park slope place piece (if you are a veteran slopie you will probably like this)
Sally, take my hand
We'll travel south cross land
Put out the fire
And don't look past my shoulder
The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
Let's get together
Before we get much older
Teenage wasteland
It's only teenage wasteland
Teenage wasteland
Oh, yeah
Teenage wasteland
i will bore you with the assignment summaries...
i started with this, it's a process thing so you really don't have to read this part, but a lot of things got left out that are here and not in the final thing...read what you wish:
Assignment: Focused freewrite #5: Generate a list of memories associated with a place that holds significance for you:
Park Slope
-first day Shiro, travis, etc brought me to ps and went to 321 and met ppl including kevin, tylor, preston, amanda, jonah, gwen, next day caitlin and julia
-meeting max when he gave travis vodka that he thought was water-degrassi
-jules-high the log/field/nachos dizzy's
-the log
-321-schlesingers, shane, burton, drunk kevin, keys, shiro
-bringing kat to the slope
-chicken in brownie batter
-the hill
-green highligheter pipe-kevin, kat,
-tylor and jonah
-sbc
-new years 2004
-rollercoster relationship w/ tylor-max bif interferance-confusion
-being high all the time-smoking in closet and every day after school
-1st shroom trip, 2nd shroom trip lotr
-weed from jamaica
-prospect park in general
-max april and may
-jonah 321
-max and grace
-max's house-smoking in his bathroom-banana bread
-sleepovers/talks w/ amanda at her 6th street house
-summer 05-dailey blunt sessions at max's (day) and park (night), shrooms, john and alex, jared,
-sally
-charlie's parties 05
-1st time getting smashed 9th grade
-bacardi raz-jules, 6th st and 5th ave stoop
-abandonded house-dan, jules, joon
-last night of summer 05
-briana-friendship/drunkness, winter 05, smoking
-new years 2005-crashing party
-park benches by field, 40's, drunk all the time
-pinos, 321, 1st street benches, 515, carvel
-park-field, hill, jose, log, the cove, the baseball fields, the elephant steps
-blizzard last winter-falling down hill
-kicked out of benches every day by gary-9th grade
-sleepovers w/ max
-kat, megan, briana drama/jules reunited
-summer 06: coke frenzy, amanda's drunken night, my house gathers, acid, shrooms to coney, the cove, colt45 and a pack of 27's a day, wasting hte days, 15th and 8th, 1st street benches, cliques, growing apart from ppl, max, john, alex, mikey always
-black rob, 5th ave rob, cujo
-bay ridge party
-breed of kids-rep-slopies
-heart of park slope between 1st and 3rd on 7th
-ghetto, punk, hippy, emo, hipster, other
-5th and 5th
-mike's
-3rd st deli
-1st st deli
-back of 321-playground
-kat-parteners in crime
the vale-fountain, constant paranoia, smoking robbed, stabbings
-gazebo
-picnic house/benches-bbq's
-puprle flashlight pipe
-starbucks, conneticut muffin
-burn rides w/ max and rachel
-smells: weed, malt liquor, cigarettes, beyond paradise, humid air
-tastes: pizza, pop tarts, ash, beer, georgi, banana bread, liquor from bums
-acid at my house
-same way home when mikey and i walk it
-bif mikey when moved to new house
-diff types of weed
-alex becoming dealer, john dealing coke
and then the finished Place Piece! I apologize for the length but we all know i write A LOT
Park Slope was more than a place, it was a way of life. It came with a neighborhood perimeter that stretched from Flatbush to 15th street, but would sometimes go until Prospect Ave horizontally, and vertically as far in the park as you dared go, straight down to 5th ave. These weren’t city limits, they were our lines. In all technicalities Park Slope started at the Q on Flatbush and 7th and ended at the F on 15th and the Park and from the Park down to 3rd Ave or the Gowanas Canal. Kids in Park Slope had a reputation for being the stoned and drunk kids of the brownstone-owning yuppies that resided there and shopped at Union Market and the boutiques on 5th ave. But I only ever knew one or two people who owned a whole brownstone, everyone shopped at Key Foods, and the only shop on 5th Ave I ever went in was Beacon's Closet which was a second hand store. The term Slopie never constituted where you lived, just where you hung out-and we never left. We came from all over, that 9th grade year, a melting pot of Slope residents, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, South Slope, Dark Slope, Fort Green, even Manhattan, and for me-Windsor Terrace. We were a breed of teenagers that bought their weed on St. Marks and 6th Ave, their alcohol from 5th and 5th or Mike’s, smoked and drank on the hill or at the log or the back and side of 321, bought their pizza at Pinos, hooked up on the front playground of 321 or the bedrooms of their friends, and the heart of their stomping grounds only reached from 1st street to 3rd street. Stoners, Drunkards, Metal Heads, Ghetto, Hippy, Emo, Punk-we were hybrids and young and dumb, but they were the best and most carefree days of our lives.
I guess it all started with the 7th ave F stop. The monumental train station where I have come and gone so many times. I was taking the train home after school one day and so were five boys at my new school, BFS-Shrio, Travis, Sam, Eli, and Michael. I didn’t really have solid friends in New York yet because I’d just moved there from L.A., but I was looking for guy friends because that was what I was used to. They invited me to go to Shrio’s house, but we never really got there. He lived across the street from an elementary school, 321 on 2nd st., where teenagers hung out after school. I was nervous as we approached the entrance to the gated playground in the back of the school where a bunch of teenagers stood around talking. Gwen and Max Devlin, who were going out at the time, were leaving so I wouldn’t meet them just yet. At first I just talked to Michael because I didn’t know anyone, but slowly made my way into conversations, talking to a funny guy named Kevin. A boy named Preston walked up to me and immediately engaged me in a thumb war, I complimented his friend Tylor’s shoes. After awhile a boy came running into the playground and I recognized him from being at soccer tryouts at the beginning of the year, but he was a friend of Travis’s and didn’t go to my school. His name was Jonah, and he remembered me. We got kicked out of the playground and migrated to Carvel under an aunning on 3rd st. because it started to rain. They told me that they called the owner Tits because he had giant man-breasts, and about a kid named Gary who worked there and always hit on the girls and kicked everyone out for loitering. The thing was, they always came back, and sometimes I’d see Gary chasing people down the street because they had been fucking with him. I soon came to know it as a vicious cycle.
