WUTR: Utica/Rome

Me and my best friend had way more than altitude to adjust to, deep in the remote mountains of upstate New York. Before the Internet and cell phones, we had a pay phone on the first floor that we shared with an entire dorm and a television in the common room, also on the first floor. We'd already broken a lot of rules in the dorm and around campus, the least of which was having a hot plate in our room for heating up cans of soup or making box mac and cheese, in direct violation of the dorm's fire code. There were no microwave dinners, no cable TVs, no personal computers, and no anxious "helicopter parents" circling overhead. We were free.

Our relative isolation from the rest of the world created a bubble for young minds to thrive, especially in exploration of the past through our art history and history textbooks. It didn't really matter what day or time it was, because we lived through our studies, anyway. The allure of being out of touch in a cool way has trapped many a hippie perpetually in college towns, like the demon from the movie 'Krampus' captures souls stuck in so many snow globes sitting on its shelf. There was something eerily dead about going to the same bar forever, dating the same tie-dyed wearing sophomore over and over again.

We'd shudder in the frigid evenings over the possibility of a similar fate, which propelled us past incredible odds to our respective educational careers: Karen from urban-based Yonkers, and me from the projects in Queens. Sometimes we wondered like 'The Talking Heads', "....how did we get here?", only to be brutally reminded of our commitment to our ideals by a six-hour bus ride through the frozen tundra of a nearly deserted landscape. In the overheated dorm rooms of our engaged minds, we always left a window open to catch the coldness of the crisp, clear mountain air.

After a night of Old Milwaukee and weak pot, we slunk down to the first floor to watch TV on the sly, with our reputations preceding us. It was late, so we'd escaped the voracious Long Island crowd that were more supported in their daily habits by their similarly enabled parents. Used to the abuse that comes with shared family spaces, we sank into the old, sunken couch with a sigh of relief, in a mostly dark room that was empty of other kids. Finally! We had the TV to ourselves, without the petty power plays or bitchy stand-offs that happened among the factions of hardcore viewers in the dorm with time and madness on their sides. Kids would plot TV "takeovers" in the cafeteria with their dorm-mates by shouting down anyone who objected to their "Must See TV" during coveted time slots.

But, like two weary, single moms at the end of yet another tough day, we just wanted to put up our feet and relax without making a highly charged political statement about how spoiled and compulsive we weren't. We'd had enough of that growing up. So, one late night found us turning the dial on the TV unmolested by cries of outrage, to catch Letterman or maybe a "Honeymooners" rerun. Didn't really matter. New York City channels usually showed black-and-white classics or freaky monster movies for the overnight crowd working the night shift at the precinct or in the ER; great, working-class stuff.

We'd gotten to the right point of mellow before bedtime when catastrophe struck. We'd lost the signal! Some old movie started playing, then cut out to a screen full of static. What the...? We were left to spend the rest of the night in wondering paranoia. Had the Russians attacked? Was it nuclear war? A media blackout based on alien invasion? What? WHAT? WHAT?! What the fuck just happened? We'd adjusted the rabbit ears, unplugged and replugged the set, banged on the side of it until horizontal lines shimmied across the tube; no such luck. Our electronic babysitter was dead. It was humbling to our superior senses of self, as well-adjusted freshmen.

The next morning in the cafeteria, we immediately told our friends the bad news. Someone had to approach the Residence Hall Director with the creepy molester 'stache about buying a new TV ("dude, we should totally draw straws to see who does it"), because the old one had just cut out. Huh? What are you guys talking about? Our friend from Buffalo was a blue collar girl used to working the early morning shift at the local convenient store, so she'd already been up to catch "her programs" at six a.m., and the set was working just fine. What'd you two do?

Nothing! We protested. We did absolutely nothing but turn the thing on and sit down. Must've been a signal drop, because we were watching some old movie and then the fuzz came on. Wait a minute...our friend from Syracuse asked us around what time. Oh, we didn't know. It was late. Letterman had been on, then some war movie started with this big flag flying and the National Anthem playing...no, wait, dude! Probably a baseball movie, hence the music....yeah, that was it. Totally.

