Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-01-21- 11:11 p.m.

Judy And The Dream Of Horses

Dinner at the Elephant Room in the West Village and Wee and I are drinking ginger ale out of mason jars and talking about places we used to go. I’m struck, and not for the first time, how hard we’re rushing through life. Sometimes I think we’re a unique breed; our own subspecies of humanity. We’ve seen too much. We spent too many early years idle. We’ve survived. We want to make up for lost time.
I never meant to be popular in high school. Even when I was, I didn’t really realize it. It was a weird time for everyone I think. I wasn’t captain of the football team or anything. I was just another kid with long hair who skipped class and smoked cigarettes, and then MTV put Nirvana on the air, and suddenly my friends and I were the It kids to a bunch of underclassmen.
Judy, I don’t know you if you’re gonna show me everything
There was this girl when I was a senior. Her name was Bonnie, and she was a freshman, and she liked me. She was just a sweet girl with a nose ring and a Cypress Hill t-shirt who wanted to be invited to senior parties. She wanted to be a part of it all. She would flirt with me, and I’d be nice to her. I remembered too closely then what it meant to be a freshman.
By the time I graduated high school, she was in the Phoenix Rehabilitation Program for heroin.
My senior year of college, I was home for Thanksgiving, and I went to the Hair Cuttery at the mall for a haircut (nope, I didn’t have any class then, and I don’t have much more now). She was still pixie cute, but her hair was in a shorter cut, and she had a tattoo that ran across her temple. She was the girl who sweeps up the cut hair. I could hardly bear to ask her how she was doing.
Judy never felt so good except when she was sleeping
I remember all these things. I remember skipping trig class when I was a sophomore, to go over to Ali’s house to screw. I remember how she would bark at her unemployed father to get out of the house for a couple hours when we would get there. I remember him collecting keys from the drivers that year’s graduation, before he sheepishly left to let all of us teenagers wreak havoc upon his little home.
I remember watching a kid named Tony hold a straight razor to my best friend’s throat when he didn’t want to take his birthday hits in the student parking lot when we were juniors. I remember not having the guts to do anything, or to say a word. Tony had a .45; I remember this because he once pointed it at me as a joke, and when I almost lost it, he popped the clip to show me it wasn’t loaded. I remember Tony scared too, forced into inaction when a bunch of kids trapped his friend Sean and beat him with a lead pipe on the auditorium freight entrance.
I remember skinhead kids beating up Ian McKaye with empty forty bottles outside an Earth Crisis show in Mt. Pleasant.
I work hard now at being friends with my little brother. He doesn’t understand why I never took him places when we were young.
Judy, where did you go wrong? You used to make me smile when I was down
I remember college, piles of cocaine powder white on coffee tables. I remember Dax, forever picking shards of safety glass out of his shaved scalp, six months after he drove his car into a wall on heroin, three months out of the coma. We never talked about these things; we just drank cheap beer and played the keystone at intramural softball. I remember sitting up all night with SHG when he had a concussion, reading the list they gave me in the emergency room over and over again to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I remember two weeks in December of 1997, when it all began to come apart. I remember meetings then with the deans, and half my friends dropped out or expelled by the time it was done.
I remember first coming to the city; going with Jen T. to the Fetish premiere at the Korova Milkbar and sipping drinks at the Opium Den while ballet dancers did blow in the bathroom. I remember going into an illegal gambling joint in Corona while Derek tucked his .38 into the back of my jeans, and later that night cruising illegal strip joints with a couple on-duty TCD cops.
The best looking boys are taken, the best looking girls are staying inside
Wee and I know what this feeling is. My other best friend in high school, Pablo, dealt pot and was expelled from the University of Maryland for driving a car into a frat house. I miss him, but I can’t call him anymore when I go home for the holidays. I don’t know what to say.
I don’t know how to explain that I don’t want to go get smashed with him because I’m beholden to that twist of fate that has me here and him there. I dream now of mortgages and good credit ratings. I dream of sheets with a high thread count. Now that I’m old enough to see part of the void we transversed, I’m running out towards more solid ground.
I’ve already been places. I just want to be able to stay where I am.

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Older

Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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