The Clancys of Queens (14 page)

We drove to Rosemary's apartment in her low-rider Caddy with chrome rims—apparently she had really taken to L.A. culture—and she went extra fast and rolled down all the windows and I asked if I could wear her leather jacket, claiming “I'm getting kinda cold…” But I wasn't.

She gave me a wink and draped it over my shoulders, and I stuck my face out the car window into the wind, feeling in awe of Rosemary, her jacket, her car, and her wallet chain. In other words, I felt the very draw to this person that my mother had presumed I would…even if it would be another five years before I had any clue as to why.

Six months after I left L.A., by some sick miracle I once again found myself in a self-induced near-death situation that involved both a thugged-out best friend and gas masks—well, more like an event at which everyone was praying they had one of the latter. It also just so happened to take place in another place popular among sadists: Catholic school.

Several things had to happen for me to end up there. My zoned public high school had such a bad reputation (with newly installed metal detectors to confirm that said reputation was well deserved) that, come eighth grade, all my friends at Middle School 172 were desperate to find an alternative. A few lucky kids passed the test to get into one of the city's super-competitive specialized public high schools (e.g., Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science). Esther and Lynette were headed to Bayside High, a public school a few neighborhoods over that admitted out-of-district students to their arts program, and I might well have convinced my parents to let me join them had I not cut school the day of the aforementioned entry tests. In so doing, I not only lost my chance to attend one of those top schools, but I also managed to convince my parents that what I needed more than the company of my best friends, a rigorous academic program, or an arts education was the drilling of hard-nosed nuns.

In 1994, the going tuition rate for a New York City Catholic high school was around $4,000 a year—a price that most cop/construction worker/car mechanic dads in my chunk of Queens could afford, and one-tenth the cost of other private schools. For the money, Catholic schools offered a slightly better education than your average public school, though not half as good as the specialized ones. But whatever these institutions may have lacked in academics, they made up for by way of discipline—and by greatly reducing your kid's chances of being shot. And so, much to my dismay, I was headed for St. Mary's.

To make matters worse, the only other MS 172 kid set to do a stint at St. Mary's was one I didn't like. Alli was the epitome of the popular, pretty, mean girl, which in Queens of 1994 meant she was something like the love child of Barbie and Snoop Dogg. A thugged-out Irish girl with gel-curled long blond hair, brown lipstick, a perpetual scowl, and too-tight clothes, she had grown up down the block from me on 253rd Street, attended all the same schools I had from kindergarten on up, and had her Holy Communion and Confirmation at St. Greg's, like I did. And yet, at fourteen years old, having been in the same place practically every day for nine straight years, we had never spoken a word to each other.

After the L.A. trip, I started to veer from the standard Queens kid hip-hop look to some combo of the grunge fashion I saw on MTV (and not anywhere else around me) and the “Rosemary/Still Unaware Little Lesbian Chic.” I kept rocking fresh sneakers, but as the other girls' jeans got tighter and tighter, I started to wear mine baggy, pairing them with thermal or flannel shirts. And though I could still recite every Wu-Tang Clan lyric, I started seeking out classic punk and rock music—nearly all my peers listened exclusively to rap and hip-hop, and it would be many more years before I had any idea that in the larger world they were not the rule but the exception and that outside Queens I wouldn't have been the only teenager in a ten-mile radius who owned a Jimi Hendrix album.

Alli dismissed people like me as too weird and uncool to even bother with; I dismissed her as unoriginal and unintelligent. But, despite our protests, our dads—who were both cops and had long been pretty friendly—forced a get-together on us. A few weeks before school started, for the first time ever, I was to walk the three hundred feet from my house on 253rd down to hers, so “you two can spend a little time, get to know each other…won't kill yuhs!” Dad said.

I thought it would be just us, but when I got there, she was waiting out front with a little crew of girl clones—all wearing painted-on, cutoff jean short-shorts, baby tees, door-knockers, and all-white low-top Reebok Classics. Beside them was a pair of guys with matching Caesar haircuts and plaid boxers sticking out from jeans belted below their asses. Nobody said a word when they saw me but instantly took off in a pack, all behind Alli. She turned back and said, “You comin' or not?” I rolled my eyes, feeling as if I had just walked into some lame-ass after-school special, but followed them anyway, all the way to the back corner of the handball court at the PS 133 playground.

I had never smoked weed before, but I sure as shit didn't say that, and when the blunt came my way, I took a long, proper puff, hunching over and pulling from my toes so I wouldn't cough and face hell before passing it to Alli. After she took her hit, she looked me up and down, and said, “Why are you so fucking weird? I mean, ‘grunge,' or whatever might be cool in Bubbafuck, Kansas, or some shit…but here it's just wack.” To which I shot back, “Says the girl whose ass cheeks are hanging out of her shorts like some—” I stopped myself as Alli, now all cocked head and pursed lips, squared up to me as if she was going to throw a punch if I let slip a single syllable more.

I took a step back but, suddenly struck with the feeling that this was one of those fork-in-the-road, fight-or-flight, pivotal life moments, dug deep to summon my inner Lynette Solina and stepped forward again, chin up. I changed course but didn't back down. “Besides, that doesn't make any sense. I think you mean, Bubbafuck
, Seattle
.”

“Seattle, Kansas—what's the fucking difference?”

“Damn, you really gotta get out of New York. Or buy a map.”

“They got a
Bubbafuck
atlas?”

“Yeah. You never heard of it? The Big Book of
Bubbafucks
.”

