Miss American Pie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_%28music%29

Madness wasn't something that occurred just inside the home for me, safely tucked away behind locked, closed doors; it was everywhere I went out in the world, too. In this modern world that marks the abolition of segregation from our free society, I went to public school, like all of my friends and neighbors did, boys and girls happily included (with the occasional "Baby Jazz", too). That harmony and mature acceptance was (and still is) reflected in every environment I went into, like college, or going to the gym, or grown-up office work with my first real suit bought just for interviews as part of that special occasion, but otherwise, me and my generation formed a heterogeneous blend of mixed company wherever we went or now find ourselves in, because in "homosapien", it's a language easily understood, or so I thought. 

Baby geniuses have it rough out in the world; a wild place of limited abilities and other people's impairments, which pretty much guaranteed that sometimes the only other humans in the world who understood me in my smaller social circles of childhood were the very people who were most closely related to me through the "magic power" that is genetics; a fascinating branch of science that tells the truth about who we really are, whether we like it or not. Madness was the same way. Sure, people try to game us into thinking they're healthier than they are, but with time and experience, that window closes to ever-smaller widths all the time. It naturally limits the access people have to me, and for the truly sick, that's a frightening thought. I could be the only muthfucka on "da block" who will really help them out of the mess they're in, be it the inherited kind or not. I am a master problem-solver, but that don't always make the medicine go down smooth, know what I'm sayin'? Drunk fucks are still just that, same as any other century with Problem-People. 

Still, I've always wanted to help, much like my innate joy at all things "baby", animal and human alike. Are we not cute furry mammals? We sure are! But, much like the divorces that broke up bad marriages right around the time kids grew old enough to handle it (like junior high school age), parents began fleeing the scenes of their crimes the way baby birds leave the nest: very quickly while fattened on family funds, a kind of last-ditch-effort flight that belies the desperation felt by the fleeing parent, male or female, though as so often is the case for most native New Yorkers, that flavor is almost always of the male kind. And so we grew up a generation without any real father figures, though that was also like many other generations before us, certainly that of a lot of Acadian Métis; an ethnicity that knows their papas have limited ranges of domesticity built into their crazy boat-trippin' lifestyles, so much so that after the third or fourth month, you want them to leave anyway, so as to make their way at sea, bringing home bags filled with goodies and tales of adventure born on the high seas. 

We didn't exactly want them around full time, anyway. Ain't it time for you to catch some fishing boat off the coast? "Bring back lobster!", we shouted to their navy-clad backs and slammed doors. Whew...glad he's gone. He was becoming one ornery motherfucker! After my dad left, my friends' fathers quickly followed suit, swallowed up by the vastness that is the metropolitan New York City area. They were gone, gone, gone, baby! I adjusted quickly to it, as the lifelong realist I remain, but my friends with troubles didn't. Quick changes are disastrous to kids with mental problems, and my friends quickly broke apart like their parents did. The first one to go was my friend Molly, and it was epic. She left school with a bad case of chickenpox that happened during high school, way after we all had the disease and moved on from it, scars aside. She did not. That time period home, after her father left her mother, must have been the straw that broke the camel's back, because she came back to school pox-ridden and skittishly scared, breaking out in hysteric tears even at my less funny material. I was worried, and so were my friends. 

She began using drugs hard, moving straight from the sneaking-cigarettes-in-the-bathroom phase to sniffing coke and losing her virginity, then onto date rape in the backseat of one of our friend's car while she watched, a friend who'd already been to rehab and back by sixteen. They started getting shipped off to the relatives, those with out-of-state and -country grandparents, or (in the worst cases like Molly's) institutions way upstate, supposedly out of harm's way. I knew it was bad when she threw me under the bus with her mom for the minor infraction of pot smoking, which is about all I had done in comparison to my deflowered addict classmates, except they hid how bad it was for them from me, to use my younger inexperience as much-needed leverage in their savage working class households. Our toeholds on middle-class respectability were very fragile new ones at that. Any one of us could go back down at any time, and my less respectable friends would much rather it was me than them. 

She became one of the first people in my circle to honestly betray me, which she never apologized for, because I never saw her again after her coke addiction and promiscuity came to light. It had absolutely nothing to do with me because I wasn't around her anymore, after she successfully back-stabbed me several times. She went down on her own, like the genuinely addicted and insane typically do. One of the last times I ever saw her socially was during her tentative school attendance after her bouts with divorce and chicken pox, trying to recover her health in the newly shark-infested waters of her parents broken marriage. Like a lot of my classmates, she didn't make it out of their madness, because like most seriously sick people, her first brush with real madness came on the heels of her puberty, and she never fully regained her footing with the healthy life. I went over to her house after school, to see if she would apologize to my face for taking the hits from her mom for my supposed "fast life" of sex and drugs; me at fifteen and never been kissed, watching from the sidelines of their depression. I wanted to see how she was doing, not that she actually cared about me anymore, in the face of her much larger adult woes. 

She sat on the floor of her bedroom in a corner, rocking back and forth, asking me if I liked Doug McClean's* song "American Pie" (I didn't, and much like everything else about most of my hometown classmates, my taste in great music surpassed theirs at a much earlier age than normal, too), as she picked up the needle from her plastic kiddie 45 record player, playing the song over and over again, asking me if I heard the strange messages that she swore she heard, too. I couldn't follow her into madness during my teenage years. 
I certainly can't do it now, but I can tell you all about a young Irish/German girl named MollyAnn Dougherty who left our town seeking a cure and never returned, because that's exactly what I promised my friends I would for them when I got to the top: I would tell everyone about them, about what happened to them in their very abusive homes, so that we could break the cycle forever. This one's for you, kid.

American Pie

Don McLean

A long long time ago
I can still remember how
That music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while

But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
So

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die

Did you write the book of love
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock and roll?
Can music… Full lyrics on Google Play

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