Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the ’90s
Read an excerpt from Marc Spitz’ memoir, Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the ’90s, here!
Excerpt from Chapter 1
“No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful. Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.”
Upon hearing these lyrics, my father, Sidney Spitz, then forty-four, took his sneaker off the gas pedal and slowed the copper-colored Mustang abruptly. One trailing motorist honked loudly from inside her black Datsun, then sped past us. Another did the same and also gave us the finger. My father, squinting in his rearview mirror, stuck his left hand out the window to wave those still behind us around. He hit the hazards and lit up a Kent King.
“Why are we slowing down?” I asked.
I’d just turned seventeen. It was the late winter of 1987. I looked behind us. Had I missed something important in my fretting about math, girls, and whether or not the Russians loved their children too? These three things sometimes had me sleepless by day and would contribute to sleepless nights in front of reruns of Family Ties well into the following year. We were on the Long Island Expressway—operative word “express.” Go fast. Get home in time for Sunday dinner and 60 Minutes and an early bed. Do not reduce speed unless . . .
Punctured tire? Bloody cat? Were there cops? Sometimes there were cops. My father got into trouble. I knew his temper. I had it too.
“What did he just say?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The guy?”
“What guy, Dad?” I was pleading now.
“Your singer!”
It seemed this was an internal problem; a soundtrack predicament. I’d selected the cassette. It was the playful indie duo They Might Be Giants’ self-titled debut. The song was called “Don’t Let’s Start.” It was my property. And I’d chosen to share it as we passed time in traffic.
“I don’t know.”
Other cars continued to dust us as he rewound my tape, grimly.
Zeeeech. Click.
“Everybody dies frustrated and sad and . . . “
Unsatisfied, he rewound it further and more violently.
Kreeeeeeeeeeeetch. Click.
“No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful. Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful.”
The old man shook his head.
“I thought that’s what he said,” he muttered and ejected the tape. If there had been a button on the dash that would also eject me in my all-black uniform of baggy sweater, vintage raincoat, skinny black Stephen Sprouse trousers, and clown-shoe sized John Fluevogs, I think he’d probably have pressed that as well. The sweater was already controversial. Sid’s mother, my “Grandma D,” for Diane, knit it. It took her longer to make than all the other unsolicited pieces of winter-wear combined, and there’d been dozens over the years.
“Why don’t you ever wear what I give you?” she once asked me before I asked her to try her hand at an all-black pullover. She’d been hurt and maybe a little angry about all the Christmas reds and ringed blue-and-tan offerings I’d politely accepted then placed in the closet forever.
“It’s not personal. I only wear black, Grandma,” I told her frankly.
“But why?”
“Artist.”
She seemed relieved and took up the challenge, then never stopped complaining about it. Two years later, with enough Bailey’s Irish Cream and pretzel nuggets in her, she’d still point a swollen finger at me accusingly and growl, “I nearly went blind making you that black sweater. Black! Black! It was all I saw!” It was as if she’d cable-knitted a death cloud and unleashed it on the world with her two pink metal needles between puffs of . . . a Kent King.
I was wearing my hair in long, draping, jet-black bangs in the spring of 1986. I’d dyed it in June for the occasion of Depeche Mode with openers Book of Love (of “Boy” and “I Touch Roses” fame) at Radio City Music Hall and placed a streak of yellow down the middle of my skull like a highway warning: Do Not Cross. But Sid still had power over me—and the brawn to stay the boss, in and out of a moving car. Normally, I found the closeness of the driver and passenger seats useful. I liked to study the old man. In the car, I could hear him breathe, watch him react, and try to figure out who he was. Those times could be tense too. I am, hopefully, a member of what will remain the last generation to be hit with fists or objects like hairbrushes (a favorite of my mother’s) as discipline. Parents don’t really slug anymore, and when they do, it makes the papers. When I was growing up, however, that was pretty routine. Once, when I was especially obnoxious, Sid picked me up by my legs and pushed my head into a toilet bowl. I’d mouthed off to my mother and the housekeeper, a stern Belizean woman named Olive. I never did it again. This isn’t an endorsement for that kind of rough discipline, but I suspect today they’d probably send me (and Olive) to a counselor to talk about our feelings.
