Making The Peace
On the glory of friendships that start out rough and messy and end up steady and tender and peaceful.
I still remember the night I met Rayya Elias. It was at a Detroit club in the early eighties and I was nineteen. She had those dark-dark eyes that penetrated the tightly locked pockets of your mind you didn’t even know were there. Dark, slick hair. Full pouty lips. Her voice was husky, commanding, yet melodious.
“Hey, Jane,” she said, nodding her head, letting me know she’d taken me in. She was the best friend of my boyfriend and then husband and then ex-husband, Kory. And when I say best friend, I mean they came as a pair, something cosmic and primordial and impenetrable weaving them together.
“Kory’s told me all about you.” Rayya had a way of saying things with this nonspecific intonation, a slight curl to her lip (I may be inventing this but that was the vibe), and a twinkle in her eye, eyes that were looking unwaveringly into yours, so that simple statements could mean anything: Kory raved about me and together they celebrated his good fortune or Kory said god knows what and they had a good laugh at my expense.
Kory and Rayya were always laughing.
They were both musicians, occasionally making music together, but mostly supporting each other’s projects. They were the darlings of the Detroit music scene, beloved and respected everywhere they went. They also partied a lot. But in those days, I did, too. I had my gang of friends; Rayya had hers. There was some crossover. But it was clear from the get-go, I did not fit in with their non-crossover.
For one thing, I was in college—and they let me know that was not cool. “You might be book smart but you’re not street smart,” one of their friends said to me, cringing.
And then there were the drugs. Theirs were harder than mine and used with greater frequency. They knew about drugs: Where to buy them, how much to use, what to combine, what to do solo, how long a buzz would last, what to do if something went wrong.
Kory was somewhere in between. It was that in betweenness that gave birth to the trouble between Rayya and me. But in the early years, the trouble was more a possibility than a reality.
The three of us moved to NYC in 1983. Kory and I were twenty; Rayya was twenty-two. We were so young. Of course, we didn’t feel that then. We were righteous, and thought we knew all there was to know. You hear stories about New York in those days; how wild it was. They’re all true. We found apartments on the Lower East Side and after a rough start, Kory became the darling of the downtown music scene, Rayya, who during the day was doing hair at a prestigious hair salon, by his side.
At night, the three of us moved as one. After late-night dinners at The Odeon, we would ride in limos to clubs—Danceteria, Pallidum, The Tunnel, The World—with lines of hopefuls wrapped around the block and the red velvet ropes would miraculously lift; all night, the drugs and drinks flowed and the music pounded. We never paid for a thing.
In the morning glow, we’d head to Save The Robots or Pyramid, tripping over rats, the hot screech of urine competing with the dull thud of garbage. No cab would take you into Alphabet City back then. The same streets that now house trendy restaurants and gifts shops and wildly expensive apartments, were a tapestry of broken windows and eerily empty sidewalks, except for the three of us, laughing and bumping into one another, catching each other by the elbow. The green hue of the streetlights, those that worked. The quiet of the parks. The overbrightness of the distant corner bodegas as Rayya and Kory fumbled to light cigarettes. The feral cats that I tried to bring home. The music thudding out of top floor windows or the abandoned gas station on the corner of Avenue B and Second Street; Kory and Rayya, wasted, harmonizing on some tune they were working on; then suddenly we were inside, amidst others like us. Everything was about music then. All of us there, together, finding each other in these forgotten corners of the City. Then maybe the Empire Diner for breakfast, then home at seven or eight in the morning to catch some sleep before work.
That was our New York. It was hard. But it was buoyant with community and curiosity and youthful, unquenchable love. And hope. Somehow, improbably, Kory, Rayya, and I were in it together. Until we weren’t.
By the time I hit my early twenties, I tired of the drinking and drugs and late nights and moved toward raw foods and Buddhism and even joined a gym.
Rayya started smoking crack and doing heroin.
Kory remained in between
He recorded his first album and joined the gym with me. We juiced in the morning and spent Sundays at the Farmer’s Market filling our bags with freshly baked bread and organic veggies and sprouts and flowers for our apartment on Great Jones. At nighttime, we’d cuddle into zipped-together sleeping bags and watch James Bond marathons or make love under the stars that twinkled through our skylight. We taught ourselves to play chess. It was a perfect life.
But other nights, he still wanted to be at the clubs. And despite my pleas and increasing demands that he stay home, where he was safe, though I did not say that last bit out loud, there was Rayya, calling up to our window (like much of below 14th Street, we had no buzzer), for Kory to come down. And down he went.
