Amy's way or the highway

I'm white

I had a friend when I was little, named Tara W. She was my only black friend as a little kid, who I remember. I'm sure mom will tell me that I had more black friends than that. She’ll probably have a whole list, but as mom and I have discussed with the inception of my blog, these memories are how I remember them. Though, mom, or anyone else, I am totally open to being corrected.
Tara never came to my house. I never went to hers. In my head, she lived in public housing. I may be remembering that wrong. I also remember her being dark black, not medium black, not light black. That part may be wrong too. And she didn't not come over because she wasn't allowed. My parents didn't say, "Tara can't come over cause she's black." I have no idea why she didn't come over. Maybe I never invited her. Maybe she lived too far away. Maybe her parents hated white people. Maybe she commuted from Vernon Hills. Was there a Vernon Hills thirty years ago? Maybe she had to take the bus. Maybe she carpooled and her ride wouldn’t wait. Maybe her world wasn't public housing. Maybe, she was from Wilmette. Maybe her dad was a neurosurgeon and her mom got a PhD in Chinese from the University of Chicago, and she had to get home to play tennis with her stockbroker. I don't know why I decided what I decided about her life.
I used to tell this lie.
I told people that I had a friend named Tara W. That part was true. That’s the only reason I still remember her name; because I told this lie about her years after I knew her.
This part isn't true. I went to Tara's house, at public housing...I remember the apartment that I made up...the floors were white and black speckled linoleum and cracking open like lava, the walls were thin plaster, there were no doors between the rooms...it felt like a corrugated tin shack, but on the seventh floor of a tenement. We rode the elevator and I was a little scared about it breaking down or someone putting a knife to my throat. Then, the lie lie. We were playing in some dreary room; light leaking through the cracked windows, and then Tara's mom comes home. She comes in and looks at me and says, "Tara, she's white!" I never told the story beyond that. That was the punch line. That was my proof that I'd been in that place, that I'd been outed for being white. That I wasn’t afraid to go to a place like that, where I was in danger and where I was acutely different, where I had journeyed where no white person had journeyed before. The story made me feel sort of weathered, even though I knew, every time that I told it, it was a lie. I never talked myself into thinking it really happened. But I probably told it thirty times in my life.
Last night, I got into a conversation with some friends about race, and I woke up remembering this lie. It made me wonder about why a kid would tell a lie like that.
I know it has a lot to do with the neighborhood I came from, which has been called "one of the most successfully integrated neighborhoods in the country." I used to brag about that title, until I realized how few black friends I had actually integrated into my daily life. And then I wondered, "What is a successfully integrated neighborhood?" Sure we talked the talk, we all said the right things about race. We knew you didn’t say, “I have black friends” , because it made you seem too aware of race. The assumption was ‘of course you had black friends, why mention it?’ We knew we were all racist, to a degree. We said “Everyone’s racist.” We said “Everyone’s gay.” We talked the talk.
But what about that little lie about Tara? Why did I have to make something up? Then, it hits me. As a kid, I learned it was important to be a good white person, so I made up lies about being a good white person. I took a spiritual shortcut. The values of the neighborhood demanded that I didn’t make up lies about my dad winning the Nobel Prize, or my mom being a marginally famous movie star...I made up lies about being racially sophisticated. I made up lies about being a good white person. What in the hell is a good white person?

College Freshwoman

College Freshwoman

I ordered my college transcripts in an effort to reconstruct my past. They came and I gave myself a week to open them.

Day one. I was nervous and unable to recall my grades from college number one, my first husband, in California.  I moved the envelope around the house, like a bill I couldn't pay. the transcripts lived on the coffee table.

Day two, they moved to the kitchen.

Day three, they relocated to great grandpas dining room table. You get the picture.

Then day four, at group therapy, the therapist had us write our ten most embarrassing moments. It took me a while to remember anything I had ever done. A) Because my memory is leaking. B) I tend to candy coat and rewrite my past. C) I also look at my shoe whenever I leave a bathroom. I am also such a deliberate person that I rarely embarrass myself unless I'm under the influence, which I no longer am.

