WUTR: Utica/Rome

Me and my best friend had way more than altitude to adjust to, deep in the remote mountains of upstate New York. Before the Internet and cell phones, we had a pay phone on the first floor that we shared with an entire dorm and a television in the common room, also on the first floor. We'd already broken a lot of rules in the dorm and around campus, the least of which was having a hot plate in our room for heating up cans of soup or making box mac and cheese, in direct violation of the dorm's fire code. There were no microwave dinners, no cable TVs, no personal computers, and no anxious "helicopter parents" circling overhead. We were free.

Our relative isolation from the rest of the world created a bubble for young minds to thrive, especially in exploration of the past through our art history and history textbooks. It didn't really matter what day or time it was, because we lived through our studies, anyway. The allure of being out of touch in a cool way has trapped many a hippie perpetually in college towns, like the demon from the movie 'Krampus' captures souls stuck in so many snow globes sitting on its shelf. There was something eerily dead about going to the same bar forever, dating the same tie-dyed wearing sophomore over and over again.

We'd shudder in the frigid evenings over the possibility of a similar fate, which propelled us past incredible odds to our respective educational careers: Karen from urban-based Yonkers, and me from the projects in Queens. Sometimes we wondered like 'The Talking Heads', "....how did we get here?", only to be brutally reminded of our commitment to our ideals by a six-hour bus ride through the frozen tundra of a nearly deserted landscape. In the overheated dorm rooms of our engaged minds, we always left a window open to catch the coldness of the crisp, clear mountain air.

After a night of Old Milwaukee and weak pot, we slunk down to the first floor to watch TV on the sly, with our reputations preceding us. It was late, so we'd escaped the voracious Long Island crowd that were more supported in their daily habits by their similarly enabled parents. Used to the abuse that comes with shared family spaces, we sank into the old, sunken couch with a sigh of relief, in a mostly dark room that was empty of other kids. Finally! We had the TV to ourselves, without the petty power plays or bitchy stand-offs that happened among the factions of hardcore viewers in the dorm with time and madness on their sides. Kids would plot TV "takeovers" in the cafeteria with their dorm-mates by shouting down anyone who objected to their "Must See TV" during coveted time slots.

But, like two weary, single moms at the end of yet another tough day, we just wanted to put up our feet and relax without making a highly charged political statement about how spoiled and compulsive we weren't. We'd had enough of that growing up. So, one late night found us turning the dial on the TV unmolested by cries of outrage, to catch Letterman or maybe a "Honeymooners" rerun. Didn't really matter. New York City channels usually showed black-and-white classics or freaky monster movies for the overnight crowd working the night shift at the precinct or in the ER; great, working-class stuff.

We'd gotten to the right point of mellow before bedtime when catastrophe struck. We'd lost the signal! Some old movie started playing, then cut out to a screen full of static. What the...? We were left to spend the rest of the night in wondering paranoia. Had the Russians attacked? Was it nuclear war? A media blackout based on alien invasion? What? WHAT? WHAT?! What the fuck just happened? We'd adjusted the rabbit ears, unplugged and replugged the set, banged on the side of it until horizontal lines shimmied across the tube; no such luck. Our electronic babysitter was dead. It was humbling to our superior senses of self, as well-adjusted freshmen.

The next morning in the cafeteria, we immediately told our friends the bad news. Someone had to approach the Residence Hall Director with the creepy molester 'stache about buying a new TV ("dude, we should totally draw straws to see who does it"), because the old one had just cut out. Huh? What are you guys talking about? Our friend from Buffalo was a blue collar girl used to working the early morning shift at the local convenient store, so she'd already been up to catch "her programs" at six a.m., and the set was working just fine. What'd you two do?

Nothing! We protested. We did absolutely nothing but turn the thing on and sit down. Must've been a signal drop, because we were watching some old movie and then the fuzz came on. Wait a minute...our friend from Syracuse asked us around what time. Oh, we didn't know. It was late. Letterman had been on, then some war movie started with this big flag flying and the National Anthem playing...no, wait, dude! Probably a baseball movie, hence the music....yeah, that was it. Totally.

Our upstate friends erupted into hysterical shrieks of laughter, crying at the cafeteria table, clutching themselves and each other. Me and Karen just looked at each other. Now what? <shoulder shrugs> We were called "Abbott and Costello" behind our backs by some of the kids, because she's a big girl and I was a beanpole. Sometimes, we were funny without even trying. Okay...mind letting us in on the joke? Finally, good ole Tracey told us the truth, and it was so much weirder than The Cold War or the end of the world. "No, you guys." Hahaahaa! "Lemme tell 'em!" What? WHAT?

"That wasn't a movie. That was the station signing off for the night." Crickets. I looked at my friend again and shook my head. I had nothing. We turned back to them. What do you mean? They, in turn, looked just as baffled. A sign-off! The station "signed off" for the night! What are you talking about?! Finally, Lisa from Rome kicked in, "Guys! GUYS! That means no more TV!" No. More. TV. What is this strange Bizarro universe? "That's it! The TV goes off the air until morning." Holy....what frigid level of hell is this?! We struggled to assimilate a place with no late night take-out, or Ralph Kramden banter with Alice. 

