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.
He sings to me, has been singing, in public, since we met two weeks ago. Some days, I catch him watching me from a distance, motionless.
This is something new to me, this….wooing.
Something new has pale white skin & wild red hair. It’s Howdy Doody red, Opie Cunningham red, Brenda Starr red. I’m finding it hard to ignore him.
He hangs over my head from low tree branches and sings to me, about me. Red Wolf lifts my skirt, wraps himself around my ankles like some sweet snake content to stay at my feet, and he sings to me.
My skirt is long enough to hide quarts of Budweiser underneath when cops roll past. They cruise the outside circle where we drink and hang –the Indians, Sleazy John & Rat, Jack & Carmine, Johnny One Eye, the Starriders motorcycle club, Haney & all the little runaways. Cops roll past and a dozen hands slide a dozen beers under my skirt.
I look all hippie in this skirt, no matter that that peace & love shit was ten years ago. Long skirts hide how my thighs touch. I have my deerskin full of wine I don’t share with anyone. I hate beer. I only drink beer when I’m run out of wine, when there is no acid to be had.
Sitting in Washington Square Park, drinking wine in my long skirt, I’m supposed to be writing a script for my directorial “debut” at NYU film school–they never should’ve put the school so close to the park–but I can’t think of a single thing anyone would give a shit about. I can’t think at all what with all that singing going on.
So I just hang out in the park, waiting for inspiration, for something that will blow everyone the fuck away when they see it. Anything. Some days all there is is hallucinogenics. Some days all there is is watching the cops roll up, roll past, roll away.
Whether I stand or sit, inspired or not, as long as there’s a cop in sight, there’s beer between my legs.
The cops roll away and one by one, hands reach under my skirt, between my feet and re-claim their beers. And Red Wolf wraps himself around my ankles singing some nonsense he’s made up about me. About the curls in my hair, the whiteness of my skin, my zodiac sign for chrissakes.
He lives here, in the park. He’s out of his mind.
and I think I love him.
I can never let him find out about Floyd.
he wouldn’t love me if he knew.
I’m careful not to run into Shortun.
or anyone else who knows what happened the night the Bon Soir closed...
he couldn’t love me if he knew.
dirtygirl wonders : How do you know the difference between romance, passion, obsession? C’mon, talk dirty to me
This entry was written by , posted on August 12, 2009 at 11:32 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, drugs, Greenwich Village, love. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Wednesday afternoon Frankie called and canceled our Thursday Central Park plans. Thursday morning, the phone on my desk rang again.
“This is the Police Department. Do you know a Frank Stewart, Ma’am?”
Yes. I did. I do. Why are police calling me?
“He overdosed on drugs, Ma’am.”
No. That’s not right, I say into the phone. A thousand tiny feet of hysteria starting to dance inside me. Funny sounds come out of me. I know that only because heads are turning. Ears are perking.
“He overdosed.”
Where is he? I need to know what hospital he’s at. I need to be there, to fix him, we fix each other when we’re broken. That’s the agreement. No one buys damaged goods. We fix each other. Where is he, I scream into the phone.
Everyone in my office has stopped working. They’re staring. I am desperate to find a pen. To be writing down a name of a hospital. To sit by his side. To stop screaming into the phone. To make sense of what the cop voice is saying.
“He overdosed.”
I tear the phone cord out of the wall, hold the dead receiver close and scream: STOP. SAYING. THAT.
I scream again, into the darkness that has swallowed me whole, hurling the phone across the room. We hit the wall at the same time, each shattering into a million sharp pieces.
There’s a thin line between here & hell. Sometimes the pain of living is more than you can stand. Frankie swallowed a bottle of Darvon, one of Triavil and one of Quaaludes, washed it down with two quarts of Budweiser, called me, then lay down to sleep in Brooklyn.
He immediately became known as Dead Frankie.
If he hadn’t killed himself I might never have met his family.
Todays question for my readers: Somedays it hurts too much to be alive, but what about the people you leave behind, the people you lock out? Or tell me about your first heartbreak, what was that all about?? Are you over it yet? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on June 22, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, dirty boys, drugs, suicide, The Chalice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Everyone is on the game, everyone is following the money. The hustlers come for the money. The queens come for the hustlers. The whores come to relax. They can drink in peace and the queens fuss up a big production when they’re all dolled up.
Sharon’s a high class whore. An escort, she says. She wears satin pumps and vintage underwear she swears belonged to Greta Garbo. Garbo pussy stains, she says, See? She lifts her skirt and points. She’s a natural blonde, that’s what I see. Candy, a towering glamor-puss in red patent leather platforms works the dark night of the West Side Highway with her dick tucked neatly and discreetly between the cheeks of her perfect apple ass. You’d never know she was a he. Candy is a less than natural blonde, the furthest thing from a natural anything. Cindy’s an Irish bulldog. She’s been turning Delancey Street tricks with her mother since she was eight, on her own since she was eleven. Well, not totally on her own. Candy looks out for her and tries to teach her about makeup and other girlie things. Cindy’s thirteen.
Cowboy follows me home to Levittown like a hungry puppy. He followed my mother around after that. I don’t think he’s ever had a real mother. We have sex between his doses of the clap, so, not that often cause he has the clap most of the time. There’s usually only a few days or a week window before he’s got it again. I tend to the cuts and scrapes he gets when he has his epileptic seizures. We pretend they never happened, the cuts or the clap. Nobody buys damaged goods.
In this dark cavern, I wait nightly for whoever it is will need me to feel he’s a man, whoever I’ll need to make me feel like a woman.
An old queen named Hollywood Al slides up next to me & bets a dollar a drink I can’t finish 25 drinks in 25 minutes. Twenty-five Black Russians later, I win. Hours later, I wake up stuffed into a small alcove full of cleaning supplies–cramped, cold & clutching twenty-five worn singles covered in vomit & Kahlua. The string mop next to me reeks of disinfectant and vomit, probably mine.
Old queens like Al don’t appreciate me fucking the hustlers. I’m a distraction, an annoyance. The best they can do is get me drunk enough to get me out of the game for the night.
I found Frankie in the darkness of Christopher Street and fell in love. I work days at a law firm. He works nights hustling out of the bar. Somehow we find time to be together. He lives in a basement apartment with a toilet bowl in a closet. When we make love there, we’re hit by falling bits of plaster. And cockroaches. Central Park became our sanctuary from the night life, an escape from the darkness, from booze and sex for money. We lay on the rocks, cleansing ourselves in sunlight.
He’s turned my world upside down & suddenly I’m living in a Hallmark card full of cheap poetry.
Todays question for my readers: How ever did the disastrous story of star crossed lovers Romeo & Juliet become a romantic mythology? Tell me about your first love….Post your thoughts below, c’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on June 18, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, dirty boys, drugs, Greenwich Village, hustlers, Levittown, love, The Chalice, whores. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
