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Port Authority

by ANNABELLA HOCHSCHILD

She was my best friend. She became my best friend after her boyfriend, who she had loved, died. Mine who I had thought I loved had nearly died. Someone suggested we meet in a punk bar. We did. She was outraged that someone suggested her tragedy was wholesale, exploitable and enough to recommend her to me. I was nonplussed, admiring of her pissed-offedness.

We didn’t get too drunk that night. Just a little drunk. Drunk enough for me to bring her back to my preppy roommates with pizza. We made gin and tonics and they looked at us like weekday drunks. We were weekday drunks then.

We had both been models in times before. Worse times when we both were skinny. I guess we were still skinny but not enough to be paid for it.

To the outside world we looked like drug fiends. I did not find out until later that she actually was a drug fiend. Until after she had stolen thousands of dollars from me and left me in the middle of the night too many times. She also welcomed me in the middle of the night many times so I don’t mind about the money. Minding would mean nothing here to either of us.

I do not know if she really believed that the pharmacist in the old Italian Brooklyn neighborhood she lived in would not check that the refill was not due yet. From the prescription I picked up from the doorman of the wizened Freudian Jew who treated her on her parents’ dime on the Upper West Side. The pharmacist checked the date on the scrip. He always did. We made soup that afternoon and drank coconut rum in coffee that we bought from the downstairs deli where Puerto-Rican shop boys would drink giant Coronas as a way to ​cool​ their hands.

I could never tell that she was addicted to opiates. I thought she was just a sad-writer trope type like me. Bored by not writing. Writing about being bored. She was an actor but from what I understood the gig was similar in its boredoms.

She had to leave one night. I had gotten a magazine job and went to the office. She’d been asking me to come over to the place she was living with the guy who she’d slept with who happened to be the best friend of the man who died. She’d been asking me to come over for a couple of months but would never meet me anywhere in between. It had turned out that I liked working really hard and was at the magazine for 16 hours a day and never wanted to take the bus to an Alphabet City crackhouse when I was done.

She disappeared for three months. I sought solace in that if she had died I would have heard about it. She had not died.

I’m still waiting for that call, though, telling me that she has died. I think she is waiting for it too. I think when it comes it will not be a surprise, and I’ll still think of her in the same way, in the long dark subway tunnels we walked down together. When I was joyous just for having a friend I loved so very much. ​

Annabella Hochschild is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages.