Enter Sandman: A Manhattan Melodrama

An oldie but … a goodie? How I used to write here on a regular basis. In a way, the night described below was the impetus for starting this here blog. This happened in April. I started the blog in October.

He invited me to his birthday party. We met at a party the year before. Insane sparks flew. I then ran into him once by accident, on September 9, 2001 (take note of the date) but that was it. We emailed one another from time to time. Nothing serious. I shouldn’t have been corresponding with him. I didn’t know I was courting danger. The birthday party invite came out of left field.

The party was at Bellevue, a hole-in-the-wall bar on 9th Avenue hovering in the grime-encrusted shadow of Port Authority Bus Terminal. Bellevue is no longer there. It was a sad moment when it closed. A new bar is there called “Blue Ruin” (calling to mind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but I can’t bring myself to go there. It won’t be Bellevue. Bellevue was a tarpit of insanity similar to the other Bellevue. The clientele was a hodge-podge of bikers, Goth chicks, drag queens and poets. One of the bizarre charms of Bellevue was it showed porn on the television above the bar, straight porn, Boogie Nights era movies-on-film-stock porn, starring bulky Tom Selleck look-alikes and girls with flippy Farrah Fawcett hair. The best part was everyone in Bellevue was blatantly “over” the porn. Nobody even looked at it, it just flickered above the action, a subliminal message that kept the alcohol flowing and the atmosphere one of ribald hilarity.

I went to the party solo. My sister was going to accompany me but something came up at the last minute. Once she canceled, I considered not going myself. I am not good solo. Especially not then, when the loneliness was making me neurotic. Tormented by what Tennessee Williams called “the blue devils.” I hid the loneliness even to myself. It felt like too big a monster to face. That night, getting ready to go to the party, I found myself in a state of almost unbearable suspended animation. I used to be comfortable with being visible, with assuming a persona for a night out. Those days were gone. It took me a couple of hours to psych myself up into a public mindset. I wore fishnets, a tight black skirt, chunky platform sandals. I would be walking into that party by myself. I needed to adopt another personality, another kind of girl in order to handle it.

I took a bus into the city and called my sister from a payphone outside Bellevue. She wasn’t home but I babbled into her answering machine about my fears, my hopes, my dreams, and my outfit. Then I hung up and strolled inside, head held high and defiant against my own anxiety.

I saw him immediately. He was at the end of the bar surrounded by a huge rowdy group of friends. To walk over there nonchalantly was unthinkable, and I considered turning around and walking right back out. My panic disoriented me. I was not stalking him. My presence would not be an unwelcome surprise. I was invited. By him. But I felt pathetic, needy, all those old feelings from high school dances, wanting to ask some boy in a toga to dance but terrified he would scoff at the mere request. So I went up to the bar, ordered a drink, and engaged in conversation with the bartender, pretending I was not, in actuality, a little lost lamb.

As my beer slid across the bar, I caught his eye. Like lightning, up he got, his intention and emotion tangible in his movements and gestures, and then he was at my side, engulfing me in a hug. It was electrifying, the freedom with which he expressed his joy that I was actually there. I lack such freedom myself. What would have happened if I bounced into that bar and charged over to him as he charged over to me? I was even wearing a leather biker’s jacket that night, a deliberate choice. Armor.

He barely seemed to notice my armor and hugged me roughly, saying over and over into my ear, “I’m so glad you came!”

“Happy birthday,” I managed to get out, even though my face was squashed into his shoulder.

He started sniffing my neck like a gorilla. “God. You smell so good.”

I have thought about this night a lot in the years following, trying to discover the nugget at the bottom of the sieve, the reason. Not why it happened, but why I retained it. One of the reasons why it remains so vivid is because of how bad things got afterwards. I think of the spring and summer following the Bellevue night as “the bad time” and although there have been a couple of dark seasons in my life, none were as bad as that one. There was no end to it. It was not sadness, it was a flatline interrupted by jagged-edged moments of terrible anxiety and loss, which usually came over me at 3 a.m. His birthday party was not world-shaking event, but it awakened something terrible and joyous in me. I couldn’t get back to normal.

There was a giant struggle going on in my spirit during “the bad time”. You can’t be bitter in just one or two areas of your life. Bitterness spills over, staining everything. I didn’t want to be one of those bitter-in-general people, but the more I tried to contain it in a holding pen, the more unmanageable it got. The struggle on the opposite side was just as persistent. I wanted to remember what happened that night, even with the drunken blurriness around it, I wanted to remember what he said to me with openness and receptivity, not cynicism. It seemed vitally important. It is no small thing to realize you have been seen and loved. If I turned my back on the night and wrote it off as a drunken debauch, I would also be writing off the best part of me.

In a funny way, I got exactly what I wanted that night at Bellevue. It’s a difficult thought and a part of me even now resists it. Bellevue was a catalyst, a turning point, a moment where I actually got to choose afterwards who I would be in reaction to it. It seemed very important I choose rightly. It was a spiritual crisis.

