58

CW: Physical and sexual violence, and references to substance abuse.

We are both 58 now. She, my friend from childhood, had always considered me the dimmer of us since we met in 11th grade. She was raised in the town my family had hastily skirted us away to after my father had cheated on my mother and was caught when mother drove me to the secret barn that he had rented under the auspices of being an artist and needing privacy. She and I entered the barn and there he was with a student, naked, and an easel, paintless. As mother was in hospital for overdosing in front of me, I was raped by my first boyfriend’s best friend and dumped at the rotary to hitchhike home. Couldn’t tell anyone about that so I stayed, sleeping under my bed until it was decided we would all get a fresh start. Also, father had been fired for hitting on students.

While father was working on moving us to Europe via his new job, I was recovering from unspoken traumas and being blamed for things that were done by men older than my 15 years. I just appeared on the first day of school with a class list and two sections of study hall which took place in the cafeteria. I was well dressed as I had come from Catholic school wearing slacks, skirts, blouses…. I had a dabble with modeling and knew how to put myself together even when I felt hollow. Looking back, I was stunning. No one spoke to me because I sat quietly with my books, in my suits and blonde hair. Come to find out they all thought I was a substitute and were afraid to speak with me. I walked like a zombie thru the halls as other girls called me a bitch for how I looked.I was getting used to being abused for my face and body, so I staggered in and out of consciousness, falling asleep from boredom in all the classes. I would not realize for at least 20 more years that I was intelligent.No one told me I was…. anything but pretty and that equated to whore. At last, after a month another blonde girl from the west coast, came and spoke with me. She recognized me from a class we had together. Birdy really saved my life. I called her Birdy because she lifted me with the unseen wings of an angel. She was also an outsider child of divorce, so I was taken in. She began picking me up in the morning in her little car and we both played hooky every day as school was a joke. Then she introduced me to another. A girl who dressed tough in leather vests and ripped jeans but was in all honor classes. She was also a child of divorce. The three of us hung out. The smart girl partied with a group of kids from the lowest classes who were mechanics in training. They smoked pot, did mushrooms and wore chains on their wallets. Her mother worked in financial aid at a prestigious college, and I did not know what her dad did besides hit her mother and leave them in an apartment owned by the grandmother. The mother was on some self-punishment regime of control. She made us bland food and sat with a milkshake and a straw for every meal. Plastic on all the furniture and plastic runners on the rugs that you had to walk on, or you were scolded. 1983 and a diet of starvation for a highly educated and successful woman.

I don’t know how I passed that year at all other than the benevolence of teachers. My fate was to move to Germany with my ailing mother and competitive father. The druggies tried to talk me out of going and even set me up with a lame boy in the group. I remember that was the time of concerts and the boy wanted me to go to some awful band. My father on occasion was psychic and he refused. I screamed and cried and was locked in my room. That night on the way to the show there was an accident, and the car flipped. The girl in my spot was thrown from the car and killed instantly. That would have been me. The boy died about ten years later and one of the druggies called me as if it was my fault that he drank himself to death, by saying he always loved me. What did I care. People have misplaced ideas of blame I realized. I moved to Europe. My two friends decided that they wanted to go to Europe and when they went to school, they did just that thru the university. Safe, orderly. I visited with both, one to France and one in the UK and we had crazy fun antics. My friend Birdy and I popped on a ship from Liverpool to Dublin on a whim. We bought a huge jug of Irish whiskey and played cards with the men until we arrived as sloshed as could be in a dreary rainy port. We foolishly thought we would find a hostel but to our dismay there was an international step dancing festival in the entire country. After walking for miles until we were sober and screaming at each other in the road, a kind mother rescued us and dropped us at a shelter where we huddled next to each other under a scratchy wool blanket on the floor with the other dumb Yanks who had not checked the schedule of events in the country. The next day the sun was out, and we hitchhiked all over until we arrived in Dingle. Another mother with two small children who were all speaking Gaelic and having a privet laugh about the state we were in saved us. We had no money and smelled like old goats after failing to bring a change of clothes on this impromptu journey. We were rescued and brought into the home of these kind people. There was a teen girl in the family who gave us a change of clothes and her bed. We slept for 14 hours that day. In the morning the little children brought us down to the vision of a full Irish breakfast. Enough food for days more on the road and tickets for the ferry to return to England. These memories are the real meaning of success in my mind. Overcoming disaster after disaster with laughter and good will.

Then we all three became adults. The blonde Birdy married two rich men, got an MBA and is currently having relations with another rich man. She has a rule to only be with men who can buy her things. I remember going to clubs in Boston when we were 16, she would hustle men for drinks then let them feel her giant breasts, laugh and run away. I would not let anyone buy me drinks as I didn’t want the strings. They were at college together and had sex with dozens of guys, I dropped out of school after a year as I was attacked in my dorm room, set up by a roommate, and was sick of being sexually abused and treated like I was a dumb blonde. Like meat. I had success there being the lead in all three theater productions, but the theater clique refused to give me the theater award. The ones who needed the protection of others always tried to exclude me. They still do.

