yustyoking

Has it really been 20 years since the Twin Towers fell? What a hollow feeling of grief.

Her name was Melissa Xenos and if nature had not created her, the literary digests and fashion magazines would have. I admit, she was no Hemingway. Never-the-less, we are left with a subtle bouquet of sawdust in our nostrils after ingesting even one of her many short stories. The lady could write. Xenos in Greek means “a stranger.” Melissa means “a honeybee.” Much of her work was divinely inspired and, despite her being a whiner and a dilettante, her stuff was damn good. 

The first time I met her was in 1979 at a Women’s Collegiate Golf Tournament in Branson, Missouri. We were both 19 years old. A summer job, I was production assistant at the local TV news station. When she won the tournament, Melissa was interviewed on the grass adjacent to the 18^th hole by sportscaster Savannah Detroit. I sat at the mixer board in the trailer while my boss called the shots between Camera One and Camera Two.

Savannah: Quite the win. How does it feel…?

Melissa: Sock it to me! Here’s the deal. When I was, like, three years old, I fell off my rocking horse and broke the little finger of my left hand. Here. See? That makes it really hard to hold a golf club. But each of us does what she can and takes pride in her achievements. Everything else is blood, sweat and granola bars.

Savannah: Well… Congratulations. What’ll you do with the prize money? Any plans?

Melissa: Hotel accommodations here are frightfully expensive. Hopefully, with the prize money, I’ll be able to break even for the tournament. Air fare, hotel, taxis, meals, all cost a load. But I’m not complaining. Hey, I won!

Savannah: Well, I’m glad you’re not complaining.

Melissa: Hey, mom and dad. Woo-hoo! Just look at this trophy! Neat, huh? I know, I know, one more dust collector. Be happy for me, you wack jobs!

A dude, a monumental screw-up and the world’s biggest gofer, I was told to put my sorry butt in gear and get her signature on the release form so we could air the tape. When I joked with Melissa about her expensive hotel room, she asked if I wanted to see it. “Sure!” I said. One thing led to another. Admiring her jet black hair and entranced by her chocolate brown eyes— so kind, so compelling— we went halfsies on the room and I stayed the night. College stuff.

Graduating in 1982, Melissa became part of the New York City art scene. Stripping off her clothes at gallery openings in Manhattan, she wandered nude among the crowd busy admiring the paintings, a Rubens masterpiece come to life, rich in urgency, zaftig in appearance. Waving an unlit cigarette in an intricately carved ivory cigarette holder, her voice a throaty contralto, her comments fell like bombshells upon a shocked public:

“Come here often, do we, Rothschild?”

“How now, brown turd blossom?”

“I prefer the same painting, but in blue.”

She lived in a loft on West 37^th Street in the heart of the Garment District. Delivery boys shoved racks of clothes on metal trolleys along the pavement outside her building, rain or shine. Cabbies added 25 cents to the fare when forced to double park.

“Donald, darling, I’m dying. Please bring me a mimosa ASAP,” she purred into the phone on more than one occasion, dressed in a flesh-colored leotard, lounging on the filthy wood floor of her loft.

Sometimes, he did.

A waitress and occasional model, she was featured in several independent films:

Emotional Sewage Side – Dirk Nuremberg’s autobiographical farce. Too cute by half. Lots of cameos by New York politicians. Melissa plays herself.

1994 – V. E. Scheherazadevski’s take on George Orwell’s 1984, where the authorities’ preferred form of punishment is decapitation by battle axe. Melissa plays Marianne Devochka.

Unwholesome Cowpoke – A rip-off of Midnight Cowboy, we follow the misadventures of a New York City hustler. Mixes professional Broadway actors and street people. Melissa plays the cello.

Bouffons Sans Frontières  by Marcel L’Heureau – “Buffoons Without Borders,” a Jean-Luc Godard meets Buster Keaton mash-up, the film juxtaposes a serious recital of the group’s manifesto against the absurd situations its adoption would entail. Looking gorgeous, Melissa angrily reads aloud the group’s manifesto. 

Liberté, égalité, fraternité – A film about fraternity life at East Coast colleges. Melissa plays the Homecoming Queen, sitting naked on a pink plastic throne, primping, cradling a small white dog that continually barks at the camera.         

