“Yeah. After you left, she invited me over to her place.”
Her deceit was like a siren in my ears.
“And in November it happened again. Some random night. We were both wasted, both times. I’m sorry. I know she’s your super close friend. I just don’t want us to have any secrets.”
I felt disoriented, my world a lazy Susan my lover had spun. Where was my point of entry back into normal functioning? Who did I trust? Who was I mad at? Where did I place these feelings?
Blame ended up landing with her. He knew I was in love with him, but he wasn’t committed to me. It was her I was angry with. She knew how much her sleeping with him would devastate me, she’d seen it. She was so hot, she could literally get any dude she wanted, so why did she need him?
I pulled the blanket over my suddenly uncomfortable nudity and recoiled into myself.
“I get it if you don’t want to be with me anymore, but I felt like you needed to be able to make that decision with a full deck of cards. You needed all the information.”
“It’s okay. She’s hot. I get it.”
“iO . . .”
“I . . . I just need a minute, okay?”
He nodded, folding his long body out of the bed. He went to the hatch window and propped it open, lit a cigarette, and blew smoke out over the Parisian rooftops, leaning on one elbow the way I’d admired thousands of times. I could see the sky past him and my eyes traveled to his ass. Here was the man I had spent so long pining after, the man I’d built a fantasy future with, the dock I’d hooked all my dreamboats to.
I watched his tattooed arm bring the burning stick to his mouth and I knew I loved him, no matter if he had been a selfish prick. The way his tanned skin spread over his collarbones, I knew I wasn’t done with him, but something had shattered. Glass castles are made of particularly thin panes.
I WANTED TO FORGIVE HIM so badly that I forced myself through it. He booked two big modeling gigs and bailed on his world tour early, saying he wanted to come home to New York with me. We went back to my ma’s house and shacked up in my room together.
He was supposed to find an apartment for himself, but in the meantime he was there, on my bed in his yoga pants when I came home from work every day. Frankie spent most nights at her boyfriend’s place, and my ma was basically living with the “reggae star,” but still, it was a full house. I grew irritated with the situation.
I spent nights out of the house again, on dance floors with girlfriends. Then one of them kissed me and started an avalanche. She knew Jon, and I was friends with her boyfriend. We all had a kind of unspoken agreement that this was okay, but it made me realize I missed the softness of a girl’s mouth so much. I started hanging out with her on a weekly basis, going to parties and making out everywhere. Jon knew and was fine with it, but when he’d come meet up with us he’d be cold toward me.
Not eight weeks into being back, I skated home one night to find him sitting on my stoop looking sad. I sat down next to my dream boy and asked him what was wrong.
“I can’t do this, iO. It doesn’t feel right.”
“You can’t do this?” I said, gesturing between our chests.
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I think there’s just too much pressure on the situation. I think I need to leave. I know I go cold with you, and I can’t explain it, it’s just . . . something doesn’t feel right.”
“You know what, Jon, I waited four years for you to fucking come around. If you’re gonna bail on this the second the wind blows in a different direction, maybe I was wrong to begin with. Go. Do you. I won’t be here waiting when you come back.”
I stood up and went inside, stiff with anger, but a little relieved. I was prepared to fight for this love, but deep in my heart I knew he was right even if it tore at me.
A week later he was gone. He bought a used car, packed it with all his shit, and drove clear across the country.
I was gutted by the loss of the dream, but more than anything, I was shaken by the loss of my best friend. I was angry with him that he’d given up on us, but I missed my running buddy. We had done everything together for four years, and now he was just suddenly gone.
I went up to my pop’s place in tears. He had been skeptical of the whole relationship to begin with, more astonished when I came out to him about being in love with a boy than with a girl. He didn’t seem surprised that Jon had disappointed me in the end.
I sat on his couch and cried, telling him I felt like an alien, like I was too weird for everyone, a sexual hybrid that people are drawn to because I’m such a hustler, but no one can get close enough to actually understand me.
