Chapter 4 — My Best Friends and Boyfriends, part of the series from The Life of A Jewish Stripper, A Memoir

My true and always in the end best friend has been my mother. But at the same time, all the hurt and anger I harbored toward her as a kid and teenager, just made me want to get away from her.

I never had a problem making friends and finding boyfriends, it was keeping them that has always been a challenge.

By now I was maybe fifteen and in junior high, and my best friend had curly, blonde hair and big brown eyes and lived in my apartment complex. Her name was Shannon, and she was of Scottish, German, and English descent and we hung out all the time. We must have been around fifteen and boy crazy when the thing to do was go to other school’s dances to meet new boys. There was a battle of the bands at an all-boy school, Our Lady of Good Counsel in Wheaton, MD, where I met my first boyfriend, Brian Rush. I was a “nice” Jewish girl dating an Irish, Catholic boy with reddish brown hair, freckles and full lips. He had braces and he was sixteen and took my virginity a month before I turned sixteen. Thinking back, I think my friends and I were having a contest as to who would lose their virginity first, and for some stupid reason I was dying to be the first.

Obviously, as with everything else, no one bothered to tell me how painful that would be or how much blood there would be. No one talked to me about men or boys or pregnancy and birth control. Luckily, we had a “health” class in school which not only taught us about sex and birth control but also the effects of drugs. I remember watching movies about people on LSD and how they went crazy, running down the streets naked. But that didn’t stop me from trying pot with my friends. As many kids, I think I learned more at school and from my friends then at home. These were modern times and yet none of us discussed sex, alcohol and drugs with our parents. Though we were a new generation, many of our parents were from the “old world” and didn’t talk about such things just as their parents didn’t talk to them. Of course, I remember whenever there was a gathering for a birthday party of a holiday, there was always vodka on the table and our parents doing a few shots and often driving after.

I had been going out for about a year with my first boyfriend and I had broken up with him because someone told me he cheated on me during the summer with some girl that supposedly looked just like me while I was away for the weekend in Ocean City.

Brian worked part-time at a gas station as a mechanic and my best friend Shannon ended up dating Brian’s best friend Larry who also worked as a mechanic at the gas station and was around nineteen or twenty. The gas station was right near a mall, and we could take the bus there so our parents wouldn’t have to drive us. Shannon was very proud that she was dating an older guy. I think we were all obsessed with the movie ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’. If you’ve never seen that movie I’ll just tell you it’s one of the best movies about what really happens in high school. I’m quite certain I can recite most of it by heart after probably watching it a hundred times. And another movie came out, ‘The Breakfast Club’. Who can forget that movie? It was all about the teenage movies; they reflected our lives. We were emulating them.

I only realize now the impact of the music and movies and the pop culture we were obsessed with. We never told our parents where we were really going or what we were doing, just that we’re hanging out at the mall, while we were drinking and smoking. I would just tell my mom I was going to someone’s house to hang out and that was sufficient for her.

We were doing the same thing our parents did which they were telling us not to do because they’ve been through it. Every generation it’s the same. You either point your kids in the same direction you went, or they figure out to go the opposite on their own. I wonder how much I would have fucked up my kids if I had kids. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. Maybe in my heart I have the chutzpah to know that I’m meant for something more, who knows.

After that summer, my best friend’s mom ended up marrying her boyfriend, and they ended up and moving to Rockville, Maryland (another town in our county) and we didn’t really keep in touch. Every time I made a new best friend something always happened to leave me alone again.

So, guess what happened? I made a new best friend, Carrie. She was from a big Greek family and somehow again I had a new sister and was usually at their Sunday dinners. Carrie’s family had changed their last name from their Greek name to something more Americanized. I think my mother was relieved I had a new friend and also glad I was part of their family, and I would even go to Ocean City with them where they owned property. You could say her family was well off. I think her dad was a chef or cook at one point at a restaurant in D.C. or he worked for a food company. John, her father was tall and very handsome with dark straight hair and gorgeous blue eyes which Carrie also has.

I don’t know if they felt sorry for “the little Jewish girl” and I don’t remember how she became my best friend. I think we had chorus class together and we were sneaking cigarettes at school in the bathroom across the hall from the class and drinking her dad’s beer or liquor at her house while watching HBO. Not only were they one of the first to have HBO in her neighborhood but they were one of the first to have a VCR.

