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.
The morning sun blinded me as we rode into it –
and then I blinked.
When I open my eyes again I’m staring at greasy tin ceilings and the smell of oil and gasoline weigh me down. I lay on a thin foam mattress surrounded by cogs & gears. Greasy metal things litter the cement floor around me. It’s the itching that wakes me. My arms, my legs, my thighs, my crotch. I scratch till I bleed. I scratch some more.
Through grimy windows and thick exhaust I make out the corner of Second Avenue & Houston Street in the failing sunlight. The back end of the motorcycle blocks the open front door.
That would make this Havasha’s motorcycle shop.
My body howls as I turn to look for him. Shoved in a corner atop a pile of dirty yellow cushions, he scratches in his sleep. Curled into a dark leather ball of grease, sweat, and hair, so close I can touch him if I reach out. I don’t.
Pulling myself up, despite my body’s loud objections, I take a step towards the open front door. My muscles scream as I fall. Or maybe it’s me that screamed this time. Havasha continues to sleep, one foot trembling like a dog when he dreams.
The heel on my right boot is completely gone. My foot is caked with dried blood, which I assume is mine. Even if I couldn’t feel my toes wiggling, which I can, I can see my toes wiggling through the holes of what’s left of my cowboy boot. The rust corduroys Doug’d bought didn’t even last the week. The right leg is torn and stained. Dirt, grease, pebbles, torn skin, urine, dark clotted blood. Same for my right arm, only not so badly. Scrapes and bruises that cover my back. I’d see them too, if I could turn my head. My left side seems intact, just dirty and itchy. I poke and prod, checking for serious damage, breaks or fractures.
Nothing.
Bites, bruises, blood, yes, but nothing broken. My lucky day.
I ache. All over.
Havasha rolls, scratching, a small pool of spittle glistens in the coarse dark hairs of his beard. He mumbles in his sleep. Outside, cars speed by, honking & yelling. Suits rushing home. Everyone everywhere has somewhere to hurry from and someone to hurry to. I pull myself up again, bracing on the wall and the desk for support. What happened? I wonder, How did I come to look and smell this bad, feel this bad, hurt this much?
Shit. This is what happens when I blink.
Slowly, I remember. Red Wolf. The police. The roaches. Shit, the roaches. I have nowhere to hurry to. I don’t really even have somewhere to casually saunter to.
Names & numbers of no one I know are written on the wall above a desk piled with more dark and oily mechanical things. An old black rotary phone hides under dirty napkins and empty Chinese food containers. I hold the receiver to my ear and dial slowly, afraid I’ll wake the sleeping troll.
“Michael,” my voice hoarse, “I want to come home. I didn’t know who else to call.”
I watch Havasha struggle and scratch while I whisper directions to my oldest friend over the phone. Michael got me my first hit of acid in high school, but what will he think when he sees me like this?
“Bring roach spray. Lots of it.” I place the receiver gently back in its cradle and slip out the door, leaving Havasha to fight his own demons there on the yellow cushions.
I leave a gouge in the wall where my name and number were.
Sitting on the curb not even a bum stops to ask me for change or a cigarette.
I’m still there, smoking my last few cigarettes
when Michael pulls up on his Harley.
I can tell how much of a mess I am
by the look on his face.
I point to Havasha’s bike.
It’s all I can manage and it’s enough for now.
Mangled gears.
Bright metal torn
and twisted.
Leather seats sprinkled with dried blood
and dirt.
Handlebars contorted
and compressed.
Just a big shiny scrap metal sculpture now.
I wrap my arms around Michael’s waist as he kicks the Harley to life. “Drive slow,” I whisper into the curls around his ear, “please, just drive slow.”
This entry was written by , posted on October 15, 2009 at 11:14 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, dirty boys, East Village, roaches. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
artwork courtesty of A. Andrew Gonzalez
Movement at my left distracts me.
Havasha.
I’d forgotten about him. He removes his wet clothes, hangs the heavy leather jacket from a nail in the wall. His worn leather boots, caked with mud, stand alone in a corner. A torn thermal shirt hangs from another nail. He looks up, watching me watch him and I hear “To dry”, in my head, but no one’s spoken. We’ve gone beyond the need for speech.
