The Mat Room

Fraternities and sororities at Oneonta existed mostly for the hardcore suburban Long Island crowd who went to the same high school together (which seemed like a pointless thing to do in college), or those downlow weirdos too embarrassed to join the unisex organization of social do-gooders with the purple triangle logo on their Greek shirts, ya dig? With the high-priced fees that came with "rushing" during pledge, me and my crew thought it was crazy to pay to have friends when you could just throw a kegger and kids would show up, anyway, once the word got out around campus. We had more trouble containing a good time than publicizing it.

Still, a slow Wednesday night with no Thursday classes could find you extending beyond your typical routine to include off-campus frat parties, especially if one of your boys roomed with one of their "frosh" pledges. It meant we might catch a break with the cover charge. Five bucks blown on skunky stale beer or a drained keg meant you just walked down a mountain in a snowstorm with nothing to show for it besides missing dinner at the cafeteria. Oh, well. You'd have to wait until the morning, if you didn't stash food in your room from lunchtime.

I'd been to few of them without incident, which must have driven the crazies wild, because I found myself alone in their basement kitchen thumbing through an old issue of NatGeo I'd found on the counter (with its distinctive yellow border) while my friends made a run for the keg, when some douche came over to make a rude comment to me about the partially nude African women depicted in the magazine. It was a shocking thing to do at a hip New York school with a lot of urbane city kids, but certain pockets of the state bred bad stuff that we didn't have close at hand growing up, though it was certainly around. 

He was obviously drunk, too, and he had a wild angry look to his bulging glassy eyes that made him doubly dangerous. Psychotic drunks were a serious hazard at any party. Most gatherings I went to were attended with my large boyfriend, but without a big bouncer around, anti-social headcases could take the time to hassle you and feel comfortable doing it with their similarly challenged friends. As soon as he targeted me, he flipped on me, demanding to know who I was and how I got into his party. I was trapped against the kitchen counter, alone in the room with him.

I tried to look past him to catch the eye of someone, anyone, because I couldn't see the heads of my friends over the crowd in the living room. He got in my face, yelling about who the fuck did I think I was to rebuff his advances in his frat house? It was insane, and it got out of control within seconds. Some tall guy finally came over to see what the commotion was about, because the kid wanted me thrown out of the party, which was fine by me. I'd had enough. As bad as it was, that was nothing compared to the stories I'd hear walking home that night.

As we walked around collecting our friends after my "ousting" from their lame party, I caught a glimpse of a dirty room, behind a partially opened door, covered in graffiti with bare mattresses on the floor. During the party, we'd been told that it was a makeshift crash pad for brothers too drunk to stand, but that's not what another girl at the party told us. She whispered to our small group that it was the room they took girls too drunk to resist. It was their rape room. And it was the last frat party I ever went to.

The Tank

Being poor as a teenager in an aspiring, upwardly-mobile "bedroom community" meant that country kids had to bum rides from their friends in the rural Rockland County of the 70s and 80s. People still hitchhiked their way across the USA, though me and my friends never had much luck with it. Cabs were slow to arrive from neighboring towns, and our unmarked country lanes were even harder to find, if the car even bothered to show up at all. We had one county minibus that went to the mall every couple of hours during the daytime, and that was it.

When my dad told us there wasn't any money for college after his divorce (after years of telling us that we had to go to school to get a job), a luxury like a used car was so far out of my reach that I knew better than to inquire about it to any of the adults around me. I should be grateful for food! I was "lucky" to be alive! It was always the same answer from our disordered parents, anyway: if we wanted something bad enough, we had to earn it for ourselves (unlike them), and if I couldn't get a job that paid me well enough to buy a used car, oh well. Them's the breaks, I guess. Tough luck, kid. Maybe get another job?

This, from pampered city folk who always upgraded their own cars, while we walked several miles to make up for the differences in their finances that they couldn't earn, to properly provide for children living far away from an easily accessible school or town. It was always our fault and our burden to bear alone, because well-meaning people who asked after our well-being or expressed their concerns about us were harassed or shut out of our lives, forever. Our parents knew how to maintain a tightly controlled circle of abuse and fear around us, to keep away the good (while telling us it was to protect us) so they could get ahead at our expense, because they saw children as disposable and/or replaceable items in their commercially-fueled halcyon fantasies about "suburban living" from 50s-era t.v. shows. 

Because we had to, we figured out often insanely difficult transporation situations, as one of the most mobile and independent generations of children to be raised in America since The Great Depression. By senior year of high school, my best friend Steve drove me to school almost every morning and back home. If he was having car troubles and/or "crazy mama" problems, my other best friend Karen would pick me up and drop me off at home, though that was much less frequent. She worked a lot of hours. Both of them worked in the town of New City that they lived close to. Karen worked at a drug store (both before and after college) and Steve ws a check-out clerk at the grocery store. 

We all came from rough homes, so there wasn't anything leftover to go around in our crowd. Karen's parents were chain-smoking drunks, and Steve hadn't seen his dad for many years. I don't know if he even remembered his father, because he took off one day to leave them boys alone with one seriously crazy Jewish mother struggling to pay a big mortgage and hold onto her remaining sanity. But, we got by, and we all got into college despite the abuse. Because we had it more or less the same at home, it made hardship conversations easy for us to have. Needing a ride might be the least of our problems, on any given afternoon.

In between the struggle to survive, we managed to have some really good times, albeit simply country pleasures like riding around the surrounding hillsides with the windows open and our hands out of the car to feel the cool passing breezes, something that had been taboo for us during our childhoods. We had Clarkstown South H.S. gatherings in the parking lot of Rockland Lake, and after a few beers, Karen might let me ride on the hood of her car in another test of courage that had us in a game of chicken: more speed or hang on for dear life? 