Our upstate friends erupted into hysterical shrieks of laughter, crying at the cafeteria table, clutching themselves and each other. Me and Karen just looked at each other. Now what? <shoulder shrugs> We were called "Abbott and Costello" behind our backs by some of the kids, because she's a big girl and I was a beanpole. Sometimes, we were funny without even trying. Okay...mind letting us in on the joke? Finally, good ole Tracey told us the truth, and it was so much weirder than The Cold War or the end of the world. "No, you guys." Hahaahaa! "Lemme tell 'em!" What? WHAT?

"That wasn't a movie. That was the station signing off for the night." Crickets. I looked at my friend again and shook my head. I had nothing. We turned back to them. What do you mean? They, in turn, looked just as baffled. A sign-off! The station "signed off" for the night! What are you talking about?! Finally, Lisa from Rome kicked in, "Guys! GUYS! That means no more TV!" No. More. TV. What is this strange Bizarro universe? "That's it! The TV goes off the air until morning." Holy....what frigid level of hell is this?! We struggled to assimilate a place with no late night take-out, or Ralph Kramden banter with Alice. 

Suddenly, two hip girls from the 'burbs realized how far from home they were, and then our real education began. "Humbled" wasn't exactly the word for how we felt. We were almost completely cut off from the outside world, and we were alone in it. After that, we had a new nickname around campus. 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' had officially arrived, and it was massive in its scope. Like, totally, dude. And dudettes! It was the start of a whole new era.

Angel Fire

One of the best meals I've ever had in my life wasn't at a fancy "eatery" (please excuse the hipster term) in a trendy New York neighborhood full of outsiders looking to make it big in my hometown. It was at a modest cabin nestled quaintly in the gorgeous Sangre de Cristo valley of New Mexico. I'm not an avid skier, coming from a childhood home of much humbler and inexpensive past times, but during my active teenage years, me and my brothers (with a cousin or boyfriend/girlfriend or two, thrown into the mix) would fly out to spend our college breaks with my father and his wife at a lovely small-town resort they found in New Mexico that's within driving distance of their West Texas home.

Since it wasn't some pricey tourist dive*, our trips meant (as they always did growing up) that we had to socialize with the local provincials, with their very limited experiences that they had no trouble abusing children over, so that we could have maybe a day's worth of fun during our grueling college years to satisfy our parents arrangements. It was also weather and/or our pocketbook(s) permitting, or my father pulled his purse-strings to call the shots that favored him best. We were lucky to have a good time at all, is what I'm saying to you, and as my faithful working class readers, I know you understand the drill.

It's like a Florida vacation washed out by monsoon season with your ADD grand kid who freaks out during horrible airplane turbulence that lasts for hours and you spent $8000 for it (and you couldn't even afford that), which is why credit cards were invented: so you could try and escape the soul-crushing reality of your 9-5 office hell with the promise of a heavenly vacation that was never real like they are on t.v., except now you're in debt, in addition to having a really bad time. Oh, and there's all those work emails in varying tones of recrimination and panic to go through before Monday morning, too. You lucky asshole. Isn't it grand? Our family trips were like also that: a terrible guessing game of who will get drunk and be a complete piece of shit first, because every family vacation is like that. Every. Single. One.

The revelation of an uncomplicated good time at a family restaurant that served us at a long table with mismatched bowls we simply passed around to each other, without worry of this one's Epi-pen peanut-dust allergy or her Celiac Disease that's easily manageable with basic human speech skills that are devoid of the typical (and repetitive!) brain-dysfunctional Off-Broadway show, was utterly miraculous. A husband and wife team cooked the food they served to us in the cabin they lived in, as their only guests in attendance, away from the maddening tourist crowds. They served the best mashed potatoes I've ever had in my life, followed by the best peach cobbler I've ever had for dessert, too.

