SEPTEMBER CHANGES

Rolling the Dice on New York City

Banking on the promise of new beginnings amidst a Scottish art renaissance gone south

Ever since E. B. White wrote, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky,” umpteen writers, artists, and dreamers have quoted, misquoted, and appropriated his sentiments.

Including me. I was desperate to “be lucky,” when I spilled out of a People’s Express Boeing 747 at Newark from London in the fall of 1983 into a cloak of heat and humidity people said was unusual for that time of year.

My Scottish genes, unused to such sultry temperatures, squirmed in discomfort. They, like the rest of me, were hungover, thanks to the rousing sendoff my pals in London insisted on giving me the previous night. Champagne and brandy cocktails? Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly…. Well, maybe just a small one. T’was ever thus.

Feeling lost—fleeing a disastrous love affair that had made my heart feel like it was rotating on a spit — I had been determinedly drinking myself into oblivion. My senses were not only bruised, battered, and bewildered, but also a little bedazzled by the adventure upon which I was embarking.

I walked past the wrinkled face of Ronald Reagan greeting me from a portrait in the Immigration Hall, collected my suitcase, and headed out towards the waiting throngs.

When I’d left London that morning, I’d considered myself pretty snazzily attired in a nuclear grey pencil skirt and top courtesy of fashion chain Warehouse. But after hours in transit, my outfit resembled more a creased dishtowel than Paris chic. Not the look I was hoping for my entrée into New York society.

A fabled yellow taxi spirited me towards Manhattan. “Some people get into taxis and are never seen again,” my friend Donald had warned me.

“You from Benny Hill country?” asked the driver, after he heard my accent. A giant cross dangled from his windscreen. Benny Hill, a comedian barely tolerated in the UK, was revered by the French and Americans, especially this one. The driver spent the rest of the journey recalling his favorite episodes. Perhaps he wouldn’t kidnap me after all.

When the taxi pulled up outside the art gallery in SoHo, I listened to the drumbeat of instructions in my head: Be aware of who’s in front of you, alongside you, and behind you. No eye contact with strangers. Don’t ride the subways after dark. New York is full of muggers. Avoid Central Park at night. I repeated them like a mantra.

A plume of steam rose from a nearby manhole and a banner proclaiming “The Scottish Renaissance” hung outside the gallery. The Renaissance was a new movement in Scottish art, the brainchild of Donald, my old friend, and director of an art gallery in Edinburgh.

About ten of us, artists and friends, had congregated here for its New York launch. The aim was to take the city by storm. While the official opening had been two days previously, it was a two-week-long event, with festivities planned for most nights.

“Come to New York for opening week,” said Donald, a few months earlier. “Everyone’s going. It’ll be great. I’ll introduce you to people in the arts and publishing. You’ll love New York.”

At the time, I clung to his words like a lifeline. As soon as the notion entered my mind, I knew it was the answer to my problems. I rented out my flat in London and managed to prize a few stipends out of UK magazines and newspapers to write about US business. Other than that, I was a pauper.

Like all pilgrims, I was chasing a dream of salvation, transformation, adventure — something. I wanted to kick my old life, with its heartaches, disappointments, and mistakes to the curb as fast as I could, and morph into someone else, somewhere else. I wanted to disappear into the fabric of a new city and rewrite my life.

I stashed my suitcase behind the front desk. It was still early — 5-ish, and not many people were there yet. I spotted Donald from afar and waved. He saw me and rushed over.

“Ann! How lovely to see you.” His red-rimmed, lapis lazuli eyes were out on stalks, his handsome face drawn, as if sleep had been a stranger and booze a constant companion. He was draped in what he called his “Official Function Outfit,” a green and black tartan wool suit accessorized with a green lurex bow tie and bright green suede shoes. Even in New York, he stood out.

“How are you? Did ye just get here?” He sounded surprised.

“Did you remember I was coming?” I said.

“Good God, of course!”

He’d forgotten.

Donald and I had been friends since Edinburgh. The summer I met him, I was sharing a drafty, Edwardian flat off the Canongate with an American studying law and an Englishman studying medicine. Donald, a friend of the American, arrived one Saturday afternoon and never left. We argued politics, whether to vote for Labor or the Scottish National Party, buoyed by the discovery of North Sea oil.

He was tall and thin and wore a navy military jacket and baggy cream trousers. His thick black hair fell over eyes that sparkled with life. I thought him exquisite.

We continued our discussion on a tour of hostelries, collecting people in each one. Later at a party, I sat on his lap, imagining what a lovely couple we’d make. He gently unwrapped me and told me he was gay, he’d always been gay and always would be gay. And while he loved women, he didn’t love them enough to sleep with them.

After that, we became firm friends and often gave joint dinner parties in his tiny flat off the Royal Mile. It was there, lubricated by champagne and whisky, he’d recline on the pink velvet chaise longue, gaze out at Edinburgh Castle, and wax lyrical about his favorite subject next to himself and male flesh.

“Art in Scotland is like the Scottish church,” he proclaimed. “Ancient, elite, dominated by dogma and ritual and controlled by the hierarchical few for the benefit of like-minded peers.”