We'd skip school to go sailing on the hood of her car in circles around the parking lot, splashing through puddles of rain that'd collected during school hours, now glowing like liquid gold in the fading light of another autumn day. That dang thing was as ugly as sin and covered almost entirely in a dull flat primer for whenever she saved enough money for a new paint job, but, until then, it just didn't matter what it looked like. That car got us to school and back, and really, at the time, what more could we ask for? Though "The Grey Beast" has surely been in Car Heaven for quite some time now, I can't help but feel grateful for it, especially during these days filled with schoolkids walking home from school amid the slanting rays of a beautiful October sun. Thanks, mate.

http://www.nynjtc.org/park/rockland-lake-state-park

Joie de Vivre

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

Like Wadsworth's "Evangeline" and her happy Acadian family with the beautiful black eyes living in a fertile river valley, my joy at being alive is something I can't always hide, even when it is more convenient to the people around me (or more appropriate to their customs) for me to do so. In Asian cultures, a big toothy smile is often seen as the prelude to a false act, like an overly solicitous shopkeeper trying to sell you damaged goods, or the villain dressed in black from a martial arts movie with one hand behind his back, waiting to press the button down on a bomb detonator. "Oh! Haha! You die! You die, now! Hahaha!"

Let me assure you, laughter and smiling in my culture is a sign of happiness, not deeply repressed anger or hostility. If being psycho makes you happy, you need to see a reputable doctor. Like, now. At the office it was even weirder, attracting notice wherever I went, with whomever the audience, as thinly-veiled digs that were supposed to function like so many pins popping so many balloons of mine, like the child I haven't been for quite some time. I guess when you grow up without a wailing wall at your disposable, problems are much less interesting as a showpiece for attention.

We grew up with sayings like "misery loves company" and "keep a stiff upper lip", followed by my dad's favorite "the sun comes up tomorrow" as a rip-off from the popular Broadway play "Annie". It is culturally entrenched among my people to handle problems by solving them through hard work, not worrying over them like a hangnail by "pouring salt on an open wound". There is a time to grieve, and there is a time to live, and we get to savor the richness of life through our emotions and feelings. No one is excluded from it.

Most evenings, I enjoy watching the updated version of the popular game show "Family Feud", most particularly for its inclusive representation of American families, encouraged and culled as they are by the staff of the show and their host, actor/comedian Steve Harvey. It's a lot more real than so-much genteel hand-kissing and flirting, much as I loved Rich Dawson's campy turns about the stage in the 70s and 80s. For the family that makes it to the speed round at the end of the show comes a quick sucession of answers to really hard questions, like last night's repeat episode.

The question was: on a scale of one-to-ten, how happy are you at being alive? The attractive African-American woman answered "TEN!" right away, at the same time as me. After her turn, another nicely-dressed family member came out to answer the same questions, with the extra burden of answering again if she repeated the first contestant's answers. It's a telling way to hear how families have the same mindset through their similiar answers made under the gun. Same question: how happy? And again, same lightning quick response: "TEN!"

Uh uh. Try again. "NINE!" Next best thing, right? And like that <snap!>, I felt less alone in the world, as a part of an "oppressed" people supposedly so drug down through the mud that we can't get clean. Right? Wrong! Wrong answer. I felt like we was all in the same room togetha, and we could be! That's the magic of inclusiveness, and faith, and family. You can't burn your way through it. Suddenly, I knew there were other people in the world like me, and do you know how I felt? Yup. Happy. That's the "joie de vivre" that marks our particular flavor, and you're welcome to it. That's being Acadian, y'all.

Camp Out

The suggestion of any overnight venture with a bunch of insane (and gay) Girl Scouts was stomach-churning to me in the extreme, but me and my mom had already committed to being there, so we wanted to see it through. I was at the end of my rope with this clique, in the same way I practically decided overnight (to my rather detached and then suddenly overly-aggressive parents) that I would not pursue anorexia nervosa with a bitchy all-girl ballet troupe for a living, like, after the very first lesson, but they needed years to work out their overreaction to kids in tutus, which I understood, to a point. I'm really cute! This felt like that: I knew what was going on, but they needed "time to process it", which was our family's go-to phrase for mental disabilities and serious learning impairments.

Such is the way of life for the healthy children of sick parents, and, besides visits from my grandparents, I didn't know any other types of experiences at home, because all of my classmates and friends growing up had similar stories (or worse) to add as fuel to our group's fire. We hated our home lives, but children can only do so much, not that it stopped our parents from using us however they saw fit, which was poorly and often. My mom's neighbors in her current senior neighborhood are the exact same way: crazy angry city parents suffering from serious disorders who back up one another over, say, the health of any other type of human being on the planet, give or take a few acceptable life forms like their plants, because in "DivaLand", they must always come first, or abuse will surely follow.

"Yeah, Diane!" Ruth calls out to me working for my mother, like I always do. "That's what children are for!" And that's how they see it: they're sick (and now old, too) and we're not, so they will tap us until we crack, if we stick around, in between hours of free labor. Then, you co-dependently cycle through your circle to bleed other people dry, which doesn't work, because they're sick, too. So, it's back to me? NO! I'm so shocked! It's like a really bad play that's repeated over and over again, and any events or activities attached to them as a generation played out more or less the same, which made us tired of parenting them as children, which, as far as I can tell, is unique to Generation X. Nonetheless, they we were: at a horrible overnight with a fucked-up troop of gay Girl Scouts and their crazy butch "leader".

It was to be borne with as little drama as possible, but with manic depression flowing as freely as the soda that sustained these raging bitches, we were kinda doomed from the beginning. Not that I needed anymore confirmation about these types of things. Sigh...parenting is really hard in childhood, you know? I felt like I needed coffee with my mom and the other parents just to get through the night, and I don't need caffeine to remain aware mentally, which means I'm forced to undergo rigorous feats of endurance, yet again, that I did not need to repeat. My ethnic background and my home tribe of Acadian boys had pretty much set me up for country life, anyway. I didn't need these fucking chicks, and they hated that, too. Becoming overly attached is a sign of involvement in the "Mental Patient" world, and we knew how that play ended, too: badly. For you.

With this mindset of gritted teeth backed by true grit, it was simply a situation made to be borne out by me, however it happened, and I just hoped none of the country queers (and their pampered city parents) died or tried to kill each other throughout the madness that would surely ensue, because that's what madness does to people and their children, gay or not. The mothers were set up in a cabin, and my mom had already bitched about that to the Nth degree with her own act that spanned three curtain calls, because before she had MS as a convenient excuse to freak out, she used a hypothetical "bad back" and "pre-arthritic condition" that was possibly osteoarthritis (so interesting!) that she could deliver expertly when it was needed for her comfort, like sleeping on the wood floor of an old tent in a sleeping bag, like I did with the other children in the troop. But, not her. Oh, no.

