Guy
I used to go out with a guy named Guy. It wasn't his real name, but I never
heard anyone call him James, not even his sisters. He used to call me Maria
even though I corrected him on this a few times. His cousin Mousie knew. "Why
you always gotta call her Maria?," he'd go. "Her name is Marie. Right?" Mousie's
real name was unknown to me, but he had "Mousie" in an uneven prison style tattoo'd
over the knuckles of his left hand. Mousie had a crush on me and he had some
sort of weird fantasy of meeting up with me in a disco, me dressed in some flared
swinging red Qiana number, strappy sandals, my hair and make up done, and the
two of us would clear the floor doing the latin hustle. "I know you can move,
Marie. I know! Why you gotta listen to that punk rock shit?"
Guy was 21 and I was 15, which meant we couldn't legally have sex, but he could
buy me drinks. We'd stop by the stores first stop and get cigarettes (Newport
for him, Marlboro for me) and then next door at the liquor store he'd pick up
the vodka while I'd go to Waldbaums and get OJ. Then it was over to the bleachers,
sneaking through a hole in the fence since the gate to the high school football
field was locked after six. Guy would tell me these stories, like, "Maria, we
went to 2001 Oddessey and I banged this chick her tits were the size of your
head! Swaer to god, Maria." and I'd just go, "Uh huh." and sip my drink. Or
"Me and Mousie went to Studio and we got blow jobs from these pigs in their
Dadillac." And I'd be like, "Do you and Mousie have some sort of weird homosexual
relationship?" And he'd be like, "Aw, stop with the intellectual talk, Maria."
He broke up with me several times that summer, but the last time was in September.
I was back in school and I figured I could do better there, even though I'd
have to get a fake ID to buy my own liquor. After I refused to see him anymore,
he started following me around, showing up at places I'd hang out at, pestering
my friends. I vaguely remember an ugly scene in the laundry room of the Tysens
Apartments. It was raining that day and I got soaked running home with him chasing
after me. I met his sister several years later on the bus and she told me he
was in prison for armed robbery. "He still talks about you, Marie. You really
made some impression on him."
When Guy would call me on the phone, first thing he'd say is "Hey Maria! How
ya gonna act!" To this day, that statement baffles me.
Denny
Denny was a disco queen. Drunk off her ass, tettering around on high spiky heels,
hair curled and sprayed copiously, nails perfect. Drink sloshing over the rim
of her plastic cup. During a good song she'd get up on one of the cubes and
start freestyling, with a lot of high kicks. Once she kicked so high she pulled
a muscle.
Roz
Roz was a teen disco queen. Her usual outfit of choice was flat chinese slippers
(inexplicaly refered to as disco shoes), those sort of balloony genie pants,
and a bippy top. Her hair was usually piled in a modified Pebbles Flintstone
atop her head. Tons of black eyeliner, a maybelline pencil softened with a lit
match. And of course the disco bag, a small purse on a strap to wear over the
shoulder, only big enough to hold keys, a small wallet and cigarettes. Roz was
also surprisingly a virgin, so besides being a disco queen, she was a blow job
queen. Like Bill Clinton, Roz and her crew felt that only actual penile/vaginal
intercourse counted as sex.
I knew Roz through Janice, who I knew from shop class. Janice dropped out of
school during sophmore year because she had a first period class and she couldn't
get up early enough to take a bath a go through her two hour make up routine.
If she wasn't going to first period, she may as well miss the whole day, and
then the whole year. That was the way she thought. Sometimes I'd meet her sister
Joan during my free fourth period and we'd go down to the house and Janice would
still be sitting in the tub, smoking a Benson and Hedges and reading a trashy
novel. We'd remind Janice that it was 11:30 and she'd throw on her robe and
emerge from the murky water. Then we'd all sit around the kitchen table drinking
International Coffees, smoking, and reading the Weekly World News. Sometimes
Janice would meet us at Mr. Donut for our free period and we'd all sit at the
counter, this whole gang of want-to-be-bad girls: Janice, Joan, Roz, me, Anne
and some hangers on, drinking coffee and smoking and maybe sharing a donut.
