michael

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.

Posted October 22, 2009 at 7:01 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, Bon Soir, drinking, drugs, family, Levittown, partners in crime. Bookmark this post. Follow any comments @ RSS feed for this post.