I checked into the Chelsea Hotel. I could have gone to my apartment, but I wanted to stay someplace that had someone else’s dreams and nightmares in it, not my own. They gave me a good-sized suite painted mint green, less sleazy than the usual Chelsea room. I had wanted to stay there because of the sleaze, but the management overruled me. I wonder how often they do that to red-eyed waifs buckling under the weight of their carry-on luggage and failed affairs. Blinking inside walls that suggested refreshment, I washed my face and hands of dead cow. In this beautiful light, good-person’s light, they felt as filthy as if I had slaughtered the beast then anointed myself with its innards. I threw up and washed myself again.

Stumbling out of the Chelsea, where a few gay boys noticed me but pretended not to, I steered my way to the East Side to buy records. Every other girl on St. Mark’s Place was a mélange of piercings. I wanted to ask them if the metal was holding them together, or did it mean they were falling apart? I opened my mouth a few times to talk to my fellow young people, but they brushed past me—these people with rings through their lips brushed past ME—because they could tell I was weird.

“You’re a weird kid. You’re a weird kid.”

As long as I bobbed my mouth open as if to speak, nobody recognized me. Film stars don’t actively pursue conversation with strangers.

I went into Kim’s to look at CDs. I picked up some Joy Division, Patti Smith, Gram Parsons, and Laura Nyro, then put them all down and bought what I really wanted, which was the soundtrack to Fame.

Purchase in hand, I drifted upstairs to videos and books, where I wandered hesitantly into the section for comic-book porn. I found one, once, under the bed of a one-night stand, and I liked it because the drawings in it seemed more human than the bloodless beings who star in porn films. I looked over a man’s shoulder as he browsed a comic depicting two female roommates climbing into bed together because they were cold. He was taking too long to turn the page and I tutted impatiently. Seeing me behind him, he put it back on the rack and moved anxiously away.

I was just getting to the good part when a bunch of Goths recognized me. “Hey, aren’t you Ruby?”

I replaced the comic as delicately as I could and nodded my head sheepishly. The youngest of the Goths, a fifteen-year-old girl, apple-cheeked and sweet beneath her pancake makeup, pushed to the front of the group.

“We loved the one where your father saves the world from the asteroid. You looked dope in that spacesuit. What was that film called again?”