I spent many weekends with Carrie, and her dad and he became my dad too. Carrie’s dad spoiled her, and I got to go along for the ride. He was good to me and treated me like his own daughter. I suppose deep down I was jealous of Carrie’s life and the big family she had which I always wanted. Her parents were also divorced but occasionally her mom would come stay in the house in her father’s bed which was odd to me. I spent a lot of time at her house. We were inseparable. I really thought of her as my sister. I even went to their Greek church with them once, I remember hating the smell of the incense.

Thinking back, I’m surprised that her family took me in the way they did. Her dad was very racist, and the N word was used quite often by him and my friend which made me quite uncomfortable and surprised since she had introduced me to rap and we were listening to Doug E Fresh’s ‘Latidati, We Like to Party’. She played that record over and over. Friday nights we went to Chucky Cheese to watch the black kids break dance to Roxanne Roxanne and other rap artists I can’t recall. We went to the junior high dances and heard ‘New Edition’ sing ‘Candy Girl’. My best friend’s family was racist, yet they had me in their home for Sunday dinners, but at the time she loved rap music and ‘Prince and The Revolution’. It’s crazy when I think about how she is now into country music and obsessed with Bret Michaels from the group ‘Poison’. When we were in school she was obsessed with ‘Menudo’ and Ricky Martin. Sorry, but I have to put an LOL here cause it’s so fucking funny.

Then came the day when Carrie had to go to a different high school, Springbrook, not far from my school, Paint Brach, the ultimate rivalry. It was her family tradition that everyone in the family attend this particular high school. So, guess what happened again? My best friend traded me in for new friends at her school. We hung out a few times, but it wasn’t like before. In fact, every time we hung out it ended in trouble. And apparently, trouble is my name with a capital T.

So, around tenth grade in high school I made a new best friend again, Heather. She introduced me to Bon Jovi and George Thorogood and other rock legends. Heather’s dad Mike was an Allstate agent, and her family was pretty well off. He took their family on exotic vacations to Hawaii and the Bahamas. I was very jealous of her life. Her family was a very typical American family. She had a younger brother, her parents had been together for a long time, and they had a nice house which had both a living room and a sitting room. It was in a neighborhood called Burtonsville not far from our high school. Heather had her own car and on the weekends the thing to do was cruise around Laurel Mall and hang out and talk to the boys. We would cruise around for hours listening to the radio or tapes in the car while checking out the other people cruising the mall.

Heather looked like a good girl from the outside. She was an all American girl with blonde hair and blue eyes like her dad. My best friends always seemed to be blonde whether real or fake. She always managed to keep good grades and didn’t seem to get into a lot of trouble and for that she got rewarded by her parents. But her parents didn’t really know what she was up to when she left the house. For instance, they didn’t know that she loved to drink beer and smoke in her car or that she was already sexually active. In junior high, I was kind of in Heather’s circle of friends, but we weren’t really close, but after Carrie left to go to her high school somehow I got close with Heather. I had started to spend a lot of time at Heather’s house and got to know her family. My mom would drop me off at Heather’s place on the weekends and I would stay overnight there. We got really close and even went on a double date to the Junior/Senior prom. That was in eleventh grade before I had quit school the next year. But I had a whole other secret nightlife. I would go to Georgetown in D.C. and party on the weekends. I had gotten a fake id and I could pass for twenty-one.

It finally all blew up in my face when I figured out how to get a fake i.d. for Heather from a Russian guy. Since I was already going to bars in Georgetown with my fake id with an older guy, Sasha that lived in my apartment complex who was kind of in love with me but too old and I will just be kind and say not my type. I just used him to get the fake i.d. and take me to bars with live music where I could get drunk and dance. And I thought it’d be great if my friend could come with me, but before that could happen my friend’s parents found out and I was in trouble and my friend wasn’t allowed to hang out with me anymore. Once again I was separated from my best friend, and I was no longer welcomed in Heather’s house.

Honestly, not just my teens but my entire life is mostly just one big blur. I was always hanging out with people a little older than me who drank and smoked and did drugs as many people did, I just tried to fit in somewhere. It isn’t all my mother’s fault, it’s mine, my conscience knew I shouldn’t be doing any of this, but I wanted escape from all the pain built up in my head and now I was old enough to make choices and no one seemed to be paying attention that I was screaming for help from the inside.

