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 

Black Eyeliner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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