Goth Kid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek-a-Boo_%28song%29

When we were in high school, we knew who the gay kids were, because we'd known most of them all of our young lives thus far. It isn't very difficult to suss out the shy Irish boy who speaks with a light lisp and hangs out with the same group of tight-knit Irish-American boys we took First Communion with at the older, smaller St. Francis of Assisi parish back in the day. Our classmates were simply part of our lives, not some over-dramatic assimilation into another alternate universe. They remain they same down-to-earth New York kids I grew up with.

Their teenage years were a bit rougher, though, as the drama queens dug deeply into Glee Club, A/V classes, and art studios with an intensity that spoke more of a desperate soul seeking kinship or validation during those fragile, ego-forming years than the truer scholarship behind those disciplines. Imagine incorporating an undesired sexuality into your adolescence with a traditional working class background? Yeah..it was like that. We could talk to each other about what was going on in our lives, and that was about it.

That funny kid with a flair for the naughty limericks we passed back-and-forth in religion class at Albertus Magnus after public school became "Brion" in high school, with an ascot and attitude to match it, followed quickly by his acting debut on television with a widely aired commercial for a popular board game that he announced in art class with an alarming frequency. And it didn't stop there.

Pete was unknown to me until junior year, when he became our resident "Goth Kid" in a big way. His rebellion was epic, and totally 80s. He wore heavy black eyeliner (like the singer of his favorite band "Siouxsie and The Banshees"), an Egyptian ankh symbol (like she did), tons of black turtlenecks, Doc Martins, and occasionally a flannel tied around his waist, like any true-to-life Goth* would. It didn't hurt (or help) his look that he was six feet tall, which is a lot of black clothing to wear around so many pastel-colored Yuppies in Izod shirts with the collars popped up in the back, or the bright primary-colored Guidos and the Guidettes who loved them, with their shiny hot rods bought by daddy in the school parking lot, wearing gold crosses on thick chains. It got easier and easier to stand out from the herd.

It was made even weirder by his obvious Nuyorican background, because his full name was Peter Costales, and I write "was" because (like Mikey from the Life cereal commercials), it was rumored that he died from an overdose, though I am happy to say that isn't true. Instead, he became really serious about painting dramatic portraits in oils like Sargent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Singer_Sargent), and that's what I remember most about him, besides his large dark frame stretched out across a studio desk to recover from an experiment with clove cigarettes that went awry, in a furious bout with nausea that took him all class to recover from. His work was beautiful and very sophisticated for a teenager.

Unlike posers, he had the real thing, though in the political game that is high school, he lost a rigged contest for "Best Artist" to the Vice Principal's son Paul Bierker, which turned him off from school for good, as it should be. He was definitely better than him, and so was my boyfriend Raphael, who also painted in oils to great effect. Whereas Ralph dropped out of school to party (and blame it on me), Pete took his act to the S.U.N.Y. school system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_University_of_New_York_at_New_Paltz), like two other friends of mine from that senior year art class. We had no idea how to make a portfolio for submission, because there were no teachers to help us with it, or mentors to teach it, so we applied to a bunch of state schools to see which ones we got into and could afford.

The last time I thought about that group of dedicated artists from high school was when I saw Keith from our senior year art class, as we waited for an Adirondack Trailways bus upstate in the Nanuet strip mall off Rte. 59, where there used to be a Dunkin' Donuts. I asked him about John and Pete, and they didn't see each other as much anymore, what with classes and life taking over. Made sense to me. My best friend and I were destined to part ways as she became a student history teacher, and I went on to earn a B.F.A. from R.I.S.D. after my Liberal Arts classes at S.U.N.Y. Oneonta. They had a much shorter bus ride than I did! It almost made me wish I went there instead, because it was the first stop we made before the long difficult mountain bus ride in snow and ice laying ahead of me, but I knew that.

I was going to take a much harder road than they were, and I knew that meant something to them, too. Pete fucking hated high school for being oppressive and juvenile as much as we did, with an art teacher so burnt out, he announced on the first day of class that he would give an "A" to anyone who showed up for his class, and that was it. There was no talent required, or intellectual thought, or rigorous training involved: just a bunch of brilliant, ethnic, New York kids riding out a senior year we didn't really need, because we all had Regents credits for college already, with one tall, gay, Goth kid wearing pronounced eye makeup included. Thanks for staying strong, Pete. You big weirdo!