I peel layer after wet layer of my own clothes, hanging them on nails, off shelves; laying them out in open areas on the dusty cement floor, until finally, we’re both naked.
Where is everyone else, I wonder at him. We’ve been waiting for hours.
Or minutes, he thinks back, I don’t know.
Minute or hours? I can’t tell.
Trapped in each others’ eyes, we ease down onto the blanket, floating now on the sky, now on the sea. Cross legged. Face to face, touching only knees & fingertips, heart & soul, past & future. The last two hits of mescaline melt on our tongues, sliding purple rivers down our throats, filling lungs with purple breath. The candles glitter like chandeliers through a violet haze that engulfs the three of us.
The tiny orange cat binds us further, soft apricot trails following her as she figure eights around, behind, between us. She settles in my lap, nuzzles into my pubic hair, cuddling safely into my nest of calves and thighs, my fortress of warm pink flesh. My chi, my soul, my brain, my heart, my fucking essence flows into Havasha, his into me, ours into her, this scrawny red cat. Giving her strength, giving her life, in exchange for the sanctuary she offered from rain and night.
Always I find myself looking for sanctuary and safety.
She closes her eyes and sleeps.
We leave our bodies there to keep her and then travel on to another level.
Physical boundaries dissolve.
Time and place liquefy.
We flow, caught in the eddies and whirlpools,
spinning & dancing into oblivion.
Into darkness.
Into light.
Music fills me, buoys me higher, then escapes through my pours. It carries me away and drops me, tumbling through soft smoky white skies. I breathe and a thousand little bells chime. My heart.drum.beat. keeps the rhythm. I float and tumble, finding another heartdrumbeat–Havasha. Our drums beat together, our bells ring in harmony and we spin into a silky bright whiteness, cascade down a waterfall of lavender, splash into the brilliant emerald, the pulsing lapis of the blanket where we started.
The kitten hasn’t moved, she sleeps in my lap.
Our clothes are dry. My skin is slick with sweat. The air thick with the stink of sweat, candlewax, blood & urine. A few candles sputter, barely alive at their final inch.
My eyes burn, my muscles ache, my mind searches for a soft dark place to sleep.
My hair hurts.
I wonder if Havasha is as tired and sore as I am. I ask, without speaking, but this time I get nothing back. Our moment has passed. We haven’t spoken a word aloud since the accident that we’ve both forgotten by now.
I wonder, again, what happened to everyone else.
The sun is up, again, as we mount the bike. I close my eyes and we ride into the blinding white.
This entry was written by , posted on October 12, 2009 at 9:52 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, dirty boys, drugs, East Village. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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.
The cat’s whiskers tickle my face until I wake up. It’s dark. Uh,oh I’ve slept and missed a whole ‘nother day. I push her away, jonesing for just a few more hours of nothing, but she’s curled up beside me anymore.
It’s roach feet. Not cat whiskers. Roach feets. Roach feets crawling across my ear and onto my cheek and as I realize that last night swooshes in and slams into my head in Technicolor. Surround Sound. 3D. Last night slams me into the wall and I realize that this is no hallucination. These fuckers are real & they’re everywhere.
Look, I freak out when the cat drags a half-dead waterbug up into the loftbed and now I’m sitting in the loft surrounded on all sides. Mwaha-ha-wha-wha flies out of my mouth. What is that you say? It’s the sound you make to keep from losing your fucking mind, that’s what that is. Some ancient Ashkenazi tribal mojo spitting through my fingers pfeh pfeh like those roaches are the evil eye and like somewhere there must be something I can do to make them go away.
A roach wandered into my microwave oven once just as I was about to warm up a biscuit. I thought, gotcha motherfucker, slapped the door shut, turned it on high and I listened to him snap, crackle and pop. At the end of six minutes I opened the microwave. The biscuit had turned into a rock, but that little roach shook himself off and toddled away like it was nothing more than a cockroach tanning booth. Nothing I do or say is going to change the fact that you can nuke a roach long enough to cook a hamburger and the roach couldn’t care less.
I know this as I’m in the loftbed, flailing my arms around, batting them off my face, shaking my hair and whoop whooping until I totally freak the cat out. She runs down the ladder and out of the room. The roaches are non-plussed and continue to scuttle about.
