When was the last time you went home?

Not your apartment home, home home

Hey, friends. This segment doesn’t have an Etc. or Daily Musings. Did you miss them? Please let me know in the comments. If you love The Museletter, please become a paid subscriber.

I spent my earliest years in a mish mash of small east coast towns, but grew up, formally, for the longest amount of time, in a lovely and idyllic little hamlet on Maine’s rocky coast.

I’ve talked about Maine a bit on stage and in my writings, and there’s a reason for that. I didn’t realize it at the time, but after leaving and looking back, I’ve disseminated that it’s as magical as it is weird as it is and special as I ever thought it might have been.

My childhood home

A few interesting things about my small home town are that, first of all, there were only, I was told, 1000 people living there while I was—in the wintertime, anyway. In the summertime, the population ballooned, as was evident by bumper to bumper traffic along every inch of our little Main Street, and overcrowded swimming holes. People came in from “away” and brought much of our economy with them. I knew they were gone when they left, because we could get places quickly and easily.

Another thing that sticks with me are the characters, and I suppose I might even be included. We all had a story, and because it was such a small place, everyone knew everyone’s story, or some rendition of it.

One particular story I will tell you stems around a lady I knew in high school. I’m going to call her VD for short, because those are her initials.

V was the “leader” of a “girl gang” called the Cobras. She was beautiful by Maine standards, with long, wavy brown hair and feathered bangs, a small perky figure accented by tight-fitting acid-washed jeans, a purple-fringed leather jacket, high-top sneakers and clear glossed lips. She spoke with a richly identifiable Maine accent and dialect (imagine a lot of friggin’s and wickeds and yahhs) and had a reputation that preceded her, for fighting and being sexually active. She was rumored to be from Bremen, which was where all the bad kids came from.

V and I never really crossed paths, though we did share a business math class, until one day, I found myself fist to fist with the head Cobra.

I went to a party on a Saturday night in Bristol at someone’s parent’s house. Several dead deer hung upside down bleeding out in the front yard like something out of Chain Saw Massacre. A bad omen, if I had any juju then, but we partied anyway. A dozen or so cars were parked in the front yard, and I have no idea how these kids were able to have a party like this without any interruptions by neighbors or law enforcement, but that was the desolate beauty of Maine in the 1990s, I guess.

I got a ride to the party, and it started off easy enough. I filled a plastic cup with beer from the keg, yes, there was a keg at a teen party, because that’s how we rolled back then, and I wandered through the house, looking for familiar faces. Finding none, I settled into a spot on top of the washing machine in a back corner of the house.

It’s funny how I don’t remember whole years of my life; whole chapters of my parent’s divorce is missing, and I don’t recall one actual birthday from ages 4 through 21. But I will never forget the girl’s name, or the look on her face, when she came waltzing over to me with a half drunken smile and a full cup of beer and made a sloppy attempt to dump it over my head.

Looking back, I still don’t understand the logic here; I had the higher ground perched atop an appliance. She had no chance. I was easily able to smack the beer out of her hand and push her backwards with my feet. And when I did, all hell broke loose.

One of the Cobras yelled, “She hit K!” and when she did, VD came a-runnin, and she looked serious. Luckily, a bunch of other girls did, too, and they all scrambled on top of each other like a pile of drunken morons, while I stepped back and away from the ruckus, which I was pretty sure had been intended for me.

That was my cue, and so I headed outside, not quite sure what I’d do next. But V knew, and she was behind me like a hornet. We had a hot minute of flying fists and hair, as a crowd gathered to watch the fun, and her crew rallied, ready to jump in if she needed assistance. After our scramble, I had the smarts to hustle around a nearby car. I toyed with her, moving this way and that, a half-smile on my face—catch me if you can, bitch! She was on the other side, humorlessly eyeing me down, whining and huffing like a rabid cat. None of this was funny to her. She wanted blood.

At that moment, a crummy, rusty old white sedan pulled up. The passenger door opened up and a voice yelled, “Jessica! Get in!”

I ran to the rescue of my White knight and we drove off into the pot holed moonlight.

I didn’t know the guy who saved me, I don’t remember his name, or how he knew to be there at that moment, but he surely saved me from a drunken gang-pile ass kicking.

The next day at school, VD had a black eye in business math class. “We cool?” she asked me. “Yeah,” I said. We’d never not been.

And that was that.

I later learned the fight was a case of mistaken identity, intended for another Jessica, and relating to the “stealing” of some boyfriend. Typical Maine shit.

That was a long-winded way for me to say, I’m feeling a little homesick lately. And why would I be homesick for a story / place like that?

It’s a good question.

What attracts us to the people and places we love and pine over, with all the hurt and pain that inevitably come from them?

It’s mostly intangible, I fathom, but if we try hard enough, we can usually finger an explanation, or two. Nostalgia is a highly powerful emotion.

I had a writing job working for a dark money funded liberal research-based marketing company (say that 3x fast), and a takeaway was that nostalgia activated our demographic like gangbusters—you know, talking about pop pop and the war, and grandma’s pie and all that.

It’s frustrating how predictable humanity is, but it’s also comforting, in a way.

Over the holidays, a lot of people “go home” and some don’t. I am one of those people who has had to make my own home. My childhood home has been gone for years, my parents sold it after the divorce. All the places of my childhood are mostly memories, or some unrecognizable version of themselves when I try to return. Yet, I still keep going back.

But the memories of the places, the few remnants I have from my childhood, the photos, the stories, the friends—they represent what home is and/or was to me.

And they fuel me and my comedy. In a time when the entire world and internet is all about politics and war and partisan this and that, I can count on and fall back into that warm, safe cocoon of memories and dig, and I am guaranteed to always come out with something relatable, unique, funny and good.

When was the last time you went home?

Til next time, homeslice.