wine and cheap perfume

Last night Annie and I were at Melissa's, watching her dog and the tv when at one in the morning the buzzer rang. Someone named Samantha said she was a friend of M's, and that she wanted to drop her laundry bag off. So I buzzed her in and who busts through the door but a St. Marks junkie who Annie sees everyday on her way to work with track marks all over her legs. Her shirt was completely torn open in the front so that her tits were just dangling out, and she flung her "bag of laundry" on the floor and started digging through it and smelling the crotch of each pair of underwear to determine which were clean. She was clearly strung out and I was thinking, weird how you think you know someone so well and then they do something that completely catches you off guard. Melissa is one of my best friends, and I had no idea that she occasionally hangs out with homeless drug addicts. I started thinking, am I being a judgemental asshole, or is this just weird? The girl starting plowing through Melissa's drawers looking for her "bracelet," and I had no idea what to do. She turned to me before she left (after an obvious trip to the bathroom) and said, "How do I look?" I looked at her scabbed legs, torn shirt, dirty hands, stained clothes, and bare tits and thought, how the hell do I answer this? I finally decided on: "Good, but you might want to cover up a little because you'll probably get bothered by guys on the street."
She said, "I don't care about that," and left. I felt like an asshole, because I realized that she's probably a prostitute who wants to get bothered by guys on the street, and suddenly everything felt so fucked up. One second I'm getting all worked up about job decisions (do I save an endangered lesbian bar from extinction, or do I continue whoring myself at a straight bar while picking up weird writing jobs along the way?), and the next I'm faced with a person who has no semblence of pride, inhibitions, or hygiene. Nothing makes sense to me. This entry is very "My So-Called Life." I'm just shaken up a bit.

I just had brunch at Kate's with Jake and some of his weird quasi-famous friends. I walked in and looked at the people he was with and whispered, totally kidding, "since when do you hang out with the guys from Good Charlotte?" Every last one of them had 2002 hipster mullets and eyeliner smudged all over their faces. Jake was like, "yeah, actually, one of them is the brother of the guys in Good Charlotte." I ended up sitting next to that very guy. The first thing he did after we sat down was to inform me that he grew up "poor and fat."
Everyone started talking about tattoos, and he asked me why I don't have any. I said, "I don't know, I wouldn't want to have to talk about their significance all the time," and he goes, "Yeah, I mean, when people ask me about my tattoos and I tell them what they mean, they're all, 'wow, that's deep, you're a deep guy,' and I'm always like, 'yeah, I guess I am kinda deep, but whatever.'"
This was a guy who is totally sweet, granted, but who runs his own successful clothing line ("made"?? never heard of it) and has many people working beneath him. He's the CEO of a major company (compliments of his family) and I serve pints of Michelob Ultra for a living. After thirty seconds of conversation with the dude, I cursed my sister for not being his brothers' female counterpart (Avril Lavigne?) who could hook me up with a similar spot. Employment in creative industries is not democratic. They're not meritocracies. It's all about nepotism, and it sucks balls. Until the day my dad becomes Sugar Ray or my aunt magically morphs into Star Jones, I will never make a living doing anything in the arts. Awesome.
On a brighter note, last night the guys from the band Berlin came in, and it was excellent. They were all done up in mid-eighties show gear, sans irony, with chipped nail polish and Twisted Sister hair, and I said to them, "Let me guess, guys. You just played a show." They looked at me with weary eyes and one of them said, "Yeah. On LONG ISLAND. And no one showed up." Then another one says, "I bet you don't know who we are." I was all, "You're right, I have no idea who you are," and he said, "Ever heard of the band Berlin?" It did sound vaguely familiar but I couldn't remember why or think of any of their songs, and I told them that. They all exchanged nauseated glances and the first one mutters, "Ever heard that song, "Take My Breath Away?'" I was like, "OH MY GOD! Yeah! I LOVE that song! What did you think of the Jessica Simpson cover?!" I've never gotten so many death glares at one time. But then I gave them a free round of beer and they started being nice. I tried to get them to perform in the bar, but they wanted to do new stuff and I kept insisting, "No! Do "Take My Breath Away!" They ended up not doing anything and instead going to eat pizza. The story of my life.

