Speed Weed

Back in the day, me and my friends all had several part-time jobs after school, and we had them before the legal employment age requiring parental consent on your employment application, which is a classic upbringing for working class New Yorkers. I had a work permit from my elementary school principal (I know it's against the law now...sigh), so I could earn a few bucks with my older brothers working paper routes. Once I hit 15, me and my two friends worked at the McDonald's in Nanuet (it's still there, too), with my mom's signature alongside mine on the job application. I simply didn't (and still don't) know how to live without working really hard for a buck. It's part of my DNA.

It was a daily part of my low-class, ethnic friend's lives, too. We all humped it with a few jobs living with our dysfunctional families, just to have food and new clothes, and to escape our insane asylum homes. I met my first French Canadian boyfriend (Hi, Joe!) at the Nyack McDonald's my friend Donnel worked at. Yeah, it was like that. Her dad had died unexpectedly and suddenly under mysterious circumstances overseas, which sent her entire family into a tailspin. Her "best friend" Laila had already been to rehab and sent back to her grandparents in Norway to "dry out" for awhile, which meant she managed the convenient store in West Nyack as a high school teenager.

That's just how it was for us. And it didn't end with high school. Me and my best friend fit right in with our new college friends, almost all of them "ethnics" from the city, with the occasional banged-up Italian chick from Syracuse with the drunk, abusive Indian boyfriend from "the res" thrown into the mix for local color. Oh, yeah? We have those downstate, too. Know what I mean? We fit each other real well. My college boyfriend worked at the school cafeteria, worked the door as a bouncer at the hip music bar downtown that his brother played at with his "art fag" girlfriend, and then he spent excruciatingly slow summers helping old rich Jewish ladies with their shopping bags get out of cabs on the Upper West Side, which financed our first European trip abroad that we got on discount because his older brother worked bags and the ticket counter for Aer Lingus.

It was everywhere we went, with everyone around us repeating the same insane chorus: if you want to eat, get a job. If you want clothes, get a job. Not health insurance or medicine(s), or a savings account, or a "golden parachute" if the job suddenly ended for reasons that typically had nothing to do with me and my hard-working friends, even if excuses were used, and by the end of high school we'd heard them all. Just survival. It was all about surviving for another day. Just one more day. We were hungry for life because we were really good at it.

And so, it wasn't a big deal to me that my Dominican friend Ariel from Brooklyn had been hustling various jobs since childhood, too. His mother Miriam was a loud, screeching hairdresser who worked intermittently for shops, and when those went bust because she got angry and threw a tantrum at the boss, she cut hair at home. We met in Oneonta because he liked my look as he passed me by on a campus staircase—we both sported Eisenhower jackets*, though he claimed his was real and I knew mine was a "faux" one that I bought for cheap down at the Jersey Shore on LBI over the summer—which gave him extra "cool points" in his desperately trendy "art fag" clique.

He lived in the dorm beneath us on the hill, right next to ours, so it wasn't long before his group and mine began mixing it up at parties. I introduced him to his first serious girlfriend—my friend "Dev", who pursued my friendship aggressively after Photography class, because I got great "crits" and she knew I knew a lot of "hot" guys—because he wasn't my physical type, and I already had a boyfriend who lived directly beneath me in my dorm. We had a lot of other differences, too, as our friendship unfolded, but suffice to say, he was very happy with his "consolation prize". They immediately hit it off as "city kids" who both wore hipster black almost exclusively, right down to their underwear, which Ariel promptly showed her to prove his "Goth" cred.

He had "Bauhaus" posters in his room, his busted-ass bikes that he fixed sometimes, and lots of dope, though he just as hungry and thirsty as us. We'd rip off smokes from each others packs during parties, and weed and beer was our collective currency that could get you instant access anywhere. Dev had already had a live-in boyfriend and a retail job in Manhattan, because her parents kicked her out of their Roosevelt Island place after she refused to go to a good college, and after they paid for Bronx Art and Science, a really prestigious city high school. Instead, they got a typical "Art Fag" with a lot of gauzy black clothes that needed steam cleaning, and a pretentious closed-jaw accent for their troubles, but she fit in with my bro from Brooklyn, and I liked that. I wanted us to keep hanging out, you know?

