the prologue: livin' la vida hoochie

missing days, weeklong nights, lost years

I want to tell my story in chronological order. Unfortunately, things didn’t always happen to me in chronological order.

This maybe happened before that—but next time it was the other way around. I might not remember Tuesday until Sunday—you see what I’m saying?

A month or so of Wednesdays—gone entirely. Forever.

In the real world, in your world, night follows day, and day follows night. That’s what I was raised to expect, but that was for civilians¹. Instead, day and night arrived more like a shotgun blast or a spiral paint splatter design.

Night followed night followed night and really, I never had any idea where the days had got themselves to or what they wound up doing wherever it was they wound up.

My story started in 1957 and “The End” should’ve been 1980, July 27 to be exact, four days after my twenty-third birthday. Twenty three years & four days, that was the plan, should’ve been all she wrote. There was no point in keeping track, insisting on order, chronological or otherwise, when I knew it was all going to end, badly.

I had an expiration date, livin’ life like a quart of milk.
I’d made no plans for living past July 27, 1980.

I want to tell this story in chronological order. But things just didn’t happen that way.

This is really a simple love story. Between a girl & her bottle.
Typical. Girl meets boy. And another boy. And another and so on and so on…

It’s an age-old love story between a girl, a boy, a bag of dope, a bottle of vodka and the most famous street corner in the world.

This is the story of a single wild night interrupted by ten years of blackouts & blinding strobe lights, of money & murders, of obsession, desperation, innocence & addiction.

These are stories of hotpants & heartbreak, 
    and every once in a while,if you squint your eyes,
       if you believe in fairy tales,
          if you listen for the laughter,         
              it is a tale of love, survival & hope.

Times Square owned my naked ass for ten years, it has my broken heart for a lifetime. This is our love story. 

You know you wanna hear more, so…

1. Civilians are unaffiliated with anything or anyone that matters to the nightlife, the thug life, the gangster life. Not an addict or a drunk, not a thief. A regular joe or jane with a day job & dreams of a white picket fence.