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

Werewolves of London

Me and my best friend from school were genuine in our desire to get a good education at a great price, but it was most definitely not reflected back at us. The spoiled upstate kids of our generation saw it as practically a free ride that was easily dismissed, so good were the deals of the SUNY school system back then. The application was a simple two-sided form you could write in your sleep to apply to ten schools at once, which made college acceptances rather anti-climatic. I think I applied to five schools at once, as a fail-safe.

Just like my passion for narrative was derided by supposed industry professionals in publishing who just happened to "land" a job in the field, my friend Karen was looked at as an oddity for knowing she wanted to be a teacher and then going to a teacher's college in New York for her NYS certification. I know; too straight a line between points, right? One of our favorite sayings is the basic "clarity is key" phrase, often seen as a threatening balm to the rather scattered psychoses we would encounter throughout our lives, starting in our fucked-up family homes.

We became adept at explaining concepts to disordered minds over and over again, wearing down even the most brutal game of repetition to brass tacks, as a necessary part of any real educator's toolkit. Before our generation would take to "Special Needs" and "Special Education" like the obscuring terms for mental illness and retardation that they are, we had levels at school: Above Average (that's me), Average (occasionally me, especially if I didn't care for the material), and Below Average, or those BOCES kids who will fix your car for an exorbitant price after graduation from high school as a petty revenge for your hard work and natural aptitudes.

At Oneonta, we had a lot of financially successful "white-bread" kids from upstate New York riding the first wave of affluence from their orthodontist/lawyer dads, like the rich Jewish kids of New City. Irish, Italians, and Hispanics were still coming up through unions and the police force when we were kids, commuting to a loud ethnic city with stronger ties to the motherlands "across the pond". For upstaters, America was a generic Rachel Ray type of "EEVEEOHOH!" accent, spoken in an annoying "doncha-know" MidWestern twang. If they were Micks or guineas, they sure as fuck didn't show it as much, up there in north country.

Fiona was like that for us. She'd been born in Ireland, but with her softball mullet that somewhat expressed "butch lite" and her yuppie turtlenecks with the alligator icon on them, we had no idea she even was a Mick 'til we invited her over for a pre-party beer on St. Pat's Day. She's "Dark Irish", like Colin Farell: someone with dark eyes and hair that's linked to the Roman occupation of Ireland, leaving behind their genetics with their legal system and paved roads. That's a harder thing for a lot of Americans to understand with their weaker grasp of world history, but with a History Major roommate/best friend and boyfriend, I didn't have much of a case for pleading ignorance.

Just like Latin folk are pegged as Italian-looking for merely having dark eyes, dark hair, and olive-toned skin (see the show "Jersey Shore"), so did many Irish in America "pass" for other ethnicities, simply by not being the fair-skinned, freckle-faced "ginger" stereotypes portrayed on t.v. True to form, Fiona came from a hard-drinking family rife with tensions, which made her the right fit for our crowd and most of our occasions, but she just as often blew a good party by taking risks that were connected to her deeper ties to addiction than the ones I manifested in school. At first, we thought it was a lark: a Catholic schoolgirl away from home "stretching her wings" sort of thing.

But then she took a bunch of serious nose-dives that me and Karen stayed far away from, like taking full hits of blotter acid with her on-again-off-again boyfriend from high school that she cheated with while he dated another girl, introducing this blond girl from back home as his "girlfriend" at our parties, when he'd been talking our friend Fiona "down from the ledge" just the night before in our suite. We'd find her next door in the boy's suite, sitting with him in a corner on a beanbag while he petted her hair and read her a children's book in a creepy dad voice. What the...?

Back at our homes, we were the adults who handled stress well, not the other way around. This...this crazy shit that they did? It was everything we were afraid of becoming: a bunch of brain-dead drones with loose morals cuddling each other in the light of dawn, rocking back-and-forth like retards. We wanted to experiment and have a good time, within reason. Who attends a teacher's school just to soothe their fucked-up dark-haired mistress? Not us, man. We'd just as soon cut stuff into halves, think about it, and then divide it again into quarters. We wanted to run things, not sit it on the sidelines of life like the deranged people around us.

My final break with Fiona happened gently junior year, while I was the sole inhabitant of the ground floor (barring any party crashers on the two couches) of the big old house we shared off-campus, while she and the two Karens were on the second floor. I had volunteered to take the one bedroom on the first floor because of my big boyfriend who frequently stayed over (or vice versa), since it was a bit of a hazard not to have the front door locked 24/7. Nothing bad actually happened, besides some of our wilder parties that were starting to get a little bit out of hand and scary, as the addicts busily sorted themselves from recreational party-goers like myself.

