My Origin Story

 

If I go back to the beginning, if I start all the way back…

maybe I can figure myself out.

 

—–

 

I wasn’t always the *happening* chick you see on social media. I was a skinny unattractive nerd, a white outcast in an all-black neighborhood who got her ass kicked on the regular.

I grew up on Staten Island –  The Land That Time Forgot. It’s the only borough the New York subway system doesn’t run through, and this isolation from civilization has turned it into a caricature of itself. The amount of hairspray used on Staten Island is solely responsible for the hole in the ozone.

It also houses the world’s largest dump. A metaphor if there ever was one.

 

I grew up in one of the worst housing projects in all of New York City – The Stapleton Projects. My mom was a widow with six kids, and we were poor as fuck.

But fuck you, we had an elephant.

 

Mom did the best she could raising the six of us, and that best included beating the snot out of us. I got my ass beat inside and outside the house, so I suppose my childhood wasn’t very safe. I wasn’t aware of it then. Who has time to process psychobabble when you’re scrambling around, dodging beatings?

I do know that my mother’s approval was sacred to me, and I never got it. Nor any attention, unless it was at the receiving end of her fist.

This was how I began to mistake abuse for love. This was how I learned that if I just tried hard enough, if I did better, was better, I could make abusive people love me. 

 

You know how kids just LOVE hearing about their parents’ childhood?

Little Dude’s favorite anecdote of mine?

The time I was walking down the dark, dank staircase in my building. I was 7. I grabbed the railing, and felt something furry and warm. There, sticking up out of the banister at the foot of the stairs, was a dead cat’s bloody dismembered head. Still warm.

Ah, memories…

 

Stapleton was made famous as the birthplace of the Wu-Tang Clan. They went to school with me and NO I DO NOT KNOW THEM.

Wu-Tang was a gangsta rap group, back in the day when gangsta rap meant you had a prison tattoo and an unlicensed gun, not a trust fund and a beach house. I was a flat chested nerdy ginger growing up in a gangsta rap video.

Pippi Longstocking meets Ghostface Killah.

 

I grew up confused. I possessed a white-hot rage, but a desperate desire to love and be loved. I had a profound appreciation for the underdog, and a project girl’s survival instinct. If you fuck with me, or my kid, I will Take You Down. My Stapleton instincts have quelled some, but not entirely. You can take the girl outta the projects, BUT.

 

 

 

As I kid I was desperate to find an escape and an outlet. So I read. Constantly, because we were poor and books were available. And I wrote stories, to make sense of the world around me.

At 9, I tried to wrap my brain around “A Wrinkle In Time,” a masterpiece of Inter-dimensional time travel and quantum physics. This book twisted my mind up to where 39 years later, it has still not fully recovered.

 

I came from a family of overachieving geniuses. Five brothers, all brilliant, all musicians. My older brothers gave me an invaluable education in every genre of music.

And then-

In one of the true defining moments of my life, my older brother put a copy of Patti Smith’s debut single “Hey Joe,” into my 11-year-old hands.

Patti Smith. Skinny, brainy, gangly, unpopular.

 

In the 1970’s, Patti Smith put her poetry to punk music and was eventually crowned Godmother of Punk.

The B side of her first single is “Piss Factory,” an ode to New Jersey factory work, and the experience of getting her head shoved into the toilet by the other workers.

 

She became my idol. Patti Smith gave me hope that I could escape, and reinvent myself somewhere. Someday.

 

The only public transportation to get to Manhattan is via the Staten Island Ferry, which is like the Love Boat – only when you get off, you automatically have herpes.  When I was growing up, the ferry was seedy and dilapidated. It sells beer and used to allow cigarette smoking, so at 2 am on a Saturday night, it was filled with homeless people and drunken degenerates.

The summer of 1982, I was going on 13 and about to enter high school. I fell in with a group of older kids and we starting taking that sordid ferry into Manhattan, the gritty, grimy, pre-gentrified graffiti-ridden city of the 80’s.

