It began in a bar. A snarky-blast of a bar that matched my mood.
The best of things usually do start in bars. (More on this later.)
But so do the worst of things. (WAY more on this one, too.)
And so it began in a beastly bar, but was just another bad beginning of an eventual end - an unraveling of a stringy, sketchy, ill-fated relationship (based on late night Jagermeister shots chased by slatherings of warm Warsteiner beer) that got thwarted to a pinnacle of a plop on a late night in January, during an ice blizzard at a jazz club in Gotham City.
This so called “relationship” between me and Nestor had started at the seediest slatherbock of bars, an unimaginable cockroach-infested, crusty, blue smoky-insulting-the-air type of dive-ass bars that made you want to either continue to drink so heavily that you barely knew who you were or just leave immediately because what little brain cells you had left were telling you that you didn't want anyone stealing your car (although they would probably be doing you a favor by keeping you from driving it).
I knew that it is written somewhere sordidly in some important century (probably Cleopatra’s) that after your boyfriend leaves you, SHUT THE DOOR and stay on the other side of that door and don’t look back. I think there is an Addams’s Family cartoon that relates to this vexing scenario - so then be on the other side of the door with a shotgun hot-barrel acid-wired to the door waiting for the ex-boyfriend to walk through your door.
But now I was stuck on the other side of that door beating on it to my banged-up heart’s ill-content, barraging obstinately that it wasn’t over til some damn fatass lady sang (whither it be blissfully beautiful opera or greasy gripe-oid country, I cared not). In the midst of my vodka tonic haze, I was thinking that Nestor was in our apartment in Manhattan screwing his new girlfriend’s brains out. (And that it was just another temporary breakup, like the last three had been.)
You probably think that this time he'd left me at that jazz club, Birdland. Left me for his new girlfriend, the type of girl that you can’t help but notice in high school, the one who has the best boobage/body, silky hair/skin, height-weight proportionate merge (basically a good combo lookswise, et al), and so glamorous that you wonder why she deigned to even be in your high school. She’s not only the head cheerleader, but also the Valedictorian, and the one whose parents have all that money that paid for her brand new black BMW convertible and all those fashionista outfits, the one who plays guitar in a rock band, and who also gets the lead in the musical school play. The one who goes on to star in major motion pictures after a mammoth modeling contract as a supermodel and who continues to coast giddily through life on her good looks, grandiose brains, and glorified talent.
And her name was Chauncey. (A man’s name. She could pull it off, too. Kind of like a modern-day Lauren Bacall, who totally gets away with the nickname, "Slim.")
But no, you are wrong. Nestor did not leave me at that jazz club with Chauncey, whose hair just happened to be a silvery blonde that sparkled in the moonlight, and whose lips were as vivid red as the most beautiful Tuscan sun, and who could sing sweetly as a nightingale and had sung all night long to all the jazz songs and even gotten up on stage (snooty show-off!) to sing one of Frank’s old songs that Nestor liked so well. Nestor wanted to stay at the jazz club with his new girlfriend so he merely told me to leave the jazz club because he wasn’t going to be with me any longer as of that moment in time. Because he was now with Chauncey.
He stated it simply and pleasantly.
“Could you please leave, Jacy.” Nestor had said. As if I were a busboy and he had just asked me to clear his messy table because he was finally done with the used-up-and-stinky-unsightly dishes. Ever so politely rude. Such an asshole putting that word “please” in there. Typical of him, who wore the latest Italian pin-striped suits and cleverly matching posh ties and shiny shoes that smelled suspiciously too leathery, like his façade of “Intellectualism” and sharp like his heart, which wasn’t much of one, not really. He was someone who always wanted to do the right thing, the appropriate thing, but he did not really know what that was and he always did it in the wrong way. Frankly, his glossy, seedy-creepy style sucked, I knew this suddenly, knew what he really was and what he really was like. A shark. Infesting intrepid waters, feeding on girls’ souls, sucking them out so that he could feed his own. He had no use for me any longer. He’d sucked the life out of me.
