Shop Girl

Like my friends, family, classmates, and acquaintances, all of us worked as children and then into adolescence for real. Because of the depth behind the dependence that tied me to my working class family, I simply didn't know any other way to live, and because my family fears the bankruptcy of Social Security, Disability, Medicaid/Medicare and Public Assistance from their near-constant use of such services, they always leaned too heavily on the shoulders of their healthiest family members, like me, leaving them trapped in a cycle of abusive neglect and intentional indifference that's coupled with violent outbursts in between their deliberately cold silences. 

They are an extremely sick group of people, and they openly encourage(d) anyone who seemed to be stronger, smarter, and faster than them, and while I was certainly all of that out of sheer necessity, they never acknowledge my gifts (as if I don't know), so as to keep this system of societal dependents who lean on the healthy in place, in lieu of any better ideas, but that's madness for you. Troubles at home? Hey, get a job, Marie! Don't like your abusive neighbors in the next rental apartment you move to? Hey, work harder and get a second job! Bad marriage? No problem! Become a traveling salesman! See? Problem solved! Jobs solve everything.

It became their dysfunctional answer to anything in their lives that was wrong, and like the worst that the working class has to offer, most of my family are trapped in either soul-deadening jobs for the obsessive compulsive/ADHD/dyslexic, or corrupt corporate gigs that pay well but sicken people and the entire planet, in direct violation of their Holy Roman Catholic faith. My friends and I, as the highest functioning family members of our particular units, had no such illusions about our self-worth. They needed us and they hated us for it, which is the essence of every abusive relationship. My poor brothers thought I was mired deeply in their patterns, when really, I was just a single working woman dating from a bad pool of "candidates".

Not even manic depression and alcoholism could ever deter me from fighting back, nor did it save me from the domestic violence that's typical for the severely sick, drunk, and Irish, but that's a Gerritsen Beach millionaire at nineteen-years old for you (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerritsen_Beach,_Brooklyn). My friends were/are intellectually gifted, and unlike my mother's pseudo-brainiacs in "science" who never really went anywhere with it (besides getting by on low-level lab tech jobs), me and my friends knew that we had to be better than that which we hoped to change. We had to lead others out of it, like we had with ourselves, and we had to talk about it. Quickly. Nothing is more clarifying than a punch to the face, and I learned over time that I could take that like a champion, too. It was a deadly combo.

Backed by my innate savoir faire, I entered one of the most corrupt working environments on earth, Midtown Manhattan. Of course, it isn't designed for you to feel that way immediately. No, there's a gradual "easing in" process to their abuses, like a man looking to score with a hot chick who hides his cigarette smoking habit; everyone's on their best behavior at first, except for "Mama Marie". Because I do what you can't, it means that I have a line outside of my office the first few months, after the crazies have figured out that I can outwork them (without recognition or a pay raise), but I am kinda stuck, you know, because of the whole female working class thing. Uh, no, bitch. It actually simply meant that I won, albeit after a few hard rounds.

In case you've ever wondered out of curiosity what those childhood/teenage jobs were, here's the list. Excuse me if I missed a few, or left you off. I was a kid, you know? Oh, wait...no, you don't. You didn't have to survive that! OK, here we go!!

Unpaid: 
A) Everything a full-grown woman who runs a household does, as a child and young teenage girl. Everything.

Semi-paid/unpaid (if my brothers "gamed me" right):
A) A work permit from my elementary school principal at Chestnut Grove in New City who gave signed consent to child labor, because if I wanted money from my brothers to help them with their paper routes, I needed to have it to work with them, which they would immediately begin attacking by criticizing my on-the-job performance (I was too weak as a young girl to help them out much, anyway), so as to have an excuse for whittling down my cut. 
B) Collecting cans and newspapers to recycle for the money.

