From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel (15 page)

My arrival into Grand Central Station Monday morning was always my favorite part of the trip. Commuters crisscrossing like mad under an aquamarine cathedral ceiling, their heels clicking across the marble floor, everyone out of time. They are like cattle being herded toward the slaughter. I liked to walk against the flow of traffic, to paddle against the current, and to observe the tense look on people’s faces as they rushed to their offices.

I had breakfast—a café au lait and a croissant—at a coffee stand on the northwest corner of Bryant Park. I bummed a cigarette off an old Italian gentleman in suspenders and smoked while I finished my coffee. My ass was wet from the morning dew on the chairs. I remember this so clearly. It was November and it was
humid, the start of a new week, the week that would have the greatest impact on my career in fashion.

That morning, back in Bushwick, Ahmed and I went over the details in his living room. Details that seemed fluid and flexible. Perhaps working this way was just easier for me because of my naïveté in business.

“If our courtship is going to blossom into fruit, and our trust grow into a stern oak, we must give it all of our fluids,” Ahmed said. “By fluids, I mean water. And water is what sustains life, Boy. Life is energy. You see what I’m getting at? I’m in it all the way. Tackling a new business is like farming. Today we will plow the soil. Tomorrow we plant the seed. Come.”

We took a drive—our second together. It was as if the open road was his meeting room. The Zipcar his conference table. It was all very American to me.

“I spoke to my accountant, Dick Levine. He’s a Jew, good with numbers. The funds are all in place. The numbers we talked about, seventy-five K. Yes? But you understand I can’t hand you the total amount. And this has nothing to do with trust! No, we’re cuffed together, you and me. Dick will handle the finances, but the money is ready when you need it. When you get back to the apartment Yuksel will give you an envelope containing your first ten thousand. Well, nine thousand five. Dick feels it’s best that I give it to you in these increments, for tax purposes. You understand, of course. And as expenses arise, as I said, the funds will be available to you.”

He drove us over to Williamsburg so we could check out twenty-two hundred square feet of available space in the toothpick factory. The old brick building boasted giant bay windows—elliptical
arches of steel and glass. It was right on the waterfront on Kent Avenue.

The loft was a dream. It was completely open, with a high cast-iron ceiling and a tremendous view of the East River. The bay windowpanes were cloudy and stained. Some were even cracked and had been taped many times over. A piece of New York history, as I saw it. My own piece. And in the whole time I lived at 113 Kent, I never had them replaced. Not even for the spanking clean view that I would have attained. Besides, at night one could make out the city skyline as if one were viewing it through a stained-glass mural. There was the sprawling Williamsburg Bridge reaching out to the Lower East Side, the towers of light downtown. The arched windows reminded me that in its original form this was once a factory of workers. And that is what I would be. A worker. Sure, I was an artist, but I had a whole first collection needing to be worked on. For all of my high-minded intentions, I knew what I needed. A dose of practicality. A blue collar around my privileged neck.

If there was one oddity about the space, it was the cage. The only freestanding structure left behind from the old factory days, the cage was a storage area under lock and key, tucked away in the darkest corner of the loft. I entertained converting it into a bedroom. It wasn’t that much smaller than my studio in Bushwick, and it would give me something of a division between my sleep and work spaces. I went ahead and told Ahmed my idea. He opened the grated door, lowered himself beneath its six-foot ceiling, and ascertained that it was indeed big enough for a queen mattress, but little else. “It’ll be your very own sleeper cell,” he said, amused. We went on for a time referring to it as my sleeper
cell. (This type of humor would be used against me prior to the Overwhelming Event, courtesy of Herizon Wireless.)
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But in the end I determined the space too small and used it for storage.

“So, Boy, what do you think? Is it what you need?”

I was so enamored of the space—industrial concrete columns holding the turn‑of‑the-century ceiling aloft, newly finished hardwood floors that squeaked and cracked beneath my Nikes, natural light from the bay windows illuminating nearly every square inch, a remodeled bathroom with checkered tiles, and a modern kitchen. What a far cry from my apartment on Evergreen Avenue!