They’re everywhere. Have I said that? It’s surreal and not in that oh, isn’t that interesting Salvador Dali kind of way. In that I think someone spray painted my apartment with cockroaches way. I shake my head out, back and forth. I’m convinced the key is to keep moving, if I keep moving they can’t get me.
This is my general goal in life, to remain a moving target.
I shake my clothes out–a dozen roaches drop to the floor on top of dozens more. Arms, head, legs & hair all flying in different directions to keep the roaches off me while I pull on the same clothes for the third day. This is an impressive feat in the confines of the loft bed, but I don’t want to go down. I mean I do, I want to get out of this bed of roaches, but there are more…down there. I brace myself, hop down the ladder, grabbing my dance bag as I run out the door crushing families. Entire cockroach generations and future dynasties die beneath my feet.
The cat is on her own.
Outside, the cool night air calms me down a little. A few final shakes and shimmies just be sure there are no stowaways in my hair or my ears or my pockets. When I was little, kids used to say that earwigs would lay eggs in your ears, the babies would be born in your head and then eat their way out. I’ve never gotten over that image.
An old checker turns the corner; I jump in, grateful for the big leather backseat.
Maybe this is my lucky. There’s not too many of these big old cabs left. It’s a sign. Yesterday the bus showed up in the nick of time, today, this cab. If I can just make it to Lola’s everything will be OK. I can shower and change and figure out what to do next.
Lola was the one of the few things worth remembering about the two years between the Mardi Gras and Red Wolf. She was real life. We’d met when I was drinking my way through junior college and she was dreaming of stardom. She was the love child of Brenda Starr, Mae West and Etta James. The things that happened to me didn’t happen in her world. She was…a civilian. I wanted to be in her world just long enough to catch my breath.
I close my eyes and remember to breathe, in, out, in out. I’ve almost got the rhythm down as we pull up in front of her building.
I know there’s a couple of bucks in my bag to pay the cabbie. It occurs to me, slowly. I look at the dance bag, sitting next to me on the seat. Innocently sitting next to me in this cab and I realize, it probably wasn’t a good idea to leave my bag on the floor last night. It probably was not a good idea at all…
This entry was written by , posted on September 24, 2009 at 8:04 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, East Village, roaches. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
courtesy of nick vail
I smelled the smoke before I noticed the charred walls, the remnants of ash, the damp floor or the wooden planks nailed up where the apartment door used to be. All my life I was looking for a way out and now there was no way in.
I have a tendency to live in just-get-through-this-moment survival mode. Each bit of chaos pushes the previous bit out, so it’s hard to see connections. When there’s a lot of crazy in the air, it’s all I can do to just make the noise stop.
The screaming in my head went from 0 to 60 so fast it came flying out of my mouth.
“Oh my god, oh my god, ohmygodohmygodohmygod.” I’m yanking at the boards with my hands. That crazy fuck came back and burned up my apartment. Fucking Red. Fucking Red Wolf. Fucking animal. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod Ketzel! Ohmygodohmgodohmgd”
I’ve had Ketzel since I was 16. Mom named her, it’s Yiddish for kitten. It was what she called me until the cat showed up. I don’t care what happens to me really, but taking care of the cat, that’s my job, my real job. That cat is the only place I feel safe.
I pull at the boards harder, faster, bloodying my fingers, tearing my nails. Broken bits of plywood and door clatter wildly on the sooty mosaic floors of the hallway. Where is everyone? Why isn’t anyone coming to help me? I don’t feel like I’m crying, but my face is soaked with tears. If he hurt the cat I’ll kill him, I’ll find him and kill him.
I’d opened enough of a hole in the door to reach through and let myself in. My apartment was untouched. It wasn’t Wolf at all. I’d find out weeks later that an electrical fire had devastated my neighbor. The fire department had broken down my door. The apartment was fine, except for the door… and the thousands of cockroaches that covered my floor.
A hundred shades of black, brown and red glittered on the floor, not an inch of white linoleum showed. My ears filled with the crisp rustling of hundreds thousands of cockroach wings & shells brushing against thousands of cockroach shells & wings as they stepped over each other, searching for food and a little personal space. Every single roach in the building, every roach on East 7th Street, all huddled in my apartment for shelter from the storm, safety from the fire. Their delicate exoskeletons tinkled against each other as they climbed tables and chairs, devouring Ketzel’s food, body surfing across her water dish. Ketzel, normally happy to chase, catch and devour any and all comers, watched from her perch on the kitchen sink. Baffled by their overwhelming numbers, she looked to me, confusion on her small furry face, for further instruction.