At seventeen, in 1987, I had my own car and a set of college applications on my desk, but I was still a minor. Sid remained entitled to these weekend custody hours, and let’s face it, after someone treats your face like a plunger, you tend to defer to him when he tells you he’d like to see you on a Sunday afternoon. It was a big deal to be playing my own music for him at all. Usually dominion over the dial was his. Sid handed the They Might Be Giants cassette to me. He held the object with the edges of his fingertips, as if the toxic sentiments he believed its songs contained might somehow seep into his pores. I returned it to the case with the pink and green sleeve and placed that in my book bag with my other cassettes and notebook.
“Do you believe that?” he asked, as he turned the dial to CBS FM. Don K. Reed’s Doo-Wop Shop. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers was more like it, as far as he was concerned. I didn’t know what to say. He asked again. “I said, Do you believe what he said? In that song?”
While I remained scared of him, on that day, my father seemed older and sadder then than I’d ever seen him look before. We’d been making these trips from Long Island into Manhattan for most of the decade, since he’d moved out for good in 1980. He was the man who introduced me to Manhattan. It took some time but I eventually realized that this was not Manhattan in full. It was only ever Sid’s version of the City. We did the things he could handle. We’d emerge from the Midtown Tunnel, head downtown, park the Mustang in a garage, then eat a pair of slices at Ray’s Pizza on Sixth Avenue and Eleventh Street. Ray’s was a large, heavy slice, with a thicker layer of cheese than most. It was “famous,” like all Ray’s claimed to be, but most acknowledged that this was at least one of two or three that may actually be the “original.” There were photos on the wall, after all, of the cast of the NBC sitcom Gimme a Break! flipping dough. Then we’d go to the Postermat on 8th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. It was always the next stop. The store was deep and narrow and felt like a scene. People lingered. The clerks were hip. They played WNEW, the local rock station, loudly. Scot Muni and Dennis Elsus set up lots of Tull, Zeppelin, Neil Young, and Yes, who were my father’s favorite. “Don’t surround yourself with yourself,” he once warned me, quoting the “Your Move” suite from “I’ve Seen All Good People.” I still don’t know what he meant. The song’s about chess, isn’t it? My father never played chess.
On the wall behind the counter that separated the Postermat sales staff from the customers, they offered T-shirts imprinted with vintage cartoon characters like Rocky and Bullwinkle and Beanie and Cecil. Elsewhere, there were plastic bins full of wind-up walking versions of the aforementioned dinosaurs, as well as hopping sushi rolls, hopping bloody thumbs, hopping bloody penises, and the more conventional chattering teeth. Some of the teeth hopped as well but didn’t bleed. One could stock up on rubber bats with suction cups affixed to their bellies if there was concern over running out. They sold rubber-gasket bracelets (the kind that Madonna had popularized in her “Lucky Star” video) and greeting cards with Bloome County and The Far Side cartoons on them. The very rear of the Postermat, however, was the only place that really interested both the old man and me. There they kept an L-shaped row of metal flip bins full of six-foot, heavy-plastic leafs, on which iconic images of movie and rock stars were mounted. Charlie Chaplin, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda from Easy Rider, Jane Fonda too (naked on a beach), and Gary Cooper in High Noon, Sophia Loren, David Bowie, Edward G. Robinson as Rico in Little Ceasar, King Kong (the original from 1933), Clint Eastwood, Bridget Bardot (naked on a bike), and the Marx Brothers. Each poster was numbered, and a customer would have to match the code from the floor copy to the shrink wrapped, rolled-up posters collected in little bins beneath them.
Sid’s new house, ten minutes away from ours, out in Atlantic Beach, was covered with posters from The Postermat. His favorite was Brando as the brooding, leather-covered Johnny Strabler in The Wild One. Often I would spend an hour just selecting a David Bowie or Boris Karloff poster only to find that it was sold out in the bin. This store was a wonderland for a time, but at seventeen, it just didn’t do it for me anymore. The difference between my father and I was becoming clearer to me. He was content to have these posters on his wall. I wanted to be one of the people on somebody’s wall. I didn’t care, or even really ponder, that most of those people were long dead, some of them like Monroe and Dean gone so young. I never considered the violence or the sacrifice or even the method of achieving such recognition. I only knew I wanted in. I had to make my mark somehow, find a way to let people know “I was here.” There was a trick to getting in, and I suspected it had to do with size—being big, acting grander and stranger than everyone else around you.