After school we'd meet at Nathan's and play video games and smoke. We weren't
smoking as much as it sounds; most of us could make a pack last through a whole
school week. When we'd hang at Nathan's sometimes we'd look out the big plate
glass window into the parking lot and Joan would laughingly point out the cars
that Roz gave guys head in.
Ann
I knew Ann from bio class. Bio was 6th period, and before class we'd meet and
smoke a joint. I really didn't need to pay attention during bio anyway. Ann
and I formed a friendship when we discovered during the bloodtyping experiemnt
that we both had the same rare blood type, AB-. Since only .3% of the population
has this type, we skewed the curve for the class. Mr. Sinclair never let us
forget that.
Mr. Sinclair
Mr. Sinclair was our bio teacher. He was pretty young but kind of nerdy. We
liked him anyway. He was out for a few days because he had an accident with
a bagel--he sliced a big chunk off his thumb. One time when Ann and I were hanging
out a few blocks from school rolling a joint Mr. Sinclair caught us. All he
said was "Hello, ladies..." At the end of the year, our class bought him a bagel
slicer.
Mr. DiGiacomo
Mr. DiGiacomo was my geometry teacher. None of my friends were in this class
with me, because all the smart kids were already in trig, and my normal friends
didn't take math past algebra. I had a hard time with math since jr. high, mostly
because I couldn't see the blackboard, but somehow during the first week of
geometry everything just clicked. Mr. D used to give tests every day, and after
the first week of me getting 100 on every test I didn't have to take them any
more. He used to hand back the tests the next day, announcing each student's
grade to the class. "Ms. Winstead, a nice 80. Not bad, not bad. Mr. Romano..."
looking around for John Romano, "A big round goose egg. You keep this up Mr
Romano, this summer I'll be walking by the school, maybe I'll have a nice cold
can of coke in my hand, the can will be sweating, and I'll look in this window
and you'll be sweating just like the can, sitting in here taking geometry over
this summer, in this un-airconditioned classroom..." and so on. Since I didn't
have to take the tests, he'd let me grade the tests from the previous day while
the other kids suffered through writing proofs.
Guy
My grandmother and my cousins, who were a little older than me, loved Guy. They
thought he looked like a young Nick Nolte. Remember, this was a few years after
Rich Man Poor Man and I guess Nick Nolte was considered something of a sex symbol.
I think they were thinking of Guy as being a bit like a trophy boyfriend for
little nerdy punk rock me. I wasn't as beautiful as my cousins, yet somehow
I almost always had the better looking boyfriends. What I mean is that at least
my boyfriends had all their teeth.
Jim
Probably my worst-looking boyfriend was Jim. I was 15 and he was somewhere between
27 and 31, depending on whether you believed his driver's license or the police
report. His ugliness really didn't have anything to do with his physical attractiveness,
it was more the way he presented himself. His hair was cut in a non-cut, but
too short or too long to make any sort of statement. He wore completely the
wrong glasses. He occasionally had facial hair which didn't help matters. He
had one long fingernail, for cocaine. He always wore weird loose clothing that
sort of made him look like an out-of-work gas station attendant. He tried to
be punk rock and wear ripped-up stuff, but it just didn't work on him because
he was too fat and hairy. The winter that we went out was very cold and it was
always icy out and one time when we went to CBGBs he showed up at the ferry
terminal wearing cleats. I swear. Like golf shoes! I was like "Look, no way
can I be seen with you like this." I was a very snappy punk rock dresser and
I was probably wearing pink stockings and black ballet slippers and a black
k-mart slip underneath my gigantic parka. And he was like "But I won't slip!"
Like I cared.
Police report
Some time after I broke up with Jim, my mom saw a small item in the paper that
he had been arrested for assaulting someone with a baseball bat. The newspaper
listed his age as 31. My mom said, "I thought you said he was 27!" I was like,
"Ma, is there really much difference?"
