I had made overtures toward Delilah.
I adored her presence,
I loved to smoke cocaine with her, and she certainly shared that enchantment.
I tried in one epic adventure to get her interested in me and get her boyfriend interested in Janessa [who was still the senior bitch on the premises, but she didn’t sleep in the big bed any more, did she Janessa?].
Delilah was easy, but her boyfriend was far too way-out to befriend (or was he way too far-out? I don’t remember precisely).
Janessa and I still made a good faith effort to befriend them, to be social. We were freaks, but so were they. We were still humans, we would be civil.
There was still, at this time, a vestige of “Janessa and I” to reference. We had been an item, at least I believed we were. Sometimes we still “were” and sometimes not. Boundaries were being tested, moved, adjusted. Janessa had moved in, but was often disinclined to provide the services I sought, even when she was handsomely remunerated. She insisted her household responsibilities ended at keeping the house clean. This meant I was free to fish wider waters, for new game, perhaps with new bait, though most likely with the same bait Jan competed for.
For our first and last social engagement with Delilah and company, I provided what passed for a dinner party. I bought us all Italian sandwiches from the Amato’s down the street, a case of Coronas with limes, a family sized bag of Ruffles. I had procured balls of cocaine. It would sadly turn out to be a failure and a waste, but I had prepared for success.
He wasn’t really a pimp, he was mostly just a recurring sore.
The boyfriend went back to town early [we insisted, good God!] because he was being a discernible freak, even he knew it, yelling, pacing, and annoyingly paranoid. I told him what his options were, and then he just lost his shit. I dropped him in town.
Communications got skeevy because of course the boyfriend and Delilah shared one damned phone [though Del paid for their fucking phone with fellatio] and he took it with him. They texted back and forth, through my phone, which I had to unlock and hand to Del whenever boyfriend deigned to text.
He told her [hence us] that the police broke down the door to their apartment, and he had to run out the back and go somewhere else to stay, down by Oak Street, blah, blah, blah. I don’t remember the details. Turns out it was the fabrication of a seriously tweeking, legitimately psychotic boyfriend off his meds, who had for months been cooking up his own pharmaceutical interventions with whatever preparations his crack ho GF could arrange for him. His dual-diagnosis breakdown was full-blown, and uncontrolled. He was addicted to opioids. He wasn’t really a pimp, he was mostly just a recurring sore. I had never dealt with someone like the boyfriend. Ever. Or Delilah, or Janessa, or for that matter, any of the other crack people I was meeting.
I drove Delilah back into Portland, to who knows what shenanigans at home, in the wee smallish hours, sneaking up on the day. We drove in the silvery dawn like spies dispatched from last night.
After I dropped Delilah at their apartment (and I only got this information second-hand) a noisy, violent breakup scene ensued, the apartment was damaged, the boyfriend arrested and locked up in a closed psychiatric facility. Delilah “packed her clothes in a matchbox” and exited the state, back to Florida, where she had family.
Weeks went by. I’d receive an occasional text, but no real word on Delilah. Then suddenly a flurry of communication. Delilah needed to come back from Florida, for a court date right around Thanksgiving. Was there any way I could find it in my heart [and bank account, my heart was the proxy route to my Visa card], to fly her to Portland, ME from Orlando and also could she stay with me until court, where she would be sentenced to at least a year of jail time for fraud and misappropriation of funds, and she’d be no bother whatsoever? In the meantime, she would cook for me, clean the house, smoke my up, suck my cock? Think about it, please?
Her presence would also ensure that nothing I accomplished at home would be simple, or underspecified, or unchallenged.
So, I carefully thought it through. This chick wants to stay with me for the short time before she goes to court, from where she will go to prison. Our experience together will be what she’ll remember during all those interminable days and nights behind bars. I really could not imagine being incarcerated. Thinking about it made my heart hurt.
I made a quick tabulation, listing pros and cons in my mind, speculating on possible upsides. I’m down for this. I shopped online for a cheap, one-way ticket. I’d done it before– Orlando to Maine and vice versa, this time of year, the way people in Maine go on vacation, and how they came home from vacation.
I’d known Delilah’s arrival time for a couple weeks, because the airline reminded me [reminded my Visa card, but that’s the same]. I ended up calling her the morning of her flight, which she’d somewhat predictably put out of her mind, and I had called her just a couple hours before she had to take off. She had forgotten. “Just the time, not the day, silly,” she protested. I reminded her and crossed my fingers.
At home, I went out of my way to make sure there were groceries, clean sheets, ice cubes, and that we would have cocaine to smoke. I really wanted it to be a memorable stay for Delilah, with such a wretched short-term future.
I called my guy, said I was on my way to the airport, for 2:00 pm arrival. He met me at 1:45, big smile, the only time he ever met me at the right time without dicking me around for at least 45 minutes, because [he’d invariably say] he was “careful” but I know he did it because he’s a dick, and because he can.
No problem, my guy met me right on time, $250 for 3.5 grams of excellent rock, he came through solid when I had a first-class crack ho to meet at the airport, less than 10 minutes away because I knew the shortcut and it was a clear, sunny day and my welcome mat was hung out for her like a joyous dancing Chinese dragon half a block long.
I met Delilah (she had no checked baggage, imagine!) at the gate, with only one problem, the fact that as I pulled the car up to the curb, she texted that she had to piss and would be in the ladies room, wanted me to know in case she got mugged and left for dead in there. This was precisely the worst-case scenario I riffled through my mind, as I constantly do, of what could go wrong that very second. I idled, high-strung, carrying a barely sub-felonious amount of highly controlled substance in the No Parking zone at the international airport just past the arrival area where we’re supposed to meet crack bitchez flying in, and she eventually climbed into the car a couple of stressful minutes later, carrying just a backpack, her ho bag, blonde pony-tail, and a smile, and we drove to my house. I felt accomplished and upbeat.