Ariel was busted like we were, and every summer we tried to think of ways to avoid going home for the horribly long summers that included mandatory hard labor at jobs we fucking despised...except Ariel. He was actually a street kid and not just some "wanna-be", because in addition to the usual skate-punk skills with a board, his dumb ass was crazy enough to work one of the most dangerous jobs in all of Manhattan—a bike messenger. It was like being a cabbie in the 'hood. You could get killed just for making some change. He told us harrowing stories about car doors that suddenly opened, side-swiping him off his bike that was then too broke too ride. No bike = no money.

In addition to tense stand-offs with cab drivers and truckers, he had to stay alive and stay on his bike to earn money. I can't really explain to you how insane a proposition it is, until you visit Midtown Manhattan during a commuter rush-hour, with the added bonus of a million dumb European tourists wandering around the streets during summertime. It was a stress test devised by some mythic "Men in Black": if you arrive safely, you survive. The worst accident he ever had was when he was ripped off his bike by a speeding cab, dragged with his bike underneath it, to come out the front end and grab onto the back of a huge truck's bumper that was right before him and the cab. Yeah. I know.

It was always a rough ride, but he loved adrenaline rushes and getting high, so the job took, give or take a summer session upstate. It was his way to earn, and we very much wanted to get back to our college campus in the mountains of upstate New York. It was our paradise away from home, and we got educated, too. We all had T.A.P. from the state** and single mothers (or close enough to it, with their notoriously bad marriages) who needed cash to maintain their lifestyles, not ours. I also took out a personal loan that I got for my mom so she could meet some expenses, and our tuition back then was...ahem...$750.00 a semester. Yeah, you read that right.

Everything else we had to pay for, including food, clothing, shelter, books, art supplies, medicine, and laundry. We were the most independent kids I'd ever met, and to match our advanced know-how, we'd developed maturely good tastes, like travel and fresh gear. Ariel had the added burden of being an arty hipster, which meant his hair and clothes had to be "on point" to give him status in his clique, a group of cool surfer/skater kids from Long Island, who were all more-or-less the same height, which made Ariel the tallest and skinniest at 6'1. That's a lot of hair dye and black clothes. He also needed the goods to maintain a connection with his bitch of a girlfriend who played hard to please like an angry, spoiled, rude brat. A lot, bro.

So, he did what a lot of messengers who were "hep cats" did on the side: he smoked and sold a lot of weed. I didn't really make the connect until a venture into the city for a meet-up between semesters, when his beeper would go off constantly. That's how they did back then, with special codes for "weed", or, if you were an upscale club-goer at night, coke. Ariel dabbled in a lot darker shit than me and my main crew, who were destined for scholarly lives, but Ariels' main goal was to work in a recording studio with "The Ramones", which he did, because he took us to the joint to scope it out. He still works with audio, too (sans the college bitch I introduced him to), doin' high-end installations for rich white people in the city (and occasionally their ski chalet or Woodstock country cabin in upstate New York), who want one remote control for their stereo system, alarms, and car park. Shit like that. He also married the daughter of the owner for extra security.

But, I can't deny that his bravado and skill at circumnavigating those crazy-ass Manhattan streets blew me away back then. That n*gga knows how to fuckin' ride in all that shit without dying, and that's impressive, yo. Props to you, pops! You were one of the coolest kids on the block back then, and you knew how to telegraph it, too. Good on you, bro! You were always one of my favorite Oneontans from the 'hood, guy! Have a great summer. Watch out for the sharks! With or without the "speed weed", ya hump. Ha! And, Dave, fuck you still.  Ass hat. Keep yo' Niagara ass close to the Hudson River with yo' job, and off my shit this summa! I got shit goin' on and I don't need you sniffin' around being pokey, looking for an "in" with me like you do, Indian boy. Stay off my jock!

