The Buddy System

Soldiers Holding Hands: It is not unusual in many societies throughout east Africa for men to display their friendship for one another by holding hands in public. Two soldiers on patrol in the streets of Bujumbura, Burundi nonchalantly express their affection for one another. Geordie Mott from Halifax, NS, Canada

My best friend from high school and I formed a friendship pact the summer after our graduation, drunk and high as we were on the beaches of New Jersey, because were were going to be roommates as freshmen, and we were looking forward to freedom, school, boys....or maybe that was just me. I tried back then to be as discreet as possible about my liaisons, taught as I'd been by many years of envious abuse that my looks (never to be openly discussed) were in the same category as my rampant heterosexuality; something to be hinted at, glossed over quickly (for your comfort), and then summarily dismissed, lest it cause anyone else in the room with me embarrassment over something I couldn't control then or now.

It was oddly secretive, which aren't my personality traits, but I considered good social manners and politeness towards my friends to be very important, because we all came from disastrously broken homes that were rife with crazily violent outbursts, followed by those mellow periods that marked our parents shameful lives. It also followed cleanly along with those typically deeply-ingrained patterns of manic depression that we "wrote the book(s) on" as children, because we studied it up-close and personal, and not by choice.

We continued our comic routines about our fucked-up parents well into adulthood, and some of us even have their native New Yawk accents down pat (uh, yeah, me). Our brilliant timing and high sense of comedy made for strong bonds between us; everyone in our crowd loves a good time. Having fun with my friends was something that got me through the rough spots even when we were badly banged up by other people's problems. It was in this common spirit of preserving a well-maintained equilibrium among the mental anguish around us that made the difference between our success and failure, alone as we were.

So, me and my best friend devised a few necessary ground rules to cover us through those first few rough patches we would inevitably have during our first year in college. We were accepted into our schools of choice, proving to nasty detractors (and family alike) that our intelligence wasn't just some crazy person's bullshit hype, something our hapless parents have denied to our faces all of our lives (they have to be smarter), despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Karen's parents took their pride all the way home to an early grave, which was a type of winning in their twin books of life's massive stand-offs and epic show-downs. They'd rather die from cancer and addiction than admit we were winning, which we are, and we knew it because we had to always justify our existence to the madness of their minds, despite our freedom from their decision to meet, mate, and marry.

We were independent way too soon, and we knew that, too. There would be no rescue for any of us from any of our failures (as individuals, or within a group), because our parent's were the first people we knew who hurt us badly. In response to their insanities, we became perfected, which they hated, too. It was the perfect love/hate dynamic for a disordered generation with no real ups-or-downs. It was "Easy Street" all the way for our softer parents, which is exactly why we went to school with a lot more focus than most 17- and 18-year old's matriculating within an excellent working-class school in upstate New York. We had jobs, some money, and a strong sense of self... and that was about it, besides all of the ideals we knew we had to enforce to create the change we needed to exist out there in the world.

The first challenge for us to address was our rather infamous party skills, ones openly displayed that were duly noted by friend and foe alike, and isn't that life itself? Know thyself first, then know thy enemy second, and we did. Karen was hurt early on during our last summer home by a group of friends who turned on her while they "played house" and we drank on the beach around boys with bonfires, and then I got hurt later on in the season by a man in his 30s looking to "score with a hottie", which meant someone else existed in his head besides me, probably someone made-up and far from reality.

We hammered out the details, though, behind the backs of people we were meant to cut off from, because they couldn't keep up. In between peals of giddy laughter at our new-found freedoms, we planned for the inevitable backlash that always followed on the heels of our frivolities, like partying on a beach in summertime and then being dropped into the coldness of a Canada-like deep freeze for college, in a simulacrum of opposites that we could do nothing about but accept, because we grew up swinging between other people's polar extremes. We knew what to expect, hurt as it was inevitably designed to do anyway.

But, we didn't die at school, and believe it or not, that can happen at any time, which we accepted as gracefully as any teenage woman could. I contracted a serious illness from a tick bite during a walk through the woods my second month at school, after first tangling swords with the "Duke of Puke" and then meeting my first real boyfriend, though today's concept for kids is to stay safe, like we tried to do. One of our few precious rules was to "never party alone" which we intoned to any kid reasonable enough and sober enough to listen (or care about). We didn't save everyone, but we fought hard for our generation, the very one you as Millennials (or more charmingly known as "Gen Y" by their inept parents, as in "Why did I have kids?" Indeed! Why did you?) hold us to the highest human standards one can have for their elders, which is the right thing to do.

Always have a drinking buddy, never go to a party alone, don't party by yourself (in case something should happen to you that requires immediate medical assistance), and never walk home at night in the dark. Stay safe, loved ones. The woods are full of wolves...and Generation X. Welcome to the "New World Order"! It's time to survive, and it's time for survival skills, because "survival skills are paramount to success" (yes, another saying just like my...NOOO!!! My Dad says that!) So. Survive. I want you to survive. Then, we can thrive. And that's another one of our motto's, too. Survive, then thrive.

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/staying-safe-away-from-home/. Every childhood is worth fighting for.

Bad Santa

I've always hated staged photographs with phony backdrops, like the ones most suburbanites take their kids to during Christmastime at the local mall. There's nothing fun about some drunk dressed up as a big scary rabbit who wants you, a small child, to sit on his smelly lap. With my basic instincts intact, I moved into my aunt's old apartment (in the Kensington section of Brooklyn), after college to get work as soon as possible, because I have always been the backup plan in my life. There is no "plan b", which is why we (as a family) invested so much in my education. OK: here's time to think. Now: do. Simple. 

