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.
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.
Life might’ve been different if Frankie hadn’t killed himself, if Cowboy hadn’t left town, if I hadn’t gotten fired. I’d have a ham sammich if I had some ham, if I had some bread.
But Frankie died and I don’t think it took three days before we started calling him Dead Frankie. So, I woulda been Mrs. Dead Frankie if we’d managed to get it together before he managed to fall apart.
The police called me in the office to tell Frankie was dead. That’s not the kind of thing you should be telling a person over the phone, ‘hey girlie, your fiancee killed himself so you better start making other plans’. Really, that’s the kind of thing you should tell a person face to face. I said, when you tell his moms, tell her to her face. Then I ripped the phone outta the wall and threw it across the room.
The ripping the phone out of the wall, the howling and flipping over of furniture - they can say that’s why they fired me, but really, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was time. I wasn’t cut out to be a file clerk.
Cowboy was my best friend, my back door man, which was all he could be. He’s out of commission with the Clap most of the time. I guess it all got to be too much for him, the funeral, the Clap, the whole downtown hustler thing. We went up to Port Authority and I put him on a bus back to wherever it was he called home.
Suddenly, I am unemployed and extraordinarily single having gone from a boyfriend and a fiancee to nothing. The ad in the back of the Village Voice said “BARMAID - NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY”. I have that, no experience, and plenty of it.
I’d had dreams of being a criminal lawyer, not a $90 a week file clerk. That’s what the law firm was paying me before they fired me. That was before taxes. My first day behind the bar at Robbies Mardi Gras I made $85 in cash. No taxes. No paperwork. No experience necessary.
Yeah. That’ll work. I’m not going anywhere for a while….
dirtygirl wonders:
Can men and women be friends if they’re attracted to each other? Can you be “just friends” with someone you’re having sex with?
Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on July 2, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, death, dirty boys, dirty money, hustlers, love, Robbies Mardi Gras, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Everyone turned up & tricked out for the funeral. Cindy and her man BamBam from the Bronx Savage Lords, Geronimo, Candy, Cowboy, Sharon, Fat Phyllis, Terry the Moose and all the pretty boys. It was the first time I’d seen any of them in the daylight. There’s something to be said for the kindness of moonlight and mirrored balls. I’m sure they were thinking the same about me.
One of Candy’s johns, a little Truman Capote looking thing, drove us out to the funeral home. Frankie’s mother and sisters introduced me to two or three other people who were also engaged to him, and another couple he’d already married. I met the jealous ex-girlfriend who was always banging on the apartment door because, she said, it was her apartment and she wasn’t his ex-anything. We’d shared the same lover and the same vaginal infection. Both were over for us now. She introduced me to more people who were engaged to him and others he’d married, some he only lived with. Half of them were younger women, the men were mostly older.
Standing graveside as they lowered the coffin into what would remain an unmarked grave, an aging blonde drag queen named Sunshine in a tasteful black lace dress & veil handed me a plain white envelope and offered me a ride home. She drove a big convertible with soft white leather seats, and a blazing cherry red paint job that matched her lipstick exactly.
I crawled into the back seat, tucked myself into a corner. Horse Faced Linda climbed in next to me and started to cry. Linda was neither engaged nor married to Dead Frankie, but had the dubious horror of being the woman whose bed he chose to kill himself in. She was the only one there I hated & I was the only one she spoke to. She wept and babbled into my ear the entire drive home.
I caught the blonde’s eye in the rear view mirror. Her veil lifted, the wind sent her Nice n’ Easy Honey hair flying around her head, catching in the fine stubble on her chin. She watched as I opened the envelope. I thumbed through the nude Polaroids inside. Two front view and one rear view. With matching wallet sized copies. They’re the only pictures I’ve ever had of Frankie. She smiled into the mirror, lipstick smears on her crooked teeth. I leaned back, opened a small vial of butyl nitrate, amyl’s cheap & easy sister, and watched the sun pulse as it slid out of view. The sounds of the road, of blood rushing through my veins, through my head, to my heart, drowned out Linda’s equine weeping next to me. The wind caught the tangles of my hair now, and beat me into oblivion as I inhaled a little more of the butyl.
He’d been about to turn twenty. I was seventeen. Overwhelmed by lonely, with fears and shames we couldn’t name–we hunted for somewhere safe, dark and distant.
It was a good day to die.
Todays question for my readers: What do you do in your life today to ease stress, how do you deal with sadness or loneliness? Do you have someone to talk to, do you meditate, go running, drink till oblivion? How do you handle that?
This entry was written by , posted on June 25, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, death, dirty boys, hustlers, johns, love, The Chalice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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