Falling Through the Stars
CHAPTER SIX from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
Falling Through the Stars
6
Unprepared for college, having floated through high school in a haze, it was no surprise that Petra’s freshman year was a bust. Convinced a more amenable and less pretentious institution would solve her academic problems, she followed her family’s example and ran. A description of the University of Arizona in an underground college guide intrigued her.
“Drugs, drugs, drugs, party, party, party…“
Raymond, pleased with the price tag, had no objections. She applied, and they accepted. No one more surprised than Petra. The university placed her in the international student’s dorm. Perhaps they had honed in on a high school diploma from Brazil. Were they looking to fulfill a diversity quota? Her Major in cultural anthropology, a discipline that complimented her personality and life experience, was a far cry from the business major her father longed for.
Tucson’s wild west vibe, its beautiful sunsets and untouched raw desert as far as the eye could see, inspired her, as did a daily intake of weed. She experimented with a variety of hallucinogenic drugs. Carlos Castaneda, Native American spiritual practices, Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead became essential elements in a newfound, somewhat healthy, hippie lifestyle.
It was easy to support herself waiting tables, a job she was pre-qualified for, thanks to Lou’s painstaking lessons. Raymond paid her college tuition and housing costs. He was happy to do so in response to unexpected soaring grades. When it came time to move off campus, Petra asked him to co-sign for an inexpensive, older-model jeep. She begged and pleaded. He thought an off-road vehicle was the height of stupidity. Convincing him it was necessary for an upcoming archeological dig was easier than expected. Her ability to think on her feet had developed into a pattern of manipulation, as she struggled to get what she desired from a man who always wanted the exact opposite.
The old Jeep blew up the same day they bought it. Not at all pleased with the recklessness of the dealership and uncomfortable placing his signature on any vehicle that might kill his daughter, her father did what many well-off parents do. He purchased a brand-new Jeep Wrangler and paid in full. Petra observed his behavior, something she had picked up in class. He took enormous pleasure and reveled in the feeling of his financial success. As he threw money at the problem and watched it disappear, she noticed the jagged edges of his jawline soften.
Now she had premium transportation and trips out beyond the city limits into the desert wilderness became a regular pastime. Friends bought the gas and beer. The weed came from Petra, yes; she was dealing again. Mushrooms, peyote and LSD came straight from the gods and appeared out of nowhere. Work hard, study hard, play hard was their motto as they raced headlong into their twenties, beautiful and invincible.
One of her older friends, Dave, threw a coveted New Year’s Eve party every year, and 1980 was no exception. The hippie culture, now almost two decades strong, was dissipating. Free love had evaporated into selfish anarchy. The sand shifted beneath Petra’s feet as the Sex Pistols banged around in her head. She cut her hair short, dyed it black, and began styling it in spikes. Hippie skirts gave way to form-fitting vintage dresses, skinny jeans and raunchy t-shirts.
At the height of the party, Vincent, a man she never met before, but a man she had always known, sauntered across her field of vision. She recognized his mannerisms. He had a cadence all his own, an ancient rhythm her soul remembered. Pulling the refrigerator door open, he lingered, contemplating his choices, the light illuminating his sharp Italian features. A Corona in hand, he made a certain pivot, a movement she recognized on a cellular level. A primitive, animalistic feeling of ownership consumed her. It was as if she had stumbled upon a missing piece of herself.
As Vincent closed the refrigerator door and caught Petra’s gaze, he, too, had a significant, visceral reaction. Their combined magnetism was not of this world; it was like two ancient entities falling through the stars. At least that is what it felt like, made even more illusory by snorting a Dilaudid he had brought with him from New York City. In a back room, maybe Dave’s, she lay contented in his arms well past midnight, at home with a man for the first time in her life. Enraptured, she floated through eons, observed slivers of ancient civilizations and other dimensions. As the visions wove their way in and out of her consciousness, they cemented her to the man by her side, her eternal partner, here, again, at long last.
