Callista had been to my house several times, and I’d been to hers. In fact, I visited several places she lived over the year I knew her. When we met, Callista (she was originally introduced to me as Cal) was an eighteen-year-old, mixed race girl, tall with sparkling eyes, pretty cheekbones, braces on her teeth, a wide confident grin and heavy bosom. She and I were acquainted because her Mom was my on-again, off-again lover, my stoned junkie crack ho part-time nemesis Janessa. Jan went through a horrible 3-day break-down involving a high school lover and a bunch of meth, and the whole flare-up dropped the poor woman into county lock-up. Though she was profoundly addicted to opiates, she would not be bailed out and had to detox behind bars. Less than a week later, Callista ended up hanging out at my house. Only nineteen, she had lost custody of her twin boys, their baby daddy was in prison in another state, and Cal had to give up her apartment in Rumford, which was functionally free for a year, because she could never get it together to make it to the grocery store, or to keep her utilities hooked up. She was slow learning that stuff about life, how to make things happen at the right time with the right paperwork and the correct amount of cash. Her Mom, Janessa, could never get that stuff right either.
One dreadful day I ditched Cal’s mother at Cal’s house, because after I drove all of us all the way to Rumford, and despite complex and elaborate denials, her Mom had gone upstairs to shoot heroin while I sat in my car in the driveway in the middle of winter with one of Cal’s fussy two-year-old sons in the car seat. (The other had gone upstairs with his Mom on her first trip). Various afflictions preclude me from attempting to walk over the snowbanks, across the puddles, the ice, the partially shoveled steps, and up the three flights of stairs required to get to Cal’s apartment, so I waited in the car. After 20 minutes or so of yacking to the kid, singing a song, and letting him sit in front and turn the steering wheel, I finally got the kid back in his seat, then laid on the horn, sure to raise highly negative awareness, parked as I was among giant snowbanks in the capacious parking area in front of three four-story tenements. Faces appeared in windows in all of them. Cal came down and rescued the kid, and after another full 20 minutes, I unbuckled the car seat, laid Jan’s cellphone and purse into it, and I left it perched in the snowbank. I drove away, enraged, texting dark and furious oaths, to what I now understand was the phone, lying in the car seat, lying in the snowbank, in the Rumford parking lot, only five hours after a blizzard.
I saw in the diffused light how Callista’s face was a perfect draft of her mother’s face
Now, Cal’s Mom was in jail, and Cal and I sat up all night talking and puffing, smoking weed and cocaine and maybe drinking a beer too. Cal sat in what I laughingly describe as the interrogation chair, beside the bed next to the nightstand. I reclined on my bed, and when it was very late, when we were barely whispering our stories to one another, my vision came un-focused for a moment, and I saw in the diffused light how Callista’s face was a perfect draft of her mother’s face. They shared a jawline, the corner of their eyes and their mouths, a genetic symmetry, a perfect carbon copy, redrawn for me to see up close in this warm light. Now, of course I see the resemblance all the time, the way once you’ve seen the old lady’s face hiding in the German psychology drawing you can’t imagine not always seeing her. Cal was Jan, and vice versa, with an arresting but not always obvious resemblance. But Cal is a zaftig, black teenage chick, with a flattish nose, fat round lips, African hair. Cal’s mom is a porcelain-pretty freckled brunette fair-skinned Irish girl approaching middle age, with a pointed nose and thin lips. I loved and desired them both. Good God, what is happening to me?
By the end of the first night, daylight had come but hardly broken the night’s spell. Callista had gone to bed upstairs when the sun came up. I felt a warm non-urgent desire for her, along with a kind of reluctance as well, about the possibilities of our hooking up. The thought of connecting with this sweet café au lait señorita in her prime was a delicious fantasy. She may have even dropped a broad hint. On the other hand, I couldn’t help thinking I was contemplating a sin of Biblical proportions. I couldn’t help thinking Janessa would quite literally kill me. I was blissfully happy, and high as fuck. I decided not to pursue it.
Apparently at the same instant I summoned the good sense to avoid Cal, she and my friend Dení, who was visiting, had cooked up an alternative outcome. Dení traipsed into my room, hesitantly offered a two-girl encounter with her and Cal, if it was OK, if nobody else was at the house, and if I was interested, and if we had time, if I paid them three hundred each. Dení felt awkward, but at the same time, was breathless and curious. “Do you like Callista? “ she wanted to know, “Is she hotter than me?” At that moment, I knew my roommate wanted Cal to move out, and providing her cash was a way to effect this outcome; I would help Cal get on her feet. This turned into a reasonably good way to give them both some cash, and to solve the predicament of wanting to be fellated while tracing the regal jawline of my Jan, err um, I mean Cal, I mean um, yes, Dení. Good lord.
While it was supposed to be an easy solution to many problems, this was among the most awkward and tentative encounters I’d embarked upon. I knew and adored Dení, we were very comfortable together, and clearly, she was interested in my reaction to Callista, while I think Cal was possibly horny and genuinely motivated to move right along. The three of us were all stupid with puffing. Dení assumed her preferred one-kneed crouch beside my bed, fellating me a bit theatrically, expertly holding my attention while writhing receptively in hot slow-motion, at my feet in tank top and thong, while I fussed with Cal’s top, straining to free her heavy bosom. My memories of the geography and geometry of the encounter have become decidedly non-Euclidean, as I was somehow French-kissing Cal’s shaved, herb-scented, and freshly showered pudendum, while Dení nose-breathed loudly and with some annoyance at my unbalanced attention to Cal as her busy mouth cycled from pleasuring me to making pretty-girl-kisses with Cal’s exquisite grinning black-girl lips. We all murmured consent; mmm hmm, yes, yes.