My first boyfriend
Jim got my name and number from Tony, who got my name because I called him about
being in his punk rock band. Tony decided not to start a band, but Jim wanted
to, so he called me and then we started having sex because I felt it was time
to have sex. I certainly didn't love him or anything. I was 15 and I didn't
want to be the last one in my class not to have sex. I went to his house to
audition and we smoked a joint and made out and he opened his pants and put
my little hand on his hard-on, which seems like one of those canned snakes about
to spring out. It was kind of gross. The actual sex is sort of a blur because
it hurt and I was stoned and his mother was banging on the door saying, "Get
that spic out of your room!" We went out for eight months and the only time
I came was when I was alone. I'm not blaming anyone, that's just the way it
was.
After we were done having sex the first time, he asked me in a really sappy
quiet way, "why did you give me your cherry?" and I said "because it was time
for it to go." I was a very pragmatic 15 year old. We never did start a band,
but he had a bunch of possible names that included such winners as Orgazm. The
one we finally settled on was The Child Molesters. When me, Jim and Tony would
all go out and we'd get into conversations with people we'd always say we were
in a band together and they'd say "Oh yeah? Waddya called?" and Jim or Tony
would go "The Child Molesters!" and the other people would sort of look at me
and shake their heads. The joke being of course that I was the child.
threesome
Jim wanted to have a threesome with some other couple. I guess it would have
actually been a foursome. He started his campaign slowly, showing me porn of
girls kissing and fondling each other. He didn't have a VCR, he had one of those
old super-8 projectors and all the porn he had were those old stag reels that
were 3 minutes long and exceptionally boring. He'd show me this stuff and say,
"is that turning you on?" and I'd be like, "Didn't you promise to get me the
new Throbbing Gristle single?" or "I think I have some math homework I need
to do..." He worked his way up to more explicit group sex reels, not quite getting
that I was supremely uninterested in sex with him in any form. I wasn't even
considering that maybe the other people involved may have been interesting.
He still would have been there. Finally, one day in the car, he said to me "I
want to watch you have sex with a woman." I was like "Uh, that's nice, Jim.
I think I have to change my tampon. Can you pull over?" He started talking about
this other couple constantly. "She's really hot! I think you'll like her!" And
I was like, "What sort of woman do you think I'd like Jim? What evidence do
you have that I'd like any woman at all?" One day at his house he got us both
on the phone. She said, "So Jim says you're ready to have sex with a woman..."
And I said, "Uh, no. Jim is ready to watch me have sex with a woman. I personally
have no interest. And did you know I was 15?" She didn't, and that was the end
of that.
Car
Jim had this very ratty van that he bought for too much money. It never ran
right and always broke down, and then we'd have sex until someone came along
to tow us. It never did me any good, because he never wanted to bring it into
Manhattan, but it gave me somewhere warm to wait while he went into the porn
shops along route 1 in New Jersey. I was too young to go in.
One day he came out of the store with a pair of crotchless panties. "Look what
I got for you!," he exclaimed. He was so proud of himself. I was very blase
about the whole thing. "That's nice Jim. Where's that Undertones tape I lent
you?"
"Ain't you gonna put them on?"
"Well, that would imply that I wanted to have sex with you."
"..."
Later, when he dropped me off, as I was leaving the van he called out to me
"Don't forget these!," waving the panties. I said, "Jim! The last thing my mother
needs to find is a pair of crotchless panties in my underwear drawer. Get a
clue dude! You're dating a 15 year old! You could go to prison!"
Teenage kicks
Apparently though no one in my classes was having sex but me, so I became the
instant authority. Telling everyone how it hurt, how you couldn't sit down for
days, how they just plough away at you for what seems like hours with your legs
up in the air, how you look at that thing and think "how the hell is that going
to fit?" but they always make it fit. How they hold the back of your head down
when you give them blow jobs and how they squirt come all over your face when
they titty fuck you. How sometimes you have to pretend you're some 18th century
heroine and he's some guy you don't want to have sex with but he's promised
to spare the life of your beloved sheep if you fuck him. How sometimes it's
so dull you start thinking about your math homework.
