Rosie Hernandez

On paper it was the easiest breakup I have ever experienced. The cleanest and most complete of separations. That morning our relationship, doomed and toxic and laced with distrust, existed. An obstacle neither of us were equipped to either carry on or end properly. A stubborn impasse. A Mexican standoff. But by 11:00 that night it was as if it never even existed in the first place. No raised voices. No tears. No division of possessions. No accusations or apologies or temporary reconciliations. No online stalking.

Yes, it was very easy.

Because Rosie Hernandez died.

Rosie Hernandez was far too young for me, certainly not old enough to be working in The Hurricane Saloon, and from a side of life completely removed from anything I would ever be able to comprehend. We’re talking a family of eight co-existing in a second-floor illegal apartment in a red-brick rowhome in Fishtown. We’re talking roaches in the Frosted Flakes and lime green SNAP cards, cousins in prison and visits from Child Protective Services, crackhead aunties and fathers belonging to weird urban motorcycle gangs. We’re talking real-deal poverty with zero romantic bearings, not just slumming it like the students and proto-hipsters that made up the Hurricane’s core customer base. Rosie Hernandez wasn’t mobile. She wasn’t temporarily passing through the ghetto West Philly lifestyle, trying it on like one of the many costume-jeweled necklaces she used to wear around her long, veiny neck. She wasn’t intending to write songs or prose about it, wasn’t after cheap rent or good times or urban farming opportunities. She wasn’t looking to start a coffee shop or record store. She would never move on through that early 00s pipeline to NYC or Los Angeles, would never spin tales of West Philly house parties and colorful street urchin characters to bemused listeners in bars in metropolises worldwide.

Rosie Hernandez was mired in it.

Exactly how she came to work at a notorious coke bar at 19 remains unknown. I never asked her a lot of questions I would like answered now. I could tell you it was because I knew the answers were going to be dark, that I cared about her too much to bear them, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. The real truth is that I didn’t become interested in these answers until decades later, until now, when the specter of Rosie Hernandez, long wandering the periphery of my conscious thoughts, finally came screaming through.

Rosie Hernandez made the news. She’s been preserved. There are many photos just a few clicks away. But I hate seeing them, because the fashion in those times was something awful. The emo bangs. The ironic chunky jewelry. The lip piercings. The raccoon eyeliner. Nobody ever mentions this when covering the tragedy of dying young, when a person is forever trapped in the style choices of a certain era. They never got to move on. And if the era they died in happened to be a bad time for fashion, say the mid-80s or the early 00s, then those severe bangs will forever be their fate.

This fact is especially cruel for Rosie Hernandez. Not that her fashion choices were any worse than anyone else’s at the time, but because she was gale-force, full-stop beautiful in a way that deserves proper framing. To see her marked out by the signposts of aughties blog-era style trends is the greatest of tragedies. When she appeared out of the menthol smoke haze behind the bar at the Hurricane, shy but slyly mischievous with those big, almond-shaped eyes stamped into her little face like two gaping wounds, it was Revelation Time. Who was this little Mexican girl? Where did they find her? What was she doing here in this portal to post-modernist urban hell? I had arrived to nurse a dollar Yuengling and waste away maybe an hour in that very strangest of establishments, a place that mingled true West Philly street gang members and oldhead OG Septa workers with 20-something students and urban anarchists, where a “$40 dollar Hurricane Special” would come with a little something taped to the bottom of the glass for your pleasure. I didn’t leave for five hours or more, until closing time at 2AM when the festivities would spill to the narrow, rowhome-lined street outside, a time for gunshots and robberies and mass brawls that was generally avoided by all but the most criminal of Hurricane patrons.

But I stuck it out for Rosie Hernandez.

