“Lars is coming soon with some weed.” Bruce says.

Lars did the production work on the one album release the band would ever make before breaking up after my and Bruce’s affair became recognized. Lars was tall and rode a fixed-gear bike, and he was hot. Bruce rode a fixed-gear bicycle, too; looked the part as Lars did, yet was about two inches shorter than me. His slicked-back, dark chocolate brown hair was recently cut short into a fade along the back and sides, changing his look to something I found more irresistible. Clearly.

“Should we hide you?” He asks with a grin as I cover my face with his beer-stained duvet cover.

“You know he will tell Chip.” I laugh deliriously.

Attempting to power up my phone, I anticipated an inbox flooded with text messages from my boyfriend.

“He will kill you, Bruce.” I snicker, utterly aware of the fact that if Chip knew I had screwed his bass player the past two nights in a row, he would undoubtedly kill me, too.

“Ah, c’mon dahling!”

Bruce looks sexy, leaning against the door to his bedroom. The two of us are still drunk from last night’s party. Bruce lives with three other roommates in a retired gospel church that has been made into a concert venue slash living space. It’s similar to Shangri-La but much filthier.

“Fuck it!” I say.

Bruce’s body bobs to Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon.

“Lars is here. I gotta go let him in.”

Before Bruce can move, Lars pushes the bedroom door open.

“Dude!” Lars shouts.

He hasn’t yet noticed my head peeking out from under the covers.

“I bagged the hottest chick last night, ma-”

He’s frozen. He sees me.

“No. Fucking. Way. Dude."

Bruce and I laugh because neither of us feel remorse. We’re monsters.

I picture Chip sitting on the new sofa in our apartment in Crown Heights. He’s staring at the walls—still fresh with clean, bright paint paid for by his parents. Chip doesn’t care where I am at, not at this point. Had he broken all of the new vases or smashed all of the framed vinyl album covers his mother had gifted us from his father’s collection? Were all of my dresses still hanging in my closet? Had my shoe collection been destroyed and thrown from the fifth-floor window into the piss-drenched alleyway below? What had I done? What had we done? 

No remorse. None whatsoever.

***

I packed my bags quickly and carefully as I watched Chip sit for hours in the same position on our black leather sofa. His elbows rested on his knees, his face rested in his palms, and he cried crocodile tears. Chip kept repeating the same three questions over and over, and I remember wishing he would just shut up because I didn’t want him to hear my answers; he didn’t want to listen to my answers. It was terrible enough without disclosing the reason he so desperately wanted to know. “Why?” He cried. “Why him?” He wouldn’t look at me as he spoke. “What does he have that I don’t have?” I didn’t want to answer him. Please, Chip, please don’t make me say it. Don’t make me tell you that he fucks me in ways you’ve never even attempted to. Don’t make me say that he’s just different from you, and that’s what I feel I need right now. Don’t make me tell you that the sex is better or wilder, or steamier or kinkier. Please don’t make me tell you how many times we did it and how it didn’t phase us one bit that what we were doing was hurting you and that we knew it, but we didn’t care. Don’t ask me again, Chip, please.

I packed all my bags into the elevator at once and watched the door to apartment 5C one last time as the cold, steel slats slowly shut. I tossed the luggage, garment bags, and boxes as quickly as possible into the back of my co-worker Kirstan’s SUV and slammed the door shut. 

“Where to, my dear?” 

She smiled at me, trying to make me feel at ease because she knew I was torn and acting on impulse. I was moving into an artist’s space with a DJ booth and a stage and creative energy swarming the place like Andy Warhol’s Factory. At least, that’s what I imagined living at ‘The Church’ would be like, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Doug was a heroin junkie who had shown up one night to a party at The Church and never left. So, he lived on the couch for the entire two months I tolerated living there. I never saw him take a shower or change clothes, but Doug was an incredible painter and sculptor, his work scattered around the vast and open space. I moved in on the first of December. Two weeks later, Bruce came home from work one night—the first night I didn’t accompany him to Saint J’s, staying for his entire shift, drinking whiskey for free—at five o’clock in the morning, beyond drunk, with a black eye, carrying a snow-covered Christmas tree he’d bought for me on his way home. Apparently, someone attempted to steal the tree. To no avail, of course. Doug crafted ornaments for the tree while Bruce and I decorated it, and each other in incandescent string lights, snapping  black and white photographs with my 35mm Nikon.

