I guess if I were giving these flashback posts titles, I’d call this one “Oh, to be  young and just plain fucking dumb.” That would be the title. I have been in the workforce for a long time. In fact, I lied about my age so that I could work at Woolworth’s in Medford Square. I was fifteen and I told the manager I was 16. My mother was working there too, and she was pissed I did it, but as we found out when she died, she was in no position to give me shit about the age thing. It took us forever to figure out how old she really was after she died in 1992 because she had lied about it in so many places it wasn’t funny. Know why? She just plain didn’t want to be forced into retirement.

Anyway, the manager, a guy named Mr. Clark, wasn’t much for detail. Neither was his assistant, Mr. Benson. Neither of them asked me for a birth certificate, probably because they figured my mother was working there and wouldn’t let me work if I wasn’t 16. They loved my mother, but they didn’t know my mother. I did. What I knew about her was that she knew that, once I had something in my head, I was going to figure out a way to do it one way or another. If it wasn’t Woolworth’s, I would simply try it in as many places as I could until it worked. There were plenty of retail establishments around at that time. In fact, Strawberries was right near my house. I had applied there too.

Anyway, I’m not beyond living on the edge even now. (But I have to tell you that I’m just good at doing it. I think it through first. Plan. I have to. I’m married to a real crazy.) But back then, I really loved living on the edge. Totally. The whole gay thing was a head rush to me. I mean I knew I was gay by this time, but it was like some surreal thing floating around out there. I wasn’t sure how to connect it with real life. It was an alternative universe. When I look back at that now, it’s because things were so different then than they are today. From a societal perspective, it’s much easier today. Back then, it was tough. So, you tended to compartmentalize your life: (a) The normal part; (b) The gay part.

And this is how I would discern who would and would not have problems with part (b). Did they make crass gay jokes? Did they use the word ‘faggot’ or ‘dyke’ in a derogatory way. (Those terms are loaded, even though some gay people use them. They don’t mean the same when we use them as when ‘they’ use them.) Did they use the word ‘homo’? I have always hated that word. If any of those symptoms were present, I did not tell those motherfuckers about part (b). But I digress.

So, back to Woolworths and living on the edge (and the gay thing, in fact). I got hired at Woolworth’s. No problem. I was now working with my mother. And boy, did I give her a hard time. I used to piss her off on Saturday mornings because I had balloon duty. I used to have to fill the helium balloons. Pretty soon, it got to be some for the balloon, some for me. And it wasn’t that I got high on it. Hell no, it just made me sound like something out of the fucking Wizard of Oz. It was a blast talking to customers sounding like a munchkin.

What invariably would happen is that my mother would find a good product display (preferably a clothes rack) close to where I was, and then she’d get my attention and mouth to me, “I’m going to kill you when I get you home.”  See. That’s what happens after your dad dies. “Wait until I tell your dad” magically morphs into “I’m going to kill you when I get you home.”  Then, she’d try to appeal to my chickenshit side. “Don’t you know doing that can kill you?” I was not worried about such things at that time.

Just ever so absurdly pushing the envelope

Almost three years later my mother and I were still working at Woolworth’s. By then, I was pretty much ‘out.’ When my girlfriend turned sixteen, I told her to come in and apply for a job. The thing was, she really was my girlfriend. It’s just that nobody knew it except she and I. (Definitely not my mother.)  As messed up as this might sound (even to me all these years later), she and I were together for almost two years. Anyway, she got the job. Talking about complicating your life just a bit.

You know, this post is a testament to the stupidity of youth. For all intents and purposes, this girl (her name was Linda) and I were in a real relationship. It was emotional and it was physical. And there were definitely times when we were arguing or disagreeing. Trying to work those days with both she and my mother around were merciless. I almost immediately began to ask myself, “WTF were you thinking, Deborah?????” On the flip side, when things were going well and we could find ways to flirt with each other, it was exhilarating. You know, like everything else in life. Yin and Yan.

Ah, but as all things go when you’re young, my first relationship was about to crash and burn. Luckily, I had moved on to other things before it did, and she would move on soon after, leaving my mother at peace once again. Poor thing.

Ever hear of Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts? If not, I’m not surprised. If you want to know what it’s like, in 2000 the population was just over 4,400 and it was about 94% caucasian. In other words — Whiteyville. I never knew it even existed until Miss Headcase decided she wanted to go to school out in Turner’s Falls. She managed to find the Hallmark Institute of Photography out there. According to Miss Headcase, it would only take her ten months to get her certificate. Every school in the Boston area offered a two-to-four year curriculum, and she didn’t want to go to school for that long. Let me tell you that this WTF moment lasted for more than a year.

Relationships are funny things sometimes. Although I spent more than eight years with Miss Headcase, I wasn’t nearly as upset as I thought I’d be when she proposed this little plan. Frankly, I think she was trying to get away from me, and I think I needed a break myself. However, what would play out here was really messed up. This event would mark a slow, painful decline and ending to a relationship. I would have preferred it if we had just parted ways while we were living together in Melrose.  Not only did it cost me a lot of money, but I got it stuck up my…well, we won’t elaborate.

