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is like being the queen of two blocks. But it got me in magazines, and it got Interscope”—her future record label—“interested.”
    She found a place at 176 Stanton Street, and this was the tiny one-bedroom walk-up that was her part-time home when not decamped with her parents. (She didn’t have a day job; her much-talked-about stint waitressing was during her sophomore to senior years in high school.) On the Lower East Side, too, she made quite the impression: One of her neighbors says that, not long after he moved in, his sister asked him if he knew that “there was a prostitute that lives in the building.”
    Her neighbor was totally flummoxed; Stanton Street, like the bulk of the Lower East Side, was mainly inhabited by young scenesters and professionals. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘I saw this girl stumbling up the stairs at, like, four A.M. , wearing, like, nothing, and she was drunk.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, great. What a scummy building I live in now.’ ”
    Stefani would spend her days composing and demo-ing at 176 Stanton; her place was sparsely decorated with a futon, a queen-sized mattress, and a record player from Urban Outfitters. She had a picture of David Bowie over her bed and she’d sit at her kitchen counter with her keyboard and her laptop, working out songs.
    “She had a bare-ass apartment,” says her friend Brendan Sullivan, who would go on to work as her DJ. “It just had turntables, a synth, and a couch. It was like a monk’s cell—just for work and study.”
    Stefani was running around in leotards and go-go boots, stumbling up the stairs at four in the morning, but at heart she was an extremely hard worker who kept to herself. Those who knew her during this time and those who knew her once she’d achieved global fame describe her in very similar terms: a girl with insane levels of charisma, who outwardly seemed very popular and self-possessed, but who was actually very difficult to get to know. In this way, perhaps Gaga’s description of herself as an alienated teenager, the high school “freak” who never fit in, may not be all that far from the truth. It’s possible, after all, to be both popular and alienated. Just watch Rebel Without a Cause or Heathers or Gossip Girl .
    In any event, it was the other tenants who caused problems, once dramatically, with Stefani. Her neighbor says that, at one point, some kids who lived in the building “jimmied the lock and broke into her apartment, saw her in the shower—it was a big thing. They all got arrested.” Another neighbor happened to be a cop, and he helped make the arrest.
    Recently, her old neighbor got a text from that cop, who wrote, “Remember that girl whose apartment was broken into? Stefani? She was a musician and now she’s Lady Gaga.” It took her old neighbor a while, he says, to believe it. Today, he realizes that the timing of her move out of 176 Stanton—to L.A.—had nothing to do with the break-in, as he’d assumed, and everything to do with the record deal to come.
    During her time on the Lower East Side, Stefani would head over to local bars like Welcome to the Johnsons and St. Jerome’s, both of which were managed by a reedy peacock of a rock boy named Lüc, who also worked as a bartender. Once she became Gaga, she said he partially inspired “Paparazzi,” with the actual paparazzi and her ravenous desire for fame inspiring the other half.
    Lüc Carl is well over six feet tall and, with long black hair that sprays up from his crown like an unruly fern, looks like a cross between Russell Brand and Nikki Sixx. He doesn’t so much bartend as lope around and drape himself over the bar, staring into space; a customer waits for him to decide if he’s up to making the move to serve you. (The bartender as rock star.) Stefani had her eye on him, but also on a burlesque dancer named Lady Starlight, who worked Fridays at St. Jerome’s. Starlight was another