She explained in great detail how she had several unique conditions that required special treatment, like a pad to sleep on and her own bed, which she got, while I wondered who would try to kill a girl first in the big tent at the camp. It wasn't long before I found out. There was movement along one side of the tent that sent the already-hysterical girls screaming like it was their big scene in a "Jason" movie, except it wasn't. It was probably a snake attracted to the lights they insisted in shining after "lights out", because of their night terrors, also a greatly understood part of the their tribal culture that was easily assimilated by their types of brains. Yes! Had to be it! I sighed, took a look, decided (what I already knew) that they weren't worth talking to, and then went to find my mom at her continued coffee klatch that was "hardship" in Diane-speak.

She decided that it was worth checking out, after she had abandoned me to sleep there on my own with those crazy bitches because the floor was "too hard", even though she had a stiff wood board installed beneath her mattress for firmness at home, with a gay little step-stool on her side of the bed, so she could get into her prized "antique" bed. I knew about it from every angle, because all of my young life I was forced to help her with everything, included flipping her orthopedic mattress, adjusting the wood slats under the bed, changing the sheets (of course), and adjusting the wood board. She had to have light-proof shades, the birds were also too noisy by her window, and she had a bevy of water-bottles, cold compresses, pills, special pillows, and other accoutrements attached to her bed-rest days that included hoarding piles of papers on my father's side of the bed that she would then dump onto the floor at night, until he finally forced her to go through it.

I didn't expect much courage from her, is what I mean to write to y'all. And she didn't disappoint me, as she played the "city mouse" frightened by the woods at night to a hilt. We talked it over as a group (sort of), and after my mom was also similarly reassured that they were bat-shit and overreacting to normal nighttime stimuli (like noises and movement) as a means of entertainment, she left after finally suggesting that maybe the boys from an overnighting Boy Scout troop were pranking them by pulling on the tent flaps, and that was it. Boys?! NOOO!!! "My mother specifically said I was not to interact with boys!" It sent a shiver of terror through the group that was way worse than a snake sighting, but I was psyched. I could use my flashlight to signal for help! Heck, it was better than having to go through the torture of picking an "outhouse buddy" with some chick in a full-on house bathrobe, metal mouth retainer, and bunny slippers. Fuck, man...where's my badge for that? None was forthcoming.

But, I'd made my point with Diane, and the next morning's pancake breakfast cinched the deal for me, forever. We were done, and my mom had a tale of torture and abuse that included severe back pain with lots of <insert her brand of medicine here>, and a total lack of sleep because the mattress was "lumpy". I got closure, and an end to enforced gay girl groups for me, for the rest of my childhood. It was quiet, I cried a lot in my room from the sheer loneliness and isolation of it, but at least I could read, and since that was considered an "educational pursuit" by my upwardly-mobile parents, they couldn't be seen as ripping that away from me, under my grandparents watch. All I had to do now was make it into college. And wait. There was always a lot of that to spare. Just hunker down, and wait it out.

Gotta Have Park

When I wrote that I competed with adults at the hardest school in the world—with the lowest admissions rate in the world—I meant it. I was vying for my class spot with people who had already lived a few lives and careers before me, which is about as daunting as it gets, not that anyone came to our defenses. We were their fodder; everyone's: the teachers, the administrations, the other students, and that included any/all adults working around us. People who try to excel by becoming talented fakes with great mimicry skills are very nervous people indeed, because they need much better, smarter people—to feed off of to survive—and that included the teenagers and very young adults we were back then, which was sort of like sending a young Jimi Hendrix into war involuntarily, to die for a country that denied him the right to drink at certain water fountains, let alone buy himself a real stiff drink before being shipped out to active wartime duty at 19-years old.

As much as we tried reconciling their presence at our school, it didn't seem fair to us, and we knew it, because we started making some noise, and then some much louder noise, until the "profs" who thought they could game us by sabotaging our expensive education got a real taste of working class life and the transfer student mindset. It sent them tail-spinning downward while taking potshots at kids like me, working three jobs at once while taking only studio classes, because I had essentially completed an entire Liberal Arts curriculum in just three short years, though that degree was unjustly held from me, too (in lieu of my transfer status), just like I was forced to complete my senior year of high school, even though I had completed the curriculum by junior year with college credits and a Regents diploma, but if the gifted left, who would be there to pay for all of your salaries? Right?

In retaliation for circulating a petition around campus asking for desktop publishing classes to be placed on our curriculum, equipped with the kinds of computers we actually use in the workplace, I was "blacklisted" by the very professors who were there to supposedly educate me. It didn't matter—just like it hadn't mattered in my educational past—because my mentor let me pursue my work in his classes as independent studies, which is, once again, like becoming a grad student as an undergrad, but, again, that doesn't pay for your two apartments in Providence and Brooklyn, does it, "Prof"? No! We did! We paid for that for you, so you could take open potshots at children, basically. It made for some very weird classes indeed. 

Take, for example, Ellie. She decided to play the "ethnic minority" game by wrongly trumpeting her prized European status to an openly disparaged minority like me, which made for the most awkward kiddie-adult conversations you could imagine, as she openly campaigned for me to get kicked out of "her" school that she attended as an undergrad at 34. Huh...that's so...odd. And it was. She would talk about her past as a forest ranger (why didn't she learn to draw while living all alone in a forest for months on end?), as we pondered how the fuck she could go from living on Mount St. Helen during its epic volcanic blast to sitting in on our kiddie crits, because I sure as fuck never had the time to work on a portfolio before attending college, let alone blow off one career for our kiddie art classes, in comparison.

It was highly suspect and dubious in the extreme, but just like every other situation I've faced in my life. I had to make it, like a Marine dropped behind enemy lines with no lines of communication or ammo left, nursing a serious bullet wound or two while evading capture and/or the enemy. If I didn't attain a degree from this school, there was no job waiting for me in the outside world, and I didn't want to die from homelessness or starvation, which is just like today. 

I write to you from a public library that's becoming increasingly hostile to me, because the director here has already called the police on me for standing up to one of their Special Needs crafts "teachers" for harassing me by lurking behind me as I typed, and then aggressively staring at me, mouthing words at me as I typed to you all, which, just like then, resulted in me attaining a police contact on the force by an officer who flat out told me not to even bother to talk to anyone at this location again. "Just call us instead." That's how bad it gets. 