Some say that Melissa slept her way to greatness, others that she used sex to pay the rent. I think Melissa would have been great in any case. She had a dynamite personality, oodles of talent and, like, total charisma. Whether she was sexually liberated or not had nothing to do with her rise to fame. Like David Bowie, Melissa considered herself a New Yorker.

She was not a lesbian, but she had her share of gay friends. Every year on the last Sunday in June, they proudly strutted through Lower Manhattan in the NYC Pride March. Year after year, Melissa dressed as a pink bunny rabbit.

Not one for charitable causes, she still threw herself into the AIDS relief effort, coining the phrase “I won’t give you from my purse, I’ll give you from my heart.” Too strapped to offer cash, she contributed her time and effort instead. One of the first to get involved, she jumped in feet first. Not everyone understood her motivation, this incredibly beautiful heterosexual woman stridently calling for government action. Her one woman be-in under the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows— replete with a dog and pony show— fell flat. “Helping is the right thing to do” was Melissa’s simple answer, but it wasn’t until Princess Diana came over from England in 1989 and visited Harlem Hospital’s AIDS unit that attitudes changed about combating the disease. Only a year apart in age, Diana and Melissa were contemporaries.    

If community activism became her schtick, Melissa made writing her career.   

It’s not my place to play literary critic, but since Melissa’s claim to fame is primarily literary, I should at least address the issue.

Location, location, location, 95% of her stories seem to take place in a mystical Cambridge – Gotham – Syracuse triangle. Often— too often— someone is a trust fund baby with a gun who foots the bill while the other characters are hangers-on, nervously enjoying Person A’s largesse. Sometimes Person A is a woman. Sometimes a man. Occasionally a dog. Who springs for the week-long vacation rental in an alpine chalet? Who buys ski lift cards for the entire gang? Person A, baby! Woof! Woof! Who drives a classic cherry red 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible with matching red and white interior trim and whitewall tires? Who do you think? Who holds an entire boardroom hostage? Ditto. The same. Person A.

I keep waiting to read about policemen, golf caddies, plumbers, census takers, soldiers or even Girl Scouts selling cookies, but either everybody is a 20-something yuppie or an unhappy camper from the upper 1% of the economy. Their quandaries are not your quandaries. This makes for great stories, but from a very limited perspective. To me, it seems as if Melissa got stuck inside a lump of amber, story-wise, and never broke free.

Disillusioned is disillusioned, sure, but owning liquid assets reduces a lot of the pressure. Money talks, people!

Did I mention that everyone has commitment issues?

Her short stories were pro-women’s rights, but markedly apolitical. As she told her editors, “I’m a storyteller, not a politician. My focus is on the characterization of disenchanted humanity. Let the reader decide where on the political spectrum my characters land. For me, it’s enough that they just, you know, are. They exist. That should be enough reality for anyone, free of any political garbage.” Considering that Ronald Reagan was president during most of the 1980’s, Melissa’s position was understandable.

Faced with her “take it or don’t take it” attitude toward publishing, the magazines took her stories and published them. She was good for business.

Melissa by the numbers: Not George Orwell in any way, shape or form, in 1984, at age 24, Melissa became magazine publishing’s Flavor of the Month. She pulled off this feat twelve times a year, but never more often than that, since it took her four full weeks to come up with each new story. No one could write a one-pager like Melissa, 700 words with room for both the title and a small cartoon. Her writing was completely lucid and totally delectable. Nor did anyone ever accuse Melissa of tl;dr = too long; didn’t read. She could spend an entire story describing a single frock coat. Reading her was like eating bonbons.

Her first literary agent, Paul Mellanquist, was not a success. His people suggested that Melissa specialize in women’s erotica, light pornography, sadomasochism and travel, apparently envisioning in Melissa a female Marquis de Sade.

She got a different agent.   

It was a fashion magazine editor who in 1989 felt that Melissa would be perfect at critiquing the English language edition of Uruguayan author Monte Video’s third novel, Conquistador deluxe. Inexperienced as a book reviewer and constantly zonked out on acid, Melissa said “no” before submitting a 1,000 word free form rebuttal to the main events in Monte’s book.