Suddenly, two hip girls from the 'burbs realized how far from home they were, and then our real education began. "Humbled" wasn't exactly the word for how we felt. We were almost completely cut off from the outside world, and we were alone in it. After that, we had a new nickname around campus. 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' had officially arrived, and it was massive in its scope. Like, totally, dude. And dudettes! It was the start of a whole new era.

International Male

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/395120567281045414/

Years ago, my "Irish Twin" and I used to freak out hysterically over some of his unwanted mail, which included openly gay menswear from an underwear brand called "International Male". We would giggle until tears poured out of our eyes in the kitchen, laughing over his dead-on impression of the intensely wide-eyed stare that typified most of the leering expressions of the scantily clad male models inside. We'd never seen something that gay before, certainly not sitting on the wood counter-tops of our parents' renovated kitchen, which included that suburban staple of life with kids, those blond wood kitchen stools made for quick breakfasts and fast exits, not softcore gay porn.

It was an impression of gay life that stuck with me for many years, and I found it to be dead-on, because years later, I entered the very gay worlds of art, design, media, and New York City nightlife. The first "lesbians" I met were introduced to me next to the dance floor at a disco called "Danceteria" that catered to a domestic country crowd with it's retro look, pop tunes, and "gay lite" versions of reality. My friend's cousin from Harlem was her boyfriend and prom date, and he served as our ambassador to club life on the night of our junior prom, like a scene out of a Huey Lewis video when the music skips to a stop across the DJs record, as the white kids from the 'burbs enter onto the dance floor, which wasn't far off from what really happened.

We were all wearing prom dresses and tuxes that were clearly the product of better upbringings with more money than the original mean streets we all came from as New Yorkers, which was exactly the point behind it for my parents who wanted better for us than they had. Nevertheless, Lawrence laughingly told me (after a few minutes of banal conversation) that his two friends were "gay, Marie" in a deprecating way, because he condescendingly assumed that I didn't know what a "lesbian" looked like in "real life", though that was far from the truth. "Gayness", as me and my brothers already knew just from our mail, didn't exclude itself from families who moved out of the city to the suburbs, because we all had openly gay family members, but my friend's friend didn't know that. 

He saw us as naive "white" people (even though my art classmate, boyfriend, and junior prom date, Raphael, is from a prominent Puerto Rican family), in stark contrast to what he thought was his more authentically-crafted street persona as a handsome, knowing, hip, African-American male from Harlem. After all, the very word "Harlem" has a connotation that's worldwide for a very specific lifestyle, and as a savvy wanna-be musician looking to move up in the scene, he sold his version of our world wherever he could peddle it. It was actually the beginning of my internship in the arts, as I navigated the characters who haunted the edges of what would become my actual world of real artistic credulity and not his, but back in the 80s, he made it look good, and at the time when we were teenagers, appearances mattered more than the truth to someone like him.

Years later, when I transitioned from being a constant, steady girlfriend to a series of former male classmates, friends, and workplace acquaintances to a defiantly stay-at-home single woman by choice (there's only so many bars, nightclubs, and parties one can go to, after all, because hangovers only get worse with time, and besides that, I'm that horrid anti-thesis of manic club life: the devotedly sleepy working-class "early riser", something I learned to cover up as "uncool" in college, though my steadily productive, daily work habits have made me far more successful than anyone in my crowd could ever drunkenly hope to be), I dove briefly into the compulsively driven world of internet dating. I was at an age where my career goals mattered more to me than some workplace-affiliated fling could ever aspire to be, because my work and my life is far more important to me than some casual guy who wants to sleep with me. 

Trade my formerly active sex life for a really solid design portfolio with excellent work I made on my own? Yes, please! It was exactly what I always wanted: my name on great-looking books out there in the real world, on bookshelves everywhere. This mama also paid all of her bills on her own for too many years to count. No good reason to mess with my money, you know what I mean? Men may come and go, but the truth I had in my 30s was that I was the only one who remained and endured in my lifestyle, because that's what I could count on after all my long-term, monogamous relationships with men. I was worth much more than some guy who may be passing through town, because that's exactly how a lot of corporately sponsored out-of-towners treat New York City; like our lives are just some small part of their big ATM account that they can endlessly withdraw from without ever giving back to those of us who gave them such an excellent life. Uh uh, boyfriend. This girl is sapped!

When I finally began concentrating on myself in earnest, my work grew in stature with the more time I put into it, because I was no longer intruded upon by someone (or something) in my household who needed taking care of besides me. It was a relief, it was eerily quiet, and it was (at times) achingly lonely. After finding myself on a computer for anywhere from 8-14 hours a day, for sometimes 6-7 days week (and this went on for many many years, readers), I naturally surfed in between the bone-crushing, high-pressure deadlines at work, as I waited for some big file to upload to the printer. Anyone who remembers old Internet connections will know that lengthy time bar of which I write of. Oh...watch this for hours? It's like trying to watch ceiling pant dry; not much happens when you're looking. 