For the "Dog Pound"

*   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_jacket
** https://www.hesc.ny.gov/pay-for-college/apply-for-financial-aid/nys-tap.html  

Oregano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregano

Kids from Rockland County don't know shit about real drugs growing up, because our hardcore city parents wanted to give us a taste of the "good life" in the country, where the air is cleaner. We live a wholesome lifestyle that's hard for some transplants to adjust to, accustomed as they are to the networks of "Gotham City". It can be harder to survive if you're, say, a hardcore racist redneck "Welfare Queen" (no one cares about your insane ideas about some "confederacy": http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/07/confederacy-of-dunces.html), or a pampered Nuyorican playing the fake minority card you think you have as darker southern European looking to game a bunch of crazy white women from the dykey "Social Do-Gooder" class of condescending pseudo-intellectuals. Uh uh. Not here.

And that was part of the charm for us, too. We were such quick New Yorkers that our one childhood foray into the hinterlands of the Northeast known as "Pennsylvania" (it borders New York State), saw us immediately bumped up a grade or two, just for being able to read things like "maps", which are crucial for a successful urban childhood. The rural teachers in that small mountain town were both charmed and in frightened awe of us, because we could speak as children, too. How....odd. Yes, that's it. That's what our educated genetics were to their brand of "townies": strange! We considered it flattering to be their opposites, because even a toddler knows that the flip side of "bad" is "good", like turning over cards in a playful card-matching game, or sorting shapes and sizes to fit inside a colorful plastic ball, one of my all-time favorite pastimes as a very little girl.

It was a good variation early on in habitation among different types of communities: the big city life, rural mountain towns, and then the rather bucolic country charms of a newly settled Rockland County suburb, still ripe with farmland all around us. We grew strong and outdoorsy and independent, though the farm kids left us bored, and then that congealed into an excruciating pace that felt like an eternity, even with the advanced classes in a very good public school system, with our Regents exams and college credits received before our senior years. Waiting to move on while stuck in someone else's bad head is torture for the gifted class, like putting a "Special Needs" child in a foreign language class, just to watch them surely explode in a frustrated rage. It felt like that for me and my friends.

So, we did what every smart kid does while waiting for older humans to figure it out, get you out, or give you help that never comes until it's too late in its cruelly unnatural suppression. We naturally turned to experimenting with fruity wine coolers (kiddie taste buds=marketing genius!) and cigarettes, in the lull that's intellectually like one long hot summer with the constant drone of cicadas in the background, as a white noise we couldn't tolerate anymore. I took my PSAT's and I think one SAT test at the high school either drunk and/or high, just for the thrill of it. I had a nearly perfect score on the English side of it, without even trying hard or studying beforehand (surprise surprise), and I still didn't need any classes or credits to graduate as a senior. What would you do, if you were me and still a child in someone's disordered household? We all had the same problems.

Because my friends at school were also older by at least a year or two (in deference to my "Irish Twin" brother, because my parents forbade me from moving up another grade as was natural for me to do, so as to not offend him with his Dyslexia, nor compete with my mom's early graduation that she was coached through by her gifted parents, huge artificial advantages for them both), they got into a lot more trouble way ahead of me. They had already dated and lost their virginity, were on birth control and/or having very early-term inductions so as to go through college uninterrupted or, conversely, plotting marriages through intentionally manipulative early pregnancies with a big fat Catholic wedding, in lieu of college. 

They were shipped off to rehab and/or their grandparents' homes, both here and back in the "Old World" (because it moves in both directions in the Colonies: America for the Euros living overseas, and Europe for the Americans established here), or upstate to "juvie" and mental institutions, all before I had my first date, first kiss, and/or first real teenage rebellion experiences. Of course, instead of teaching me anything with their knowledge, they sought to one-up the house genius, but I digress. That was anything I wasn't already used to.

Kids began sorting out addictive preferences according to their genetics. The obviously bad kids hung out at "The Wall", smoking and listening to po' white trash heavy metal. The Irish kids hid their homosexuality from their uptight parents with dubious hetero links to suburban normality. Smart kids hid behind their grades and their ingrained roles as "teacher's pet", loudly bragging about test scores that were largely determined by the test designers' conceits as a scholar (publishing is like that, too). The rich Jewish kids already had Ivy League lawyer/doctor/dentist/chiropractor fathers who "made it". They just had to not screw up badly enough to wind up in jail. And then there was me and my friends, cooler than any one particular strata, and adept enough to straddle as many roles as we had to adapt to, taming stresses long held in our families as best as we could.

