Telenovela

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

My grandfather practiced his Spanish by watching Univision (our Spanish-language channel here in New York) telenovelas, with his drugstore black-rimmed glasses and a small Spanish-to-English dictionary in hand for quick translations, sitting way too close to the t.v. with the sound blasting. It was great fun for us to see him watching his daily shows, too, because he could be such a tough Mick from the city at times, tempered as it was by his consideration for others and his innate sweetness. He wasn't just learning for the heck of it, either, though with his cool old-time vaudeville impersonations and great accents, his flair for language and communication was proof enough that he'd kissed "The Blarney Stone" probably more than once.

No, he did it because his older brother, my Uncle Jack, married a Colombian woman after his divorce, my Aunt Yolanda; a tall woman with a naturally majestic presence indicative of a native high-born to a good family from the mountains outside of Bogota. And it didn't stop there. My grandparents took a few trips to see them after they relocated to Colombia, once my uncle retired from his successful business that found him financially independent. They had two beautiful little boys I remember holding and changing at our house, as a little girl: Juan y Francis, with their classic mestizo coloring of olive skin, light eyes, and lush brown curls. Irish paired well with Colombian!

It was important to my grandfather that his brother's family feel comfortable in his home, and it was important to me, too. As guests, they could curse telling stories and smoke in my mother's house (my dad had to go outside or in the garage to smoke), while I refilled their glasses and emptied out the big glass ashtray we used for parties and holidays. Francis had fallen asleep, so me and my aunt took him into my parent's bedroom for a nap, using their pillows to make a barrier on either side of him so he wouldn't roll off the bed. I was so nervous about the baby that I kept going in to check on him, with their laughter following me down the hallway. "Is he still there?"

He was, and they were charmed by my youthful inexperience with newborns. "Oh, he'll sleep for hours not moving, Marie. He's fine!" Uh, you don't know that! My own parents weren't exactly careful with kids, and my uncle drank a lot more than I was used to with my more even-keeled grandfather. Still, they were raucous and fun, and we loved having a South American branch to our family tree that we'd describe as one big carnival tent for times when were we feeling less generous. Before they arrived at my parent's house, we went over simple phrases and basic sayings so we could greet them from the top of the stairs as they came through the front door. 

"I want to be able to greet my brother's family properly when I see them", my grandfather nervously explained to me again while we practiced. My grandparents always felt insecure about their lack of a formal education, because they had to leave school to earn money for their families as children. I could relate. I wanted to make a good impression, too, because in our households, family always came first. You did great, grandpa. You really did. It was just perfect.

para mi tía Yolanda

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

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.

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.

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/ 

Ghetto Movie Theater

Back in the day, when America's air often buzzed with a thousand flying bullets in broad daylight—like that was the sane thing to do with twin concepts like "new" and "people"—we had an attitude of social looseness that constantly imposed upon the needs of others with an impunity that was artificially called "freedom", when, really, it was often a smokescreen for insanity committed in public spaces without fear of censure. Take, for instance, the ghetto movie theater (see also, Times Square in the 70s: http://gothamist.com/2013/03/27/photos_of_times_square_in_the_1970s.php#photo-2). 

Kids dared one another to run into a peepshow theater and back as if we were risking our young lives like western gunslingers of yore, and we were. Yeah, we had the buses of the Port Authority to take us back home, but if you missed the last sane commuter bus leaving the station, it was just you and your friends with hours of time in an almost empty bus depot, trapped with bums who got much scarier, louder, and active with each passing sip from their cheap bottle of wine. 

We were terrified of getting caught in the city's rain, because we knew a trickle of water could rouse a bum if it reached him before the rains stopped, like the time me and my boyfriend watched water fall down in torrents, stuck underneath a Central Park overpass. We only had so much time left before the water woke him up, and then it finally did. He was pissed off until he suddenly noticed us, which sent him flying towards us in a greatly renewed psychotic rage.