One minute I’m walking down the wild side, next thing I know I’m ankle deep in cockroaches. How could that possibly happen? Obviously, I thought to myself, it is not actually happening. This is stress, a hallucination. You’ve had two really bad days, Red Wolf, the beating, the police, losing your job, the motel window, no food for two days. This is normal. Just relax, calm down. None of this is real. There are not this many cockroaches in the city, no less in one apartment. You just need to sleep it off, hit the reset button.
I dropped my dance bag in a corner and wedged the remains of the shattered door closed, crunching roaches beneath my feet with every step. Vomit rose in my throat. Audio hallucinations. It’s fine, just part of the package, nervous hysteria. Just calm the fuck down. Climbing up into the loft bed, Ketzel tucked tightly under my arm whispering her best Scarlett O’Hara into my ear, “Don’t think about this right now. If you do, you’ll go crazy. We’ll think about this tomorrow”. I kick off my boots, peel down last night’s clothes, dropping them onto the bed with the others already piled there and curl myself around the warm cat fur and escape into sleep as she purrs into my neck, “Home. You’re home. And after all… tomorrow is another day.”
Perhaps I should’ve questioned why the cat seemed to share my hallucination, but I didn’t. I did, however, wonder where she’d picked up that southern accent. We were, after all, both Long Island pussy.
This entry was written by , posted on September 21, 2009 at 11:19 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, 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 don’t remember calling my mother, risking their lives by exposing my parents to this crazy man, but honestly, it wasn’t the first time I’d brought real live crazy into their lives.
She remembers being absolutely frantic, racing in from Long Island, running every red light in the hopes of getting stopped by the police, in the hopes the police could fix it all, make the crazy man stop beating her little girl. I picture my dad, knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel, silent, stone faced and focused; my mother, small fireworks of nervous energy exploding in the seat next to him, pressing her foot to the floor as if there were a second gas pedal on the passenger side and she could make the car go even faster.
It hadn’t occurred to me to call the police, but somehow by the time we all got back to the apartment on 7th Street, they were there.
He’s still asleep when I come back an hour later with my mother, father and two large uniformed police officers. That’s how I like my cops, bigger than me & on my side. I wait in the living room, prying a dead cockroach out of the blue shag rug with my toe, while they go into the bedroom to wake him. Their voices are muffled by the walls & the city noises that slip in through the cracked windows. His voice is muffled by the blue serge of their uniforms & the thickness of their bodies as they hustle him past me, past the holes he punched in the wall when he missed my face, past the bathroom where he flushed my money down the toilet. But his voice echoes off the cold tile & dirty marble of the hallway where the dump him confused, naked & very angry. The smaller of the two large blue men, huge in his own right, grabs a pair of jeans from the back of a chair.
“His?”
I nod & hand him Wolf’s black Chinese slippers as well. The cop tosses them into the hall, smiling as he watches Red Wolf climb into the jeans. Yelling, cursing in Spanish, then begging and threatening in English, Wolf leaves the building, bare-chested and broke. The cops stay while I gather the rest of his clothes & the offending Bible, everything he brought with him. Everything except the rug and the tv. I’m keeping those. Wolf stands across the street watching, shooting me the evil eye as they dump everything he owns on the stoop and start to leave.
“Hey, wait up,” catching up to them at the front door, “I’m going with you to file charges. I want the son-of a bitch locked up.” Two blank Irishy cop faces stare down at me. “What? I want him locked up. He tried to kill me.”
The smaller one is staring down at his shoe now. The other one focuses somewhere over my shoulder.
“You’re not bruised, not enough,” he says to his highly polished black lace up, “It’s a waste of time to do the paperwork.” He looks up, not directly at me, but sideways.
“A waste of fuckin’ time? Not enough bruises? Are you fucking kidding me? Do I hafta wait until he breaks my fucking arm? Or my neck? Would you find the time to do the paperwork if he had killed me? I mean, come on here…god-dammit.”
“She’s upset,” my mother apologizes to the short cop, to both of them. Touching my arm to calm me down, “He’s gone. You’ll stay at the house, in your old room. I’ll make stuffed cabbage.”
