Death of a Nemesis
As a teenager, I had wanted an extraordinary friend. She came in the form of Amber, a charismatic artist and former heroin addict. She was my partner-in-crime, my muse, and my backstabber. After her death, could I finally shake off the hold she had over me?
I had always ached to have a best female friend. Being an awkward and bookish child made it difficult for me to make friends in my tiny New Hampshire hometown, which prized a certain vapid gregariousness in its girl children. My oddness was off-putting to my more conventional female classmates, yet I wasn’t quite trashy-fun enough for the girls who were experimenting with heavy metal, heavy petting, and raiding their parents’ liquor cabinets. In high school, I befriended a clique of misfits with whom I smoked cloves and hung out with in Taco Bell parking lots, but a serious best friend still eluded me. In that pre-internet stone age, I read and reread books on the Warhol Factory and the early New York punk scenes and fantasized about having a comrade-in-arms with whom to crash loft parties and create art happenings. Within that liminal space of the 1990s, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, there was a sense of living in an age of no particular historical importance. Our images captured on disposable cameras we never developed and VHS tapes left to rot in attics, we were the last youths to be unrecorded by an internet that never forgets.
In college, I gained a frenemy (before such a perfect word had been popularized) named Amber. She was a chain-smoking punk girl with cropped dark hair who was obsessed with English literature (she insisted I read Trollope if I was going to be an English major). We became fast friends at a women’s college in Boston mostly full of field hockey girls. We watched Russ Meyer and John Waters movies on the TV in the common area (we had to fight with the girls down the hall who wanted to watch Friends). We flirted with boys in leather jackets at rock clubs to catch rides back to our dorm, and wore sparkly thrift store outfits and velvet platform heels to the 1970s glam rock night at the local dive bars. We traded books about fringe culture and shared our notebooks scribbled with our dangerous truths. She confided in me after she was raped by an acquaintance, and she let me cry on her shoulder after I had an abortion.
Amber was also an ex-heroin addict at a time when it had a tinge of the bohemian romantic rather than the pitiably pedestrian. Even though she was in Narcotics Anonymous, she wielded her past of junk-copping hijinks as a weapon against me, a sheltered good girl from the sticks. I hadn’t experienced real life like she had, even though she herself had grown up in a wealthy New England suburb.
She was fun, she was a liar, she was witty, she was a grifter, she had a fantastic laugh, she was a manipulative bitch.
I cast Amber to play the lead villainess in a couple of my student films. In my feature-length faux-exploitation epic Girl Armageddon, she played the leader of a girl gang inspired by Valerie Solonas’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto who murdered anyone who crossed her. Friends of mine who had never met her (or had met her and hated her) thought she had a compelling cinematic presence.
Amber always left an impression. My mother first met her for coffee along with Amber’s father―onto whose lap Amber, kitted out in a short babydoll dress, kept leaping while squealing, “Daddy!” (I was shocked to hear this: Amber had always told me she hated her father, an ultra-conservative physician who once ripped out her new nose ring and called her a “slut”). A couple of my old high school friends once gave Amber a lift to my parents’ house; her endless whining in the backseat about the “boring” New Hampshire countryside prompted my friend at the wheel to jokingly whisper to my friend riding shotgun, “Hey, if we kill her and dump her body in the ditch ahead, no-one will know or care.” Curt, a rock magazine editor I wrote for, met Amber only once―she wanted to interview a sex worker for her capstone project, and he got her access to an ex-girlfriend who did full-service sex work while in college. Curt was a cynical lothario and professional alcoholic who’d seen and fucked it all. I’m not sure exactly what Amber said or did (other than immediately divulging her ex-addict status to him in a naked bid for street cred), but Curt would shudder at the mention of her name forever afterwards.
Amber was writing a novel that was loosely based on her life “back in the day” (i.e. when she was using). It included such tidbits as the time her dealer felt up her tits on the pretense that she might be wearing a police wire―the dealer’s female companion wearily looked on while smoking a Virginia Slim (later in the car, her drug fiend boyfriend asked if the groping turned her on―Amber quipped, “Only because his wife was watching”). She wrote about having deliberately sold a tainted batch of heroin to her sweetly naïve drug buddy, and coldly watched him while he quaked with near-death spasms so she could precisely record the drug’s effects later in her journal. The novel was to be her magnum opus.
After Amber and I had enough of college dorm life, we got an apartment together in the student enclave of Allston, Massachusetts. Just after we signed the lease, she was diagnosed with a rare form of epilepsy that anti-seizure medication couldn’t control. Her restrictive diet caused her to lose more weight from her already thin frame. Sometimes I carried her to her room while she shook with convulsions. I think she hated my seeing her so weak.
Amber quit grad school due to her illness. Left to her own devices, she amused herself by screwing with people’s heads. She pretended she was eighteen to hang out with some teenage ravers (it’s relevant to mention here that she first got into Ecstasy, and later heroin, when she was in the rave scene in her teens). She deliberately broke up a couple within the raver group by sleeping with the boyfriend. She did so simply because she was bored, and was unbothered that the girlfriend was newly pregnant. Within a month, she abruptly dumped the boy because she tired of his clinginess and Jnco jeans. She dragged me to her audition at infamous local strip joint The Glass Slipper (she needed me as a bodyguard, she said), then called her parents afterwards to tell them she would start stripping for real if they didn’t cough up a bigger allowance for her (they wired her more money ASAP).
She regularly “borrowed” clothes and cash from me. Once while driving me and the raver teens around, Amber abruptly kicked me out of her car and left me in an unfamiliar part of Boston just because she felt like it. The final straw of our “friendship” was her being annoyed with me over a routine roommate spat, so she called my parents and spun a tale to them that I was an escort.
