Chapter 27: Rite of Passage

I was using the delivery service I knew from my Greenpoint days and was getting coke any time I could scrape together at least 17 or 18 dollars, which was the minimum, I discovered, that these guys would accept for a 20 bag. But I was exhausted from having to earn that 17 dollars, and all the networking and phone calls and texts and follow-ups.

I was still living in disgust when our agency launched an interactive division and I stumbled upon an opportunity to step up and become the agency’s point-person Editor for digital work. I didn’t even notice this guy who worked there named James until they put him in charge of the Interactive division.

He was decrepit-looking, exquisitely slight of build and pinch-faced with rotting teeth and sunken eyes, but he bought me dinner and paid attention to me and said I was fun, and I knew that I would end up fucking him, sure as the tide rolls in. He didn’t know I did coke.

“Stick with me, we’re headed for the top.”

Within a year James would be jobless and living in New Jersey, but at the time he was bursting with the optimism of newfound power and I was, too, at having assumed an unofficial leadership role among the night editor staff, given my knack for digital work, and I believed him when he said that. If it weren’t for my rapacious habit, my career would have been number one – in my mind, it still was, or at least it was tied for number one, and I was giddy at the prospect of taking it to the next level.

James and I spent a lot of time together at work, often in the wee hours. We were getting closer, and sex was imminent, so one day when he was visiting me in the office that was basically mine because the 9-5 editor went home when I rolled in for the night shift, I braced him for something important that I said I had to tell him.

He must have read my face, and knew that it was something bad.

“What, what—you have AIDS. Right?”

“No, no, I don’t have that one. I have… herpes….” I looked down and hunched over sheepishly. I had never told anyone before.

He stared into my eyes and assured me he wasn’t fazed.

“I’m a diehard. I’m not going anywhere.”

I wasn’t as relieved as I had imagined I would be.

Then one time I was waiting for him outside of work, and sought shelter in a nook by the side doors, where stood some tall, lanky, hipster-looking young guy. I was bored and probably in a good mood—I thought things were going well—and I struck up a conversation. We smoked and talked shop for a few minutes, then James came walking up the sidewalk. He didn’t come over to us but walked over to a bench facing the street and sat down. I said bye to the hipster guy and walked over to James.

“Hey, what’s goin’ on!” I greeted him as I sat down on the bench, sidling up to him.

But he was angry, demanded to know who the fuck that was and why I was talking to him. I was completely caught off guard.

“I don’t know, I think he works here. He was here when I came down… Why?”

James’ aggressive demeanor outweighed his diminutive stature, and I was alarmed and confused. He was adamant that I had done something wrong.

“If you talk to a guy for more than 5 minutes, it means sex.”

He was aggravated and I tried to appease him.

“OK, OK, I’m sorry. Dude, relax. OK? I didn’t know.”

James and I hooked up 2 or 3 times at his place not far from work. He bragged about his apartment by work in prime Midtown but it was essentially just a studio, and had been furnished without character—except for some evidence of a woman’s touch. As it turned out, his “ex” was actually not an ex, she was just out of town.

I didn’t really care too much because that’s when I met Dante.

Dante was one of James’ programmers, and he was handsome and paid attention to me and quickly became the object of my affection and lust. Years later, Dante still insisted there was an overlap between him and James, but in truth I forgot James existed the moment Dante gave me the time of day.

Dante was on regular business hours but interactive was exploding so he was around at night, and we were fast friends. One night he waited for me and we went to a nearby bar to join some of the interactive and second-shift people from work.

Everyone sat together at one of the picnic tables in the backyard, but Dante and I sat at our own. He knew I liked to party but had only the intimation of its being a problem. We had gotten really close already, were drinking and passing a baggie back and forth between trips to the bathroom, and I found myself incapable of resisting the urge to confide in him.

I told him everything. That I was trapped in a Green Card marriage, that I was turning tricks, that I had an eating disorder, that I had the herp.

He was more than just unfazed, he was compassionate in his response. It was such a relief, to be accepted like that, for all these horrible, immutable things that made me feel like I was eternally trapped, and like I was a piece of living, breathing garbage. I was overwhelmed with joy and feelings of affection for him, and he became my best friend in that instant.

And just like that, my life shifted to another plane.

At work, we spent a lot of time in the stairwell. He’d spring for the coke, I’d hold it and we’d do it together in there—that is, when I wasn’t doing it myself. We’d share passionate, desperate kisses against the cold cement wall. I had already established myself, through enthusiasm, dedication, and a cavalier attitude about working through the night (and through doing a lot of coke), as the point-person on the Editorial side for interactive work, and became known around the second-shift crew as “Dante’s Dannie”. They probably didn’t know everything, but they knew enough, and the intimacy of our rapport was palpable.