He went in to the other room and came back with a stack of books, told me that if I was gonna date men I was gonna have a rough go of finding one that was worthy. He handed me the stack and said, “Here. Forget Jon. These are your new boyfriends.”
I’ve been floating in a gray zone between realities for the few months since. When I’m at the magazine, I’m the boss. We have recessed lighting and marble desks. When I go to my real jobs, I’m making twelve bucks an hour doing grunt work, shooting bullshit events and doing menial artist assistant crap, filing negs and fetching gear.
When my ma isn’t home, Frankie and I have the run of the roost, blasting music, smoking weed and cleaning, going out dancing. The house smells nice, like Frankie’s flowery candles, and we take herbal-smelling baths.
When Ma is in, she’s screaming. The lights are off and the radio blasts. Frankie goes to her new man’s and I do my best to stay out. Sometimes I’ll drop in on Chico for long enough for Ma to pass out, but she still regularly burns the pots of rice.
I am eager to get out of town.
An opportunity comes up to go to Los Angeles. I’ve never been, and if I fly myself out, I could earn enough to cover my ticket shooting an event for a magazine, so I do it.
I have one friend in L.A., diminutive, hyperactive, handsome Jimmy, whose couch I sleep on. He’s KGB’s ex-boyfriend, and the one who initially introduced us all to 2C-I, the Prada of chemical psychedelics. He’s a combination of mentor and bad influence, who I take some sick pleasure in making out with.
Tonight, he grabbed me when I got off work, put some mushrooms in my mouth, and said I needed to get my first lap dance. We slammed some drinks and came to this shitty strip club with a pink neon silhouette of a girl outside, just as the drugs hit their peak.
The cavernous room is dark, filled with the musty air of sex. Jimmy tells me to pick a girl. It’s topless only, panties on. California, he explains, is one or the other; tits and booze, or pussy and sobriety. I can’t imagine some girl’s stank poon in my face being hot anyway, and I gratefully clutch my cold Corona.
I hesitantly take a seat a few rows back from the stage. A brunette in a thong appears on the platform in front of us. I don’t have any money, so I try not to look at her. Jimmy pulls out a wad of singles and starts slapping them against his hand, licking his lips. This is becoming something out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. One look at his pupils and it’s clear he’s off his balls. He probably can’t even see her through the projections his mind is creating.
I can’t help myself, I’m getting lost in thoughts way too deep for a strip club. I’m examining one girl’s jazz shoes and perfect posture, and it makes me sad to realize she’s a trained dancer, probably doing this because she can’t get a legit gig. It leads me to thoughts of home, thoughts of class, thoughts of my ma.
Jesus, that’s the last thing you want to think about when your friend is pounding on your shoulder, urging you to pay a girl twenty bucks to grind on your lap for one song. But I’m not in control, I’m just along for whatever ride my tired brain wants to take me on.
I start thinking about the apartment, how befouled it is, the ring of sludge around the inside of the toilet bowl that’s been there since we moved in eleven years ago. I start to get angry, too high for empathy for my ma.
Green lasers shoot through the darkness, spinning and splitti
ng into lines dividing the sparkling air. They lower down over my face and I’m lost in them, dreaming of what could be if my ma would just stop. Stop being wasted. Stop getting high. Deal with herself. Let me clean. Let me paint the place.
Jimmy won’t let up, so I pick a girl with a blond bob. She looks soft, I tell him. He laughs at me and waves her over.
She leads me into a back room and pushes me down on a bench, straddling my lap. I am too high to be sexual and I’m finding this incredibly awkward.
“Let’s wait for the next song, okay, hon?”
“Okay . . . what’s your name?”
“We don’t ask those things around here, baby.”
“Oh. Got it. Sorry.”
“Nadine. It’s Nadine.”
“Cool. Nice to meet you, Nadine.”
She pushes her hips down onto me.
“Nice to meet you, too, honey.”
I’m caught off guard by the feeling in my jeans. I realize I’m turned on by the soft, powdery smell of her skin, and when she grinds on me again, my breathing gets deeper without my permission. The song is taking forever.