I suppose I just figured out that negative attention was the only attention I seemed to get. No one seemed to give me positive attention when I was going to school and trying to make good grades. No one talked to me or asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, no one asked what I wanted to do with my life. No one really talked to me period. But when I did something bad, well everyone was up my ass then. But they didn’t talk, they yelled and screamed, and as usual I was the fuck up, I was my father’s daughter. Any part of me that was good was considered to be from my mother, and any part of me that was bad must have come from my father. I was also told at one point that if I wanted to go to college, I will have to pay for it myself. Most of my grades sucked, I hated science and math. The only classes I loved were English and history.

I remember when we first came to the states, and I forgive my mother for this now, but she was buying herself new clothes and buying second-hand store clothes for me.

When I got to junior high, I noticed the cheer leaders were the popular girls. So, I came home and told my mom I wanted to try out for cheer leading and how much the uniforms were if I made it. They may have cost around sixty-five dollars. God almighty, you would have thought I had asked for a thousand dollars. We couldn’t afford sixty-five dollars, but she could afford to buy herself new clothes. I was fourteen or so and I still couldn’t buy clothes I liked on my own, meanwhile my friends’ parents would give them cash or a credit card and drop them off at the mall for a couple hours so they could go shopping. Carrie’s dad would take us a to a big department store, and she picked out whatever she wanted. I had only enough money for maybe one pair of brand name jeans. We wore our jeans so tight that sometimes I had to lay down on the bed to get the zipper all the way up. This was before the days of spandex when jeans were made of one hundred percent cotton.

Anyway, once my grandmother got her own apartment in the same complex we lived in and that’s when I pretty much started to come and go as I pleased and don’t get me wrong I love my mother dearly, but either I’m a great actress or she just didn’t pay attention to anything. And once I started driving, it was over.

It was the summer of 1987. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was seventeen because I had no car. When I turned seventeen my mother bought a new car, a Dodge and gave me her old car, a brown Chevette. I had gotten a summer job at a shoe store near home, so I was working by day and partying with a girl that lived in my apartment complex at night. Being that I didn’t have a best friend anymore, I would hang out with anyone that was just there. That was the summer I met my second boyfriend, Troy. He was tall and tanned and muscular but lean. He had dark curly hair, chiseled features, deep brown eyes and beautiful lips. He had some German in him and also Native American, which gave him the dark tan. He was from Laurel, MD and I was in love or lust at first sight.

What I didn’t know was that he and his older brother Tim liked to smoke what was called “green”, marijuana lased with LSD or something like that.

He was from a working-class family and worked for a tiling company. He and his brother actually laid the tile floor in the bathrooms of my mom’s condo, which is still there today. My mother bought that apartment because she felt she couldn’t stay in our apartment complex because I was shaming the family by not dating a “nice Jewish” boy. But he was good enough to tile her bathroom floors.

By the time I was eighteen, I quit school three months before graduation and moved in with my Troy who was living between his mother’s apartment and some friends of his mother’s at their house. In actuality that came about because I snuck Troy into my house a few times and my mother told me I was shaming the family (since we had many Russian Jewish neighbors in our apartment complex) and if I was going to continue dating him I will have to leave. So, I left, because what girl wants to give up her boyfriend at eighteen. She doesn’t remember it that way, but I do in the blur of my life, unfortunately I tend to remember everything bad or negative where I felt wronged. I have a pretty good memory of every wrong ever done to me and every wrong I’ve ever done to others.

I know I’m not perfect and can be vengeful and vindictive when I feel hurt and feel wronged. What I’ve learned from that is it only hurts me more when I try to avenge where I feel fucked over. It takes so much more energy to make paybacks then to let it go, but at the same time you can’t allow people to treat you like a piece of shit either.

