JANE GEORGE                       See Jane Write

 

New York
August, 1980

 The young man struggles to get his bicycle through the double doors in the building entry to my hard-won ground floor flat on Fifth Street between Avenues A and B, in the Lower East Side area of Manhattan known as Alphabet City. Timid, lacking confidence, I stand and watch him. His face, flushed red with embarrassment, creates a stark contrast with his lank, white-blonde hair, which falls forward and covers every feature except for his mouth.

I let him wrestle with his bicycle while I survey his lips, which are wide and full yet don’t cross over into the obscenity of excess. I’ve only previously encountered such captivating curves, dips, and dents in museums, on mouths carved of marble.

“Is it you who has the ad? For the roommate?” he asks.

He sets his bicycle against the stairwell and flips his hair out of his face. The movement causes his messenger’s bag to slip around and bang him in the chest. He reddens again and turns the tables by staring acutely back at me. His countenance arrests all preconceptions, and captures my heart and aesthetic sensibilities on the spot. He looks for all the world like an albino black man with straight blonde hair and hazel eyes.

He is beautiful.

I nod in response and we enter the apartment I cannot afford. Even with two jobs, I need a roommate.

Once the residence of a turn-of-the-century physician, the dwelling charms with decayed elegance. The doctor’s rat-infested offices in the basement are now home to a pair of party hearty boys from Alabama, who have their own construction company. With their jumpsuits and helmets, it’s like having Devo-with-a-drawl living down there.

In my apartment, floor to ceiling shuttered windows face the street in the living room and a non-working fireplace graces one wall. I’ve claimed the room as mine and tell the young man as much.

“That’s O.K. Is the middle room taken?”

“Consider it yours.” I lean against the wall, face turned to the floor.

He cranes his neck sideways to get a better look at me. “Hold your chin up,” he commands in a gentle tone. “Just like that. You are not going to believe this.” He runs to his messenger’s bag, pulls out a dog-eared sketchbook, and then flops cross-legged on the floor.

“Look at these, you are the first girl I’ve met who looks just like my drawings.” With excitement, he places sheets of paper filled with masterful, spidery sketches on the hardwood floor.

Haughty, idealized fashion faces frown at me from every page, their poses languid and life-like. With spare lines, he expressed the grace of neck and collarbone, and did not shy away from the difficulty of hands and fingers. Each face is John Singer Sargent’s Madame X; each face, is me.

Am I flattered? Hell, no. I seethe with jealousy. I want more than anything to be an artist. My tortured attempts fill one corner of the room. His drawings are superb, so lovely I could tear them up, and I can tell they come straight from his head, the human figure rendered beautifully from memory, or, I assess him again, imagination.

I sigh. “If you’re going to live here, I should know your name.”

He points to the repeating signatures on the scattered pieces of paper.

X-It.

“I’m J.J. Buckingham.” I cross the room with echoing footsteps. “X-It, would you care to see the view?”

X-It gathers up his lifeblood, returns it to the sketchbook, and then stands next to me. More comfortable around him than most people who tower over me, I appraise him as compact, muscular and graceful. He is about five foot eight, just right for my five foot two inches.

I let in the unforgiving August sunlight, and we enjoy the view. Only two of the buildings on the opposite side of the street are not burned and gutted. These two serve as neighborhood “shooting galleries” where junkies can get a fix from a communal cook pot.

Entranced, I have already watched the addicts trail to the buildings like ants to borax. One shooting gallery appears to cater solely to Puerto Ricans; the other is indiscriminate. I’ve noted that not one of the junkies resembles David Bowie, or Patti Smith, or Jim Carroll, or even wrinkly William Burroughs, but that doesn’t mean that none of the parade never will.