2003. One Father Dead, One Childhood Home Sold, One Black Man – Just the Average Trip Home to Memphis
Two days after my dad's funeral in May of this year, I decided to go to the home I grew up in on Estes Street in Fox Meadows. I wanted to ask kindly of the stranger now living there to oblige me a walk around the house one last time.
It was Memorial Day in Memphis, TN. My sister and I had a huge falling out on the day before the funeral, involving a security guard and an official escort to my car from dad's efficiency apartment. When I say 'one last time,' I meant this to be the last time the Dowda family ever raked me over the coals. I wanted peace. I wanted to smile at the ugly paneling. I wanted to be willfully jarred by the different style of furniture of the second family giving it a shot in this brick home. I wanted to see the pecan tree in the backyard that I scaled countless times, a refugee from the silent tension of my dad and mom ignoring the huge elephant of Sex and Cancer that was genetically seeded in the sediment of our family. I wanted to see Velvet's grave and doghouse. I wanted to smell the mustiness and mold that was always in my closet – that ruined my clothes and sent me to school consistently smelling like a forgotten dishrag. I wanted to remind myself that I wasn't living nor trying to survive in that house or that family any longer. If obliged, I would walk into that house, and see another family loving and living, and the nightmares would stop, or at least relocate themselves in a different setting. Either way, there must be peace upon closing the door.
On the front door, a brass doorknocker read "DAVIS" in cursive type. The house holds no loyalty. So soon does it open its doors and subsume any sign of life. So soon. I googled my house previously and found that it had been sold to a "Carlos Davis." A Latino "Davis"? Italian? Spanish? These names didn't match. I had no idea what face of which angles and shadows would be on the other side.
I knock on the door, step back a little bit. Wait. Step back a little more. The white iron decorative piece hanging on the red brick wall beside me is a decorative effort leftover from my mother. The two oak trees in the front yard are blowing in an unusually cooling May breeze. They shade the entire house now. They are the work of my father. When I was 6 or 7, they were no taller than me but lovingly planted, nursed and watered vigilantly by my father. He worried over their growth, one different than the other – slower, shorter and thinner than the other. Yet, here they both stand tall and keeping the house's utility bill down. My father must've hated to leave that.
I continue to wait. A little embarrassed. I remind myself, "This is not your house anymore. This is not your house anymore …" But it's a lie because I remember Mama's smile every time someone complimented her on that ugly iron hanging. I know that house like I know the landscape of my own body. I know the reason behind every brick. I know the slant of the driveway. I know the dents in the front yard. I know why I'm knocking on a just 10 year old iron frame door that was hinged to "keep the blacks out" when a neighbor down the street was broken in on.
I stand there listening for my dad's moccasins slapping against the tile and wresting the door open to greet me. From the carport I hear the familiar, so familiar sound of the storm door opening. The sound of the unlocking and loosening of the aluminum door. I recognize it. That sound was my dad coming home, either to ignore me or to give me tasks to do.
I walk over and peek around. Sure enough. A black man in his early 30s stands there on the threshold holding on to the handle, trying to smile.
"Hi, Um, Hi." I don't venture too close, as he seems suspicious of my intent. It is clear I am expected to earn his trust. "My dad just sold this house. I was born and raised in it."
He's smiling curiously, politely. Confused.
"Hi, I'm Lisa," and I extend a hand, and begin moving toward him. He's not budging, but he is watching my feet move. I still. "I just wanted to stop by and see it one last time." He's not moving. His smile is beginning to hit its expiration date.
"Mr. Dowda? Did you know him? He just passed away."
"Naw, naw, I didn't know anybody like that."
His smile has frozen before it's faded altogether. Politeness has quite a grip on all us Memphians. A life raft.
"Ok." I keep putting my hand to my heart. I'm standing there in front of this black man, the only thing standing between me and MY HOME, and I am instinctively acting on my nice-girlness. It's the only negotiating technique my upbringing afforded me. Certainly I can summons the survival skills needed in this land. Any moment now, this man's going to see my need, relent and invite me in. Any moment, this moment will have passed, a new day will rise on the races coming together in ironic justice.
