I have been feeling very nostalgic lately about a few certain “eras” of my life, and it’s kind of driving me crazy. Of course, at the time I didn’t think life was that great, but every so often I catch a whiff of autumn air and I get a flood of feelings and memories and it’s like, “Holy fucking shit, I should have appreciated that time in my life so much more.”

Then I found this picture when I was looking for something else, and of course it made me all introspective and at least fifteen untold stories flashed into my mind.

I don’t think I’ll ever get over the time I lived in my first apartment, where this photo was taken in ’98, but at least now I’m not crying about it all the time and wishing I could go back. That’s a sign of maturity, right? (Lol.)

More on this era later!

Manischevitz.

Boggle.

Big beige floor pillows, tear-stained.
Black Bible and the Cure.
Freddy’s pizza.

Red suede Mary Janes.
Pumpkin candles.
Pondering Judd.

Every Saturday night, my Pappap and I would go to church. Sometimes we were joined by other family members, or my friends who were looking to score a good meal afterward. (I maintain that this is the sole reason why my Pappap was so adamant, religious if you will, about attending mass every week.) If my step-dad was in tow, that meant we couldn’t slip out after Communion, but instead were forced to return to our pew, pasty wafer refusing to dissolve before first gagging us and adhering to our uvulas, until the priest formally urged us to go unto the Lord. My aunt Susie would join us if she had a hankering for osso bucco and Naple’s was the restaurant of the night. I never wanted her to go because it always turned into a tense night of us vying for my Pappap’s attention. She’d pinch me under the table when I was young and humiliate me in front of cute bus boys when I was older. My Pappap had forged friendships with the owners of some of the best restaurants in town. Fortunato’s was one of those restaurants. I would always order Veal Denny, which was stuffed with crabmeat and had a delicious fromage sauce ladled upon it. It was served on a silver plate flanked with slices of marachino-marinaded apple rings. I loved those apple rings. It was hard to say what my Pappap would order, but it was always Lambrusco filling his glass. There was a whole group of us there one night, a long time ago. Susie was teaching me how to turn ordinary wine glasses into melodious instruments, hoping it would chagrin my Pappap. But the chagrinning would all go to my step-dad, who became obviously flustered as the owner emerged from the back and approached our table. "Oh Jesus, would you knock that off?" my step-dad begged. "You’ve made the owner come out now!" The owner was a robust man in his fifties with a stern face. We had eaten there often enough for he and my Pappap to form a friendly rapport with each other, and I was afraid I had managed to ruin that with my unruly tableside manner. When he reached our table, he brandished an enormous crystal goblet from behind his back. "Try this," he said with a sly smile. That thing produced the deepest, bellowing hum and I have yet to replicate it to this day. My Pappap leaned back and grinned, taking joy in the fact that someone else was able to please me. The owner died sometime in the nineties and his restaurant has since become some run-of-the-mill Chinese dive, which has a really delicious dessert of fried bananas but Henry and I have never gone back. Sometimes I think about that Veal Denny and I wonder if I’d have succeeded in being a vegetarian for so long if Fortunato’s and my Pappap were still around. My guess is no.