Which meant that we were constantly searching for safe places and happy diversions to combat the hellish scenes popping off around us. It was, uh, a little stressful, to put it mildly. People chain-smoked and drank like "The Final Days of Judgment" were being visited upon them any second, and if you believed the signs of the ranting religious zealots who frequented the midtown tourist areas, the end was always near. Ditto with the bald white "Hari Krishnas" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Krishna_(mantra), who were usually ex-hippie burn-outs from the 60s looking to wind down (or amp up) from their tense neurosis "the natural way", which meant spinning around like a "Whirling Dervish" for hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mevlevi_Order), banging tambourines and asking for money from onlookers.

There were also door-knocking, tie-wearing, short-haired Jehovah's Witnesses, robotic over-groomed Mormons who looked like extras from a 1950s-era movie, or "Moonies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonie_%28nickname%29) who would turn aggressive on you in a New York minute, which made the average New Yorker play this weird game of pretending not to notice that bleeding guy sitting next to you on the train, because he might stab you if you tried to help him out. Eye contact was also a serious no-no that kept us from helping out one another, because my dad repeated the same line about it over and over again with "no good deed goes unpunished", as an illustration of that very principle we used to live by. 

And so, our public lives were rife with strangely surreal scenes from horror movies or prescient sci-fi movies like "Escape from New York", that warned of The Second Coming as an apocalypse for the damned. Behavior was at an all-time low, and public life reflected the lesser of two evils that presented itself to us at any time. Sure, smoking a big stinky cigar in a movie was rude, oppressive, and unhealthy for everyone around you, but heck, it was better than rape, right? Right?! People sneaked booze and pot into theaters all the time under their jackets, and gay men used the movie's bathrooms as frequent hook-up spots that became so notorious for city people, we avoided public restrooms like The Plague. Anything could happen to you in there.

Like the worst of the human experience that becomes repetitive over time, we got used to extremely fucked-up people. Not comfortable or complacent, but accustomed to seriously violent offenders who'd snap at the slightest excuse to do so. People shouted back at the movie screen, or hissed their questions loudly to each other, in bad stage whispers that were clearly audible to everyone around them. My mom is so bad with watching movies, that I got used to prepping my friends about her odd behavior, because she loses the thread of the narrative quicker than anyone I've ever met. 

At home it was better, because we could stop the movie for food and drinks, or bathroom runs, or funky relatives with serious impairments, which my parents are not nice about. They're New Yorkers from the Bronx and Bed-Stuy, ya feel me? They aren't "nice" about anything, including their own ignorance that they self-defend like embarrassed kids at the rough local playground for tough kids in leather jackets, with switchblades and greased-back hair, smoking unfiltered cigarettes while snapping their chewing gum loudly. In other words, "assholes" presenting themselves in quick visual shorthand. 

"Who is that?!" my mother would yell out loud, and if you ignored her, she'd just abuse you until you had to give her the answer, which she argued about through her constant sense of befuddlement and misunderstanding, especially if she objected to the highbrow intellectualism that surpassed her grasp of the subject matter, like an offended two year-old after their lollipop is ripped out of their hands. It was histrionic bullshit, but look where they came from. Horror shows.

Years later, after we escaped our own individually tragic fates that working class people like us were often fated to, we could sit back and relax over something as simple as watching a t.v. show or a movie without being molested with uncommon violence for our presence or preferences. And, lo and behold, along came a show that addressed our humble city roots with a fun twist: we were safe now, and we also had homemade hand puppets to help spread the fun around to our friends. We'd say to each other in asides: "Yeah, check out that guy's hat and hairdo! Historically accurate, n'est ce-pas?" Or: "Yo, did you see that karate move?", quickly followed by "Hey, I wonder what he'll do next?" "Oh, I don't know! Let's pretend to be surprised by hammy bad acting and a cliched script!" Ahhh! Look out!! He's right behind you! Nooo!!! Don't go into that scary dark basement! 

