My life: a series of rats, a variety show of dungeons & dusty opium bottles seized by the Tenement Museum. The remnants of Agent Provocateur lingerie I bought with modeling money punctured by an aggressive ex. Failed actors turned semi-famous graffiti artists, doing cocaine in neon bathroom stalls off of Asian breasts while watching Asian strippers smack balls on Snapchat. “She was once the hottest girl in New York City…” the middle-aged beer-bellied Bud Light Lime guzzling man-wolf-thing told me while hovering over my body tranquillized on purloined muscle relaxants... Now she gives facials to Carey Mulligan and when her rock star husband didn’t come home she punched her aquarium and the glass impaled her pet tortoise whose ghost now haunts the Lower East Side. And what about the Bone Crusher? That terrifying soft-boiled Vietnam Vet who periodically screams in my face close enough for me to see his dentures reverberate. A little mouse crawled out of his t-shirt when he threatened to break my leg. “Don’t worry, the Bone Crusher will never hurt you,” B. said while fingering the hole in my latex catsuit in a dank stairway. I wish I’d stayed stranded in a taxi in Times Square and vomited Vicodin bile all over the Liberal Arts school graduates not paying attention to me; I was killing myself to be devastating so it’s not fair to be ignored. I showed up at a bar that served free meatballs in a red slip I bought at my local Chinese dollar store, hoping to get high on a charmed stranger. Especially if that stranger wrote for N + 1. In those days, I was more than willing to turn myself into an object for a byline. I took P. to my rat-infested tenement apartment to show him how a real artist lives. We waded through rows of drying laundry searching for Narnia, an escape from wanting more.
