CHAPTER 38- YOUNG AND PRETTY NEW YORK CITY GIRL

Another Mainer in a Chevy picked me up. My bag contained the same velvet maroon dress, because you never know when you might meet someone who wants to treat you to an elegant dinner next to a glowing fireplace with a bulbous glass of red wine. I had seen it in a magazine. I wanted to live it. 

He dropped me off at a cheap hotel in Portland, Maine, where I took some of the 100 dollars I had and bought black hair dye and applied it.  I wanted to look Hispanic or African American. 

The following day, a trucker driving to New Jersey let me and my pretentious hair off near a loading dock on the West side of New York City. I jumped down from the truck and walked to Times Square, drawn to the epicenter, wanting to be in the bowels of it. Wanting the distraction of it. 

And Times Square was a sluggish bowel churning to the tune of Curtis Mayfield's Superfly. The lyric 'trying to get over' played on a falsetto loop in my head. I walked as fast as possible, carving ululations through wafts of bad smells, bodies congealed on the sidewalks like fecal matter -society's detritus: hardened nuggets endeavoring to suck vitality out of the place --dehydrated lumps of pimp, whore, junkie, pickpocket, and three-card Monty dealer. Society's shit, to make a fine point.