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I don't know if I've introduced Botch to you all yet. And I guess in order to do so I would have to introduce Janet. I think I may have already done this (*skims thru entire diary*) ok I guess I haven't. I thought it would be in one of the more autobiographical-type entries, but that must have been an old version of it.

I moved to Ohio a few weeks before my freshman year of high school started. I don't remember much about this time, except that it is was boring and uneventful. We were living in an apartment complex, the biggest in the city (City's name was Delaware, a county north of Columbus) that was acroos the street from a convience store (I got a grape slushie there oretty much everyday after school, she stopped charging me after a while and would have them waiting on me... even if I didnt go to school, or had skipped etc I'd still go there at 3 for my slushie), the bowling alley (where we ate for almost a month because my mom had set the kitchen on fire in a "grease accident" and unless the accident involved throwing grease around and lighting it on fire, there was no accident. If me and Prett had been home at the time I would have thought she was trying to kill us). I was within walking distance to the high school, it was just a soccer field, a football field two baseball fields and a parking lot away.... Lacking shade, it was a Very Hot walk in the summertime, and in the winter with snow drifts and gusts of wind and the parking lot would be a sheet of ice... sometimes it was impossible to walk to school.... There really are only two seasons in Ohio, "Sweat" and "Ice".

School in NY starts the Wednesday after Labor day. School in Ohio starts the third week of August. No one informed me of this, so as I was "merrily" going about my business of re-adjusting to life in a city of more than a thousand people I found out that school was going to start only a couple days before it actually started. I remember spending a lot of time at the complex's pool that summer and even though I swam all the time I'd still managed to gain weight from all the overeating I was doing being stuck at home, bored out of my mind, with only the free basic cable and ice cream to keep me busy. It wasnt good cable, this was 1991 where basic cable meant 20 channels. Even tho one of them happened to be Mtv, at that time GnR and Metallica were big. Yeah they'd play some Nirvana once in a while but it was ALWAYS Teen Spirit. (I didnt get to see CAYA until after he died!) ok so anyway I was super-nervous about having to start a new school. Besides the whole being poor-white-trash, fearing rejection and or ridicule... there was also an anxiety over how many people there were going to be. There were more kids in my new high school than there were people in my entire old town. High school was a lot to get used to as well. It was all fucked up. The day before school started I was at the pool and I'd gotten stung by something, a bee or wasp... inside my ear... and I couldnt hear and I ran home, couldnt find my bee sting kit and passed out from hyperventilating. When I woke up my ear was just one huge red THING on the side of my head... it didnt resemble an ear at ALL, and I sure as hell couldn't hear out of it. So I was the new kid at this huge scary school, with dirty clothes and smelly shoes and mismatched socks, AND a big tumor looking thingy on the side of her head.... The NY thug accent didnt help, nor did stupid questions like "So did you live near Brooklyn?" and It didn't help being so young too. I've always had that look in my eyes, that "I had to grow up way too fast" look. When I was younger, back in elementary school years before I was kicked out of the "gifted and talented" program, some would confuse it with intelligence, but really it was just a lack of innocense. I was still 13 starting high school, which was so rare in Ohio that they wanted me to repeat eighth grade for "lack of maturity". So even though my face, my body, looked younger than everyone elses, I felt ancient.