Paid:
1) McDonald's at 15, with signed parental consent on my job application (and mocking abuse to go with the free food I pulled off the line at the end of the night shift for me, my brother, and my mother).
2) Fancifoods, a "gourmet" food shop that catered to the wanna-be upscale yenta. I did food prep for the trays of free samples we gave out, in an effort to convince some hideous loudmouth from the Bronx that marzipan from Austria was "an acquired taste", because you know how tacky bourgeois desperate housewives are from t.v. nowadays. Yeah, we didn't have that then. All the managers slept with each other and did coke, which means they went out of business very quickly.
3) A clothing store in the old Nanuet Mall that made me take a polygraph test, after my friend Donnel was discovered shoplifting and tried to pull me into her scheme. Thanks for that, home-girl. I needed clothes for school, yo!
4) Random and intermittent babysitting jobs that I didn't like because I was too young to care for yet another baby that was outside of my huge family circle. You know? Oh, wait, no, you don't. Rich white people don't change diapers! They hire people to do that for them!
5) Mowing the lawn and shoveling snow for neighbors.

And that was elementary school, junior high, and high school.

In the future, we can dive into all the part-time jobs I had during college, too, while I became the first scholar/artist at both of my schools and certainly within my family.

Then, I began working at your companies at, what was it, 22? Yep, I think that was it. Oh, and I attended my R.I.S.D. graduation already employed because I graduated mid-year to help my family with my college bills, you know, like the loan I took out for my mom at Oneonta to help with her expenses, like cars, houses, clothes, vacations, and medications tied to her psychosis that she still lies to me about. So, yeah, bitch, I know how to do your fucking job...and about 10-30 others at the same time, too. Any other questions? No?! Good! Let's move directly to the "shut the fuck up" stage of my directions to you, because I fucking earned it. Just shut the fuck up and do it.

Credit

In addition to his lack of driving skills, Cotto has no idea what money stands for (hint: it's for goods and services).To him, every day is either the best day ever (like a whacked-out teenager at Disneyland), or his imminent death—like a kid eaten by a gator at Disneyland (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/15/us/alligator-attacks-child-disney-florida/). And that's exactly what his serious mental disorders are about: really really REALLY!!! great things that make you stay up for days and days and you just don't understand and why aren't you more excited, Marie? Sleep?! Food?! WHY???!!! GET PUMPED UP!!! Yeah, kid. Call me when the show is over, or starts, whichever happens last. I'm going to sleep, and I'm eating breakfast. Bitch.

The same is true about his understanding of family. His dad was his drinking buddy/sexual escapades partner (aye yi yi), and his mom's new "old man" looks at him kinda funny, too. He's been staying up late to watch t.v. recently, so he could screw the people living around him from using "his" pull-out sofa as a bed, and when you question that, he blames you for his escalating drunken abuse. It's a landscape without any safe places, which makes jail seem much better in comparison, because at least you get decent food and a bed to sleep in, you know? And maybe skip the nighttime rape scene, for once.

I felt bad for him because he had it that hard coming up in "da game" of life, but he's such a selfish fucking dick, you can't help but wish for him to be as far away from you as possible. Just because someone's really sick doesn't mean they can't also be a completely selfish asshole. I'm sure the staff at his residency center wants him dead or gone on his worst days, particularly the days when he deliberately craps his bed so the big buff orderly in the tight white scrubs can change his diapers for him while he sexually harasses him with molester-type comments. You know? A punch in the face is sometimes much quicker and easier than strapping him down to the bed and cleaning out his mess. Poor fucker. I've been there with head-cases before. Many, many, many times over.

So, when I asked him about his "credit card debt" that he intentionally mischaracterized as a fun "Sex and the City" shopping spree, it was just as depressing as I thought. "Well, Marie...", he began. Oh, OK. I'm the dumb fuck sleeping on your floor in your Army/Navy sleeping bag that you can talk down to. I forgot where I was for a minute! Actually, I didn't. Yeah, Cotto. What happened? I wanted him to just take his sleeping meds and go the fuck to sleep, but he was going off of his prescriptions one-by-one, because he couldn't handle the stress of homelessness, welfare, and his broke-ass two-year school on Staten Island for people without their G.E.D.'s coping with several mental disorders, and I was supposed to pretend that wasn't true with him, so he could psychotically pretend that I was his trapped quarry, when in truth, I could crack open his shin bones to the marrow whenever I wanted. 

