Needle (6 page)

On October 5
^th
I uncovered a plot hatched by Oscar’s evening manager, Eli Stanton, to do away with me at his earliest convenience. I was informed of this tidbit by Robert, a waiter, who had become aware of Stanton’s intentions earlier that day.

“Oooh, baby. Better watch out! Eli’s gettin’ ready to fire your ass,” he said to me as I clocked-in.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Where you think? From that ugly bitch’s mouth.”

Robert was black and gay and as such, the ugly bitch to whom he was referring was none other than Eli himself.

Eli wasn’t due for an hour, which left me time to mull over exactly how I wanted to handle the situation. I was the only bartender scheduled that night, so I knew that my termination would have to wait at least until the shift concluded. One thing I was certain of, however, was that my departure from Oscar’s would hardly be inconspicuous. I hated the restaurant, hated the job, and most of all—hated Eli Stanton.

A casual observer might deduce that Eli’s job was two-fold. First of all, he was to closely monitor the status of each and every glass on or around the bar. Then, the moment he noticed that one of them was empty he’d snap into action.
“Get that fucking glass off the bar,”
he would bark. Sometimes, just as a customer was finishing off a drink, Eli’s uncanny ability to detect its ever-changing state of fullness would kick-in and he’d immediately point out the offending glass.

Beyond that annoyance, Eli sickened me on a daily basis as he would sit at the bar for hours scratching his dirty head. His scalp was apparently so dry that you could actually
hear
his fingernails raking up the crusty matter that lay hidden beneath his hairline. With each passing itch and irritation came a scratch, and then a little blizzard of dandruff would fall from his head and cascade down to the surface of my bar. At first, mortified with every passing squall, I would use a rag to clear away the accumulation. I thought that by continuously removing the biological debris he would eventually get the hint, and either take the hygienic steps necessary to correct the problem—or at least get the fuck away from me. But neither happened and I soon realized that it would be wiser to resist shoveling until the rancid weather system had completely moved out of the area.

My last shift at Oscar’s ended up being the busiest of all. At one point, Eli must have felt a greater sense of purpose than ever before as not one, not two, but
three
empty martini glasses rested on the bar. Of course, he immediately made me aware of them, but being inundated with drink orders and a bar full of drunken assholes made it impossible to correct the situation.

Often, during times of volume-driven crisis, many restaurant
managers are notorious for retiring to their peaceful back offices—rather than assisting their overwhelmed employees. But Eli was not one to be intimidated by hordes of thirsty customers, and when he detected an unprecedented fourth empty glass sitting on the bar—he met the challenge head on.

“Hey asshole!” he yelled at me. “I thought I told you to get those fucking glasses off the bar!”

“You got it,” I said, and then slapped the empty glasses onto the floor before walking out of the restaurant forever. Obviously, I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with that type of environment and would have to find another way to chase the buck. Besides, I was supposed to be a
professional
.

11

Regardless of the excitement and anticipation for rock & roll glory, I was still extremely reluctant to embrace eventual success as a forgone conclusion. Fortunately, less than a week after fleeing Oscar’s I’d landed a job as a secretary/receptionist for Archer Advertising and believe it or not, The Good Detective secured Matt a position as a special education teacher in the Bronx. Honestly though, it happened to be the only teaching position Matt was qualified for as he would be instructing a group of students whose educational expectation was actually
less
than he was equipped to deliver.

After getting hired at Archer I met Gail Garcia. Gail was vacating the position for which I had just been hired, and would be acquainting me with the daily tasks I’d now be responsible for completing. The job was absolutely dismal, but I liked Gail and we soon began dating. Though originally from Cuba, Gail was raised in Miami and had moved to New York in 1990 after graduating from the University of Florida. She wasn’t incredibly beautiful, but she was tall and had sexy legs as well as an uncanny ability to make me laugh. Most importantly, however, it was because of Gail that we settled on “Sections” as the band’s permanent name.

