Chapter 32: I Am No Prude

By the time I got the big railroad apartment in Bed-Stuy I had stopped turning tricks. I had a solid rapport with a couple of regular dealers and was making enough money to cover my $2K a week drug tab – usually. And when I couldn’t I got my coke on consignment, until I had an ever-running tab that my paycheck only put a dent in and which put me eternally behind the ball.

Not too long after I moved in I got sober again. I sailed through a year on a positive attitude alone.

But my self-esteem was in morbid disrepair, and I worried whether I could ever have a real connection with a man again – at least, with someone who wasn’t hell-bent on trying to fucking kill me. I wanted to meet people – men – so I opted to give online dating a fair shot.

I kept my profile honest, focused on my positive attitude toward life, career, relationships. I had a way of wording things to keep away the guys just looking for a good time. That’s not what I wanted anymore; I had been celibate for much of the year+ that I had been sober and was finally done hooking up. Besides, 40 was not too far off, and I wanted to grow the fuck up. I wanted to experience real companionship, and with someone I trusted, and who trusted me. I wanted to learn what sex was supposed to be, and how it brought people together. I wanted to know intimacy with a man who was not my father. I needed to know that I could be present during sex. I needed to know that I could shake the Daddy-penis demons.

That’s when I met Jason.

I was so flattered when Jason reached out to me online. Men rarely did. He was adorable, very poetic, insightful, and seemed cool. And he liked my height. I was sold.

My first impression of Jason was not a positive one, but at least I didn’t think he’d try to fucking kill me. He was 6’ 6” but he slouched – it didn’t look terrible on him, he was pretty well-built, but he was not what I was expecting. He wore cargo shorts and converse sneakers, and one of his shoes was untied, and he was 20 minutes late.

I was sitting at the counter of the café where I met all my first dates, holding the phone away from my ear as my business partner blathered on about SEO or some other garbage. I knew something was off about Carl, but I was still glowy from my own new sobriety and didn’t quite piece together that the stale beer stench of his place + his professing to be in “recovery” / the fun tales of cooking meth in his heyday = he was a fucking drug addict and probably high as a kite every time he called me.

I spotted Jason across the street, sauntering with rounded shoulders, totally passing the café and walking too far before realizing his mistake and stepping off the sidewalk, trying to gauge how the fuck to get across Bedford Ave at rush hour.

“Carl, Carl, I need to go, my date is here. Carl, CARL, I gotta hang up, I gotta hang up….”

I hung up as Jason came through the door. I smiled big and brightly as he sat down at the stool next to me. We were both kind of shaking, but for different reasons.

“Hey Dannie,” he said. He was softspoken, seemingly sweet; I was happy to see him and very curious despite his haplessness, but I was also a little exasperated.

“I’m gonna throw my phone in the fucking river!”, was the first thing I said to him. Pretty typical, I thought; trying to turn it into a joke, maybe I’d seem witty.

I gave him the rundown, I found this guy on Craigslist who had a startup blog, I just wanted to fucking write, and Carl seemed pretty cool but he was driving me crazy! I didn’t want to harp though, so I changed the subject: Did you find the place OK, Thanks for coming to Bed-Stuy, Where are you coming from, that sort of thing.

Jason was very attentive, and he leaned in when I spoke, seeming to hang on my every word. And he liked my jacket.

“Nice biker jacket, it looks good on you.”

I still wasn’t sure about him but compliments went a long way with me because I rarely got them, and even though I sensed something was wrong, I wasn’t eager to write him off. After all, how often did attractive, interesting and attentive men reach out to me first on these stupid dating apps?

Talking to him made me anxious, maybe because he seemed anxious too, and even though the conversation was lively enough after about half an hour I said I needed a smoke.

“I’m so sorry, do you mind if I go outside for a smokey-smoke?” There was something about him that made me feel at ease, however restless, insofar as I could be myself. As if I had known him for my whole life, and he wouldn’t fault me for being goofy.

“No, not at all, I’ll come with you.”

We sat at on the bench in front of the café, and the conversation quickly took a confessional turn, from prescription meds to gripes about our old therapists to our issues with street drugs. I had been clean over a year but he used no such word and I didn’t probe; I sensed he was in crisis, certainly compared to where I was at, and I just let him talk and talk while I smoked and smoked.