“What?” I burbled, barely breathing. I felt lifeless and so drunk. As drunk as when I’d first met Nestor at that slimy bar in the midwest a year ago. Which was treacherously bad. I could barely stand, let alone walk. And hardly talk. My cosmopolitans and vodka something-or-others had slipped down to a silkiness and despair that was beyond the bartender’s control, for he had cut me off hours ago. I'm sure that I’d been drunky-drunk bad-reality-TV-show-rude all night to everyone, but I thought Nestor and Chauncey had it coming because they’d been flirting with each other openly all night long, in front of me and everyone. At least they hadn’t been total sneaky slimebags about it. They’d been honest. They did not hide their lusty affection for each other.
No. Wait, I was wrong. He hadn't been honest. So now, to me, not only was he a shark, he was such an utter creep! Why hadn’t I noticed before? Why hadn’t I been the one to leave him?
Nestor Orlan Teopold did not repeat what he’d said but merely pointed at the door sharply and then swirled snakily around, turning his large frame away from me. A vivid dismissal. And returning his full attention to the silvery-haired moon goddess, who was in full form, loving the night, giggling it up cattily and tossing her long mane behind her as if to say to me, there, see how you like the night now!
The walls collided in on my brain, that was totally lacking in brain cells that seemed to pop and snarl and fizzle away in this one very moment. And this moment seemed to last forever to me. Everything came crashing down into my world. I spinned around to leave but tripped over my heels and fell. I toppled into one of Nestor’s friends, just another snooty law school buddy named Horatio Ignacio-something-or-other, who probably couldn't wait to finally push me away indignantly. I bumped into the girl he was screwing, Geraldine Goffmeister (whom I thought had been my friend), who thought she was actually dating Horatio, but we all knew better and deep down she did too.
I asked Geraldine for assistance but Geraldine declined. So then I started asking random law school friends for help, whom I had thought were my friends, but apparently they all decided to take NOT’s side. (FOOTNOTE: since Nestor Orlan Teopold is NOT an important part of this story, we are hereafter going to refer to him with his initials, which are actually NOT. Very fitting for someone who is not cool, not nice, not ethical, and not real.)
It figured that this breakup would happen. For I'd actually gotten fired earlier that day. So now I was a foiled, spoiled, out-of-work accountant, fired again from a stupid meaningless clockwatcher-ish job at a chocolate factory because I got caught "stealing" chocolate (but there was a 20% EVERYBODY tolerance and my variance was 25%, which was just a teeny bit over the 20% level, so it was just a technicality).
I was just fired that day for GODSAKES so I'd already had a sucky-ass day and had just told NOT about it but he was too busy flirting with ChickenLegs (FOOTNOTE: In the midst of the swirl of the breakup and my stunning and stellar but majorly drunken stupor (there were at least two snarky-sparkly braincells paying attention!), I suddenly noticed something: that Chauncey’s legs were gangly and on the depression-era thin side, and since Chauncey is also not an important part of this story and matters as much as a giant’s left pinky in a random fantasy novel, which isn’t very much because sometimes they lose their pinkies after battle, we are hereafter going to refer to Chauncey as ChickenLegs. Very fitting for someone who is incredibly bitchy, absolutely too thin, feverishly gloating, and obnoxiously pissy. Very bad combo BTW.)
Earlier that day, NOT had shrugged off my job loss and said, Oh you’ll find another job, you always do. Don’t worry about it. You hated it anyway.
But this had naturally pissed me off. And so we had been arguing again. All day long the arguments ensued. And continued to crescendo, especially when NOT had informed me that an old girl friend from Kansas would be visiting us that evening.
It is true that we had not been happy lately. I'd been living in Manhattan in this blasphemously expensive apartment the past year with my boyfriend, NOT, because he’d transferred from TU to NYU law school and he’d told me when we’d moved that he'd been desperately in love with me. That had been a year ago and everything since then had changed drastically.