His is a novel chronicling the derring-do and dysfunctional lifestyle of one Capitán Facundo “The Fox” Fernandez, the drunken, tango-besotted, womanizing caretaker of the peculiar-looking Palacio Salvo in the capital’s Independence Plaza. This building houses, among other things, the Tango Museum of Montevideo. The book even contains a plot to overthrow the government, using sticks of dynamite tethered to weather balloons, but the conspirators keep postponing the attack, waiting for the wind to shift. Although fiction, the story exposes uncomfortable and disturbing similarities to Melissa’s own misshapen existence.

Too close to home, she felt like sparks were flying off the page! Seething with rage, dressed in stonewashed overalls, hammering away on her vintage IBM Selectric golf ball typewriter, gnashing her teeth and living on coffee, like an avenging angel, Melissa abandoned more earthly pleasures and committed thought to paper.

“Boo!” she wrote, among other things. “I prefer the samba.”

Publication of Melissa’s review created a cause célèbre, of minor proportion, especially among Uruguayan expatriates.

Still, her daily grind was less than perfect. She wondered if there was any reason for our existence. Was all of life an automobile race, clutching stopwatches to our breast? Where do elephants go to die? When was Hizzoner the Mayor going to do something about the crime wave, the crack cocaine and the mess in Times Square? Melissa wanted to be able to meander unmolested throughout her city, and she couldn’t do that. Now that he was out of the White House, was Dear Ronnie still fueling his sugar highs with jellybeans? she wondered. When oh when were the Arabs going to do something about the proliferation of grave robbers at archeological sites all across the Middle East? she pondered, gazing out the window at a brilliantly sunny day. For a lady with questions, she had few answers. Life sucked.

Based on a dare, however, she did venture into new territory, penning a Greek tragedy about Socrates, Aristotle, Plato and Athena titled “You Are Toast!” Set in modern times, it takes place in a Staten Island bakery. “Workers of the world, unite!” declares Athena upon reading Das Kapital by Karl Marx. “Freedom is our yeast,” she insists. “It helps us rise to the occasion.” Lamenting their four-way love triangle, Plato bores everyone to tears with his hair-splitting analogies. Fed up, Socrates clubs Plato to death, strangles Aristotle and then throws himself off the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge that connects Staten Island to Brooklyn. This last act takes some doing, but eventually he succeeds. Causing Athena to renounce Marxism and enter a nunnery. There is also a longish digression about Roman togas, their Greek antecedents and modern women’s fashion.

British socialist Cassandra Broom labelled Melissa a “faux liberal.” It was a more innocent time. Conservative columnist P. Naughton Butler accused her of being a stalking horse for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Ever helpful, literary critic Terry Sacks wrote, “She’s not a socialist, she’s just a writer.” As if all writers are socialists and all socialists are writers. Resigned to her fate, Melissa tried not to lose sleep over it. Her European friends took to calling her, with great affection, Melissa la Magnifique. 

In 1990, Melissa decided she was a diva, half woman, half deity. To celebrate Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire, she and her gangster boyfriend Red Rudy scoured the city’s moviemakers, gathering at gunpoint as many of her celluloid images as they could find. On July 4^th, they burned these, along with her magazine collection, in a colossal bonfire by the Hudson River, a plume of sooty black smoke spiraling skyward. Did they draw a crowd? Did they ever! They were surrounded by mostly young people blitzed on marijuana, youth who liked the rebel vibe but didn’t seem to know who Melissa was. “Some broad,” people said. “Oh yeah, her.” Melissa wasn’t a household name and it’s not like she and Red Rudy took out a full-page ad in the New York Post.

Unamused, the fire department called the police, who arrested Melissa and her boyfriend, charged them with a misdemeanor and fined them $500 each for violating the municipal ordinance prohibiting open fires. A thousand dollars seemed like a hefty chunk of change to bohemians like Melissa and Red Rudy, doing battle on the fringe of New York’s avant garde.

That’s when Melissa realized that she needed a lot more publicity and started a squeaky-voiced puppet show on Public Access Television on local cable in Manhattan. Called Spaced Out with Melissa, the scantily dressed hostess interviewed puppets who— using Rudy’s voice, always the same— dished up fictitious, semi-malicious gossip about the British royal family and the amount of revelry on Bahamian islands, two topics about which they seemed to possess not a scintilla of evidence. This didn’t affect the ratings which, being public access cable, were basically zilch to begin with. 

