"Double Your Pleasure" by Anonymous

After a long, tiring streak of drinking and dancing for many nights in a row at a night club in Metro-Detroit the lights came on and it was time to leave. My attempt to meet someone was once again thwarted and I started to think there had to be a better way to be single and mingle.

As I was walking out, I noticed my inner thigh was sticking to the inside of my jeans. In a drunken stupor, I shoved my hand down my pants to see what was lurking in the abyss. It was gooey and sticky and when I pulled my fingers out to explore what was creating this hot mess, I was overcome with the smell of grape.

I, nor anyone I knew, that evening had been riding the bubble-licious train so there is only one explanation that I could come up with:

In my booze-fueled haze, I had not only *gasp* sat on a night club toilet seat but had unknowingly entered into a symbiotic relationship with a stranger's used gum.

I'd hit rock-bottom, or so I thought, only to arrive home (alone) and have to use Goo-Be-Gone on my lady parts.

"Rock Bottom at Raffrika's" by George P. Gordon the III

It was the year after I graduated from college and I was confused and lost about what I wanted to do with my life. The summer before what would've been my final year my father sat me down and said, “look, you have got to finish school."

Now at the time it didn't seem like that big of a deal to me because it was the start of year 5 and I was already thinking "nobody graduates in 4 years anymore." My thought process was that I'd take the 20 hours I needed to finish in two semesters rather than bust my ass in one. My old man didn't see it that way, so that fall semester I took all 20 hours at once.

This was a pretty arduous task for me considering that I had never taken more than 15 hours and had no qualms about dropping a class or two if it was not to my liking. But I had to do it. To make matters worse it was my first year in college with a car and I had to pay the money back which was spent by my father who made the decision for me to hurry up and graduate. I owed him a lot of money.

I wanted to keep my on-campus job but to supplement my income I waited tables on the weekend. I was taking 20 hours /week in school, working part time on campus, then waiting tables Friday & Saturday night, and all day Sunday. It was a tough schedule but I made it through.

The restaurant I worked at was a place called Rafferty's. It was a chain down south that was nicer than Applebee’s, but shittier than Chili’s (if possible).

This was Memphis, TN and only two types of people came into Rafferty's: poor white trash and ghetto clientele --jean shorts, wife beaters, gold teeth, real camouflage and jerseys--just awful.

It was nothing to be working one night and have a party of five just reeking of weed. I once had a guest at a table get up and start peeing beside another table. And of course tipping might as well have been some sort of alien custom because nobody who dined there understood it. (The servers who worked there hated waiting on the black folks that came in there, but the white folks didn't tip either.)

So why would I work there? Well, several members of my fraternity already did and the store manager, who works there to this day still, was one of my best friends. Even though I had never waited tables I knew I could get a job.

So there I was waiting tables at Rafferty's on the weekends and hating life. To give you an idea about what was on the menu at “Raffrika” (a name that my buddy Todd coined because of the large groups of African Americans that would frequent there) one word could describe it and that word would be FRIED. Chicken finger platter: fried. Club Sandwich: fried. Bread Basket: fried.

The one healthy thing on the menu was a house salad with fried potato sticks on it. But the most popular version was the Chicken Finger Salad which had a mountain of, you guessed it fried chicken. Of course we had burgers and steaks but everything else was fucking fried. (Memphis is one of the fattest cities in America)

A steak we had was called the Cowboy Steak--which was about the size of your fist and was ALWAYS ordered well done by the awesome customer base at Rafferty's. When it was brought to the table it looked like a lump of sizzling coal.

With a clientele like we had, and a menu that was unhealthy to say the least, you knew the staff had to be interesting. There was Sylvester a coke-head from the streets of Memphis and Carlos and Nebraska (yes his name was Nebraska) two brothers who were slightly off. The wait staff rapidly turned over but our fearless leader Pill Bell (Bill Bell)--A rotund redheaded, piece of shit, degenerate, thieving, drug using, womanizing (only if they were underage), and lowlife GM, was always there.

Pill Bell would steal from the servers by charging them $2 to wear the Rafferty's shirt--a shirt that was rarely washed and smelled like it was fried. He’d steal from the bar by drinking all of the Crown then buying well whiskey and pouring it back into the Crown bottles, which in Tennessee was ILLEGAL. He ran a sports gambling ring in the restaurant which again is ILLEGAL. And of course he named his daughter Britney after a then pubescent Britney Spears. The guy was a pederast.