“It’s perfect,” I said.

Launch me from the cannon! Boom! I say I was a bomb ready to go off on the entire industry. My collection in the works was growing, sprouting in new and unforeseen directions. Its antennae grappled for everything around me. And I stole like a bandit. For color I looked to Catherine Malandrino. For textures I turned to Comme des Garçons. For pure bravado, Galliano and McQueen. Andrew Saks once said of Coco Chanel that she was like a general, obsessed by the desire to win.
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Nothing could better describe where my head was at this moment in time. The new pieces would draw from all of my heroes but with the added chutzpah of my own acutely developed style. And what was that style? I had been asking myself this question my whole life, but only now was it becoming clear to me. It seems that my place in New York, particularly Williamsburg, was the final piece in the maturity of this style.

The neighborhood proved to be most productive not only for my state of mind but for my state of multiple affairs (big pun coming).

Williamsburg! The name alone rang out with history and made
me think of other exotic cities that also donned the authoritative “burg”: Johannesburg, St. Petersburg. It conjured great men who belonged to even greater cities, like Johan Lindeberg
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of Stockholm, Sweden. Williamsburg was not just a place; it was a heightened state of mind. Though like any good thing—white Ferragamos, uncorked vino, mama’s breast milk—it couldn’t be preserved forever. I hadn’t been settled into the toothpick factory for long before I noticed button-down nincompoops landing on our main strip. One could catch a glimpse of these finance types, the kind known to wear their work shirts untucked on the weekends, speaking into their clunky BlackBerrys, defaming our neighborhood by branding it “Billyburg.”

With a little help from Ahmed, I had been grandfathered into my building (“grandfathered” being a term Ahmed liked to use for the way things got done in the city), and like a true New Yorker I was possessive of my own ’hood.

At those khaki financiers, I scoffed.

My disdain for these impostors swelled to outrage as winter descended. The snowfall, which looked so fresh and clean from inside, created nothing but black puddles of slush that one stepped in when not paying attention. And then the salt that the shopkeepers laid down to defeat the ice ate its way into even the best leather boots. By four o’clock the sun already began its retreat. Darkness by five. Wall Street wankers with their wrinkled shirttails along Bedford Avenue by six.

Could it be that I missed the humidity of the tropics, that muggy weather I had despised all my life? Was I, in fact, a little
homesick for a thin jersey T, a short plane ride to Palawan, a skinny-dip in a salty lukewarm bay, a cigarette in the hot sun? My very first winter in New York and I was contracting what Americans call “seasonal depression.” It is because of their hard winters that so many of them require Zoloft.

What saved me from this pharmaceutical was my new studio in the toothpick factory, which by January 2003 was fully operational. Ahmed had proved true to his word. I had a sturdy drafting table, a workstation for cutting and sewing, dress forms, racks of new dresses. It was now time to tend to my neglected living quarters, marked by a mere mattress on the floor and a few bar stools. Between traveling up to Bronxville and working, I hadn’t found much time to furnish. Michelle never came down because of her classes and a new play that she was writing for an independent study. When she finally did stay over one gloomy February weekend, the loft was too cold, dry, and sparse for us to get comfortable. So that Sunday after a morning brunch with her nana in Carroll Gardens we boarded a shuttle bus to New Jersey bound for exit 13A, the site of the Swedish furniture warehouse.

A strong flag has always struck me as the reason for a nation’s prosperity. Look to Japan’s red sun, Korea’s yin yang, America’s red and white bars, Israel’s Jewish hexagram, Russia’s hammer and sickle.
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These are symbols of power. Color coordination, balance in design, distinguished composition. Compare those to the suffering nations. Moons, stars, evergreens—things that can be seen only through total darkness or which cast tall shadows. Put those
symbols on palettes of blacks and reds and yellows and whites and you can almost guarantee a disaster. As colors clash, nations clash. The Philippines, Malaysia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan—these have flags that will never fly above flourishing nations. They’ll always come in dead last. You think when Francis Scott Key or whoever unveiled that season’s Old Glory, the president turned to him and said, I love it but does it come in Third World?

