Okay. I need some help with this one. Today I was driving up in New Hampshire, and I found myself behind a truck with the one sticker that really sets me off. It’s pictured here and the one on the back of this particular truck read “Git ‘r Drunk.”  I looked into the cab of the truck and immediately hoped that this was not the way this clown was going to get any girl into the truck with him. However, there are always exceptions to the rule.

They say ignorance is bliss, and it truly is in this case. Guys who brandish this decal on their trucks are about as forward thinking as the bimbos who go to work at Hooters. If, in fact, women think that working at Hooters is reflective of  “women’s liberation,” they have their heads jammed firmly up their rectums. I’m here to tell you that they have set all women back by several decades. It’s hard to demand respect from men when women are filling the very role men have traditionally carved out for them.

Here’s what I’m thinking: We’re always hearing about these FEMA camps that have been built all across the United States. The right-wing paranoia squads are absolutely convinced that we’re all going to be rounded up and incarcerated there. I suggest a better use for these camps. Let’s round up all the clowns that brandish these stupid, sexist female silhouette decals and put them in the camps. Then, we can give them all some kind of massive sensitivity training. After that, we can round up all the women who waitresses at Hooters (and related jobs) and give them electroshock therapy.

That’s what I’m talkin’ about and, seriously, WTF?

Never let it be said that business travel isn’t sometimes adventurous. It is especially adventurous when you’re somewhat fearless and have no idea WTF you are doing or where you are going. That would sum up my trip to Chicago for the Pittsburgh Conference. I’m not sure when this little event took place, late eighties maybe early nineties. The Pittsburgh Conference is an analytical instrumentation show. Prior to moving it to the McCormic Convention Center in Chicago every other year, it had always been held in New Orleans. At the time, I was the Marketing Services Manager for Millipore’s Analytical Division, and was attending the show to conduct a Press Breakfast and work the booth.

But first, we had to get there and that proved to be a challenge right from the get go. The guy who worked for me, Brian, and I left on a Saturday morning so that we could go to the convention center and supervise the booth assembly.  We only had forty feet of booth space, small for us in comparison to other shows, but it was a key market for both our HPLC sample prep filters and our lab water purification systems.

I know that we were flying right after some type of international terrorist event, so it was particularly touchy going through the gate. So, here we are standing in line and the woman in front of me sets off the alarms. I’m thinking. Okay, this will be simple. The problem was that she kept setting off the alarm. First, they had her remove all her jewelry, including her earrings. She still set off the alarm. Then, her belt. She still set off the alarm. Then, they asked her to remove her shoes. That’s when my alarm went off. Why?

Maybe because I had a quarter ounce of hooch in my shoe. I remember turning around to Brian, “Hey, I need to get the fuck out of this line.”

“Why?”

“Because I stuck the ganja in my shoe.”

“Yeah, in your sock, right?”

“No, in my shoe. I didn’t have time to put it in my sock.”

He was very comforting, “Oh, then you’re screwed.”

Yeah, thanks, Brian. What a pal. I was at the point of no return, however. The woman had finally cleared the security check. It was my turn. After all that sweating, I cleared it the first time. Don’t ask me why I didn’t set off alarms, but the best part of all was that Brian did. Yeah, sometimes I love payback, man.

The flight was pretty uneventful and it was, as unusual as it sounds, right on schedule. We got to Chicago and got settled into the hotel. Then, we headed over to the McCormick Convention Center to check on the progress of the booth assembly, and go through a dry run of the press briefing. The booth looked great so far. There were no problems there. But I have to tell you the worst thing about working with tekkies is that they just don’t get what kind of material to present to editors. These guys were writers, not chromatography scientists. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to drill that into their heads before the trade show. Now, I was at the trade show going through the dry run and they were editorializing again.

It started with the first guy. He started his portion of the presentation and made it so complicated I wanted to just tell him to STFU and let me do it. I remember telling him to stop, and then I told him if he went into this kind of an explanation half of the editors in the room would stand up and walk out. I remember saying, “Just tell them in layman’s terms what the products do and the benefit to the customer.”  That’s all they need to know. Every editor in the room would be given a package of detail, a copy of the presentation, and access to one-on-one discussions with the scientists in the room while they ate breakfast. Still, they insisted on cultivating what I like to call the deer-in-the-headlight effect.