I was madly in love. Bruce utterly took me, and neither myself nor anyone else could pinpoint what was about him that had swept me so completely off my feet. He was a rough and tumble epitome of a bad boy. A Catholic schoolboy from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Blue collar, working class, alcoholic father and bipolar manic depressive mother. He was tired, faded, wild, and crazy, and I was obsessed with him.

“What do you want for Christmas, baby?” Bruce had such a wide-eyed curiosity. 

I moved in closer to him and planted a kiss on his thin lips. His breath was warm with sour mash. 

“All of the Evan Williams Egg Nog!” I shouted playfully before resting my head on his shoulder.

We cozied up on the sofa in the back corner of the bar next to the old television set. Lauren was kneeling on a barstool, her hands planted on the oak bar as she leaned into an order of drinks from Luc, who could barely hear her over the loud hair metal blaring from the speakers, and the voices of happy drunks that crowded the Johnsons’ every night of the week during the holiday season. The scene was festive and inviting. The staff at the J-Hole were instructed to outdecorate any and every neighboring establishment on any given holiday, Halloween and Christmas being the two main events. Lights and garland, cardboard cutouts and fringed paper mache, glitter and tinsel, and every dollar store decoration in between covered the bar’s interior walls and ceilings to the point that no bare space was left at all. 

“She wants a puppy!” 

Lauren produced her trademark grin, snide and devilish, as she carried glasses of liquor in both hands over to the TV. stand.

“A Boston Terrier!” She added as she danced around the sofa. 

I could see the gears of Bruce’s mind working overtime. Surely, he wasn’t considering Lauren’s idea. Twas the night before Christmas Eve, and we were all wasted. Well, everyone except for Bruce. Bruce was beyond wasted. Bruce was… Where's Bruce? He was just sitting with us. Now, he's gone. Fuck.

“Let’s go back to my place. Shannon has his tattoo rig over there. Let’s get Christmas ink!!” 

Before I could talk her out of leaving the bar, she and Shannon were already heading for the door. I followed. I dialed Bruce’s number. There was no answer. I couldn’t just leave without him, but it was apparent he had left without me. 

“He’ll find you," Lauren reasoned with me as she held out her arm to hail a cab. 

“You live together for Chrissakes, he probably went home to pass out.” 

She opened the door to the backseat of the yellow cab and motioned for me to enter the car first. 

“I know you’re not gonna go after his drunken ass, when you could be getting a new tattoo!!” 

The next morning's bright winter sunshine nearly blinded me as I stumbled onto the sidewalk. The walk to Manhattan Avenue was too far from Lauren's Brooklyn address and wasn't on a convenient train route. A yellow cab appeared in the distance like a knight in shining armor. Relief. And pain. Ouch. My side. Fuck. I grabbed my ribcage, covered by layers of flannel and knobby wool, and a peacoat. Even over all of the layers of fabric and thread, there was a stinging sensation whenever I put pressure on my body. For my life, I could not remember at that moment what Shannon had tattooed on my body the night before, and I couldn't see it without a mirror. 

The car came to a stop in front of 'The Church.' 

I handed the cab driver my last ten dollar bill and went through the mesh wire gate that opened up to a concrete pad and walkway in front of the one-story, vaulted brick building. There was an eerie silence as I entered the empty room. Even the couch was free of Doug. I entered mine and Bruce's bedroom. There was no sign of Bruce, but some evidence showed he had been home at some point, at least. Our bedsheets lay balled up in the corner, and new sheets, still creased from being folded into tight packaging, lay untucked on the mattress on the floor. I took off my coat and tossed it on the bed. I lifted the layers of clothing as I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the wall and inspected the skin that covered my ribcage. A 'Crimson Ghost' skull face made a scab of fresh blank ink. I needed a drink; my head was spinning. I grabbed the pile of dirty bed linens and immediately felt a cold and wet sensation against my fingers. Puke. Bruce had come home, passed out, threw up, and cleaned up. But where in the hell was he now?

Figuring out where my boyfriend was after escaping into the cold night was a high priority but not on the top of the list. At the top of my list was the trip to the corner store where I needed to make a post haste. I bought a twenty-four-ounce can of high-gravity malt liquor. The kind in the neon-hued, camo-printed can that's fourteen percent alcohol by volume. It was the type of drink that had made headlines recently for putting unwittingly naive but inquisitive college kids into their graves too soon. One can of this stuff could put a two-hundred-pound man on his knees, and I was drinking two or three cans of it for breakfast.