I toughed it out though and at the end of that hell semester --1.6 GPA-- I graduated. Seeing that I didn't want to go out and get a real job, I went to graduate school. This was a no-brainer because my campus job was willing to give me an assistantship, meaning that once I became degree seeking and passed the GMAT, grad school would be paid for and I’d get $800 a month. Maybe I'd work a shift or two for extra cash but nothing crazy. That semester of grad school I had one goal and that was to kick ass on the GMAT and after taking it 3 times. I never did. I never got that assistantship.

I never finished grad school and lost my campus job because by the end of that summer I was not in school anymore. I was a non-student and a full time waiter at fucking Rafferty's.

As the months went on I was the only one left working there. My friends had moved on (they were fired) and Todd had been transferred. I had to get out of there.

One day after coming home to the foul stench of fried food, I realized that I’d had enough. I was determined to take the first job opportunity that came my way and it happened to be working for a pyramid scheme which at the time seemed legit enough. It was one of those places that advertised themselves like this:"Do you have what it takes to make 150K in your first year of employment?!?!" I was down for at least looking into it. I remember the first day the salespeople would stand around in circles shouting, "We've got juice, how ‘bout you?!?"

Now of course this was a sham but I so desperately wanted to leave Rafferty's that I'd figure I would take anything. My job was selling children's books and toys inside K-Mart, Toys - R - Us, and any other shit store in the south. We were selling this crap under the pretense that the money raised was going to a children's charity. These items looked more like dollar store reject items but people were willing to buy it because they thought it went to a good cause. And it did--sort of. Roughly less than 5% of the proceeds went to that charity, the other 95% went to that shady business and to my team.

I knew something was up when we were specifically asked to not take donations. Why not? It was a charity, right? But it was a lot easier to make it look legit if we were ACTUALLY selling these items. So by the end of the day I had to make sure I had a running tally in my head of donations so when we settled up at the end of the night it looked like the numbers matched. Meaning, at the end of the day we had to give away some of this shit. I was in essence scamming a scam company who was raising money for a scam charity.

It all came to a head when after having to drive 2 hours away, setting up a table in bumble-fuck Mississippi, and working all day, we each made $58. I quit immediately and went back to Rafferty's.

Rock bottom hit hard when I went up to Pill Bell and had to ask this horse- ass for my server job back and explain how I didn't make it in the world of selling children's books for a fake charity. I went on to sell fried food to low-lives at “Raffrika’s” for another year.

Rock Bottoms: Short and Sweet

" After arriving on an ill-planned vacation with basically no money I sustained myself on leftover room service trays that littered the hall of my hotel... for 3 days."

"I was so poor for a stretch of time that I couldn't afford basics let alone new potting soil for my rapidly withering plants, which by all rights, were my only decent possession. I started stealing soil from my landlord's potted plants in the hallway cup by cup at a time to fortify my own plants. This plan worked great until she caught me in the act and told me she "suspected it was me doing it." I was literally dirt poor when I hit rock bottom."

"The time I had no red flags" by Brooke Van Poppelen

Short of selling my body to the night, I have been one to go the distance for a little of that human touch. It wasn't really about sex either. I was emotionally bankrupt and spent months on end refusing to help myself but insisting that someone else do the work. Individuals who I looked to to "do the work" included random men with or without a staph infection who might populate a crusty bar in Brooklyn at 3am, a mind-boggling amount of whiskey, and copious amounts of junk food. The junk food served as my buffer if the copious amount of alcohol was unsuccessful in helping me get laid--I could go home and ingest a bean bag chair's worth of food in an attempt to fill my emotional hole.

This little routine of appearing normal to everyone during the day, but falling off the map every night after good people go to bed went on for close to a year. Even though I worked early hours, there was a restlessness inside of me that kept me awake and drove me to co-mingle with scum-bags until the wee hours of the morning.

Sadly, after not being in a relationship for a very, very long time, let alone being touched by another human, I sort of lost perspective on what a normal interaction with a male was like and it only got worse in NYC where I have a theory that there are no men available except for cheaters, sociopaths and closeted homosexuals who already have 1 foot submerged into a Roman bath.

So not only is this a story about being really hard up to meet someone, but just how much you let your guard down when you think you’re making a connection. This is a time when I had no red flags.

I used to go out on dates from time to time at a place called “Doc Holiday’s” which, if you don’t know, might be in the top 5 dirtiest places to drink in NYC. And I wasn’t really on dates there. I just stayed long enough drinking myself blind, talking to a stranger until I convinced myself we were on a date. We suburban, indie types love us a dive bar,and I was always looking for a kindred spirit but generally it was just a bunch of Ted Nugent roadie looking dudes passed out in their beer.