Mike
The boy I really wanted to have sex with was Mike Walters. He sat in front of
me in AP English. He didn't always, but I changed my seat so I could gaze at
the back of his head during class. He was a tall skinny new-wave type, black
hair, brown eyes, trenchcoat. Played Riff-Raff at a Staten Island Rocky Horror
thing. I never fantasized about actually having sex with him, I just knew I
wanted to. I think. Anyway, I had a huge crush on him. I told Aimee one day
during gym class, and she and Jenny were seeing him that weekend because the
German club was going to dinner at some German brewhaus. So they told him. At
gym that Monday in the locker room Aimee and I are changing out of our shorts
and Aimee says to me, "I told Mike." I'm pulling down my shorts going uh huh,
you told Mike what?
"I told Mike you were in love with him..."
"What? What happened?" Jenny was laughing.
"We were all at Luchows..."
"Yes! I know! What happened! What did he say!" I was particularly freaked out
because English was my class right after gym.
"I said, 'Mike! guess who's in love with you!' and he said 'Who...?' and I said
'Marie!' ..."
"And..."
"And what?"
"What did he say!" I was grabbing Aimee and shaking her by the shoulders. Aimee
and Jenny were laughing.
"He said, 'Marie? She's so intelligent!'"
I was mortified. How could I show my face in class knowing that he thought of
me as intelligent? If he thought I was smart, he'd never want to have sex with
me.
AP English
In advanced placement English we had to read "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and
"Pride and Prejudice" over the summer, before we got to class. This fact alone
discouraged many from signing up for the class. Mr. Flynn was our teacher, and
he alternately used to call me The Dragon Lady and The Druid. When Mike said
I was intelligent I knew he was referring to one particular episode that occurred
during the first month of school. We had to analyze some poem, I don't remember
what exactly it was, something about spring and flowers, and Mike volunteered
to read his analysis to the class and his interpretation was just wrong. So
Mr. Flynn is feeling out the class and he says, "What does the class feel about
Mr. Walters' analysis?" and everyone murmured their agreements because even
in AP English most of the kids don't think and I raised my hand and said "NO!
This is no 'ode to spring'!" and Mr. Flynn is intrigued! And he says "Ms. Mundaca,
please, read your essay..." which he's already read, so he knows I'm right,
and I read it and that's it. It's all over. I went from punk rock girl to brainiac
in 3 minutes. Mr. Flynn made me read one sentence over. It was something like
"the poet disdains spring's 'perilous beauty.'" And he shook his head yes and
said, "Wonderful alliteration Ms. Mundaca." Even damn Yale-bound, Westinghouse
finalist Michelle Galliano is impressed.
Aimee
Aimee was my closest school friend in jr. high. You know how in junior high
you get thrown in with a bunch of kids from other elementary schools. Aimee
came from one of those other schools, but it turned out that her dad owned the
kennel where our dog stayed. Aimee and I were both nerds waiting to break out,
so we got teased a lot by girls who thought they were cooler than us. But, as
it turned out, the cool girls weren't cooler than us. We were drinking, smoking,
taking drugs and having sex, and they weren't. Aimee's older brother Timmy was
our pot and alcohol connection, and Aimee also borrowed from his library of
pornographic novels. While the other girls were reading Paul Zindel's "My Darling
My Hamburger" and thinking they were the shit, Aimee and I were reading "The
Story of Joanna" and "Two Swinging Families." Even Anais Nin's "Little Birds"
and "Delta of Venus" were way too tame for us. Aimee was very angry that I had
actual sex before she did.
Jenny
Jenny had very long hair because her father wouldn't let her cut her hair until
she turned 16. She got a very short haircut on her 16th birthday.
hair
My hair is very fucked up. I have white girl nappy hair. It's very very horrible.