Ninth grade sucked. I'm sure everyone can say this though. The NY state school system is pretty much on-the-ball and most of the classes I took in Ohio I'd already had back in NY one or two years earlier. I enjoyed art class, even though the teacher didn't like me, didn't like my art and would grade people on how much she personally liked your art... it was still a creative outlet. I managed to make a few friends in that class too, although only one of them I would talk to on the phone and hang out with after school. Her name was Theo and she had just moved up from Columbus cuz she was getting into too much trouble down there (dont we all!). She was like six feet tall and had the figure of a polish jew circa 1944... she had purple hair and wore knee socks all the way up and huge combat boots but then the rest of her clothes were hippie-stuff. she got me out of the cure and nin and into the Dead. I'd already listened to some, my mom had American Beauty on vinyl as I was growing up (the only albums she had were that one, Big Brother & the Holding Company (w/Janis, duh) and Willie Nelson's Stardust. I owned, although I dont remember how or why, an 8-track of Culture Club's greatest hits. (So growing up to those four albums pretty much explains it all I'd say....) Don't get me wrong, I was still all-about Nirvana, I was just learning that there were other bands out there besides Nirvana (really though, there aren't!) So anyway I was hanging with Theo a lot but was too much of a dorky little sister than anything else. She was still looking to get into trouble and it isnt as much fun getting into trouble with someone who never had any money. A girl I was sort of friends with who lived in the same apartment complex brought me to church youth group one wednesday, and I didnt stop going for two years. That's where I met Angela, my first real friend in Ohio. She went to church for the same reasons I did, to get away from a fucked up household. Angela was still in middle-school so we couldnt see each other in school yet and didnt hang out outside of church cuz she was too busy being locked away at home being her father's fuck toy.

Around April of that year we moved into a house my mom had bought. Nothing fancy at all, one of those matchbox houses in a neighborhood where all the houses are the same, all built in the early 50's.... It wasn't a white-trash neighborhood though, it was "let's pretend we're not white trash". I joined the church softball circuit and did fairly well for myself. This was when my only known physical deformity was being overweight, (and I wasn't even that overweight). I didn't hurt myself until the next winter when the church basketball circuit came around, but I'm jumping ahead (you say "good, I wish you would"). Memorial day weekend we got Boggy, half sheepdog half bearded collie (essentially, a medium sized sheepdog). So I dont really remember what I did the summer of 92. My brother had moved to ohio six months before me and had a head start on making friends. I think I hung out with them, smoking cigarettes and spray-painting things. Other than that i was most likely in the woods with Boggy.