Annie naired my bikini line on Wednesday night and I howled like a teenage wolf. It hurt so bad it was just weird, and afterwards there was this weird glue residue all over my crotch that made it difficult for me to walk. Then, she let me slather her in gobs of makeup. I even put this long blond weave thing into her hair and crammed her rack into a tiny black push-up bra. The icing on the cake was that she let me photograph it all. There's nothing quite like the sensation of watching your butch girlfriend slowly transform into a girl right before your very eyes. When it was all done she leaned forward to kiss me, and I swear I've never felt gayer in my entire life. I thought, I am kissing a perfectly coiffed female right now, I might as well be packing, with a large set of prosthetic balls nestled between my legs and an empty beer can in my hand. The funniest part about it was the way she kept posing for the pictures. She got really into it. She wrapped this Moroccan blanket around her shoulders and peered up at the camera with this perfectly trite blend of vulnerability and seductiveness. She did the pouty thing, the slightly drunk/retarded American Apparel thing, and the straightforward big-smile Cosmo thing.
Then I worked my first night at Girlsroom. There was this herd of moderately unattractive femme girls who got really drunk off of well gin and kept high-fiving and exclaiming: "Yea bi POSSE!!" throughout the night. I was thought, okay, you kind of don't go to a lesbian bar and start hollering about all of your quasi-hetero pride.
Yesterday morning I woke up to discover two portly construction workers leaning out the window of the building across from ours, staring and pointing at my naked body while laughing hysterically. It's like, thanks guys. You'd think that when most guys see a dangerously attractive blond sleeping buck naked next to her equally naked tattooed girlfriend, they'd have some other sort of reaction then utter and complete knee-slapping hysteria. Nope.
Last night at the bar, this gay named Paul told me that if he "batted for my team," he'd be all about me. I was like, "thanks." Whatever that means. He was like, "no, seriously." And I was all, I get it. I also get that you're not really gay, you're one of those weird straight guys who fronts like he's gay for God knows what reason. Like Jake, for example. Yesterday Monica bleached the living fuck out of my hair, and it looks pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately, no one has noticed besides me.

I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I will have to work anywhere from five to seven days a week from now until I'm old to support myself and my depressingly low-brow lifestyle. I spend all of my money eating in bad restaurants in and around the East Village, three to five times a day. I can't stop. It's compulsive. I'll wake up and have all the fixins' (I said "fixins") for a lovely at-home breakfast, yet before I know it, I'll find myself being served a plate of undercooked eggs by a heavily-tattooed gay at a local vegetarian restaurant with flies on the wall.
Last night a Spaniard named "German St. Clair" came into the bar and told me that I was "a magical girl" who "make(s) magic behind the bar." I was all, "in other words, I make drinks, which help you forget that you're a Spaniard named German St. Clair." When I asked him to play me a Journey song on the jukebox, he told me that my wishes were his "orders." I was like, thanks. That's really romantic. So he bounded over to the jukebox and instead played "New York, New York" six times in a row, and as he danced back to his bar stool (jazz hands and all) he shouts, "I can think of nothing more better than to sit-- with you-- in a New York restaurant, as this song is playing in the background!" I thought, "Wow." Like, wow.

Today's theme was France. An elderly French couple came into the bar and tried speaking to me in German. Then these three sorority girls came in and starting talking about how it they had to "party hard for Jessie's birthday!" and all of a sudden one of them shouts, "Shit!! I TOTALLY forgot to call Francois and wish him a Happy Bastille Day!" Which is funny on about eight different levels. For starters, as if Francois cares. Second, it's kind of the equivalent of screaming, "Goddamnit! I TOTALLY forgot to call Ira on Channukah!" "Motherfucker! I TOTALLY forgot to call Jamal during Black History Month!" "Fuck me! I TOTALLY forgot to call Jose on Cinco de Mayo!!" And so on and so forth. Calling Francois to wish him a Happy Basille Day is something that only happens within the pages of a French textbook, not in real life. Then I got off work and ate some french bread.
I went to dinner with my mom on Tuesday night at a totally lame seafood restaurant in midtown, and she tried to wrestle the url for my blog out of me. I was like, "Mom, it's not happening." She was like, "Is it because you talk about taking drugs in your blog? Is it because you talk about eating pussy? Cause it's no big deal!" At which point I wanted to run away and dry heave in the corner for an hour or more. Instead, I choked on a piece of crab and was all, "Mom, that's gross. Don't."