We spent most of our date on that bench, and I don’t know who called it a night but I walked him to the G stop that was on the way back to my apartment, and when we parted ways at the subway, we hugged goodbye. I can’t speak to any particular chemistry between us, despite his physical stature; and even though we had shared a range of personal confidences, I was overwhelmingly disappointed. Or maybe that’s exactly why I was disappointed.

A couple of days later he texted me, he had a nice time talking to me, and could we meet again, maybe see a movie?

People used to tell me I had bad judgment. They told me that I didn’t think before I acted, that I didn’t ever weigh the possible consequences of my behavior. I was reckless, they were basically saying, and impulsive. To be fair, I had quickly earned a track record of doing things that would suggest this was the case; but I insisted, usually with a mischievous glimmer in my eye, that my judgment was sound, and that I did, in fact, consider all possible outcomes before I did something ostensibly ill-advised.

The problem was, I said, that I just couldn’t help myself.

And so I agreed to a second date. I questioned my first impression of him, maybe I was wrong, anyway he was sweet; so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

I agreed and started to get excited about seeing him again, about getting out of the house and actually going on a fucking date. I told him I would wear a dress, that I had a closet full of them I never had occasion to wear. He more than approved of that idea.

But I also expressed my reservations, especially about his coke use, which, without his explicitly saying so, I had gathered was an ongoing thing.

“Oh I’m sober,” he wrote back.

My instincts were finely attuned, doubt shrieked somewhere inside my skull; but I wanted it to be true and I was willing, even eager, to take my chances.

“In that case, my dress just got shorter,” and I got up and rifled through my closet and found just the right one.

I basked in his approval, this is the fucking dream, I thought, and anyway he should be rewarded – not that I was so sexy or beautiful, but he should know how much his sobriety meant to me, how much it woke me up and caused a stirring between my legs.

We saw Dope at the Williamsburg theater not long after that. Sitting next to each other as the lights dimmed, I said I felt fat.

“’Fat’ is not the word that comes to mind,” he murmured, and we both chuckled.

I wondered why my first impression of him was so duly disappointing, and where had my head been to think that way about him? When he was so clearly not the same man that night – a vastly different, more composed and collected man.

His attention was like a sprig of hope, after years of neglect and self-denial, and his physical presence so close to me was intoxicating, and I remembered that I was alive.

I crossed my legs and sidled up to him, and as I leaned my head on his shoulder, like a reflex he put his hand on my bare thigh. I wanted to plant my mouth on his and push my body up against his bigger one.

Outside the theater after the movie he stood with me while I waited for my Uber. And that’s when we kissed; he was very toothy and wide-mouthed for a first kiss but I was aroused from his touch on my thigh in the theater, and by his pure proximity, and mostly didn’t care.

He said he had a date the next day with someone else he had met online, though I’m not sure how the topic came up. I was a little disheartened—I get attached quickly—but I tried to act charming and unfazed.

“Don’t fall in love!” I quipped good-naturedly as I left him and reached for the car door.

“Oh, I won’t!” he smiled as he watched me get into the car.

For our third date we laid out on a blanket in Union Square Park. My shorts came right up to the top of my thighs, and I wore 4” platform strappy sandals. I felt a little self-conscious but Jason seemed like he wanted me and I was attracted to him and it kind of felt nice to show off my body, even if I did have reservations about the way I looked. He was very affectionate and maybe touched me a little more than I was comfortable doing in the wide open, but I obliged, trying to garner his favor.

For our fourth date, he came over and spent the night at my place. He was 6’6” and sculpted, but not too cut; and, for a big guy, he was an endearingly considerate lover—even though I tried to goad him to ravish me.

But Jason was often cagey and unresponsive through text, and never picked up the phone. Because I was sober and had been for some time, I decided it was OK that I didn’t like this about him, and firmly held that it was probably a big fat red flag; so I very cordially ended our courtship in a text message, though I don’t remember if I told him the real reason why.

And then I relapsed, and the first thing I did was text him, and the next day he was back in my life.

I was never really sure if I could really trust him, but I wanted so badly to. The coke made it easier to pardon his strange and distant behavior, at least in the beginning; but I still confronted him about it, in my way. Whether I was sober at the time or not—though it usually was the latter—I would examine why his behavior or something he said hurt me so much and lay out my thought process in these long letters that I would then read to him out loud. He would listen as I read, look deeply in my eyes, and softly assure me that he understood; and even though I rarely got an apology, I would be moved by his attentiveness. He would take my hand as I read, turn my arm elbow down, and caress the underside of my forearm with his fingertips, and we would get back together.

