The Graduate

One flew east, one flew west…  I teach high school seniors.  Watching them prepare for graduation has become an exercise in keeping my emotions checked.  “Oh, my babies they’re all grown up.”  Two years later I can’t remember their names.  Observing the ritual of this year’s group of seniors has synchronized with my mid-life crisis.  Last week I chaperoned a prom.  It was more fun then my own high school prom.  I am observing teenagers who are responsible, although not well educated; prepare to enter a phase they are completely unprepared for.  And neither was I in 1981.  I packed up for college listening to Bowie sing, “Win” over and over and over again.   I hadn’t a clue why I needed that particular song.  These kids I watch have not one clue about life.  I didn’t.  I didn’t know how to “Win.”  These kids think what they have now will be forever.  They don’t realize that one day they will think back to that “wobble song” and it will bring tears to their eyes. 

I went to my prom with someone who was murdered.  Murdered by his neighbor, chopped into pieces and buried in his own backyard. This had something to do with a drug dealer and a homosexual couple.  The details are not clear in my mind.  My prom date was part of the homosexual couple.  He was my friend, not a date, date.  I see this happen more frequently, and it makes me happy.  Why do I disdain romance?  A voice in my head screams, “it will never work out, it will never work out!!!”  On my prom night we picked up a third party.  She needed a ride to the post-prom party held at some awful NYC disco club.  She and I spent most of the night in the bathroom snorting cocaine made up of talcum powder.  She’s dead too.  Became a crack head.  I could have seen that coming.  When my family tells me I wasn’t very impressed with my prom, there are mitigating circumstances.  For me, “my prom date was murdered,” is enough.

I took a "not date" date to the prom because at the time I was dating a thirty-two year old man.  He was my guitar teacher.  A hot New Jersey ‘had been’ musician, train wreck.  At some point instead of teaching me how to play “Smoke on the Water” our music sessions, which my father was paying for, transitioned into long make-out sessions.  I was seventeen. There was no way I was asking him to go to prom.  He had an old, beat up VW, a wife who did low-level music publicity.  She supported him.  They were getting divorced.  He lived in a Bukowski-esque one-room apartment off of Route 17.  It had a hot plate, and I loved it there.  When his wife was out of town he invited me to spend the night in the tiny house they once together lived in.  He cooked beef stroganoff.  We had sex in their bed.  The next morning he hustled me out of there, a frenzy of nerves.  It still never occurred to me that once out of the nest, my life might change.  I remember she had scarves hung all over her bedroom.  As I grew older I always hung scarves on my walls and thought of her. 

When washed up musician guy broke up with me, in Johnson Park between my freshman and sophomore years of college I lost all my baby fat plus my freshman fifteen.  I should have written him a thank you note.  Years later he called my house.  He asked my mother what I was doing.  I was a record executive by then.  I felt triumphant.  I imagined him old, bald, living in a one-bedroom apartment full of vermin and a single hot plate.  By then I knew life did change, and I had already forgotten most of the people I attended high school with.

High school was the place I began to make mistakes that today I recognize as patterns.  I watch my students develop patterns; forks in the roads they will travel.  There are healthy patterns, but I tend to focus on the negative, “Oh no, oh God, do not do that thing!!!”  Gotta work on that.  My big high school pattern was I dated boys who did not appreciate me.  Befuddling, because I knew then as I do now that I am fairly fabulous. 

My “main” high school boyfriend was obsessed with another girl, although while we dated he was quite frank about it.  This chick was a tall anemic, plain looking blonde with a horsey face.  I was pretty and oozed cool.  I constantly gave him blue balls in the backseat of his car.  One day he drove off while I was sitting on the hood of that car.  In front of all my friends, I hit the pavement of the high school parking lot straight on my ass.  It was the former that caused the real pain. Base and mean an act of aggression that could have broken a bone alongside my ego.  What was I doing to make these boys so angry? It’s something I still do.  However, moving forward no one has ever again attempted to run me over.  I consider this a sign of progress. 