As I took the first sip, slowly melting into that feeling of ease and comfort, my phone sounded, alerting me that I had received a text message. I stopped in place on the sidewalk and took another huge swig from the can, eagerly swallowing down about three-quarters of its contents at once. Ah, that's better. I could now pull my phone from my purse and hold it without dropping it from my shaking hands. It was Bruce. It was just a picture with no text. I downloaded the image to my Blackberry smartphone and nearly dropped my booze when the file opened. A photo of Bruce, taken by whom I didn't know. He had a big smile and was looking down at the tiny, black and white creature in his hands, a Boston Terrier puppy. Just then, the phone rang, and a rushed voice slurring every word was on the other end. It was Bruce.

"My Ma, baby, my Ma, she saved Christmas! I got your dog, baby!! He's a cute little fucker, the cutest one!!" 

I could hear the excitement in his voice. I could listen to the liquor in his voice, too, but that was before it had become a sound that made me furious. I still thought it made him sound wild, fun and relaxed back then. 

"Where are you?" I spoke softly before quickly thanking him for such an unbelievable gesture. 

"In Scranton, love." He slurred. "I had to, baby, as soon as you said that you wanted this dog." 

I never said I wanted the dog; Lauren did.

"I called my Ma from outside the bar when I went to smoke a cig." 

I had never seen Bruce smoke a cigarette. 

"She said she knew a guy, but it had to happen right then, baby!" 

Or four hours later, which is how long it takes to get to Eastern Pennsylvania from New York City on the bus. And he left the bar around midnight. 

"We met the guy at six this morning. He had the dogs in the back of his truck in a box, baby, and I got a helluva deal too!! Ma shit-talked the guy and he went down to three hundred!" 

My boyfriend of less than a month had just spent all of his rent money on a living animal that I was now responsible for, and I could barely take care of myself. 

Fuck me!

Omitted. Other.

It was the third of December. It was cold outside and only getting more frigid as an impending snowstorm brewed along the North Eastern Atlantic seaboard. Bruce and I spent the day warming up in pizza joints near Tompkins Square Park or dumpling houses in Chinatown until an employee would ask us to leave; then we wandered around a park in Little Italy for a while, sipping from a brown bagged pint of cheap whiskey. I remember feeling so much frustration because there were places I could've spent the night in an actual bed and stopped in for a hot shower, but not if I was with Bruce. Our reputation had outstriped us. However, love marked our skin in bruises, cuts, and lacerations that we either gave to each other intentionally or on accident while intoxicated. But I didn't care one bit.

I would have frozen to death if that meant that Bruce and I were together until the end. That night, we ended up at the Broadway subway station in Soho because the temperature was a few degrees warmer there. I hadn't eaten at all that day because my throat couldn't perform the simple task of swallowing food, only liquor. My body was so dehydrated, and my blood so saturated in alcohol that I couldn't physically nourish my digestive system. I was feeling weak, so Bruce suggested we board a mostly unoccupied train car as soon as the F arrived. We could ride to Coney Island and back so that I could lie down and relax. I was sweating profusely even though my body was cold to the touch.

Bruce stood up first and reached out his hand to help me up. We could hear the sound of a train leaving Second Avenue and heading our way, so we walked toward the platform edge. Bruce was unsteady on his feet, so he leaned against the steel beams supporting the ceiling above the platform. I leaned in towards him, placing my head on his shoulder and closing my eyes. The fog seemed to take me over rapidly, outrunning the locomotive. I opened my eyes quickly in an attempt to snap out of it. I saw the reflection of headlights dancing along the cement walls of the tunnel; then everything went black. When I came to, I was lying on the cold concrete floor of the train platform with a crowd of unfamiliar faces hovering above me. Bruce and a few other commuters explained to me that I collapsed. I remember a man's deep voice speaking to me.

"Your friend here saved your life. You were facing the man at first, but when I glanced at you again, he caught you as you fell away. You were falling onto the tracks, ma'am. This man you're with tonight, he just saved your life."

We exited the station as soon as I could steadily walk. I needed fresh air. 

"You need rest." Bruce said almost frightenedly as he grabbed each side of my face with his hands and stared into my eyes. 

His cheeks were wet with tears. 

"I have an idea." 

Bruce grabbed my hand and led me southward on Lafayette. 

"We're gonna hit this liquor store at the corner before they close because we both need a drink after what happened." I let go of his hand and stopped walking. 