At first, there was a tiny problem with a certain brotherly code that appeared to be etched in stone. Dave let him know, after seeing the two of them laying together, that he had first dibs.
“So, infuriating!”
She had no idea that Dave had any romantic feelings toward her. And, besides, was it inconsequential that she was not, and never would be, attracted to her friend Dave in that way? Was she a horse? Something to be bought, sold, or traded? Could some random man claim ownership of her? Did the 1960s even happen? It was bizarre and incomprehensible.
Sorting it out wasted several days. In the meantime, she had her Jeep, and they were flush with mushrooms, beer and gas. They spent those few days tripping their brains out in the desert. The connection between Vincent and Petra was obvious to anyone with eyes, and Dave, with the therapeutic intervention of hallucinogenic drugs, had no choice but to relinquish his claim.
Petra had some mad off-road driving skills. She got a kick out of taking four-wheeling novices on a ride that they would never forget. There was a sandy hill on the edge of a wash. It looked like nothing but, if she drove almost to the top and stalled the jeep, she could bury the back tires in the soft sand, causing the Jeep to rest perpendicular. It was like being strapped into an open-air rocket ship.
She instructed her passengers to, “Fasten your seatbelts and hang on tight.”
Turning the key in the ignition, she gunned the engine and popped the back tires up and out, sending them flying back down the hill. Stop for a moment and consider that they were all high on mind-warping substances.
Screaming and scrambling to get out, she thwarted them with a command to, “Hold on!”
With her foot heavy on the gas, Petra flew up and over the hill, through open air, and landed with a bounce in the wash below.
“Okay, you can get out now.”
One might surmise that she had inherited, at least a tinge of, her father’s psychopathic personality.
Vincent left Dave’s house and moved in with her for the rest of his stay. To say it was like Heaven on Earth would be an understatement. The day he went back to New York, she crashed and fell into a dark depression. Unable to bear the idea of living in Tucson without him, she devised a radical plan, opting to take her final college semester in London. Her father, opposed to foreign studies in an English-speaking country, deemed it a waste of time.
More important than her intention to finish her studies abroad was her plan to go to New York City for the summer. Vincent would be gone for the first month, and his apartment was available. She would spend the last two months living in the dorm at Columbia University. Excellent grades landed her a spot in their urban anthropology program. Go figure. There, she would complete the remaining credit requirements of her major.
Her father threatened to cut off the rest of her college tuition if she insisted on going to London. They were already on rocky ground. He was living in Mexico City and asked her to move in with him. In exchange, he offered to pay for her graduate studies at the University of Mexico and take care of her for the rest of her life. If she did not agree, he intended to marry his secretary and could not guarantee any ongoing financial support. She declined his offer. It reeked of dysfunction and tugged on childhood memories that she could not remember, but continued to feel on a deep, unconscious level. With the end of his financial support pressing in from the ethers, she, on impulse, sold the Jeep. It was best to be free of his influence and move forward with her life. If she adhered to a strict budget, she had just enough money to cover her expenses for the next seven months.
—
“This can’t be it.”
She double checked the address scratched onto a worn out letter from Vincent.
“Yep, 127 Second Avenue.”
Architects, (not sure they deserve that title given the circumstances), designed tenement buildings in straight lines, with one room leading to the next and a tub in the kitchen. Most of the apartments on his floor shared two toilets located outside in the hall. Unlike those, this dwelling, considered an upgrade, had a tiny closet with just enough room for an interior toilet. The hallway facilities, also in closets, had become shooting galleries where random junkies did their drugs. Petra had an uneasy feeling walking past them. She imagined what it would be like to enter one and close the door behind her.
“Gross, I’d rather do my business in a jar.”
The front room, overlooking Second Avenue, had a mattress, a reading lamp and various piles of books, all laid out on the floor. Cradled in a down comforter she brought from home, and hard-pressed to sleep with an all night flea market hocking its wares under the open window, she sensed movement. She flipped on the light and let out a horror movie scream as dozens of cockroaches scurried into cracks along the floorboards. In the morning, first thing, she set off six roach bombs. When she returned four hours later, the inside of the walls were raining cockroaches.
