HQ BK: Drugs, Decadence & Dumb Sh!t At the Turn of the Centuryis the story of Eula Tessitore- a suburban-born, self-described “designated white girl,” who struggles to find her footing as she careens from self-designed disaster to epic implosion. Convinced she’s the star of her own Brooklyn crime epic, Eula is oblivious to the fact that the people around her barely see her as a bit player.
Drawn to the energy of late-90s Bed Stuy, Eula attaches herself to Mundo, the magnetic leader of a small crew of private school-educated, socially mobile Caribbean-American hustlers moving drugs and guns throughout the Tri-State area, with a lucrative sideline in EBT fraud and ATM scams.
Eula’s closest to Mundo when she’s useful, and most entangled with his lieutenant, Cabrón, a man whose ambitions run deeper than she can fathom. As she mistakes proximity for belonging, the real currents of loyalty and power move around and past her, threatening to drag her under.
A series of brutal betrayals and a voicemail left in a moment of rage plunge Eula headlong into a pre-dawn arrest and three-year prison sentence. Incarceration- first at Rikers, then Beacon Correctional Facility, strips away the illusion of Eula’s leading lady status, forcing her to admit that her script needs a massive rewrite. And she’s the only one who can make that happen.
Released into a city that’s moved on, Eula counts on bonds she’d forged inside to help her gain her footing. She finds herself taken in by two savvy Latina dominatrixes in Washington Heights. Peeping game, and with the encouragement of her new roommates, Eula returns to an earlier trade- non-penetrative sex work. Every step on the outside is a negotiation between survival, self-mythology, and a slow, silent collapse.
In 2004, a botched encounter with a childhood acquaintance turned Finance Bro triggers a family intervention and a stint in an upscale Florida rehab. Sober, broke, and stripped of the chaos that once defined her, Eula faces the hardest question yet: without the story she’s been telling herself, who is she, really?
Darkly funny, spiritually attuned and unapologetically female, Donald Goines meets Erykah Badu, as told by Larry Clark- HQ BK is a bruising, cinematic exploration of addiction, autonomy and the high cost of pledging loyalty to a game that doesn’t even want you on the playing field.