Not that I wanted that. He was a dumb bloated mess of a human being, and I questioned that status on most days, too. But, let's hear it. It'll come out anyway, and it's not like I have anything better to do on a Tuesday night, besides getting a good night's sleep on this here dirty tenement floor so I can out-design the crazy "creative director" at work tomorrow, who would short-change me out of a health plan and rip-off all of my cover designs out of professional envy and hateful sabotage. So, yeah. Go ahead. Well, my grandmother died, and she asked me to "look after" her mail while she was in the hospital, so I did. Uh huh. I question every part of that sentence, but yeah. And?

"I took her Sears credit card." For how much, Cotto? And he waffled on that, too. Sigh...every step of the way, eh asshole? "About 3 or 4 grand." It was probably much higher than that, between the $5-$7000 range, because he then told me his "lawyer" advised him to pay it back quickly. Riggght...while you blow off your dish-washing job (not good enough), buy dirt weed instead of meds, and jam in a stressful college-like experience at the same time, so you can justify your subsequent freak-out and imprisonment? I think I know this tune! "It came addressed to her in the mail and I was staying there." So? So what? "I needed money." He clammed up like a hardened convict who's just "lawyered up" because he already knows the drill.

But, like, why? I mean you have two fucking cell phones, an expensive video game console that's also your hard drive, an iPad, a laptop, and ghetto headphones. The whole nine, kid. What the fuck did you spend it on? I never got a real answer that made any sense to me. What the fuck did he buy with it? For those of you reading me outside of the U.S., "Sears, Roebuck and Company" is a really old catalog business that began when the west was still a bison-filled frontier for European sharecroppers in covered wagons hoping to escape/frame "Indians" for all of their horrible massacres, in a lustful quest for blood and oil money that has come to be known as "The Wild West." You've seen the movies, right? Like that. Or, more specifically, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears.

I mean, he wasn't exactly home-owner material as a self-entitled welfare queen. People like me work hard. Not him! He's "special". Well, Cotto, sigh...don't make me phrase it like I'm taking away your lollipop, you fucking prick. I'm tired. What did you buy with it? I waited...and then waited some more. And some more. This, from an arrogant dick who liked to pretend he was exceedingly verbal and highly loquacious with his carefully chosen bon mots. Give it up! He looked down, and thought about it, but finally, he was too embarrassed to tell me. I'm sure it wasn't for garden hoes, or trimming shears for his fucking front lawn with carefully groomed hedges. And to this day, I still don't know what he bought with a housewares store credit card used by Americans for generations as their rural general store.

I know what we did. My mom asked me to circle clothes out of a huge Christmas catalog every year for toys and clothes, and if they didn't fit or we didn't like it, we went back to the store in Nanuet (still there) to return it. That's what country folk did back then, while your dad browsed the barbecue grills and dreamed of a motorized lawn mower with a comfy riding seat, like the big Italian douchebag next door to us had, riding around smiling on his ghetto "pizza money" from his 'hood storefront in the Bronx that would become a model for the summertime NYC movie classic "Do the Right Thing" that explored ethnic and racial tensions between the Italian-American immigrants who earned their plush living off the backs of impoverished, trapped African-Americans living in a hot city without air conditioning, just like we did.

