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.
The inside of a cab is a relatively small space for all this screaming, most of which is coming from me.
I drag this dance bag around with me everywhere I go, stuffed with anything I could possibly need in case I can’t go home for a day or two, which considering the week I’m having, is a smart move. Now, in addition to all the crap already in the bag, I’ve brought dozens and dozens of shiny black and brown roaches with me. Roaches waddle over my change purse, ski down my house keys.
I try to explain to Abu Ben Taxi Man, and to ask for help. All he hears are garbled sounds, convulsive breathing and screams of cockroach, cockroach, cockroach from a crazy girl spasmodically flinging a bag around the back of his cab
A couple walks by on their way home, they eyeball us for a moment without even slowing down.
“Lady, calm down, I have no bugs. You pay and then you get out. You give me six dollah and then you go away, go away and no cockroaches.” He talks to me in a soft voice, maybe a little afraid I’ll wreck his cab, stiff him or turn my hysteria on him.
I know that tone of voice. It’s the one you save for the crazy people, the one you use when you want to say “Okay, just put the gun down and back away…” Maybe he’s right and I’m crazy and this is a hallucination. Apparently. I’m the only one who sees the bugs. It happens. I know it happens, like with coke bugs. I haven’t done a that much coke in the last few days, but it could be.
I take a deep breath, in with the good, out with the bad. Okay. I’m good. Fine, just keep moving, like a shark, keep moving.
I reach into the bag to get the money. I have superior hallucinations, I think to myself, tactile as well as visual. Imaginary roaches crawl over my hand, through my fingers, up my sleeve. Calm, breathe, it’s a figment of your imagination, I tell myself. In with the good, breathe, out with the bad.
The cab speeds off down the block before I can finish closing the car door.
Standing on West 27th Street I yell up to Lola’s window, explaining that there are two distinct possibilities here. I’ve either lost my mind, which is entirely believable, or I’ve brought with me a bag full of cockroaches and maybe I shouldn’t come into the house just yet, maybe she should come take a look first.
Lola cocks her head and puts on a sad face that says she knew that eventually I would to lose my mind. Reluctantly, she comes out in her pajamas and slippers, with Chester the Dog to inspect my bag. They’re the bag inspectors.
I hold it open in front of me for them to see.
Lola leans over, peeks, yelps like a Pekinese, looks up at me and jumps back, still yelping.
She startled me and I start yelping and jumping along with her, dropping the bag. Roaches flood out of the bag and scatter everywhere. We dance and scream and jump around them, on them, yelp and jump off of them. Screaming, laughing and crying so hard I pee myself, just a little. We hold on to each other to keep from falling. Drowsy faces appear in the windows, watching two crazy girls and a dog screaming, laughing and jumping for no apparent reason. It’s still too dark for anyone else to see the bugs.
Chester the Dog, jumping along with us and licking up mouths full of live roaches acts as if I’ve brought a bag of fun treats just for him.
I’m grateful for Chester’s help, but really, she needs to feed that dog more often.
This entry was written by , posted on October 1, 2009 at 3:43 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, Chelsea, roaches, the abyss. 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.
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