I'm about 58,000 words into recounting my life story. ..

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The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect me from lawsuits. 

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My life story makes Augusten Burroughs’ 2002 hard-to-believe-it’s-true-cuz-maybe-it’s-not memoir Running With Scissors look like a summer beach read. And it’s not one bit exaggerated. That I’m still here at all, much less that some people somehow (including a few members of my own dear family, who should know better) find reason to pick fights with me or knock me down a peg because they have some bizarrely skewed perception of me is beyond my comprehension. I’ve been to Hell and back so many times I have frequent flyer miles, and around the block more times than a goddamn Good Humor truck. Maybe it’s the fact that I always somehow manage to clean up all bright and shiny that throws them off? In all likelihood, in the case of my family anyway, it was their illness speaking, not them. I have yet to figure that one out…

While we're on the topic of  bright and shiny, my first memory dates back to the age of two or three, meaning 1959 or ’60. Our family had just moved into our brand new, six-room ranch house, complete with front and back lawn, three trees, four azalea bushes, and driveway.

My mother was wearing a housedress, with her hair bobby-pinned up—very Alice Kramden. I was sitting on the floor staring up at her as she moved a gleaming silver thing back and forth over my father’s shirts and even the sheets she had draped over a long skinny table. I was entranced, and can remember clearly how surprised and thrilled I was whenever a big, billowing cloud of steam would rise from it. My mother always sang when she ironed. She had a beautiful singing voice, and in later years I’ve come to decide that with her voice (and her temperament), she would probably have made a very good opera diva. By and by, the singing would stop, replaced by other, less pleasant forms of vocal expression—but we’ll get to that. At one point, my mother, having gotten every last recalcitrant wrinkle out of whatever garment she’d been working on, set the iron on its back end as she folded her latest triumph. I wanted to touch the silver thing my mother seemed to enjoy so much. Did the pocket watch-like motion of the iron hypnotize me? Was I looking to connect to my mother by coming in contact with this thing that seemingly gave her such pleasure?

I laid my palm squarely on the mirrorlike bottom surface with its two rows of little holes running along the edge. So my earliest memory included a valuable lesson—a lesson that may in fact be the reason this exceedingly painful incident is my earliest memory. Like most of the lessons I’ve received in my life, “Don’t touch the bottoms of hot steam irons” was learned the hard way. For her part, my mother turned whiter than the crisply starched sheets that laid neatly stacked on the kitchen table.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t had my share of laughs. Lots of my relatives, however loonybins, were funny, even if their humor was usually bitter as wormwood. Once I escaped the horrors of the high school pecking order for the more accepting environment of college, I made the shift from “out-crowd pariah” to “character.” The positive reinforcement I got from being outré (by suburban New Jersey standards, anyway) and entertaining (by suburban New Jersey standards, anyway) encouraged me to head further in that direction—indeed, the small but excellent community college I attended was where I took my first classes in art and theater. It goes without saying that the art and theater crowd was also far more entertaining and quirky than most of the kids I went to high school with. As soon as I finished college, inspired by the music of Lou Reed, David Bowie, and the New York Dolls, I made the leap and relocated to the big, bad city, where funny people abound—or used to. (This same music also encouraged me to indulge in a lot of naughty behavior, something else we’ll get to.) In the early 90s, I fell in with a circle that made lots of money and became quite well known for being funny. Sometimes I think my ability to laugh, no matter how bleak things may appear, and my refusal to let my oppressors come out on top are the two factors that prevented me from throwing myself in a river, like one of my favorite cousins, “Annette,” did. The deadliest thing on Earth is to lose your sense of humor—never mind that your sense of humor can be acidic enough to eat holes through metal…I remember expressing to “Elizabeth,” another of my dozen first cousins, once how great it was that we always maintained that sort of cockeyed optimism, no matter what the circumstances. Her response? “Yeah, well, maybe we’re just a buncha happy idiots, laughin’ away while life passes us by...”

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So if I didn't grow up to be the greatest actor of my generation, there was much to be gained from studying the thespian arts. I can speak comfortably before an audience of hundreds, and have. I have a decent singing voice—my karaoke rendition of “Town Without Pity” got everybody slow dancing at a redneck bar in Pennsylvania once. (What was I doing at a redneck bar in Pennsylvania? The answer lies ahead.) I can deliver a joke. But best of all, I can dance. Or could, before that pesky brain surgery came along. Dance classes gave me control of my body—well, except for one part maybe.

Standing hunched over smoking on a street corner for years trying to look cool had given me the posture of a candy cane; take away the red stripes and that's exactly what I looked like naked. But studying dance transformed me from a candy cane into a peppermint stick. I stood erect and swung my arms when I walked. It helped the teacher had a background in African dance, which tends to be looser and freer, and works your whole body in a way European dance just doesn't. Feeling more comfortable about how my body looked and moved made me more confident in general. I was featured in a choreographed hustle number at our year-end dance recital, I'll have you know.