I’ve been trying to put this on a timeline, but I simply cannot remember what year this was. However, since I met Beth four years after I split with Miss Headcase, I figure 1988 was the year it finally (mercifully) ended. I was working for Millipore at the time and making decent money, so paying for her education wasn’t an issue. The tuition was $10,000 and she would need a car as well because she was planning on coming home on the weekends. I ended up paying cash for a 1985 Nissan Sentra. I wanted something in good shape and safe because the snow was no joke out near Turner’s Falls. Now, all that was left was finding her a place to live.

The school helped us out with that one. They had a listing of people who rented rooms at reasonable rates. We figured that this would be a perfect solution, since the school was small and didn’t have dorms. We made a couple of calls and found someone who seemed really nice. She was older (around sixty) and had just lost her husband. She was renting a room to help herself financially and so that she would not be so lonely. We drove out to TF together and met Barbara. She was a sweetheart (or so I thought at the time) and the room was a decent size, so we gave her three months advance rent. I felt really good that I had found Miss Headcase a good place to live and was happy that I could help out somebody who was still feeling the pain of her husband’s death. The housing thing was settled on the first trip out, which made the move much easier.

The first couple of months pretty much went according to plan. Every other weekend, Miss Headcase would come home. I would go out to Turner’s Falls the odd weekends. It was a postage stamp sized town. We’d go to festivals and check out the shops. There were a lot of small affordable restaurants. The surrounding towns were pretty picturesque, and it was a great place to do some hiking. I’d stay until about 4 a.m. on Monday mornings, then I’d get up and drive all the way to work in Bedford, Massachusetts.

In the heart of winter, driving back home in the early morning hours was absolutely treacherous. There’s this really ugly curve on Route 2 east. You’d best be going slowly when you approach it because there’s no sense in braking when you’re in the middle of the curve…unless you want to end up in a ravine. The first time I drove the curve in the middle of a snow storm, my car lights caught the words “Deadman’s Curve” written in red on the side of an abandoned barn. Whomever wrote that was not kidding. Apparently, several people died mishandling this curve in the winter.

What in the wide world of sports is goin’ on around here?

Several months into this experience, Miss Headcase started coming home less and less. She told me they were piling on the work and I believed it. That seemed to make sense to me. It was a short, ten-month program and there was a lot of ground to cover. I made a few extra weekend trips out to visit, but that was a tough drive. Instead, I consoled myself by running up the phone bill and partying with my landlords (this is a whole other story that will be told).

One weekend visit by Miss Headcase was indeed a warning of things to come. We had been talking about a project she was given by the school that would be an important part of her overall grade. She was to be one of the photographers shooting the children at the local elementary school. I believe she was to shoot grades 2 and 3.  I remember her saying, “I wish you could come out and help.”

I told her that I had almost four weeks vacation piled up and I’d be happy to take a few days off to drive out and help. No problem. Well, it was like I told her that I’d be removing her spleen. She got this look of terror on her face and said, “No! You can’t!” When I asked her why, she told me that the school said that people would think she’s a child molester if she brought me out to help with the project.

Hmmmm. This didn’t sound good. Somewhere in the back of my head,  the theme from The Twilight Zone was playing. If this thing was going to end, I just wanted it to end with a minimal amount of pain. Needless to say, the adventure was just beginning.

Okay, so today we’re driving back from the store and changing the radio station and we stop at the song Spirit in the Sky. This turned into a real WTF? moment. Here’s how the conversation goes:

B:  Oh, I love this song! It’s Hedda Nussbaum, isn’t it?

D:  No, Beth. Are you fucking kidding me? Hedda Nussbaum was the woman who was involved in that unbelievably nasty abuse case in New York where her five-year-old was repeatedly abused and killed by her boyfriend. It’s not Hedda Nussbaum. It’s Norman Greenbaum.

B: Oh, yeah.

Now, this is woman with five degrees in various subjects, and difficult subjects as well — like Pathology, Biochemistry, Counseling Psychology, Music Comp…stuff like that. Five. Norman Greenbaum. Hedda Nussbaum. What’s the matter? Can’t you see the similarities, people? W-T-F?

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.

Again, living in the present…for this morning at least. Did anybody catch the story about the Texas couple who found Jesus in a bag of Cheetos? No, if you haven’t heard about it, I’m not kidding. This is really a WTF moment. Something as absurd as this could only happen here, really. Think about this happening, say, in Jakarta. You’d never see it. I’m not quite sure what that says about us, and I’m really not quite sure if I want to know what this says about us.

Needless to say, the Cheesus Christ Cheeto has found it’s way onto ebay. You knew that was next. I confess that I just don’t get it. I mean, when I find things like this, why can’t I see Jesus and cash in? Oh, wait, I’m a Buddhist. That could be it. Or maybe I’m just not that twisted. Yeah.

This also confirms that Texas should just be allowed to go on and secede. Let’s face it. This is also the state that gave us George W. Bush. Let it go. Democrats will probably be outlawed, so we’ll take them. No problem. Then Texas can rejoin Mexico and get back to its roots. It’ll be good for them. And us.

I went to Texas on business once, and it was quite an experience. I mean, these people were, well, unique. That’s all I can say. Very impressed with themselves. You know, The Lone Star State. The bar at the hotel lobby was a fascinating vantage point for people watching and I spent hours there. I felt like I had been there for hours the next morning. I couldn’t even remember what I drank, but I drank a lot of it. I only went to Texas to help set up the show, so I did that the next morning and immediately got on a flight and came home.

I have a feeling there are a lot of Cheesus Jesus finders in that state. Beware.