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Despite our crowd's consistent demonstrations of hearty appetites backed by impressive quaffing, we were not immune to bad party fouls, like any other high-aiming social group. We were the kind of kids who'd try and make the worst combinations of lunchroom leftovers we could think of, daring kids to eat it for, like, a quarter or fifty cents, which immediately knocked out the rich Jewish kids with orthopedist/dentist dads. They didn't need the change as badly as we did. White milk in a carton was $.15, and my mom didn't give anyone anything extra. Ever. If we wanted some chips to go with our bologna sandwiches or maybe a carton of chocolate milk for $.30/.35 (both junk food items in my household), we had to earn it, which we did by creating insane concoctions we giggled profusely over.
Drinks were fodder, too, because you could make gross-out combos in the obligatory thermos that came with every lunchbox back then. Do people even use those anymore? I'm not sure, but like our clothes and sneakers, a new lunchbox that wasn't a knock-off or a hand-me-down from your less-than-cool older sibling was fresh gear to sport around, and that meant something to us. Like a weird Midwestern religious cult that forbids gifts, presents, and celebrations like the booze that will surely cause them to snap out and kill someone, we were strictly limited in our options, which forced us to get creative, so we did.
Peas mixed with mashed potatoes and something sweet was a solid combo, but over the years, as our stomachs grew stronger, so did the thrills and angst accompanying cafeteria dares. After awhile, like, say, in junior high school, we had jobs for fast food and extra things like a novelty eraser that had meant so much to us in grade school. So, too, did our appetites grow in high school and college. "Mixology" was considered an unspoken minor alongside rolling joints and tobacco in rolling papers, which is kind of like baking with really thin puff pastry in cooking school for the first time: one tear and you're out of the game, unless you become adept at fixing the hole that could render a joint unsmokeable—or a pastry edible—making you the target of jeers for the rest of what could be a very long night.
Certain drink categories quickly became defined to us as a group as utterly non-potable and undesirable for long-term partying, meaning the wrong combo could take you out of the scene and into the bathroom for the entire night, missing out on the kind of crucial action that always takes place at a great party with slammin' music and beautiful people. It hurt, you know? As working class kids, we didn't have a lot of time for recreation, and for us to blow a rare opportunity for fun to remain behind closed doors while recovering from one of the worst hangovers of your life meant you fucked up somewhere, so you'd better fix it for the next time. We had the added bonus of hearing all of our friends make fun of us in the very next room, or prank us hard while we were down for the count, and these were kids from rough homes: they could turn vicious and mean with too much booze and pot.
You didn't want to be "down for the count", like a prizefighter in the last round of a title fight who needs just a few precious seconds to make it to the end of a fight, in order to earn out from the bout, for all that hard work and dedication. It meant that much to us at school, and we really couldn't afford to blow it. There were no magical "Plan B" pills for us to take, back then. Every fuck-up we made could hurt us badly and take us "out of the running" for life, forever, like "Crackhead Jen" who got busted by "Pubic Safety" (public safety): a ragtag bunch of fat locals who hated us/needed us for a living. She got caught by them for over-drinking between dorms, and then was sent back to Ireland by her parents for awhile, to cool her heels. I finally got Karen back to our room, after they'd been pounding cheap fruit punch powder mix with grain alcohol that our friends bought for us in Pennsylvania.
As part of the prized "heavyweight" class of drinker from solid German/Irish/Italian working class New York roots, Karen could pull it in for adults and parents like I could, but Meg and her roommate Jen were from the quieter town of Mamaroneck in Westchester that left them lacking in their party-training, though Meg proved heartier than little Jen, who'd completely lose her shit after a few drinks. It was weird, because they're both solid Micks, but, with her cheerleader crew, Meg had sampled the darker world of blotter acid trips gone bad in the 'burbs, which actually left her primed and ready for a serious party experience like O-town. This shit wan't no joke to play with, yo. Kids snapped out and went down all the time around us, sometimes waiting it out at a local community college while living back at home with their parents for what could be a few crucial years in our development. We didn't have time for interruptions like that, esses.
And so, like grain alcohol with powdered fruit drink mix, Tequilla (or "Ta-Kill-Ya", as we renamed it back then) was "loco" to us, man, as were the rest of the mescal group of drinks from south of the border. We'd drank the bottles to the bottom to eat the worm in front of each other, and that's exactly where it went all wrong for us: at the bottom of a bottle of seriously strong booze. We became the kind of crowd who could smoke and drink all night to exhaustion, braced for the deathly-cold walk home by a strict one-shot rule of whiskey at the end of the night, pounded to the same "Smiths" song that signaled it was closing time at the bar to us, cranked to an ear-splitting level. It was time to go home, and no matter how hard the booze hit you in the warmth of a cozy pub, the freezing bitch-slap of our mountain air always (ALWAYS) sobered us up enough to make it home problem-free. It pays to know just who the fuck you are at the end of a night out, especially around a bunch of roughneck New York kids. Take care with it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everclear_(alcohol)
Because my parents were desperate to be seen as upwardly mobile—or "uppah middel clah-yass", in my mutha's particular accent—we moved around a lot during the first few years of my life. First, we lived in the projects of Queens, then Co-Op City in the Bronx, before my dad took a job with a family of crooks in a very small town in Pennsylvania that only lasted a year, before we finally settled down in Rockland County. The drama caused by so many moves was epic, and like any two real "drama queens", my parents played their new roles as stressed-out "Noo Yawk" parents to the hilt.