Two days later I found myself making friends with girls, which I wasn’t used to. We’d hung out all day, and now a bunch of us sat on Eli’s stoop on 9th street. Three of them, Amanda, Julia, and Caitlin, had been friends throughout middle school, and the fourth, Jules, an old friend of Travis’s. That was also the night I met Max, who we passed on the street. Travis asked him for a sip of water, which turned out to be vodka, and Travis spit it out all over the street. I would meet a lot of people and make a lot of new friends in the next few weeks. I would become close with Kevin for a bit, meet the crazy Schlesinger twins, Will and Max, and also Shane and Burton at a night time rendezvous at the 321 front playground and watch in awe as they accumulated a large amount of vodka and got extremely drunk. Kevin would take me to my first Brooklyn party where all of these people attended and drank midday, but the end result was a bus ride back to the Slope with Kevin, Amanda, and Gwen. We met up with Travis, Jules, and Max Devlin and walked to “The Log” to get high for my first time since living in New York, the second time in my life.
I cannot tell you how many logs there are in Prospect Park, but for some reason if you told your friend to meet you at the Log they knew that it was into the park between 6th and 7th street but that you had to enter around 4th and go down a path into the trees which covered the area where this famous log sat. The Log only lasted part way into freshman year until it got busted too many times to be considered safe, but it would become a regular after school spot for my new friends and I. Most of the spots in Prospect Park that were used for drinking and smoking by the Slopie teenagers had equally vague names. Just past the log was “The Tree” (just try counting how many trees there are in that park), and then a path which led to “Three Stones”, a gathering of three awkwardly shaped, gratified stones blocking a fork in the dirt path. There was also “The Hill”, which lay just beyond the 3rd st. entrance to the park after the road, a popular night spot for Slopies getting high and drunk, which would stay safe on a regular basis for most of 10th grade. Adjacent to The Hill was “The Field” on its 2nd st. side, and on the other, a path, a clearing, and then the Picnic benches and the Picnic House which was equal to about 5th st. There was also The Vale which was deeper in the park past the Hill, a beautiful place and safe from the cops, but not from harm (sometime during 10th grade we would discover someone had been stabbed there). Bendy was a tree near the Garfield entrance, the Baseball fields from 15th to 9th st. entrances past the band shell into the park. Learning the spots in the park was like learning a new language and having everyone know it but you.
My life in Park Slope really took off when I became friends with Max. We discovered our mutual love for Degrassi in a chat room that got formed by our friends online and figured out that we’d met recently. It was the same weekend I became friends with Kat, who came with Shiro and I after school to the Slope and we were instant friends after we learned we both smoked. I invited her to Max’s where we all got high and left to chill on 7th ave in front of Pinos, a repetitive ritual for the next two years. Max’s house for me was the center of everything. I spent more time there in 9th grade than I did at my own house. Max was also how I got to know Tylor. The two had been best friends since middle school and always talked about growing up together and all of their past, including girls, teachers, and friends. As I got to know the two of them, Tylor would eventually break up with his girlfriend to go out with me. One fall day at Max’s when we were all sitting out on the balcony smoking, I was sitting on the table and I started turning circles with my upper body very slowly. Someone asked me what I was doing, and I replied very vacantly, “I’m a chicken.....swimming in brownie batter...”
Days turned into weeks which turned into months, and soon the chills of winter came crawling down my California spine. Thirty degree weather scared me, I belonged to “The Stoners” now, an implied clique although they weren’t set well, and even though my grades were slipping and life at home wasn’t great, I was happy. After being depressed all summer about moving I finally had friends and a boyfriend, and a place, this magical place, where I truly felt I belonged.
New Years’ Eve 2004 was when Christina came to visit. She was my old best friend in California and now she was going to see me in my new life for the first time. She wasn’t used to all the things I’d been doing even though she pretended like she was. She clung to me and I felt dragged down by my past, I’d changed. Her and Max hit it off and hooked up on New Years’. A combination of all these things ended our friendship for awhile and we were never as close. I guess Park Slope was a giver and a taker. That was the New Years’ of couples. Everyone seemed to be paired off that night, and if you weren’t you would always look back on that New Years’ far less fondly than the rest. Julia’s parents went out of town and we had a party at her house. I stole a bottle of Silver Patron from my parents, a tequila I later found out cost fifty dollars. I spent the first part of the night in a bedroom with Tylor, followed by the walk to the park I cannot remember and the countdown with all of Brooklyn that lead to fireworks and my first real New Years’ kiss. I always remembered it as my favorite New Years’ and maybe that’s why, it set big standards that seemed to have to be met every New Years’ but never would.
The next couple of months shifted into a blur. Almost every night I hot-boxed my tiny closet, ate food, and watched a movie. I’d rush through my homework just so I could get high, or wouldn’t even do it at all. Tylor and I broke up and got back together a month later. It was also the first time I got really sick from drinking. I was supposed to get a half pint of Georgi to myself, but instead I accidentally got a pint. I found myself on the steps of 321 projectile vomiting, I don’t really remember any of it but someone took me to Shane’s house where my dad picked me up and Max Schlesinger carried me to the car.
This period of time was also the first time I tried shrooms. The tempting hallucinogen I’d done a report on in 6th grade for health. I was more interested in the spirituality of it than for fun, and I would do it several times in the next couple of years. I remember it perfectly, the way the white designs formed like smoke ring shapes on Max’s green couch that winter afternoon as I came up. Amanda was doing them too, but she left and went to Cobble Hill. I ended up in the park with Max, and two kids, Thomas Chism and Seth while they got high at the Picnic Benches. The snow crunched under my feet, tree branches looked like spider webs, and the sky turned purple. Eventually we went down to 7th ave where people tried to freak me out, but all I could think about was life and all these crazy theories I’d never remember. I ran into Tylor, it was while we were broken up, and it was bothering me. Amanda had warned me that if something was bothering me it would really bother me on shrooms. It did. I spent a long time in Pinos sitting with him and a few people. Coming down, I smoked with Max at 515, the stoop of an abandoned house on 2nd street where we sometimes went.