Kiss Them for Me

Siouxsie and the Banshees

It glittered and it gleamed
For the arriving beauty queen
A ring and a car
Now you're the prettiest by far

No party she'd not attend
No invitation she wouldn't send
Transfixed by the inner sound
Of your promise to be found, oh

Nothing or no-one will ever
Make me let you down

Kiss them for me, I may be delayed
Kiss them for me, if I am delayed

It's Divoon, oh it's Serene
In the fountains pink champagne
Someone carving their devotion
In the heart shaped pool of fame, oh

Nothing or no-one will ever
Make me let you down

Kiss them for me, I may be delayed
Kiss them for me, I may find myself delayed

On the road to New Orleans
A spray of stars hit the screen
As the 10th impact shimmered
The forbidden candles beamed

Kiss them for me, I may be delayed
Kiss them… Full lyrics on Google Play

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goth_subculture

Oregano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Island Ice Tea

A street in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island.

Like most people from around the way, families either went to the Jersey Shore for the summer or out to Long Island, which I knew nothing about. I never really met anyone from Long Island until freshman year at my SUNY school, and it was rough. I had no idea where people that horrible came from, except maybe the town of New City here in Rockland, infamous for nasty, vicious, desperate housewives with their scary long-clawed manicures and overly coiffed hair. My best friend was my first roommate ever, and she did no better with them, even with her family summers at Montauk fishing. We were adrift in a sea of some of the worst human behavior we'd ever seen, but I'll tell that story on another day.

Me and my family made the long drive to LBI* almost every summer, with the occasional stop in Cape May to see family, but mostly we went to a rental house in the town of Shipbottom, and we loved it. Long Beach Island doesn't have a boardwalk, or cheesy strip malls or (back in the early 80s and late 70s) much of anything besides mini golf, surf shops, seafood joints, bike rentals stalls, saltwater taffy/ice cream/fudge stores that also sold seashell magnets, and a few depressing old man Irish bars thrown into the mix.

But we didn't care. We weren't there for the human ambiance. We were there to soak up some sun, play in the sand, and body-surf, because the ocean side of the island is one big beach that seems to never end. When we were kids, we tried walking the length of the island when we got bored, but we never actually made it, because it's 18 miles long, which was way too far for us to go. It was magical, and it was family-oriented, for at least for my childhood and preteen years, until my family broke apart through divorce; a sudden stop with a horrible soap opera ending that included one very short, skinny, thick-glassed, and bucktoothed barely-legal secretary, which was excruciating to tell people, so I mostly didn't unless I was talking to a schoolmate.

My family tried to stumble along with our summer traditions, like the times when my grandparents or my aunt (who had money from her late husband) rented a house, but it wasn't the same. They weren't ocean people or active swimmers, so some of the fun was lost. In any case, in the summer of '87, it all blew up anyway. I already finished high school with Regents college credits by my junior year at age 16, while my mom held me hostage in her house by denying me most of the obvious suburban teenage supports, like rides to work or a cheap used car, so that her and her ugly Italian boyfriend from the house next door could find time be alone (which was so creepy because I grew up with their household as neighbors), after his wife died of cancer. 

They made my mom's house unbearable for me on purpose to have some privacy from their kids, secure that they had the upper hand over me while my older brothers were away at school. One night when my bro was on break, he pulled me quietly onto the staircase so we could hear them downstairs gossiping about money. The old boyfriend from next door actually suggested to her that I could be a hooker ("Maybe she's 'whoring'!"), or selling drugs, and that she should check my purse regularly for items related to those work pursuits. Meanwhile, his daughter had barely made it through high school, and not one of his kids ever went to college. She told me one time at the top of our lane, while waiting for the morning bus to school, that she thought she had a miscarriage. She was just 15 at the time, and I was a late bloomer who'd barely been kissed, and someone who'd also been taught to pinch every damn penny like it was my last, from my thrifty Acadian father and all of my Depression-Era grandparents; which was totally unlike my pampered, white-gloved, private-school mom, with her tea parties and petty, vicious sisters used to getting their way. I made $20 last a long long time, just like I do now.

But everything I did, wore, or said was open to suspicion and scrutiny in my mother's house. I became accustomed to their unfounded fears and wild paranoia about me, and like any good teenager, I eventually caved into their hated suggestions to become the wild rebel they wanted me to be deliberately (so they could tear me apart), and not without a certain amount of style. I couldn't wait to leave home. Senior year was a wash for me and my mom knew it, but letting me stretch my wings towards serious academia would break her "College at 16" family record, and like any evil mother from a fairy tale gone wrong, she couldn't let me get away with beating her, which is as far from parenting as you could get, but both of my highly insecure and very disordered parents were always more childish than mature.