The cleaner my life became, the rougher Rayya’s grew. At times, she was on the streets, prostituting herself for drugs or in Rikers. She’d disappear for weeks, Kory sick with worry, then turn up in our kitchen, emaciated, scabs on her face and arms, teaching us how to steal handfuls of mail from the postal carrier’s wheelie bag whilst they were inside a building and rifle through it for credit cards. She needed money. She needed Kory to go somewhere with her. “Don’t go,” I would say, shaking my head, my jaw tight with fear and anger. “I’ll be right back,” Kory would say, and I could see the worry in his eyes for his friend, but I could also see something else. “Don’t you have other friends?” I would say to Rayya, my voice hard, protective. She would smile at me, “It’s just for an hour, Jane. Don’t worry, honey, he’ll be back. Your boy loves you.” And they’d disappear, Kory coming home the next day, wrecked.
Even when things weren’t this extreme, the extremes were always present, the lingering imprint of what had been and what could be again.
I don’t want to turn this into an essay on Rayya’s drug addiction and hardship. She’s written about it all beautifully in her gorgeous memoir, Harley Loco. Rather, I want to examine how, in that time of our lives, we stood against one another whilst also trying to find each other.
We both loved Kory tremendously. And we both thought the other one was a bad influence. I was increasingly terrified by the amount of drugs Rayya was doing and feared Kory could all too easily fall prey to the same demons that had ahold of her. While I can’t speak for Rayya, I think she felt I was trying to control Kory, force him into being someone he wasn’t, rather than letting him make his own decisions. In other words, I was trying to take him away from her. And if that’s the case, she was right. I was.
Rayya would clean up, put weight back on, get that glint back in her eye, land a job at a nice hair salon, and conjure astoundingly delicious meals for us at whatever new apartment she’d found. She and I would earnestly try to make the peace; attempt meaningful conversations. I’d cat sit for her. She’d cut my hair. We’d all go to movies together, take walks, sit at outdoor cafes sipping cups of tea, take turns playing favorite songs on the stereo, go to concerts. She and Kory would burrow away for days and weeks writing music without touching a drop of anything illicit. We’d find a cautious, hopeful rhythm.
But soon enough, she was doing drugs again. And I was back to controlling.
“You used to be fun,” Rayya would drawl at me at two in the morning when I wanted to go home and wanted Kory to come with me—sometimes teasingly, that twinkle in her eye; sometimes with reprimand, her dark eyes locked, her brow heavy. Some nights Kory would slip his hand into mine, give me the sweetest kiss, and beneath Rayya’s iron glare, would hail a cab, and off we’d go. Other nights, after a few too many drinks, he’d nod in agreement. “Yeah, baby, you did used to be fun.”
“Don’t be so uptight, honey,” Rayya’d say, when we were hanging at her apartment and the drugs came out and I tugged Kory toward the door, “it’s not good for you. And if it’s not good for you, it’s not good for Kory.” And the two of them would laugh uproariously, then do a line or pop a pill or guzzle a Jack and Coke.
For what it’s worth, defending yourself against accusations of lack of fun or too much uptightness is largely impossible. The moment you open your mouth, you indeed sound un-fun and way too serious. So over time, rather than snap back with my list of what wasn’t good for Kory (i.e. Rayya), I left on my own—feeling, in those moments, small, unwanted, embarrassed by the person I’d become.
Then Rayya would get clean again and we would talk it out in the days that followed.
I wish I could offer a detailed account of all that was discussed but it was decades ago. Rather than words, what I recall is the tension, the frustration, the inability to truly understand the other, the anger, and, at times, the meanness, on both our parts. We spoke calmly and gently, I can remember Rayya once coming to our apartment whilst Kory was on tour and I made us tea and toast with honey from the Farmer’s Market and we did our best to find one another. We also yelled, we paced and postured and shook our heads and sucked our teeth and wrung our hands. A friend and I were reminiscing the other day about how Rayya and I went at it, how we would throw down—and how we broke one another’s hearts, though, of course, we didn’t see it that way back then.
We were attempting to find a way to co-exist and yet neither of us was willing to give an inch. An inch toward Rayya, to me, meant an inch toward the streets and hard drugs. An inch toward me, to Rayya, meant…I’m not sure what: giving in to someone she most likely didn’t trust. Someone she certainly liked less and less, the cleaner I became.
We would have long ago parted ways if not for our shared deep love of Kory.
Years went by, Rayya drifted in and out of our lives. There were times we lost her completely, then she’d be back in a beautiful new place with a beautiful new partner. She was loved. Kory and I tried everything to keep our marriage together but eventually we divorced. We were still very much in love, but our divergent life paths had become untenable and we agreed we were causing each other harm.
After that, I’d occasionally run into Rayya on the streets. She’d cleaned up for good and gotten married and sometimes I’d see her with her wife and we’d chat. The last time I saw her was on 9th Street, I think. She knew I was writer, and I shared some of my successes and struggles, more of the latter in those days. She’d recently started writing, as well. Screenplays, I believe, and it was going well for her.
“I never knew writing was so easy,” she said, that same nonspecific intonation, that same heavy gaze. Was she intentionally diminishing me and my struggles? Or was she simply stating that for her, writing and success came naturally? I’ll never know.
Shortly after that, I left NYC and never saw Rayya again.
