Epigraph
If it doesn’t hurt like hell,
it ain’t worth a jack shit.
—MY MA
Contents
Epigraph
PART I: Heredity Chapter 1: Babygirl’s Gun
Chapter 2: Birth
Chapter 3: Fernando
Chapter 4: Turning Five
Chapter 5: Alexander Nevsky
Chapter 6: Cutting My Hair Off
Chapter 7: The Invasion
Chapter 8: The Purple Cape
Chapter 9: POPPA . . .
Chapter 10: Pee
Chapter 11: Cartoon Moon
Chapter 12: Zack
Chapter 13: Budapest
Chapter 14: My Third Grade Yearbook Poem
Chapter 15: The Move
Chapter 16: He’s Got Nuts
Chapter 17: Fourth Street
Chapter 18: Pet Store Rafik
Chapter 19: Cold Cuts
Chapter 20: Camouflage
Chapter 21: PCS
Chapter 22: Rocky
Chapter 23: Orange Juice
Chapter 24: Climbing In
Chapter 25: A Whole New World
Chapter 26: Renee
Chapter 27: The Day
Chapter 28: In the Twisted Halls
Chapter 29: The Escape
Chapter 30: Fork and Knife
Chapter 31: Karlsruhe
Chapter 32: Barbara’s
PART II: Agency Chapter 33: The Boot
Chapter 34: Give Me Life
Chapter 35: The First Time
Chapter 36: Feral
Chapter 37: Out
Chapter 38: Too Soon
Chapter 39: The Second Round
Chapter 40: Homecoming
Chapter 41: The Hospital Incident
Chapter 42: Good-bye, My Friend
Chapter 43: Finding the Answer
Chapter 44: Black Eye
Chapter 45: The Piece of Shit at the Center of the Universe
Chapter 46: Sleep Is My Cocoon
Chapter 47: Blue Pea Dies
Chapter 48: Skeletons
Chapter 49: Surgery
Chapter 50: Around My Edges
Chapter 51: The Bridge
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
January 8, 2016
Dear Ma,
Since my first conscious moments, you have been a gladiator to me—the fiercest example of a woman’s power I could ever know.
We are some kind of twins, able to see each other in a room of closed eyes, able to hear each other in a world of silence, despite the trauma layered into our story. You are the priestess at the head of my tiny tribe of one.
Since I learned to use a phone and to this day, when our family wants to reach you, they do it through me. I am the whisperer, the only one who can ever locate you in the jungle of New York, because you will always call me back.
When no one could find you to break the news, it fell to me to tell you that your mother had died. The noise that came from you then was an animal pain. The realization that I would also one day lose you was so unbearable that I had to hang up.
For years, we were best friends. Long before the fights and the screaming and the law got involved.
Which is why I feel like I need to say a few things to you before you read this collection of stories intended to capture my life.
People often marvel at my having “turned out so normal.” They ask how I’m not angry, how I’m not a fuck-up, why I don’t turn around and abuse people.
They say it’s extraordinary that I’ve forgiven you.
I am hardly without effects. I am a vortex of damage. In my brief three decades, I have hurt people, betrayed trust, caused confusion and disappointment. I have sauntered around the shores of an ocean of rage, avoiding what would eventually become a crippling anxiety.
It’s taken thirty years for me to melt the sandstorm of emotions within myself into glass, but now that I have found acceptance, now that I have forged an understanding of happiness and built my own world, I finally grasp the beautiful gift that is the lens I possess. Through it, I can see that instead of a “mom,” I have been given a moral compass.
Your solitude, your rigorous discipline in your body, the brilliant originality of your vision, as if your eyesight were replaced with a loop from another planet, these things are all gifts to me.
Your demons—the visitor that would seep into your eyeballs on so many nights, clouding the kindness, turning your spit to poison—I do not begrudge you.
I bow in humbled respect at the feet of your loss, Ma.
