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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Boy_Paint#Logo.2FTrademark |
Me and my best friend Karen were psyched to be in college, unlike a lot of the other kids struggling with big changes and major culture shock. Given our hardcore working class backgrounds, we were happy to have arrived at school safely, because we almost didn't. The drive up there was epic, involving duct tape from my mom's trunk for Karen's old car bought with her after-school money from working at a drugstore in New City, some of the gnarliest twist-and-turns on one of the scariest mountain roads in all of New York State, a bit of MacGyver ingenuity (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/01/kitchen-mission-accomplished.html), and good old fashioned luck.
We landed! We had officially arrived to everything we ever wanted: the freedom to be "you and me", which included working hard, studying, playing harder, and working part-time jobs in between classes, which was just like high school, but with the intellectual freedom to do so unimpeded by our dysfunctional families not-so-hidden agendas. We excelled at writing our thoughts out in essay form, something that had to be actively suppressed during the show-pony multiple choice tests that lower level students needed to make the grade on a curve. Take a "D" test and earn a B?! Oh, my stars....it was heavenly!
Where other students struggled, we blew past as obstacles, running over them or leaping sky high, way above above their heads in leaps and bounds, and our dorm room conversations were no different. Most kids wanted to get high and check out from their life, but this was the stuff we'd been waiting all of our lives for, and we loved it. We quickly found a tight-knit group of other cool, working class New York kids, and we made them our friends for life. Neither of us had ever had so much in common with so many people, and we once again relished in our ability to socialize easily, with a natural charm. With our advanced learning and understanding, we could talk to anyone we wanted to, though not a lot of kids made the cut into our inner circle.
We were protective of the kids from "around the way" who'd been beaten and battered in their own homes, trapped for years in cycles of frustration, poverty, addiction, and/or madness that we didn't cause or control. This, we could control. You only did as good at school as you wanted to (or needed to), without answering to anyone beneath your abilities, and it was so freeing, we almost forgot our bearings early on in the semester that we quickly corrected within a few simple lessons. "Earl, the First Duke of Puke" reminded us that even seemingly mild kids could become lurking predators with enough drugs and alcohol, and the frats were busy hazing the pants off their pledges in the school's cafeteria. OK. We get it. Stay sharp.
But, it didn't stem the damage as much as we hoped. Kids dropped out (or failed out) an alarming rate that shocked us. We couldn't believe how bad freedom was for the coddled ones with rich parents. They were fucked up in a scarier way than the boozy Irish-Americans who tended bar in our neighborhoods, as those nice beefy lads manning the door and cutting you off safely after you had one too many. This wasn't no easy bounce, yo. A lot of them didn't recover their bearings; either from an overdoses, alcohol poisoning, poor grades, or mental health issues, often all of the above at the same time.
We had a great time (per our beach pact on LBI, at the beginning of the summer), but we kept a look-out for trouble spots we could either escape from easily or "man up" on, with as little static as possible. We were greatly assisted in our safekeeping endeavors by my boyfriend's best friend at school, who we'd promptly named "Dutch Boy" the first time we met him. He was a country kid who lived outside of the dubiously named area called Utica/Rome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utica%E2%80%93Rome_Metropolitan_Statistical_Area), without any of the attractions of other twin cities, because it was basically a wide spot in the road. At the time, we knew it for having the only t.v. station that aired locally without cable (you read that right, ONE station with enough reception to reach O-Town), and a terrible low-end beer that tasted like watery piss called "Utica Club", and this was wayyy before hipsters with their fruit-flavored artisanal microbreweries.
We bought the cheapest beer we could find, because that's what we could afford, like the horrible Black Label Piels. It was a rough ride of a night when we drank bad beer, encouraging each other to down it quickly through fun games like beer pong or "Quarters", and Dave was right there with us; on a budget and flanneled up with the Timberlands you had to have for the deep snow drifts. They were (and probably still are) the only boots that can survive an upstate winter for more than a few years. It wasn't a state of mind that other types of kids could handle well, but we got where he was coming from.
We met him after he met Bart, stopping by our party room decorated for the occasion with a tie-dye tapestry hanging from the wall, and with his collection of vintage rock tees from rock concerts he attended, we knew he was the right fit for our burgeoning group. He had the perfect receding hairline of fine blond hair to match his round-tipped nose, like many a New Amsterdamer before him, and we kind of freaked out on that for awhile. He thought we were funny wasted New York girls from downstate, blowing his mind with all of our attention. It was near Halloween (Bart and I got together officially in October), and we started riffing on costumes to freak him out as part of our captive audience.
"Hey! You know what, dude..." passing a joint around, "you should, like, totally be that logo from a paint can!!" Hahaha! We shrieked loud girly giggles at him, and he backed up a little from the unforced gaiety of it all. "You guys are wack!" He put up his hands with the palms up, in a relenting gesture we knew meant that we had him hooked on our growing group. Haha! Yeah, we are wacked! "You know...," Oh no! These girls are going on with it! What to do?! "You could totally do it!" Karen picked it up right away. "Yeah! Just get some denim overalls and a can of paint!" Hahaha! We loved it! It was such a great idea, he had to do it! "No way, man!" He wanted to play it off like he was too cool for school, as an old guy of 28. "I, like, barely, dress up for Halloween. Halloween's for kids!"
Yeah, old man! You should still do it. "Maybe! I don't know...I usually wear a black turtleneck with a mask or something, but it's totally last minute." Ha! Yeah, right, "Dutchboy". Lame. So lame. Totally lame-o! But, he wouldn't budge, so we knew he meant it. Ah, well. Can't win 'em all! Still, we had him as part of our circle for the entire time I was there, including my boyfriend's semester at McGill, when he still drove us out to the lake in the summertime, whenever we felt like it. His loyalty meant something to us, even as he doubted the wisdom of dating a super-douche like Bart. He was right, and we did indeed split, but not until years later, after Dave fell out of contact with us.
The last time I saw him was at a Smashing Pumpkins concert upstate, with my boyfriend "Dangerous" Dave, who'd been a friend just like Dutchboy. He was dressed like a gay frat boy, in a polo shirt and slacks, something he never would have done at Oneonta, where he played a classic burned-out hippie guy from a rough town. It disturbed me, and he gave me a nasty look when we passed by his group of boys all dressed the same. Something was really weird about it. Years later, Bart told me during a mini-reunion we had when I moved back to the city, that Dave was "closeted" and "just trying to fit in" with this new group of college kids, like some sad perpetual teenager who enrolls in school after school as a way of putting off life indefinitely, and that definitely wasn't party of our group's ethos at the time. Still, it was fun while it lasted. Thanks for the good times! Next one's on me. Promise.
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Brewing_Company |