But in 2014, a mutual friend posted on Facebook that Rayya had a memoir coming out. I was deep in my post-head and brain injury challenges then, barely getting through each day, and writing very little. “I guess writing had been so easy for her,” I thought. I was jealous and yet also strangely excited for her success.
I reached out to Rayya via Facebook messenger, tentatively.
I wrote: “I don't think I've had a relationship with anybody else like I had with you! So much above ground fighting (as opposed to behind each other’s backs!). And so many earnest attempts to make the peace. Really, all because we both loved Kory so much. I think we were the two most important women in his life at that point. As I look back, I have to hand it to us for our honesty as our two different personality types tried to sort through this quagmire of life as best we could at that time in our lives.”
Reader, I was nervous to send that message. Have I made it clear that Rayya was a force? Well, let me do so now: Rayya was a force, indeed. I often ponder how I stood my ground with her. But stood my ground I did.
Rayya responded immediately: “Thanks for that, Jane. Yes, we made no qualms about how we felt about Kory or our relationship to one another. It was always a mixed bag, and you’re right, I do think we were the most important women in his life at that time.”
And so began our correspondence.
When her memoir arrived in the post, I opened it with great trepidation. If I were in the pages, I would not be portrayed well. But Rayya had graciously written me out. “No honey,” she said, “you’re not in the book, so just breathe and enjoy the ride.”
Rayya’s memoir changed me. Whilst it was true, I did not make an appearance, Kory was all over it, alongside our world. I’d left our marriage with many emotions and feelings and mindsets but for the purposes of this essay, I’ll share that I left it with the resonant imprint that I was an uptight bitch who no longer knew how to have fun and that belief had stayed with me and shaped me, in one form or another, right up until the moment I cracked open Rayya’s book.
Observing my life at that distance, with the honesty and clarity with which Rayya wrote about the level of drugs and drinking I was enmeshed in, for the first time, I could see clearly that I had been in over my head. It wasn’t that I was no fun. It was that I wasn’t an addict. And I was surrounded by addicts, many of them hardcore. I was flooded with compassion for myself; a switch flipped and I completely, almost miraculously, released that characterization of myself.
I was also flooded with compassion for Rayya. I wrote to her saying I was sorry for all that she’d lived through and apologized for ways that my lack of understanding might have made things worse for her. “The amount of drugs you all were doing did scare me,” I wrote, “but I wish I’d been able to see past my protective stance.”
Rayya responded: “If I wasn't in it so deep, I probably would've reacted the same as you back then. but...all is well Jane, all is understood...”
And just like that, this person whom I had done everything possible to protect myself from, I suddenly felt tremendous love and affection for. Rayya and I had always been honest about our feelings toward one another, that wasn’t new. But the way in which we were able to see one another had shifted and expanded and deepened—and with that came a freedom from the constraints we’d put on ourselves and each other.
After that, we kept in fairly regular touch. We chatted about back-in-the-day and about books and life. She read parts of my novel and put me in touch with her agent. I started this essay and sent it to Rayya. We played around with the idea of co-writing it. But I was still struggling a lot with my health and it never got off the ground. We tried to figure out ways to meet up again. I was living back in Michigan and she was living in a converted church in New Jersey. Those were the years where for a long stretch I wasn’t able to travel at all and when I was again, it was hard.
And then Rayya was diagnosed with pancreatic and liver cancer. I didn’t see her before she died. A variety of things interfered with that happening too numerous and mundane to list. A part of me wishes so very much that we had. How beautiful that would have been to be in one another’s presence again, to share a hug with this newly awakened, vibrant love for one another in our hearts, to laugh about those crazy days, reminisce, and create new memories. To understand things about one another’s lives that no one else could.
But another part of me is glad that never happened. Our healing was weighty and tender and potent. But at the end of the day, we were still Rayya and Jane. And maybe, just maybe, if our energy connected again in the uncontained arena of in-person versus the written word we would have naturally, against our own wishes, begun to tussle.
Or maybe not.
A mutual friend shared with me that toward the end, when Rayya was in Michigan and several of her Detroit friends were gathered round her to say goodbye, my name came up with affection. Rayya’s friend who all those decades ago had told me I was book smart but not street smart as a way to let me know I didn’t belong, said, “Jane? We hate Jane.” And Rayya said, “Nah, we made the peace.”
And so we had.
If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy this one about getting divorced when you’re still in love:
Thank you, Jane. For sharing so beautifully about Rayya and letting us meet her through your eyes too. I’m so glad you two made the peace in the end. It’s such a hard thing to do with addicts sometimes. I think that’s the thing I wish the most for, that I’d been able to do with my parents before their addictions took them.
You’ve given me much to think about today. 🩵🩵 Lots of love your way!
(Small aside - my son’s middle name is Kory!)
Beautiful! You invoked so many memories of my own early 80's experiences in Detroit; however, the images of your relationship with Rayya were humbling. I'm not sure I've ever had a relationship with such raw honesty.