The Village was our playground. We bought loose joints and hung out with street musicians. We carried a boom box the size of a suitcase and blasted it as we roamed downtown.

We had a THEME SONG (don’t judge):

 

The following summer I enrolled in a New York City program that allowed poor slum kids to obtain their working papers at 13.

My first job – The Public Library.

The library owned every banned book – but did not circulate them. All illicit books were sequestered away in a super-duper top-secret file cabinet with a big-ass sign labeling it “Banned Books.” I cleverly unearthed these nuggets of literary rebellion.

And read every motherfucker in that file.

 

I discovered On the Road, an American classic of crazy adventure and freedom, and riddled with drugs, jazz, drugs, sex, and drugs.

I tore through Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.

Naked Lunch? This isn’t a novel; it’s a twisted series of disturbing, drug ridden, sexually explicit vignettes. Burroughs wrote it while living in Tangiers, in a one-room apartment above a male whorehouse, strung out on smack and male prostitutes.

This was the shit I was feeding my 13 year old brain.

Are things starting to come together?

I THOUGHT THEY MIGHT.

 

We finally moved when I was in high school. Were you hoping for the happy ending?

Not. So. Fast.

Back in those days, if you were “bright,” you got “skipped” so I was 2 years younger than most kids in my grade. Get the picture? No more scary gangsta projects.

Instead, we’re talking TRAINING BRA in the GYM LOCKER ROOM. I think my pal Ghostface Killah did less damage to my psyche.

So, to heal all those psychic hits on my ego? I read. I listened to music. I wrote.

And I planned my escape.

 

I eventually got out of the projects when I left for college. The very first summer, I decided I would stay in my college town instead of going home for the summer. What was there for me?

 

I never went home again.

 

 

If I go back to the beginning, if I start all the way back

maybe I can figure it out…

 

To be continued. 

 

Have you ever tried to figure out how you came to be who you are? 
Tell me about your childhood. 
Talk to me. I’m listening.

My Instagram Crush

 

Well, that was bound to happen. After all, I’ve been on Instagram – what, a whole month?

 

What IS it with me and social media? How is it that I can get attracted to someone who I’ve never touched?

I’ve had mad crushes on people I’ve met blogging. Too many.

I fell in love with Jennie Saia after only blogging a few weeks, and only 2 weeks after “meeting” her. I actually declared my love for her in the comment section of a post I felt in every cell of my body. It’s there now, for all eternity – or until she shuts down her blog.

Jennie in real life turned out to be pretty much the same as Jennie on the blog. It’s very disappointing when you have feelings for someone based on how they write, or the personality they portray online, only to find they’re not at all like that when you really get to know them.

The Honoré de Balzac school of “be sexually charming and financially wise in your literary work, while in real life be a complete asshole who dies broke and in debt.”

I suppose I’m guilty of that. My blog persona is much tougher and care free, and way less needy and crazy, than me in real life.

 

I had a pointless, unsatisfying, destructive emotional affair with someone via Facebook. I was ripe for that one.

I’d just spent several months at the receiving end of a vicious hate campaign directed at me because my writing mentor was accused of being a predator and ousted offline. I would have grown attached to Hitler if he contacted me online and acted kind and sympathetic.

Actually, Hitler probably would have been less disingenuous. The whole experience was so bizarre I’m writing a book about it. You’ll have to wait for that one to come out to get those juicy details.

 

I’ve been temped on Twitter. I’ve been direct messaged by some really cute (I guess?) people who wanted to get to know me, but Twitter doesn’t do it for me. It’s like trying to connect with someone in a hippodrome while thousands of people shout to no one in particular “HEY LOOK AT ME HEY LISTEN HEY LOOK AT ME ME ME ME!”

 

I originally opened an Instagram account because I had broken up with Facebook after being booted off. I was told that people connected at BlogHer through instagram.

In the end, anyone I wanted to meet up with I texted, or, if I didn’t know their phone number, we tweeted one another. As a matter of fact, it was fun getting tweets from people like Kitten Holiday so we could announce online in front of all our followers just how awkward we felt at BlogHer:

 

 

 

I like Instagram. I can get in, and get out and catch up with the latest adventures of friends and fellow bloggers. I don’t get sucked into a social media black hole; where I spend 10 minutes that morphs, through cyber alchemy, into 2 hours.

I don’t have much to say on Instagram; most people I follow don’t. A few words to caption your picture, some cool #hastags to encourage people to land on your photo. I have to stop myself from hashtagging every photo I post with “This is how we #fuckshitup.” It would make no sense, but still, the urge is there.

So what do I post? Rock tee shirts of the day, or skull tees of the day, usually. One or two pictures of my face from when I attended BlogHer, the first weekend I had my account.

Because I am a woman, and I don’t post pictures that attest to a husband or boyfriend, I receive direct messages on Instagram from men. I’m always a little surprised. My snarky personality is not at all in evidence; I say very little. I’m not scantily clad; although the very first picture I posted was the infamous one that showed up in the WordPress Reader, me in my bondage bra.

I snapped the pic and posted it because after I checked into the hotel, I realized that walking through the lobby of the Hilton clad in my bra was now off my bucket list, and I felt like commemorating the occasion with photographic evidence.

I ignore the messages.

Usually.

A really good looking English guy with a muscular physique and lots of ink starting “liking” all my rock tees and we followed each other. I say he’s English, but I really don’t know except he called me his “favourite” and I hope he’s not Canadian.

He appears to be traveling the world, or at least Europe, and I believe his home is in England. I’ve no clue. I know very little about him but he’s dead sexy to look at and he has a habit of captioning his photos with rock lyrics.

I’m a nerd with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of rock lyrics. I held back responding to his captions with the next line of the song so I wouldn’t seem like I was being a know-it-all until the day he posted a line from my favorite Patti Smith song, “Rock And Roll Nigger.” He wrote “outside of society” and I responded with “That’s where I want to be.”

He wrote that he couldn’t believe I knew that, and I answered that I couldn’t believe everyone else didn’t. It’s a fucking great song.

Seriously. Stop right this second and listen to it on YouTube. There isn’t one single thing I, or anyone for that matter, has to say that is more important than you listening to this song RIGHT THIS SECOND. I would post the video here but then it will show up in the Reader as my post image (ha, in your FACE WordPress, I am on to your trickery!)

It progressed from there. He would post a picture from where he was in the world, captioning it with a song lyric (“Look at those cavemen go”) and I would respond with the next lyric (“It’s the freakiest show”) and so on.

I got a direct message from him and I was instantly nervous. It’s SUCKS donkey balls when you open up a message from a man you don’t know and it’s a dick pic. And I liked his taste in music as well as his tattoos and muscles, so I did not want a reason to dislike him.

It was just this: “You drive me crazy.”

He’s only seen my covered torso. I don’t say anything flirty or sexy in any of my captions. Why was I driving him crazy? Was this a good thing?

So I asked him “is this a good thing?”
Apparently, it was. And so, it began.

 

Why do I develop crushes on people I’ll likely never meet? Won’t ever touch or hug or probably never even hear?

I suppose everyone who’s everyone had an online crush has a reason. For me, it’s safe. I can invest just a part of me, maybe more than I wanted intentionally, but certainly not the same amount I would invest in a real life person I was involved with.

It’s like having a de facto boyfriend, which is Latin for “my therapist is gonna love hearing about this guy.” You can’t get hurt, although in truth I did get hurt with that Facebook debacle, but that was only because he convinced me that we were having a “real” relationship and I bought it.

I won’t get fooled again.

I’m seeing someone in real life. Is it crazy that, at this moment, I like Instagram Man better?

Don’t answer that.

 

Did you ever have an online crush? (You KNOW you have). Was it fun? Can you talk about it even? 
If you can, then talk to me.  I’m listening. 

Follow me on Instagram so I look popular.

A SLUT, A WHORE, A BLOGGER, A MOM

 

 

I may incite the rage of many people, in this day of sexual harassment, objectification of women and rape culture. But I’m going to say it.