I keep clutching my heart – the Gone With the Wind Melanie negotiation technique ain't working. It's never worked – not on bill collectors, car dealerships, landlords. I keep using it though. He's standing, shifting his weight on his flip-flopped feet, waiting for the white girl to get the hint. I'm blinking in the silence between us, knowing a black man in my own home is the only thing standing between me and it. The last black man that stood on that threshold was the man I was in love back in 1996, trying to get in. The black man that caused my father to disown me from the family and then in 1999 to sell this home and write me out of the will. And now Carlos, a black man who could buy his way in, stands there in ownership and authority. Another black man in Memphis. Certainly, this Carlos is someone who'd been living at the hands of a Lazurusian prejudicial discontent and would at least give me a chance.
He exhaled loudly, scuffed a stray string off his foot with the other, adjusted his grip on the door handle, his eyes downcast.
"Um, ok, ok, ok. I'm sorry to bother you." Hand to my heart. He nods and closes the door, locks it. Then closes the wooden door and locks it. I walk down the driveway on which I taught my dog to fetch the morning newspaper. Down the driveway on which I played countless games of solitaire jacks. The driveway on which I crashed my bike, sustained a swollen and bruised blue chin of such a size that my mother forced me to wear gloppy pink makeup to conceal it. One more walk down the driveway, I get into my rental car, take a deep breath, crank up the MAGIC 101 R&B, and hit the road.
Maybe it's the house. Maybe it was never the family dynamic. Maybe it was the intent of the developers – to sell to people who needed to make a new life away from a more dangerous one. Maybe it's the architects, sketching out the human geography of this bluff city that keeps me at bay, keeps me moving on down the river. Maybe this black man is segregating himself from a community where he was not welcomed or where he was not succeeding or where he couldn't safely raise his children. Maybe it's just the house, built on fear. But I'm still not welcome in it.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Soooooo, I’ll Move On
1.15.07, North Hollywood, CA
Eh, Soo, the Williamsburg real estate agent, never called back. Perhaps she smelled the i-don’t-know-when-my-moving-date-is-ness in my voicemails.
Eh, not to worry. There will be other Soo’s.
Recently, I was plopped on my couch in front of a documentary on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Seems that Al Capone was born and raised in Brooklyn and then settled in Chicago to run a gang.
I like knowing this. I like knowing things about Italians criminals. It makes me giggle for some reason and smile with a sort of knowing pride ... Although I know no mobsters and as far as I know, I am related to no mobsters. This, however, makes me sad. No mob bloodline. A mobster might have been influential in making the fallout relations between my father and me a little easier, if you get my meaning….
Again with the blogging tangent …
Anyway, …
Earlier that morning, I read in the Los Angeles Times CURRENT section a bit about how Whiteness defined itself in pre- and post-Civil War/Civil Rights days. There was some rhetoric about the ethnicities that rooted themselves in the South in the earlier part of the 20th century were skilled at Americanizing themselves and losing their whiteness. What was at once Italian or Lebanese or Polish, quickly became Not Black. The accents faded, the spices in the fried chicken softened, and everyone lived peacefully behind closed doors in wonder of the Other.
My own family: Interracial. It took me years to figure it out. My mother was first generation Italian. My father was run-of-the-mill white with pickin’-cotton parents finding respect and a pension in the Industrial Revolution working for the Light, Gas and Water Company. My father’s mother always seemed relieved that my mom was finally out of the picture, never quite sure how to deal with the remaining hysteria and passion from her half-Italian granddaughters. It’s not unusual (anymore) to me that my Granny would hurl insults at me in a fit, saying I was just like my mother. She obviously thought it would hurt me. I always took strength from those fights.
Thankfully, over a number of years, I’ve realized that my psychological struggles, my emotional demons, my incessant nightmares are not all caused by Memphis, TN. There’s something deeper, genetic - not just geographic, not just socio-economic - that has me replete with the wanderlust to Brooklyn, further exiled from my birthright.
It’s something in the history of Brooklyn, the birth of writers and criminals from Neil Simon to Al Capone to the current writers and filmmakers living there now. It’s something in the pavement, I’m guessing – some East Coast Loch Ness buried in the Naval Yard.
That undefinable something. Maybe it’s a color that I can live with and a sound that relaxes me. Maybe it’s the mom and pop stores that provide a certain economic transparency that was clouded by my subdivision childhood and privately funded education away from the real minority majority population of Memphis.
Soo, why was I depending on Soo’s helping me to define home/family/soul in some developer’s overpriced, fake marble bathroom condo?
This is probably the spin that was put on my own family when we moved into a house with no history out in a subdivision of Memphis.
