From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel Read online

  “Mustn’t forget Chloë,” said Rudy.

  “Oh, right. And Chloë is coming by later this afternoon.”

  Who doesn’t get starstruck? The mere mention of Chloë drove me up the wall with jealousy. She was coming to Philip’s studio to see Philip. I had to be there. This was an opportunity not to be squandered. “Really?” I squeaked.

  “The pop star?” Michelle added, with just the slightest detectable touch of sarcasm.

  “Well, she’s going to be more than a pop star in a few months,” Rudy answered. “Her acting has gotten a lot better.”

  Philip poured my glass. “Actually, Boy, maybe you and Rudy could have a word?” He turned to her: “Boy’s got a great collection in the works. You should put Chloë in something of his.” Then he said to me: “You need a publicist to make things happen, Boy. Give my friend Ben Laden a call. He’s the shit.” He waltzed over to a side table and returned with Ben’s card. “I’m so sorry,” he said to Michelle. “I’m all ADD today. A gazillion things are happening at once. How are you?”

  She smiled at Philip’s enthusiasm, but it was a manufactured smile, I could tell. She despised him already.

  We took a seat on the sofa, away from the flash of Polaroids, and sipped our champagne. Philip stood up. “We forgot to toast.”

  “My God, Philip. We’ve been toasting all morning.”

  “Well, we’re celebrating.”

  “We’re always celebrating,” Rudy said.

  “What can I say? To Boy and Michelle. You’re so cute together. Aren’t they so fucking cute?”

  Rudy blushed.

  Philip sat down again next to Rudy and placed his little shaved head on her shoulder with a lover’s intimacy. Rudy looked at me, but I tried to ignore whatever was happening between us for Michelle’s benefit. Michelle was very perceptive, however. Picking up on this flirtation, she studied me. I felt the pressure of her gaze, even after I’d turned my attention to the skylight in the ceiling. “This studio gets wonderful light during the day,” I said.

  “When else would it get light?” Michelle said.

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Michelle,” said Philip, “did you know that Boy was all the rage back in the Philippines? You should see the blogs during last year’s Philippine Fashion Week. It was all about Boy.”

  “I didn’t even know they had a Philippine Fashion Week,” she said.

  “Neither did I.”

  “Boy’s just being modest. Michelle, you want to see the hype around this guy, go to Bryan Boy dot com. Bryan Boy is this brilliant blogger whose site gets like a jazillion hits a day. I was telling Marc about him last week. He may name a bag after him.”6

  Bryan Boy had featured my clothes one day on his blog shortly before I left Manila. It was the only coverage I’d gotten in my career.

  One of Philip’s assistants called over with a question. Julia, I believe, who worked on textiles. As this Julia distracted Philip and Rudy, Michelle looked at me wide-eyed and mouthed: “Let’s go.” She mimed hanging herself with a noose. I gave her a face that begged for a few more minutes, and she in turn tugged the rope even harder, tightening the imaginary noose, gagging herself.

  “You all right?” Rudy asked.

  “I’m fine. It’s champagne. It makes me gag.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  In later encounters with fashion types like Philip, Michelle would often put an imaginary gun in her mouth, slit her throat with her index finger, or mime sticking her head in an oven. I asked her once how she could be so turned off by my crowd when she was so fashionable. One of the things I found incredibly alluring about her, remember, was her sense of style. She told me: “I love clothes. I just don’t see the need to suck up to those people like you do. They’re hideous, egocentric…hyenas!”

  But Philip really had produced an ungodly amount of work in a period of only a few months. And nearly all of it was brilliant. He had twenty to thirty new looks completed. To give you an idea of where I was in comparison, my first collection had ten to twelve.

  “I’m really into baggy right now,” he said.

  “Well, it’s not baggy, is it?” Rudy said.

  “No, I suppose not. Not baggy but loosey.”

  “Yeah, more loose than baggy.”

  “What’s the difference?” Michelle interrupted.

  “Baggy, I think big jeans worn below the waist, yeah? Hip-hop is baggy,” said Rudy. “Baggy is deliberate, in’it? This is loose.”

  “And puffy,” I added.

  “Right,” said Philip. “Puffy.”

