I am a native New Englander with a more-or-less elite northeast liberal establishment education, a BA in Religious Philosophy from a liberal arts college in VT. I also studied literature, back in another time when feminists were being read and discussed widely. I read Kate Millet, Betty Freidan, Shulamith Firestone, Gloria Steinem, and Angela Davis, among others.
Forty-five years later, I “found myself” (for want of a better expression) quite atypically referring to a specific group of women of my recent acquaintance as “bitchez,” to other bitches and others who knew them. Everyone with whom I used the term knew exactly who and what I was talking about. I’m spelling the word with a “z” in order to emphasize I’m using the word not in judgement, but to classify and describe them. It took me years to understand this tribe of bitchez, their similarities, their differences, and their menace. But at first glance—attractive, vulnerable babes with bad drug habits, good connections, and nowhere to sleep—at first blush these bitchez exhibit some desirable traits.
One important thing to know about bitchez is they’re trapped in the financial lower class, though that may not be obvious at first glance. Almost none of the dozens of bitchez I met over two years had a car or a license. Some had warrants or bail conditions which made them inconvenient passengers and risky house guests. Bitchez learned to do what they needed to do to get by, to keep a roof over their head, a couple of meals a day. Most all of them lived in insecure circumstances which on the outside could resemble a stable relationship, even marriage, but were often a week-by-week arrangement, sometimes day-to-day. Lots of bitchez were accustomed to putting out to pay the rent, though over time that too could predictably turn into a bad situation, and one that would be replaced as soon as a new situation could be devised. Bitchez have to stay busy and stay mobile.
Bitchez who could procure crack cocaine and other drugs were able to leverage their tenuous positions significantly, but that lasted only until the end of the cash or the end of the run. Crack ho bitchez are always at work, can’t rest a minute. This explains their penchant for opportunism. From experience, I offer this observation: It’s never safe to let any trippin’ bitchez hang around if you plan to get some sleep. They are quite likely to rob you blind. And you know the bitchez ain’t on their knees payin’ the rent, when everyone’s flying, when all the stems in the house are smoking hot, and all the mouths are yapping. If we stay up for 48 hours, it’s like no days have gone by, hence no rent. And the bitch is never, Ever, EVAH gonna suck you off while she’s high like this. Look elsewhere friend.
A few bitchez live off government checks, but most do not. Some try and live part-time with people who do live off a government check, with varying success. The bitchez are living hand-to-mouth, in situations which sometimes start out as (or otherwise mimic) a legitimate relationship. These bitches need to hustle to get by. They’re a specific subset of the homeless. And there are legitimate reasons for the minutiae of whatever predicament they’re in. Many are ex-convicts. They are required to check off the felon box on job applications. They have sketchy educational backgrounds, learning disabilities, dual-diagnosis—like bipolar-opiate addiction, that sort of thing—that more or less ensure a bitches life is harder than a non-bitch’s life. Some of the diagnoses are worse. Anxiety disorders were common, with their endless pharmaceutical interventions. I saw schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, several autism spectrum issues, dyslexia, ADHD and FASD, and any number of addiction related syndromes. These bitchez are addicted to crack cocaine, and many– the least reliable of all– are addicted to opiates as well. And they screw up, a lot, consistently, and often they screw up in the same way they screwed up the last time.
I was at the time pursuing a disastrously expensive lifestyle—filling my life with crack hos and cocaine—which seriously impairs everyone involved, too profoundly to allow a lot of interactions with the real world. I “mentored” a brilliantly vivacious and charismatic woman who applied for a job at the pharmacy down the street from where we lived—no car required, it was literally under two minutes to walk to, a place we often stopped for last minute supplies on the way home. The whole staff were introduced to Janessa by the assistant manager, after she filled out her application and aced her interview, and for three or four days we were treated like celebrities the times we stopped there together.
But a strange thing happened, on the way to success. The more certain the job seemed to be, the more Jan’s enthusiasm cooled. Jan got so aloof, I asked her, why? The job waited only for her background check. She divulged, in perhaps too relaxed and sing-song a manner, the quite large impediment that her background check would report her having been fired from WalMart just over a year earlier for stealing from the till. Before that, she’d been convicted of aggravated shoplifting. Titanic. Meet Iceberg. In other words, she would never get a retail job if the job application required a background check. Simple, right?
She didn’t consider it weird to apply for a job she knew she’d never get in the first place. It’s the way she did things—the same way every time. Completely ignore the fact that every previous attempt was a failure. She couldn’t think of a new way to find a job. I tried very hard to get her to tell the truth up front. Let the employers, who were already besotted with her charisma, and eager to hire her regardless of her past, figure out what needed to be done to get her on their payroll. Instead, Janessa would privately, with me, bow and shake her head no, rue her miserable circumstances, and shut down. For more than a year I blamed this woman, otherwise so bright, articulate, charismatic, focused and demonstrating an uncanny ability to organize people and get them onboard for whatever project or adventure she might plan, for being a fuckup. I blamed our drug use as the primary reason for her “mis”-behavior, for the times she would do things half-assed (missed appointments, neglected to bring required documents, didn’t wake up). She would self-sabotage any situation that started to feel expansive, continuous, and real.
