Tampa, Fl.—This past week after receiving Facebook birthday wishes from friends, Diane Fox was reminded of some questionaable wine and necking choices she made in high school. Divorced three times, Fox, now a resident of Tampa, Florida, graduated from South Park High School in the late seventies and recalls it being a mostly carefree time of great friends, monogrammed sweaters, David Bowie and a little Shakespeare terror in Mr.Pulisi’s demanding English class. Fox, who has kept up many of her high school friendships couldn’t quite place one well wisher named Louie Targente. She sent a text to one of her old friends, Donna Womeldorf, asking if she remembered him. The response was instantaneous: “You gave Targente about twenty hickies and threw up all over his car after drinking Mad Dog 20/20 sophomore year.”
Little bits of vomit assembled in Fox throat as she recalled the taste of MD 20/20, the hangover that came with it, and the memory of that night. It was random a high school party and Fox was heartbroken because the boy she had been writing about in her diary since seventh-grade, Larry McAndrews had paired up with Dee Dee Devole. Trying to be cool she jugged MD 20/20 with Targente, leading to the night of hickies, vomit and weeks of avoiding him and his phone calls. When Targente wouldn’t get a clue, Fox was forced to humiliate him in front of his friends one day after B lunch.
Pondering why Targente would send along birthday wishes after she had been so cruel to him, Fox received another text from her friend Donna…”remember George Pitter?” Fox sighed as she remembered the night of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine and sucking face with Pitter, whom her friends affectionately deemed, Pitter the Critter. There wasn’t the fireworks of hickies and vomit, but Fox’s friends teased her mercilessly for years about necking with this not so handsome, dumb kid.
From there her old friend Donna texted a slew of Fox’s greatest high school hits: Bob Kersten, Bo Brown, Bo Brown’s brother, Benny, Tim Watts, Albert Griffiths, Kevin Kujawa, Ronny Leisten and more. The whirring array of wine, sloppy tongue kisses and cliched high school parties flashed through Fox’s mind like a bad dream. Some of the names mentioned weren’t so bad, but on the whole she was horrified by the list and her choices.
But Fox was determined not to be defeated by these choices from so long ago. She had gained perspective, was self-actualized and was living her best life just like Oprah said she should. The little pep-talk she gave herself lifted her spirits, so she got in her car and went to the liquor store and bought two ten dollar bottles of 19 Crimes, Cabernet Sauvignon. Looking at the man with the misshapen head cashing her out she laughed a little thinking about the boys she necked with in high school. But, just as she was about to exit the store, it occurred to Fox, who she really was, who she had been all along. She stopped, turned back toward the counter and asked the man for a pen. On her receipt she wrote phone number and said “I’m going home to binge some Netflix and drink some of this wine. I can be pretty fun after some wine. Text me.”
She then ran the back of her hand lightly along the length of the man’s lopsided head, smiled and left the store.
