SHIMS & RENOVATIONS

Given a choice, I would have opted for a safer and slicker place to live—Greenwich Village, Soho, or even uptown in the West 80’s—but I couldn’t afford those neighborhoods in 1982. Instead, I moved into a three-hundred dollar per month fifth floor walk-up on East Sixth Street near the corner of Avenue B. It’s brick façade was painted a garish turquoise blue, the definitive eyesore on a block dotted with the carcasses of burned-out tenements.

The “village” on the east side of the island of “New Amsterdam” got its start when Peter Stuyvesant, a director-general of the last Dutch West India Company, bought the land from his bosses in the mid-1600s. It’s been under renovation ever since. By the early 1980’s, the neighborhood was more bohemian mosh pit than urban melting pot with a mix of Eastern European immigrants, families from various parts of South America and the Caribbean, NYU students, punks, squatters, anarchists, activists, radicals, musicians, writers, painters, filmmakers, actors, theater directors, performance artists, gallery owners, drunks, drug addicts and drug dealers. I was a twenty-two-year-old college graduate who grew up in a beach resort town on Long Island. Getting to know the neighborhood was like kissing a stranger at a party, plunging into the taste of a person and finding permanence. It was a romance of discovery, a push into the flesh and breath of downtown city parts. I had no choice but to call it home.

I guess I looked “East Village” but I was never a punk. I never had spiked hair, never colored it screaming pink or electric yellow, or shaved my head; I never had piercings or tattoos. I rarely wore leather or vinyl and wouldn’t be caught dead in torn T-shirts or ripped fishnets. Nor did I have that Girl of the Earth or White Rasta Mama thing going; I never had dreadlocks. I never perfumed my body with patchouli; I wore Lauren, and later peach oil from the perfume shop on Seventh, or Shalimar. I never went Goth. I didn’t dye my red hair black, wear black lipstick or black nail polish. Mostly, I wore jeans and T-shirts. If I was getting dressed up to go out clubbing or on a date, I’d wear short skirts with printed blouses and patent leather Mr. Man shoes, which were easy to dance in. There were often parties or art openings to go to, and those demanded something special, yet the shops I frequented never seemed to have what I was looking for. I began decorating clothes with colored tape or by sewing clear plastic pockets onto shirts or pants and filling them with random odd and ends. Occasionally, I’d wrap myself in a woven wooden beach mat from a shop called Azuma. It looked like a strapless mini. I couldn’t sit while wearing it, but it looked great on the dance floor. One night at a club on East Eleventh Street, Andy Warhol pointed his camera at me in my wooden dress and took a photograph.

I began creating clothes out of objects in college, which I did more and more after graduation. It was a dislocating time. My mother had passed away my senior year. I was working at a job that meant nothing more to me than a paycheck. My apartment was temporary. I had no anchors. Re-purposing objects into clothes gave me a purpose during a time of renovations and reinvention.

Added to this was a physical sense of discombobulation. The floors in East Village apartments and local shops were almost uniformly uneven. They sagged and sloped and had give as though they were made for gymnastics. The tin ceilings bulged beneath water damage and rotted subfloors. My walk-up on East Sixth Street was jammed with shims and tufts of paper wedged under bookcases and table legs to keep them from wobbling. Small blocks of wood of varying depths were pushed under the kitchen tub’s clawed feet to compensate for the slanted floor beneath layers of fossilized linoleum. The walk-up’s marble steps were worn into shallow bowls from eight decades’ worth of shoes trudging up and down them. They were like something from an ancient ruin. If you wanted to get a tenement apartment building straightened out and achieve standardized geometry, you’d have to start from square one, which is why so many renovations had to be gut jobs. Unless your place had been demolished and rebuilt, living in the East Village meant being perpetually off-kilter.

For some people, the challenges of living without right angles was an opportunity to play. One of those people was my friend from college, Adamo*.  He was a star in our school’s visual arts department. I spent hours in his on-campus studio watching him paint, mesmerized. I had never seen an artist work a canvas before, at least not someone who had progressed beyond finger painting and was planning on making a living at it. Adamo had been born in 1959 with a cleft palette. He had had multiple corrective surgeries and the outcomes, though good, still showed the work of reconstruction. His face was asymmetrical, like a Picasso. I had no comparison, but it seemed to me that my friend created his artwork at an incredible speed, dashing between the long table where he mixed the paints and the canvas where he worked his brush. There was a palpable energy in the studio, an electric connection between Adamo’s hand, the paint and the canvas. It was fantastic to be near that creative power. It was different from the thinky sobriety of the lit. department where my biggest rush came from uncorking ideas. Adamo liked to talk about colors while he painted, and how hues interact and often trick the eye. He would point out the tension of a particular paint stroke or the weight of a shadow. I watched and listened intently, silently, only occasionally asking questions, which he always answered patiently. One time, he handed me a small canvas, paintbrush, and palette and asked me to make something. I began painting a horrible abstract. I had no idea when to stop. Adamo glanced at the picture after I’d been at it a while and said, “Don’t overwork it.” He understood the picture’s stopping point before I did. Over the years, while doing any number of writing projects or any task, creative or otherwise, housework, exercise, it didn’t matter, I could hear Adamo’s gentle voice saying, “Don’t overwork it.”

Adamo drew lots pictures of me. I never minded. He had a way of looking at me without it feeling intrusive. If anything, he made me feel beautiful. The sketches were more than what I looked like. He would capture a pose, how I crossed my legs, rested my chin on my hand, how far away my gaze seemed to take me. It was fascinating to be reconstituted in some way, to be reinvented on the page.