From the standpoint of a junkie crack ho, we lived the perfect, nearly sustainable life. Most often—basically every day for 4+ months, at the cost of $100/week on my Visa plus $2.00/day for tolls—we would start the day driving to the methadone clinic. Some mornings we would stop “real quick” at a housing project a few miles from the clinic to procure heroin, and occasionally get cocaine as well, though the up deals were always lousy, before clinic. Wrong hour and the wrong connections. Jan often nodded out in the car, even when she was high on up. Once she nodded out in the clinic and they wouldn’t administer her methadone until she woke up, at which she took deep offense and stormed out of the clinic, and that may have been when they kicked her out of the program altogether and she went back to the straight heroin intervention protocol to manage her addiction. After clinic, it depended on the weather of storm-front Janessa how the rest of the day would proceed. We rarely came home without first procuring cocaine to smoke, unless as often happened, we already had some at home. I certainly took care of my responsibilities at home as the “bread-winner.” We got high every morning, and we got high every night. I bought legal weed and Jan would try and convert it to narcotics. Her pushers loved her, and loved my weed.
Twice, Janessa told me, in a wet whisper, “It’s Friday, and I want to be really bad,” and we made the investment to get high all weekend. We also experienced bitter, animated break-ups after both weekends. The second time we only made it to Saturday afternoon. I learned from these scenarios. Janessa apparently did not. Or she learned it differently, learned a different lesson from the same situation, which of course she would internalize differently than me, because even though we were nominally “together,” her situation in no way resembled mine. She exhibited traits which indicated she would never intellectually grasp someone elses situation. And this was in stark contrast to the other side of Janessa, the provider of sexual services, at which she was a marvel. It felt impossible that she was not completely, deeply, intuitively connected both physically and mentally with her client. Janessa breathed a gamine sexuality, humming and hiccupping small sounds, murmuring her assent, and tracing graceful movements to ingratiate, to bring her client into her ritual. Into her head. I’m terribly reluctant to admit that the miraculous, nearly Vulcan-mind-meld powerful, and apparently intuitive spell she cast over me, was nothing but my own projection onto her relative silence and air of limitless accommodation. I wanted and needed so much. I never doubted this quiet and affectionate Jan could easily fulfill all my romantic and sexual needs. The silence, I would learn, generally came from heroin. The depth of her intuition was a direct measure of my own needs and desires. I wanted this woman to transcend the twenty-seven years of age difference between us. I wanted the drugs to make me young. I wanted to use my money and resources to provide a life for Janessa. I know that’s what she wants. Listen to her when she fellates me. Mhmmm? The tiny turned-up tail of a sound that says yes… HHhmmphfff. HmphHmph. Right?
This wasn’t working out for me. I wanted to no longer be wrong all the fucking time. I wanted a woman who cost less than $300/day before we fucked. I wanted a woman I wouldn’t be so likely to abuse. I needed a woman who wouldn’t take me to the cleaners when she scored for me. How many bags in a year did Jan theatrically pull out of her bra? “I just can’t keep it,” she gaily announces, “Jimmo gave me this.” Haha haha ha! Papa’s got a brand new bag, but Mama’s taken the bag as a tip from her dealer, held it aside. She called it, “my stash.” Four nice bags for my two hundred, and that perfect extra nipple-bag, the excuse for me to slide my hand flat under her bra at the armpit and over and across her breast, raking the edge of my palm against her rosy-rubber nipple. Her back flexes liquidly, pressing her chest against my palm, then pulling away and twisting so I can slide my hand the rest of the way across, to grasp and evaluate her other breast with its own erect pink nipple, checking for any other gratuitous stashes. Janessa and I, right then, shared all my up, 50-50. Also, because Janessa is a freaking vacuum cleaner, we smoked it quite a bit faster than we needed to, or ever should have. After we’d smoked most of mine—we were making a legitimate Star-Trek-like clinical study of the exact furthest boundaries of a cocaine high we could reach—then she threw hers down and we happily smoked that, too.
We were prepared to go all the way, for science. We did all the stupid, deplorable, and destructive stuff that all users (nay, all cocaine addicts) do, but we also had hysterical fights neither of us could remember the details of an hour later, and which I think were nothing less than spontaneous psychotic episodes, fueled by large amounts of cocaine often mixed with various mixtures of marijuana, alcohol, various prescription down preparations, and Viagra, neurontin and benzos—Effexor, Xanax, Klonopin, etc. Some bitchez took Soma, Valium, and Ambien; were rarely heard from here on earth. We were all freaking crazy. Bitchez confirm it. Bitchez cause it.
Bitchez 