"What?!" He yelled. "Wait, are you okay?" He rushed over to me. 

"Your idea is to get more liquor?" I asked, trying to hold back my tears. 

The truth was, I wanted the booze, too. With every fiber of my being, I believed I needed it. I gagged as soon as the liquid came in contact with my dry mouth. Then, the feeling of ease and comfort set in, and Bruce and I hatched a plan of action that only two people as insane as we could have devised.

The plan was seedy and dishonest, but it was all we could surmise in our desperate condition. Marmalade, the vintage shop where I worked that season, had once been a Chinese eatery, so the boutique's layout offered a larger-than-usual changing room where the restaurant's tiny kitchen once was. Behind the mirrored walls that made up the fitting room was a black leather loveseat. The worn-out piece of thrift store furniture was to be our sleeping bed. Electronic metal gates were lowered at night to secure the store windows, which offered substantial privacy for us to plop down on the two desk chairs by the cash register, where we'd stream movies before retreating to the dressing room to cover ourselves in coats and shawls we borrowed from the clothing racks. The used outerwear provided warmth and comfort, but I never got any decent sleep because of the overwhelming fear of getting caught.

Bruce was waiting tables at a winery in the West Village where no one knew him. Every day, as he dressed for his lunch shift, I opened the store as if I'd just arrived. I'd relocate our bedding back to the racks by raising the electronic gates, cleaning up our mess of empty cans and bottles, and carrying out containers. I hope we don't sell out of wooly coats soon. We lived this way for twenty-eight days. Whether it was grace, luck, or just plain negligence on my boss' part, we never got caught.

Somehow, we scraped together some money, and I answered an ad for a single roommate in Bushwick. I asked the woman who had placed the ad, almost double the amount she was asking for rent, to take in a couple. She was a native New Yorker, a Korean girl from Queens, who worked at a nightclub in Chelsea. I could tell by the home furnishings I observed when we met her at her place that she spent more money than she made. I could tell right away that she was intrigued by my offer, even though friends and colleagues had warned her about the drama of sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a couple in their twenties.

Bruce and I could have won Academy Awards for our performance on the day we signed our names to Heidi's one-year lease agreement, finally securing a natural home again. We remained on our best behavior, spending most of our free time behind the closed door of our spacious bedroom, which came with a cable-equipped T.V., and a queen-sized mattress that the previous tenant had left on the floor. We only left the privacy of our bedroom to venture downstairs to the ground-floor bodega to buy copious cans of high-gravity malt liquor. 

Eventually, roommate Heidi had the pleasure of learning who Bruce and I were underneath the masks of normalcy we'd been wearing in her presence. I quit Marmalade over a scheduling conflict brought to my attention over a phone call from Hannah on my day off. If she hadn't rang me while I was ten margaritas deep, mid-pool game at the Johnsons', I might have been able to reason with her. But, such wasn't the case. Two days after I quit, Bruce was fired from the wine bar one morning before lunch service when the manager spotted him chugging bottles of Beaujolais from the wine station. I was angry at Bruce, at myself, and even at Heidi. I lost my keys on my way home, and when neither of them was at home to let me inside to pass out, I climbed up the fire escape and kicked out the glass panes of one of the two windows in our rented bedroom, but I couldn't tell our roommate that, so I filed a police report on a fictional burglary.

Three weeks later, I was impatiently awaiting a call back for a potential job and answered a phone call from an unknown number. I was surprised to hear the voice on the other end; it was a voice that I knew so well. My mother was released from jail. She wanted me to know that she and her husband had just arrived in Tennessee, where they would live and work on the fifty-acre farm my stepdad’s parents owned. She spoke of second chances and renewing her relationship with God. She mentioned the idea of us seeing each other sometime soon but that she understood entirely if I wasn’t ready to take that step. 

She chuckled as if to lighten the mood. 

“I feel like I just need to hug you," she whispered. 

But, I felt that she just needed the chance to show me what she looked like sober from crack cocaine, hoping that version of her would be the image in my mind when I thought of her after all the last time I’d seen her; she was skin and bones. I told her I would keep in touch and wished her the best with her fresh start. I didn’t contact her again for a little over a month. I had heard from Gigi that my brother wasn’t speaking to her either. And Gigi, her sister, of course, had completely cut her off.

