Welcome to The Season When Your Allergies Threaten to Remove You From The Census
I'm sneezing my way back to 1987 today. ACHOOO.
On the L.A. bus system, it’s normal to encounter unhinged men screaming about the apocalypse, people shouting into their phones (why do people refuse to use earbuds— inquiring minds want to know), and kids who don’t know the meaning of “indoor voice,” which puts me to thinking I’m sarcophagus old.
Decades ago, in Brooklyn, my friends and I boarded the bus and played catch with the free maxi pads doled out in gym class. We removed the plastic and you’d find an errant pad stuck to the window or landing on some poor woman’s head and we’d howl and guffaw and rap to Slick Rick (Lodi Dodi) until the bus driver told us to shut the fuck up.
We, of course, did not shut the fuck up.
We would tumble off the bus and I’d say let’s go to the diner because a plate of link sausage was 75 cents. Sakima would tell me that I was “mental,” and so we’d steal bags of Dipsy Doodles and grape juice from the bodega and run all the way home. Run as fast as our little legs would take us, with our lips stained purple, faces covered in chip grease. And Thomas would blast Taylor Dayne and we’d tap kiss and years later he’d write me the longest letter telling me he had a son now, and maybe he was gay? The jury’s still out on that one, he wrote.
Was I married? Did I have children? I wrote that I’d thought about it once and after careful consideration realized I wan’t built for baby or for one man to lie beside me until undertakers shoveled dirt over my sleeping face. To which he replied, yeah, I can see that, and I was confused because the last time we’d actually spent time together was when I was twelve, and how could he possibly know then that my womb would flash no vacancy signs as an adult?
How could he know my wants back then?
I think about 1987 a lot. It was the last year I lived in Brooklyn until I would return home many years later to see it whitewashed and gussied up—a stranger, nowhere near the original. It was the year before I moved to Long Island and be surrounded by whiteness. I’d never thought about race until I was confronted with it. Until I heard the sound of my voice and how it differed from the girls who cemented “like” into their vocabulary. The girls who sported designer jeans and iron-straight hair though there were still a few who hair-sprayed their hair into electric shock territory.
It was the fall of 1987 when I made the slow transition from Brooklyn Felicia to Long Island Felicia because I was desperate to blend, not stand out, to fit in.
It didn’t work out. I’d come to realize years later I would never be a person that fit in.
I return to 1987. We were poor and my mother was borderline feral but it was the last time I felt unmasked. There was no performance, no artifice, just me being my weird self and surrounding myself with a bunch of weirdos until our weirdness became a kind of normal. There was blue-eyed, blonde-haired Thomas who was possibly gay (though I didn’t know the term back then), Judy, who made a game of choking herself until she passed out because maybe she hated her mother, herself, or all of the above. Sakima with her beautiful braids, loud mouth, and wide smile who never did seem to want to go home for reasons undisclosed. Millie with her too-big teeth and penchant for speaking English mixed with Spanish, forever warning me that Dominican men could never be trusted.
Stick with Boricua. Millie and me—we were homegirls.
I went to a junior high school in Park Slope that focused on the performing arts and I wrote cringe-worthy stories about my mother, learned how to use a printing press, and recorded news broadcasts. We were always creating, always working with our hands, until I moved to Long Island and all I did was memorize. Memorize and parrot because that was how you got into college. Not those silly little stories about your sad, sad life.
In 1987, we sang “Heaven is a Place on Earth” until our throats went dry and we could barely speak. We were mouthy, beautiful, and filled with a hurt that seemed bottomless, but there we go throwing boxes of Kotex every which way and what’s the deal with you and the sausages every single day, Fee?
Even back then I needed consistency, a routine. Repetition gives me comfort even now, even after all this time when the girl from Brooklyn and the woman in California are complete strangers.
Sometimes, I wonder what my life would’ve been like had I stayed. If I’d went to Edward R. Murrow High School like I dreamed of, and still run my fingers through Thomas’s hair.
I think about the spring of 1987 when a bunch of boys jump on the 110 bus in Los Angeles and sit with their legs splayed, tap-tapping their phones, and playing TikToks on volume ten. They are bombastic. I close my eyes because they are so loud and it’s 1987 again when loud was who we were because we were children and the world was winnowed down to only us. We had no concept of decorum (the world would beat that into us soon enough), no way of modulating our voices, and besides, this is a free country and we can be as loud as we want to be, old lady. I think about 1987 realizing I could now be the lady with the Kotex on her head urging the bus driver to tell these kids to shut the fuck up.
Now, bus drivers drive with earbuds to block out sound.
There is a spring that exists before the world was intent on stripping away our innocence, reducing us to walking, productive automatons, a la Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Where we marched in unison, in uniform, our heads bowed to grunt our way through the days that repeated themselves with minor variation.
There is a spring that exists before oh, fuck, taxes are due and did we renew our prescription, make the mortgage payment, rub-rub our eyes because pollen may very well be the death of us? Before we feared the air we breathed and became aware, acutely aware, of our mortality, and maybe I should believe in God just in case?
I’m thinking back to the spring of 1987 as I sneeze my way through my days and wonder if I’d really die if I took two allergy pills within 24 hours because this wheezing is unbearable and why wasn’t it always like this? Why didn’t I wheeze and rub and sneeze in Brooklyn all those years ago? Why had my face been clean and unweathered before the masks and war paint? I think of 1987 because I no longer prefer the taste of sausage but still crave the routine and pack for another move because the one constant in my life is movement.
The itinerant child, the nomadic adult.
I think about my first book and wish I would’ve written it now because it would’ve been so different, so less suffused with rage, so much more measured and calm. I think about all the stories I should’ve told but didn’t. Stories where the sky was visible, when it was here, so close, so close, but still an arm’s length out of our reach.
Note: For my paid peeps, I’m sorry, so sorry. A new dispatch IS coming. I’ve been thrifting every day, all day, in preparation for my move to Bakersfield and the fear of barren thrift stores out in the desert. And I’d rather send out something meaningful than fill your inbox with noise. Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait.
My friend Arestia tells me I should remind you fine people I sell clothes online. Eh-hem, I sell clothes online and update my shop daily. Here are links to my Poshmark and eBay stores, if you’re so inclined. If not, no big.
However, I will encourage you to read Nicole Chung’s exceptional essay about the costs of being a writer. It’s quite good.
Felicia, my chest is still tight, my breathing jittery after reading this incredible memoir. Watching Metropolis made me cry.
You're an astounding writer. Please keep sharing. Please keep writing.
Hugs and love
Linda