One day he stopped answering my emails. I had been high, at work, the night before, and was by myself, waiting for something to come back from Production so I could provide my sign-off and go home. I wrote to him a couple of times and was surprised I didn’t hear from him.

When I came in the next day around 5 pm he didn’t come by to say “hi”. I think I caught his eye one time from across the room, but he looked away. I was a little confused but I didn’t think anything of it.

When I saw him coming up the hallway, I stopped him to talk and check in. He was weird, almost seemed annoyed, and was carrying a strange tenseness. I didn’t want to talk in the hallway, so he stomped to the door that led out to the stairwell. He strode past me, walking with a heavy step and very purposely, and expected me to follow. So I did.

When we stepped into the stairwell and closed the door behind us, his face was contorted in some kind of agony, like he was holding something back but having trouble, and the sense that he might burst made me uneasy.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he growled at me, grimacing.

I had no idea what he was talking about and I was freaked out by this new side of his personality, and gleaned that I had done something wrong.

“What the fuck is your problem, I heard you fucking flirting with him, I was right fucking there!”

I needed further elucidation but finally realized what he was talking about—a brief conversation I had had the night before with another one of the programmers, who sat one cubicle over from him. I remembered being in a good mood, being friendly and joking with him, and must have laughed a little too hard.

“Camille would never fucking do that to me,” Dante snarled at me with escalating agitation.

I didn’t know that was his girlfriend’s name but would later put the pieces together.

His face bulged and turned red. I was in turn plaintive and apologetic, and asserted that it meant nothing and what was he freaking out about? But none of it seemed to curb his anger, and he tore into me, spewing invective, a few classic hateful slurs—but it was the words around them, the words that dug in, and I realized, He’s gone too far.

He was still blathering when I slapped him.

Within a fraction of second he had grabbed me by the throat and pinned me against the wall. His face was close to mine, contorted like he was fighting against himself somewhere inside. Between the furrows in his grimace, behind the glint of his pearly snarl I read something tortured in his eyes, something more blood-curdling than the rage that brought us here.

I don’t want to do this to you, Why do you make me do this to you??

This was a new kind of intimacy for us. I feared for my life, but felt comforted, like I’d been here before. All methods of reasoning had been exhausted, all things had come completely undone. It was the moment where distress rose in a crescendo—before free-falling in embers of pure, unadulterated catharsis.

Time had lost meaning but at some point his face relaxed, he let go and stepped away. I didn’t wait to catch my breath, I just went ahead and punched him.

I saw eons of pain ripple across his face, in a fraction of a second I saw it all, from a child’s devastation over a murdered pet, to a man’s pledge, I’m gonna kill you.

My terror went neck-and-neck with a twisted eagerness, What’s he gonna do next?

But he contained himself, and it was over.

One night I came into work with some stuff that was sub-par. I was strung out and my work on the interactive shit must have been taken a nosedive.

“You need to pull it together, Dannie. You need to be on-point for this shit.” Dante was reproachful but his tone suggested he thought I could do it.

I was contrite without knowing what I had done wrong, whatever it was that had compromised my professional repute, and, recognizing I was out of sorts, flushed everything I had left.

That night, Dante and I went to a hotel.

He dropped the keycard when he tried to open the door. I brushed it off like it was nothing. I was surprised by his fumbling, but found it endearing, like it took the edge off whatever apprehension lurked just below the surface.

Dante didn’t overpower me, though he wasn’t especially tender. I lay on my back the whole time as he did what he needed to do. Strangely, the passion seemed to vanish the moment we were alone and undressed.

“Whatever happens between us, we’re going to be friends for life,” he said as he got dressed, preparing to go home. He told me he had paid for the whole night, and I should stay and sleep.

Dante may not have been shrewder than me, but I was drug-addled and often tend to miss the obvious, except I did manage to grasp that he wanted me out of my husband’s apartment. In not so many words he made me feel like I was betraying him by staying there, that we couldn’t maintain our relationship—whatever that meant—if I didn’t move out.

I didn’t like it when he was upset with me, and I didn’t want to lose him—whatever fraction of him I had access to, or whatever hope of a future we had. I had nowhere to go, no money—but I did have enough to get a short-term stay at the Greenpoint YMCA. Greenpoint was convenient, and my delivery service was always around. I got coke when I had the cash, and would sit on the bed in the tiny room, with the old TV tuned into whatever channel I could get, and just knit for hours.

