Holly Northrop Blog

Jasmine called me the other day and opened with this.
"Hi Peanut."
"I just saw someone get hit by a car."
"Again?"
"Yep, she was lying on the ground with a pink blanket covering her..."
"Her head?"
"No, not her head, not her head."
"Where are you? Are you ok?"
"Yeah, I'm driving back home. I was hungry and I wanted to get something to eat."
"I don't know what to say, Peanut. In all the years I've been alive I've never seen anyone get hit by a car, and with the company that I used to keep you would think that would have been a common occurrence. I've been on this planet twice as long as you have and you've seen it twice."
"She was on a bike. Her purse was twenty feet in one direction and she was lying in the middle of the road."
"Oh my God. That's horrible."
"All this just proves that I need to get out of this town."
"Call me later if you want to talk about this more."
"Ok. Right now I'm going to go home and smoke a bowl."
"I would too, Peanut, I would too."

All day last Thursday, I was fighting with the Voice and their wacky math of severance. They say one thing while I have something very different in writing. After an all day affair of rapid emails, general frustration, back pain and that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I think we finally might be on the same page. Well, at least we are down to a few days discrepancy instead of several, several weeks.

God, I want them to go away.

I rarely talk about pussy here, oh sure, in private conversation, but hardly ever here. Unless of course, I am talking about our cats or my ex-husband, (Oh stop.), anyway last Friday I had a gynecologist appointment in Hoboken. Now, this is a big fucking deal for me to get to, quite the pilgrimage you might even say. I live upstate and well, he is in Hoboken, some two hours away. The funny thing is I really don't care for my doctor that much. Well, it is not him it is his goddamn staff. They SUCK, especially that blonde one. I've been putting this whole appointment off for months. He has to do shit to me that I do not particularly care for but this is the main reason I still go to him. My mom had uterine cancer when she was 58 so I get that extra special scraping that honestly, I cannot take enough Xanax to make better. I know because I have tried to Xanax it all away before.

So after an hour and a half driving through mist, rain and fog and a forty-minute train ride I finally arrived in Hoboken. My appointment was at noon but it was only 10:00. With not enough time to go into Manhattan, I decided to stroll around Hoboken for a while. I had an umbrella but it was misting, more like a spritz thing going on then umbrella weather.

I started out by walking around the waterfront area. The fog and mist was so thick that parts of Manhattan were lost in the sky. It was pretty cool and I took a cell phone photo and emailed it to Martha.

I've been doing that every now and then. While I'm out and about I shoot a cell phone image of something pretty and send to Martha. To Jasmine I send shots of Sushi just because I'm a bitch.

Anyway, after that I walked up Washington Street to Dunkin Donuts and grabbed a cup of coffee. Having nowhere to go I decided to sit down and enjoy the coffee instead of walking around with it. While sitting there in the quiet of pastries, a woman came running in holding a Dunkin Donuts bag. She walked right up to the counter, interrupted the current sale and demanded her money back because they had charged her for two muffins instead of only one. She didn't want two, she wanted one.

So the cashier, who was in the middle of helping a customer stopped ringing him up and closed the cash register. Instead of finishing with him, she proceeded to loose herself in how to do a refund. The guy is just standing there while muffin lady was pushing him off to the side. His coffee and donuts where now on the counter in front of muffin lady.

After five minutes, (five minutes was an awfully long time to watch this shit unfold) the cashier figured out how to refund the wackjob muffin lady her two dollars. The cashier then took the extra muffin out of the bag and put is back in the basket for resale.

This is where I stopped drinking my coffee.

Wackjob muffin lady obviously touched the muffin and just where the hell have her hands been. The pastry had left the store and who knows what could have happened to it. She could have dropped it on the ground or any number of unsanitary things could have happened to it, but the cashier put it back on the shelf.