Fun became besides the point, with so much freely-floating booze and drugs around. Despite Fiona's brush with a nervous breakdown sophomore year, she decided to trip out at one of our parties again, probably in retaliation for a visit by Steve's girlfriend, or something like that. That's the "alchie" way of problem-solving: become an even bigger problem, forcing someone else to sort it all out. By the time the band was unpacking their gear and setting up amps in the huge basement of the house, Fiona was already getting into vicious fights with my punk rock crew who wanted better music than the same old hippie song for trick-or-treating kids on Halloween being played over and over again, to calm her down while the first rush of blotter acid kicked in.

Once again, there was a square-looking Steve by her side, who studied meteorology so he could do the t.v. news of upstate New York in a strait-laced suit and tie, talking his mistress out of stabbing someone with a kitchen knife in his weird "dad" voice of calm authority that was as fake as Fiona's whole "white girl" routine. I may have partied like a rock star with other rock stars in my day, but this down-home girl knows that when the lights come on, everyone goes home. Now. Party's over. I gotta go to work tomorrow, ya dig? This shit, though? Some things were way too kinky to handle well, even for a hardcore city kid like me. This was one of those things. "Aah-ooo!"


I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fooks
For to get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

You hear him howling around your kitchen door
You better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo, huh

He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
You better stay away from him
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw Lon Chaney Junior walking with the Queen, uh!
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw a werewolf drinkin' a piña colada at Trader Vic's
And his hair was perfect, na!

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London
Heh, draw blood
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fooks
For to get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

You hear him howling around your kitchen door
You better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo, huh

He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
You better stay away from him
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw Lon Chaney Junior walking with the Queen, uh!
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw a werewolf drinkin' a piña colada at Trader Vic's
And his hair was perfect, na!

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London
Heh, draw blood
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London

Space Mountain

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

Amusement park rides always bothered me with a bad case of "mal de mer", and so for many years I avoided them unless I took the over-the-counter meclizine pills that are sold here in the States for motion sickness. I often thought the dizziness was related to my hearing loss, and that the damage to my middle ear bones heightened the vertigo I felt during fast-spinning rides, but my father is more imapired than I am and he has great "sea legs". Oh, well. After experimenting with rides both on-and-off the pill, I knew it was best to take it an hour before any rollerocaster rides, which was about the length of the wait on the line in the summertime.

But, Disney was different. The whole place is one big tourist attraction, which meant double-dosage every morning, in anticipation of the day's events. I also had to take it while flying, which meant I arrived in a sleepy haze and stayed that way for the whole trip, before the manufacturer suddenly discovered that excessively doped-up sleepiness was a bit too much for anyone to handle well, let alone traveling children. Years later, the non-drowsy version offered me much better results. It wasn't like I had a choice about it, either. I went wherever my family decided to go, whether I wanted to or not, and they don't have the best tastes in travel, preferring easy Americanized experiences over authenticity.

With the park in Florida, everyone around me was way more excited than I was. Once I hit the water slides at our hotel, I had no idea why anyone in their right mind would choose to wait for several hours on a line in the brutally hot Floridian sun. We had all the fun we needed at the hotel pool. Why not just stay there? It was designed to funnel tourists through a series of highly choreographed "events" that eliminated pesky things like choices, because the tram to the park was right outside of our hotel. Wasn't that neat? Uh, sure. Like the subway is above ground, but with too much sun and heat. It seemed pointless.

At the time of our big family vacation that cost too much money (hence the drive towards the park everyday, with a reminder about how lucky we were to see other pale flabby tourists from New York wilt sickly in the heat), the biggest sensation was a ride called "Space Mountain"; so secretive in its marketed allure that no one at the park would disclose what the ride actually was. *SPOILER ALERT* It's an indoor rollercoaster, btw. Just like horror movie hits like "The Exorcist", we were given a build-up worthy of hell itself with caution signs like "Don't ride this if you have a heart condition", and warnings to pregnant women about the stress.

It started to freak my mom out, and then me, too. I didn't want to die. I just wanted to go on a friggin' vacation I could have fun with. I was a kid! But, once we'd passed the point of no return, and we needed to pick buddies for the ride, everyone but my dad bailed on sitting with me, in case I threw up during the ride. They debated backsplash, too. My dad just laughed at me the entire time, hitting my arm around the turns, and taking both of his arms out from behind the bar to make it extra scary, in defiance of the signs that cautioned us not to do so repeatedly. The photos of us taken during the ride were disastrous, too. My dad had on an angry red-faced smile while I looked like I was crying, as did my brothers and my mom. I was just glad it was over.

