The East Village
CHAPTER SEVEN from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
The East Village
7
Seated around a scarred 1950s linoleum kitchen table with cigarette burns lining its edges, in what was now “their” apartment, were the three people Petra loved most in the world. They were her first family of choice, which included Vincent, herself, and another couple, Charlotte and Fred.
Born and raised in the suburbs of New York City and educated in top-notch school systems, the three conversed, with pronounced adeptness, on a wide range of literary, social and political topics. Their dynamic, intellectual banter far exceeded Petra’s ability to comprehend or comment. In response, she withdrew into her imagination.
Their voices blended and faded into a dissociative haze. She perceived, as if a movie was playing on the inside of her head, the four of them sitting together around multiple tables over many lifetimes. A flash of them as soldiers, caked in blood and sweat, enjoying a reprieve from the battlefield in a raucous tavern; as ancient royals, a solid oak table extended and laden with every manner of delicacy, feasting their conquests; as peasants shaking off a brutal workday with a bowl of soup, a crust of bread and watered down wine in a dingy hovel; and this day, shooting up street heroin, cooked in dirty silver spoons with blackened underbellies. Three hardcore junkies and one tourist, who would never succumb to Hypnos or Nyx.
Charlotte’s drug of choice was Fred. Crossing any, and all, boundaries, she defied basic common sense to be with him. She saw beyond his outward self-destructive behaviors into his particular brand of divine light, and that was that. She was hooked. Petra, caught in the same predicament, understood this about Charlotte. They were helpless to resist, naïve young women who entrusted themselves to the men who loved them, who accepted them as they were, men who emanated a powerful luminosity impossible to extinguish. A resplendent radiance that shone brighter against the dark, seedy underworld of bacchanal delights that defined the East Village in the 1980s.
Vincent and Petra spent their first year together languishing on a mattress in the front room of 127 Second Avenue, above the B&H Dairy. Most mornings, hours before dawn, the fragrant aroma of Challah bread baking in the giant ovens below gave rise to sweet-scented ripples of pleasure; compelling, lovely, and pure. Scents capable of permeating even the deepest heroin slumber. Morning twilight dreams interrupted by a brief inhalation, a fleeting moment of appreciation, before she tightened her grip on the dreamer laying beside her and cascaded back into oblivion.
It was Vincent’s custom, with the morning paper tucked under his arm, to wake her in the late afternoon with a cup of coffee, light and sweet. Through two grimy windows, sunbeams highlighted trails of otherwise invisible dust, floating, suspended above an ancient, musty oriental rug dragged in from the street. Petra reveled in their first waking hour, a special time set aside to recuperate from the languor of the previous evening. In it, they were almost a normal couple, almost sober, just high enough to feel straight. A real Leave it to Beaver moment. Then, as necessity dictated, the waiting game began. A hellish interlude, where she stood by, all alone in their sad hovel, a dwelling place that had lost its previous luster as the last drops of narcotic bliss faded away and reality had its harsh, sordid way.
These were the hours when Vincent started his rounds, weaving his way through downtown apartments, collecting money for dime bags of heroin. Tiny glassine bags of hope stamped with brand names like Poison, Toilet, and Red Cross. She hated the waiting game. On one particular evening, after she tidied everything possible, worry gripped her. It drove its talons far beneath her defenses. Coping copious quantities of heroin on the street was a dangerous business. Vincent had developed a plausible backstory that linked him to a Mafia family in Little Italy. Not a lick of truth to it, but believable all the same. Still, anything could happen.
“What if he’s arrested, for God’s sake?”
The kitchen window looked out onto an airshaft where former tenets used to hang their laundry, back in the day, when first-generation immigrants pursuing the American dream lived in the building. As she stared at her anxious expression reflected on the filthy glass, the contents of someone’s trashcan floated down past the window, clinking and clanging as it hit the pavement below. It was impossible to open the window without gagging on the rotten stench rising from piles of decaying garbage.
On some level, she acknowledged she had brought this on herself. She had earned it. Her escalating anxiety, now topped off with a profound sense of unworthiness and self-loathing, rose from unfathomable depths. With gentle persistence, it suffocated her. She did not deserve the air she breathed. She was on borrowed time. Wasn’t it obvious that Vincent’s love was a complete sham, a fantasy cooked up by a desperate soul longing for life to have some sort of meaning?
“Why would anyone love a crazy bitch like me, anyway?”
This was her mental state when the key turned in the lock and Vincent, already high, breezed through the door.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Where have you been?”
Vincent, a sheepish grin on his face, that under better circumstances, she adored, replied, “When I got to Dinah’s apartment,” (his ex-girlfriend), “she asked me to stay and get high with her. I knew that you’d be okay since you’re not hooked.”
The statement had a certain amount of truth to it. She had not been using dope long enough to have a physical addiction. She had, however, fallen under its spell, and developed a psychological addiction from the start. Heroin is a master manager of emotions. Depending on it, even for a brief time, depletes the user of their self-soothing abilities. He had no way of understanding that she was trapped in unconscious tunnels wrought with fearful despair. He didn’t know who she was or what he had gotten himself into. In her mind, his prolonged absence and the extra attention he paid to Dinah was proof enough that everything between them was a lie. He was on his way back to his ex-girlfriend, having seen Petra for what she was.