With Spring came an array of disaster. As Tylor and mine’s relationship began to dwindle again, Max and I became closer. We would spend all of our time together because Tylor was never around, we even had sleep overs. Kat and I went to Jamaica for Spring break and when my mom asked if I missed Tylor I said no, just Max. It wasn’t long after, once I’d told Max I was going to break up with Tylor, that he told Kat he liked me. I felt weird about it, but went along with it anyway. Just a few short days after I broke up with Tylor, I found myself in Prospect Park hooking up with Max. He would break it off, start it up again, and break it off again, and I would hook up with Jonah in the end as revenge. It would put a dent in our friendship, especially after I would return from a trip in May only to find out him and my good friend Grace were going out. I would also regret what I did to Tylor for the next year and a half.
There’s a reason they say time heals wounds. For the first month that summer Max and I weren’t friends, until we realized what a significant hole we’d left in each other’s lives. I became friends with Shiro’s sister Mina, and we hung out a lot. At some point Grace went away to camp and Max and I found a way to be friends again. Summer of 2005 was a routine. I would go to work in the city and come back and meet up with Max and some of his new friends, John and Alex, or Mina. There were daily blunt sessions. The first would occur in the afternoon, everyone would chip five dollars and go to the park or Max’s to get high. Following this we would spend anywhere from one to six hours sitting on a wall (which, with no surprises, we called “The Wall”) on the side of 321 until it got dark enough for people to head down to 5th and 5th, which we called the corner deli that sold us beer. Then everyone would go to the park to get drunk or high in the field. The Field was my home on those summer nights, but sometimes we’d go to a clearing behind some bushes just past the Hill that was called Jose. I will never know who named it. On the occasion I did drink, it was always two 22’s of Bacardi Raz. Sometimes we would take a break from the park and have an adventure to the Gowanas Canal which was the boarder between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. Everything that summer was exactly the same, but the end was the cherry on top.
A boy named Charlie who lived in my neighborhood had several parties that summer. Even though it was in Windsor Terrace, it was still considered a Park Slope party because everyone that came hung out in Park Slope. Charlie was famous for the trampoline in his backyard and for being completely ridiculous. That summer for his birthday party, everyone got drunk at his house and then he took everyone to the park and concocted a giant slip n’ slide out of trash bags, soap, and water. On the last night of summer, everyone gathered at the Hill. Everyone I knew was there and everyone was completely smashed. It had been a year since I’d moved to New York and started chilling in Park Slope, and already things had changed so much. The people on the hill that night were not all of the people I’d made friends with freshman year. If they were they had changed some way or another. That was the thing about Park Slope though, it was always changing, and yet never at all.
I had never heard the term Slopie until I started the 10th grade at Elisabeth Irwin High School and made friends with a girl named Rachel Kauffman. Rachel and I had met once in Freshman year, she was a friend of an old friend of Max’s from middle school and came to one of Charlie’s parties the previous winter. I hadn’t liked her, but I hadn’t liked any girls then, and as we got to know each other she always referred to my Park Slope friends and I as Slopies. I started to find this common among the city kids I made friends with, and realized it was how the rest of New York saw us.
The fall of 10th grade was a time of significant change. Kat and I began to grow apart because I started at a new school, and she became good friends with Megan, a girl who went to BFS. Jules, who had been absent from the slope for some time, returned as my new drinking buddy. I quit smoking weed for a month and went whole heartedly into drinking Bacardi Raz on stoops near 6th ave with Jules and our friend Dan. That was the fall Briana came to us. She went to Jules’s school and we were instant friends. I introduced her to the Slope and all the people, but unfortunately it put Jules on the back burner until Spring. It was also when Mikey and I became good friends. Mikey had lived in my neighborhood the whole time I’d lived in New York but we’d never been close. That fall I moved onto the same street that him and Charlie lived on, and he and his girlfriend Lauren of two years broke up. It was a shock to everyone, but I guess also the beginning of our friendship. I introduced him to Briana and we became a trio of sorts.
The Holidays brought all the drama. Kat and I had worked out all of our problems but now there were new problems on the rise. The MTA went on strike the week before Christmas and somehow I found myself with Max in the back seat of his Sister’s car going to pick up their mom in the city from work. The bribery was a burn ride and banana bread, and also the fact that there was nothing better to do. It was then that Max confessed to me that despite that there was nothing wrong with his and Grace’s relationship, he had developed a crush on Briana. For the next several days Kat and I found ourselves in the middle of all of this passing messages back and forth, and Max even broke up with Grace for a few days to go out with Briana until he changed his mind. The whole thing exploded on New Years’ when Julia yet again had a party, but this time much bigger. I stole rum from my parents, which I’m sure they didn’t even know they had. Faces of the past were there, but I spent my night yelling at Max and outside laying on the sidewalk chain-smoking with Kat and Allison (a friend of Jules’s who moved to Costa Rica the same time I moved to New York and was visiting, and I hung out with whenever she was in town.) There was lots of drunken crying and confusion that night, but I refused to take part. At midnight I was once again in the park, falling all over drunk with Shiro and singing, scared the fire works were going to eat us. Afterwards we all retreated to 7th ave where Kat, Jules, Allison, Shiro, a friend Brian, and Gary from Carvel all managed to crash a twenty-something-year-old party above Starbucks by ringing random buzzers until we were let up. We danced to Buddy Holly and stole alcohol and got hit on by creepy older guys. A long shot difference from the cliché New Years’ I’d had the year before.
I always tell Briana that when I think of that winter I think of one thing; the blizzard in February. For whatever reason it was that we decided we could handle the blizzard that night I will never know. Yet somehow I found myself at the top of the Elephant Step’s hill in the Windsor Terrace part of the park, way high up with 1 1/2 40’s of Budweiser down passing blunts with a surprisingly large group of kids. After we drank and smoked we fell down the hill in the snow trying to get down and it took us all two hours to walk to Park Slope, when it really should’ve taken fifteen minutes, slipping and sliding on the icy road. It didn’t matter how cold it was that winter, we were always out. Most of that winter was spent at the benches near the 3rd st. entrance that faced the Hill drinking 40’s of Colt45 that we bought at Mike’s deli at the end of my block which we hid in our bags till we got to the park, and hitting whoever’s blunt was passed around. It amazed me that the cops never bothered us, but the spot got blown when several kids successfully transferred a garbage can fire to lighting the entire field on fire. Running away I remember Kat asking if she should call 911, and Shiro yelling at her to call it. I didn’t stay to watch the field burn but I hear it was quite the sight.