Afterwards, we talked about how the ride was just an indoor rollercoaster in the dark with some flashing lights. The hype had made it seem much scarier than it was, and I felt like I just passed a bravery test. My dad and my brothers were eager to try other scary rides, but me and my mom had enough boyish thrills for the day. We went on a pleasant little choo-choo train that offered a nice slow ride around the park, giving us a chance to see how pretty it was, without whizzing by at a blurry hundred miles an hour. The boys laughed at our "gay kiddie ride", boisterous to go around the mountain again. They'd later complain about the lines they abandoned in their search for more scares, while me and my mom went for ice cream, iced tea, and souvenir shopping. It was the best ride, yet.

Rock Ptarmigan

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

Hippies living in Oneonta were largely comprised of two parts: the arrogantly rich "Trustafarian" from Long Island (kids with trust funds who "slummed it" just for college), and the meeker "peace-punk" of upstate New York. Neither camp liked me very much, as someone who could not be brainwashed by exposure and near-constant repetition of "The Grateful Dead", but I could care less. They liked to have fun more than anything, and in my quest for the perfect good time, they came closest to the concept I had in mind.

Their group centered around a wealthy hippie named "Bobby" from Long Island, whose mom sent him Italian-American food by the frozen trayful every few weeks or so. Because my college boyfriend was housemates with him one year, I was obliged to attend a few of his "Monoke-ass" events: a party game made out of smoking pot, playing the board game Monopoly, and eating his mama's cooking. As much as I loved lasagna, I had an Italian-American mother (and grandmother) of my very own, and she had no big problems with making food, outside of her willingness to do so.

I always felt like an interloper around them, and judging by the nasty looks they threw my way, I could tell they knew I didn't belong to their group, either. Cults are sensitive like that. Even slight deviations from their strict set of "norms" would find you greeted with a chilly reception, standing outside of their group looking at them from a more comfortable distance, which was fine for an Acadian girl like me. They were, uh, much less receptive to the werewolf cold that I withstood wearing my brother's old flannel shirts. I was also wayyyy too beautiful for them to handle gracefully, and I knew that, too.

That's where the more mellow upstaters came into play. They tempered the aggressive ethnicity of the downstate hippies with their more laid-back country vibe, since this was their "neck of the woods". They were more familiar with concepts like "Canada" and "Nova Scotia", making it slightly easier for me to attend their events without the rigorous hazing that went with the Jewish and Italian girls from L.I. looking to play sexy in rich hippie garb. I didn't even know there was a competition going on. Me and Karen just didn't want to die. Like I wrote before, no one gave two fucks about ethnic working-class girls like us. We were on our own, and no group would have us, which suited our independence well. Sink or swim. That was our home shore we always washed up on.

But I understood their need to belong. They wouldn't have made it, otherwise, and perhaps that's why their envy was directed at me whenever I was around. Anyway, I've never been a diva or an "attention whore", so staying in the background was fine by me. I really didn't need another spotlight to perform under. My class crits gave me more than enough time to hone my voice. I certainly didn't need the phony pressures of a pseudo-friendly social scene to boost my ego. I wanted to survive. And so, when the upstate group joined forces with the downstaters, we all benefited from their creative merger, in the form of a groovy rock band that played tunes anyone could enjoy and dance to.

It was the last ingredient we needed for our perfect party cocktail, catapulting our parties to instant fame, like all of our other antics. We now had a really good house band that would play for beer and pot. Done and done. Bobby played the drums, and they found a guy named "Tony" to be their lead singer. He wasn't particularly good-looking or charismatic, but it didn't matter. We always had girls at our party for him to flirt with and/or hookup with. They were kinda skanky to my crowd, what with the herpes that spread through their group like wildfire (in the guise of their "sexual freedom"), so we were fine at not being included in their events as party planners.

We could drink and dance as much as we wanted to, without having to clean up afterward. Me and Karen grew up emptying other people's ashtrays and rinsing out sour-smelling beer cans. Uh, not invited to their "private" practice sessions, too? High five! It ain't easy bein' a single teenage parent, so any night off we had to simply enjoy listening to music was always a good time to us, and with my bouncer boyfriend, no cover charge was even sweeter. Over time, their parties and our groups blended together anyway, as we jokingly changed the band's original "peace dove" hippie-bird name to the more fun and familiar choice of cool New York kids everywhere: Rock "Parmigiana". And we did. We rocked good music and good food like the authentic lifestyle to us that it is. Join us.