“Wasn’t it obvious?”
He was preparing to put her out, and she went ballistic. An explosion of rage boiled up and out of her. Screaming a barrage of accusations, she toppled a bookcase they had purchased, scattering its contents across the floor. It was the first piece of furniture they bought as a couple, a symbol of the home they were building. Pulling it down was tantamount to sacrilege. She was doing what she always did, destroying what she loved before it destroyed her. A desperate move to control something, anything.
Vincent, while he was not a practicing Buddhist, had a similar internal calm about him, an unexpected groundedness and an innate ability to practice compassion under harsh circumstances. He grabbed ahold of her shoulders and without harming her, maneuvered his feral, wild animal of a girlfriend up against the wall. He spoke calming words of love and acceptance, assuring her he knew who he was looking at and that she was the one for him. It was a demonstration of compassion, unlike anything Petra had experienced. It unleashed a longing for something better.
Compassion, the be-all and the end-all. She did not understand it, did not know where to find it, but that was the moment it sparked inside her. A tiny flame, like a pilot light in a gas oven; a seed planted underneath all the garbage, the filth, the accusations, the guilt and the shame she had accumulated and would continue to accumulate. One day, if she made it out alive, she would awaken and compassion would reveal itself in her.
Vincent helped her breath, slow and deep, in and out. As she calmed, he guided her over to the kitchen table, prepared a shot of heroin and handed it to her. Now he understood. She was more opioid-dependent than anyone he knew. Her mental health hinged on a regular intake of narcotics. He saw the darkness of her wounds and he was not afraid, not in the least. He loved and accepted all of her and had the deepest compassion for her. It was otherworldly, the truest form of love. From that moment on, he became her anchor.
Their daily life routine would have been perfect if one of them had a trust fund. As it stood, they had to make enough money to pay their meager bills, which should have been easy, but they were too busy getting high and staying high.
Rent control kept their Second Avenue apartment affordable, and one meal a day, or every other day, was plenty. They considered a cup of coffee and a six-pack of powdered sugar mini donuts an acceptable meal. A crazy friend of theirs, Rockets Redglare, an aspiring character actor who ended up playing himself in several movies, told them to head uptown and forage at Nathan’s condiment bar in Times Square.
“You can fill a plate with sauerkraut, pickles, relish, mayo and mustard. No one will notice.”
According to today’s appreciation of fermented foods, Nathan’s unintentional outreach program provided a healthy free meal, keeping many an impoverished junkie alive longer than expected.
Vincent grew up on Long Island. His father was a corrections officer who died young, leaving behind a widow and three sons. These boys, as half-orphaned children do, became further attached to their mother, a classic, doting Italian woman who cooked seven-course family dinners, from scratch, every Sunday. She expected her sons at the table, no excuses. Every weekend, he left the city lugging a duffle bag full of dirty clothes. Following the meal, he returned on the last train. Under one arm, he carried the duffle bag packed tight with laundered garments, folded and ironed, and under the other, a paper grocery bag, brimming with deli meat and cheese. Before he could finish placing it on the kitchen table, Petra, famished, dove in, searching for the coveted container of whitefish salad. With a speed reserved for the ravenous, she spread the delicacy over a hunk of freshly baked bread and shoved it down her throat.
Regarding the clothes, she wondered, “Who is this woman ironing my sad little panties into perfect origami squares?”
Not long after, she received her first invitation to Sunday dinner. What should have been a delightful event turned out to be excruciating, heartbreaking, and downright sad.
Vincent, in a twisted sense of Italian Catholic guilt, created another code, another rule, declaring, “It’s disrespectful to go to my mother’s house high.”
She thought, but did not dare say out loud, “WHAT? Is this some sort of penance? A sacrifice of suffering offered to the godly saint of perfect mothers?”
In protest, she agreed. They went out to Long Island dope sick, unable to eat any of the spectacular seven courses. Instead, they caused that beautiful woman to worry for their lives, while they, without intending to, insulted her. It was like inviting Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy to a hallowed celebration.
Something had to change, and that change was going to have to come from Petra. Vincent had a high threshold for pain. She did not. Allowing themselves to depend on his mother for sustenance came with its untenable expectation. The dreaded Sunday dinner, unsustainable without the aid of narcotics, was too much to ask from a full-blown addict. The ordeal had become as threatening to her well-being, as the strings attached to financial dependency on her father. It was imperative they become responsible for themselves.
Many spiritual teachers propose the idea that thoughts create reality. They insist human beings are more powerful than they imagine. To believe such a claim suggests that even the desperate thoughts of a drug-addicted Petra had the power to create provision out of thin air. What other explanation could there be for the four hundred dollars that magically appeared in her bank account?
A burgeoning criminal, she withdrew the money and closed the account before the bank had time to discover its mistake. Waiting for the light to change, still standing on the corner in front of the bank, a plan of action unfolded. Vincent was already providing dime bags of heroin to the downtown artist and literary guild.
“What if we offered cocaine as well?”