With Spring came more change. I returned from my Spring Break trip to Germany to discover that my two best friends (who were girls) had grown very close and I felt left out. It had gone from Briana and I and Megan and Kat, to Megan, Kat, and Briana, and me. Nothing was deliberate, but it changed a lot of things. For months we didn’t hang out, hardly talked, but it brought Jules and I back to being friends and eventually very close. Mikey and I had been close the whole time, and as Spring turned to Summer this remained.
The summer of 2006 was also a routine, especially in the beginning. I would wake up, watch t.v., wait for someone to call, walk to Park Slope, sit at the Connecticut Muffin benches on 1st street until it got late enough that we could go buy beer. Then we’d walk to 15th and 8th, the new corner deli who sold to us (5th and 5th had stopped selling that Spring). At first they would make just me go in because I apparently looked the oldest, but once I could no longer carry five 40’s to the counter at once, I eventually made everyone get their own things, and then we would walk through the 15th street entrance at the park, through the baseball fields, to our new home, The Cove. The Cove was literally a cove, and was nice because it had several exits. You could see everything, but once it was dark, no one could see you. It was located to the equal of 8th st., and sat between the Picnic House and the Baseball fields. I probably spent more time at the Cove that summer than anywhere else, always with a 40 of Colt and a pack of 27’s, getting drunk and eaten by mosquitos while blunts were passed around. After we were all drunk we’d head down to the ave and stand around for a couple of hours until I had to go home. Mikey and I would walk the exact same way home every night, we wouldn’t have it any other way. If someone tried to get us to walk another way we refused. First we’d walk on 7th ave until 12th street, which we took up to the park and walked along until Prospect ave, and walked down to our street; Vanderbilt. And every night we would talk about stuff, and people, and life, always the same, the most comforting of routines that I had.
That was the summer Alex started to deal weed and John, after just graduating 8th grade, started to deal coke. This sent a frenzy throughout the Slope, it was like the cocaine era, and all of a sudden everyone was doing it. It was ironic because I had tried it just before school had ended on an all-nighter after my two friends’ Sweet Sixteen, and now one of my friends was selling it. People came and went that summer, but Max, Mikey, Alex, John, and Megan were always there. Jules was gone for most of it, which was sad, and so were Briana and Kat who’s friendship I had rekindled at the beginning of the summer. Also at the beginning of that summer, Max and Grace broke up, which I think made me sad more than them. Burn rides with Max and his sister, Rachel was an amenity of that summer, as well as making new friends like Kat Fry, Kelsey, and Cheney. Free houses were frequent that summer, whether it was mine, Kat’s, Max’s, Amanda’s, or the house Cheney was moving out of and copied the keys to so we could all drink there, only to have the neighbors threaten to call the cops on us.
I can safely say that it was the best summer of my life. It went in no way as planned, seeming as I had meant to spend the entire thing in LA. I never went because my dad told me my mom would probably die that summer, and instead invested all my time in drinking rather than getting a job. It was a summer full of drugs, alcohol, and friends, but it taught me valuable lessons. Because I spent the summer so slothfully, when I got back to school I started to do my best and realized I had to try if I wanted to do something with my life. I stopped liking weed, I quit hard drugs, I (sort of) quit smoking, I quit drinking so excessively, but most importantly I quit the Slope. If you never thought you could quit a place, well you I’ll tell you, you can. I informed all my friends that I wasn’t going there, and for several months I didn’t step foot inside it’s boundaries other than to go to Max’s house occasionally. Unfortunately it made me grow apart from a lot of people that were very important to me, but they still go to the Slope and do the same things every weekend. I go occasionally, but it is never the same, or maybe the fact that it’s always the same makes it not the same because I am not the same. I have not set foot in the park since 11th grade started, but I’m sure if I walked through it I would point out every place and hear the laughter and memories in the back of my head like a montage in front of my eyes. Sometimes when I walk down 7th ave and look at where Carvel used to be or the side of 321 and remember 9th grade when Park Slope was so new and fresh and exciting I wish I could turn back time and go back there. When I talk to friends about those times they all say they same thing. I wonder how we all got to be this way, only wishing for the past.
New Years’ 2006 was unlike anything in the past. For starters, I was sick and sober. But more importantly I created a monster. The day before New Years’ eve I was at my friend Ana’s house when I met a girl named Eliza who told me she had wanted to have a New Years’ party but didn’t really have enough people to invite. I was immediately thrilled because people had been asking me about a party for days and had no such luck. I told Eliza that if she wanted to have a party, Mikey and I would give her a Party. A Party is what she got. Just about everyone I ever knew was there that night, but the funny thing was that a lot of them were ghosts of my past, and about 75% Slopies. I felt so unattached to so many people there, and maybe it was because I was sick and sober, but also maybe because I was different. A girl I’d known in 9th grade came and didn’t even recognize me at first. It amazed me how through networks and networks of friends and their friends and their friends that we could have such a completely insane and out of control party. When midnight came I wasn’t the slightest bit excited, I just wanted to go home and felt sick.
I think about all of the things that will happen in 2007 and hope there is as little of Park Slope in it as possible. But the thing about Park Slope is that it was never really about the place, it was about the people. It was just a nice area of space for us all to be reckless teenagers in together. Places change, like Carvel into Tempo Presto or the scaffoldings over 321 or the way Maggie Moos just popped up next to Pinos one day, and people have changed and grown, some are still friends and some aren’t, some I haven't spoken to in years. I guess the thing about memories is that they’re always nice to have, no matter how you feel about that place now, you know what it once meant to you. And when the leaves turn brown every fall and crunch under my feet and the air changes from humid to cool, I can still smell the weed from a cheap purple flashlight pipe in the grassy field of the park, in young love, filled with the awe of life and new beginnings.
