loosie: words: Death Gossip

Death Gossip

Loosie mingles with Damon Dash, a one-armed Swede and John Negroponte.

by Fabulous Julien | 2004.04.27

The text message looked clean enough, but I could still make out the pink and doughy flesh of the salmonella dripping off each letter. Nugroove, notorious producer and founder of Bastard Jazz Records -- the long time Anglo-Syrian drum and bass label -- was on his deathbed. Fuck, I thought, the war of words between Nugroove and Chingy would go unsettled and Bastard Jazz Records would plunge into the Hudson following closely on the heels of the Sound Factory. So this week, NEW YORK slept, ate and drank under the looming shadow of bad chicken.

At the 2/3 train stop at Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, a choice terrorist target, black smoke-fueled pandemonium filled the station as the faint whiff of Al-Qaeda villains turning tricks sent passengers screaming and fighting for tunnel exits. Spotting smoke billowing from the front of the train and defiantly battling fear and death as only New Yorkers can, passengers trampled fellow passengers and a pack of Chinese men lofted baby strollers down flights of stairs to clear the path for faster and fatter Gothem denizens. Down the street, Crown Heights-based designer Erik Colburn was a beehive of activity as the uber-Berlin-Bed-Stuy in-house design team poured over Fall line patterns to the background shots of CNN’s War Report.

Erik Colburn seemed still perturbed over not receiving an invite to cross-town rival designer Jade Jagger’s swanky jump-off at the Gramercy Park Hotel on Thursday night. Jagger knows what filthy rich New Yorkers like best: a horde of models packed into the Cobalt Room like illegal Mexicans scrambling for the KFC dumpster, Mark Ronson laying down new wave tracks and Ethiopian queen Iman high-knee dancing to salsa. I didn’t even try looking for Brook Shields, Robert Kennedy Jr. or Barry Diller. Instead, I kept drunkenly shadowing a squat and thin-stashed Mexican who looked like Cheech, waiting for the right moment to corner him and interrogate him about ratting out the whereabouts of Chong’s bong stash. But after an hour of fruitless stalking, I decided to pursue the delicious rumors that self-proclaimed populist and public enemy number one of the Bush NWO, Tim Robbins, was sipping Screaming Organisms in the V.I.P. afterparty upstairs in the High Bar. I located an unsavory hotel guest who claimed to be a professional gambler who also shared a keen interest in smashing in Robbins’ self-righteous face for having the gall to turn the Public Theater into a house of limousine liberal ill repute with that theatrical garbage, Embedded. But by the time we galloped the seventeen flights up the backstairs, (neither of us were privy to the entrance password), the male Janine Garafalo was MIA. But Damon Dash sat outside on the terrace sneering and a one-handed Swede who owns the rights to the entire Abba collection calmed our blood lust with comic tales of the Scandinavians sterilizing the mentally challenged throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s.

The next day I wandered the Chelsea Market halfheartedly tickling my week-old unshaven nuts and tiptoeing towards the tantalizing scents of Hearty and Hales and the crooning oranges nestled inside The Fruit Exchange. Omar, a cross pollination between Ben Harper and Ricardo Flores Magon, was on the phone ranting about hiding out in Red Hook and having Ari Fleischer strapped to an old dentist chair in the basement of Defontes’ Sub Shop. On the other line, I had El Salvador’s most lethal flaming gay on hold; the self-proclaimed founder of an El Salvadorian death squad, the White Warriors Union (Union de Guerreros Blanco), insisted he was down the street at the Maritime Hotel pounding rum with John Negroponte. His accent was thick and smoky but he seemed insistent on dropping a cool million to get the home address of that sweet and pudgy-faced A-Rod in a hail Mary attempt to try to weasel some fun out of him. I thought I heard a delusional Negroponte scream that it might help A-Rod hit.

Well with both lines crackling of death and the odds high that Nugroove and his waterlogged empire were sinking only two blocks away from the market and that Al Qaeda villains were currently signing a lease to a safe house in Murray Hill and that The Man, Dick Cheney, was in some den cracking open lobster backs with his back molars, it certainly seemed like the Grim Reaper had laid claim to another week. But nearby me and my entourage of oranges, Julianne Moore’s angelic daughter squealed and hurled a jar of dried fruit across the ground. She gleamed up at me and flashed a wink. I squeezed a ripe mandarin and thanked god for the city’s movie star daughters.