After two hours of this torture, Brian and I headed out to dinner with Ed Black, the sales manager from Analytical Chemistry magazine. Ed was one of my best friends even though we were on opposite ends of the political spectrum. He was a true conservative from Georgia, now living in Connecticut. His wife Lynn was an airline stewardess, and she was just an awesome person. She was so funny and quick witted. We were close enough on the friendship scale that I’d go to Connecticut and spend the weekend. We had one rule: He and I never discussed politics. But that didn’t mean we didn’t jab each other good naturedly once in a while. We surely did.

I remember we got home in the early morning hours and we were wasted. Nevertheless, we had a free day Sunday. The only thing we had scheduled was a three o’clock review of the hospitality suite set up and a meeting with the convention center support staff. Brian and I made plans to go to this great flea market we saw in the local paper.

Our second close call: WTF were we thinking?

Brian and I ate breakfast and immediately hit the road. We hailed a cab and told the driver where we wanted to go. “Are you sure?” I guess I was kind of puzzled by his question.

“Yeah, we’re sure. Let’s go,” was my response.

When the driver had gotten us to our requested drop off point, he turned around and said to me, “Are you sure you want to be here? I’m not sure I should leave you here.”

We looked around. It looked perfectly fine to us. I replied, “Yeah, we’re good.”

I paid the driver and he drove off. We started heading down the street toward where the flea market was supposed to be when we saw this gang across the street with baseball bats. Yeah, that was comforting. The fact that they were looking at us was also comforting.

So, Brian and I started walking. “Can you see that they are walking with us across the street?”

“Yeah, Brian, I can see that.”

“You know, we’re dead meat.”

At that point, we started looking for somewhere safe to hide. Brian first suggested the church. I thought that might be a bad idea. Aside from the fact that I hadn’t been in a church for about a hundred years and was afraid of it collapsing, it didn’t seem like there was any action going on there and the doors might be locked. So, we started looking for any open stores we could find. We were sure we’d be safe there. Brian found, of all places, a hat shop. We talked about it for a few minutes, then the two of us broke into a hell-bent run and managed to get ourselves into the shop safely. We explained to the shop keeper what was going on and he started laughing.

“This isn’t a good place for you two. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. This may be an ordinary flea market, but this is not a safe part of town. The gangs don’t bother the shopkeepers, but they like to victimize visitors to the city.”

He was a really nice guy. He called a cab for us and told him to pick us up at the back of his shop. As fate would have it, the driver was the same guy who had dropped us off. When he saw us, he laughed.

“I told you, man, that I couldn’t figure out why you wanted to get out here. I don’t even like driving in here.”

We sat in the back seat and, once we were safely out of there, Brian and I started laughing. “How many days are we here for?”

I looked at him. “We’re here through Wednesday, why?”

“I can’t wait to see what other kind of trouble we can get ourselves into,” he responded.

When I was going to school at both Aquinas and BHCC , I had a great Pontiac GTO. I loved the thing. It was mint and it was a teal blue. Okay, so it had a few problems, not the least of which was the driver (that would be me). This is the infamous car that I unwittingly parked on my front lawn.  After a day of partying at school — and I mean partying — I drove that thing home. This was when the old Thompson Square elevated train station was still intact. I have no freakin’ idea how I negotiated all of those poles on the way home, but I managed to get there without cracking the thing up. Then, I kind of missed the curb, wound up on the lawn, turned the car off, went inside and passed out. About two hours later, I heard this unbelievable banging on my front door and I dragged myself down the stairs. It was my friend who just happened to live next door.

“What are you doing with the car on the front lawn? Your mother’s walking up the street from work.”

“Wow,” I said, “did I do that?”

“Well, it sure wasn’t me. It’s your car, and you’re the only one home at the moment. But if you don’t hurry up and move it, someone else will be home and you’ll be dead meat.”

I handed her the keys. “Here. You do it. I obviously was in no condition to park it then, and I’m not sure I’m much better now.” I shut the door and went back to bed. Needless to say, she moved the car onto the street in front of the house just in time, and put my keys back in the mailbox.

We had plenty of fun in that car. The trunk was a virtual wet bar. Everybody kept their party shit in my car because I had a car to myself. It wasn’t my mother’s (she never drove a car). It wasn’t my sisters’. It was mine, and it was the group party vehicle. I had one friend I absolutely hated to drive around in that thing because she was a lightweight when it came to drinking and I was terrified she would let it fly all over the inside of the car. Then, I pictured the warm weather setting in.

