1995: Have you ever seen the movie “Die Hard”?
The first & last time I received my Last Rites was in 1989. I was fourteen, & this is part of a much longer story that I am telling, but that like all critical stories, requires a level of meticulousness, precision, & care that — well, I just don’t put into my Medium posts.
These are fast, rattled off, stream-of-consciousness-with-a-general-direction-in-mind diary entries.
The story about what happened to me in 1989/90 is a story that needs to be told more delicately because the actual solid precise facts will, ultimately, matter a great deal in doing that story, which is my story, proper justice.
But in 1989 either I received my Catholic Last Rites or Father Patrick * was just dropping by the ICU and somehow a nurse let him in despite the fact that I was so sick my parents weren’t even allowed in. My parents weren’t allowed in, but there was Fr. Patrick. No, nothing untoward happened. He said some prayers at me. He blessed me with Holy Water. This was the night the doctors told my parents I very well might die, and so I’m guessing Fr. Patrick was giving me my Last Rites because why else was he even there?
The 80s were a rough decade for me, my family.
The 90s started out strong, and ended in a kind of personal ruin.
1995, my second year away at college, the year I was nineteen, was the last truly uncomplicated year of my life. 1995 was the last truly innocent, simple, year for me. Everything, for me, was still okay in 1995 — for the first and last time, & I wasn’t even present enough to fully enjoy it.
This is what I do regret profoundly from my youth: that I wasted so much time on fear.
Alas, some of us are preprogrammed with a little “extra” in the sadness and anxiety department (usually makes us quite colorful characters, difficult lovers, great artists) & if the right amount of catastrophe lands just so on the brain of the innately anxious/depressed child . . .
They sent me back to high school.
I missed 3–4 months of high school owing to illness & I was released back into my Freshman year, confounded, tired, terrified.
When the decade turned that year — 1989 to 1990 — I was underweight, using crutches, still fitted with a port that delivered a constant stream of antibiotics from the cartridge in my fanny pack to my heart.
1995, which at 14 seemed impossible to conceive of, was such a joyous contrast to the misery of 1990: I was young, physically healthy, still cute, & I was just beginning to amass what would become a signature collection of band t-shirts: Blur, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Smith’s Meat is Murder . . .
I was having fun. Smoking a lot of cigarettes, dope, and drinking tons. I remember my peers being truly impressed by how I could “put it away.” I know now this is often a “red flag” for alcoholic behavior. Le sigh.
At some point in 1995, in a smoky dorm room on the shores of Lake Michigan, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, probably under a blacklight, I said “later” to a teenage boy and then never saw him again until yesterday, in July 2021, when I had coffee & conversation with the grown man version of that teenage boy in Tucson, Arizona.
Sometimes I tell Sarah that she would have loathed me as a teenager/early 20s kid because this is how I rolled (on a day without classes to attend):
1. Wake up, smoke a ton of cigarettes and drink coffee. Smoke more cigarettes to mask my growing hunger for food.
2. Eat something eventually. A burrito. Some french fries. Cereal. Whatever I had access to.
3. Smoke lots and lots and lots of dope beginning around 10:30 a.m. and not ceasing until I passed out drunk that night.
If you had the grave misfortune of falling in love with me during this time in my development, & I drunkenly (or soberly) reciprocated, this is how I rolled:
- Let’s hang out & then have sex ASAP.
- Now that I’ve had sex with you, I realize I don’t really like you as much as I thought.
- I ghost you.
& this was back before “ghosting” was a term in the colloquial American vernacular. I was “ghosting” lovers before “ghosting” was a thing. I ghosted lovers not to hurt them (though that’s what I always ended up doing), but because I was an emotional & spiritual & sometimes physical dumpster fire atop a flaming hill of manure with maybe a few flowers sprouting out here and there. (Also did you know manure is highly flammable? It is. Stick with me, reader, & you’ll learn all sorts.)
My friend’s name is Zac (I don’t think he’ll mind if I say so) & I didn’t really know him well in 1995, but he did make an impression on me back then — enough that I have followed his life through social media, enough that I made time for coffee with him when we both — much to our mutual astonishment — discovered we were living in the same American city.
When I think of 1995, I remember Zac “being there” for much of the mischief my friends & I got up to, but I remember that he was quiet. Yesterday, I told him this. I told him I remembered what he wore, and that he was quiet. Quiet people always intrigue me because often quiet people — especially quiet kids — are really interesting. Zac is still a quiet person, from what I gather. I am also a quiet person, though it may seem otherwise sometimes.
In 1995, I started declaring myself a “real writer.”
At 19, I felt since I’d been in the game since I was five it was time to start referring to myself as a “writer.”
This was also the year, or right around, when my new friends in college stopped calling me Allison and took instead to calling me “Gruber.”
Zac reminded me yesterday that it was our friend James who started this. James thought my last name was absurdly Germanic. He would call & leave lengthy voicemails on the dorm room phone (this was pre-cell phones) in a bad German accent: Gruber? Where est du? Gruber? Are you coming for lunch in the cafeteria, Gruber? Das Gruber must eat food. Gruuuuuberrrrrr!
Our friends thought Jim’s German accent coupled with his use of my last name was hilarious, and it stuck. By the time I was a junior in college, no one but my professors called me “Allison.”
One of my friends was rooming with the Chinese exchange student who often ate with us. I don’t remember the young woman’s name, but I remember one lunch she looked at me & said, “Gruber, I have been wondering — what is your last name?”
This morning, to streamline my professional life (which is increasingly involving social media/online presence), I changed my name on Facebook today from my married, legal name back to my given name. My wife followed suit, only she removed the hyphenated portion of our married names that contains her maiden name. So now we are just Allison & Sarah Gruber.
Much easier for everyone.
Much easier for my presence on social media.
Much easier for my students, & her students, too.
But beyond the pragmatism behind this small choice was the bigger symbolism of that moment, that decision. I took my name back & my wife loves me enough to take a crazy last name like Gruber, as well.
That means something to me.
That means a lot.
That my wife Sarah, a perfectly normal, healthy, sane adult woman would want to publicly hitch her wagon to all the nonsense that comes with this name? To choose “Gruber”? That’s bold. It’s not exactly a beautiful sounding last name. If you search the origins of the last name they are (not shockingly) Germanic and Ashkenazic and in the German it means something like “pathetic weirdo who lives in a ditch” or something to that effect.
Seriously. Google it.
When I was writing this post, I looked up songs that came out in 1995 (I have done extensive research on American music and politics in 1989, when I was sick in the suburbs of Chicago — but, as I mentioned earlier, that’s a story for a different platform). & there was a lot of very solid music coming out of the States & the UK that year.
Back then, in 1995, I listened almost exclusively to Brit Pop & indie. Here and there I’d braid in a little Blues or Hip Hop or old Country, but mostly I was a Smiths girl, a Tori Amos girl, a Joy Division girl.
Lately, though, reader? I’ve been listening to almost nothing but Rap & Hip Hop. I feel like my white upbringing kept me away from an entire education, a whole world of unbelievably good music performed by real poets. But for the Rap & Hip Hop that surfaced to the Billboard, I was largely unaware . . . like The Pharcyde. I’d heard of them, but I never really “heard” them before. Now? I think I have more of The Pharcyde’s songs on my daily playlists than anything that harkens back to my last idyllic year in 1995.
So I’ll conclude with this song by The Pharcyde released in 1995 (replete with a shout out to 1995). If you, like me, missed The Pharcyde in the 90s because you were busy being so white, I’d highly recommend starting with a Spotify account.
