February 13, 2000
Gimme an X - Part Two

...
Desiree, may someone choose to have mercy on that soul in particular. Our mothers were friends, which is why we were also. Daughter of a bohemian artist, daughter of a nameless man that had once placed the barrel of a gun in her mouth before the first her baby teeth had fallen out. She was preordained to be a world class fuck-up. It was Desiree that I allude to in the bio section, who pushed me to latch onto an identity. Who shoved Marilyn Monroe, the Sex Pistols, and the Exploited down my throat. Who smoked sage with me on her roof when we thought we were cool.

This is the same girl who confronted me on that same roof, surrounded by those that I thought were my friends, and told me that I was a whore, and they saw no reason to ever be acquainted with me ever again.

At the tender age of 12 she was composing songs to the deceased Sid Vicious, with detailed lyrics involving her own death by heroin overdose. Is it any surprise how she ended up?

A junkie, living on the piss filthy streets of Manhattan.

She came back two or three times, trying to kick. Every time she did, she’d meet one of her old friends in Little Five and they’d talk about how shitty the drugs in Atlanta were, she’d get nostalgic and follow them back blindly.

I gave up after the third time.

Now she’s back, and has had a baby with a man that lost a leg in an accident, and they live on his disability. It sickens me. I stopped answering the phone, and eventually she stopped calling.



Wai-Ling, the righteous mixture of a Japanese Mobster father, and the Chinese career mother. The obvious end result of such an equation was a spoiled, absolutely beautiful girl who was used to being the center, and being denied nothing. These sound like character faults, but it was the opposite, she was adored for it.

We were so close that her boyfriends accused me of trying to sleep with her, and it was a true rivalry between her suitors and myself. They hated me with a vengeance. I can’t blame them. Nothing was more important then than the girlfriends were. It infuriated them. Once, it came to a head at a party, and at four in the morning her boyfriend came after me because they were having a fight. Of course I was to blame. Maybe I was. I hated him. I had already slept with him the year before.

That was also the night when I learned that talk is cheap, especially when it’s your best friend saying she’d never choose a man over you. They lie, they lie right through their teeth.

I wish I could remember the good things we did, the time that Debbie’s parents went to Greece and Wai-Ling and Debbie and I made her house our fucking deviant headquarters….and put the whole damned thing on videotape. The time that we stayed until the last keg of 8 was empty at Emerson’s party, passing out upstairs and hobbling home to tell my mother that we had spent the whole night at her house. Stealing hundreds of dollars worth of clothes a day, and never getting caught.

She would call when she had a problem she couldn’t handle on her own. But only then. I began to feel used, and quit answering when she called. The last I heard, she didn’t model anymore, hadn’t graduated high school and was deeply in love with a coke dealer.



Squeaky was responsible for me meeting Adam, and following up on that meeting. Such a fragile girl. The first time we met I was carrying a large box with me at lunch and sitting on the lawn – everyone kept asking what was inside. By the time this girl did, I got tired of explaining and was just saying “Your Momma.”
I made her cry. Soon after she was telling people that I was a lesbian, with AIDS and she slept with my boyfriend. Funny, I don’t even know whom I was dating at the time.

So, it was inevitable. I beat her ass.

Then I thought of making her cry and felt so awful, physical violence makes me ill. So, being the person I am, I called and apologized.

She was my best friend for the rest of high school. I found out later that she cried when I said “Your momma” because her mother had died of a coke overdose, and she was now the legal ward of her mother’s lawyer and lived with her family. Later down the line I looked her up and found her out in the boondocks of Cartersville, kicked out of her house, living with these drugged out hicks.

The day I drove to see her, the man she was supposed to marry soon, and the father of her unborn child had eaten too many hits of blotter and drooled and laughed in my back seat the whole time.

I didn’t ever drive back out there again.



That’s it, I’m empty. I have nothing left inside to describe the other women that I shared my life with. None of them lived up to my expectations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought the same thing of me. I, on the other hand, have never injected anything into my body and I refuse to put anything up my nose. I have not borne the child of a laughing drooling freak.

I wonder if they hadn’t, would I have done it instead? I sit perched over it all, only steps away from each and every one of them. I am just the same as them, no more and no less. For all their evil and hurt caused, I miss them like a lost limb.

But the magic. There was real alchemy, invincibility, strength in numbers and the comfort of the X chromosome.

Women need other women.

And in my race to know all there is about Adam, I let them each slip through my fingers one by one. Until they were all gone. That’s what has brought this on, realizing that I have no girlfriends left. And those bridges were burned, long burned. I can’t go back and repair those friendships; the strongest bonds that I have ever felt were with these women. Stripped naked and loud, ritual and new, knowledge and the divine secrets held by girls at that time.

Women are so cruel to one another. Later in life I gravitated towards men for friendship because they didn’t have two faces, and you knew that if they said something, it was because either they meant it, or they wanted to have you. Both of those options were safer than being in the manicured hands of my female friends.

There’s little else to discuss. Adam and I have argued. I was in a car accident on Thursday. The baby has grown. I had meeting of the minds with an up and coming artist at the Texaco yesterday. I had a three day weekend. I shaved beneath my arms. I saw my cousin last night with the woman I’m sure he’s fucking behind his wife’s back. I’m tired and lonely most of the time. Adam’s working most of the time, later on Saturdays now. So much time on my hands, it’s no wonder I’ve crawled inside to mull things over.

It’s not that I’m weepy and morose, just thoughtful and weak. I’m permitted weakness occasionally. Usually I begin to disgust myself and move forward after a few days. There’s just so much time I’ve never had before.

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