Luckily, she had a drinking pattern. She’d start with beer, then move on to whiskey sours. What a freakin’ disgusting combination. I can’t drink either one, so the thought of combining them was more than nauseating. If you paid attention to Karen, she could suck down about three whiskey sours after a six-pack, then she’d pass out. We figured we had about an hour from the time she passed out until the time she started hurling. (I used to call her Yakmaster Plus.) So, we’d time our leaving the event carefully, laying her across the back seat. Then, we’d drive to our school parking lot and roll her into the grass near the bushes. (And I mean roll.) She’d wake up, get sick for an hour or so, so we’d listen to the radio or nap ourselves. Then, we’d retrieve her and bring her home and tuck her in. In the three or four years I owned that car, I managed to keep it yak-free.

The car with an extra-special talent

I mentioned earlier that the car had a few problems. One of those problems was a leaky driver-side window when it rained. The rug was constantly damp and it was highly annoying. But I inadvertently found a way to turn that into a positive. Not only did we drink in this car, but we smoked a lot of weed in my Pontiac back in those days. Never let it be said that we didn’t push the party envelope.

One day I dropped the lighter and couldn’t find it. I pulled the car over to look under the driver’s seat and lo-and-behold found a marijuana seedling farm under my seat growing in the the ever damp carpet. It makes sense. A lot of seeds were dropped in the GTO. Nobody vacuums under the seat (at least nobody in my world). I’m lucky I vacuumed the car at all! I mean, these things were impressive. At first I thought I was hallucinating, but I certainly didn’t have any blotter acid with me that day. I rubbed my eyes to be sure I was actually seeing what I thought I was seeing. And I was. Needless to say, my little farmer friends and I carefully extracted these gems for further cultivation.  It was at that moment that I decided not to fix the leak. Ever.

That parking thing again

About a year later, I was coming home from a long night out drinking tequila shooters somewhere on Route 9 in Framingham. It must have been two in the morning before I got home. In Medford, you can only park on one side of the side streets (or at least that’s the way it was back then). Unfortunately, I was too wasted and tired to do something as trivial as try to find a legal parking space. So, I parked the GTO on the opposite side of the street, risking a ticket.

About an hour after I fell asleep, we heard a huge bang outside. My mother tried to wake me up. I rolled over and told her, “Don’t worry about it. Some idiot’s car probably just got totaled.”

Yeah. Now, who could that idiot be?

Okay, I have a really good sense of humor where my family name is concerned. I mean, I understand that unless it’s something like Smith, Leahy or even, you know, Russo…it’s a challenge. But seriously give me a break here. My family name is spelled exactly as it sounds ‘Della Piana’. No, it’s not De La Piana. There’s no pause between Della. Okay?

The other night brought a new twist to my family name in the form of a certificate of achievement given to Thalia. Yes, something even I have not seen yet. Not only was the appearance of this certificate of achievement a couple of months late because it sat in Thalia’s book bag, but the name on the certificate was very adventurous, as you can see, because it was awarded to Thalia Dellapenia. Yep, just one change in letter and she could have been Thalia Dellapenis.

It’s not like she’s new at Amesbury Middle School. In fact, next year will be her last year in Amesbury Middle School before she moves onto high school. It’s not like they don’t have files to consult. They sure know how to spell it when they’re sending home bad reports or warnings, I might add.

Check this out, I had to go up to the school to pick Thalia up after school, which meant I had to check in at the office. So, I think I might have actually dealt with the person who made out the certificate today. I’m standing there and this older woman asks if she can help. I told her I needed to pick up Thalia and she was in homeroom 305. She gets on the the phone right in front of me with the correct name pulled up on her computer screen. Here’s what she says:

“Hi, this is Mrs. WTF, is Talia Del Penia there?”

Yeah, Talia (as in Shire). Ugh. Del Penia. Are you fucking kidding me? I just kept telling myself, “Bite your tongue, Della Piana. Don’t get too sarcastic on the first day of school.” But WTF, can’t these people even read a name off the computer screen? They work at a freakin’ school. I knew the other woman behind the desk really well and even she couldn’t believe this woman couldn’t read the name. She had her arms raised in the air and was shaking her head as she was listening to her. I started laughing. I was secretly hoping that Thalia would refuse to answer to the name on the other end because she hates having her name mangled as well.

Walking out, I asked Thalia how often this happens. Her only reply was, “You have no idea, ma.” Actually, I do.