It had never occurred to me before I met Jason that it was OK to be a woman—that it was OK to be womanly. Decades ago I had internalized the misogyny around me and against me, first and eternally by my father; very early on I had constructed a defense against it by shunning everything I deemed “feminine” about my manner of dress, my behavior, the way I thought, the way I fucked. Instinctively I had gone to great lengths to try to preempt the abuse and discrimination I knew I had coming to me, just for having a vagina. I carried this through all the way until my late 30s.

But Jason was the first person to tell me it was not only OK to be a woman, but something to be celebrated. And thank God, because all my posturing and pretending to be one of the guys, and that the cat calls didn’t bother me, and that I could screw without emotion didn’t fucking work, anyway. In the end I was ever-sensitive to all the shit men said and did and by the time he came around I didn’t even know who I was.

But Jason’s exaltation of everything feminine about me that I had tried to suppress introduced me to a new way of thinking. I couldn’t fully process it at the time but I knew there was something exciting and liberating about it, and it opened up a new avenue of thinking for me.

In fact, this new concept inspired a whole slew of body-affirming artistic endeavors, starting with sexy pics of myself that I sent to Jason. I’m not a photographer but I think I have “an eye”, and I would labor over my attire, what there was of it; and the way I framed myself in the shot; and how I posed to capture the light and shadow as dramatically as I could. For the very first photograph I took, I sat in an armchair in a wifebeater and boy shorts with my legs crossed and my arms draped over the sides; and over the image I superimposed the text, “Daddy issues”.

From here, I began sketching and eventually painting from the photos, though the ones I painted from were much different from the ones I took for Jason. I was usually more sullen than seductive, and I was always fully nude. I would stand with my weight planted on one foot, such that my hips fell on a natural slant, while I tilted my shoulders along the opposite plane to create the illusion of symmetrical breasts; in my mind’s eye I saw the lines converge somewhere off in the distance.

As I approached 40, I turned my attention to body art. I had gotten a small tattoo in the crook of my left arm of my sober date on my 1-year anniversary, and I wanted to build a complete sleeve around it. I started with a tarot card image I found online of a woman turning in a tree, which the same artist who had inked the date carved into my skin under it from a stencil he made from a printout. When he moved to Mexico he referred me to a gifted artist he knew well, and together he and I forged a vision of a cherry blossom—a universal symbol for femininity—that sprawled all the way up my arm, with roots that poured over the tarot card and grew all the way up to my shoulder, where it erupted in tiny pink flowers.

“Just make it super-creepy, with lots of contrast,” I told him at our initial consultation.

For me, this piece represents my entrance into womanhood; and that’s exactly what I tell people when they ask about it.

“It’s about coming into myself as woman,” I happily offer up, when I’m prompted to divulge what it’s “about”. But I always qualify that, as a piece of art, it was begat of a creative process, a conversation between myself and the artist. And yes, it took many, many sittings; and yes, it cost quite a bit of dough.

But the cherry blossom is more than just a symbol of femininity; it’s a marked political protest, an assertion of my autonomy and rights to my own body and what I do with it. And it’s certainly a better and more stirring act of reclamation than hanging over a toilet several times a day with my fist halfway down my throat.

I have 3 big tats now and almost every single needle-stab was done when I was stone-cold sober; to me, tattooing is sacred and it commemorates that period of abstinence and focus and relentless optimism through body-carvings, because then I would never forget that I was sober when I did it, and that I would never lose that time and what I learned from it, and that I could always get back to that place if I stumbled again—which I inevitably did, over and over, just as the sun rises and sets.

But the cherry blossom remains my favorite piece, both symbolically and in terms of pure aesthetics. I didn’t know at the time of the consultation why I wanted it, other than I just thought tattoos were sexy and gorgeous. But as he etched it into my skin, and with each successive sitting, as it came to fruition and the permanence of it sunk in, I slowly came to perceive that it was like a second “awakening” for me.

Just shy of a year into our relationship, Jason told me he was being “evicted” from his apartment, but, as a legal term with a legal definition, that was inaccurate; in fact, he was very nicely asked to please get the fuck out of the apartment where he rented a room from this chick on the LES. She had given him a chance because she “liked his vibe,” as he told me, but she needed to make money off the second room and he hadn’t paid her in a while.