Within a night or two of learning that “Pray for Rain” was already
taken by a band that was credited for work on the
Sid and Nancy
soundtrack, I noticed a training manual on a desk in Gail’s apartment. As I thumbed through it my eyes landed on the top of a page with a highlighted heading that read, “These are the Sections to Remember:” Although I can’t recall the manual’s subject matter, for some reason the “Sections to Remember” part stuck with me. We officially adopted the name, and eventually people started referring to us as simply, “Sections.”

October was apparently the month for love or something like it as not only I, but Helmer and Matt became involved in intimate relationships. Helmer met a very attractive French lady named Emmanuelle, I met Gail, and Matt began dating a girl he had first met at Bethany. Her name was Cynthia and it quickly became apparent that she was a bit too sheltered and proper for Matt, who was forced to maintain a facade of complete sobriety whenever around her. Evident to most, the relationship was doomed from the very beginning. Cynthia was deeply religious, didn’t drink or do drugs, and while at Bethany she rarely left the library. In fact, she was so pious that Matt was convinced she was still a virgin, even though Cynthia claimed to have had her first and only intimacy just prior to meeting him at school. Even so, according to Matt, this first love was an invention of Cynthia’s intended to reel him in, as she secretly felt that someone with his level of sophistication would never be interested in a 23 year-old virgin. “She even gave him a name…
Josh McGregor
!” he’d blurt out, in a way that made you want to punch him.

Throughout the rest of the month and on into November, Perry remained in the midst of helping Shannon relocate to Los Angeles, as she had finally landed a small but significant role in Steven Seagal’s,
Out for Justice
. For Shannon, the exposure meant a viable, future career in the film industry. For Perry, it meant packing up her shit and carting it out west; however, before departing he assured us that he’d be back within a month or so. Apparently even now, after he’d been politely dumped, it was still worth driving 3,000 miles just to touch the booby.

God love him…really.

12

At first, I really loved the 80
^th
Street apartment. Located in the heart of New York City, it was only a half-a-block away from Central Park which has always been my favorite place in the world. Eventually though, I realized our building was in an area that we really didn’t have any business being in. It was the wealthiest part of the wealthiest part of New York and wholly disconnected from everything adjacent. Without a need for fences or barriers, it was and still is neatly sequestered from the rest of the city.

The area makes up a large part of the 10021 zip code, one of the most affluent in the country and completely sanitized for your protection. It is here where the New York City aristocracy lives lavish lifestyles, with overbred dogs and an underbred sense of compassion in a zone exclusively reserved for the ruling class.

In this neighborhood brimming with untold riches to spare, you seldom see a panhandler, a homeless person, or any other member of New York’s forsaken underbelly as the city can effectively shelter the privileged away from the homeless, but can’t always shelter the homeless away from the winter. I soon became affected by it all; how those who ask so little have even less, while those who have so much want even more. We didn’t belong in that part of town. We were disaffected, disenfranchised, and disappointed kids who had much more in common with those on the
outside
.

One evening in late November, we decided to celebrate Perry’s return from California with an impromptu jam session. Unfortunately, an irritated neighbor—apparently unmoved by the infectious grooves emanating from our apartment—abruptly ended the drunken jam by filing a noise complaint with the doorman. As considerate tenants and rather than risk any additional complaints, we decided that a game of touch-football might be a more appropriate end to the evening’s festivities.

Initially, we headed towards the park but quickly realized that darkness would soon become a factor. So, instead, we situated ourselves in front of the Metropolitan Museum which provided us with a huge, extremely well-lit area. Unfortunately, positioned across the street and almost directly on the 50-yard line lived one of the editors of the
New York Times
, who would soon become our
second
noise complainant of the evening. After only ten minutes of the first quarter the game was postponed due to police.

By January of 1991, Helmer and I seriously considered departing the stuffy Upper East Side location. It made no sense to remain there, sharing a tiny studio apartment in an area we were growing to despise, when for the same price we could afford something spacious in a more appealing part of Manhattan. A breaking point of sorts occurred one evening later that month while we were listening to music and a very angry man started bellowing outside our apartment and pounding on the front door. As I lowered the volume we were able to catch the tail end of his message:

“…
you fucking assholes!”