After college, Adamo moved into a large apartment two blocks away from me on East Fourth Street with a group of people we had known in college. He soon discovered that the local hardware store sold glow-in-the-dark paint by the gallon. It was like the paint from monster model kits, the kind that you dab on Dracula’s eyes to make them glare out at you in the dark. He and his roommates painted their entire four-bedroom apartment with the glow-in-the-dark green paint. Every square inch of the space was covered in it: the tin ceilings, the walls, kitchen cabinets, backsplashes, the clawfoot bathtub, the toilet, furniture. Maybe because there were no right angles, smooth or even surfaces, the paint created an illusion that the apartment was undulating. To celebrate this effect, Adamo and his roommates threw a housewarming party. The event was treated as an invitation-only art opening. They managed to station two bouncers at the apartment building’s entrance, two enormous men with studded leather jackets who stood menacingly with printed lists of the RSVPs attached to clipboards. The space was packed with overdressed people slapping back glassfuls of champagne and eating stuffed mushrooms and other hors d’oeuvres Adamo had skillfully prepared. I wore a dress made out of a black Hefty trash bag. I poked holes for my head and arms. I added a belt, put on black tights and heals, and wrapped my mother’s long strand of fake pearls around my neck.

A group of us formed a circle on the living room’s glow-in-the-dark sloped floor. One of Adamo’s roommates, Evan, was sitting directly across from me, and made no bones about making eye contact. I didn’t know him very well. He was a couple of years ahead of me at school. I tried to remember his major, filmmaking maybe. He was tall and slender with tissue-thin bluish skin like skim milk, his blue veins visible beneath his clean-shaven face. His dark chocolate eyes were framed by heavy black-rimmed Buddy Holly eyeglasses. His short raven hair was carefully groomed and oiled. He was wearing a very proper dark wool suit that looked as though it had been made on Savile Row thirty years ago, and a gray silk tie and black leather wingtips. During college, he wore a similar suit every day. There was something old money about Evan. He had a graceful, self-possessed reserve that evoked long European family lines. It was hard to say if these airs were born to or put on.

One day in my junior year, Adamo brought me with him to visit Evan in his dorm room. I was amused to see that there were no sheets or blankets on the bed. I had this image of him sleeping in his suit and tie, laid out like a corpse. Evan’s girlfriend at the time wore vintage dresses with high heels, pink frosted lipstick and evening gloves, and went to classes looking like a background extra from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Her skin was the color of cigarette smoke. Many young women at school liked to emulate the glamorous starlets of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. Norma Shearer. Bette Davis. Lena Horne. Marilyn Monroe. We would scout vintage clothing stores for satin or taffeta dresses or classic silk peg leg capris. And the shoes! Scoring a pair of platforms from the Forties or silk pumps with a sexy Fifties’ peep toe was the best. If we were going to a party, we parted our hair all the way to the side and painted our lips scarlet red. Some of us had a few coveted dresses that had belonged to our mothers. I had my mother’s black velvet scoop neck cocktail dress from the early Sixties. My friend Tuck had five or six of her mom’s swing dresses and a few magnificent gowns with harem draping. Evan was one of the few college boys who liked to play dress-up, taking on the role of the Dashing Man. He and his girlfriend looked as though they’d leapt from a classic movie studio’s casting stable. I pictured them in black and white, her lips painted as dark as Black Magic roses, the humidity of her lipstick smearing across his naked body when they made love, staining it like ritual blood.

The extreme slope of Adamo and Evan’s glow-in-the-dark floor gave the impression that the people sitting in the circle were floating on invisible rafts. I felt drunk as though I had absorbed the physics of the nonlinear surface into my bloodstream. As if on cue, Evan smiled at me, got up from the floor, and took a moment to smooth his tie and button his suit jacket. I pretended not to notice as he stepped toward me. My roommate D. suddenly materialized at my side, holding his hands out for me to take. “I’m rescuing you,” he whispered, pulling me to my feet. We went into the kitchen and stayed there for the remainder of the evening drinking champagne and chatting with guests who wandered in.

A week later Adamo called early, his voice ragged, to tell me Evan was found dead in his bed with a syringe in his arm. I imagined him shirtless on his naked mattress, the deep crease of his wool slacks running down his legs like twin black veins, his tie and suit jacket neatly folded beside him. This was the only time I thought of him in color, pale green, like a plastic model of Frankenstein held together with glue and glowing in the dark.

Evan was the first of many friends and acquaintances, including Adamo, who died over the course of the decade from drugs, AIDS, or other illnesses. The finality of death, I quickly learned, was the one thing I couldn’t change. It was the other way around: loss changed me—a complete gut job resulting in a total renovation of my life. But as sad and difficult as this time was, I knew, as Adamo would have said, not to overwork it. Loss taught me about potential, that the beauty of reinvention was longevity. No matter where I’ve lived, in the East Village, a brief stint in Astoria, Queens, or in the suburbs north of New York City, my living room walls have been covered with Adamo’s paintings, reminding me that at least some of him, maybe the best of him, is here forever, a resurrection in oil.

* Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

 H.E. Fisher is pursuing her MFA at City College. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Rumpus, Pithead Chapel, and Barren Magazine. Her lyrical essay, “Ocean: An Autobiography” (Hopper Magazine), was nominated for the Best of the Net. “Shims & Renovations” is from H.E.’s memoir-in-progress Between Rockland & a Hard Place: An East Village Mom Moves to the ‘Burbs.