The one in the next stall is dying...

She crawled (and I mean crawled) into the bathroom, slammed the door, and somehow managed to pull herself up for a minute to lock it. She was about to die, wearing an unflattering mid-calf skirt and foam-core platform sandals (which they still make?) in a seedy coke-bar-and-restaurant. "What was she thinking?," I wondered as I discussed with friends ideas about Culture Industry and the even more intriguing Black Embassy, both bizarre Factory-ish projects. This woman in the bathroom, however, was about to die, and seemed to have nothing to carry on her name, her beliefs, her terrible choice of footwear. . .

Maybe we had more than we realized. First of all, we had friends. Certainly no one would allow us to drop into a crawl position in public. Nor would they allow us to spend 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes alone in a bathroom, doing G-d knows what and praying to G-d knows who. Were we in the same position, certainly someone would save us, break open the door, call an ambulance, visit us at the hospital, all Demi Moore in St. Elmo's Fire with tubes and dramatic lighting, laughing, because now we knew that we could start over.

We didn't save her. We didn't know her. We joked about it (I mean, fuck, the foam-core platforms). That moment we cackled and strangers turned to us and joined in, because *it wasn't us*. Because someone who loved her was certainly about to save her....

I wonder what she thought, before the lights went out and it was all over. Perhaps she had a realization that it had come to naught, that life was a joke she didn't understand, that it was an agreement between her body and her soul, that she had surrounded herself with the wrong people, and that maybe these lessons would follow her into reincarnation. This next round, she could become something amazing. Maybe there were visions of a strong person taking a chance and loving her, a Kennedy Compound wedding, her daughter's first birthday, growing old and wondering how she'd pay for her medicine...

Eventually, someone showed up. We didn't worry about who she was, or concern ourselves with how shitty she was for leaving this chick she knew alone for 45 minutes to die and come back, die and come back. . . her arrival, no matter what, meant that everything was going to be okay. She had saved her, even kept track of the platform sandals as our heroine stumbled her way to the car, still clearly blacking out, unaware of the spectacle she had created...