Not that I spoke to her. Not that night, anyway. Elbows on the bar, I sat for hours marinating in the strange glow of that unexpected little figurine, that apparition, barely even looking at her the entire time. She was bar backing, fucking around with an ice machine, washing glasses, but mostly just standing behind the bar in front of a row of gleaming bottles and the huge, filthy mirror, not really knowing what to do, her stick arms crossed, looking over the heads of the patrons as if planning her escape. Whatever vague plans I had for that night dissipated like nothing, whatever inane thoughts I may have been harboring, wondering if I should grow out sideburns or maybe get tix to The Libertines gig, gladly discarded. All that mattered to me in that moment was this new bar back at the Hurricane, because the glances I did get in were truly shocking. Small-boned and ensconced in a faded yellow tee with the image of two cherubs on the front, long silver chain dangling down to a frayed black skirt, jet black tangle of hair with bangs like 1972 Keith Richards and several wayward locks spilling down the small of her back. Later on, Rosie Hernandez would get mad at me whenever I referred to her as being “otherworldly.” But it was an apt description; she was tiny in size but made a huge imprint on any dimension she passed through, a micro-meteor with the gravitational pull of a planet. Everything just got swallowed up in her slipstream.

I became a regular at the Hurricane from that night on. Whatever friends I had or connections I had made in the West Philly scene became tenuous at best. People I hadn’t seen in months, stopping by the Hurricane for their “Special,” would approach me at my usual seat and ask where I had been, why they hadn’t seen me around, and I didn’t really know what to tell them. I would feign drunkenness, because that was something tangible that they could all understand. “Oh, he’s become a drunk down at the bar.” It was much easier than just coming out with it: “I’ve become obsessed with a little Mexican girl who bar backs at the Hurricane.”

Rosie Hernandez would tease me about this later, the nights I spent sitting there trying not to look at her. “I didn’t know whether to call the cops or ask for your number.” But she never would have done either of those things, at least not then. Later on she would grow into herself, wrap herself in confidence, begin to glimmer on to the bare bones fact that she was gorgeous and young and temporarily free. But when I came across her she was deer-in-the-headlights terrified of every customer and co-worker the Hurricane had to offer, including me.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw her smile. It was the second time I saw her. I had gone to the Hurricane the next night but she wasn’t working. But on the third night she was there, and when a whiskey-soddened old grey-haired unc said to her, “Check out a picture of my sweetheart” and offered a crumpled polaroid from his jacket pocket of his pet rabbit, she beamed a toothy, crooked grin that instantly lit up her face like a tripped motion-sensor light.

It was maybe the fifth night that I spoke to Rosie Hernandez. You could smoke in bars in those days, but I needed some air, and apparently so did she on a break in her shift. “You see that glow around that streetlight?” She startled me, standing in the shadows next to the concrete loading dock behind the Hurricane. She stepped forward, presenting herself to me, huge lips and charcoal black eyes and little upturned nose, hugging herself lightly. “When I was a kid I thought those were ghosts.”

She might not have been old enough to drink or be employed at the Hurricane in the first place, but it didn’t take long for Rosie Hernandez to be promoted. She didn’t know how to mix drinks and her beer tap skills made for beverages that were mostly foam, but it didn’t matter. She was a hit. Everyone loved her. She was so far out of place in that establishment, like a dolphin jumping from the polluted waters of the Susquehanna. She became a draw. There was at least one Tumblr blog about her, and if you cruise the back pages of the Wayback Machine you can find her mentioned in Philly forums of the time. And while it’s true that a lot of the chatter surrounding Rosie Hernandez was of the amorous male variety, it never seemed to cross the line into the type of open sleaze that was perfectly acceptable to attach your name to at the time. The posts that can still be found about her ring poetic, protective, lovelorn. She was a magnet for a particularly pathetic brand of simp-blog journaling, as she still is to this very day if this story is anything to go by.

