It's a creekmore world

Friday March 24, 1994, Manhattan

It was raining on my birthday.  Some friends told me to come with them for casual drinks after work. By 7pm I was wasted – as usual.  We stopped at a Starbucks, one of the first in NYC, and I stole a pound of coffee beans.

I smoked a fatty on the way over to a party on 1st Ave and 12th St. at the apartment of the bass-player from slightly famous band ‘Girls against Boys’.  It was packed.

My roommate Paul, who had stopped by a local drug church for a hit of DMT, put on aviator goggles and sat in a corner of the room mumbling to himself.

I talked to this chick about how I was going to Vietnam soon.  (not true)  I did not talk about how I was unemployed, an active addict and alcoholic, and a casual shoplifter (very true).  She gave me her apartment phone number and left.

After leaving two or three answering machine messages the following week, I made a final attempt to reach the chick.  She had completely forgotten me.  But she agreed to a date anyway.

We joined her Columbia journalism-school friends at a Time Square strip joint.   We wandered through the pink neon light and sticky floors and private booths.  We were thrown out by security.  We had casual sex that night.

Four years later the chick, Trisha Creekmore, married me.

I was lucky to get her digits on my 25th birthday, and even luckier that she trusted there would grow a man from inside that boy.  (She still has her doubts.)

I will never need another birthday present.  I got the person that I like and love more than life itself for my 25th.