Jason spent most of his time holed up in the room at the back of my railroad apartment. He did fat, quiet rails with the door closed while I tried not to snort piles of my own stuff in the front room with the door slightly ajar. One night I was up drinking cheap port straight from the bottle and inhaling piles against my will, and it was a little after midnight and he still wasn’t home. I knew better than to keep tabs on him – I knew it would push him away– but I was up, and I was wired not just on that but on adrenaline: he was doing it again. He had said he was at Barnes & Noble, but it was after 12 and didn’t they fucking close already? and he wasn’t answering my fucking texts.

In a blind and blustered attempt to intercept his social media messages, I changed the WiFi password. I had been Googling how to read his shit for God-only-knows-how-long that night and had started screwing around with the sign-in with little idea how or why that would work.

It did not.

I had a bad feeling. It wasn’t new. But I had coke-fueled courage, and the angst of dealing with his incessant evasiveness and vanishing acts was coming ever closer to a crescendo.

In my stupor, after hours of laboring over a dead-end hack, it finally occurred to me that his laptop was probably still sitting on the desk in the back room.

I stumbled from my bedroom, through the kitchen and down the short hall past the bathroom until I reached the back room. The door was closed but unlocked. I stepped over the pulled-out flimsy sofa-bed and waded through the garbage he had strewn about, sidestepping the Bustelo piss cans, and sat down at the desk, in front of his laptop.

The WiFi was disconnected because I had just changed the password but his computer was on and active, no password needed—all I had to do was graze the touchpad and it woke up to his Facebook page. I started to poke around but didn’t have to try very hard to find what I was looking for; the screen was already open and was stuck there, it must have been the last thing he looked at and it hadn’t closed out when I changed the WiFi password.

Livid and desperate for proof, for answers, and the world fell away and it was just my throbbing brain and shaking hands and the holes in my head used for seeing that I pushed close to the keyboard, squinting. And I started to read the conversation he had left open.

“I miss you baby”

When I scrolled up, I saw the photo of a young woman; she was naked and she looked short, and she was out of shape and probably useless except as a sex toy for coked-up and damaged middle-aged men, and she was curled up to look sexy, and she was beckoning him with her eyes.

“oh god baby you look so hot.. when can I see you again” Jason had replied.

I stopped breathing for several moments, my heart pounding hard from coke and panic all the way down through my legs, and all the way up and around my skull. My feet, if I could feel them, were probably cold and sweating. There was solace in this proof of his infidelity and now I could finally confront him – not like when I dumped him 2 months in on pure suspicion because he was habitually evasive. But still I needed to see more, read what else had been going on, except my head was swimming. I waded through the current, fighting for clarity, but my legs were atrophied and heavy like boulders and the rush of the water nearly sucked me under.

The current was wild against my ribcage and as I fought for air I tried to reconnect his laptop to the WiFi. But I couldn’t remember what the new password was so I stomped back and forth between the 2 rooms in a port and panicked haze. On each trip back to my laptop to change the password to something I could actually remember I stopped at the bathroom to snort a fat pile, and then take a few gulps of that warm, sweet poison from the bottle, and then back again to try that new password on his computer. But I was too fucked up and my hands were shaking too much and I simply couldn’t get it to reconnect.

I knew Jason liked S&M and had been to sex parties, so I knew he was into outside-the-box sex stuff. He had said he wanted to explore our sexuality together, and I was happy to have found someone that I could be with who didn’t expect a fucking show, and that maybe I could finally relax and enjoy myself and see what I was really into and be appreciated for who I was, and just let go.

I lingered in self-reproach—I guess I just wasn’t enough for him. It seemed unfair, though; he had never actually given me a fucking chance. But apparently he had given up on me already and his Facebook skanks were prepared to offer him something he never even asked me to do.

Livid and despairing, wallowing in worthlessness, I went back to my bedroom again and texted him that I knew what the fuck was going on—I didn’t say exactly what that was, maybe there was still some possibility I had misinterpreted what I read—and I wanted him out by the end of the week.

He didn’t ask what it was that I knew. I knew that he knew that I knew what he had been doing. Actually it was more conjecture on my part but he didn’t fight back. It was deeply saddening that he didn’t—I knew through my stupor that his reticence equaled quilt.

He came home a little before 1 am and went straight to the back room. I was running on pure coke and angst and I was fuming but I wasn’t ready to confront him. I wasn’t good at confrontation and even loaded it was nearly impossible to find the courage.