Subdiving in a cell-splitting time in US history – post-Civil Rights.
No wonder people live such fractured family lives. They’ve been sold a sub-divided bill of goods.
Eh, Soo, the Williamsburg real estate agent, never called back. Perhaps she smelled the i-don’t-know-when-my-moving-date-is-ness in my voicemails.
Eh, not to worry. There will be other Soo’s.
Recently, I was plopped on my couch in front of a documentary on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Seems that Al Capone was born and raised in Brooklyn and then settled in Chicago to run a gang.
I like knowing this. I like knowing things about Italians criminals. It makes me giggle for some reason and smile with a sort of knowing pride ... Although I know no mobsters and as far as I know, I am related to no mobsters. This, however, makes me sad. No mob bloodline. A mobster might have been influential in making the fallout relations between my father and me a little easier, if you get my meaning….
Again with the blogging tangent …
Anyway, …
Earlier that morning, I read in the Los Angeles Times CURRENT section a bit about how Whiteness defined itself in pre- and post-Civil War/Civil Rights days. There was some rhetoric about the ethnicities that rooted themselves in the South in the earlier part of the 20th century were skilled at Americanizing themselves and losing their whiteness. What was at once Italian or Lebanese or Polish, quickly became Not Black. The accents faded, the spices in the fried chicken softened, and everyone lived peacefully behind closed doors in wonder of the Other.
My own family: Interracial. It took me years to figure it out. My mother was first generation Italian. My father was run-of-the-mill white with pickin’-cotton parents finding respect and a pension in the Industrial Revolution working for the Light, Gas and Water Company. My father’s mother always seemed relieved that my mom was finally out of the picture, never quite sure how to deal with the remaining hysteria and passion from her half-Italian granddaughters. It’s not unusual (anymore) to me that my Granny would hurl insults at me in a fit, saying I was just like my mother. She obviously thought it would hurt me. I always took strength from those fights.
Thankfully, over a number of years, I’ve realized that my psychological struggles, my emotional demons, my incessant nightmares are not all caused by Memphis, TN. There’s something deeper, genetic - not just geographic, not just socio-economic - that has me replete with the wanderlust to Brooklyn, further exiled from my birthright.
It’s something in the history of Brooklyn, the birth of writers and criminals from Neil Simon to Al Capone to the current writers and filmmakers living there now. It’s something in the pavement, I’m guessing – some East Coast Loch Ness buried in the Naval Yard.
That undefinable something. Maybe it’s a color that I can live with and a sound that relaxes me. Maybe it’s the mom and pop stores that provide a certain economic transparency that was clouded by my subdivision childhood and privately funded education away from the real minority majority population of Memphis.
Soo, why was I depending on Soo’s helping me to define home/family/soul in some developer’s overpriced, fake marble bathroom condo?
This is probably the spin that was put on my own family when we moved into a house with no history out in a subdivision of Memphis.
Subdiving in a cell-splitting time in US history – post-Civil Rights.
No wonder people live such fractured family lives. They’ve been sold a sub-divided bill of goods.
Which Came First – the Family or the Soul?
1.10.07, North Hollywood, CA
So long ago – when I was 16 or 18 – ok, not that long ago - I was struggling with my father. Daily. Getting good grades, going to church, popular at school, in a lot of clubs, getting main roles in the school plays, running cross country, but just growing up. That’s all. It’s not much more than that.
But Dad wasn’t handling it well. I could leave the iron on, and he would freeze me out for being his irresponsible daughter for weeks. I could come in 3 minutes later than my 11pm curfew after a night of ice cream cones with friends after a Homecoming Game, and he would tell me he doesn’t love me because God doesn’t love me. If I begged to go spend the night at a not-so-pretty friend’s house, his concern was when I was coming home and doing my Saturday chores of cleaning and waxing all the kitchen cabinets. But when the pretty girl called and asked me out to a play at the local community theatre, he could care less about curfews or the when, the where and the what.
It’s a wonder my dad didn’t just make me angry AND a lesbian. It’s funny that all I got was angry from Surviving Dad. Or some other uncomfortable adjective other than funny.
Anyhoo, I’m bloggingly off-topic …
There was a family friend that stepped in for my dead mom and my remaining OCD father and she saved me. I attribute any success and/or sanity that I have had as a person to a.) the times I was left alone in the silent aftermath of mom’s cancer, and b.) Ms. Plunk.