Less than an hour after meeting my guy, Del and I were high, naked in my bed, and Del was sucking my dick. She was perfectly content to spend our whole time like this, except we had to endure frequent interruptions from Janessa, who knocked on the door when she wanted some too. Some cocaine, I mean, not some dick, because if she wanted dick the other chick wouldn’t even be here now, would she, Janessa? Jan would bend her own rules a bit and share the big bed [no longer hers], but she would not be left out of the puffing. Nope, my experience when Janessa was around was suck, suck, knock, knock, fumble, fumble, puff, puff, puff. Elaborately apologetic voices, whispered reassurances, crack hos lying and scheming, checking the locks, eyeing each other, fiddling with their lighters, and poking at their stems.
Don’t get me wrong, Delilah didn’t mind the interruptions all that much, because when Janessa wasn’t there, I gave her more to puff. She’d smile and blow a vapor cloud all over my cock before she took me in her mouth. We would make the best of this situation, caress and munch one another. GFE. Fly. I wanted Jan to catch us with my hand up in Delilah, French kissing her, licking my way inside, sixty-nine. I wanted Jan to feel jealous. She did a little, but not enough really to make the effort worth it.
Del and me would hang out in my bed and we’d talk, talk, talk. Then she’d suddenly sigh and listen, paranoid and electrically jumpy for the footsteps that came just before Jan’s unsubtle knock. Del always wanted me nearby. It took a long time for her to understand Janessa would not beat her up the moment her defences were down and I wasn’t in the room.
Even in this limited, short time we had to enjoy one anothers company, Delilah and I would still argue. Like Janessa, Del was a devilish crack fiend and she’d use every kind of shady or coercive strategy to enjoy more and more of this joyous drug of choice we pursued and used together. Once, I announced I had to leave the house, and she and Jan were perched on either side of the table where the crack sat, and I said Delilah was in charge of it, and nobody should touch it until I got back. Then I turned to Janessa, and said, “You keep an eye on Delilah.”
This would turn out to be altogether a bad idea. They both hated me for it, and hated each other even more. Neither of them could wait to explain it all to me at length. All this bad mojo accumulated just in the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to drive to RiteAid to get cigarettes [for all of us!] and come back. Crack hos go out of their way to get in another crack ho’s face. I came back to their mutual fury, throwing shade, scoffing threateningly, about to boil over, aggressive nose breathing, stems getting poked and flipped over and poked again, shit about to be thrown down.
They’re not good judges of their tone of voice, how they’re being perceived, whether they are speaking in an appropriate tone of voice, bitchez ain’t. Cocaine impairment can introduce autism spectrum symptoms, or it can uncover pre-existing mental health conditions. It’s not a good idea to have cray bitchez this angry in your house. Hits were dispensed, tempers smoothed if not calmed.
Delilah was never satisfied, with anything, partly out of habit, and partly because she was tweeking. Crack hos [actually most all crack users] have no grasp of the concept of enough, of satiation. I certainly didn’t. She would regale me with broad rhetorical questions, formed and presented with an urgency that indicated she needed to know something terribly important from me that very moment, like a kind of aggravated codependency emergency, but off the rails. More is what she wanted, what we all wanted.
Using the Drive-Thru window at McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts with Delilah was a baroque form of torture for me, to get the sugar, caffeine, flavored syrup, flavored ice concoctions they dispensed as drinks for five bucks plus, just right. I couldn’t [refused to, consciously and volubly] place a pass-through order, so I invariably had to duck my head to let the bitch shout her absurdly over-specified drink order through the dead air space into the microphone, invariably resulting in a huge vessel of soupy, putty-colored sludge, sometimes hot, sometimes ice-cold, often with whipped cream filling the clear plastic space-helmet-like bubble they top these cups with, with the tip of a foot-long orange straw sticking out the top, passed through from window to me to Del. In moments the concoction would be charged to my debit card, and for the rest of the hour and a half it took my Del to finally finish the fucking ice-headache inducing frappé, I listened to her complain about it, how the color was wrong, the flavor, too much mocha, not enough coffee, blah, blah.
In spite of the tensions, and Janessa’s quite forceful cock blocking, Delilah and I enjoyed hours of physical and possibly metaphysical interchange, and I faced up to the fact she would soon be gone, out of my life for good in a couple of days. We were adults, I had access to some cash, we can get all the drugs we might desire, Janessa could help us out with her connections. I made Delilah’s brief stay as pleasant and memorable as I could. Times were fat. She wasn’t going to a nice place. This was my gift to her.
Delilah had made specific, largely realistic and responsible plans for her life, up to the point she was hauled off to jail and beyond. She needed nothing until she was released. The reason she was in trouble was she had fucked over the body shop who fixed her car after she crashed it [high on up, but still insured], and spent the check her insurance company mailed her [on drugs, etc., for her and the boyfriend] instead of paying the body shop for the work they’d already completed. She knew she had fucked up, and she was prepared to face the consequences.
Delilah went to court, and the case was dismissed over a technicality. Her case was dropped and she was released without condition. All of the order in my life was now tossed into the air. Del was free, and in Maine, and the only place she had to go was my house. Good God, it was the holidays. Good God, Janessa was going off the rails.
Bitchez 