Youth.

I bow to the demands of my cruel corpse as I am its  slave. I answer to it cowered. There are rules that must be followed … Don’t make eye contact is first and foremost.

And above all ?

Never ever argue.

(“No Massa! Please don’ hit me no more!”)

No matter what lines I toe and what protocol I follow? It beats me like a drum whenever it gets the chance. Sadistic, you do understand don’t you darling? Merciless it draws much pleasure from the act….When it looks at me like that I flinch head-shy, this is a movie that I have seen before, it is three stars tops and that is pushing it way more than it deserves. I know what comes next.

We all do really ,no matter how much we try and kid ourselves. You wrote it baby and you gotta dance with the one that brung you….

To appease it so that it doesn’t try and murder me with a meat axe when my bent back is turned ,I lace it’s Lucky Charms with laudanum and when it becomes pie eyed and all “Yeurr ma’ behst fwriend…” messy I lock it securely in a dark room with all corners diligently padded, gently cover it’s bloodshot lapius-lazuli  thousand yard stare eyes with a soft silk mask, fill it’s ever-ringing-due-to Motorhead-abuse- ears with grey foam plugs. Ruined by a million rehearsal rooms ( “You turn down first and then I might you arrogant fuck!!”)  and thus , deprived of it’s senseless senses and with no consideration to any form, folly or social protocol whatsoever?

I let it rest. I leave it the hell alone. It has teeth. It bites, you dig?

And rest it did. And it dreamt….

From a rain whipped 3am till 5 pm the next afternoon. I read for an hour or so ,attended absent minded to my sparse correspondence  and then had a much needed nap (?! )  which took me up to wanton witching hour of midnight. And here she lies ladies and gentlemen, swaddled like a cartoon Collette in my tomb of a bed with Coltrane weaving his opiate way softly from my speakers, I am pondering the relativity and relevance  of memory. Pinging around like a disjointed pinball of the past. (“Tommy can you hear me?”) 

(*TILT*)

Quite frankly,and  just between us mind, some days? I just don’t know how beasts of the lower field  like me manage to survive…..

But in surround sound retrospect I can see how it can define….How we carry the essence of our youth to some kind of warped conclusion wondering if anyone can see how vulnerable we really are, how deep down we are all still who we were when we were young, just becoming and barely blooming…..

I blew up my patchy attempt at childhood ,such as it wasn’t and ran .(“ Engage in three-two-…..“)

I ever so valiantly attempted to forget every sneering pock marked face, every cruel aside , swift fingered don’t tell assault and wiped every number except my own. (“You, my terrible child, are a nine ,built for strife and combat” she sighed and swept the clever cards from my hungry sight…) I detonated the whole sub-par mess and lit out to Paradise City on a one way non-refundable ticket like a blood hungry banshee with a tenuous maybe of a  modeling contract , an Elvis box set from Readers Digest ,a tattered book of disconnected numbers joined to almost forgotten names divulged in nightclub toilets,high and cheap drunk and possessed by a rapidly blooming and rather vicious drug habit. Look, Most days I didn’t know if  I was meant to wind my ear or scratch my watch.

But can we say chutzpah?

Bless you! Why just bless your soul on the bosom of Abraham! Thank you.

Here’s the fractured fable, pull up a pew and get comfortable honey, this shitty little ditty ( apologies to monsouir Fruiciante mon cheri ) only gets wailed long and loud when the lights are low, good people are in bed and the detritus has no place left to go and no way to get there even if they did .

Check me out and lick it up….A pill pulverized socially retarded adolescent with a huge mostly non- applicable vocabulary and an utterly disgusting attitude. Every medicine cabinet at every house party or toilet stop on the way to the next mess was a smorgasbord of  un -prescribed delights .Heavens very own pharmaceutical pick-and-mix. Oh me, I was every pervert pederasts dream of perfection incarnate, chain-smoking and dancing on the head of a pin to Motown’s finest all the fast foul mouthed way.

Of what I can recall of my small town exile all these moons and miles later ?

Being on the eternal outs and longing moist of eye and granite of resolve for a place where I would be able in my absolute difference and who knew, maybe even rewarded for it. A fear that weighed down my will.

Lost nights driving in circles with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Tight bathtub speed procured from hopped up bikers with rotten teeth running the chemical grand national in my pubescent veins ,energy and bravura to burn, sitting cramped in the back of cars patched primer grey ,chain smoking if you had ’em listening to gloriously smutty Bon Scott era AC/DC barking through tinny migraine inducing speakers while the lights of the cold city below bit jagged icy chunks out of the sub zero stoned darkness.