Which featured plenty of backstage drama, thanks to a war between the set designer, who was doing the lighting, and the dance instructor. I don't know why he was doing it instead of the lighting designer, but he and the dance instructor had a huge blowout at a rehearsal just before opening night. Dancers aren't lit the same as actors, and there was a difference of opinion as to whether the lights were in the right place. Things got ugly and the set designer and his our-fellow-student girlfriend, who was in the show, stormed out, leaving us with a bunch of stuff to figure out really fast. But we did it, and the two routines I was in went over.  Especially the hustle number, since my partner could spin like the Tasmanian Devil from Bugs Bunny. In the middle of our post-show congratulations, the teacher pointed to me and said, “And this is the man who said he couldn't dance.” For someone as graceless as I had always been, had seldom been congratulated for anything in his life, it was meaningful beyond comprehension. Teary-eyed yet? I am.

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Not that it makes me a better or more important human being, but it’s a kick to look back on your younger days and know you frequented all the hot spots that people who missed the boat, or were too young to have been there now refer to as “legendary.” It was one of those eras, like Paris in the 20s, that we won't see again for quite some time, if ever. Let's be real—I could have done without being robbed, mugged, harassed, plagued by vermin, and assaulted by unpleasant smells. But never was I bored, and if New York hadn't been so run down and cheap to live in, this blip on the radar, this increase in the city’s heartrate, this unique and magical moment in time wouldn't have been possible.

None of us had any money, except for the trust fund kids and celebs (who were as subject to the whims of the doorman as anybody). One guitarist we knew fell behind on his electric bill, and came home the same time as his neighbors so he could function in his apartment with whatever light spilled out of their windows. You never knew when the TV at “Ellie” and “Jennifer’s” was going to cut out because Manhattan Cable had once again disconnected their illegal hookup. I was always scrounging for the rent. 

We dressed up to go out and spent time doing it—part of the ritual—but whatever glamor the scene had was a very downtown kind of glamor. We cobbled our look together from stuff we found at thrift stores and cheapo hipster emporiums like Canal Jeans, Reminiscence, and Trash & Vaudeville, occasionally splurging on pricier items we “just had to have.” If the clubs had a reputation for being snotty and exclusive, it was because the ones who were excluded were the ones who’d excluded us. The in crowd came to New York from places they never should have been born.

It was Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. & Dancing. & Art. & Fashion. & Live Bands. & Performances. & Film. & Theme Parties. & Fun. So much fun. We met people face to face or were introduced through mutual friends. There wasn’t much choice since the only other way to communicate was on the phone—a pay phone if you were out. (Should your friends not be at home, all you could do was leave a message on their answering machine. Equally horrifying, you had to make sure you got to the bank on Friday because they were closed on weekends and there were no ATM’s.) Smartphones have their advantages, but they've also destroyed the intimacy and realness we experienced in those packed-to-the-rafters sweatboxes.

Every club had its own vibe. Places like the Mudd Club and Danceteria had multiple floors, and each of those had its own vibe. Mudd, for instance, was bare white walls with nothing that could be called décor except the art hanging on the walls. It had the ambience of a scruffy apartment waiting for its next down-at-the-heels tenant, and the bathrooms were used for all manner of activities besides bathrooming. It was the people, a mashup of anybody categorizable as “interesting,” that made it what it was. The entertainment was every bit as mixed. The crowd crammed between the bar and the stage on the first floor would be skank dancing to reggae music while up in the VIP room they’d be milling around with cocktails listening to Gregorian chants. We never thought it would end, and saw no reason why it should.

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After having every housing situation since I left home evolve into a disaster, I was treated to an impossible piece of good fortune. It was the start of a chain reaction that would one day put me among people few get to be among, for better or worse. (The jury’s still out on that one.) Indirectly at least, it was all because of my waiter job at Café Figaro, corner Bleecker/MacDougal.  

First came an invitation to take care of “Kristi’s” cat Murray (real name—short for “Murray Christmas” because he was a holiday present to her and her sister from their parents) for an entire month while she was away. The Upper East Side would have been more than fine, but by this time “Kristi” had moved to Saint Mark’s Place—the main drag of the East Village! This was the equivalent of living on Carnaby Street during Beatlemania, or in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Murray was the only drawback, and I had to keep telling myself I wouldn’t be there if not for him. He was old and cranky and demanding and the sized of a bean bag chair and he woke you up by sitting on your face, so you had the choice of either feeding him or being suffocated to death. Breakfast was to be served promptly at six.