Since I was a small child, you have recounted the story of Billy, your epic love, and his murder. Nothing has ever touched me or provoked as much empathy in my heart as that; the violence of your loss, so shortly before my arrival in this world. How could I have hated you?
I think, even as a tiny tot, I understood; Billy was taken from you, a tragedy without which I would never have existed, and thus, you were to be protected.
People call me brave, for getting up on stages and being open about who I am, but I know no other way than to be proud, because of you.
I was given the most important gift two parents can give to their child: Your respect. My dignity.
So, whether or not you understood that I wanted a clean house, regular meals, and to know which version of you would come home at night; whether you grasped the inappropriate level of professional expectation you put on me as a child who just wanted to play; although your addictions ravaged our relationship for so many years—I understand.
I hope, now that we finally know where Billy was put to rest, that we can find a way to his remains, and close the gash that has defined you for three decades.
I will do everything I can to help you find peace, so you no longer have to medicate with flavored solvents and pharmaceutical hammers, so you are no longer the loneliest wolf.
Because of you, I know forgiveness.
Because of you, I know love.
Forever,
Your Bud
PART I
Heredity
Her
Chapter 1
Babygirl’s Gun
13 Third Avenue, New York City, 1982
SHE SAID HE GAVE HER THE LITTLE GUN BECAUSE IT WAS classy and elegant, like her. A feminine twist of metal and pearl. Lethal, like her. She kept it under her pillow “just in case.”
Her bed was, is, and always will be under an open window, this one looking out onto Third Avenue. In 1981, her pillow filled a head-pistol sandwich, but she doesn’t use a pillow now.
Then, she pulled her bleached blond, bombshell locks into a ponytail when she slept, always with her man, Billy. Under a pile of blankets in the winter or sweating naked in the summer, but always with her man.
The window gaped like a loyal simpleton, beaten by the sun or drooling raindrops, but its mouth never closed. The window stayed open.
My mother’s world was a riot of improvisations, everything in flux and nothing predictable except the open window and the radio on. Rhythm in the air. “Life! In the air,” she’d say. It stays on. She would tape over the switch. Nobody fucks with Babygirl’s radio.
Later, she would say that there was never a gun in the house. She would swear to this, like a Mafia wife, blinded by passion or loyalty. Either way it wasn’t completely true. There was a gun under her pillow. Whether or not he pulled it out before they shot him, nobody knows.
Them
Chapter 2
Birth
Third Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery, late summer 1985
IT WAS A FULL MOON, THE LAST NIGHT OF AUGUST 1985. MY mother
told my father to turn the video camera on because the baby was coming.
It was sticky hot outside, the kind of air you can feel. She waded uptown through warm pudding, to a swimming pool in Hell’s Kitchen. Two weeks before, belly the size of a basketball, she had posed in a bikini at the Russian baths for a young photographer who told her that swimming was the best thing to loosen up her hips for birth. My mother had been swimming every day since.
Sounds travel differently in the summer. Horns are sharper, screams pierce, and catcalls work double time, trailing swinging booty shorts for blocks. In the mid-eighties, streetlights on Ninth Avenue winked on and off over sidewalks cluttered with garbage, the carts of fruit vendors, and the splayed bodies of crackheads, hugging the cement, sharp ribs laid bare in the heat.
Three lanes of headlights cut through the darkness, making Dick Tracy comic books out of countless shady instances of deals in doorways, pupils dilated from a thousand synthetic euphorias, uptown kids in Brooks Brothers and pearl earrings who thought coming to Hell’s Kitchen was coming “downtown” to cop. The beams backlit a fleet of muscle-bound tranny hookers, teetering back and forth on six-inch heels between twenty-dollar tricks. They carried box cutters in their garters in case tonight was the night some dumb motherfucker decided to let his Jesus guilt get the better of him after cumming on their miniskirt. At nearly six feet tall and broad in the shoulders, her eyes raw from the chlorine, Rhonna was perfectly camouflaged within the local wildlife.