Rosie Hernandez lived in a hallway behind the stairs at her parent’s chaotic, cramped rowhome apartment. She had to be inventive if she wanted her own room, and she fashioned one for herself in that disused 200-square-feet by hanging a curtain that blocked it off from the kitchen. Walls painted pink and Bright Eyes whining from the portable CD player with the Weezer sticker and a poster featuring The Strokes sitting on a couch under an American flag and cutout collages from VICE Magazine. And the futon on the floor where I had trouble sleeping because I was terrified of rats. Three feral little sisters running around in their underwear in the dead of winter. Twin junkie older brothers on the couch watching American Idol with glazed eyes. Her father, a small man in a cutoff denim vest with motorcycle patches, spent much of his time sitting on the stoop under the green overhang out front yelling Spanish obscenities into a cordless phone. Stone-faced and fat, catatonic, her mother sat at a table in the kitchen covered in mountains of bills, smoking Kool after Kool after Kool while staring helplessly at the piled-up dishes. I would bring them stolen food from the Drexel cafeteria using the student ID of a friend who had run off to travel India. Nobody in her family ever said a single word to me.

The first time I walked Rosie Hernandez home from the Hurricane I was maybe a little too drunk or perhaps just excited to be walking with her on one of those rare East Coast summer nights where there’s no humidity and the air hums and crackles with static. She took exception to the story I told her about a failed mugging attempt by a midget with no weapon, about how my friend and I had counseled the little man to get a gun, not out loud but with a sad smile that indicated she wasn’t feeling the nihilist worldview I was rocking with at the time. We walked the last two blocks in silence, scary dark blocks with an alley roped off by crime scene tape and vacant lots. I thought I had blown it, but the way she patted my arm before ascending the stoop and vanishing into the rowhome indicated this would be continued. Just that light touch of her hand, those long soft fingers, stayed with me until I saw her again, which was probably the very next night. Because for me there was no longer anything other than Rosie Hernandez. I would hibernate, collapse into myself, until I could see her once more at the Hurricane.

Much like everyone else, my housemates adored Rosie Hernandez. “You brought the girl from the Hurricane" Brooks exclaimed with sheer glee when I showed up with her one night, when she remained cheerful and unphased in a room of 15 people comatose on Special K, playing Super Mario Kart with Brooks’ girlfriend and letting out little screams every time her kart was knocked off course. From that night on my housemates’ girlfriends basically adopted her, dressed her in their clothes, photographed her, took her to the hipster circuit parties that were cropping up around that time with names like Making Time and Misshapes. Inner city neighborhoods were just beginning to be gentrified, places like Williamsburg and Northern Liberties and Silver Lake, but it was a far cry from the scorched-earth merciless neighborhood takeovers that happen today. There were years of overlap where the gentrifiers and the gentrified co-existed, often peacefully, and cross-pollinated. Rosie Hernandez’s ascent within the Philly hipster circuit would later spell doom for our relationship, but I was always happy to get her away from that nightmare rowhome for even just a night.

On the second night I walked Rosie Hernandez home from the Hurricane, she didn’t want to go inside yet even though it was around 3AM and we sat on the stoop until dawn. I remember she stamped her foot on mine, punishment for saying something dumb, but kept it there and we sat in silence for a long time with our ankles touching until a red Honda Civic lowrider cruised past bumping Soldier Boy.

“I hate that song, Rosie.”

“But it’s fun.”

And there was the main difference between us. Rosie Hernandez was fun. She was curious and playful. Nothing got her down, even her quite dire life circumstances. At 22 I was already a burnout. A walking wounded. A peripheral entity, suspicious of everything and everyone. Already I was turning inward, away from the world, crawling for the cracks while she was branching out.

This difference was never more evident than when we would attend the Making Time parties. All eyes would be upon us, but really just her. They would call for her the moment we walked in. They knew her by name, from the androgynous bartender with the gauge earrings to the big black doorman to the sneering bloggers on their Blackberries to local celebrities like Amanda Blank and Spank Rock, both of whom stole their entire looks and mannerisms from Rosie Hernandez. I looked upon all of these people with nothing but acute suspicion, could see where this whole movement was heading, could envision already the steel and glass condominiums with their Juliette balconies overlooking Section 8 Housing, the cold grip of post-Myspace social media, the 14-dollar-lattes. These people were jaded and could never match her pure, unfiltered enthusiasm about all things life. But she was able to locate something good in all of these otherwise vapid emotional vampires…the fact that Amanda liked cats or that Spank Rock adored his grandmother…she was able to enjoy them in the moment and filter out their many sins in a way I never could. “You know he stole 30K from his girlfriend, right” I would ask her after some DJ would come up to speak to us. “Well hopefully he did something good with the money” she would say, bumping me playfully with one of her long, swan-like arms and everything would be right again until the next person approached.

