A true story about flipping the verbal bird and ungraceful pimping in New York City’s art world?
Let me share a little about my time in Greenwich Village in the 1990s.
Tony1 sold Christmas trees on the official ‘Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk’ for two seasons. This Corner was the far edge of Bleecker Street, where a strip of music clubs intersected with NYU, a grocery store, and a UFO landing strip (but more on that another time).
The corner was active and colored in red and white. In that space I had my capitalism coming of age as I watched famous people walk by, got mugged, and embraced each minute of my experience in the city that never sleeps.
It was the mid 1990s and I often worked until 4:00am, ate breakfast with drag queens, and drank enough red wine to feel civilized and grungy all at once.
Inside this brick-built corner B-grade Jazz musicians played each evening as did Jazz geniuses hiding from the spotlight and alimony payments. Because of the people, I knew I couldn’t have landed in a better place.
Inside were dangling Styrofoam notes and black and white penny-tiled floor. Outside, a dingy red carpet covered a portion of the sidewalk, and in warmer months, a low white metal fence kept our customers from escaping before they paid their checks. It was an all cash business and the joint only cut out of making good money once we started accepting American Express.
The low sidewalk fence also allowed guests to feel protected as they sipped their Negronis and beer. They’d rest their arms on the railing like one would sit in a Captain’s chair. What a fun way to feel like you own the joint, sitting like that and observing the world walking by.
The fence kept the muggers at bay most days, and contained a place of fast math, cocktails, and cheap bar food, with absurd tips and even more absurd laughing with found family.
This story takes place in winter though, when no one wanted to hang around outside The Corner except Tony and perhaps 50 Christmas trees trucked in from upstate.
Tony had medium dark skin and a well kept mustache. He was soft-spoken and handsome. I never knew if he was of Puerto Rican decent, or maybe had blood from the other Islands. It didn’t matter, he was a New Yorker and the perfect combination of hustler-dreamer for all of us to enjoy his company. He fit right in.
Tony would come inside when the tree business was slow, eat and drank with class, talk with us for real, and leave great tips. Joanie1 especially seemed to enjoy him, and he came inside for her bar shifts more for than any others.
From Tony’s perch on the mahogany bar stool, he chatted up Joanie and watched the mirror behind the liquor bottles, which gave him a reflected view of the huge window and his trees outside. This was a really icy winter in New York, if you remember the one. Storm after storm made sidewalks as slick as luges.
During that time, we also all smoked everywhere. Staff smoked like chimneys while serving customers. With a cigarette hanging from her mouth and deftly opening champagne bottles to kill it on sales bonuses. Our star performer, Nora would rock a lacy teddy, platforms and mesmerize anyone who dared to ask why they were now paying for 6 bottles of Moet.
More on Nora another time. She was special. And she didn’t give two f&cks what anyone thought, while being immensely kind to all of us girls who worked the Corner.
Back to the Christmas trees… Tony’s barstool view may have also cued him when the good cocaine customers showed up. They never came inside, as far as I know, yet this side-of-a-side-hustle made perfect sense for him. When it snowed, it snowed, and Tony’s Snowy Corner was easy to find in icy winter.
I understood that Tony was making love with our day bartender, one of the most amazing women I’d ever met. She looked a little like Frida Kahlo and wore clothes like mod 1960’s music videos. She walked like a grounded goddess and spoke like a Shakespearean Queen.
I saw Joanie as my work mom, the perfect maternal surrogate for a country bumpkin fresh from Rhode Island. Although this bumpkin thing is questionable assertion given I was living with prostitutes nodding out on my doorway and making rent by wearing short skirts.
I guess my courage was as a high as my sights were lovingly low.
“This is New York City!” I thought as I stepped over needles and kicked homeless guys out of my car. No judgement, no desire to change. No desire for “more.” I’d made it after all. I was showing my art and had fabulous friends. I was pretty sure this was exactly how life was for everyone just starting out in New York City. I loved every minute of it.
A quick side-eye.
My eyebrows at the time, were also a touch Frida-esque, so much so that a man named Wesley once bee-lined it across the street from another club to meet me. He was 15 years or so my senior but living in a teenaged body, and smiling so hard I knew he was real. He said, “anyone with eyebrows like this is someone I have to know.” I chatted him up and got back to work. I was tending my territory in the land of red and white tables turning tips for rent and paint.
Okay, back to Tree Tony’s Christmas Corner. Sorry I talked about eyebrows.
Tony was so handsome and twinkly of eyes, it was no wonder my Jazz club mom found him appealing. So much so, she’d let him use the bathroom without hassle, which was not the usual style. Sometimes we asked folks to crawl if they really needed it, with a smile. The cute new mid-west boys would do it. We’d all laugh. Bathrooms in the village were a buy-to-try proposition most of the time.
So when Joanie suggested that Tony would like to be an art agent and wished to represent me to a SOHO gallery, I said, “why not?”
