Literary Nonfiction
Bottle Girl
By Clea Bierman
Originally published in [PANK]
At 8am on a Sunday morning I found myself running east on 33rd Street from Madison Avenue. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there or where exactly I was going. It was July and the New York air was dewy. I could feel the strings of my bikini—tied too tight—digging into the sides of my neck. Why I had a bikini on, I couldn’t be sure. Between the hours of midnight and 4am, I’d finished a gram of cocaine by myself. I worked as a bottle service waitress in Manhattan’s most elite hip hop nightclub, and lost hours and blurry memories had increasingly become the norm. But bursting into a moment of consciousness while mid-sprint fifty blocks away from my apartment was something new.
Here I am Joanne
By Clea Bierman
Originally published in Pithead Chapel
I’ve signed up to be a Shot Girl for ten days during Bike Week in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
I’ve seen people do body shots, mostly in movies and a handful of times at frat parties. The Shot Girl lies on a table, her midriff exposed, lime juiced is squeezed on her stomach and then covered in salt. Tequila is poured into her belly button. The shot taker licks the salt-lime combo off her body and then slurps the tequila from her naval.
Rolling
By Clea Bierman
Originally Published in The Los Angeles Review
On New Year’s Eve 2011 I almost killed a friend. I was twenty-three and for the previous three months I’d been helping my boyfriend sell drugs in San Diego. He’d been a college football star who’d fallen just short of the NFL and found himself in identity limbo, selling “Molly”—the street name for MDMA—as he searched for a full-time job. While he handled the cash, I became the pusher: chatting up strangers and even convincing my strait-laced friends of the euphoric effects. I’d also begun using: twirling my fingers through my long, blonde hair every time the tactile joy washed over me, relinquishing control and riding the wave. Rolling. In three months I’d gone from feeling out-of-body after one pill, to requiring two or three.