Fall 2009 living at the mothership in Port Jefferson on the north shore of Shlong Island. I am looking very thin after making it out alive from the shitstorm of stress/drugging/bipolar mood cycling/chemical imbalances that befell me in the months prior. 110 pounds type thin, like literally i am wearing leggings i stole from The Children’s Place.

I’m in my childhood bedroom here. Mine since we moved from Manhattan when i was 3. That’s my sunlight simulation floor lamp behind me, which i got at 18 when i left home for college and Vermont’s 6 month winters.

So yeah by the night I took this self portrait I was a quarter century old and living with my parents but at least i was stable after said shitstorm. I was way past the Wellbutrin-induced manic episode where i didnt eat or sleep. Or know that I was assuming the embarrassing identity of a candy raver (below.)

Wellbutrin is a smoking cessation/antidepressant drug in the NDRI class that works by basically flooding your brain with dopamine. NDRI-induced mania produces the same feelings/mindframes/cliched sentiments as an MDMA-induced roll. So because I was basically taking government ecstasy every day, i started acting weird. one day after beginning the med i felt like a “new man” so i shook my parents’ hands and was like “Hi, I’m Adriana.” i decided i had no problems in my life, slept only 2 hours each night and only ate dried fruit from this one bag i got at Costco. i busted out my everyday tutus from college and resumed that wardrobe. i decided i was only going to listen to trance music, thrilled with its positive song titles like “Embracing the Future” and “Tripping the Light Fantastic”. I  rejected my beloved roots dubstep with all its titles like “Punisher” “In the Void” and “Impossible and Overwhelming.”

In my state, I wandered out into uncharted social territory, AKA i briefly became a 25-year-old raver/rave promoter’s girlfriend which i am still teased about often by close friends, and tease myself about publically (<THAT IS HOW I SPELL PUBLICALLY…….) because it is ridiculous. very embarrassing. the only thing more detestable than hipsters— scoffing, wine swilling, “adultlike” (yet impolite???) hipsters—is ravers. LED glove-wearing, plastic “kandi”-stacking, slackjawed “lightshow”-watching, new jersey-based overgrown baby ravers. Or okay, i rescind the statement: the hipsters i described are worse, because they are mean, whereas ravers, although functioning with reduced brain activity and bad taste, are at least nice. STILL— my idea of winning life is to be at the exact middle point between a haughty hipster preoccupied with seeming adultlike, and a regressing raver who’s ignorant to the extent of their childlike persona.

I’m only glad there are no pictures of me with this so called “kandi” covering my forearms. i didnt get a chance to make any, or foster retarded rave friendships wherein i’d receive any, cause i woke up out of my “trance” after three weeks when my parents and doctor made me stop taking that ASSY wellbutrin. i had a terrible comedown complete with rage and utter despair but eventually reached an equilibrium and got my own personality back; not manic nor depressed, which i think comes through in this photo.

Here I am in August 2009 right before leaving the best place I ever subletted: a room on 7th street and 1st avenue. How I came to live there is odd.

My sublet on 11th street was almost up and I didn’t know where I was going to live after that. Three nights before it was up, I had been dancing and doing blow at Konkrete Jungle at the Pyramid on 6th and A. I got bored, got in my car and started driving. At 7th and 1st I saw a whole bunch of canvases being thrown out on the sidewalk. The paintings on them were ugly but the canvases themselves were crazy, one was three hinged together, one was octagonal, etc. There were also very clean, very small V-neck mens’ tee shirts and man-tanks that were sort of my size.

I was loading everything into my car when I suddenly felt compelled to buy cans of black bean soup. I went into a bodega and was wandering the aisles when a group of dudes my age said what up. I told them I was on coke and looking for soup and they told me to come next door where their friend Victor was having a gathering. I followed them into a ground-floor apartment and met the dude, a smiley bearded guy from Mexico City. For the next hour I talked absolute face to all these dudes, and for some reason i felt like i was psychic. With pressured speech I proceeded to tell them about themselves. “YOU’RE close with your sister. YOU like to cook. YOU’RE from Connecticut,” I said to them respectively, and kept going in more detail. I turned out to be correct about every last thing I said, which baffled everyone including myself.

