We Started a Nightclub: Building the Pyramid

STEP INSIDE

All day/night you worked your shit New York job at the office/bookstore/messenger service/restaurant/nightclub. Maybe you quit. You can find another job. Maybe you were high or drunk last night. You still have more than eighty dollars to make it till the rent is due in three weeks. Your body aches. You spent one of your dollars for mushroom barley soup and buttered challah bread at Kiev for your 6:00 a.m. lunch. You worked on your band/comic book/monologue/design/play/film/painting/poems/graffiti/flyer all afternoon. Your boy/girlfriend is somewhere else. Night has come and your senses are sharp. You know what’s out there. Soon you’re dressed, out and heading east. Straighter friends said you were crazy to live east of Second Avenue:

“Do you want to get shot?”

CBGB’s is over and you’re not that comfortable at Club 57. You don’t wear all black anymore. You can wear what’s fun: something masculine/feminine.

A trashcan lid crashes down the block as you cross First Avenue. The only other soul on the avenue is the plastic-capped bum rifling through the garbage. You scoffed when they said it was dangerous over here but you’re walking fast anyway. You turn a corner onto Seventh Street, heading toward Avenue A. The spires of the Polish church rise to the full moon. The six-foot-tall black drag queen half a block ahead struts on, unafraid. He/she taunts back at hassling teens. More garbage can lids crash ahead but she passes. The Ukrainian/Puerto Rican youths fix their gaze on you. All the storefronts are empty. Some still have Yiddish writing or faded pictures from a vanished world. While you were dreaming you forgot your fear. You are almost to Avenue A. Leshko’s coffee shop, with its Polish/Ukrainian home cooking, is still open on the corner. You turn right and walk to the dead-looking bar at 101 Avenue A.

The door opens and you hear your name announced loudly over a microphone. Applause erupts from the crowd at the long bar stretched out before you. Even the boys dancing on the bar are clapping. You look down the bar and see that it was Tanya Ransom (AKA Michael Norman) who has announced your name. He/she is holding his trademark Cape Cod high in a toast to YOU. Here, you are a star. This is YOUR Pyramid Club. When the door opens again the next patron is announced too. The whole place erupts again. But you don’t mind. Let her/him be as famous as you. Let’s all be famous together. Gay and straight, black, white and brown. Artists and art lovers. This is why you came to New York. We have found our place, the Pyramid.

“Where’s Bobby?”

“Downstairs,” says Alan, his boyfriend. You head down the steps to visit the manager. The stairwell still smells like the smoke and spilled beer of most of the twentieth century. The basement is more finished than before when an ancient Manhattan creek ran across the dirt floor. You cross the dark room past the drug dealers and the drag queens toward Bobby’s “office.” It is a closet-sized cubicle, hastily nailed together out of plywood. You knock.

“Just a minute!” Bobby Bradley, a boyish, brown-haired twenty-three year old opens the door, a few flakes of white powder still stuck under his nose.

“I was just going to call you,” he says.

You step into his cubicle and sit cramped in the tiny area with its makeshift desk. Above you is a big paper planning calendar. Penciled into each square is a night’s worth of programming: bands, plays, solo performances, variety acts. Bobby asks you if you want do something and you say yes. He lays several healthy sized lines of coke before your hungry eyes and you snort. He asks you the name of your piece and you make something up. Your mind races. You and Bobby are talking...