I am officially registered for fall semester 2010 as a matriculated college student.
Wow. Wow. I’m so excited, and proud of myself. This is going to be a long road ahead but it’s one I am actually honored to say I’ve worked hard to get on.
I went over to the school to finalize the actions this evening and the woman who helped me with my academic advisement was kind enough to push up my available registration date so that I had a better chance of obtaining the classes that worked best with my daytime work schedule. I rushed home and completed the necessary clicking-arounds to ensure that I be officially registered for two of the six pre-requisite courses I need to complete prior to entering my nursing curriculum elsewhere. Done deal, readers. Classes start September 11, 2010.
The bus ride home was an interesting one. My iphone battery went kaput after about 30 minutes of listening to music via the Pandora application. This made it impossible for me to drown out the sound of the two valley-girl like teeny bopping, squeaky voiced, bad-make up applied girls who were sitting behind me discussing some boy who was 31 and still a virgin. I will not enjoy the commute home from school each evening if this is what it is normally like. Car, now – please. Anyway, I was able to filter their squawking out while I looked out the window and I realized that this particular bus runs a route that could easily be associated to my entire life. It’s really rather unsettling when I sit down and think about it.
The timeline I was running in my mind in fact started prior to getting on the bus at all. As I entered the campus I looked around at all the youngish faces and remembered myself in this very same place at their age. I was enrolled here right out of High School. At the time of my first semester I was dating a boy named John. I wondered whether or not the bench in which we carved our names was still around. I didn’t check –and instead I walked the halls of the institution and took note of the other handful of ‘adults’ who looked like they were students and not professors. The number was small – and for a minute or so it fucked with my head but I reminded myself that there is no time like the present and what is important is that I am HERE.
The ride home brought me past not only my High School but my Junior High and my Public School as well. We rolled by the giant High School – no students outside hanging about the way they did during my tenure. I thought about the time I’d kissed Charlie, the hottest bad-ass in the school, right on that bench that was outside my bus window. The memory brought on countless other thoughts of boys I’d kissed and girls I’d had fights with. I thought about this one time that I was waiting for the bus at the very stop we were picking up passengers from and some older kids threw a rock out the back-emergency exit flappable windows that are a NYC MTA bus feature. The rock hit me square on the bridge of my nose and cut my face open.
We rolled through Gravesend. This is where the memories are most plentiful. The small stretch of area that this particular route covers in Gravesend somehow managed to cover two previous residences, my public school, the library I did my homework in every night as a child, and a stretch of concrete that was the coolest place in the world to hang out when I was a tween. The first apartment we passed on my way back home was actually the last apartment I lived in with my mother prior to moving out on my own. I remembered the time I walked in and found strangers in the house, and the time I came home to find my niece hysterical crying over a fight my mother and sister had gotten into over their drugs. This was definitely not a good period of my life. The second apartment we passed was the one I grew up in. We had a two bedroom walk-in, with brown shaggy carpet, an eat-in kitchen and a bathroom that was as pink as pink could be. Being that we were on the ground level, we had access to the back yard as well. There were two kids standing outside my old home – and they were playing some sort of ball. I remembered how my sister and I would play stoop ball on those steps – or box ball, a Brooklyn original, in the three concrete slabs outside of our front-door. A lot happened there in the 18 years I occupied that space. There were countless drug-riddled arguments and dramatized events, robberies, assaults, and the most vivid of all the memories, overdoses.
I clearly remember coming home from school one afternoon and walking through our long narrow living room to find the paramedics working on my mother. White foam fell down the sides of her mouth as she seized. I couldn’t have been older than 6. My mother would overdose a few more times throughout her opiate run – and then she graduated to crack.
I was lucky to have family members on my street. Two houses to my right lived my great – grandmother, a woman like no woman I’ve ever met. She was the rock on which I lay my head at night and know that all was going to be alright. Across the street and a few doors down was my maternal grandmother; a woman that never really accepted me because she didn’t like my father – and because I had a father and my sister didn’t. She died some years ago – and we never did really become fast-friends before that happened. Aunts, uncles, and cousins were never sparse growing up in Gravesend – and I thank god for that!
Driving down the main Avenue on which I spent many a night hanging out on street-corners and being a little asshole was a welcomed reprieve from the memories of a gloomy home life. The hang-out scene in Brooklyn back in the early 90’s was fierce. There were literally never less than 20 kids hanging out back then. We all knew each other and we all looked out for one and other. Fights were never real – and if two guys wound up getting into a tiff over some bullshit, they’d have a chance to settle it with the insurance that no one there would let anything truly BAD happen to each other. I miss those days – eating sunflower seeds and drinking Snapple iced teas while listening to old-school hip-hop out of one of the older kid’s car radios. Us girls would hang in little cliques. We’d flirtatiously look at the boys we were crushing on – and give the other girl-cliques dirty looks if we thought there may be an overlapping of admiration. It was a great time to be a kid in Brooklyn.
Public school memories are few and far between – and the bulk of them are bad enough that I’d rather not even get into them at this point. Let’s leave it at this: I was the daughter of known drug-addicts who wore hand-me-down clothes and had a problem with my eyes that resulted in my having to wear a patch half of the time…. Yes, I was a poor dirty pirate girl up until the age of 8 or so…..
We passed the neighborhood projects. Building 15, 14, 12 – and I was reminded of Louie Alonzo – I was his first kiss in Junior High. He lived in building 6 with his parents and 3 brothers. Our torrid love affair lasted three hours until I found out he tried to kiss another girl before kissing me. Fucking Latinos are players even at twelve years old… Damn them and their sexy boriquenness.
Onward we moved - my getting closer and closer to where I now call home. We drove through the neighborhood in which I lived prior to moving in with Daniel. It has only been around 9 months or so since I’ve been gone from there but the area looks even worse than it did when I was initially becoming disgusted with it. It’s a completely different world than what it was back in the day. Fully populated by an immigrant mainland Chinese population, the area is filthy. Store signs are half falling off of their canopies – and garbage is strewn all over the streets. Empty store after empty store passed by my window – and I felt a tinge of happiness to be gone from there even considering the circumstances under which I parted. My new area, although not too far from the old, feels much more like the good old days of Brooklyn.
My bus finally took its turn onto the Avenue I currently reside - and by this time I was less engaged in the memories of yesterday – The time-line was an interesting one. It was one that brought up feelings of sadness, shame, happiness, and confusion. It also allowed me to identify the fact that my drive to move up and out of this southern-Brooklyn territory is not at all unrealistic. My entire life was just chronologically recounted on a one-hour bus ride. If that doesn’t scream sheltered I don’t know what does.
Brooklyn… I love you, baby – but this break up is going to happen whether you like it or not.
