Nothing was ever worse than that week in 1979, the week I would use to measure and rate all other weeks and incidents in my life, for the rest of my life, even today. Nothing was ever worse than the week my husband stole all my money and tried to kill me by beating me to death with a Bible, I got fired, Lightfoot locked me up in a roadside motel with the intent of ‘turning me out’, my apartment got infested, infested I tell you with cockroaches and I was on the back of a motorcycle as it crashed head on into a parked van.
Even I could see something was slightly askew. Something was always slightly askew. The bottom line was that I was still alive, albeit a little more banged up, a little broker than when I started, but alive.
I took a few days off at my parents house to get over the very worst of the accident, then headed back to the East Village. Lola got me a waitressing job at the Italian restaurant where she worked and I tried, I really did. I tried to make a go of it with a straight job for almost a year.
1979 October
I tried on those boots with the red suede stars. They looked great, but they’re $160 - so it’s back to selling drugs for extra money. I can pick up 100 Black Beauties this week.
October
Granma Helen called. “You’re not a princess anymore,” she said. “Nope, too many frogs,” I thought to myself. I wish she’d stop calling.
November
I’m nothing but a lowly waitress and I’m drinking again. Luckily, it takes less and less to get me drunk. I don’t do anything very well. Except give head. I’m not sure if that’s depressing or not.
November
I go to the 50¢ photo booths every week and study the four small black and white impressions of me. I don’t really recognize myself in these photos.
December
Wednesday : Crashed a private party at Great Gildersleeves for the Hell’s Angels and got as drunk as I could.
Thursday : Had a tooth pulled out.
Friday : Stayed in.
Saturday : Took Laurie to Bellevue Hospital after Havasha beat her up.
December
Winter is here and I’ve started drinking at home. Not to worry, but it’s a change.
1980 March
I’m sick and not even a cat here to keep me company. All I want is someone to feel sorry for me. The landlord’s been banging on the door all day, yelling for the rent.
March
I hate being grown up. It’s lonely and there’s nothing to look forward to. The older I get, the less I’m able to remember. It used to be just my childhood but more and more of my teenaged years are gone. Maybe if I had a job or something… I’m scared.
March
I get so violent when I’ve been drinking. I’m almost knifed a bitch in Gildersleeves over nothing, a guy.
May
Sometimes it’s more painful to live than to die.
May
I do not recognize the face in the mirror.
June
The apartment is clean, the roaches are gone and I have a large cold glass of Rosé beside me.
I am very calm.
June
Finding that I can ingest a lot of booze in a short a period of time and still be clear. The physical clumsiness of the 3rd drink now takes me 1/2 a bottle of wine and 1/4 bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream to find. Unfortunately, the maudlin crap comes just as quickly as before. Quicker as get older. Maybe it’s not the drinking at all, just the aging.
July
So far this year I’ve seen 16 movies and had sex 17 times with 10 people. That makes a movie every 11 and 6/16 days and sex 2 1/2 times a month. I guess I don’t actually have a lot of sex, I just have it with a lot of different people.
July
BW got out of prison. Neighbors say he’s been looking for me. I decided the best way to deal with this was to get drunk. It worked, I fell asleep, which I don’t seem to be doing a lot of lately.
July
Voices call my name I turn and see no one as the day grows nearer (any day now, this is the year, this is my last year) the voices grow louder and more distinct am I mad or right or both is it madness to wait patiently for one’s own death?
September
I’m 23 and bored with people and life. The thing that kept me most excited about life was death - and then, I didn’t die.
September
Decided to really go straight, take anything to avoid the midtown sleaze. My first interview - a receptionist job - turned out to be at a whorehouse. I start 10:30 tomorrow morning. I don’t know if I’ll show or not, but apparently sleaze is my fate.
September
Still looking for work. Losing track of days and time. Drinking less because I’m short of cash, but I’d rather eat less. If things get tough I could dance one day a week.
One day wouldn’t kill me.