I fogged the window like a delinquent dragon and wrote my initials on the glass with a slow bitten finger.The condensation rolled lazily to the crumbling rubber seal like a liquid hookers hips. I could feel the metronome of my heartbeat keeping time  in my over pierced ears hung heavy with cheap jewelery tempting immanent green-stained infection and it soothed me.  (“STILL-alive-STILL-alive-STILL-ali….”) Up all night and superbly  reckless…

As I hitchhiked fearlessly propelled by pipe dreams from the sedated suburbs to the joke of a feeble city center to save my precious bus fare for cigarettes and strong black coffee, I kept the knife that my wayward father had had made for my thirteenth birthday by one of his nut-job fringe dwelling survivalist buddies kissing close at all times as the broken men who picked me up tried to get into my only just teen-aged pants. I  stubbed stolen cigarettes out on forearms and jumped nimble from moving vehicles un-besmirched by their curdled mid- life crisis desires.

I strutted ,chin held high, impervious to blatting car horns and abuse spewing drivers to the hole in the wall restaurant buried deep in a dark  turn of the century block wedged between a pawn shop and a peep show where dear Andrew, the smarmy slick oil eyed barman let me take up space and write when I should have been in school.  Un-bothered in the darkest booth by the spring loaded  limb hungry kitchen door and fed straight gut-rot scotch on ice that I would take small wincing sips of all the while trying not to pull a Munch-worthy  face.

I had informed him in lofty tones that if “It’s good enough for Hemingway,its good enough for me!” like the asshole that I am when we first met waiting to score what we had both been promised was “The most amazing hash ever!” in our mutual dealers dirty kitchen where he paid with his hard won tips and I paid by running said dealers devastating deviant delivery’s all over town because he was to baked to do it himself.  He was making me pay for my bullshit bravissimo now as I wished for the candy water of emerald midori and lemonade like the child I was. Smirking he would pour me a heavy handed double knowing that my pathetic pride would never allow me to turn it down.

I loved my hideaway passionately and with great propriety.

My fingertips memorized the intimate braille of the hardened chewing gum deposits left under the table,most of them admittedly by me. The giant chinzano ashtray ,low lights and stale air bearing the elegant echo of grown up ghost laughter from the night before made me feel like the stage was set and Holly Golightly could drop by for a fortifying beverage on her way to visit Sally Tomato in Sing-Sing. Or that Sally Bowles would slink in all big eyes,bowler hat and moss green nails. There I was safe from harm, rejection and ejection as I had charmed the morbidly obese and foul tempered owner months before .Ever rushing to nowhere , surprisingly swift given his impressive jowl draped size ,he had barreled in through the back door, glanced at me in swift passing and upon arriving at the bar commenced yelling at at Andrew.

“What the blue veined throbbing fuck is it that I am paying you to do exactly and who is that fucking jail-bait waif in the back booth!?!” I studiously ignored them both and gently lit a fresh chest kicker off the butt of my last and calmly read on.

“Me? To make sure there is at least one warm body in here in case anyone mistakes it for a morgue and as for her?” he glanced slyly in my direction “Well, that depends which day of the week it is” slurred the irrevocably stoned and unshaken employee  as he  lovingly continued to polish the same heavy highball tumbler that he had been molesting with a grayish wash-worn rag for at least the last twenty minutes

“What is that meant to mean ?!!”  roared the  big boss-man while riffling though the garnish caddy by the sticky post-mix gun and deftly throwing a handful of pearly cocktail onions into his terrifying pie-hole.  “She changes her name all the fucking time, go talk to her!” replied Andrew laconically with a hash aided smirk.

Frank Sinatra informed the empty room of the pleasures of being young at heart hot on Ella’s heels. What a difference a day makes indeed.

He came over like a storm cloud, heart attack, panzer division and I stood up, swaying like a willow, pleasantly buzzed by the charming combination of the single malt whiskey, chalky yellow horse chocking pills of stolen codeine and the penis littered poetry of Allen Ginsburg.  Resplendent in my favorite falling apart, moth bothered 1940s black silk ankle length evening dress that I had appropriated and lovingly mended from the pathetic theater wardrobe of my hateful high-school pre-expultion because, let’s face it,they didn’t deserve it, I extended my nicotine and ink stained hand.

Badly moulting grey rabbit fur Russian fur hat jammed on my blond birds-nest of hair ,dull duct taped combat boots on my feet, all wrapped  in an greasy army great coat acquired from my morally deficient pussy-hound of a fathers disposal and army surplus store ,the lapel dotted with badges featuring beloved Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, Elvis and The Sex Pistols and 11000 miles of scratchy lurid badly self- knitted scarf. I looked-like an acid trip by way of an overdose. I figured myself charming. I promoted myself irresistible.  Cigarette clenched twixt my teeth just like I had seen and studied Saint Hunter S Thompson doing on the dust jacket to one of his anthologies that I had procured by way of five finger discount  from Gilliam’s bookshop in the arcade, I snatched and pumped his gold sovereign ring weighted hand like a crooked politician.

“Welcome to bat country son! Buy you a drink?” I said through my shark grin and watering eyes . He cracked like the Liberty Bell and slid into the booth ,his gut uncomfortably bisected by the edge of the table. He shoved it back with a grunt and the amber liquid in my glass did the shimmy and then settled back down to sleep.