“Where are you from?”
“The Valley. What about you?”
“New York.”
“You visiting L.A.?”
“Yeah. How long have you been doing this?”
This is not how this is supposed to go. I know that. But I realize that I’m intoxicated by the closeness of her body. I find myself staring at her mouth. I want to kiss her.
“A couple years.”
I realize I want to protect her. She reminds me of a blond Minnie Mouse.
In two seconds, stripper straddling my crotch, I understand what I’ve been avoiding all along: I prefer girls.
I put tentative hands on her lower back and look into her face, realizing she’s older than I thought. She lets me do this. She’s spacing out, looking away, chattering until the song starts.
“I started doing this to put my daughter through high school.”
Oof. That’s it. My hands come off her back, my body temperature drops. I want nothing more than for this nice-smelling lady to dismount me and to go take a shower. My skin feels creepy crawly. But an Usher jam kicks in and I grin and bear it as she rubs her now visibly wrinkled skin over my whole body.
When she finishes, I thank her politely and race back to Jimmy, who is having an incredible time showering a brunette with dollar bills. He has gone to the ATM to replenish his supply, half of which he presses into my hands.
As I’m standing over this girl, making it rain on her, I look down at her ass clapping, I look into her tired, checked-out eyes and realize I’m not destined for much better if I don’t make some moves of my own. Something has to give, and it’s not gonna be my ma. I can’t wait for anyone to do it for me, it’s gonna have to come from me.
Chapter 49
Surgery
New York City, summer into fall, 2007
WHEN I COME HOME FROM L.A., SOMETHING HAS changed in my disposition. I’m not interested in fighting it out anymore. I’ve understood, deeply, that change will only come from myself. My ma has been this way nearly my entire life.
I avoid her completely. I can’t erase my anger, but I do my best to keep it in. I spend my time working on the magazine, developing exit strategies: businesses I can start, careers I can embark on, ways out.
Then she breaks up with the reggae star. He convinced her to lend him her meager life savings and then it disappeared. She tells Frankie and me this one night, not even tipsy, and both of our hearts break. I get pulled right back in to caring for her, swearing to kill this guy, break his legs and drag him to a cash machine.
I look at her, hunched on her massage table, crying quietly. Such a proud back, slumped in pain from yet another disappointing man, and I feel so much for her. I would do anything to take her hurt, pull it out of her bones, and throw it away. I want her to know relief, at the very least from her physical pain.
We fetch her tissues and talk her through it tenderly, staying up for hours coaxing her out of her despondency.
My own hope fucks me. When her inevitable spiral back into psychosis happens, when her lip snarls back up and her eyes glaze back over, when the rice cloud seeps under the door, I’m crippled by the disappointment. I stop talking to her almost completely, but now she’s in the living room every morning, and I can see how bad her hip has gotten.
When the singer douche bag finally returns the money, she pieces together every single dollar she has, borrows what she can from her family, finagles some kind of temporary insurance policy that will cover a hip replacement, and sets a surgery date.
The day of, I go up to the hospital with her. Standing at the window next to her bed, looking out over the East River, I am bouncing back and forth between immense guilt for not wanting to be there for her, and fury for everything she’s done to damage my instinct to love and care for her. I ask her if she’s stopped taking her pills and she sucks her teeth sarcastically.
“Psh. What pills. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ma. This is not a joke. They’re gonna put you under. You can’t be on speed when they do that, it could kill you.”
“I don’t take any pills.”
“Ma! The fucking pills I found under your bed! The Desoxyn! You think I’m a fucking idiot? I’m trying to help you right now.”
Clearly, she intends to hold to her lie, so I push past her gurney and go out to the nurse’s station in the hall.
I ask a petite middle-aged blond nurse who’s in charge of my ma’s care if amphetamines mixed with anesthesia can be lethal. I watch her hit the keyboard a few times.
“Am I right? Is she at risk?”
