Polaroids in the Darkness

When I first met Cory I was still making my initial, tentative forays out onto the stroll. I was getting on the job training - learning how to turn tricks and how to act,what tricks liked and what they didn't and learning most of all how to get more money. I'd sucked a couple of dicks before, but I learned so much in such a short time. Then there was meeting the other girls out on the stroll a cast of characters "Star Actress Charlene would say - and some of those girls were tough! Usually the hottest looking ones. Don't fuck with a tranny.- most of them were at least outwardly friendly to me, a few giving advice and a couple trying to bum cigarettes. I was at this point in my life relatively new to hard drugs - I'd done acid in high school and Ecstasy a few times, I'd explored my own
consciousness on mushrooms and buzzed around or wasted a day or three with valium or other benzo's. I had smoked pot since I was young and been drinking a lot by the time I hit high school. But I'd so far managed to avoid getting a cocaine habit or worse becoming a junkie. More through lack of easy access, than anything against it. In fact it was the opposite.They say "Nobody wants to be an addict," and it's not true. I really did - and so did at least two of my friends growing up. We admired a lot of early punk bands and no wave bands just asmuch for thier legendary excesses as for their music I was working as a prep cook at aresaurant I had worked at before after work I'd added the habit of buying cocaine to my habits. Only once in a while at first do cocaine so by this time it had gotten to a point over the course of a few months that it was no longer enough for me to use cocaine on the weekends as I had been. I was now needing to do coke every day. I was also drinking like mad. My working in the kitchen was not paying for my ever increasing appetite and so I was shuttling between Toronto and Guelph for a while - whoring on the Tranny Stroll on days I didn't do my day job.
It was easy money. And money is what it was about. or at least the biggest part of it was money initially - but there's also a part somewhere inside of me was getting off on the excitement and drama and my romanticized ideas about being a junkie street hooker - which I probably picked up from too many hollywood movies as a child. And thats how it felt-at first like I was the star in some great film
It was very soon to become all about the drugs.
It was New Years Eve and naturally I was in Toronto for it - the cool surprise was to me at least was that I'd befriended some cool "alternative" people from Toronto one day and they'd invited me to party at their house.
I got crazily drunk and was doing cocaine like mad and was asked at one point, politely, to leave.
I was turned away from the Bovine which was my next stop - and I wound up at Lee's Palace. I spent my time hugging people and stealing beers from those who left theirs unattended to dance or use the loo. I managed between this and people buying me drinks all around to have at least one drink on the go at all times. And its no wonder lot of people were willing to buy me drinks ;I had on a slinky slip, stayups and some killer ankle boots. I was seriously hot. And I have low self esteem so I don't say that a lot, believe me .I looked good.
So when the bar stopped serving booze at 4 or whatever I staggered with the crowd down towards Queen. I was piss drunk and as I teetered on my 5 inch stiletto boots a trick pulled up beside me and I knew he was a trick instantly the same way he knew I was working.
You just know
So I got in the car and we agreed on 40 for a blowjob.
The thing was he didn't want to do it in the car, but why argue? Wwe parked and went to an alley just off Queen. I got on my knees and started sucking. His dick smelt of soap - but not overly - he'd probably just recently showered. It was big though, I couldn't deep throat it all
He began really pushing my head and pulling my hair which you expect a little of and can normally shake away- but he was a little more forceful than that
He cracked my head against the wall and spun me around calling me slut and pig the whole time
(he was quite a bit bigger and stronger than me) and pulled my thong aside and with no lube, no condom just off Queen st stuck it in my ass. He must have spit on it I would rhink but I dont know
As he's fucking me I kicked backwards and swung around and was able to
push him back .
I then did something stupid and to this day I don't believe I did it.
I reached into his pocket. where I knew the money was.
I grabbed and pulled the first thing I touched and ran. It was a twenty. I booked it onto the street and ran into the middle of a crowd on Queen and when I looked back he was leaving in his car.
In a bit of shock and not so stumbling drunk now all of a sudden I was hungry Absolutely famished. I needed to eat immediately and so I grabbed a sub and then went to sit on the front step of Yehudahs building to wait for his eventual return.
My sub long since finished I just sat on the stoop for an eternity and then a cab pulls up and two rock and roll looking people fall out..
By rock n roll I mean the guy had sunglasses at night and spiky hair and a fuck you swagger the girl even more so she had bleached white hair and bright blue eyes i could see from 15 feet away with a little leapord skirt,a cutout Ramones t and a little leather cap. They spill out of the cab and slink my way they need to get past me to get into the building. As they're going in the girl says to me "Do ya

wanna come party?" She s got a killer smile and even better looks to me like some Canadian bred version of Courtney Love - in that instant I'm lost - I'll do anything for this girl, go anywhere. She's beautiful to me.
She's obviously a mess - obviously a junkie. She's beautiful to me.
And so I follow up the steps.
We get upstairs and her and the guy start emptying plastic wrapped little packages onto the table - I'd seen enough anti drug ads to know that it was crack.
"Do you have a pipe?" Cory, the girl, asks
"uh,no"
"you can use my ginny then,"
so she hands me a broken little bottle that used to contain ginseng infused liquid.You see them in stores but no one I know uses them. There was a piece of steel wire - brillo pad - stuffed in the top, unbroken end. Cory put a small crumb of the white soapy looking rock on the brillo end of the "pipe" and melted it. It melted like wax too except for the distinct snap crackle and pop that give its name
then the jagged end was stuck in my mouth and I inhaled. The smoke is thick and tastes like burning tires. I hold it in and inhale again.
Corey points out a 12 pack - her and her friend have no interest in it - a trick left it she tells me as I crack open a beer.
Her place was a fucking disaster two feet of clothes and candy bar wrappers and orange syringe caps, pieces of brillo, shoes, broken crack pipes, several tiaras, a mattress was buried under a half a foot of this mess and that was where we sat. The guy eventually left and I got myself more comfortable. At 9 AM Corey ran out to make a phone call and in 15 minutes came back with 2 200 mg morphine's and I was given half one two snort while Cory shot a whole one into a vein in her hand while I looked on in rapt fascination. Her veins were a mess from 13 years of IV heroin abuse. The ones in her arms were all nothing but scar tissue and completely collapsed so she was using her hands - she explained all this as she poked around and poked around trying to find a vein. And then at last there was that urgent red explosion in the needle and she pushed the warm soothing softness inside her.
We talked then for hours of how we got here of our childhoods and music music music - we were singing Patti Smith songs together before it was over - she told me of her days as a stripper and of all the rock stars she's met and partied with including, if she was to be believed Nirvana and the Meat Puppets and then there she was unbelievably with photos of her indeed with the meat puppets along wit h Dave Grohl (no Kurt tho)
We found we even knew a few people in common.
We are like soul sisters some sort of cosmic twins and so we begin plotting world
domination and debating which one is Pinky, til we both nod off and blend in with the debris.