Nicky, a likeness
We’d received a notice, slipped under each door, that the premises were about to close down, that everyone had to vacate soon and find a new place. We figured we had about a week.
I decided to take on one last adventure, as I knew I’d never be in such a dive again.
The ‘bad company’ I mentioned earlier was a prostitute named ‘Nicky’, who, when she was kicked out of Scott’s room down the hall came knocking on my door and I let her in, for four days.
She was only twenty but she was already far gone. Her skin was yellowish and pasty. She would have been a nice-looking girl if it weren’t for her lifestyle. She was medium height and average build, (which is strange, as most needle users who totally neglect their diet are skinny), with light brown hair and large eyes. I’m sure she was disease-ridden and I never for a second contemplated sleeping with her.
But as a would-be writer I wanted to observe her life and hear her story, so I let her stay with me and drove her around for ten days to various, sordid ‘tricks’ under the guise of helping her. She did supply the scenes and stories, all of them set in squalor, portraying her self-destruction. She could never explain why she did it, though I tried in roundabout ways to get to that mystery. But she did reveal a few sparkles of wit and humor, a few curious sentences, small glimpses into the workings of her mind. It was too depressing a tragedy to spend much time in, so I quit her and the warehouse with the same wave ‘goodbye’.
Our acquaintance began on Sept.16th. For the last twenty days I’d been filling my notebooks with daily descriptions of my life and thoughts, detailed, almost hour by hour accounts. I was ramping up my desire to become a writer of novels (after so many notes to myself to do this). Now I was treating my life as a colorful story and she came to me just at the right time to ‘fit her in’. Two months earlier or a month later I would have closed the door on her without hesitation as pure trouble. But I’d been hanging out in Scott’s room several times in the past few weeks as he was a musician who one day promised to teach me a few things, showing me sheet music and pages of chord progressions and how they worked, for over an hour. That’s where I first met Nicky several times. She’d come into his room and he’d ‘shoo’ me out, in his rather abrupt way. He was tall and muscular and from his rude manners almost asking for a physical fight, in other words ‘threatening’. But at other times he was calm and friendly. He didn’t have any real friends at the warehouse and maybe he was looking for one in me. I didn’t know it at the time but he was one of Nicky’s gold card customers, there to give him an almost daily twenty-dollar blow job, as she later told me.
“Mond. 12.05 a.m.: Hanging out with Nicky in my room, listening to a song ‘Nowadays Clancy can’t even sing’, a song very apropos to the situation, having finished one bottle of ‘Lambrusco’ and starting on a second, soliciting stories from Nicky. Two hours earlier I took her, at her request, on a ‘job’, dropping her off on a very dark street, waiting in my car ten minutes and she returns, with a quarter gram of coke. Driving back, here is exactly what she said: “I’ve spent 50 dollars and 40 and 20 and 30 and 20 and 20 today on coke. What does that make? 275? No wonder I have a headache”. She had complained of a headache a few moments earlier, wanting aspirins. She took a yellow Valium from her purse and ate it, to calm herself down. At 10 p.m. we get back to my room. Mark (a young kid who lived down the hall) is in my room making a twenty-minute call to New Jersey to his parents. She stands right next to him and shoots up.
“He, as usual, doesn’t notice a thing. He goes with me to get the wine. We start drinking and she mentions she’s hungry. She gets up and heads down the stairs, me right behind. I suggest ‘Ely’s’, a cheap but respectable Italian restaurant. She says she doesn’t ‘fit’ there, (and she’s right). In my car I suggest ‘the Starry Plough’. She say’s ‘no’, and in her ‘reclusive’? (I probably meant ‘elusive’) way suggests we buy a bottle at a liquor store and return to my room — which we do, but only after her scoring another quarter gram of coke, while I wait in the car outside a nearby gambling club. Back at the warehouse we go to Scott’s room. He’s momentarily gone. She shoots up, I sitting right beside her holding her arm up in my hand. She turns on the radio to a mellow, half-romantic, half Afro beats station, 105. She does a few dance gestures, then lays on a double chair like it was a bed in her black miniskirt, taking off her shoes, with her head on her arm against the chair. She complains of the headache. I pet her head a while. She wants an aspirin. I go get her three but she wants unbuffered. She takes three of Scott’s but thinks they are wrong. Still head-achy, she wanders about the room, me too, drinking Lambrusco. A phone call for her, she goes out to score, money and ‘C’. She’s gone twenty minutes while I buy the second bottle of Lambrusco. She returns to my room. I dim the lights and play a Neil Young record. She leaves again, gone twenty minutes. It’s 1 a.m.
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