Red Haired Susan

The name says it all. You could see her coming from over the horizon - and woe betide you if she was coming from behind the wheel. Susan was the incarnation of Janice Joplin - but without the voice to sing her tortured soul. She was a trust-fund baby, with enough money to buy her boyfriend a bronze Porsche, and then replace it twice after he wrapped it - and then another - around trees off the shoulder of Highway 1. Three cars in two months. She ran out of affection for the boyfriend long before she ran out of funds.

Billie Holiday sang, : "when you've got money, you've got lots of friends - crowded 'round your door...God bless the child, that's got his own..." Susan and her entourage held court in her expansive living room, in her lodge style house on the Bolinas Mesa. The booze was an ever flowing fount. Cocaine and other powders were like a snowy blanket, laying piled up in drifts on tables around the house. The party never ended at Susan's house - even as she would fall into her room, bleary eyed, and beyond control of her physical and mental abilities. Often, as she lay semiconscious in her room, utterly wasted, & near overdose, revelers from the other room would slither in to relieve her of the cash which was stuffed in uncounted wads in her purse & pockets.

Susan's breakfast consisted of fresh squeezed orange juice, mixed with a pint of 151 proof rum. She was always proud of how healthful the fresh squeezed orange juice was, as if to note that she had some little corner of will for self care left.

Susan died, predictably, in her bed. Her autopsy revealed that she had ruined nearly every major organ - stomach, liver, pancreas, kidneys, heart & lungs - with the uncontrolled flow of smokes, fluids, powders and pills into her addiction riddled body.

Susan was a lost child, trying to live without love. She tried vainly to buy it from a circle of self obsessed friends, too enamored of her wealth & willingness to see (or care) that they were exploiting a dying woman.

Susan was twenty eight, when she passed away.