We were young and we were beautiful and we were addicted

To youth, to rock n roll, to excess, to loss, to each other. Nothing lasted. Not even us.

I’m not going to last either, unless a few more of you subscribe!

I got in the car to go somewhere the other day, and I caught myself in the act of being young.  As I slid into the seat, I pulled the door with my left hand and hooked my thumb in the seatbelt as it closed.  With my right, I was already starting the car.  I had my eyes on the rearview mirror as I flicked the shifter into reverse, my left foot came off the clutch, and the car started backward.  All of this happened in about five seconds.

It was like that every time I went somewhere.  Never a wasted move, never a missed moment.  Boom!  In!  Start!  Out of there!  Always in a hurry.  Even if I didn’t have anywhere to go and nothing to do when I got there, I was in a hurry. 

What was it, anyway?  That I was afraid I was going to miss something?  That seems right, but what about what was happening now?  If you’re in such a hurry to get somewhere else, might you not miss something where you are?

I stopped the car before I got out of the parking lot and sat there for a moment thinking about my friend Mitch in New Orleans.  It was the late 80’s and he lived just down the street from me in the Quarter.  He and his wife Linda ran a B & B out of the slave quarter behind their little single story clapboard house on Ursulines Street.  He had grown up on a farm in Kansas, and as we got to know each other, we discovered that we both like to go fishing.  Mitch had a little John-boat and a trailer he pulled with his pickup, so once a month or so, we would head out to one of the bayous and go fishing for bass.

What got me thinking about Mitch was how he drove me crazy every time we’d get in his truck.  He would get in the driver’s seat and get settled and look around to see if there was anything in the way of the door, then he would pull it closed. He would reach in his pocket for his keys and put them in the ignition, and then he would reach around for his seat belt and pull it across his chest and fasten it and wiggle around in his seat until he was comfortable, and only then would he reach for the ignition key again and start the truck.  Once the truck was idling, he would begin another ritual, looking around the cab to see if he had forgotten anything, and then his eyes would find the rear view mirror, and each side mirror, and he would check to see if it was okay to pull out of the little garage he rented, and then, after checking both side mirrors a second time and looking out both side windows, he would back us out of the garage and we would be on our way.

It drove me batty, all that messing around and fiddling and double checking!  Why couldn’t he just get in and start it up and go? 

But what was I in such a hurry for?  Neither one of us had a job job, like an office we had to go to, a time clock we had to punch.  Mitch took care of the B & B and worked on renovating a little shotgun house he and Linda had bought and were fixing up to sell, and I was a writer.  We had all the time in the world to go fishing.  If we left five minutes earlier or later, who cared?  What difference would it make?  The bayou would still be there, the bass didn’t care if we got there at 7, or 7:15, or 7:30.  We could stay as long as we wanted, catch as many bass as we wanted, we could come back at 6:30, or we could come back at 8:15 or 9:20.  Neither of us had a schedule.  We were totally free when it came to fishing, so what the hell was I in such a big hurry about?

I realized the other day that I was about 42 when this was happening, with my impatience and squirrelliness about Mitch taking all that time starting the pickup.  I reacted like I was a 25 year old with jiggly knees and nervous hands and places to go and people to see and something to prove.  

I wasn’t 25 anymore, not even close.  Or was I?

There was a pay phone in the Spanish restaurant downstairs from my loft on Houston Street in the early 70’s when I really was 25 years old, and let me tell you what I used to do at that pay phone.  I would make some excuse to my girlfriend, who I was living with in the loft at the time, like I was meeting a pal at the Lion’s Head, or I had a dinner uptown with a magazine editor, and I would run downstairs to that pay phone and drop a dime and call up a gorgeous girl I knew who lived up on West 10th Street, and then I would hightail it up to her apartment and we would go out to some bar in Chelsea and drink and buy some coke from a skeezy guy who hung out there, and then we’d go back to her place and drink some more and snort some coke and fuck.  And then around midnight I’d make my way back down to Houston Street and climb in the bed next to my girlfriend and go to sleep, like nothing happened.

That’s what I was like when I was 25.  Nothing was enough for me.  There weren’t enough hours in the day, enough assignments to get, enough stories to write, enough Jack Daniels to drink, enough steak to eat, enough coke to snort, enough gorgeous girls to charm and flatter and maneuver into bed, enough miles to drive, enough flights to take, enough places to go, enough motels to check into, enough rock and roll to listen to.  There wasneverenough, man!  Don’t you understand?

That’s what my generation was up to, or at least the cohort to which I belonged.  We were young and we were fast and we were hungry and we wouldn’t let up, because the world was rewarding us for being who we were.  We were the “me generation,” or we were new age, or we were punks, or we were back to the landers, or we were new leftists, and we were hip, man! 

We got older, of course, but we wouldn’t let ourselves age because we didn’t have to.  We fashioned a place to live that belonged to us, we earned a living doing it, and we were praised to the high heavens because of how we were changing “the culture.” 