But I digress. By the time I turned nineteen. I was still living with Troy and had gotten a job as a telemarketer for a newspaper. We had been living with a friend of his mom’s not far from Laurel, Maryland in a house off Scaggsville Road. The lady who owned the house was a truck driver and wasn’t home very often. I think her husband was unemployed and they had a couple of kids that were living there. I was kind of a substitute mom to them, and I was doing laundry and some cooking and cleaning. I think his mom’s name was Jeannie and the couple who owned the house were Johnny and Reba, I don’t remember her name for certain or the kid’s names. I think the boy was around seven and he was Johnny, Jr. but I can’t recall the girl’s name though I remember the girl was older and had asthma and all of us smoking around her didn’t help. Both Johnny and Johnny, Jr had the most beautiful, piercing blue eyes, so blue like the ocean.

I was making a little money and spending most of it on helping to pay the rent, cigarettes and his drugs, which is how we actually met, getting high. Then one night we were arguing, we were in Laurel at his mom’s apartment, I have no idea what we were arguing about, and he hit me, so I called my mother to come get me and when I got in the car he was running after me and my mom almost ran him over with the car, and then I was back at her house. Troy became obsessed with me. He followed me around and showed up out of nowhere at a gas station while I was getting gas and threatened me.

Then one night a couple days after I went shopping for new clothes and shoes. Troy broke into our apartment by climbing the balconies and cracked to pieces the sliding glass door, went into my room and sliced all the new clothes and shoes with a knife, and sliced any stuffed animals he had won for me at carnivals. We had to call the police and I had to get a restraining order. When we went to court for restitution and to uphold the restraining order the judge told him to stay away from me and if he saw me on the street to cross and walk in the opposite direction. I never saw him again.

He was a pretty boy and a bad boy, that became my type. I remember when I first met him, he was so sexy. I met him while hanging out with some girl from school in the summer. She lived in my apartment complex.
Troy was part native American, part German and who knows what else. He had dark, curly hair and deep brown eyes and a gorgeous tan. He was tall and thin, but very muscular and I fell for him the moment I saw him. The sex with him was amazing. He was so good at oral sex¸ oh my God, it was mind blowing. Troy was very into making sure that I always climaxed but sometimes I was just too tired and started to sometimes fake my orgasms.

He had a friend named Joey and Joey had this girlfriend, Alexa, she drove a red Fierro. Alexa’s real name was Wendy, but she renamed herself because she didn’t think Wendy was a very sexy name. She was a big girl, and she became my new best friend. The four of us would hang out at Joey’s house in Beltsville, Maryland. Joey’s grandmother lived with his family, and she would tell us the funniest stories. One story she always told was about someone chasing her with a machete knife or she was chasing them, I’m not sure. My new best friend, Joey’s girlfriend had a contagious laugh and though she was a big girl she always had her hair and makeup done, usually a bit too much makeup, and she dressed very provocatively. She didn’t care that she was fat as hell. She wore miniskirts that showed her fat legs and cellulite. She just didn’t give a shit if she was fat, she considered herself sexy. To be totally honest, in the small space of her little Fierro the sweat between her legs made her pussy stink and even though I was her best friend I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

That summer the four of us took a trip to Virginia Beach and somehow it came up that I was faking orgasms with Troy. He went crazy, yelling and screaming. He was so upset, and I was crying, trying to calm him down and telling him it wasn’t every time. I never turned him down when he wanted sex, but I tried to explain that I was just too tired sometimes. That trip was insane, and I realized I was with a control freak.

Every guy in my life in one way or another was just like my father. I had not had one healthy relationship in my life, not with men and not with friends.

After that break-up, I found a job at a collection agency because I had a good phone voice, and I was doing better. But of course, being the fuck up that I am, I found people to party with at work and worst of all in my family’s eyes I got involved with a black man at work.

I don’t think my family were racists, I think they were more of separatists because of being Jewish. When you’re not even told your entire life not to touch something, but it is an unspoken idea always in the air, what you want to do most is find out why.

So, I of course got involved with this man who was a terrible man, Richard. Richard had several women. He owed child support; he was even arrested right at the job for not paying the child support. He just was not a good person, but I guess something about him fascinated me. He told me I looked like a China doll, and I fell for it. Richard said to me “I’m going to teach you to fuck like an animal”.

Being the nice person that I am, I got Alexa, my new best friend a job where I worked. We planned to get an apartment together and then she met a guy one night when we were out at a club. Well, they were in love and before we moved into out apartment, they sprung on me at the last minute that it would be three of us not two of us, yet I had to pay half they rent. Nice girl she turned out to be and I had to continue working with her.