Fascinated ,he softened toward my strange pixelated presence in the theater of his failing business. “And just who and what the fuck are you meant to be? Stevie Nicks?” he said kindly after he had finished laughing and Andrew had placed dos coronas in front of us, the cool condensation clotted necks chocked with foam and lime. I took a lusty pull on mine and made a burp laden belated toast  “That was last week ,I’m working on Dora Marr and Lemmy today and here’s to swimming with bow legged women!”  We clinked bottles and I grinned closing my red silk covered notebook.  “What’s for lunch Boss?” I winked “Anything you like princess”  he said and waved impetuously for the lazy wall eyed waiter who was in the habit of spotting heroin off a battered piece of tinfoil behind the huge freezer between shifts to attend to our hunger post haste.

And that is how I met Geoff.

Gluttonous ,generous, gruff Geoff who taught me how to eat caviar on toast points, translucent onion slices as thin as an anorexic supermodels , to drink and enjoy the dust-bowl dry martinis that he favored over our  tres jolie tet-a-tets  (” The tears of F.Scott and Zelda!. Flappers blood!! “ he would roar as I sucked the bitter juniper from the fat olive that swam in my shimmering glass ) and brought me any and every book my bibliophile backwater ass desired on the very strict proviso that I wrote him a report on said tome and read it out loud while he inhaled his complex carbohydrates and early type two diabetes for a late and liquid lashed lunch. Who would yell at me for the benefit of his couldn’t -care -less staff all the while winking and throwing a packet of  heartrendingly elegant gold tipped Sobranie Black Russians into my lap on his way to pillage the till for funds for our next adventure.

Who talked to me like I was grown, relevant and protected me like I was his own.

We would sit ,sedated by the stroppy and surprisingly strong winter sun in the sculpture garden at the gallery and drink splits of Moet-Chandon from brown paper bagged bottles as the cold razor light  made a million diamonds dance on the water and he told me long and involved tawdry tales of artists going mad under the weight of their terminal terrifying gifts. Of the depths that they would recklessly plum to bring back the bounty of beauty everlasting. I would drag him drunkenly into the main hall and stand cross-eyed with reverence in front of the huge Elvis screen print by Andy Warhol awaiting directions or messages. I prayed to the King for a gift all of my very own. He stayed silent and dead in Memphis and I hung my head and wept.

I felt my benofactors kind arm across my bent shoulders as my breath hitched its watery wagon to the sad express. “Your time will come love” he said softly. I looked up into his kind face benevolent above an eternally  food besmirched tie and gave him a small smile. “You know what the problem is my cherubic bad seed? ” No?” I said in a small copper voice as a crocodile of schoolchildren rattled past corralled and shushed by their harried teachers. “We are nowhere near drunk enough” he intoned gravely. I laughed and he bowed.

I told him my real name from the get go as he inspired that kind of confidence but he called me Chiquita Lolita , You renegade shit, Marta Hari, Baby Bowie and all kinds of random shit.When you are that young every adult is older than dirt but he was  only a jaded coronary bound forty eight years old to my Fourteen and a half scant summers. He was my first real friend, my first champion and believer and I miss him still.

Never underestimate the rarity of true chivalry and complete kindness. It comes around so rarely. When it does? Treasure and horde it.

I sent him pilfered postcards for years, the uglier the better.I would panhandle for change outside the post office to purchase the stamps to send them. My tiny obsessive block print chewing up every inch of available space. ( ” Bastard child of Fagin! Dickens thief! Delinquent!!!” he would bellow whenever I presented him with lurid ties and such that I had procured for him by felonious means and wrap me in the safest hug in the world sealed with a giant shit-eating  grin ) and he always reminded me that when he first asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up that  I had answered “Great”.

He never let me forget it, the fat bastard. I still think that his belief is what patched me together till I got steady enough to trust myself and just become. He was my Merlot and lobster fueled training wheels. My cholesterol coddled guardian angel.

At my lowest living in the big shitty city, strung out on loneliness,bad pharmaceuticals and diamond dusted dreams that seemed to be rotting on the vine as I watched helpless, dying , I would call him reverse charges at the restaurant so lonesome for the future that I thought my tinsel tacky heart was going to explode in a shower of shit and syringes and he would tell me there there was always a free meal and a single malt waiting for me if I ever wanted to come back.

He knew that I would not return. You can never go back.

Tears rolling down my half starved Slavic boned face I would wedge my bony ass up onto the graffiti scared shelf in the piss stained phone-box on the corner of Nowhere Street and Shit-Creek Avenue  ,biting my nails to the bleeding quick and waving to the transvestite hookers fishing for tricks ,most of whom resided in my broke-down building and doted on me when the drugs didn’t get them all rancid with meanness. They wobbled knock kneed on scuffed stilettos as big as the boxes that they came in, broad shoulders wrapped in ratty dyed squirrel fur as he told me that one day ,and he was sure of this mind, he reassured me over the jazz stained racket in the background, I would make sure the whole world knew my name “What ever it fucking is that week you fiendish little charlatan !”  I would laugh though the make-up destroying Niagara wash of my teenage tears and feel like I could eat a mountain and shit a highway once again. Every kooky kid should be so lucky to find such angels.

