NEW YORK, 1980

Chapter 1
PUT YOUR HANDS UP!

I opened my eyes at five in the morning to see the flashing red lights from a fleet of NYPD cars swirling and bobbling across the ceiling of my tiny Eighth Street bedroom.

Some twenty-year-olds on their own for the first time might have been alarmed, but I thought they gave the spartan room a kind of festive whorehouse feel. They were a confirmation that I was no longer in Belmont, Massachusetts, under the same roof as my insane, increasingly violent mother—that I’d made my escape.

Then a belligerent voice squawked over a megaphone, crackling and beeping below my window: “This is the New York City Police Department! We have the building surrounded!”

Half-awake, I wondered who was getting busted, when someone’s beefy fist started pounding on the front door of our apartment. My sixth sense for disaster, honed over years of sailing the emotional tsunami that was my home life, told me to run for the fire escape. Unfortunately I was pinned to the bed by the heavy arms and legs of my sleeping boyfriend.

“Wake up, Michael.” I nudged him. “Huh,” he muttered into the pillow. “I think the police are here.”

“What?!” He bolted up.

“At the front door,” I said resignedly, rolling off the futon and slipping on a cotton nightgown. “Here.” I tossed him my oriental-print robe.

My roommate, Beth, a Parsons student fresh from Ohio, met us in the living room. She cowered next to the counter of the kitchenette, clutching the collar of her plaid bathrobe closed over her Lanz nightgown like the schoolmarm in a spaghetti western after the bad guys ride into town.

“Oh my God, what’s happening, Wendy?” she whimpered as the reflected red lights played across her frightened face.

“Open up! This is the police!” a gruff voice bellowed from the hall.

“The police are here, Beth,” I said calmly. She reminded me of the girls I’d gone to high school with in Boston— cherished princesses who had never had a big zit or a hair out of place or a cavity. I felt sorry for her. I’d had plenty of experience with the police but could tell this was her first time.

“It’s probably just a mistake,” I assured her. I was an expert at pretending nothing was wrong from the years I had gussied up the truth for my younger sister, Robin. “Some men came and took Mother away on a bed on wheels!” I’d explained after Mother had attempted suicide and was taken to Bellevue. “Heat wave!” I’d pronounced when we found the trousers of one of Mother’s boyfriends draped across the wicker chair in Robin’s bedroom.

“They probably have the wrong apartment, Beth,” I said soothingly, shrugging my shoulders. I was so good at this.

“Are you gonna open the door or are we gonna break it in?!” the voice from the hall shouted.

I headed for the door. Bright light from the hallway glowed at the bottom like when the aliens come for the little boy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I should be so lucky, I thought.

I peeked through the peephole. A crusty-looking old guy in a crumpled fedora and a coffee-stained trench coat with a badge pinned to the lapel was standing in the hallway, flanked by a couple of uniforms.

“Come on, you gonna open up or what?” the guy barked, eyeing me through the peephole—its fish-eye lens exaggerating his nicotine-yellow teeth and pasty nose with clogged, enlarged pores, making him look like a giant feral rabbit with a skin condition.

I recoiled from the view and looked at Michael, who nodded at me to go ahead.

“Certainly, Officer,” I chirped. Maybe because my last name is Lawless and my ancestors were sheep thieves, or because my mom had been arrested and liked to crank-call the cops to falsely report my sister for stealing from her, I had a perpetual feeling of guilt by association and so tended to be overly officious and polite with the police. “I’d be happy to open the door right now.”

But as soon as I turned the lock, they shoved the door back—almost taking off my fingers—and barreled into the living room. In addition to crusty guy, there were four uniforms and two more plainclothesmen. Once they were in, they scattered, darting quickly, serpentine-style, through the apartment, checking our bedrooms and bathrooms with their guns drawn as if they expected to find a dozen naked Dominicans cutting cocaine with baby laxative. Unfortunately for them, there was just us: a terror-stricken princess, a bathrobe-wearing actor, and the recently liberated child of a crazy woman. I could hear drawers and closets opened, light switches flicked on, the shower curtain screeching along its rod, and the top of the toilet tank lifted up and down. Then, having found nothing, the cops regrouped in the center of the room, their SWAT-team dance coming to an end. Stone-faced, they all holstered their weapons and gave the three of us the once-over.

