Me and my best friend had finally made it to college after one hell of a crazy summer. There were times when we thought we wouldn't make it there at all, during the summer of '87. We blew off senior prom to rent a house at the Jersey Shore with some friends, which officially kicked off our last season at home. A few kids in our crew had already been to rehab and back while still in high school, so they spent their time at the shore recreating versions of their parent's marriages, playing house and pretending to be grown-ups. It was eerie. I had no such allusions. I was 17, and I'd been set free. Me and my best friend partied like it was "1999" by having a total blast at the beach. I thought it was a good sign for our last summer at home, but things took a turn for the worse.
My mother's tensions escalated with her dating our disastrously dysfunctional neighbor next door (now widowed), which quickly made my childhood home a "no-fly" zone, while my best friends' parents did their best to pass out drunk and burn the house down with their lit cigarettes, which she removed from their stained fingers as they lie in a stupor on the couch in front of the t.v. because the other one had claimed the bed in their bedroom. It'd become life or death for us to escape homes that'd turned bad and we knew it, so to break the chains that bound, we took "outs" from the stress whenever we could.
My mom and her youngest sister rented a house at the shore later in the summer, so I went back to the same beaches where me and my best friend formed our college pact after graduation, to celebrate July 4th with my family. After entertaining my mom and her dopey sister with fireworks on the beach and copious amounts of white wine, I got bored and restless while they giggled like little girls over a bag of pretzels back at the rented sea shack. I was back on the streets quickly, looking for a house party, which I found a few blocks away. I met a guy by the keg from the hippie waterfront town in our county, and we immediately hit it off.
He was older than me, but he matched the way I felt inside, so I went along with it. Me and my friend connected up with him when I got back from the beach with a number he'd given me at the keg party, and to a couple of teenage girls waiting to escape bad homes, he had the perfect place. It was a two-level loft above a cool bookstore in town, with a circular wrought-iron staircase that led upstairs from the brick-walled living room. It was grown up but stylish and fun: the perfect place to drink and stay away from home. I thought I had it under control, but as my mom began putting the hard squeeze on me deliberately (she was setting me up out of spite for escaping from her house, because she told me she hated me), I knew something had to give, and that was someone was me, but that's a story for another day. It ended badly and dramatically, with my family getting involved (he had sex with me as a minor: he was 31, I was 17). Me and my best friend showed up to Oneonta bruised, beaten, and out of breath, sighing with relief at making it there alive.
Karen's old car had barely made the rough mountain trip, breaking down halfway there on the side of a dangerous mountain pass, blowing a gasket that exploded steam out of the hood. My mom and her older brother repaired it with a roll of duct tape she kept in her trunk (she gets into a lot of car accidents). At the dorm, some girl had already been tripled up with us. We were left with bunk beds that had no ladder, as her brother bitched us out for having too-heavy bags that he lugged up three flights of stairs to the top floor. We should have packed everything in garbage bags! Jeez! We sat in the room mute and scared, but with a dawning realization that we would finally be on our own. At first we looked at each other stunned, sitting on these small twin beds, but then a slow, creeping smile spread across our faces. We made it. We actually did it. Yeah! Cool, let's party. We couldn't get rid of her bro and my mom fast enough, which they were happy to do. We immediately ditched our stuff to take a look around outside. It was glorious: a beautiful mountain campus with kids everywhere. Oh, fuck yeah. I think we're gonna like it here...
We set out finding the party right away, which was easy for us, because at that point we were old hands. All we had to do was sit somewhere and wait for the boys to find me, which they did. I just had to say "hello" in their general direction, which I did. My life experiences had cured me of my shyness, fueled by the alcohol and drugs that were our social lubricants. We created a scene that first night in a spectacular way (another great story for another day) that made us famous on campus right away. Every cool kid wanted to hang out with us.
We found a party group in the dorm behind us; a ragtag collection of skaters, surfers, and street punks, which created a party conduit between the two dorms. I was fully invested in the scene because I was finally single, really and truly, and I'd made a promise to my best friend to stay that way, but with the amount of good-looking kids around, it was hard for me to stay that way for long. People were everywhere, high and happy before classes began. It was a festival, a carnival atmosphere, with a bunch of fun New York kids doin' it up every way they knew how, and we ain't people to turn a good party down, you know what I mean? Me and my friend found ourselves drunk in some kid's room outside of our dorm, and the next thing I remember is kinda making out with the guy, while my friend scowled in the hallway outside of his dorm room.
She ditched me thinking I wanted to hook up with him, but I was so drunk, I can't remember what happened except the next thing I know, this kid was on top of me on a bottom bunk with my backside exposed and I couldn't move to stop it because I felt so sick. The motion of the bed made me wake up, and before he could finish, I threw up all over him, me, the entire bunk bed, and it didn't stop there. He moved me to the twin bed on the other side of the room and put a trash can by it, which I continued to hurl into and around. It was an impressive amount: I covered his sheets, his roommate's bed, and the floor with vomit. Everywhere was stank and mess.
That summer, I had puked on the way down to our shore house, sitting in my friends back seat next to the cooler, pounding beers and Doritos, which created an bright orange show that earned me the name "The Uker" as in, you puked your guts out because you can't handle your booze, which actually kinda pissed me off. For my size, I have amazing stamina, which also made me famous. I could drink much bigger guys under the table all the time, but that day, motion sickness brought me down. I had simply rolled down the car window in the back seat of my friend's car, puked out the side, took my shirt off, threw that out the window, too, then zipped up my hoodie and partied on. It became infamous at the beach house within minutes of our arrival. To this day, too much alcohol and food makes me sick, so I avoid overindulging or risk paying the full price of admission. Same principles in play.