Then, a mere week before I was set to go back to the smokehouse, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse—an open-ended sublet in Midtown for—sit down if you aren't already—two hundred fifty dollars a month! It was the first time in my life I had a place that, except for the fact that it was someone else’s, I could call my own. It gets better. Eventually It did get to be all mine, and I didn't have to pay anything at all to live there.

This is where the Figaro figures in. The couple whose apartment I was moving into were friends of “Ellie’s,” whom, as we all know, I met there. “Kate” was another escapee from Missouri, where she played guitar in an all-girl band called “The Prom Queens.” She'd married a French guy named “Antoine,” and the two of them had decided to move to Paris. The downside here was that it was the kind of place most people would say was overpriced even for free. This wasn’t such a problem as far as I was concerned, since I still had my starry-eyed romantic notions about the big bad gritty city. It thrilled me that I was doing my laundry surrounded by New Yorkers—even though you had to keep your eyes open to make sure nobody stole your underwear for whatever use they might put it to—and that I knew where the A train went. I thought how lucky every tree in New York was to be a New York tree, although I'm not sure the trees would have agreed.

I lived right on naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty Forty-Second Street, a few blocks west of Times Square—heart of the Theater District, home of The New York Times, and hotbed of the most depraved behavior you could imagine, if your imagination goes that way. Soon, Times Square would also become the most obvious example of the direction the whole city was headed in.

My neighborhood was known as known as Hell’s Kitchen. Only a few short years before it had been the domain of the Westies, a small but particularly nasty Irish gang known for storing the hands of one of their hits in the freezer so they could “borrow” his fingerprints at a later date. (To be fair, that was an isolated incident. Normally they just dismembered and disemboweled their victims, and that was only to make sure they didn't come floating to the top of the East River.) Although plans were underway to turn Times Square into an outpost of Disneyland, immigrant Mexicans in mouse outfits were a ways off yet. There were still plenty of opportunities to catch a live sex show, have sex in a porn theater, or rent someone to have sex with. If so inclined, you could also buy drugs of dubious origin and quality, lose all your money in a game of three-card monte, or take in a street-corner sermon. One image from those days that remains tattooed on my brain is seeing some poor old non compos mentis homeless guy down on all fours drinking water out of the gutter, cat-style. The sight was enough to stop a pimp decked out in a white ankle-length fur and canoe-sized hat dead in his tracks—“Ooh, ain’t dat some nasty shit!” No small thing to impress a Times Square pimp.

Every Manhattan neighborhood has its own microclimate, due to the fact that on this one thin sliver of land surrounded by water there are sky-high glass towers and tiny brick carriage houses, superhighways and dank alleyways,  tall cliffs and lowlands. Before the world became a giant crockpot, Hell's Kitchen was known for its harsh winters. There was the Tenth Avenue Body Slam, a blast of arctic air that hit you as soon as you got past the recently completed Manhattan Plaza, a forty-some-story apartment building on Forty-Third Street they’d knocked down a block’s worth of porn emporiums to make room for. Although that was better than walking down Forty-Second Street, which is six lanes across and offered hardly any protection at all from the elements. Especially once you got to Dyer Avenue, the short but wide road that leads into the Lincoln Tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey, where gale-force winds whipped you from every direction. The closest subway station from my little tenement, the third of three identical buildings dating from the 1920s, is a good ten, fifteen-minute walk east, and crossing  that annoying Dyer Avenue made the hike seem all that much longer. Being only two blocks over from the Hudson River on a major thoroughfare, my corner was colder than most.

Technically,  the apartment wasn’t a “garret,” since it wasn't in the attic of somebody's house, but otherwise it qualified absolutely. It was a fourth-floor walkup that bore a more than passing resemblance to Ralph and Alice’s apartment on “The Honeymooners”—one hundred and sixty eight square feet divided into two rooms,  water closet off to the side, and a clawfoot bathtub in the kitchen next to the one and only sink. It still had the original gas oven, which operated more or less like a broiler, with the broiler operating more or less like a flamethrower. Fortunately, there was a loft bed, which helped make the place feel a little less claustrophobic. “Antoine” once remarked that living together with “Kate” in a space barely big enough to raise bunnies “eez proof ow mush we love eesh ozair.” (They had a kid together but eventually divorced.)

I did the best I could to make #4F my own, wallpapering the phone booth-sized foyer with pages from the Weekly World News, the only newspaper you could count on to cover all those stories the other papers ignored—like how a photo of Elvis cured a woman’s cancer and the discovery of a half-bat, half-human child in a cave in West Virginia. I hung a life-sized gold plastic cow head I found in the trash above the bathtub and named her “Tiffany.” (God, I wish I still had her…) “Lorraine,” a female mannequin torso (no legs, no arms) that I’d spray-painted black, hung out in the corner. She had a point where her head should have been, so she became storage for my inch-wide Elvis Costello neckties. It was all very bohemian.