NYC MixTape Volume 3: China Rain (1994)

This is the third of 3 pieces about my time as a student in New York City (the first one is here, and the second is here).

Desire is both weather and compass through the ocean of a woman’s life. In the Spring of ‘94 I get a job over on Columbus Avenue, near the Museum of Natural History, in a store that sells soaps, lotions, and perfume oils. The owner is a woman in her 40s named Joan*, a Jersey native who thinks Manhattan is the height of glamor, and always applies flecks of glitter to her nails and eyelids in tribute. Her wedding ring is bumpy with gems, her store does well and I want to keep up her standards. She is loud, brassy and blunt, and I secretly love her even though she scares me. Every time I walk into work, before I can even take off my jacket, she is on me with a list of tasks, counting them off in her honking purple voice. After that she disappears down the stairs to her basement lair, where she works on orders and listens to baseball games cranked high on her desk radio. I turn up the CD player dreamlova/ come and rescue me to drown out the sound. Sometimes when I’m with a customer a roar of dismay booms up through the floorboards, and I’m always relieved that it’s not directed at me.

Some famous people are regulars at the store, and I get very good at remaining calm in their presence. Kathy Bates is always quiet and focused, with a powerful dignity that moves me so much I sometimes cry after she leaves with her coconut shampoo. Kevin Kline is fussy and anxious, glowering at his watch if I don’t ring up his key lime soap fast enough. His wife Phoebe Cates is completely serene and always asks for my recommendations, holding my eyes with kindness in her gaze. Once, as I emerge from the storage closet with a box of paper towels, Robert DeNiro is at the cash register, laughing with Joan. His hair is shaggy but his clothes look crisp and tailored, and his nails are manicured, something I’ve never seen on a man before. He asks for face lotion and Joan gives him a bottle of our best brand. He presses a $50 into her hand and thanks her, his coarse yellow voice scraping the air. Once he’s gone she turns to me and we shriek like little girls all my life he’s my fuggin hero, and now he comes into my shop but I’m married! she laughs. 

On weekends I sing backup in a band that practices in a run-down part of the Village, in the ass of a building that always takes me forever to find. The lead singer, Steve*, is 25 and Jewish from Israel/Palestine. He uses a fake goyish name because he deserted his post in the army for moral reasons and is afraid of being deported. He worships Robert Plant and tries hard to look and sing like him. His girlfriend Gina* is a gorgeous Brooklyn Heights girl with big hips and wild curly hair, the kind that looks wiggish even in a ponytail. She is 33 and the mother hen of the band. I am just shy of 21 but I look 15, so she styles my stage outfits to toughen me up. That usually means baggy overalls thrown over a white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up tight, and big silver hoop earrings that knock my cheeks when I sing. I draw a strong cat eye with ink-black liner, and Gina lends me a tube of MAC’s Russian Red, the same lipstick Madonna wears. This combo will become my stage makeup for the next 25 years.

 ©Alicia Dara Backstage before a show in Seattle with my band Diamondwolf in 2015

Mostly the band plays in clubs around the Village, but sometimes we go out to Long Island or Brooklyn for a private weekend gig. We do Steve’s originals and some Grateful Dead covers I knowwww you rider/ gonna miss me when I’m gone which I don’t much care for, but it’s fun to be part of a traveling circus for a while. The guys in the band all have dry skin and rough hair, so I bring them lotion samples from the store. They are flirty but harmless, being low-key stoned 24/7, supplied by a pot dealer who carries business cards with the word CAPTAIN printed on them. You dial the number and say hey captain, it’s captain, give your address and get a prompt delivery. The dealer sometimes brings his sketchy friends with him, and that’s when Steve makes Gina take me down the block for coffee. They are fiercely protective when I’m in their circle, and I appreciate it more than I ever think to tell them. 

The weather gets sweatier, and the band’s windowless practice space starts to reek so bad that we have to take frequent breaks to go outside for air. One night I’m sitting on the curb with the bass player, leaning away from his cigarette, when he tells me about a singer he heard a while back in a club called Sin-e in St. Mark’s Place. He can't get the man’s stunning voice out of his head, and he wants to learn to sing like that, or at least better than he does now. I offer to teach him what I’ve learned from my years of voice lessons, and we go back inside and sit down at the shaggy old upright piano that no one ever uses. I press vocal scales onto the cracked keys. The bassist croaks up and down with them, and after thirty minutes it starts to sound a bit like singing. He is grateful and offers to cook me a meal at the restaurant where he works, but I ask for a kebab from the cart down the street, which is run by a Persian man whose beauty mesmerizes me. I can’t believe the gods allow him to hang out with mortals, serving up salty stick-chicken by the corner bodega. The Persian never looks me in the eye, but watches my mouth intently when I bite down on the food, and it makes me shiver, and that’s sex between us. 