As computer systems improved, so did my multifunction job performance, because I could put the dull mechanical stuff in the background of my computer screen while I kept my brain active, alive, and thinking. We all did it in art and design departments throughout the world, and soon the people around us in the offices who are our group of daily onlookers as we sat immobile for hours realized why: the quicker the human brain powering the machine, the better the work, and the better the work we design, the more money we make as a company. It gives us the necessary freedom we need to produce complex visual communication regularly, but it also led to some nasty habits that could be compulsively addictive to the wrong kind of brain, and given the laxity most people wrongly presume working artists have, we attracted a lot of those brains, too, at least in the beginning of desktop publishing, when people also wrongly thought that modern artistry is like sitting at a typewriter. Once they gave it a "go", most of our co-workers realized that our job is more like powering a rocket ship as a NASA-employed engineer working in several different languages at once, and at lighting quick speed. We cleared out most of the kooks with time, eventually, as they learned to take their constantly fretting selves elsewhere, to safer hobbies and easier workplaces better able to provide for people afflicted with their predilections.

But in the beginning of online dating, that's exactly what was out there, as it was reflected onscreen: those Internet cafe junkies who stayed up all night looking for sexual thrills, spills, and quick jerk-off fodder. At first, I used my old, paid-for email account (before "free" e-mail service was offered with future revenue-producing caveats attached: I know, how quaint) and deliberately bad, blurry images of myself to attract guys looking to get to know me, and it worked in many ways. Instead of some "yahoo" fresh to the city looking for a sexy dark-eyed, "exotic" native to show him the city's ropes, I connected with highly-educated, well-earning respectable men like myself, albeit with a creative flair or two attached necessarily, for maximum compatibility. It worked!

Men would actually write to me over a series of days or weeks, getting to know me and my interests in the search for a real partner and not some bed-hopping club queen. Because I paid for access to the dating portion of my email provider's also paid-for email service, I attracted professional men who were older than me, just as I intended. In those early art directing days, I met the de rigeur European man du jour for lovely New York women with a French-sounding last name: the West Village-residing financial planner transplanted by his fancy Parisian firm. <shrugs to self, sitting at a computer>...at least I won't have to pay for half of all of our dates, I thought. Why not? He was handsome enough, and the wintertime was getting lonelier. There were only so many snowy walks in the park I could take with my Mal before getting weary of that, too, and my body was already in excellent shape through a combination of his hard pulling and the typically low-paying publishing paychecks that kept me housed and running, barely.

I met Francois offline in the safe area near NYU that is St. Mark's place, at a more upscale pub joint that caters to students and tourists. I was wearing my Old Navy light blue parka and a red, cowl-necked sweater that was form-fitting, and he was shocked. "How...how...how are you still single?" he sputtered to me over our first pints together. "You look like a petite model!" It was hard to fathom, and he was sensitive still about his newly developed fluency in English. Sigh...how to explain that I had already been a mother to other people's lives and children? I spoke about it in the best ways I could at the time, and when the night turned snowy again with sparkling snowflakes that dusted everything in the silent streets under an enchantingly lit stardust, he became entranced with the magical spell that beautiful New York City has on all the people who fall in love with the greatest city on earth. It was like being in a real, live version of Christopher Cross' song Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do): you can't help it.

I took him to a jazz club further uptown, and by the time the sets were almost over, I knew I had him eating out of the palm of my hand. We took a lightly gliding taxi back to his awesome (and very expensive) West Village townhome apartment, on the exact same block that the fictional character Carrie lived on, in the hit t.v. series "Sex and the City" (we saw the "Sex and the City" tours with touristy women wearing big feather boas and eating cupcakes from the then-trendy Magnolia Bakery down the block), because back then I was living for real what a bunch of out-of-town actresses were playing on t.v.: the hip, media-driven, New York City native girl showing a tall, strikingly handsome Frenchman with a fabulous apartment on one of the planet's most expensive neighborhoods a rockin' good time. It was for him, in fact, the best time ever, and that's exactly what it's all about for us here 'round the way, friends: having the best time ever. Thanks, NPH.

Garanimals

In case you haven't figured it out, yet (because I publish to whoever happens to be reading, or not, as the case may be), my mom has a lot of really serious issues with her brain. Some are silly, but many are not. She did not adjust well to young motherhood, but given her brain, there would be no reason to expect otherwise, so it wasn't. It was pretty much exactly how I describe it, which is hard for her, because she suffers from severe limitations in her brain's ability to remember stuff, sometimes really easy basic stuff, too, which is very embarrassing for her as a self-described "feminist" with "advanced degrees in science". She simply doesn't understand how she went to school with a brain disorder and yet, people do it all the time.