We stood with each for a while, enraptured, shouting at each other excitedly. He kept grabbing me, kissing the top of my head, saying, in a refrain, “So glad you came.” He dragged me over to his crowd of friends, many of whom I already knew from the brief manic season when our circles intersected. There was the painter, and the ex-Mormon who would soon to be on his way to Iraq (and eventually publish a book about his experiences). There was a crazy chunk-ball of a guy who worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and seemed to be a legitimate vampire (he told me once he had not seen the actual light of day in two years). He had more money than he knew what to do with. He was 25 years old. He ate McDonalds three times a day. I will always have a fondness in my heart for that crowd, all interesting smart people, artists and lawyers and teachers and soldiers. Everyone remembered me and hailed my presence. I was back in the fold.

Then, with visible weirdness on his part, the birthday boy introduced me to his girlfriend. I am an old pro at immediately lowering my expectations on the spot, so the hug he gave me and the gorilla-sniffing behavior was put into a tiny box out of sight. Done.

I shook hands with the girlfriend. I felt the unfriendliness in her eagle eyes and I didn’t blame her at all. I saw how she must have been interpreting me. I was a witch in black leather, with big hair and dark lipstick, showing up at her boyfriend’s party to tag him with a stun gun and drag him off into the bushes. I won’t lie. I had wondered if he was still with that woman. One of the reasons I went to this party – which I could barely admit at the time – was to raise some hell, cause some trouble. I instantly saw that I caused trouble just by showing up. I backed off. I was not dependent on him for company, which was a good thing because after his effusive greeting he didn’t talk to me at all although every move I made caught his attention. I felt like I was under surveillance. Eagle Eye noticed and was not happy about it. She restricted his movements, keeping him holed up with her by the jukebox. I ruined his experience of his own party. I would catch him looking at me from across the room. He was not a deep brooding person. He was an open-faced funny free spirit, but in those moments, he was lost, staring at me, and I’d turn away, startled … Is he actually looking at me like that?

Believe me, if the time is right and the moon is in the seventh house, I am not shy. If he was single, I would have devoured him whole that night. Yes, I strolled in there fluttery with hope of some kind, but I was under control once I saw the lay of the land. Looking back on it, I feel a chill, because I know what is coming. The months of grey fog. The reduced capacity I have for this sort of thing now. But that girl in fishnets perched on the bar stool felt free to revel in her sense of power, cackling at the brouhaha she caused. She didn’t even have to do anything. She just sat there, and the drama over by the jukebox continued, not touching her, not really. It would take a long time to realize that this was why I went. Playing with fire.

I would never be so careless now.

At one point he walked by me on his way somewhere else and I leaned over to say something to him. It was casual, it had nothing to do with the intense radio waves coursing between us, and it had nothing to do with the fight I started with his girlfriend. I said something like, “Check out the juggs on Farrah up there …” You know. Some normal comment like that. I got out maybe two words when he physically recoiled from me as though I charged at him with a battle-axe. He held his hands out at me and actually said, “Stay back … stay back …!!” Like he was scared. Staving me off.

I was startled. Obviously I figured out the situation the moment I pried the embedded glass from the girlfriend’s eagle eyes out of my epidermis, but I was way more willing to, oh, lie and pretend, rather than shout in his face “Stay back” when he came too close.

Game face fully on, I decided to play dumb. I gestured at his body language and said, laughing, “What the hell is going on with you?”

He shook his head and said, “You’re dangerous.”

“Oh, gimme a break. I am not.” (I was.)

“Yes, you are. Stay away from me.”

“You invited me to this party. Are you not going to talk to me at all?”

“I’m in big trouble with my girlfriend.”

To not use my power in that moment took almost superhuman strength. I leaned back from him and shrugged at him, friendly but letting him know, “That’s yours, not mine. Good luck, hope it all works out.” Frozen out, the birthday boy moved on.

I threw myself into drinking and socializing. I did shots with the Wall Street chunk-ball and I laughed until my stomach hurt listening to the ex-Mormon’s stories. Only he could make working security at the airport after 9/11 funny.

Meanwhile, out of the corner of my eye, I was aware of the fight intensifying over there by the jukebox. I could see her angry gestures, I could see him defending himself. I should have left, knowing I was causing problems but in that moment I got stubborn. I dug my platform heels in. I loved it. Maybe if I left, I would have spared myself the darkness of the coming months, but it is useless to speculate because that is not what happened. What happened is: even though he shouted “Stay Back” at me like a lion-tamer, I stayed, leaving him to stew in his relationship nightmare, while I, on the other hand, had fun.

Hours passed. At around one a.m., a sushi chef arrived and began quietly chopping up raw fish beneath the jiggly 70s-era tatas on the television. Shots of whiskey downed, sushi rolls swallowed whole. Music roared and pounded. People ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor. Everyone screamed at each other. I got wasted.

The years since the night at Bellevue have been, in many ways, rather dark. Something was lost that night, something I have been unable to find since. A certain joyousness, a sense of humor in social situations, a calm awareness of the ground I properly claim, and a courage to toss myself into the fray. And so I look back on Bellevue with a bit of awe and dread. What should I have done differently? Anything? Should I have not gone at all? Do I dare make such a wish or would that be tantamount to rejecting the complicated gift that was that night? [Side note: I wrote this before I got my mental health diagnosis. The mental health issue is REALLY what this piece is all about. I just didn’t know that when I wrote it.]