Anyway, this Victor was so impressed that he offered to sublet his $1000 room to me for only $600 a month while he was in Mexico City, and he was coincidentally leaving the following week. So I moved in right away and hung out a lot with his Chilean roommate Galo and their Ecuadorian friend Campoverde who made minimal techno together.

I loved the living situation, but that summer i fucked myself over physically, mentally and emotionally. By August when this picture was taken, I was drained to a husk by coke, weed, and partying. I was also depressed because of this guy Will. He had dubbed me his girlfriend that spring, only for me to dump him rudely for no reason in July on Avenue A. I said I still wanted to fuck and he grinned maniacally and went “OK, but i’m not going to be, like, a nice guy about it or anything” and kept true to his word. I promptly fell in love with him but he wasn’t having it. We fucked a lot but he was officially cold as ice, like, probably wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire.

So that combined with excessive narcotics and dragging my stoner self through the streets in my deteriorating black slouchy boots made me feel like I got hit by a truck. Plus, I had to move out of Vic’s room which I adored, because I had no money. Shit sucked. So in September when my friend from San Francisco was in town, bearing E pills he had smuggled over in a Rubik’s cube, I decided to take a whopper of a dose in an effort to change my brain chemistry. We went to a party on a boat in Brooklyn, took two pills each and a third at a friend’s East Village apartment afterwards while watching The Jungle Book and huffing giant nitrous balloons during all the musical sequences. I had a full-on psychedelic experience, a trip deeper and more intense than any other in my life before or since. I was seeing, hearing, and understanding fractals for the first time and it blew my mind.

Literally it blew my shit out. My parents came two days later to pick me up and move me back to Long Island, and when I got there I had a horrific nervous breakdown out of nowhere. Like, I distractedly told my mom I was going to go sweep the deck, and I swept the deck completely clean, but something was very wrong because my face was coming out of my face in huge long strings of snot and spit and tears. My mother was alarmed and kept asking if I was okay. I went into a trance-like state. I put the broom down and walked across the backyard into the cul de sac with my mom chasing after me. I sat on the concrete and my extremities went numb and my throat closed. I was hyperventilating and couldn’t breathe or speak, I could only make sounds like w-w-w-w-w-w-www-w-w-wwww-w-w-ww—- because a deep seated issue was uncontrollably bubbling to the surface while my body struggled to keep it down, and it would be another three years before I finally allowed myself to deal with it. but yeah, i sat there bugging out like that for fifteen minutes, wandered back into the house, passed out and slept like the dead.

Later that evening I ran away from home and stayed with various friends for a week, then came back and got very sick, and by sick I mean an impossibly deep depression. I got put on Wellbutrin which shot me into a month-long manic episode where I was too happy to eat, drive, or sleep, culminating in a giant crash where I was so angry I couldn’t talk, and would fly into rages when anyone spoke to me.

For the rest of 2009 I tried every goddamn antidepressant on the market one by one, and they all sucked and so did my therapist “Dr. Quilty” even though he had a PhD. All he ever did was shake his head at me and go “tsk, tsk” and guilt me for my bad behaviors.

Summer 2009. I was renting a room in Alphabet City on east 11th street beween B and C. The room was so tiny it only cost $600 a month. I think it was even actually a closet. It could fit a twin air mattress and a teensy bookcase and a full-length mirror and not much else, and it was a 6th floor walkup. But location is everything and I like small spaces so I loved that room. The apartment itself was awesome too. I lived with a lesbian art student who was also a black haired electronic music enthusiast from long island, and would loudly bang her ukrainian girlfriend Vlada upstairs. The whole place was decorated with her incredible space-themed visual art. We had a black and white checkered kitchen floor with a black spiral staircase in the middle that led to the expansive silver roof.

Notable events from my time living there include: Will screwing me doggystyle on the roof to “christen it” the day i moved in; hanging out with this kid Seth in my bedroom and snorting heroin for the first and only time in my life (which made me feel like i’d drank too much vodka and too much espresso and then spun around in circles for ten minutes UGH); The Hamburger Debacle of a Lifetime.