Everything changed after that February night in 1996. When I returned to school, I was met with sympathetic faces and had faux-friendly exchanges with girls I hadn’t spoken with all year, like Keri, who was always too spineless and weak-willed to create her own judgements of people. I wonder if I would have taken her back if the situation was different, if I hadn’t been reduced to a despirited girl barely floating down highschool hallways; all I know is that at that time, under a current situation bogged down by gravity, I was willing to latch on to anyone for support, even those I wasn’t sure I should trust. And Keri has proved that she is not, and was not ever, one to be trusted. Justin broke off our second attempt at coupledom. Said it was the long-distance thing. He transferred out of my high school the previous year, and even though he only lived a few miles away, neither of us had cars. But I know he couldn’t handle it, was tired of trying to find the right words to comfort me in lieu of his protective arms. I had become emotionally taxing and burdensome, always wanting to hash out the whys of the situation, always wanting to find other things to cry about. "No, this movie is really sad. Really, I’m crying about the movie. Not….that." I greedily tore through an entire box of Kleenex while watching Higher Learning on Lisa’s bed that winter. "I mean, it’s sad, but c’mon, Erin," she said in disbelief. Home life was more chaotic than ever. No one was really talking to each other, tongues paralyzed and brains drained of normal comfort responses and the capacity to show compassion and empathy. Rather than unite in tragedy, we all drifted apart. Susie and Mark and my mom and step-dad all began the slow, excruciating path winding down to the bowels of slander and divorce. Easter was the first holiday in the history of my family that no one greased a casserole dish, brandished a carving knife, or capped pies with a dollop of whipped cream. I didn’t care. It gave me more time to cry uninterrupted into my pillow. Me, I started falling asleep in classes, my As morphing into Ds and Fs, and I was sneaking off a lot to hang out with Jessie, the "bad girl" who smoked pot and slept with possible gang members. She lived down the road, the adoptive daughter of a couple with a big house, big dogs and big mob ties. We would skip school together, dye Easter eggs and drink liquor with her boyfriend’s older friends. Six months later, I met Mike. He came with the appealing factor of attending a different school. My friend Christy knew him. She begged me to leave him alone. "He’s an arsonist! He’s been locked up for it! Please stop using such poor judgement." But poor judgement and I, we were inseparable like two young boys who had just smeared each others’ fingertip blood into a Rorschach picture. I spent a year and a half being emotionally ravished and scarred by Mike, I dropped out of high school, I picked up hitchhikers, quit jobs after a day, drank myself stupid, had sex with reckless abandon, one nervous breakdown always waiting in the wings. Things would have been different if that night never happened, sure. But I wouldn’t have Henry. I wouldn’t have Chooch. It’s enough to drive a person crazy, dwelling on cause and effect, wondering if it was some sort of subliminal swap with God. Him for them. This for that. But I wonder, if my Pappap was alive to celebrate his birthday today, would I have still managed to spend two hours locked out of my house? Probably.

Six Octobers ago marked the official start-up of my relationship with Henry. We had been whatevering clandestinely for an entire summer prior, but if you know anything about me, you’ll understand that this means I spent that whole time pushing him away, screaming obscenities at him, slamming doors in face, refusing to answer his calls (but glady accepting gifts), and cancelling plans with him. In other words, nothing really changed except that we gave the arrangement a title.

Most of my friends had already met him because we were all regulars back then at a bar named McCoys, but my mom and brother had not yet had the privilege of meeting the man who would become their own private IT guy. (“Henry, I fucked up my computer again. Can you fix it? I can’t get onto MySpace!” — sadly, my mom, not brother.) I planned to remedy this by inviting him to my mom’s Halloween party; he nervously RSVPd as a positive, already worried that the age difference would cause ripples.

A few days before the party, I had all four of my wisdom teeth surgically extracted. It was a traumatic ordeal for me, as I awoke from anesthesia and was asked how I was getting home. “My mom,” I replied. Duh, she was in the waiting room. Except that she wasn’t. The whole procedure took only fifteen minutes and she couldn’t even wait that long? The dental team could not have made their distaste any more evident. I was apparently taking up valuable space in the recovery room.

My mom finally came back, and we had a huge fight later on while I was nearing a state of unconsciousness with shocks of gauze jutting out from my just-been-through-hell lips, because she didn’t want to fill my prescription until it was time to pick up my brother from school. You know, to save her trips, because the town of Pleasant Hills is so huge. Doesn’t it sound huge? And foreboding? Like, you hear “Pleasant Hills” and your mind automatically conjures a megatropolis with tall gray blood-tipped spires for a skyline, right? Like, Gotham City but even more stormy and sprawling; fatalies unfolding on every block.

Clad in my PJs (the shirt splattered with gum-blood – yummy), I wrestled my car keys from my mom and peeled out of the driveway. I do not remember the drive home. I do not remember stopping at red lights and yielding at crosswalks and even stopping at the pharmacy. But I know I made it home and my insurance wasn’t raised, so I guess I’m either pretty good at quasi-comatose cruising or I pulled some really slick hit and runs.

I knew that I had escaped imminent danger, and so when I awoke the next day with swollen cheeks and kohl-smeared eyes, I called my dear friend Keri and asked her if she would run to the store and please please please buy me some cans of soup so I wouldn’t have to deal with any vehicular manslaughter bullshit on my permanent record.

But Keri was watching a movie. She was really sorry (no, she really wasn’t), but maybe she would do it later.

