Read Online Poker Face by Maureen Callahan - Free Book Online

eyes.”
    “I was dating somebody that I couldn’t be with,” Gaga has said. “I wrote that at three A.M. , crying in front of the piano. Wailing in front of a Yamaha.”
    “Blueberry Kisses,” Starland says, is also about Rob: “They used to have blueberry pancakes in the morning,” she says. “They had a serious connection.” They also had very similar personalities: volatile, dramatic, contentious. “The highs were really high, and the lows were really low,” says Starland. “They were both going crazy.” At one of the lowest points in her relationship with Fusari, Gaga called her mother to come out to New Jersey for moral support.
    At her most tired and tormented, she doubted whether she had the fortitude or the ability to see the demo through. “She’d say, ‘I don’t know if I can finish this record,’ ” says Starland.
    And what would Starland tell her friend? “You’re a professional. I didn’t fucking spend all this time and energy and work writing these songs and creating a vision with you, putting all this together, dealing with every facet of drama for you to say, ‘I don’t know if I can deal with it.’ ”
    Meanwhile, Stefani was still struggling to break into the upper echelons of the Lower East Side scene. She’d been dancing with Starlight at St. Jerome’s and had gotten herself booked at the Slipper Room, but, ever the overachiever, she wanted promoters Michael T. and Justine D.—two of downtown’s biggest stars, who conceived of and threw parties on their own and for clubs and other clients—to hire her for their Motherfucker events.
    A series of roaming, dissolute, debauched parties held on the nights before major holidays, Motherfucker events—not unlike the DJ collective and weekly party known as MisShapes—dominated downtown nightlife from 2003 to 2008, eventually attracting thousands of partygoers, among them the “bridge-and-tunnelers” who commuted from suburban Long Island or New Jersey. (Bridge-and-tunnelers, who are usually identified by their suburban styling and overreliance on hair product, are considered complete undesirables among the city’s self-styled fabulous, who themselves often come from suburban Long Island or New Jersey.)
    The Motherfucker parties would traditionally close with Diana Ross’s 1976 disco hit “Love Hangover,” in tribute to Studio 54, and access was granted by one of the scene’s toughest, most infamous doormen, Thomas Onorato. As Glenn Belverio, author of Confessions from the Velvet Ropes, put it in a 2006 blog post: “Remember: Motherfucker is a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the dance floor—so work a look or New York’s #1 doorman, Thomas Onorato, will send you straight to the New Year’s gulag.” But Motherfucker wasn’t really a dictatorship—all you had to do was pay to get in. The threat of rejection, though, is always a great selling point.
    Lady Starlight, it turned out, knew Michael T., who knew her by her real name, Colleen Martin. At the time, Martin was working as a makeup artist at a M.A.C store by day and, in addition to her own gigs, had often been hired to dance by Michael T. for Motherfucker and another party he did called Rated X. Martin began bringing Gaga around to Motherfucker bashes in 2007.
    “Certainly her look was completely eighties stripper rock trash,” says Michael T. “She looked like something out of 1987.” He was perplexed by just what bonded the two girls, but noted that Martin’s younger friend was unabashedly aping her look.
    “Colleen, at that point, was also looking really heavy-metal trashy,” he says. “She had a grown-out shag—dark on top and literally fried blond at the tips. She did it on purpose; it was definitely funny.” Stefani’s look, by contrast, seemed earnest; she appeared to have put herself together that way because she genuinely thought it looked good. She’d not yet picked up that esoteric trick of telegraphing irony and wit through