My Imaginary Friend Was Real (Self-Deprecating)

Every year in the week after New Year’s, I like to sit down with my journal and make a list of the five people who have been the biggest impact players in my life throughout the previous year. This habit probably spawned from a similar list I decided to make in the summer of 1998 when I figured it might be fun to choose just who the most important people had been to me throughout high school. In an ideal world, the top two spots of that list would be occupied by the two things in life I had wanted most back then: a girlfriend and a best friend.

Number One was easy, as the previously mentioned Deirdre Curran had just recently dropped back into my life and put the cherry on top of what had been a mess of a four year sundae. After basically not speaking to me for all of our senior year, she and Liz called me up out of the blue one day. They were poorly disguising their voices behind hits from a nearby helium tank and were demanding that I “come out and go roller skating.” (I’m pretty sure none of us owned roller skates.) Three weeks later “roller skating” turned into Deirdre and I sitting in my grandfather’s Monte Carlo outside the Friendly’s on Tuckahoe Road, drinking Fribbles and listening to the classic Q on the radio. In a move that still blows my balls off when I think about it ten years later, Deirdre leaned in and started making out with me for what would be the first and only time. Right as it began, the radio cued up Joe Cocker’s cover of “Get By With a Little Help From My Friends,” the theme song to The Wonder Years.

Winnie Cooper, eat yr heart out.

But while Deirdre provided me with an epic romance that never was except for that one night when it amazingly was was, the rest of my high school fave fives did not present themselves so neatly. While Liz and I eventually developed a pretty solid (granted, abusive) friendship, we both had a pretty “take it or leave it” attitude towards staying buds. At the time I was writing the list, life was dominated by my gang of best friends, the Three Toed Sloths. But until that last year, those guys were more of just the Circle Kids, the friends I hung out with when I didn’t wanna leave the circle at the end of my block. And four years of Regis was just spent drifiting from one cafeteria table to the next. The only other real figure of consistency I really did have was the girl I had spent a good number of my Saturday nights with over the previous four years, Janeane Garofalo.

Between seeing my older cousins grow up in suburban Rockland and watching the West Beverly gang go thru their adolescent trials on Beverly Hills, 90210, I had entered high school with the notion that I’d spend the next four years going to house parties with a lot of Solo cups and would likely lose my virginity at sixteen. By about halfway into my sophomore year, I had realized that I was either on a very different path or else people just don’t make photo albums and write teen drama scenes inspired by how many Saturday nights they spent alone watching Comedy Central. With no real crew to turn to, I’d usually just check in with Janeane. At ten o’clock, I got to watch her do sketches on reruns of The Ben Stiller Show. Then at eleven, she would host the “alternative” stand-up comedy show, Comedy Product. At the end of the show would be the credit for her production company whose name we heard voiced over by a defeated Janeane, “I Hate Myself.” What a note to end another unfulfilling Saturday night on.

Janeane used to make cameos in my dreams sporadically back then. There was never any exchange about who I was, having to explain myself as a fan who was more than a fan, but a fan who had dedicated the feature piece in my zine to her. The dreams never took place backstage at a comedy club, like the one time we actually did meet and I invited her to the Regis Junior Semiformal. Nor were any of them set in the dog park in the West Village where she would walk her dogs and where I spent a lot of my senior year hanging around with hopes of bumping into her so I could ask her to senior prom. We never talked about being a celebrity, nor that she did comedy.

We just walked around Riverdale, hanging out, like it was no big thing.

Never Made My Bed, But I Did Cry in It

At some point in the summer of 94, shit hit the fan. I started crying a lot. Sometimes on the phone with girls who seemed to be writing me off. But sometimes, it was at The Lion King, sitting in the front row, by myself. Seemingly out of nowhere the same kid who proudly watched Sportscenter every morning before eighth grade was telling his Yankees-loving friends that it was stupid to root for a team just cause they had yr city’s name on their shirts. Secretly, I was thinking that it was stupid to like sports at all. And even though I hadn’t seen her in months, I decided that I had a crush on Deirdre Curran, the only girl at my grammar school to give a shit about Kurt Cobain killing himself that spring. She was so upset about it that she wrote “KURDT” on her bag in a sharpie. “Kurdt” was the intentional misspelling he had signed his name with in a letter he wrote to his fans inside the liner notes of Incesticide, their B-Sides album. She was sad and clever.

I didn’t know exactly why, but Deirdre seemed to be my ticket out of being depressed about what a piece of shit I saw the formerly cocky thirteen year-old me as. So I sort created a role for her in my life that was part crush, part guru. She had no desire for either. But she went along with it. She answered the phone when I called every night to chat and she lent me her older sister Cecilia’s CDs when I decided that I needed to broaden my alternative rock horizons past Counting Crows and Green Day, bands that I had learned about from watching them on MTV Beach House weekday afternoons from my Grandma’s sofa.

