Bad Habits is the mostly-autobiographical story of Road’s personal revolution.

Growing up Cuban in West Miami, the protagonist clashes with the confining and repressive aspects of that culture, and, like countless other young people, leaves for New York as soon as she's able. Landing in Brooklyn, she moves into a house full of wild characters, and enters an underground scene that few ever see. Of her new family, she writes, “We were the things that went bump, crack, and hump in the night.”

In Bad Habits, Road takes us on an uncensored tour of her world- dingy dive bars, drugs in dark bathrooms, and long nights in strange beds. Her street-psychopharmacology results in experiences that are both revelatory and tragic. In her circle, drugs are cheap, ubiquitous, and they sometimes feel like the only way out.

Writing in a tradition of transgressive authors—mostly male like Genet, Bukowski, Selby, Rechy, but also female like Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles—Road takes us deep inside the damaged soul and psyche of her young protagonist with a crushing language, violent as the street: "According to the law, I’m just some bipolar junky who happened to have been sexually assaulted once or twice, and later mind-fucked by some crass romantic I shouldn’t have trusted anyway."

But our heroine learns to leave her bad habits behind and emerge stronger and more independent, clean and open to love. Still punk, but punk by her own rules – she finds that life can be much more than mere survival.

Cristy C. Road attended the Ringling School of Art and received a bachelor’s degree in illustration. She began writing and drawing fanzines (including Greenzine) in 1994, at which time her art and writing were devoted to the punk rock subculture. She continued to write Greenzine for ten years, toured with punk rock bands, and documented her nomadic existence—analyzing it through political lens. At this time, Cristy Road's work focused on issues of sexuality, race, and gender, and she began to contribute her work to radical causes and groups working toward social justice [CIW, Incite!, NACLA, The Icarus Project]. She has worked in independent publishing as a zine writer and spent many years attending zine conferences, tabling, and presenting. In 2004, the year she stopped publishing Greenzine, she released Indestructible (Microcosm Publishing), an illustrated memoir about being a queer, Latin, punk rock teenage girl in Miami, FL.

She works as a freelance illustrator as well as a writer, and over the past two years has given readings and showings of her art throughout the country at various events including a national tour with Sister Spit in Spring of '07.

Thirteen-city author tour: Boston, MA; Providence, RI; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Baltimore, MD; Washington, DC, Richmond, VA, Miami, FL; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco, CA; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA

From Chapter One, unedited...

As clocks ticked timelessly and humans aged blindly, every antique Corner of New York City was in danger of evolution. But when I looked outside of my window, every color and virgin texture of her condemned ruins took me someplace beautiful and far off.

Like that one corner on Graham and Siegel—whose boots kicked a perfect cloud of distressed concrete and perfectly painted signs. I always liked old painted signs the way most people liked the Mona Lisa or pornography. The voices on that strip would seep in one of my ears, and out the other, lyrically, in my grandfather’s tongue. I wanted to caress those corners; but indignantly would ask questions that I would rather keep to myself.

Questions like “Will everyone stop speaking Spanish when the rest of Brooklyn is derailed?” and “When will the bricks burn and resurrect as sleek, pure architectural malice?” or “Who’s gonna save the souls of the cobblestone sidewalks and brownstones doused in accidental ivy?”

Something better save us now, I thought, so my kids can know what I know.

And Like Brooklyn, The human heart is divided into several humble portals with a function, relevance, a history, and a culture, distinct to its region. Like every developmental blow cripples the antiquity of any borough in New York City, every imperfect experience cripples the wellbeing of every corner of the heart. But like an old city that doesn’t stop; the human heart trudges with clandestine motivation. However, in those safe havens and hidden opportunities for wayward glory—the human heart beats to the pace of a sick, sick world.

This is a love story. It all started when I broke my roommate’s bong. Actually, I’m lying. It may have well started in 1997, after learning I was bi-polar and did too much speed. The chaos transcended, after I kissed this one girl in some raver’s house party in west Miami, and the rumor mill toppled my campus hallway. I soon learned that within the culture of my upbringing, bisexuality was wrong. The party was at Victor Castellano’s house and I painstakingly recall the smell of his taupe stucco ceiling. Lead poisoning, I think. Or maybe just because on that day, I learned being Latin and sexually unkempt was undesirable.

My story reached its cataclysmic gap just recently, when I moved to Brooklyn and couldn’t afford therapy, let alone that numbingly perfect lubrication that didn’t have glycerin as an ingredient.

I lived in a country where earthly mental ales are outlawed, because their crops are primarily owned by people with a heritage distinct to that of our leaders. Fortunately, I could sometimes soar through an otherworldly pillar where unorthodox was celebrated. I was through with fear of persecution, I decided one evening on the ferry, overlooking an anti-Wal-Mart billboard at the foot of Staten Island. In our country, Humans were taught to think that hardly anything viable can come from the pleasurable instances where choices were made to salute our good bearings, or maybe get over damaging intricacies, where behaving badly was often the only choice that could alter us.
I wanted to find compelling morals from misfortune, but trying was like beating a corpse.

I’m no less imperfect than anyone else, with a self-esteem that looked more bruised than a tormented ego. Stepping out of my world made sense, after moving to this city with a history and a future trickled by both the savvy rebels and the fundamental maniacs. It seemed like we could make it out alive, whether or not it involved crawling out of a puddle of our own blood, with only a little white flag to signal friends. Unfortunately, the future was still touched by sheepish murderers, who too often affected the bigger things that touched us.

Who would have thought that the country who tarnished home-cooking with delightful items like “hot pockets”, in order to make the life of a pothead all that much simpler, would be so unqualified at understanding the existence of different, or rather, real people? I fumbled, until defacing rules came to me as second nature.

Truthfully, though, existing in America with an alternative lifestyle hardly meant immunity from inevitable injustice. New York City, alternative in itself, has had several faces of good, evil, rich, and poor before I even got here. And while plenty of independent minds scoured the sidewalks in hopes of preserving any culture outside of the white-bread basket of glass condos, varied ethnicities keep lessening and men still rule.
“Why die?” I thought, counting the times I’ve hated being alive. “The people who think my thoughts or speak the language of my motherland are the only ticking bombs on the face of New York City. When we get pissed, we get pissed.” In a manic instant of unleashing motivation to live my life, I digressed. To a fundamental many, we were the scum of the earth. We were the things that went bump, crack, and hump, in the night.