And it was. I got an entry level job right away with lots of prestige, per the pedigree we just paid for at school. That was the deal. We used "white-bread" RISD for a resumé cred that would get me into big city life, I would give back to the world, and here we are. But with each new level I attained came pitfalls and challenges so severe, I always knew I was the best player on my particular family team. How else to win in the forefront of your technology? There was no other spot for me than the one I took up, with the worst and most severe extremes you could imagine, which is why I write my stories down for all of you to talk about, verify, then act on, because it's all true. Every single word of it.

But not everyone lives an honestly open life, because they don't know how to succeed through trying. My aunt was one of those lazy types. She could do stuff, but she wanted to smoke and drink more than she wanted to think. What can you do? There's only so much therapy and rehab you can pay for, before you learn to just give up their ghost, which is what most hardened addicts decide to do, especially the smart-mouth arrogant ones. They feel that the "thumbing the nose at life" routine is cool, so that's what they do: make stupid snarky remarks at the local bar, like some brilliant bar-stool philosopher who deliberately chooses to blow their big time career so they can sit around and regale you with their life stories, except without the big life, or will to live. In the end, it's almost always suicide for them.

You keep waiting for a punchline to the joke, or a moral to the story, only to find at the end of their big "onion-peel" routine that there's absolutely nothing at their core; the ultimate jab at all of humanity, by being an utter waste of time. It's evil, petty, and cruel, but so what? If you want to crumple up your life like it's a wadded-up piece of used toilet paper, I guess you can, but who will be there to witness it? Other drunks who testify about your offenses against G-d? Why would a divine presence that can be anywhere at anytime in any century, doing anything, care about your ineptitude? Should we care at all? Of course, we should, but it is something that I still struggle to define for my brilliant but careless family, which is the core of every human problem. What do you do about lazy fuck ups? How far does it go? 

I don't know if anyone can answer that for anyone else, except I know that I fight evil wherever it rears its' ugly head, and that it's always there somewhere, either in the background, or as that fat loud drunk spitting right in your face. Ultimately, who gives a fuck about some drunk, but you in that one small moment with them? Is that the best you can do? I don't follow along with the bottom-feeder set, even as I tentatively cross through their barren territories, ones that were strip-mined of their usefulness many years ago, probably by some fat, corrupt, white guy not from my line; someone who treats the earth, the land, and the people around them like it's disposable, just like their life.

And so I looked through the flotsam and jetsam of my aunt's life, just like the pieces of history she left behind too soon for us to sort through, like we were guests at her intergalactic junk sale, which was the highest heights she aspired to. Some of it was intentionally scary, like the old photo she had on one wall of her paid-for Brooklyn apartment, with scary eyes that followed you everywhere, for me to take down and give to some art fag in the city who aspired to decorate the sets of other people's movies; a perfect ending to the fake history she attached to the picture when I asked her about it, like he was my real dead uncle, just so she could have a drunken laugh in my face.

It was silly and bitchy and beer-flavored and...so what? But that's what she was like; in between the bad jokes were real histories that she tossed away just as casually, like all of my war hero grandfathers' medals from WWII that I kept for years as the only family conservator who cared about them, now framed in my father's house after I salvaged and packaged them for him, because at the time, he could've cared less. Every time I moved (and I made several big intercontinental moves funded and fueled by my energy and output solely), I lovingly wrapped his trophies to be carried away with me. Finally, years after my father built another weird extension to his desolate McMansion, in a hollowed-out space with an empty trophy case where we should be, he finally asked me for them, so his housewife could have something to decorate with, and then show guests, at their holiday dinners.

But that's how it was. Some of her trash was obviously treasure, like those sepia-colored photos of people who were clearly family, because my father and his sister were easily recognizable to me in them. I asked them questions about who they were, and sometimes they answered (correctly or not, I don't know), and sometimes they didn't. All I know from this vantage point in the autumn of 2015 is that as a very young woman who was used to running other people's households and lives, even as a twenty-something on a borderline poverty paycheck in publishing, I still had the presence of mind to call my aunt from her abandoned apartment one weekend afternoon, on a phone and line I paid for on my own, black pen in hand, to ask her about each and every old photograph I found.

And so, here it is for you to read: family from long ago, carefully reconstructed through the disordered recollections from a bunch of lying, cheating, stealing drunks, a people who were given the keys to a castle that's deeply engraved in their hearts, never to be collected. On the back of one such photo I inscribed (in carefully legible black handwriting) the story of Shirley Doucette, because I had an immediate feeling of dread just looking at her "bad" Santa photo. That's how intuition works; you learn to trust your gut by honoring your immediate reactions to real life situations, without the beery boozy drunk to talk you out of what you know to be true about life and the world around you. And there, in my neat adult handwriting, is her brief but sad life story that may or may not be true: that at the age of 12, some man ripped her off the street while she was walking home from school, kidnapping and raping her repeatedly, before murdering her like she was worth nothing more than a piece of trash.

I have no idea if it is true, but this is what I have, here and now, in this year that is 2015, and that is this: when I took out those old crumbly sepia-toned photos, ones that my aunt had carelessly discarded like my ancestors' body flung out onto the road after someone evil had finished using her, I saw this image after taking a series of pictures of her and the rest of my clan. It looks like the dark blurry outline of a girl about her age, with a low-set, dark blond, curly ponytail, dressed in her century's garb, encircling her young arms in a hauntingly beautiful embrace from behind me, with her arms wrapped around my shoulders, as I stood by the window taking a photo of her old Christmas photo, and this is what I know about it now. I feel nothing but love: a purely simple, honest kind of love, of a kind that endures forever, in every time period for all time, through the ages, in this century and that one, too. This is a forever kind of love.

Hello, Shirley. I love you.

Earl, The First Duke of Puke

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/.

Summer of '89 (Oneonta, NY)