“Look what Scotland’s given the world,” he continued to anyone sober enough to listen. “Penicillin, TV, telephone, western economics, golf, the breech-loading rife, anesthetics…. It’s the rise of the Scots. I’m talking about the beginning of a new art movement like the Bloomsbury Group, only Scottish. A renaissance of Scottish art.”

After art school, Donald opened a gallery so fellow young artists would have somewhere to show their work. It struggled for years, sustained only by Donald’s endless energy, gift of the gab, and talent for extracting funds out of a variety of sources.

His fortunes rose following exhibitions in London, St. Petersburg, and Paris. Newspaper articles and TV appearances followed. Donald knew what people wanted to hear. “I say exactly what I think. I’m rude, controversial, opinionated, arrogant, and I’m always right! They love it, they always ask me back.”

New York was the key to the future, said Donald. “It has the power to make or break any movement or individual. Paintings that sell in Scotland for 500 pounds fetch $4,000 here.”

His Pied Piper allure was such that we’d all followed him.

“It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.”― E.B. White, Here Is New York

“How was the opening?” I asked.

“Chaotic. We’re all crazed. Everything’s falling apart. David and I had a fight at the opening–.”

David was Donald’s lover, a hot-headed Irish artist. They had been together since art school, earning them the nickname of the two Ds.

“What was it about this time?”

“He’s so bloody jealous. And neurotic. He accused me of having an affair. Me, have you ever known me to have an affair?” He giggled.

“Since you mention it — ”

“Alright, it was only a little one-night stand. It meant nothing. Besides, he did the same thing to me with some Italian number. He’s the one who gets violent, not me.”

The couple’s fights were legendary. And vicious. Once, they had chased each other, knives in hand, around my kitchen table in my flat in Edinburgh, while I screamed at them to stop.

“He’s gone back to England to see the dentist. I accidentally broke his tooth. But only because of what he did to me. See that?” He swept back a swathe of hair to reveal a bruise down the left side of his face.

“How do you accidentally break someone’s tooth?”

“He’s impossible. Despite all appearances, I’m keeping it together. I have to. I made a deal to sell the gallery’s work as well. That’s the gallery owner over there.”

Donald pointed to an older, bearded, balding man in a checked sports jacket and slacks, lurking around. He looked out of place compared to the youthful demeanor and colorful attire of the artists trickling in.

“How is everyone else?”

Donald laughed again, as if I’d asked something funny.

“Sarah’s fallen for Jerry Katz, the gallery owner. We all went to Danceteria two nights ago, and she ended up in his blue-tiled Jacuzzi at 5 o’clock in the morning. Rumor has it, he asked her to marry him.”

I reexamined Jerry Katz, still lurking.

“Oh! Is she going to accept?”

He shrugged. “And Ailsa’s husband has left her. He told her he didn’t love her anymore.”

“No!” Ailsa was married to a handsome, charismatic musician, whom we all liked. It was the first I’d heard of any trouble.

“She’s distraught, and has decided to move to Corfu,” said Donald.

“Corfu!”

I seemed to be talking in exclamation marks. I had a lot to catch up with. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one in extremis, then.

Sarah was an English rose type from London, who lived with her mother and was bored with her job in an art gallery. Ailsa was an on-the-cusp-of-becoming-famous Scottish painter known for her stunning landscapes, her vivacious personality, and her equally as vivacious mass of blond curls.

As students, we’d hung out together, roaming the streets of Edinburgh, lamenting about love gone wrong, lack of money, or D&D’s latest fight.

“Where are you staying?” Donald asked.

“You said you’d find me somewhere…”

“I did?” He laughed, in his disarmingly charming way. “I’ll do my best, though, I’m sleeping on someone’s couch myself. We got kicked out of where we were staying thanks to David. It’s his fault we had that row.”

Not the news I had hoped to hear.

“Ailsa and Sarah might be able to put you up,” he said. “They’re staying with a friend of a friend of Sarah’s. Don’t worry, we’ll find you somewhere.”

Hope soared. Maybe I wasn’t destitute after all.

Donald turned and waved to a large woman who entered the gallery. “Don’t go anywhere, she’s interested in buying one of Ailsa’s.”

He shot off, leaving me to process the news, feeling surplus to requirements, and vaguely wondering where I would end up. The last thing anyone needed right then was another Scottish freeloader looking for somewhere to kip for the night (or two).

Donald never did find me a place to stay. Ailsa and Sarah were billeted in a studio apartment, taken up almost entirely by a pullout sofa bed. There wasn’t room to swing a cat, they said, never mind another person.

So that long day ended with me, Sarah, and Jerry, the gallery owner, bouncing up First Avenue in his 1976 station wagon, with me peering up out the windows at the towering skyscrapers and turrets of my new world. I’ve no idea who suggested I stay at the Vanderbilt YMCA on East 47th Street, but that’s where Jerry kindly dropped me off and where I laid my head for the evening, with strains of “It’s fun to stay at the YMCA,” running through my mind.

The first day of the rest of my life was almost over. And I realized, going with the flow would serve me well on this little adventure.

And the thought of it felt exhilarating.

Thanks for reading. And thanks to Deb and Ellen for your editing patience.