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

James Hendricks

It was the thing to do back in the day: hop on a bus to the city, or catch a ride with a friend, and grab a fake ID from one of the shady vendors that lined Times Square. In terms of illegality, it was on a scale on par with buying beer while underage, hence the phony driver's license. Hand skills were also highly in demand. If you were good enough as a forger (and I was), you could erase the info on someone's license and type over the last number that placed you as a minor. If you still had a ways to go, and you needed two numbers changed on your birth date, it was a harder sell.

Bouncers were pretty savvy, especially when the drinking age in New York was 18, and that was the glorious age my oldest brother fell under: a time when you could be a teen and drink in a grownup bar. It seemed less a crime to fudge one number when you didn't have that much time left to go, anyway. For me and my middle bro, it was way more difficult to get away with, because they raised the legal age to 21, and there was absolutely no way I could pass for someone older. I barely passed for a teenager as a kid, let alone someone who could amble up to a bar and order a real cocktail. Besides that, I didn't really like the taste of alcohol.

My brothers passed their fake ID between the two of them, because in the dark of night, photos were less important than the age. Woe to you if you got a smart guy at the door, like someone who knew how to shine a flashlight underneath the unlaminated paper license to read the real numbers under your typewriter job. Then, you could be really fucked; like, hauled down to the station fucked. And any parent from this area who gets a call like that at night does major damage to your psyche for an indiscretion like that. You don't wanna know what strong-ass parents from the Bronx and BedStuy do for discipline, although by now, I'm sure you have good guesses, most of which is now considered illegal to do to a child under current laws. You could get punched right across the face, like my bros did for really serious infractions, for lying about a sleepover to go see a Stones show in Philly. It was really bad and very scary, and that was the whole point. 

http://gothamist.com/2013/11/22/1970s_photos_show_a_dirty_old_city.php#photo-1

We lived in very dangerous waters, and my parents figured it was better to be scared of them than us taking crack addicts on the subway lightly, and in many ways, I didn't disagree. It's hard to come down on the strictness of parents terrified of being knifed on a train during daylight commuting times, or the hellish cast a flaming garbage can had at night on the West Side Highway, intimating the fiery pits of hell, which is exactly where you'd be if you broke down on the wrong side of town, late in the middle of the night, where no one (not even the cops) dared to go. We faced big-time foes, not some tweaked-out little "wigger" with hipster neck tats, a sideways ball cap, and a copped bad attitude, like a suburban kid from Mount Vernon who took the Metro North into "the city".

In comparison to that, who wouldn't need a drink? We reasoned to ourselves as a group that it was insane to be involuntarily pressed into military service without being able to take a stiff drink beforehand. We could die for our country as bullet fodder, but we sure as fuck couldn't dull the pain from it. War before alcohol: an American example of our tendencies towards violence over drink, if ever there was. Doubt me? I've seen movies in the past few weeks (new releases, too), that toss real children around like they're nothing but rag dolls, or they used sled dogs like they are trash to be jerked around on a leash for some stupid fucking movie, with one star punching and pushing away an obviously real animal. Disgusting stuff, and not exactly the red wine with cheese my parents liked to have sometimes.

Compared to a climate like that, an older brother with a penchant for really good music could only mean one thing to me: the mischievous spirit of the 60s lived on and still rebelled, every time some dumb dick bouncer with a high school dropout education and a guido fucking attitude didn't discern what any of our crowd knew at a glance: we were (and always will be) Jimi Hendrix fans. R.I.P., my native brother. And fuck y'all with your weird priorities. Rock lives on forever! We will never really die, because the truly gifted never really do.

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

(For Jim)

The Rabbit Head

WTF?!

I was on my way to the library, when I saw this from across the street. I had to cross the street for a closer look. Sometimes I see random objects hung in the chain link fence, like the skateboard sold at the dollar store or a missing baby sock, but this stuffed animal took me way back, to a time when me and my brother outgrew our childhood toys forever. 

Instead of play, my Barbie doll got a Mohawk haircut that I dunked into a paper cup of blue food coloring on the kitchen counter, and we froze my brother's Stretch Armstrong doll in the freezer, just for kicks, to see what the red goo inside would do. It cracked into big chunks after we took it out and threw him onto the hard kitchen tiles. Oh. Neat! 
After that initial experimentation, everything we had was up for grabs. 

Oh, I see. It's "Don't let this be you!" in kid-talk.

My Kermit the Frog doll was hung by a rope-fashioned noose from the top of the stairs by my brother and our cousin, as a tribal warning to me when I came through the front door about what was in store. Aha! Something was afoot with those boys, and methinks our childhood is officially over. I could fight the tides that be, but true to me, I shrugged it off and joined in the fun. 

Kermie went into the dryer, Barbie was blown to bits by firecrackers (after she drag raced Mad Max style a few times in several horribly disfiguring crash-and-burn scenarios), and then we just simply tore things apart. The next year in junior high school, we read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Lesson learned.