I’M A SLUTTY WHORE. 

Jarring? Perhaps. If you don’t feel something when I write, then I’m doing it wrong.

 

Is it bad to be a slutty whore? When did that happen?

I thought that whole stifled sexuality thing went out in the 50’s. By 1969, wanton Woodstock nymphos were taking on bushy haired bohemians two at a time in the mud at Yasgur’s farm, urged on by Country Joe and the Fish.

He spelled out F-U-C-K to the crowd. They did it.

They just don’t make rock festivals like they used to

 

They were slutty whores.

I love being a slutty whore.  Not being labeled one by others.

ON MY TERMS.

The words “slut” and “whore” are aggressive. But I will not let society control me with the use of these words.

Being labeled “slutty whore” by others is abhorrent. In a patriarchal society, there is an inherent danger in these words. Because these words support Rape Culture. Blaming the victim is the dark side of the American Way.

There are compelling reasons to support sensitivity around the use of these words; why feminists fight against the use of these words.

Sexual harassment is UGLY. Objectifying women is UGLY.

.

Still, I’M A SLUTTY WHORE.

And simultaneously, a card carrying feminist.

I’m wholly independent, and always have been. I’ve supported myself since I was 16 years old, and support a child as well. On my own.

If that’s not female empowerment, in a world where not only are women competing against men for jobs, but where we are all competing in a global environment for gainful employment, than nothing is.

 

I’m not always a slutty whore. In this moment, I’m in a thick fluffy purple bathrobe and slippers.

I’ve just fed Little Dude homemade chocolate chip cookies and milk, and he’s doing his homework while I write. I’m in full-on Mom Mode.

Homework really fucks with Mama’s cocktail hour

 

But later on, tonight maybe? Will I be a slutty whore?

Hopefully.

 

There are many situations in which being a slutty whore is a positive thing.

1. In Bed with Your Man (or Woman)

Here is where you should be the sluttiest whore you can. This is a key component to sheet ripping sex.

If you love the person, all the better. Extra credit if you’re married. Triple extra credit if you’ve been married 10 years or more.

Can you imagine couples married for 20 years with enough fire in the relationship for the wife to want to be a slutty whore in bed? That’s extraordinary. It’s a 2-decade hot and heavy romance, and that is PURE GOLD.

 

2. Going Out/Escaping Real Life

When I was in my 20’s, I went out clubbing in New York all the time, and yes, I frequently dressed like a slutty whore. That’s what your 20’s are for.

These days, I’m a working mom. I’m in total denial about my age, which is somewhere between 30 and none of your business. I rarely go out, and when I do, Saturday nights at Applebee’s is not the forum for a slutty outfit.

BUT – don’t we all, even just once in a great while, need to put on a costume and play at being something we’re not? Don’t we all occasionally need that brief respite from being a Parent and a Grown Up and a Super Responsible Human Being?

Last December, I saw Patti Smith perform at a club in New York. I was meeting up with college friends I hadn’t seen in 22 years.

I went all out and dressed goddamned slutty to pay homage to my High Priestess of Rock.

I wore black, skin-tight, low-cut clothing and high-heeled, over the knee black boots.

These boots were NOT made for walking

 

Little Dude actually blocked the door.

“MOM! You can’t leave here LOOKING like that!”

It was the first time he’d ever seen Mama look like a rap video ho, and he did not like it one bit. He’s fine, now that I’m back in the fuzzy bathrobe. Hopefully, he hasn’t been scarred for life.

 

3. Shopping For Lingerie.

My college BFF fought a brutal battle against breast cancer. An entire year of pure torture. But she fought like an amazon warrior. She recently had her reconstruction done, and we went online and ordered a cornucopia of bras. A lot of them were super charged, high octane slutty bras that say,

“HELLO, WORLD. CHECK THESE PUPPIES OUT. I’M ALIVE, AND I’M HERE.”

Because if ever a woman needs to feel that way, it’s her after what she endured this past year.

