Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
Everyone asks how I’ll feel about the tattoos and scars in thirty years. I always say: “I’ll like them.” I’ve always loved damaged monuments, in architecture and in humans. I like Brigitte Bardot now, petting stray dogs and sitting in the sun, skin getting more and more leathery. I was trying to be a ruined beauty then, at twenty. I wanted to know how ugly I could get, how ruined and ugly and spoiled, before they stopped trying to fuck me. I didn’t think they’d ever notice. Nobody had so far. Because I was still in the shape of a beautiful girl. Although I behaved like an ugly one.
Even with my arms covered so you couldn’t see the scars, the high-maintenance hair color told everyone on the set of Mean People Suck that I was damaged, demanding, fragile, and fake. They only had to put a prop in my hand, to fit me for a costume, or hand me my morning coffee, to see that. On a bright morning, as all mornings on the set invariably were, the blue of the sky bounced off the white of my hair in such a way that you couldn’t really see me at all. I was the girl beneath the hair and the sky. I started to look forward to long interior shoots, three days in a classroom, in a broom closet. I loathed the exteriors.
It was Sunday morning, my first break in a while, and I was hanging out with my dealer, who soon left, having installed the new toilet roll in my gray marbled bathroom. I swallowed a Percocet and started to feel better. Drawing back the blinds, inch by inch, I surveyed New York Street Scene No. 1: another glare day, when people scrunch their pretty faces ugly in the sun.
“I can’t die,” I reminded myself, “because tonight I have to be in Brooklyn, where the dining room will stink of cats and Grandma Yetty will again note how much weight I’ve lost since I stopped seeing Sebastian.” Grandma Yetty is a grandma, but not mine. She used to babysit me when I was a little girl.
When I first told Grandma Yetty I was seeing Sebastian I said he had an English literature degree from Harvard. Then I told her that he was black.
“White-black, I presume?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know, like a white South African. As opposed to a black South African. Is he a white-black?”
“No. I don’t think there are any white-blacks, Yetty.”
“Oh,” she said dejectedly, “well, is he black-Jewish?” Her voice grew more hopeful: “Like Sammy Davis.”
“No. He’s not like Sammy Davis. Um. At all.”