My So Called Wackness

I just saw “The Wackness,” a film “dramedy” set in New York City in the early ‘90s when the city was still ‘getting clean’ by Giuliani’s oh-so-kind urban reconstruction policies. The film has some flaws—loosely limned characters that probably work better on paper than on screen (aged role model protagonist is a pot-smoking psychiatrist who screws Mary Kate Olsen in a telephone booth, for instance), and the tiresome conventions of coming-of-age and enlightenment, blah blah. But a review is not necessary here because it was basically awesome, mainly for its depiction of a time with pinpoint freakin’ accuracy. It brought to mind my own loafing around NYC days in the ‘90s. Wheatpasted street art was the craze, as were Digable Planets, Biggie, A Tribe Called Quest, KRS, etc. I remember visiting the city in the swelt of August when I turned 15. I got to stay with my nutso 22-year-old cousin in Fort Greene. My dear mother must have been in such denial about the reality of my accommodations. When my cousin worked, I aimlessly roamed the streets of Manhattan. I met so many people, which is crazy for me to recall, because I don’t meet people randomly on the streets anymore. Maybe that’s a good thing.

I remember frequent stops to the “pizza parlor” at 2 a.m. to pick up “pizza” from some weird dude with barely any teeth who lurched into the car and commented on my smile. Then onto some loft, who knows where that was, to do drugs, smoke weed, and sit around naked, like a pack of sweaty animals. I remember my cousin’s friend talking to some of us girls about smearing raspberry jelly on her –nether region- so it would taste good to some boy. I loved that one! No trip to New York as a teenager was complete without the obligatory and entirely unsanitary piercing on Saint Mark’s Place behind a see-through curtain (later to be ripped out by Oribe, the famous ‘90s hair stylist to the stars, in a “hair show”…Do they even exist anymore? Anyhow I was a very glamorous hair model).

Then I met “Gabriel” who was friends with Mike D from the Beastie Boys, a dubious fact he managed to mention over and over. He later came to visit me at my parents’ house in California. I can’t believe I pulled off that request. When I rejected his sexual advances he recoiled into the reflective depths of his journal, which I later found because he was dumb enough to leave it under the bed. No Freudian interpretation necessary. Upon reading the journal I discovered he did not think so favorably of me (words like “cunt” and “bitch” served as clues) and that he was a heroin addict. He detailed all of the times he shoved a suppository up his ass in my bathroom. Lovely. When he arrived back home he called imploring me not to read his journal and to just send it back, a ridiculous request that human nature can only respond to with a burst of laughter. I actually didn’t read it for over a week, truth be told. But because I delayed in sending it, it sat on my bedside table, tempting me, for far too long. Needless to say I read the whole thing. He called and asked if I had read it.
I said, “Only one page.”
“What did the one page say?”
And with that, the flood gates opened and I couldn’t help but purge all of my disgust about this that and the other, which was all detailed in the journal.

He was silent for awhile and then replied, “You got all that from one page.”

When I moved back to New York a few years later I randomly ran into him at a deli -- a weird occurrence to say the least.