It took the better part of an hour but then I realized, I wanted, needed, to know how deep and how far back his consorting went, and I still wanted, needed, to confirm that it wasn’t limited to social media, but that he had seen these women in person. The message chain I had seen provided enough evidence that he had been unfaithful, but I was desperate to hear it from him or at least give him a chance to serve up some kind of explanation.

Even with all my instincts and resources aligning on what was clearly his betrayal I still wanted to give him an out.

I stormed up to the to the back room. It was locked. I tried for a minute to turn the handle, but it wouldn’t open.

But within a minute I remembered that I had locked myself out of this apartment so many times that I had developed a trick for getting back in, and realized that I could get into his room through the window off the fire escape. So I went back to my room and slipped on my shoes, and headed out the door and up 1 flight of stairs to the fourth and top-most floor. The fourth-floor landing was discernibly slanted and slimy with years of unkempt foot-traffic, and the vinyl beneath my feet was pealing in places, and I almost tripped.

I made my way uphill to the foot of the stairs that led to the roof. I stepped carefully, but not too carefully because I didn’t really care if I got hurt and figured I wouldn’t feel it anyway, and made my way up the stairs, stepping over boxes of forgotten crap, paint cans, loose and rusty nails or screws.

At the top of the stairs the door to the roof swung in the wind on a single hinge. I had once considered it a safety hazard, and of course it was never fixed, and thank God, so that I could go right up to the roof, walk across it to the back edge, and shimmy down the fire escape to the window on the back room.

Fear of death was in there somewhere, it was one misstep and I’d fall 4 stories; but the thrill of being severely impaired as I clambered down the ladder trumped that fear and anyway I still didn’t care if I got hurt, plus it was fun to be up here and not really care.

I made my way down the ladder to the third-floor fire escape. The lights in Jason’s room were out as I grabbed the window pane from beneath and pulled then pushed it fully open. The screen was still open from the last time I broke in, so I swung one leg and then another over the windowsill and set both feet down on the floor, being careful where I stepped lest I trip and prematurely alert him to my presence. I waded through the mess to the edge of the desk and turned on the lamp, and I saw him lying on his side, facing away from me, on the folded-out mattress. He appeared to be asleep—or at least knocked out on Klonopin.

I strode over to his supine form and started kicking him, hard but not hard, yelling but not yelling.

“Get the fuck up you piece of shit”

He stirred, but not much. He had taken what must have been like a fucking handful of Klonnies – he was a big guy, 6’6” and well-built, but totally out of it, and the meds had rendered him basically inert.

Almost, but not quite—even though he barely responded when I kicked him and demanded to know what the fuck was going on, when I took his laptop he got up and followed me. He moved slowly, his eyes were half-closed, he seemed to stumble as he did; but he followed me down the hall, through the kitchen and into my bedroom, and then back through the kitchen, back to his room, and tried to catch me as I turned on my heel and headed back to the kitchen. His speech was slurred and he was slow to speak, and he seemed removed from the moment as it was happening.

But he kept trying to get it back from me and followed me around the apartment as I carried it, trying to remember the fucking latest new WiFi password so I could read the rest of his messages.

He couldn’t quite catch me but I grew weary of the pointless game and was hurtling toward coke-crash so I stopped at the kitchen counter and put the laptop down.

“Just give it back to me, give it back to me,” he mumbled.

I demanded to know what the fuck was going on, why he would do this to me, what the fuck was wrong with him?

“I had a rough childhood, I had a rough childhood, OK”

Later he would deny having said this.

“That doesn’t sound like me Dannie, no way.”

But in that moment, my brain like cotton, my heart broken and bleeding, and I saw how close his head was to the corner of the cabinet on the wall above the counter where we stood. It would be so easy, he was dangerously close, and he was totally out of it—after all, coke trumps Klonnies. How strong would I really have to be to just reach up and bash his skin-skull against that corner?

But somewhere inside my brain another voice clamored, Don’t slam his fucking skull into that cabinet, you’ll regret it, he’s just a little boy and you’ll fucking regret it. My right arm twitched with the sensation of that single, irrevocable movement; but ultimately my hand listened, and I just gave up and gave him back his laptop.

He had cheated me out of my only chance for confrontation by chowing down on benzos and tapping out early, and I hadn’t gotten what I set out for – no confession, no explanation – and as much as I was wired on adrenaline and fueled by little white piles, I was otherwise spent. I did the last baby bump and swallowed the last drops of port, and eventually lay down and passed out.

In the morning, he was gone.

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

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