Like every moment that's precious in this life we live, so is our land. We live off the land that grows the food we need to live. No healthy land, no food for the animals to eat, and that includes us. If we do not protect our precious resources—like our land and water—then we do not survive. Sometimes—like my work, education, and life story—it is that simple. It becomes that basic, our survival. No food=no us. No bees=no pollinators. It all comes back to our defense and self-defense skills, and so, even though adults with more money, more experience, and a heck of a lot more time than me still tried to kill me off, here I still am, fighting for my survival while I fight for all of us. 

So, Ellie, even though, in your misguided hatred and aggression of an artistic life that was never yours to live by destiny, I dedicate today's fight to you anyway, for a t-shirt you wore back in the day that read "Gotta Have Park", and even though you wore it to protect your own government job as a forest ranger, I still believe in its message. What cannot die has never really lived, as far as I'm concerned. Live.

http://www.earthshareny.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdevelopment 
http://www.environmentnewyork.org/ 

Y2K

 

My Scottish/British-American boyfriend and I decided we'd spend the end of the world at one of the most beautiful spots in the Rocky Mountains; Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It has a huge outdoor swimming pool full of the sulphurous-smelling water, immediately verifying its lauded status as a natural source of mineral water that bubbles up naturally from the ground. There are also natural red rock caves catering to the modern "spa aficionado", with requisite red clay treatments and New Age "healing" massages. 

I'd finally convinced my old-fashioned father to get one on a previous trip there with my ex, and he and his second wife chose to get the "Couples Massage" together, which meant that the poor female masseuse working that day had to spread clay on them one at a time, in front of each other in the nude, and these were people who still thought sleeping together in the same bed was kind of risque. But, it established a pattern of deep tissue massage that my father would continue after that initial exposure to the traditional healing arts, and I'm glad. He's had bad back problems for most of his adult life.

The underground red rock caves dripped with the natural mineral water that'd been used since ancient times by the Ute Indians for healing, so we figured the place must be steeped in good "juju" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juju). What better way to go out than in the middle of a natural American wonder? It seemed apt to us that if the world ended, we'd be floating weightlessly in a huge body of mineral water that made you seem lighter, like floating in the Dead Sea, looking up at the great Milky Way stars burning brighter in the high dark skies of the rural west. 

Then, after we'd accepted our part in this "New World Order", we'd fight our way to my dad's ranch in West Texas, "Mad Max"-style (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max). Kent and I figured on the drive there that natural gas for our vehicles would be the most precious resource during the upcoming "Apocalypse", so we'd probably have to fight off marauders from stealing our fuel for the ride through New Mexico to the panhandle. There, we'd steal onto my dad's ranch to await our fate(s). After all, Kent had installed a solar-powered unit for my dad's use at the small shack they had on the ranch that could run A/C and water. That, and the solar water pumps on the property combined with my dad's cattle could take us to the very end, if we played it right. My pops also had land that'd been used by the ancients for long-term living. 

There were dripping overhangs and small streams that had huge rocks with the circular indentations from the pounding of wheat over millennia. If they could do it back then, so could we. We came from them, too. We'd feel it stirring in our blood, the will to survive off the land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas#/media/File:Palo_Duro_Canyon_State_Park_2002.jpg. We'd be completely off the maps of the known western world. Let 'em find us buried deep in the canyons somewhere, safe in our ranch land stronghold.

In preparation for our requisite battle(s) on our route to "nowhere", we'd obviously have to have weapons, so Kent put his big elk-hunting guns in the back of his big red truck, with a couple of red containers full of gasoline, in the event of a total annihilation that knocked out all of the power sources on the planet. Of course, we're working class people, so the night before "the big event", we were asleep before 10:30 pm. Oh, well. I'd never really had it in me to stay up past midnight just to drink a beer or a glass of champagne at midnight. Who cares? We could that whatever we wanted to, not just New Year's Eve. So, we said our "good nights" to each other, and we were fast asleep soon; such is the effect of swimming in a natural hot spring all day long. 

Since it was wintertime, you'd have to do a quick hop from the big hot pool to the smaller really hot tub while sporting a knit cap, but that was about it. Above a mile high, the sun is still very warm, even in the middle of a Coloradan winter. We had fun looking at this one cute lil baby floating in a little plastic inner tube for adorable baby girls wearing striped knit caps on their "widdle" baby heads, laughing and splashing with her mama as she floated around the big pool like we did. We smiled, and rested at the edge of the pool. Not a bad way to go. We'd done it! We'd made the end of the world "cool" without even really trying to, just like every other thing my generation has had to survive and endure at the hands of others who should have known better. But, that's the way it was. We had to survive, so we did.

As we woke up the next day to a bright sunny day, Kent immediately checked the digital alarm clock as I turned on the t.v. in the motel room for the news. Nope! No apocalypse. Oh. We'd figured that it wouldn't happen, what with our computer skills for reference and the amount of time to prep for the changing of so many digital clocks that folks had to get right, but, you never know! Best to be prepared. We turned to each not speaking. "I'm a little disappointed..." I began tentatively. Kent immediately brightened up. "Me, too!" and he went on to say, "I was kinda looking forward to fighting my way out of it. I mean, I know we'd win." Yeah, you're right. We would have. Sigh...

We got dressed, had a big pancake breakfast dinner at Denny's, then rolled out of town for the drive back to Denver to pick up Teddy from the kennel. And just like that, we'd begun planning the rest of our work week. After all, the newspaper didn't wait for me, and neither did the power supply that was still working off a functioning grid for his electrical work. "No rest for the weary" they say, but the thing of it was this: we'd never felt more well-rested in all of our lives. We had a great plan, and we'd been kinda looking forward to executing it with excellence, just like every other thing that demanded our attention and skills. That's the job. That's what we did then, and that's what we do now. We work our way out of it, because we can. For you. All of you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenwood_Springs,_Colorado

for Kent

I ` M Gonna Be

The Proclaimers

When I wake up, well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who wakes up next to you
When I go out, yeah, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you
If I get drunk, well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who gets drunk next to you
And if I haver, hey, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who's havering to you
But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
When I'm working, yes, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who's working hard for you
And when the money comes in for the work I do
I'll pass almost every penny on to you
When I come home (When I come home), oh, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who comes back home to you
And if I grow old, well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who's growing old with you
But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
When I'm lonely, well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who's lonely without you
And when I'm dreaming, well, I know I'm gonna dream
I'm gonna dream about the time when I'm with you
When I go out (When I go out), well, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you
And when I come home (When I come home), yes, I know I'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who comes back home with you
I'm gonna be the man who's coming home with you
But I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da
And I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door

