You know something? No one can describe it as well as you…it’s so dead-on accurate. The way we seasoned club girls used to think about someone new and fresh and innocent and clueless in the night-world we inhabited. How it destroyed them. This story reminds me of someone I worked with in the downtown rock clubs.

There was a beautiful girl named Eve fresh from New Mexico who came to work there as a cocktail waitress with us. All the guys couldn’t take their eyes off her. I remember all us girls saying the same thing about her that you girls did about Lele. What the hell is a girl like this doing in a place like this? We’d never met someone as pretty and naive and sweet and affectionate and innocent and childlike-giggly. You wanted to protect her but at the same time, you thought, she came here of her own volition. We used to tease her about being Rebecca from Sunnybrook Farm and she laughed too. She got me home once. I don’t know from where or how, but all I know is when I became aware, I was vomiting into my toilet, and she stayed with me to make sure I was okay, always maternal, very much the caretaker. She didn’t do any drugs yet, nor did she drink much. But then came the downslide. And a year later no one saw her again. By then she’d left and became a hooker to support her dope habit. As opposed to Lele, she did lose her looks within that one year…

Very moving story, and so was your reading of it, poignant, uncomfortably funny, real….