Why do I ever pick up my phone after 1am?

I haven't stayed up all night sober in...well...I can't really remember it, so we'll just assume at some time it did actually happen. Also, how convenient is it that I don't have to change any of the clocks I actually look at? I listened to a LOT of Ozma. They make me think of that night in the Detroit Casino, Rudy and I talking about movies and girls while Paul actually won some poker money and had to pay for the gas money back. The drive through beat down Midwest sunrise, in Paul's van occasionally used for band equipment but mostly just drunk people sitting on the floor.

I wanted to tell you about My Girl Snow. She's the cousin of a friend of mine, and for years she'd been the Go To Girl for everything, especially party favors. We'd call her on Tuesday afternoons, when neither of us had a job or maybe we did but it was retail, and meeting up with her involved taking a brief tour of old poor porches in the outskirts of Lakewood (you know, where really it's still Cleveland?). The living rooms were always filled with what would be thrift store furniture, if it hadn't been there for the last 20 years really, stained with Koolaid and menthol smoke. Dogs in the basement. Shake on the table. Daytime television running in the background. And we had to hang out, you always have to hang out, the requisite cover time. But it was better than going to Uncle John's by yourself, because he was 500 pound man who never left his house and he wasn't letting you escape anytime soon.

Side note, I remember one time we bought from someone My Girl Snow knew very briefly, and at some point the man of the household/apartment(the kind of yellow brick 1972 apartment where old gay guys go to surround themselves with cats, plants, and cheap drugs while they wait to die) told me if I really wanted money, I should go into the escort business. Fat girls can totally do it, he said, as long as you're not picky. The lady upstairs is like 350, and she gets guys online all the time. I'll help you, he said. We did not go back there.

So this was how I knew her for years. She worked at a BP station, if you called her at work, she'd have her boyfriend bring the stuff there and she'd meet you in the warehouse next door. Then she'd do a few lines herself, surrounded by boxes of plastic coffee stirrers and old office chairs. She dated this boy who grew in his basement pretty seriously, and collected giant dogs, and broke up with her all the time. For like ten years, it was on and off, she was at her mom's house, she was back in with him. He was terrible, an awful human being. He had a mastiff that got sick, and when he didn't want to take care of it anymore, he abandoned it in Rocky River Park. In winter. She cheated on him constantly, with his friends, old boyfriends. Snow must have a magical puss, because no guy has ever been able to dump her, and she's not the most attractive girl, covered in tattoos and flabby, loose like a stretched out sweater. But she gets into a dumb guys soul, and plants her little tentacles there, so that she can pull a guy back from miles away. I just never understood why she would want to. She wasn't always ghetto as shit, she used to have the semblance of a smart person, she used to be entertaining, funny. But slowly she peeled away from the decent world, shrinking away from the light, clinging to the beds of cockroaches.

Snow found out a few years ago that she had this serious disease, and her intestines were all rotted away and falling apart like swiss cheese. I thought maybe she would clean up a little since she was so sick, it didn't seem to me like a choice. Several surgeries later, she hasn't let it affect her indomitable spirit, except that she seems more determined to kill herself and also doesn't use birth control at all. She used to live with her mom, but then her mom died. I went over there once. My Girl Snow was just laying in the upstairs bed, covered in dark bruises from some new guy she had met. Her mother's boyfriend had cooked for her, the mother, a candlelit spaghetti dinner downstairs, but she kept him waiting while upstairs she tried to bum the stuff I had just bought off me. Literally, standing there with her hands out to me, because My Girl Snow wouldn't give her any for free.

The rest of us have of course grown out of certain expensive habits and gotten day jobs and boyfriends who don't necessarily require us to be lookouts, but she's a trooper. Snow still swallows oxys twenty times a day, lives off the state and sells out of some efficiency one room apartment where she crashes with her 19 yr old dealer boyfriend Paco. She has his name tattooed on her in at least ten different ways. He has a giant one of her name across her chest, like the Sublime album cover. He won't let her take showers by herself, he'll will cry and beat the wall if she does. She never leaves the house without him. At least, she'll never have a baby with him. Her body rejects pregnancies like your skin pushes out splinters, the baby chunks fall out of her battered womb with the ease of sausage pulling out of the casing. It's like her body knows better than her.

I bring her up because she is still my friend's cousin, and he just told me this story about her. I had to stop answering my phone when she called a while ago. I just couldn't take the tragedy anymore, and I'm not related, so you know, I don't have to.

My Girl Snow and Paco went on a deal. They drove in her old blue explorer, which has a bad starter and you have to hit it with a hammer to get it going. Paco has been selling these pills for a while now that he passes off as E, but which are in fact so queasy causing combination of speed and other nastiness. So they went down to the East Side, to meet up with this crackhead (no, actual crackhead), and the customer takes the pills, then refuses to pay Paco. Paco of course fights with crackhead, and crackhead pulls a knife. He stabs Paco in the face and chest. My Girl Snow has run back to the car to grab her own knife, and joins the fight, where she proceeds to get STABBED THROUGH HER CHEEK.

So eventually this ends with My Girl Snow and crackhead (who has health care) both sitting in the emergency room, and she steals supplies to glue Paco's face later. And she buys a gun. She now has a 4 inch scar on her cheek and 2 shot pistol.

Seriously. Stabbed in the cheek by a crackhead while trying to sell bad pills in the ghetto. I mean, seriously?