Electroboy (5 page)

My academic career was particularly uneventful, with the exception of my film classes and filmmaking experiences. I had a particular fondness for one of my film professors, a woman with a keen sense of humor and an astonishing knowledge of film history. My other courses I usually missed, thanks to my altered sleep schedule and inability to remain awake. I relied on the notes of friends and any materials that were handed out in class. Sometimes it felt like I was attending a correspondence school. I knew that I was sabotaging myself and even discussed my problem with the dean, who’d had complaints from my Japanese professor during my sophomore year—the dean warned me to “pull it together.” I tried to focus on the course material, but my mind wasn’t there, and I eventually dropped the course. The dean encouraged me to keep seeing Dr. Logan.

But the mania was helpful, too. It propelled me forward and (along with NoDoz and caffeine) kept me up for hours on end cramming for exams that I was absolutely unprepared for. It was easy for me to catch up the night before because I had an excellent memory. I wrote term papers the morning before they were due. I was on overdrive and got things done. My grades were mediocre, but I graduated with high honors on the merits of my senior thesis project, a sixteen-minute black-and-white documentary film about filmmaking called
Screentest
, which won the Frank Capra Prize for best film.

The mania also transformed me into an extremely outgoing and sociable character. Fueled by drugs and alcohol, I constantly socialized and partied, avoiding the possibility of sliding into a dreaded depression.

My weekly sessions with Dr. Logan were the one appointment that I never missed, even if I was otherwise glued to my sheets. I became addicted to them. I spent hours with her, free-associating, exploring my dreams, making stick-figure drawings of my family, and sharing anything I could think of in the hopes of coming up with answers to the crazies. But the therapy never actually helped relieve my depression or control my mania. In fact, it was the mania that relieved the depressive states, and I continued to function at a ridiculously manic pace for four years. I don’t believe Dr. Logan ever got me to function the way that, in our first session together, she had suggested I could. I’ve always suspected that she didn’t have any understanding of what I later learned was my illness.

June 3, 1984
.

The day after the bright blur that was graduation I returned my red satin cap and gown and started the impossible task of packing up four years’ worth of accumulated junk: textbooks, tapes, boxes of index cards with brilliant observations about life and my existence, copious notes from my four years of therapy sessions, journals of unanalyzed dreams, and senseless notes I made on scraps of paper when I was stoned. The thought of leaving paradise behind was frightening. Not that I wasn’t curious and excited about the next stage. Fame and fortune lay ahead, didn’t they? I replayed my dead grandfather’s “youth is wasted on the young” lecture in my head all the way home on the Merritt Parkway and cried. A little melodrama to pass the time. I told myself the trip home was only a temporary layover.

D
riving across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey—the wrong side of the river again—feels like a visit to the dentist. Mom and Dad greet you as if you’ve just returned from another galaxy. Our son, the college graduate. Back home to recuperate from four years of intensive orbiting and scientific research. Within an hour, you realize you are living in a mental hospital. Only here, the walls are wallpapered. Frightening floral pattern from another decade. All of it presses down on you. The
National Geographic
map over your bed. The globe on your desk. The stamp album. The
Penthouse
magazines in the exact same place you left them in the closet. Not much goes on in the suburbs when you have no schedule and you’ve just graduated from college. The next day, you make sunny-side-up eggs and toast at noon, read the obituaries in the
Times
(a disproportionate number of German architects and Hollywood makeup artists from the 1930s), maybe watch some television, and wait until the mailman comes. You get the feeling that your parents wouldn’t mind if you stayed home for another twenty-two years. You don’t do too much else during your monthlong hiatus except for watching Letterman with your door closed and sleeping late. Each morning you’re awakened by phone calls from your parents’ friends, congratulating you on your graduation and in the next breath asking you what you’re going to do next. Easy answer. Find an apartment in the city.

The funny thing is that I have it all planned out. My life, that is. I am moving to New York to live off my inheritance and make independent films. Actually, it’s only about $25,000 my grandfather left me when he died my sophomore year in college. But in June of 1984 it seems like a huge amount of money to me, and somehow I can’t imagine it will ever run out. And since it will never run out and nobody is telling me how to spend it, the first order of business, of course, is to buy some cocaine.

In keeping with my “cash shall always flow like water” credo, I start apartment hunting on the Upper West Side. I don’t worry about finding a job first. It seems like the right neighborhood for a future yuppie. I don’t put much effort into seeing what’s out there. After looking at four apartments within a five-block radius with one broker, I take the most dramatic, a large studio at 84th and Broadway. Let there be no pretense of poverty—it’s a $1,200-a-month luxury rental, a great space with high ceilings, brick walls, and shiny hardwood floors on which I can do my
Risky Business
routine in my briefs if I am so moved. And I think I am. The building is in a gentrified neighborhood—Columbus Avenue is already a suburban mall choked by bars and restaurants. It doesn’t have much of a view—it overlooks a Sony movieplex next door—but at least I can fantasize about a movie of mine opening there one day. It’s only four blocks from the notorious Zabar’s and H&H Bagels, and across the street from Charivari, where I quickly drop $1,000 on a few pair of pants and a couple of shirts before I even move in, unconcerned that this represents 4 percent of my inheritance. There is so much available to me twenty-four hours a day in my new little neighborhood—and I haven’t even ventured below 79th Street or above 86th Street yet. I’m living on my own for the first time, and my parents are keeping their distance; they’re not asking too many questions.

I always knew that I would live in New York. After four years at Wesleyan, I was whirling—an adrenaline junkie, used to sleepless nights, drug and alcohol binges, and wandering around campus looking for fun. There was no doubt in my grandiose thinking that this surge of energy would sweep me here, where I’d choose
something incredibly risky to do and soon find fame and fortune. Since my film thesis project at Wesleyan had been very successful, winning an award, I have the confidence to undertake making an independent film.

The second order of business is to create the ultimate bachelor pad, due to my need to perpetuate the myth that I am a rich kid and exude a sense of success. I like the idea of spending this chunk of money I have, and I take the project quite seriously, consulting a few magazines and a friend’s mother who is a decorator. I envision a “modern country farmhouse on Broadway,” replete with pine furniture and such uncountryish details as a sectional couch, a glass-and-metal table, a platform bed, halogen lighting, and the most up-to-the-minute stereo, TV, and VCR—a place where a gentleman farmer will be just as comfortable as an investment banker. I go straight to the seventh floor of Bloomingdale’s and within an hour and a half choose a few pieces from one room and mix them with a few from another room, making the salesman very happy. I also pick up a few electronic toys—television, VCR, stereo, answering machine—and pay for everything with cash. Later in the afternoon I buy a set of Stendig chairs and a halogen lamp from George Kovacs, then make a brief stop at the Whitney Museum to pick up a Fairfield Porter mountain-landscape poster. Now all the apartment needs is a wine rack, a case of wine from the liquor store across the street, and some final decorating touches—a couple of baskets and a few pieces of tumbleweed. Maybe I can find tumbleweed downtown or just have a friend pick up some when he passes through Santa Fe.

Determined that the apartment be painted precisely the perfect color, I become involved in an obsessive search for an earth-tone paint I’ve seen in a magazine layout. I remember that it is called something like Country Paté. Or is it Country Plate? I go crazy trying to track it down. I have visions of having to smear the walls with paté from Zabar’s to get a sense of what country paté will look like. Finally I find something close enough, called Mushroom Mountain. I decide not to attempt the job myself and hire Calvin, a professional painter and, I learn later, a professional
drinker. Calvin gives me a long list of supplies to get: rollers, brushes, pans, turpentine, and beer. He reeks of alcohol when he greets me at 9:00
A.M.
I leave Calvin alone for the whole day and head across the street to the hardware store, where I buy every conceivable houseware object and tool: lightbulbs, extension cords, screwdrivers, a wrench, a power drill, hangers, coat hooks, screws and nails, a tape measure, and vacuum bags, although I don’t even have a vacuum cleaner yet. Total cost: $500. Then on to Zabar’s, where I spend $1,500 on dishware, glasses, cutlery, knives, pots and pans, pot holders, measuring cups, a Cuisinart, a blender, the wine rack, and other odds and ends for the bachelor gourmet. I am making sure not only that the apartment is well stocked for entertaining but that it has all the accoutrements necessary to be the model apartment. The gratification from my shopping comes from the ability to spend money and actually get something that I find valuable in return, transaction after transaction. The more transactions I can make, the better I feel about myself. When I return to the apartment at the end of the day, Calvin is gone, along with a dozen beers and a pint of gin.

My first night in Manhattan. I can’t stay in the apartment because the paint fumes are so bad. My friend Lindley Boegehold, whom I met during a summer job at Macmillan Publishing a few years earlier, and who is a few years older and wiser, takes me out to Teachers Too, a neighborhood restaurant, for my Upper West Side indoctrination. I have the Thai chicken with peanut sauce. We talk about my plans for my film, which I imagine as a comedy set in the suburbs. I tell her I think I’ll ride the trend in filmmaking and raise the money independently and make a teenage movie. She is encouraging and believes that I can pull it off. After dinner I walk Lindley home and go back to my apartment. When I walk in and turn on the lights, it feels like a hotel. And it still reeks of paint fumes. There is no blinking red light on my new answering machine. Not a good sign for such a popular guy like me. It feels like the world is crashing down on me because I have no messages. Fuck it. It’s only 10:30
P.M.
, so I decide to take a walk down Broadway and see what’s going on. It’s a Sunday, so it’s pretty quiet on
the street. I stop in at Shakespeare’s and look at some photography books. I don’t know anyone in this store. I feel like I’m in a foreign country. I leave and walk farther down Broadway. It’s extremely humid. At 79th Street, a light breeze provides me with some relief, coming up from the Hudson River.