We had heavy, awkward window units that sat tipsily in the small window sills of our split-level home, and if we wanted even that cool comfort in our rooms, we had to pull down a ladder in the ceiling to go into the attic, carefully stepping between the beams so we wouldn't fall through the floor, and then pushing the heavy units down the stairs at a steep angle to whoever was at the bottom. We had air conditioning in our small bedrooms only; not in the kitchen, or the living room, or the converted basement downstairs. If it was too hot to stay in our rooms for too long, we went outside, or we walked a mile and a half to the public pool up-and-down the impressive hills of this area, or we ran through a sprinkler on the lawn, spraying each other with a green garden hose. I know that he didn't do any of that, because he said would die in his early 50s, just like his father and his father's father. 

It was sad, but it was real. As he told me his life of woe, I knew his life was designed for him to fail. And so, I listened to his halting confessions that he had to work up the nerve to tell me over shared dirt weed blunts and cheap beer, because it probably included evil staples of the projects like child rape, child abandonment, and/or child endangerment. How did I know? He told me his dad was his first "party" partner. You fill in the blanks. And that's what I did. I "read" him expertly, better than anyone else did, and that's why I got out of the ghetto alive, just like my hardcore New York City family. That, and I kicked out an old abandoned bookcase piece-by-piece after work one night, so I could leave the floor of his dirty room for the room next door with a chain through the opening where the doorknob used to be, in front of him and our neighbor "Rex", his "hood rat" partner-in-crime for those days, even though it was mostly particleboard. Almost.

My mutha's naybahood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Avenue
My fahthizz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford%E2%80%93Stuyvesant,_Brooklyn
And mine, bitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodside,_Queens

Welfare Burger

True punk-rock spirit, as evidenced back in the day. Keep on it, man.

It's hard for our brothers and sisters around the world to tap into our common consciousness, beset as they are in this world by the woes cast upon them through continued war, famine, and injustice. That's why it's so important for us to speak up whenever we encounter wrong, difficult as they may be to do at times, because we often traverse the worst adversities when we are at our loneliest low points in life, but just like that old Christian poem "Footsteps"*, it just seems that way from the outside looking in. It is then when you are carried by The Lord Our G-d, as His Most Faithfully Beleaguered in Faith. As so often happens in my life, outsiders see one reality when in truth, it's the exact opposite of what they presume it to be, and that very deception is what leads them down the wrong path.

I meat a bleary-eyed Ecuadorean the other day on the street while he was waiting for the bus. I'd noticed him from the other side of the street before, because he stared at me like I was levitating across the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, instead of me hatted up and running an errand, sans makeup. In fact, when we crossed paths, I explained to him that I spend zero dollars ($0) on my appearance. But, but...he sputtered, swaying a little on his heels, I'm so pretty! Now that you've gotten to know me better, that sounds funny, right? Like, asking Jesus when he got his last pedicure while he walks around poorly shod in a pair of old worn sandals, but I was charmed by my new friend.

After all, that's what he was raised to believe in. Pretty girl = easy street, just add (+) one man. Done deal! Of course, that's an absurd way to think, because I'm not a prostitute for hire based solely on my looks (not that I mind beauty as a visual artist because it's part of my world) but in many American cultures, beauty is mythologized to such an extent (especially if you're a drunk, divorced, red-eyed Central American grandpa waiting on a cold Northern sidewalk for a public bus that's on slow rollin' country time), that talking to someone like me seems like, how can this be true ?! Oh, it be, brother man. I assure you of that, esse.

You see, when you're out there in the real world, you don't just get a small slice of pie from the same place over and over again (my G-d, the horror of that!), you eat "the whole enchilada" as they say, and that's exactly how me and my crew play this game called life: like it's winning just to be here, because we come across a lot of "walking dead" out there; bombed-out, brain-dead folks just wandering listlessly throughout their days, so unconscious and unplugged from the world as it exists, waiting to die. A nightmare...and so, when we see something we don't like, we say something, because speaking up is an action that leads to other actions, even if at first it's just misguided thoughts (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/06/say-something.html). It's all part of your training.