My sophomore year was much better, the people I knew from frosh year art class were in soph year art class too, and this time the friendships took off. I hung out with Brenda and Courtney mostly. They got me into Rocky Horror, which I'd seen with my dad when I was little. On the weekends we'd "sneak" up to the city (they'd sneak, I, having no rules or supervision, have never needed to sneak anywhere or anything ) to go to the live showings. Art class was more fun, we had a different teacher and then she got sick and we had a sub for almost two months, he was gay and almost open about it, his name was Mr. Scott and we'd call him Dr. Scott and he'd sing Rocky songs with us sometimes. I sort of starting talking to Becca this year. She lived in my hood and rode the bus with me, she was in my art classes too but she's very shy, quiet and makes it so people forget her (thus leaving her alone). Her mom had been in and out of mental hospitals growing up and her father ended up divorcing her only to come back, move in to take care of her, and even tho Im pretty sure the two of them would still fuck sometimes I think the father would sleep on the living room floor. So yeah, Beck was from a happy, stable environment just like me and Angela.... Anyway Beck and I would talk on the bus and goof around some in art class, we'd even "eat" lunch together (Beck, like Neil, is a bird-eater, they just peck, nibble, tear pieces of the food off, move it around the plate but never really eat anything). I would sometimes eat with kids from church youth group but was never really part of their little clique because theyd all grown up together.... One kid that hung out with the youth group people, Andy, he was from Buffalo so sometimes we'd hang out and talk football (this was the hayday of the Bills remember, theyd only lost two superbowls up to this point....) Angela, who says she was born in Albany, considered herself a New Yorker too. (My Ohio friends were either New Yorkers or kids from fucked up homes). That same year (sophomore year) I joined orchestra. Initially it was for clarinet but I wasn't orchestra material ("maybe you should try concert band" she said...). I ended up switching to percussion. Angela joined orchestra a little bit late for some reason, she played the flute, and not well enough either, she got stuck back in percussion with me. It was great, as the year progressed so did our friendship. I'd spend time at her house, her father out of the picture finally and her mother spending all of her free time out of the house not having to deal with her fucked up kids (just like mine...). Angela's mom always kept plenty of alcohol around though. My mom sort of did too, but Angela's mom would replenish the stock when we'd get through it. So her and I would take turns bringing some sort of alcoholic concoction to school to share during first period orchestra. Orchestra is ALWAYS first period. For our first year of orchestra we spent our time in the corner, sitting on the heat register drinking away and drooling over Gabe. God he was damn-near stalkable (ok, we really did stalk him, but he knew it and sort of encouraged it). Gabe was a year ahead of me, a 'real" drummer, it was just the three of us back in percussion for most of the year. His whole family is either lawyers or doctors. He had an old mercedes that he thought MEANT something, like as a status symbol, and the first time he took me for a ride in it the door fell off.... I got MOST my duct-taping skills from Gabe. He also had an old camero that he tried to teach me to drive stick on. Quite funny. The doors wouldnt open and we'd have to "dukes of hazzard" it. He was awesome, but in that "hey you know, you ARE kinda cute and could even be sexy if someone would clean you up and I would probably date you if you weren't like, poor and ummm mental" kind of way. I'm not sure if he really liked me or if he felt sorry for me or what, probably a mixture of both. He could obviously tell that I was way too much effort and we were only ever sorta friends. He did nice things for me though, and he did them in such a way to where I didnt feel like I was a chairty case. He knew I liked to read so he brought me over to his house, one of those three story brick hundred-plus year old places with secret passageways and four different rooms that they called by names like "lving room, family room, tv room, den..." where in any other house I'd ever been in all of those were the same one room. I remember considering a person who had a dining room (table outside the kitchen) to be rich. So he takes me to the library, (which was different than the den OR the study) and its just like this room, not very big, but still its got no walls, just books, and there are shelves in the middle of the room too. So I'm looking and the books are all incredible. Some of them were really old. The library I've accumulated doesnt even come close and I've got thousands of books.... He and I had a really good convo about Hemingway that day. There were a lot of his books on the shelves and I cracked a joke about it. I'd read "A Farewell to Arms" and didn't like it, was too depressing, and why was it always raining?? But Gabe told me to give it another shot, that its ok to be depressed (sometimes), and thats not what the main theme was in the book anyway. I'd never seen him as a brain until this day. So after that he'd let me borrow books, or really he'd bring me one, say "you'll like this", I'd read it, would like it, we'd talk about it in orchestra then he'd bring me a new one. So I read most of Hemingway's novels, Crime and Punishment and The Great Gatsby this way. Gabe was interesting. I wish we could have been better friends but we were from two different worlds.... This happened a lot in high school actually. People really were afraid of me cuz of how I talked and acted and pretty much everyone knew I was a drunk and came from a fucked up home etc anyway where the hell was I chronologically speaking... I had become friends with Angela. She keot mentioning her cousin from NY, Janet. I heard a lot about her actually but had never met her even though her and ANgela were in the same grade and Janet was somewhere in the same high school as the two of us. One morning before Orchestra a very small evil looking girl runs up grabs my water bottle and sucks down most of whats inside. Before I can protest she's finished and says "Hi I'm Janet, you must be Joey..." and rather than pummeling her like I would have anybody else for doing something like that, instead we instantly became best-friends.... She explained how she wasnt Angela's real cousin, they werent related at all. Janet had moved to Ohio about the same time I had. She's from small-townville also, about a hundred miles south of my NY smalltown, almost on the NY/PA line. She was only three months younger but a grade behind me. Janet's just shy of 5 feet tall, just shy of 80 pounds (though shes managed to gain some weight in her adulthood, she might weigh like 95 now....) She's got a high pitched mousy voice and has been known to acually say "eep!". If I'm the perfect Winnie the Pooh, she's the perfect Piglet. and thats how our friendship went.

Always remember to quit while you're ahead.

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