Around the World

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

Parties at Oneonta became our go-to creative outlet for lifting our spirits and casting off the sometimes extreme pressures we were under, as working class kids from New York. When I mentioned to my father recently that I can write "lowbrow" at times in a colloquial dialect that is unique to this area, and to also mean that I can be at every level of work, he reddened and barked a sudden harsh laugh at me, baring his top row of dentures. "Hah! Yeah, you're 'lowbrow'!", as if I had suddenly forgotten who I am and where I was, which I hadn't. I have plenty of reminders. 

I don't have the luxury of checking out from my life, no matter how bad it can sometimes be, because such is the nature of living. Suffice to say, unlike the hangers-on to our hip scene, I really wanted to learn, and anything that jeopardized that went out the window. I couldn't afford to not be present during my own education, happily deferring it to the hands of others, like so many other spoiled suburban kids. I was born in the projects of Queens to an Acadian Metis and an Italian-Irish American, some of the lowliest ethnicities on the planet for this country. Of course, in your country of origin, it could be the complete opposite, because such is the perversity behind prejudices and hate: to blind you to your true worth for the false ones of a commercial world.

We had discussions about our parties, too, appropriate to each setting. For freshman year, kids often joined together to have a party on the entire floor, or sometimes the whole dorm threw one large shindig. The most popular kind was the "'Round the world" party, with every dorm room offering a different type of booze. Those were completely fucking dangerous. Kids did crazy shit like soak a whole watermelon in grain alcohol, in a garbage can or a bathtub that they were proud to show off during the week. "One bite of this should do the trick!", as we took turns slapping the melon. We wanted a quicker entertainment we could afford, because every penny counted in our fractured homes, where scarcity was often used as a weapon.

A girl from "Lawnguyland" had a set of test tubes in a wooden carrier filled with a noxious-looking neon-green substance, while another carried around a tray of red jello shots (made with vodka) that had been neatly set in those small paper condiment containers from the cafeteria. It was like "Martha Stewart: Unplugged", which is an MTV reference, kids. Look it up! I left after a few dorm rooms, because our run-ins with campus security and two-day hangovers had learned me to steer clear of liquids that were uncertain-looking. I wanted to have fun, not throw up in the bathroom down the hall for hours and hours.

As sophomores, we expanded our view of partying to include multi-levels, in mixed gender dorms that reflected our more mature mentalities. Random wild hookups were a thing of the past, with most of us either in relationships or busy with school and jobs. There was always work. Boys and girls now lived in suites right next to each other, without incident. Anyway, the Long Island boys next door to us were a tight "Jew Crew" of frat brothers and a couple of very white upstaters. No problems, there. Still, with Halloween right around the corner, epicness awaited us in the form of grander and more complex parties.

On our list was the oft-touted "Heaven and Hell" party. It was a fantasy scene suited to three levels: the top level was Heaven (of course), the middle layer was Purgatory, and then there would be a "Dante's Inferno": a hell of our own creation. We decorated each floor in our minds with smoke machines and cotton ball clouds, or flickering fiery flames like those lamps from "Spencer's Gifts" (another 80s reference*) with plastic strips powered by a mini-fan to simulate fire. We'd use tinfoil-coated walls to bounce light around the rooms, or paint one room a heavenly light-blue color at the beginning of the semester, decorated with sparkly stars and even more mood lighting. 

Mood lamps....eh. What can I say? It was a thing**. Anyway, every year around this time, I still think about cool crisp autumns, fall decorations, the fun of Halloween, my outfits and costumes, and how much I still want to spread that great feeling around. The joy we felt at just being free enough to talk out loud about whatever we wanted to, whenever we could, without being abused or pushed aside, felt like "manna from the skies" to us; a gift so valuable, we knew we couldn't live without it. That's what freedom and a good time can do. It can set your soul free. Soar!

*    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Gifts
**  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_lamp

Kegger

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idol Worship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The U-Haul Mauler

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Haul 

Going back to school for Oneonta students felt like a Christmas Eve party on the same day as your birthday, and you just got a puppy that looks like Snoopy from your parents before you and your crew hit the town. It was that great. Of course, by junior year, we were all feeling the numbness that comes with so many good times, which meant we were growing up. But, we still wanted to summon up that fresh feeling before every semester, and junior year was no different.