My fixation on Deirdre took shape that fall when we would both ride the same express bus, the BxM1, home to Riverdale from our respective single-sex, Upper East Side, Catholic high schools. It was brought to a halt the Friday night of Martin Luther King Day weekend that winter. That was the night that I met Liz Mann, Deirdre and Cecilia’s new best friend.

Liz was a girl who had grown up in the West Village and took my Regis High School dance that Friday night by storm when she showed up baby doll dressed, bleached, and tiara crowned as fourteen year-old version of Courtney Love. Liz had been hyped up to me in the months prior. She had just recently been brought onstage by Courtney herself at a Hole show to join the band in playing “Miss World” on guitar. I’m pretty sure that she didn’t play the guitar, but merely knew that one song, just in case such a life-changing moment would present itself. Seeing this as my potential life-changing moment, I immediately introduced myself to her in the senior section of the Regis cafeteria. Liz had snuck in to put on Hole’s Live Through This. She introduced herself to me as Polly and gave me a Swedish Fish, the wrapper of which would linger in my coat pocked for the next twelve months. I remember her quickly brushing me off and whisking away as “Jennifer’s Body” came on, meaning that I met the girl who would immediately become my new high school crush/obsession while listening to a song called “Ask for It.”

Deirdre must have seen something in my eyes when I met Liz. Because almost immediately after, Cecilia’s pseudo boyfriend and Regis High School dance band god Matt Walsh was sent over to tell me that maybe it was a good idea that I stop calling Deirdre, that maybe I was just a little too much for her. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think that Deirdre may have been marking her territory. I could follow her around like a puppy dog all I wanted, but Liz was her new thing, her ticket out of our boring Riverdale existence. I probably didn’t realize that at the time because all I could think to do was find a stall in the cafeteria Boys Room and ball my eyes out for the next hour.

Since I lost access to the all-girls Catholic high school version of Courtney, I had to settle for the real thing. The week after that Regis dance, I decided to buy a second copy of that month’s SPIN magazine,  one that had Courtney on the cover. I wanted to have a fresh copy because I had decided to use the cover of the one that had arrived in the mail as the cornerstone of the first magazine collage I would put onto oak tag and hang on my bedroom wall. At the time I bought the second copy, I was managing the Regis freshman basketball team. Rome wasn’t torn down in a day and I had still kept some of my old jockish attachments. I had known that cool guys who played basketball had been the best audience for a wiseass like me ever since I was ten and had the eighth graders of the St. Margaret’s varsity baseketball squad in stitches with my Old Testament material. The Regis frosh were equally in my camp four years later, but something was starting to change. A rift was forming. As I sat in the front seat of the van, issue of SPIN with this rock star widow, roots showing thru her bleach job and mascara running down her eyes, placed face-up on my lap so that it didn’t get ruffled, something was becoming clear to both me and the rest of the team: I was weird now.

And I was on my own.

Winky Reflections

  

 

Life is a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

My life is moving really fast. I’m putting a lot of money on credit. It feels a lot like the Roaring Twenties really. I guess that means The Great Depression would be upcoming. You know, I wonder a lot about my mid-life crisis. Since I’ve spent my twenties trying to figure out just what the fuck my deal is, does that mean that I get to avoid the painful crash at forty where you look in the mirror and wonder just who you are. Or will I avert a mid-life crisis simply by being in a state of permacrisis?

I once heard this writer Kate Atkinson doing an NPR interview one day while I was driving around Portland. She apparently wrote her first novel (her first anything) when she was in her late thirties. She said that she couldn’t imagine writing during her twenties cause she was always so caught up in the moment of what was going on. And when I was twelve, MTV ran MTV News at the bottom of the hour (N*E*W*S*) and one time they interviewed Whitney Houston about having turned thirty. She said that at twenty, she thought she had a good grasp on the world but was a fool compared to what she knew now ten years later. And I know, sure, Whitney Houston’s thirties were filled with a lot of crack smoking. But still, maybe she was onto something. With the wisdom of thirty thing, not the crack. Okay, maybe she was onto something with the crack too. My friend Roy was smoking crack when he was thirty-six. In fact, how great would it be if acclaimed Scottish author Kate Atkinson was actually speaking in code for her post-thirty brethren? “How could I have written a novel in my twenties? *Wink* I didn’t even smoke crack back then.”

A lot of times I have something I wanna share. One day it was about what a great friend Kim Harvey has been and how painful it’s been to watch her go thru a tough time and feel like I couldn’t do more to make her life in New York something special. Another day I just wanted to ask anyone reading this what their favorite Pavement lyric was. I had been hanging out with my friends Jen and Amrit and asked if either of them had ever, as Pavement sings, “caught their Dad cryin.” And it turned out one of them had! Lyrics inspiring life, what’s better than that? But then I sit down to write and–vrrrrrrrrrrroom–I’m needed to take pictures of a Hilary Clinton Hummus Head or get a text asking if I wanna come over and finish novels together or or Wet Hot American Summer is playing in the Park tomorrow night. And suddenly I’m swept away. When I finally get back to the two lines I’ve written, the burst I wanted to share is gone. Often there’s a new burst. Now I wanna talk about how the album title “Confusion is Sex” is a phrase that has haunted my life pretty much ever since I first heard it at fifteen. It’s all a big cyclone: my twenties, sex, blogging–ya know, life.