Or to have them find you.

I had never fit ..It was never a hot option, my rare refined kind were not built for it thankfully……He taught me to find solace and strength in the motley shapes of my divine difference.

I had long dreamed of dark places with endless brass clad bars full of dubious and dangerous people with no last names and ink blue prison tattoos bleeding into a blur beneath the skin,desecrating deviant dermis’s while I was life- locked in the pastel purdah of soul suffocating suburbia. The kind of bar where you would wipe your feet on the way out. The tarnished bar clogged with old European men sucking hungrily on port scented hand rolled cigarettes pouring over the form guides and picking every winner while whores with morgue thick makeup shot up in the toilets white knuckling their way to hammer heaven. Of night time amnesty ,hastily loaded and badly concealed Saturday night specials ,boot concealed blades, fake id’s and ghost inhabited boarding houses where one paid weekly and in cash only pour  favor Merci beau coup .

I swore blind on Led Zeppelin’s first four albums that I would not use my own name again until I had made something tangible and epic of myself, until people would sigh it awestruck in my now formidable wake.

I devoured Charles Dickens ,Michael Herr, Hunter.S.Thompson , Jackie Collins, Dostoevsky,Harold Robbins and John Irving in equal measure. Fables of thieves, crooked campaign trails stained with ether , The Tet Offensive laced with phosphorus tipped bullets and rock and roll ,Broadway chock full of neon nepotism ,German girls dressed as bears and limber air hostesses fucking sheiks muddled and merged in my teen-aged brain and I held fervent faith in the healing powers of total and complete reinvention.

In a nest of foam mattresses stolen from the burnt out abandoned hotel across the road ,wrangled down rusty fire escapes while I was drunk off my ass, I fell in larcenous lust with the majestic  music that had happened long before my blighted birth. The specter of thick chemical smoke haunted me every time I shifted on my foul bed as I huddled beneath my poster for Alex Cox’s “Sid and Nancy -Love Kills” and fell in love with sound. I had great teachers with discerning non-snobby tastes. Queens,queers,bikers and dancers. All of us fatal fuckups who thought that we were in a movie so you know that the soundtrack was always going to be great…

I never relinquished the music that I had loved growing up as so many did.I didn’t know that it was a requirement. I had no idea what was cool,thank God, so I loved what I loved passionately,defensively and with no bias to the stranglehold of hip. The MC5 held hands with Nina Simone while they spoke of liberation. Nikki Sixx painted thick black lines beneath my wide eyes and told me gravely about why Johnny Thunders hair would never die. Patti Smith lurked by the phone waiting for Allen Laneier to call from the road. I hoped it wasn’t a reverse charges deal. The door crashed open and a cheer went up as Iggy and Coral fell onto my Chinese rug while Michale Des Barres pledged his blue-blooded troth to perfect Miss Pamela. ELO made out with Black Sabbath on the sofa while Elvis,Olivia Newton-John and Motorhead did speed huddled around my milk-crate desk and stayed wantonly wired, rapping about Chuck Berry and Little Richard till the sun came up.

A foundling, a mistake to throw away. I came from nothing and no one so my creation was to be my sole responsibility, my mission, my quest. I knew that I was trash and it thrilled me to my distortion seeking core.

And whence upon I found it? When it found me?

It saved my life.

It was everything and more than I ever could have ever imagined. More that I had ever dared to dream for.I fell to my thankful knees like I had been struck by lucidity bearing lightning. .Dipped nubile naked in scented oil and rolled in the gaudiest of glitter. Up all night sealed with secret handshakes and deep velvet kisses. It had no gag reflex and could go for days. Got me slack jawed and moist with one sin soaked glance. Upon recognizing me as one of its own ,a black lamb wandered far from the fecund fold  ,tottering on treasured patchwork platform boots of worn leather and a tissue paper thin New York Dolls tee shirt stolen from a foolish rent boy who ripped me off on a dope deal, it  found me cerulean wide eyed , pinned of pupil wanting, starved of its sordid salutations and it tucked me ever so gently under it’s oily black wing and ushered me past the ruby studded gates and inside…..

Where I would drink parched from unattended glasses sporting umbrellas and spit-sticky to be avoided straws, smudged with criminal fingerprints and dance until the room spun surrounded by the nastiest human specimens on offer. Every door sighed open at my underage presence, I dressed in clothes stolen in midnight raids from the spewing over-stuffed skips behind the charity shops, remade in an afternoon into custom built miracles by the two drag queens who lived in one of the big rooms a floor below my attic lair, who fought like cats then fucked like porn and introduced me to the slow soft joys of 10mg Valium pulverized to careful powder on the cover of the latest impenetrable copy of French Vogue,thick as a bible and just as holy, chalk bitter and sprinkled into honey hued cognac cradled  in blown glass balloons thin as the word of a liar and the crushing viola soaked majesty of The Velvet Underground.

