The day I was almost strangled to death was an oddly warm and fogless one, in the late summer of ’97, in the gentrifying Mission District of San Francisco. The single kitchen window framed a clean, blue sky.
I’d meant to put a curtain on that window for the entire year and change I’d lived there but never got around to it. That day, its nakedness seemed a glaring indictment.
I loved the place when I moved in. It was a postage stamp–sized, shotgun flat in a buttercup-yellow Victorian. I hand-stitched the leopard-print pillows on the bed myself. The only other furniture was a set of overflowing IKEA bookshelves, a trash-picked dresser, and a vintage kitchen table with rusted chrome legs. I had moved in with happy dreams of graduating college, finally. Writing, ultimately. It seemed a possibility.
Not three feet away, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Billy sat at the table, arms outspread, palms down, forehead on the marbled red Formica. A tangled mop of sandy-brown hipster hair fell over his face, and his shoulders shook with sobs I found both heartrending and embarrassing.
Though it was still morning, the world shimmered with a lazy, hazy gloss, imparted by the pea-sized dollop of black tar heroin I had just smoked off my last sheet of aluminum foil. You couldn’t see the shine anymore, it was so streaked with smears of brown-black sludge smuggled across the border in the ass of some poor fuck way less fortunate than I.
When I was being realistic—as drug addicts are apt to do only first thing in the morning, when the jones sets your nerve endings alight—I knew it was demented that I was regularly ingesting a drug that had recently killed two acquaintances of mine. They had unwittingly fired up not just the precious opiate but also a flesh-eating bacteria. Over the next three days, both they and their friends helplessly watched as their bodies dissolved, cell by decimated cell, into the bloody hospital sheets beneath them. There was nothing the doctors could do to arrest the progress of the bacteria. There was nothing we bystanders could do but watch in shock and awe as our friends fell to pieces in front of our eyes.
At the time, it seemed to me the worst way to die—medieval torture where you die being eaten by rats, starting with your toes. Start with my brain, my heart. Overdose. Myocarditis. Anything other than flesh-eating bacteria.
I continued to suck a cloud of heroin smoke through a rolled-up dollar bill so caked with tar it held together by itself.
To the outside world, I was a functional human being. I held down a job at a high-end women’s clothing boutique. I was the fun sales girl, dressed in a vintage cocktail number and Keds, always looking like I was going swing dancing straight from work. I flirted with the well-heeled women and their bored chaperones alike, working it for a pathetic commission. I had terrific sales numbers. My father always said I could sell sand in the Sahara. I had honed the skill during years as a stripper “putting myself through college,” though I never seemed to actually finish.
I was through with all that now, trying to get my life together. Even though I had just dropped out of school mere moments before graduating (again), I was not entirely bereft of ambition.
I could still walk away from these poisonous drugs, this equally poisonous guy. I was chipping: using on weekends. Though little by little, the weekends had been growing longer. Friday was now solidly a weekend day. Thursday too, occasionally. As long as you were clean come Monday morning, you wouldn’t get strung out and wind up under a bridge.
This was Monday, and I was high. But it was an especially horrible Monday.
“I love you,” I’d told Billy the night before, after he had placed the heel of his hand against my sternum and pushed me up against the wall one too many times. “And I’m leaving you anyway.”
That morning, I wrapped each mismatched piece of glassware in packing paper, placed it in a box, and struggled to manipulate the tape gun under his gaze. Heeding the advice of concerned friends, I had secretly rented a storage facility the week before. For weeks, I had been making plans to move out of town. A clean break. Los Angeles. New Orleans. Austin. Paris. Madrid. Marrakesh.
Los Angeles was good enough for now.
I’d visited the City of Angels a couple of times over the years and noted how literally they take the name. Never was there a city with so many representations of wings. You could find a majestic expanse of white painted on any available flat surface. It was so on the nose, and still, no one could resist.
Wings were a possibility. With wings, you could soar, if you could just figure out how to turn into the wind. A mother’s wings could fold around you, a downy soft tent.
Wings could also break, the hollow armature fragile as a wafer. Wings could appear strong, even work fine at first, but prove to be held together with wax from a birthday candle. Wings could get too close to the sun and melt, dropping feathers one by one until you fell like a stone into the ocean.
I had a friend in Los Angeles who was a high-end hairdresser. She told me if I got my cosmetology license, I could come work for her. It sounded like a palm-tree-lined day job.
Something to support me while I plugged away at my novel.
I placed one glass after another into the box to the rhythm of Billy’s sobs. He had a right to express his pain. I deserved it. Who hadn’t I hurt in the swath of destruction I cut?
Nevertheless, it was time to go. And when it’s time to go… I whirled around.
“Why are you doing this to yourself? Why don’t you leave?”
“Because if I leave,” he said without taking his head off the table, “I’ll come back and you’ll just be gone.”
I almost doubled over. Instead, I imagined my spine to be fashioned of steel. You can do this. You can leave. I turned on one bare heel toward the cabinets.
I didn’t spin more than a few degrees before the world was upended like glitter in a shaken snow globe. I have no memory of the time in between plucking a mason jar from a shelf of peeling paint and waking up, confused, aware at first only of the throbbing back of my head against the linoleum. Slowly, my shoulder blades, my upper arms, my wrists, my hips, the backs of my calves, my heels existed again, even if they belonged to a different body.
I was underwater. It was so quiet. I wondered if I was dead and my soul would begin to rise. Would I look down at my candy-apple-red hair, nerdy glasses, cutoff jeans, chipped blue nail polish and see, in death, what I suspected the rest of the world saw every day of my life? Another entitled, reckless, college girl gone a little bit too wild. A whorish junkie. A junkie whore. A girl who had been too hungry. A girl who had asked for it.
My neck burned, and then it itched. I swallowed a tennis ball on fire, and it lodged in my esophagus. I clawed at it. I still have the white threads of scars you’ll only notice if I inadvertently get a tan.
I was alive.
Billy straddled my chest, hands in a position of surrender, face a mask of disbelief. I studied him for what felt like a long time.
The night I met him was wildly tilted, humming with possibility, fizzy with laughter. We were at a house party in the Castro. There had been a drag queen selling Tupperware, a bowl of punch floating with shrooms, a lesbian band with a topless singer, a famous porn star turned tantric healer, flashes of color, sparkling twinkle lights, a roomful of people delighted with their youth and beauty, enthralled by their cleverness. Billy held court in the corner—the most beautiful and cleverest of them all. We talked about college things, like Milton and Jung and Elliott Smith. It was morning when he went home to the girl he lived with.
The next day, he called to tell me he was walking his dog outside my door. I hadn’t recalled even giving him my number, much less telling him where I lived, but there was plenty I had forgotten about the previous night. I blew him off at first. He lived around the corner with some girl who had a trust fund and two shar-peis. Who needed that shit?
He wore me down. He pursued me relentlessly, prolific with the poetry—a dilettante James Dean, the same tortured azure eyes. I felt adored.
I looked up into those eyes—bloodshot, deranged, exhilarated. I wasn’t sure if the exhilaration came from the fact that he had stopped himself or the fact that he had finally strangled me.
This sadistic loose cannon on top of me had been there the whole time, if I had looked. If I hadn’t been so busy inventing him.
I didn’t know anything about anyone.
As if we’d reached a tacit understanding, Billy stood, wiped his palms on his jeans, and held out a hand. I took it and allowed him to pull me upright. To this day, it is the moment I most regret about the incident. I still fantasize about running into him and saying, “I could have made it back onto my feet on my own.”
Maybe he fantasizes about saying, “I could have killed you, you broken bitch. So easily. And you never would have had the chance.”