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My friend Melinda said that I really ought to go have someone check it out, preferably right away at the nearest emergency room. "They've gotta take you even if you don't have insurance," she said.
She was right. I left at the break and headed down to Queen of Angels. Last time I'd been in that place was for my little sister's overdose suicide attempt back in '95. The emergency room hierarchy is folks who have insurance and are gonna die go first, folks who have insurance and aren't gonna die second, and, if they run out of folks with insurance, folks who don't have insurance last. That would be me. Luckily it was a slow night for the insured, so 6 hours later they checked out my shoulder, determined it was dislocated, snapped it into place, gave me a sling and suggested I head to Rite Aid and score a bunch of Motrin.
"Don't pay any attention to what it says on the bottle. Take about 8 of 'em every now and then for the next few days."
"You got a pharmacy where I can pick some up?"
"Rite Aid is just up the street."
Turns out I missed an exciting and tragic night at Bates. Across the street from the Jewish Center was the (now closed) Sunset Motel, which catered mostly to crackheads and dopefiends. A teenage crackhead tranny was doing a little strip tease in the window of her third floor motel room. Apparently she was hot and the crowd started cheering her on, so she climbed out onto the window ledge to give a better show.
A third story window ledge is probably not the best place to be doing a strip tease when you're high on crack. Melinda had her daughter with her. She had a sudden feeling things were going to go awry and turned her daughter away from the excitement a split second before the tranny tumbled off the ledge to the cracked concrete sidewalk 3 stories below.
A couple of friends visited her in the hospital. The ID the police found said she was 17 years old. She never came out of her coma and died a few weeks later. No family was ever located.
1998 - 1999. I was two years clean, wrapped wire tight, perpetually on edge, razor sharp, very, very uncomfortable...and tremendously alive. Hyper alive, really, an exhausting sort of alive, not something I'd like to go back to, not if it meant feeling the way I did back then. Two years out of narcotic oblivion and my nerves were still completely on fire. Things were very immediate without the distance of drugs, and I really did not know what to do with it all. So I took a lot of pictures, trying to use the camera as a barrier between me and reality when reality seemed a bit too present. Consequently the depiction of these few years is perhaps the most thorough and honest of all my work.