More than anyone else I’ve ever known, she just liked to BE. She could sit on the stoop at that rowhome for hours, all day and night, with nothing to read, no phone, observing and commenting on every person that passed, every car, every bird that flew by. She had nicknames for people around her neighborhood, but they were never mean or derogatory like the the ones my friends and I came up with. No “Osama Bum Laden” or “Crackhead General.” Her nicknames were kind, endearing monikers like “Claire Bear” for the schizo named Claire that would run around screaming about being spied on through wall sockets or “Mr. Doowop” for the homeless guy with one leg and one arm who would sing for change outside the corner store. I never saw her drink and, for someone who worked at one of the most notorious coke bars outside of Brooklyn’s own Cokies, she claimed to have never so much as taken a single puff of weed. This was a girl who toiled most nights amongst junkies and dopamine fiends of all kinds and was romantically linked with a notorious one (me), but she never once looked down upon a single one of them. Never held her sobriety up as any type of badge of honor or cudgel. This was a girl who gained a massive amount of clout in the emerging East Coast hipster circuit in a short amount of time but never wanted to write for a blog or be in a band or become a model, three things people were always inviting her to do. Rosie Hernandez simply enjoyed the act of existing.

The times I liked best were the times we were alone. In my bedroom on the second floor of the house I shared with six people where I would try to explain to her the genius of Seinfeld. She would tell me the characters were “petty and borderline mean” and there was no argument I could make against that. Or the times we would walk all the way from 50th and Baltimore to the river and beyond, into Center City, miles and miles and miles, just for a slice of pizza from a particular spot she wanted to try, walking until our feet hummed and we had to give up and jump the turnstile and hold on to one another on the Septa home just keep from falling over. Once she took me to see an oracle she knew, an elderly Italian man named The Panopticon who lived in a basement apartment on 13th Street, and we sat cross-legged on his floor while he performed a half-assed ritual involving an incense stick and a water bottle with a big orange PAID sticker on it, before predicting future doom for us both. “Everybody needs a Panopticon” she told me when I asked how she knew about the man. When I asked if his doomy prediction bothered her at all, she just shrugged and hooked her arm in mine. “I never said he wasn’t full of shit.” Or the time Amanda had given her a designer getup from a photoshoot and she sold it at Buffalo Exchange for a very high fee and we used it to dine at Buddakan, a high end seafood joint in Olde City, where we ate so many crab legs we started to hallucinate.

It was inevitable that Rosie Hernandez would have to ditch me at some point. Her star was rising, and even though she never seemed to care about such things, her ascendance was bringing her into contact with other men. One of them was named “Jacob” and this Jacob was certainly better suited for her. I vaguely knew him. He also didn’t drink or do drugs, a straight edge Minor Threat type, an embodiment of the Positive Mental Attitude cult that rang truer to her positive sensibilities. He had some sort of career too, one that could perhaps lift her permanently out of the Fishtown rowhome in a way that would take me another decade to accomplish. We never did come to any type of agreement about what our relationship even was. I just knew that I wanted to spend every waking moment with Rosie Hernandez and at first she let me do that. Even as Jacob increased his presence in her life and she became a little more distant, a little more occupied with each passing day, she was never mean to me, never ghosted, always treated me with nothing but the gracious affection that came absolutely natural to her.

I yelled at her once. There’s nothing I regret more than this fact. We were lying on my bed late night, after a party, watching COPS, a show I found amusing but she found sad, and I could feel her slipping away. I demanded to know if she loved me, if she could choose, right then and there, between me or Straight Edge Jake. I remember that she was wearing two white flowers in her hair as some girls did at that time. I remember hitting my hand on the bed to emphasize a point and it bounced and hit the headboard, breaking one of my fingers. I remember the flash of fear in her eyes that instantly turned me into a sobbing, collapsed being. I had scared her. I was ever so sorry. She was hugging me. She was picking me up with some sort of long-dormant physical strength. She was trying to wipe away my tears but just smothering them all over my face. Her lips smelled of cherry ChapStick. She held my face in her hands, smudging my cheeks like a baby, until we both started laughing.