Enter onto this groovy 70s scene a woman who was never very feminine, even on a good day, coupled with the unnerving task of dressing children appropriately for school and life. It's excruciating to watch now, but as a child, it was horribly abusive. She missed certain key dates and appointments, and she was excessively tardy, which she covered under a nasty princess-like attitude that allowed her to sweep into a room like she was going to some swinging cocktail party, except it was my ballet class, and she left me sitting on the curb for almost 2 hours when she was a five minute drive away, because she babbles compulsively on the phone with her similarly disordered sisters for stress relief, none of them actually healthy enough to retain the repetitive inane gossip they share.

I was privy to such revealing truths overheard by one of them as thus: "So. How ya doin'. Oh, yeah? How was _______ (insert name of local suburban chain store here). Oh, yeah? How much? Blah blah blah blah blah..." Then, at some point, someone would get up to use the bathroom, or simply run out of tiring gossip, and at that point it was understood in their OCD world that this brief pause or interruption ("NO! Go ahead! You talk now!"), was a signal among them that they could emit throat sounds and other vocalizations amounting to nothing. 
For some reason, my mom and her delusional sisters thought this placed them far above our safety and security as kids, because such is the power of untreated patterns coupled with crippling delusions. And so it went, still, to this day, as I sit here writing to you.

Fortunately for us, most of our dads worked the city as "Mad Men", which gave them the ability to sell to their desperately bored and firmly ensconced housewives. There was a bevy of products available in the 70s and 80s for every type of disorder three times over, in brightly covered and very hoard-able plastic, which gave them the same type of shopping high as if they fondled them directly in stores for hours, so as to check out from reality. "Stuff" became this way out of your domestic iron chains, when in actuality, it was another outward manifestation of a common compulsive/addictive disorder that needs firm addressing in these modern times, lest we generate more "reality" t.v. contestants and their weirdo objects, an ironic term if ever there was.

Because my mom was so challenged in such an obviously similar way to other dysfunctional females, she used t.v. to create an artificial world that she could drone out to and disappear within, and that was exactly the point advertisers wanted to make. Unhappy? Here: buy this! It was instant and immediate relief, but not the kind that ever solved their problem. Do you have to feed kids? How awful! Throw this on the table, girls. Then you can have FUN FUN FUN again! Do your growing children need clothes for school....again?! Omigosh I can't believe children grow so fast. They're like weeds! All of Madison Avenue in the city catered to their flawed senses of self (mostly lacking), and their immaturity about caring for others, by solidifying their points of view through commercials, which gave them the wrong idea that they were getting it right.

Ever year my mom used a thick Sears catalog to handle the enormity of clothing for small people by asking us to go through it, flag what we wanted, and then she would order it over the phone and pick it up in Nanuet, a task you can still perform in Rockland County today, though most "bubbies" have migrated to the internet to hide their gnawing addictions. My mom floundered even under that simple system, and like-minded disabled salespeople responded in kind, by designing a foolproof way to clothe children with as little thought as possible, you know, because the fate of the world is in your hands, SuperWoman!

It was nuts, but so were our parents. Even more pathetic than hating a rather banal and easy task was the fact that my mom mismatched the turtle icon with the giraffe pants. It may have been cruelly on purpose, so that we would be mocked in school, in retaliation for not liking her horrible dashed-together food, or simply because "Dr. Diane" didn't want to be bothered attending to the needs of others, which is the same type of patterned self-centered selfishness that each and every kid I grew up with had to contend with: the mindset of a bully, whether small or large. It didn't matter if it was clothed in a child's sized shirt, or a grown-ups tailored suit jacket back then, and it still doesn't. Gen X'ers see past advertising gimmicks easily today because we had to back then, just to get through any school day. YAY! Fashion!*

So bring it on, world. We're more than ready for any type of insanity you got. I got ten kinds of crazy flavors in my peeps, some of which you ain't never heard of before kid, ya feel me? Yeah, you do. That's 'cause it's a round-the-way type of life from NYC, babay. Everybody crazy in the hood. It's our way here, yo. Project people be snappin' out all day every day, just 'cause you there, right? Word. Your crazy-ass Brooklyn grandma is now my mom's next door neighbor, and my mom's from the Bronx, okay? Let's work through this together, people. We ain't got nobody else to solve problems for us.


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

Long Island Ice Tea

A street in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island.

Like most people from around the way, families either went to the Jersey Shore for the summer or out to Long Island, which I knew nothing about. I never really met anyone from Long Island until freshman year at my SUNY school, and it was rough. I had no idea where people that horrible came from, except maybe the town of New City here in Rockland, infamous for nasty, vicious, desperate housewives with their scary long-clawed manicures and overly coiffed hair. My best friend was my first roommate ever, and she did no better with them, even with her family summers at Montauk fishing. We were adrift in a sea of some of the worst human behavior we'd ever seen, but I'll tell that story on another day.