Most of my peers have already reached the type of early success that puts us in direct proximity to junior staff who need constant mentoring and teaching because we're tradespeople, and giving back to underlings is crafted into our lifestyles. I teach every day that I'm alive, even if it doesn't fit into your misconceptions about relegating learning to some far away classroom staffed by someone else, even though that someone else is probably someone I went to school with, here in New York, and I can also out-teach any day of the week. My creative hierarchies necessitated me into learning many many abilities so well just to stay competitive and on the job, that I can teach you in another language (in your native language, since you can't speak mine), using whatever tools you have handy.

After you do that for many years like we have, you develop a sophisticated routine centered around schooling. And so, when my Coloradan ex-boyfriend decided to take his act on the road by lecturing the Asian liquor store owner down the block from us in our Denver neighborhood, I couldn't have clapped harder for him in appreciation if I tried. It was one of my most favorite characteristics about him: that he used his power and prestige as a high-earning white man in our society to tell people what they avoided hearing through deliberately planned abusive neglect, by feigning continued ignorance about well-known facets of our American lives. On one such afternoon, I guess Kent had enough of the hypocritical bullshit, because he told me that he finally told the Korean owner what was up, and I was enraptured.

Kent liked to buy some booze to put into his little biker backpack that they make just for riders to squeeze liquid into their mouths during a ride (yeah, not the best use of it, but you don't know his full story and it is massively bad), so he could meander around town on the many bike paths that line the area in an inter-connected web that's the envy of older cities, though the common practice of compulsive over-exercise to cover up a serious mental disorder as it is used out west is a whole other article entirely. Suffice to say that he was familiar with the lay of the land, as he'd lived in town for many years, spending his days driving through he streets that he didn't bike, as a Master Electrician with his own junior apprentice to school in the trade.

I guess he figured he'd had enough of the shit show we'd seen play out unfairly in society over the years, because he and I talked about the judicious use of "mixed residential" zoning laws that are the mark of enlightened urban planning in newer cities like Denver, escaping the common traps most older cities succumb to, like the bust-and-boom, up-and-down patterns that characterize the instant ghettos and gentrified private parks with silver key access that define New York City life. We'd seen our native cities go down fast that way, like he had with the council flats in England, and I did with the projects in the city. Urban planning had created instant ghettos that insured encircled and entrapped cycles of poverty that no one could escape from, let alone a terrorized impoverished people who'd descended from the cruel mistreatment of corrupt plantation owners from centuries past.

We had enough, and it was reflected through his band's song titles about injustices that I felt keenly in my life, too. Kent told me back at our place that as he was walking back to the cooler for a cold drink, he couldn't help but razz the wealthy owner into embarrassment. We'd seen him cruise up to his immigrant business in the 'hood with a brand new Benz curbside, strategically placed as it was right across the street from public housing that was clearly demarcated as such with bolted-on plaques across the front row of old brick townhomes, across the street from his ghetto liquor store. Who the fuck did he think he was? What right did he have to come here and pick off the "po' black folk" with instant access to the very poison that killed them and their brains, by walling himself behind a plastic partition like some pussy?

Kent and I had seen him roll up in his fancy car in our urban neighborhood with his clean little prep school boy, all nice and pressed in his fancy private school clothes, but what right did he have to set up shop across the street from the poorest folks in town? Huh? Kent said he just stood there towering over this little guy and his small prep school kid. They played the whole smiling " haha...no speaky engrish" game with him that they'd been taught by the very people they bought the place from, with one very important caveat left unwritten but certainly lived out loud for the whole block to see: American assimilation is possible in one quick generation, you just have to sell out the more beset "minority" beneath you on the totem pole, even though there's no fucking way any Chinese-American can be a fucking minority, when China and the Americas are this fucking big. 