Ms. Plunk was key in confirming that my dad was crazy. All the times I spent in her car detailing the irrational demands he placed on me as the only one left standing at 3172 Estes, she recanted with her own Plunkian Edits to Survival as a Dowda outside Dowda rule.
It doesn’t take years of therapy for a child with loss to clearly put out to the world how irrevocably damaged their outlook is. The kids left fatherless/motherless after 9/11, and even teenagers with those externally less traumatic losses related to the bad lungs and the complicated health issues that the Ground Zero cleanup workers incurred – kids left with empty chairs at the dinner tables, depressed surviving parents behind closed doors, and no good excuses as their attention waxes and wanes during biology class.
I was among the lucky. I had someone pick me out to foster, someone who needed to mother something while her teenage kid went to college. Due to timing, geography and a genetic code of disease, Ms. Plunk came and put into my head words that have whispered to me over the years, infuriated my attempts to secure a man in my life and given me the reprieve of a lost girl playing with an inferior deck of cards.
It’s what really motivating this move to Brooklyn.
Ms. Plunk said to me one night – she said – after I confessed to her a disturbing dream that I had of my dad’s treating me like a wife, expecting me to sleep in his bed, expecting me to have sex with him. Just a dream, a metaphor of the daily demands placed on my 11-18 year old self, but Ms. Plunk heard beyond the trauma of my emotions shaking out the chaos of mixed signals of a limping family unit. She said to me, words that curse and bless me:
“Don’t worry – you hear me? You just go and make a family for yourself.”
Now for any other motherless daughter in any other generation and any other geography, this may have resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. And it did. And then it didn’t. But mostly, it’s resulted in an unwanted loneliness and a compulsion to seek a safety at home that I’ve formulaically laid out and a family that I’ve only imagined.
“Don’t worry – you hear me? You just go and make a family for yourself.”
So… it’s not about home at all - home is where I live. Home was Memphis, TN. Home is a structure and a place where I can fit some soft pillows in the corner of a worn couch, throw together some good food on a lousy tableclothed table, and invite folks over to talk about the day, the government, the mundane, my hair. Home is a dream state that’s always in flux. And for this washing machine life, Home will be Brooklyn.
But is Brooklyn about family? Is it about soul?
I’ll start with a soul and a mortgage, and maybe the family will come after? Or maybe family will just happen to me.
So long ago – when I was 16 or 18 – ok, not that long ago - I was struggling with my father. Daily. Getting good grades, going to church, popular at school, in a lot of clubs, getting main roles in the school plays, running cross country, but just growing up. That’s all. It’s not much more than that.
But Dad wasn’t handling it well. I could leave the iron on, and he would freeze me out for being his irresponsible daughter for weeks. I could come in 3 minutes later than my 11pm curfew after a night of ice cream cones with friends after a Homecoming Game, and he would tell me he doesn’t love me because God doesn’t love me. If I begged to go spend the night at a not-so-pretty friend’s house, his concern was when I was coming home and doing my Saturday chores of cleaning and waxing all the kitchen cabinets. But when the pretty girl called and asked me out to a play at the local community theatre, he could care less about curfews or the when, the where and the what.
It’s a wonder my dad didn’t just make me angry AND a lesbian. It’s funny that all I got was angry from Surviving Dad. Or some other uncomfortable adjective other than funny.
Anyhoo, I’m bloggingly off-topic …
There was a family friend that stepped in for my dead mom and my remaining OCD father and she saved me. I attribute any success and/or sanity that I have had as a person to a.) the times I was left alone in the silent aftermath of mom’s cancer, and b.) Ms. Plunk.
Ms. Plunk was key in confirming that my dad was crazy. All the times I spent in her car detailing the irrational demands he placed on me as the only one left standing at 3172 Estes, she recanted with her own Plunkian Edits to Survival as a Dowda outside Dowda rule.
It doesn’t take years of therapy for a child with loss to clearly put out to the world how irrevocably damaged their outlook is. The kids left fatherless/motherless after 9/11, and even teenagers with those externally less traumatic losses related to the bad lungs and the complicated health issues that the Ground Zero cleanup workers incurred – kids left with empty chairs at the dinner tables, depressed surviving parents behind closed doors, and no good excuses as their attention waxes and wanes during biology class.