I had a feeling this was going to be another noise complaint. I opened the door and cautiously stuck my head outside to see which particular neighbor we offended, only to get a glimpse of his departure through a fire exit.

“I think it was the guy from downstairs again,” I informed my roommate.

“Yeah, probably,” Helmer agreed looking up from a magazine. “He hates us.”

Actually,
everyone
there hated us. We clearly didn’t belong, and made no effort to ingratiate ourselves.

Before long we officially decided to vacate the premises. Helmer found an apartment in the Village with his French lady, while Perry and I agreed to share a place on East 74
^th
Street in order to better manage the band. Then, on February1
^st
, Eric and Virginia drove their van into Manhattan to help us move.

Eric and Virginia Holst were two of my favorite people of all time, and though I’ve never been much for mementos, a prized and cherished possession was a photograph taken of them at their engagement party a few years prior. They were now married and Eric had just received his degree in dentistry. Though, of course, my relationship with Eric stemmed from childhood when he and Troy would often play the role of family surrogates, I was also extremely fond of his new wife. Virginia had a sense of humor that complimented her husband’s perfectly, and a general concern for others that was palpable.

“Hey Craig,” she said to me as I loaded their van with my last box of belongings. “I’ve been there before and I know things can be crazy, and sometimes it seems like it really doesn’t matter, but it can get out
of hand before you know it. Be really, really, careful because it’s totally not worth it.”

I’m not exactly sure how she got the inkling, but I believe this was Virginia’s indirect way of suggesting that I
not
become a heroin addict. But by this point I was hardly an
addict
and the possibility of becoming one was beyond conception. I was still only a Weekend Warrior, though I must admit—I now found myself waiting like hell for the weekends to arrive. Even so, I’d completely stopped drinking alcohol as it only teased me with an unfulfilled euphoria that heroin delivered almost immediately—and much more cost effectively. In fact, friends who dabbled with nothing beyond liquor were spending almost three times as much on their vice than the 30 or 40 bucks I’d set aside each week for my own. Of course, in time that ratio would be dramatically reversed.

13

Perry and I had moved into a fairly reasonable, one-bedroom apartment on 74
^th
Street between First Avenue and York. It was situated on the ground floor of a building that certainly wasn’t as grand as the previous, but compared to some of the dwellings I would later inhabit it was nothing short of palatial. Although initially, Perry seemed to favor the bedroom, more often than not we would fall asleep on the living room couches. As a result, the apartment’s only bedroom was treated like a walk-in closet and devoted to clothes, instruments, amplifiers and recording equipment.

As far as Sections was concerned, this was an important place. It was here where we’d begin to assemble the rest of the band and struggle to find our musical footing. It was also where I accepted the fact that, for better or for worse, I was meant to be a musician. Of course, getting fired from Archer helped facilitate that decision.

With two weeks severance pay I was let go at the end April and alas, my romance with the exciting world of advertising lasted a mere six months. Getting fired from a position that had previously been considered a foot in the door to my industry of choice was a bit
disheartening. I would be lying, however, if I said it was a complete surprise. I found the job to be completely uninspiring and can only assume my performance reflected that. Furthermore, for months now I could sense a bitter dislike emanating from Judy who was Archer’s CFO and who, ironically, had remained a close friend of Gail’s even after she left the agency.

Judy had apparently considered herself an older sister-figure to Gail. They were both single women that had come to the big city to launch their respective careers, and I suppose they felt a kinship of sorts. As a result, Judy took great interest in Gail and would attempt to mentor her in a variety of areas. In fact, during the months leading up to my arrival at Archer she’d been delving into Gail’s personal life, cautioning her not to be too selective when it came to men. Judy said that if Gail wasn’t careful, she’d end up a spinster by the time she was 30. Judy herself—now
over
30, single, and already sharing an apartment with 16 cats—was just about the last person on earth who should have been dispensing relationship advice. Nonetheless, when she first heard of our budding romance her response to Gail was a totally disgusted, “That’s not what I meant by
lowering your standards.
”