Nice try, though. "Kunta-Kente"**, you're my straight-up superhero, man! Don't ever change, bro, no matter how hard they grind you down. You're beautiful to me, baby. "Papa" this! We did, you know that, right? We really did show that small town what living is all about, be it with this century's immigrants or the very next ones. Still have your passport with your little boy Visa photo? That shit's adorable, kid, even if you did have a rough go of coming and going whilst traveling back and forth from "The Motherland", because someone (ahem, you know who) fluffed your fucking birth date on your kiddie passport, to give you a ride every time you exited and entered the country of your own free will. Who would do that to their kid going into a new country, you know? We do! Don't change a thing, baby. You're perfect just the way G-d made you to be. Amen to you, brother. This one's for you and yours today, baby. We're all red on the inside: http://taylorseafood.co.uk/ and http://www.taylorfoods.co.uk/

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=welfare+burger

* http://www.onlythebible.com/Poems/Footprints-in-the-Sand-Poem.html

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

Earl, The First Duke of Puke

Me and my best friend had finally made it to college after one hell of a crazy summer. There were times when we thought we wouldn't make it there at all, during the summer of '87. We blew off senior prom to rent a house at the Jersey Shore with some friends, which officially kicked off our last season at home. A few kids in our crew had already been to rehab and back while still in high school, so they spent their time at the shore recreating versions of their parent's marriages, playing house and pretending to be grown-ups. It was eerie. I had no such allusions. I was 17, and I'd been set free. Me and my best friend partied like it was "1999" by having a total blast at the beach. I thought it was a good sign for our last summer at home, but things took a turn for the worse. 

My mother's tensions escalated with her dating our disastrously dysfunctional neighbor next door (now widowed), which quickly made my childhood home a "no-fly" zone, while my best friends' parents did their best to pass out drunk and burn the house down with their lit cigarettes, which she removed from their stained fingers as they lie in a stupor on the couch in front of the t.v. because the other one had claimed the bed in their bedroom. It'd become life or death for us to escape homes that'd turned bad and we knew it, so to break the chains that bound, we took "outs" from the stress whenever we could. 

My mom and her youngest sister rented a house at the shore later in the summer, so I went back to the same beaches where me and my best friend formed our college pact after graduation, to celebrate July 4th with my family. After entertaining my mom and her dopey sister with fireworks on the beach and copious amounts of white wine, I got bored and restless while they giggled like little girls over a bag of pretzels back at the rented sea shack. I was back on the streets quickly, looking for a house party, which I found a few blocks away. I met a guy by the keg from the hippie waterfront town in our county, and we immediately hit it off. 

He was older than me, but he matched the way I felt inside, so I went along with it. Me and my friend connected up with him when I got back from the beach with a number he'd given me at the keg party, and to a couple of teenage girls waiting to escape bad homes, he had the perfect place. It was a two-level loft above a cool bookstore in town, with a circular wrought-iron staircase that led upstairs from the brick-walled living room. It was grown up but stylish and fun: the perfect place to drink and stay away from home. I thought I had it under control, but as my mom began putting the hard squeeze on me deliberately (she was setting me up out of spite for escaping from her house, because she told me she hated me), I knew something had to give, and that was someone was me, but that's a story for another day. It ended badly and dramatically, with my family getting involved (he had sex with me as a minor: he was 31, I was 17). Me and my best friend showed up to Oneonta bruised, beaten, and out of breath, sighing with relief at making it there alive. 

Karen's old car had barely made the rough mountain trip, breaking down halfway there on the side of a dangerous mountain pass, blowing a gasket that exploded steam out of the hood. My mom and her older brother repaired it with a roll of duct tape she kept in her trunk (she gets into a lot of car accidents). At the dorm, some girl had already been tripled up with us. We were left with bunk beds that had no ladder, as her brother bitched us out for having too-heavy bags that he lugged up three flights of stairs to the top floor. We should have packed everything in garbage bags! Jeez! We sat in the room mute and scared, but with a dawning realization that we would finally be on our own. At first we looked at each other stunned, sitting on these small twin beds, but then a slow, creeping smile spread across our faces. We made it. We actually did it. Yeah! Cool, let's party. We couldn't get rid of her bro and my mom fast enough, which they were happy to do. We immediately ditched our stuff to take a look around outside. It was glorious: a beautiful mountain campus with kids everywhere. Oh, fuck yeah. I think we're gonna like it here... 

