The Reality of Other People

Do you believe in gay ghosts? Lux editor Natalie Adler’s debut novel Waiting on a Friend is full of them — bitching, moaning, and demanding that the story’s heroine, Renata, do… something. Renata lives in the rundown East Village of the 1980s, crammed with artistic weirdos and shuddering on the edge of gentrification. She can see ghosts but she can’t see the ghost of her best friend Mark, the gorgeous golden boy of the East Village gays, who has recently died of complications from AIDS (like many of their friends). The novel is about Mark and Renata and their friends, but it’s also very much about New York and the spectral histories behind every facade. I adored it. I talked to Natalie in advance of its release.

Order the book today and attend Natalie’s book talk at the Strand on Tuesday with Hugh Ryan. We will also be celebrating Tuesday with a big party at 101 Club with DJ GuarionexJR – Details and RSVP here. —Sarah Leonard

SARAH LEONARD We’re both people who moved to New York as fast and hard as we could. Your book captures that love of the city. What drew you to writing about it in the 1980s?

NATALIE ADLER Everyone who moves to New York hears something like, “Oh, you just missed the good phase.” As soon as I got here when I was 18, I was very aware of CBGBs and things like that; I started getting more interested in post punk and no wave and feeling the ghosts of people who had lived here before, who had gone out, had a good time. There’s this good energy of people wanting to live affordably, make art, and hang out with their friends. The period I’m writing about in this book is one of the last decades where that was really possible.

SL It’s tricky, also, to move here and not be part of the problem.

NA Queer people, weirdos, artists, writers, political radicals, these are all people who move to big cities because you can make change with other people. Transplants and immigrants are a vital part of New York. So people come here, and it makes the city better, but then sometimes people come here and they make it worse. They want to extract from what the weirdos, the immigrants, the queer people, the radicals, have to offer.

SL There’s an extremely funny scene with a character who’s doing an art performance in the apartment he’s being evicted from, and everyone assumes that the only people who show up will be his friends. And then a couple of bougie party goers show up and wander around very incongruously — it’s their little frisson for the evening to be in such a rundown place.

NA Yeah. I mean, 1984 is the year that “East Village art” starts getting commodified. This is when Keith Herring and Basquiat and all these people are starting to sell for major money. Galleries that had been opening in the early 80s in the East Village — now people are suddenly swarming to get into them, to buy the art up. People are seeing the neighborhood as a place of extraction and exploitation. So whatever nostalgia we might have for, like, “Oh, I wish I could live in a neighborhood with all of my friends and be weird and do art,” is tempered by the fact that everyone who wants to make money and vampirize coolness will also be interested in the same neighborhoods.

SL Yeah, always two steps behind. I did get the feeling of nostalgia for a world that is not about productivity so much as creativity.

NA Is it even nostalgia if you’ve never experienced it? But yes, my characters are not careerists. It’s a weird thing to find the AIDS crisis era nostalgic, right? No matter how cool the East Village seems in this time period, I wouldn’t trade that for — what, all of my friends dying? There’s this Gary Indiana quote that I put on a sticky note over my desk when I was first writing the book. Something like: “There’s so much necrophile sentimentality for this era. In the 1980s, all my friends died.” And that’s the tension of the book.

SL This unbelievably traumatic period is expressed, of course, by the presence of the ghosts. I was curious about your own experience of New York as this kind of haunted place, if there were specific ghosts that you experienced.

NA Renata, the main character, explains the rules of seeing ghosts. If you’re walking around looking for thing — if you’re doing a guided tour or something — maybe someone could point it out to you, but mostly it’s a sudden feeling: oh my god, there is something really present here. Sometimes it’s visual, like a palimpsest of something. 

If you walk around like the Lower East Side, for instance, where so many people lived for so long in these really cramped spaces, even Orchard Street, which has become this insane TikTok shopping mall, I think you feel something residual — you could know nothing about New York City and you could know it was dense with people.  So I think it has to do with density. I think it has to do with time. I mean, it is a little woo. Feelings are always a little bit woo. You could just think about it as the reality of other people, that their lives were real.

SL A core part of the book is the way in which people who are geographically close together have created families, often to replace their biological ones who have rejected them or had severe problems. That’s something that becomes remarkably difficult when finding an apartment to live in is so fucking difficult. When I was reading your book, I was thinking a lot about Sarah Schulman’s great Gentrification of the Mind. There are ghost catchers in this book who represent a kind of sanitizing process that is part of gentrification, part of real estate turning over. They’re kind of the cops in the book.

NA I think of them as ghost cops, for sure. This is a period where the people who are moving downtown have an incredible sense of entitlement. Like: “Everything is for me. Nothing has ever not been for me.” This is the “greed is good” era. We’re coming off NYC Drop Dead, of the Fear City pamphlets, of huge white flight from the city. Then the kids of the white flighters start wanting to move back and buy up some cheap real estate.