And at the same time that the tension broke, the weed kicked in, and we both started laughing so hard, we keeled over. Then we hooked arms to use each other as leverage to get to our feet, and that was that.

For the next few years we began every single day this way: arms hooked, crying-laughing over one stupid thing or another, smoking a blunt for breakfast, walking down our block to get the bus to school. By our sophomore year, however, we weren't getting on the bus to St. Mary's anymore—after we instigated that near-death situation, we got kicked out.

A month into my freshman year, I had proven to be the type of high school student who—if I wasn't asleep or stoned during class—I was drunk. In the waistband of my uniform's pleated wool skirt, I kept a “flask” of whiskey, which I'd made by washing out a travel-size shampoo bottle a thousand times (and then I colored it with a gold paint marker). Whenever I drank from it, I thought I was Janis Joplin reincarnate.

Meanwhile, in the waistband of Alli's skirt, rolled up to shorten its length to all of four inches and always worn with thigh-highs, was a beeper that went off incessantly with the stream of guys she was flirting with but never talked about.

By this time, Alli and I were inseparable. I loved her brand of toughness, and she loved mine. I loved how smart she was, even if she didn't want anyone to know it. I loved that, as hard as Alli worked to keep everyone else at arm's distance, she pulled me in close, twice as hard. And yet, for all the time we spent together, all the bus rides, lunchtimes, weeknights, and weekend conversations, sex was the one thing we didn't speak about—in fact, even though it wasn't difficult to guess that she had some experience, I only learned the extent of it by accident.

Half-drunk at 3:00 p.m. and lollygagging along at Alli's side as we walked toward the bus stop after school one day, out of nowhere I heard, “You little bitch! I know what you did! Stop!” We both turned back to see a gang of senior girls a block away but gaining on us, the two at the front shouting to their crew, “That's the fucking freshman who screwed my boyfriend!” “Yeah, mine, too! I'm gonna kill her!”

Just then the bus appeared at the corner, and Alli put her hand on my back, pushed me forward, and took off running toward it, “We gotta book! There's too many of 'em! GO!”

Alli gave them double fuck-you fingers through the bus window as we pulled away, then took a seat and made as if nothing had happened. I was confused as all hell, but right then I remembered walking into her house the previous Saturday night, just as two guys I kind of recognized were walking out. As soon as I saw her that night, in her room, I said, “Who were they?”

“Nobody,” she said. And I'd left it alone. But this time I couldn't.

“Those boys, from last week—they were seniors?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You never said you…I mean, how'd you meet them anyway?”

“School.”

“Yeah, I got that part…So did you? I mean, you hooked up with both of—”

“That's none of your fucking business.”

“Okay. Fine. But—”

“But what!? You wanna sit around talking about first-, second-base bullshit, all huddled up in the cafeteria, giggling, like some teen girls on TV shit?”

“No. But I also don't want to get my ass kicked, so maybe you should tell—”

“I'll handle it tomorrow—trust me.”

“Okay. I guess, I also just want to know if…you're okay?”

“I'm fine. Leave it.”

I have no idea when or how, but Alli managed to do something to make those girls leave us alone forever after. And, as she clearly wanted, I never brought any of it up again. Even so, for me, there would always be this unresolved internal debate: on the one hand, I loved that Alli alone seemed to burst the stereotype of teen girls sharing every detail of their budding sex lives with one another, of needing to get approval on whether they should or shouldn't do this or that, or of talking about sex incessantly because they thought it made them look cool. She just went out and did whatever she did with whomever she pleased, and she neither bragged about it, nor was ashamed. At times, I told myself,
She's just more mature than everyone else. She's a badass. She can handle it.
At other times, the fact that it seemed to me that she had more sexual experience at fourteen than most people do at thirty straight-out worried me sick. In retrospect, I should have said as much, but when it came down to it, some part of me lacked the nerve to question her. Besides, initiating any further conversation about sex put me in danger of having my own feelings on the subject examined, and, though I really didn't know what they were just yet, I knew I didn't want them analyzed.

Halfway into our freshman year, Alli and I were spending so much time together that her little crew of girl clones from the neighborhood hardly ever came around anymore. Thanks to something of a perfect storm—being in different schools, my wanting to be with Alli all weekend, and their disapproval of all the drinking and weed-smoking I was doing—for a bit I saw a lot less of Esther and Lynette.

Alli had let her guard down around me in a way I hadn't seen her do before or since; but even when you lifted the chain mail, she was still a pit bull underneath it. Yet every once in a while, if we were alone in my room, she'd lie belly up on the carpet, high and silly, eating Cheez Doodles, telling me my Rancid album “isn't that wack, I guess, but Biggie is up next,” and for at least a few minutes, she looked like the fourteen-year-old girl you could sometimes forget she was.

While other teenage best friends expressed their mutual love by writing their names in their notebooks with
BFF
underneath, Alli's way of showing me she cared was by threatening to beat up a girl who ratted on me for smoking in the bathroom. She didn't tell me she was going to do it. I came out of class to find Alli waiting, dead silent, arms crossed, eyeing the girl down. Then, without a word to me, she stepped up to her and said, “If you ever mess with my friend again, I will fuck you up.” The girl burst into tears, and Alli hooked her arm under mine, and we walked away. It was the closest thing I ever got to an “I love you.”

For six straight months we hardly spent more than a few hours apart, and yet Alli and I still looked like the types of girls who not only sit at different tables in the cafeteria, but who spend the entire lunch period sneering at each other, mutually enraged by the other's mere existence. But there we were, day in, day out, at our very own table, alone, together.