Area Code 212: New York Days, New York Nights - Hardcover

Janowitz, Tama

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312320620 ISBN 13: 9780312320621

Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

A first nonfiction collection by the author of Peyton Amberg features her on-the-edge observations of New York City with such accounts as her experience at Andy Warhol's 1980s blind date club, her brief encounter with celebrity as a ZZ Top video extra, and her failure of an IQ test. 40,000 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tama Janowitz exploded onto the literary scene in 1986 with her bestselling book, Slaves of New York. Her most recent novel is Peyton Amberg. Janowitz's work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Vogue, the New York Times Op-Ed page, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"The other day I was walking down the street (again, fully, 100 percent clothed, and when I say 100 percent, that means practically not an inch of exposed skin) and some man on a corner yelled, "You having a bad-hair day! Whoops, I mean you having a bad-hair month! I guess you probably having a bad-hair life!"
- from Area Code 212

Praise for Tama Janowitz

"A writer of considerable talent."
- The New York Observer

"A singular talent"
- The New York Times Book Review

"A true original."
- San Francisco Chronicle

"Funny, reflective . . . wonderfully sharp."
- The Washington Post

"A penetrating eye."
- New York magazine

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

 

Area Code 212

Part One

Family Life

Performance Art

Sometimes, living in New York, I got invited to movie premieres and screenings. There were all kinds. Usually a premiere was held in a cinema—tickets and the invitation for the party to follow came in the mail. There would be a big crowd gathered in front of the theater to watch the arrival of the celebrities, a velvet rope, security guards, Klieg lights on the streets lighting huge arcs in the sky.

After the movie there was usually a party of some sort. One I remember was held in the Plaza hotel, following a Western comedy: hamburgers and beans were served on paper plates. One was in the restaurant adjacent to the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. Another time the guests were taken in old-fashioned English double-decker buses from the movie theater to a restaurant.

I had lost the passes to get us on the bus, so I went around the line to ask the woman taking the tickets what I should do—if she would let us on the bus without them. Later, somebody wrote an angry article in a local free newspaper, about how I had thought I was so important I tried to cut to the front of the line. I kept wanting to say, That’s not why I went to the front of the line! I went to the front of the line to find out whether or not I would even be let on to the bus without a ticket or should I find a taxi. But in this situation, my own personal equivalent to a movie star’s getting a mean mention for behavior, there was nothing I could do.

Screenings were more fun; one got to see the movie in a little screening room, and some of these were incredibly fancy, with only twenty or thirty huge plush seats, high in a skyscraper, just a few of you at your own private movie in Manhattan. Sometimes after this the director might take a group out to dinner.

Of course the best premiere I ever went to was for the Merchant-Ivory film based on my book Slaves of New York in 1986. Bloomingdale’s had opened a boutique with clothing based on the fashion worn in the movie. My Grandma Anne attended and each time the photographers tried to take my picture my tiny grandmother appeared out of nowhere and sprang into the picture alongside me, shouting, “I’m the grandma!” She was so totally gleeful—at getting her picture taken—that I always felt good that I had given her that experience before her death. Then a red carpet was laid out across Third Avenue—the entire stretch, across the avenue—and traffic was stopped so that the attendees could leave Bloomingdale’s and cross the street to the movie theater.

During the movie not one person laughed. Fortunately the next night my brother and mother attended (there was a second, different premiere) and even though on this night the theater was still totally quiet, my mother and brother were sitting directly in front of me, howling, screaming with laughter. So at least at that time, for the movie, there was an audience of two.

Another time I was invited to a movie premiere which was to be followed by a dinner at the Museum of Modern Art. Tim, my husband, was out of town so I invited a friend of his—who had become my friend, too—to be my date. I was very pleased to go to a premiere and to have a friend to go with, and it seemed particularly nice in the last days of summer, first days of early fall, to be having dinner in the museum.

I didn’t feel so good, bloated and a little queasy, but I dressed carefully and put on black tights and a long flowing black skirt, with a T-shirt and a sort of long frock coat over it. I think it was an old design of Nicole Miller’s, whom I knew and who had given it to me. I liked being covered up. My idea of a bathing suit would have been one of those Victorian things down to my ankles, but even at night it seemed best to keep every inch of skin covered. That way nobody could look at me and judge me; and since I am my own harshest judge, I knew what they were thinking.

The film wasn’t particularly good but it wasn’t unbearable and later it won all kinds of prizes. Afterwards everyone walked the block or so to the museum and we showed special passes to get in.

It wasn’t the most glamorous evening, though it might have been if you had never done one of these things before, but it was entertaining in a peculiar New York sort of way, to be at a party in a museum that was closed to the general public, at night time. But neither of us really knew any of the other guests. That made things a bit awkward; it was like attending a cocktail party for a business in which you didn’t work.

Then my friend bumped into someone he knew and introduced me and the three of us stood chatting near the top of the escalator going down.

Suddenly I realized my black tights were wet. They were completely soaked. Next it occurred to me my shoes were sodden, like two sponges. It seemed very peculiar. I looked and saw the shoes were full not of water but of blood. For a moment I didn’t move. Drops of blood began to dot the floor. The floor was shiny and the dots of blood were very red.

“Excuse me,” I said and I went down the escalator toward the women’s lavatory.

By the time I got to the bottom of the escalator my shoes were almost overflowing and in the toilet I started to bleed more. There was blood everywhere. I couldn’t control it. Finally I mopped myself up a bit with toilet paper, and the floor and toilet. I went out and bought a sanitary napkin from the machine with my only dime, dripping blood everywhere.

Back in the toilet stall I bled through the sanitary napkin. There was blood on the walls, and all over the floor, it looked as if someone had been murdered. In a way it was sort of cool, I thought, even though I couldn’t figure out how this had happened. I was getting a lot weaker.

Women were going in and out and it seemed a bit peculiar that no one called, “Are you all right in there? Do you need help?”

Suddenly there was a commotion at the door; I peered out the crack in the toilet stall and saw that three men had entered with buckets and mops as well as two women, all five were in janitor uniforms. “Somebody cut themself?” one of the men was saying.

“There’s blood all over the floor,” a woman said. She sounded furious.

“Going up on the first floor, too,” another man said.

They began to mop and scrub. “Who did it?” said a woman.

“The blood led down here.”

They must have known it was I, I thought, since I saw there was a pool of blood leading directly to my toilet stall. Surely one of them might ask if I was OK. It was true I had made a mess and was very ashamed, but after all, what if I was trying to commit suicide and was bleeding to death in here, that would be a lot more work for them. It occurred to me it might be amusing to put on a couple of different voices, in a high voice I could scream, “Stop! Stop!” and in a deeper voice I would say, “I’m going to kill you!” Then I could bounce back and forth between the walls as if I was being throttled. This was a long time before the O. J. Simpson case. How surprised the cleaners would be when they finally burst open the door to my stall and found only me, covered in blood: it would be like a Sherlock. Holmes case, the attacker mysteriously vanished.

They finished mopping and left. The women’s lavatory was quiet and empty. Once in a while a woman came in to use the facilities but I guess nothing appeared amiss. I tried to wring out my...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martins Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312320620
• ISBN 13: 9780312320621
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 349
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar