It’s 2 AM in the East Village and I’ve been staring into this coke-dusty mirror trying to get last night’s eyeliner and tonight’s eyeliner to meld and marry but it isn’t working and there are at least three stray cats mewling in the courtyard. I’ve got nothing to feed them but the crusted-up tin foil I’ve been smoking dust on. I crunch down on three amphetamine pills, which I like very much, and frown at my own reflection.
[*Reductress would like to indicate here that we frowned, too, when we read that sentence about the recreational drug use, and felt concern.]
I’m on my way to cover a party at C.H.U.D, a newish afterhours located a half-floor below an abortion clinic (same entrance) on Rutgers Street where I was supposed to meet my friend Kvaaar there two hours ago. I’m smoking these disgusting Ultra Lights that some 21-year-old coke scavenger fucking left in my apartment, and gross as they are, it seems foolhardy to waste them. I crunch down on the third Dexadrine in as many minutes and keep slapping my feet onto the sidewalk.
I nip into a deli for proper cigarettes and a juice. I haven’t slept in thirteen days, but I’ve been drinking the good juice-press juice, the expensive kind, and I think it’s making up for whatever restorative shit my body’s supposed to be doing while my eyes are closed or whatever. On my way out of the deli I see my very close friends Verb and U-Mark on their way to tag some building in Williamsburg (gross) and who I can tell on-sight are carrying Percocet, Endocet, Adderall and Demerol, respectively, exactly 34 pills between them. It’s just something I can sense.
Verb looks at me under the deli awning lights in my filthy white jeans and my $700 Obesity & Speed tank top with “Poor Person” written across it. It’s sheer and stained with tequila and blood and an old Boku that I unearthed in a box of old records in my dear friend Colossus’s basement. I stole the top from the beauty closet of a magazine (I can’t remember which) where a friend of mine works, and where once, after freebasing in a nearby Blimpie’s, I fucked all four guys in the art department, including the gay one, who wound up being an illegal immigrant which in hindsight kind of made me sick.
As my close friends look at me, I realize I’ve forgotten to put on a bra. Again. Verb shakes his head before folding me into a nicotine-scented hug. There is a tiny bit of loose cocaine lodged in the fold of his shearling coat and I do a quick bump before pulling back and looking at him in the face. Boys are tall.
On the corner we decide to snort some H, so I pull some baggies out of my Celine purse and begin to cut sloppy lines with a nail spa loyalty card on my phone screen. I shake my hair out of my face; it smells of a mix of Kerastase, ocean water I saved from a summer party in Montauk, and an electrical fire. I lean over and all of a sudden, just like that, I’ve done all the lines by myself. I look up, surprised, but Verb and U-Mark are already halfway down the block. “Bye” I call out. They do not reply (probably the benzos). I head down toward Bowery, but my legs wobble and then shake and so I lean on this old pay phone booth for a little bit of support, but they’ve ripped the phone out because who uses pay phone booths anymore, and I realize I don’t know what to call it now and tears start to prick at the back of my eyes.
[*Reductress would like to indicate here, again, that we are experiencing feelings of concern, and are considering options for the author.]
I look at my iPhone, winking bright in its leather Smythson of Bond Street case. Fuck. Seventy-four missed texts from Kvaar. Fuck. Where are you? Where are you? Why aren’t you here? Why isn’t the answer to ‘where are you?’ ‘Here’?
It’s 4 am. I pop two Mollys. Suddenly I am extremely thirsty. I stub out my cigarette and wander into a bar for a quick half bottle of champagne which I down standing up, while middle-aged men stare lustily at my bloody knees, which are bloody because I collapsed outside a moment ago, which I forgot to mention.
[*Also we are happy to assist the author in looking into low-premium health insurance coverage.]
Out on the street again, I fish around in my Celine purse for the flat pink disks of Adderall and send two of them into my mouth, pop, pop, like tiny pink flying saucers. Flying saucers with tiny brain changing aliens aboard them, thank god. Aliens. I’m beyond sick of having sex with guys who have zero curiosity about cults, like this one guy at The Den last month who, I can’t even tell you, had never even heard of est. “Is that a band?” he’d asked.
He was uncircumcised.
Somehow it has become 6:40 in the morning, and I realize that I’m in a McDonald’s in Battery Park City. I scramble with my 2% battery to call an Uber—no yellow cabs after dawn or before dark—to take me to Balthazar to order a steak and eggs and the raw bar seafood tower. The restaurant won’t be open for hours, so I pop four Lunesta and two Xanax so I can nap on the benches outside and be fresh and vital when breakfast service starts.
Later, I will order and face-plant into both dishes, but eat or pay for neither and after that I will need to be carried home by my good friend Marcusio whose wife won’t let me in their house anymore because she’s old and jealous, but for the moment I am here, in this McDonald’s, my brain spun like an outdated telephone cord at an anxious typist’s desk, all alone but for a teenage girl crying softly behind the counter, and two old homeless men curled like soft creamy newborns on the Playplace floor.