  “Well,” Michelle concluded, as if the whole thing made no sense whatsoever.

  Philip went through most of the dresses. They were knee-length and sleeveless, made from exquisite wools. He took a few off the rack and held them up to the light, one by one. I’d admired him when we were students, but now he was a fully formed artist, I stood in awe. How different each look was from anything I had seen, even from him! This new line was much darker than the collections he had done before. It brooded and slouched. It was sorrow and anguish and jealousy. I saw myself. In the greatest art we see ourselves reflected back at us, do we not? Guernica, The Scream. For me to witness an artist of such caliber at the height of his capabilities was a gift! Even Michelle, responding to the dresses, couldn’t deny Tang his due. She despised him, it was true, but she could never say anything bad about the clothes.

  And oh, how he could weave beauty! There was one dress in particular that I still remember. I could pull it out of a lineup to this day. It was a black, sleeveless evening dress made from recycled hosiery. Going green got you noticed. The skirt was ruffled, layer upon layer, like a blossoming flower. “Puffy” and “loose” were the wrong words to describe it. It was flowing and movable even though it was composed of highly constricting material. Its hem was laced with black floral knots. It was a dress that was completely unwearable, yet you knew it would be the centerpiece of the collection. I believe it’s the very dress that got the CFDA7 doing cartwheels. They gave Philip Best New Designer 2003. Within eight months it was on display at the Tate Modern. Joseph Beuys, Marlene Dumas, Pollock, Tang 2.0.

  Damn him, he was that good.

  Michelle pulled us out of there before I had the chance to meet Chloë. As soon as we were on the street she launched straight into her bad review of the day. “Abhorrent. Flimsy. Those people are lost beyond repair. And did you see how your friend Philip offered me those sample sizes knowing very well that none of them would fit me? And I had to go over and act all interested. And that Rudy! Ugh. I’m sorry, I know they’re your friends, but they’re just not my kind of people.”

  But these same abhorrent, flimsy people were how I met Ben Laden, my soon‑to‑be publicist and good friend. If it hadn’t been for Philip, perhaps I would be sewing bridal wear in some backroom in the garment district of Manhattan. Then again, perhaps sewing bridal wear would ultimately have been a fate preferable to mine.

  Thinking about this moment in my life makes me wonder about fate. For most of my life I believed I was bound to a certain destiny, a purpose to exist. I believed that good things were in store if only I believed in myself. But look at what happened to me. For that matter, look at what happened to Ben. What did he do? An American native, Irish Catholic in fact. You’d think he’d have luck on his side. But because of some phonetic coincidence with the world’s most wanted man, Ben ended up losing most of his clients. He took a hit because of some other guy’s mess. Makes me suspect there is no such thing as fate. Only coincidence. Life is a series of coincidences. It was a coincidence that Rudy Cohn, Chloë’s stylist, happened to be at Philip’s studio that day, and that Philip had pitched my work to her, triggering a series of events that would lead Chloë to make a red carpet appearance in my inside-out dress at the Grammys two years later (but for the performance of her hit single, “Chas-titty,” that same night, it would be Philip Tang 2.0 that she’d change into). My rise as a hot new designer was pr
ecipitated by Ben Laden’s loss of clientele after 9/11, coincidentally, and so I was given a dedicated publicist willing to promote me to the world. What great coincidences. So many random connections! And far too many mythical explanations for them!

  I ask you, is it fate that I am in here and you are out there?

  1. It was Maurice Sachs, the French writer, who said this. Not Andrew Saks, founder of Saks Fifth Avenue.

  2. Founder of J. Lindeberg.

  3. The flag of the Soviet Union (“hammer and sickle”) was last used in 1991 at the time of the communist state’s collapse. Russia’s flag once again uses three colored stripes: red, white, blue.

  4. Shakespeare: “My salad days, / When I was green in judgment.” From Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, Scene 5.