Explanation: My roommate and I threw a 4th of July party for which she and her friends made food. They made altogether too many raw hamburger patties studded with onion and we didn’t have room for them in our tiny dorm-size fridge. So half of them were placed on a baking sheet and stored in our unheated oven to keep them from bugs before going to the rooftop grill. We apparently forgot about this because four days later there was a terrible rotten meat odor. My roommate and i discovered the decomposing hamburgers in the oven and threw them out the window into an alley while screaming. Three days after that I was home alone in my bedroom with Seth. We ate a few hits of acid and had sex. Afterward, I wandered out into the kitchen and noticed there was still a rotten meat smell, so i decided to heat the oven and kill any lingering bacteria that was causing it. ten minutes later the air was filled with the smell of sour meat and burning plastic. i opened the oven and discovered that on a rack all the way at the top there had been even more rotten meat patties on a hot pink plastic plate. hot pink plastic was dripping down through the oven. I was tripping by then and not sure how to deal with this so me and Seth just turned the oven off, opened windows, got in my car and drove to Long Island. My roommate actually forgave me for that, almost immediately, which I still can’t believe.

Post-coital, pre-toke at this kid Vinny’s house on a tiny island on the south shore of Long Island.

It was kind of scandalous how we got together. My first job in New York after graduating college at Bennington was as copywriter for this little ad agency called Mr. Youth. They became very successful and moved offices from midtown to Chelsea Market and started hiring a bunch of new people including a 36-year-old Creative Director, Matt, who was to be my new boss. He was this cool guy who skated to work on a 2x4, wore AdBusters shoes and was always gleeful and encouraging. One day he said to me and my creative team, “yo guys I just found out I have a BROTHER. Like literally, my mom told me about this 18 year old half-brother i never knew i had! His name is Vinny and he lives on Long Island.” he showed us the kid’s Facebook pictures. Me and this graphic designer Kate exchanged furtive glances because this Vinny was a shirtless Adonis. All his photos were basically of him outside, wearing very little and suspended in midair doing some kind of super acrobatic Parkour off rooftops and stuff. Tight shots of his face showed his high cheekbones, strong jawline, ice blue eyes, boxy cleft chin and full lips.

Afterward Kate and I secretly added Vinny on Facebook, introducing ourselves as Matt’s coworkers. He added us back and later commented “very nice” on three of my photos. I told myself, well, he’s only five years my junior and yeah, he’s 18, but to me that is a turn-on. So I struck up a conversation with him online. A week later we were hanging out smoking weed in my car and two weeks later we were screwing in my childhood bedroom in Port Jefferson.

Because dude spent all his time doing wallflips and corkscrews and back handsprings and breakdancing, he had the nicest body of anyone I’d ever been with. He drove a black and orange camaro named Rachel. He had two cats named Bootsie and Buttons. He was very nice and modest to the point of insecurity even, but I stayed bigging him up, raving nonstop about his hotness. Those south shore boys, they’re all italian with dark tans and get around on skateboards. By the end of the summer we had spent a lot of time together. I even got into a car accident kissing him while driving in traffic, but I didn’t care. I was always speeding home from his house in the morning, listening to Steely Dan “Hey Nineteen” and smiling a shit-eating grin.

I kept the whole thing a secret and did not tell my boss Matt that i was fucking his teenage brother. Regardless, I decided to leave my job at Mr. Youth for different reasons. Mostly because Matt hired a senior copywriter in addition to me, and she was 30 and named Erica, a sexy ex-Brit brunette with a huge rack, and i suspect she thought i was hot too and didn’t like that, because we had a tense relationship of not knowing whether we wanted to be eachother, fuck eachother, or kill eachother. Plus I had gotten into Sarah Lawrence despite applying a month late, and I thought it was a sign to become a college professor instead of a copywriter.

On my last day my coworkers threw me a party at Art Bar. I got a little sloshed, and my drunk logic told me this was a perfect time to confess to Matt about the scandal, because I’d maybe never see him again. He was speechless. Not mad but totally incredulous. I flew to Los Angeles the next day for a vacation, and I tried to be unreachable but Vinny was all texting me like “You told Matt???” It was the first of many fights we’d go on to have throughout our five years of chilling and banging. Some of the fights were pretty bad because of shit like me hanging out with his friend Gareth alone seemingly to hook up, and Vinny actually physically hooking up with my friend Steph, but we always recovered (for instance, i hollered at him after a long period of us not speaking cause i had to go to court in his town for the kissing ticket, and we smoked an estrangement blunt.)