-love liv
We'll travel south cross land
Put out the fire
And don't look past my shoulder
The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
Let's get together
Before we get much older
Teenage wasteland
It's only teenage wasteland
Teenage wasteland
Oh, yeah
Teenage wasteland
i will bore you with the assignment summaries...
i started with this, it's a process thing so you really don't have to read this part, but a lot of things got left out that are here and not in the final thing...read what you wish:
Assignment: Focused freewrite #5: Generate a list of memories associated with a place that holds significance for you:
Park Slope
-first day Shiro, travis, etc brought me to ps and went to 321 and met ppl including kevin, tylor, preston, amanda, jonah, gwen, next day caitlin and julia
-meeting max when he gave travis vodka that he thought was water-degrassi
-jules-high the log/field/nachos dizzy's
-the log
-321-schlesingers, shane, burton, drunk kevin, keys, shiro
-bringing kat to the slope
-chicken in brownie batter
-the hill
-green highligheter pipe-kevin, kat,
-tylor and jonah
-sbc
-new years 2004
-rollercoster relationship w/ tylor-max bif interferance-confusion
-being high all the time-smoking in closet and every day after school
-1st shroom trip, 2nd shroom trip lotr
-weed from jamaica
-prospect park in general
-max april and may
-jonah 321
-max and grace
-max's house-smoking in his bathroom-banana bread
-sleepovers/talks w/ amanda at her 6th street house
-summer 05-dailey blunt sessions at max's (day) and park (night), shrooms, john and alex, jared,
-sally
-charlie's parties 05
-1st time getting smashed 9th grade
-bacardi raz-jules, 6th st and 5th ave stoop
-abandonded house-dan, jules, joon
-last night of summer 05
-briana-friendship/drunkness, winter 05, smoking
-new years 2005-crashing party
-park benches by field, 40's, drunk all the time
-pinos, 321, 1st street benches, 515, carvel
-park-field, hill, jose, log, the cove, the baseball fields, the elephant steps
-blizzard last winter-falling down hill
-kicked out of benches every day by gary-9th grade
-sleepovers w/ max
-kat, megan, briana drama/jules reunited
-summer 06: coke frenzy, amanda's drunken night, my house gathers, acid, shrooms to coney, the cove, colt45 and a pack of 27's a day, wasting hte days, 15th and 8th, 1st street benches, cliques, growing apart from ppl, max, john, alex, mikey always
-black rob, 5th ave rob, cujo
-bay ridge party
-breed of kids-rep-slopies
-heart of park slope between 1st and 3rd on 7th
-ghetto, punk, hippy, emo, hipster, other
-5th and 5th
-mike's
-3rd st deli
-1st st deli
-back of 321-playground
-kat-parteners in crime
the vale-fountain, constant paranoia, smoking robbed, stabbings
-gazebo
-picnic house/benches-bbq's
-puprle flashlight pipe
-starbucks, conneticut muffin
-burn rides w/ max and rachel
-smells: weed, malt liquor, cigarettes, beyond paradise, humid air
-tastes: pizza, pop tarts, ash, beer, georgi, banana bread, liquor from bums
-acid at my house
-same way home when mikey and i walk it
-bif mikey when moved to new house
-diff types of weed
-alex becoming dealer, john dealing coke
and then the finished Place Piece! I apologize for the length but we all know i write A LOT
Park Slope was more than a place, it was a way of life. It came with a neighborhood perimeter that stretched from Flatbush to 15th street, but would sometimes go until Prospect Ave horizontally, and vertically as far in the park as you dared go, straight down to 5th ave. These weren’t city limits, they were our lines. In all technicalities Park Slope started at the Q on Flatbush and 7th and ended at the F on 15th and the Park and from the Park down to 3rd Ave or the Gowanas Canal. Kids in Park Slope had a reputation for being the stoned and drunk kids of the brownstone-owning yuppies that resided there and shopped at Union Market and the boutiques on 5th ave. But I only ever knew one or two people who owned a whole brownstone, everyone shopped at Key Foods, and the only shop on 5th Ave I ever went in was Beacon's Closet which was a second hand store. The term Slopie never constituted where you lived, just where you hung out-and we never left. We came from all over, that 9th grade year, a melting pot of Slope residents, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, South Slope, Dark Slope, Fort Green, even Manhattan, and for me-Windsor Terrace. We were a breed of teenagers that bought their weed on St. Marks and 6th Ave, their alcohol from 5th and 5th or Mike’s, smoked and drank on the hill or at the log or the back and side of 321, bought their pizza at Pinos, hooked up on the front playground of 321 or the bedrooms of their friends, and the heart of their stomping grounds only reached from 1st street to 3rd street. Stoners, Drunkards, Metal Heads, Ghetto, Hippy, Emo, Punk-we were hybrids and young and dumb, but they were the best and most carefree days of our lives.
I guess it all started with the 7th ave F stop. The monumental train station where I have come and gone so many times. I was taking the train home after school one day and so were five boys at my new school, BFS-Shrio, Travis, Sam, Eli, and Michael. I didn’t really have solid friends in New York yet because I’d just moved there from L.A., but I was looking for guy friends because that was what I was used to. They invited me to go to Shrio’s house, but we never really got there. He lived across the street from an elementary school, 321 on 2nd st., where teenagers hung out after school. I was nervous as we approached the entrance to the gated playground in the back of the school where a bunch of teenagers stood around talking. Gwen and Max Devlin, who were going out at the time, were leaving so I wouldn’t meet them just yet. At first I just talked to Michael because I didn’t know anyone, but slowly made my way into conversations, talking to a funny guy named Kevin. A boy named Preston walked up to me and immediately engaged me in a thumb war, I complimented his friend Tylor’s shoes. After awhile a boy came running into the playground and I recognized him from being at soccer tryouts at the beginning of the year, but he was a friend of Travis’s and didn’t go to my school. His name was Jonah, and he remembered me. We got kicked out of the playground and migrated to Carvel under an aunning on 3rd st. because it started to rain. They told me that they called the owner Tits because he had giant man-breasts, and about a kid named Gary who worked there and always hit on the girls and kicked everyone out for loitering. The thing was, they always came back, and sometimes I’d see Gary chasing people down the street because they had been fucking with him. I soon came to know it as a vicious cycle.