We developed habits and coping skills as we needed them, as we watched our parents' lives fell apart. We became parents, mentors, elders, and counselors before our time, inadvertently pole-vaulting ourselves far above the heads of the generation immediately before and after us, the good results of which you are reading about now, as the "X" that marks the spot for you to find treasure, on the road-map we laid as our joint beneficial futures. We became law enforcement, clergy, teachers, social workers, activist, artists, writers, and philanthropists, without the corrupted money inherited from other people's labors, because there was none to be had. We would have donated what we didn't need, anyway.

And so, when me and my friend Molly were bored in homes empty of mothers, we fiddled with grown-up stuff, like any teenager running a household would: we played with the stuff that was around us, and available for us to use. She delved deeper into drugs, alcohol, and sex, to a level that scared me, but I was interested in any experimentation that made time go by faster. We giggled as we recollected the smell of "pot" (marijuana). It kinda smelled like burning oregano! Kids that we were (and already experienced cooks, which girls were expected to know how to do, in our large traditional households), we found the spice on the shelf and dived right in. Here it is!

We had cigarette rolling papers, but no real drugs, because none of us liked the time it took to go into the cities worst neighbors for something as silly as dried-out weeds. Not worth the risk. We didn't have the money or the cars that'd make the drive into town either, scant as our working class resources were (are), because every single one of us had to have after-school job(s). We took our badly-wrapped pseudo "joint" (a rolled marijuana cigarette) into my mom's bathroom, because her small powder-room had a window we could crack open to dispel the strong smell, only to be promptly discovered by my "Irish Twin" brother now home from school, too. He banged on the door to scare us, and we laughed even harder as we tried to put out the burning paper in my mom's tiny bathroom sink. Oh, well!

What did we learn from this banal experiment in recreational party tricks? Well, since we'd already taken lab classes with dissections in junior high school, not much. Unlike other pantry items (<cough> meth monkeys <cough>) that the much harder and more ingrained addicts around us must have known could give you a "buzz", we simply found out what we already knew at the outset of our funny little time-waster: oregano is made for better things, like spicing up a Sunday dinner spaghetti sauce, but I'm sure you kids today are much hipper at this kind of stuff than we were back then, what with the decriminalization of cannabis as your "Medical Marijuana" today, because of its mildly narcotic medicinal effects, and all. GenX did that, too.

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/340818/Better-Off-Dead-Movie-Clip-Nasal-Spray.html

Dirt Weed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blunt_%28cannabis_cigar%29

Years ago, after the publishing industry went bust and employers quickly set-up weirdly convoluted political climates to drive out the healthier and more expensive employees by using their cheaper and more deranged ones to do their dirty work (hidden behind a thinly-veiled agenda that was never really very cloudy or unclear, except if you had to prove it in a court of law,) my bubble burst by design, because I beat the "big boys" at their own game. 

Rich white men have always used money and the threat of impoverishment to silence those carefully observant, high-performing employees who are better than their own kids at the family business, knowing that most single women in New York City are one paycheck away from homelessness. It's a total dick way to "win", which is the point of Evil, Inc: a place where we don't do business fairly (the real company motto), but tricky knife-in-the-back games are part of what makes dysfunctional business go. Healthy people tend to share the wealth, as well as the free dispersal of information, which sucks if you can only win by rigging the game to your advantage illegally.

After that, I was on the move from place to place. At first I stayed locally, finding temporary friendship with a troubled man I met at the public library (I could tell he knew who I was behind his badly done "actor-y" facade), but times were desperate, which was the whole point behind that hurt, too. See? "If you would have just played the game, Marie, your entire family wouldn't have turned their backs on you (no one wants to see you anymore without money and help to give out freely), because you talked openly about what you saw at work." Of course, that sick family was my responsibility, too, and if I don't help sick people whenever they want it, there's abuse to be had. I should have learned my lesson years ago. I'd heard the bullshit speech thousands of times before.