Day five, I decide to open the college transcript envelope, to see if there's anything in there to be embarrassed about. Yep. The grades were pathetic, which was 50% shocking, cause I really didn’t remember, but I knew it couldn’t be good.
I used to tell people I left California (my rewrite of dropped out) so obviously I wasn't thriving, but I couldn't recall the specifics. Had I packed before? Had I planned on returning? Did my parents refuse to pay when they saw my GPA? In my rewrite of my California college experience, I'd told myself I didn't go back to that school because I didn't like it there, but I did like it there. I remember liking California. When I was thirteen, I ran away there. Then five years later, I legally went to college there. I had an uncle who lived there who lived on top of a mountain by Malibu. That was pleasant. The whole state smelled like movie stars and cocoa butter and burnt cement. I remember getting off the plane and thinking, finally California. Everybody in the airport was tan and wearing miniscule white shorts. There were a lot of giant blonds, a lot of toes painted in pastels.
I remember getting set up in my dorm room. I remember a knock on my door and opening it to two giant statuesque blonds, who looked nothing like anyone on the South Side of Chicago. In fact, if they showed up, the academic neighborhood would have founded a football team. The blonds lent me clothes that they thought would be super cute for the party we were going to. I remember a leather white mini skirt and a neon greenish yellow crop top. Then we get to the party and it gets vague from there. Me and the blonds drove to Tijuana a lot. We stopped at Denny's on the way home, at about four to six a.m. We were never in Tiajuana for fewer than ten hours. I remember thinking that this life was very glamorously seedy. The border patrol always complemented my friend Laura's passport photo. It wasn't even her picture. It belonged t a 21-year-old named Kelly, who'd vanished the year before. The blonds kept me dressed in endless pastel leather clothing, and when we weren't in TJ, we hung out in Beverly Hills Bars, where women put coke up their nose before they reapplied their lipstick. I remember the gas station that we renamed cigarette land and the men I dated with golden hair all over their bodies, who were also better looking then any women in my past life. Also unlike the Midwest, women were utterly unapologetic about sex. On the flip-side of their sexual experience, I met a girl who thought babies came from storks. Years later, I would see her boyfriend on Fear Factor, and I remembered him telling us “Don’t ever tell Kelly the truth or I’ll find out who did.” I remember not knowing if that was a threat. I met a girl whose mother was dating Chuck Woolery from Love Connection. Apparently, he was a player. I found out game show hosts were sought after men. That was jarring. I learned cars could wear bras to keep flies off. I saw Mickey Rourke at Sushi on Sunset and I remember him buying Laura a drink, but we might have made that up. I remember Axel Rose at a breakfast place in LA. I met a guy who got up and surfed at five. He looked like cupid elongated, and he never stopped smiling until his older triathalete girlfriend, Anna, dumped him, and then he just dragged his surfboard around campus and became a Philosophy major. I was friends with a girl who watched pornography so she could be the best sex on campus. One month, she clocked 28 different different lovers. I couldn’t believe she called them lovers. Nobody called her a slut, and she told us we were not allowed to date anyone she’d been with since all sex was sacred to her. Oh, and the cops didn't give you a speeding ticket if you smiled at them and acted super happy to be pulled over, especially if you drove in your bikini. You were always to drive in your bikini, Laura taught me, and she almost taught me how she got her gasoline for free, but then stopped, saying I would judge her. I met a hundred people from Hawaii. They were all fiercely attractive and drove sports cars or surf boards. My dad came out once and bought me two cartfuls of groceries and a boom box. He also paid my 360-dollar drinking on the beach ticket. My uncle Danny came out once and bought me breakfast. Years later, when he told the story, he insisted I ordered two. Who knows?
He said “You were really hungry, you were such a pig.” I later learned some people say mean things to children to confuse the Gods into thinking you’re a bad person; insults are actually protection from being taken early and being made into an angel.
Okay, day five, part two. Transcript read three F's. I don't even remember the classes, taking them or going to them. I sort of remember the Italian one. I stared out the window and thought about Italian men. And there was some human behavior class called Marriage and Family taught by this three time divorce. I remember trying to get him to fall in love with my just by looking at him, but he only looked back with those sad brown middle aged man eyes.
Day Six. I woke up remembering that I remember things wrong, that I'd actually I failed out of California, twice. First I bought a plane ticket there when I was thirteen and got sent home by the police. The second time, I got sent home because I couldn’t keep my grades up at a party school. Failure. What a strange word. Especially since it sounds like lure. Like I lured fail. Beckoned it. Wooed it.  You can drove to Tijuana so many times, that your anchor starts to weld into it. Failure is such a final frontier.
Day Seven. There's a lot I don't remember, I tell people. The fact is, there's a lot I don't want to say aloud. There's this illusion I carry that I am supposed to be better than I am, that my past should be shrouded in A's and bravos. That I've chosen to flail through life, not that I took a road here. The fact is, when it comes down to it, I'm lucky as hell to have survived my adventures. So, I'm still catching up? So what.