They would dress me up like Brooke Shields in “Pretty Baby” by way of Fleetwood Mac and Sex era Kings Road , all sausage curls, safety pins ,Nico languor and frothy layers of white lace and lead me stoned and tottering  in their wicked wake to their deviant subterranean haunts. Upon arrival I would be fed just a pinch of speed wrapped in a ciggerette paper to be swallowed  for fortitude given the long night ahead and cheap petrol scented vodka and grenadine in scratched plastic champagne flutes to be sipped slowly though a striped straw.

Later, much later ,8th birthday party tired and bombed on secretive sedatives fed lovingly to me by the badly painted acne scared boy with tiny milk teeth who manned the coat-check ,I would curl up like a sated smudged kitten and sleep soundly in this bass propelled Sodom and Gomorrah on their cold oily leather jackets as my fairy godfathers butt-fucked randoms in the dim lit toilets upstairs, daisy-chaining their devilish dicks to dust, up to their cop booted ankles in cloudy piss, sniffing Amyl nitrate from tiny brown bottles,  spinning reckless dizzy and delinquent to only the dirtiest disco all night long.

I was finally home sweet home ,a protected child, a mascot if you like. A living lucky charm to horse cocked sodomites, bat-shit crazy cracked cross dressers, minor dealers sporting decaying teeth and slumping in cheap grey zipper sided shoes, perverted pimps sporting fake gold Rolex’s as big as a babies fist, hatchet headed hookers hot wired to handling their heinous hungry habits and slick suited glamorous gangsters dripping with vacuous blonde’s sporting huge bolt-on augmented tits and dead eyes. A howling salacious soaked seraphim choir of sin. And there I go, silk swaddled and fleet of Mercury-Virgo winged ankle delicious, a rabbits foot in the shape of a slightly shop-soiled abused almost infant female.

A sublime silver dollar of a girl.

I languidly let an asexual Asian hairdresser who operated out of a charming turn of the century terrace house on my street wearing a ratty Suicidal Tendencies tee-shirt, cock crushingly tight anthracite leather pants and white high-top Cons like Metallica used to sport with bright blue eyes and pin straight hair to his tiny ass ply me with fat spliffs , shots of aniseed addled ouzo and dye my horsetail hank of hair  jet black as we listened to Stevie Wonder one boring hot Sunday afternoon  in January, both stoned immaculate .

His fingers felt like slow liquid nirvana on my chemically sensitized scalp and I purred beneath his meticulous ministrations. A riot of jasmine snaked through the cast iron balustrade of the crooked balcony and presented itself  fragrantly fetching as bursts of scented stars .I sighed high and listing with it from behind my onyx curtain, my crowing glory as he toked hard on the six paper joint ,lent over kissing close and shotgunned the sacrosanct smoke into my bitten lipped mouth….

I was now veering into my somewhat lamentable Priscilla -Priestley-child-bride-Elvis-come-love-me-daddy-phase. I learned the rules and steady handed regulations of  bat-wing eyeliner and the still practiced faith of the false lash. I would bolt kimono clad down the street bare foot, running well paid errands for reprobates and drag queens who shunned the daylight like sequin shrouded vampires. Supposed gold chains given by eternally rejected  horny johnny-come-lately’s  slavishly longing for my attuned affection and sugar sweet under-aged cunt tuned my neck green.

Finally a fearless fit in my flesh and adored? I soared.

I saw a man shot point blank in the back of the head outside a closed bank one Turkish mooned night as I ran to procure drugs for someone with a six syllable last name who was in the midst of a big money card game that was edging into its methamphetamine assisted third night running .The gunshot sounded wet and flat .A steak dropped onto a kitchen floor. Screams and sirens ensued.  I waved to the blond dread-locked juggler on the corner as he got caviler with flying fire to impress the tourists, he winked at me and threw an extra spin into his danger driven routine that got the yokels gasping, I laughed and flew away. I took the long way around as not to be hindered by the lead-footed law and their yellow crime scene tape upon my triumphant return.

As I made fleet footed way back up dirty dust choked ill lit stairs after the automatic flood light had registered my presence,the camera had checked me and the heavy door buzzed open. Entering the lions den I pulled the small hard packed flat plastic package of  persuasive powder from the warm shadowy recesses of my garnet lace bra and placed in next to a half finished fifth of Johnny Walker Red on the edge of the greasy green felt table,my duty done. I didn’t say a word and he didn’t look up.

The ugly concierge with the port-wine birthmark taking up most of her left cheek bussed me away from the action kindly ,fluffing around me like a hen .She sat me at the tiny table in her crap-choked cubby hole by the triple bolted stainless steel door.  I looked at the tiny black and white monitor that showed the staircase and exterior and was rewarded with the visual of a bum pissing  into the redwood planter in front of the brothel across the road. I was promptly served a piping hot cheese and tomato focaccia from the raucous restaurant downstairs and a crisp fifty dollar note was swiftly folded and went straight into the spot the speed had just vacated. Just like a magic trick.