Imagine a place where all your best friends hung out and came back to every year, knowing they'd show up ready for a good time. We hit the ground running, docked for the summer at our stupid low-paying jobs, in places that seemed like they were stuck in the mud, time-wise. You know that excruciating summer blues when its all heat and and dust and nothing's moving, especially the air? That's what we came from; stranded from the only people we'd found so far who got us on a few levels, even if some of the crucial parts were still missing. It wasn't nostalgia, either. It's a really beautiful town in upstate New York with a really good state school, framed by a perfect small-town Main Street filled with pubs. Done.

After two years on campus, we were finally allowed to live off-campus, and for my crowd, that was a good thing, too. We'd come close to getting kicked out of our dorms for having louder better times than other people, and the strain of that for two years running started to show. Now, we had house parties to look forward to. Because we were active kids (we didn't call ourselves "athletes" back then unless we attended school on a sports scholarship), we rented a house for $200 a semester split four ways at the bottom of a hill that lead directly to campus, if you could climb a steep mountain hill covered in ice and snow in tan construction books (the only kind that works), all weather permitting. We could be exceptionally healthy like that.

My best friend was JV and Varsity volleyball in high school as the team captain, breaking every finger on both hands, sometimes more than once. Her good friend at Oneonta was on a soccer scholarship, and one of our housemates ate tofu and taught aerobics classes for Continuing Ed. at the school, and at suburban joints over the summer as the prototypical "hot blond" cheerleader type, but with soul. We took all that to mean we should play hackey-sack wasted whenever the sun was out. Ah, youth. Our friend Meg was a real former cheerleader and so was her bestie from home, "Crackhead Jen".

Before my boyfriend switched majors, he wanted to be a sports therapist, being the former high school quarterback he was at the posh Jesuit school Xavier's, while he worked double-time as a bouncer during semesters and a doorman on the West Side during summers throughout our college career. He and I also opted for the actual physical labors of a "Body Conditioning" class (still have the textbook with fun 80s photos on my shelf), while our friends either bowled (and smoked pot) or took camping class...and smoked pot. With beers, too, of course. Not one of us hadn't been camping or to a bowling alley before. My friend Dave (who I would later marry) was also the star quarterback at his high school, and his crew was deep into skateboarding, biking, hiking, surfing, swimming and boating, depending on locale and budget.

So, that's what we showed up with: a bundle of fun under the clear night sky. I drove up to school with a crew of my own, navigating town and driving by our friends houses to see if they were up, yet. Low and behold, there was my man "A-Roll" in his biker wraparound shades driving some busted rental van from the 'hood with graffiti all over it. Ah, Brooklyn boys. I shouted "Hey!" out the window as we passed, just as he turned his head to look but not before we saw him rear-end a car parallel-parked on the street. Haha! What a dick. Keep driving!

We had arrived. For the entire first half of the year, Ariel tried to shake me down for cash as a participant in his smash-up with a townie's car (because I called out his name and waved to him from a passing car), and they hated ethnic city kids with a passion, especially his dark gothic hipster ass in all-black with a slicked-back ponytail. Every time we were at a party, he said I should give him some money for my part in his accident, because he was being sued by the townie with the dent in his car, after he abandoned the moving van on the street. Yeah, right. He sulked for months about losing his deposit on the vehicle. 

He might have just wanted beer and pot money. You never knew with a hungry thirsty Dominican street kid like him. What we did do is almost instantly craft a new nickname for him that we greeted him with every time he showed up for a party. "The U-Haul Mauler" was a smash hit, and we went on to design a punk rock album cover art in his name. We dominated town and campus gossip our first day back in town (like usual), and the semester had just begun. Anything could happen in a magical mountain town nestled in the hills of beautiful upstate New York. Anything. Anything was possible. See you there, kids.

Arael - variation of Uriel; prince over the people.

Psychic Friends Network

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic# 

Certain generations develop a type of "groupthink" that transcends their immediate presence, to become indicative of a much deeper action taking place than that which it would openly appear to be. Because me and my classmates were forced into extraordinarily difficult life situations coupled with extreme stress, we had to communicate without exposing it to the very people supposed to protect us, our parents, who would retaliate any action they could perceive or stump as a threat while in their delusional states. I know it's as intense as it reads.