We set out finding the party right away, which was easy for us, because at that point we were old hands. All we had to do was sit somewhere and wait for the boys to find me, which they did. I just had to say "hello" in their general direction, which I did. My life experiences had cured me of my shyness, fueled by the alcohol and drugs that were our social lubricants. We created a scene that first night in a spectacular way (another great story for another day) that made us famous on campus right away. Every cool kid wanted to hang out with us. 

We found a party group in the dorm behind us; a ragtag collection of skaters, surfers, and street punks, which created a party conduit between the two dorms. I was fully invested in the scene because I was finally single, really and truly, and I'd made a promise to my best friend to stay that way, but with the amount of good-looking kids around, it was hard for me to stay that way for long. People were everywhere, high and happy before classes began. It was a festival, a carnival atmosphere, with a bunch of fun New York kids doin' it up every way they knew how, and we ain't people to turn a good party down, you know what I mean? Me and my friend found ourselves drunk in some kid's room outside of our dorm, and the next thing I remember is kinda making out with the guy, while my friend scowled in the hallway outside of his dorm room. 

She ditched me thinking I wanted to hook up with him, but I was so drunk, I can't remember what happened except the next thing I know, this kid was on top of me on a bottom bunk with my backside exposed and I couldn't move to stop it because I felt so sick. The motion of the bed made me wake up, and before he could finish, I threw up all over him, me, the entire bunk bed, and it didn't stop there. He moved me to the twin bed on the other side of the room and put a trash can by it, which I continued to hurl into and around. It was an impressive amount: I covered his sheets, his roommate's bed, and the floor with vomit. Everywhere was stank and mess. 

That summer, I had puked on the way down to our shore house, sitting in my friends back seat next to the cooler, pounding beers and Doritos, which created an bright orange show that earned me the name "The Uker" as in, you puked your guts out because you can't handle your booze, which actually kinda pissed me off. For my size, I have amazing stamina, which also made me famous. I could drink much bigger guys under the table all the time, but that day, motion sickness brought me down. I had simply rolled down the car window in the back seat of my friend's car, puked out the side, took my shirt off, threw that out the window, too, then zipped up my hoodie and partied on. It became infamous at the beach house within minutes of our arrival. To this day, too much alcohol and food makes me sick, so I avoid overindulging or risk paying the full price of admission. Same principles in play. 

The next day, I was pissed as hell. Why had my friend left me behind? She said she had knocked on his door to get me and bring me back to our dorm room, but she saw my boots stashed outside his door in the hallway (which my would-be rapist was considerate to do for me as his "overnight" guest, a fact he wanted to publicize because of my fame as a beauty on campus). I do remember seeing her with another girl in the hallway asking after me, and then when his door was closed, hearing her friend ask her again if they should just open the door to come in and get me out of there. Karen got angry and said "no" ("Just leave her there!") because she thought it was obvious that I was hooking up with him and she was disgusted with me for it, because I'd supposedly "sworn off" men during college. She was actually envious over date rape, which sucked, because the kid we met was this short little rich kid from Long Island. And that's exactly how it all went down. 

We talked about what to do the next day by laying out all our options, which we listed out loud to each other, back in our room: 1) we were working class girls, and as such, utterly disposable to society. No one gave a fuck whether we lived or died, including our parents. OK, telling adults who were supposedly "authority" figures was out. We played out the different scenarios in our heads: we'd tell some counselor at the school's health center, she'd go bat-shit over it (because tons of shrinks are also headcases), then she makes me into some big feminist statement by broadcasting it everywhere on campus, we'd get hooked into committee/faculty meetings about the incident, there'd be excruciatingly overwrought and inept meetings with our parents, law enforcement, written confessions, all the routine bullshit that hadn't worked for us in our own community. 