Anyway, I had no friends in NYC and all my “so-called” friends were all of his law school friends, which I now realized were not my friends. Nobody would help me leave the nightclub and get a taxi to go home. I knew I was too drunk to walk so I asked the bartender, who had previously cut me off, for help. Somehow, I wasn’t really sure how (there is a major blur and wide gap in time here), the bartender asked two blonde girls (was everyone a blonde these days?) to escort me out of the jazz club, outside in the blizzard and called a taxicab. I seemed to recall that one of the blonde girls gave me a business card with a taxicab phone number scribbled on it.
So now I continued to bang on that door, feeling like a midnight harpy in a bad midwinter sonnet written by Shakespeare’s illegitimate son, whose name was also probably Chauncey. Chauncey Shakespeare.
I fell into the apartment as the door suddenly opened wide. I was now face to face with the men in midnight blue. GAAAHHH! The police.
They were in our apartment, casing it, ransacking it as if something was amiss, awry, assaulted, and all our personal belongings were strewn madly on the floor. Suddenly, the greasiest looking policeman (who strangely enough looked like Ron Jeremy) grabbed me for a 45-minute question session about the whereabouts of said cocaine in the apartment.
WHAT THE HELL? First I heard of it!
“I have no idea what you are talking about.” I suddenly had some sobering clarity of all the vague excuses NOT had given me about his odd behavior over the last six months. He was using cocaine! He’d probably also been screwing around on me. And somehow the police had gotten wind of the cocaine and were now searching our apartment. It occurred to me that I could be in a ton of trouble and that I somehow had to get my personal belongings and escape. Not sure how a pissed-off, unemployed, slobbering-drunk, broke-ass girl, who'd just been dumped-cruelly-by-slimy-ass-boyfriend was going to escape, since I had no real place to go, but I would obviously worry about that later. Just had to get outa there fast!
I'd managed to think quickly, saying that I barely knew NOT and had met him through my friends, Geraldine and Horatio, and that he had given me a place to stay while I was looking for a job. I then named all of his law school friends and their descriptions perfectly and even told the police the name of the jazz club so that they could go there and question NOT about the cocaine- in-the-apartment that very night. I tried to be very helpful. I even gave them a stunning description of ChickenLegs, telling them that the duo seemed to be on a special "high" tonight.
“I barely even knew what he was up to half the time,” I told them. “He acted strangely and had strange people come to the apartment, but I was too busy looking for a job to really notice.”
The Ron Jeremy look-alike policeman seemed to believe that I knew nothing about the cocaine because he nodded and took my statement down on a pad of paper. GASPING sigh of a relief erupted from me.
Suddenly, the police got up to leave, but one of them handcuffed me before I could protest.
I was going to be taken downtown! No fair! I tried to tell them how I'd just been dumped badly for a silvery haired moon goddess who was a bitch from hell, but they thought I was making it up. I could tell from their glazed over eyeballs that they were done here.
"Public Drunk,” Was what the policeman told me.
My arrest had been long and grueling and embarrassing. I really had nobody to bail me out of jail. All my real friends were back in Oklahoma and they were not physically located in NYC to help me and I did not know how they could help me since most of the time they were out all hours of the night partying and probably wouldn’t hear their cell phones ringing. If my friend Jazhette happened to answer the phone, she’d probably be drunk and think the whole story was a practical joke since unfortunately we’d played one too many pranks on one another. And I could not waste my one phone call. So I was stuck with absolutely nobody in NYC to help me. And nobody in Oklahoma, either. (The only other people I could have asked were my ex work acquaintances, but I'd been fired and they would totally not help me. My ex boss would have probably laughed at me, then sent an email to everyone about it, cracking up to death about it. I could just imagine the humility of it all.)
I knew that my aunt in Italy would not help me and I wouldn’t even DARE ask her. And I could not ask my other relatives, because they would want to teach me a lesson.
That is, until I thought of somebody who had the money, the wherewithal and power and energy and resources to help me, if only this person would have the grace and empathy along with it all.
It was my sister - my estranged older sister, Katrinka, with whom I had not spoken in five years. I was sure that Katrinka would help me if I explained that I had absolutely nobody else to turn to for help out of jail. Wouldn’t she? It just had to be Katrinka, who would wire the money and make a few phone calls to lawyers, etc. RIGHT?
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