Washington Square Park was always the next stop on the Sid-lead tours. We’d have a Coke and watch the jugglers or the stand-up comics and street performers try to hold the crowd from within the then-empty fountain in the center of the public sprawl. On lucky days, we’d catch the brilliant but doomed comedian Charlie Barnett. Some say that Charlie Barnett could have been as big as Eddie Murphy. I believe it, having been one who’d witnessed him stalk the rim of the park’s big fountain in his backwards ball cap and T-shirt. You could tell when he was on by the crashing laughter that grew louder and louder as we sprinted to catch him. Nobody else was that kind of draw. Charlie Barnett owned the Park and seemed to charge the entire City with dangerous currents when he came on. Birds and squirrels crept down from the trees to listen. Tourists and strangers chanted, “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!” Barnett didn’t have a mic. He shouted his riffs in his gruff voice, improvising about the ethnic diversity of the crowd and the difference between black and white people before it became a hackneyed trope of Def Jam–style comics. He’d grab a tourist’s handbag or camera and use it as a prop while they nervously looked on; their uneasiness contributing to the crackling energy of the bit. I studied Barnett. He was a window, a door, a portal, a way out of my boring suburban life and into something bigger and better. Danger, I noted, danger was necessary. Do not fear danger. Make friends with it. Like Lenny Bruce. Like Jim Morrison. Like Charlie Barnett. Everyone knew the chainsaw jugglers, who also performed in the park’s ring, weren’t going to lose a mitt to the blade, but it was impossible to predict what Barnett, with his elastic face and surging posture, was going to do or say next or whether that camera was ever going to be returned.
As I said, I never stopped to consider the consequences of such an approach; what happens to the ones who walk through those exits and say goodbye to polite society. Charlie Barnett was already on a path towards ruin; dead of AIDS in 1996 at just forty-one, after years as a junkie. I only knew that he’d made it to New York City (from West Virginia), and he was killing that crowd like he killed every crowd.
The back of the Postermat and the genius of Charlie Barnett were among the few things my father and I still agreed on. We didn’t even meet at The Police anymore, the one band that I thought we’d always be able to share since Sting, Stuart Copeland, and Andy Summers were eccentric enough to charm the new wavers and big-rock enough to get those who came of age in the sixties (probably because, despite their spiky haircuts, they secretly had as well). My father bought me my first copy of Ghost in the Machine. But The Police had recently released a remake of their own hit “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” as “Don’t Stand So Close to Me ’86.” It had a drum machine beat instead of Stewart Copeland’s skewed and exotic playing, and rather than sing the excellent lyric “just like the old man in that book by Nabokov,” Sting, for some reason, now sang “that famous book by Nabokov,” as if we were thinking of Pale Fire instead of Lolita.
Sometimes, instead of the Postermat, I’d drag the old man to Flip, the narrow vintage-clothing store directly across the street, near the 8th Street Playhouse and Electric Ladyland, the studio that Jimi Hendrix built. There, I’d buy vintage green and gold sharkskin jackets and later load up both lapels with as many of my band badges as I could. My collection was pretty vast: ranging from bands who’d already split like the Sex Pistols and the Jam and The Specials to new favorites like The Dead Milkmen and Sonic Youth. Flip had its own band-style badge, and I’d try to collect a new color each time: green, maroon, pink, black with white lettering. I’d collect them from Zoot (whose badges were green) and Unique Clothing Warehouse (black with rainbow lettering) over on Lower Broadway as well. The Flip-Zoot-Unique triumvirate of sales people didn’t behave like the vendors on Central Avenue in Cedarhurst, the town that neighbored my hometown, the more residential Lawrence. Lawrence was one of the Five Towns (the other towns were Inwood, Woodmere, where I went to high school at Woodmere Academy, and Hewlett). On HBO’s now-classic show business satire Entourage, Kevin Dillon’s hapless Johnny “Drama” co-stars in a critically maligned, Ed Burns–produced prime time soap set there. Burns was from Valley Stream in real life, but Entourage‘s writer-producer Rob Weiss was the older brother of a high school pal from the Five Towns. It was a given that in order to be or do anything remarkable, you had to get the hell out of all Five. None were safe for the ambitious, and by my teens, I was already making a mental tally of those who had done it. Jim Steinman, Meatloaf’s collaborator and the composer of the mighty Bat Out of Hell (plus Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and a half dozen other immortal pop songs), attended Hewlett High. Harvey Milk, the martyred leader of the modern gay rights movement, was also from the Five Towns. Years before Sean Penn won an Oscar portraying him, I’d rented the documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, and kept it out long enough to never bother returning it. The late fees outweighed the cost of the tape. Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction planned and schemed in Woodmere, while then answering to Perry Bernstein. There was Ross Bleckner, the painter, Peggy Lipton, who played Julie on The Mod Squad, and Lyle Alzado, the professional football player. He was from Cedarhurst and knew my mom.
