The first time I showed my father the footage, we were sitting at our dining room table. He took a long sip of tea, then asked, “Why did you have to do this?” And yes, it was broad, amateurish, a little vulgar. It didn’t have narrative propulsion or cinematic graces. But watching it now, I can also feel the giddiness, the joy of creation we were all experiencing, the catharsis of admitting to our situation. It jumps off the screen. It’s silly and obvious and high on its own supply, but it’s something. It’s a step forward.
People who weren’t my father kind of loved it, and we were invited to present the videos in a small gallery on Greene Street in Soho. In an attempt to remain staunchly rooted in the conceptual, we decided to decorate the gallery like a replica of Isabel’s apartment. We hauled all our worldly possessions across Canal Street, including a treadmill, Isabel’s couch, and some family heirlooms. We pulled all-nighters, decorating the space lovingly, and I insisted on wearing painter’s overalls to complement my new identity as a serious artiste.
The night of our “opening” remains among the most surprising of my life: by the time I arrived (I was late, as my mother insisted I shower), the space was full, and the crowd was spilling into the street, wine in cups, feet in pirate boots and fluorescent heels. People we didn’t even know were there, a testament to the idea that energy attracts energy, because our parents sure as hell weren’t advertising. Someone asked to take our photograph. Isabel and Joana and I clutched at one another, unable to believe our luck. We went to a bar afterward, and a DJ gave me his business card in a way that could have been sexual. We had made it.
After that, life at Peach and the Babke lost some of its luster. Work induced a sleepy malaise, and I wondered if I had recontracted mono. Joana got some illustration work and cut back on her hours. Isabel found increasing reasons not to appear. The walk across Hudson Street to open the store began to feel a little tragic.
Then one day, I botched the mailing list. I was meant to send out one thousand postcards heralding our summer sample sale. But, caught up in a reverie, I didn’t notice I had printed five hundred address stickers for one single family and applied nearly all of them. My error was so shocking to Linda that her nostrils flared and spit flew as she screamed at me.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “But I have a bus to catch.”
I boarded a Greyhound to Ithaca to see a college friend, the kind of purposeless trip you will never take again after age twenty-five. We spent the weekend walking in fields, taking pictures of old-fashioned neon signs with a disposable camera, and watching carp spawn in a river. We ate nothing but hummus and drank nothing but beer. We went to his neighbor’s funeral and sat in the back row and got the giggles, sprinted out. We walked around his mother’s garden, crushing living things with our boots.
“How’s your job?” he asked.
“My boss is such a bitch,” I told him.
I projected onto his life a sweetness, a lack of complication, the kind of vibe terrible people would call “quaint.” I loved his basement apartment in a ramshackle house, the fact that there was only one Chinese restaurant in town, and that he’d never have to see a more successful person than himself at a party. I was jealous. I wanted to be in it. I wanted to fuck it up.
So, on the night before I left, I drank half a whiskey ginger and hurled my naked body onto his, kissing him in an unfocused but enthusiastic way. He responded with a sad smile, and we fucked in the blue light of a documentary about police brutality. We didn’t speak for a year, but I thought of his house all the time.
In September of 2009 the Delusional Downtown Divas were offered our first real gig: hosting the Guggenheim’s First Annual Art Awards. Our parents were shocked that this lark had brought anyone even remotely serious knocking on our door, but I’ve always believed that it turns people on to get made fun of, and the art world was no exception. We were offered license to run wild and a five-thousand-dollar fee to split among us. We all quit our jobs at Peach and the Babke that day with the joyful abandon of lottery winners.
I rented a hundred-square-foot office in a nearby building, which became our official headquarters, and set to work. The building was populated with young handsome filmmakers in porkpie hats and professionals who couldn’t quite explain what they did. People built half-pipes in their offices and encouraged interoffice sleepovers. Everyone bought their lunch from a deli called New Fancy Food. The landlord, a Chinese woman named Summer Weinberg, asked sweetly whether I was a prostitute. Our minifridge had nothing but tres leches cake in it.
We spent months preparing, creating new episodes and writing awards-show-style banter about figures like performance artist Joan Jonas (“Is she the Jonas Brothers’ mother?”). We shot an episode in the museum itself and were almost removed after I encouraged Isabel to hang her leg over the mezzanine and scream, “I’m gonna pull a Carl Andre up here!”