They would invite his family over to the apartment and while I was out, they threw their stinking laundry in my room and promised to move it out when the family left. Some best friend! Let me tell you the stink of her underwear from her nasty, fat pussy was sickening. When I objected to this treatment and said I was moving out she threatened to sue me if I didn’t pay my share of the rent and I ended up moving back in with my mom and still paying my half of the rent. I should have said “Fuck you, sue me bitch” and let her so I could tell my story to a judge.

That is the tragedy of my stupidity in life, is that I do something nice for someone because I want them to like me or love me and I get fucked. She ended up getting married to her boyfriend and actually had the balls to contact me through Messenger on Facebook some time ago and wanted to “make peace”.

My old best friend Lana, from the old neighborhood in Hyattsville, when she got married, I was there for her through every step of her wedding (which took place in Brooklyn, though not one person at the wedding actually lived in New York) including maid of honor, and bridal shower and all that bullshit. But when it was my turn to get married, she was in dental school in Richmond and it snowed a few days before, so I had to give myself a bridal shower at a restaurant, her bullshit excuse was the roads were still bad even though the snow had started to melt. She couldn’t come to the bridal shower I basically threw for myself. And the day of my wedding when she was my matron of honor, I was ready to say forget it, “I don’t want to do this” I was saying to myself, but she came in and screamed at me yelling that everyone was waiting for me instead of being concerned for whatever was going on with me.

And I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life and went ahead with the wedding. In the back of my mind, I thought “Well if it doesn’t work out, we’ll just get a divorce”. Who thinks like that? I suppose the answer is look how many people are divorced. It’s not like I had any examples of long, surviving and thriving marriages.

In any case, these are usually the best friends I ended up with. Do I seem angry yet? Yeah, my lesson is basically don’t do nice shit for people. Most of them don’t deserve it. Real friends show up for you and don’t threaten to sue you or trade you in for new best friends.

Now by 1989. I had not seen my aunt Rima, her husband and my uncle and my cousin Yosef since I was nine years old and suddenly after my involvement with this black man my mother decided it was time to go see the family in Israel. They had been there about a year now. In 1988 the sister who told my mother it was her fault that her mother had killed herself was finally allowed by the government to immigrate to Israel. I suppose she was young herself when she said these terrible things. But according to my mom what actually happened was there was some fabric that belonged to Rima’s mother (my grandmother’s sister) and my grandmother used to sew my mother’s clothes and my grandmother was using this fabric to make my mother a dress and Rima told my mom that fabric belonged to her mom to make her feel bad. Rima seemed intent to let my mom know that her existence was somehow her fault that her mother was dead. And my mother chose to forgive her because when we came to America my mother was writing letters to try and get help for her family to get them released.

All I know is she wrote a lot of correspondence to Jewish people in Europe that were involved in helping Russian Jews, and the other sister, the oldest sister, was very opposed to them leaving because of how it affected her and her family. For my aunt and uncle, it was only Israel. They studied Hebrew in secret, they did not want to go anywhere else and exercised their “right to return”. In 1989 for the first time in more than ten years my mother and her sister saw each other in person. My cousin, three years older than me was now a man. He ended up marrying his high-school sweetheart when she came to Israel, and they have two daughters now.

I wonder often how my life would have turned out had we gone to Israel. My mother tells me she was afraid with all the wars in the middle East to go to Israel. You see in Israel; women are mandated to serve in the army, and I suppose she was afraid I would have to serve.

And I wonder all the time if I would have found a good Jewish man unlike my father. I wonder if I would have had children by now and may be even grandchildren. I wonder if I had been raised in Israel if I would have made lifelong friends from school and if I had gone into the army. In Israel it isn’t six degrees of separation, it’s probably more like two degrees of separation, and you can’t turn around without finding a cousin or finding some distant relative.

Instead, I married a black man and became the “black sheep” of the family. Even not growing up with my father didn’t stop me from marrying a man exactly like him, a cruel and sadistic asshole. So, it made no difference that he was not Jewish or even white, I married a guy just like dad. But more about the main asshole of my life later.