Stuffed Cabbage. Chicken Soup. Brisket. Chocolate Pudding. It’s the way she says ‘I love you’. But my old room is my father’s office now. Some parents keep their kids rooms like museum exhibits the last day they lived there. Mine got turned over the minute I left. She doesn’t like me cursing at the police, it’s not the way I was raised. But then my life isn’t going exactly the way she had planned, not even a little bit. I’d completely forgotten they were there.
“There’d have to be more bruises than you got,” the big cop one says. “Sorry, but it’d be thrown right out. No witnesses, nothing broken, no case. Sorry, but I’d get the locks changed if I was you.” He glances across the street, but Wolf is gone.
I watch them walk out of the building and think I know where not to go next time I need help.
“Come, we’ll pack a few things and…,” my mother steps up next to me, so close I can feel the warmth of her body and get a little whiff of Jean Nate. Her everyday summer scent. I smell her sweat too, a little bitter, tangy even. Nervous sweat.
The cops couldn’t look at me.
I can’t look at my father. I know she blames him for a lot of my mess, him and his wild stories.
I can’t look at my mother. I can’t handle her fear.
I can barely manage my own.
It’s not right, what I do, dragging them into the mess of my life.
“I gotta go to work, Ma.” I don’t tell them he took all my money. I don’t tell them we had sex last night. I don’t tell them I miss him even though I’m scared.
I tell them to go home.
This entry was written by , posted on September 3, 2009 at 6:37 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, East Village, family, Guys & Dolls, lonliness, love. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Loving me makes him weak.
I’m not stronger than Wolf, and Lord knows he’s got crazy on his side, but I don’t love him anymore, so I’m stronger than I was when I walked through the door, stronger than when he hit me the first time today. Stronger than when I let him convince me to throw Nada out of the house, when he first started with the washcloths and the crazy. I don’t love him anymore, so I’m stronger.
I believe he loves me and I believe that is my only weapon.
I throw myself into creating the Sarah Bernhardt of asthma attacks, hyperventilating huge loud wheezing noises.
The hitting stops.
Maybe he’s exhausted, or sobering up, or maybe we’ve just reached the end of today’s regularly scheduled programming, the Messianic Crazy Hour. Or just maybe a year of community college acting classes weren’t a total waste of time and he’s afraid I’m going to die.
I didn’t realize how much I want to live. I’ve been ready to die since I’m 15 years old and now, faced with an earlier than scheduled departure, I’ll be goddamned if I’m going anywhere.
He stops fighting & cradles me in his lap, rocking me as I wheeze, shake & tremble, whispering into my ear, “I could’ve killed you, I still can. I love you, but I can still kill you.” I can hardly hear him, the ringing in that ear is still loud, but his breath is damp & sour on my cheek, his arms, cold with sweat, stick to my skin.
I’m counting on that love. I stay curled in his arms, slowly letting my breathing appear normal, rocking & planning…
He pulls me into the loft bed, laying down behind me. Even now, our bodies fit perfectly. He strokes my hair, finger combing the curls, tucking a stray wisp behind my good ear, comforting me, he whispers, “I can kill you right now, but I love you. I can kill you in your sleep if I want to.”
He nudges my legs apart, entering me from behind, sliding in smoothly. I’m wet. I hate to say it, but I am. He croons softly “I love you, but I can kill you anytime” over and over as he makes love to me. Our bodies, utter perfection, my cunt made for this, for him, made for each other even in the insanity, until finally he comes inside me and falls asleep.
I stay awake in his arms all night. Staring at the back alley through the bars on the window. Motionless
I wonder about the baby I think I’m carrying, his baby. Our baby.
He’s still sleeping the next morning as I pad into the bathroom, shower & appraise the damage. I find a few new painful spots as I scrub myself. I want the smell of him off of me. The scalding water beats down on my scalp, tender from being dragged by the hair, running in streams off my nose, the tips of my breasts, down my stomach, between my legs, any place he’s been, any place he’s touched. I want to burn him off of me.
He’s sleeping still, as I let myself drip dry. Let the little bit of June that makes it through the air shaft caress me, tend my wounds, purify me. Extra makeup erases last night. Carefully, layering foundation, cover up, blush, eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara, & finally lipstick–a recipe that starts our nightly battles. My eyes are red & puffy, but my head is clear & my hearing is back. I listen to the whoosh and hum of his breathing in the bed above me.