“There’s nobody else here,” said one of the uniforms who had searched Beth’s bedroom.

“Are you Harvey Buchbinder?” the old cop asked Michael, eyeing the turquoise, flowered kimono that barely came down to his hairy thighs.

“No, I’m not. My name is Michael Pope,” he replied somewhat righteously. Michael and I had been together for about six months. He was an actor, and I could tell from his overly dramatic delivery that he’d rehearsed the line in his head, going over various readings before finally settling on “indignant defiance,” as if he were auditioning for the role of a perp on a police procedural show. The cop snorted, unimpressed.

Michael and I had met at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, where he was playing various small parts and I was working in wardrobe. Our first conversation had taken place in the dark backstage during a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was playing one of the fairies and was wearing a celery-colored bodysuit that covered his face, making him look like a spring vegetable on steroids, so I didn’t know until later that he was nine years older than me.

“I’m gonna have to see some identification,” the cop said, unconvinced.

Michael retrieved his wallet from my bedroom and brandished his license at him.

“Are you Harvey?” he asked me.

Seriously? I thought. But, always the good girl, I answered sincerely, “No, Officer, I’m not.”

“Call me Detective, Detective Stanley. They’re officers, in the uniforms,” he barked. “What about you?” he said to Beth.

“I’m from Ohio.” Her voice quavered.

“No, she’s not Harvey, either,” I said before Beth had a heart attack. “Look, Harvey’s not here. He went out for a pack of cigarettes—”

“When?” the detective said, showing a bit of liveliness for the first time. He pulled a small memo pad and a pen from his coat pocket—preparing to take down the details.

“A week ago. We haven’t seen him since.” I looked at Beth for backup.

She nodded eagerly. “He rented us these rooms.” Her squeaky-clean tone seemed to express hope that the correct answer would end this hideous nightmare.

“There was an ad in The Village Voice,” I said.

“Figures,” Detective Stanley said sourly, “that’s where all the sickos are.”

I didn’t like Detective Stanley, but I had to admit he was right. I had lived in New York when I was a little girl in the late sixties and early seventies. It had been the New York of Holly Golightly and Eloise, a clean, well-lit place where the only homeless person I saw sold pencils with his little dog on the carpet in front of the Bloomingdale’s taxi stand. Nothing very bad could happen to you there. But now, in 1980, it seemed something bad could happen to you everywhere. It was very much the New York of Travis Bickel, Son of Sam, and Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine—a city where the Guardian Angels rode broken-down, graffiti-covered subways when even the cops were intimidated, and drunk homeless people assaulted you for change every ten feet. Now I carried Mace in my purse and strode down the street with a “Don’t fuck with me” attitude and my house key wedged between my thumb and forefinger in a fist in case I had to fight off a mugger—or worse. I never got into an elevator alone with a strange man.

I’d seen a lot my first week in town as I looked for this “dream” apartment with its three flights of stairs, lack of closet space, cockroaches, and leaky faucets. The crusty radiator in my room blasted heat twenty-four/seven and emitted high-pitched screams like a troupe of teenage girls in a horror movie; I’d long since given up trying to open my window, which had been fused shut by coat after coat of slathered-on paint. I’d arrived, after a final fight with my mother, with one suitcase, an acceptance letter to NYU film school, and a couple of hundred dollars in cash. I stayed with Michael in his studio uptown while I looked for a place closer to school. I was wary of moving in with him—where I had once seen my boyfriend as my champion and defender, I now felt as if he had difficulty listening to me and seeing who I was. Maybe it was the age gap, but he tended to lecture me and tell me what to do. My frustration had led to some terrific arguments, and he’d pleaded with me a few times to give him another chance.