Little baby Ta-da!

I quickly kissed her besmirched cheek wondering if it would taste of raspberry or red wine and she huffed at me with mock annoyance as I licked my fat lips .I settled in watched over by the gallery of ugly pastel mall portraits of her rat faced grandchildren and ate.

When you are in it? Over abundance of reality and the realest of the real looks like nothing more than a jump cut uncensored movie. Trust me on this one ok? It never once occurred to me that I was on the outside of the regulated loop. That my movie was X-rated and underground from sea to shining sea. That what I and my felonious new found family, that all that I knew and was doing was highly illegal,morally unsound and just plain weird. Truth? I don’t think that it would have made any difference if I did. I was in and I didn’t plan on leaving anytime soon. All I knew was that I was home and amongst my own.

This was my life.

I read,wrote and slept curled beneath one of the unused pool tables hidden behind the heavy drop cloth that covered it like a kid in a rainy day fort until I was needed again during the long runs.It was worth staying. The players tipped heavy and well when on a winning streak. One fat Greek would pat my head if he was standing, my ass if he wasn’t as I darted by for luck,the pervert. They pissed in empty wine carafes to avoid leaving the table. I took their food orders downstairs. I got their cigars from the dodgy Chinese importer three blocks away. I prided myself on being necessary. I had a place on the planet at last ,in my once dreamed of and now real world.

I was so fucking happy .

I lived on warm Coca Cola, Marlboro’s,creamed rice eaten straight from dented  tins and the ever amazing red and yellow neon stroked reality of 24 hour Mcdonalds. I was a child without curfew nor restrictions. Unwanted and unmarked by any family heredity I set out to willfully construct myself and invent a bullet proof skin to inhabit. I watched and learned. I sucked it all up and filed it. I sat at the feet of the twilight masters of subterfuge and arctic cool.  Killers are often the sweetest men. Whores tend to want to mother you.  Junkies are easily stood over when they are withdrawing and ice heads with their superhuman strength and serial killer lack of empathy should be avoided at all costs.

Everyone was running towards or away from something. Questions were rarely ever asked and answers were at your discretion.

I was reminded recently that as a kid I would hand out my autograph at school because I was convinced that one day it would be worth something. I spun in high rotation with absolutely no shame to get any attention at all as a very small child. . Until it broke my silver spirit, I shut down and started plotting my escape. I was hated and made to pay for my unintentional differences.

I turned up to my last school dance at thirteen dressed in my treasured vintage lace up boots of tapestry that I had paid off over endless months at a second hand store in the city at five dollars a week, huge silver shoulder skimming earrings ,Liz Taylor Butter-field 8 eyeliner, Sharon Tate white lipstick and a skin tight turtle necked black dress featuring a thick silver zip from chin to hem. I thought I was Edie Sedgwick and not one person asked me to dance the whole night. Not one.

Parsimonious philistines.

I pretended not to care as they laughed and snickered in my Warholian wake as I made my long way to the lawns to sneak a cigarette. I conversed wittily with Andy’s silver-haired ghost and never let them see me bleed and baby? I was hemorrhaging. My hopeful heart shattered for the final humiliating time, I returned home and sat in my haven of a closet chain smoking Kent’s with the micro-lite filters by candlelight listing to nothing but the dirtiest early Rolling Stones on my treasured inherited turntable, a purple vinyl padded remnant from my parents teen-aged courtship.

The bitter smoke curled and sunk into the clothes hanging above my hate hollowed head as I cradled a slack boot in my arms like a dead baby. Taking a bitter swig of cask wine from my Mickey Mouse glass I shuddered and looked out of the half open door into my spooky room.

The moon hewed light set into the side of the console under the molded smoked perspex lid shone across the spinning platter searching for dust and clues and I swore that I could hear redeeming wings beating outside my window, the slow drip of my pirates pulse keeping time with the Glimmer twins….

I didn’t feel cool, not here, not there by their shitty sub-par standards and for some stupid reason, even though in my heart of hollow hearts I knew that I knew better and sickeningly it pained me.There was not one battle I could pick. Not one…. I attempted, away from the legalities of school not to feel much of anything at all. I had a battered bong hidden in the back of my crap choked locker constructed out of a chocolate milk bottle and a few inches of stolen garden hose complete with a soot blackened tinfoil cone as one of my only friends reminded me in a chance meeting on a deserted beach years later.I coughed coca bean and weed. I had forgotten about that. I had tried, alas unsuccessfully, to forget so much…

I wrongly assumed that everyone did, that everyone needed some kind of herbal or pharmaceutical assistance because they too felt like an inconvenience ,a blip ,a acne addled mistake. So check me out with my  cloudy plastic Hello Kitty drink bottle full of pilfered Baileys Irish cream that would provide soft liquid inoculation  from the rabble, that I imbibed daily and slowly .Forever dimly lit, tight and in a world of my own.

