photo courtesy of Olafur Kr. Olafsson
It’s dark and quiet under the truck, out of the way of the pounding rains, restful. My fingers make designs in the drops of blood, playing on the smooth irregularities of the peach cobblestones. Tiny rivers form, swirl, then flood and carry away the dirt, washing away the little red droplets.
“You O.K.?”
The voice is very far away, inside the rain, inside the dark here under the truck, on the other side of the flood. I turn my head and see Havasha squatting beside me, silver dripping off the dark terrain of his face, filling my little rivers, cooling my skin. Wide muscular paws hook the crevices under my arms, pulling me out of the under truck dark and into the darker wet night. He leans me up against the panel truck that so rudely interrupted our flight and rummages around, grunting and growling he pulls, tugs and struggles to free the bike, stuck under the truck as well. Together, we manage to pull her free, pull her upright and mount her again. She coughs, sputters and then hums off, carrying us into the sparkling dampness.
There’s a new club opening tonight with live music and an open bar…somewhere on Bleecker Street. It’s part of the cure, he says. The good time part. No time to check for damages from the fall, there’s an open bar, a good time, live music.
All doors are grey in the dark. Big heavy doors with red painted numbers that fad and change with time, rain, life and mescaline.
The mescaline is in full bloom again. Did we take more just before the fall? Glittering sapphire breezes softly around us as we search for the right door, listen for music, look for crowds spilling into the street. Huge rats sporting their dressiest furs scamper across our feet and each other, rushing to a party of their own, chattering wildly with the excitement of it all. You’re too early, screaming, squeaky cartoon voices thrown over their shoulders as they scuttle down the block. Open the door. That one, there. Wait inside. Hurry, get off the street, hurry, hurry, hurry…they squeal and fade away, barely audible now as they find the door to their own party and stumble over each other, each trying to be the first one inside.
The night thickens imperceptibly, our movements slow in the viscous evening air. And the door looms in front of us, leans over us, eclipses everything. Havasha pops the old brass lock & handle and the rusted hinges and rotting wood just give way.
No one is here. We’re the first. We decide to wait inside.
Inside, a bony red cat waits patiently, the rats must’ve told her we were coming. The heavy door slams shut behind me, I take Havasha’s rough hand and we follow the cat. She turns, her sparkling yellow eyes meet mine and she leads us past unfinished walls, bags of nails, boxes of tools, discarded paper coffee cups and small piles of cigarette butts. Past a large green plastic can full of garbage – half eaten sandwiches, scraps of wood, crumpled papers and old copies of the Post & the News. She turns & catches my eye again before she rounds the corner and disappears through a narrow doorway.
Someone lights a match - was that me? Havasha? I don’t know. Two liquid gold eyes sparkle in the flame, and we move closer to them. She sits on a shelf, her tiny frame flanked by two thick white candles on one side and a gray cardboard box of plumber’s candles on the other. The first candle gets lit, then another and another and another until the box is empty and the room is bright & warm.
I look around for the raggedy cat. She’s curled into a tight red fur ball in the center of a coarse blanket of blue and green, apparently unimpressed as the colors ebb & flow around her, over her. The blanket covers a thick mattress on the cement floor.
The mattress begins to sag in the center–
–as the tiny cat grows heavier & denser.
This entry was written by , posted on October 8, 2009 at 3:00 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, East Village. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I really have no idea how I wound up on that motorcycle.
I was hiding under blankets on Lola’s couch, while she petted my head and murmured something that sounded vaguely like “nice kitty”. Things had veered off in a direction I didn’t know what to do with and Lola’s Chelsea couch was a safe distance from the East Village and miles away from Times Square. I sipped chamomile tea, mumbled quiet nonsense to myself and tried to find my way back.
And then, Havasha appeared. He’d been a brief bit of harmless crazy before I even moved into the East Village. He was a little…special. Every morning, he drank his own pee, something to do with his martial arts training and while I’ll drink just about anything no matter how foul if it gets me fucked up, I draw the line at pee. Even my own.