I said that love can make you stupid. Sex can make you even more stupid. There’s no question about that. I was going along my merry way, thoroughly enjoying my coming out party (it went on for three years, I have to tell you), and then something happened. It started at a gay bar called Darts, as I recall. I know the original Darts was, of course, on Dartmouth Street in Boston, and I believe it was in the site that Paparazzi eventually took.

I met Greg there after work one night. I can’t remember for sure who else came. I’m sure Joe must have come after work, maybe Steve, but I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that two of Greg’s lesbian friends, we’ll call them Lucia and Sal, were there. Yes, they were a couple. I can’t remember exactly how Greg met them. Maybe it was from work. Not sure. Anyway, we were sitting at a table having drinks when Lucia started running her foot up my leg. Of course, at first, I’m thinking it was unintentional and the result of shifting positions.

No such luck. When I moved my leg away, she looked at me as if to tell me she was disappointed. Greg and Sal were busy talking away about something (that’s why I think Greg knew Sal from work), so I obliged Lucia. Lucia was older than me, and I’m not sure by how many years. I think I must have been about 25 or 26 at the time. She was from Honduras, very sexy and very mysterious. While she was rubbing her foot up my leg, we were making small talk. This remained a flirting situation until the night I went to a party at Greg’s place in Allston.

On that fateful night, I chose to bring a bottle of Pernod. Looking back, I have absolutely no idea why I chose to drink that vile greenish liquid on that particular night. Now, this is not the new Pernod Absinthe that is coming out. This was the Pernod anise liqueur. A couple of shots would have sufficed, but it turned into a party of shots with three or four people participating (someone even went so far as to suggest someone go down the end of the street for another bottle). As I recall, we were drinking something else in between the Pernod shots. That’s not a good situation for me. I’m always up for the challenge. So, here’s where we ended up with this one:

The last thing I remember is swallowing a shot. The next thing I remember is waking up the next morning — at Jehova only knows what time — in one of Greg’s bedrooms with Lucia in bed next to me. She was smiling. It must have been fun. I don’t remember what sound must have come out of my mouth, but I am sure it was a real W-T-F moment. Because did Sal come to the party? Was she there? Do you know that I have no freakin’ idea to this day. Can’t remember. But I do know that the liaison did not end there.

I’m going to interject here because Greg was just so funny. I cannot put this incident in at the precise moment it happened but at some point, he got himself involved in this thing I was having. Greg was younger than me, but he was like a big brother. He was worried that I was becoming ‘emotionally involved’ with Lucia and it was just a fling for her. So, I remember that he asked Lucia just what her intentions were with me. I do not know what she said to him, but I remember that the fling continued on.

Let’s fast forward to the next snippet. We were sitting in someone’s apartment. I know it was not Greg and Jack’s apartment, because I can picture the room we were sitting in. It was on a second or third floor and it had all white walls with big windows minus curtains. It was beautifully sunny outside and the sun was just pouring into the room. I believe we were in Coolidge Corner, and I have a feeling it was probably Lucia and Sal’s place. I was on the sofa and I was on the end. There were two people next to me. Jack was on my immediate right, Sal was next to him and then Lucia was on the other end of the sofa.  Greg was on the other side of the room in a chair. That I can remember.

I can’t remember what the subject was. I can’t remember who was talking, but we were all having drinks and talking away. I had my right arm spread out across the back of the sofa so that it went behind Jack and part of the way behind Val. That’s when Lucia decided to put her arm across the back of the sofa and start playing with my hand. Okay, so here I am, with my hand right behind Sal, and Lucia — her lover — is diddling with my fingers. I froze. I wanted to move my arm away, but I froze. Then, I looked at Greg. I mean he was looking at it and he was freaking out. Quietly, of course. It was at the moment I saw his face that I just wanted to burst out laughing, but I managed to control myself.

At the beginning, I figured Sal had no clue what was going on. However, by the time I got to the arm across the sofa incident, I had to believe that she knew. She was absolutely not a stupid person. Far from it. I’m thinking that this was probably a pattern for Lucia, and Sal had been subjected to this stuff before. Greg had also been working on me, not from a guilt perspective, but because he thought I was getting involved and he knew Lucia wasn’t about to leave Sal to be with me. That, combined with how bad I suddenly felt for Sal, was one of the reasons it ended.