The twins were cute.  I dated both. We were hippies.  It was the late 70’s.  We should have been punks.  I jumped on that bandwagon in the early 80’s.  Thank you WFDU, Uncle Floyd, The New York Dolls, Creem Magazine, The Runaways, and that Sex Pistols album. The twins had a band together.  They would play Battle of the Bands concerts and I would show up wearing satin pants and platform shoes.  Once I attended a show with full on Paul Stanley make-up wearing black velvet Stevie Nicks get-up.  Nobody in 2015 is walking around in kabuki make-up like it’s no big thing.  Still, I am audacious enough to make fun of the “pants on the ground” boys of today, and I recently asked what a 22” Brazilian was because I imagined being waxed from the eyebrows on down.

One twin dumped me the moment his ex-girlfriend, the love of his life, moved back into town.  A nice girl, but, but, but, I was prettier and much cooler.  Plus, to think you’ve found the love of your life at sixteen is stupid.  Unless you really have found them, otherwise you are “whupped” as my students would say. I have only one student who is whupped.  He will most likely end up married, have a kid then divorce because he is going to be an alcoholic, and she looks smart enough to kick him out and let him find his bottom. Back to me, for revenge I momentarily dated the other twin who could hold deeply philosophical conversations on the revelations of every Led Zeppelin lyric.  The problem was he thought the Vietnam War was still going on.  I have students who are clueless when asked about Saddam Hussein, but they can recite every single fight that has ever happened in the high school cafeteria.

One young boy loved me too much. We were only in the 8^th grade.  I think he even gave me my first oral sex experience while rolling around underneath the kitchen table. Then his dad came home.  That yummy boy was a glue head.  Addicted to the rush of psychedelic grandeur, then nothing left but to do it again.  I didn’t like it much, the glue huffing.  I needed pleasure to last longer.  Recently he sent me song lyrics via social media they were “ZOSO.”  You know, the king and the queen are in love and then separated.  Alas, the king never forgets his queen.  He wants to be sure his queen forever remembers their love.  I don’t mean to make fun, because it was very sweet, but I recovered from “The Song Remains the Same” decades ago.  The era around the The Clash and Ramones was a time when the hippie boys and The Who posters had to go.  Anyway, I couldn’t be around a guy who was nice to me, even if he was a glue head. I think glue huffers are creatures of the past.  I am fairly certain there are none graduating among our class of 2015.

I have made up for all my young, screwed up boyfriends in other areas of my life.  I am not unforgiving; nope I am fully cognizant that I am as guilty as any mentioned or unmentioned party.  Not to say I don’t still succumb, but I overcome.  I graduate.  I graduated.  Somehow I got into a college that is now considered elite, even though I had truly absurd SAT scores, couldn’t do math and still can’t.  Today this is impossible.  My students need the outstanding test scores, the GPA, to have run twelve clubs and played five sports in order to even be considered entry to an estimable college.  On the other hand, I surrounded myself with people I could learn from.  Badly chosen boyfriends are usually intelligent. They might not know how to be nice to girls, or to girls like me, but they know about records, books, photography, magazines, comic books, theater, film, art, and poetry.  All of which fed my other needs.  My students don’t have the same appetites.

Reading was important in the 1970’s and 1980’s. It’s not important anymore.  My generation and yours, if you are reading this from Face Book, are irrelevant.  If you say Face Book to an eighteen year old, you might as well be saying Friendster.  My students Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, text, text, text, and tweet, they love the hash tag.  Reedit to them is like saying NPR. 

I see who controls the reigns.  I watch them graduate year after year.  They mean well.  They can’t read, and they can’t write.  Literacy no longer exists. There may be one or two out of sixty graduates who have the capacity to be curious.  Most of them are medicated.  God, what happened to self-medication?  Partying?  A gathering of people.  Isolation is killing society, and the creation of community.  The newbies are connected through “the cloud.”  Maybe because they are connected it is a society and I don’t understand this form of technology based community because I am old.  I still don’t see the point of an iPad.  