The cashier then turned to the guy who by now is beyond pissed, and started to ring him up again. The problem was that she had already rung him up and taken his money. She hadn't given him his change back and she cannot remember what the total was or how much money he had given her. He kept telling her that she was to give him seven dollars and forty-seven cents back but she did not believe him and could not figure out how to fix the problem. She was the only one there and there was no manager.

She put a tainted muffin back on the shelf but wouldn't give this guy his change back.

I stood up, threw my full cup of coffee in the trash and left the store.

Avoiding any and all humans I walked down Washington Street trying to convince myself that I had not been poisoned or that I was not going to be sick.

After walking that off for about six blocks, I loitered in front of Maxwells, slowly reading the upcoming shows and shooting photos. I walked back out to the water, finding a new park that has been built since Martha and I lived in Jersey City. It is right on the water in front of a massive high-rise. "It is certainly nice to be rich" I said out loud to nothing but the seagulls.

Finally it was time, or close enough to the time to where I could go into the doctors office and wait in the waiting room.

I walked in and noticed that the waiting room was only slightly full with four pregnant women hogging up two seats apiece. I see that blonde girl is still there, her overuse of Cerulean blue eye shadow announcing her well before the sight of her snarl. She is in her resting position when I walk up to the glass to check in.

"Hi, Holly Northrop for noon."
"Who are you seeing" There are three other doctors in the practice.
"I give her the name of my doctor."
"I can't find you here."
"I have a noon appointment, I'm about a half hour early but I should be on the list."
"Oh, right we didn't call you because we didn't have a number for you."
"What?"
"The doctor had three woman go into labor this morning. All of his appointments have been cancelled."
'What?"
"The doctor isn't here."
"A phone call would have been nice."
"We don't have your number."
"What do you mean you don't have my number? I've been a patient here for five years? How the hell could you not have my number?"
She opens my chart, studying it for a few minutes.
"Well, what is this 518 number?"
"That's my fucking number!"

Behind me I felt the weight of expectant motherhood shift uncomfortably in their seats. By now I'm starting to push my face though the little eight inch sliver of glass that is separating us doing my best to resemble Jack Nicholson in The Shinning.  'HERE'S JOHNNY. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just gonna bash your brains in.'

"And this 917 number? What is that?"

"That's my fucking cell phone. The same number I've had for eight years. What the hell is wrong with you?"

It was at this point another staff member came over and told the blonde girl that she would handle this. Blonde girl raised her French Tipped fingers up in the air, (the universal 'whatever' sign), pushed her chair away from the counter and walked away.

The new nurse apologized repeatedly, made sure she had all my numbers in the computer and rescheduled my appointment for two weeks from now.

I walked out of there, slightly calmed down but still snarling and snapping at the air. I was surely alarming small children and the elderly. For fucks sake, I could be home instead of walking around for the next four hours in the mist.

Somewhere in my walk back to the Path station Jasmine called me. I knew the results of her Spanish test were due that day. Spanish is one of the reasons that Jasmine has to go to summer school. This child cannot learn a language.

"Hi mom!" she's all perky and shit.
"What did you get on your test?" I said with such flatness that she immediately asked me what was wrong.
"Nothing is wrong. What did you get on the test?"
"Um, he didn't grade them yet."
"What? Jasmine I am in no mood."
"He didn't grade them yet, he said Monday."
"Jasmine, just fucking tell me. Don't fuck around just tell me." I am yelling at her while walking down Frank Sinatra Drive. It's a good image.
"MOM! I'm telling you the truth. He didn't grade them yet."
I hang up. I guess we'll find out on Monday.

After Jasmine, I crossed back up to Washington Street & headed towards Tunes. Goddamn it, I'm going to the record store.

I was there for an hour digging through bin after bin of used vinyl records. It's probably the best therapy in the world. I ended up buying two Monkees records. One I have, but it is almost unplayable and the other I've often wanted. Yes, yes The Monkees, Monkees. Whatever, don't judge. I almost bought Joe's Garage, Green on Red, and a few new things, but Martha would have lost her shit with me. No matter how bad my day is, it is never worth it to piss her off by overbuying records.

