The Never List

trajectory of Tracy’s life, I suppose it was inevitable that her crowd started gravitating toward the darker side of the city, the parts the bus tourists avoided. Her favorite bar had no sign, just a black door against a black wall throbbing with the beat of industrial music. Nine Inch Nails. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Lords of Acid.
    The door creaked opened on its rusty hinge to reveal a dark cavernous interior, like a black hole, with threads of cigarette smoke unwinding out into the night air. That was it. The bouncers, with their slow-healing cuts in the shapes of slave markings, knew Tracy and stepped aside for her to enter.
    Later she would admit she’d been naïve. At the time she didn’t understand where this life could lead. All she knew was that she felt like a part of something, something secret, something that gave her a sense of belonging. The rich tourists coming through the city had nothing on them. This was an empire. And the angry music that pounded in her head every night almost matched the anger she felt at her mother and at the world. This was a strong empire they’d built, and she felt its strength coursing through her veins, more powerfully than any Class A narcotic ever could.
    Tracy spent four years in that scene. On the rare occasions when she talked about that life, I almost grew jealous of it. The freaks and weirdos had all congregated in the church of New Orleans, a privileged spot in the world of outsiders, and they lived together on the streets, in disintegrating rooming houses, in group apartments, all hanging with bright scarves, cheap jewelry, and unclean sequined garters, in a strange community of acceptance.
    Nothing really mattered there: age, appearance, gender, preference. It was all one big melting pot of aberration, and the sex and drugs and occasional violence were only small pieces of the picture, pieces that helped them all live through the experience of being misunderstood, used up, and broken but still deeply, unerringly human. There, in that bubble of underground life, judgment was suspended for an hour, a year, a lifetime, while occasionally a shred of self-esteem and even pride would blossom under the folds of gossamer, lace, and leather.
    Then something happened to Tracy that caused all that power to drain out of her. She kept the story a secret from us for years. Inthe cellar, we named it the Disaster, so she wouldn’t have to spell out the details of the worst thing that had ever happened to her. The worst thing besides Jack Derber, that is.
    And after the Disaster, her mother disappeared again, maybe for good. When she’d been gone for three weeks, Tracy just about decided she wasn’t coming back. She figured she could hide that fact from Social Security for a while and could forge her mother’s name on the checks long enough to get some savings together, but by then she didn’t even care.
    She sank deeper into the club scene, sickened, miserable, and alone. Her life was going nowhere, and she was smart enough to know it. Drinking wasn’t helping. That night at the bar some stranger offered her a hit. That night she took the needle in the dark, her hands shaking with fear and anticipation. Maybe this was the answer after all: the quick way out of the pain, if only for a little while.
    She had seen enough people shooting up to know the drill, and she took the leather strap and fastened it tightly around her arm. The needle found its way into her vein easily, slipping in like destiny. The first rush of the drug filled her with euphoria and wiped away her suffering, sweeping it out like a burst of clean air whipping through the city streets at dawn. At that moment, for the first time ever, she thought she understood her mother and wondered if she hadn’t been right about life after all.
    Somehow Tracy stumbled out of the club, into the back alley, where she could be alone to savor the pleasure. It was a hot summer night, the air full, so thick with humidity it hit her like a wall as the door slammed closed behind her. The sweat was beading on her forehead, dripping down her chest and into the cheap leather of her hand-me-down bustier. She leaned against the Dumpster out back and slid down into the refuse of a thousand sunken lives—used condoms, cigarette packs, ripped underwear,part of a rusted-out chain. But even then something at the heart of the pleasure of the drug made the tears well up, made her think about everything that had happened, and