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NEW YORK STORIES

"Selling A Junkies Clothes Brings Back Memories" by Marian Kuemmerlein



When Jeremy caught Emma selling her furniture on the corner of Hope and Union while simultaneously buying heroin, we all agreed things had gone too far.

Time for Bellevue. You’ll be fine there, we assured her. It’s not like the crack hospital in Brooklyn where people puke on the floor and steal your socks. Clyde carried her downstairs and Jeremy called her parents in Florida. They said “whatever”, it was fine with them.

I hailed a cab. She put up a fight, of course, but we weren’t fucking around this time. “It’s for the best,” I said when we reached the gleaming mental ward at dawn. Zelda Fitzgerald and Edie Sedgwick lived here. You’re in great company. We signed papers that made it impossible for her to get out.

Later, we divided up the chores. Jeremy sat at her kitchen table with stacks of bills. Clyde showed off his Kansas-boy physique hauling furniture down the stairs. They started to get competitive. They were both still in love with her. “Do you know how much debt she’s in?” said Jeremy. “Do you know how much that sound system weighed?” said Clyde. I went to the health food store for cigarettes and vitamin water to keep the moral up.

When I returned Jeremy handed me a trash bag full of Emma’s clothes and directions to Beacon’s Closet. This is how we’re paying her bills, Clyde informed me. You’re a female. You know how much this stuff is worth.
A girl with heart tattoos took my ID and the trash bag and told me to wait. I tried on a pair of cowboy boots. I wondered if I would ever see Emma again.

When they called me, I went to the counter to watch as a guy in his 20s wearing a trucker hat and a wealth of charm necklaces sorted through Emma’s clothes.

He pulled out a pair of Habitual Jeans first. Kate Moss’s favorite brand, Emma had told me once, girly and prideful. They had fit her really well before she’d gotten super skinny. The guy in the trucker hat shrugged. Ten dollars, he guessed, and stabbed a plastic price tag into the right leg. He tossed them into a bin of sellable items.

He drew a black lace dress out next. The older lover Emma had between Clyde and Jeremy had bought it for her. He owned hotels, sent her to Costa Rica for weekends and bought her a small British car. I pictured Emma wearing the dress that cost four months rent, eating a meal that cost two, while pretending to ignore the waitress’s judgmental smile.

The guy in the trucker hat recognized the brand, but being see-through, the dress was a stumper. He frowned, fingering a hole near the hem. Five bucks.

A peacock colored silk nightgown was next. When I couldn’t sleep at night, worried to the point of nausea, Emma brought me a saucer of ginger cookies, and tea with coils of honey in the bottom of the I HEART NY mug. We talked about sex, men and marriage. I was a celibate Catholic; Emma, a professional dominatrix. We compared notes and theories, agreed it was a man’s world. I finally fell asleep between Emma in her brilliant nightgown and her blinking Devon Rex cat.

We don’t buy lingerie, the guy said.

He pulled a wadded up shirt out of the bag and shook it out. I’d bought it for her from a Williamsburg boutique. China-blue and flimsy, the shirt had a silver Mexican lace pattern embossed into it. The pattern cut across her chest like a strapless dress. Emma had pressed the shirt to her shoulders and cocked her head toward the mirror. This will be great for LA, she had said. She was always talking about California, how everything would be fine once she got there. The guy in the trucker hat spread Emma’s shirt out on the counter, checked it for rips and stains. She’d burned a cigarette hole through it of course.

Worthless.

He took out a daffodil yellow skirt she wore to a birthday party. We’d paired it with a black linen shirt—flip up the collar, I’d said, “Wear your Gucci heels.” I’d spun her in front of the mirror. “You’re Audrey Hepburn on the back of a Ducati with Gregory Peck, Rome, spring, 1953!” She had worn bracelets to hide the track marks.

Two dollars.

I peered at the charm necklaces the guy sported. Tarnished skulls, enamel butterflies, lightning bolts. There was also a Catholic relic. I wondered what saint it belonged to.

The hipsters gave me my driver’s license back and 17 dollars. I put the discarded clothes on the charity shelf and went to a bar.


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