Ralph: “In the ‘80s, and ‘90s, for me it was all about Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘N Roll.” Angie “I wanted to live as a girl, early on, but I made a cute looking boy, and all of my gay friends discouraged it.”
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In the darkness where the shadow dwellers reside, a throbbing, bustling world thrives in secrecy. Drugs are plentiful. Sin looks pretty, and debauchery is de rigueur. Voyeurs from the outside world steeped in pretensions, illusions and hypocrisies venture here on occasion, but nocturnal creatures like Ralph Bell and Angie Collabrian have settled here even though it is the bane of their existence.”“You know, my life isn’t exactly where I want it to be, but it’s getting there.”
Ralph Bell, 43, is a noted musician from Brooklyn. “Born and bread, baby,” Ralph said. A day in his life consists of working out, going to school, playing his music, and spending time with his wife, faithfully. Twelve Step Alcoholic Anonymous Meetings are a staple in his daily routine. But it wasn’t always that way. He started off on a disjointed path. He went to his first whorehouse at 13 years old. “Get my jimmy waxed,” he said. At 14 and 15, he started smoking cigarettes and drinking. The one thing that sheltered him a little from the negativity was his desire to play guitar and record music.
“I started learning the guitar at 14 years old, and playing gigs around the city when I was 18,” he said. But even that didn’t squelch his desire for his forbidden past times. He relished the night life, and the drugs and prostitutes that went along with them. Added to this was the post traumatic stress disorder he incurred in 1984 after finding the bloodied body of his sister-in-law stabbed 17 times, murdered by his drug addicted brother. After being introduced to cocaine by a drag queen at a night club, there was no turning back.
He was drawn, like a moth to a flame, to the night life and what it had to offer. “In the ‘80s, and ‘90s, for me it was all about Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘N Roll,” Ralph said. As cliché as it may sound, according to him, he played gigs at places like CBGB and women threw themselves at him and all the cocaine he could imagine.
“I became so addicted to sex and drugs, I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “I would sleep with women, and girls like you (transsexuals), life was just a constant party. After a significant period of 20 years I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t get the hot chicks I used to get, and without a consistent job, I had to beg, steal and borrow just to feed my habit.”
That’s when a friend took him to a 12 Step Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and that’s where he found redemptionand has regained his sobriety. “You know, my life isn’t exactly where I want it to be, but it’s getting there,” he said.
“I wanted to live as a girl, early on but I made a cute looking boy, and all of my gay friends discouraged it.”
Borders Book Store, 57th Street and Park Avenue, had a flurry of people, and among them Angie Collabrian, 37, from Boston, Massachusetts. The raven hair beauty of Italian descent belies a bitter truth. Growing up, she always felt she was a woman, but opted to live as a man for the first 27 years of her life because she thought it would make her life easier. “I wanted to live as a girl, early on, but I made a cute looking boy, and all of my gay friends discouraged it,” she said, sitting at a corner table in an alcove of the book store. As a 17 year old male, she was determined to leave her hometown, and head to Los Angeles. Going solo, she went in hopes of discovering her destiny.
“I went there thinking that I was going to be a film star actor one day,” Angie said. “I didn’t know any one there. When I arrived I took my shirt off, stuck it in my back pocket and walked down Santa Monica looking for the beach. Little did I know it was 30 miles away?” It wasn’t long before the manager of Billy Idol and Kiss (during the 1970s and 1980s) pulled up, and asked him at the time to get into his car. “You wanna party,” he said, and that’s when the wild times, according to Angie, began.
He took Angie to Hollywood Center Studios where they had a sexual tryst, and a financial relationship (years later, and in desperate need of money, Angie sued Aquin on the grounds that she was a minor at the time). For the first few months of her life going without meals, she would either be sitting on the boulevard with hers suitcase or room with a few gay male prostitutes who took pity on her. It wasn’t long before a jeep convertible pulled up and this man Nick R. took Angie under his wing. Nick introduced her to men and relationships, credit card fraud and the traditional gay life style. She met a man named Bradley, at one of Nick’s shindigs, and they became inseparable.
They moved to the East Coast. First to Roosevelt Island. Angie became a frequent visitor of Manhattan’s infamous Rounds. There, at 18, she abused cocaine and became a prostitute. “I would make 2000 a week turning two to three tricks a night,” she said. “It was the Reagan era, and the money was good.” Bradley wanted to go to Paris with Angie to continue his money laundering scheme that began in California. There, they bought bags and clothes on stolen credit cards. Bradley got caught, and spent time in a Parisian prison, and Angie returned to the States.
When Bradley got out, he hooked up with Angie in New York. “He told me he met this Arab drug smuggler while incarcerated, named Arfif,” she said. “He wanted mules to fly to Amsterdam and transport heroine into Mexico City, so I did that for a while.” Soon enough, Angie made enough to hire friends to do it for her. Then Arfif was arrested in Maryland. “Me and Bradley, decided to ramshackle his house. We ended up with a solid brick of a kilo, and a half of fish scale cocaine, and $163,000 in a suitcase,” she said.
In her early 20s, Angie went back to Los Angeles where she spent night after night using copious amounts of cocaine with random people. After several arrests for drug transport, she got tired of the cocaine trade. “My father was a drug smuggler, who got murdered by his best friend,” she said. “Like father, like son.”
She eventually tired of the lifestyle, and at 27 moved into her wealthy uncle’s Park Avenue condo where she started taking hormones with the intent of living as a female. Transference of her drug addiction to a plastic surgery addiction seemed befitting of a masculine man who wanted to become a woman. She had gender reassignment surgery, five nose jobs, forehead lift, her chin done, her breast done several times, fat transfers, and various facial fillers.
Now, a 37-year-old gorgeous woman, er life is remotely different from the way it once was. “I still haven’t tackled all my demons yet”, she said, “I love plastic surgery, and I don’t believe I’ll ever get over that. But as far as drugs go, well, that’s just a thing of the past.”
As this article was being edited, Angie Callibran slipped back into the throws of crack cocaine addiction.