The tension between Bruce, me, and our roommate Heidi was nearing the boiling point. She complained about our drinking, and so I threatened to turn her little sister in for cultivating psychedelic mushrooms in the kitchen of the apartment. We argued to no end. Heidi and her sister would hide in her bedroom while Bruce and I thrashed around the living space, grabbing mushrooms by the handfuls, stuffing the fungi in our mouths, and washing it all down with Colt 45. We were beyond our control, but we couldn’t admit that we had done it to ourselves. The world was treating us unfairly yet again, and since we weren’t yet able to see where our drinking was causing all this pain, we drank even more heavily in an attempt to trump our misery. 

There wasn’t a single day in 2012 that I was the least bit sober from alcohol. Not one day.

An old co-worker of Bruce’s, aware of his devil-may-care lifestyle, took a chance on him and hired him as a server at a posh and hip pizza restaurant newly established on Mott Street. Second chances seemed to be in the water because a ghost from my past appeared just a day or two later with a job offer for me. Chuck had moved The Cast from the basement below Motor City Bar, further south on Orchard Street, and had transformed his t-shirt business into a bonafide fashion label with a growing and cultish fan base. He and his partner, Elisa, designed and sold leather pants and jackets with thousand-dollar price tags. They needed a sales girl who looked like the part of a ratty rock and roller but also had a business mind about her that was adequate to run the shop. At the same time, the pair welcomed a new baby girl into their family and subsequently traveled to Elisa’s hometown in California for weeks at a time. I took the job without hesitation. The first day I worked, I was unsupervised and in charge of the entire operation. In my twisted mind, stopping at the liquor store for a breakfast bottle of cheap whiskey was in order.


Fired a few short weeks later, I left that gig defeated, yet my inner monologue was still ranting and raving—their loss, not mine. I’ll show them. I can have another job by tomorrow. And I did. I went to another interview drunk. I handed the lady my falsified credentials, hoping she wouldn’t call my bluff, and she hired me the same day. 

“Welcome to the team! Here are your keys. We have a mini fridge in the back, and we encourage you to serve champagne to the customers.” 

I rarely offered a drink from that refrigerator to anyone other than myself. However, I did vow to keep my alcohol consumption limited only to what was on hand for the clientele and not to visit the liquor store while I was on the clock. I made good on that promise for a few weeks, then in December, almost two months before our lease in Bushwick was up, Heidi told us we had to move out.

We went straight to the bar and ordered a double shot of oblivion. Somewhere in the chaos, I ran into an old friend. Seth, a regular of the bars Bruce and I frequented daily. He knew we were bad news, but he needed someone to fill the empty room in his apartment. He took a shot in the dark and offered us the room for thirteen hundred dollars per month, which I would later discover was the rent amount for the entire place, a two-bedroom condominium on the fifth floor of a highrise in Chinatown. The man who spent very little time at home would live with the couple from hell but would do so rent-free. A week before Christmas, we collected every resource we could muster. We made the only rent payment we would ever send to the owner of the condominium, an Asian businessman, whom we ever laid eyes on.

The living situation was so unrealistic that I lived every moment in fear, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Bruce and I were consuming alcohol every morning upon awakening and barely skating by as gainful employees. I lowered the metal gates that secured the glass storefront of the boutique on Houston Street, where I was working full time. I had just finished off a bottle of mezcal that was intended to be a gift from my boss to her mother. I marched directly to the pizzeria where Bruce was tending bar, pushing past the sea of tourists gathered around the front entrance to the place awaiting dinner reservations. I spotted Bruce leaning over the bar and whispering to a young, attractive female. The hostess stepped from behind her wooden podium to stop me from attacking the bar patron, who was flirtatiously clamoring over my boyfriend as he shook a martini shaker. Still, her efforts were hushed by the crashing sound throughout the candlelit dining room as I grabbed the wooden perch with both hands and smashed it to the ground before making my dramatic exit.

I walked as fast as I could toward Rivington Street and cut the line formed outside the door to Saint J's. I forced my way inside the crowded bar and ordered a pint glass full of Jameson Irish whiskey that I took down in one gulp. I decided I would join the two girls who were hired to go-go dance on the bar top and began to climb the barstool nearest to me clumsily. I struggled to hoist my body up and onto the bar but lost my balance just before my face made abrupt contact with the hard surface. The black abyss behind my eyelids was all I could see, and blood was all I could taste. I moved my tongue across what remained of my left front tooth and grabbed ahold of the arm belonging to the stranger helping me up from my position on the cold tile floor. I regained my footing and firmly tugged at my thigh-high stockings, repositioning the socks. I grabbed a cocktail napkin from a stack on the bar and wiped the gore from my lips as I rolled my eyes at the bartender, who was now staring at me in shock. 

