Episode 15 ❤️‍🩹 1979: Running From Myself

Like changing seats on the Titanic, you can't win when you're the ship and the iceberg.

Jun 04, 2025

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The original telling of the Wolf story used too many words. It took years in sobriety to stop calling him my husband, then to let go of referring to him as my ex-husband. But the most married we got was in the story I tell of our Native American wedding ceremony under the arches at Washington Square Park.

A lovely day, I remember everyone who was there, the chubby Asian guy who performed the ceremony, our matching rings of turquoise and coral set in nickel.

Except, it never happened. We never actually married, legally or otherwise. There was no ceremony, but there were rings. I’d gotten them, two for five dollars.

I can say we exchanged rings in Washington Square Park, where we’d met, but I don’t know if that’s true either. Maybe.

Neither of us are Native American. He’d said he was a member of the Native American Church of New York—could be. There was some flexibility about membership in the late 70s.

A guitar player from the Bronx named Tommy Doyle—not native anything—had given me something that said I was a member, it would keep us from getting busted that time we loaded the trunk of my Ford Pinto with peyote. The peyote buttons had been skewered on straightened hangers and hung to dry; we bartered peyote buttons for gas on the way up to Boston University, where we were heading to sell some of it.

But Wolf was, if not the actual inciting incident of that Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week in 1979, the first of the terrible days that totaled a horrible, no good, very bad week, so if you don’t know Wolf, I’m just dropping you in the middle of a kidnapping somewhere in New Jersey with no explanation of how it all happened.

So, we’ll Wolf, but first, let’s 1979 together.

1979

music

—The Sugar Hill Gang dropped “Rapper’s Delight,” ushering rap into the music world.
—Christopher Street danced to The Village People’s anthem, YMCA.
—And punk. Punk was alive, Nancy Spungen’d been murdered, and Sid Vicious overdosed. You want to know what the East Village was like in the 70s? Watch Sid & Nancy.

murder & mayhem

—Mafioso kingpin, Carmine Galante aka The Cigar, self-proclaimed capo di tutti i capis was assassinated.
—The Three Mile Island nuclear reactor had meltdown.
—It was the year John Wayne died and David Cassidy committed career suicide in a TV series as a 20-something undercover cop in a high school—a premise that’ll make Johnny Depp a household name a few years later.

appearances and disappearances

—The Guardian Angels appeared in the subways.
—Snow appeared in the Sahara desert.
—Six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared and became the first kid on the side of a milk carton.

And, that year, I’d have to make a choice.
Behind Door number one: a bright & airy apartment fitted with live-in handsome and attentive foreign prince.

Behind Door number two: a dreary tenement with no closets, no sunlight, and no princes of any kind.

One felt like a trap, the other, like freedom.

I’d made it through NCC by the skin of my teeth, transferred to New York Institute of Technology for a fresh start that lasted one semester of princes knocking on my door, demanding I cook for them.

Cook?

I’d been eating the same meal three times a day, every day, for an entire semester. Take note Martha Stewart / Rachel Ray /Meghan Markle: Two slices of Kraft processed American cheese evenly divided onto three Stoned Wheat Thin crackers and a glass of iced tea for a total of nine crackers & six slices of cheese a day. No more. No less. It would’ve been a great diet plan, had I not been supplementing it with Kahlua, Amaretto and vodka.

That was all you’dve found in my little refrigerator in my little room at the Henry Hudson Hotel, the residential hotel well past any glory days it might have dreamt of, that doubled as a dorm for NYIT, housed WNET Channel 13 and a minor television game show celebrity guest that frequented the elevators for some reason.

I’d spread myself too thin too fast for a single semester in a single building. I had my boyfriend, my other boyfriend, someone else’s boyfriend, the guy down the hall who wouldn’t “waste his seed on me,” his brother who did, the Romanian gardener/Charles Bronson body double who barely spoke English, a Greek “prince,” a shoe store box boy, my economics professor, a boy named Hamlet, and his cousin who I’d find some mornings asleep in my bathtub with a face full of girly makeup.

I think that was everyone.