I noticed, while picking at Flip, Zoot, Unique, and Canal Jean Company, that the Manhattan sales people seemed to be in denial that they were working at all and acted instead like they were just hanging out. Years later, when I too entered the world of Lower Manhattan retail, I adopted a similar attitude toward customer service. My father found their languor offensive.
We didn’t even look much like each other anymore, whereas with my full lips, long nose, and thick, brown hair, I was once his double. Now, he was thickening in middle age, and by fifteen, I’d lost all my baby fat and grown about four inches taller than him. It didn’t make me less afraid of the guy. I still knew he could and might take me in a fight. And while I felt safe walking Lower Manhattan with him, I felt embarrassed too. He’d stopped dressing like a seventies velvet-and-suede-loving dandy and began showing up for our Sunday dates in oversized cotton sweatshirts (gray, sometimes white) with the names of places he’d visited on them: Miami, Chicago, Lexington—horse-racing cities with big tracks. His jeans were loose and faded, and there were sneakers where there’d once been ostrich- or snake-skin boots with hammered silver tips. After a point, some people just start dressing for comfort. I still dressed to be noticed. My tight wool Sprouse pants weren’t comfortable, but nobody else in my high school had them . . . or the shoes.
It never bothered me much that my father was a degenerate gambler. I’d never known him to be anything else, and aside from throwing me a beating or two, he was as devoted as any other dad. The worst abuse he ever inflicted on me was making me listen to “Run for the Roses” by Dan Fogelberg repeatedly. It was his favorite pop song, a top-ten hit from 1982. If you’ve never heard it and perhaps only know Dan for his other big hits, “Leader of the Band” or the mellow gold classic “Longer Than,” I will tell you that it’s about a pony (a horse with no name), born in western Kentucky, that grows up to vie for Kentucky Derby glory. It’s equine porn (“The sun on your withers . . . the wind in your mane,” the old beardo sang). I don’t know if Dan’s horse wins the Derby (or the Preakness and Belmont), but in the old man’s fantasy, he certainly did, and my father was right there in the winner’s circle, flashing a thumbs-up.
My mother, Susan, whom everyone called by her middle name, “Ricki,” was a Five Towns girl who, like me, had a rebellious streak and a series of teenage exit strategies, while still depending on the comforts that an upper-middle-class enclave offered. In the mid-sixties, my father and his Brooklyn friends enthusiastically welcomed the attentions of these “classy” Jewish princesses, with their bobbed noses and blonde hair and big houses and new cars. My mother was just seventeen when she began disappearing with Sid, after being introduced by her older and better-behaved half-sister Marlene, who’d spent a few semesters with him down at the University of Miami, where he was briefly enrolled.
My mother knew that dating my father would enrage her own parents and initially found his outlaw energy and the money that he’d take home from the track and spend easily, quite the sexy thing. If you’re seeing images of Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco in act one of Goodfellas (pre-Lufthansa heist), you’re probably not too far off. In Scorsese’s masterpiece (and in real life), Karen Hill was also from the Five Towns, and while my father was not an Italian, he dressed and acted like one and even sometimes called himself “Sonny.”
“You know these Jew broads, they got a lot of money,” Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito tells Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, while trying to convince him to double date. “You might end up with a big fucking score, you motherfucker.”
But my father wasn’t motivated by loot. Money came and went. So did women. The only constant in his life was the post-time bugle call and the track announcement, “And they’re off . . .” Life wasn’t about anything but that moment; and then the next race.
My father avoided the draft into the army and ‘Nam, but my mother drafted him into marriage. She’d been looking for a partner to assist in her big escape. She wanted out of the Five Towns and out of her big but lonely house where, as a child of divorce herself, she felt unwanted and ignored. Her mother, Regina, my “Grandma Reggie,” had re-married a self-made successful lumber salesman named Charles Albert, my “Grandpa Charlie.” Marriage two for both, they lived it up in effort to extend the romantic rush; and traveled the world together, taking cruises and treks through Asia and the Middle East. My mother, her biological brother, Peter, and her half siblings, the aforementioned Marlene and my Uncle Larry, were left at home and basically thrown in a bucket together. It didn’t feel like family to her, so she began inventing her own in which she would be the wife and mother.
