Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,23

borrow his cell phone.

I nervously called Damon.

“Hey! I’m outside your apartment.”

I anxiously waited in the backseat and looked around the busy street. Was that guy Damon? Nope. Was . . . that guy? It suddenly hit me . . . I didn’t remember what the fuck he looked like. He was definitely white. He had black hair. Or wait, was he blond and it was just dark outside? And . . . two eyes, for sure.

A twentysomething-year-old guy with disheveled hair and a beautiful face ran up to the cab, in shock. It was as if HE couldn’t believe I’d actually come. And he was wearing . . . bright red lipstick. Umm . . . lipstick? Now I was the one who was shocked.

“Laura!” he said.

He kissed my cheek, getting lipstick all over it. What had I gotten myself into?

We walked up four flights of seemingly never-ending stairs, and he opened the door to the smallest studio apartment I had ever seen. It was smaller than an elementary school bathroom. No furniture. Just a gross twin-size mattress on the floor.

The studio was decorated with wine bottles, ashtrays, and one green light. Which looks VERY MENACING, I MIGHT ADD.

I tried to diffuse my nervousness with a joke. “You okay? You’re looking a little . . . GREEN HA-HA!”

“What? No, I’m fine,” Damon said with concern.

“I’m talking about the light.”

“Oh, no. I’m not sick. It’s just the light.”

Right. This was going to be rough.

He picked up one of the wine bottles. “Want a drink?”

Oh thank God. Don’t mind if I do!

Soon enough, my drunk, na?ve, Midwestern ass thought the green light was very, very cool; the apartment was cozy rather than suffocating; and the Frank Sinatra playing on a cassette player was intentionally hip rather than a random thing that Damon found on the street. This place was awesome!

I asked the man for whom I moved to New York why he was wearing lipstick. Maybe he was gay? Maybe the fact that I had no choice but to sleep on the same tiny mattress with a guy I’d met only twice wouldn’t be a big deal, because he likes men! Maybe I had nothing to worry about!

He told me he had just come from an abandoned church-turned-nightclub lipstick-launch party. Apparently, Amanda Lepore, a famous transgender model, was launching her new lip line and insisted he try a shade.

Oh, and remember when he said he was a photographer? I now learned that he meant he was a . . . drug sharer . . . who accepted money in exchange for his good will. And he also took pictures occasionally. You might be thinking, “That’s another red flag, for sure!” But that only made me like him more because, free drugs! I was getting drunk regularly, smoking weed daily, and dabbling in cocaine; so as an addict, I was attracted to other addicts. Like Damon! He didn’t judge me, criticize me, or tell me, “Hey maybe you shouldn’t be smoking weed for breakfast.” Or, “Do you really need that sixth glass of wine? Your teeth are disturbingly purple.” Damon understood my purple teeth.

He also understood my need to numb out any uncomfortable feelings that might have caused slight pain. God forbid I would feel human emotions, right? I didn’t actually have the courage to sit through uncomfortable feelings without getting high until I was twenty-four. That’s normal, right? And to stay on this track, I made sure to only hang around with other unformed, self-sabotaging delinquents so that there was absolutely no one around that would encourage me to be a fully functioning, productive adult. He was the first on that list, the first full-blown addict that I had gotten close to. And we were sure to enable each other.

Our awkward conversations and public drunkenness soon became love. It didn’t really matter if we had much else in common. Bonding over our absolute inability to drink alcohol in moderate proportions was good enough for me.

Within three days of being in New York, Damon was telling me he loved me and I was saying it back. It was love at . . . uh . . . tenth drink.

There was truly never a dull moment during my two-month stay in the Big Apple. Damon would take me to these crazy underground clubs and we’d run around the streets of New York and take pictures and get drunk. And then there were darker moments where I would sit in his green-light apartment while he’d