Clareified

ALL ABOUT KAROL: A conversation already in progress

My little Karol is all grown up.
What is she today? 29? 39? 61?
Who can keep track.
Heck, I remember when she turned 12 like four years in a row. Ahhh, those were the days when I always insisted that she was perenially a little kid. That little annoying kid who is always trying to talk to you and hang out with you and be your friend.
And then when I’d get home, there she’d be on the phone.
“It’s for you, Dawn,” my mother would say.
“Naw, I’m not home.”
And then after a conversation that I figure went something like this:
My mom: Wait. You’re real? You’re not a boy? And you want to talk to Dawn?
Karol: Uhh…yeah.
My mom would say “get your ass over here and take the phone. You need some girl friends.”
But mooo–oom I’ve almost reached level six on Zelda.
Happily, “talking to Karol on the phone” never really involved much talking…sometimes, she wouldn’t even be on the phone. She’d call, I’d answer and she’d say “I’m going to get some spaghetti.”
Two hours later, I’d hear giggling in the background and remember that the lines were still open.
“HEY!”
“Ooops, I totally forgot you were there!”
My first memory of Karol was riding back from a Model U.N. trip at Horace Mann with her and the rest of the debate team. We found out that we both watched Days of Our Lives and spent the whole two hour trip reliving the best couples/best come back from the dead/worst letting my brother marry my girlfriend because he was dying only to try to kill him after he raped her storyline.
(Seriously, if there is a stronger bond than television shows — I’ve yet to find it. Although…how she managed to watch Days of Our Lives without watching TV, as she would claim again and again later in our friendship, I can’t figure. )
In those days she was really nice.
When I jokingly said that after paying the registration fee for our Model U.N. trip to Yale, that I wouldn’t be able to afford anything but candy bars for dinner, she brought enough money for both of us to have lunch and dinner for the whole weekend.
Karol was the only one of my prep school friends who would come see me in the ECB, consequently, she was the only person I ever hung out with outside of school.
In fact, there’s a horrifying picture of us at Coney Island that is still on my list of things that must be destroyed.
However, lest you think Karol is so great…
I also remember the hours and hours of my life (that I will never get back) spent watching her write Bas (in honor of Gilmore Girls’ Sebastian Bach) over and over again in different styles searching for just the right one.
Curvy letters, straight letters, bubble letters, grafitti letters.
Or being forced to take Sassy quizzes with horrible names like “Are you a good kisser?” (The range 1-5 did not contemplate my improbable score of 0.)
From a payphone in Bensonhurst, Karol, wearing rollerskates and braces, would call to give me hourly updates on the shortest relationship the world had ever known (before Paris Hilton, of course).
And every conversation would start with strange a pop.
“What’s that?”
“I opened my Snapple.”
I think she waited to open the Snapple till I answered the phone on purpose.
She always had a million friends and even more stories about them.
“Your life is so exciting,” I’d say about her stories of her friend who had an abortion or her friend who was a transvestite or her friend who went to jail or her friend who ran away or her friend who was a drug dealer or her transvestite drug dealing friend who had an abortion ran away and then went to jail.
It was all impossible to keep straight. (That’s how I learned the invaluable skill of picking a name that I heard often enough and referring to all her friends by that name. In the 90s, it was David. A single “How’s David?” was good for like twenty minutes of conversation on my part. Followed by a “Nooo way,” I was set for the night.)
And that was only the first year that I knew her! To this day, I have a standing cash money offer to be allowed to follow her around one day.
When Karol left my high school to go to another school in the area, she completely became the voice on the phone.
I would beep her and instead of my phone number, I would leave all the cool beeper tricks I knew, like 411 (I just need some information) or 911 (it’s an emergency) or 43110 (hello in numbers).
For her sweet sixteen, she rented a party limo and I spent an hour driving around Brooklyn with her and her seven next closest friends. It would be another 10 years before I ended up at another Karol birthday bash in April. However, I often threw her surprise parties in January at the Limelight which she never remembered come Spring.
When I left for college, Karol cried and cried. She even sent me a care package with candy and snacks during my freshman year.
And horrified by my musical tastes (defined as whatevery was playing on Z-100), she made me mixtapes with songs by bands that had names like Five Man Electrical Band or Faster Pussycat. Then she’d call to quiz me and make sure I had listened to it.
“Uhh…yeah…third song. Wow. Blew my mind.”
“Why? What’d you like about it?”
“Ummm…it was catchy?”
“Listen to it before I beat you.”
Yes, mom.
Over the years the phone calls turned into e-mails, though every now and then she would inexplicably wait until the middle of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to call me from Boston.
“DUDE. What day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
“What time is it?”
“eh….8:35″
“Ok then,” I would say hanging up.
Karol was my very own personal google.
“Dude, who is Kirk Cobain?”
“KURT. He was lead singer of Nirvana. He killed himself today.”
Ah.
“What the hell is BDSM?”
“Uhh…you don’t wanna know.”
Check.
In keeping with the theme, I would first meet all of her boyfriends over the phone.
“Dawn, Tommy/Warren/Peter thinks you’re imaginary, so say hi.”
Of course, when they took the phone I wouldn’t say a word. Then I’d laugh.
With all the poker craziness, I see Karol much more than I ever used to – but even when that ends and she moves away to D.C. I know that I can always count on Karol to be the familiar voice and/or silence on the phone.
Because even though she is a mean, Republican, racist, card carrying member of the NRA and worst of all, a Yankees fan, my mom was right that at 15 I needed a girl friend and now, at 25, I am glad it was Karol.
Which is why, I’m sure, that if I find myself in France on Saturday and unable to come to her birthday party, she’ll be just as happy to hear my voice on the phone.

Happy Birthday, Red.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.