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.

Tags: angst