These kids are careful.  There is minimal risk in interacting through a screen (unless you encounter an Isis recruiter and that isn’t even funny).  On a midnight stroll through the LES an ex-boyfriend proclaimed, “Where are all the 20-somethings trying to wreck their lives?”  Jeez, we read On The Road and then wanted to do it.  Some of us did, or tried and got grounded, but at least we tried to have an experience, even if it was in our heads. Overall, the class of 2015 are far, far, less fanciful, and I think this is what gets under my skin most.  They have lost their imaginations, sacrificed them to an emoji. The other is, they don’t read!  I would like to force them to eat a book just to get ONE into their system.  Isn't The Sun Also Rises yummy?  Just like Burger King, see, told you.

One last thing and then I’ll go away, why is the media naming a new set of generations every time I turn around? Gen X, Millenials, Gen Y, Gen Me, Gen We…  Have that many decades gone by?  Why do I feel like “Baby Boomer” lasted for thirty years and all of a sudden every five years we have a new generation?   I am already confused about my youth, my mistakes, my successes, the kids I see today, my imagination roaming around their lives trying to figure out where they will land, when I have not yet managed to land.  Then again, mmmmmy generation was screwed up and we managed, we keep managing.  I do, so I assume you do too. In the end, we were alright.  Okay, so I ripped all their posters off the wall, still, The Who was onto something, the kids are alright.  I’m going to watch these students graduate and then I’m going to go listen to “ZOSO.”

Dedicated to Gary Harris who wonders how the girl from Hackensack became the girl he knows today (well Gary here’s part of the early shit).

We Had No Plans

It was Uncle Eddie’s final send off done Southwood-Smith way style.  If we can’t do it with complete class we ditch formality and go for a laugh.  Even at a funeral.  And so, the girls carried the casket.  Oh, the dresses and heels and scarves with hands on polls, made gorgeous casket bearers.  Looking down from the cosmos, what the pastor called “his perfect heaven,” Uncle Eddie with a sip from his flask (a hand-made Elmer’s glue bottle), a pull on a Camel and a wink at Cousin Diane, who he nicknamed “BT,” said, “Don’t crush my cigarettes kid,” and smiled.

Within ten days my Aunt Pat had been buried and now my uncle.  Both married to Southwood-Smith’s, one to my father’s youngest brother and the other to his only sister.  The entire Florida contingent plus cousin Donna stationed in El Salvador arrived in upstate New York for Uncle Eddie’s funeral.  We attend funerals for the living, as much to honor the dead.  Our family memories came pouring out of us as quickly as the tears and laughter.  There were so many of both I was a desert for two days after.

At some funerals, particularly when people are exhausted, perhaps from two sequential family deaths and travelling mercies, guards come down, and facades melt away.  Immediate intimacy.  We freely share our financial status’, our broken dreams, the reality behind the masks we wore in our 20s and especially 30s; how anxiety works on us, what hurts, that we view one another as role models, the dreams we shoot for, knowing they may fail, and this is the tough one because if they do fail we might be embarrassed when next we meet.  But it doesn’t matter because everything we share is done with trust.  A funeral can be a unique experience.  The bits are at their best.

Our last name was Smith.  In Jamaica on my grandfather’s side the Southwood would float around in people’s names.  My father’s oldest brother was born Norris Southwood Mayer Smith.  My grandmother, who Uncle Eddie called “The Battleax” and later in life “The Dragon Lady” (he could get away with this because Eddie was fearless, also the name of his second cat), decided she didn’t want the Southwood to just float around and demanded my grandfather hyphenate the Southwood to the Smith.  Rubber-stamped for approval the first son was re-christened Norris Mayer Southwood-Smith. 

