“It’s a pool of sharks. Get ready for the bite,” Pappy told me over a finger of whiskey one sweltering August evening several years ago. The next morning my mother and I were to drive a U-Haul across the Mason-Dixon, over a river and into the teaming center of life, corruption, pleasure and sorrow. But I just knew that I could handle it. New York City was to be my city (as I’ve said time and again).
“No, no, no!” I told him. I could spot the cads, the fakes, the poor girls from far away lands without good sense or two honest dollars to their name. Intuition and just enough intelligence would save me from every two-bit hooker and con-artist in the Big Apple…
The wider my eyes grew and the more ardent my rhetoric became, the deeper the lines grew in Pappy’s furrowed brow. Granddaddy was a wise man.
I care deeply, I love deeply. And, at times, this has meant that I’ve put my trust in the wrong people. Even the most immoral characters I have imbued with hope and faith. No longer. I leave this week and go into the next a bit hardened… and, of course, saddened. Who were they to take away my naivete?
Time to wisen up or leave this town.
I am a Southerner in the City, an aging debutante, a small town girl cursed with big city aspirations. My grandfather says that I’m at the cusp of feminine failure—I’m as old as a bottle of prime Tennessee whiskey (aged 25 years) and still single. I need to “get on home” and find a nice Southern boy—a doctor, maybe an insurance salesman. At this, I dig in my heels and set out to date every inappropriate man in Manhattan…
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