“Um, potentially. You never know. There could be respiratory failure if a stimulant and a sedative are mixed incorrectly.”
“The bottle is in one of the plastic bags next to her bed. Maybe once she’s sleeping you can check for the dosage or something . . .”
“How long did you say she’s been on these pills?”
“Desoxyn. I don’t know . . .”
She gives me a fleeting glance filled with so much sadness I pale. I want to disappear. I thank her quickly and retreat to the room, to the window, to the view.
Ma starts talking about dance classes and auditions and fantastical career bullshit that is never going to materialize. Anything to distract herself from the fact that she is in a hospital bed, about to go in for surgery, and her twenty-two-year-old child just had to warn the nurse about her amphetamine addiction. I can’t do it anymore.
Turning around, I put both hands on the railing by her feet and look into her face. My tone is grave.
“Listen to me. I just told that nurse out there that you’ve been taking speed so that they know how to not kill you when they put you under. They’re gonna probably detox you to be able to do the surgery. This is your one chance. If you start taking those pills again after this, once, even one, Ma, you will never see my face again. Do you hear me?”
She is silent, picking at her fingers. She shakes her head in the tiniest way, on autopilot. I won’t let her feed me another line.
“Do you understand what I’m saying? You will never see your kid’s face again.”
She can’t agree. If she agrees, she’ll be confessing. She can’t acknowledge that it’s real, but I can see that something has reached her. She has been shamed enough by this proclamation that she falls quiet.
Guilt fills my throat, and I feel the desire to hug her. I want to hold her and erase her at the same time, and it’s splitting me in half. I have to go. Before I can do something stupid, I bolt out the door, past the nurse, into the elevator, and onto the street. I throw my skateboard to the pavement and rip down York.
There’s been an accident, so one lane of the FDR Drive is empty of cars all the way to Fifty-ninth Street. I jump the wall and skate down the center of the highway angrily. Part of me wishes they’d let the cars go, that I’d get swallowe
d up by them. The faster I ride, the less I have time to cry.
I’m racing home to pack my shit. I don’t know where I’m gonna go, but I have to get the fuck out of there.
Chapter 50
Around My Edges
New York City, fall 2007 through February 2008
THE FALL CREEPS BY SLOWLY. I TRY TO LEAVE, BUT MA gets escorted home from the hospital and put into bed, where she’s supposed to stay for a while. My ma who I can hardly remember seeing sit down, even once. She’s clean; I can tell because she’s nice. Her eyes are clear, and she doesn’t become dark at any point in the day. She can’t get up to go buy any booze, so she’s free from that, too. I’m quietly proud of her that she managed to pull off her insurance hustle and make her surgery happen. I feel like I have to care for her.
When she looks at me, it’s with kindness and a twinge of embarrassment. We can speak to each other, have a conversation that makes sense and doesn’t spiral into a fight. She doesn’t want to ask me for anything, but she can’t do anything for herself, so I bring her food and water, help her to the bathroom and into the bath.
To see my evil twin in pain flays me. Despite my roiling anger, I love her so much. No matter how she’s hurt me, when the cloud of drink and drugs clear, she’s my ma again, and I’m her cub. That’s just the way it is. Unconditional.
Frankie has been keeping the apartment clean so my ma’s hip heals right and doesn’t get infected. We’ve been taking turns hanging out with her, and it’s almost nice around there. But I know I’ve still got to go. The end is coming, though its shape is still amorphous.
Edie, meanwhile, has taken a turn for the worse. My beloved grandma has to be moved upstate to my uncle’s house in preparation for her inevitable passing. My pop calls one day and tells me that she’s stopped eating. She is ninety-two and proud, and she is stepping out of her own accord. No doctors, no illnesses—she has decided to go. He says it’s only a matter of time.
Caught between the crushing trajectories of the two matriarchs in my life, I cry on the fire escape by myself, alternating cigarettes and joints. I listen to sad songs and try to figure out where to put all this shit while my ma quietly reads books on her massage table.
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