Onward.

So I happened upon a dark stranger who was drinking by himself at Doc Holiday’s. I had stumbled in with a rowdy group of girlfriends and struck up a conversation with him while I was waiting for my 500th margarita in a pint glass to arrive. He was handsome and his attire was casual yet sharp. He said something smart alec-y to me and I decided I liked him so I pulled up a bar chair next to him and lured him into my web. Web meaning I am a female and I have a vagina. Our conversation got very out of control quickly and we found one another quite entertaining. So much so that I asked him what his name was. He wouldn’t tell me.

My drink arrived and I started in again with the witty banter and asked him again what his name was. He insisted I call him…”Lord Quinne”.I thought it was cute that he was being so hard to get. He told me I was adorable, but then took a bar napkin and said, “Here. Your face is greasy,” and as though I was a child wiped off the bridge of my nose and cheeks--the T-Zone. I sat there stunned for a moment despite the rapid numbness setting in from the alcohol to sort of calculate what had happened. That was like, really rude, right? Huh. Who knows. I’m drunk and he’s cute and sitting here. Oh WELL!

We were nursing some PBR cans when he asked me if I wanted to get out of Doc Holidays and watch a flick at his place… which was upstairs. Above Doc Holidays.

“Sure!" I said, thinking I was really hitting it off with this stranger who I was apparently now on a date with. The drunk mind is a magical place, is it not?

We scurried out of there up to his apartment. He unlocked the door and we were greeted by anywhere from 6-10 cats. They were everywhere. He picked 2 of them up by their scruffs and smashed them into his face as though he had a giant cat beard and made a really intense screeching noise which maybe the cats liked?

“You ready to watch a movie?” he asked. We proceeded into his common space as he hit play on his dvd player and American Psycho popped onto the screen during an especially violent scene. Okay. I was finally feeling uncomfortable but didn’t have the sense to just burst out of there because I’m afraid of looking stupid or making a scene, but apparently not of being killed.

He cozied up very close to me on the couch, reached into a drawer of the coffee table and pulled out a little Star Wars tin with Darth Vader embossed into it. It was full of a fine, white powder which he began snorting with a vengeance through a plastic straw.

"Is that cocaine I asked?", not wanting to know the answer. He told me it was Ritalin. Phew. That’s so much more normal. I was eyeballing the door and getting fidgety when he lurched at me and started trying to kiss me.

This is so hard to admit, but for a brief moment I actually kissed this freak back. I thought that maybe I was just being too Midwest for my own good what with having morals intact and knowing a bad situation when you're in one. Maybe this was some ultimate test of his that I needed to pass before letting me see the real him which did not have serial killer written all over it.

But then I shoved him away. I felt my face break out into hives because I am terribly allergic to cats and he had smeared them all over his face which was pressed against mine. I bolted up and locked myself in the bathroom and looked at the irritated welts on my jaw and around my mouth. And then I really looked at myself. What the christ was happening to me? I legitimately started panicking. I was splashing cold water on my face when I also felt my heart racing, because I got a contact buzz from whatever that substance was that he was snorting. I had (and still have) never done drugs and now, I was sailing from adrenaline and residual powder that got onto my tongue from his gums and mouth.

With brute force, I unlocked the door, grabbed my purse and fled out the door while cats scattered everywhere, muttering something unintelligible. But really, at this point, at THIS point did it matter that I didn’t make sense? This guy was fucking nuts. I hailed a cab and spent the last 20 dollars I possessed to get back to Brooklyn at 4am unable to sleep, whacked out on an upper and trembling with shame.

That incident was definitely a rock-bottom moment from which I am a survivor. If I had possessed the capability to have any red flags go up instead of being so desperate to meet someone, this wouldn’t have happened. I finally felt shook up and knew I had escaped a totally weird situation.

A few days later, a text popped up on my phone from “Lord Quinne” asking me out on a real date. Really? Something about the other night spelled success to him? A girl covered in hives fleeing from your apartment? Wow. It really is hard to meet someone in NYC I guess.

Time to take out the trash

This is Brooke mere months before hitting rock bottom. Note her use of NYC garbage as a place to recline, fake mustaches worn as eyebrows and blue-blocker sunglasses. This picture was taken at 7am and it's clear she was in store for a wake-up call.