We all grew up, I remember my friend with the good family was in NYC. She got a job with a news show by sleeping with a guy in his 50s for a few months.I went to LA where I refused to sleep with belly bulging producers covered in sweat and pastrami. I went for the poor victim guys who beat me up, stole from me and got me nearly killed. I returned to MA after being burned in a fire and spent months in hospital. My smart friend was getting married. She married a sweet guy. I still have the video of how innocent he was. She treated him like a slave, dismissed him, until he cheated on her and became a spiritualist. She had a rent-controlled apartment, I remembered with 1200$ per month rent. She and her hubs were making probably 250 thousand a year each by then. I remember visiting her when there was some potential legislation forbidding this abuse of rent control but the people benefitting from it of course had that stricken. 2025 these same people making around 500 thousand a year still get to live in these apartments in the heart of Manhattan for let’s say 1600$ when the market rate is close to 5000$ per month and up. Just two blocks from 30 rock. But they don’t feel guilty and won’t give these places over to teachers, for example. Teachers working in the city must commute hours a day to work, catering to the ones who gobble up the housing meant for them, and not a smidge of guilt. A privilege silently pushed far into their souls, saying they deserve everything, and they will hang on to the shelter until they die and pass it on in their families. Astonishing that this scam is allowed but, shhhhhh, it’s a secret.

I became a social worker. 40 thousand under grad bill and 20 thousand for each master’s degree to make only an eighth of my friend making 400 thousand for a once-a-week frivolous tv show masquerading as news. This one bragged to me about the free travel and the thousands of dollars of products given to her for nothing while I could not pay my rent and pay off the huge student loans. But I was happy, and my daughter and I saw the world on a shoestring budget. People never knew how poor we were. Reality crept in with my friend however and came to a head when she decided to visit me in LA. She booked us a house in Newport. I showed up and was suddenly told I had to pay her 600$ for the weekend. I was invited I thought but quietly gave her my credit card which she charged on her phone. Now it was at the limit. No food for my daughter and I that month. Then she took me grocery shopping. She put the most expensive crap in the cart and made me pay for 200$ worth of food I didn’t even want or need or get to eat as she was an awful cook and burned most of it. Then as some unconscious sick abuse of her wealth threw down a pink unlimited AMEX card in front of me. It was really an aggressive situation, and I didn’t even know why she had me there. I just had hip surgery and walking on the beach was dangerous for me, but she did not care. A strange moment came when she entered my room and took a rank turd in the toilet, smiled and left. I departed early as I just felt like she was shoving herself down the throat of her poorest friend. A friend who slaved to help many abusive clients and worked so many hours that she had no time for her own child. I felt success was when I could treat my daughter and take her friends with us on little trips and have the feeling of warmth by giving of myself, my time and what little I had.

I notice on social media that NYC, as I came to call her, formed a group of her rich girl friends in the city and called them “The greedy girls”. That was really the last straw. I was disgusted by her cheapness. When she divorced, she lamented to me, that her husband only paid her 2800 a month. My jaw dropped. My ex paid 500 child support, on a good month and I didn’t complain or go for an increase. She abandoned her youngest to a series of institutions for troubled boys when he attacked her. I didn’t blame the kid. She could not see what a tyrant she was. I was still the dumb friend except I out did her by 2 masters. Our other friend lives in Europe still being an executive for an education program and remains quiet and levelheaded about her good fortune by the ways of men. I never married and I live on my own. I am proud of my achievements in life. Yet this friend will just not wake up. Eventually her husband reported the inequity of her living in subsidized housing after she was able to buy a home upstate and a second rental apartment in NYC. Everyone has their limits I suppose. But here she is still acting the big shot. She was let go from the news show after they learned of her making half a million and having 3 properties by way of rent control meant for the poor, but I don’t feel bad for her. She had farewell luncheon with the members of the greedy girl’s club and then then all dropped off her social media. They wanted nothing to do with her failure and the shame of bragging about their good fortune. Not really friends after all just a gang of takers bracing each other up as they sucked up all they could around them.

I got tired of being abused by the social system and inept supervisors so after a client’s assault caused me to have 2 rotator cuff operations I just retired. I struggle and still get jabs from my friend and her Catholic mother, but they also have become the only people who knew my parents, now they feel like a dysfunctional branch of my connection to the past and the ghosts of my family.So, I sit like a stray dog on the outskirts of their lives on the internet and hold my tongue. Except for this little letter of annoyance to the universe.