Coming from such a chaotic household, Rosie Hernandez had a lot of experience with injuries. She swiftly and expertly taped my damaged finger to another in a makeshift cast made up of a Band-Aids from her purse (she never wore the right shoes and was always dealing with cuts and blisters) and some scotch tape. It eventually healed perfectly. We were both calmer now. “We need to get out for a bit,” she said.

It was about three months after that night that Rosie Hernandez died under horrific circumstances. She never even made 21. I hadn’t seen her that week. Things were strange between us after the broken finger. If she was seeing Straight Edge Jake I will never know. I wouldn’t blame her for it. That night she was riding her bike, the one with the basket she acquired just weeks prior, the one I took her picture with while she beamed proudly. It was the very same picture they pulled off Myspace and used on the front page of the paper the next day when the news broke. She was leaving a party on Gerard Street. On the surveillance footage you can see the teenager in the white tee drive past her on his bike, heading in the opposite direction, but he slows down and turns after her. There is no surveillance footage of what happens next, but she was found in the bushes of a vacant lot. The teenager later said he just wanted the bike but she refused to give it up and his anger got the best of him. She was so tiny…there was just no way. The week after the murder this teenager would be defended by a very famous Philly musician. “He’s just a baby,” the musician would say. She had been strangled with her own bra. The attack was quick and she was not raped, but she certainly felt fear, and pain, in her final moments.

I took the Oxy I had stashed away to kill the pain in my finger and we hit the street, both still rattled. Her mascara was smudged, her eyes big and glistening, the white flowers fallen from her hair. She was clinging to me in a way she hadn’t done for a good while, since the 3rd time I had walked her home from the Hurricane, the time that she had finally, mercifully, asked me if I wanted to come inside. From the lone physical photo I still have of her, taken that night, I can see she was wearing that same long chain she had worn the first time I saw her, and I remember at one point she looped it around my neck and we walked with our heads together for a long time along dark streets and abandoned buildings, the street lights few and far between but each one alive with the ghosts she had seen as a child. We walked and walked and walked, as we had always done. There was nothing else we could do, nowhere else we could go. Somewhere around the river we came upon a small square, in the middle of which there was a fountain with a sculpture of a frog in the middle. She laughed, delighted for some reason, and without hesitation waded into the water without taking off her shoes. She approached the frog sculpture. She was splashing at me playfully. Some old winos in the square started jeering at us. “You ain’t gettin’ laid tonight if she catches da’ flu, mane!” In the photo, Rosie Hernandez stands calf-deep in the filthy water. It appears she is about to give the frog a kiss on the head. And now I know exactly why she wanted to get out that night, why she wanted to take that walk, why she was so enthused to come across that dumb frog sculpture. She wanted to leave me with a memory, a good memory, not some long tearful breakup conversation in some dusty bedroom in the Western Philly badlands. She knew she had to go, but she wanted to stamp that moment with something fun and meaningful. That’s just the way Rosie Hernandez was. Her instincts always tilted good.

I’ve never written about this before. I’ve never even talked about it. Rosie Hernandez was not her real name. In the weeks after the murder, several people who were following the news and knew the score would ask if I was ok. “We were broken up,” I told them. This may have sounded cold, but if any one of them had asked if I would have traded my own life for hers that night I would have said yes. Because it’s true. Rosie Hernandez had never done one single deed to deserve even a second of fear or pain. Rosie Hernandez would have made a much better imprint upon this world than I have. Anyone that came across her in those 20 years of her existence loved her, adored her. That love would have spread. It never really had the chance to do so with the limitations of her circumstances and youth, but it would have grown. It would have branched out and taken on new directions.

It would have become colossal.

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