The next day, I was pissed as hell. Why had my friend left me behind? She said she had knocked on his door to get me and bring me back to our dorm room, but she saw my boots stashed outside his door in the hallway (which my would-be rapist was considerate to do for me as his "overnight" guest, a fact he wanted to publicize because of my fame as a beauty on campus). I do remember seeing her with another girl in the hallway asking after me, and then when his door was closed, hearing her friend ask her again if they should just open the door to come in and get me out of there. Karen got angry and said "no" ("Just leave her there!") because she thought it was obvious that I was hooking up with him and she was disgusted with me for it, because I'd supposedly "sworn off" men during college. She was actually envious over date rape, which sucked, because the kid we met was this short little rich kid from Long Island. And that's exactly how it all went down.
We talked about what to do the next day by laying out all our options, which we listed out loud to each other, back in our room: 1) we were working class girls, and as such, utterly disposable to society. No one gave a fuck whether we lived or died, including our parents. OK, telling adults who were supposedly "authority" figures was out. We played out the different scenarios in our heads: we'd tell some counselor at the school's health center, she'd go bat-shit over it (because tons of shrinks are also headcases), then she makes me into some big feminist statement by broadcasting it everywhere on campus, we'd get hooked into committee/faculty meetings about the incident, there'd be excruciatingly overwrought and inept meetings with our parents, law enforcement, written confessions, all the routine bullshit that hadn't worked for us in our own community.
It sure as fuck wasn't gonna work in this hick town because 2) "townies" fucking hated city slickers/suburbanites like us. They'd be glad we got screwed because 3) we're just a couple of drunk Mick bitches who got what we deserved because 4) I was stupid enough to be alone and drunk in a room with some guy we barely knew. Any way she and I played out the scenes between us, we got fucked. It could possibly derail our college careers, and there was no way we could do that. I remember it like it was yesterday; my best friend sitting on her bed across our room, drinking a beer, looking at me, and saying to me, in a shaky voice: "We barely made it here, Marie. We can't screw up", which we were in grave danger of doing. If we got kicked out or failed out, we essentially had no homes to go back to. My mom and her parents were nobody's guardians. There was simply nothing left to "go home" to. This was it for us, "do or die" time, you know? And we did. We knew this was our one shot at success.
So, we did the next best thing that a couple of throw-away kids from the wrong side of the tracks could do: over the next few weeks we told every kid at every party we went to what went down, in exacting detail. Like, who he was, what he looked like, his name, the town he came from on Long Island, the name of his dorm, his room number, where he hung out, what his major was, what classes he took, what bars he frequented, the whole nine. That fucking punk couldn't make a move without us being on top of him, and we knew it. We won. My bestie dubbed him "Earl, the First Duke of Puke", conferred and bestowed upon him forever, with great good humor and whip-smart violence. It stuck with relish.
You know how we do it with nicknames around the way, right? It's like a crew of kids from a "Fat Albert" episode; a catchy nickname sticks no matter what. And that's what we did. It was so successful, his reputation was shot and his entire college career side-lined around that night. He was so delusional about what happened that he even had the nerve to ask for my number over our first summer break from school so "we could stay in touch", deliberately waiting for me in the hallway outside the weight room I went to for the "Body Conditioning" class me and my boyfriend (my first real love, a French Canadian/Irish boy from Brooklyn) took together. I was so shocked that I gave it to him just to see what he would do, with my boyfriend's consent.
It was crazy. He actually called me on the phone at home that summer, which my cousin answered. I told him to say that I wasn't there and hang up the phone. In typical dipshit fashion, he kept calling, and once my younger cousin was out of the kitchen (I didn't want to upset the boy anymore than was necessary, because he'd lost his father to cancer in high school.), I ripped into him. Did he know he raped me?! I mean, he was lucky to be alive! Nope, he didn't. He actually had the nerve to cry to me about us spreading the word around, and how we ruined his college experience because no girls would date him, and everyone made fun of him at every party or bar or club that he tried to go to. Yeah, right. That's the whole point!
I yelled at him as discreetly as I could over the phone without being heard by my mother's guests, shaking with anger. I hissed at him, threatening to tell his rich psychiatrist daddy about his actions by addressing a letter to him, if he ever called me again. He'd actually written out his address and phone number to me when I asked him for it, in the hallway outside the gym I worked out in at campus. My college boyfriend (who I dated for almost 6 years) was a beefy bouncer at the hippest bar in town, which he and his older musician brother ruled over it with impunity. His bro lived above the bar in town in a brick-walled, loft-style apartment that he shared with his girlfriend Shelley: John Cryer's curly, red-haired (and rich) stepsister, a singer who occasionally played the tambourine in their hipster band. Last I heard, she was a jet-setting hairdresser/makeup artist in the SoCal showbiz scene.
We ruled our territory with gusto, because that's exactly what a young Acadian Queen in-training does, mes amis. I cut my teeth on boys like him as a teenager and won, because by the end of my stint in that far-off mountain town, every other muthafucka from miles around knew it, too. Together, we unite in strength: http://nomore.org/.
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| Summer of '89 (Oneonta, NY) |
