Disclaimer: TOTALLY UNSAFE FOR FAMILY. DO YOURSELVES AND ME A FAVOR AND GET OFF NOW…
It’s funny that I write this blog and routinely get comments and emails from people saying that they can’t believe the shit that happens to me. My life is relatively calm now compared to the life I used to have which was was completely insane. Hotbox and I have been in her kitchen for 3 hours and counting, making homemade dog biscuits for her little home business. I’ve got her linked in my sidebar as Bella’s Bones.
I lived in Connecticut when I graduated college in 1995 until 1998. Then, I moved to Atlanta to be with my then boyfriend who you all know as AtlantaBoy. We were dating long distance and I decided to leave the hell that was Connecticut, to join him to start our life together. I stayed until April, 2001. Looking back, I find it comical that I could commit to both moving so far from home and to living with a man when today I can’t even commit to wearing the same pair of socks from sun up till sundown. After that point, I spent the summer in Phoenix and then moved to Baltimore for grad school in 2001.
Hotbox, one of my best friends from Connecticut, also left our home state and moved to Atlanta. I was unfortunately already gone from Atlanta by two years though. She moved here in the Fall of 2003. But it gives me a reason to come back and visit her and a couple other friends who haven’t left the area. The big secret about Atlanta is that a lot of people move here, but rarely do they stay. Sorta like D.C.
A sampling of the weeks conversations, flashbacks to rougher times, circa 1996 – 2000.
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Expert Driving
Hotbox: “Remember when you made me drive by your high school boyfriends house and I smashed into that car on his street?”
Velvet: “Yeah, no one told you to back up down a one way street doing 40, that shit was your fault.”
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Expert Waitressing
Velvet: “Remember when we were waitresses at the bar and you fell and dropped my table’s food? I was talking to some guy and I saw you fall but I didn’t come help you. Then you got up like nothing happened, brushed yourself off, swept their stuff into the dust pan and walked into the kitchen screaming ‘I need another order of nachos, fish sticks, and three burgers on the fly!’ And the table turned out to be the biggest assholes and they stiffed me on the bill? I remember all the illegal guys in the kitchen searching and searching for fish sticks in the freezer for like hours.”*
*There’s actually more to this story but it involves some really bad shit that could land me in jail so I’m going to shut up now.
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Waitress Blackmail
Hotbox: What ever happened to that guy Gavin?
Velvet: I don’t know, but I remember he was dating that high school waitress* who had a curfew and he used to beg me to close for him. I never got out of that fucking place early.
Hotbox: He used to do that to everyone.
Velvet: One time he said, ‘Hey, I left a bag of coke on the back of the toilet in the women’s bathroom, you can have it if you close for me.’ I did close for him that night so he could go play with what’s-her-name, but, who just leaves a bag of coke laying around like that?
*This high school waitress was so dumb, she walked up to the owner of the restaurant, holding a menu with his fucking picture on the front and said, “Can I get you a table?” She didn’t know it was him.
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Projectile Vomit & Million Dollar Ideas
Velvet: “Do you remember AtlantaBoy’s friend Kevin? Talked like he was chewing his cheek?
Hotbox: No. Which one was that?
Velvet: He came to New York to help AtlantaBoy and I move my stuff down. He used to date a stripper at the now-defunct Gold Club and she dumped him for some Prince from another country who handed her tens of thousands of dollars to go home with him. He slept on our couch for weeks, he was so upset. We lived across the street from the Gold Club back then.
Hotbox: Is he the one that gave us the drugs and you almost died at that club on the Lower East Side?
Velvet: You got it. That’s him.
Hotbox: Does anyone know what it was that he gave you?
Velvet: I have no clue. He said it was X, but no way. I just remember projectile vomiting for a couple days. AtlantaBoy thought it was heroin. But I did invent several ingenious things on that high, including the “Commemorative Sonny Bono Christmas Ornament” and the “Giant Baseball for the Yankees in Times Square.”
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Priorities
Hotbox: When was the last time you were here?
Velvet: When you moved down here and I came to see AtlantaBoy and we broke up.
Hotbox’s boyfriend: Was I here?
Velvet: Yes, HotBox was mad at you because you wouldn’t help her unpack. You just kept smoking pot all day.
Hotbox: That was so annoying. Fucking idiot.
Velvet: Sort of hypocritical since I’ve witnessed you snorting coke off my dashboard when we were stuck in traffic in the Bronx.
Hotbox: Yeah, but that’s different. BF becomes useless when he smokes pot. I needed him to be productive and help me unpack. You and I were going to Webster Hall that night.
Velvet: It’s shocking we actually have two separate nasal passages you know.
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Driving through the neighborhood the other day of my first apartment with AtlantaBoy:
Velvet: Oh. My. God. This place is amazing now.
Hotbox: What was it like when you lived here?
Velvet: You wouldn’t believe it. That Home Depot, that now has a Best Buy and a bunch of other great stores surrounding it, used to be the only store here. And behind there are projects. So the people from the projects used to come through the Home Depot parking lot and come into our complex, basically also projects, and steal shit. One day the management put a note up that someone’s bicycle had been stolen off their patio. The next week a note about a car being broken into. The notes went like that for a while, each time AtlantaBoy and I joking about the color of the notes – bright blue, green, pink – to get your attention. Then he walked in one day with a purple piece of paper in his hand and said, ‘We’re fucking moving.’ I asked why and he read me the note. Someone had been kidnapped and carjacked out of our complex the night before.
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Gun Control to Major Tom
Velvet: Remember that guy Tom?
Hotbox: Yeah, IrishOne still talks to him.
