Chapter 25: A Solitary Profession

Not long after I relapsed and had steady work again and was back on my own, and living in a house in Kensington. I had bought a cheap twin mattress and put it on the floor in the corner. The place had ants so I bought ant-killer and sprayed the floor around my bed—that is, when I was lucid enough to notice them approaching.

I was estranged from my family but one day I was talking to my mother on my cell phone. I don’t know how she found me—unless I had called her, maybe out of a sense of obligation? As I sat on my mattress, I watched the stampede of ants stop and struggle in the pools of poison spray around it, and my mother started to tear into me. To this day I don’t know why she went off on me; at the word “asshole” I promptly pulled the phone away from my ear, holding it in the air. Every once in a while I put it back up to my ear for a second or 2, muttered an ”uh huh” or “sure”, and pulled it away again. To this day I don’t understand how I could be an “asshole”; what could I have possibly done wrong, when I wasn’t even around? When I gathered that she was done with her rant, I politely bade her goodbye and hung up, and took another swig from my 40-ounce of Bud.

I lived there for a few months before the landlord, a wispy-haired old guy who wore his shoes on the wrong feet, kindly urged me to move out. Maybe it was because I clogged up the toilet with my purges, or maybe it was because I seduced the other residents – either way, I was grateful that he didn’t give me a reason, and when he asked me to leave I just nodded agreeably and said I would leave as soon as I could.

My rolodex of clients was starting to dwindle. By the time I got a room in Sunset Park I had lost contact with everyone I had met through Carlos’s network, and I was always looking to rebuild my client base. In a chance encounter somewhere close to the Greenpoint-LIC border, I picked up a fat Hasidic man. It wasn’t that hard – they solicited young White girls on the street in Brooklyn all the time. I never took the bait, though; anyway I initiated most of my relationships. He was resistant at first – I imagined this sort of thing didn’t happen to him very often, or probably ever – but I managed to solidify the deal.

I was not a fan of Hasidic men or their community or beliefs or practices, so with him I didn’t try too hard to make a connection. I was sweet, of course, but mostly persistent that we get down to business, figuring that I didn’t need to grease the wheels too much. For some reason he resisted this, too. Finally he bought into it and we got a room in some crummy Queens motel, and he told me what he wanted from me, in a mumble.

“I want you to piss on me.”

I didn’t catch it at first but when I did, I paused. This wasn’t in my wheelhouse but I needed the cash so I could renew my ever-dwindling supply. Besides, my dealer network had fizzled since I had gotten sober and I needed more contacts.

“Sure, whatever you wanna do!”, I shrugged.

He took off his clothes and laid down on his back at the foot of the bed. His big, hairy belly didn’t flatten but retained its round shape. I swung one leg over it and then squatted and peed. He moaned a little as I relieved myself. He laid there for a minute as the rivulets of piss came down over the side of his belly and soaked into the floor.

I really wanted to move things along.

“Do you want to fuck me now?”

His response was less than enthusiastic but I was persistent. I wanted to get it over with before the last of what I had completely wore off; as it was, I was already feeling tired and bored and disinterested. I really needed to get more shit so I could get right again.

At first, he was flaccid so I put my mouth on it until he got hard. He put it in for a few minutes, but he didn’t come, nor did he seem to care whether he did or didn’t.

When I got up, I stepped in the puddle of pee that had soaked into the rug. For a moment I considered trying to clean it up, but then reasoned that they probably knew what we were doing there, anyway, so what difference did it make if we left evidence behind?

Even back then I used to hang out with my dealers—except back then it was mostly business, a friendly quid pro quo. There was this one older Black guy I used to hang out with pretty regularly; when had cash I met him outside Junior’s in Downtown Brooklyn before I went into work, and when I didn’t, he’d come over to my place or we’d get a cheap room when I got off around 12 am. He was affable and pretty chill, and liked to imbibe—in coke and other things, especially things you could smoke.

The coke homeboy brought me was especially effective and a fairly “clean” high, and it made me super-focused, and I always needed something to focus on, so I stated doing crossword puzzles, and that became our thing. We’d snort a fat pile each when we got there, and he’d whip out the crossword puzzle he had brought me and I’d get chatty and start thinking out loud. Of course, by like the second time I knew how to keep him happy and off my back while I did with my puzzle, and would playfully rip off my clothes after the first bump, toss them across the room, and jump onto the bed, naked, crossword puzzle in hand. I’d sit on my heels and arch my back, and play it kittenish as I probed him for answers, painfully focused on my puzzle, blessedly not-so-painfully self-conscious for once. And he’d sit in a chair at the foot of the bed and just watch me, and take swigs from a quart bottle and tokes off whatever-the-hell he was smoking.

I’d do this for like an hour or so, before I remembered why we were there—and that coke doesn’t last forever.

“Hey buddy, you wanna come over here and fuck me?” I’d coo at him.

He was never in a rush to leave the chair, and it usually took some urging to get him to join me on the bed. And sometimes it didn’t work, or his dick didn’t work; and the sex, when it happened, was nothing memorable—because I don’t remember any of it, except that it didn’t last long and he never fucked me to completion.

I never asked him what he was smoking; I worried it would ruin the mood. Every other drug out there besides coke, even weed, freaked me the fuck out. I didn’t want any of it in my house, so that’s why I never asked.