Aside from that I haven't had much sex in New York. For one thing, between theater school, my job at the store and the band I am hella busy. For another, I don't yet know how to feel at ease with a complete stranger, having previously connected with men (boys, really) through mutual friends who verified facts about them and kept their shit mostly in check. Those boys were also fellow artists, inclined to books, videos and nature walks. Most of the New York men who ask me out are in business or finance, and they like extremes. Their weekends are packed with clubbing or sailing or racing motorbikes, and I’ve never done any of those things. I often spend my Saturdays at museums, the Met or Natural History, and at night I go to house parties where bands are playing, not too loud because of neighbors. Sometimes I sit with my guitar for a whole Sunday, scratching new songs into my diary and eating black licorice whips until it’s time to meet friends at the diner for fries and water. The New York men don't know any of this. Because I’m an artist they think I’m exotic, a wild flower thirsty for life. They order whole bottles of wine and expect me to down most of it. I press the glass to my mouth politely but never even taste. Even the smallest amount of alcohol drags me into the Underworld, and I need to stay above ground.

There are some New York men who want a woman as a bulwark against loneliness, and until they find her they use drugs for that purpose, and I find this repulsive. I learn what it’s like to sit across a table from someone who is thrashed by cocaine or pummeled by heroin, or drained and blurry from mysterious prescriptions. Even the men who are only mildly addicted can be unpredictable. If I accept a dinner date I insist on picking the restaurant, choosing places where my girlfriends wait tables, so they can slip me out the back door if things don’t feel right. This happens more times than not, but I don’t apologize and my friends don’t judge. We’re all trying to stay safe, as safe as this huge, ravenous maw of a city will allow us to believe we are. 

Dating feels like a distraction from what I really want, which is to get moving with my music career. But it gets me down, sometimes: the loneliness. None of the stories I ever heard about the city, nor the movies I watched and books I read, accurately described its beingness. New York lonely is a smoky, choking brown that can find you even on the brightest Spring days when you’re walking down the middle of a sunny street. It can rattle your window when you’re trying to sleep, or trip you on the stairs going down to the Subway. It swirls around people’s faces when they talk to each other in clubs and bars. You can even hear it in their voices, especially when the music is loud and the lyrics are loving always I wanna be with you/ and make believe with you/ and live in hahmony hahmony oh love they sing along and try to enchant each other.

Women in New York are supposed to be powerfully enchanting to men, adorning and polishing themselves to a high gloss. Even the Kate Moss clones in their slipdresses and denim jackets have shiny eyes and red lips. But I am tall and long-limbed and long-haired, which already stirs up more static than I want. Adding high heels and mask makeup just makes it worse. I refuse to give up on seduction completely, but I want it to feel true, not forced. I am full of passion but painfully shy, and balancing these two mighty, opposing forces fills me with anxiety when I’m with men, rendering me uncharacteristically mute in their presence. They take this as an invitation to dominate the atmosphere and the conversation, which is fucking bullshit. I need something that can give me courage, so I can stay grounded and find strength to speak up for myself. 

One afternoon a brand-new shipment is delivered to the store. Joan comes to supervise the unpacking, because these bottles are glass and I am clumsy. I drop one right away. It shatters beautifully, and as I bend down to collect the tiny shards a soft perfume nuzzles my face. It seems to enter my bloodstream and turn up the volume in my pulse, but I also feel dreamy, like I’m floating on a flower. I look up and Joan hands me a fresh bottle, and it’s China Rain, and I tap it behind my ears the way I’ve seen women do in the movies. A song comes on the radio, piano ripples then finger snaps is it my turn/ to wish you were lying here and between the creamy pink sound of the song and the scent of the oil I am completely enchanted, I’ve enchanted myself, and I want to kiss someone but instead I hug Joan, who is startled but laughs. I am grateful for her gift, which is exactly what I want to smell like. Men don’t understand who I am, but I can teach them, and I can start with this perfume. 

*Name and some details changed for privacy

You can learn more about my job as a Power Voice coach for women HERE.

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