I was among the lucky. I had someone pick me out to foster, someone who needed to mother something while her teenage kid went to college. Due to timing, geography and a genetic code of disease, Ms. Plunk came and put into my head words that have whispered to me over the years, infuriated my attempts to secure a man in my life and given me the reprieve of a lost girl playing with an inferior deck of cards.
It’s what really motivating this move to Brooklyn.
Ms. Plunk said to me one night – she said – after I confessed to her a disturbing dream that I had of my dad’s treating me like a wife, expecting me to sleep in his bed, expecting me to have sex with him. Just a dream, a metaphor of the daily demands placed on my 11-18 year old self, but Ms. Plunk heard beyond the trauma of my emotions shaking out the chaos of mixed signals of a limping family unit. She said to me, words that curse and bless me:
“Don’t worry – you hear me? You just go and make a family for yourself.”
Now for any other motherless daughter in any other generation and any other geography, this may have resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. And it did. And then it didn’t. But mostly, it’s resulted in an unwanted loneliness and a compulsion to seek a safety at home that I’ve formulaically laid out and a family that I’ve only imagined.
“Don’t worry – you hear me? You just go and make a family for yourself.”
So… it’s not about home at all - home is where I live. Home was Memphis, TN. Home is a structure and a place where I can fit some soft pillows in the corner of a worn couch, throw together some good food on a lousy tableclothed table, and invite folks over to talk about the day, the government, the mundane, my hair. Home is a dream state that’s always in flux. And for this washing machine life, Home will be Brooklyn.
But is Brooklyn about family? Is it about soul?
I’ll start with a soul and a mortgage, and maybe the family will come after? Or maybe family will just happen to me.
I Know I Know –
1.8.07, North Hollywood, CA
I still haven’t come clean on my 2007 resolutions. … still working it out.
I’ll let you know.
Later that day …
Notes to Self:
Do the Write Thing
Who to work for: Spike Lee, Lee Daniels, Hip Hop Theatre Festival, BAM, Steiner Studios
Also, who to live around… Spike Lee, Lee Daniels, Hip Hop Theatre Festival, BAM, Steiner Studios.
I’m sure the real estate developers know this already. Don’t care. Don’t care how I factor into the demog. Don’t care.
I will BeCome my own Cliché.
I still haven’t come clean on my 2007 resolutions. … still working it out.
I’ll let you know.
Later that day …
Notes to Self:
Do the Write Thing
Who to work for: Spike Lee, Lee Daniels, Hip Hop Theatre Festival, BAM, Steiner Studios
Also, who to live around… Spike Lee, Lee Daniels, Hip Hop Theatre Festival, BAM, Steiner Studios.
I’m sure the real estate developers know this already. Don’t care. Don’t care how I factor into the demog. Don’t care.
I will BeCome my own Cliché.
I’m The Worst Blogger.
1.7.07, Burbank, CA
I edit like nuts.
I fact-check my own social history.
I may never ever ever find a man that thinks this is a funny, quirky or lovable trait.
Maybe I’ll find a publisher that does?
I edit like nuts.
I fact-check my own social history.
I may never ever ever find a man that thinks this is a funny, quirky or lovable trait.
Maybe I’ll find a publisher that does?
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig
1.6.07, 8pm, North Hollywood, CA
I called a real estate agent over the holidays who deals in new development, high-rise condos. A too-rich-for-my-blood 2-bedroom, but nevertheless, I called. What the hell.
In Williamsburg. Found it on Craigslist.org. I am how I Google. I shop for real estate on Craigslist.
Oof, is that’s depressing. Anywaaaaaaaaaaaaaay…
Soo called me back with a warm and friendly voicemail confessing her plan to move to Billburg as well in the summer, and how simpatico. The condo is to be in a new development totally unlived in and ready for move-in in July. (Who knows who was priced out of their own home in order for this development to happen.) I’m shopping for brownstone apartments, too, 150 years of paint and shellac. However, the desire to own – finally – something that I can be the first in is pretty damn strong these days.
How freeking American… damn mutated genetics.
Anyhoo, the real estate agent Soo … is she driving up the market in Billlburg? Or will she become my newest best friend? Or will we shop at the same Crate & Barrel and only wave politely when we run into each other? Or is she destined to be the High Priestess of my Home Ownership Neuroses?
It’s been phone-tag and e-tag ever since.