Her boobs will damn sure be saying “Hello!”

 

4. Writing.

I’m not talking about writing erotica (although by all means, do. Whatever tickles your pickle.) I’m talking about using those words when you write.

“Slutty whore” is an incredibly evocative phrase. When you write, “I was such a slutty whore when I was in high school,” we know JUST the girl you were.

Words inform the mind.

They thrill and excite, kindle the flame, affect as powerfully as physical actions.

Wordplay is life. Handle with care, but USE them.

 

5. Out With the Girls

It’s like African Americans using the N-word. Outside the community, it’s a racial slur. Inside the community, it’s an expression of solidarity. My girlfriends and I have reclaimed those words, and if we want to banter with them, by God, we will.

They’re multiple meaning words. We can use them to express appreciation or dismay. For example:

“Ooh! Where did you get THOSE, you whore?” might be said to my girlfriend who has on the perfect pair of stiletto ankle boots.

“WHORE!” I might say to the same girlfriend, when she shows up 30 minutes late for coffee.

Any excuse to use a Regina George reference.

 

To use these terms pejoratively is one thing.

But to describe yourself that way in a celebration of your own uninhibited freedom;

to rejoice in the escape from your everyday world of work/mom/PTO drudgery;

to bond with friends in an exclusive language that allow you to metaphorically take back the night;

to be evocative with words; words – the lifeline that connects this cherished community online comrades;

Right now, I’m not a slutty whore.

I’m a writer.  And I want to know how you feel about those words. 
Talk to me. I’m listening. 

I Still Have More Depraved Stories To Tell

I know I’ve been shirking on my own blogging duties.

Never fear. I still have absolutely NO FILTER, and will continue to blog about dildoes, whorehouses and killing off annoying Dance Moms. 

 

I could do an ENTIRE post on how the Moms just acted when I picked up Little Dude from his last day of school.

They were all in a gaggle.

Videotaping this momentous occasion. And not just on IPhones – on videocameras.

Dressed in frocks, like the Kindergarten Mom Mafia. 

Hair done. Makeup perfect.

It’s fucking 11:50 AM. Where are you going all dolled up like that? Shoprite?

Out to lunch, maybe? I got NEWS for you.

You don’t need to get all groomed for Chili’s, you know?

I’m not wearing anything nice to that hellhole. Grease stains NEVER come out.

One french fry smeared hand touching your shirt – and you’re SCREWED.

 

I was clean. Hell, I had just washed my hair, even!

Okay, so maybe I had this teeshirt on:

I’m not Patti Smith. I just think i am.

 

But that’s only because I slept in it.

What? The school is at the end of the block. They’re lucky I even put pants on.

At least I walk.

The other people on my block DRIVE THERE.

Yes. They DO.

 

And you think they’d be use to how I dress around here.

I’m not outlandish.

It’s not like I look like Skeeze Princess Courtney Love, stumbling out of a shooting gallery, in all her full-blown herpes glory:

 

I kinda liked her like this.

 

Anyway.

The reason I’ve been MIA is, I’ve been incredibly busy over on our new blog collective, The SisterWives!

And you really need to visit there.

Because:

 

That’s the post image.

We’re really learning this new theme as we go along.

Thank God for Deanna, because she’s the other admin, and she KNOWS STUFF.

Anyway, we put it up at after the post went live.

In a frenzy, because we realized that without a post image – the post would not show up as current.

Here’s a glimpse at the behind the scenes drama:

 

   

 

That’s SISTERWIVES TEAMWORK, YO!

That is how we roll!

(My favorite part is when Deanna tells me to “iPiccy that shit”)

iPiccy is an image editing program that I use, and am completely inept at.

 

Okay. Stop by the Sisterwives blog, and find out why Deanna is dressed as Wonder Woman. (Besides the fact that she likes to.)

 

Peace out,

Samara

I Walked In At 7 am; Dirty, Drunk…

 

…my shoe was broken.

My 10 year old lectured me.

“It’s morning, Mama! Do you realize it’s MORNING??”