Velvet: Is he still trying to be a cop?
Hotbox: I think he’s a Sheriff now.
Velvet: He used to get drunk all the time and sleep on my couch. He left his gun under my bed once.
Hotbox: Well, now he can actually legally carry a gun.
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When a Guy will Endure Anything to Get in a Woman’s Pants
Hotbox: Who was AtlantaBoy’s friend who I dressed up and put makeup on?
Velvet: Terry. You know I have all that on video.
Hotbox: What happened to him?
Velvet: He’s still around. He told AtlantaBoy that he came to D.C. and we fucked.
Hotbox: Is that true?
Velvet: Nope. He and AtlantaBoy got into a fight and he was trying to piss him off. I think AtlantaBoy believes him though.
Hotbox: There’s something wrong with all of them you know.
Velvet: Too many drugs. Everyone’s brain is fucking burned out.
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The Real Live Grinch
Hotbox: Why are you going to make me out to be worse than you on your blog? You were really bad when we lived in Connecticut.
Velvet: Whatever, you stole a Christmas tree!
Hotbox: Oh yeah.
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The Princess of Grace
Hotbox: You were with me when I fell at the Thirsty Turtle, right?
Velvet: Yeah. You said you were going to the bathroom, so I turned my head to look out the window and reached blindly for my beer which was sitting on our table. But you had tripped getting up from the table and your pant leg caught the leg of the table and brought the whole thing down on top of you, including my purse, our beers and that chick sitting on the barstool in the aisle.
Hotbox: You just sat there laughing.
Velvet: That was some fall. The whole place was staring at us.
Hotbox: And look at us now. Making homemade dog biscuits in the suburbs.
*The Princess of Grace*
I can’t stop laughing at that, I am sitting at my desk and people are walking by and wondering WTF…..OMG too funny!
Glad you are having a great time!
Too funny. My best friend from high school lives in New Orleans and we have conversations like that whenever we’re together. In the past, it often involved making cookies.
Rings on her fingers & bells on her toes & a bone in her nose, oh oh.
Ahhhh… Lindbergh. I grew up a few blocks away. Thinking of the Gold Club brings a single tear to my eye.
Haha, I love that you’re still friends. Remembering the good ol’ days is fun.
Priorities is easily my favorite story. Who snorts coke off a dashboard? Fucking brilliant.
One of my friends stole a christmas tree once, too. I haven’t given her shit about that lately. I need to get on that.
Always good to laugh with good friends about crazy times. And no more italics!
You be nice or I’ll break the internet again. Don’t think I won’t.
Did you get the coke that was on the back of the toilet?
It sounds like you have both had some VERY crazy times in your young life.
The worst drugs I ever tried were speed and marijuana and it has been well over 9 years since I tried either of those.
Hilarious!! I just had a similar convo with one of my girls last weekend…talking about how I did exctasy all of senior year and various debacles from clubs/bars in college. It is amazing I can still think like a normal person. Ok, not NORMAL per se. 🙂 Great post.
hehehehehehehe. the greatest is doing coke off the saddle horn of the horse that is going to be carrying your pick up rider in about 15 minutes. but, off the box of a stripper was always a fave. now i’m fat, broke, and too lazy to go back to school. ahhh, how i long for the days of yore. sort of.
good post…but webster hall? dear god.
So funny. See you in a few hours!
You shared a funny, so we’ll share a funny:
A: “So what’d you do, sitting in traffic?”
B: “I wanted to see who the hell was causing this black-top nightmare. So I got out and went to check it out.”
A: “Accident?”
B: “No, bunch of gangsters shooting it out with cops.”
A: “So what’d you do?”
B: “Only thing I could do — emptied out both [Glock] clips [at the gangsters]. Went back to car and sat in traffic.”
I hope Sammy and Thora are extracting lots of dog biscuits out of you in exchange for not telling what they know to be the truth! You guys are just too funny. It’s amazing you still have all those active brain cells after what you have swallowed and snorted over the years…
A, i wanna party with you and B.
Well, thank God you weren’t snorting the coke random pieces of the anatomy….but, seriously, when did life cease to be such a care free adventure and suddenly become a series of worries and woes. It happens so quickly…instantly….but with such blinding force that when you’ve finally flick away the detrius of the past you forget you ever had one.
Isn’t great to have a best bud to have fond memories with? I’m jealous. I’m not close to anyone that I went to school with. Sometimes I miss those moments where you want to say “remember when…?” Or when you tell a random story that you find hysterical but no one else finds funny because they weren’t there…
Wow, Circumlocutor. You went all kinds of poetic on our asses. How long did it take you to get that kind of prose down?
I’m still waiting for underwear pics 😉
The stuff that caused you to projectile-vomit all over the place was probably GHB. I left my drink out of sight once and had to be carried out of the place because I was puking like nobody’s business and later on didn’t remember half the night (and I never drink to the point of vomiting or blacking out). One of my raver friends hypothesized that someone must have slipped G in my drink.
Your memories are great. I was talking to a college friend today, and he kept marvelling at my “detail” in the events. I said, “Yeah, I remember every rotten thing you did,” and he replied, “You do, but who gives a shit about me anymore? Who are you gonna tell?” He doesn’t know I have a blog. 🙂
Reminiscing sure is fun….the subject matter is different than these stories, of course, but I can vouch for the fact that my family never laughs harder than when we start reliving crazy stories from the 80’s with life on the farm. I pity the poor person who comes over for dinner with all of us and has to watch us doubled over with tears in our eyes laughing about dogs, geese, goats, sheep, whatever. It can’t possibly be as funny to other people!