Fueled by the music of The Beatles and The Stones, The Kinks, Donovan, The Shangri-Las, and The Ronettes, Ricki craved her own adventures, and dramas, which my father’s restless energy and dark brown eyes seemed to promise. She thought he looked like his idol Marlon Brando. He thought she looked like Bridget Bardot, with her carefully ironed bangs, the color of marshmallow chicks. She told him that she wanted children immediately, and he resisted until she explained that she needed them to somehow counterbalance the way she was raised—as if doting on me and eventually my sister would be a parenting version of carbon offsets. He felt for her, and by nineteen, she was pregnant with me. To this day, my mother and I sometimes talk like peers rather than parent and child. I’ve dated much younger women with much older mothers.
To his credit, my father warned her about his sickness before he proposed.
“I’m a gambler,” he confessed. “I won’t make you happy.” It changed nothing. She didn’t believe it. And so he proved it to her.
The first bet Sid ever placed was on a horse named Silver Ship, and it came in. From that moment, he was gone. The race track was a separate universe, and he no longer needed to live in the hard one, with its missile crisis and assassinations and draft numbers and riots, or even the smaller, more routine hassle of showing up to work somewhere and taking shit from some fat boss. Walking through the turnstile and buying a program was like flipping the bird to the straight world. The track had its own etiquette, and at the time some of them even had their own currency. Sid could buy a roast-beef sandwich with a make-believe gold coin, and from that point, all money seemed make-believe too.
Once they got a load of my father and his clothes and attitude, my mother finally had her parents’ attention. Horrified by the notion of this Brooklyn punk marrying into the family, they did whatever they could to cancel or postpone the wedding date. As the engagement drew onward, my mother’s family went from calm reasoning to begging and eventually threats to cut her off. Nothing worked. A Five Towns spoiled child, my mother couldn’t even conceive of not having everything she needed. There was no frame of reference to produce any fear. Finally, they dangled intrigue.
“We know something about the Spitz family,” my Grandma Reggie hinted. “The Spitzes, they have a dark secret.”
“You don’t scare me!” My mother replied. Every song in her record collection was rebellious and romantic: “Leader of the Pack,” “You Don’t Own Me,” “You Really Got Me,” “I’m Free.”
“Trust me, you’ll want to know what it is,” my grandmother warned, like a storefront psychic. “And when we tell you, believe me, you’ll think twice before becoming a part of their family.”
The dark secret, as I would later learn, wasn’t any darker than those most families hide and didn’t even involve my father. It was his father, my Grandpa Jack, who was the culprit. Now, Jack was the one who made my old man the degenerate he was, and he was most likely the single battiest entry in the entire gene pool, but I adored him for his eccentricity. Jack wasn’t like anybody else. He ate raw hot dogs from Grabstein’s Deli in Canarsie as we barbecued in the driveway. He also let me throw one paper airplane after another onto the grill, watching them slowly burn and curl.
“They’re all dying inside,” he’d laugh. “You’re burning ’em up.”
Jack, whom I called “Poppy Doc,” let me drive his cream-colored Cadillac El Dorado across the frozen ball field during the winter. I must have been twelve or thirteen, behind the wheel of a gas guzzler, playing Men at Work and the Steve Miller Band while crunching donuts over second and third base. In the spring, we’d walk Sheepshead Bay together and peer into the buckets of the fishermen as they pulled octopi and crabs from the brown drink. We went to the Kings Plaza Mall to window-shop or see a movie, but my favorite thing to do was go through his library. In their narrow house on Flatlands Avenue, I’d sit with his Gray’s Anatomy books and marvel at the human body with all the veins and muscles and things I knew I had in me, even if at the time, I felt like a giant brain connected to a dick. Jack kept medical books on freaks and the severely afflicted as well, and these were not off-limits. I fixated on patients with massive goiters, Siamese twins, or men with their arms chewed away by leprosy. I’d take it all in as my grandma sipped at her Bailey’s or saw to a customer in the basement where she ran a small yarn and knitting-supply business. The office, just off the laundry room, was always chilly, but the soft balls of tightly rolled and binned yarn, while poor natural insulation, gave it the illusion of warmth, and there was a big dish of butterscotch candy that I had a taste for, so I found myself down there a lot, listening to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett on the radio and “helping out,” mostly by keeping her company.
Be sure to pick up a copy of Poseur to read the rest!