It sure as fuck wasn't gonna work in this hick town because 2) "townies" fucking hated city slickers/suburbanites like us. They'd be glad we got screwed because 3) we're just a couple of drunk Mick bitches who got what we deserved because 4) I was stupid enough to be alone and drunk in a room with some guy we barely knew. Any way she and I played out the scenes between us, we got fucked. It could possibly derail our college careers, and there was no way we could do that. I remember it like it was yesterday; my best friend sitting on her bed across our room, drinking a beer, looking at me, and saying to me, in a shaky voice: "We barely made it here, Marie. We can't screw up", which we were in grave danger of doing. If we got kicked out or failed out, we essentially had no homes to go back to. My mom and her parents were nobody's guardians. There was simply nothing left to "go home" to. This was it for us, "do or die" time, you know? And we did. We knew this was our one shot at success.

So, we did the next best thing that a couple of throw-away kids from the wrong side of the tracks could do: over the next few weeks we told every kid at every party we went to what went down, in exacting detail. Like, who he was, what he looked like, his name, the town he came from on Long Island, the name of his dorm, his room number, where he hung out, what his major was, what classes he took, what bars he frequented, the whole nine. That fucking punk couldn't make a move without us being on top of him, and we knew it. We won. My bestie dubbed him "Earl, the First Duke of Puke", conferred and bestowed upon him forever, with great good humor and whip-smart violence. It stuck with relish. 

You know how we do it with nicknames around the way, right? It's like a crew of kids from a "Fat Albert" episode; a catchy nickname sticks no matter what. And that's what we did. It was so successful, his reputation was shot and his entire college career side-lined around that night. He was so delusional about what happened that he even had the nerve to ask for my number over our first summer break from school so "we could stay in touch", deliberately waiting for me in the hallway outside the weight room I went to for the "Body Conditioning" class me and my boyfriend (my first real love, a French Canadian/Irish boy from Brooklyn) took together. I was so shocked that I gave it to him just to see what he would do, with my boyfriend's consent.

It was crazy. He actually called me on the phone at home that summer, which my cousin answered. I told him to say that I wasn't there and hang up the phone. In typical dipshit fashion, he kept calling, and once my younger cousin was out of the kitchen (I didn't want to upset the boy anymore than was necessary, because he'd lost his father to cancer in high school.), I ripped into him. Did he know he raped me?! I mean, he was lucky to be alive! Nope, he didn't. He actually had the nerve to cry to me about us spreading the word around, and how we ruined his college experience because no girls would date him, and everyone made fun of him at every party or bar or club that he tried to go to. Yeah, right. That's the whole point! 

I yelled at him as discreetly as I could over the phone without being heard by my mother's guests, shaking with anger. I hissed at him, threatening to tell his rich psychiatrist daddy about his actions by addressing a letter to him, if he ever called me again. He'd actually written out his address and phone number to me when I asked him for it, in the hallway outside the gym I worked out in at campus. My college boyfriend (who I dated for almost 6 years) was a beefy bouncer at the hippest bar in town, which he and his older musician brother ruled over it with impunity. His bro lived above the bar in town in a brick-walled, loft-style apartment that he shared with his girlfriend Shelley: John Cryer's curly, red-haired (and rich) stepsister, a singer who occasionally played the tambourine in their hipster band. Last I heard, she was a jet-setting hairdresser/makeup artist in the SoCal showbiz scene. 

We ruled our territory with gusto, because that's exactly what a young Acadian Queen in-training does, mes amis. I cut my teeth on boys like him as a teenager and won, because by the end of my stint in that far-off mountain town, every other muthafucka from miles around knew it, too. Together, we unite in strength: http://nomore.org/.

Summer of '89 (Oneonta, NY)