Omens for the Annum

Okay, so what if I overindulged last night? So what if Mister MacFarland and I started the day off with a fight? It was his turn to get up with the puppies he sired upon me, not mine; when said chirren came yelping for their breakfast and he wouldn't move, I forcefully and nastily ejected him from the bed. He screamed at me that I was the ugliest white woman in creation in the mornings, stalked out, and slammed the door. Hello, 2005!

Luckily, the day improved, mostly when I woke up enough to put out. The first day of the year is shaping up to be not-so-bad, actually; they say that whatever you're doing on the first day of the year foreshadows the rest of it. If this is true, Queenie will be fighting, fucking, vacuuming, eating fried chicken, collards, blackeyes and cornbread, getting high, drinking wine, and taking long naps all year long. Hey, it could be worse.

It has been worse, actually, much worse. I recall New Year's Day of 1990 with a shiver of remembered dread; I'd been to a huge bash at the home of a Local Celebrity, haunting the open bar like a fucking specter out of an Anne Rice novel. I was drunk and I was dressed to the nines; cocktail dress, silk stockings, four-inch heels. In my thoroughly hazy mental state, I decided that it was a good idea to leave with a bunch of people I barely knew and go snork up keybumps in the car. Through a chain of decisionmaking that I don't even remember, we ended up driving to the edge of town, to the track-sitting shotgun shack of a smacked-up local musician instead, so as to do actual lines instead of those miserly keys.

Our gracious host was a total hippie, thrilled to open his home to Greeks Bearing Gifts. I was too tore down to think about it at the time, but everything about him - from the pungeant tang of patchouli and armpit that pervaded his person, to the total lack of sanitation present in the house, to the constant stream of "visitors" he took into the back room - screamed probable cause. Silly me; I was more interested in getting trashed and having fun than I was in that pesky-ass "still, small voice" telling me that I had made a tactical error. I had no exit strategy for this one.

Oh, yeah, we horked down most of our nosey treats, smoked some big hog-legs, shot some tequila - party, party! - but the cops showed up before the last lines were laid, while our hippie host was negotiating a deal in the back room. To add danger to insult, I'd come to realize that the hippie's shack was bloody packed with Schedule Ones; weed, coke, smack, pills gotten illegally, crank, acid - it was like sitting on a pharmaceutical time bomb, and the good Law Enforcement officers knocking on the door were nothing but a lit fuse.

Queenie say bye; I was in the john in seconds. I swarmed out the bathroom window like a boneless Houdini, my only object to put as many yards between myself and those blue lights as possible. I sprinted to the treeline one hop ahead of the beam from a police issue flashlight, and rapidly lost myself in the woods.

Honey, I spent all night navigating those woods and that railroad track, fucked out of my mind, in a torn cocktail dress and four-inch heels. I don't know what the official temperature in Georgia was that night, but I can tell you that it felt like forty fucking below. No coat, no gloves, no hat. Just me and my pocketbook.

I didn't get caught, but it took me over four hours to get back across town to my car and get home, for there are no cabs in the sticks that time of night. It was miserable, my shoes were shot to hell, and my dress was ruined. I had deep scratches all over my legs, some of which required stitches they never got, becoming infected weeks later and leaving several nasty scars. Besides all that, my New Year's Day night presaged a year from hell. 1990 blew syphilitic old French man-whores. It sucked.

What? I ain't glorifying it...take it as a cautionary tale, kids. This is your brain on drugs. You wanna end up like me?

Posted by Queenie at January 1, 2005 11:06 PM