Trudy

Trudy was the oldest woman I was involved with during this period, only two years younger than me. The one crazy-ass thing about Trudy—I was head-over-heels in love with her. I thought we would be romantically involved, commit to one another, make plans for the future, and live it. Trudy thought so too. She’d be my old lady, I’d be her old man. We had the “old” part down, we’d mastered it. We just had to get the lady part, and the man.

I had met Trudy a year before this, so I “knew” Trudy but I’d never “been with” Trudy, she was a friend of a friend. About a year after I first met her, I’d gone to a party at Ernest’s, where Trudy was, who was constantly being shaken down for a BJ or other sexual favors by Ernest. When Trudy and I got some privacy to speak, I told her how pretty her face looked in profile. With the tip of my finger I drew the lovely line of her jaw. She sighed, smiled, and shifted position slightly. I knew she was listening, knew what made this ho respond. It would take a couple more days before Trudy would get to finish what I was quietly starting. Eventually Trudy provided the best blow job I experienced in my 18 months of courting blowjobs. She insisted on the ranking and gave the BJ that won the Platinum Metalhead Medal Award for Head. Trudy was a superstar of providers. My breath catches when I intone this. My achingly pretty, 62-year-old angel Trudy.

For over a year her home was one of the sacred respites to which my girlfriend Janessa could retire when her life turned to shit, which it did with disturbing frequency. Trudy was a safe harbor, a big sister; family, period.

Trudy was also the horribly damaged victim of a heaping double-bushel of shit her life handed to her; two days after a double-mastectomy for breast cancer she was run over in a driveway by her own car, driven by a friend who had tweeked out on cocaine and turned on her when my Trudy attacked her for something or another. Most scary, Trudy never spent near enough time recuperating in the hospital after her brushes with death, and hence came at the world in a disheartening broken up, unsewn Frankenstein-like shamble, dangling ad hoc injuries, barely healed, a near-literal trainwreck of a body. Now add to that discouraging list of co-morbidities the fact the poor, dear woman also takes concerning doses of medications to manage some profound mental health issues she faces, from as far back as her early adolescence, Valium, Soma, and that nutso sleep medication Ambien. Trudy spends lengthy periods of her life in a profoundly impaired state. Smoking cocaine is the only pharmaceutical intervention that reliably lifts her spirits and hauls her out of the death spiral she enters whenever she goes back to her normal medications. She discovered cannabis fudge was a preferable sleep preparation to Ambien, using clinical evidence we compiled ourselves. I slept at her house as light and innocent as a monk.

Our romantic entanglement proved impossible, because Trudy maintained two lives—the recovering and repentant failed parent persona, which she assumed in order to be in contact with her daughter and grandchildren—and the swaggering crack ho who could keep herself high for just the first 8 or 10 days of the month, month in, month out, and that part of her life would never change—and I was unfortunately unable to keep a foot in each of her lives to make our love connection work. Trudy herself admitted she could never again love a cocaine addict. We agreed, and yet we loved being with one another, loved connecting. And then we didn’t. We were together for three months. Then our arrangement fell apart. I recently blocked her phone number