Nice Day for a Black Wedding

...Oh, I was in a rage...

...William Tucker PITY THE NEW YORK LANDLORD The heir, the immigrant, the refugee, the operator, and the fiddler—legends, each one of them, in the rent-controlled city...

...It was a jimdandy, complete with what I took to be a grail, an ornate ceremonial dagger, and a phallic ritualistic instrument periodically elevated above the gathering in what seemed like a parody of the Catholic mass...

...Whose idea was the fish spouting Asti Spumante through its gills...

...She had to have help...

...No windows, and old scabbed walls, cracked from the water pipes, which were covered in a fine, furry mildew...

...weddings are out of our depth...

...rr he ceremony was soon over and 1 the witches and warlocks shed their black robes...

...Hallucinogenic drugs...

...The following are tales that illustrate this bizarre cycle...

...Each time the phallic device was lifted, those in the know would recite, "Ave, Satanus," "Hail, Beelzebub," or something similarly deferential toward Moloch...

...Everybody knows of somebody who has a terrific deal, but when they look in the papers all they find are studio apartments renting for $1,200...

...They would also lift their right hands into the air, with the three middle fingers tucked inside the palm and the thumb and pinky protruding...

...Vacancy rates have been below 3 percent for a decade, and 17,000 homeless people—the equivalent of the city's police force—spend winter nights in more than one hundred welfare hotels and shelters...

...At a party a couple of years ago, a friend and I spent the entire evening trading nuptial horror stories...

...I was just heating up a little soup for dinner," he said...

...Macrobiotic foods...

...Kathy told the one about the organ catching on fire in the Delaware chapel where her brother was being wed...

...Inside the video was a scene where the soon-to-be newlyweds showed a second video to all the people at the service who were being filmed in the first video...

...His new book, The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policy, will be published next fall by Regnery Gateway...

...The second question is: "Whose idea was this...

...The Longhorns happened to have a very good team at the time— they had won the national championship a year or so earlier—so they were in the news a lot...

...Thus, Stash (who has not paid rent in six months) continues: I thought to myself, Don't let the fact that he is pretending to be a kindly old geezer, all alone in the world, fool you...

...When we arrived, the whole group, attired in black robes, washuddled over in a corner facing Lispenard Street...

...The satanists considered this very poor form...

...What drives people crazy, though, is that once all the rent-controlled bargains are gone, even reasonable housing becomes impossible to find...

...But now, having learned that demon-worship conferred no special powers on the practitioners of the Black arts—such as the ability to sneak up to the front of a line in a gas station—I lost all interest...

...The video inside the video recounted everything important that had ever happened to them up until the marital video...

...There won't be any breast of chicken, flying rice, dueling accordions, or poorly tossed garters, but there probably won't be anybody named Uncle Jerry or Aunt Mildred either...

...The fat guy's body was never found...

...I did meet a compatriot once who said that she'd been at a wedding that was not a total embarrassment to everyone concerned, but it took place in Asia and besides, she had no proof...

...At the end of the reception, Elaine got so fed up with her new husband's antics—he insisted on wrestling with each of the male guests before they went home—that she knocked him down a flight of stairs...

...It's never the bride's fault, or the groom's fault, or the caterer's fault...

...The ceremony was held in her Soho loft on a Sunday afternoon in March...

...Old Vardig said...

...Satanism...

...This insidious quartet of overqualified war criminals not only had the tight black pants and fluffy pink shirts but also featured two accordions, doubling the evocative power of "Lady of Spain...

...Whose idea was it to have your very best friend in the whole world—the guy you used to play football with in high school and who used to ride Philadelphia's dreaded Broad Street subway with you at three o'clock in the morning—wear a yellow ruffled shirt with a lace bow tie...

...You'll never get an answer to these questions...

...She's the one who insisted on the Little Bo Peep headgear, the nine-tiered cake, the table napkins with ethnic jokes...

...Expecting to meet Donald Trump, he discovers Old Vardig...

...Mantello...

...At weddings, as at funerals, the first question people always ask is: "Doesn't the bride/corpse look beautiful...

...No bride's mother, no matter how sinister, could possibly rig up the kinds of weddings we have all suffered through in this country...