Two Brooklyn Bridges to go, please

I totally trust strangers(not you stalkers, killers, poison-candy givers, and thieves)...more like waitresses and car salesmen and air-conditioner repairfolk.
When I go to a restaurant, I ask the waitress what she likes. My husband always laughs when I do this. He says, "How do you know she likes the same things you like?"
I say, "Look, I've worked in a restaurant and the waitress knows what's good." It's me, being Erin Brokovich. "I know what the people want. I'm a people."
When we go to buy a new car, and my husband is feeling nervous about the purchase, mid-paperwork, I say "Honey, we made a deal." And we go home with buyers remorse. We take the car back three times and get a different one, losing money each time. Two crazy people out car shopping.
Here's the problem. He likes how excited I get about things. I like every car so much, my cup bubble-ith over. I trust he'll cut me off if I'm being insane. We're not speaking English. We speak NUT-BAR. I even, expensively, think it's romantic that he trusts me, when clearly, I'm a mental patient.
It has come to my attention that I may trust strangers a little too much. The fact is I just want no conflict. I want the waitress to feel good about what she knows about the menu. You're the expert, Flo. I want her to know I trust her, I like her, I respect her craft. bla bla bla.
I don't want the car dealer to have any trouble with us. I want him to remember us as easy customers, as nice people, who don't worry about money.
But I'm done. Finito. I don't care if salepeople like me anymore. I feel like a rat in a cage who'll pretend wax is cheese. No more. Done. I said, done. Now beat it!

idiots guide to sleeping

Idiots guide to sleeping says...if you are in your thirties with career unclear...still mucking around your spiritual bog for some meaning...some purpose...then chances are you are not sleeping properly every night.
Don't blame your forty dollar mattress-people run in Africa without shoes-
Don't blame your mother-you can no longer hear her flipflops on the woodstairs(maybe their echo, but she's not there. It's just you. Maybe it's just you and just someone else, but there you are, insomniatic, haunted, rewinding different versions of your life)-
Maybe you're playing the movie with the rich guy in it-had I married him, I would be in spas all day
Maybe you're playing the single version of yourself-if I were alone, I would have conquered the world(how does that bullshit taste? )-
Maybe you're wondering what you forgot to do-
Maybe you're wondering if your dreams were too arrogant, if you should have reached for a career, not the slim possibility that you are special, that you're supposed to one day be dressing for a big awards ceremony-
Doesn't matter. You're not sleeping. You forgot how. Your REM is having an affair. Your stage 4 sleep went to Bora Bora cause Cameron Diaz kept talking about how great it was on the letterman show
Doesn't matter if you were supposed to be lighting fires on the tops of mountains-
Doesn't matter that you were looking at boys instead of math equations-
Fact is-
Fact realy is, but don't tell your 4am brain this-
The fact is, is sleep or no sleep, this is the human experience. Mortality is a bitch. As soon as you figure shit out, your knees start to hurt. As soon as you grasp it's meaning, your lips are chalky, your hair is thinning to the point of extinction, and you're choaking out the word "Rosebud"-
If it turns out your little piggies have graced the red carpet, someone will publish your last words
If it turns out, you scraped by with the rest of the humans, you may not have many witnesses to your final utterances-
You may even be alone. Is that why I wake up?  Is that insomnia? Afraid of dying alone? Talk about freaking out about things I can't control.
No, that's too depressing. Even famous people have horrible ends...lonely, embittered, solitary, unobserved...
I knew a farmer, indirectly, so indirectly that he wouldn't have recognized me(before or after death)...simple man, simple life, life measured in acres not glossy pages...500 people at his funeral, lined up all the way down the dirt road. I worked with his grandson who wore some kind of a long coat called a slicker. The jacket matched his hat, which was also slicked with something. Anyway, visually, this guy was foreign to me, a blip, uneventful, benign, rural. I still thought of myself as inches away from fame. He'd say one day "I knew her when." He comes into work one day, glowing, beaming inside everything that's slickery.
-What's up, man? I ask him.
-Grandfather died.
-Sorry.
-Nothing to be sorry about.
-Jeeze. Didn't you like him?
-FIve hundred people at his funeral. People around the block. (I, for some reason, doubted it was a block. It was a dirt road, I was sure of it.)
-Wow, I sort of said.
-What a life. What a good life.
At the time, I thought this guy was some kind of nimrod. Death was no kind of life. God made him a farmer. His life was on mute. He tilled land. Nobody knew who he was but all his neighbors and the pharmacist. And Pam, at the foodmart.
IN my defense, I once thought Chicago had no sports teams. One day, I'll wake up, and it'll all make sense, clear as a zit after zitcream, and then I'll fall into my coffin, and that'll be that.