“Shows over, asshole. Pour me another one already for fucks sake.”

"Let me get that for you." 

The small-framed Asian fellow spoke softly and quietly as he hurried from behind his desk to help me with the glass doors of the luxury apartment building.

I was stumbling slightly, hiding my glassy eyes behind a pair of large, black, oval sunglasses. The early morning sun was bright, and spring was in the air. The bell on the door of the liquor store sounded alarming as I made my way inside the musty room, where my source of ease and comfort sat shelved and ready for me.

I poured the contents of my wallet directly onto the counter, where an old Persian cat sat perched—studying me cautiously, just as the store owner did.

"I need three pints of Georgi," I spoke with a crackle, my voice hoarse and weathered. 

"This should cover it," I assured the store clerk, sliding crumpled bills and coins toward the frightened woman as she zeroed in on my quivering hands.

The shopkeeper didn't say a word, but placed the three plastic bottles of gut rot vodka into separate paper bags before motioning for me to exit her place of business. Before leaving, I quickly unscrewed the cap of one bagged pint. My hands shook so aggressively that the liquid contents of the bottle streamed down along my fingers and then onto my chin as I struggled to place the bottle between my lips.

I threw my head back and chugged hard until there wasn't a drop left in the bottle. I threw the remnants into a trash receptacle just inside the door and made my sloppy exit onto East Broadway.

When I returned to the apartment, I found Bruce dragging our suitcases into the living room. We hadn't made the rent again after paying for the first month, and it would be soon that a notice of eviction caught up with us and our absentee roommate. The guy we lived with was under the impression that we'd been paying the rent to the Chinese businessman who illegally leased the place to him.

"So, we're really doing this?!" I cried out as I opened what Bruce thought was my first drink of the day.

Bruce nodded, clinking his bottle to mine. Soon, we'd have to clean up our act. Three hours later, we were scheduled to leave town in a rideshare with a man we'd never seen before. There was no one left to say goodbye to. There were no jobs to put in a notice at. We had no money other than three hundred dollars in cash, and we were to pay that sum to the stranger facilitating the southbound trek we'd found on Craigslist. The trip would land us in Virginia, where my mother and stepfather would be waiting somewhere off the highway to take us in.

I rode in the backseat and aggressively rubbed the tip of my tongue against the rough edge of my broken front tooth until the tip was raw. I took another swig from my plastic bottle. By this point, I had given up on trying to conceal my open container from the Ivy League scholar of a young mixed-race man sitting in the driver's seat. Bruce was riding up front, talking the guy's ear off about anything that seemed to come to mind. Every few minutes, I would hear the name of a New York sports team come out of my boyfriend's mouth. This meant his dialect would become exceedingly loud. Every once in a while, the nervous eyes of the regretful driver would meet my glassy peepers in the rearview mirror, and I would pierce him with the anger that was oozing out of my every pore during the entire twelve-hour drive.

It was nearing daylight when I spotted my mom inside a silver SUV. I tossed my empty bottle below the driver's seat and stumbled from the back seat of the rental car.

"Give me a cigarette!" I asserted, wrapping my arms around my mother's tiny frame.

She studied me nervously, as usual.

Bruce emerged from the convenience store, holding a paper sack like a newborn. I could make out the shape of two twenty-four-ounce cans.

"No," Mom spoke sternly.

"I just left my life in New York to be with you, okay!" I slurred in a shout. "I'm drinking a fucking beer on this drive to Tennessee!"

She could only shake her head in disappointment, but I was beyond human aid. Bruce and I watched the sun rise over the Great Smoky Mountain range as we rode in the backseat, feeding our already inebriated minds and bodies with more malt liquor.

As we got closer to the rural town of Dandridge, a new day had officially begun. The stark reality of it all hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn't just catch a ride back to the City. Our life as we knew it was gone. Deliriously, I embraced my boyfriend's forearm. I gazed out of the back window at the beautiful landscape. Electric green pastures of fresh dew-covered grass seemed to go on forever into the horizon. Sublime wildflowers seemed to jump upward from beneath the sea of crisp blades. Plump and stocky cattle stood assuredly in the fields of tender meadow, slowly and constantly chewing cud.