Two days later I found myself making friends with girls, which I wasn’t used to. We’d hung out all day, and now a bunch of us sat on Eli’s stoop on 9th street. Three of them, Amanda, Julia, and Caitlin, had been friends throughout middle school, and the fourth, Jules, an old friend of Travis’s. That was also the night I met Max, who we passed on the street. Travis asked him for a sip of water, which turned out to be vodka, and Travis spit it out all over the street. I would meet a lot of people and make a lot of new friends in the next few weeks. I would become close with Kevin for a bit, meet the crazy Schlesinger twins, Will and Max, and also Shane and Burton at a night time rendezvous at the 321 front playground and watch in awe as they accumulated a large amount of vodka and got extremely drunk. Kevin would take me to my first Brooklyn party where all of these people attended and drank midday, but the end result was a bus ride back to the Slope with Kevin, Amanda, and Gwen. We met up with Travis, Jules, and Max Devlin and walked to “The Log” to get high for my first time since living in New York, the second time in my life.
I cannot tell you how many logs there are in Prospect Park, but for some reason if you told your friend to meet you at the Log they knew that it was into the park between 6th and 7th street but that you had to enter around 4th and go down a path into the trees which covered the area where this famous log sat. The Log only lasted part way into freshman year until it got busted too many times to be considered safe, but it would become a regular after school spot for my new friends and I. Most of the spots in Prospect Park that were used for drinking and smoking by the Slopie teenagers had equally vague names. Just past the log was “The Tree” (just try counting how many trees there are in that park), and then a path which led to “Three Stones”, a gathering of three awkwardly shaped, gratified stones blocking a fork in the dirt path. There was also “The Hill”, which lay just beyond the 3rd st. entrance to the park after the road, a popular night spot for Slopies getting high and drunk, which would stay safe on a regular basis for most of 10th grade. Adjacent to The Hill was “The Field” on its 2nd st. side, and on the other, a path, a clearing, and then the Picnic benches and the Picnic House which was equal to about 5th st. There was also The Vale which was deeper in the park past the Hill, a beautiful place and safe from the cops, but not from harm (sometime during 10th grade we would discover someone had been stabbed there). Bendy was a tree near the Garfield entrance, the Baseball fields from 15th to 9th st. entrances past the band shell into the park. Learning the spots in the park was like learning a new language and having everyone know it but you.
My life in Park Slope really took off when I became friends with Max. We discovered our mutual love for Degrassi in a chat room that got formed by our friends online and figured out that we’d met recently. It was the same weekend I became friends with Kat, who came with Shiro and I after school to the Slope and we were instant friends after we learned we both smoked. I invited her to Max’s where we all got high and left to chill on 7th ave in front of Pinos, a repetitive ritual for the next two years. Max’s house for me was the center of everything. I spent more time there in 9th grade than I did at my own house. Max was also how I got to know Tylor. The two had been best friends since middle school and always talked about growing up together and all of their past, including girls, teachers, and friends. As I got to know the two of them, Tylor would eventually break up with his girlfriend to go out with me. One fall day at Max’s when we were all sitting out on the balcony smoking, I was sitting on the table and I started turning circles with my upper body very slowly. Someone asked me what I was doing, and I replied very vacantly, “I’m a chicken.....swimming in brownie batter...”
Days turned into weeks which turned into months, and soon the chills of winter came crawling down my California spine. Thirty degree weather scared me, I belonged to “The Stoners” now, an implied clique although they weren’t set well, and even though my grades were slipping and life at home wasn’t great, I was happy. After being depressed all summer about moving I finally had friends and a boyfriend, and a place, this magical place, where I truly felt I belonged.
New Years’ Eve 2004 was when Christina came to visit. She was my old best friend in California and now she was going to see me in my new life for the first time. She wasn’t used to all the things I’d been doing even though she pretended like she was. She clung to me and I felt dragged down by my past, I’d changed. Her and Max hit it off and hooked up on New Years’. A combination of all these things ended our friendship for awhile and we were never as close. I guess Park Slope was a giver and a taker. That was the New Years’ of couples. Everyone seemed to be paired off that night, and if you weren’t you would always look back on that New Years’ far less fondly than the rest. Julia’s parents went out of town and we had a party at her house. I stole a bottle of Silver Patron from my parents, a tequila I later found out cost fifty dollars. I spent the first part of the night in a bedroom with Tylor, followed by the walk to the park I cannot remember and the countdown with all of Brooklyn that lead to fireworks and my first real New Years’ kiss. I always remembered it as my favorite New Years’ and maybe that’s why, it set big standards that seemed to have to be met every New Years’ but never would.
The next couple of months shifted into a blur. Almost every night I hot-boxed my tiny closet, ate food, and watched a movie. I’d rush through my homework just so I could get high, or wouldn’t even do it at all. Tylor and I broke up and got back together a month later. It was also the first time I got really sick from drinking. I was supposed to get a half pint of Georgi to myself, but instead I accidentally got a pint. I found myself on the steps of 321 projectile vomiting, I don’t really remember any of it but someone took me to Shane’s house where my dad picked me up and Max Schlesinger carried me to the car.
This period of time was also the first time I tried shrooms. The tempting hallucinogen I’d done a report on in 6th grade for health. I was more interested in the spirituality of it than for fun, and I would do it several times in the next couple of years. I remember it perfectly, the way the white designs formed like smoke ring shapes on Max’s green couch that winter afternoon as I came up. Amanda was doing them too, but she left and went to Cobble Hill. I ended up in the park with Max, and two kids, Thomas Chism and Seth while they got high at the Picnic Benches. The snow crunched under my feet, tree branches looked like spider webs, and the sky turned purple. Eventually we went down to 7th ave where people tried to freak me out, but all I could think about was life and all these crazy theories I’d never remember. I ran into Tylor, it was while we were broken up, and it was bothering me. Amanda had warned me that if something was bothering me it would really bother me on shrooms. It did. I spent a long time in Pinos sitting with him and a few people. Coming down, I smoked with Max at 515, the stoop of an abandoned house on 2nd street where we sometimes went.
