Townies is a series about life in New York.
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“Then I won’t even try,” I said, trying out my new air of cosmopolitan disaffection.
“A gay men’s sex club!”
“Shut up!” I gaped.
He beamed.
We were strolling down the cobblestones past St. Mark’s Church on our way to an unmarked Korean cafe located above the row of sushi joints and alley-wide hair salons on Stuyvesant Street — the tiny diagonal block connecting East 9th and 10th Streets, between Second and Third Avenue. Being a vegetarian, I could eat virtually nothing on the menu besides kimchi, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that we were now New Yorkers. The point was that we knew where to go, that we were finally privy to the secrets of this city that we’d been aiming toward our whole lives.
It was the year 2000. The world hadn’t ended as predicted, and the future was at our fingertips. Peter and I were both 20-year-old transfer students at the New School, and had been in the city for about six months. As we delighted in the luxury of purchasing plastic containers of sliced mango for $5 a pop at 3 a.m. on our way home from our first favorite bar, Blue and Gold, where drinks were $8, we had also been fretfully watching our bank accounts dwindle.
Now, he was spending four nights a week in his underwear, manning the “clothing check” at a sex club in Alphabet City. All he had to do was hand out tickets, tuck the folded clothes of the club’s patrons into numbered cubby-holes, and look cute. He suffered the occasional pinch, and the tips were no better than those of any waiter in Manhattan, but the point wasn’t dignity, and it wasn’t even, not really, the money either.
As neophyte New Yorkers, we already hated Times Square, tourists and the G train. But with Peter’s new career, he’d reached a new level of insiderness. He had slipped below the radar into an underworld that couldn’t be found in Time Out New York, or even Vice Magazine (no one had yet discovered blogs). A job like that was the best way to get behind the city’s public facade and to mingle with the real locals — the grizzled and glamorous.
This was the bedrock, it seemed, of New York’s underworld. I spent my evenings dressed in vintage corsets and fishnets.
Soon after Peter’s announcement, I started working as a personal assistant to a wealthy Upper East Side divorcée. I had no idea what the job description for a personal assistant was; I imagined some kind of contemporary lady-in-waiting, zipping up the backs of her Versace gowns before benefits. It turned out that those intimate jobs were assigned to my superior, a weary and beautiful woman named Nicki who seemed drastically less enthusiastic than I was to be spending her afternoons in a vast penthouse overlooking Central Park. The pad was decked out like Barbie’s Dream Penthouse — no inch uncovered by gold leaf or pink satin. In the entryway there was a life-sized gold statue of the mistress and her Pomeranian, Lulu.
I was only the second-assistant, so I was relegated mostly to licking R.S.V.P. envelopes for luncheons and walking the dog. By my second week, I learned that maintaining a stony nonchalance to my boss’s flatulence was also an important part of my job, along with listening attentively to cocktail-hour rants about her ex-husband.
I gleefully relayed these details to Peter and my other friends. We all laughed, but me hardest of all, my pleasure a mixture of feeling both superior to this entitled woman, and excited to know her.
Around the same time, I began working as a professional dominatrix. This was the bedrock, it seemed, of New York’s underworld. I spent my evenings dressed in vintage corsets and fishnets at an upscale “dungeon” in an unmarked suite near Bryant Park, acting out the fantasies of wealthy businessmen. It was both posh and dirty. It was technically sex work, but didn’t include actual sex. And so I got to maintain my idea of myself as a feminist, while indulging my fantasies of being desired.
I felt I was living many lives at once, as a student, a sex worker, a writer, a New Yorker. My idols were those writers — William Burroughs, Kathy Acker — who’d boasted of criminal pasts, hustling, stripping, doing whatever was necessary to survive, gleaning worthy material all along.
That same year, a girlfriend of mine got a similar thrill from donning a giant lobster costume and handing out coupons for a seafood lunch buffet in Midtown. Humiliating, yes. And the inside of the mask smelled like unbrushed teeth. However, it contrasted nicely with her new intellectualism — gave it a working-class authenticity — and was fodder for her new radical feminist ideology. “It’s the only time I can walk the streets of this city and not get a running commentary on the size of my breasts, or get asked to ‘smile!’ by every creep I pass,” she explained. “What do I have to smile about? Grinning is a sign of submission in dogs, you know.” She wrote a term paper about it and got an A.
Another friend, Buddy, started advertising his services as an “organizer” over Craigslist to make ends meet.
“It’s totally gross,” he explained. “But fascinating. What people can’t let go of — I mean, I’m pretty much a garbage collector.” He sifted through people’s moldy doll collections, takeout containers, broken furniture and baby clothes, piling the bulging garbage bags on the curb. “If I can, I ask them to leave while I’m ‘organizing’ because they have an argument for keeping all of it; that’s how they ended up in the situation in the first place.”
