Friday, May 24, 2013

The Little Girl From Youngstown, Ohio

How did I get here?  Where is here?  New York City of course.  I'm a real estate agent, renting apartments on the upper east side.  I'm originally from Youngstown, Ohio, formally a steel mill town that turned into a down trodden city from it's lost industry.  Youngstown has been trying to rediscover and redefine itself and it's industry as it goes into the next century.

What most of my weekday clients don't know is that the sharply dressed, petite, 27 year old, short haired brunette showing them apartments, is a former high school soccer star, a waitress, a stripper, a porn actress, a prostitute, a drug dealer and an ex-convict.  Now I'm a real estate agent in New York and living a pretty good life.  But I'm not done.  I've cleaned my act up, I've matured and I'm ready to take conquer this town.  In another life, I'd be a double platinum album selling, white female rapper with all my personal drama.

So where do I begin?  Well, I have a lot of good beginnings in my life.  Those good beginnings were usually followed by a short lifespan and then bad endings before I learned to move on.  So perhaps I'll just start here.  During my senior year in high school I skipped town and moved to Los Angeles, California with a distant relative.  I hated home and everything my family, friends and Youngstown represented.  My father was as religious as he was a racist, an alcoholic and a philanderer.  He would sometimes disappear for weeks, leaving my mother to fend on her own to raise six kids while he constantly took odd jobs after doing a stint in the military.  My mother cleaned beds at a motel and worked weekends at a laundromat, while my oldest brother and sister worked hard to help raise us four younger siblings.

Most of the folks in Youngstown, grow up and just get jobs in Youngstown.  So they never leave the area.  Generation, after generation of people from the same town, growing up, working, living and dying in the same town.  I wanted more than that for me.  I had dreams.  Big dreams.  I played soccer, and softball.  I was well known for my blue eyes, blond ponytail and well developed body in high school.

I always spoke to my friends about going to Hollywood.  Lots of kids do that sometimes.  We dream of leaving home and going someplace to make it big and that way we could come back to our hometown and sort of flip certain people the bird.  Tell them to kiss our asses, because we made it.  We left Youngstown, went somewhere else and became something.  Most of us dreamed of going someplace, but we ended up no place at all.  I was going to be different.  I was going to get out of Youngstown.

I had my first kiss at 13 to my first love, Michael.  We didn't really try anything more until we both turned 15.  I lost my virginity to him when I turned 16 and thought that he would be mine forever.  But, Michael didn't want out of Youngstown.  Michael was just counting the days when he would graduate high school and get a job alongside his father at the General Motors plant.  I wanted more than that.  He broke up with me at the end of our junior year.  He said that we needed to spend some time away from each other.

That summer I had sex with two of his friends hoping that would make Michael come back to me.  But I was wrong.  When Michael found out, he only stayed further away from me.  That in turn made me run into the pants of three more boys.  It was a potent mixture of marijuana, alcohol, teenage hormones and rejection.  I was just trying to find something to make myself feel better inside.  To make matters even worse, my mother lost our house that my father flopped on our house mortgage, so we had to move into the Martin Mobile Home Park.  Yep, South Ave in Youngstown.  We had finally sunken to trailer park status.

A couple big family fights, including my father getting busted by my mother for fathering a five year old kid on the other side of town with another woman.  Six months into my senior year, I was already labeled one of the  town sluts.  I wanted out.  My mother had a second cousin who had moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles to work for a TV network.  My mother wanted me out the door anyway since I had began doing drugs a lot casual drugs more often and openly in front of my other siblings.

So I got my little bit of money together and off to Los Angeles I went...


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