There wasn’t enough NYU housing even for freshmen, so most of us were just tossed into the streets with the classifieds. Because of the city’s bankruptcy, crime, and overall lack of services, a lot of people had fled to the suburbs, and it seemed as if every other residential building was filled with enormous rent-controlled apartments presided over by weird guys or lonely cat ladies who subsidized their “life-styles” by renting out rooms. I must have looked at thirty shares or sublets. Some of the men were so creepy I worried that if I moved in, I’d wake up in a dog collar chained to the wall. The women were mostly loonies who’d been divorced and practiced chanting and incense burning or were fading actresses or dancers who were still waiting for their big break on Broadway and needed to be free for that last-minute audition.

Compared to them, Harvey Buchbinder seemed positively normal—a frizzy-haired hipster in his late forties who wore low-rise, bell-bottom jeans and an oversized belt buckle. There were no cats in the apartment, and Beth, with her entire girlhood room from Ohio—including skis, hair dryer, popcorn popper, and Kenny Loggins poster—was already ensconced. Harvey only asked me two questions: Do you do drugs? And do you have a steady boyfriend? I had answered no to the first question and yes to the second. I got the feeling the answers didn’t matter, but he seemed nice and not likely to own a dog collar. So I gave him a deposit and moved in.

“Why are you looking for this guy?” Michael asked Detective Stanley.

“We believe he may be in danger. Do you know if he’s armed?”

Harvey? Armed? I thought. With what, soap on a rope? I imagined Harvey wielding his long-ago Hanukkah present from a Hai Karate gift set, swinging it nunchakus style over his head. I smothered an impulse to laugh.

Apparently Harvey had embezzled money from a company owned by the Mafia, and he and his girlfriend had disappeared. The cops wanted to talk to him while his head was still attached to his body. It was a question, the detective explained to us as if we were children, of who got there first—the NYPD or the Gambino crime family.

I hadn’t known Harvey long, but he had sort of grown on me. He always came home bearing gifts—like a middle-aged, denim-clad Santa with a Jewfro. One day he gave me the little, white, egg-shaped TV I had in my bedroom; another, a new, black vinyl Ciao! suitcase; and before he took off, a box of chocolate-covered cherries—perhaps, I thought now, as a farewell. It was only later that Robin revealed to me that during a visit she’d made to the apartment, Harvey had shown her his gun.

“What?! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew, stupid.” My sister shrugged at me.

I suspected he was trying to impress her by showing her he had a dangerous side. She was always getting hit on because she had big boobs.

“I’m going to have my colleagues Detectives Washington and Bernstein move in with you for a few days in case he comes back or calls.” Detective Stanley waved his arm at the crowd of men, and two stepped forward.

Washington introduced himself as Stan. He was a dapper African American guy with a pencil mustache, a natty suit, and a knit tie. “And that’s Lou,” Washington added helpfully as Bernstein nodded at us, shoved his hands in his pockets, and aggressively chewed his gum. He was short, on the chunky side, with red hair and glasses. He seemed a little angry. Dressed in jeans and a denim jacket, he reminded me of a trigger-happy version of Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Jaws.

Detective Stanley took the uniforms and left while Washington and Bernstein parked themselves on the sofa and played with their guns. Beth emitted a high-pitched squeal, ran to her room, and shut the door. I could hear the punched clacks and flat tones of the buttons on her baby-blue Princess phone as she frantically dialed her parents as Michael and I straggled back to bed.

After a few more fitful hours of sleep, we got up and said good morning to Washington and Bernstein, who’d already sent out for doughnuts and coffee. Beth was still holed up in her room even though I knew she had a morning class. I wasn’t sure what she was still upset about; in a crime-filled city, we were the only apartment besides the mayor’s with twenty-four-hour police protection. Michael left to go back to his apartment on the Upper West Side to prepare for a play audition, and I got ready for my Fellini/Antonioni class. Starting with black tights, I dressed in the “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” look that I’d adopted while hanging out in music clubs in Boston and Cambridge. Always short of cash, I shopped in the secondhand places a few blocks away on Second and Third Avenues, buying vintage dresses, men’s jackets, and sequined sweaters from the 1950s. On top of the tights, I pulled on my favorite mini tube-skirt and a little, scruffy red-and-white-checkerboard-patterned sweater I’d picked up at Andy’s Chee-Pees for three dollars. The East Village of 1980 may have been kind of a war zone, but I was thrilled to find a glut of cheap shoe stores on my street, where I had bought the cool pair of black ankle boots that completed any ensemble. I zipped myself into them, grabbed my book bag, and headed out the door.