Red Rudy dealt drugs. For a small-time pusher like him, the competition could be deadly. So many people were so deeply involved in the drug trade, a tourist could hardly snap a photo in the city without being accosted and accused of being a narc. “Whyfore has youse taken my picher?” a denizen of this demimonde might howl in indignation.

“I was just photographing the Charging Bull in front of the Stock Exchange” may or may not mollify an enraged local.

These encounters usually turned violent, with the drug dealer trying to snatch the camera and the hapless tourist shouting for assistance, vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the cavernous wilderness of Wall Street.

In 1991, taking a page from Amanda Lear and Nico, fashion models who jumpstarted their music careers by diving straight into the recording studio, Melissa booked time at Electric Lady Studios on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and recorded a modest 10-song set of self-styled compositions, many leaning toward the weird. Half were done a cappella, just her voice warbling away.

Who’s my hero? My cousin Zero.

He’s doing time in the jungle of his mind.

It’s morning in America,

We’re mourning in America.

Sad and amused, Zero snags me some blue.

It’s a new day in America,

Life’s a subway in America.

My way or the highway!

Bing! Bang! Boom!

The musicians were either high schoolers or from bar bands. They had names like Mike, Mitch, Pete and Shiloh. Divvying up points, nobody got paid actual cash. If Melissa hit it big, they got rich. Otherwise, not so much. Avoiding the cost and headaches of vinyl pressing plants, Melissa released her epos solely on CD and cassette. Totally underground, it got nada radio play, but the a cappella tracks were often set to beats by DJ’s at dance clubs. People assumed they were listening to Madonna.

Using a video camera, I taped Melissa’s only live performance at CB’s 313 Gallery, a performance space adjacent to the CBGB music club in the Bowery. She was stunning! Like, totally. She even kept her clothes on. “Help! I’ll never do that again!” she groaned at the end of the evening, bathed in sweat. I am still waiting to get paid.    

Flush from a drug buy, Melissa flew home to the island of Lesbos. When she came back, she complained that she just didn’t get the whole Hellas thing. She did like the food and ouzo, a Greek liqueur that is a specialty of the island.

Eventually, she was interviewed by Fred van Holland on PBS. Naturally, he asked, “Where do you get the ideas for your short stories?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Melissa insisted adamantly. “They pop up inside my head, fully formed, although I have to put a lot of time and effort into transcribing, editing and proofreading them.” While for some writers, this might have sounded a death knell, for Melissa, it only added to her mystique.

Like any professional writer, Melissa struggled— sometimes unsuccessfully— to avoid formulaic plots: boy meets girl, girl dumps boy, boy pines for girl, girl takes back boy, girl regrets herself, girl dumps boy again, boy buys high-powered pistol, stalks girl, shoots his brains out in front of her. THE END 

“Women read fiction, men read non-fiction” goes the adage. As strict and unyielding as that sounds, I cannot argue with sales figures. A dedicated feminist from the get-go, chic and iconic, the mere mention of Melissa’s name on the cover of a glossy magazine meant the edition sold out. The magazines couldn’t get enough of her.

Sexual Mechanics Magazine  (Revista Mecánica Sexual) of Mexico City has given me permission (documento justificativo  # 202125-A) to quote in extenso a translation of a portion of Melissa’s 1999 short story A Hustle in the Works. One of her most mature efforts, it shows the full force of her talent:  

Carmelita could hear him crying in the bedroom. He loved her, this Carmelita knew.

He was an americano, a gringo whose name was Josh something and he wanted her. Badly. Although Carmelita knew this, Josh didn’t understand her. Not at all.

She could smell his bitter tears. Hear his inner fear. It was all his fault, she realized now, standing over him in the darkness, watching a solitary droplet of cold sweat run down his spine in the moonlight.

Oh what a fool he had been! People must have warned him, she was sure of it, but oh no, he had to travel to México on his own and chase señoritas, and him without a single word of Spanish to his name!

He arrived in his fancy carro, “car” en inglés, a red car with a beige leather interior, cool to the touch, and that new car smell, 550 km on the clock, she checked, but because of the language barrier, she was stuck staring at videos of Colombian homegirl Shakira belting out the Spanish-language hits that had made her their very own Latin American superstar, singing Latin songs on the TV in the inky black stillness of night, while raging lust pulsed through every sinew of Carmelita’s body. Her young, sinuous body. 