There are four or five of us sitting around drinking at a big round table in  the Brasserie in midtown, writers, magazine editors, fashion stylists, even a model for Halston with a look that will stop traffic on 53rd Street when we walk out.  One of the guys says, geez, did you hear Townshend’s guitar last night at the Beacon?  Another mention’s a young woman we all know who just opened a cool new restaurant in the West Village where everyone we know is going.  And we’re talking about what we’re reading, seeing, where we’re going -- did you read his new book, or her essay in the New Yorker, or his brilliant treatise on the French New Wave in the New York Review?  How about her genius take-out on Times Square hookers?  Carver had another groundbreaking short story in Esquire, did you read it?  Did you hear she’s running for congress in Massachusetts?  That he just got elected secretary of state in Colorado?

We were doing so much, so fast, we didn’t have time to get older, and why should we?  We were young, we were beautiful, and as wonderful as our lives were, if we got tired of them, we could change everything about them.  We didn’t have to age, because we could get face lifts, and tummy tucks, and chin implants, and we could sculpt our bodies with personal trainers and massage our cellular structures with the latest diets and power smoothies and we could tune up our synapses with Prozac or MDMA or mescaline or sinsemilla buds from mountainside weed customizers in Humboldt County.

When we made money, we could fly away to exclusive enclaves like St. Barts in the Caribbean, where we ate grilled lobster at the table right next to the same three people we shared steak frites with at Raoul’s last week.  Look over there at the next table, there’s Gilda with Lorne and Paul Simon.  I saw Keith Haring at Grand Saline beach…he’s sharing a villa with the guy who owns Basquiat’s gallery, you know him, what’s his name?  Everybody is there. It’s so hip it’s painful.

We threw out everything we grew up with.  If your parents had doilies on the arms of the big plush sofa and porcelain figurines on the sideboard and little ceramic boxes that held matches for their cigarettes, we had a glass-topped coffee table with chrome legs and one perfect slender solid crystal pyramid that stood there by itself like we were giving the finger to the past.  Everything was pared down, sleeker, brighter, stripped clean so we could move faster forward, always forward, never back. 

There was a time when every other guy I knew in New York had to have a simple black leather Armani jacket, unadorned, smooth, shiny but not too shiny, not show-offy, that gave you a slouch that was just…perfect.  You had a Saint Laurent velvet blazer and two French long sleeve shirts with no collars and a pair of 501 XX Levis with the button front and one pair of rough-out suede cowboy boots, and that was it.  Women we knew, magazine editors and writers at Vogue and the ones on their way up the ladder in the advertising racket, they wore black.  All black.  Black leggings, black skirt, black heels, black boots, short black Balenciaga jacket, black bag.  Nothing else.

The generation that had dodged the draft and protested the war were wearing uniforms, and they were happy because they could wake up in the morning and put on anything in the closet and they didn’t have to make a decision, they just threw it on and looked cool and moved.  You had your hair cut and colored by Sally Hershberger, because, well, everybody did.  A genius cut could save you, and I mean it, just look at John Bon Jovi.  She saved him and she’ll save you, too.

I remember when a young woman we all knew opened the first new, hip shop in Soho, right down from my loft.  Close to Houston was Joe’s Dairy, where they made fresh mozzarella every day.  Across the street were three shops:  a butcher shop that sold meat…steaks…chops… roasts, chopped beef.  Next door was a fowl butcher:  only chickens, ducks, turkeys, whole, cut up, ground, any way you wanted.  And next to that was a little vegetable market with a table out front under a wide awning showing off their colorful apples and tomatoes and eggplant. 

And then two or three doors down, a friend opened up this mid-century modern antique shop, selling funky 50’s lamps that arched up from a big platter base and had chrome balls for shades, and love seats with triangular backs and knobby upholstery and blonde wooden pegs for legs, and chrome dinette sets with four chrome chairs with Naugahyde seats and a round table with chrome legs and a speckled turquoise top made out of linoleum.  People started buying this stuff and decorating their apartments and lofts.  It was sleek and modern and… minimal.  It was furniture like our clothes, a few perfect pieces and there you were! 

The old Italian ladies on the block used to walk past the mid-century modern shop and cluck their tongues, because these young people were buying the chrome dinette sets for $200, and upstairs, in the same building, the old ladies and their families were still eating on their sets which they bought at May’s Department Store on Union Square for $15 only a few years ago.

Everything around us was going to save you – the hip haircuts, the minimalist furniture, the sleek all-white lofts with white floors and white walls and white ceilings, and other stuff, too, like Werner Erhard and EST where you would “get it” for only two grand and a long weekend in some hotel ballroom in the suburbs.  At least for awhile, rock and roll was going to save us, and drugs were going to change the world, and communes were going to teach us how to get along, and yoga was going to cleanse us and style was going to save us, our minimalist style where everything was cleaner and purer and…better.