Shopkeepers were hosing down the sidewalks, creating a putrid mist of trash and dog shit that wafted through the air as I headed for St. Mark’s Place—a dilapidated hash of dive bars, hippie candle and incense joints, and record and book shops, interspersed with edgy leather- and spandex-filled clothing stores with names such as Search & Destroy and Trash and Vaudeville. The block was presided over by the ghosts of rock ’n’ roll, living and dead, who haunted the now-boarded-up Electric Circus, a nightclub where the Grateful Dead, Nico, and the Velvet Underground had played in the sixties and seventies. On the other side of the street stood the St. Marks Baths, a gay all-hours playground for beautiful young men. The mysterious disease that would soon begin to kill many of them was then only just being whispered about, and the baths were still going strong. The corner of St. Mark’s and Third Avenue seemed to belong to the Ramones—four hunched-over, pale guys dressed identically in white T’s, jeans, leather jackets, and black high-top sneakers. They were there all the time that fall, their dark hair long over their eyes, which were hidden behind sunglasses—as if they were vampires shutting out the light of day.

I’d stopped at the Kiev, a grimy Ukrainian diner on Second Avenue, to pick up a bagel and a coffee to go for breakfast during the screening. I had already scoped out other inexpensive restaurants in the neighborhood. The Veselka, a Polish place a few blocks away, had huge bowls of borscht or chicken noodle soup that came with big buttered pieces of challah that would easily fill you up for the whole day. The Dojo, which I walked by on my way to school on Eighth Street, had a brown rice and vegetable plate that came with a delicious salmon-colored tahini dressing for a couple of dollars. I was a girl on a budget but quickly discovered I could eat well and cheaply on the Lower East Side. The simple food in heavy rotation became my version of a normal family’s weekly menu, but instead of Meat Loaf Monday and Taco Tuesday, it was Tahini Thursday and Pickle Soup Sunday. The flavors and smells, chipped china, and fat-fingered waitresses were the grandparents’ house and family dinner I’d never known growing up.

Crossing on Eighth Street over Lafayette and Broadway, I walked past the huge, black, metal cube sculpture in Astor Place that groaned as you spun it around on its axis. In the morning, the cube was surrounded by backpacking traveling kids in their sleeping bags, with a few homeless people strewn about snoozing. This encampment was usually broken up by the police midmorning, only to return later at night, after the drunk kids wandered home.

I cut down University Place. The theater where my class was held was on the far side of Washington Square Park. Passing the elegant town houses with their gated stone staircases and shiny doors flanked by pristine window boxes of artfully arranged geraniums and ferns, I felt as if I were entering an Edith Wharton novel. But when I crossed the street and walked under the huge marble archway into the park, I left the genteel 1800s behind and entered a gritty, nefarious world straight out of Serpico. The lawns were bald and brown, trampled by stoned drug dealers and desperate addicts looking for a fix. Busking musicians, young couples making out, old men playing chess, and groups of black kids beating on upside-down white buckets for donations rounded out the park regulars. The rest of us—students, professors, and old Greenwich Village retirees—clutched our bags and moved swiftly across the sidewalks, trying not to stare. At night, we’d just walk around the park.

When I reached the south side of the square, I dashed up the stone steps to Vanderbilt Hall, where the movie theater was. I pushed the heavy swinging door open and felt an immediate calm. The familiar hush of the auditorium seemed to stop time. I settled into a shabby red-velvet seat in the back and waited for the lights to go down. It made me think of sitting in the audience with my sister when we were little, at Lincoln Center or the West End of London, or the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, squeezing hands until the moment darkness slowly fell and the show—The Nutcracker or Mame or a Shakespeare play our father was acting in—began.