As we stood on their wood-plank porch watching the Milky Way stars emerge above the rural New Mexican mountains, free of sky-obscuring light pollution, after a spectacular pink and purple sunset we knew was divinely inspired, not even my dad's annoying toothpick habit that included repeatedly sucking his teeth loudly could spoil our mood. For an evening, just one evening, we'd been in heaven, and it was worth the price of the ticket. Believe you me. And you should. Some memories are so good, they withstand the test of time, like a love that's everlasting. Amen to you, on this holy All Saints Day in 2016. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Fire,_New_Mexico

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Fire_Resort

Kegger

The road to Oneonta is long, winding, and dangerous in the snowy seasons, but held such fascinations for us as young adults (and a few teenagers, ahem) that we were always psyched to make that last turn around that last bend before town. Because it was so grueling to get to, we had check points at every spot along the way, especially if you had to take the bus because you couldn't afford a car...ahem, that was also me. The Phoeniciaville stop had a redneck bar with a huge wooden eagle above it that matched the tourist bear statues for sale in the gravel parking lot that was their bus stop, for wealthy "urbanites" to buy for their country home's porch. You know the one: roughly made with a chain saw? That's it!

One of the hill-folk closer to town made a fun artpiece on the side of an old barn made from the hubcaps that came off around that last hairpin curve before town, and as soon as we saw it, we knew we were close enough to catch the radio signal from our college radio station. It always seemed to be manned by the voice of Jenny-O, the first real "celeb" most of us ever knew, because everybody we knew knew her, too. As soon as we heard her voice, we knew we were home for the semester, listening to the New Wave sounds of the 80s, where freshness lived.

We were used to pockets of cool civilizations nestled in the rural hills and mountains of our beloved upstate New York, but even for us, New Delhi was whack. It was a wide spot on the road, a small two-year school carved out of the hillside. My friend Meg from Mamaroneck knew a kid going to school there, so she asked me to go with her one weekend. "If you think we party hard, you should see how they drink!" Uh, oh. We were ferocious. "There's nothing to do and nowhere to go. There's not even a town near there! They get drunk in their dorms built around a square, and the only space on campus is that!" Holy fuck...I loved party challenges, but even this one had me apprehensive. I wasn't looking to die or lose my mind. I just wanted a good time.

They did all the party tricks we did at O-town, like keg stands and beer funnels, but there seemed to be a lack of joy to their partying, like we were just going through the motions. There's only so drunk you can get, until there's sickness and hangovers. Who needs that? As soon as those kids got really fuckin' drunk, shit got weird. It was nighttime in the quad, and they lost it. Garbage cans were lit on fire in the square, while students lurched across it, going from room to room. Their dorm rooms sucked, too. No flair at all, compared to ours. Just beat up and covered with marks on walls that hadn't been painted in years. And then some idiot took out fireworks, and started shooting them off the balcony at people in the quad below, while other kids simply looked on nonchalantly, smoking indifferently.

Hey, man. Count me out. I wanted out of that hellhole, like yesterday. We talked about Meg being too drunk to drive, and then getting a cab back to town. We were supposed to sleep over on some kid's dirty floor, but I'd had enough. There's partying, and then there's just plain batshit crazy. This was nuts. No one was having fun. You could see it in their blank eyes, not that kids at an easy two-year school had a lot of brains to begin with. They seemed completely gone, lost in the smoke that wreathed through the square, waiting for the police to arrive. The campus seemed abandoned to them.

"Yeah, they kind of just leave 'em alone to do their thing," Meg said to me, when I noticed the difference between their lackluster mayhem, and the quick censures on our campus. It was striking. "I think they're afraid of them here, because they're mostly from the city." No shit. Me, too. It was a good lesson in the differences between mountain towns and SUNY schools, which can be markedly so. I wanted out. We left that campus for good, and the next day I felt more fondness for our mountain home. That place was not our town. Oneonta was.
The city of the hills.

Idol Worship

The differences between kids from upstate versus the ones from downstate can be pronounced, as we were to find out during college. Much like the rest of the country takes the social distortions of Hollywood to be synonomous with being Californian so, too, do upstaters sometimes feel mischaracterized by ethnic stereotypes from the tri-state area. Whereas southern New York is almost tropically warm during the spring, summer, and fall (made more acute with global warming), winter for many New Yorkers is the same as Canada: long, brutal, and cold.