This entry was written by , posted on November 23, 2009 at 2:02 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, 1980, death, drinking, drugs, East Village, the abyss. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I stared at the ceiling from my childhood bed, warm under the growing pile of dirty clothes, trying to figure out what was next. I’d spent the weeks since I’d been fired popping the occasional Seconal or Tuinal, whatever I could find in the lint and loose tobacco of my pockets; leaving my room for food and the occasional need to pee. That job had required no skills, nothing but the parts I was born with and I’d fucked it up. Fucked up cash money and an bottomless bottle because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
I looked at the framed sign over my bed–– a birthday gift from my father — “Engage Brain Before Opening Mouth”, took another hit off the joint I was holding and rolled over. My mother stared at me from the doorway.
“You’re going to get a job, go to college or you’re going to find somewhere else to live. You’re not laying around here getting stoned all day.” She was shaking, her face white, tense, on the verge of something. There were never a lot of rules at home. I mean, there were crazy rules, like how you had to put books back in the exact place you’d taken them from on the bookshelf or how we had to take turns making pleasant dinner conversation, but I could drag home all kinds of strays, addicts, street hustlers. They’d rather I brought trouble home than keep it secret. Even so, I never told them about the Mardi Gras, about dancing or what it was like to feel pretty. I didn’t tell them anything I thought they couldn’t handle, especially her. She was terrified I’d turn into one of the strays if I didn’t have a home to come to.
I rolled over, curled around my pillow. I was tired.
She went downstairs. I think she cried. If she did, my father’d punish me later, for upsetting “his wife”.
I’d never planned on college, never thought there was much point. I’d be dead by 23. I knew it. She knew it too.
I’d been having the dream every night since I was 15, since they kicked Snake out of the house; it never varied. Four days after my 23rd birthday the big clock at the train station says it’s 4:04. Leaning over to watch the train rushing in, suddenly someone pushes me. I hit the tracks and just before the train crushes me, before it cuts me into a thousand soft bloody pieces, I see him. Snake. My best friend’s uncle. One of my strays. The boyfriend I’d met the day he came home from prison. He asked me to marry him that first day. I said yes and moved him into my parents house. Snake wore long sleeves to hide his track marks and taught me about the morning drink.
I’d had that dream every night since my father threw him out of the house. Three hundred and sixty five nights a year. This was a leap year, lucky me, I get one extra nightmare.
What was the point of wasting time in college? Where did she even come up with that option?
I hugged the bar in neighborhood biker joints and corner dives. I passed joints back and forth to strangers in the park, hid out in dark rooms, dank bars, discos with lighted floors and called it self-exploration.
I considered joining the army and learning a trade, like demolition. I could be a gun moll or a mob hit man. I considered joining the circus. I thought about being a madam, but figured I’d need some hooker experience first.
Truthfully, I didn’t really want to get a job.
What I really wanted was to be a guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I enrolled in Nassau Community College, aiming for a degree in acting.
I couldn’t memorize lines. I can’t memorize a haiku, can’t get past “There once was a man from Nantucket” in a limerick. I barely remembered our phone number. I’d lived in the same house my whole life and still didn’t know the name of the street behind us.
What was I thinking?
dirtygirl asks: How did you figure out what you wanted to be? Did you have a mentor, a plan, a clue of any kind, help of any kind? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on July 27, 2009 at 11:10 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1976, death, dirty boys, Levittown. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Life might’ve been different if Frankie hadn’t killed himself, if Cowboy hadn’t left town, if I hadn’t gotten fired. I’d have a ham sammich if I had some ham, if I had some bread.
But Frankie died and I don’t think it took three days before we started calling him Dead Frankie. So, I woulda been Mrs. Dead Frankie if we’d managed to get it together before he managed to fall apart.
The police called me in the office to tell Frankie was dead. That’s not the kind of thing you should be telling a person over the phone, ‘hey girlie, your fiancee killed himself so you better start making other plans’. Really, that’s the kind of thing you should tell a person face to face. I said, when you tell his moms, tell her to her face. Then I ripped the phone outta the wall and threw it across the room.
