Tribeca
CHAPTER NINE from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
Tribeca
9
Vincent’s obsession and constant attempts to manhandle her drug use had serious consequences for them both. As it happens, a friend of a friend needed someone to rent her high-end loft in Tribeca. Fed up with his interference, she made a rash decision and moved out. The speed of her heartless departure was demoralizing and left his head spinning. A poet friend from his days at Naropa moved into the Leroy Street apartment to pick up the pieces. Richard, who came across as an intense intellectual, also modeled in the nude for university art classes. The combination surprised and fascinated Petra.
“He’s an enigma.”
Without a doubt, his presence, relative sanity, and stable influence saved Vincent’s life.
Petra, in contrast, was on her own. With no more restraint from her partner in crime, everything fell to shit. She began partaking in regular three-day coke binges, became unreliable, lost another ten pounds, and experienced the first stages of hallucinatory paranoia.
In the heat of an auspicious summer, marked by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, the heroin supply dried up. Kurt and Joanne, as usual, were in Nepal, with no known return date. Their stay had far exceeded the allotted three-month window and the street supply, in an unexplainable act of God or of the devil, shriveled to nothing. Petra was in a bad way when she heard a cop knock on her apartment door. Expecting to be hauled off to the Tombs, she was relieved to see Vincent and his pissed-off face.
“This is unexpected. What are you…”
He pushed past her and through the door.
“The fucking customers are on me day and night. They’re all sick and begging me to get them dope. It’s impossible! I need somewhere to hide out. You owe me.”
Closing the door behind her, she rested her back against it, and observed the spectacle as he paraded about the loft, taking it all in.
“I brought these,” he said, waving a ziplock bag full of pills. “No one will ever think to look for me here.”
Over the moon, happy to see him, given her advanced stage of withdrawal, she welcomed him with open arms. Petra still loved her man and missed his company.
“Richard hates your guts.”
Why wouldn’t he?
She attempted to detach herself and tried her best to avoid thinking about the pain she had caused. It is difficult to describe the depth of their love and dependency on each other. From the outside in, it made no sense. The cool, hip people in his life were at a loss.
“What are you doing with someone like her? You should be with a poet, an artist, or an actress.”
Petra was not making this shit up. It was not a figment of her twisted, self-loathing imagination. Case in point, a rather harsh comment from Cookie. They had stopped by her apartment on Bleecker Street to drop off a couple of bags of heroin. This was in the early days, on one of those rare occasions when she ended up accompanying Vincent on his rounds. As soon as he excused himself to use the bathroom, Cookie, taking her time, surveyed her from head to toe.
“Well, I just don’t understand what he sees in you.”
The unexpected, vicious and haughty tone was in stark contrast to her external beauty. Gorgeous like a model, Cookie was also a successful actress, and a column writer for Interview Magazine. She had it going on and her words shook Petra to the core.
She wondered, “What’s the point of this cruelty? I’m less than nothing to her. A nobody.”
The only answer she could come up with?
“She wants my man.”
She could take him if she wanted to. Any pair of eyeballs could see the truth in that statement. Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene” filled her head and tears welled up. Tensing with every ounce of strength she could muster against the rising emotion, she howled an internal, brain shattering scream of defiance.
“Don’t you cry! Don’t you fucking cry in front of this gnarly bitch! Not now. Not ever!”
Decades later, with five years of sobriety under her belt, the sting continued to linger fresh as ever in her self-deprecating thoughts. She attempted to update the storyline.
“Maybe Cookie really cared for him. Maybe she was just looking out for him the way friends do and genuinely felt he could do better.”
Shifting perspective, to avoid spiraling down that thought’s unhelpful rabbit hole, she decided it was much more likely that Vincent had shunned an offer for meaningless sex. He valued commitment. Petra never feared him having indiscriminate, hollow sex. Rather, she feared he would tire of her and opt for an upgrade. When all was said and done, Cookie was the first of their acquaintances to die from AIDS. The next was Dinah.
“Rest in peace, darlings, all is forgiven.”
They spent six days and nights in the Tribeca loft kicking advanced heroin habits. He made it much less painful with his ziplock bag of goodies. Percodan, codeine and Valium, five at a time, three at a time, two at a time, one at a time, and Voila, all done.
All Petra owned, in the fifteen hundred square foot loft, was a feather futon mattress on the floor, one lamp, a tiny blue plastic television set, a state-of-the-art stereo system, a vinyl record collection and close to ten thousand dollars worth of Tibetan brass statues pre-dating the fourteenth century. The initial research and investment idea belonged to Vincent. He made a convincing pitch. She, however, claimed ownership, as most of the capital came from cocaine sales. The collection was their escape hatch. A day was coming. The bottom was going to fall out. It was inevitable.
“When it all goes to shit, we’ll sell the art and move to Bora Bora.”