Credit

In addition to his lack of driving skills, Cotto has no idea what money stands for (hint: it's for goods and services).To him, every day is either the best day ever (like a whacked-out teenager at Disneyland), or his imminent death—like a kid eaten by a gator at Disneyland (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/15/us/alligator-attacks-child-disney-florida/). And that's exactly what his serious mental disorders are about: really really REALLY!!! great things that make you stay up for days and days and you just don't understand and why aren't you more excited, Marie? Sleep?! Food?! WHY???!!! GET PUMPED UP!!! Yeah, kid. Call me when the show is over, or starts, whichever happens last. I'm going to sleep, and I'm eating breakfast. Bitch.

The same is true about his understanding of family. His dad was his drinking buddy/sexual escapades partner (aye yi yi), and his mom's new "old man" looks at him kinda funny, too. He's been staying up late to watch t.v. recently, so he could screw the people living around him from using "his" pull-out sofa as a bed, and when you question that, he blames you for his escalating drunken abuse. It's a landscape without any safe places, which makes jail seem much better in comparison, because at least you get decent food and a bed to sleep in, you know? And maybe skip the nighttime rape scene, for once.

I felt bad for him because he had it that hard coming up in "da game" of life, but he's such a selfish fucking dick, you can't help but wish for him to be as far away from you as possible. Just because someone's really sick doesn't mean they can't also be a completely selfish asshole. I'm sure the staff at his residency center wants him dead or gone on his worst days, particularly the days when he deliberately craps his bed so the big buff orderly in the tight white scrubs can change his diapers for him while he sexually harasses him with molester-type comments. You know? A punch in the face is sometimes much quicker and easier than strapping him down to the bed and cleaning out his mess. Poor fucker. I've been there with head-cases before. Many, many, many times over.

So, when I asked him about his "credit card debt" that he intentionally mischaracterized as a fun "Sex and the City" shopping spree, it was just as depressing as I thought. "Well, Marie...", he began. Oh, OK. I'm the dumb fuck sleeping on your floor in your Army/Navy sleeping bag that you can talk down to. I forgot where I was for a minute! Actually, I didn't. Yeah, Cotto. What happened? I wanted him to just take his sleeping meds and go the fuck to sleep, but he was going off of his prescriptions one-by-one, because he couldn't handle the stress of homelessness, welfare, and his broke-ass two-year school on Staten Island for people without their G.E.D.'s coping with several mental disorders, and I was supposed to pretend that wasn't true with him, so he could psychotically pretend that I was his trapped quarry, when in truth, I could crack open his shin bones to the marrow whenever I wanted. 

Not that I wanted that. He was a dumb bloated mess of a human being, and I questioned that status on most days, too. But, let's hear it. It'll come out anyway, and it's not like I have anything better to do on a Tuesday night, besides getting a good night's sleep on this here dirty tenement floor so I can out-design the crazy "creative director" at work tomorrow, who would short-change me out of a health plan and rip-off all of my cover designs out of professional envy and hateful sabotage. So, yeah. Go ahead. Well, my grandmother died, and she asked me to "look after" her mail while she was in the hospital, so I did. Uh huh. I question every part of that sentence, but yeah. And?

"I took her Sears credit card." For how much, Cotto? And he waffled on that, too. Sigh...every step of the way, eh asshole? "About 3 or 4 grand." It was probably much higher than that, between the $5-$7000 range, because he then told me his "lawyer" advised him to pay it back quickly. Riggght...while you blow off your dish-washing job (not good enough), buy dirt weed instead of meds, and jam in a stressful college-like experience at the same time, so you can justify your subsequent freak-out and imprisonment? I think I know this tune! "It came addressed to her in the mail and I was staying there." So? So what? "I needed money." He clammed up like a hardened convict who's just "lawyered up" because he already knows the drill.

But, like, why? I mean you have two fucking cell phones, an expensive video game console that's also your hard drive, an iPad, a laptop, and ghetto headphones. The whole nine, kid. What the fuck did you spend it on? I never got a real answer that made any sense to me. What the fuck did he buy with it? For those of you reading me outside of the U.S., "Sears, Roebuck and Company" is a really old catalog business that began when the west was still a bison-filled frontier for European sharecroppers in covered wagons hoping to escape/frame "Indians" for all of their horrible massacres, in a lustful quest for blood and oil money that has come to be known as "The Wild West." You've seen the movies, right? Like that. Or, more specifically, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears.

I mean, he wasn't exactly home-owner material as a self-entitled welfare queen. People like me work hard. Not him! He's "special". Well, Cotto, sigh...don't make me phrase it like I'm taking away your lollipop, you fucking prick. I'm tired. What did you buy with it? I waited...and then waited some more. And some more. This, from an arrogant dick who liked to pretend he was exceedingly verbal and highly loquacious with his carefully chosen bon mots. Give it up! He looked down, and thought about it, but finally, he was too embarrassed to tell me. I'm sure it wasn't for garden hoes, or trimming shears for his fucking front lawn with carefully groomed hedges. And to this day, I still don't know what he bought with a housewares store credit card used by Americans for generations as their rural general store.

I know what we did. My mom asked me to circle clothes out of a huge Christmas catalog every year for toys and clothes, and if they didn't fit or we didn't like it, we went back to the store in Nanuet (still there) to return it. That's what country folk did back then, while your dad browsed the barbecue grills and dreamed of a motorized lawn mower with a comfy riding seat, like the big Italian douchebag next door to us had, riding around smiling on his ghetto "pizza money" from his 'hood storefront in the Bronx that would become a model for the summertime NYC movie classic "Do the Right Thing" that explored ethnic and racial tensions between the Italian-American immigrants who earned their plush living off the backs of impoverished, trapped African-Americans living in a hot city without air conditioning, just like we did.

