This used to be my favorite band and this was my favorite song and I was at this show. We lived a few blocks away and walked to Maccaren every weekend those two summers to see the free shows in the pool.
As a young woman in my teens and early 20's I had fantastic tits. In fact I had a fantastic body, and I say that with all humility. I was thin as a grasshopper, had long legs, large C's and high cheekbones. I never exercised or dieted and was just, thin, I guess. I was a total obnoxious dick about it. I was so vain and nobody stopped me, I thought I was the most beautiful person in any room and I had white teeth. I faked stupid and unaware until my head fell off. I tried briefly to be an actress, had head shots, talked with a few agents, made the rounds. I did it as a kid too, with my mom, being lugged from banquet rooms in Hotels by LAX and down to small Hollywood bungalows that had been converted into kiddie casting offices. I had mild success. I often feel like I've lived a hundred lives. I've been rich, poor, brown, white, a chola a snob, the worst kind of white girl, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a New Yorker, a Brooklynite, a hippie, an only child a sibling an outsider a friend, a slut and a liar. I've been an asshole and shithead. A poet, a patient and a beginner. A name dropper and girlfriend. I've been a chronic cheater to a fat girl with no sex drive, I've been a prude and a pursed lipped workaholic. I've walked away from five friendships and have had more than six best friends.
Things I know: I will never be a wife, I'm in love with a woman I can never love fully because I have the sad misfortune of being a heterosexual, my best friend is Nick, but for how long? Till what? Maybe nothing, maybe he's the next long time. I've been the same person more or less for the past five years, boring, a go getter, getting fatter, happy, regular. I don't skip down alleys anymore splashing in midnight puddles or run through Washington Square park trying to buy heroin from homeless guys selling AJAX in plastic bindles. I don't try to fashion syringes out of baby droppers or hang out with girls who have babies and remember working in Texas roller rinks when they found out their first boyfriend's sister died in Waco with all the other crazies, their big pregnant 16 year old belly pressed against the roller rink glass. I got out of that place, I was never in that place actually, it was just a story i heard one day when that girl and I were smoking weed in the backseat of my car in a parking lot at PCC. She visited me when I moved to NY. Her parents were rich and there was a big article about her and a bunch of her best friends from high school that had been involved in a heroin epidemic at their private Texas high school. Her parents had put her on a plane to Sweden to go to some fancy rehab. She dropped acid as the plane took off and shattered a glass in her hand and bled the entire flight over. We went to Washington Square park for her. She slept on the floor next to my bed. She's a lawyer now. Sometimes when you've been sick and then you get better you feel like you've been through a long selfish war and you miss that part of yourself and you say, hey, that wasn't so bad. I've always been cursed with wanting to crawl back and hide in the past.
None of this was about me, by the way, so don't get the wrong idea. I'm just the same ol' person you've always known.
