Page 3 of All the Way to the River
R ayya Mokdessy Elias.
Born in Syria, raised in Detroit, forged on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Rayya: who came to America at the age of seven, from the beautiful, vibrant city of Aleppo—where her family had been affluent and glamorous and where, in her memory, there was always music and dancing, and flowers everywhere.
Rayya: who—after arriving in cold, foreign, winter-dark Michigan—never felt quite at home anywhere again.
Rayya: who always felt too Middle Eastern to be American and too American to be Middle Eastern.
Who spoke just enough Arabic to argue with cab drivers, but whose only consistent nod to her background was always to preorder the halal meals on airplanes—despite having been raised as an Orthodox Christian. (“That shit’s just fresher, yo!”)
Rayya: whose traditional and hardworking immigrant parents could never make sense of this wild youngest child of theirs.
Who was utterly ungovernable. Who hated to study, hated to work.
Who was a loving and affectionate child but also the most disobedient.
Who was a radiant performer—a clown, a star—with a face that was always bathed in light.
Who never stopped making her parents laugh and never stopped making them cry.
Who, by the age of thirteen, was already skipping school to drive across state lines with older friends in order to see Led Zeppelin in concert.
While high on acid. Which she was also selling.
Rayya: who described herself as an “ex-junkie, ex-felon, postpunk, glamour-butch dyke.” Who was closeted until her early twenties, because there was no place for her queerness in the Syrian Orthodox community of 1970s Detroit, where girls did not traditionally leave their parents’ homes until they were successfully married to doctors and lawyers from within the Arab émigré fold.
Who, growing up, was considered too masculine to be beautiful by the standards of the day, but too female to be offered the freedoms that her brothers and boy cousins enjoyed.
Who always felt shamed and excluded. Who didn’t know what she was till she started seeing people like Elton John, David Bowie, and Freddie Mercury on TV—and then wanted to become them.
Rayya: who was gorgeous. Who was stunning .
Who identified as an androgyne. Who had the dark eyes and dramatic cheekbones of the heroes in Persian illuminated manuscripts.
Whose haircut was always something between the punked-out skater do of a little boy in a Japanese anime adventure and a badass Keith Richards shag.
Whose face changed from male to female, from wise to playful, from timeless to childish as the light shifted.
Rayya: whom I could stare at all day and never get bored.
Rayya: who was an outrageously talented musician, writer, filmmaker, and hairdresser.
Who could make friends with any musical instrument.
Who was an electrifying performer with a muscular, beautiful, three-octave-wide voice.
Who struggled, however, with insecurity, addiction, shame, and creative paralysis, and never became as successful as she wanted to be.
Who nonetheless made independent films that were shown at the Berlin International Film Festival, and who never stopped writing songs, and who published a brilliant memoir that was about, of all things, recovery from addiction.
Rayya: who once lost a six-figure record deal because she told a Sony executive to suck her dick.
Rayya: who was her own worst enemy—who was her own only enemy.
Who got herself into an astonishing amount of trouble during the course of her life but could talk her way out of anything.
Who once told a sentencing judge, “Sir, I deserve justice, but I am humbly asking you today for mercy.” And who was granted mercy that day—because Rayya’s humility, whenever she revealed it, was the most tender and irresistible thing you ever saw.
Rayya: who had been in countless jails and rehabs and institutions, and who—during the infamous Tompkins Square Park riot of 1988—had been living on a bench in that park for quite a while, with a needle in her arm, barely noticing the police action that was happening all around her.
Rayya: who was so proud of finally getting clean, and who truly believed she had done it all by herself.
Who never got past step four of the twelve steps, but who still went to recovery meetings for years so she could hold court with her most dramatic overdose stories and hang out with all her old friends from the streets and the scene.
Who never really admitted powerlessness over her addiction (or over anything, come to think of it).
Who announced after more than a decade of sobriety that she wasn’t an addict anymore, so she didn’t have to go to those boring meetings anymore.
Who declared of her addiction: “That label no longer works for me.”
Rayya: who graduated herself from recovery, in other words—with ultimately harrowing results.
Rayya: who swore that all she ever wanted was to be good.
Rayya: who was good. Who was the single most foundational presence in the lives of nearly all her friends and family members.
Who was everybody’s confidante. Who stayed friends with all her exes.
Who was our bedrock. Who had copies of everyone’s keys and passwords.
Who came with us when it was time to negotiate deals for cars, homes, divorces.
Who was our mediator and our minister. Who coached us through our most difficult conversations.
Who loved and accepted each one of us singularly, unconditionally, ferociously.
Who always forgave us when we fell short.
Who taught us how to forgive one another. Who made us into better people.
Rayya: who was my bodyguard. Who was everyone’s bodyguard. Who once traveled halfway across the planet to pound on a door and physically remove a beloved friend from a relationship that had turned violent. Who could disarm anyone’s insanity—except, as it turned out, her own.
Rayya: quick to fight, quick to cry, quick to laugh, quick to forgive.
An insecure individualist. A fiery Aries with a marshmallow heart.
A sentimental cynic. An unfailingly honest master manipulator.
A fierce protector who somehow always had somebody taking care of her.
A needy alpha who demanded solitude but could not bear to be alone.
Rayya: whom I never saw coming, had not planned for, and could not control.
Who started off as my hairdresser, then became a social acquaintance, then a friend, then a neighbor, then my best friend, and then my “person.” Who slowly morphed into something I did not have words for anymore—because as a happily married woman, what was I supposed to do about her ?
Rayya: who did not so much steal my heart as gradually ease it open, until I wanted nothing more than to stay by her side forever.
Rayya: who did finally become my lover, my partner—but only when we discovered that she had terminal pancreatic and liver cancer and had been given only six months to live.
Rayya: who ended up living for twenty months after her diagnosis—because she never followed anyone’s rules, not even cancer’s.
Rayya: who let me see the softness she hid from everyone else.
Who had skin like washed silk. Who loved having her back tickled.
Who curled up in my arms like a baby. Who was afraid of bugs, thunder, and having to swallow pills.
Who was terrified of hospitals. Who was always afraid she had wasted her life.
Rayya: whose pain from cancer and fear of death ultimately drove her into the arms of alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, weed, Xanax, Vicodin, Ambien, codeine, morphine, trazodone, fentanyl, and cocaine.
Rayya: whose return to active drug addiction made the last few months of her life a living hell for everyone involved. Whose relapse drove me so far into insanity that I once seriously contemplated murdering her, because I believed she was killing me.
Rayya: who broke my heart.
Rayya: who loved me the most. Whom I loved the most.
Rayya: who died in my arms.
Rayya: whose name means “fragrant breeze” in Arabic but who was more like a shattering comet.
Rayya: who was a legend to all who knew her. Who was the person everybody wanted to hang out with, party with, play with, sleep with, travel with, dress like, confide in, imitate.
Rayya: who always kicked people out of the house at the end of the party, even if it wasn’t her house.
Rayya: who was the one everyone followed home. Who was the one everyone fell into. Who was the one I fell into—the way a white-water rafter falls off a boat and gets sucked into a whirlpool and is never seen by their family again.
Rayya: who had a face made for drowning in.
Rayya.
I still sometimes have trouble saying her name and breathing at the same time.