I transferred to NYU Film School. A fresh start. Again. A re-fresh start. Getting into that prestigious program was supposed to mean I was something, someone. Someone other than me, someone better.

I wasn’t. I was still me. I dragged me around like a shadow, like toilet paper stuck to a shoe, like a binky or Linus’ blanket. I wanted to let go, move forward, I wanted to blossom. I couldn’t.

I imagine I was too scared, sure I didn’t measure up to regular people. I’d done things, a thing, a horrible thing. If people knew the truth they’d scorn me, so, never having heard the phrase, I opted in to rejection as protection. I will hate you before you can hate me. I will hate me before you can hate me.

very east 7th street

A beacon in a burned-out neighborhood, the apartment behind Door #1 was a floor through on East 7th Street and Avenue D with new wood floors, beamed ceilings & multiple skylights. Bahrum—one of the foreign princes at Tech and the “other boyfriend” mentioned above—offered to split the exorbitant rent of $300/month.1 He thought we’d be living together. Bahrum was Persian. Persia, aka Iran, where chubby Long Island Jewish girls are not welcomed into families, royal or otherwise. Most Iranian Jews were busy getting the hell out of Iran.2

Also, except for one or two homesteading blocks like 7th & D, everything east of Avenue A was a wasteland of burned out buildings, shooting galleries and empty lots. How to get to and from that apartment? Cabs stopped at 1st Avenue, wished you luck and sped away.

Your life could be radically different if you’d gone left or right at any given time, chosen the red pill or the blue. Had I taken the apartment on very East 7th Street, you wouldn’t be reading this. Too many of the abandoned buildings were shooting galleries and heroin dealers. I didn’t know it then, but in a couple of years, heroin’d become my favorite drug. If I’d never have to walk further than my front door to find a good—or a bad, you never knew for sure and maybe that made it more exciting—bag of dope, I’d become a familiar face, just one more junkie girl in the hood. I’d be dead. Or worse.
You think there’s nothing worse than dead.
You’re wrong.
But that will be years down the line.

regular east 7th street

I moved into the first floor rear apartment at 41 East 7th Street. The choice to live off 2nd Avenue instead of Avenue D didn’t keep me safe or unharmed.

Sometimes life choices are matters of degrees.
Degrees of harm. Degrees of safety. Degrees of sanity.

In 1979, you could buy an entire tenement building for $10,000 or a rent-stabilized lease off the current tenant. I paid $500 to the lease owner—it was a dump, but it was mine.

It had a loft bed, a double stainless steel sink, butcher block kitchen counters, no closets, and when you were inside you always, always felt like it was raining outside. In the close to twenty years I lived there, not a sliver of sunlight found a way in. The radiator had sunk halfway through the floor, the windows were barred, there were holes in the walls. Someone had laid sub-flooring—a rough plank meant as a base for a finished floor they never got around to. Sweeping loosened embedded sawdust. Inside, I swept up cockroaches, creating a virtual sawdust factory. Outside, tiny, dried-apple faced babushka-wearing Ukrainian babas, swept the stoops. A used bookstore to the right and a little market with many bare shelves to the left. There was no reason to be in the East Village unless you lived here, or wanted to buy drugs. Ukrainians. Junkies. Me & my roommate and friend from Tech, Nada. And three blocks away, the Hell’s Angels, but I don’t know that, yet.

It was quiet, cheap, and walking distance from NYU. It was home.

I would eventually run a phone line into the Lilliputian bathroom. I felt like a old world movie star in my pitted claw foot tub, a glass of Mateus or Lancers Rosé in one hand, chatting on the phone and smoking cigarettes—using the toilet as an ashtray.

I was fancy like that.

It was slightly less glamorous when I passed out with my head wedged between the toilet and the wall, right leg slung over the tub, left up against the wall. A Hell’s Angel whose name I might never have known waited in the living room as I tried, and failed, to catch and insert a lubed-up diaphragm that shotgunned around the bathroom.

Diaphragms are not great birth control options for drunk girls.

I didn’t know how I’d come up with the rent money each month, $175. Hence, Nada, who didn’t mind sleeping in the living room on a metal cot. She’d be safely gone by the time Hell’s Angels & the bathroom phone showed up in my life.