By Jordan Levin
Miami Herald

I first met Madonna at New York's Mudd Club one Monday night at the beginning of the '80s, right after I graduated from college. She was there with her best friend Martin Burgoyne. I'd seen them around on the downtown club scene, and was curious -- they were like fraternal twins, cherubic urban imps with identical curly blond hair and precisely ragged, tight black clothing.

So I went up to Madonna and said ``Hi.'' She said ``Hi'' back, blinking up at me with these brilliant, heavy-lidded blue eyes, and I said, ``You have incredible eyes -- is it them, or is it the make-up?''

She just kept batting them at me, so I answered for her, ``It's both, right?'' and she finally smiled and said, ``Uh-huh.''

``What's your name?'' I asked. Madonna, she said. I didn't ask if it was her real name.

We became friendly after that, though I wouldn't say we were quite friends. Martin, an aspiring artist, was easier to know, more playful and open -- Madonna had this intensity that could be as overpowering as it was alluring.

But I liked her, and she made sense to me -- I was a dancer then, and she had just quit being one, and we lived much the same life. She and Martin lived around the corner from me on the Lower East Side in a building with medieval black iron gates on the doors and dark narrow hallways that stank of urine and dead vermin.

It was only slightly less scary than the streets outside -- people lining up to crawl into burned-out buildings to shoot up.

But it was worth it to do what you wanted, and in a way it was part of the thrill. Even if we had no money, even if we lived on pizza and $1 breakfasts and wore used clothes that we cut and tied to look right, it left us free to plunge into the city every night.

Punk and new wave were transmuting bombastic metal and earnest folk-rock with intense, edgy energy. Hip-hop was coming out of the Bronx via a former skating rink called the Roxy, where break dancers reinvented what the body could do and DJs like Afrika Bambaataa did magic things to records, mixing up a whirlwind before they exploded into the rest of the world.

MOTHER OF INVENTION

People dreamed of reinventing themselves, of putting together music and moves and ideas that would rock the world, or at least the neighborhood. But Madonna really did it, and she did it with this extraordinary confidence, guided by instinct and her sense of herself and the way she could attract attention, like a small, moving light.

She could never be still -- energy swam through her body. Her eagerness was infectious. But as much as she was having a good time (she was always on the dance floor), even then she always seemed to know exactly what she wanted and where she wanted to go.

I saw her first performance at a club called Danceteria, in a cabaret run by the doorman, Hauoi Montaug. It was mostly in-joke performers, but as soon as Madonna got onstage in her black rubber bracelets, her dancer's cut-off black tights, and tiny black skirt, it was clear that she was no joke. Martin, a Danceteria waiter named Bagz, and a dancer named Erica who came to the coffee shop I worked in swayed behind her like a neo-punk Motown chorus line, while Madonna sang Everybody, the four-track tune that would be her first hit, wailing in her little girl voice ``dance and sing, get up and do your thing'' -- the clarion call of downtown.

After that you started to hear Everybody at the clubs. I was on the street one night when I heard someone yelling ``Jordan!'' and turned to see Martin running up behind me. ``Guess what!?'' he said, panting with eagerness to get the words out, like if he didn't say them quickly enough they might not be true anymore.

``Madonna's going to make a video! And the record company's going to pay for it! And she wants you to be in it!''

I was very excited, and the only one on time for the shoot. I and a dozen other sufficiently hip clubgoers did what we did every night on the dance floor while Madonna gyrated onstage, with her brother Chris and Erica as her back-up dancers. After a while I got kind of bored, as it became clear that it was work and not just about having fun. I never saw the video. I had only a used black-and-white TV with no cable.

BECOMING A STAR

That was 1982, one of the last things Madonna did in the downtown world before the rapidly accelerating events she'd set in motion made her a star. She stayed close to Martin, and a few others, but she was in a very different orbit by 1986, when I saw Martin outside the Pyramid Club, complaining that he was exhausted and kept getting the flu.

He had AIDS. It was terrifying then, because all we knew was that it killed you quickly and painfully, and that you got it by having sex, which we had all had lots of. Suddenly the memories that used to make you grin made you flinch.

Martin's illness was particularly stunning -- he was only 23, much beloved and lusted after, an incandescent boy even in the darkest after-hours club.

Madonna took care of him, paying for his medical bills and an apartment in the West Village. I visited him there once. He was emaciated, covered with sores and filled with ulcers, weeping with the pain and because the cover of The New York Post had a photo of Madonna and Sean Penn under the headline ``Madonna's Former Roommate has AIDS -- Sean is Furious!''

Martin was frantic. To have AIDS then was to be a pariah, and he'd been publicly branded a plague outcast who horrified his best friend's husband. ``How can they say this about me?'' he croaked. ``Sean isn't angry at me -- I saw them last week and he hugged me. How can they do this?''

I had never confronted such raw pain in my life and I didn't know how to deal with it. I'll come back, I thought, when he's not feeling so bad. But he never felt better. A few weeks later, one night in November, 1986, I got a call from Cathy, Hauoi's roommate, telling me Martin had died the night before. His parents, Cathy, Hauoi and Madonna were at his side. Madonna paid for a memorial service where we all wept and got drunk. She wasn't at the party. But she was there for him -- she held Martin's hand as he died.

Judging from how his death affected his other friends, I think it must have been devastating to her. Martin's death turned the giddy exhilaration of that outsider life into a frightening vertigo. I left New York for Miami a few months later, and a lot of people from the scene left around that time. Other people were dying, from AIDS, overdoses, police beatings, and there were others whose lives became increasingly degraded. It became clear that you could drop right off life on the edge.

Madonna had already leapt from the edge, propelled by imagination and will -- she drew the power to transform herself from the same life that consumed Martin.

I've watched her over the years, this powerful star, this shape-shifting icon, and I always think it's something of a miracle that her transformation and her escape was so complete. Good for her, I think. No one knows better the consequences of falling.

Jordan Levin is The Herald's dance critic.