He did not die in his sleep.
I’ll pray harder next time.
Super Girl not Supergirl by Dominic Marco
I’m pulling work clothes out of the large wooden dresser, mine since I was too small to open the heavy draws by myself. My mother’d spent hours painting it with perfect strawberry red curlicues and trim. These aren’t the outfits she’d had in mind. This isn’t what she’d planned for me. This isn’t even what I had planned for me…fuck, I’m going to be late for work.
Fleshtoned tights first, then black fishnet pantyhose, followed by a shiny red Lycra halter body suit. Tight, it hugs my body and keeps my breasts skyward. Platform high heeled sandals. I look like Supergirl on the stroll. I wish I felt that powerful. I throw on a wraparound cotton skirt, grab my dance bag: makeup, there’s enough change from the bottom of my purse for subway fare, brushes, combs, date book, phone book, pens, a knife, keys, sunglasses, contact lens solution, toothbrush, deodorant, everything I need to leave the house for an indeterminate period of time.
I grab my stuff, close the door quietly after me & head uptown. On the way to the subway, I stop at a payphone. “Mom? Mommy? It’s me….”
This entry was written by , posted on August 30, 2009 at 10:54 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, East Village, Guys & Dolls, love. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Arms fly from every direction. Someone is screaming. Someone is growling, barking. A rabid animal. My brain shuts down, the floor drops away, time freezes.
There is only Wolf, who has lost his mind, running at me, throwing punches. There are only fists and anger. And me. Crouched in a corner on the metal cot that is was Nada’s bed. I don’t remember jumping up here. Where the fuck is Nada? He wouldn’t be like this if there were witnesses. He’d be sweet, he’d be singing if she was here.
I was an idiot to throw her out.
Nada Tokay, if you can hear me, I fucked up.
I fucked up.
I really fucked up.
He towers over me, one hand holding the Holy Bible, the other a fist. Frantic twists of red hair crawl out from beneath the beret, sweatpaste themselves to his face. In the eye I can see, the one without the patch? No one is there.
“The Devil’s got your soul. I will save you,” he proclaims. I can’t take my eyes off the Bible, sweet Jesus, here it comes, he swings it at me like a bat. Whack.
Direct hit. Right side. Cheekbone, eye, ear.
“What the fuck? Wolf? What the fuck are you doing?” Whack.
Direct hit. Same side.
Sirens scream in my right ear, so loud I can’t hear him on that side anymore. I watch his lips move, afraid to expose the other side, the other ear.
“I’ll save your soul,” he whispers close to my face. “Satan’s in you, you whore. I can cast him out. I can make you free.” Louder now, he stands erect again, it’s building, “I am your Savior, I am your Redemption.”
There’s a crash of cymbals.
He swings again.
This time I dodge.
He’s quicker most of the time, most of his punches will find their mark, but twice he misses & ends up punching the wall behind me. It’s brick, his knuckles are bruised, bleeding. He doesn’t feel it. We’re way past drunk, we’re in the neighborhood of insane now.
Think. Think dammit.
Whack.
I curl into a ball, protecting my soft and tenders.
Wolf hits me with the Bible, again. And again. And again.
He tells me he loves me, again. And again. And again.
He says he’ll free me from Satan even if he has to kill me to do it.
That’s how much he loves me is, he says.
If he doesn’t kill me, I’ll cut his throat while he sleeps, I think to myself.
“Devil money” he mumbles pulling out handfuls of tens & twenties from my bag. He marches to the bathroom with all the money I have, all we have in the world, and flushes four hundred dollars down the toilet. Two months rent.
I don’t feel anything.
That’s not true, I hate him. But I’m past pain and fear.
There are only his fists, that Bible and me.
There’s only me and my need to survive long enough to kill him.
“These belong to the Devil, too.” Wolf picks up my grandmother’s kitchen shears, the ones I use for cutting through chicken bones, & holds it up to my credit cards.
I can make more money.
My bruises will heal.
Keep your fucking hands off my plastic.
I throw myself at him, grabbing at the credit cards & the chicken shears.
He said he loved me enough to kill me.
He said he loved me.