The ripping the phone out of the wall, the howling and flipping over of furniture - they can say that’s why they fired me, but really, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was time. I wasn’t cut out to be a file clerk.
Cowboy was my best friend, my back door man, which was all he could be. He’s out of commission with the Clap most of the time. I guess it all got to be too much for him, the funeral, the Clap, the whole downtown hustler thing. We went up to Port Authority and I put him on a bus back to wherever it was he called home.
Suddenly, I am unemployed and extraordinarily single having gone from a boyfriend and a fiancee to nothing. The ad in the back of the Village Voice said “BARMAID - NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY”. I have that, no experience, and plenty of it.
I’d had dreams of being a criminal lawyer, not a $90 a week file clerk. That’s what the law firm was paying me before they fired me. That was before taxes. My first day behind the bar at Robbies Mardi Gras I made $85 in cash. No taxes. No paperwork. No experience necessary.
Yeah. That’ll work. I’m not going anywhere for a while….
dirtygirl wonders:
Can men and women be friends if they’re attracted to each other? Can you be “just friends” with someone you’re having sex with?
Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on July 2, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, death, dirty boys, dirty money, hustlers, love, Robbies Mardi Gras, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Everyone turned up & tricked out for the funeral. Cindy and her man BamBam from the Bronx Savage Lords, Geronimo, Candy, Cowboy, Sharon, Fat Phyllis, Terry the Moose and all the pretty boys. It was the first time I’d seen any of them in the daylight. There’s something to be said for the kindness of moonlight and mirrored balls. I’m sure they were thinking the same about me.
One of Candy’s johns, a little Truman Capote looking thing, drove us out to the funeral home. Frankie’s mother and sisters introduced me to two or three other people who were also engaged to him, and another couple he’d already married. I met the jealous ex-girlfriend who was always banging on the apartment door because, she said, it was her apartment and she wasn’t his ex-anything. We’d shared the same lover and the same vaginal infection. Both were over for us now. She introduced me to more people who were engaged to him and others he’d married, some he only lived with. Half of them were younger women, the men were mostly older.
Standing graveside as they lowered the coffin into what would remain an unmarked grave, an aging blonde drag queen named Sunshine in a tasteful black lace dress & veil handed me a plain white envelope and offered me a ride home. She drove a big convertible with soft white leather seats, and a blazing cherry red paint job that matched her lipstick exactly.
I crawled into the back seat, tucked myself into a corner. Horse Faced Linda climbed in next to me and started to cry. Linda was neither engaged nor married to Dead Frankie, but had the dubious horror of being the woman whose bed he chose to kill himself in. She was the only one there I hated & I was the only one she spoke to. She wept and babbled into my ear the entire drive home.
I caught the blonde’s eye in the rear view mirror. Her veil lifted, the wind sent her Nice n’ Easy Honey hair flying around her head, catching in the fine stubble on her chin. She watched as I opened the envelope. I thumbed through the nude Polaroids inside. Two front view and one rear view. With matching wallet sized copies. They’re the only pictures I’ve ever had of Frankie. She smiled into the mirror, lipstick smears on her crooked teeth. I leaned back, opened a small vial of butyl nitrate, amyl’s cheap & easy sister, and watched the sun pulse as it slid out of view. The sounds of the road, of blood rushing through my veins, through my head, to my heart, drowned out Linda’s equine weeping next to me. The wind caught the tangles of my hair now, and beat me into oblivion as I inhaled a little more of the butyl.
He’d been about to turn twenty. I was seventeen. Overwhelmed by lonely, with fears and shames we couldn’t name–we hunted for somewhere safe, dark and distant.
It was a good day to die.
Todays question for my readers: What do you do in your life today to ease stress, how do you deal with sadness or loneliness? Do you have someone to talk to, do you meditate, go running, drink till oblivion? How do you handle that?
This entry was written by , posted on June 25, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, death, dirty boys, hustlers, johns, love, The Chalice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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