I was about to tell him not to lecture ME; I was the mom here.

I opened my mouth. And hurled into the kitchen sink.

 

This is all the doing of my college BFF.  She is a walking cyclone.

A full throttle unrepentant trouble maker.

She’s been my partner in crime over 25 years, ever since we were freshman in college.

We were the lone New York girls adrift in a sea of lame Midwestern chicks.

 

My BFF is a tough ass Latina chick from the South Bronx, a hard core rock and roller, and an empty nester.

This is a deadly combo.

She had her kids as soon as we graduated college, and after over 20 years of marriage, got divorced.

She was diagnosed last fall with Stage 3 breast cancer.

 

She lives every day as if it were her last.

 

In college, our mayhem was legendary.

I’m not just talking about our Intergalactic Voyage parties; in which we distributed pharmaceutical grade LSD to hundreds of students so they could get zonked out of their gourds.

I mean, literally legendary.

She is actually written into the pledge book of a popular fraternity at our alma mater.

She was so butt-toast hammered in the back of a limo en route to a fraternity formal, that she dropped a lit joint in her lap.

Her dress caught fire.

She looked down and deadpanned,

“Holy shit, I’m on fire.”

To this day, when a freshman is pledging that frat, and has to memorize facts in the pledge book,

one of the questions asked is, “Who said, ‘Holy shit, I’m on fire’?”

The answer? My BFF.

 

We both idolize Patti Smith, and when her birthday concert was announced for last December 30, we bought tickets. Immediately.

Patti was playing at Webster Hall, a club in Manhattan 2 blocks from my old apartment in the East Village.

Lot of memories from that place.

Dating all the way back to when it was The Ritz, a premier rock club in the 1980’s.

 

She and I and our freshman year boyfriends drove to Manhattan from upstate NY to see shows there.

Over the college years we had other boyfriends.

But we stayed friends with these two, because of our love for music.

And each other.

 

Freshman year, the 4 of us we saw the Beastie Boys at The Ritz over Christmas break.

Sophomore year, the 4 of us saw The Ramones at the Ritz for my birthday in September.

The Ramones. I could do a whole blog post on Joey Ramone. I will, someday.

Senior year, the 4 of us saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I still remember the exact set list, because we stole it off the stage.

 

Since divorcing, she’d rekindled her romance with her college flame, R, who was also divorced and living in Brooklyn.

He was still best friends with M, my old college flame.

 

The last time I saw either of them, it was 20 years ago at a New Year’s Eve party at the Paramount Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

M was in law school in the city.

I was in a black rubber dress and heroin.

A lot had changed in the 4 years since we graduated.

 

When we found out that they were going to the same show, and wanted to meet up with us –

I shit a cold purple Twinkie.

It’s unnerving to see an old flame you haven’t seen in 20 years.

Of the four of us, M was the only one still married.  Apparently his marriage was on the rocks, and he was about to be separated.

 

Oh, shit. 

 

My BFF traveled to my house from Boston, and we spent the late afternoon making ourselves look like club sluts primping for our night out.

My kid FREAKED when he saw me dressed for the show.

 

I was in skin tight black clothing from head to toe, lots of cleavage showing, thigh high black stiletto boots, and more makeup than I normally wear in a week.

My poor kid. He blocked the door to try to prevent me from leaving.

“Mama – you can’t go OUT looking like that! Everyone’s going to LOOK at you!”

 

“Little Dude,” my BFF said, “that’s the whole point.”

 

We took the bus into the city. No driving tonight.

I planned to get a little buzzed that night, not inebriated.

I’m a total lightweight when it comes to alcohol.

I get stupid on half a glass of wine.

She, on the other hand, planned on getting rat-ass  kootered.

My girl can drink.

 

The club was packed with about 2,000 fans. All hail the Punk Poetess.

It was a bizarre mix of people; ranging in age from 20 to 60.

United only by the demographic of worshipping the Godmother of Punk.

R had texted her that they were at the bar of the club, near the back.