This entry was written by , posted on August 27, 2009 at 12:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, dirty money, East Village, Guys & Dolls, love. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
He says I look like a whore when I work and he doesn’t want whores in his house. Sometimes, when I get home, he’s on the stoop with that wet wash rag, waiting. He grabs me by the hair & scrubs until all of the makeup is gone. Or until I start to cry.
So I don’t complain when he’s so drunk he forgets to come home. Those are the nights I secretly eat real hamburgers and brush my teeth, brush my teeth, brush my teeth so he won’t smell the meat on me. “We” don’t eat meat.
If he’s not drunk & I’m not wearing makeup, he still sings & tells me I’m beautiful. I’m not, but he says I am.
I hate the wash cloths. I hate tofu.
I hate being alone more.
It’s been almost two months since we exchanged rings–in the rain, under the arch, tripping–I should’ve known better. If life was a horror movie, that would’ve been the scene when the audience starts screaming at the stupid white girl “No! Don’t go in there!” and then laughs when she does, cause they know. They know, cause they can hear the scary/monster/slasher music that she can’t hear.
I come home from work, relieved not to see him on the stoop, I open the door.
He’s asleep on the blue shag rug in the living room, drunk. Dead drunk — out cold, in a long red monk’s robe & a blue beret — no pants, no underwear, no shoes, and a black eye patch. My head hurts trying to make it make sense.
My head hurts,
things don’t make sense.
I want to runaway, trip out, destroy something.
I have to be careful
not to destroy
myself.
I drop my work bag. It’s stuffed full with leotards, high heels, makeup, hairspray, money, tampons.Tampons…I can’t remember the last time I had my period. I think I’m pregnant, but I haven’t said a word to anyone.
I just want to be a good wife, to get him off the floor, put him to bed. I bend down, roll him over. He’s holding a Bible, like you see in hotel rooms. I didn’t know we had one. I didn’t know he could read.
I’m still looking at the Bible when Red Wolf explodes.
This entry was written by , posted on August 24, 2009 at 7:02 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, East Village, lonliness, love, whores. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
There are some decisions I’ve made, actions that’ve changed the arc of my life entirely. At the time they seem like just so much nothing. I threw Nada out of the apartment in the middle of the night. It wasn’t even a blip on my radar.
We fit like puzzle pieces when we make love. I feel loved, finally, when we make love. Afterwards, when he’s fallen asleep, I sneak out of the loft bed and go sleep on the couch.
I can’t sleep in the same bed with my husband.
My husband. Red Wolf. We exchanged rings a month ago. Turquoise, coral & nickle, a American Indian design, of course. They were two for five dollars. I paid for them, also of course.
He doesn’t have a job, my husband, Red Wolf. American Indian, by way of Puerto Rico, by way of Williamsburg, via Washington Square Park. There might’ve been one once or maybe we’d just talked about money before he moved in, I could’ve sworn someone mentioned it, but even though there isn’t one now, he does his best to help furnish my our little apartment on East 7th Street. It needs all the help it can get. He hung the bamboo shades we I bought at Azuma. He’s brought home a blue shag area rug for the living room, stereo speakers, a shelving unit and a small TV. I’m not sure where any of it came from. I mean, none of it is new…
I do have a job. The summer’s over, film school was, well, just more school and so I’m working again. Guys & Dolls is no where near the glamfest that Robbie’s Mardi Gras was. Instead of glitter & sequins, everything is red. The rug, the circular stage, the walls. It’s like being inside a giant menstruating vagina, if that vagina had a bar & non-stop porn on screens everywhere you look. The manager, Rocco, is a slicker, meaner carbon copy of Ralph.
Wolf hates me working in topless bars, he just doesn’t hate it enough to get an actual job himself. He hates that I wear so much makeup to work. He scrubs my face with a washcloth when I get home. I don’t need gilding, he says to me in Spanish. He knows I don’t speak Spanish.
Dame una cerveza. ¿Tienes menudo?
Gimme a beer. Spare change?
That’s the extent of my Spanish.
He talks to me a lot in Spanish. I mostly nod and smile.
If he catches me in public wearing makeup, at the park, he dunks my head in the fountain and smears it all off with his hands. I don’t meet him in the park anymore after work.