The first thing that hit me walking off the plane in Israel in 1989 was the smell of the flowers from the orange trees. It wasn’t all built up like it is now. We actually walked down the stairs of the plane before being bussed to the airport, it wasn’t like it is now, everything built up, the city completed and still building more. Half of Tel Aviv wasn’t even there. It was around that time I found out that my grandfather was married to my grandmother and her sister. I had just been in a relationship, if that’s what you want to call it, with the first black man in my life, he told me “I’m going to teach you to fuck like an animal.” And I recall my aunt saying to me “Don’t break the chain”, I knew what she meant. Jews should only marry Jews. A lot of good that did my mother.

Anyway, on that trip, at only nineteen years old, I still didn’t understand the importance of Israel for Jews. I didn’t pay attention to politics or know anything about the history of the Jewish people. Even though I had gone to a Hebrew school, I wasn’t there long enough to absorb what being Jewish really meant. I knew about the Holocaust and heard my family talking about the killing of my great grandparents, but the significance didn’t really sink in. I was in a group of Jewish girls from some program at the Jewish Community Center when I was around thirteen or fourteen and I can’t remember how or why I stopped hanging out with them, probably because I was smoking and drinking with my school friends.

The truth is I never really felt like I belonged to any one group, not with white people, not with Jewish people, not with black people, not with the burn outs, no one. I liked all kinds of music; my tastes are very eclectic. When I was in junior high, around the time rap came up, we used to go to Chucky Cheese on Friday nights and watch people break dancing to rap music.

In high school during lunch, I would watch the black kids dancing to the radio, one favorite song of mine was the cover version of ‘Lean on Me’. The new rap and black cultures were a huge influence on my life. Up until I had come to the states, I had no knowledge of anything about slavery and the civil war and what black people had gone through in America and Africa. I probably hadn’t even paid attention during Passover to the fact that Jews were slaves in Egypt. I was in my own little world.

‘Purple Rain’ had just come out and my Greek best friend Carrie and I listened to that record a thousand times and she had the 45’s of Apollonia and Morris Day. Just because I had long dark hair and dark eyes, kids at school were telling me I looked like Apollonia. People can be so funny. We were obsessed with ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Sixteen Candles’.

Her father listened to golden oldies stations in the car, and even though he was very racist, as he used the N word quite often which I didn’t hear in my house, he still listened the Motown tunes. How ironic people can be. Rock’n’Roll was stolen by white people (or not stolen but I guess copied by white people), yet people still go around using the N word like it’s nothing. They forget how hard people fought to erase that word from the world’s vocabulary and the significance of it. Even now when people claim it as an “art form’’, they have such ignorance about what it meant to their ancestors. And that’s my two cents on that as I digress again.

As I remember back in summer camp, my bunk was singing ‘The Supremes’ Mr. Postman in the talent show. I think I was twelve or thirteen and not a clue who ‘The Supremes’ were or anything about black music. My friend Lena (later changed to Lana) used to make up dances to Diana Ross’s song ‘Upside Down’ and she would force me to dance with her. She was such a bossy little bitch.

And another memory pops back in my head how we had an Asian girl in my bunk who was Jewish and that was the first time I learned about adoption and that someone could become Jewish by being adopted by a Jewish family. All this new American culture was taking hold in my head, but I never discussed it with anyone at home.

My family was still obsessed with ballet, and classical music, and opera. Yet, my mother’s favorite pop song is ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor, and I remember she used to go out dancing when we first came to the states, and I guess would leave me with neighbors so she could go out. But despite the N word never being used in my house, there was an unspoken rule that being with a black man was unacceptable.

Once back in Russia, I must have been five or six and I was on the street with my grandmother and saw a very dark-skinned man crossing and I yelled in Russian “Look grandma a negger”. Obviously, I had heard the word somewhere because I didn’t use the Russian word cherniy (meaning black) to describe him. My grandmother yanked my arm so I would look at her and said, “Don’t EVER use that word again”. Of course, no explanation ever followed, I just did what I was told and never used it again. In fact, I don’t remember hearing it again until I came to the U.S.

At 19, I decided to go back to school and get my high school diploma. It was hard. I worked full time and went to class two nights a week to finish the classes I needed to graduate.

I believe I was living at home with mom at the time, trying to straighten out my life. That’s the thing about my mom, whenever I needed rescuing, she is always there. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve fucked up my life and my mom has always been and still is there to pick up the pieces. But things were always my fault, that was the message I always heard. I swear Jewish guilt is an art form, your parents fuck you up and then it’s all your fault.