My mom caught a terrible cold that happily turned out to be a spot on her lung from a serious case of "Walking Pneumonia" (ooo, that sounds bad!), which cinched the deal for us moving right after my dad quit his job, pocketed by the money he got from shaking down the crooks he worked for, armed with my mom's bad health stories that served as convenient excuses for life's little problems. It wasn't exactly like becoming a superhero, but for my street-savvy parents, it could be worked into being told that way very easily to their hometown crowd, which is exactly what they did. "They'll get theirs, someday", said with a careless shrug of the shoulders, as my mom wrapped her precious antique glassware in newspaper and tissue, because, really, that was way more important than turning state's evidence against fraudulent thieves, in her mind. They got what they wanted. They also took whatever they wanted, like any city person on the make.
They took almost all of the house's original antique bronze fixtures, which they promptly packed away and never used again. I know, because I moved them around a few years back during my own horrible move from Brooklyn to here, which meant I worked to clean my mom's basement space for weeks, with her sitting there looking at everything, like any episode of the popular t.v. show "Hoarders". She'd packed up all of her stuff from the house in New City into big boxes ("Your grandfather was sick!") never to even look at them again, until the day I picked them up and moved them around, with her youngest sister's pile sitting near-by in the dank gloomy space that was crammed full, also similarly abandoned in the wake of my grandmother's death, because my aunt said she "needed room" in their apartment, which is crazy code for "hoard during times of great stress", for those of you still new to the language of the insane.
Nonetheless, I picked up a feel for the mountains of the Northeast that I still have. It helped prep me for the winters of upstate New York during college, which is "Canada cold", and for those of you who don't know how or why that is so cold, here's a handy map for you to see its relative position, as it is situated to the state of New York: http://www.canada-maps.org/canada-map.gif. It also meant that my parents almost immediately caved in to the weather, in dramatic outbursts designed to widely telegraph their ineptitude among the mountain folk of Coudersport, Pennsylvania (http://www.bestplaces.net/images/city/coudersport_pa.gif), just in case they wondered whether or not any of the stereotypes about city slickers were true, and they are.
We were smarter, faster, and funnier than the other kids, which got us immediate promotions in grade school, though I was still in pre-K nursery programs and reading classes before I attended Kindergarten, because I wanted to go to school to learn. I already knew how to read, anyway, which was the basis of my soundly reasoned arguments to my crazy-ass city parents stuck in the deep snow of the rural Pennsylvanian mountains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coudersport,_Pennsylvania). But, we loved it. We could walk around unmolested by strangers, and our neighbor's daughter Jamie (Hello to "The Peppers"!) was our babysitter, and she was a really nice girl (still is!). We could pile the autumn leaves as high as we wanted without anyone hassling us like they did in the city, and then jump into it as many times as we were willing to rake it back into a pile.
We walked around with our cute little snow doggie "Snowflake", feeling like we belonged there, because we did. The small towns of upstate New York are a lot like the classic main streets of other Northern towns throughout New England, each one as quaint and charming as the next. I actually met a girl from Coudersport at Oneonta State, a blond girl who looked Dutch/German; pretty but thick, which means farm life. We were both taking "Black and White Photography", which meant a lot of time in the darkroom to chat. We laughed about how the cold of Pennsylvania was almost the same as New York, and we were glad for the prepping. A lot of kids from downstate and other places couldn't handle it, my own parents included.
It's a cold so strong, it almost burns you like nitrogen. You just have to have the DNA for it, and I found that I did. It was similarly baffling to the Coloradans I met during my travels, who were mostly ignorant about the rest of America, like rural people in the middle of America typically are. I explained to them that I spent a year in the mountains of Pennsylvania, backed by my time in the mountains of New York, but it just didn't take. A girl I knew from high school worked at the same paper as me, and she was busy doing "schtick" for the blond crowd gathered around her, in a cheap "Seinfeld" imitation that she thought would give her safe passage through the hinterlands of America, an act she honed on the road after leaving Rockland County for Germany with her German-born parents, even changing her name to "Inga" from the plainer "Ingrid" we knew her as, like she was an exotic Swedish ski instructor instead of some loudmouth brunette from the desperate housewife town of a mostly Jewish New City in suburban New York.
Her bad act caused a lot of problems at work. "But, Marie doesn't act/talk/sound like that, 'Inga' and she's from the same area as you!", said with the same pseudo-quizzical tilt of the head, because those kids were full of shit, too. Acting awards all-around. Soon enough, they got it. I didn't use the backwoods as a "work-out" like some insane tourist from SoCal. No, they saw my version of a big blond in my Scotch boyfriend, and that lad don't feel the cold for nothing, with or without the kilt, kids. Ditto, bro. I got my own clan plaid, too: http://www.novastory.ca/cdm/singleitem/collection/digphotos/id/1368/rec/1. Oh, and I saw online that it'll top out at a "high" of 72° F in Halifax this week! Brrr...stay cool, babies;) Mama's coming home, soon.
Congratulations, Natalie! "Mummy" loves you, too: http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1348725-doucette-becomes-first-first-nations-child-welfare-specialist-in-nova-scotia