...As Irving Welfeld points out in his new book, Where We Live: A Social History of American Housing,' half of New York City landlords do not even have a high school education...

...I've been to all kinds of weddings in my life...

...The Heir Paul Goedig grew up in a four-story brownstone owned by his parents, right across the street from Mt...

...Goedig grew up and married, moved to California, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 19...

...T hey didn't make a video at my 1 friend's satanic wedding, but if they had it would have been a doozie...

...Kathy talked about her own zap wedding at City Hall in New York, where thejustice of the peace hollered out at a bunch of black teenagers who had mistakenly entered the chapel before the service was over: "What do you think this is...

...Sassy future IRS auditor that he was, Rob lifted his right hand in the satanic gesture and murmured, "Hook 'em, Horns—Texas Number One...

...This gesture was doubtless intended to signify fealty to, or at least admiration for, the Prince of Darkness...

...Six weeks later, she and her infant son left New York for good...

...Since landlords are believed to be fabulously rich—and universally evil—no one raises much objection...

...Medieval Lit...

...with the polka boys for a version of "Amazing Grace...

...That's the way people did things back in those days...

...Just before the ceremony, the groom came up and asked if I would do him a favor...

...Beer bashes and smokers are our domain...

...Old Vardig lived down in the basement...

...He] opened the door and I slipped in...

...Care to join me...

...For all intents and purposes, that was the end of the marriage...

...William 7-ticker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...

...In Slaves of New York, Tama Jano- witz's best seller about New York's underground art world, there is a scene in which "Stash" Mantello, a young hustler-artist, confronts his landlord, Old Vardig, about the lack of heat in his rent-controlled apartment...

...What do you want, Mr...

...Weddings in this country give the lie to any notions Americans may entertain that we can undertake serious affairs with circumspection and dignity...

...It was the second track on an album of light classical favorites and marches...

...The room had a rank smell...

...Oh dear...

...He wanted me to put his favorite piece of music on the stereo as soon as the lights went down and he and Elaine came into the room for the wedding...

...I've been to the kind where half the VFW hall is reserved for the wedding party but you have to share the men's room with the vets, so the Vietnam vets in your half of the buildingget into fistfights over Agent Orange with the WWII vets from the bar on the other side of the building...

...At the wedding I was seated next to my best friend—the subway companion mentioned above—who had dated Elaine when she was still living in the City of Brotherly Love...

...ne of my best friends got married in a satanic wedding service in New York City in the spring of 1974...

...Rent control, after all,promises people they can exploit their landlords...

...I personally have been to weddings in VFW halls, weddings in Mafia-style lounges, weddings where string quartets supplied the entertainment, weddings with bagpipes, weddings where the couple wrote their own vows, and weddings where they didn't...

...What few people comprehend, however, is the kind of municipal madness to which the system eventually leads...

...It was furnished with a variety of old cast-out furniture, broken chairs, and a sort of rotten desk with one leg held up by books...

...We didn't attend the wedding, but a few months later, while visiting the bride's mother, we were shown a video of the event...

...It was a bit off-putting to find out that satanists huddled, chuckled, ogled, and guffawed just like normal people...

...In the minds of the finger-pointers, it's always the bride's mother's fault...

...Jesus, his apartment was even worse, if such a thing was possible, than my own...

...The selection was Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King...

...You'll never find anybody who's willing to say, "Yes, I'm responsible for all of this, and I am now ready for the garrotte...

...Morris Park in central Harlem...

...Obviously, this theory is flagrant hooey...

...Everyone went into the back room and got ripped, none more so than the groom, who, a few hours later, when guests began to file out, stripped to his underwear and proclaimed that no male guest could leave without first wrestling with him out on the kitchen floor...

...They are all true...

...Old Vardig looked at me with soulful eyes...

...The explanation finally becomes that landlords themselves are subverting the system...

...The highlands wedding was the inspiration of some Scottish-American friends who hired a bagpipe player they met in Central Park to do their reception...

...I came up with some friends from Philadelphia and got there early enough to meet some of the witches and warlocks in attendance, including the coven leader who would be conducting the ceremony...

