There was no one else I’d even thought to call. Boyfriends & girlfriends came and went, but we always had each other. Michael was the original BFF, my go-to guy since that first hit of acid we dropped together.
I was safe with him around. No matter how much I drank, he’d never leave without me. He was the one who took me to the Raven’s Nest, my first topless bar. If my mother knew, maybe she’d have cut my father some slack in the “whose fault is it she turned out to be such a fuck up” department. Michael shot pool while I dropped shot glasses full of bourbon into mugs of beer, downing them in one gulp. I hate bourbon, but the long-haul truckers who packed the Nest every night thought it was cute. By fifteen, as long as you were buying, I was drinking.
He was with me at the Bon Soir too, charming underage Puerto Rican girls while I was getting ready to turn my first trick. He knew everything there was to know about me. If anyone could understand how I wound up broken, bloody and covered in flea bites on the floor of a garage in the Lower East side, it was Michael.
I wrap my arms around him and cramps shoot painfully through my lower body. It’s the beginning of a miscarriage, but I don’t know that, not yet. For now, I hold on to Michael’s waist as the spasms roll through me and he kicks the Harley to life. “Drive slow,” I whisper, “please, just take it slow.”
I spend a few days with my parents, recuperating from the last seven.
Communications are on a need to know basis and I don’t think they need to know much. They know I’m away from Red Wolf - I let him take the blame for all my bruises. They don’t know about the topless bars, the pimps or Havasha. No ones day would be made better by sharing that information.
They take the cat back to live with them. Apparently, I’m not responsible enough to care for another living thing. Truth is, I’m barely able to care for myself. My body agrees and a bloody worm is flushed down the toilet—the last traces of my storybook marriage, Red Wolf’s almost baby.
I’m tired. So fucking tired.
My father used to say “If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, get a job in a restaurant,” which is pretty practical and it worked for a while. Lola gets me a gig with her at Mimi’s, an Italian restaurant with a piano bar, which keeps my belly full of lasagna. Lola keeps my tea cup full of Harvey’s Bristol Crème. I keep a used tea bag on the saucer & pretend no one can smell the sweet sherry on me. I sip at it non-stop and she refills it over & over.
But my bruises and flea bites heal. I forget that week and now what I remember is “If you don’t know where your next drink is coming from, get a job in a bar.”
Blink.
And just like that, I’m back to where nobody expects me to behave any better than I can. Where I don’t have hide my drinking in a tea-cup. I go back to where I belong. Home. Times Square.
And I still haven’t told you about my first trick, even though I meant to, that’s where this all was going. It’s just such a long story. And he was so very fat. So very, very fat.
This entry was written by , posted on October 22, 2009 at 7:01 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, Bon Soir, drinking, drugs, family, Levittown, partners in crime. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
What was I thinking?
I’d flunked out of Times Square. I didn’t want to go back to some job-job. I didn’t have a job-job to go back to, or any job-job skills. Since high school I’d been a short order cook, waitress, karate school receptionist, file clerk, bar bimbo. Quit, fired, fired, fired. Fired.
I was sixteen when I got out of school. I’d secretly turned 18 behind the bar at the Mardi Gras. I felt like I was a hundred years old. I felt like I’d been slagging around for years.
I had five years left before I got killed, give or take and I’d be an idiot to move out, I had a pretty easy life here. The answers were too scary so my parents didn’t ask the questions. Three hots & a cot, that’s what Snake used to say about prison, why he didn’t mind it. Three hots & a cot…and laundry.
Community colleges have to take you no matter what. I hadn’t bothered with SATs or Regents exams. School wasn’t part of my plan. I don’t like doing things I’m not already good at, which narrows the field considerably.
My plan had been easy money in the bars. I fucked that up. My plan had been some factory job & a cold water walk up. I’d lasted one day in a factory making little spools of copper wire from giant spools of copper wire. Eight hours of winding wire bobbins. Spin, clip, spin, clip, spin, clip. My fingers were so swollen by clock out I couldn’t fold my hand to hitchhike or dial a payphone to call for a ride. I sat on the curb and cried. I have no idea how I got home. So, add that to the list. Factory: quit.
September
The theatre department of Nassau Community College is directly across the street from the Garden City Bowl. I don’t bowl, but I like that things get knocked down and then set right again. I’m hoping I can make that a metaphor for my life. My average is 27 so I don’t put too much hope in a bowling metaphor. Maybe hoping for someone to run in and set me “right” is too much. It’ll be enough if I can just figure out how to stop standing in the way of the ball. Either way, the cocktail lounge it just through that door and I can cocktail with the best of them.
October
My first time on the small stage at NCC is somewhat less glamorous than my Mardi Gras debut. I’d made my own costume, a green and yellow strapless maxi-dress, a chiffon tube held up by an elastic band running around the top, just above my breasts, just under my armpits. I make my entrance, step on my own hem, the dress slides down to my waist and once again I’m on stage, topless, sans lights, sans mirrored ball, but still, topless. With an audience, of mostly our parents. No metaphor. Just destiny. And you cannot fight destiny.