I always had a crush on some cruel pockmarked pinched faced juvenile delinquent of little or no distinction. Interchangeable 9th grade boys constructed out of  malevolence, football scores ,dirty laughter,rampaging hormones and sump oil. I would watch him play basketball with his henchmen from the grassy knoll in the afternoons when it was probable that I was meant to be somewhere else. Nervous fingers picking at the dry grass. Tube socks drooping around mosquito mauled calves.

This shit was nowhere.

I would collect his crumpled cigarette butts after he and his pack of goons had left. Precious as his mean mouth had kissed the filters. I slept with them in a white plastic box that had once held my charm bracelet under my pillow, curtains ever open to the midnight moon,tea roses rambling thick and heavy headed around my window, a heroine to no one .Every once in a while he would make fun of me in the  pillbox hat I had constructed out of cardboard and covered in black fabric, net hanging over my eyes as I read thick racy novels stuffed with seasonal mating and migration patterns of nymphomaniac Hollywood wives and rich ruthless tycoons on the 365 school bus .

Besides that?  He never even knew I was alive. He never knew my name.

My other life beckoned…

I like to think that I was a happily anticipated and entertaining distraction the emphysema raddled Hungarian tobacconist  in the city .The clear oxygen lines wedged in the hair choked nostrils of his prominent large pored nose leading to a highly flammable and daily changed canister below the counter. He lovingly smoked a giant hand carved pipe from his homeland and then proceed to blow smoke in deaths cranky slit eyed  face.”Vone day?”  he would cackle and point at the squat grey container of life at his feet faithful like a hound ” BOOM!”he yelled and was then snatched by another round of of wet coughing as I counted out my pilfered small change and laughed with him.

Ah the city!  The mediocre metropolis where I longed to spend all my time watching the boneless whippet thin amphetamine assisted skaters by the chess pit, fearless and catching and kissing the air like a lover and then gravity graced, fleeing its all too temporarily embrace, the plaid-pupil- punks making like ’77 never ended and little old me escaping my suburban shackles. I smoked heavy filter-less french cigarettes in beautiful sky blue boxes that I saved and displayed in my weird room like Russian Orthodox icons.

I smoked like a silent film star, here at this overpriced cafe I could see myself as I wanted others to see me . Greta Garbo,Dee Dee Ramone and I share the same birthday …a copy of a memory of something that had never happened , I picked the blond shards of tobacco off my tongue and read weighty biographies on mean misogynist Picasso as I lingered long over fast cooling bitter coffee and listened to one of the endless mix-tapes that I constructed to provide a soundtrack to my half assed movie of a loitering life, full of my parents music that I got teased over…Wondering if I would ever find a brilliant man to make me suffer.

I still don’t feel cool and yes, eventually we found each other and suffered, you will be happy to note, to the fullest extent.

All those puke inducing perpetually perky pastel kids with their snide secret zit free naturally blond language of catered birthday parties ,18 carat gold signet rings inlaid with enamel blue birds and predictable group designated longings. I tried for all of five unholy minutes at my sainted mothers request to toe their line all the while knowing in my marrow that it was utterly pointless. I didn’t watch TV, nor listen to the Top 40. I always got it wrong.

They wanted things that I could not even fathom let alone begin to understand .They did not know that James Brown was The Godfather of Soul, That Miles Davis live at Carnegie Hall in 1958 was a benchmark, that Joe Cocker danced like a spazmo because he stated out as a drummer and didn’t know what to do with his stick-less hands, that Frank Sinatra had told George Harrison and Patti Boyd one night over dinner that in his humble opinion  that “Something” was the greatest love song ever written… None of them ,that I knew of granted ,had watched “Apocalypse now” in the dark tripping balls on acid with a hunting knife in one sweating hand and a white bread lunch-meat and cheese choked sandwich crushed in the other…well, not that I knew of or could imagine. Did they dream?  Fearing even more ridicule  I never asked  as I knew that my replies would do nothing but invite even more eye rolling derision .Dream?  It was all I did and the sum of my meager worth.

Let me tell you..

If I wasn’t entertaining the troops on a USO tour with Bob Hope in a skin tight purple bugle beaded dress making the marines lose their collective shellshocked  mind?  I was hanging out with swoon inducing Richard Hell, Cyrinda Foxe ,Legs Mc Neil and Debbie Harry, not sure who I wanted to make out with more. Watching the Ramones bicker and occasionally grace us with a blast of distortion masquerading as a song and wishing that Hilly would clean up the dog shit off the sawdust choked floor already ….thinking about heading to Max’s for the free chickpeas .Yours truly and Lester Bangs closing down the bar for another night, Robitussin raiders on a holy crusade storming the golden gates of sonic heaven. Vicodin vikings pillaging the night. Refugees of raw rock and roll forever  loudly arguing over who loved The Stooges more….

