Iris Has Free Time. Iris Smyles

illegal card rooms right here in Manhattan. Lex knew all of them. Lex knew everything.

      An empty catering hall with one table occupied: A fifty-five-year-old dealer whom everyone called “The Greek,” two DJ’s Lex knew from Gambler’s Anonymous, a truck driver, a soldier on leave, a public school teacher who said very little, Lex, and me. I’d look on quietly, drink my beer, smoke my cigarettes, and occasionally write things in my notebook—poems or snatches of prose for a novel I planned to write about desolation and how much fun it was.

      Settled in with my grilled cheese sandwich and beer, I’d watch Lex gamble away the morning, study the faces of the other players, and flirt innocently with the older man who ran the room. He liked me and gave me menthol cigarettes when I ran out of my regular ones, and then took me aside to a table next to the big one in order to share his stash of hard candy. He pulled my chair out and asked me to tell him all about myself, but then didn’t pause for me to speak and began telling me all about myself instead: I was a nice girl, he said, and I shouldn’t be hanging around all night with a bum like Lex in a place like this.

      “She likes it,” Lex yelled over, without looking up from his cards.

      I smiled and shrugged and chose a pink candy from the dish.

      After a while I’d return to Lex’s side where I’d dream about the wonderful novel that might contain us, the sordid romance of Lex and me in the underworld. Wasn’t I bored just to sit there? the others asked, not understanding how busy I was in my mind, polishing the night until it gleamed like a rare fiction. Bored? How could I be? I was the heroine of a great book.

      I’d pass out at Lex’s place, and in the morning or the afternoon or early evening, depending on when we woke up, hungover and tired, we’d go for breakfast around the corner. We’d eat pancakes and eggs and then, tired still, would return to his apartment to escape the heat and watch TV.

      In his living room filled with records, four vintage televisions sets, and his very own pinball machine, the air conditioner wheezed loudly as we sat on his stylish mod couch, ridiculing Ruthie of MTV’s The Real World.

      Ruthie always got too drunk. The camera followed her as she crawled on her hands and knees through a crowded bar. We cracked up laughing at her expense, before I asked seriously, cringing as I recalled my own actions the night before, “Am I that bad when I drink, Lex?”

      “Sometimes,” he said. “Not all the time, though,” he smiled.

      We’d walk his dog, a melancholic ridgeback named Lola. We’d walk her around the block but never over to the river, though it was only five blocks away. “What’s there to do at the river?” Lex asked, when I suggested it. “As soon as you get there, all you do is start walking back!”

      Walking to the river was not essential. What was essential was the invention and perpetuation of the good time. What was essential was yesterday—“In the ’80s, you could go to a party and meet anyone. Basquiat, Warhol . . . People were interesting then; creativity mattered!”

      Lex would frown and complain, but even his bitterness was not without style. “I went to the video store and there were all these videos. Too many! I didn’t know what to get. What’s the point of all that selection? If I owned a video store, I’d only stock Caddy Shack. Every video in there would be Caddy Shack. This way you’d never be confused about what to rent again. . . .”

      We’d run into his friends—B-movie actors, indie-directors, musicians and designers, or party promoters like him. In the middle of what for anybody else would be a workday, they’d stand on the corner, chatting about what to do next. No one ever had any place to be.

      “We’re going to go buy more mint-flavored toothpicks,” Bernie and her boyfriend told Lex, but not me. They twirled the ones already in their mouths.

      “We’re running out,” her boyfriend added, looking out across Sixth Avenue and blinking slowly.

      “She wants to be a DJ now,” Lex began, after they left. “She called me up the other night, and she’s like, ‘Lex, I’m deejaying at Veruka tomorrow. Can I come over and borrow some records?’ I’m like, ‘Get your own fucking records!’ The whole thing of being a DJ is building up a record collection, and she just expects me to loan her mine? If a club wants my records, let them hire me! I’m gonna give them to her so she can play DJ and make money she doesn’t even need?” We walked a few more steps in silence. I’d learned to keep silent until his anger passed. Then he added, “It’s a joke that they’re dating. He’s just dating her because of who her father is.”

      “Who’s her father?”

      “Bax Stubbs.”

      “Who’s that?”

      “The guitarist of Xenophobe,” he snapped.

      I shrugged. “I didn’t know he was married.”

      “He’s not.”

      “How chic. I’d love to have a little bastard myself some day. Name him Edwin . . . make him sleep in the stables . . . ask the servants, ‘Where’s that little bastard Edwin got to?’”

      “When did everyone get to be so fucking fake?” Lex said, kicking at the ground.

       2

      Though Lex was thirty-six and I was twenty, in just a few years I would be too old for him. He’d had many “good friends” like me already, girls who eventually grew up and left him behind. Lex, always and forever, the boy behind the DJ booth.

      Some people said he was living in the past, that he didn’t revive the’80s, but had never let it go. And sometimes, behind his back, I called him “the denim gargoyle.” He had lines on his face and thick skin from too much sun, too much partying and, finally, too much time. One of his tattoos, a thorn of roses circling his forearm, was fading to blue. In the mornings, before we’d head out for breakfast, I’d trace my fingers over it. I love you, Lex, I’d think, which is perhaps why I invented the cruel nickname.

      “If I met you back then,” I said, looking up from a photo, “if we were the same age, I don’t think you’d like me.” It was a Saturday night, and we were at his apartment, looking through a box of old pictures taken in the early ’80s when he first moved to New York. In each, he looked so young and handsome, he and his friends so effortlessly cool. I dropped the stack onto the bed. “I think you’d be mean,” I said, going into the kitchen.

      Lex and his friends dated models, fresh-faced movie stars, and the daughters of the rich and famous. Seeing him among them, I felt rough and embarrassed, as if my body were sewn from a cheaper material. I returned with a beer.

      Lex was laughing and handed me another photo. One of his friends, the preppy one, had gotten the Lacoste alligator tattooed onto his chest. He pointed him out.

      “That’s funny because I’ve been thinking about getting a one-legged alligator tattooed on mine,” I said frowning, “the insignia for the Lacoste knockoff on sale at JCPenney.”

      “What about the Polo symbol without the mallet?” he ribbed back. “We could get matching ones. You get the mallet, and I’ll get the rest of him.”

      “I don’t want the mallet,” I said, flopping down on the bed. I stared at the ceiling, at Lex’s face as it came over mine, as he kissed me.

      I would never be cool. And I wouldn’t have cared finally, if I knew that Lex didn’t. Still, I couldn’t blame him for being shallow; his life depended on it. Cool people, cool places, cool things. As a DJ and party promoter, being cool was how he made a living. And with no distinction between his personal and professional life, Lex, quite simply, couldn’t afford to date me.

      That said, I don’t think he really wanted to. Though he’d pursued me in the beginning, I didn’t know how to hold the interest of a veteran playboy of his caliber. He’d had hundreds