She strode down the stairs and into the bar, a flock of toady girls behind her–not a single one of them worth remembering. But Piper, well, Piper was a star. Picture Doris Day. Her sweet smile, her All-American good looks. Now, picture Doris drunk, but not a hair out of place, blood on her hands and a twelve-gauge shotgun held causally out of sight behind her poodle skirt, still smiling.
I’d had very few girlfriends growing up, but when I did we were the girls most likely to be separated by teachers, the girls your parents won’t let you hang out with, the ones mothers warned their sons about and fathers offered rides to. But, Piper scared me. She could squash me with a look if she noticed me
She was short and solid, with broad shoulders and a thick waist, corn fed like a gym teacher. She wore white leotards & pumps, gold jewlery and pulled her shining blonde hair into a flawless bouncing ponytail. Faint traces of coral lipstick stained the filter of the ever present Newport dangling from impeccably manicured fingers. You’d think she was Miss Missouri, Miss Bible Belt or even Miss Family Values. Next to Piper, I was a metaphorical third runner-up Miss New York Subway. Miss Subway Token Booth or Miss Vaguely Urine Smelling Subway Platform. You get the picture.
Piper’d come from that part of America west of the Hudson River where there were no Jews, and Klu Klux Klan rallies are an acceptable after-school activity. While I was smoking pot, drinking beers and making out with Donnie Cacamis under the bleachers in the suburbs of Long Island, Piper was riding in the back of Bubba’s pick-up, rolling through the black ghettos of St.Louis, blonde hair thrashing in the wind, shooting up cars, windows, and mailboxes.
That was before Times Square, where her blond hair, tough skin and razor charm would be put to better use.
Joey Two Shoes bought her her own club and then they’d partied it into the ground. She was that kind of girl you bought things for. Big things.
The fat man in her life got her a suite in the UN Plaza hotel paid for by donations from his “Feed the Hungry Children” fund. Other than him, Piper was the only “child” being fed. Her fat man scammed the fat of the land and Piper siphoned the fat off Ellsworth and into her own pocket.
And she was Myron’s special girl, they’d been together since the standing room only days of Winks and the Cookie Jar, when money rained down from the ceiling, enough to wipe your ass with, if that’s what rocked your boat. Or, that’s what they said.
I’d missed the Cookie Jar entirely, and stupidly stumbled out of Winks after half a shift and a single whiff of someone else’s cooch. Bottomless before the Alcohol and Beverage Commission (ABC) started making all the rules, the nightly take for a Winks barmaid in the late 70s was at least a grand. A few months working for Myron at the Butterfly and I learned that cooch smelled like money.
I was finally catching on. I’d found my Fagin and my Artful Dodger, but by now the ABC had thrown on a lot of rules about distance and coverage and no matter how you sliced it, the really wild days were gone. There’d be an occasional big fish, but now you had to work three days to pull in a grand instead of just one.
It was unlikely that we would ever get along, me and Piper. I was the kind of girl men locked in motel rooms, she was the kind of girl men bought hotels for. I was disheveled even in just my leotard and Piper’d never left the house with so much as lipstick on her teeth or a chipped nail.
She was beautiful. I was broken. The kind that extends all the way down to your soul, the kind that you know no one anywhere can ever fix, but you never stop trying to patch that soul-hole up with something or someone, cause things keep slipping out through the hole, sanity, boundaries, faster and faster, dignity, principles, memories, everything oozes out the hole, so you try and fill it with a frenzied mélange of cocaine, boys, vodka, more anything, money, hurry up now, more boys, bright lights, hurry, sex, drugs, anything to make me dizzy so I don’t mind the slippage, don’t notice what I’m losing, don’t know I’m losing anything.
Piper had that same broken.
I wanted to be her best friend. She was everything I wasn’t.
And she was everything I was.
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Posted December 3, 2009 at 1:08 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1980, Butterfly, partners in crime, Times Square. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.