...I in turn described my own 90-second special at City Hall, after which a guy came up to my wife and me as we were embracing outside the chapel and said, "You got a dollar...

...There's usually not much of a line...

...They were all thoroughly unforgivable...

...Numerous warlocks and witches were in attendance, along with dozens of friends with no demonic affiliation...

...The apocalyptic moment came when some fat drunk decided that the bagpipe player should join in Joe Queenan is a writer for Barron's...

...I also mentioned my wife's missionary relatives who were married in Oregon just before leaving for a four-year stint in Indonesia...

...And I've been to so many Motown revival weddings that I no longer find Marvin gay or The Miracles such a temptation...

...Diabolically, they also hired the statutory wedding band`Darth Polka"—so the oldsters wouldn't feel left out...

...Whose idea was it to lure the 79-year-old priest—who had married the groom's parents fifty-five years earlier—out of retirement, so that he could smash the old 87-minute indoor record for matrimonies...

...The Apollo Theater...

...We flipped the lights on, got the music straightened away, then ripped 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 right into the ceremony...

...By now, probably everyone knows how rent control has ruined New York's housing market, creating a perpetual "housing crisis...

...Whose idea was the cash bar...

...It was "The Stars & Stripes Forever...

...Yet none of this ever discourages anyone from believing his landlord is an evil manipulator with almost supernatural powers...

...But the gesture was identical to one practiced at University of Texas football games...

...I've been to mixed marriages with co-celebrants, where baby-faced Episcopalian clerics fresh out of the seminary get smoked by red-hot rabbis fresh from the Catskills...

...This is how the average New York tenant confronts his landlord...

...To which a devil-worshipping colleague replied: "You should have hit the Shell station in Union City...

...For all intents and purposes, that was the end of the reception...

...The solution for regulation is even more regulation...

...What is needed are politicians who will crack down even more harshly...

...What's more, they had fuel problems just like everybody else...

...Unfortunately, when the lights went down I couldn't see what I was doing...

...This 'Simon and Schuster, $17.95 guy is a rat . . . a wheeler-dealer and conniver who owned half the buildings for miles, though he acted as if he were poverty-stricken, obliged to live in the basement and feed himself off cans of ravioli and peanut butter...

...I described a reception where a friend of the groom pulled a knife out of his boot and said he'd use it on the bride's ex-boyfriend if he dared to try kissing her...

...Performance art...

...It was a dud marriage, undeniably, but as wedding ceremonies go, she could have done a lot, lot worse...

...As the couple—he in black leather, she in black silk—entered the room, I cued up what I thought was "In the Hall of the Mountain King...

...But I never went to another marriage like Elaine's...

...Eventually Elaine became so enraged at his antics that she dashed across the kitchen floor, smashed him on the back of the head, and knocked him down eighteen or nineteen steps to the ground floor vestibule...

...He had the accent and persona of many nationalities—a big handlebar mustache encrusted with food, but whether this was an Armenian, Greek, Spanish, or Jewish mustache I couldn't say...

...So if you happen to be in the marryin' mood this year, I suggest contacting your local warlock or witch and seeing whether you can't schedule a satanic wedding...

...Even before I'd learned of his satanic predilections I'd had this guy pegged as a jerk, but this being his big day, I figured the least I could do was be civil...

...There are thousands more just like them in the rent-controlled city...

...Remember, these were the days of the Arab oil embargo, when people had to line up for hours to get gas...

...Evangelicals go through a lot of film this way...

...Drifting over to the huddled group, hoping to catch some satanic scuttlebutt, I overheard one warlock muttering: "I had to wait thirty-five minutes in Secaucus...

...At the time, I had been vaguely toying with the idea of going satanist myself, largely because of hassles with my landlord...

...a few weeks later, Elaine was an ex-wife, an ex-satanist, and an ex-New Yorker...

...It wasn't...

...Elaine had come to New York in 1972 with the right attitude: plunge headlong into everything, and stay plunged into it for at least fifteen minutes...

...The family lived in a basement apartment while renting out the top three floors...

...Having decided to marry the man she affectionately referred to as "my little Belgian turnip," she also decided to tie the knot in an old-fashioned Black Mass...