1980
My parents drive me to a ramshackle New Orleans' neighborhood lined with shotgun* houses where oodles of children are playing jacks and hoola hooping on front porches. A lady with slippers and a dozen yapping mutts around her heels shows us inside. In the middle of the back room there's a large cardboard box that is moving in little shakes and squeaks, like a wind-up toy running low on batteries. Inside is a mass of yellow puppies with crinkly ears and runny, pink noses. Without hesitating, I choose the runt. She's definitely the most scrawny, lonely looking pup in the box. It would be nice to think I chose her out of compassion, but really it's an annoying, unrelenting sense of duty to the underdog. I force a smile as I lift this pitiful creature away from its mother and place her in a hamster-smelling Nike shoe box which the slippered woman hands me. On our drive home, I can hear her little paws sliding over the bottom of the box and the dull thud of her body hitting the walls as my father turns sharp corners, and it makes me want to cry. Neither the dog or I are fooled. She knows her peaceful life was just permanently interrupted, and I know what my parents are up to. It's not that I can't appreciate a store-bought friend, but I want a real one.
*Shotgun House: The southern term for a house with "floor-through" architecture
1983-1986 (roughly)
My mother is taking me to my first day of drama camp. I'm riding in the back of our 1980 robin's egg blue Oldsmobile. It's New Orleans hot. My chicken-bone thighs are stuck to the plastic seats, and I have butterflies so bad it hurts and is threatening my bowels. I don't like going places where I don't know anybody, and I'm not even sure what "drama" means, only that my parents often accuse my two teenage sisters of it. The director of the camp meets us at the door. This helps. She is a peppy, blonde Tulane drama student who, because she is pretty, I instantly idolize. Children are shallow. But beyond her are the faces of the very girls who terrify me, older, smarter, richer, prettier girls who look at me like I am old chewing gum on the bottom of their espadrilles. And then I see a face I recognize, a girl from my Catholic grade school who I don't know that well. It doesn't matter. God has just intervened. I can see it on her face too, and we agree with one look, that this hell our parents have assigned us to for six weeks will now be bearable. I tell my mother she can go now.
We spend the remainder of our camp days sitting in the back row and snickering at the older girls who dance and sing ridiculously to Oklahoma and Pippin. We bond over the hillarity and embarrassment in the way the camp director pronounces, "pianist" (pee-nist) and laugh so uncontrollably that we are ordered from the room. Of course we didn't know that was how you really pronounce it.
This is the friend* and these are the childhood memories where I am my happiest and most free. Amazing how it can all start with a look. From that summer on, we spent countless hours, years together and we unearthed a world I never knew existed, one that cannot exist between a girl and her dog.
* For the sake of privacy, I will call her "S".
Your House or Mine?
S and I sit at her dining room table with pen and paper. We make a list of enticements regarding her house and mine. This is a solution we've developed, a friendly ritual for deciding whose house to play at on any given day. The list would look something like this.
Aubrey's House S's House
trampoline the big swing
hideout under the stairs walk to Langensteins Grocery
Plum Street snowballs the neighbor's pool
the dog the neighbor's kids
the food game
egg toss
the tree on the neutral ground
You can easily see how my case was won. I, being practically an only child (due to a major age gap between me and my sisters) and from a home where my mother was always there with a relaxed but watchful eye, craved the freedom of her house. She, being the youngest of five children and from a home where both parents were either working or sort-of over the whole parenting thing, craved the safety of mine. At least that's how I perceive it now. Thus, 99.9% of my memories with her are under her roof and just outside it.
We would go into the refrigerator, unload an entire carton of newly-bought eggs into our pockets and head outside. We would then throw them back and forth to each other, one by one, slowly increasing the distance between us until each egg failed to reach its receiver and landed with a splat on the sizzling southern sidewalk. What could have possibly become of this mess? We sure as hell never cleaned it up. Nor did a soul ever question why there were no eggs for their omelet the next morning.
We were naughty and, if memory serves right, we rarely if ever got caught. We stayed up as late as we wanted playing truth or dare with her older brother, who terrified me. Playing with two little girls, this teenage boy had nothing to gain from the "truth" portion of this game, so he focused on "dare". He once dared S to ride her bike down St. Charles Avenue in nothing but her underwear at ten o'clock at night. There are many horrifying aspects to this dare. 1) St. Charles Avenue is a major street running through New Orleans, the street of the infamous green and red street car. 2) New Orleans had and still has one of the highest crime rates in the nation. 2) S was a nine year old girl about to ride a bike at night in nothing but her Strawberry Shortcake skivvies. She cried so hard he agreed to let her wear a t-shirt too. But she went through with it, and I remember standing on her front porch, next to her sneering brother, nervously waiting for her shadow to return to the streetlight.
There was more refrigerator fun. "The Food Game" was when one of us was made to wait patiently in the living room while the other went into the fridge (the sort that is dark, dense and has things morphing at the back of it), and concocted the most disgusting combination of things that imagination could behold.
Rule #1- The eater was NOT allowed to ask what was on the spoon, fork or cup.
Rule #2- The eater HAD to eat it. All of it. Reader, I will leave the rest of this game to your vivid imagination.
I will speed the flashbacks along for the sake of blog attention span... There was the time we rubbed donuts on my sister's steering wheel just to see her squirm. And the time we literally outran a hurricane together, from the Florida Panhandle to Montgomery, Alabama. And the time we "babysat" a one-year-old and decided we wanted him to look like John Travolta in "Grease" so put an entire jar of Vaseline in his hair only to discover it doesn't wash out (even after five hair washings and lots of crying on his part). And the time we awoke at her house and found a handgun on the kitchen table, left there by someone who attempted robbery while we were sleeping (New Orleans' criminals are so damn dumb). And the time, when we thought we were too old to play with dolls, so we locked her bedroom door and made a pact not to tell anyone. Only a B.F.F. lives up to that pact.
S and I moved on and away from each other in Junior High. It happens. That's why these stories are like liquid gold because we all know, even when we promise it, that the last "F" in B.F.F. is a lie. Nothing's forever.
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To me, one of the greatest joys of being a parent is watching my son with his friends. They may not be his forever but they are most definitely his now.
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