A woman in the West Village named Adriana sold weight, nothing less than an eight ball. She was a spindly little thing with horn-rimed, Coke-bottle glasses who had earned her place as one of the “Beautiful People” in the downtown scene. Petra respected her accomplishment.
“Vincent, what if we sell quarter grams, half grams, and grams? We could easily double and even triple our investment.”
He made his usual rounds.
“Would you like some coke with that?”
They sold out within hours. Easy, seamless, perfect. The plan worked better than expected. Hauling ass back over to Adriana’s, they made it through the door before she closed for the day.
Huffing and gasping, Petra blurted, “I’ll take half an ounce—please.”
Manners meant something to Adriana. She filled the order and inquired, “See you tomorrow?”
Now they were in the shit! They had money to burn, money to eat in restaurants, money to buy an enormous television set, money to buy proper furniture, money, money, money and more money. And the best part? Neither of them cared for the effects of cocaine, maybe a little pinch to add flavor to a shot of heroin, but never on its own, all night long, the way their clients used it.
Petra made weekly deliveries to John, a make-up artist for Devine, an infamous drag queen and the female lead in many of John Water’s films. Through John, they supplied both cast and crew. One evening, he asked her if he could do her make-up.
“Oh, my God, YES!”
Petra marveled at his expertise as he erased her face and built her a new one. She understood, at that moment, that she could be anyone she wanted; she wore a mask, and she was brand new. Rather than become the fullness of herself, as many drag queens describe it, she reverted into her past, into a darkness she did not remember, into the role of a perpetrator who victimized her long, long ago.
Her arrival shocked Vincent, who, while surprised by her unrecognizable face, was also excited. After all, who doesn’t like a little role-play? At first, he was into her performance. It was enticing and sexual. All around them, people were taking part in what many would consider perverse behaviors, from half-naked dancers and random hook-ups at Studio 54, to clubs with orgiastic and sadomasochistic themes, like Hellfire’s. Even many of the mainstream clubs, frequented by the bridge and tunnel crowd, offered glass enclosures for performance artists to express explicit content. It was the 1980s, after all.
Making it clear from the get-go that she was not into public sexual displays, she told Vincent, “No, to threesomes,” and doubled down on, “No, to orgies.”
All she needed was him, and she was unwilling to share.
She threatened him once by stating, “If I ever catch you with another woman, I will kill her and paint the walls with her blood while you watch.”
That was gangster, and by the look on Vincent’s face, she was sure he believed every word. They had a vigorous, love-based sex life. In her opinion, including more people would “Fuck the whole thing up.”
Much later, when Vincent was an old man in his sixties, he said, “All I remember is us constantly having sex. It was a lot of sex.”
She remembered a bunch of other stuff happening, but went with his recollection of events.
What was most disturbing about Petra’s performance that night was her complete lack of conscious involvement. It was unnerving. In an uncanny portrayal, as if she were a seasoned actress, she disappeared into a molestation memory and took on the role of the perpetrator. By now, Vincent knew her, inside and out. They spent almost every moment together, more so now that they ran a home-based business. He knew that someone had victimized her as a child. It had played out in front of him as unreasonable fears, anxiety, and depression. He had witnessed her PTSD flashbacks, hallucinations, panic attacks and fainting spells. On occasion, he woke up beside her in sweat-soaked sheets.
That night, he experienced what it had been like from her perspective. The eyes of her perpetrator looked into his eyes, commanding him, subduing him, preparing to violate him on every level. He felt her hidden fears. An insatiable, soul-stealing lust that rapes and devours its prey was attempting to dominate him. He revolted.
“Get that shit off your face, right now!” he said, as he pushed her off of him.
He led her to the sink and wiped the makeup off with a wet washcloth. She could feel his body trembling against her. Tears ran down his face as he lifted her head, directing her gaze toward the mirror and then back into his eyes, over and over, until he saw her slide back into her body and return to normal, to the woman who loved him.
“You know what you need? You need a hamburger and fries.”
Vincent was her guardian angel, keeping her safe as she walked along the cliffs in Hades. He had an instinctual sense of what to do. Anyone close to her knew she had secrets. He guarded them as if they were his own.
Once Fred asked him, “What happened to her?”
Vincent replied, “Nasty shit, terrible. She’s all fucked up. No more questions.”
And that was all he ever said to Fred, or anyone else, for that matter. Many, many times, over the decades, she thanked him for keeping her alive, for protecting her, for loving her. He never accepted her gratitude.
In his words, “I am the one who destroyed you.”
How heartbreaking and untrue is that?
Their client list continued to grow. They began selling more and more to doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers and stockbrokers. The East Village apartment, now too seedy for their posh clientele, needed an upgrade and, again, out of thin air, a random guy offered to trade. He had an apartment on the top floor of a six-story walk-up on Leroy Street, in the West Village. For some unexplainable reason, he found his neighborhood boring and preferred the flavor of the East Village.
Vincent and Petra gasped for air, resting on every landing, laughing at themselves, as they carried a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound television set up six flights of stairs. The apartment was a tiny one-bedroom that looked out over a courtyard. A quiet street, an acceptable location.
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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.