Expendable

It was the end of June and I had just turned 18.  A high school graduation party at Bobert’s house, and the neighbors weren’t having it.

The cops came.

Some kids were in the house, some kids were outside.  Some parents were there, some parents were called.

I had started drinking at the age of 12.  I drank more in high school than I ever have at any other point in my life.  Not everyday, but every weekend, and to excess.  In college I would start smoking pot, but in high school, marajauna was more verboten and unquestionably illegal.

My friends and I drank every weekend and were hungover almost every Sunday.  We called it fun.  I remember it being fun.

Somehow up until this point I had never had any real encounters with the cops, mostly they stayed away from the neighborhoods and houses we hung out at.

But for whatever reason, Bradley Boulevard had had enough and the cops we’re looking to make quota.

Flashlights and deep voices commended us to sit at the round linened tables, they would get to us.

I sat next to one of my best friends Mare. We waited.  As we waited some parents came and took their children away.  I remember Eliza and Mags with a white blazer wrapped over them as they were ushered to safety and away from the police.

Where were they going?

Why wasn’t anyone coming for me?

Bobert and his kin, the kids of the owners of the house were inside hiding under beds, they

didn’t get citations.

At the time I was too young to understand the higherarchy, but as I watched the prodigy of affluence escape while I was left to sit, I understood I was expendable.

When it was our turn, Mare and I blew the Breathalyzer and received our citations.  We had to go to court, and were sentenced to a mandatory drug and alcohol class.  At the courthouse there was a piece of paper posted, with our names and the names of those who received citations.  The owners of the house were listed, but next to their name, it said, “settled out of court.”

It is a demoralizing feeling when you realize just how little control or power you have in relation to those around you.  Bobert should have gotten a citation, it was his house, his party, his parents, but their money and influence had shielded him.  And they had shielded the other children deemed “important.”

I hadn’t been one of them.  I wasn’t one of them.  I’d never be one of them.

Watching the footage of the press, and particularly the women of the White House Correspondents dinner brought this memory flooding back to me.

Beautiful and accomplished Weijia in her her fitted sparkle dress, looking for shelter with the president, boxed out, crawling on all fours after them.  Cheryl Hynes running to keep up, her husband not looking back.  All the press as they watched the order of succession removed one by one from the room.

They felt like I did, but it was worse.  They believed their lives to be in danger, and they just had to sit there and wait.  Learn their true place.  Learn just how unimportant and inconsequential their lives were deemed to be.

For me, I am twenty-six years older than when I sat at that table in Chevy-Chase, but I have never forgotten and never forgiven it.  Maybe I can now.  Being helpless can happen to anyone no matter how powerful they are, and at least I never thought I was in real danger.

My heart goes out to those who were “secured” in the ballroom as weapons pointed at them and chaos and confusion that lasted only minuets will steal future parts of themselves.

My heart goes out especially to those who were not experiencing this moment of helplessness for the first time, those who were at previous assassination attempts, who now after being re-traumatized may never be able to truly relax in a crowd ever again.

People just going to work, people just going to diner, people just trying to take one moment for camaraderie, frivolity, networking who came home not with a full belly or hangover, but with trauma instead.