“Holy shit!”
Regardless of how disturbing that experience was, she had the wretched place to herself. She adored living in the city and wandered the streets, feeling and inhaling every detail. Hanging out on building stoops, people-watching, absorbed in the sheer spectacle of it all, she waited and waited for her man.
To pass the time, she revamped his apartment and turned it into a somewhat comfortable home. The transformation shocked Vincent, who fell into a state of moderate despair. She was way too bougie for him and above his station. If he was certain of anything, it was a newfound belief that he would never measure up. She, in a similar vein, convinced herself that he was out of her league. He was a literary genius, well-educated and much-too-much of an intellectual for the likes of her. With such a rocky foundation, it remains a mystery that the relationship lasted as long as it did.
When Petra was twelve, her parents allowed her to take the train, by herself, from the Connecticut suburbs into the city. It was always the same, a round-trip train ticket, ten dollars cash in her pocket and a Gimbel’s credit card with a twenty-five dollar spending limit.
With joyful expectation, she waited for the landscape to mutate from the lush green countryside to the boarded-up, burnt-out buildings of the Bronx. Sitting up straighter in her seat flooded with exhilaration and excitement, she, too, transmuted. She became energized and alive as adrenaline pumped through her body, giving her a sense of direction, destiny and purpose, her suburban boredom slipping off like a useless garment. Nothing compared to the feeling of the big city, its potential danger and the expectation of getting lost inside hoards of strangers. The moment the train doors opened at Grand Central Station, the aroma of a dirty, raw, unkept metropolis where anything could happen descended on her. She belonged. She felt it in her bones.
The parental decision that enabled a twelve-year-old child to run wild in the streets of New York City, while questionable by today’s standards, was not that unheard of in the early seventies. In fact, it was one of the most incredible gifts her parents gave her.
After wandering, shopping, eating soft dough pretzels, and questionable hot dogs from street vendors, she headed to Midtown Manhattan, to her father’s office. Following a long ride in a fancy elevator and a walk down a lengthy corridor, with employees waving her on and welcoming her, she reached the Vice President’s office. It gave her a sense of importance and a feeling of prestige that was absent in her everyday life. As Raymond straightened his desk and gathered his belongings, she relaxed in a leather wing-back chair, put her feet up and gazed out the window at the Empire State Building.
Gallaghers, their dinner destination, was a fancy steak house where huge sides of beef hung on hooks in the front windows, aging. The Maître d’ and all the waiters knew her father by name. They doted on her and wrapped her leftovers in fancy swan-shaped pieces of aluminum foil. Following dinner, they strolled through the crowds and peered in department store windows as they headed back to the station. The bar car, its conversations roaring above the sound of the train as it rattled and screeched, the clinking of glasses and clouds of cigarette smoke, a perfect finish to a spectacular day.
Petra’s middle school often took trips into Manhattan to visit museums, the ballet, or opera. She was under-whelmed with classical culture. It paled compared to an urban landscape teeming with life. The chaperones always gave a specific time and place to meet, which she considered before asking to use the lavatory and heading out the front door to play in whatever neighborhood presented itself.
She would have blown off Columbia and stayed downtown with Vincent, but he insisted she complete her coursework. His concern for her studies was genuine and also a maneuver to keep her at a distance, as he had much to hide. In truth, he had gone to Arizona for a month-long “cure” from his heroin habit. Petra knew he used narcotics, but she had no experience with opioid addiction or withdrawal. She did not comprehend just how high the stakes were.
The previous summer, while studying poetry at Naropa University and attending lectures by Allan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, with sporadic guest appearances by the infamous William Burroughs, he discovered his truest self. The Beat culture catapulted his soul and transformed his perception of the world. He established lifelong relationships with like-minded poets, assimilated their intellectual gifts, the rhythm of their poetry, their love of jazz, their penchant for Buddhism, and some nasty, self-destructive habits. She soon discovered that after returning from Naropa, Vincent, who lived within blocks of some of the city’s finest street heroin, began experimenting and pursued his new passion with reckless abandon.