We had heavy, awkward window units that sat tipsily in the small window sills of our split-level home, and if we wanted even that cool comfort in our rooms, we had to pull down a ladder in the ceiling to go into the attic, carefully stepping between the beams so we wouldn't fall through the floor, and then pushing the heavy units down the stairs at a steep angle to whoever was at the bottom. We had air conditioning in our small bedrooms only; not in the kitchen, or the living room, or the converted basement downstairs. If it was too hot to stay in our rooms for too long, we went outside, or we walked a mile and a half to the public pool up-and-down the impressive hills of this area, or we ran through a sprinkler on the lawn, spraying each other with a green garden hose. I know that he didn't do any of that, because he said would die in his early 50s, just like his father and his father's father. 

It was sad, but it was real. As he told me his life of woe, I knew his life was designed for him to fail. And so, I listened to his halting confessions that he had to work up the nerve to tell me over shared dirt weed blunts and cheap beer, because it probably included evil staples of the projects like child rape, child abandonment, and/or child endangerment. How did I know? He told me his dad was his first "party" partner. You fill in the blanks. And that's what I did. I "read" him expertly, better than anyone else did, and that's why I got out of the ghetto alive, just like my hardcore New York City family. That, and I kicked out an old abandoned bookcase piece-by-piece after work one night, so I could leave the floor of his dirty room for the room next door with a chain through the opening where the doorknob used to be, in front of him and our neighbor "Rex", his "hood rat" partner-in-crime for those days, even though it was mostly particleboard. Almost.

My mutha's naybahood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Avenue
My fahthizz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford%E2%80%93Stuyvesant,_Brooklyn
And mine, bitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodside,_Queens

Jailbreak

 

After I went bust during the last big economic recession, I was forced to undergo severe deprivation, like Americans do in times of war. I didn't have any luxuries to begin with, which meant that I almost immediately lost a lot of weight, and fast, too. I spent a few weeks light-headed and slightly dizzy, especially when my family chose to reenact their rather ritualized behavior called "kicking people who are down" by pretending that my living expenses were the result of laziness (ha!), ineptitude (how?), incompetence (oh, no) or an inability to work, which is, unfortunately for them, not backed up anywhere by any type of actual legal documentation, like, say, my complete work history through Social Security and the IRS. Hard to beat, but true.

As I freefalled expertly into poverty like I always do (because I've compensated for familial inadequacies all of my life), I met the typical lifelong poor who live in the 'hood, and who've never accurately reflected me or my reality. "Everybody's 'crazy' in the hood!", my friend Cotto explained to me, as my so-called expert on ghetto fabulosity, not expecting a "white" girl (uh, oh) like me to come from the projects in Queens (also documented), or having parents from Bed-Stuy and the Bronx. Real but true, as our native stories from around the way. He got angry and aggressive at my "street creds" (like I planned it), tensely inquiring about street names and directions to my parent's so-called neighborhoods that were immediately under suspicion, because he lies almost every time he opens his mouth.

And that's true about critically impoverished project people who are on their 7th or 8th generation of the American Experience; they don't actually solve problems. Other people do that for them! Cotto had an arrogant sense of entitlement about his welfare the same way a wealthy white man expects "his" table to always be ready for him at his favorite restaurant, as part of his price for eating at the establishment. "It's not a law, but that's the way it works in the world, Marie", typically accompanied by a pitying gesture like the sideways head tilt and a condescending tone. Right...I'm the poor muthafucka who doesn't know what time it is. I keep forgetting that!

In truth, after my family forced me into "Public Assistance" by turning their backs on me (I got some MetroCards for hours and hours of waiting and form-filling), I needed a sit-down with Cotto so I could take notes on his lifestyle. It was fascinating. There were unwritten rules about everything that you'd never find in print, which would legitimize an already-shady situation. He had to tell me what time to get there so the lines wouldn't be painful to wait on, and after I did that successfully, he told me I forgot to go to this particular window on this floor to ask for MetroCards because "they're supposed to do that for you!" Huh. Uh, homeboy, nobody told me that. It was so fucking crazy and half-ass that I immediately knew it was designed for him and his mentality.

Nothing made sense about their process. Not one single fucking thing, and I can write books on any subject matter there is. There were secret rules about special windows, lines, locations....it went on and on and on. After his bad Alfredo dinner, I finally told him the truth. "it sounds like this is a full-time job!" He agreed. "Yep. Being on welfare is like having a full-time job, because to get benefits, that's how much time you need. You have to think of it as your job." What the...? A job? But, like, I've been working since I was a minor. Where do healthy brilliant female publishers go? Of course, the answer for me was as simple as the local library (duh), but for unskilled generational poverty on a continual course, I was stumped. I still have no idea how anyone could live within a system as fucked up as that and survive, but as I found out through Cotto, it's made to foil criminals, not law-abiding citizens rocked by changes in the economy as old as the hills, like highly-skilled managers dumped for their pricey salaries.

As I fought the final battles with my disordered family on an empty stomach, I found a temporary cover design gig, then more "Unemployment Benefits" that I paid for in full (like all of my single-girl health plans), then another design gig that was deliberately cut-off to intentionally suck cover designs out of me for catalog season before my six-month kicked in that would give me full health benefits, as they cheated me out of them for the first few months that I worked longer and harder than around me, and then a final round of Unemployment Benefits that I lived off of for months, at my mom's place. Being healthy didn't pay off for me, yet again. But, how to fake being sick? If I had to bend myself into that contorted a shape, I might as well go into the movies and acting! Who can do that? It hurt me to even try to be in a sick world for too long, like one big held-breath underwater.

Into this scary mix of crazy systemic incompetence came the necessary delve into tenement housing and shady subletting situations, like the weird OCD guy with a rental listing service who made me stand behind painted lines and follow his posted instructions written out in his tensely scrawled handwriting from behind a long counter, because he'd been beaten up too many times for taking poor people's money and then giving them bad information. Huh...so, not like my Park Slope real estate agent taking pictures of available brownstones for me to peruse while I corresponded via email in Denver? Uh, no. Not at all like that, or like me. The place on 9th Street that Cotto rocked like it was his personal prison cell gave me the creeps, but I survived. The guy who sometimes lived next to us on the top floor had invented a pseudonym named "Rex", which his friend told him to do if he dared to rent a shady sublet, as another critical piece of "hood rat" info that I didn't know. Ah.