NYC had this huge amount of like foreclosed housing stock that by like 83, 84, they’re like, “Well, we got to offload this.” So the real estate industry, the city government, and yuppies come together to change the face of this neighborhood. And who’s dying of AIDS in New York City? In Manhattan, they’re dying in the East Village, West Village, Chelsea, and Harlem. Those are the neighborhoods that end up being the most radically changed by gentrification in the decades to come. The Christodora building, which is on Avenue B and Tompkins Square Park, got sold and turned into expensive apartments. So who are the ghost catchers now? It’s still anybody who opens up a Blank Street Coffee — the name could not be more perfect — or a fast salad place. It’s the Sephora on St. Mark’s Place, the glass buildings. Maybe it’s me when I buy an eyeliner at the Sephora. 

SL One of the things that’s so evident in this book is your love of New York. And there’s actually a lot of history, a lot of knowledge about specific buildings. Was that research? Was that accumulated knowledge? Where did it come from?

NA I read books by Kim Phillips-Fein, like Fear City about the fiscal crisis. There’s a book called DIY on the Lower East Side. I took a lot from what I learned going on Tenement Museum tours back in the day. I just read everything and I started writing during lockdown. A lot of it is driven by desire for a city that I couldn’t really have in that moment. There’s this videographer named Nelson Sullivan, all of his stuff is on YouTube, who died in the 1980s. He was just a guy who would go around the East Village, go to the Pyramid Club. He was friends with RuPaul and Lady Bunny when they were first starting out; performance artists like Ethyl Eichelberger, John Sex, who died of AIDS. But you also get people walking around, crossing 14th Street, hanging out at the sidewalk cafe and seeing who they run into. And you just get a vibe, which is what’s harder to put in a book. Queer people are really good at self-archiving and documenting because no one else is going to do it and we’re all indebted to the things that we have found from before us.

SL There are central characters in this book who are not the city itself, namely Renata and Mark. They have this super intense, loving relationship. They occasionally have sex. They’re aiming for maximal closeness most of the time.

NA They’re enmeshed with each other in a way that is very common in your twenties. You have a best friend and it’s not weird to spend all day every day with this person. And it’s kind of romantic! It’s kind of more romantic than the people you might be seeing at the time. Mark has been kicked out of his family. Renata just had a single mother who died. They drop out of college together and find an apartment together and their friend groups, which are built out of people they’re dating, just coalesce. By the end of their twenties, things change. For Mark, it’s not only dating someone seriously, but getting really sick. Renata can’t fully let that in.

SL The ghosts play unexpected roles though where their visibility to her doesn’t necessarily reflect exactly their closeness to her, or any business they have with her specifically.

NA It’s a way of decentering her that I think is real to city life. We’re the main characters of our own lives, but we’re always encountering somebody else’s main characterness. Sometimes someone’s the main character of the subway and that person might be a problem for everybody or it might be like, now we have to all jump in and deal with the reality of this other human being, right? I think Renata is generally okay with ghosts because she’s okay with the reality of other people. So it’s not that strange to her. It starts getting upsetting when they are young people who should not be dead. 

SL There’s a moment in the book where one of the characters goes missing and others have to figure out what happened to them. It raises the question: What do we owe each other? To what extent could any of these characters have stepped up to prevent that from happening? How much can we really protect one another? 

NA Yes — and they don’t always make good choices. Renata makes a couple of pretty lousy choices because she’s human and because she’s grieving. She’s pushing the limits of: How can I be responsible for others when I’m barely able to be responsible for myself? The book doesn’t always have the most harmonious vision of queer community.

SL This comes up with her girlfriend in an interesting way. Her girlfriend does not want to look at her ghosts.

NA Her girlfriend tends to the living who are sick in ways that other people won’t tend to. She’s a nurse in the AIDS ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital and she’s like:  “I’m seeing people die every day in these really dramatic ways and I am treating people that I am not equipped to treat. I’m kind of defacto doing hospice care. I need a boundary. I can’t also be responsible for the dead.” Renata is always asking other people to not have a boundary, but she’s got a million boundaries herself.

SL I wonder if it’s a moral responsibility to be looking for the ghosts in a city like ours, or just… 

NA Not hating them when they show up? It’s about not being offended by the presence of others. In this country right now, the right is driven to madness by the concept of a stranger — right? That there could be “an illegal,” that a person could be an “alien.” And it’s resulting in horrific violence, the separation of families, the shootings of protestors. These are people who cannot abide the idea that someone different from them could be sharing space with them. They don’t want to share. So I think it’s exigent to know that we are not alone in this space, that we also share it with ghosts, because the dead deserve recognition and respect. 

For more by Natalie Adler, read her essays on botox and AI, ACT UP, therapy, queer Lolita novels, disability, Moomin creator Tove Jansson, Cookie Mueller, and much, much more.