He regularly called me to crow about particularly bizarre findings: snarled wig collections, desiccated pots of homemade sauerkraut found under beds, more velvet paintings than a person could ever hope to see in one lifetime. I traded him stories about sweater fetishes for those of sweater collections.
Together we all felt like cultural spelunkers: brave and curious, with growing troves of stories to amuse each other.
After a while, however, Peter became disillusioned with his nights in the sex club.
“My nipples are sore from people tweaking them,” he complained. “I’m not even gay.”
I frowned in sympathy. “But,” I countered. “I’m not really into spanking people, and I do it all the time. That’s part of what’s fun about it, right?”
He looked at me, unconvinced. Suddenly, my words didn’t make any sense to me, either.
“The whole place smells like dirty underpants,” he said.
My girlfriend got a tenacious rash from the lobster costume, and quit.
Then, the divorcée threw a cocktail. She had been leaning over me, dictating an e-mail. “My Dear Irishman…” She rested the base of her martini glass on my shoulder. “Why have you not responded to my previous invitations?” She grunted in satisfaction. “My soirees are simply incomplete without you.”
I didn’t mean to, but I laughed.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“Nothing, I was just thinking about something else,” I said.
She backed away from me, the hand with the martini swaying. “Well, you shouldn’t be thinking about anything else,” she said, giving me a dull, mean glare. “You should be thinking about me.” The martini hand swayed more vigorously, and then she simply let go. The glass fell with a thunk onto the white carpet, its contents seeping into the plush fibers. She stared at it, and I couldn’t tell if she was surprised to have thrown it, or disappointed that it hadn’t smashed.
Somehow, I couldn’t muster a compelling enough reason to go uptown the next day, or the next.
Buddy arrived one day at an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen so full of detritus that the inhabitant couldn’t fully open the door.
“I really need help,” she whispered through the crack, her face a pitiful sliver. Buddy tried to wedge his foot in, and pry the door further, but then stopped.
“Yes,” he said, “you do.” And then he left. He didn’t want to see inside anymore.
Often, when you’re young and new to New York, your identity isn’t real yet, just as the city isn’t real yet.
I stayed at the dungeon the longest, probably because my reasons for being there ran deeper than novelty. I actually did write about that job, but not for a few more years, until the fantasy of who I’d been, in those green early days in New York, and how I’d gotten there, had burned away.
Often, when you’re young and new to New York, your identity isn’t real yet, just as the city isn’t real yet. It’s a fantasy; it eludes you. You fashion yourself into the person you think will belong. It’s cliché to compare one’s relationship with a city to a love affair, but incomparably apt. We invent ourselves in love, as we do in new places. It makes sense that we often end up serving those who have been here longer, whose selves have solidified into their unromantic reality: the mad, the lonely, the perverse, the rich and miserable. They feel native to us, and they need us.
A favorite poet of mine just the other day told me the story of her early days in New York, how for a period of months she’d brought the day’s paper and coffee to her own idol, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was known for his frequent stays in the Bellevue psych ward, and had set his apartment on fire just prior to her hiring.
“It was wonderful,” she said. “But I only did it for a few months. It was too much, too … crazy.” She shrugged. “I could never do it now.” My feelings exactly.
This semester I’m back at the New School — teaching this time. A favorite student of mine lingered after class a few weeks ago, clearly brimming with something.
“Thank you so much for recommending that reading series,” she gushed. “I started talking to one of the readers, and it turns out she needs a paid intern.”
“Score,” I nodded, sliding my stack of folders into my wheeling, yes, wheeling briefcase. (The stronger your own identity gets, the less it depends on the right accoutrements.)
“She runs an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. writers collective. They have weekly meetings where the members present their works-in-progress, and she needs someone to cook the gluten-free hors-d’oeuvres, and clean up afterward.” She smiled triumphantly, and I could see visions of hobnobbing with literary luminaries dancing over her head, perhaps a chance friendship with some famous poet who would take her under his wing, invite her to weekend on the Cape with him and his boyfriend and their dogs.
“That is going to be great,” I told her, and meant it. It would be great, until it wasn’t anymore, until her fantasies bumped up against the actual denizens of New York. But for now, she had that glow found only on pregnant women, those fresh in love, and those who’ve just signed their first book deal.
I know I’ve worn that glow. I chased this city’s secrets like I have those of my lovers — believing that by winning entry into its darkest corners, I could consume that alluring mystery, and possess it for myself. Inevitably I found, as one does, that a mystery once revealed is extinguished. In the end, you are left with plain people — their quirks and flaws and fears and stinky laundry. And when the city gives herself to you, you stop wanting to give her so much of yourself.
Melissa Febos, the author of the memoir “Whip Smart,” teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence, the New School and New York University.