'Licious

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

Urban legends play havoc with an American kids' sugar-addled brain, already heightened by the potently charged atmosphere inherent in our wildly free mix of humans. You never know on any given day what you're gonna get, because the New York City area is the capital of our whole Empire, with a new set of immigrants (refugees from your next civil war or natural disaster) streaming daily into our harbor seeking a respite from their woes. What can we do? It's messed up that your parents don't speak English to you, but that's nothing compared to the horrors we scared each other with on the playground, most of which centered around candy, a crucially important part of any kids' school day. Candy gave us something to look forward to, you know?

Myths abounded in our Gothic towns, like the pet alligator some kid flushed down the toilet that grew to epic horror-movie proportion in the city sewers, or the boa constrictor that bit a kid in the ass, because it crawled up through the sewer pipes to bite him while he sat on the toilet. Like, really scary stuff. If that didn't happen to you in the morning, you might get beat up for your lunch money, forget your homework, then get spanked for that, or you could die from a toxic candy combo that we dared each other to do on days when we were feeling a little braver, because nothing really bad had happened to us.

"Life" cereal was a huge brand back in the day, and in a brilliant counter-espionage move, some company wonk circulated this fake rumor that the child actor who played "Mikey" in the commercial had died from a lethal combination of Pop Rocks and soda, which naturally drove us to dare each other to try it for money. No problem! My mom and her scary sistas were bad enough witches with or without the soda they're all addicted to, anyway. Gimme that! And so me, my middle bro, and the Katt sisters stood at the end of our lane daring each other to try it. We each did it after no one died, taking turns feeling that weird popping sensation of mini candies mixed with fizzy soda. It was odd, like spearmint-flavored Lifesavers sparking in the darkness of a closet while you watched your friend eat one (my mom told me about that particularly fun food fact growing up), but that was about it.

Nonetheless, the madmen who created those classic ad campaigns pushed product over what was basically a childhood dare for many years, by firmly implanting it within each and every American kids' memory. It was sheer marketing genius. After that, the rumor mill cranked into overtime, when Madison Avenue spreadsheets reflected the buying power attached to false rumors. Kentucky Fried Chicken had rat meat in it, so that's bad. Don't eat it! 

Spider eggs were found in Bubbalicious gum, probably because some crazy redneck working in a factory hated city kids, like that fat lazy bitch behind the KFC counter who hates us, too, or the weirdo who injected shit into Tylenol bottles, just like that crazy psycho who put razor blades into kids' Halloween apples one year: it was crazy enough to be true, just like the psychotic people we meet everyday who want to kill us for no good reason other than the fact that they're fuckin' nuts and we felt vulnerable as kids, because that's what our neighborhoods feel like on any random day. You just might die, yo.

Reel Life: Chop Shop

Few movies capture the horror of growing up on the streets like this one: no parents, no authority figures, and no protection whatsoever. Like the Brazilian movie City of God, Chop Shop lets you see what happens when a society utterly fails its youngest, and then exploits their naivety and innocence for profit.

The biggest difference for me is that Chop Shop feels exactly like the area of Queens that circles the big baseball stadium where all those juicy cars park, begging to be ripped off. This is my home turf. In between that con is a massive array of gypsy cabs illegally combing our city streets looking for fares, then clogging the nearby garages, seeking the cheapest deal to quickly replace a broken rear-view mirror.

Our hero is a “little man” in the ghetto sense of the words: because he has to be. He finds his sister (also out of foster care and in the shelter system), then tries to fold her into his now-legit world at the garage. He both works and sleeps there, and humble as it is, it's a toe-hold into the makings of a new life, as we watch him struggle to bring her into it.

I won't give away much more, but if you're a native New Yorker, you know people who grew up like this, or maybe you did, too. I know I started working as a kid, and it's still the mainstay of many cultural labor forces. Some parts are difficult to watch (who likes seeing children hurt or violated?!), but in the end, they remain a family: a small family of two, with a boy-child who is more of a man than many will grow up to be, and his troubled teen sister, and how they manage to stay together.

That's hope.