"PRETTY VACANT"
Episode one in a series
by
Walter Cessna
Going full force into the forbidden reaches of her own mind had at first seemed like a good idea, but as Veruca fell deeper and deeper into a bottomless K. hole she began to seriously wonder why she spent so much of her free time a fucked-up mess. Veruca was willing to try anything. At least once. If she liked it she stuck to it like glue. If she didn't then it got the boot.
At sixteen she was living an utter virtual reality, juxtaposed of conflicting multiple personalities, moods and awkward exaggerations. Her body and her mind had developed early, like at twelve, transforming the former fat and nerdy child into a freaky deaky Russ Meyer supervixen.
She shot up to five foot eleven without the aid of the vintage Frederick's heels she had bought for ten bucks on St. Mark's, and her butt length honey colored hair spilled into straight edges around her face, streaked white on the sides. Her tits defied description and gravity, proudly saluting all those who went by, without the aid of a Wonderbra.
It was exactly ten minutes after
midnight and Veruca estimated that she had been waiting exactly five in
front of the Dead Zone for this pink haired door troll with too many holes
in his head to acknowledge her presence and let her the fuck in.
She was wearing an aluminum dress that her friend Lurch, a not yet famous downtown sculptor had welded onto her body for the evening and was perched upon foot-high platforms that she had been getting customized over the past six months, two inches at a time. Her hair was greased down into jagged tendrils that bounced Medusa like about her face, sometimes getting stuck in her thickly glossed lips that were already drowning under a too heavy coat of ruddy red lipstick.
Veruca had just run away from home and moved into a small hotel on the lower east side. It was a really trendy joint, and the owner warned her that the rent was due at 9 a.m. on the first of every month, as he took her last hundred dollars and gave her the key to a tiny room with the bathroom located down the hall.
This left her with no cash so she hooked up with some of the kids she had met at an SVA party a few weeks ago. They were mostly artists whose work Veruca admired and she had wanted to collaborate with. Veruca was a wanna-be designer who loved to draw but hated to sew. The decision for collaboration was not only logical, but it also got her some local press.
It was at an art gallery opening for her friend Berta, an anorexic Belgian girl with a rubber fetish, that her new life began to take shape. She had poured a liquid rubber and lycra body molding substance over Veruca and then shaped it into a Botero-esque mass that convoluted any former impression of the vixen-ish Veruca, and cast her for the evening as a grossly overweight drooling slug with a fierce hairdo.
She made Page Six (with a photo!), had lunch with Musto at The Voice, was the subject of an entire column as the new "girl of the moment" in Interview, and modeled for a fashion show at a fourteenth street meat market where a performance artist (who shall remain nameless) draped her nude body in extremely rare slices of beef as a Maria Callas record played angrily in the background. Veruca was more than willing to lower herself to whatever depths necessary for her art.
That was all in her first month of freedom. The second month had been a total fucking bore. Most of the artists she had worked with were jealous of her press and her hunger for more of it. They all dropped her like a hot potato except for Lurch, who hated everybody and loved the fact that Veruca was so good at pissing all those trolls off.
She had recently become friends with a "lollipop kid" - as Lurch called the scruffy ravers that inhabited Hotel 17 - along with a myriad of other fabricated yet fabulous drag queens, junkies and tourists.
The little green-haired girl wearing clothes about ten sizes too big for her and sporting five painfully pierced hoops in each nostril had met Veruca in the lobby one day and gave her an invite for Gila Monsters Emergency Room Party at the Dead Zone on Wednesday night. Veruca's entry into night life thus began.
To Be Continued....