I spotted them as soon as we walked towards the bar.

 

That M.

He was still really cute.

He hadn’t changed a whole lot in 20 years.

It was like a time warp.

Almost instantly, everything was just like it used to be with the 4 of us.

The same exact energy was there.

 

Oh shit. 

 

M wanted to buy me a drink. I didn’t know what to have.

He suggested Vodka and Red Bull.

He told me it was “Refreshing. Like soda.”

 

He’s a FUCKING LIAR.

 

What happens is, you get drunk, but you’re so gorked on 5000 mg of caffeine, you don’t realize it.

So you keep drinking them.

Which is what I did.

 

The lights dimmed and the stage went black.

The band started to play the unmistakable and haunting opening strains to Lou Reeds, “Heroin.”

A few months earlier, Patti Smith had written a gorgeous eulogy to him when he died.

Her male counterpart, the Godfather of Punk.

 

Now, she was opening the night in an homage to him, and one of his greatest songs.

It took the audience a collective 5 seconds to recognize the song she was opening with – and then –

they went HOG WILD OFF THE WALLS FUCKING BONKERS BAT SHIT CRAZY.

2000 people screaming and clapping.

This is the kind of shit New Yorkers are famous for.

When it comes to honoring one of our own, it’s no holds barred.

 

I had so many emotions running through me that night.

This club. The location. My old neighborhood.

The opening song. Heroin. My demon.

My BFF

Her cancer.

These men. The boys we dated in college.

 

When we first spoke at the bar, M asked me about my husband.

“I’m not married anymore. I left him.”

He said,

“Of course you did. That’s what you DO.”

 

“Drunk” is an understatement to describe my condition.

Ossified. Comboozelated.

The kind of wasted where you lose your underwear (I didn’t.)

The show ended at 11:30.

The night went on forever.

 

I remember walking through the cold windy streets of downtown from one bar to another. And another.

I have no memory of where, exactly.

At some  point my shoe broke.

I think…I fell?

That would explain me getting so dirty.

Partly.

 

We ran the streets like we were 19.

My heart was free that night.

My mind traveled back in time, and I had no responsibilities.

No kid. No mortgage. No worries.

 

Things were said that shouldn’t have been.

Things happened that shouldn’t have.

 

We kept missing buses back to NJ.

The 2 am. The 3 am.

My BFF and I ended up on a 6am bus back to the suburbs.

We left the glittering city of hope and promise and rode the bus into the gray oppressive suburban morning.

I had no coat.

I had lost it at some point, and spent the night with M’s jacket around my shoulder.

 

The last thing I remember that night is him walking me on the bus – literally, onto the bus, taking his jacket back, and giving me a very soft kiss goodbye.

Just a peck on the lips.

And me looking up at him.

Then, I passed out.

 

 

M texted me the next day, and the day after that.

I never responded to him.

“Of course you did. That’s what you DO.”

I just heard through the grapevine he’s back with his wife.

Good.

 

 

We got off the bus and had no ride back to my house.

It was a mile walk.

I hobbled drunkenly, my shoe broken.

I fell again.

That would account for why I was dirty.

Partly.

 

I walked in my house at 7 am.

Dirty, drunk.

My shoe was broken.

My 10 year old lectured me.

 

My BFF started the worst 5 months of her life January 7th, one week after the concert.

The chemo nearly killed her.

She kept having seizures and almost fatal temperatures after every treatment.

After that, months of radiation burned her body to the point of blistering.

But she’s ALIVE.

 

We have tickets to go see an epic concert at The Stone Pony in July.

 

The Stone Pony is an iconic New Jersey venue. Bruce Springsteen started his career there, and is known for dropping in unexpectedly.

It’s in Asbury Park, right on the beach.

 

Our old college flames are thinking of getting tickets to the same show.

 

GOD HELP ME. 

 

 

Do you have that one friend who gets you into all kinds of trouble? Are you still friends with your college roommate?
Have you ever encountered an old flame, after a very long time?
Talk to me. I’m listening.