When my father, Harrington Ovenelle Corrinaldi Southwood-Smith, all the sons and daughter were given both odd and long names, came to the United Stated in 1952 he dropped the Southwood.  We’ll never know why because cancer took him from us on November 17^th, 1986.  After the marriage proposal, my mother found out his last name wasn’t Smith and demanded he return the Southwood to its rightful place.  Thank god.  I think my entire life would have been different, quite possibly ruined, if I’d been forced to live it as Debbie Smith. Mom got a round of applause from the clan. Apparently the formation and retention of our name has been an ongoing battle.  Appropriately initiated by “The Battleax.” 

“We had no plans,” Aunt Winnie told the seated crowd of mourners gathered round her at a folding table during the post funeral reception held at her church, a 150 year old Episcopalian Church in Tappan, N.Y.  In 1957 My Uncle Eddie informed her, “I’m going to kidsnap you.”  She asked, “Is this a proposal?”  His reply, “I’m going to kidsnap you.”  Proposal made, no kneeling, no ring, purely the understanding they were going to be married. 

“You see Eddie hated that I was dating other fellows,” she told her crowd of folding chairs.  Albert Edwards, known as Al to friends and Eddie to family, was a street-smart Italian kid from the Bronx always in possession of a quick wit, a pack of Camels and a Chrysler. They both worked for NYC’s MTA she a secretary and he an engineer.  Albert worked on New York’s subway lines until he retired.  That’s where cupid’s arrow pierced him, but according to Winsome not her, “Oh I couldn’t stand him!  He was such a pest,” she bemoaned.  Eddie turned the lights on and off in the elevator when he found them alone.  Standing by her side he’d bump her elbow while she was working on a six carbon copy report.  He’d taunt her, “You’re gonna make a mistake.  You’re gonna make a mistake,” until eventually she did.  You can’t hit delete and start over on six carbon copies.  Through gritted teeth she cried, “Oh, he would make me so angry!” 

“Didn’t you have a crush on him?” I asked.  “Oh no, I just hated him.  He was from the Bronx.  I would NEVER date someone from the Bronx.”  The two began dating.  “He thought once we dated he would be the only one,” she explained.  Either this was a 1950’s mentality, or it was how an Italian kid from the Bronx felt about territory, or most probably it derived from what my Aunt Winsome looked like when she was dropped from Kinston onto American soul.  With not the slightest note of exaggeration, she was the embodiment of a pin-up girl.  Thick dark hair, exotic brown eyes, full lips, a Barbie doll waist and everywhere else Monroe curves. She was a dish. Eddie made a habit of unannounced visits to the Astoria apartment shared with her mother, Winnie complained, “He thought he could come visit whenever he wanted.”

One evening there was a motorcycle outside the building.  It was belonged to a competitor.  “I don’t know how he found out where this fellow lived, but he paid him a visit…” and what followed were euphemisms for the threats Eddie made should this man ever darken Winsome’s door again.  A murmur erupted from the crowd of the threat sans euphemisms.  Apparently, Winnie’s audience forgot they were seated in a church.  Curious as to his abrupt departure she eventually found the cause of her absentee suitor, and so did her mother.

The Dragon Lady had a few choice words for Albert Edwards from the Bronx.  “Winnie leave the room.  I need to speak with Albert.” Instructions stringently issued, Eddie was boldly informed that if this manner of behavior continued a commitment would be forthcoming.  These words were not minced, my grandmother was known for many things, the best rice and peas on the planet being one, demands met being another.

“We had no plans.”  The refrain repeated again and again.  The kidsnapping was kept secret for a year and the two sweethearts opened a joint bank account.  Albert Edwards did not want mama to know.  “She’ll make a big deal out of it.  She’ll cook for weeks and invite everyone.  I don’t want any of that.”  I don’t know what Aunt Winnie wanted.  She lived almost her entire life torn between the two.  They never had kids.  Didn’t need them.  With a mother prone to illness and a husband prone to bad habits her caretaking instincts were fulfilled.