I was already showing my work on 2nd Avenue and selling art each month. Every sale fueled a great dinner out and more time with friends, and more supplies. I had already accomplished everything I’d come to NYC for in my first 3 weeks, so common-styled Ambition was not my thing. Desire for Adventure still was.
So, one winter afternoon, Tony and I trekked my most recent art (a grid of sinewy paintings on boards found in a dumpster), my slides, and the two of us to the meeting. He looked annoyed at my choice to bring along perhaps the worst examples of my craft, the edges of the works were splitting like veneer would. But he said “current,” and this was most current– garbage turned to art. I didn’t have lots of money for canvases that month.
We sauntered past the really well known “serious” artists’ work into a posh gallery office, and the director talked with me for real. Her desk was large, full of art books and slide tables with loupes, and the room was appointed like the place that made big dollars off artist’s art.
Tony knew the woman somehow. Maybe from Christmas Corner.
I was there for the ride, but not particularly interested in getting a show. Getting a show meant to me that I’d need to produce twice as much art each month for two galleries, and honestly, how the F was I going to do that from my tiny apartment while working 4 shifts per week slinging cocktails? The Corner was my family. I wasn’t leaving that.
So my math brain, simply could not compute how that would work. More galleries = more art = more time. How much time did I have? I knew I was not at the level like Jeff Koons who had a pile of paid assistants supporting him. Koons made tons of work, via their hands, backs, and skill. He also had unlimited cash for supplies, a big space to work in and galleries pimping him to big collectors in turn. I respected his racket, don’t get me wrong.
I was not bowled over by ‘important’ people (like the gallery director), so the whole thing felt a big adventure with no real stakes. Didn’t I tell you, I’d already made it?
At the meeting, I kept my country bumpkin meets “I don’t need you,” attitude, with growing annoyance as Tony kept trying to “shush” me and take over the negotiation.
I may as well have flipped them both off and left. They would have chased to represent me, maybe. But I was polite. And confused.
Why would he do that, I wondered, shush me? Aren’t I, the artist, the one with something to say? Isn’t that precisely what art is? Saying something?
The dawning of this relationship with Tony came fast and hard: he wanted to make money off of handling me. And I was showing in full spirit of rebellion, that I couldn’t, and wouldn’t be handled. On top of it I insisted in talking about turning tables, instead of discussing art history.
He was clearly embarrassed, with sheepish “sorry I wasted your time” vibes at leaving. He knew I hid what I knew in order to talk about what I know: the most colorful stuff I was currently steeped in: Red & White and Wacky Corners.
The Gallery Director maintained a sparkle in her eye throughout the entire conversation, wished me well, and Tony and I both left, annoyed. I did not care that I sabotaged my chance of a real SOHO show by refusing to quiet down and behave. That’s not what artists do.
I felt like Tony was trying to pimp me, but didn’t clue me into what that meant until I was fully in the scene.
See, no one had never actually explained to me what agents do: which is make a living by percentage, rep-ping a person who makes things with people who want things. I realized this on-the-fly. And because I felt pimped, not understood, I walked out of there torching the bridge to boot.
It’s hard to do business with someone like that. But even harder to ‘perform’ to impress folks when you believe that important people stuff is only pretend. That was then. Now I realize, real people in position, are not a bad thing. It’s a role after all: agent and rep. Totally cool.
Ooops.
And that’s what the owner of the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk taught us to say when we made a mistake: “oops.” No self beratement or even obsequious apologies. Just “ooops.”
And this story is so rebellious in a way, in that I have no regrets for standing in my own integrity and only participating in relationships when we all know what the dynamics are meant to be. I clearly don’t like getting pimped by men who don’t bother to get consent, or explain themselves and their agendas plainly. Who the F would?
To tease another story, the owner of the Corner was a 6 foot 5 man with a huge forehead, no children, and an enthusiastic sense of how to make the art of bartending more efficient. This concept “making the art more efficient” is by itself kind of a misnomer.
But, Mr. Smith loved Henry Ford’s mindset, and fancied himself a hybrid of spaceship captain and bar optimizer. He was the reason we considered Laguardia Place a landing strip for UFOs.
But more on that later… if you’d like.
Let me know if you’d like more writing like this by subscribing, or dropping me a line. You don’t need to pay to read more, but I do need a touch of real feedback to proceed. A working girl’s gotta get herself a workspace and paint, and I’m not too proud to ask for cash to do so.
I used to live on prostitution row after all, but that’s yet another bit of story for another day. Many thanks.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT
I have written about some of these moments before, which may be searchable by tags like New York City City and Artist.
If you are in this story, and not pleased with your portrayal, drop me a line too. It’s told with love and sauciness, but is maybe a touch too… too? Wishing you well as always.
- Names changed to protect the awesome, the guilty, and those who may not wish to be outed. ↩︎