Under this hateful cloud, I took an invite to join my mom and her younger sister at the shore for the 4th of July weekend, but this time I was more experienced. I'd been accepted into every SUNY school I applied to, and my "bestie" would be bunking down with me at Oneonta, so I thought I was set. What could my mom and her vile family do to me? I was naive about powers of destruction, and foolishly optimistic. It was the let-down in my guard that my teenage spirit needed to run free. After a giggly night on the beach with wine and fireworks, I put my mom and her sister "to bed" back at the house (they can't handle adult drinks), and then I went in search of a good time. I didn't have to walk far. I had found my confidence with men (which would lead to a late summer downfall later on, but I didn't know that, yet), learned by watching a pushy Jewish frenemy with lots of time, absolutely no parental supervision, a free car, no after-school jobs, and lots of money. She does PR for fashion in the city today. Yeah.

So, leaving my mom and her sister at the shore shack eating chips at the kitchen counter, I put on a white half-shirt with shorts and a funky hat from a thrift store in Nyack, in true 80s style, and I walked into a house party that was a block away uninvited. I just walked into the house, quickly scanned the place, picked out the best looking guy there, walked up to him at the keg in the kitchen talking to a group of girls who surrounded him as they laughed at his story, blew through the ring of them, and then picked him up over a beer that he poured for me. I left the party with his name and phone number in my pocket. It was the house phone number to his swank downtown Nyack pad with a wrought-iron spiral staircase and exposed brick walls, with a cool city job as an sound guy at MSG. Nice...but I was just getting started.

The next night, my mom was feeling good for once, a little tipsy because she actually convinced her pukey little sister to drink one of her dumb little kid drinks, like Coke and Root Beer Schapps; disgustingly sweet drinks to match her sugar tooth, with its' raging soda and caffeine addiction, one that continues unabated to this day. She was feeling loose, so my mom let me order Long Island Iced Teas at our table, the strongest drink known to man. She didn't know that, which was rare for her, so I took advantage of this opening to order with impunity. I'd been warned that they snuck up on you silently, but by the third one, it was already too late. I was knock-out, pass-out drunk.

We were at one of the few nightclubs in town, because my mom's latently gay sister had decided to showcase her rarely seen heterosexuality by openly gawking at male strippers, boldly proclaiming her lame status as a "cougar" (a term sadly not yet in existence in 1987) by hanging a Chippendale's air freshener in her car, when her and her gay friend went to a club in Manhattan on one of their rare hetero-themed larks. It didn't last long (thank G-d), but she was in the middle of her 30s, and this was the last gasp her immature sexuality had before it died forever, helped along by junk food and Valium. She and my mom were also getting along, which was rare, too, because they don't have much in common besides family.

I don't remember much about the show at the time, except that I made eye contact with the cutest guy on stage, while my mom and her stupid sister encouraged me to put money in his pocket so he would come over to our spot where they could look at him. He wasn't my type at all; he had a cheesy pencil-thin and very gay mustache, with tightly-coiled curls that were shaped into the mini mullet of the day, with a tan that was classic guinea at the seaside. Anyway, I really hadn't wanted to see anymore of him than I already did, but I got bored with my mom and her dumb kid sister, so I turned my attention to the dance floor.

"Macho Man" was now in his street clothes, dancing with some girls and waiting for me to make eye contact, which I then did, and WHAM! that was it. He came over to talk to us, asked me to dance, and then we did. My mom went back to her sister, barely noticing me until later on, when the dancing got tighter and closer, and the lights blinked on and off. Uh oh. This was a highly public display for me, something I didn't often do in front of family, because the bitchy repercussions weren't worth the few minutes of attention I got. My mom had sobered up a bit for the drive home, and then she was on us like a harpy, eyes flashing with anger, her nails dragging along my arm and digging in, because she loved scratching me as warning signs to more aggression.

"Do you now how old she is?!!" My mom spat out the words into his face while she pulled me away him. "Uh, no. She told me she was 19!" He looked really young then, too, and startled at this New York mom outburst, which was probably a lot like the spiteful guinea mutha he had at home, waiting for his tip money to put into the family till. "Well she's only 17 years old!!" She screamed it out, and by then, we had made a scene. With the house lights on, he and I looked very young, like the teenagers at the beach that we were, caught red-handed at having a good time. It was all for the best; he wanted to go further with me, and that I couldn't do. I probably would have thrown up in the sand, just like "The Uker" rep I had earned at that summer's first trip to the beach with my friends in lieu of senior prom, and I was just getting started. It was the summer of 1987. Anything was possible.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Beach_Island