Advice like that also originated from the same bodega that had attracted a drunk and high Cotto like a magnet, where he bought his "loosies" (didn't know that, either), and received such sage wisdom as "Don't let me hear that you actually paid Jose for that place!", which is so illegal, I can't even touch it from this angle. Do your thang, hood rat. What could I say? He wouldn't have listened to me anyway. Our neighbor Rex was deeply saddened and shocked by my "phoneless" state, which he telegraphed to me as this, "Oh, you should let me 'jack' your phone! I worked for a Verizon store." Uh, excuse me? "Yeah! You 'jailbreak' your phone from your carrier so you can get another plan!" Okay...I actually tried looking it up on the Park Slope library's public access computer, but it was so fucking convoluted and fraught with technical difficulties that once again I thought to myself, well, shit; if he can do that, why is he here in a tenement with us, you know?

I'd adjusted to having no phone the good old fashioned way: I used payphones on the corner, and the library's WiFi to access the Internet through my old iPhone. Still do. In time, I bought a cheap drugstore cell-phone, and my mom's broke-ass cousin had to tell us how to do that, too. I simply didn't know you could buy a phone for, like, $10 and then load it with phone minutes. I always paid for all of my expenses. Sure enough, the next time I walked down Fifth Avenue towards the Hispanic neighborhood of Sunset Park, there it was, advertised on a placard in Cotto's special bodega: WE JAILBREAK iPHONES HERE. Great. Yet another piece of criminal knowledge that I didn't want or need. I just wanted to live life for another day.

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

Counterfeit

My attempts at creating a home out of the remnants of my aunt's apartment in Kensington were often met with sneers from the 30-something crowd who competed with us as teenagers at RISD (taking the one available scholarship for Illustration from us as well!). She dropped snippy remarks about my poverty, like: "Oh, this is such a claaasic 'starter' apartment", the very same privileged bitch who took college money from us by working professionally as a graphic designer for many years, and was taught illustration by her illustrator dad before going to school with us for Illustration (hence "winning" that Hallmark prize money, the one and only prize awarded to students for Illustration), living off the comfort that her IT husband provided for her. She then set at sabotaging our lives and work when she realized NYC was out of her reach (even after she ripped us off), to finally retreat to that northern place where all rich hippies go: Woodstock, NY.*

But enough about her. I was left with whatever my aunt didn't want to pack and move with her, like she was on the run from a serious crime, instead of the easy living my father's sponsored support provided her, present at each and every level of her life, which included (totally free of charge): apartments (in New York City), houses (in West Texas), jobs (in his company), healthcare (from out of his pocket as her employer), furniture, movers, cars, insurance, food...everything was always included. The only way I could do my apprenticeship in the city and stay alive was living in her cast-off apartment that had some furnishings, leaving me to pay off her monthly maintenance fee (it was a co-op), and all of the other bills that came with living in Brooklyn.

Anything else that I needed to survive, I had to either find, make do with, or do without. It was with this barely-able-to-eat budget that a basic answering machine came to mind because I had none, and I needed one for potential employers to contact me while I interviewed for work. I had nothing except my clothes, my artwork, a drafting table, and a few lamps, moving out of my mother's house at 17 for school, and not looking back. I have always been almost completely and totally on my own, for most of my life so far. I told my cousins from Sheepshead Bay (they liked to drink at the old man's bar on the corner, down the block from my aunt's place, because it's a cheap dive with a great jukebox), that I needed an answering machine, and they told me not to shop on Canal Street for home goods, but what could I do? I was flat broke with just my work savings from college jobs and a credit card, before I began living paycheck-to-paycheck.

I'd known about Canal Street since my student days, because there's a really well-known art supply store there, packed with several floors of stuff. It's the one place in the city where you can find everything you need to make art, and that's a rare thing. Back in the frontier days of Brooklyn, I had to do most of my shopping in Manhattan, and lug it home on the train or (if I just got paid) in a taxi, but that was extremely rare. Every penny counts. I screw up my budget, I starve. End of story.

So, I knew when I picked up a shrink-wrapped machine down on Canal Street (which cost me two subway fares to get to, for the ride there and back from way-out Brooklyn, taking me hours to do, with transfers and construction re-routing on the weekend) that I was entering into a shifty no-man's land of goods and services, a shady place to shop where there are no guarantees, but when was my life any different? If I didn't do something (anything) to help myself, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing changed, because no one did anything about it, just like it is today. It looked "hot" and slightly used when I picked it up in front of a street stall, but it was either this or nothing, so I bought it from some chain-smoking Chinese guy for $15.

My dad's cousin laughed drunkenly in my face the next time I saw him, because within a month, the two mechanical arms that sprang up when you needed to change the tape broke off. They completely popped out of their tracks, never to be put back into proper working order again. "I told you so", he slurred at me, and then he bought another round. Thanks. Within a week, I made the painful decision to invest in a $25-35 machine, knowing I'd feel the squeeze at the supermarket that weekend; no after-work drinks or take-out slices for me. When I turned to look around the joint, I simply saw myself reflected in the mirror behind the bar, because there was no one else to turn to. Ain't never been any different for me than that.

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trustafarian

Black Eyeliner

"I HATE pichas! I look so weirdly dwarfish and outta praportion  in them! Ugh, she could wayeh a papeh bayag and still look good. I know! I KNOW! I hate huh, too! Don't stand next to huh in pichas!"

By now you know that I grew up in the 80s, right after Punk Rock and New Wave hit it big, and that my family life is less than stellar; the music has changed, but not my peeps. At least, not much. When I was small, we thought my mom's minuscule youngest sister was a kid, because mentally she is. She was 16 when I was born and because she's handicapped, we treated her like a favored pet, because if we didn't, she might come at you with a really sharp knife from the kitchen drawer that she snatched with rare Hobbit-like quickness in under 40 seconds, made odder still by the fact that she is chronically lazy and almost completely physically inept....except in highly important cases of mania, like someone noticing she is very small and unpleasant.

It had some funny moments (like only people who grew up around serious disorders can have), which was driven home for me last week through the animated show "Bob's Burgers", about an eccentric family with a wacky "New Yawk mutha" who has a (surprise, surprise), paranoid tinfoil hat-wearing younger sister who has to hide underneath a tent to go to sleep at night. In her ample spare time, she also creates weird games called "Gail Force Winds" with rules that she can change at anytime, like blowing your game pieces off the board because you're 9 and you don't yet realize that she is clinically schizoid because she acts like a kid you go to school with, and that's why she slept on your grandparent's couch for most of her adult life, with the exception of that time when she had a series of creepy basement apartments, first in my Mom's house (where she was thrown out for competing with my mom's compulsive rules about germs and cleanliness), and some other house in New City...with weird games that had fluctuating rules according to her mental state.