  5. Proprietor of the label Doo. Ri.

  6. Marc Jacobs did name a bag after Bryan Boy. The BB by Marc Jacobs, $2,199, Fall ’06.

  7. Council of Fashion Designers of America.

  The Story of My Bathing Partner

  I shall devote today’s installment to the story of my bathing partner. I cannot, in good conscience, keep it to myself any longer. (I trust my special agent will know what to do with this information.) You see, over the last few weeks I have gotten to know this man, my bathing partner, and from what I have learned about his situation, I believe a mistake has been made. Just as a mistake has been made with me. I do not mean to abuse my writing privileges by indulging in what the officials here may deem a cryptic tangent, and so I will respectfully curtail this digression.

  Riad S—, my bathing partner, had trained as a civil engineer but left his discipline for something nobler in his eyes. He became a bookseller, opening his own specialty bookshop with the small amount of money he had inherited from a distant uncle in Pakistan. The shop was in Birmingham, England. The uncle was a real loner, as I understand it, and so he left everything to Riad, his favorite nephew, the boy who was already so well traveled—Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Asia. It wasn’t as if the uncle didn’t have any other descendants. Riad came from a big family. But the uncle knew that by giving the money to Riad he was ensuring that it would not be squandered. And good for the uncle, because he was right. Riad opened his own business, the only bookshop of its kind in this working-class section of Birmingham.

  Unfortunately, the shop was not much of a success, and Riad had to close its doors within a year. There were really too many factors to say why the shop failed. Now a failed bookseller, Riad gathered his very pregnant wife, packed their bags, and moved the whole family to Pakistan, a place he often mythologized. Why? Several reasons. For one, this is where his family was from. The S—’s of Islamabad. And Riad felt he could do some good in Pakistan, perhaps by returning to his career as an engineer. The decision was also one of faith. Riad, a practicing Muslim, wanted his unborn daughter to grow up in a country where she would be surrounded by other little Muslim children. And there was no shortage of those in Pakistan. As we all know, childhood can be such a cruel stint, and Riad felt it best that his daughter not grow up in a place consumed by fear. This was the age of fear, remember. Riad saw Pakistan as a second chance, a new way of life for his family, one where they could live comfortably numb. His wife could have a maid to help with the baby. And when the baby got older, she could attend a Muslim school with other little Muslims just like her. Life would be sweet in Pakistan.

  And so the young couple moved to Islamabad, where the wife, we’ll call her Manal, did get her own maid. Riad was able to find work as an engineer, for the government. And the baby, born by a reputable doctor, was healthy and fat. And then there were three, plus the maid. But Riad had a weak spot. His empathy. After all his good fortune in his new country, he just wasn’t satisfied. Even as his boss at the government office, aware of Riad’s talents, showered him with promotion after promotion, would you believe that Riad still wanted more? Not more, I should say, but less. Riad longed to help the lesser off, the poor. Call it a hobby. We all have those. There were plenty of corners in Pakistan for Riad to practice his new hobby. Which led him to travel outside of Islamabad, where the lesser off seemed to proliferate. He traveled to the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan and to the western towns bordering Afghanistan (a horrible place at the time, and even more horrible today, as I understand it).

  What can be said? Riad had a soft spot for the poor. He was, in the classic sense of the term, a real “do‑gooder.” Eventually his empathy led him away from his career. He began to take more and more time off to travel to these impoverished areas, where he brought along, among other things, books. Literature. He still had a passion for books. He never gave up on them. (His words.) He frequented bookshops all over the country. Books were cheap in Pakistan, and he bought them in bulk, as he once had as a bookseller. Then he distributed the literature to these impoverished towns, where the people could barely write their own names. Though Riad claims never to have stepped foot in Afghanistan, his charity brought him into tribal-run areas in the north where the border between the two countries is somewhat blurry—where Riad may as well have stepped across the border. “What’s the difference?” his interrogators would say to him anyway.

  And yet Riad wasn’t arrested in one of the poor districts or the dangerous tribal areas. Riad S—, of Birmingham, was in no way connected with weapons or jihad; in fact, he was promoting just the opposite—the word. Not just God’s word but poetry and literature—Islamic, sure, but also translations of English classics, like Charles Dickens. And he had help. Friends, translators, others involved in his cause. A whole caravan of book peddlers. No matter. You see, the man we perceive as a do‑gooder was to others an antagonist. Throughout his travels he got on many people’s nerves. One such nerve belonged to a mullah who was up for reelection in some poor, shitty district. This mullah saw Riad as someone trying to undermine his campaign, administering foreign literature to eligible voters who couldn’t even read. The mullah had ties in the government, a cousin’s cousin or what have you, and it might have been as simple as placing a call, speaking Riad’s name into a receiver to so‑and‑so, who gave the name to so‑and‑so, and on up the chain of command. Well, what happened next wasn’t so pleasant, and it is the only part of Riad’s story that mirrors mine.