Two weeks before the wedding Winnie let mama in on the secret.  Once informed Millicent left the apartment and went running down 31^st St., unabashedly hysterical. Winnie right behind her yelling out to console her, “It’s going to be alright ma he’ll take good care of me!” “No, you can’t do this to me!  Two weeks!!!  Two weeks!!! You tell me you are marrying in two weeks?  What kind of daughter would do that to her mother?”  As they passed the tailors and small delicatessens, the liquor stores, the neighborhood kids sitting on stoops, people leaning out of windows over fire escapes all watching to see what the street drama was about, this time.  Down the streets tears, puddles of tears, accusations and excuses raced past like the Q train above them. 

My dad liked Eddie.  Although, they fought like mad dogs.  They argued over chess games.  Sometimes having to be separated at family dinners.  They even fought over issues they agreed on. The altercations between Hal and Eddie, like saying grace before meals and my Grandmother’s rice and peas, were a fundamental part of Southwood-Smith life.  Still, he gave his only sister away on that day. The tiny wedding took place.  Millicent wasn’t happy, but she did obstinately cook, for a full two weeks.  Millie was a milliner and I doubt she had time to make the hat and veil for her only daughter.  She did make my mother’s, who asked for a tiara and ended up with a crown, perhaps my aunt got lucky.  In any case the food would have to suffice.

On the day of the funeral, placed beside Uncle Eddie’s casket was a formally posed wedding photograph.  The photograph was elegant.  It was beautiful.  Everyone praised it.  Hence the tale began. “We had no plans, and never thought to have a photographer present. It never crossed our minds.”  Someone in the wedding party told them they needed a formal, posed photograph. As they had no plans, they skipped the entire ritual of wedding photos. There were a few casual Polaroid flashes here and there, but not one traditional shot of the bride and groom (not even in this blog).  “As we were driving down Elmhurst Blvd. we saw a photographer’s studio and went in.  The man agreed to take some photos. That’s where the photograph come from.” They posed, he in his suit, dark Italian hair brillo-creamed back into a small pompadour and she in her white, conservative wedding dress. That photograph is all she has to capture the ritual of her wedding day, one beautiful photograph and her memories.

Afterwards, “we had no plans.” No honeymoon planned.  No tickets in hand.  No hotel booked in Niagara Falls.  Instead they drove across the George Washington Bridge, in a 1952 Chrysler because that’s the only car my uncle ever owned, no matter what the decade there was always a 1952 Chrysler to be found somewhere on their property, as a matter of fact he never bought a Chrysler that wasn’t made after 1960.  When my Aunt Winnie had her own new car parked outside their driveway my mother asked, “Does he ever let you drive anything other then a Chrysler?”  No.

Eventually Eddie pulled up next to a cop and asked, “Where is there a nice hotel around here?”  The honeymoon took place for three nights wherever that hotel was, in New Jersey just over the GW Bridge.  As far away as that 1952 Chrysler took them from mom in Queens, and whatever else they wanted to leave behind.  Once back in New York they both returned to work, homeless, living in a hotel in the Bronx.  “We had no plans.”  Eventually they found an efficiency apartment in the Bronx, and lived in it for eight years.  In every manner Winnie had recovered from her Bronx phobia.  In 1966 they moved to the house in Sparkill, N.Y. where for the next 50 years my Uncle Eddie lived until his death on April 26^th, 2015 and where Aunt Winnie will now live alone.

We are a family of 1950’s, 1970’s and 1980’s Jamaican immigrants; my brother and I are the only Southwood-Smith’s that have been born on American soil.  The Cousins, as we have come to be called, have a plethora of names beginning with “D’s,” Diane, Deborah, Donna, Denise, David, and Daryl. After 51 years of life on this planet I finally figured out that I have a family, steeped in stories, tradition and many “D’s.”  A family filled with warmth, love and acceptance.  I feel utterly and completely stupid that it has taken me 51 years and one long funeral to recognize them.  We have a name that means something.  Southwood-Smith.  One other thing, even if I have no plans, my family comes with a lifetime warranty of companionship.

 Dedicated to Aunt Winsome Edwards (after all it is her story)