With Spring came an array of disaster. As Tylor and mine’s relationship began to dwindle again, Max and I became closer. We would spend all of our time together because Tylor was never around, we even had sleep overs. Kat and I went to Jamaica for Spring break and when my mom asked if I missed Tylor I said no, just Max. It wasn’t long after, once I’d told Max I was going to break up with Tylor, that he told Kat he liked me. I felt weird about it, but went along with it anyway. Just a few short days after I broke up with Tylor, I found myself in Prospect Park hooking up with Max. He would break it off, start it up again, and break it off again, and I would hook up with Jonah in the end as revenge. It would put a dent in our friendship, especially after I would return from a trip in May only to find out him and my good friend Grace were going out. I would also regret what I did to Tylor for the next year and a half.
There’s a reason they say time heals wounds. For the first month that summer Max and I weren’t friends, until we realized what a significant hole we’d left in each other’s lives. I became friends with Shiro’s sister Mina, and we hung out a lot. At some point Grace went away to camp and Max and I found a way to be friends again. Summer of 2005 was a routine. I would go to work in the city and come back and meet up with Max and some of his new friends, John and Alex, or Mina. There were daily blunt sessions. The first would occur in the afternoon, everyone would chip five dollars and go to the park or Max’s to get high. Following this we would spend anywhere from one to six hours sitting on a wall (which, with no surprises, we called “The Wall”) on the side of 321 until it got dark enough for people to head down to 5th and 5th, which we called the corner deli that sold us beer. Then everyone would go to the park to get drunk or high in the field. The Field was my home on those summer nights, but sometimes we’d go to a clearing behind some bushes just past the Hill that was called Jose. I will never know who named it. On the occasion I did drink, it was always two 22’s of Bacardi Raz. Sometimes we would take a break from the park and have an adventure to the Gowanas Canal which was the boarder between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. Everything that summer was exactly the same, but the end was the cherry on top.
A boy named Charlie who lived in my neighborhood had several parties that summer. Even though it was in Windsor Terrace, it was still considered a Park Slope party because everyone that came hung out in Park Slope. Charlie was famous for the trampoline in his backyard and for being completely ridiculous. That summer for his birthday party, everyone got drunk at his house and then he took everyone to the park and concocted a giant slip n’ slide out of trash bags, soap, and water. On the last night of summer, everyone gathered at the Hill. Everyone I knew was there and everyone was completely smashed. It had been a year since I’d moved to New York and started chilling in Park Slope, and already things had changed so much. The people on the hill that night were not all of the people I’d made friends with freshman year. If they were they had changed some way or another. That was the thing about Park Slope though, it was always changing, and yet never at all.
I had never heard the term Slopie until I started the 10th grade at Elisabeth Irwin High School and made friends with a girl named Rachel Kauffman. Rachel and I had met once in Freshman year, she was a friend of an old friend of Max’s from middle school and came to one of Charlie’s parties the previous winter. I hadn’t liked her, but I hadn’t liked any girls then, and as we got to know each other she always referred to my Park Slope friends and I as Slopies. I started to find this common among the city kids I made friends with, and realized it was how the rest of New York saw us.
The fall of 10th grade was a time of significant change. Kat and I began to grow apart because I started at a new school, and she became good friends with Megan, a girl who went to BFS. Jules, who had been absent from the slope for some time, returned as my new drinking buddy. I quit smoking weed for a month and went whole heartedly into drinking Bacardi Raz on stoops near 6th ave with Jules and our friend Dan. That was the fall Briana came to us. She went to Jules’s school and we were instant friends. I introduced her to the Slope and all the people, but unfortunately it put Jules on the back burner until Spring. It was also when Mikey and I became good friends. Mikey had lived in my neighborhood the whole time I’d lived in New York but we’d never been close. That fall I moved onto the same street that him and Charlie lived on, and he and his girlfriend Lauren of two years broke up. It was a shock to everyone, but I guess also the beginning of our friendship. I introduced him to Briana and we became a trio of sorts.
The Holidays brought all the drama. Kat and I had worked out all of our problems but now there were new problems on the rise. The MTA went on strike the week before Christmas and somehow I found myself with Max in the back seat of his Sister’s car going to pick up their mom in the city from work. The bribery was a burn ride and banana bread, and also the fact that there was nothing better to do. It was then that Max confessed to me that despite that there was nothing wrong with his and Grace’s relationship, he had developed a crush on Briana. For the next several days Kat and I found ourselves in the middle of all of this passing messages back and forth, and Max even broke up with Grace for a few days to go out with Briana until he changed his mind. The whole thing exploded on New Years’ when Julia yet again had a party, but this time much bigger. I stole rum from my parents, which I’m sure they didn’t even know they had. Faces of the past were there, but I spent my night yelling at Max and outside laying on the sidewalk chain-smoking with Kat and Allison (a friend of Jules’s who moved to Costa Rica the same time I moved to New York and was visiting, and I hung out with whenever she was in town.) There was lots of drunken crying and confusion that night, but I refused to take part. At midnight I was once again in the park, falling all over drunk with Shiro and singing, scared the fire works were going to eat us. Afterwards we all retreated to 7th ave where Kat, Jules, Allison, Shiro, a friend Brian, and Gary from Carvel all managed to crash a twenty-something-year-old party above Starbucks by ringing random buzzers until we were let up. We danced to Buddy Holly and stole alcohol and got hit on by creepy older guys. A long shot difference from the cliché New Years’ I’d had the year before.
I always tell Briana that when I think of that winter I think of one thing; the blizzard in February. For whatever reason it was that we decided we could handle the blizzard that night I will never know. Yet somehow I found myself at the top of the Elephant Step’s hill in the Windsor Terrace part of the park, way high up with 1 1/2 40’s of Budweiser down passing blunts with a surprisingly large group of kids. After we drank and smoked we fell down the hill in the snow trying to get down and it took us all two hours to walk to Park Slope, when it really should’ve taken fifteen minutes, slipping and sliding on the icy road. It didn’t matter how cold it was that winter, we were always out. Most of that winter was spent at the benches near the 3rd st. entrance that faced the Hill drinking 40’s of Colt45 that we bought at Mike’s deli at the end of my block which we hid in our bags till we got to the park, and hitting whoever’s blunt was passed around. It amazed me that the cops never bothered us, but the spot got blown when several kids successfully transferred a garbage can fire to lighting the entire field on fire. Running away I remember Kat asking if she should call 911, and Shiro yelling at her to call it. I didn’t stay to watch the field burn but I hear it was quite the sight.
