Tenth Avenue called Chelsea Commons, which would let us in after hours and lock the door with us happily inside because someone knew the bartender.
I never made it to the end of my first semester. I couldn’t get to morning classes after what I’d done the night before. I dropped out. My dad, whose impeccably performed complaint to all of his friends at the time was that his kids only ever called when they needed money, was bone-ificently relieved to be sprung from the balance of the tuition he carried after my student loans and aid package covered what they could. I paid my mother’s electric and phone bills that year, while she puzzled out how to be an independent, financially solvent divorced woman in blue jeans for the first time in her life. I gave her a wide berth. When Jeffrey had been questioned about the liberty he was taking by helping himself to a couple of eggs out of her fridge the morning after the long drive up to Vermont in his truck filled with her things retrieved from the split, furthermore making some derisive comment about our dad’s inconsistent and inadequate support checks, I decided to just send the electric bill money and to avoid the fraught visits to her home. She mishandled a lot of things in those first years, but nothing more so than her evident inability to shield us from her significant fury at my father. I bought a stereo and got a Macy’s credit card. I flew to Aspen and went skiing. I took home more than ninety thousand dollars that year and spent most of it on drugs.
At some point, urban cowboy started to slow down as a hot trend in the city’s nightlife, but we didn’t pay attention and we didn’t scale back. Around this time a new girl started at the club, and I, for the first time in my life more senior than someone, ignored her in the dressing room. She carelessly left her book of dupes sitting in a drawer in the waiter station while she was having a pee break, and I stole them. Now I had a whole book of checks, marked in sequential order, which should have been returned to the office at the end of the night accounted for, wrapped up in her neatly organized paperwork. They had not been assigned to me, and I could do what I liked with them. It was the waitress’s equivalent of having her own cash register. I used them judiciously over the next few months, getting my cash-and-carry drinks rung up on these checks that could never be traced to me. But things were slowing down so considerably that we began to scale way back and frequently, in fact more often than not, worked whole shifts on the up-and-up.
On a slow night, one month shy of a year to the week after I’d started, I arrived at work, almost late and out of breath. I had woken up late and hurting from a night of decidedly more sinister hue than average, most of it unrecoverable in my memory, and I was particularly disoriented from not being able to recall even one detail of how I had gotten home, and when it was time to leave my apartment, I was rushed and ill-prepared. I couldn’t find a clean T-shirt or a clean apron. Melissa had left a brief note, in reference to the cockroach problem, “Remember Mr. Kornfeld when we were kids? A German exterminator! Get this: He drove a Volkswagen bug!!! No kidding. Ha. Ha. Ha.” I grabbed an old dirty apron that still had bobby pins and matchbooks in the pockets and a couple of chili stains on it and ran out the door. I got changed in the locker room, put on my apron, and discovered in the pocket one of the old checks I had stolen from that new girl a few months before, who had not lasted even two weeks.
It faintly registered in my dull and harried mind to take care, but then the thought vanished, and I went up to my assigned station on the balcony. We were used to big acts, Jorma Kaukonen and Bob Dylan and Dr. John—I even worked an Osmonds gig once at which every customer was a Mormon female clutching a scrapbook and a decaffeinated ginger ale. But this was a quiet night, with an unknown onstage, and very few customers. Laura was working the downstairs station