To old friends

The idiots guide to old friends reads as such--
Because you met your old friend a very long time ago...though the relationship contains mountains of well-earned love, it may lack the maturity that your newer relationships possess.
If you met in high school, you may still be acting like you did in high school. You, meaning me.
I met C when I was thirteen. When I ran away from home at thirteen, she left a five-page letter stuffed in my locker, for when I returned. It was written in black sharpie on typing paper. It was massively crumpled. It began "How could you leave me in this place with all these assholes?" Our friendship was lanched from this letter. We had not been close at the time that she wrote it. It was a lifeline thrown from a sinking dingey. She is not a dingey, but her boat was. She's always been a woman, since way before she was born.
She'd tell me years later, after a year long fight...we did not speak that entire year...We bumped into each other at the bar Schubas, hoping to see a band featuring a boy we'd grown up with...a snowstorm kept his band in Iowa, and the other customer-fans at home. She and I sat there, on separate ends of an empty bar, she with a new engagement ring, me with a Bushmills whiskey...I inched over to her.
"I'm sorry," I said.
She nodded.
"That probably doesn't mean much at this point," I said.
"Actually, it does," she said. "You've never apologized before."
It was true. I had grown up with the fonz. I was more likely to punch a jukebox into disco than say the dreaded words of apology.
She said "You know why I liked you so much back then?"
"Not really."
"You were the only person I knew more fucked up than I was."
Someone who did not know themselves as well might have been offended. But to me, she was only holding up an old mirror. The kind you can walk in and out of. Narniatic.
We've been friends ever since.
Last week, we got in a fight. I was thirteen again. She was stuffing a note in my locker. Be careful where you anchor.

The Idiots Guide to Making Sense

I am resistant to making sense. I'm a mucky muck, a muddled huddle, a confused muse. I do not like sense in a pan, I do not like a structured plan, I do not like it in a spreadsheet, it's taken years to tuck a bedsheet.
Last night in class, each person stood in the front of the room and "did a rant."
My stage fright returned, unhinging my cool, flicking my wires, short circuiting my flow.
I watched in admiration as people got to the point. Someone was mad at men for telling her she'll want a baby someday, another rant about the new Pitt/Jolie spawn, another about the endless procession of 24 valedictorians(suggesting perhaps a battle royale for last Val standing).
Rants are born from anger, as surely as babies are born from teenage sex.
I'm not angry enough. LIke I told the class, I've got a condition called "Tums of the brain." As soon as I start to feel something I shut it off like an antacid. I lack passion in conviction. I'm luke warm until someone cuts me off from the right side of the road. Then, I'm existing, then I'm acutely aware of my existence.
"If you can't be mad," my professor says, "Be afraid. Fear is as potent as anger."
My teacher, my clue meister, dropping me crumbs so I may find me way back to the candy house.