Me and my family made the long drive to LBI* almost every summer, with the occasional stop in Cape May to see family, but mostly we went to a rental house in the town of Shipbottom, and we loved it. Long Beach Island doesn't have a boardwalk, or cheesy strip malls or (back in the early 80s and late 70s) much of anything besides mini golf, surf shops, seafood joints, bike rentals stalls, saltwater taffy/ice cream/fudge stores that also sold seashell magnets, and a few depressing old man Irish bars thrown into the mix.

But we didn't care. We weren't there for the human ambiance. We were there to soak up some sun, play in the sand, and body-surf, because the ocean side of the island is one big beach that seems to never end. When we were kids, we tried walking the length of the island when we got bored, but we never actually made it, because it's 18 miles long, which was way too far for us to go. It was magical, and it was family-oriented, for at least for my childhood and preteen years, until my family broke apart through divorce; a sudden stop with a horrible soap opera ending that included one very short, skinny, thick-glassed, and bucktoothed barely-legal secretary, which was excruciating to tell people, so I mostly didn't unless I was talking to a schoolmate.

My family tried to stumble along with our summer traditions, like the times when my grandparents or my aunt (who had money from her late husband) rented a house, but it wasn't the same. They weren't ocean people or active swimmers, so some of the fun was lost. In any case, in the summer of '87, it all blew up anyway. I already finished high school with Regents college credits by my junior year at age 16, while my mom held me hostage in her house by denying me most of the obvious suburban teenage supports, like rides to work or a cheap used car, so that her and her ugly Italian boyfriend from the house next door could find time be alone (which was so creepy because I grew up with their household as neighbors), after his wife died of cancer. 

They made my mom's house unbearable for me on purpose to have some privacy from their kids, secure that they had the upper hand over me while my older brothers were away at school. One night when my bro was on break, he pulled me quietly onto the staircase so we could hear them downstairs gossiping about money. The old boyfriend from next door actually suggested to her that I could be a hooker ("Maybe she's 'whoring'!"), or selling drugs, and that she should check my purse regularly for items related to those work pursuits. Meanwhile, his daughter had barely made it through high school, and not one of his kids ever went to college. She told me one time at the top of our lane, while waiting for the morning bus to school, that she thought she had a miscarriage. She was just 15 at the time, and I was a late bloomer who'd barely been kissed, and someone who'd also been taught to pinch every damn penny like it was my last, from my thrifty Acadian father and all of my Depression-Era grandparents; which was totally unlike my pampered, white-gloved, private-school mom, with her tea parties and petty, vicious sisters used to getting their way. I made $20 last a long long time, just like I do now.

But everything I did, wore, or said was open to suspicion and scrutiny in my mother's house. I became accustomed to their unfounded fears and wild paranoia about me, and like any good teenager, I eventually caved into their hated suggestions to become the wild rebel they wanted me to be deliberately (so they could tear me apart), and not without a certain amount of style. I couldn't wait to leave home. Senior year was a wash for me and my mom knew it, but letting me stretch my wings towards serious academia would break her "College at 16" family record, and like any evil mother from a fairy tale gone wrong, she couldn't let me get away with beating her, which is as far from parenting as you could get, but both of my highly insecure and very disordered parents were always more childish than mature.

Under this hateful cloud, I took an invite to join my mom and her younger sister at the shore for the 4th of July weekend, but this time I was more experienced. I'd been accepted into every SUNY school I applied to, and my "bestie" would be bunking down with me at Oneonta, so I thought I was set. What could my mom and her vile family do to me? I was naive about powers of destruction, and foolishly optimistic. It was the let-down in my guard that my teenage spirit needed to run free. After a giggly night on the beach with wine and fireworks, I put my mom and her sister "to bed" back at the house (they can't handle adult drinks), and then I went in search of a good time. I didn't have to walk far. I had found my confidence with men (which would lead to a late summer downfall later on, but I didn't know that, yet), learned by watching a pushy Jewish frenemy with lots of time, absolutely no parental supervision, a free car, no after-school jobs, and lots of money. She does PR for fashion in the city today. Yeah.

So, leaving my mom and her sister at the shore shack eating chips at the kitchen counter, I put on a white half-shirt with shorts and a funky hat from a thrift store in Nyack, in true 80s style, and I walked into a house party that was a block away uninvited. I just walked into the house, quickly scanned the place, picked out the best looking guy there, walked up to him at the keg in the kitchen talking to a group of girls who surrounded him as they laughed at his story, blew through the ring of them, and then picked him up over a beer that he poured for me. I left the party with his name and phone number in my pocket. It was the house phone number to his swank downtown Nyack pad with a wrought-iron spiral staircase and exposed brick walls, with a cool city job as an sound guy at MSG. Nice...but I was just getting started.

The next night, my mom was feeling good for once, a little tipsy because she actually convinced her pukey little sister to drink one of her dumb little kid drinks, like Coke and Root Beer Schapps; disgustingly sweet drinks to match her sugar tooth, with its' raging soda and caffeine addiction, one that continues unabated to this day. She was feeling loose, so my mom let me order Long Island Iced Teas at our table, the strongest drink known to man. She didn't know that, which was rare for her, so I took advantage of this opening to order with impunity. I'd been warned that they snuck up on you silently, but by the third one, it was already too late. I was knock-out, pass-out drunk.