He was probably lying when he told me about him and Nada, that she fucked him while I was at work. Fucking Polack bitch.
Nada hooked up with Red’s brother, Brown Wolf, so he moved in with us too. And the kids from the park, every night, a different mass of runaway bodies sleeping on the living room floor. It was just too many people for one apartment.
I know she didn’t fuck him. Now, that a few days have passed, I know it. I feel bad I threw them all out in the middle of the night, bad about all the screaming too. Nada, Brown Wolf, all those kids. But it was too much. Too many people…and I was so tired. Working at the bar, trying to earn money and take care of a home. Trying to be someone’s wife. I don’t know anything about being a wife. With all those people in the apartment, I was stuck in the same bed with him after we had sex.
I can’t sleep with someone in the bed. Not even Wolf.
I’m just so damned tired.
And now, it’s just the two of us.
Me. And my crazy husband.
That’s what he wanted all along.
We fit like puzzle pieces.
Afterwards, I sleep alone on the couch.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but it’s not very useful.
Nada Tokay, if you can hear me, I fucked up. I really fucked up.
This entry was written by , posted on August 16, 2009 at 10:10 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, East Village, Guys & Dolls, lonliness, love. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I found a place, a home of my almost own. I’m sharing it with Nada–she’s willing to sleep in the living room, which is great, cause I’m not. I paid $500 under the table for the rent stabilized lease–we’ll split the rent, $175 a month. It’s a dump, but it’s my dump. It’ll do for now.
I’d found a beautiful place on Avenue D with wood floors & skylights. Hamid wanted to split it with me, but seriously, how the hell do you get to Avenue D? 
No cabbie’ll go past First Avenue. Except for that one block, everything east of Avenue A is a fucking war zone.
Hamid had in his head if we lived together we’d actually be living together and wind up married. Uh, no. Tech is mostly foreign men, all claiming to be exiled princes. Hamid is a Persian prince–I’m not sure Persia even exists anymore, but for sure it’s not a place for chubby Jewish girls to call home.
So I took the place on 7th & 2nd, with the radiator sunk half in the floor, the bars on the windows, the holes in the walls, the cockroaches inside and lots of small shriveled babushka wearing Ukrainian women outside, sweeping the stoops. There’s a small bookstore to the right and a little market to the left. The West Village is all touristy, but there’s no reason to be in the East Village unless you live here. Ukranians. Junkies. And me. It’s quiet, cheap, and walking distance from NYU.
I made it through NCC by the skin of my teeth, transferred to New York Tech, and now, NYU. I had to get off Long Island. I lasted one semester at NYT, what with all the princes running around, knocking on my door, demanding that I cook them dinner. Hullo? Are you out of your royal fucking mind? Cook? I’ve eaten the same meal every single day for an entire semester. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Two slices of Kraft processed American cheese evenly divided onto three Stoned Wheat Thin crackers and a glass of iced tea for a total of nine crackers & six slices of cheese a day. No more. No less. Seriously. I fortify myself with Kahlua & Vodka, sure, but as far as food goes, it’s all you’ll find in my little refrigerator in my little room at the Henry Hudson Hotel. The Henry Hudson (353 W. 57th Street) passes as a dorm for Tech. It’s really just a cheap residential hotel whose current claims to fame are Channel 13 and Nipsey Russell wandering the hallways bothering girls so young they giggle hysterically when he hits on them.
I’d really spread myself too thin there, it was time to go, man, go. Like a pressure cooker with the top nailed down, it was ready to explode. I’d put too much into the mix: My boyfriend, Rey from the Bronx. My other boyfriend, Hamid, the Persian prince. Bobby Lee, someone else’s boyfriend entirely. Maurice, who won’t come when we fuck–he doesn’t want to waste his seed on me & his brother Michael who has no problem with that at all. Milan, a Romanian gardener & Charles Bronson’s body double, barely speaks any English. George the Greek, another “prince”. Duke, (prince-lite) the box boy from the shoe store. My professor, Abe–I got an A, ’nuff said. Hamlet, and finally, his cousin Tulio who likes to sleep in my bathtub.
It’s a wonder I got to any classes.
dirtygirl wonders...
If anyone has ever really manged to outrun themselves. Is it always “where-ever I go, there I am”…? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on August 11, 2009 at 12:02 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, dirty boys, East Village. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