Did you know that at the time of this truly tragic tale, Keri lived a few streets over from me? That’s right, we both lived in Brookline, and we have the convenience of a CVS drugstore and a Foodland, both within a 5-mile radius of our houses. But unfortunately, it appeared that Keri was watching some anomaly of a flick that would only be available in front of her eyes one time in her life. Just this once. She can never again watch that movie. So, yes, I completely understood why Keri was unable to pause it (hello, DVD player remote) and help out an ailing friend.

Unable to wait for Henry to get off work, I threw on a duster over my sweatpants and took my puffy cheeks for a car ride. My body was pumped up on Vicodin like a turkey on hormones, and while it was doing wonders for the pain of my wisdom teeth pits, it was really wreaking havoc on my emotions and decision-making skills. In the middle of the dairy aisle, a pair of downtrodden housewives as my audience, I burst into tears — the kinds that whiny girls burst into in Japanimation — because I couldn’t decide if I wanted 2% or skim. Which would make my tomato soup the creamiest? I didn’t know! And to make matters worse, the Vicodin was telling me to fuck the milk and go for some top shelf Tequila.

Drugs, recreational and otherwise, have never had pleasant effects on me. I could never even smoke a bowl without suspecting that every male in the tri-state area was diligently drawing up blueprints that detailed the precise actions they would employ to systematically rape every opened pit of my body. People would say things like, “Wow, it’s snowing really hard out there” and I, while under the herbal influence, would construe their innocent observation as, “And then you’re going to blow me while I anally rape you with this barbed wire.”

When I first came in contact with my older half-sister a few years ago (we share the same dad), she told me that she was so mentally incapable of smoking pot that she once tried to jump out of a moving car while stoned. “Oh, you really are my sister!” I enthused.

My mom had a Halloween the weekend after my wisdom tooth extraction.There are always labels on prescription bottles, warning people not to imbibe alcohol was taking pills. But what’s a few swigs of hard cider going to hurt, I thought, as I popped a Vicodin for the road.

Henry and my mom were meeting for the first time. I’m sure this was an awkward situation, but I wouldn’t know because the Woodchuck in my gullet was making the Vicodin coursing through my body do the Lambada. I was feeling good.

Two Woodchucks later, I was publicly attacking Henry’s mouth with my tongue. I vaguely remember Keri exclaiming, “Oh my god, she’s kissing him. In public! In front of us!” My mom said, “She must really like him.” Notoriously anti-PDA, I had never made out with someone in front of my friends before.

Another Woodchuck found me behind the garage, smoking a joint with my brother’s friends, a scene that did not make Henry very proud of me.

Five minutes later, I was supine on my brothers’ large trampoline, reaching my arms to the Heavens and wailing, “When are you going to come for me, Robert Smith?” This is a memory that was supplied by Janna, who had the honor of making sure I didn’t try to get too Mary Lou Retton on the trampoline.

Henry was not pleased with me that night, not at all. While I was off slutting it up with minors, he was left to his own devices with a group of my friends he barely knew and a mother who was undoubtedly judging him for his age. Basically, it would have made for a pretty good episode of The Real World.

Henry confiscated my Vicodin after that night and has since vowed to never let me take it ever again. I’m hoping that I won’t need a root canal any time soon, or I guess I can kiss my relationship goodbye.

When I was in high school, I bought this totally awesome blue neon frame, which I used as a “Now Playing” CD display. I would leave it on all night as I slept, much to the chagrin of any friend who happened to be sleeping over.

“Can’t you turn this off while we sleep?” they’d whine. Sure, it might not have been very conducive to restful slumber, but every night as that blue neon washed over my sleeping mound on the bed, I was getting more resilient for city-living, for one day in the near future when I’d be living in an NYC loft, bedroom bathed in the bright lights of bordellos and theaters and all-night chicken shacks, bathroom mirror reflecting fragments of the twirling reds and blues of cop lights, the TV unwatchable from the glare of my roommates cooking crack and the sounds of subway riots pealing past my crumbling plaster walls.

Instead, I wound up in Brookline.

I might not be in the center of a neon circus, but I have a hole in my bedroom wall, my stereo is capped with a bright blue light and I’m fairly certain my neighbor has a meth lab in her basement.

I’d say that’s pretty damn close to realizing a dream.