Sometimes Dante would come over and he would buy me coke. He told me I didn’t have to do that anymore, that he was there for me and he wasn’t going anywhere.

“You don’t have to suck dick for blow anymore baby, you can just suck on me from now on,” he might as well have said. As long as I was at the Y, he knew I wasn’t seeing anyone else.

And we’d have dispassionate sex, and he’d go home to his girlfriend.

Right before Christmas break, my boss asked me to housesit for him while he and his partner went away. I opted to take him up on this offer, deciding not to renew my sojourn at the Y. I packed up everything I owned – a small bag of clothes and shoes, what was left of the journals I had had since college, some old pictures. Everything fit on a small cart.

For the 2 weeks I stayed at my boss’s apartment I was legitimately homeless. I fed the cats, which I never even saw, when I could, and watered the plants per his instructions. One night when I was drinking and had no money for coke, I was desperate for a binge/purge so I raided his cupboards and ended up setting the toaster oven on fire.

For Christmas Dante sent me a huge bouquet of roses. I thought it was sweet that he thought of me and I spent the day watching TV and drinking beer in bed, fiending for payday. Or the next time Dante came by so he could give me the cash to get something.

The morning of the day my boss was coming home, I packed up my little cart and headed back to the Y. I spent 2 more weeks there before I found a place in Long Island City. It was an industrial part of town that was so inaccessible and depressing that it had never even earned a proper name like other parts of LIC, like “Astoria” or “Sunnyside”. I rented a room in a 2-bedroom railroad from a sweet, naive Polish girl who I quickly assessed had, for me, an affinity—however misguided. Her room was in the back of the building and I had my own entrance, and she never asked me about my daily visitors, or why there was defecation splattered all over the bathroom wall, or what happened to her ever-dwindling collection of fine wines.

Dante gave me 200 bucks for a mattress to throw on the floor so I found one for not much more than 100 and told him it cost 200. I pocketed the rest for a rainy day. Coke wasn’t top of mind, but it was good to have some cash, since Dante wasn’t always around to foot the bill and anyway I it’s not like I could service some random guy to get it. I couldn’t do that to him, I was enamored, and anyway he’d fucking kill me.

I wanted Dante to leave his girlfriend. After all, we had such an incredible connection, and he knew he didn’t have that with her.

She was a friend of his mother’s, he told me, and it was complicated.

“Your relationship is like your cats—fat, complacent, bored.” I had been to his place once, when his girlfriend was out. We had drunk beer, done some of the coke he had sprung for, made out a little. But mostly we had talked. It was invigorating and comfortable and made me want him more.

One day we were at a bar up the street from work, and he said something that I understood without it consciously registering—something conveyed through suggestion, a mincing of words and the power he had over me: he wouldn’t leave her unless I got clean.

Or was it that he would leave her if I got clean?

But that’s not altogether why I put myself in the hospital. I did it because pretending I was straight when I got to work, that I hadn’t copped, was too stressful, and I had finally reasoned that it would be easier to actually get clean than to keep lying—especially considering his temper. I was afraid of what he would do if he found out, but more afraid of being straight—but not by much. Finally the fear won out and I figured inpatient rehab was the only way out.

I had been going to an outpatient program at Beth Israel in lower Manhattan. I hadn’t done much research, just figured it was creditable because it was in Manhattan, plus they took my insurance. I didn’t attend every session and didn’t really try, either because I didn’t trust the counselors or because I wasn’t ready to commit. But probably both.

Or maybe it’s because I ran into Maria.

She looked fat but I recognized her instantly. When she spoke during group, all I could think about was the time we had gone to town on some black guy’s dick a couple of years ago, when I lived in Bed-Stuy and did business around there. One of us would suck his balls while the other puckered up and gulped his flaccid penis. The guy was responsive in every way except his dick, and we kept trying with enthusiasm—as long as he kept giving us what we wanted.

“Oh shit, I need more, can I get more? I’m getting so tired…”

We spoke to him as we tried to get him hard, asking if he liked it and pretending his dick wasn’t fleshy and limp in our mouths. I remember Maria had her wits about her as she checked in with him as he moaned and writhed, and could she get another rock?

Eventually I gave up, my mouth was getting chapped and at some point I figured it just wasn’t worth it, especially when the coke wasn’t that great. Anyway I had earned enough of what I came for, so that I could go home and do my drugs all by myself—which is really all I ever wanted.

I got up, got dressed, headed for the door.

“OK, guys, I’m pretty wiped, I’m gonna head out.” And I left them there.

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

Follow me on Facebook or Instagram.