November
“If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t let her hang out with you, either,” my mother says not for the first time.
We’re sitting at the kitchen table. My mother, my father, me, and Rachel. Rachel and I had gone to high school together without actually being friends, now we’re in school together, again. Levittown is just small enough that bad behavior doesn’t go unnoticed, even by parents you’ve never actually met. I was on the other side of that invisible, but very definite, line that separates them from us, “high spirited” from out of control, the good girls from the bad. Rachel made a crack over dinner about how her mother didn’t approve of me, how she was afraid I’d be a bad influence, afraid just knowing me could screw up Rachel’s future. Rachel was a good girl, the kind every mother hopes for.
“If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t let her hang out with you either,” my mother agreed as she cleared the dishes from the table. Rachel helped.
I’m stuck in Limbo, two exits south of Purgatory off the Long Island Expressway. Levittown. The best thing about been stuck in the suburbs is catching a train back into the city.
dirtygirl wonders…
How would your life change, if you knew when it was going to end? Or more to the point, how would you change your life if…? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on July 30, 2009 at 10:41 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1976, Levittown, 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.
I didn’t grow up in a house that said nigger. I knew people who did, of course. I grew up in Levittown where you can’t buy a house unless you promise never to sell to a non-white family. Seriously. Even so, in my a house we didn’t say things like kike, or spic or nigger.
“Jus’ give the niggers their drinks, take their money and walk. Ya spendin’ way too much time talkin’ to ‘em. I didn’t hire ya to talk to niggers.” Ralphie’s jowls vibrate as he yells at me, again.
The bosses were worried about their own pockets. Pimps don’t drop for the champagne hustle, they’ll sit on the same fancy drink for a whole shift. They don’t put money in the cash registers if they can help it. But I work for tips. The pimps were waving a lot of green at me, most days I go home with six times my shift pay in tips—that’s more in one day than I’d had in a week working a straight job. I wasn’t about to bite the hands that fed me, no matter what color.
“Well, Ralph, who you want I should talk to? I got no other customers. Switch me up. Put me on nights.”
“Then I got niggers at night. You know I ain’t putting you on nights. My ass is awready on a line causa you.” The Mardi Gras had a lot to lose. Days the risk wasn’t too bad, but there was like two, three, four times as much money at night. Putting a seventeen year old on a night shift was asking for trouble from the Vice Squad, from Public Morals, from the State Liquor Authority . I could lose their liquor license for them. No license, no money. I’d heard the speech every time I asked. Probably for the best.My family lie had me working the lunch shift at some restaurant. No one’d believe I was good enough to be offered a dinner crowd.
“Ralph, no one’s gonna tip me just for opening a bottle of beer and walking away. Who’my gonna talk to, huh? You?”
“I don’t pay you to talk to niggers.” He runs a thick hand through his hair, greying, slicked back and greasy, then across his mustache, also going grey. And now it’s greasy too.
“Well, who’re you paying to talk to ‘em, cause really, I’m perfect for it. C’mon Ralph. You barely fucking pay me at all. Fifteen bucks? C’mon. I get almost a hundred from them. I’m here to make money. Like everyone else. Do the math, Ralph. Do the fuck-ing math, seriously, what would you do?”
Ralphie stands, adjusting his pants and belt around his paunch, he stares down at me.
“Ya got a real smart mouth, kid. That don’t make ya real smart though. Ya like spendin’ so much time with these jungle bunny muthafuckas, spend ev’ry goddamn day ‘n night wit ‘em then. Getcha crap. Get outta here. Take ya nigger pimp witchoo.”
“So, no night shift?” I rush out the door, mouth still running. He’s this close to pulling his belt off and walloping me, I can see it in his eyes. I don’t know when to shut up,but I know when to duck.
JJ was a pimp, but he treated me with respect, unlike Ralph. He never cursed. He showed me how to survive in Times Square, how not to get eaten alive. I’d heard ugly stories, girls who were so far in they couldn’t find a way out. That wasn’t gonna happen to me.
“What’s happenin’ Little J?” he whispered. The music pounded me, louder than usual. JJ’s voice was like a hot knife through butter. He was the heat. He was the butter too.
Anger danced in my head, shattered my thoughts, sent them flying and crashing into the walls as I gathered my stuff from behind the bar. I bumped into Ralphie as he was closing out my register.
“I’m fired,” tossing my head at Ralphie, “for talkin’ to NNNIIIGGGERS,” loud enough for everyone to hear over the throbbing disco beat.
“Get da fuck outta here.” Ralphie shoved me roughly down the bar.
“Hey,” I turned, “my shift pay, Ralphie?” holding my hand out, smiling sweetly.
“You don’t work a full shift, you don’t get paid, that’s my math.” He smiled back at me and puffed his chest out.
“Fuck you Ralphie, I don’t need your stinkin fifteen dollars.”