The “end of days” loomed prophetically. She could feel it in her bones. It would be a collective descent of massive proportions. Vincent, herself, Kurt, Joanne, stockbrokers, lawyers, psychiatrists, the entire downtown artist and literary guild, all falling as one. The end of an era. Rats were already jumping ship. The lucky ones found their way to rehab and 12-step programs. The unlucky ones overdosed, committed suicide, died from AIDS, landed in jail or ended up in mental institutions.
From 14th Street to Wall Street, the sickness spread. None of them could withstand such prolonged, self-inflicted abuse. Their youthful bodies teetered on the edge of death and they were losing their minds. In less than six months, Petra would be in rehab at The Ranch, defeated and broken into tiny bits.
The loft was a gorgeous space, with lots of natural light, polished hardwood floors, and a state-of-the-art kitchen with a walk-in pantry where she hid her safe, scale and everything needed to package product. A secluded back porch, perfect for sunbathing, was the pièce de résistance.
They lazed around on the futon, under high-thread-count cotton sheets, held each other tight, ran to the toilet multiple times a day as their bodies revolted and laid out on the porch, allowing the sun to do its magic. Following a three-day withdrawal hellscape, they spent a few more days together smoking weed, resting, and ordering in from nearby restaurants, while they regained some strength. It was a “mini-cure”, a staycation.
“I hope you know, I can’t tell anyone about this, especially not Richard. He would kill me!”
Naturally, he had blamed her for his condition. From Richard’s point of view, having anything to do with her was the equivalent of a wife returning to a husband who beat her.
On the sixth day, Joanne showed up. By now, almost every junkie in lower New York had kicked the habit. The telephone unplugged since she went off-grid with Vincent had left her cocaine customers “high and dry.” Two regulars never came back. The drought led them straight into the arms of Narcotics Anonymous.
“Oh well, there’s always more where they came from.”
She was sad to see Vincent walk out the door, almost as sad as the day he left Tucson and went back to New York. The difference was, in a couple of hours, she would cease to care about anything. She would forget the whole ordeal and fail to remember he had ever been there.
Every time Petra cleaned up and started using again, her habit progressed and escalated to another level of depravity. The second she plugged the telephone back into the wall, it rang. She was happy to hear from Alan. He was one of her best customers, a stockbroker with a vicious habit and deep pockets.
Her finances were rickety, product was running low and rent was due. Alan wanted a half-ounce, close to everything she had on hand. He was an eight-ball guy, but Petra’s disappearing act had unnerved him enough to turn into a hoarder. She asked him to write a check to her landlord for the rent, instead of the usual cash. She did not have a bank account. How would she explain the deposits? He obliged, took the product and off he went, never to be heard from again.
“Way to burn a bridge, Alan.”
His parents had tracked her down a couple of months earlier, some serious sleuthing on their part. They begged her.
“Please, stop selling cocaine to Alan.”
They continued on and on about his personality change, his late-night partying, and his unaccountability at the office. She had to cut them off.
“Look, Alan’s going to do cocaine no matter what. At least here he’s safe, and the product is clean. If you think about it, I’m providing a service. I’m protecting him from the street dealers and the Columbians.”
There was a hint of truth in her statement that his parents had not considered. What they had contemplated was calling the police and having her arrested. They assured her they would leave her alone. Petra’s big mistake was assuming Alan was flush with cash like he’d always been. The visit from his parents should have raised an antenna or two.
When the check bounced and she couldn’t pay the rent, she followed her basic programing and ran. She bailed on the entire situation and walked out the apartment door with a suitcase in one hand and her tiny blue plastic television set in the other. Next, she committed the unthinkable act, the one thing she said she’d never do. She called her father.
“Dad, I’m in big trouble. I owe the Columbians two thousand dollars. They’re threatening me. I can’t go home. I’m in the lobby, at the Chelsea Hotel. Can you meet me?”
Sensing a genuine emergency, Raymond, who had recently moved back to the city with his second family, left work and came right over. He looked her up and down, checked her in, and paid a month’s rent.
“Daddy, if I don’t pay them, they’re going to kill me. I’m safe here for a little while, but I have to pay them. They’re going to find me. They may have followed me. Can you please help me?””
Shaking his head, disappointed, confused, unable to believe what was happening to his daughter or him, he went to the bank. On his return, he handed her an envelope with twenty crisp one hundred-dollar bills inside.
“I can’t give them hundreds. It has to be in twenty-dollar bills.”
She sent him back to the bank, insisting that it wasn’t safe for her to be seen out on the street. A con or payback, the motivation didn’t matter. Consequences and karma be damned. She needed to jumpstart her business, and she played her father like a pro. She was an excellent actress. No one knew that better than Raymond.
Years later, he asked, “That two thousand dollars, that was for drugs, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, no, Daddy, I was in real trouble. You saved my life.”
Flush with cash, she called her dealer and was up and running the very next day.
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.