I mean, you can't even imagine. My mother has straight white people hair so
she never knew what to do with it. It was constantly being twisted around in
ridiculous ways with barrettes and clips and rubber bands... braids, buffies,
and the dreaded 'dorald,' which was the front of your hair pulled back into
a pony tail on top of your head and the rest left loose, named after Dorald
Fria, a girl in my class who always wore her hair that way. I wanted my hair
long loose and swinging, hanging down over one eye like Collette or Joy, but
they had straight hair! When I was 13 I tried to chemically straighten my hair,
but it wouldn't take. Because, you see, not only did I have white girl nappy
hair, I had thick white girl nappy hair. My grandmother used to say "Reenie..
you don't have thick hair, you just have a lot of it." Because english wasn't
her first language, thick hair meant to her that each individual shaft was thick,
and that was bad, because then you had hair like an indian, like my dad did.
And you didn't want to have hair like an indian, oh no no. Only I would have
traded an eye to have hair like an indian--who wouldn't want straight thick
black hair? That's like, I dunno, heaven.
hair care products I have known
gee your hair smells terrific. body on tap. wella herbal essence shampoo. pert
plus. head and shoulders. t-gel. wella strawberry essence. pantene. pantene
pro-v. tea tree oil shampoo. straighten out. faberge wheat germ oil and honey.
vo5 hot oil treatment. the shampoo that dorothy hammill was on the bottle of
that smelled like tomatoes. jhermack efa. jheri redding. shampoo one. salon
selectives. frizz-ease. citrishine. laminants. queen of africa coconut oil.
mirtha's. hair mudd. vidal sassoon. thick ends. dippity do. manic panic. jazzing.
punky colours. halsa. loreal blue black. miss clairol blue black. natural instincts
indigo. dep. infusium 23. herbatint. crazy colors. vo5 botanicals. st. ives.
mill creek.
Cousins
In 1976, my cousins and I were watching the fireworks over the Statue of Liberty
on a little tv in my cousin's bedroom in Jackson, New Jersey. It was the bicentennial
and I guess people in general and kids in particular were really hyper-excited
about this Independence Day celebration. So there we were, watching, crowded
around the little set, all three of us, and my cousin Dana starts crying. I'm
like "Dana! Why are you crying?," and she goes, "Because by the tricentennial,
we'll be dead!"
Boyfriends
Dana and Shelly had a lot of really weird awful boyfriends. Remember, this was
Jackson, New Jersey, not exactly a hotbed of social activity. John started going
out with Shelly when he was 17 and she was 12! I know five years is not a big
difference, but there's a huge gap between 12 and 17. As it turned out Shelly
was the more mature of the two. Then there was this character named Cowboy.
I don't know his real name. I guess the nickname came from when he was a kid
and he liked to play cowboys and indians. Cowboy, at the age of 18, had already
lost two of his front teeth. He dropped out of school when he was 15. Since
he was still living with his parents, he hadn't yet joined the welfare roles,
but it was going to happen, sooner or later. There was an incident when Shelly
and Dana broke up with Cowboy and John and the two boys were besides themselves
with grief because Shelly and Dana were by far the hottest girls in town, and
the boys began stalking them! Dana and Shelly were shuttled off to my parents
home which was like 50 miles away. One Friday night, we all went to the teen
disco and who showed up but Cowboy and John! They tried to kidnap Dana and Shelly,
but we hopped on a city bus and went to Nathan's. We were stoned by the time
we got there and played video games until midnight.
grandmother
My grandmother always had something wrong with her. When I was little, it was
usually migraines. One time, my hippy uncle who lived in her basement gave her
some marijuana. She says she didn't smoke it, but I heard otherwise.
Uncle
My uncle James, my dad's older brother, lived the life that so many other people
his age lived in the 60s and 70s; since he didn't go to college, he got drafted.
I saw pictures of him hunkered down over a little pot of white rice, his big
dark eyes looking up towards the camera. He said he bombed the fuck out of villages
populated by women and children. He was exposed to Agent Orange. When he came
home he took up pot smoking and listening to hard rock and Cheech and Chong
records as a full time occupation, in my grandparent's basement. Besides turning
my grandmother on to pot, he turned my grandfather on to Janis Joplin. Once,
when I was wearing my white go go boots and a mini dress, he told me I looked
like Grace Slick. Since I didn't know who that was, I didn't know how to take
that.