They invented the word glamazon for women like my mother. Grace Jones had the same severity and stature. Mix one part unicorn, three parts thunderstorm, two parts wounded bull, and you’d have an approximation of the vibe my mother gives off. A wild tiger would be at a disadvantage in a fight. Bleached blond hair sliced at her chin, eyes crystal blue. Her head is carved for the shoulder pad look, all bones and lines, her face anchored by a Greco-Roman nose that dives into crimson lips, full and finely drawn, over ivories so impressive we call them her piano keys. Her muscles twist over her sleek bones like steel cables, and she leads with her chest like a native warrior, her hands made to grip a sword in battle.
The seventies and eighties were a primitive time in New York, a time of robbery, drugs, and rape, so a working model who favored miniskirts and skintight jeans had to be able to show her teeth. She learned to train a look on a man that could make him piss himself. She once carried a busted fluorescent tube through Midtown and shook it in the face of street thugs like a jagged spear.
But that evening, my mother was slow moving, vulnerable, if ever fierce. She looked like a teenager carrying a backpack on her front, because little aside from her belly had grown during the pregnancy. Her hair was swept back, her skin clear and radiant, glowing the way pregnant women do, with a sharp nose and a head of loose blond curls like Alexander. Her bright red denim Daisy Dukes hadn’t closed for weeks, so she wore them unzipped and rolled down. Maternity wear didn’t enter her universe.
As she walked toward a Times Square teeming with twenty-five-cent peep shows and bargin-bin hustlers waiting for daddies to make their night, a vendor stepped out from under his awning and said, “My god, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!”
My parents lived on a notorious block in their day: Third Street, between Second Avenue and the Bowery, an address that is innocuous now. The barnacled gore of used needles and crack pipes, the sludge of despondency, waste, and murder, the freaky traces of poverty clawed into these crappy tenements have long since been bleached out and washed away.
My parents and their scene were there before the gleaming 7-Eleven and the thirty-dollar brunch specials, lounging in their high-waisted jeans, collars turned up, hair teased out, blasting rap and jazz and no wave from boom boxes. Before the East Village was referred to as “the NYU neighborhood,” you had to use a pay phone to call your dealer, and you had to shout up to windows to be let in.
The Bowery Hotel, now a glamorous weekend landing pad for movie starlets, used to be a twenty-four-hour gas station that served radioactive vindaloo on Styrofoam plates to my mother in the middle of the night. Two mangy dogs roamed between the pumps, so dirty and caked with exhaust grease that one’s fur had turned green, the other one’s blue.
The street was no picnic at the turn of the previous century, when immigrants packed each apartment, six to a room. But by 1985, even with the city broke and in chaos, at the tail end of punk, and in the midst of the AIDS and crack epidemics, Third Street stood out for the refinement of its violence, for its kaleidoscopic insanity.
Directly across the street from our building stood the largest men’s shelter in New York, which had turned the block into a dumping ground for homeless people from all over the country, the abscessed injection point for the nation’s addicted, vagrant, and mad, the Ellis Island of the criminally insane. America had been cutting loose its mental patients for a decade and blending them in with the detritus of society—the failed, the lost, the abandoned—and this toxic brew, refused at every backyard in the country, was being shipped in like barges of garbage and unloaded onto our street, making it the festering point for every fuck-up from as far away as Texas. The result was a low-key permanent riot.
My mother used to look out our window at the crowd, milling around like hypercharged ants, and say: “Look at ’em. America’s undiagnosed misfits. They’ve got to self-medicate to survive, and all they got to work with is hammers, dope, crack, and Night Train.”
And many did not survive. At night there were so many homeless people sleeping shoulder to shoulder that you could hardly see the sidewalk. Occasionally, in the morning, an ambulance would come to take away a “late sleeper,” leaving a gray silhouette in the concrete where the carcass had drained out.