Singing ” Gimme shelter” clad in a sequin studded mini dress that turned my high highfalutin ass into a disco ball of manic movement in front of thousands with my beloved Rolling Stones as a rubber rainbow of balloons rained gently from the cavernous ceiling miles above our holy heads. Keef grins as I wail like a horny air raid siren back to back with Mr Jagger and his black tooth is a victory flag..Lost in child-bride fantasies of Priscilla Bellieu with and Elvis of my very own. New Orleans called to me by my soon- to- be- bead bedecked name .Dr John sang to me. He shook the stick and I danced to the Meteors on the point of my 11 twinkling toes on top of his purple piano,gold and green ribbons trailing from my keloid scared tattooed wrists……..

I would come true far ,far from here and they would all hear about it.

Then, as now , I existed in my imagination.

They are all grown up I guess.The bullies and the bitches.Me? Well,I like to think that I chose the more tasteful and self perseveringly tactical option and grew on. Well done Team Me. I guess they defer to their robust breading habits and crippling overdrafts. School runs, Juicy couture tracksuits stretched tight over two years of un-lost-thus far baby weight ,Starbucks and sports days .Ruled by the endless whinging needs of their fuck trophies.

They look like their parents and I look like a fucking Stan Lee sketch.Women of my proportions are usually only found airbrushed on the sides of panel-vans clad in copper bikinis and wrestling polar bears. I still dress like an adolescent that has escaped from Rodney’s  English Disco on the Sunset Strip circa ’72 by way of Bad Company’s road crew. Why not be who you are? If I have a fox tail hanging from my belt  and a trucker cap taming the brunette ponytail that taunts the crack of my ass? It’s all gravy.I have a pile of band tee shirts that reaches my hip and still rock inappropriate shoes every chance that I get.

I still inhabit myself. This is what I chose for better or worse, in sickness and in health ,till death when I depart in a Hello Kitty and Slayer decal bedecked coffin to the strains of  “Tuesdays Gone ” by my adored Lynyard Skynard.

So ,I guess that was who they were meant to be then….It confounds me daily, I mean, they look happy but tight with it you know? So I have my doubts and they are grave .I get to thinking there is more than one silent scream locked behind all that expensive dental work .I think that it goes back to the whole pack mentality thing. Too afraid of what other people will think and say. I never had a pack hence?  I don’t give a shit. Some days I still cannot believe that this part of the puzzle still consumes me as much as it does….

But that’s just life innit?

It gave me a fine line in longing though, rejection. It honed me. Gave me something to dream on. Because I never got any of my fleeting hearts desires I never had to let my bloom fade .I still  fervently believe in the fairytale no matter how throttled or scum soaked. I still believe in rock and roll baby. I have 11 Mickey Mouse tee-shirts, 43 pairs of boots, I play bass and wail like an anti aircraft siren .I love you Dee-Dee. And I still look like a wet dream on parole in skintight jeans. What more could one ask for?

Well,outside of a major lottery win?

Exactly.

I was and am  still primed.

All the girls who were catered to? They have turned into over aerobiced,thin lipped harridans with a platinum grade sense of entitlement better suited to mattress actresses and schoolgirls. Closed legged witches whose husbands sniff around my tail because their wives won’t fuck them anymore. I know this to be a fact as my boyfriends wife hates me… I’m Kidding! We are good friends these days…Joking!!!.

All I can say is that from here? Well, my professional opinion is that it does not look like too much of a good time from where I sit tapping my boot clad foot to The Rezillos and Black Flag, inhaling orange tic-tac’s and writing another song…..

Adam Holloway ,Simon Pill, Tim Greshkie, Christian Kernott…..Oh Lord! A veritable rogues gallery that hardly even knew I was alive.How I burned for these spectacularly unworthy dullards! How I pined… I remember all the names and the hours that I spent wondering why they didn’t even know that I was alive.

Don’t get me wrong though. Not being wanted is good mighty for a girl. It forges an iron heart and a strong yet supple spine. My careless teenaged parents ,bless them, didn’t want me and couldn’t of kept me if they did, my new family didn’t know what to do with me  and Elvis only knows that I didn’t want a bar of myself . So what is a lost girl to do? Aim for perfection and notability and then withhold herself from the whole world that’s what.

If you can? My advice for what its worth? ( A scratched 7″ of  “The Gambler” by Kenny Rodgers, a truckload of books and a sassy way around four strings…) Stay on stage forever. As Sir Henry Rollins once said “Nothing can ever go wrong up there” I know that Curtis Mayfield ,were he still with us would beg to differ after being paralyzed by a rouge lighting rig while playing a show but I do think that Hank has a rather salient point…..

I know that is where so much of my dysmorphia and OCD stems from. To want so desperately to be so resilient and stunning that I get to be the one to reject rather that the forever rejected.

Cute huh?

As Bob Dylan once said to Miss Pamela “You could take you anywhere…”

All you have to do is go.