I have never (NEVER) met a GenX'er who was not physically, emotionally, mentally, and sometimes sexually, abused to the extreme. Under our parents bigger and often stronger hands, we had to make quick life-changing decisions "on the fly", though it is not something we wish to replicate in any other generation. Sanity and hindsight will do that to you. It left us to contemplate just what the fuck went wrong with the sick people around us, when we had the time and space to do so, which, for me and my friends, meant our successful escape to an away college, as a time period of such happiness and fulfillment that it ever marked in severe contrast those later times when we felt just as unfulfilled as we had during our entrapped childhoods.

We had been tasked, as children and teens, to heal every serious adult woe that existed including, but not limited to: alcoholism and addiction, sexual dysfunction, homosexuality, their media-touted "mid-life crisis", adultery, divorce, joblessness and homelessness, extreme over- and under-spending, bad healthcare systems and the medicated side effects of their genetic disorders like madness and dementia combined with schizophrenia and a bevy of scientifically complex mood/identity/personality disorders with a lack of available and appropriate treatments that threatened immediate bankruptcies, foreclosures, and debt, along with not-so-handy alternatives like debtor prisons and/or incarcerations (or foster care) through corruptly inept social services and justice departments. Like, everything that the world has to offer us as severely marginalized individuals.

As a really small generation, we found that our dire circumstances necessitated an unforeseen sophistication to our brief interactions, squeezed as we were by our parent's (and/or grandparents) acute paranoia, which meant that all of our household communiques were strictly monitored for any signs of advanced thought or problem-solving abilities that would conflict with an illness that took on biblical proportions, in direct contrast to our religious ethics. We were "wrong" for simply existing in the covering chaos that evil thrives in, susceptible as our families were to it, in their sicknesses. We became adept at "reading" our emotions well with just a glance or a look, which often only increased the paranoia of the less adept around us.

Survivors of bipolar families like ours often describe in alarming detail (to them, not us) the "rock-and-a-hard-place" space that the severely mentally ill impose on the people around them, as a boxed-in corner where you can either choose death or their abuse. I'm not kidding or using an arty metaphor, either. We had death-defying car rides with stoned drunks as children trapped in their back seats, or rocky water rides down spring-filled rivers that became ego-driven contests with parents hellbent on destruction in the face of our greater gifts that were designed for service but refused through wanton pride.

It's a hard thing to prove as a child, and even harder to describe without the evidence that our families would just as wantonly destroy, in fear of prosecution or exposure. That's how entrenched their untreated sickness became. They'd rather die or kill us, or at the very least hurt us badly, than admit to any wrong-doing or making of mistakes. It was an incredibly selfish and spoiled thing to do, and I remain aghast at my parent's immaturity, as I am in awe of our relative composure in the face of their extreme carelessness. I've been told that I am extremely "lucky" to be alive, but I know it's not luck. It's me, and my extraordinary band of "freaks" that you call "superheroes" or "X-Men", if and when the mood or the money strikes you. Try living it.

Colored

The conversation about race and ethnicity can be a troubling game to the people who confuse it, because they lack proper cultural definitions within an appropriate context. I found myself in such a desert last week, watching a popular news entertainment show that highlights the most offensively outspoken headlines of the day. A prominent white news anchor used the word "colored" in her story about African-American issues and, like the jocks working the radio program that airs on t.v., I immediately took umbrage at her usage of it, too. What the...? Who the fuck is she? She don't know.

And then I remembered similarly odd conversations in my own past, where words can tumble out of control given the wrong situation, at any moment. Take, for instance, my meeting with a professor of English Literature during my time at Oneonta. He'd made some political references to his mostly "Anglo" class (or so he thought) of college students, about his supposed activism in South Africa with famous anti-apartheid movements that led him to flee the country to teach in our small po'dunk mountain town. Huh...really? He was handsome, so I dismissed him at the time for playing the adventurous romantic lead seeking to bed willing co-eds looking for a taste of the East, via one fucked-up African country and this state school educator.

He had a posh British accent that bespoke of his family's rather wealthy position in society through his obvious attendance at expensive private schools, and he had an irritating habit of wearing dopey silk ascots to go along with his condescension towards all things American that extended to decidedly less wealthy New York students, like me. I didn't think that much about him until a visit with my friend Donnel shook it up for me. We were still baffled by the death of her father while he was overseas in Ghana, and the subsequent disappearance of his body kept his whole family on edge, including me. According to their tribal customs, her mother needed to be in attendance to perform ablutions related his burial ritual, and they couldn't get any answers from the government or the state department about the events leading up to his death, leaving us in a paranoid "X-File" state.