I saw Matt a whole bunch in the following years while attending Vinny’s various parkour performances. We’d sit together in the audience just talking about life.

Vinny and I haven’t spoken in a year because I told him I would no longer make pilgrimages to see him in the suburbs because i’m not about that life, and plus he never spent dime one on our relationship despite earning a salary as Director of Parkour Procedures at a gym, and he had what i would describe as a faggot freakout. like he said some really weird and inexplicable things that belied some sort of mental illness or at the very least a semi-serious neurosis, and i was bewildered and over it.

While living in Bronxville and attending Sarah Lawrence for my writing MFA, I worked part time at a shoe store called Plaza Bootery on the main street through the affluent town. It was run by a world-weary man named Lee. I had reason to believe it was a pirate shoe store because it was extremely unorganized in every possible way and there was never new stock being ordered and I was constantly told to just sell the stock we had as fast as possible so we could get rid of it. One day I sold a thousand dollars worth of Stride Rite.

It was 2009. A good year for roots dubstep. There were a lot of parties in Manhattan where UK headliners—the founding fathers and pioneers of the original low, slow, reggae dubstep sound—were booked to play for their small underground following. I was always haggard and tired from staying out all night and getting high every two hours of my life. If I wasn’t at a party I was sleeping, in class or at the shoe store. I was always there alone with my thoughts, attending to intermittent customers and slipping my bare foot into one display shoe or other to see how it looked. Customers were either very pleasant, like this nerdy man Rich who hired me to babysit his toddler boys some nights, or irate, like certain old ladies who had me fit them for ridiculously white, pillowy sneakers they ended up bitterly dismissing. Also parents who got mad that I couldn’t make a pair of size 2 slip-on water shoes materialize, or baby keds. We never had the shoes anyone wanted, and they demanded to know why, and I wasn’t sure, and it was stressful.

I was always getting high in the basement where we kept the stock, and once found a melted Croc wedged behind the radiator. The shoes we stocked were mostly merrells and running shoes, which I decided are the ugliest possible shoes a person could buy, and to this day I am shallow and judgemental about people who go around in those like they are perfectly fine things to be wearing. Not that I don’t have heart for people. People are my favorite thing in the world because they are dumb and ugly with rich emotional histories. Or excruciatingly beautiful and harboring very little emotion (hi.) Anyway here is one of the two poems based on Plaza Bootery that I wrote for my grad thesis.

Plaza Bootery

The whole khaki town’s in a line outside

when I get there, delicate

with ratty hair, having walked

on the churchless side of the street

up to work at Plaza Bootery

where I stick the tall brass key

in its lock and shuffle in. I fit Addisons, Hadleys

for communion Maryjanes,

see the branches flaking leaves

that blow through the doorway,

endless mothers struggling there

to steer the strollers,

saying Ashton sit down

so the lady can measure you.

Then the fugue of my trips downstairs into disorder,

boxes bursting from my arms

and scattering wads of tissue paper.

D’you want a lollipop? What color?

I’ll use a red one, a kid said carefully,

and there can be those moments

but at the end of the day I’m ticketed in the lot

and the metermaid is long off duty

and it somehow hurts, the word lollipop, and the idea of all

the families home at dinner.

I won’t forget the boy

who started sobbing when I didn’t have his size.

His father called him Little Bird.

2009. me in my bed in the Bronxville apartment, awkwardly displaying my palm.

When I was in grad school at Sarah Lawrence i lived in Bronxville. It was a wealthy town in Westchester bordered by Yonkers and Tuckahoe. When I first moved in I was horrified at the idea of living not only in a suburb, but a suburb where I didn’t know anyone. And I was prone to depression and cried so much that I gave myself a sinus infection, for which I was prescribed penicillin, and I had an allergic reaction to penicillin in the middle of the night where i was jumping out of my skin with a horrendous full-body itch because apparently i was breaking out in hives from head to toe. i had to call 911 and get carted away in an ambulance and spend the night in the hospital with a nurse named Diva.

The medic alert bracelet in the photo says PENICILLIN ALLERGY.

anyway i continued to be depressed after that and extremely somnolent as well, like i couldn’t stop sleeping for shit. and also i had this troublesome recurring dream every night where i was shoplifting from grocery stores.