I know that I spent one day with Lucia somewhere in this mix. I picked her up somewhere and we spent the day hanging out. I don’t think the opportunity for sex presented itself again. It certainly didn’t on that day, and I’m thinking that was the day we mutually ended it. Lucia and Sal stopped hanging out with us. I’m not sure if Greg stopped inviting them, or if Sal finally put her foot down. As I recall, our parties continued on unabated.

As one of my lesbian friends would put it, albeit most graphically, “We have places to go and people to…” Well, nevermind. You get the idea.

This is one for the books. It will show the folly of youth, and the incredible greed in which students engage just to have party money. More dough means more trips to the “packie” as we used to say. (Or, of course, two bags of Jamaican in those days.)

So, I graduated from Aquinas and it’s 1973. For lack of anything else to do, I enrolled at Bunker Hill Community College. I don’t even remember what I took, probably liberal arts because I was teetering between art and writing. [Of course, I ended up at Aquinas to begin with because my mother spent many days and nights trying to convince me that there was no future in either.] Anyway, this little Charlestown adventure — to a school where the most fun we had was throwing rocks at the water rats and then slamming the door shut before they went for your throat — lasted one year. In 1974, I’d join Millipore Corporation. That’s for later. That’ll give us 23 years of stories.

So, we’re sitting in the cafeteria at Bunker Hill on an unbelievably snowy day. It was really coming down. The drive had been treacherous. Then, after we spent all morning getting there, they decided to send us all home. Idiots. We were talking about the new movie, The Exorcist, when somebody asked for a volunteer to go see the movie alone. We all asked what was in it for us. The response was too good to resist. The ones who didn’t go to the movie would pool their money and give the volunteer $50. The volunteer would have to bring back the ticket stub. I took it. Little did I know that — this one event — would bring home to me just how incredibly powerful my Catholic education and brainwashing had been.

I drove in a raging storm into Boston. It was windy, the snow was piling up quickly and it was freezing. I was really happy to get inside the Music Hall parking garage. Back in those days, and in that weather, the investment was worth the payoff. I went inside and bought a ticket, carefully putting the stub inside my back pocket after going past the attendant. I was literally alone inside the theater. There were maybe 3 other people. That only made it worse. Here’s where I came out:

I was completely freaked out, scared to shit. You know, I read the book and it was bad enough, but seeing it on the big screen was horrifying. It was scary and outstanding, right down to the music. I know that the movie kind of destroyed Linda Blair’s career before it even got started, but she was brilliant in that movie. Actually, they all were, but she really stood out. She had so many ways of scaring the shit out of you: The flopping around on the bed so completely out of control; the levitating; the evil shit she said; the impression that she even smelled bad; and the bile colored puke were just too much for me. Those individual scenes were some of the most frightening I’ve seen on the big screen, and I’m a big horror fan. But it was the overwhelming reality that she was so completely in the control of someone or something so evil was the most frightening part of the movie. She wasn’t even a bad kid. She was benign. She did not invite Satan in. Even the image of Satan that they use inthe movie is exactly as I had envisioned him all of my young life.

I lived in Melrose at the time, right next to some railroad tracks. It was on the commuter line and the stop was called Melrose Cedar Park. I did a pretty good job after the movie telling myself it was just a movie. I went to bed normally that night, at about 10 p.m. because I had school the next morning and wanted to cash in — especially since I had psychologically screwed myself by going to that foolish movie. It was fine until about 11:30 p.m. when the first train went through…and my bed shook, as it always had. Of course, after The Exorcist, that shaking was a bit tainted. I sat bolt upright after coming out of a dead sleep and was terrified that my bed was shaking. I immediately jumped out of bed and turned on the light. After that, I slept with the light on for nearly four months. And I certainly did not go back to bed that evening. I turned every light in the apartment on, made myself coffee and watched television until I had to leave for school the next morning.

To this day, I can’t even bring the movie into my house. I tried renting it about four years ago and ended up leaving it in the trunk. I was convinced the next morning that I was going to be possessed as soon as I sat in the driver’s seat. I dropped it back into the drop off box on the way to work. Totally irrational, I know. But the nuns had me for fourteen years at that point and they scared the shit out of me. The worst thing was that they made you as afraid of God as they did Satan. That really sucks. No solace anywhere.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. The little girl, Reagan, was using a Ouija Board at the beginning of the movie, and that’s when all the problems start. My Ouija Board went out in the trash the next morning…after I bent and broke it into pieces. I had that thing for years until that movie. Permanently scarred, I tell you.