Why I should at least have herpes

In high school, I had two best friends. Rhonda and Donna. We were Rhonda, Donna, and Chris. But you have to find a way into your inner mind to hear how they said Chris. Like Chris was dried dog poop they accidentally tasted once and they were telling the story about it now. Like eating the tequila worm and chewing it gritty in between your teeth then remembering the next day.

“Rhonda, Donna, and Chris.” Barf. I wanted to be Lana. “Rhonda, Donna, and Lana.” Rhymey, sing-songy, pretty little birds. But no, my name was two day old dog vomit.

So “Rhonda, Donna, and Chris” liked to be scruffy independent beatniks, makin’ it on their own without the man keepin’ ‘em down. We only had one allowance between the three of us (mine), and that had to pay for gas. Everything else we scavenged.

At Denny’s, we ordered two cups of coffee and the third person shared off the others. Somehow, it was usually Rhonda and Donna who got the coffee. “No, Chris, it’s not your turn to get coffee,” they’d sneer at me.* So, I drank the leftovers, again, then drove their sorry behinds home.

Laws about cigarettes got tougher when I was in high school. When we were fourteen and fifteen, the legal age became sixteen. When we were finally sixteen and seventeen, the legal age became eighteen. We used to joke that when we turned eighteen they’d raise the law to 21. Jerks. The man out to stamp out the beatniks again.

We had to get creative about cigarettes, and being scrappy young beatniks, we came up with a tobacco reclamation program. While one person put $2 of gas in the car, the other two would go collect cigarette stubs off the ground outside the door of the filling station. It’s amazing how many people threw lit cigarettes on the ground at a gas station. We tried to go for the cigarettes with the most tobacco left, and we’d hit a particularly sweet score when we found a Camel. Camel smokers didn’t throw out many cigarettes though.

Sometimes we’d squish the tobacco out of the cigarette into a rolling paper and twist up a new cigarette from the cast-offs. If there was enough on the cigarette to be worthwhile, we’d just re-light it and smoke it whole.

Shudder. It’s hard to imagine doing that now that I’ve become a die-hard germaphobe. Life wasn’t very scary growing up in Kentucky. Little flotsam and jetsam just floated to me, like the driftwood Rhonda, Donna, and I collected on the shore of the Ohio River. We elided into life easily on the banks of Bardstown Road, finding other people’s garbage to make our own recycled creations.

I used to have the idea that there was no sense in buying pens or pencils, because during the first week of school everyone would lose brand new school supplies in the hallways, and I could just pick them up there. That “found” philosophy permeated all of my life, like the cigarette butts thrown out with tobacco still left inside.

My sensibilities all changed when I moved to Chicago. I never touch the things I find on the ground anymore. The flotsam of Chicago’s streets is really refuse, not a gem accidentally discarded. When I see a pencil lying on the ground, part of me gets a cringe from wanting to pick it up. Today I saw a cigarette butt on the sidewalk outside an office, and I looked at it to estimate how much tobacco was left. Fortunately, I don’t have to scavenge anymore. Now I choose clean shiny things still in cellophane.**

* They loved to put me down, but I’m not going to get into the psychoanalysis of our psychodynamics right now.

** But not cigarettes. I haven’t smoked in years. The last time I smoked a cigarette, I ended up at an emergency care clinic because my throat had swollen shut. I’m not real fond of the tobacco any more.