We were at one of the few nightclubs in town, because my mom's latently gay sister had decided to showcase her rarely seen heterosexuality by openly gawking at male strippers, boldly proclaiming her lame status as a "cougar" (a term sadly not yet in existence in 1987) by hanging a Chippendale's air freshener in her car, when her and her gay friend went to a club in Manhattan on one of their rare hetero-themed larks. It didn't last long (thank G-d), but she was in the middle of her 30s, and this was the last gasp her immature sexuality had before it died forever, helped along by junk food and Valium. She and my mom were also getting along, which was rare, too, because they don't have much in common besides family.

I don't remember much about the show at the time, except that I made eye contact with the cutest guy on stage, while my mom and her stupid sister encouraged me to put money in his pocket so he would come over to our spot where they could look at him. He wasn't my type at all; he had a cheesy pencil-thin and very gay mustache, with tightly-coiled curls that were shaped into the mini mullet of the day, with a tan that was classic guinea at the seaside. Anyway, I really hadn't wanted to see anymore of him than I already did, but I got bored with my mom and her dumb kid sister, so I turned my attention to the dance floor.

"Macho Man" was now in his street clothes, dancing with some girls and waiting for me to make eye contact, which I then did, and WHAM! that was it. He came over to talk to us, asked me to dance, and then we did. My mom went back to her sister, barely noticing me until later on, when the dancing got tighter and closer, and the lights blinked on and off. Uh oh. This was a highly public display for me, something I didn't often do in front of family, because the bitchy repercussions weren't worth the few minutes of attention I got. My mom had sobered up a bit for the drive home, and then she was on us like a harpy, eyes flashing with anger, her nails dragging along my arm and digging in, because she loved scratching me as warning signs to more aggression.

"Do you now how old she is?!!" My mom spat out the words into his face while she pulled me away him. "Uh, no. She told me she was 19!" He looked really young then, too, and startled at this New York mom outburst, which was probably a lot like the spiteful guinea mutha he had at home, waiting for his tip money to put into the family till. "Well she's only 17 years old!!" She screamed it out, and by then, we had made a scene. With the house lights on, he and I looked very young, like the teenagers at the beach that we were, caught red-handed at having a good time. It was all for the best; he wanted to go further with me, and that I couldn't do. I probably would have thrown up in the sand, just like "The Uker" rep I had earned at that summer's first trip to the beach with my friends in lieu of senior prom, and I was just getting started. It was the summer of 1987. Anything was possible.


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

Games that Suck(ed)

Mission impossible, now ready for your 7 year old hands.

Board games of the past were usually about freaking you out, by proving to you (once again) that being a kid means you have no control over life (just like the game called "Life" that goes on forever), and that your tiny hands can actually do jack-shit because you do not have superior motor control, yet (like your dad who loves to beat kids at their own games). Topping the list for us was "Operation", which has all of the hallmarks of a bullshit game designed by adults who actually hate you at your level.

It had small pieces that went missing the same Christmas morning you excitedly opened it on (probably swallowed by the dog, which means you have to "pooper scoop" for days in the yard to look for it, then wash off the dog crap after you do find it and pick it out of said crap wearing rubber gloves), then when you do have all parts required AND assembled (with your dad who hates holiday mornings with hammers and screws, because he basically escaped from the 'hood by following motor skills to the Navy, which he also hated, and then into white collar work, so this brings back all those bad mornings with his alcoholic parents who drank their pay away and bought no gifts, while you wait for him to angrily burn off his Christmas energy and make your game), a friggin' pair of adult-sized tweezers so other kids can watch your hand shake all over the place with tension and nerves over some stupid game that (to them) has the very fate of the world at stake, with this scary loud alarm that instantly sets your heart racing uncontrollably with a flashing red light that goes off, to let everyone near you know that, yeah, you suck at this game, too. 

So basically, like a really bad, totally dysfunctional, and typically broke-ass working class New York Christmas morning (with or without the hangover,) which me and my bro re-enacted for ourselves and the next generation by working through it one morning at Grandma's place, building an extremely complicated Transformer-like obstacle course with over 100 separate pieces for his totally freaked-out oldest son who doesn't like anything not to work ever, so he stood by us tensely monitoring our progress, alternating crying and occasionally nail-biting within plain sight because my werewolf Malamute unknowingly swept his very large tail all over our work up to that point, thus creating yet another starting point for us to panic over anew.

Up there with the rest of this water torture entered arcade games, designed to rip you off in under 15 seconds flat. Scammers, man. Also, here's a strong "Fuck you! " to the creators of Pacman, Ms. Pacman, and dumb-ass Donkey Kong. Take that! I hated you all >:o( Super Mario Brothers, Intellivision's Pitfall, Tetris, and Wolfenstein may stay with the new computer, but you must go. Go now!