There was talk of her father's assassination at the hands of some rival gangs with competing economic interests in their home village area which, given the general instability of many African nations, made more sense to us than we cared to admit. After he died, their financial circumstances drastically changed, revealing how deeply in debt their hereto presumed successful international businessman father was. During their foreclosure, our friend drove us past their house after school, to find deputies putting all of their furniture out on the front lawn, in full view of the entire neighborhood. "Just keep driving." Donnel said to us, crouched down in the back seat of the car. It was really disturbing. They moved to a smaller town home, and her mother began working as a low-end healthcare aide in a nearby nursing home to make ends meet, while we pursued various theories and connections to Ghana and Africa, no matter how bare or small.

During her visit to my college, I told Donnel about my English Lit professor with the supposed activist connections. Perhaps he could introduce us to a few of his contacts? We were desperate for any leads, and truth be told, I wanted to get a better look at him in private, to better feel out his intentions towards our student body. And so, one day after class, I made an appointment to see him in his office, a normal practice for any student seeking help, but totally rare for me. I'd never been to a professor's office before, and it was nerve-wracking to me, especially given the content of my errand. After I sat down in our semi-closed door meeting, I simply told him the truth. My friend's father had died mysteriously while in Ghana, and no one would talk to them about it. What to do?

He gave me a nasty look, then pointed to a map of Africa on his wall. You see, South Africa is there, and Ghana is here. See how faraway they are? Yeah, thanks. Asshat. But, you spoke in class about African geo-politics. Do you have any advice for my friend and her family about an agency that they can contact for guidance and support? He launched into another hipster diatribe about Apartheid and his status as a "Colored" man, because Indians (from India) were grouped in with "the blacks", and here he made a disgusted face like he smelled doggie doo-doo, which signaled to me that he was more upset about his classification as a minority in a faraway land than helping out poor black folks and their friends.

It was an astonishingly douchebag thing for him to admit to a student, especially since India has an extremely poor history of human rights, given the rigidity of their caste system of "Untouchables", but I was too stunned by his attitude to respond. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there, disturbed by the look of his purple tongue moving weirdly around his mouth while I had briefly talked. Back at my dorm room, I went over the exchange with my best friend from high school and college roommate, Karen, who was also navigating the rocky shoals of predominantly male academia as a history major; classes that often found her as the only female student in attendance. Here again, my heterosexuality counted heavily against me, as I described the shock of seeing a Chow Chow-colored tongue for the first time.

"You only went to see him because he's good-looking!" Well, yeah, but, no. I honestly wanted to help Donnel and her family, mired as they were in dire straits that I knew from my own mother's single parenting experience, a.k.a "My Mom Fell Apart Again": now performing a disastrous series of nervous breakdowns that we, as children and teens, were supposed to bear up under the weight of, and I wasn't sure how much more this family could take. She understood. Karen's parents (both dead for years now) were locked in horribly passive-aggressive co-dependence that saw her and her older brother begging them to divorce each other in lieu of an early grave, but you can read exactly where that got them. Nowhere. The stakes were so high for all of us to make it out of the messes they made for us, as a generation. They really needed my help.

After that, we took to calling him "Mr. South Africa" for his prettily-waved hair that was highlighted with a gay purple rinse, flatteringly cut just above his shoulders for that nouveau-hippie look, with his bevy of stylishly expensive ethnic-print clothing that fluttered around him like his many-layered Euro scarves, as the Indian answer to our naive prayers, while every AmerIndian on campus was probably just as interested in girls and hooking up as he was, because I howled at the midnight moon with them as a young pack member. It brought me back to talks around our kitchen table with my father growing up, as he explained to us that we're considered coloreds by society for first being Acadian, already a small ethnic minority, and secondly for our familial associations as Métis people.

I called my grieving friend from a pay phone on campus to tell her the bad news that I didn't get any information from the professor we could use (other than people around the world still hated us, which certainly wasn't new to us), and I never felt as frustrated and helpless as I did then, hanging up after a very brief conversation with my normally loquacious friend. I felt like I had totally failed her, in the face of some guy's arrogant assumptions about our society, but I was only 17 and a freshman. Now, I'm an expert in the media's weird and wild "Minority Reports", so old and out-of-date that they still think we're a bunch of simple black-and-white cookies they can split evenly in half, without the juicy red filling that beats at the heart of every American experience. It's time for a palette change.