Mini dress
Things I remember having when I was 8: a psychedelic mini dress made of some
silky synthetic fabric. White go go boots. A pop-up book of a japanese fairy
tale. Fuzzy wuzzy soap. A rose print dress with a green apron that came from
Germany. A 110 camera. A pink Realistic transistor radio. A radio in a plush
poodle. An iron frog playing the mandolin, painted in green glow juice. A very
old copy of Wind in the Willows. A pink bed spread with silver threads. A plush
white kitten with a graduation cap. Sidney, my stuffed bear. Rose hip eye drops
in a blue glass bottle with a glass dropper.
quiet
You know those quiet times when you're with a boy. You're both laying in his
bed staring up at the stars through his window, you're listening to his breathing
and Run DMC is wafting up from the project's courtyard and you're so tempted
to ask, "What are you thinking?" but you don't because you learned at at 16
that he's not going to say "Oh, I was just thinking about the first time I saw
you, and how your hair looked like dark cotton candy and I could see your nipples
through your buzzcock's t-shirt and I wanted to throw you down and fuck you
right there..." No, he's going to say, "I was thinking about this turtle my
brother Kyle had when I was eight and it had some shell rot and we had to take
it to the vet at the zoo because no one knew how to treat a turtle." And you're
left there laying on your back in a strange boy's twin bed, wondering if maybe
the boy outside with the boombox and the mixed tape might have been a better
sexual partner. Better not to ask at all.
Kevin
Joan and Janice used to hang out at Timmy's house. Timmy lived across the street
and his mom had a screened gazebo type thing in the yard where we used to hang
out and drink beer and smoke pot. Timmy's mom decided it was better to have
everyone drinking and smoking there--we were going to do it anyway, and at least
we weren't going to get raped or into a car accident or something. When it was
real hot she'd get us bags of potato chips and other salty stuff, and when it
was cold we could hang out in the basement.
We were the only girls. Me, Joan, Janice, sometimes Roz and Ann, and sometimes
Joan and Janice's cousin. But she was annoying, so we tried not to bring her
too often. She always had perfectly done lipstick and she smoked, even though
she had asthma really bad, so she would puff and then inhale, puff and then
inhale. She also had very expensive clothes and wouldn't sit on the ground,
so if it got crowded in the screenhouse someone might have to give up a seat
for her. One time Janice got into a fist fight with her while we were watching
Orca the Killer Whale and she kept asking stupid questions like "Why does he
kill people?"
But basically, we were the girls, among a large group of guys, so we had our
pick. But for some reason none of us wanted to go with any of the screenhouse
guys. The ones that were cute, like Kyle and Johnny, were dysfunctional in some
way. Like Kyle was too quiet and Johnny was an acid freak. Both of them would
spend hours sitting in the corners of the screenhouse scribbling with colored
pencils. Timmy had some girlfriend somewhere, but no one ever saw her. So mostly
we'd just shoot the shit and drink beer and sometimes play cards. Now that I
think about it, it's kind of weird. Anyway, one day I was at the screenhouse
and a new guy was there, Timmy's cousin and Kyle's brother Kevin. I could tell
right away that Kevin was a freak like me because he looked like Brian Eno,
and I said so, and he knew who I was talking about. Musical knowledge for most
of the screenhouse denizens didn't extend beyond Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers.
So we talked about music all night and I told him all the shows I'd been to
and we made out and he walked me home and on the way home he asked me how old
I was and I probably told him 17 which was a bit of a stretch (I think I was
16) and he asked if I was a virgin and I said "No way!" and that was that. I
went to his apartment a few nights later and we fucked. I remember he had a
clock he had taken apart, it was just flipping the minutes out of its shell.
fanzines
I started writing for fanzines when I was 13. I used to get a mailing from
a record distributor called cross country; besides selling a lot of hard-to-obtain
british punk singles at prices better than what I could get at Bleecker Bob's
in the village, they sold fanzines. I wrote a couple of things for Cowabunga!,
which was probably one of the bigger zines at the time. It was always on color
stock. John Koenig, the guy who ran it, had some sort of hand-crank mimeo machine.
