My Sick Obsession with Rib Cages
This new Hegre-Art gallery reminds me of a sick old anorexic woman I used to see named - hmm what the fuck was her name? oh yeah, Helen Weiseman (however you spell Weisman) - back when I used to live in New York City. She lived on one of those sixty X streets off Columbus Avenue near Amsterdam Billiards, a pool hall with the best looking waitresses in Manhattan.
Helen was always sick. She sometimes had epilepsy fits in the middle of dinner (we’d be sitting at a restaurant and she’d suddenly stare blankly and drool). When she walked down the street, she’d claw at the crack of her ass. She’d call me up at two in the morning to take a bus with her to St. Lukes Hospital, or she’d call equally as late in the middle of jungle-heat summer to sleep with her (when I say sleep, I mean sleep), while her knees kept shaking like she was trapped inside a freezer. She told me one time she bled internally for hours without knowing it and could have died, if it weren’t for a girlfriend of hers dragging her sick ass to the hospital.
Helen was also old and dirt poor. I don’t know exactly how old - she refused to say - but I’m guessing from the wrinkles on her face and her hands she must have been around forty five or over. Her landlord let her live in her apartment for free, and let her earn money from renting three rooms on her floor. She must have been letting him bang her occassionally for those perks, because the rent for the entire floor I figure added up to over $2,500 a month. That hardly covered vetenarian bills for her four black cats (one of which had a tumor between its ears) and her medical bills.
She was jobless. She wrote a few articles as a volunteer for a local newspaper ran by college undergrads, but obviously that made her no money. She’d often be strapped for cash; she’d call me up and say “I’m so broke this month I feel like a street walker.” One time she seriously went looking for stripper work, till she decided she was too old for the job (or more likely some club owner decided it for her).
She was always in a foul mood, spaced out, off in her own world, closed minded, and bitter. She’d openly say, “I hate the world.” Maybe that’s one thing I liked about her — her Mad Max existence.