  The knock on the door in the middle of the night.

  My Name Is (B)oy

  So very much is in a name. Ralph Lifshitz and Donna Ivy Faske are nobodies, but Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan are gods. A name can bring happiness, fame, fortune, but it can also destroy you. Such was the case for my publicist, Ben Laden.

  Ben was an architect of fame. He could build names into brands, and he operated with panache. He had everything to do with getting my own name exposure. Ben had been an established name himself in New York in the late nineties, representing all of the hot ethnic designers, mostly Asians. Doo Ri Chung, Derek Lam, Pho(2), Yellow Bastard, and later Philip and Vivienne. But after 9/11 Ben felt the hurt, personally and professionally. His brother, Patrick Laden, a police officer twice decorated, was in the north tower when it fell. Then, without a minute’s notice, more than half of Ben’s clientele dropped out—most of the aforementioned, with the exception of Vivienne and Philip. All because of a name. When I finally worked up the courage to ring him, Ben was willing to take on even the smallest unknown designers. Though he would have taken me on Philip’s word alone.

  We first met over dinner at Freeman’s. We were drunk by the time the appetizers were served. One Manhattan after the next, we talked about fashion, art, and all the latest gossip: which sellouts had an eyewear or fragrance deal in the works, who was banging whom. By the time I dug into my pork chop it had gone cold. At the end of the night, out came the Macallan, and Ben couldn’t contain himself.

  “Boy,” he started in, “you think I give a lick about what people think of me? Do I look like an Osama to you? I’m a gay Irishman from Queens. The youngest of four. Our name used to be McLaden, but my grandpappy dropped the Mc because
he didn’t like being called Mac everywhere he went. In his day it was derogatory. He took an offense. This was at a time when an Irishman couldn’t get a cab in this city, let alone a decent job. My, how everything comes back around. So he changed the family name, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to change it back because some jihadi thinks himself Allah’s messenger. Disgrace my grandpappy? I’ve lived lies for most of my life, but when I came out to my parents in 1987, I said, ‘That’s it. No more.’ ” Ben took a swig. “Honest to God. That’s all we can be.”

  “True that.”

  “There isn’t a lot of loyalty in this business. Believe me, I’ve borne the brunt of it. But I’m a goddamn patriot first and foremost. I’ll be the first in line to wring al‑Qaeda around the neck. We’ll skip trial, verdict, what have you. And my brother, the hero…After all this, would you believe the FBI has been to my house? Do you know that I was detained trying to fly out of JFK. I missed London Fashion Week altogether. I never made it past check‑in. The clerk looked at me like I was putting him on. This is the age we’re living in. My job will be to shield you from all of this nonsense. The world as it is will not be your world. With me you won’t have to worry about a goddamn thing. Now where’s that rugged waiter? I’m running on empty.” Ben snapped his fingers and the waiter appeared.

  “We’ll get the check,” I said, trying to inspire our exit. I didn’t want Ben to become any redder in the face. I’d soon learn that the scotch whiskey only came out when he talked about his namesake.

  “Nonsense, we’ll have two more,” he told the waiter. He turned to me. “They made us wait forty-five minutes for a table, now they can wait on us forty-five minutes more. It’s an eye for an eye where I come from.”

  “You come from Queens,” I said.

  “I mean America, Boy. America.”

  He was hungry like I was. His clients were still dropping out by the fistful, only he used that betrayal as fuel to salvage his reputation. He was a stand‑up, all-around, cutthroat guy’s guy. He had grit, guts, and gusto—the three Gs as he called them. His rough, leathery face had seen one too many hours in the tanning bed, and written in the lines around his eyes was the story of a man who wouldn’t be defeated.