With Spring came more change. I returned from my Spring Break trip to Germany to discover that my two best friends (who were girls) had grown very close and I felt left out. It had gone from Briana and I and Megan and Kat, to Megan, Kat, and Briana, and me. Nothing was deliberate, but it changed a lot of things. For months we didn’t hang out, hardly talked, but it brought Jules and I back to being friends and eventually very close. Mikey and I had been close the whole time, and as Spring turned to Summer this remained.
The summer of 2006 was also a routine, especially in the beginning. I would wake up, watch t.v., wait for someone to call, walk to Park Slope, sit at the Connecticut Muffin benches on 1st street until it got late enough that we could go buy beer. Then we’d walk to 15th and 8th, the new corner deli who sold to us (5th and 5th had stopped selling that Spring). At first they would make just me go in because I apparently looked the oldest, but once I could no longer carry five 40’s to the counter at once, I eventually made everyone get their own things, and then we would walk through the 15th street entrance at the park, through the baseball fields, to our new home, The Cove. The Cove was literally a cove, and was nice because it had several exits. You could see everything, but once it was dark, no one could see you. It was located to the equal of 8th st., and sat between the Picnic House and the Baseball fields. I probably spent more time at the Cove that summer than anywhere else, always with a 40 of Colt and a pack of 27’s, getting drunk and eaten by mosquitos while blunts were passed around. After we were all drunk we’d head down to the ave and stand around for a couple of hours until I had to go home. Mikey and I would walk the exact same way home every night, we wouldn’t have it any other way. If someone tried to get us to walk another way we refused. First we’d walk on 7th ave until 12th street, which we took up to the park and walked along until Prospect ave, and walked down to our street; Vanderbilt. And every night we would talk about stuff, and people, and life, always the same, the most comforting of routines that I had.
That was the summer Alex started to deal weed and John, after just graduating 8th grade, started to deal coke. This sent a frenzy throughout the Slope, it was like the cocaine era, and all of a sudden everyone was doing it. It was ironic because I had tried it just before school had ended on an all-nighter after my two friends’ Sweet Sixteen, and now one of my friends was selling it. People came and went that summer, but Max, Mikey, Alex, John, and Megan were always there. Jules was gone for most of it, which was sad, and so were Briana and Kat who’s friendship I had rekindled at the beginning of the summer. Also at the beginning of that summer, Max and Grace broke up, which I think made me sad more than them. Burn rides with Max and his sister, Rachel was an amenity of that summer, as well as making new friends like Kat Fry, Kelsey, and Cheney. Free houses were frequent that summer, whether it was mine, Kat’s, Max’s, Amanda’s, or the house Cheney was moving out of and copied the keys to so we could all drink there, only to have the neighbors threaten to call the cops on us.
I can safely say that it was the best summer of my life. It went in no way as planned, seeming as I had meant to spend the entire thing in LA. I never went because my dad told me my mom would probably die that summer, and instead invested all my time in drinking rather than getting a job. It was a summer full of drugs, alcohol, and friends, but it taught me valuable lessons. Because I spent the summer so slothfully, when I got back to school I started to do my best and realized I had to try if I wanted to do something with my life. I stopped liking weed, I quit hard drugs, I (sort of) quit smoking, I quit drinking so excessively, but most importantly I quit the Slope. If you never thought you could quit a place, well you I’ll tell you, you can. I informed all my friends that I wasn’t going there, and for several months I didn’t step foot inside it’s boundaries other than to go to Max’s house occasionally. Unfortunately it made me grow apart from a lot of people that were very important to me, but they still go to the Slope and do the same things every weekend. I go occasionally, but it is never the same, or maybe the fact that it’s always the same makes it not the same because I am not the same. I have not set foot in the park since 11th grade started, but I’m sure if I walked through it I would point out every place and hear the laughter and memories in the back of my head like a montage in front of my eyes. Sometimes when I walk down 7th ave and look at where Carvel used to be or the side of 321 and remember 9th grade when Park Slope was so new and fresh and exciting I wish I could turn back time and go back there. When I talk to friends about those times they all say they same thing. I wonder how we all got to be this way, only wishing for the past.
New Years’ 2006 was unlike anything in the past. For starters, I was sick and sober. But more importantly I created a monster. The day before New Years’ eve I was at my friend Ana’s house when I met a girl named Eliza who told me she had wanted to have a New Years’ party but didn’t really have enough people to invite. I was immediately thrilled because people had been asking me about a party for days and had no such luck. I told Eliza that if she wanted to have a party, Mikey and I would give her a Party. A Party is what she got. Just about everyone I ever knew was there that night, but the funny thing was that a lot of them were ghosts of my past, and about 75% Slopies. I felt so unattached to so many people there, and maybe it was because I was sick and sober, but also maybe because I was different. A girl I’d known in 9th grade came and didn’t even recognize me at first. It amazed me how through networks and networks of friends and their friends and their friends that we could have such a completely insane and out of control party. When midnight came I wasn’t the slightest bit excited, I just wanted to go home and felt sick.
I think about all of the things that will happen in 2007 and hope there is as little of Park Slope in it as possible. But the thing about Park Slope is that it was never really about the place, it was about the people. It was just a nice area of space for us all to be reckless teenagers in together. Places change, like Carvel into Tempo Presto or the scaffoldings over 321 or the way Maggie Moos just popped up next to Pinos one day, and people have changed and grown, some are still friends and some aren’t, some I haven't spoken to in years. I guess the thing about memories is that they’re always nice to have, no matter how you feel about that place now, you know what it once meant to you. And when the leaves turn brown every fall and crunch under my feet and the air changes from humid to cool, I can still smell the weed from a cheap purple flashlight pipe in the grassy field of the park, in young love, filled with the awe of life and new beginnings.
-love liv