I was drunk enough to get confused about events from only an hour or so ago. I thought to myself, fuzzily, “Did he actually shout ‘Stay back’ at me or did I just imagine it? Do other girls have men shout ‘STAY BACK’ at them after they say ‘Hello’?… or is that my particular stock-in-trade?”

Things were getting blurry. I couldn’t slow down time enough to contemplate what was happening, and how it might be time for me to go.

At some point, the opening strains of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” started, and it was as though Bellevue lifted off the sidewalk. I love the song but it sounded different that night. It was less a song than a command. The place erupted, en masse. Conversation ceased and as the opening of the song built and built and built, we merged into a mindless pulsing mass (except for the sushi chef who continued to make spicy tuna rolls, oblivious). I was holding so much back the whole night, every natural impulse within me: the urge to walk into the midst of their argument and get bitch-slappy on her, the urge to grab him and kiss him, demand that he choose. I followed through on none of my impulses and, while I was aware of the cost, when “Enter Sandman” came on and the entire bar exploded, I felt ohgodohgod let me get some of this out … We jumped, writhed, pounded our arms in the air, I lost a sense of where I ended and where the crowd began.

Halfway through the song I had to pee, so I staggered off to the bathroom, pushing through the throngs, frenzied because I wasn’t done dancing yet. I needed to hurry. The bathroom was tiny with a bright red light bulb, making everything look debacled and sinister. Graffiti splattered everywhere and when I sat on the toilet my knees touched the opposite wall. I was drunk enough to flop around in there for a while after I peed, standing and staring at my reflection in a baffled way, my red-lit face, wild hair, smudged mascara … who the hell is that? She looks FERAL. No wonder why he said STAY BACK!

Suddenly, the door opened and he entered, barging in after me like a monster in a movie. He grabbed my head, fierce, tight, and shoved me back against the wall. Without thinking, I put my hand over his face and pushed him back against the wall. He took hold of my wrists, I knocked them off. The bathroom was barely a foot wide so it was a tight squeeze. He tried to pin me against one wall, and I smashed him into the other. There was no kissing, believe it or not, and no speaking. We were too busy beating the shit out of each other.

Then he grabbed my face in his hands, not gently, and he hissed at me, with what sounded like hatred but which wasn’t hatred at all. What he said was, “You are the woman for me, Sheila, you are the only woman. Fuck. You.” This was there between us the whole night – it was there the night we first met, too. It was there on September 9th too. And now it was out. It was a beautiful and terrible confirmation. I grabbed at his shoulders, in a rage, because fuck HIM for being like this when he wasn’t free to be like this, and said, “No, no, NO, fuck YOU.”

He held me tightly so I would be forced to stand still, and said, “Here’s what needs to happen, okay? And you need to listen. Here’s what has to happen: You need to get whatever you want out of life, okay? It’s so important. I want you to be happy and get whatever you want. How do we make that happen? It must happen. You have to get whatever you want out of life.”

This really happened.

Somewhere along in there, I started to shake my head in protest, his words were too much for me, too over-the-top, and it was at that point that he slapped me. A quick 1940s movie slap, a fast “whap” to snap me out of … not believing in myself? rejecting his words? The slap was so beyond anything I could even interpret it literally stunned me. I stared up at him, my cheek stinging and tingling, trying to focus my eyes, trying to keep up with what was happening. We barely paused to acknowledge the slap. I then found myself in tears, because he was coming across to me as a bombardment of love, love with no possibility of expression, but in its purest state, and suddenly, awfully, I knew how much this was going to hurt. The knowledge rose up out of the sickly red light, it took my breath away.

He wasn’t waiting for me to catch up. After the slap, he grabbed my arms so hard I had bruises the next day from his fingers – no word of a lie, he hurt me – and he said, “You need to know I will be out there watching, I will be out there, and if something good happens for you, know I’ll be out there thinking, Yup. Sheila deserves this.”

I felt a tidal wave rising, and so, crammed in the filthy bathroom with him, I knew I had to get out of there as quickly as possible, because now it was going to be MY melodrama, not Eagle Eyes’, it would be mine and mine alone, and I needed to be nowhere near him when the wave hit.

I put my head down on his chest, resting it there for a second, and I felt the gentleness of his hands on the sides of my face, the sudden softness of his touch after the roughness … it was done … no more … must leave now … unless you choose me, I am gone. I will miss you. I will miss you. His arms were around me, mine around him. I said his name into his chest and I felt him hold me tighter in response.

My cheek still stinging, I shoved him aside and pushed my way out of the bathroom. I was paranoid about what I must look like. Who saw him go in there with me? What were people thinking? “Enter Sandman” still pounded, the crowd jumping with savage madness. I was part of it before. Briefly.

Time to go.

Say your goodbyes Sheila … quickly … because the tidal wave is coming … it’s almost here … the oblivion of months is upon you … go go go … before it’s too late.