Even the prose turned minimalist, shorn of excess, pointed, direct, stripped of the baggage of style until stories were about a guy who parked his truck and drank a beer and hit his wife and fell apart and cried, lost in the nothingness of his trailer.  The stories didn’t contain meaning, they lacked.  They didn’t say anything, they just were.  They taught minimalism in writing programs, they wrote it in skinny books, they sold it as a philosophy that was so barren it could be broken down into cigarettes and coffee and a sheet of blank paper and despair, because it was minimalist and it was hip, man.

The amazing thing is, we were addicted to all of it, and I don’t just mean drugs, although they were around too.  Even the drugs slotted into the whole thing so neatly it was like they were designed just for us.  You worked really, really hard so you could make money and you took the money and bought some coke and you snorted the coke so you could work even harder to make even more money so you could buy larger quantities of coke and snort it so you could get even more work and buy even more coke and…

You get the picture:  a kind of pure, minimalist capitalism emptied of everything but a skinny, jumpy high that fit us perfectly. Cocaine fed the beast of youth by keeping you moving and hunting and getting and taking and spending and doing pretty much anything but living a normal life, because who wanted normal?  Not us.  Not so long as we could keep ourselves young.

It was like being on a carousel that didn’t stop.  You couldn’t get off because as soon as you got on and achieved whatever it was you were trying to get on for, it went around again, and what you had wasn’t there anymore, or it was past its sell-by date, or its buy-by date, because it was, well, old.

We were addicted to it all:  to the music, to the art, to style, to the getting and having, to the loving and leaving, to the excess, to the front table at Raoul’s or Elaine’s, to the next martini, to being young, to each other.  We were young and we were beautiful, and we were never satisfied, so we changed ourselves, we changed everything, our hair, our clothes, our coffee tables, our diets, our faces, we changed everything because we didn’t want to grow old because then we wouldn’t be beautiful anymore.

I remember one time when my father came to New York to visit, and I took him uptown to some little club on the west side where Muddy Waters was playing.  I thought, I’ll take my dad and show him the kind of music I like so he’ll understand who I am, that I’m different from him and his Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra.  I’ll let him listen to something real like Muddy Waters, and then we’ll see what he thinks.

So we sat in this little club that held maybe 100 people, and Muddy Waters played and he sang some of his hits like “Got my mojo working,” and “I just want to make love to you,” and “Mannish boy.”  As was typical at that time, when musicians like Muddy toured alone and played gigs with pick-up bands, he was playing with some young white guys, but they knew his songs and they were holding their own as Muddy stood up at the mic and sang his classic, “Rolling Stone,” that told tales of growing up Black and hungering after everything and being tempted by “good lookin’ women” whose “husband just now left Muddy, sure nough, just now left.”

And I’m thinking, man this is the real shit!  My dad’s going to get it, he’s going to understand why I am the way I am, because this is what I love, and he’ll hear the music and he’ll finally see me for who I am. So after Muddy’s set as we were walking out of the club to get on a subway and head back downtown to my hip loft, I asked my father what he thought of Muddy Waters. 

He thought for just a moment, not long, and he said, “Well, he is quite a gentleman, son.  Quite a gentleman.”  I walked along next to him, and I thought, wasn’t he listening?  I couldn’t believe that was his reaction to this essential American music, this essential man who had influenced so much of the culture.  I mean, the Rolling Stones named themselves after Muddy’s song!  So did Rolling Stone magazine!  You couldn’t get anymore authentic than Muddy Waters.  You couldn’t reach down into your own soul and touch deeper than his music touched.

I was mystified by my father’s reaction to Muddy Waters until I got old, and then I understood exactly what he was saying, exactly what he meant, and how right he was.  The night we listened to Muddy was in the summer of 1972.  Muddy was 59.  My father was 51.  Dad saw something I hadn’t seen in Muddy because I was young, and he was old – not as old as Muddy, but old enough to realize that was how you survived if you were Muddy’s age, and especially if you were Muddy’s race.  You were a gentleman because who is less threatening than a gentleman?  If you want to make it through your life in this world, or at least the world in which we lived in 1972, being a gentleman was the way to go. 

I was too young to see that age strips you of youthful arrogance and all the dangers that go with it.  You move through the world at a different, slower, steadier, kinder pace at 59 years old than you do at 25, which is the age I was then.  You don’t want to be hurt.  All you want to do is pick up your paycheck and get along to the next day, and if you’re Muddy Waters, the next city, the next gig, and if you’re a gentleman, and you take the world on its terms, the chances are that the world will let you be.

What we thought the world owed us was life on our terms.  We were addicted to having things our way, the way we arranged our lives, not the way the world arranged itself around us.

My father and Muddy Waters had already come to their senses by the night we went to see him at that little club in Manhattan.  It only took me another 50 years, but with their blessing, both of them, I finally made it.  I’m old, and I’m still here, and that’s enough.