Still feeling awkward, we disengaged a bit and all three of us slid under the covers where we puffed and tickled, luxuriated, relaxed and talked as if the fate of the world were in play; it was. I didn’t get off, but we maundered playfully, climbing up onto one another, falling over with sheets and covers wrapped over one pair of shoulders or another. We shared warmth and silliness. Tits, times two. Asses. Labia. Bras. Thongs. Leggings. Ellipses…
The day spun away wildly. I eventually drove Dení home. Cal and I cooked mystery meat out of the freezer together, and later drove through the dollar menu at McDonald’s at 2:00 am. We finished the encounter we’d started earlier. Cal’s generous patience and careful fellatic attentions and my cunning explorations of her lush body combined to get me hard enough to fully penetrate her and to gloriously and joyously orgasm inside her. I believe she climaxed as well but will confess to not knowing for sure. Pleasures and enthusiasms were positively expressed, fun was had. We were high, we were beautiful, we were… oh wait, I didn’t care. Our encounter was spectacular, and I felt ridiculously and impossibly happy.
Everything was completely new to me, I found myself having to learn about my life while it happened all around me. In my best head states, I knew this life I’d built was a sham and counterfeit. The drug controls everything, and the sex controls the drugs, and there isn’t any one ring to rule them all, just endless nights, eliding one into the next in the forever unreeling present. I had made Callista my lover, or more precisely, my provider of fantasies, of fantastic love. My Plastic Fantastic Lover, who would never get the reference to the Jefferson Airplane song which her grandparents would almost certainly have listened to, it didn’t pass down to the younger generation, but that’s OK because I have heard the song, I know the reference, and I’ll tell Cal about it, the same way I told her Mom Janessa about it. Professor Henry Higgins. This is a narrative, one I embraced easily and blindly, was easy to support. Eliza Doolittle’s mixed-race daughter is upstairs with Professor Henry Higgins, practicing her fellatio.
At the same time, another narrative held. It became clear every crack-fueled encounter involved conscious exploitation of a partner’s vulnerability. Supplying the drug to someone who craved it was a marvelous, almost unbelievable gift and at the same time the worst thing I could possibly do. By making the current encounter possible, supplying the drug precluded future connections without the drug. We could support any narrative we wanted to, so long as everyone involved was on board. We all said, “I love you,” to one another. This was supportable precisely until one or another of our putative lovers didn’t respond back in kind. I desperately grasped and held to my narrative. Our world depended on it. I love you. And you.
I had by now committed at least some of my resources to ensuring Cal found a situation she could live in. I kept saying “You have to leave,” and she’d say, “anytime,” she could leave right then if that would work, but I’d protest, “You can’t leave without a plan. It’s not really leaving unless you’ve got a plan. Let’s make a plan.” Eventually she ended up hanging out with my friend Theresa, driving around with her, taking care of her dogs, tending gardens, and likely helping her deal drugs, and I was happy, because Cal was occupied with something besides my home, my kitchen, my weed, and my cocaine.
One morning, very early by my internal clock, but perhaps 8:45 am Eastern Daylight Savings Time by the Greenwich Observatory, on a bright sunny morning in June Theresa and Callista arrived at my house and rapped on the glass door from the deck outside the bedroom. I shambled out of bed and across the room to roll open the door, and Theresa and Cal excitedly jostled in, announcing they planned to smoke this bag of cocaine Cal dangled in front of me, with me or not, because they’d had no drugs at all since the last time I saw them, two or three days earlier. How lovely! Wake-and-bake with two of my favorite people right then, feeling so gratified they had found one another and hooked up, Theresa—who I hardly knew, but I knew was a close and perennial friend of Callista’s Mom, almost family and by association, family with Cal. Smart, big-hearted, big-bosomed, big-eyed and big-red-haired Theresa was taking care of Callista. Theresa told me, reassuringly, “I took her under my wing.” We fist bumped as she walked out to the car, before they drove away.
Sadly, ridiculously, only two days later Theresa was murdered, shot in the back of the head with a 45-caliber bullet and left beside the road in East Millinocket, ME. Two days after that, two black people were arrested in the Bronx for the murder; one of them was Callista. Can you hear my scream? Has this story become Greek tragedy yet?
A week or two later, my phone lit up one night while I sat at a bar and waited for two cheeseburgers-to-go from Red Robin in Scarborough, and it was Cal, calling from Riker’s Island. I spoke with her while I drank my IPA at the bar. Her Mom was already in jail. My life had become a tedious Lifetime Movie plot, heavy and slow with object lessons, plodding orchestral score, and shrill, nit-picking advertising that sounded like a Greek chorus. The script was written by Aeschylus, who revealed a curse on my protagonists like that on the House of Atreus. Three weeks after her Mom went to jail, Callista went to jail. Except Callista was innocent; it could be argued she was a victim.
After the burgers and beer, I looked forward to an affectionate encounter, later in the evening, with Electra. I mean Reese. I no longer felt a whit of control of my life, I no longer felt any agency. There was a leak in the hull of Now, and the plot poured in. I could only bail. The deitic Olympians slam their beakers of mead down on the table, watch with florid laughter as the Fates of mortals unwind in their dizzying, fluttering sprint.
Bitchez 