Suddenly, I belted out, "We're in God's country, baby," as loudly as I could. 

I repeated the phrase several times before realizing how wasted I probably sounded.

I'd talked Mom into letting us come up with a story of wanting to change our lives. She was living sober in the basement of her in-law's house on a secluded farm. I'd assured her it wouldn't end like the last hiatus I'd spent under the same roof as her, not for either of us. The scenery was different—that was for sure—but this time, my aider and abettor sat by my side, which meant everything would be okay. As long as Bruce was along for the ride, I told myself this inevitable phase of my life would play out smoothly and comfortably. 

It did. For a short while, it did.

Our pitstop at the farm, owned by mom's in-laws, lasted just short of six weeks. We spent that time fishing for stocked bass all day from a pond on the property so that we could drink beer unnoticed. We bid the farm in Tennessee farewell and hit the road again. This time, my father was at the helm of my and my co-conspirator's home together. We were eager to get to where we were going. We were ready to be alone again with no one to answer to. We were prepared to find the nearest liquor store because we had been in a dry county for over a month. 

We were like two untamed animals, chomping at the bits.

After coming across a reasonably priced studio apartment for rent on North Main Street in downtown Greenville, just fifteen miles from where my dad lived at the time, I called on him for help. With the help of an upper-middle-class demeanor, Bruce and I were able to win over the young couple during the fifteen-minute-long meeting that the five of us attended in their living room, thus ending their search for new tenants. The money used for the security deposit and the first month's rent was paid in cash by my father, with whom I verbally agreed to pay back the money just as soon as Bruce and I acquired a steady income. The way my dad looked into my eyes when we shook hands to seal such a deal reminded me of when I was just a child, and he first told me what a loan was. 

"Don't ever loan anyone anything you can't afford to lose."

This was just the outset of the substantial monetary debt I would be in with my father over the next ten months I resided in that garage apartment, with and without Bruce.

I was hired immediately following my first job interview at a clothing boutique. After a few weeks of interviews, Bruce gained employment at one of the area's highest-priced and most acclaimed eateries—a brasserie nestled within a downtown park. Our gigs paid well and were close enough to our apartment that we could walk to work. Walking a mile meant nothing to two street kids from New York, but eventually, my dad surprised us with a used car, so I learned how to drive again. We took it easy on the booze for a few days here and there and then for a record three weeks straight. 

Three weeks felt like an eternity, and on the twenty-first day, we celebrated feverishly; no looking back, Bruce and I found ourselves dismissed on insubordination from the jobs we barely held onto. Just like that, we were desperate and seeking refuge again. I accepted another loan from my father, but this time, taking his money didn't feel as it had felt all the time before. I can recall the feeling of defeat and sheer disappointment in myself and who I had become.

I was closing in on thirty years old, and here I was, borrowing money from a parent. I was recklessly driving around in a beat-up, old car valued at no more than a grand, and I couldn't even register the title in my name. I was playing house with another alcoholic in a rented room above a garage in the backyard of a beautiful residence that was owned by a couple even younger in age than Bruce and I. We only owned a used mattress with no box spring or bed frame; nothing else filled the hotel room-sized living space. This wasn't how I envisioned closing out the decade of my twenties. I had thrown away far too many golden opportunities to list, and the only comfort that I could find to ease the pain of my dastardly existence was every ounce of liquor that I could get my hands on.

Bruce and I spent less time with one another as the weeks and months passed. Somehow, our incomprehensible and co-dependent need to be physically close to each other at all times seemed to have faded. Yet, there we lived, night after night, holed up in our barren little love nest together—drinking, dancing, fighting and fucking—just like in the beginning. 

Part of me was craving isolation, while another part of me longed to be a part of the normal functioning society that I could see all around me but couldn't seem to grasp hold of.

Bruce worked every night at a brewery and almost always stayed past the last call. I was pulling double shifts as a waitress at The Bohemian Cafe, a hip eatery adjacent to a record shop. I stayed drunk from the lunch shift through dinner and into the cocktail hour when the restaurant transitioned into a live music outpost for acoustic performances.

It only took a few days of me functioning alcoholically as a food server there before I was in the kitchen after dinner service, taking shots of Irish Whiskey with the young and charming Executive Chef. I had fallen out of love with my person, my Bruce. It was time, I decided, to throw in the towel.

That Christmas Eve, I asked Bruce to leave. He flew to Pennsylvania on Christmas Day.