I took a sip of tea, looked up and he was there. Crouching on muscular haunches in front of me, his short thick body leaned on Chester the Dog for support. Chester & Havasha, tilting their furry heads this way and then that way, the two of them sniffing the air around me, they could have been brothers. Squatting there, jeans streaked with grease and street dirt, his chestnut hair matted into clumps, square yellowed teeth, big, like lemon flavored Chiclets you’d found at the bottom of your purse, giant horse teeth in a smile just this side of madness, he looked a little bit…troll-like, like maybe he knew the secrets of the universe
She needs a drink, he said.
Apparently he did know the secrets of the universe, or at least the secrets of mine.
I hadn’t had a drink since the Porkpie…only two days ago? I’d lost control of the days and nights and had to keep reminding myself what followed what. Too much of the big and scary. I was afraid even a deep breath would cause the walls to collapse, everything would come crashing down, crushing me, breaking windows and bones, cockroaches would fill my mouth
She needs a drink, he said. And a good time.
I was the couch, waiting for the return of my sanity.
And then I wasn’t.
How he found me there I have no idea. One minute I was on the couch in borrowed pajamas –I blinked–and I was on the back of his motorcycle, a behemoth 1100 with crash bars front and back. I traded toast and blackberry jam for mescaline, chamomile tea for vodka. Vodka & Kahlua. Vodka & Kahlua with Milk. Kahlua, Amaretto & Milk. And finally, when the bars ran out of milk, Kahlua, Amaretto and Vodka.
Havasha stuffed handfuls of quarters into jukeboxes in the back of each bar we stopped at, making sure I had everything I needed. Music loud enough to drown out the noise outside. Mescaline to drown out the noise inside. A motorcycle that could get me anywhere but here, and fast. Vodka, because a day without vodka is a day without sunshine. Cigarettes, because you can’t live on Vodka alone.
Life was beginning to feel normal again.
Minutes grew into hours and the white hot mescaline morning slid us into yet another bar. Another drink. Hours turn into seconds. Another hit of mescaline.
Time stops.
We watch, crouched in a dark bar at the end of a deep hallucinogenic tunnel, a million miles away, the air damp and cool as silver glitter floats slowly from a pussywillow grey sky, each silver piece shattering into a thousand deafening shards as it hits the quiet cement sidewalk outside.
Time for one more drink before it really starts raining, I think as my mind scrambles out of the tunnel, scratching and clawing, only to slip back down inside. One more drink before we need to get the bike off the streets. There’s always time for one more drink.
Sharp, cold silver needles shower down on me, pierce my skin, cry down my face. The chrome monster between our legs roars to life and I hold tight at Havasha’s thick leather waist, burying myself in the matted fur at the back of his neck. We scream into the storm, racing down Second Avenue, rushing away from the wet, afraid of melting. The asphalt, slick with oil and water, shrinks back, exposing bits of Old New York and its cobblestone streets. I scream at the night, howl along with the roaring engine, sharp needles pierce my tongue and fill my throat.
I scream at the panel truck.
Parked directly in the path of our mescaline blind ride.
The truck appears not to notice me
and the motorcycle
seems to have no intention
of Evil Kneiveling anything at all this evening.
This entry was written by , posted on October 5, 2009 at 2:18 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, East Village. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
3 naked ladies talk about their view from the stages and laps of the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s and today.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Rachel Aimee: Stripping can be a really difficult job to do sober: dealing with rejection from assholes, struggling to make back your house fee, working till 4am every night, and all the while having to act happy and flirty with each new guy.
Jodi Sh. Doff: Tried it sober. Couldn’t do it.
RA: I know plenty of girls who’ve gotten seriously into drink and drugs because of the pressure of the job.
JshD : Zoe Hansen mentioned a girl who couldn’t get work because of her track marks.
Lauri Shaw: I had plenty of friends who did dope. You could usually spot the junkies, they wore evening gloves or dozens of bracelets. Or you’d get tight with someone and realize she was going home and shooting up between her toes.