Sir, no sir!

Perhaps these are the ramblings of a simple man taking a stab at world affairs, but when our shuttle bus pulled up to the grand furniture warehouse draped with the Swedish flag, I was overcome with a feeling of solidarity for that powerful symbol of economic prowess.

Unfortunately, this titanic pride went flaccid when we began to pace the living rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms of Swedish modernity. Sad couples took turns trying out love seats and faux rockers in a maze of domesticity. All of it—the thin walls sliced in half, the strategically lit scenes—a stage! We were walking through sets like actors in one giant play, pretending! Michelle and I, we were pretending too. Could it be that my reluctance to tend to my living area in the toothpick factory loft had stemmed from this fact, buried deep in my subconscious? We were
pretend
lovers.

Turning one of the corners, Michelle and I came upon a day care area. A child was bent over, being spanked by his mother. The child whined. Other parents and couples stood around, wondering if they should say anything. But it was the winter, a season
of inaction. Everyone watched the young child get his and continued to do nothing. Perhaps it didn’t matter. He was wearing a snowsuit, so I can’t imagine he felt much of anything.

Nor did I as I let Michelle fill our pushcart with random marketplace articles. A colander, French press, glass jars, rice-paper lamp, bath mat, throw rug, plants, various other knickknacks. At checkout I again saw the child trailing his mother, his tears gone, and he gripped a hot dog in his hand without any sort of bun. How could he have forgotten what had just transpired? Could a little piece of beef frank make everything in his world better?

I turned to Michelle, who had a vacant look on her face. Under these lights she was no longer beautiful to me. I didn’t want to be playacting anymore. But I was helpless to resist the entropy of our love. At the time I blamed the winter, but another full year would pass before I would manage to put my liberation in motion.

These were still, after all, my salad days, a time of green judgments, if I may borrow one of Michelle’s stock phrases. (She was always quoting Stanislavski.)
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In 2003 my actions addressed nothing—not Michelle, not my bed frame, which I’d have to order from West Elm. I was not concerned with the world outside of the shiny couture bubble that is the Fashion Industry—capital F, capital I.

Deep inhale now.

The industry bubble, first inflated in New York City, stretches out across the Atlantic to Paris, London, then Milan, until it goes
pop at the end of a given season. That’s when the designers, investors, publicists, stylists, and models look up as the profits rain down. But once the bubble is dispersed, and before you can catch your breath, there’s already another bubble, a second, being inflated back in New York. Look, there it is, stretching out over Seventh Avenue. Look at all the hot air it’s taking in!

Now, after months of slaving over my new line, I still wasn’t one of the mouths fattening that bubble up. Who was but Philip Tang, my friend and former classmate. For all the help he’d given me when I first arrived in the city—the equipment, the connections—I was still envious of him. He had been in New York only a few years more than me and was already flirting with the top echelon of the industry. He certainly had his mouth on the bubble, and with his clothing line Philip Tang 2.0, he was giving it all he had.

Philip, the enfant terrible, was a Taiwanese immigrant who at age six had come to Manila with his family. His parents quickly made a small fortune with their store chain, Lucky Dry Clean Non-Toxic. Lucky? Try blessed. By age nine Philip was sketching couture and could operate a sewing machine all by his lonesome. At eleven he was making dresses for his two older sisters, sending them off to middle school dances like divas. By fifteen he had been admitted into FIM as the youngest student in the college’s history.

It feels like yesterday that I was watching Philip work in our collective studio. My table was directly behind his. Our dress forms were side by side, outfitted with whatever we were assigned in a given week.

I sometimes called him over for his opinion in those days, but
only when I had come upon something really magnificent. Once I remember finishing a short cocktail dress, what I considered the best piece I had whipped up that semester. I was proud of it, and I wanted his approval. More than anything, I wanted him to tell me I was great too.

“What do you think?” I asked him.