Just like my grandparents with her when she got pregnant, and I think forced to marry my father. I suppose I should be thankful I wasn’t born a bastard. Her job became the most stable thing in her life. She went to work for a company a month after we came to the U.S. and forty years later, she is still there. But I heard her complain so many times, and I would say “Why don’t you look for something else if you’re so unhappy.” And she went to some school and tried to learn some computer language but for whatever reason didn’t finish. When we first came here, she always seemed to date older, rich men, and a lot older than her, an alter kaker (meaning a super old man) she would probably say now. Then she tried dating guys her own age. And I was always hoping for a new daddy. But no one ever seemed to stick.

Back in the summer of ’85 or ’86 my mom was dating an older man, she had used contraception but got pregnant anyway. This was my second time in summer school, I was not passing some classes during the regular school year. I guess the guy didn’t want any more kids, I think he already had a grown son, so he gave her money for an abortion, half of what it would cost I recall. I wanted a sibling so badly. I begged her to have the baby and said I would help take care of it, but I suppose she didn’t want to be tied to this man for the rest of her life and chose to have the abortion and didn’t want to go to a clinic. She made an appointment at a hospital and asked that I drive her because she didn’t want to take a cab. I had to get up at five a.m. that morning, drive her to the hospital, go to my summer school classes, then come and pick her up from the hospital.

I was and still am so angry that she chose to make me part of the whole thing and so wished that she had just taken care of it on her own and never told me she was pregnant. But I guess at that time I was her best friend and she needed me, and this is how I learned to deal with responsibilities. I love my mom, but she knows that she fucked up a lot and this was one instance that really pissed me off because later I would do the same thing. As I said before to quote Carrie Fisher, “My mother made a blueprint and I followed it to the letter”.

Yes, I’m airing ALL the dirty laundry. Because most of my life my mother has been my best friend and I have been through some sort of traumatic experience with every best friend I ever had and one of my biggest challenges in life is not saying no to people, especially my mother. I still have to practice constantly in situations that are uncomfortable for me to just say no when someone asks me to do something that I don’t want to do, that is my hardest lesson in all of my relationships whether it’s with family, friends, or men. Always wanting to please and fit in, instead I would just go with the flow.

I tried being friends with my Greek best friend on Facebook several years ago, but her obsession with Brett Michaels was quite annoying. She was always asking people to help her win concert tickets to go see him or whatever other contests she was into. Once, I came to her house in Frederick, Maryland (a town often referred to as Fredneck since it is considered very redneck and racist). I had brought her some yellow roses, but instead of thanking me she said, “Oh, I have plenty of roses”.

We went out for pizza, and she mentioned something about my weight. She knew I had been a stripper and said, “They like big girls in West Virginia and have clubs there”. What nerve! She and her second husband were both over three hundred pounds when they got married and both had gastric bypass surgeries to lose weight, but she was talking about “big girls”. Unfuckingbelievalble!

Right before her father passed away, she called me and I came to the hospice, but by the time I got there they turned off the machines and he was gone. I was the one that was there, I came to the hospice and yet she said, “I have twenty-eight messages on my phone”. Well, gee, thanks bitch! Why did you even call me to come to the hospice? Out of respect, I attended her father’s funeral, because he had been a father to me for a couple years. Out of all her so-called friends, I was the only one that showed up.

Recently on her fiftieth birthday, I messaged her on Facebook Messenger. She started to tell me about being a grandmother and had a new baby grand daughter, I congratulated her and told her that was wonderful but rather than ask how I’m doing she sent me a friend request. I am not one who collects Facebook friends just so I can say I have five hundred Facebook friends. I told her what I thought. For once I didn’t hold back and let her know that it hurt my feelings that she didn’t even ask how I’m doing.

She proceeded to tell me she was busy at her new job because I told her “I don’t have time for people who don’t give a shit about me”. I told her it was polite when someone says “Hope all is well with you” to say the same back to them. She blocked me after that and that was the end of me trying to revive a friendship which no longer served me. That day or the next I also unfriended a few people who never wished me a happy birthday or even occasionally asked how I was doing. At fifty years old, I finally realized I don’t need five hundred Facebook friends or even a hundred, I figured out that I have to be my own best friend.