RA: At the same time, I hate to propagate those stereotypes about stripping messing up people’s lives, because I also encounter plenty of Wall Street bankers whose jobs are clearly driving them to drugs too.
LS: Listen, stripping doesn’t make girls into addicts, but it’s an environment where it’s more acceptable to be off your face than, say, an office. It’s also easier to procure your favorite high there than it would be in the 9-5 world. That combination can be the tipping point for someone who already has tendencies.
JshD: I discovered heroin working at the Mardi Gras. I sniffed the first time thinking it was coke, but within a month I was fixing with one of the floor managers. He taught me about saving the twist tops off the champagne to cook the doojie. But coke was all over the place. A few of the girls dealt coke but no one was dealing dope in the clubs–too scared of serious mob consequences. Smoking pot, on the other hand was like smoking cigarettes & everyone smoked cigarettes.
LS: Yeah, pot was de rigeur. Coke was harder to find, you’d be more likely to get it from a customer than another girl. Girls who went to after hours did Ecstasy and “Special K.” But usually not at work. And drinking? A girl taught me about bringing vodka to work in a Sprite bottle, and I immediately started making more money. You wanted a small buzz on while you worked, but not enough to make you careless. I saw this one girl at a fairly upscale club pass out onstage. The “house mom,” who was actually a gay guy, came out of the dressing room, lifted her up and carried her off. Someone else got on in her place, and no one said a word.
JshD: I remember a dancer, Jessie, ODing in the basement locker room of the Lollipop Lounge on West 46th. The other girls robbed her before telling management she was unconcious. I didn’t occur to anyone that she could’ve died. She didn’t, but no thanks to the “Sisterhood of the No Pants”! It sounds awful, but stripping was a tough girl’s game.
RA: I’ve seen a girl pass out onstage too, but at my club it’s quite common for us to just lie around on the stage if the customers aren’t tipping (it’s a dive) so nobody really noticed until she was supposed to get down!
LS: Management didn’t care if your liver fell out of you, so long as it didn’t happen in front of the customers.
JshD: Oh no, you could be fucked up, but you were being paid to hustle. Once, when I didn’t want to dance, I sniffed a little extra dope and threw up right in front of the manager. It got me off the stage for the night, but not off work. You hadda be dead to get the night off.
RA: Unless they were looking for an excuse to fire you, right?
LS: I don’t recall anyone ever getting the sack for being too wasted.
JshD: More than anything it was the booze for me and clubs watered down their liquor. I always cracked a fresh bottle of vodka, just to be sure.
RA: Did you get commission on the drinks? I’ve never worked where dancers got paid to drink but it sounds like a really bad idea.
JshD: It was a great idea!!!
RA: In most clubs I’ve worked at, you have to accept a drink if a customer offers to buy you one but it doesn’t have to be alcoholic so there’s no pressure to get drunk if you don’t want to. Except sometimes from the customer. Sometimes I’ll order a real drink even if I don’t want it because I think the customer will stop tipping me if he thinks I’m boring.
LS: Girls who wanted to stay sober drank juice. We let the guys think we were getting drunk. In the nude joints, they didn’t serve alcohol, just fake beer and fake champagne for the customers, both of which tasted god-awful. You brought your own booze. In some clubs they kept vodka behind the bar for the girls who got their customers into the VIP. If you were the thirsty type, it was one more reason to go back there.
JshD: I loved the fact that I could drink & drug to my hearts content and get paid for it–commission on every drink. You could get a non-alcoholic drink, or use a spit glass, but what was the point of that?
RA: I never really let myself get too drunk at work, even though I know I’d make more money if I did. I just don’t want to be out of control in that environment. Although the few times I worked at high pressure clubs with big house fees I’d get so stressed out I’d sit with customers just to get a drink, even if they weren’t buying dances. (Another reason I don’t work at those clubs anymore!)
This entry was written by , posted on September 30, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged drinking, drugs, strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
