearing – sections of a pair of blue jeans had been carefully carved out and pieces of deerskin had been sewn in with semi-precious stones mounted in sterling silver riveted into the intersections where denim met deerskin.  

Shirtless young men wearing pressed black trousers began circulating.  Some carried silver trays of Don Perignon champagne, a couple carried silver trays with large joints arrayed carefully in a Mandela, and there were two guys who carried large silver bowls half-filled with glittering cocaine, and there were long silver straws for anyone who wanted to stick one down into the bowl and inhale as much as he or she wanted.

Sometime after midnight, a man arrived and led a string of about a dozen young men clothed in black trousers and starched white shirts into the room.  He stood there as guests, both male and female, walked up to the young men, examined them, and took them by hand up a curving staircase made of Lucite and blond wood.  I turned to a guy standing next to me watching this incredible display of what can only be described as pure decadence and asked him what could possibly be next.  He pointed to the man in the suit who had brought the group of young men into the room.  “He’ll lead a sheep on a leash in here if that’s your thing,” the guy said in the flat tones of one who had seen exactly that during his time on earth.

At one point, exhausted from dancing with Jackie and partaking of my fair share of what was on offer, I escaped into the Nevelson room and sat on a leather sofa and just looked at the endless array of intricately made little boxes and other wooden figures that covered the wall.  I saw a crack of light from the other room as the door opened.  It had taken me several minutes to figure out which one of the pieces of black wood was the door handle when I left the previous time I was in the room.  Now a tall woman I had heard speaking Italian at the dining room table during Thanksgiving dinner walked in and sat down on the sofa next to me.  She was silent for several minutes.  Then she turned to me and said, “I have a room just like this one in my villa outside Rome.  Would you like to come and see it?”

She had very dark eye shadow and several rings with large diamonds on her fingers and what looked like half of a display case of gold bracelets on her arms.  I hadn’t seen her smile during the dinner, and she wasn’t smiling now.

I excused myself, fumbled for the door handle, and left.  Jackie was still spinning around by herself in the middle of a dozen other dancers in the living room.  The little aluminum foil figures on her dress glittered like diamonds.  I was glad to walk the half dozen or so blocks to the subway station at 86^th and Lex as a light snow fell.  This time, the cold November night air felt good.