Somewhere around 2:00 I went into Manhattan to pick up three rolls of color film, some over-the-counter medication and snag a bottle of my favorite ginger dressing. I walked the long way to everything and before I knew it I was running late. I need to scurry to get back in time to catch the train to Suffern. All day long I had nothing to do and then suddenly I was going to be late.

After being outside in the mist for six hours I officially had an Irish Fro. Every single hair on my head had its own curl and desired direction, completely unrelated to the hair next to it. Sitting on a crowed path train I could feel the guy next to me trying to push my hair out of his space. If I turned to look at him I could feel the girl on the other side of me jump because the back of my fro was touching her. I know I'm not gross but to them I am. It's an interesting sensation and even worse on New Jersey Transit, where we were all packed into the cars like dozens and dozens of eggs, each in a seat and no spare room for frizzy red hair.

And just to make looking for a job even more challenging, my email has been randomly deleting itself for the past three months. I don't know why and I'm not even sure I've fixed the problem. So if you've sent me an email and feel that I've ignored you more than I usually do (because I am totally dysfunctional), call me. The 518 number or the 917, you have them, right?

In a coffee shop last week, while sitting amongst the tourists and the unemployed, I let my mind wonder as I watched a girl at the next table over. She was franticly thumb-typing on her Sidekick^TM (isn't that a $300.00 phone?) laughing and snorting to herself, completely oblivious to everything around her. Her wallet was sticking out of her purse, just inches away from me screaming to be stolen. Something in the way the late afternoon sunlight crawled across her Louie Vuitton Monogram Canvas Tote, combined with her mouth-breathing laughter, made me think of New Jersey.

Between the ages of seven and ten, I lived in Jersey, Trenton to be exact. My father moved us there one year after the race riots of 1968. I did 4th grade and half of 5th grade there before my dad moved us to Ohio. Jersey was so very different from Meadville, PA. Jersey is where I started playing with matches behind the school, had my first encounter with a bully and dabbled in the teachers' pet role by way of crossing guard. Not in that order, if I remember correctly, I think it was suck-up, bully and then matches.

My dad had a ranch house built on an empty lot on Darrah Lane. We moved in just as they were finishing the final details and the whole house had that new house smell. However, the yard was not finished. The whole thing was one big mud pit. Soon after we moved in the landscapers came around with their backhoe and in an attempt to level the back yard they smashed the digging bucket through the wall and into my bedroom, knocking my bed across the room, breaking the window and leaving a huge gash in the wall.

My mom freaked out, (obviously), but she was freaking out at the idea of at night, an animal would be able to crawl inside the house. My seven-year-old brain had not even thought of that until she mentioned it but once she did, I could not stop thinking about a foaming-at-the-mouth animal, clawing its way into my room in the middle of deep dark night.

For three nights in a row I hardly slept at all. This was the beginning of a long, long road of my mother's neurosis keeping me awake at night.

Anyway, when we first moved to Trenton we still had a baby grand piano in the living room but soon after we moved there my parents sold it and bought a Hammond organ and my piano lessons turned into organ lessons.

My teacher The Organ Lady, lived across the street from us and twice a week I would walk over there for my lessons. It was an hour of me butchering Bach's Toccata in D minor for organ (very fitting I know), a few show tunes and standards like Greensleeves. After my lessons, The Organ Lady would come over to my house and hang out with my mom.

In the summer, mom would always bring out two glasses and hand one to The Organ Lady and they would proceed to talk about my progress. Together they would stand under the tree in the front yard, drinking gin-spiked lemonade; my mother in her cream and white pinstriped Capri pants, laughing as cigarette smoke streamed out of her nose, while they both swatted their hands in the air at the mosquitoes.

Eventually the conversation would turn to the 'big accident' that happened about a year before we moved there. It was on the corner of Princeton Pike and Darrah Lane. The Organ Lady was clearly fuckup about it because it seemed like every conversation I overheard was eventually about the crash, a crash that my mom never even witnessed.