 

Fudgie the Whale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carvel_%28restaurant%29

New York kids grew up with Carvel ice cream cakes. It's what we wanted for every birthday, and so did our friends, because our parents would never buy that for just any old day. They were specially ordered through a storefront here in New City, and they were customized, but only so much. You could choose the ice cream flavors, that toothpaste shit passing for icing, and some of the colors, but that was about it, because (and here's the funny part), Carvel was so 'round-the-way "flavid", that they were broke-ass like only a really successful tri-state chain would be: one mold, five different kinds of cakes.

And that was the really fun part: guessing the mold's origin in the latest homemade commercial, because "Fudgie the Whale" was also "Cookie Puss" (a weird alien-like creature with a bizarre helium voice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooky_Puss), or (given the holiday), that banged up-looking cornucopia NOW ON SALE FOR THANKSGIVING!!! It was designed to hide the mold pan's original intent: capture the imagination of every area kid on the block by turning that one mold a bunch of different ways, aided and assisted by the creative use of icing.

They were sometimes rough looking and dumb. but I defy you to find brown cookie crunch crumble shit that's bettah. You won't homeboy. It's that good. "Yeah, gimme some more with that toothpaste crap. Hit me with it, bro!" It won't last forevah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_Puss.

"Hi! I'm 'Cookie Puss!', and I'm out of this world!'" Wha the...?

Enjoy the summer, friends.

 
Special shout-out to Howard Stern and the rest of crew for representing our interests and the insanely wacky New Yawk lifestyle, because it ain't funny if it ain't done in "that accent"*. You know the one! Enjoy The Hamptons, yo. "After 40 years of hard work you're a real success!" (Thanks, Cashflow.)

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

James Hendricks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(For Jim)

Going to Graceland

We were much more Beatles fans than Elvis fans growing up in my household, a distinction in tastes sharply noted in "Pulp Fiction", in an infamous scene between John Travolta and Uma Thurman. My college boyfriend was an Elvis fan from Brooklyn, which is sort of like being an urban cowboy. It didn't fit, but he liked to cop tastes contrary to the norm to appear different, like sporting a beret or wearing an ascot.

And so I found myself going to Graceland one summer, on an epic road trip that spanned the South to my Dad's place in West Texas. I love road trips, finding them much more preferable to horribly bumpy and terribly turbulent flights that go against the Gulf Stream, a fact that was confirmed for me when my Colorado boyfriend began private pilot lessons. It's gotten worse, too, from compulsive over-travelling brought on by a runner's type of fast pace neurosis that's as addictive as their high sugar and highly caffeinated lifestyles. Chemtrails are the sign that you've polluted the sky, you ugly American.

My exes would fight me on my American preference for the open road, but given my quickness of mind, I usually won out, as I did in this case, because my Brooklyn boyfriend didn't have a driver's license or a car. He was captive to me and my advanced skill sets, a state of affairs that never abated during our acquaintance, much to his chagrin. I made the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia my first day driving, to a smog-filled summer's day that took the wind out of my sails for the rest of the trip. Going to some tourist trap to see the housed remnants of a overdosed singer I never really liked? Great. What a way to spend my summer.

Two days later, I brought us to the state of Tennessee, for a tour of Elvis Presley's house. My very stoned boyfriend was so out of it from getting high in the parking lot, he blurted out that he wanted to see "EVERYTHING!", when the ticket agent asked him which tour he wanted. We'd been flagged by the golf cart security duo as outsiders, for walking towards the house from the graffitied walls outside the grounds, when you were supposed to know to go across the street to buy a ticket, even though no signs were posted with instructions to do so. When he found out that it would cost us over $150 (in 1988, on a working class college kid's budget), he blanched white, and in an embarrassed whispered aside, I told him to just do the house tour.

It was horrible. Priscella still lived in the top floors when she was in town, so we went past his recording studio and racketball court to an impromptu grave site in their backyard, which gave me a blessed moment of silence among the weird hick crowd, who worshipped him like he was some sort of demigod. They also toured his tour buses, his car collection, his costumes, his airplane collection (one of which was named the "Lisa Marie"), and a movie theater that showed his films exclusively. I half-heartedly bought a couple of tepid souvenirs in the gift shop, and then we got back on the road.

My naive New York City boyfriend didn't know how much trouble I steered him out of, until we stopped at a gas station in Mississippi, with a visibly pregnant (and cigarette smoking) woman talking with the clerk behind the counter. They both narrowed their eyes at us when we walked in, eyeballing his dopey "CULTURE" t-shirt, with the word emblazoned over a picture of 70s rhinestone jumpsuit Elvis visiting the White House, posing with Nixon in the Oval Office and shaking hands. He wanted to make an ironic hipster statement that was cutesy "tongue in cheek", and definitely not appreciated by them, which was backed up by our brief exchange with the rural couple at the counter.

