past 2, closing on three

and the liquor stores are closed and I'm thirsty and water is a poor subsitute for the vodka that I have been plying my system with, that is between bouts of dancing on runways with gayboys with my phone on vibrate in my cleavage waiting in vain for the the red headed youth with the faux hawk to ring with the promise of a party in my bed. But the bar is small and I am practically the only real girl, it's K's 40th, and we dance and sweat beads on the brow, and I think that I might short out my phone, but it doesn't ring.

What happens. I bump into an old flame who tells me I am the prettiest girl in the room, this is at Tosca pre-scene of my tentative ventures towards degeneracy, easy to practice when your facing the mirror.

What happens later, we pile into the rare cab on this night of the bridge and tunnel black and white ball to a club I used to dance when I was young and misguided, and now I am older and equally misguided but the club is now a very, very gay bar in the lower Haight, and if you would have known the pink projects on the corner 10 years ago, white girls didn't walk there, but it was fun to dance there in the stiffling heat, redolent of dope and spilt beer.

And oh what a decade can do, gone is the terror of the pink boxes and gun shots, the gays have invaded, it's all beards and lithesome bodies, except the almost tragic tranny with the mismatched implants singing la vie en rose, her tits were seriously askance and on the sidewalks the crack addled are praying on the drunken and the high for nickels and cigarettes.

Which brings me to me, yes me, wide eyed and swathed in smoke at three in the morning, and my jaw is working, and just how much do I love to dance. It's the best kind of exhibition, because I am cloaked in a beat and I am not responsible for my hips, and I can clasp my sweet gayboy in my arms and lead and twirl, and the fake smoke might clog my nostrils but no more so than the drugs that K gave me and I sucked down in the toilet, which is why I had the cab deposit me at cala foods even though it was too late and they were out of camel lights, which is why I am smoking marlboro 100's and feeling very much like a denny's waitress, which is why I am wide awake and not asleep, and I am this close to walking out to patrol the neighborhood and peek in windows for the cool of the night on my face or if I were really feeling crazy I could take the car and drive fast on vacant streets and wake on a forlorn curb on a desolate corner of Daly City, but that might result in an accident or arrest, and I am just not that high, or not high enough, or high enough but tempered with reason.

Or just really awake, and how I love to be awake when all the rest of the world is dreaming, flauting dreamland for songs and cigarettes and if weren't too late, alcohol.

And then there is my friend M, who doesn't seem to realize how lucky he is. If I had the good fortune to find a P, knowing that we are desperately human and imperfect, then again, what is a good friend for, but to remind, and to graciously scold, there is a large part of me that would gladly surrender a limb to sleep with my best conversationalist, it's a little sad that I'll gladly undress the first willing body that expresses the slightest interest.

Am I still making sense, have I made any sense at all, if I had any sense I would sing myself a lullaby and try and get some sleep, smoking these ridiculously long cigarettes with the white tipped butts that I have always found tacky, meant for acrylic nails and hair spray. God help me, but I am wide awake and ready to run, I have done practice runs before, back when I was married and falling into million little pieces I got in the car when D was asleep and made it all the way to Monterrey before reason intervened. It's my papa's fault, the best or the worst piece of advice he gave me is that you can always disappear. Take the car, empty the account, drive as far as you can get out and walk away, that's pretty fucking powerful when you stop to consider how fantastically simple and life altering it is. Sadly, I am Taurus, and I will dig my heels and I will resist the yoke, and my back may be bloodied but I will remain fiercely loyal to that goddamned buttercup and besided if I were to disappear it would take decades to build the friendships that I have here, who would accept me foibles and all, besides I would miss my crazy family.

It's nearly four in the morning and I am busy having a one sided chat with myself, and I would just about give my eye teeth for one of those tasty vodka collins I had much, much earlier at Vesuvio's, before the sun set so perfect on a mild evening in North Beach, with the children of the bridge and tunnel in postage stamp skirts and bright jerseys of far away teams, P and I gorged on fried olives and calamari and pizza, fried, fried and melted, so we could pour copious amounts of liquor into our gullets. Enricos, long standing memories, a long time.

All my windows are open and I am feeling the pre-dawn chill, the day is coming, sunday is nigh. It's the Haight street fair, and I will be fleeing the neighborhood for the safe haven of San Rafael, and I am charged with driving and I am likely to be wreck, all sleepy-eyed and smoky voiced (oh but what would I be doing now had that call come through, I might be worn out and drowsing under the comforter, I might be giggling, I might be up to the best part of no good) rather than heartlessly, ravenously awake, humming the litany of just one more cigarette. Just one more cigarette.