However, I now have a floor plan from the website’s posting, I decorate it obsessively with my 1920s Italian-American Stink of Gaudy. I hang my dad’s mirror in the front room. I arrange my clothes and shoes in the closet. I exchange familiar jokes with the Imaginary Doorman in my mind.
And I believe that I can create my home there. All I’m doing is visualizing the Possible. Seems a little creepy and unhealthy, but I can’t stop.
650K for a 2 bedroom condo seems like a lot, though, for a starter home. Like A LOT a lot. For a toddler home? For a house with training wheels? For a home that stills has stuffed animals and a pacifier to keep from screaming bloody murder? And I get scared. I know I want to move to Brooklyn, but maybe I should find a smaller town, a lower rent. Save some more. It’s felt good, lately. The Saving. So far in my financial life, I’ve saved to skrijmp by. But for the last two years, I’ve saved towards Brooklyn, which means paying off some bills, starting an IRA and a 401K.
These are all new feelings – new, demonstrative actions proving to me that I no longer believe I’m gonna die in my 40s.
I mean, who doesn’t schedule their own death, really?
But the words in my head – ‘settling in Brooklyn’ – sound so glamorous. So end of the rainbow. So legendary. So right. It just sounds like glee. Sounds like the prom and I’m 16 and there’s a guy that’s been buying me cokes at lunch and the prom’s in a month and I might, I MIGHT JUST HAVE a chance to get dressed up and feel like a fucking girl for a change.
I gotta get that Soo on the phone.
I called a real estate agent over the holidays who deals in new development, high-rise condos. A too-rich-for-my-blood 2-bedroom, but nevertheless, I called. What the hell.
In Williamsburg. Found it on Craigslist.org. I am how I Google. I shop for real estate on Craigslist.
Oof, is that’s depressing. Anywaaaaaaaaaaaaaay…
Soo called me back with a warm and friendly voicemail confessing her plan to move to Billburg as well in the summer, and how simpatico. The condo is to be in a new development totally unlived in and ready for move-in in July. (Who knows who was priced out of their own home in order for this development to happen.) I’m shopping for brownstone apartments, too, 150 years of paint and shellac. However, the desire to own – finally – something that I can be the first in is pretty damn strong these days.
How freeking American… damn mutated genetics.
Anyhoo, the real estate agent Soo … is she driving up the market in Billlburg? Or will she become my newest best friend? Or will we shop at the same Crate & Barrel and only wave politely when we run into each other? Or is she destined to be the High Priestess of my Home Ownership Neuroses?
It’s been phone-tag and e-tag ever since.
However, I now have a floor plan from the website’s posting, I decorate it obsessively with my 1920s Italian-American Stink of Gaudy. I hang my dad’s mirror in the front room. I arrange my clothes and shoes in the closet. I exchange familiar jokes with the Imaginary Doorman in my mind.
And I believe that I can create my home there. All I’m doing is visualizing the Possible. Seems a little creepy and unhealthy, but I can’t stop.
650K for a 2 bedroom condo seems like a lot, though, for a starter home. Like A LOT a lot. For a toddler home? For a house with training wheels? For a home that stills has stuffed animals and a pacifier to keep from screaming bloody murder? And I get scared. I know I want to move to Brooklyn, but maybe I should find a smaller town, a lower rent. Save some more. It’s felt good, lately. The Saving. So far in my financial life, I’ve saved to skrijmp by. But for the last two years, I’ve saved towards Brooklyn, which means paying off some bills, starting an IRA and a 401K.
These are all new feelings – new, demonstrative actions proving to me that I no longer believe I’m gonna die in my 40s.
I mean, who doesn’t schedule their own death, really?
But the words in my head – ‘settling in Brooklyn’ – sound so glamorous. So end of the rainbow. So legendary. So right. It just sounds like glee. Sounds like the prom and I’m 16 and there’s a guy that’s been buying me cokes at lunch and the prom’s in a month and I might, I MIGHT JUST HAVE a chance to get dressed up and feel like a fucking girl for a change.
I gotta get that Soo on the phone.
Why Brooklyn?
1.7.07, 2:30 pm, Starbucks in Burbank, CA
Why Brooklyn?
It’s 76 degrees today.
It’s January 7.
.
.
.
.
.
It’s just unnatural. Who needs this much Vitamin D??!
Why Brooklyn?
It’s 76 degrees today.
It’s January 7.
.
.
.
.
.
It’s just unnatural. Who needs this much Vitamin D??!
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