On the corner opposite the gas station, the Salvation Army had set up a group home for delinquent boys, a half-way house for hopeless cases, which functioned like a prep school for life across the street. Weekly, a police car would pull up onto the sidewalk and two officers would lead a youth out of the building in handcuffs, nailed for robbing and raping a Japanese tourist in a stairwell somewhere.
To add to the stew, one avenue to the east, the infamous Hells Angels had their East Coast headquarters and clubhouse, and occasionally they would tear down the street, thirty to a posse, with no mufflers on their bikes, doing their best to get in a fight.
On the Fourth of July of every year, the Angels would blow up the block. A two-story American flag was strung from the north to the south side of the street, vibrating in earsplitting waves of psychotic heavy metal blasting from stadium speakers jammed into the clubhouse windows. One year an M-80 exploded in a closed trash can and a triangle of galvanized shrapnel tore through the neck of a local Puerto Rican kid, killing him on the spot.
The police did what they could to stay outside of a four-block radius from what they openly dubbed “the asshole of the universe.” We called it home.
THREE AND A HALF MONTHS before her dip in Hell’s Kitchen, in an apartment overlooking this miasma, my mother was up, at two in the morning, cooking herself something to eat. She had been working out feverishly for the last twelve weeks, trying to lose a stubborn little tire that had swelled around her waist. My father, staring at her in the darkness, saw her left hand draped protectively over her belly, and he knew immediately. It was pictured in a thousand frescos and altarpieces, this graceful, natural gesture of maternity.
“Rhonna, you’re pregnant. We’re having a baby.”
Without context, this could seem like a sweet moment, a wonderful development in a relationship between two young lovers perhaps looking forward to starting a family and realizing some picket-fence fantasy. Let me clear up that misunderstanding; my parents were just hot in the eighties. In fact, if we are going to grope around in the dark closet of existential responsibility, I blame the bathtub. A lot of relationships, and probably a lot of eighties babies, can be traced back to the tenement tub.
Allow me to explain: when you walked into a one-
bedroom, railroad apartment in an old tenement, you entered directly into the kitchen. Across from you were the stove and a refrigerator, and two inches from your right elbow was an iron bathtub, encased in white porcelain, a shorty, with little lion’s-paw feet, from the turn of the century, crafted for a little person. In our apartment, there was a dark bedroom to the left and a sunny living room to the right.
People tend to underestimate the importance of a tub in the kitchen to establishing the sexual tone of a bohemian existence. It adds a whole new spice when friends take a bath while you’re cooking dinner. Sensual mayhem.
Carrying an armful of records and a bottle of whiskey, my mother was all legs and skimpy outfits when she showed up on my father’s doorstep. He had run into her before, once lying naked in a triangle of sunlight at the center of a cocktail party on the Upper West Side and another time on the street, clutching everything she owned in two plastic bags. Freshly widowed, she was being ravaged by agonies beyond her control and stalked by “friends” turned to suitors. Jailbirds who had started hanging around after the mysterious murder of her husband by the police.
A week after their second encounter, my parents were both kicked out of a nightclub for drinking out of their own stashes. Collared by a bouncer who knocked their heads together, they were tossed, laughing, into the street. By this point, my father had seen all he needed to cast her as the unhinged and suicidal Ophelia in an avant-garde film version of Hamlet, which he had been shooting for a few weeks.
AT THE APARTMENT, “Hamlet” slept under a brown blanket in a corner of the living room among his paintings. He was a young friend of my father’s who I would later know as Uncle Crispy—a wiry kid with a wild head of curls, whose long eyelashes beat down over big, soft brown eyes, and who talked shit with the raspy voice of a hustler, like he had a million sentences he had to force through the bottleneck of his mouth before his dime ran out. Crispy spent his time avoiding his duties as leading man, flirting with Rhonna, and darting out of the house.
Darling Days Page 1