We walked out of the darkness into the glaring afternoon sun on Broadway, both wearing our work clothes. JJ, quiet in his three piece bankers grey pin stripe suit and me, with smart mouth & my big ass bobbing along, in a leotard shiny and red as a fire truck, legs bare, a pair of heels and a very bad attitude. Times Square roared around us.
It was a long day. I was too tired to roar back.
dirtygirl wonders: Do you know when to shut up? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on July 23, 2009 at 8:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1976, dirty money, JJ Huntsberry, Levittown, pimps, Robbies Mardi Gras. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I’ve arrived. Robbie’s is the largest topless bar in New York City, maybe in the world. There are fifteen cash registers making a horseshoe around three stages. Bottles & bottles of glittering gem toned liquids, sequins, feathers, balloons, mirrors, streamers. Broadway, jammed with cars, taxis, police sirens, sidewalks overflowing, the world screams outside our door and Levittown is a million lifetimes away. Times Square is neon, flash and glitter, crowds and then more neon. As long as I don’t mind working in a skimpy leotard (I don’t), smile big (I do) and charge high prices for short drinks, I have a job where I make more cash money in one day than I did in a week at an office job. No taxes. No paperwork. No bullshit.
Okay, a little bullshit.
The other girls are mostly friendly, mostly glamorous. There’s one, older, maybe even thirty, with dyed jet black hair. She’s covered in tattoos and calls herself Raven. Everybody’s got at least two names. One for here and another for real life. Raven takes me under her wing and teaches me to mix drinks. Rye & Ginger. 7 & 7. Scotch & Soda. White men’s drinks, she says. The brothers, the pimps, they go for fancy drinks involving cocktail shakers and milk, like Grasshoppers. Milk drinks are a pain. You have to clean the shaker & change the rinse sink water each time. But pimps tip better. Raven tells me to start thinking what name I’m gonna use, that I can’t use my own. You use your own name, she says, anyone can find you.
Lisa used to be a Rockette. Her tits are famous. One was on the cover of High Times, covered in chocolate syrup, her nipple the cherry on top. She brought in a copy for everyone to see. Lisa does tricks, like dancing while standing on her head. She’s teaching me how to suck a long neck Budweiser off and make it come. Guys love that trick.
The guys are okay, mostly my father’s age. Mostly white. The brothers sit with me or Raven, the other girls don’t want them around. I don’t mind, they tip, they’re friendly. There’s one in particular.
His name is Jasus. J. Huntsberry.
JJ was there from day one with his sleepy gray eyes hiding behind gold wire rimmed glasses and that velvet voice you need to lean in to hear. He is the color of dusty pecans. Dark blue suits, tailored. Leather shoes, handmade. He’s a subtle suggestion, a gentle mood. JJ’s silence screams next to the flashy moves and garish peacock colors of other pimps. When he’s here, I feel cared for, looked after. Safe from the reaches of other pimps and street daddies looking to turn out the new fish.
I need a name, I take his. And so, here, I’m “little JJ”. Together we’re black JJ & white JJ. Big JJ & Little JJ. JJ the pimp & JJ the girl.
For now, everyone steers clear and leaves us alone.
dirtygirl wants to know: What makes you feel safe in the world, okay in your own skin? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on July 9, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, JJ Huntsberry, Levittown, pimps, 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.
I wasn’t a pretty girl. Growing up in Levittown, I was a cute kid, sure, but by the time I was in sixth grade it was over and I knew it. There’s a photo, a group shot of all of us kids just come back from caroling, crowded into someone’s mother’s kitchen having hot chocolate. All the other girls look like regular happy kids. Me, my hair is going in every different direction looking like I cut it myself, which I probably did. I’m wearing black octagon framed glasses and clenching my teeth, straining directly into the camera — all my teeth show and my gums. I look….maniacal, but it was what I thought a smile was supposed to look like. I had no idea how to be in my own skin. I was a chubby, wierd kid with no idea how to fit in, what it meant to be a girl, how to make other people like me. To top it off, I looked like a middle aged school teacher most of my life. At least that’s what I saw when I looked in the mirror.
Robbie’s Mardi Gras changed all of that. The first time I was pretty, it was behind the bar at Robbies.
I was seventeen years old and there was a line of middle aged men at my bar that wanted my attention. They saw me, not the chubby weird kid I saw, and they wanted me to see them.
The first time I was beautiful, really beautiful, I was on stage, in a borrowed g-string, a scratchy glittery piece of blue fabric held together by two strips of black sewing elastic with someone else’s pussy stains on the crotch. Probably more than one someone.
The women around me were gorgeous and glamourous. Cocktails were served in sparkling stem glasses. Everything glittered. The music was loud, there were mirrors everywhere and I was pretty. For the very first time.
I knew then, I was never going to leave.
dirtygirl wants to know:…about the first time you felt desirable. Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on July 6, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, Levittown, lonliness, 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 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.
onlythejodi