From what I remember overhearing, it was a massive accident involving four cars. One of the cars pulled out in front of a truck causing a chain reaction where a large white car became airborne and smashed into the house on the corner, killing the woman driving the car. Apparently, there was alcohol involved and I think a dog was killed inside the house. The Organ Lady lived next to the house on the corner and on that day, she brought a blanket out to cover the woman who, having been thrown from the car was now dead in the front yard near her property line.

Sometimes I would listen to this story while doing summersaults in our yard. Other times I would go in the house and stare at them from my bedroom window, listening to their low murmurs. I could always tell when they had stopped talking about the accident because as the sun went down the sound of my mother's cackles would grow louder, with an occasional snort here and there.

In the short time that I lived there, I managed to make a few friends. One friend who lived down the street had more toys then I had ever seen in my life. She had a younger brother but still, the entire basement was her play area. They even had a trampoline and an above ground pool. My parents used to tell me all the time how spoiled I was, but this girl was the living example of spoiled.

I had another friend that lived directly behind us. She was Italian and had seven brothers and one sister. She was the youngest and named after Saint Therese.

A few times her mother invited me over for dinner. Dinner at Theresa's house was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. They had two kitchens; one was in the basement that had a walkout into the backyard and the other was upstairs, on the first floor where normal kitchens are supposed to be. The kitchen in the basement was the summer kitchen. In middle of the summer kitchen stood an enormous 'L' shaped table with two plastic checkered tablecloths over them. All the dishes, silverware, serving bowls and glasses had been in the family for generations.

When it was time to eat we all held hands as her mother said grace and then everyone began talking, yelling and passing food around the two tables. Theresa's father did not speak English so most of the conversations were in Italian. I really liked Theresa's house mostly because it was the complete opposite of mine. Dinner at my house was a painfully quite event. We had a small square table, my parents sat on one side and I sat on the other, directly across from my mother. The only sound in the house was the sound of the kitchen wall clock ticking away at the night. Nobody had anything to say to anyone and one of my father's favorite lines was, "Children should be seen and not heard."

I had another friend who lived two houses down from Theresa but I didn't like going over there. Her house was totally trashed and I mean garbage and dirty toys everywhere. The whole place smelled like pee. It was disgusting and I'm not sure just what the hell was going on down there. In that version of suburbia, they clearly did not fit in.

About once a month, our next-door neighbors would get into a fight. They would scream so loud at each other, that I would sit in my bedroom and listen to them throwing shit; the sounds of crashing and glass shattering went on for well over an hour. Then I would hear the man crying out, "Help me, help me, she's trying to kill me. Please someone help me!" But no one ever did. No police car ever came to their house. It was weird because the next day, after an argument, I would see him walk out of his house and go to work, or I would see him mowing the yard. He didn't look like his life had been threatened. My dad used to say that they probably like to fight, that it got them all riled up. At the time, I had no fucking idea what he was talking about.

Jersey was weird. I had my bike stolen from our driveway and believe it or not, they actually found it. The cops found it in downtown Trenton. Some kid who lived in a horrible, burned out area in the city stole it. My dad and I went to pick it up. The kid had taken my basket off, removed my bell, changed the license plate, and ripped my banana seat. It didn't look anything like my bike but according to the serial numbers it was. My dad put it in the trunk of the Buick Wildcat and we drove home. But you know, I never really wanted to ride the thing again. Even when my dad fixed my seat, it just freaked me out that someone took it. I had the same feeling when someone stole the Jeep (again in Jersey only thirty years later) and they found it, stripped down to nothing but the frame, wet with rain and bird shit, abandon in a burned out field in Newark. (The repetition of certain events in my life is absurd.) Once everything was made to look all new again, I never really wanted to ride in the Jeep.

So where is all this going? I have no idea. Something about being unemployed in a coffee shop make me think of living in Jersey. Who knows how my mind works.