I guess back then these hand-cranked machines were popular with serious zine
people--all the older people had them--but the younger zine publishers, like
Norm from It's Only a Movie and Jon from Hoopla, used the xerox facilities at
their schools. This was before people had real computers too, so the layouts
were always handwritten things or typed galleys pasted up to look like a magazine.
I never wrote for Punk or New York Rocker or any of the really famous underground
publications, but damn, I was just a little kid! I did have a subscription to
New York Rocker and I'd devour the gossip column with juicy little tidbits like
where DeeDee's girlfriend Vera bough her cool boots. Once they ran a really
funny interview with Cheap Trick. Years later, when I was in college, I met
the girl who did the interview, Suki Pett. I made a point of telling her how
I loved that interview when I was a kid, but I think she was pissed off because
I was so much younger than her and we were both at the same school with about
the same amount of credits. She used to diss me after that, so I made sure I
usurped her spot on the on-air line up the following spring at the school radio
station. Later, Donna Brown told me Suki was an asshole.
Anyway, I wrote a review of a Boyfriends' show for Hoopla that became semi-famous
and got reprinted in a bunch of other zines. It sort of set the tone for all
my subsequent stuff. I spent the first part of the review describing in detail
how floppy the tits were of the singer of the opening act, and how people who
were obviously herion addicts were so not attractive, and how spandex was definitely
not punk rock. The next 3 or 4 paragraphs describe what happened when I had
cut class the day before and met Marcy and Jill outside the school. I remember
it was March and I was wearing a green antique coat and a hot pink feather boa,
and I cut just because I didn't want to go. I had no plans. And there were Marcy
and Jill and Marcy was high on something, as always, and she told me that this
kid down the street was having a party and we should all go. So we did, and
the house was filled with kids I'd never even seen before, freshman all the
way up to seniors, some Grateful Dead stuff blasting on the stereo and joints
and bongs being passed all over. As soon as you passed one, there was another.
Someone put on a David Peel record. I was talking to someone about something
stupid. This kid in front of me, blond and chubby and androgynous, I still don't
know if it was a boy or a girl, took a long long drag on a joint rolled in purple
patterned paper, holds the breath, and as the breath is let out the kid says,
"Life...," long pause, "is a cosmic letdown." I spent a short paragraph describing
how much I loved the Boyfriends and it was a great show and it was so fabulous
to see them play. I heard later that Jay, the boy from the Boyfriends who I
was in love with, read the review and thought it was hysterically funny. Even
though I had his address I never even considered trying to get in touch with
him. What would a big punk rock star want with silly 15 year old me? I know,
I was stupid.
Donna Brown
Donna was one of the people I met at Hunter. When she was in high school
and used to go to shows at CBs, she'd have to sneak her cool clothes out in
a bag and change in the bathroom at Port Authority. She was part of the group
at the radio station that I met in my first year: Phil, Sean, Dominic, Bill,
Reynold, James, John and Gina were the rest. I started off 'dating' Sean, whom
I met at registration, but that ended when I called bullshit on his 'now you're
a woman' routine. I just didn't want to fuck him. He was the program director
at WLEX, the college radio station, and to break up with me he called me into
his office! I came out laughing. Phil and Dominic thought it was very immature
of him to call me into his office. Bill and Gina got jobs at the NY Post in
the during their last year, so they left in the middle of the semester. Reynold
went to work at 1010WINS, the local AM news station. One time Donna was on Staten
Island to see some band, and some other punk rockers started making fun of Donna
and her friends. Donna made one of the girls cry, and then she stried to apologize
to Donna by saying 'you don't knw what it's like to have blue hair!" and
Donna retorted, "Blue hair! Try being black!"
Nekron 99
James and John were brothers. They had a band called Nekron 99, a reference
to the Ralph Bakshi film Wizards. Since I was always looking at the Voice personals,
John was prompted to announce one day to me (and everyone else at the station
that day) that he'd date me, if I lived around the corner from him. Location
was his prime requirement.
Phil
I almost had sex with Phil, but he got an asthma attack when he
realized that there might be actual penetration.
copyright 1999, marie mundaca. all rights reserved.