She had taken this Josh person to a three star americano-style casa de huéspedes. A boarding house. She would never take him home to her own domicilio, she wasn’t crazy!

Even by moonlight, Carmelita liked what she saw in the mirror mounted over the dresser. Her flashing eyes were reflected back at her, making her laugh. Josh was sure to turn into putty in her hands. After all, a young girl needs certain things, among others a Sugar Daddy to pay the bills. Her Joshy would want to do that for Little Ol’ Carmelita, even if he didn’t know it quite yet. Her life should be sweet as a kitten, not as gristly as a T-bone steak. Let him ride a motor scooter, for goodness sake, Carmelita can drive his big, fancy, new American car. Car. Carmelita. When the pieces fit, you stop dribbling the ball and kick for the net.

Goal! 

Should she wake him, her mute Hercules, and unleash his passion from the rubbery depths of his suspensorio, his “jockstrap”? How to get him out of bed and down the stairs? she wondered, unable to communicate even her most benign thoughts. Desayuno. Breakfast. Benign. Totally benign.

Maybe Josh should have taken his bag of trouble to Belize instead. There were señoritas in Belize who spoke good English, this Carmelita had heard, although only Spanish is the true language of love. There is no substitute. Spanish is like no other, with a love as sleek and slippery as the little green lizards outside their boarding house window, slithering noisily through the leafy green underbrush of Carmelita’s soul. 

***********************

For a Manhattanite without wheels, Melissa seemed transfixed by automobiles and the color red.

As talented as she was, Melissa didn’t write book length novels and never seemed to make any money. Toward the end of her career, she really knew how to write, but strangely, the better she got at her craft, the less she produced. After fifteen years, either she was burned out or her muse visited less often. Maybe the LSD aka  Blue Acid, Blue Barrel, Blue Chair, Blue Cheer, Blue Heaven, Blue Microdots, Blue Mist, Blue Moon, Blue Sky, Blue Star and Blue Tabs did her in.

The last time I saw her was on September 1, 2001. A Saturday. She was standing behind a foldable black card table on a corner of West 47th Street in the Theater District, selling George W. Bush-inspired souvenir knick-knacks among the usual Empire State baubles.

“Ya wanna buy a bottle opener with a picher of Bush-Cheney on the front?” she asked me, smiling wanly. “Hey, I know you!”

“Hello, Melissa. How’s trade?” I asked.

“Jesus, I gotta get outta this burg,” she opined. “You got any coin? I’d like to take the bus to Paramus or somethin’.” When not forming words, her mouth was busy masticating chewing gum at 90 miles per hour.

“I’m as strapped as always,” I admitted, not actually pulling out my wallet, but miming said activity.

“Ain’t life a gross of trouble?” she commiserated, sighing, black bags under her eyes.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah, sure. Bye sickle,” she replied and it breaks my heart that I didn’t tarry to spend more time with her.

On 9/11, showing up at 10 o’clock in the morning to hawk beads on Liberty Street, she got caught in the dust cloud when the South Tower of the World Trade Center came crashing down. Although Melissa survived the collapse, stumbling blindly through the streets, white as a mummy and wailing like a banshee, she died later of complications brought on by the toxic debris to which she was exposed. First it coated her and then it killed her.

Some strange story.

Right up until her dying day, she and Red Rudy had plans. Innovators and entrepreneurs, they had dreams of their own brand name at Macy’s. Maybe Redmill Fashion. Having missed out on the Bomber Jacket craze, they seized the moment, convinced that the Next Big Thing would be the Bomber Vest. An eye-catching creation in white cotton and brown plastic, it looked for all the world like an al Qaeda-inspired suicide vest. For sale at an affordable price point and possessing a high thread count, it is wearable as an accessory in Spring, Summer and Fall. Realistic right down to the foreign writing on the label, unfortunately, it never caught on. The few poor souls who wore one of the prototypes got promptly arrested. New York City was probably the wrong venue for a launch party. True, you could wear it around the house without antagonizing anyone, but what was the fun in that?

Too many lives get snuffed out ahead of their time.  

R. I. P.