Except, really healthy, brilliantly powerful women don't work that way. That's why we run this world you live in. And so, I didn't cave. There's was nothing left for me to give, anyway: no work, clothes, housing, food, rent, healthcare...all of that goes away when you speak up against injustice, whether it's at home or at work, which is exactly why I did it. I couldn't live like that anymore. It was intolerable, the injustices I've seen, like the fact that the entire Housing Court of Brooklyn, New York is currently funded by black women on layaway, hard-working women who don't want their children homeless for Christmas. The U.S. Marshall (a nice white guy from Long Island) explained to me that they are way better now, because they don't toss your stuff on the street like they used to anymore! He looked at me like he wanted consolation then, right when I had none to give.

After getting "thrown out of the inn" during Christmastime (so to speak), I lived by my native New York wits. The very woman who had illegally harassed every worker at the shop I blew the whistle on, the same one who had once bragged to me about her "street smarts" (a total joke when you face living on the streets, which is exactly what I did), while that crazy bitch went on believing that sucking dick would save her life. It didn't (spoiler alert). It did, however, buy her what she thought was enough valuable time to plot my destruction (Girl Power!), and get herself canned, too. After all, I knew it was about money. That's all it ever was, not the fact that I noticed (and documented) each and every illegal occurrence that happened there, which is why I faced off without counsel one of the company's nephews with legal experience, who asked me to hand over my notebooks to him about the situation, which I flatly refused. I still have them, dear readers.

The Neuyorican guy I met from around the way did 'hood business with me: he wanted access to my soon-to-be-gone Park Slope digs so he could use the kitchen because he was working in food service, and I wanted to get into his tenement building from 'round that way, so I could save up some money for another rental apartment. We struck a deal: I would sleep on his floor (which I did), while me and some guy named Jose cleaned the room next to his so I could move in, which is exactly what I did. I worked as a lead cover designer for some broke crooked indie outfit that was yet another spoiled Jewish kid's response to his father's valid foothold in the business, to come home at night to a bipolar guy weaning off his meds through the copious use of weed, giving him a harsh hacking cough that did not abate with time.

He seemed amazed and paralyzed by my Acadian energy. How could I work all day and then work some more at night? Where did it come from? He came from Brownsville*, a place so bad, that the main source of income is living with crazy and Welfare, which is what he did when the kitchen jobs went away. You see, my friend was "too good" to start at the bottom of the kitchen hierarchy by washing dishes. It was so obvious that he didn't want to work, even his teenage dope dealer told him so. Imagine that? Gettin' schooled by some hood rat, but that's how it went down, for real. We went over there on one really cold winter night to meet esse comin' out his mother's nice town-home apartment that's across the street from a public school playground, to meet me and Cotto on the sidewalk. At first, my friend told me to wait on the corner, but as he stood there pacing back and forth, nervously smoking his menthol cigarette, he got bored (he's manic bipolar), so he started talking loudly to me some feet away.

At that point, I was like, why not just walk up to him, when some fly kid with his "phresh" gear came bounding down the staircase to the stoop. He wore a matching bright red hat to go with his ghetto hoodie and red sneaks. Typical. He started laughing when he saw my man there speaking with me, because we looked like a broke-ass version of "Beauty and the Beast", presenting quite the pic on some slow cool weeknight in the 'hood. He made small talk with Cotto during the exchange of a dime bag for money, when my friend let him know that he wasn't happy at his current gig because he was a "real chef" (this, from an ex-con who was forced to choose a cooking program as part of his rehab in the joint), by also explaining that he never really wanted to be a chef (he sucked at it, lighting up a tea towel I gave him one night at the stove during his very brief tenure as a personal chef in my kitchen), and that washing dishes was beneath him.

The kid looked at him laughing, and to me, which I played politically correct by staying silent, to deliver one hell of a line: "Yeah, but you gotta start somewhere, though", a line his own mama must have said to him a million times when he crossed over her doorway down to the streets, buying his flashy gear and bragging about it by sporting it up and down the block, a hastily tossed up sneaker on a phone wire serving as his calling card to area schoolkids. That fuck-up from Brownsville just got schooled by his more successful teenage dope dealer, man! It was unbelievable and also totally Brooklyn, all the way down to this kid's shiny new kicks. Only in New York, you know, bro? Only in New York can a punk kid beat out a grown man without even trying, or leaving his mama's house. That's the warped view of success from around the way, and those are the people I come from. Don't you ever try to can con me again, yo. I know you.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville,_Brooklyn