This Cannot Be Coincidental
by Dave K.
My first car was a 1993 Mercury Sable. It was silver. My grandmother’s hair is silver. I got it from her. This cannot be coincidental. It drove the way gazpacho would taste if you made it with old Band-Aids and period blood. To be specific, the spedometer was broken and the car shook like Muhammed Ali if you pushed it over 55 miles/hour.
My first joke playing on Muhammed Ali’s struggle with Parkinson’s Disease was devised in a 1993 Mercury Sable.
My first minor accident was in a 1993 Mercury Sable. It slid on black ice or oil or something as I was taking the Greenspring exit off I-695, and I smashed one of my headlights on a highway girder. I coasted into the grass next to a truck that had lost a tire the exact same way.
My first major accident was in a 1993 Mercury Sable. Not only did I get T-boned and knocked goofy by a pick-up truck, I also got a ticket for failure to yield at a left. My car was totaled. I sometimes hear the engine sputtering up teeth in my head from when I turned it on for the tow-truck guy.
Blackout
by Nikki Metzgar
The first time I wore an afro wig was also the first time I blacked out and the first time I vomited in front of a Swede. I was studying abroad in London my junior year of college and it hadn’t turned out to be as glamorous an experience as I had hoped. For some reason, there were hardly any Englishmen in blazers who wanted to discuss Dickens and how hot I am over a beer at the pub. It was actually pretty lonely and when I wasn’t pushing myself to do things on my own, I was eating sandwiches made with crappy English peanut butter and peering into restaurant windows like a smudged nose orphan.
So as Halloween approached, I became intent on going all out–dorm rooms across campus were expected to be open for parties. I was also inexplicably set on wearing an afro wig that year and I took the Tube all the way to Camden and paid a hefty portion of my hard-earned peanut butter money to buy one. Unfortunately, once I got it home it made me look less like Pam Grier and more like a straight-up boy, especially when paired with the baggy t-shirt with “The New Hotness” across the chest that I’d selected for the festivities.
Not one to be phased by a little unattractive sexual ambiguity, I fully committed that night. I remember taking shots of Southern Comfort in toasts to my homeland and I remember vomiting violently in a trashcan. I don’t remember dropping a glass in a stranger’s apartment and diving face first into the shattered remains and I don’t remember how I got home. The next morning I awoke in barf crusted sheets to find photos on my computer that a few friends had taken while on the night watch making sure I didn’t drown in my own bile. On the right was Pontus, the regal Swedish hottie I was in love with, wearing my afro wig and next to him was Rachel, another American student, giving a chipper thumbs up. On the left was Tom, English but with no blazer, chugging a bottle of champagne in front of my desk and a video of a burning fire playing behind them.
My First Love
By Melissa Surach
A few years ago I fell in love with a fingernail-less Xanex addict who would collect feathers on the sidewalk to decorate his hat on a daily basis. He made a meager living as a videographer for a garden, and spent his days smoking marijuana under trees while taking time-lapsed videos of flowers. I was an unemployed waitress/street performance artist living in my grandmother’s basement. One night, Ronson saw me perform the routine I called “Fake Poetry,” which was a poorly schemed rhyming act about marrying animals that I performed in a husky man’s voice. Later Ronson told me it was “love at first sight.”
Both of us were too poor to afford contraception, so we tried to employ the “Standard Days Method” recommended by “feminist” magazines, hippies, and trademarked by Georgetown University. Supposedly over 95% effective, in this method you keep track of your fertility with a bracelet made of beads. Of course, I couldn’t afford the official CycleBeads bracelet, so I tried to make my own with some beads from a broken purse I found in a drawer. We were both approaching 30, and as college-educated adults, we should have known better—or at the very least, had better jobs so we could afford condoms.
The first pregnancy test was negative, which made my boyfriend happily spit and wave his feathers in the air, performing what he called the “No Baby Dance.” But two periodless weeks later I took the pee test again and it turned up positive. We went to the best doctor I could afford—the Planned Parenthood in Newark. They sent us to a clinic in Englewood.
We woke up at five the following Saturday and walked up a hill in the snow to a bus stop to embark on a 2-hour bus ride. When we arrived, we waited several hours with a diverse crowd of hippies, hipsters, immigrants, yuppies, and thugs, and a second trimester teen who was alone and crying to the nurses.
They called us in batches downstairs to the operating room and gave us gowns. “You better take it out now or we’ll rip it out,” they said about my nose ring. In the surgical room they showed me the vacuum, then I went to sleep and woke up about ten minutes later. I was very confused and the nurses teased me for wandering around in my gown but I was super high and feeling good. Being super high and feeling good ended up being the only good thing about getting pregnant.
When we got home I fell asleep. My boyfriend kept asking, “Why are you so tired? When are you going to wake up, lazy?”
We broke up two years later when he said I was holding his career back. Then he ruined all my media files and hasn’t spoken to me since.