There’s a lot to be said for a pinball existence. Ramps! Flippers! Multiball!

Whenever I used to see a girl that I thought I might like–bleach blond roots, butterfly barrette, rainbow shoelaces, whatevs–I would get real close to her and start singing the Pavement song “Cut Your Hair.” It’s this ridiculous song about haircuts. If the girl looked up, I knew she was a keeper. Freshman year in EVK, our dorm cafeteria, I pulled it on Caroline, a girl I immediately had a crush on upon seeing her with a bowl of Cream of Wheat. She didn’t look up. None of the girls ever looked up. It was a stupid game, okay? But when I saw Caroline a few weeks ago while passing thru San Francisco, I caught myself singing the Pavement song “Range Life” without thinking about it. Some things never change. Except maybe they do. Instead of being a ridiculous song about haircuts, these are the lyrics to “Range Life”:

“I want a range life, so I can settle down. I wanna settle down. I’ll never settle down.”

Mature? God, no. Getting there? Maybe.

A Pool Can’t Stay Empty for Long

Day Forty-Three, McCarren Park Pool

If you’re gonna make it rain, make it pour. That was one thing I couldn’t stand about living in Portland. The (everyday) rain there is like a constant drizzle. It’s the equivalent of a daily wet willy. Portland made me realize that there’s a lot about where I grew up that I never appreciated and high on that list is thunderstorms. Serious, light up the sky, Captain Dan versus Jesus thunderstorms.

So when I was touring around on my quest to reach new levels of (mobile) lazyness, the most frequent question I got was, “So what are yr plans when you get back?” Sheesh. People need to read their Eckhart Tolle, am I right?? But generally the response I gave them was “free concerts in New York all summer long.” Then I would tell them all about McCarren Pool. For those of you who don’t know, there’s a huge old city pool that closed down years ago right smack in the middle of where Williamsburg meets Greenpoint. For the last few years, instead of just letting it lay to waste, they’ve been holding concerts there where the crowd stands inside the empty pool. Even better, every Sunday, those concerts are free. And there’s an inflatable Slip and Slide. Seriously, could this be any better? 

So I’ve basically been waiting for the free Pool shows to start with bated breath and considering them my start of the summer. The season was kicking off with The Hold Steady, a band out of Brooklyn that’s perfect for an outdoor summer show. Their lyrics are about bouncing around the country and nights that last too long with plenty of rhythms underneath that prompt a crowd to pump its fist in unison. They get compared to The Boss a lot (God bless), but they have about a fraction of the listeners of The White Stripes or Modest Mouse. So you get a larger than life show while still feeling a part of something intimate and under the radar. I love that combo.

The crowd was even lighter than expected when the forecast called for rain. Almost everyone who was meeting me at the show bailed. And that rain was no joke. Pounding thunder, dark clouds racing across the sky, and just buckets and buckets coming down. I loved it. For a while, I was being careful to take cover, mostly just cause I worried about Slackbook here. But then the Ice Cream Man was nice enough to hold my shoulder bag in his truck and it was ON. I can’t explain what happens to me in the pouring rain. But I can try.

Seven years ago, in the summer of 2001, my Mom took me down to North Fork bank to meet with one of their investment counselors to discuss what to do with the few thousand bucks my Grandpa had left me when he died. The investment guy was nice enough and laid out what the practical thing for me to do was, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. Still, I signed the papers and tried to feel rosy about how in just a few years I’d have one and a half times the money I had been left. Sure, why not? My Mom took off to do some errands and I got ready to walk back home. But as I was heading out, a crowd had gathered by the door. No one wanted to go out because the afternoon had turned into something resembling night and the winds were gusting in preparation for a massive thunderstorm.

Once it started coming, it started coming down like I had never seen in Riverdale before. The North Fork Bank was at the bottom on a two block hill too, so all the water started racing down the curbsides. Before I even knew what I was doing, I made my way thru the little crowd and stepped into the chaos. That’s what it truly was: chaos. Rain blowing at me so hard it was tough to walk down the sidewalk. I started screaming at it cause it was the only equal and opposite reaction that I had at my disposal. I made my way over to the next building over, the post office, right where the the hill ended and the water was shooting into the flat road like a river. I squatted by the curb and had it hit me like I was at the bottom landing of a tunnel slide at a water park. At one point, it was rushing down so hard, it knocked me on my butt. I think I responded to that by taking my drenched shirt off, waving it over my head, and hollering some more. At that point I caught a postman out of the corner of my eye, hiding out underneath an open garage, watching the whole thing. He raised his fist and gave me a pound. I have him one back.

I wonder what my financial counselor thought of the whole thing.

So the summer is unofficially here. No umbrellas necessary. I’m raw or I’m out.