This really happened. The junkie crack ho I lived with, and with whom I was near-suicidally in love, was in truth and at bottom a wonderful woman, beautiful, brunette, charismatic, 27 years my junior. Born in 1980, bless her—the same year as Disco, the Talking Heads, Gang of Four, The Cure, the Police, she was born the year I married my first wife. This babydoll’s parents were my contemporaries and listened to the music I grew up on. She was named after an Allman Brothers’ Band song. My license plate numbers were the last four digits of her social security number. We met under a full moon. There was chemistry. She brought me an enormous bliss.
Well, bless her heart, this chick Stormy Monday really needed a lot of help, and I found myself almost required to help her in manifold and improbable ways. One thing I tried was a kind of Art Therapy for Opiate Abusers™, using music and stuff I found online, with messages about how damaging drug abuse and unhealthy behavior were to others, not just the abuser, to try to steer her at least in a healthier direction. I’d recently discovered a song by Elizabeth Cook, called Heroin Addict Sister that is a bald, raw, and honest presentation of the story of the pain an addict causes their loved ones. My babydoll never liked the song, but she listened intently several times. I mean, what more can I ask, right? I cry every time I hear it.
There’s a band, the sometimes duo/sometimes trio, called The Be Good Tanya’s, and one of the three has a sister who, like Elizabeth Cook’s sister, is a heroin addict, and my babe and I listened to their music together, often. Light Enough to Travel is a song about a traveling musician forced by the circumstance of her being a traveling musician, to carry only the barest of essentials. She sings about having to ditch her accordion to get away from the cops.
She was named after an Allman Brothers’ Band song. My license plate numbers were the last four digits of her social security number. We met under a full moon. There was chemistry. She brought me an enormous bliss.
This song perfectly reflected my bitch Stormy Monday’s situation in the world. For various reasons, mostly Gabapentin and Xanax, but also fentanyl, heroin, copious amounts of cocaine—both soft and hard—and because she was a belligerent bully of a bitch, an enforcer, a hustler, the middle-man, a rip-off, so she never really had to answer to anyone, this woman could not stay on any useful track. This woman I loved more than I had ever loved anyone, was accustomed to squaring up with her foes, making quick getaways, traveling light, leaving stuff behind, replenishing fast. With fifty bucks and a ride to the Dollar Store, my angel could be ready for a week of adventures and wild-ass experiences. She left strategic stashes, of clothing, toiletries, bedding, goodwill, drug paraphernalia, and IOUs at the various places she stayed from time to time, stuff she could use when, as often happened, her previous situation went tits-up. She got by. Over time she came to love the song, Light Enough to Travel. Both of us tear up when we hear it, especially if we’re together, a circumstance which significantly and sadly will almost surely never happen again.
My babe was wonderfully inquisitive and simultaneously suffered from a woefully inadequate public education. Whenever she asked me something, like what does some word mean, I’d explain it, slowly, part lecture and part Socratic-dialog, like some god damned professor. She needed a lot of words defined. I was freaking Professor Henry Higgins, and my bitch was Eliza Doolittle. And she got it. I’ll never doubt she understood what I told her. If she didn’t understand then I would just explain at greater length, with more details. Louder.
I was unwaveringly convinced all I had to do was expose this bitch to art and readily available information, from the internet or a bookstore or my library, and this would light up a straighter path than the one she’s following and convince her to steer in a new direction. Art and culture, rational exchange, regular sleep and a good diet were the answer to any issue that could come up. It had to work! It had worked for me!
Monday misunderstood so many things, but most often she was just ignorant. Could it be my job was merely to teach her a whole lot of stuff in a very short time? It seemed possible. We shared a silly joke my father used to tell, “I taught her everything I know, and she still don’t know nothing”.
Over time, I lent my Stormy Monday my hardcover version of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, I bought her books by Amy Poehler and Sue Grafton she’d picked out at the store, and I ordered a math book for the online accounting class her teacher picked out. I read to her from my own poetry chapbooks, played Slam poetry videos by Tara Hardy and Taylor Mali, and of course I indulged in her frequent fellatic attentions. We’d let Google Search settle all factual arguments—racing one another for the answers, chattering our questions into phones, her Android, one of the three I bought for her that first year, and my Apple, one of the three I’d owned over that year. I reminisced with her about 12-step programs, bragged about famous people I knew or came close to, and especially the ones who knew me. We binge-watched Orphan Black and Empire and BET. I indulged in a graduate level deep dive into hip-hop music and bitchez. I served every entrée with lime zest. And bacon. I was supernova happy. This was new, had never been done before, and was guaranteed foolproof. We could not fail.
We puffed cocaine and stayed awake and spoke only to each other for days on end. For week after week, 3 or 4, sometimes 5 nights in a row or more, we’d stay up and awake and involved. Then we’d take a break, or fight and break up, or someone would come to stay and help us sort ourselves out of the uniquely unhealthy state of enmeshment we’d once again spun ourselves into.
Overall, Stormy Monday was a grateful sponge for information, loved that I’d teach her without judging her. I loved talking to her, was starving for her company. Over time she demonstrated I wasn’t wasting my time. She remembered what I said, sometimes quoting me, weeks later, sometimes months. She was learning, my fetching Eliza Doolittle, and I was in love. I leaped happily into the abyss, just to show her how serious and unafraid I was. It was impossible we could be wrong.
And I played music for her, endlessly, from playlists I’d thrown together, hoping they were therapeutic. Heroin and Waitin’ for My Man and Sister Ray by The Velvet Underground. Raw Sienna by Savoy Brown. I played her Jaco Pastorius, played Scag by Archie Shepp, from New Thing at Newport (and recorded more than 20 years before she was born). I played Charlie Parker and more Coltrane. Sister Morphine, both the Rolling Stones version and the original by Marianne Faithfull.
I listened to music until it hurt, listened for content, searched Apple Music, made more playlists, shuffled them.
I must admit, the naïve, lovelorn, and often drug-addled application of my art therapy regime to affect this woman’s behavior was a demoralizing failure, one of many I endured that year. There was no way to make our love work because I was in love with a stoned junkie crack ho of the highest order. I could even tell myself I knew it wouldn’t work– my love did nonetheless abide. I held a vague intellectual engagement with the idea my Stormy Monday was unredeemable, but I wouldn’t be steered from her presence. I cared but I didn’t care. I persisted to the end believing our love, the turmoil of our May to September romance, would somehow unfold into the deep, joyous, and nurturing relationship we both yearned for.
And to make it all more frustrating, I know I’d certainly do it all again–exercise my hare-brained strategy of teaching and hoping for the best, redefining and forgiving actions on the fly, paying for the phone and the health club and manicures and narcotics, trusting the Western cultural canon, heeding only my heart and desperately grasping at joy for dear, dear life. This is where the motivation for my life comes from, why I’m still in the fray. To question whether I could foresee failure is to misunderstand my motivation to be with Stormy Monday from the get-go. We flew on trapeze swings without a net because I never doubted we were right, and no longer needed to fear gravity. We flew, flipped, stretched, grasped the others’ wrists.
We can perhaps judge our own lives by looking backward on our accomplishments from the marvelous vantage point of our present. But our lives are always lived facing straight ahead, into the windy, pell-mell, chock-a-block tempest of the endless now. “Bring it,” I say, and it is brought. It’s all good.
Bitchez 