The cool thing to do in the late 80s, away from the redundancy of underage drinking at the house of unsuspecting parents, was to drive to the city and cruise down Division Street. Not unlike a travel guide to an exotic land, my friends and I had watched About Last Night and knew this was where we had to be. Fortunately for us, we lived only an hour away from this promised land.
It was an adventure as well as a learning experience. There was the initial drive to the city, a car load of girls singing and dancing in their seats, oblivious to the stares of more responsible drivers. And then the disorientation once we arrived, the ominous buildings looming above us, like parents watching our every move, and the occasional wrong turn down a dark alley where dark figures lurked.
Somehow, without cell phones or GPS, or even an old-fashioned map, we would find our destination, the center of the universe. It was the place where I learned how I was supposed to act as an adult of legal drinking age, an age which was still many years away.
It would take an hour or more to drive through the strip of Rush and Division. From the safety of our car, we would observe the behavior of our older
un-named heroes, recording like video cameras in our mind the way they dressed and interacted with each other. In the years to come, we would replicate this behavior many times once we found the courage to present our fake IDs to gatekeepers of these drunken establishments. Only to find out later that it did not take courage, but the ability to flash a lipsticked smile and blink heavily coated eyelashes.
One night, bumper to bumper on Division, Jodi and I, in my little black
Fiero, windows down and music blaring on a warm summer night, experienced the legend of Crazy Mary. Mary was this tiny, outspoken homeless woman who would terrorize the bar patrons in the Gold Coast. There were many rumors about her, none that were ever verified. Some said she was a old prostitute who, after getting older and less marketable, decided to beg on the streets to support her son through an Ivy League college. Others said she was in fact really rich but had a dependency problem and was completely mental. Her financial status and drug habit notwithstanding, it was clear she was at the very least, mental.
This night, in the midst of over-served college boys throwing beer in the street and scantily-dressed girls flirting with uniformed sailors, a woman yelling loudly at a policeman on a horse stumbled toward our car. Screaming, we fumbled for the button to close our window, and like the suspense of a thriller where the key locks the door at the very last moment before the killer strikes, the window closed as she lunged, toothless with spittle. Profanities that we thought would be muffled fell through the open sunroof, and before we could process the urgency of securing it too, the woman lifted her soiled shirt and pressed her stretch-marked and drooping breasts against the driver's side window. We screamed again, and she cackled and was shooed away by the horse cop. We concluded that we had just had an award-winning encounter with Crazy Mary.
It was perhaps the scariest moment of our young adult lives, and we knew we never ever wanted to grow up to be like Crazy Mary. It was so traumatizing in fact, it is probably what prevented me, a couple of years later, from lifting my shirt with the rest of my bead-necklaced friends on the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, the gateway drug of public indecency. I imagine deep in my subconscious was Mary's twisted mouth spewing degrading obscenities, coaxing me to show my teats. (Let it be noted, however, that this Mary vision did not stop me from mooning people at closing time on many future unfortunate occassions...)
I never had another experience with Crazy Mary's breasts. However, on my twenty-first birthday, I applied for a waitressing job at Kronies on Bellevue and would occasionally pass her on my way to work, huddling on the sidewalk with a dirty Dunkin Donuts cup half-full of spare change. In a strange sort of way reminiscent of Catholic guilt, she would be quick to remind me that I was a f***ing whore if I didn't give her more than a dollar.
And the last picture is early morning on the lake. I am a little jealous.
