Ghost Writer - Part V
I had just moved back to New York City and was staying with my parents temporarily while waiting for my own apartment to be ready. I was also desperately looking for a job. Eventually I had the luck of meeting a very unusual woman who was looking for a ghostwriter.
THIS IS PART 5 of a SEVEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
Image: Greta Hoffman
My gorgeous new red-headed friend led me to the bathroom, which was jammed with women of all shapes and sizes, most of them on the larger side. “You do realize,” she whispered to me, “that you’re the only woman with a real vagina in this place.” I looked around. The line of women waiting to get into the stalls boasted a lot of big hair, big boobs, big jewelry, big swanky dresses. Deep voices called back and forth to one another. There certainly was a festive atmosphere compared to most public ladies’ rooms I’d been in over the years. What I learned was the guys taped their penises down as flat as they could under their panties to avoid a telltale bulge. And talked openly about it, complaining of pulled pubic hair, rashes, ingrowns, discomfort that was clearly worth it in the end. Aside from the visuals and the talk of flattened penises, I could have been in any number of fancy restaurant or hotel bathrooms in the city. The place smelled heavily of perfume, talcum powder, breath mints, cologne, hand lotion, and was aggressively female in the way it presented itself. And yet I, the one true female, felt out of place, fraudulent.
Chrysis hugged me goodbye that night, and told me she’d see me around, which I doubted she ever would. I went back to my regular life of ghostwriting, struggling over annual reports, caring as best I could for my six-year-old daughter, drinking myself into a stupor every night.
If I didn’t have liquor in the house, I’d go to a bar around the corner, leaving Jofka alone in the apartment and getting so horribly blitzed that I had trouble finding my way home. Some mornings I’d wake up on the floor next to the toilet.
I went out with Harry Rosen a few times during this period. He’d call, saying, “Put on your limousine shoes, we’re going to a fancy club,” and he’d send a car for me so I wouldn’t have to worry about high heels and painful feet. He was an incredibly kind man. He’d made a fortune in the import/export business, had had four marriages and I don’t know how many children, and lived in an enormous penthouse apartment in the village. One night I attended a party there, and once again I think I was the only female present. Harry had a fascination with transsexuals, drag queens, people whose gender and sexuality were a little blurry. Liquor flowed abundantly and all around the apartment guests were snorting lines through hundred dollar bills. I snorted coke, too, and the rest of the party disintegrated into a fog of murmuring voices, tall bosomy bodies, loud laughter. I probably made a drunken fool of myself, but have no memory of the event other than a crush of ambiguously gendered males sipping cocktails and bending over lines of coke. About a month after that event, I got sober.
Cover Image: Pexels - Cottonbro