I was fine for awhile growing up, hiding out among a gaggle of grand-kids who are much much stranger than me (some have obvious Autism), but once I hit puberty and started to outgrow her, she went nuts, which was bad enough, because I was the teenager coping with all these changes, like my dad running away with his barely legal secretary, and me losing my childhood forever...but I digress. I began showing markedly different traits than my mom and her short, fat sisters. Like some nightmare fable, they grew wider and uglier from their abusive lifestyles, while I sprung up and grew leaner, with a beautifully perfect oval porcelain face to match, which they noticed sarcastically every time there were two of them in a room against me. Unfortunately for me, I had the body to match, too: perfectly long legs that went on for days to match the rest of my athletic frame, with perfectly proportioned hands and feet to match, beautifully sized and featured extremely well.

After the awkwardness imposed upon me by my mom's poor taste in hair and clothes, my coming out phase was disastrous for me. I grew up to be a supermodel at a normal height, so there would be no giraffe jokes that I could hide behind. I was....well, perfect-looking, and I grew more so with each passing day. I learned how to style my hair really, really well, found a great hairdresser on my own, earned my own money and bought my own clothes, then experimented with makeup that wasn't my mom's cast-off Mary Kay cosmetics, made for someone twice my age. I wasn't wildly punk or new age, but that didn't matter. I was gorgeous and normal, in fact, brilliant at school with lots of friends, hobbies, and interests, which I began not hiding as I blossomed verbally, too.

My handicapped maternal aunt with my paternal grandmother. They knew.

It was under this cloudy sky that I stupidly accepted one of my aunt's summer invites to go to her rented beach house with the younger sister, without my mom or any of my brothers. My mom was cautious about it, and so was I: they are really incompetent. But, we figured, my mom wanted some space and I loved the beach. Who cares, right? They have a house at LBI and I love to swim, which they can't do well. I'd maybe make a few new friends and be at the beach most of the time. It was a complete disaster. The first day out, I was walking with my youngest aunt to the beach when something happened; we passed by a house with two teenage boys about my age playing a board game outside, on the second floor deck of the house their family rented. "Hi!", one of them waved to me from the balcony, "Hey, how are you? What's your name? Do you want to come up and play a game with us?" Maybe! I was thirteen and I really liked boys, but, no, thanks guys, I'm going to the beach with my aunt. Maybe later?

And that was it. She went completely bat-shit insane. She gnashed her teeth in that crazy way she does, baring her large teeth in her huge head that sits on a short squat body, pulling her lips back in a snarl that bares her gums, hissing at me, spitting curses, calling me a slut with black eyeliner and that's why those boys wanted to talk with me, yeah (building up steam), because I look like a WHORE!! in that makeup and that's why I attract attention I shouldn't have and it was all my fault and I look like a slut. She spit out words like daggers, so insultingly out of place to what happened on a mild Jersey Shore beach day that I knew immediately what was happening: she was going to try and destroy me over my beauty, and if she caught me alone, she'd do something really bad to me.

It was such a bad betrayal by a woman who had pledged in front of G-d and family to protect me (she was supposed to be my "godmother"), that I didn't know what to do. My beach day was ruined, which was part of the point, and I was in tears; hysterical, scared, shocked, scalding child's tears, with no responsible adults around: not my mom, or my dad, or my grandparents. No one was there who would help me. I made a scene back at the house anyway, to drive the point home in front of my mom's sisters and my younger cousins, so that they would know it was real, though I knew they'd probably cover their asses and lie about the situation later on. I was bereft. I have never felt so lonely and isolated in all of my life, save for one or two times after that. I was trapped, because I couldn't drive away. There were no phones, so I had to walk by myself to a payphone to call my mom in tears.

She felt terrible, and she knew I was telling the truth. She knows her sisters. We talked about her driving down to pick me up, but I wanted to stick it out. Rockland County is many hours away, and as single mom, her life was hard enough. I calmed down a little bit, wandered around the ice cream hut until sunset, then slowly went back to the house. My cousin talked to me a bit, which helped. He lived with his mom's madness every day, too, and his father had died recently from cancers caused by smoking and alcoholism. He understood, which helped me calm down enough to stick it out for the rest of the vacation, because I had a witness who could testify later, on my behalf.

I didn't talk much for the rest of the summer, and from then on out, I knew my aunt was so sick, that she could kill me in the wrong mood, or if I was alone with her for too long. I turned inward against myself, and after the insults that stung successfully manifested itself directly in my markedly changed behavior, the sisters snapped at fake "slut" slurs as the ammo of choice. I would go on afterwards to have sporadic periods of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll brought on by family madness, fueled by the fact that I might as well try and act like a slut, since I looked like one anyway. I was doomed no matter what I did, which opened the door wide to a series of adult male predators. And to think that I once thought, as a young kid, that I looked like an 80s rock star.

A year later: me and my bro at the beach (I was 15) with a friend and my mom, wearing my "slutty" 80s eyeliner. We did it, man. We won, because we survived. BTW - "quel tan" in this photo, bro! Rock on!

To all my peeps: I told you I wouldn't drop this, because Rockland kids shouldn't punk-out on one another, ever. Here you go, man, for that next time your moms gets drunk and mad at you for breathing at her the "wrong" way, or your dad gets slap happy with his stupid asshole drunk friends when the family BBQ turns bad after nightfall...without the horribly nigthmarish "Annie" foster care bullshit to hurt you even worse. 

I kept my word, didn't I? Yes, I did. Because I want you to make it, guy. I don't want to be the only one at the top anymore, you know? And call the cops in town. They're my friends as grown-ups. You can trust them to help. We went to school together. They know me. Also, in this century, we leave a paper-trail that's mile wide and a mile long until we get the help we need for one another. Do it. This Mommy doesn't lie to cover her ass. (I might to help you, though. Acting chops also help me to not get knifed in a drunken bar fight gone bad, ya dig ;) We have to stick together in this world to make it.

http://www.informationrockland.com/Search.aspx
http://bit.ly/1C2Rrnf