In Oneonta, we had a saying: the sun set in September and came back in June, giving us nine full months of cloudcast winter. You had to bring the jolly with you, is what I mean, rather than being overly dependent on nature's cues about weather and personality. Suffice to say, me and my friends were more accustomed to a colder climate than the city kids warmed by so much heat-retained pavement, and the Gulf Stream that blows through coastal New York. Rockland County is at least 5 degrees cooler than the coastline, sometimes as much as 10-20 degrees, especially at night. It fools you into thinking that those city miles to the country are no big deal, but the Hudson River's massive size takes umbrage at that bold claim.

Suffice to say, it shows up in our varied taste, styles, and cultures, often worse for the wear. Like rednecks everywhere, hard-to-reach mountain terrain can breed some strange bedfellows, like those of our dorm-mate Tracey from Buffalo, and our "crazy Injun" friend Dave from Schnectady. We met Tracey from down the hall through her roommate on the soccer team, Lisa, who rocked a softball mini-mullet like the 80s would never die. Their uncanny retro qualities, channeled while living in the present, signalled to us of their rural clans proud identity as stallers of change and slowness to adapt. A lot of folks "head to the hills" seeking escape from the pressures of conforming to everyday societal norms, and they're proud of it.

Into this reactionary niche fit punk rock star turned pop culture MTV videomaker, Billy Idol. He'd gained fame as a young musician for the band "Generation X", to churn out hit after hit and video after video in the 80s. It was catchy at first, but then, almost instantly, his overplayed songs became dated, just like our upstate friend's 10-12 year lag behind our more sophisticated urban values.  Songs like "Rebel Yell" reflected their stubborn insistence at pushing away trends and new things the way vampires hate the sign of the cross. It spoke to their view that the rest of the world sucked, in rejection of their almost non-status as upstaters who felt shunted by the downward cast of Albany to the more populated areas we came from.

The first time me and Karen knocked on Tracey's door, we were greeted with her credo drawn onto the dorm door's message board that read "Idol Worship Lives!" in the logo type of his album covers. Oh...okay. They chafed similarly at my cool drawing posted on our door, done in a surreal "Alice in Wonderland" illustration style that was later ripped off, but not before the Lawnguyland girls wrote on it to let us know they disapproved of us as so-called "hippies", what with Karen's turtlenecks worn under her sports sweatshirts and big silver cross, paired with my cooler rocker-chic flair. Those girls smoke pot and attract boys=bad. We'd made our mark on them that quickly.

But, worshipping a dyed-blond skinny dude in leather pants? Uh, not exactly our style. He was too cheesy for us, and he always looked like he was on heroin, with his dark undereye circles. What was there to love? His videos were even worse; tacky over-produced "art tableaus" for people with poor taste, rife with pseudo-religious imagery he'd ripped off from Catholicism to seem commerically counter-culture. Wanker. British pop stars were "a dime a dozen" for us back then. We didn't need them to become cults of personality for us.

Sure enough, "Pretty Boy" Dave and Tracey from down the hall hooked up early on during the first semester, because he was drunk and she was smitten with his looks. It was great fun for us, because we got to hear in detail how Dave was too drunk to "do the deed", passed out on her twin-sized dorm room bed. She was cool about it, too, laughing it off the next time we were all together, because homeboy hadn't remembered their encounter, like whether or not he had sex. He didn't. It became our party circuit's favorite target for awhile, expressed through the punk rock song "Too Drunk To Fuck"* as Dave's theme.

Tracey "heehawed" at his attention-getting antics right along with us, brushing off Dave's puppy lust like the solid blond girl she was. No big deal. "That kid's got a lot to learn, and not by me. He's so cute, though!" Yeah, we all liked Dave. Then, she went back to smoking her cigarette, drinking her coffee, and putting on her makeup on a face that was underneath some of the hardest sprayed hair on the whole campus, and that was hard to beat. She just rolled with it, like the fun country girl she is. You, rocker. Rock on! Those were the days of our early lives, and nothing could beat it. Seriously. She was 23 and had already been to a community college. We were just geting started.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Drunk_to_Fuck

Dutch Boy

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.

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