My friend Audrey was a year ahead of me in school and during the 2002 mid-term elections she made an enormous homemade banner and did a banner drop from the second story of our high school overlooking the atrium where we all ate lunch. The banner said “Democrats? Republicans? Same shit, different pile.” Now I’m kind of wondering what the point was, since hardly anyone in view of the banner was of voting age, but at the time, it was so bad-ass to me.
Audrey had already committed to Brandeis for the following fall and she was going to study poli sci and Arabic. This was the lead up to the Iraq War and we all hated the war and wanted to stop the war. My other alt dirtbag friends, college-bound as most kids in my white suburban high school were, were headed to art school or design programs. But I wasn’t an artist and I had skipped too many pre-calc classes to ever close the gap and do something in the sciences. So when I got the mailer for this junior Congress program in DC for the following summer, I decided I should go to it. Not because it sounded fun to me but because maybe it would look good on college applications and I could carve out an Audrey-ish track for myself.
(It took me a very long time to realize that I could do something even if I didn’t have an example of someone I knew doing it. Like, maybe it took me until last year. Maybe I am still casting about to find someone with three kids who has a passionate marriage to someone who doesn’t work in finance and goes on cool vacations and gets an occasional fire byline. If you know this person, drop me their insta handle, thx)
The junior Congress program (which I can’t remember its actual name) was a nightmare. It was housed in a hotel located somewhere within the sprawl of the Beltway, and we were never able to leave the hotel. There were four participants to a room for the entire week, meaning that the first two “campers” to arrive to the room got a queen-sized bed and the last two got to claim cots wedged between the beds. Ya girl was on a cot. The chaos and awkwardness of sharing a hotel room with your immediate family, except the people crowding the sink are strangers.
We took one excursion to some monument, and on the bus ride out there my seatmate grabbed my breast after spending most of the bus ride brushing against me in ways that seemed increasingly intentional. At the time, I was writing endless horny, homesick letters to my boyfriend back in Ohio and I felt like I needed to confess this to him like it was my fault. I hope that boyfriend has since destroyed those letters which had the tone of being sent from a prison camp. At the time I felt guilty but not violated; I really only processed it as assault when I was assaulted in a similar way ten years later.
We had to wear suits! every day to be mini bureaucrats. Most of the girls wore lacy camisoles under their synthetic suit jackets, which was a look at the time. During our pointless committee sessions, we’d remove our blazers and lounge around with shoulders bared for as long as we could get away with it before the staff blitzed by to yell “Jackets on! Jackets on!” They said the boys could remove their jackets because their Oxfords and ties were still formal-looking. It was July in Washington, DC. No amount of HVAC-facilitated climate control could completely crush the heavy mid-Atlantic fug.
So many of the other kids there were little mini-conservatives. I wonder now what it means to not just be conservative by environment or by default, but to be a teenager who actively cherishes it. The other leftist types were quick to identify ourselves to each other and we enjoyed challenging our little neocon peers. This one guy, Brian, was an out gay teen from the Chicago suburbs who proudly boasted of hookups with older men he met at the mall. Our last night there, he told me he found out about a party where there would be ecstasy and did I want to sneak out and go with him? We had not left the walls of the hotel all week except for that one cursed bus trip. I did want to go with him, but I was sure I would get caught, and jeopardize my ability to spend the rest of my summer with my boyfriend before he went to college. I stayed in, listening to the soft snores of the three other girls breathing the same hotel room air as me.
The last morning of camp, or whatever this was, I finally was able to wear flared jeans and my favorite ironic thrift store tee and feel like my true self. We all looked awkward wearing suits, but now we were out of uniform and identifying ourselves to each other. I surveyed my fellow teens milling around the hotel lobby waiting for their parents and couldn’t believe how rich they all looked.
Keratin-treated hair, Lilly Pulitzer dresses before I knew what a Lilly print was by sight, Tory Burch sandals. Some of the girls literally had cardigans tied around their shoulders like Sweet Valley High villains. I spotted designer luggage with monogrammed initials, and it was the kid’s monogram, not their mom’s. In my well-heeled Ohio suburb, the “rich kids” wore t-shirts with mall brands emblazoned across the front, and they went to Florida for vacation.
I had wanted to hurry up and get to the east coast, among the intellectuals, as soon as possible. Like my friend Audrey would do at Brandeis that fall. But the week at the hotel had scared the shit out of me and instead of pushing me closer to a small liberal arts college in New England, it pushed me farther away.
I’m back in the crushing metro-DC July humidity now, feeling jolted back to that summer. I ended up on the east coast, and even intelligentsia-adjacent with a spouse in academia, but not at all in the way I expected. Audrey went to Brandeis, then Tufts, works for the federal government. I emailed her out of the blue last year and she invited me to her husband’s brewery across the bridge, though who knows when next I will be able to meet up with someone at a brewery.
The guy who grabbed me is a bartender in Arizona who voted for Trump. The boy from Chicago who knew where the party was works in high-end hotels, which is funny since my only frame of reference for him is sitting in a depressing hotel conference room with him, smelling the chafing dishes for our next meal.
I’m whoever I am now, wondering more and more if my vibe isn’t more west coast after all, trapped in a different building now. Same shit, much better pile.
yr mate,
Evie
###
Like NPR, this newsletter is free but donations help. You can leave me a cash tip here or become a patron through Patreon.
You can follow me on Twitter if you want to think less of me, and you can follow me on Instagram if you want to see cute pictures of my kids, because that’s all it is.
Comments
No posts