My Mom Was Right About You

You were the cool kids. The ones to whom both physics and jurisprudence didn’t seem to apply. The ones who escaped the cruel hand of fate that turned my friends and I into awkward, gangly and acne-ridden middle schoolers as soon as the clock struck 11 years of age. The ones who had parents who worked late, the ones who would smoke regs on someone else’s patio after school, dispersing like refugees from a trampled ant hill as soon as they heard a key turn the font door, laughing, tearing off on Toy Machines and BMX bicycles, utterly invincible. You ran our hometown, all cotton-mouthed and all youth. You had older siblings, ones who would purchase you malt liquor and bottles of peppermint Schnapps without thinking how the high gravity would wreck your fragile, inexperienced bodies. You would throw up and hook up, even when we were 14. You snuck into R-rated movies without paying, clubs and bars without being of age. You threw parties the likes of which I still to this day have only ever witnessed in teen comedies. I wanted to be one of you so bad that my awkward, teenaged body literally ached. Hell, I worshipped you. And after all this I can safely say: My mom was right about you.

When I got to college, you were still there. You were there, but different. Natural selection had pared you down to only the brightest and the most capable. The ones who could come to class on two hours of sleep but still make the grades to get a scholarship to state college or the ones who had enough sense to get the hell out the suburbs and join the big show. When a new town leveled the playing field and wiped the slate clean, many of my friends joined your ranks. It was a tabula rasa of coolness, and everyone who benefited either formed bands or lived with them. They became the people who made beer runs at 1:50 and partied until the sun came up. They no longer walked; they swaggered. My mom could always tell when I had spent too much time with them, when my childhood ambitions had swelled to become an unstoppable force that disallowed me from trying — still, vainly — to join their midst. It was like she could smell the booze over the telephone or sense that the lilt in my voice indicated the waning hours of a kegger-turned-weekend-bender. In my heart of hearts, I knew she was right: My mom was right about them, too.

And her. I once thought she was the greatest thing that had ever happened to 16-year-old me. Her, the one with the pill problem and the deadbeat dad, came into my life when I least expected it and turned my existence upside down. She became the terministic screen that ordered my whole life, and I would have done anything to keep it that way. She, the one who showed me Larry Clark movies and had a Cutlass that always reeked of Turkish Golds, was the subject of innumerable fights in which I thought I was on the side of passion, freedom of choice and young love. If I couldn’t fight for that, I thought, how could I ever fight for anything? I remained her advocate and biggest fan. Although the watchful eye of parental authority kept us apart, I thought nothing as pithy as sleep could bar me the chance to see her. The window screen of my childhood bedroom is still broken as a testament to this.  To admit I was wrong would have been to admit that I, too, would become a slave to paradigm of my parents’ loveless marriage, and that I would never understand a single pop song, so long as I lived. She, at one point, bore the sole burden of allowing me entry into romantic and artistic understanding. As much as it kills me to say it now, my mom was right about her, too.

And it’s not just that, for all of my trying, for all of my pitiful and fruitless attempts, you have given me only misery, embarrassment and rejection. It has nothing to do with their empty countenances, the ones that projected trust, commitment and friendship without belying addiction and shame. Likewise, it has nothing to do with the fact that just that she broke my heart so bad that I have yet to fully recover, even though a veritable lifetime has passed since our paths have last crossed. It’s been way too long for me to still be bitter about all of that.

It’s just that I see all of them. Around. Sometimes I see them over the holidays when I come back to this place of bad memories, and they’re the hostesses at restaurants I used to work at to put gas in my crappy Mazda. When I walk up, I see their drooping eyes flicker like yellow and distended half-moons of vague recognition, although we never acknowledge each other. Sometimes they drive by my house and rattle my bones with the loud bass that emanates from the cars they’ve been driving since their 16th birthdays when their moms, the ones who worked all those nights, bought them. Some of them have broken marriages, kids. Some live a life that that I fetishize and reject when I’m stoned and watching Teen Mom 2 with frozen pizza detritus dangling from my lips. I see their Facebook statuses about repossession, their stony-eyed glares when I go last-minute Christmas shopping, and I see the final shows of their bands — the ones everyone knows are breaking up due to drug problems, although the common and accepted story has something to do with “artistic differences.”

And it’s not that I’m judging anyone, although it seems that way. I know it does. And it’s not like I’m having the last laugh, scoffing from atop my high horse as I ride off into a sunset of success. Lord knows I have my fair share of faults, too, and that the concept of success is about as hazy in the world we’ve inherited as so many other things are today. I’ll be the first to say it: Life is hard, setting priorities even harder. The temptation to “live fast and die young,” as the cliché goes, is very real, and I wanted it to be the right answer so badly for so many years. I’m lucky as hell that I’ve escaped that mindset without too many indelible regrets and that I have nothing that tethers me to my mistakes and forces me to take responsibility for them. I’m only left to reckon with the casualties of an adolescence that demanded coolness and the realization of just how lucky I am to have escaped the arbitrary hand of fate that decides who takes the fall for all sorts of youthful folly. My mom was right, but I never listened anyway. Now that I’ve made it through those years, I’ll do all that I can to let her think those lessons never fell on deaf ears, even if they initially did.

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