I was drunk and high as a kite one night at my place, happily trying to get even one answer to my crossword puzzle, and I kept talking to him and asking him for help, trying to bounce ideas off him like I usually did, when I finally realized that he hadn’t said anything in like 15 minutes. I tried to get his attention but he was unresponsive; and when I went over to him snap him out of his haze, his head fell forward and down toward his lap, and just hung there.

I shook him and tried to bring him back, but to no avail, so I stopped and sat back on my heels, and my mind started to race. I sat frozen for the better part of a minute or so, then slid off the bed and started to put on my clothes.

I wasn’t familiar with the protocol for something like this, but surely I had seen it in the movies? I knew I had to at least get dressed—and then what was next, flushing the drugs?

I took several successive gulps of my beer and lit a cigarette—that’s what I did when I needed a time-out, to stop time and think.

I was about to flush everything that was out—would I even remember to search him, too?—when I strode back over to his prostrate body and tried shaking him again, cigarette in hand.

I’ll give it one more shot, then we flush this shit and call 911.

But he came to, very slowly transitioning from unconscious to basically conscious, and he pulled his head upright and sat up a little.

“Oh, sorry, I passed out for a minute,” he said in a fog.

“Are you OK dude? What the fuck? I thought you were fucking, just, gone! I almost called a fucking ambulance!”

He assured me he was fine, and that he should get going. I didn’t protest—especially since he left me with a respectable stash of coke to enjoy in peace, after he left.

I was a full-blown professional coke whore within a year or 2 after I met Carlos that time on my birthday. It was exhausting but I was relentless and remarkably resourceful. I wasn’t proud of the things I did—except I kind of was. Maybe I was ashamed of why I did it, that I had a fucking dependence on coke, and it’s not the kind of thing I would tell someone at my real job or an actual friend, if I even had any left by that point; but I was sure fucking proud of my natural networking skills and savvy in navigating the seedy underworld, especially when it came to the power of suggestion and striking up deals. I almost never got ripped off, except one time in Manhattan when I came to and I was dancing naked on a bar, while 4 or 5 guys clapped and hollered and sprayed me down with the club soda hose. I was a good negotiator generally, but less so when I was stripped down to nothing, my lopsided breasts exposed and hanging out, as I was standing on a bar before a small crowd of men who had promised me coke and money. I had already done a bunch of the stuff, or else I wouldn’t have been up there in the first place; and I thought the terms of our exchange had been laid out before my shirt even came off, but I was getting the feeling I was being strong-armed. As it turned out I wasn’t very good at asserting myself when I couldn’t find my clothes, or even remember taking them off. And my willingness to compromise increased proportionately as my little stash began to dwindle. All I wanted was to go home and do my coke in peace, and if I had nothing left by the time it was over then it was all for nothing.

The residue of club soda was starting to make me shiver.

How the fuck did I even get here?

These details were rendered moot by now, and whoever I had come here with was already long gone.

They got bored just as I started to crash, and I was ready to get mine and bolt.

“What are you talking about, we already gave you everything, that was the deal,” the leader of the douchebags said.

I tried to bargain with them without sounding desperate, but I had zero clout and I knew it so I gave up, found my clothes on the floor and put them on quickly. They were wet but I wanted to get out of there. The guys were talking among themselves as I stumbled my way out of the bar. God knows how I even found my way home.

And I had no coke left by then, nothing to lend any peace, any solace – so I grabbed a few Coors Light 22’s close to my apartment and nursed them until I passed out, silently consoling myself.

This is not my life, none of this is real.

I had just started working the night shift as a staff Medical Editor at a pharma ad agency by Grand Central. The salary was the same as where I had left off at the last place that gave me the ax; stupid me, I didn’t know I could’ve asked for like $10K more. Not that it would have made a difference—it still wouldn’t have been enough to support my habit. So I needed to moonlight.

Working at night left my days free. I typically woke up late, got a coffee and muffin from the Dunkin Donuts down the road, threw it up, put some makeup on, and set up shop at the only bar I knew in the neighborhood. It was a super-Irish place, and I became friendly with the bartender—not enough to get money or coke out of him, sadly—and learned that that was the bar where they had shot key scenes from The Departed. That was one of my favorite movies, so I thought that was the coolest thing ever, but the bar was dead in the daytime when I was there, and I never had any success picking someone up. Not that it stopped me from trying.

One time out of boredom and listlessness and probably loneliness I went there on a Saturday night. Any notion of making business contacts that night was quickly dispelled; the bar was crowded, but no one seemed to take notice of me. At least, not when I was looking.

Then a Johnny Cash song came up on the jukebox, and everyone in the place started belting out the lyrics along with music. I had just gotten into Johnny Cash and knew and loved the song, and I knew the lyrics, at the least the important ones, and sang along with the crowd.

I heard my voice among theirs, equally drunk but not even a little high, alas, and with no promise of scoring. But I was desperate for the camaraderie and sang with them, except when I looked around, I noticed that no one would look at me. It was a new low for me, utterly demoralizing in a way that was hard to ignore, even for me; and I pined for coke. With no hope of getting it, and feeling like a ghost among the living, I gave up and went home and drank beer in bed until my body gave out and I slipped into sleep.

This is part of a memoir-in-progress. Read the next chapter published on Vocal here.

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