Incredible

Comic books were a big part of my brothers lives growing up, and by extension, mine, too. Because we were so often put into situations we couldn't control as children, we naturally turned to any medium that offered us a respite from the abuse around us. Nowhere was safe, not even the tree house we built in the backyard, because my parents had long ago established that they could get to us, no matter where we were. They considered us their property, and they would stop at nothing to remove any barriers that blocked their access to us, including the cheap thin doors with easy locks you could undo with a thumbnail or a knife from the kitchen, which was part of my mother's hysterical scenes. I briefly had a diary for a day, before my brothers found it and read it aloud at the kitchen table with my mother's approval. "You shouldn't keep secrets, Marie." She did.

There was one set of rules for my parents, and another set of randomly changing rules that suited either their mania or their depression, depending on how they felt, though they would never articulate it as such. We were always to blame, for any household infraction big or small. They acted like desperate street thugs afraid of getting busted by the police, which, in essence, they were to us: criminal in the extreme. Heroes were very hard for us to find, because other than me—or occasionally my brothers and grandparents—we didn't know any. I mean, none, and we come from a huge Catholic family. Since the bulk of my parents power came from their status as bigger adults to much smaller children, they used their physicality as their number one weapon against children who did nothing wrong besides exist.

I had all the proof of that that I needed, what with our good grades and frequent church attendance, though in later years, everyone in my family would use a bogus faith as a smokescreen to hide their real infractions, but not me. I thought it was hypocritical bullshit, because my parents lied all the time to my face, which as blown off easily by "don't do as I do, do as I say", which meant I was always better than them, and I knew it. They knew it, too. I didn't have the arrogant smart-ass mouth of my oldest brother, or the stone-cold demeanor of my deadened middle brother, because I was truly alive in their sea of sickness. Of course, with time, their tactics became more brutal and concerted as I grew older, which signaled clearly to me that my brain power was terrifying to them and so was my beauty, so much did they try to hurt me when I was stuck in the home, also by their contrivance.

The only solace I ever found—amid their suddenly stormy attacks that could sink into sullen silences lasting months or years—was among the books that were written by much better people than the ones I was surrounded with daily. I knew someday I would join their ranks, because I understood their writings much better than my family's virulent mental diseases. And so, when a t.v. show came on about a comic book superhero we admired, psyched didn't even begin to cover it for us as kids. Bernard, in his fear about being beaten up, was drawn to the "The Hulk" character who would turn into a strong beast whenever he became really angry. It mirrored my brother's ongoing struggles with a violent psychosis stemming from his emotional problems, manifesting itself into bursts of uncontrollable anger that both scared him and protected him, too, just like the comic read. 

When we found out that the actor portraying the Hulk in the t.v. show was an Italian-American from the city (just like us!), we were ecstatic. We couldn't read enough about him in our fanzines, hoping to catch a glimpse of him at our comic book conventions at Madison Square Garden, not that I would take a typical fan photo with anyone: too shy. We'd tell each other fun facts about his life, like the muscle movie he made with Arnold Schwarzenegger that was a huge hit, with both actor/athletes going on to star in movies and shows about mythical comic book action heroes. It was an epic time to be a kid. And when we found out that he was successful despite his deafness, we hero-worshipped him like no other star from our childhood.

Our grandmother was deaf, and so was our aunt, with my father and I also joining the genetic ranks of profound hearing impairment that is the inherited deafness running in my paternal line. We'd cite lines from his interviews like "Did you know that Lou Ferrigno has a 'deaf voice' he tries to hide, so he went for a t.v. role without any speaking parts?" Fascinating! He'd been born deaf! We loved his triumph over adversity in real life that meant he wasn't some typical show business phony from Hollywood who'd sing anything for a buck, like a cheap sell-out. He was for real, yo! We read with avid interest about the special earpiece he wore in his ear for stage directions from the sidelines that made us cheer even louder for him whenever he appeared on screen. "Change! Change! Change!" We'd root for the "monster" in each and every episode, over the lamer Bill Bixby character. What a wimp!

Of course, as savvy New York City kids, we knew that a lot of bodybuilders took steroids to get big, but we reasoned that Mr. Ferrigno had probably been forced into it, as part of his Hollywood success, because he had a serious handicap he needed to compensate for, we reasoned out loud to each other. Unlike the other seriously delusional people we knew, we weren't looking for god-like perfection in our 'hood heroes. To us, he was great just the way he was: a city kid who'd made good, coming out of the mean city streets. That was enough for us. And it's more than enough now, though by his photos on social media, I'm proud to report that he looks as amazingly healthy as ever, and I know he doesn't need any drugs to do it. He has a really hard work ethic, just like us. Sometimes heroes are real!

http://louferrigno.com/