Here’s an excerpt from a “fictional short story” I wrote about it:

“….Then I passed out and in the morning slept through my dreaded poetry workshop while having The Dream, and then I woke up very regretful and grumbled about missing my class, and fell back asleep and had The Dream again. And I woke up having to go to work, and wrench myself away from Bed. Driving to work I called my dad and cried about how guilty I felt for missing class and how I had a sleeping problem and a self hatred problem, and when I got to work I cried on the phone some more, first to my mom, and then to my dad again, and my dad cried, and I was supposed to meet with my teacher but not sure I could leave work and drive over to school crying, so instead I called her and cried about how I can’t stop crying, and she suggested we talk later.”

These days (2013) I am doing much better. For instance, I am no longer somnolent, no longer depressed, and as of two weeks ago I no longer have The Dream because I finally stopped compulsively shoplifting after ten years. I am up on my feet and fully enjoying life. So last night I dreamed I was swimming with the dolphins and Charlie Sheen simultaneously. 

Stoned on my birthday, March 27th 2009. Driving around getting high with two friends on shlong island in my turquoise ‘94 Acura integra. It was my first car when I turned 17 and i still own it. It has a sunroof and a spoiler and is covered in iridescent stars the size of coasters. I cut them out myself from sticker material i stole from the sculpture studio in college. The car used to have a lot of “entertaining stoner junk” hanging from the rearview mirror among other toys and weirdness. It even had a pink gel taped over the interior light that made the whole inside glow pink at night.

The best time I ever had in my car was the time my friends and I found a blowup octopus deflated at the end of someone’s driveway. they were throwing it out so we stole it and painstakingly inflated it. the thing turned out to be absolutely enormous. it was bright green and yellow striped and had a smiling face on the head and also a light blue baseball cap(?) It was like the same size as my car and so we affixed it to the roof and drove to downtown Port Jefferson. a cop told us to remove it. instead we went and smoked a bowl somewhere then drove down main street with the massive smiling octopus still on top of the car. We blew past a group of cops. “I’M LEAVING NOWWWW!!!” I yelled, taunting them through the open window. They immediately pulled us over and I got a ticket while passersby snapped photos on their phones. “DRIVER’S VISION WAS OBSCURED BY GIANT OCTIPUS,” the ticket said, and I pissed myself. I had to appear in court, but it was worth it.

I forgot to mention that we named the giant octopus “COSMODIAR.” after we erected it i said to my friend Andrew “what should we name it?” and immediately he said “COSMODIAR.” which was fucking hilarious. and so it was. COSMODIAR became my prized possession but then my MOM threw it out one day when I wasn’t home. I was pissed because i loved it and had intended to bring it to Boston and do performance art with it in the streets.

The worst time I ever had in my car was in college in Vermont when I took a weird highway trying to get home for thanksgiving and accidentally drove up a mountain. it was because the highway went over it. apparently it was snowing hard at the top of this mountain and had been for several hours, and driving down a snow-caked mountaintop in a tiny import car is fucking frightening as fuck, I almost died.

2008. While enrolled in grad school at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, there was this girl Christine in my poetry workshop who really liked my hair and would talk to me a lot and offer to cook me pasta with Puttanesca sauce and make me mudslides and smoke me out on blunts and shit. I did what I usually do when straight girls get crushes on me and I assumed the masculine role and hit on her aggressively saying we should take a bath together. She was totally into the idea but I am sometimes bad at physically initiating (only with girls, with dudes I have no problem making moves.) So I ended up just halfassedly manhandling her once in a while but not really trying to get her in the actual bath, though I did sleep in her bed once. Anyway this is me on the couch at her bougie White Plains apartment.

Day after Halloween 2008. Walk of shame on Metro North after a routine screw in Boerum Hill with Timmi (first dude I ever met in person from OKCupid.) Actually it wasn’t a routine screw. I had been in my fairy costume, wings and all, and his costume was Blanche from the Golden Girls with makeup and a loud senior citizen blouse and big long beaded necklaces. We had snuck upstairs from his Halloween party to bang. I was a fairy getting pounded by a man-blanche. Awesome