yes please(57)

Then there were the bad parts. Too many kids in our town died from drinking and driving. At least once a year there was a horribly sad funeral. Flowers would appear, tied up against some pole. Paper cups would spell out WE MISS YOU, KATIE in a chain-link fence at the entrance to our high school. I shudder to think of all the times I got into a car with someone who was wasted. Once I was with my best friend, Keri, and we were in the backseat of some ridiculous car, like an I-RAK or a Z-40 or a MIATI22 (I don’t care about cars). Keri had a crush on the driver and he had brought his friend along. We were headed to Revere Beach to drive around and do nothing. The boy was a little drunk and driving really fast, and I was screaming at him to slow down. I was so angry. I kept thinking, “I can’t believe I am going to die in this cheesy car with these two *s with spray tans and names I don’t even know.”

I am ashamed of the few times I drove drunk. Drinking and driving is the absolute worst, because unlike doing coke in your basement while you teach yourself guitar, you could kill someone else. I think about the few times I drove drunk and I picture all of the beautiful families I passed in my car whose lives I could have taken. Please don’t drive drunk, okay? Seriously. It’s so f*cked up. But by all means, walk drunk. That looks hilarious. Everyone loves to watch someone act like they are trying to make it to safety during a hurricane.

My town was good at supporting future drinking problems. Our parties consisted of kegs in the woods. The boys wore “drinking gloves” and we played quarters with cups of beer. Wine coolers made their debut just around this time, and the sugary concoctions made it easier for teenage girls to get drunk. Being young means you have no sense of your own limits, so we would all drink like it was our last night on earth. But even back then I fantasized about what it would be like to drink socially, like Sue Ellen on Dallas. I would pour grape juice into wineglasses and sit in our “fancy” dining room arguing with myself. This was the beginning of a long life of attempting to be much older than I was. I was on a search for the perfect amount of ennui. I would babysit while I watched Thirtysomething, clucking out loud when the characters were failing to communicate. I was sixteen. Why did I care if Hope and Michael had another baby?

I’ve tried most drugs but avoided the BIG BAD ONES. Meth never squirmed its way into my life, thank god. It is so evil and horrifying, but I am not going to pretend that I am not fascinated by the idea of staying up for days on end painting my basement. When I was twenty-five and living in Chicago, the building supers were two very polite and meticulous meth heads. Matt and I lived above them and listened to them constantly washing their floors. They also loved to vacuum. They often spent the night rearranging furniture and wiping down surfaces. More than once I woke to the sound of them sweeping the porch steps, moving the same pile of dirt around and around. They were tough to talk to, almost impossible to understand and make eye contact with, but I had a strange affection for their ability to channel their meth-taking into real apartment improvements. The problems began once they started knocking on our door claiming our sink was leaking. Then they would spend the whole day taking the sink apart. Then they would ask for twenty bucks to go find a special sink part and disappear for a week. Then one of them died. So all in all, meth seemed too risky.

Heroin was another drug that didn’t catch my tail. I lived in New York’s East Village in 1998, when heroin was making its forty-fifth comeback. The streets were filled with suburban junkies shooting up next to their pit bull puppies. My building was across from Tompkins Square Park, which had been suffering and/or improving due to gentrification, and the apartments were filled with a lot of musicians and models living alone in New York City for the first time. Most of the models took a real liking to me. Tall women are attracted to my littleness. I have a lot of tall female friends. They like how I am always looking up to them and I like having the option to jump into their pocket if I want to hide. One model, a Midwestern beauty I will call Hannah, met me at the mailboxes and told me she liked my sneakers. Not long after she confessed she was having an affair with a very famous professional basketball player and asked if I would like to go to a game with her. She wouldn’t tell me his name, but she mentioned he was “the one you know.” We sat courtside as the team warmed up, and this player made eye contact with us and nodded approvingly. “He likes when I bring girls to the game,” she said. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I did know that if that gentleman had put his penis inside me I surely would have died. I couldn’t stop thinking about his giant penis, and every time I looked at tall Hannah I pictured the two of them having sex. A giant pale oak tree getting penetrated by a dark taller oak tree, their size-fifty feet rubbing up against each other on some special bed built to hold their enormous bodies. The player would come visit her at night while his driver waited outside, black SUV idling. Hannah lived above me, and I would picture them f*cking and eventually breaking through the floor and crashing through my ceiling, killing us all with one giant official NBA penis. The fear of this encouraged me to move to a new apartment. That and the one freezing morning I had to step over a passed-out model who had nodded off while filling out a W-2 form, only to open the outside door to find a giant pile of human shit. I said good-bye to the East Village and moved over to the West Village, where we don’t have those kinds of problems. In the West Village we just have tweaked-out gay hustlers who hit us over the heads with rocks, thank you very much.