The large beer-bellied clerk said to him: "What does that t-shirt mean, boy?" My young boyfriend nervously deferred to him with two palms up, in a conciliatory gesture: "Oh, we've just been to Graceland. It was awesome!." I paid for the gas and asked for smokes, while the two hicks pondered his statement. After a very long pause with continued staring, the large man finally said to us: "Well, we worship him around these here parts." And with that, we were back on the road, albeit with a much more sober and quiet white kid from the city sitting next to me.

Happy trails to you America, on all of your summer road trips. For most of the masses, this is prime vacation season. Just be sure to steer clear of rural areas that worship dead, drug-addicted rock stars. See you 'round the way, mes amis.

CULTURE

Queen of Denial (A River in Egypt)

Life in tha 'hood can be fun, challenging, scary, tense, and totally inaccurate, all at once. In a quest for self-determination and a carefully calculated cutting of ties with the past (to create a false new one), folks often made up versions of their selves, in lieu of access to any real information. Enter into downtown Brooklyn me and my friend from school daze, an actual African-born woman from Ghana, which created a weird dynamic around her wherever she went, fueled by Spike Lee's wildly exaggerated and often misguided tales of Brooklyn, designed to shock and amaze his exotic-seeking (and rich) white audiences.

L.I.U.'s downtown campus was exactly what Fulton Street was at the time: an almost totally black neighborhood, with a few Hispanic girls thrown into the mix for "diversity". I was given a free ride to Howard University back in the day, because black campuses struggled to right a segregation not of our generation's creation, but it was a hard way to go. Many of the kids we met in the late 80s had never spoken to a "white" girl before, so me and my suburban friend felt as adrift and lost at sea as my ancestors were in their boat rides over.

It made for some comic times that were colored darkly, like a group of earnest but completely unrealistic young men who sought freedom of expression through their public exposition on their collective hatred of "the white man", but not literally, of course (just in case I was the "PoPo" undercover and at work in their college dorm room environment, at the tender age of 18). They mocked my friend's "white" accent, which is actually a fairly standard New York one, as she ripped into them for their phony Ebonics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebonics).

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

In the glow of Junior's cheesecake and fried chicken joint, we were forced to improvise identities for the sake of our protection while we walked the streets, and with my ethnicities, it was pretty easy for me to do. I slicked back my hair into a "fly" ponytail and painted my lips bright red, swinging my head 'round with big ghetto-sized silver hoops. It gave me room to breathe and "pass", but I still looked at Dr. Zizmor's* ads for ripped earlobe surgery with trepidation. It was the violent girl gang thang to do back in the day; sneak up on a 'ho, and rip the earring right the fuck off her ear. 
Don't even think about wearing gold or fancy sneaks on the train, which I didn't. I couldn't have afforded the gear anyway. *(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Zizmor)

And so I was privy to conversations most average white people have never heard, like how "The Man" keeps us down: "Right, sista?" said one Latino girl (no, not the ancient Latin kind of Holy Roman) to me, as she turned to me listening in, on the edge of a group in front of campus, for support. It was a shock, and I hitched in a tiny breath no one noticed without skipping a brief beat: "Yeah, girl!", and I was in.

Little did we know the depths of American ignorance about the lands they'd been ripped out of, because most of them did not know that my girl from school was actually Ghanaian from the real west coast of Africa. They'd flown over on a plane though, and had an above-ground swimming pool that I certainly didn't have. None of them could really know us, because the truth would put our lives in real danger, but we laughed about it in private and behind closed doors. Oh, shit! That girl really believes she's descended from some Egyptian Pharaoh? Is that where she think she from, girl?! Fuuuuck!

Because, you see, me and my friend from school knew one very pretty and very real first generation Egyptian-American girl named Dahlia growing up: a perfectly lovely name for a ringleted girl of olive complexion from a Christian family in Egypt, and someone who is most definitely NOT Kush or Nubian, but that's a story for another day. 

For now, let's look to the blood for our real genetic history, because the blood doesn't lie. The truth will out! See you 'round the way, some day or another, mes amis. 

Your homework for today, 'hood rats:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia
http://bit.ly/1Lr7oOm 

Free

For Madiba.

Around the Way: New Jersey Diners

Cocktails and eats, from way back when.

The only really late night game in our town was either White Castle, or quietly stumbling around your parents kitchen in a quest for drunk food. Jersey, a scant ten minutes away by car, had it so much better: the all-night diner. And the great thing about diners is, the menu is long (for any type of craving) and the food from most places is actually really, really good. Most of the family joints were Greek owned and operated, so you could count on a certain type of quality.

Passing by this empty building one afternoon on a bus back from the city, I felt a nostalgic sadness for a bygone late night life that I never had in Rockland. I bet it hit locals hard to see their go-to joint close down. I am happy to see the Hudson Valley emerge as a happening fine dining kind of place, because with the kind of produce we have here, it's the perfect marriage of locale matched with interest. Enjoy!

Food, glorious food: 

http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/food/.