The last time I spoke to Amber, I was screaming-sobbing at her in our apartment after she slyly accused me of sleeping with strange men in her bed. She said this right in front of my parents and my younger sister who were there to help me move. My family called Amber a liar and told her to leave.
The last time I laid eyes on Amber, she was on a Boston subway train that was too crowded for me to board. She was seated, staring straight ahead, playing with her hair. I stayed on the platform, praying she didn’t see me in my dumpy coat and no makeup. I turned around and waited until I heard the subway car roll away.
I exorcised Amber the only way I knew how: I made art of her. For my final student film project, I created a cartoonish parody of her― a spiteful tattletale who gets her comeuppance. I wanted to crystalize her character on celluloid as the hypocritical bourgeois square that Amber had buried underneath her cosmopolitan surface. Little did I know, the real Amber was already dead.
Sometime after I last saw her, she had shacked up with a boy who was using her for money and had lured her back into heroin. Within months of her broken sobriety, Amber had taken her own life via a morphine overdose (likely stolen from her father’s office).
I heard through the grapevine that Amber’s parents were planning to send her novel to publishers. I held my breath for a long time, secretly dreading that her book would become the new Go Ask Alice or Girl, Interrupted (in the late 1990s/early 2000s, stories about damaged white girls from the suburbs who dabbled in counterculture were having a moment). I feared Amber’s angular face would be as ubiquitous as Edie Sedgwick’s on T-shirts and tote bags. I would be asked, “Oh, you knew her?” and pumped for details on her short but thrilling life.
It never happened.
Amber’s parents never published the novel. Because she died before the dawn of social media, a Google search for her name (her surname has an unusual spelling) only brings up a brief obituary and no pictures. As far as the 21th century is concerned, she never lived at all.
About a year after her death, I moved to New York and had many adventures in the fading demimonde of post-9/11. I attempted to emulate what I saw in the No Wave movies and Velvet Underground songs Amber and I had consumed together. I sang in ill-fated bands, worked odd jobs, and messed around with non-committal boys in semi-famous bands. I even finally found myself a best friend, a redheaded scene queen bombshell named Krystal who tucked me under her glittery wing. Krystal and our gang of bad bitches hooked up with each other and raised hell in queer bars, BDSM clubs, and yuppie coke dens alike. In short, I made the life that Amber had mocked me for not having lived. There was a freedom in being untethered from the people who knew you in braces and bad haircuts, having the people you meet only experiencing you fresh and in the now. But after a few years of feeling the brunt of the grinding poverty, creeping gentrification, random violence, and casual heartbreak of New York (especially after Krystal fled for the Left Coast), I was ready to move on. I fell in love with a Massachusetts weirdo artist, and returned to Boston to live in an avant-garde artist collective and attain more stable employment at Harvard University. I held on to this new, bold girl I had become in New York.
I still sometimes saw Amber’s ghost in other people―a slender brunette in an army jacket ascending a subway escalator, a gutterpunk screaming at her boyfriend in the street, the condescending grimace of a fairweather friend.
Once when I was hanging outside a Boston nightclub, I ran into a willowy girl who looked vaguely familiar (she actually resembled Amber a little bit). I had been celebrating a friend’s birthday, and was tipsy and joyous in my hot pants and fishnets. I chatted with the willowy girl, and upon learning her somewhat uncommon name of Beatrix, I figured out she was an old friend of Amber’s. Amber had gossiped to me that Beatrix had tried to become a fashion model in Europe, but ended up just smoking pot and screwing random Eurotrash “model scouts.” I had even met Beatrix once at my Allston apartment―my then-boyfriend handed a $100 bill to a tow truck driver who had tried to make off with Beatrix’s car after she parked in the wrong spot.
“Oh, I used to live with Amber!” I volunteered. “Remember when your car almost got towed?”
“Oh yes, I remember. Amber told me you were a whore,” Beatrix replied with a smirk. “That’s why your pimp boyfriend had the cash on him to pay off that tow truck driver.”
I felt as though Amber had reached out her hand from beyond the veil and slapped me.
I never mourned Amber’s death. I was relieved, finally released from fearing I would accidentally run into her at a coffee shop or on the subway. But sometimes I wondered what she would have become had she lived. One of the wastrels with sunken eyes who line Boston’s Methadone Mile? Unlikely, given her upper-middle class background. A teaching adjunct who casually slept with her students? Warmer, I think.
I would be remiss not to admit that an aspect of our stormy friendship was my inferiority complex over my appearance. At a time when the reigning look was literally dubbed “heroin chic,” I had felt like a chubby monster next to her serpentine slimness. She took pleasure in pointing out my “fat ass” (annoyingly, she would never live to see the day when ample behinds were rapturously covered by the mainstream press and flaunted by the world’s most desirable women). I wondered if her intriguing androgynous features would have eventually hardened into her mother’s haughty New England housewife face. Or would her ill health have made a tired old woman of her at age thirty? Impossible to know―she will be forever frozen in her mid-twenties.
Amber never reached an age where one is expected to make good on the “promise” of their youth. Would she have grown into an adult of accomplishment, or become a shut-in trapped in the childhood bedroom of her parents’ house, blogging into the ether poetry that nobody read?
These memories came flooding back to me after several of my short stories were published―something Amber’s writing never was. I was reminded of Six Degrees of Separation when Ouisa Kittredge claimed she did not want to reduce her experience with a young conman posing as Sidney Pointier’s son to a mere “anecdote.” I have wanted nothing more than to shrink my bittersweet remembrances of Amber down to a single bite-sized anecdote, ideal to serve up like a canapé at a cocktail party. I had immortalized Amber’s image in the videos stashed in my closet. Have I now finally captured a bit of her soul in words? Can I at last safely trap my filmy vision of Amber like a moth under glass?
*Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