Today I went to the ear doctor and learned that I have the hearing capacity "of an eighty-year-old man." Not woman, but man. I haven't been hearing so well lately, and it's gotten to the point where I'm either screaming or whispering at all times because I can't hear how loud I'm speaking. Awesome, especially because the doctor also informed me that I would need to go on genital herpes medication--immediately. I was all, "Wait, are you trying to tell me that I have genital herpes in my ear?" He rolled his eyes as if it was the most obvious solution in the world and explained, "No, you don't have genital herpes in your ear. We just treat certain ear infections with the same medication used for genital herpes. And chicken pox."
Today was also my last day working with Ved before he leaves for the rest of the summer. He forced me to hug him before I left, which I hated. He knew it was finally his chance to gage whether or not I'm bone-worthy, so he clung to me like a baby ape and quickly ran his hands up and down my back as many times as he could. I thought, "There you go, Ved. Now you know. I have a perfect body."
Last night, Desi and I ate a ridiculous amount of Mexican food at Benny's and got drunk on bad margaritas. Then we sat on my roof and I got black tar all over the ass of my white pants, which somehow managed to sink through the pants and my underwear, onto my bare ass. I still have black tar all over my ass, and no idea how to get it off. It sucks, actually. I'm thinking nail polish remover. That might work.

Since the first of July, the following things have happened:

1. I learned that an Alabama Slammer (or 'Slamma,' to those who tend to embarrass themselves) is outrageously delicious.

2. I went to Jones Beach two days in a row and left with large quantities of sand in my hair, bag, and vagina. While there, Emlyn, Nicole and myself all compared nipples as a large herd of hairy Croatian men looked on approvingly. We discovered that they were all basically the same size (our nipples, not the Croatians).

3. I watched a stout blonde toddler named Lars announce to his mother that he was going to be a superstar! He then promptly broke his beach chair and got stuck in it. He had b-cup breasts and was a five-year old boy.

5. Also at the beach, Emlyn and I joyously joined a latin drumming circle, clapping our hands like grade-a dorks only to realize suddenly that people were all staring at us and chanting for us to get in the middle of the circle and start dancing for them. We ran away in horror.

6. I offered some chocolate to a fifty-year old elevator repairman at the bar, who refused it, claiming his "pores were already large enough" as it was.

7. I dragged a couch off the street and into my apartment. Actually, McGuiness did it. I paid him $80 to drag a large, stained, denim (yes, I said denim) couch off the street, and into my home.

9. I slept through almost all of the 4th, only to finally haul ass to Dave's BBQ, where I ate cold meat and drank warm domestic beer.

10. I watched the fireworks on my roof with Emlyn and Annie. We drank four-dollar Sangria that tasted like a combination of Kool-Aid and piss. Emlyn told us that she had been bitten by a monkey when she was in Bali. On that same trip, a different monkey stole a bag of nuts from her and ate them.

11. On our daily walk today, Ved told me that when he gets drunk, he "wants sex." He also told me that he thinks I'm "a good girl from a good family who likes flirting with the underworld."

And that's what's happened, more or less.

Yesterday a guy with a braided butt-length ponytail came into the bar. I wondered, "Why does he think that looks good?" After work I went to Girlsroom, where I met Emlyn and Tara. This little woman in a flesh-colored sportsbra came up to me and said, "Hey. What's up. I hit on you last year at Meow Mix and you rejected me." Like, hi. What the hell do you say to that? I was all, "Sorry?" She then went on to brag about how butch she was. I was like, in your universe, does being butch involve brown heels and eyeliner? I got really drunk, really fast, and before I knew it, I was loudly accusing Annie of wanting to have sex with the bartender. Then we went to Julep for a second, which I don't remember, and finally Tara, Annie and I went home and Tara and I sat on my roof and talked until the wee small. On the Ved front, I'm learning to appreciate our ridiculous exchanges more and more. As I was having lunch with him the other day after work, he said to me, "Katie, dear, if you were to have some sort of cosmetic surgery, what would it be?" I should have fucked with him and been all, "Well, for starters, I'd like to have a second set of balls mounted ABOVE my dick." He was digging again, in his charmingly passive little way. He wanted to hear me say, "Well, Ved, I'd like to have a breast reduction surgery, cause these things are fucking HUGE!!"