Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction by Claudia Christian, Morgan Grant Buchanan Read Free Book Online

coming year’s Oscars and Emmys. You think that way when you’re seventeen. Still, I was upbeat. This was a small hitch. I could wait it out.

    The new apartment was another unwelcome surprise. My bedroom window was right next to the building’s cluster of garbage cans. In summer it stank like hell. To add to the ambiance, Michael was a chain-smoker extraordinaire, using the last ember on one cigarette to start up the next. He’d have a cigarette going in the shower, on the toilet, in bed, and sometimes there was so much smoke in the apartment that I considered camping out by the 405 freeway because there would have been less pollution.
    I knew Michael was gay before I moved in with him, but I didn’t know he had a bondage fetish. Our couches were wrapped in thick black leather belts, and a creepy studded leather mask was the central feature of the coffee table. It was like the S&M Mona Lisa; its hollow eyes followed you wherever you sat.
    My room was like a different dimension. You opened the door from the smoke-filled bondage universe and stepped through the portal into Teen Girl World. I couldn’t afford new things, so I’d decorated with various odds and ends brought from home: a frilly pink duvet with ’70s rainbow sheets, a boom box, an oversize Led Zeppelin poster with the hermit from the tarot deck on it, and a small shelf with my favorite books. The only things I had that were definitively adult were the clothes that my mom had bought me—classy, expensive items—and the beginnings of an edged-weapon collection that my dad had encouraged.
    Michael was a young, handsome guy, so he developed a thriving social life in no time at all, but I didn’t know anyone in L.A. I’d sit in my room trying to ignore the smell of garbage and the sound of the guys in the next room slapping the crap out of each other in the throes of passion and wonder what on earth I’d gotten myself into. Then I started getting sick in the mornings. When I took a home pregnancy test, the strip turned blue.

    The pregnancy came as a shock. I’d been on the pill. My mom always insisted that every time she’d been knocked up, three boys and one girl, she’d been using birth control. My mom is given to hyperbole, so I’d taken that with a pinch of salt. Now I knew better. I also knew I had to get an abortion. I was far too young to have a child, and at that time I felt as though Charles Manson would have been a better candidate for fatherhood than Tre. I went to a clinic in downtown L.A. and found myself sitting silently with a half-dozen miserable women, waiting for a bed. It was like a production line. They put me under for six minutes, scraped me out, and gave me a glass of orange juice when I woke up. A nurse took the empty glass from my hand and tapped her clipboard impatiently.
    “You’re all done. We need the bed for the next girl.”
    I walked out of there feeling miserable and alone, but I was determined to hold it all together. I went back to the apartment, sat down, and worked out my expenses. The abortion had eaten into my already meager savings; I couldn’t make next month’s rent. What if I lost my room? Where the hell do you go when you can’t afford to live in a smoke-filled bondage den? If they’d given me an Academy Award right then and there, I’d have hocked it for fifty bucks.
    I needed to stave off homelessness long enough to keep my dream alive, so I went down to a Mexican restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard and told the manager that I was a twenty-one-year-old Canadian (to explain why I didn’t have any ID). I don’t know if he believed me, but I got a job as a cocktail waitress. I had to wear this black leotard with fishnet stockings, high heels, and a little black bow tie. At the end of the shift I collected my tips—a grand total of twelve dollars. I went back to the apartment, locked myself in my room, and burst into tears. Stop the fucking world, I want to get off .
    I was down to two choices: endure