Not long after, in an act of providence, he discovered a physician’s handbag abandoned by a deceased doctor. It was full to the brim with opioids, pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and old-fashioned glass syringes. That doctor’s bag contained the exact amount of narcotics required for all involved to develop serious habits. With only a few Dilaudid left, he took off to see Dave and get clean. That was the first time he experienced withdrawal and even though he was very young, just twenty-five years old, the severity of the sickness caused by narcotic withdrawal shocked him.
Vincent convinced her it would be a bad idea to stay overnight. His poet friend Gregory needed a flop, and he did not want her exposed to him. What he did not want her to see was him copping street heroin for the entire downtown artist and poet scene. He did not want her to witness everyone shooting up around the kitchen table. He also felt responsible, and guilty, for introducing her to heroin, which happened soon after his return.
Truth be told, he had been on another month-long “cure”, this time up on Martha’s Vineyard.
There was a drug code of sorts, not unlike the bro code, which states, “It is wrong to introduce someone you care about to heroin.”
Vincent was breaking these codes left and right where Petra was concerned. He couldn’t help but remember that first night in Arizona. He wanted more magic. She wanted more relief.
The first time he shot her up, she said to herself, “This is it. This is what I’ve been searching for. I will do this every day for the rest of my life.”
Her commitment and compulsion to use heroin scared him. He tried to separate the two of them from the start. He said he would never shoot her up again.
She said, “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”
To his horror, she injected dope like a natural-born pitcher throws a ball.
Hell-bent on getting her uptown to Columbia while he sorted out his conflicted feelings of guilt and relief, he did his best to distract her from heroin, while still being with her. Encouraging her to study, he studied with her. He brought books of poetry up to her dorm room and read poems out loud by Keats, Lord Byron and John Donne, helping her prepare for the University of London. Petra, ever mindful, observed his conflicted and dodgy behavior. She assumed he was keeping her at an arm’s length because she was not smart enough or hip enough.
“I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s embarrassed to be seen with an idiot for a girlfriend.”
Soon enough, she left for London, another city where she was in her element. The punk scene was to die for, the fashion incredible, the music raw and the beer warm and thick. Hashish crossed her path only on rare occasions, and to her dismay, heroin was elusive. She called Vincent from one of those red phone booths every few weeks. Sometimes, Gregory would answer with his strange, gravelly voice. His edginess and uncontrollable compulsions were plain for all to see, as they expressed themselves through the intonation of his words.
On one occasion, he asked, “What have you done to Vincent? I’ve never seen a man so enraptured.”
The way Gregory said, “enraptured” gave her goosebumps and made her feel amazing. Was it possible Vincent loved her? They wrote letters that became more passionate as time passed and professed mutual love and adoration. One night, he called the house.
“How do you feel about me flying over for a ten-day visit?”
“Oh, hell yes!”
She had a single room, all her own, on the fifth floor of a row house in Oxford Gardens. Everyone in the house knew about Vincent. They wanted to meet him, and readily approved his visit, even though there was a rule forbidding overnight guests. They spent the morning hours entangled in bed. The other students were in class and the house was blissfully vacant. In the afternoon, they roamed museums, historical sites, gardens, street markets and ancient pubs. On a sojourn to John Keats’s house, Vincent teased that he would have her right there on the poet’s bed.
Sitting across from her, on a train ride home from Hampton Court Palace, he held both her hands and gazed into her eyes. Tomorrow, he would be on a flight back to New York. He seemed nervous.
“I want you to move in with me.”
If you would like to support my work, I invite you to make a donation. “Buy Me a Coffee” is a friendly metaphor, not real coffee. Each “coffee” is $5 and you can buy as many as you like. It is a one time much appreciated gift. Thank you for caring!
A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.
This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.
It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.