A bunch of us are sitting on the extremely crowded sun-drenched dock in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. As one friend gets up to go back to the con, a few people start yelling, to her, "We love you for your firm, ripe breasts!" Earlier, when we were walking through the mall there, two of the guys put their arms around each other and waltzed through the hallway chanting, "Yes, we're fags. But we're big mean fags. And that's Mr. Homosexual to you."

I'm letting this awful dork I met at a con live with me for a week. I've got lots of friends, but I'm so lonely for a good man. One of my housemates and I give this guy I really like a lift in my piece of junk car. On the way back into our development, we spot a couple in a station wagon Parking, so we pick up my date and another housemate and we drive back down to the Parking couple, write in soap on the car windows, and scream obscenities.

I actually like the guy I'm dating so I've been necking with him in the back of the car on the way to Darkover (a primarily lesbian fantasy con). Just as I unzip his fly, we get there. As we enter the hotel lobby, he realizes his exceedingly long dick is hanging out real far. The driver and my date get totally plowed, mostly on booze pilfered through the grating over the front of the closed hotel bar. The driver makes out with an underage girl on the floor of the hotel lobby forcing my date and I and another couple to end up sleeping in the con suite.

Everyone is throwing knives at the wall of our townhouse. I can't quite get the hang of it. Not one to be outdone, my housemate's boyfriend puts a five foot broadsword all the way through the wall. Later he gives my housemate a twelve pound metal plaque he made which says, "I love you".

We're all slamming in the pit at Foetus. Dripping sweat and adrenaline, we finally end up downstairs at 930. We simultaneously have the sudden terrible realization that we've just given scabies to the entire DC scene.

We're at the supermarket and suddenly we all notice that one of the guys has blood drooling out of the corners of his mouth. He's chewed like 6 stage capsules.

"Do you like black guys?" the guy in the bus station asks my friend. "No, not particularly. Why? Do you want to give me one?" she replies. I'm rolling on the dirty bus station floor laughing. It finally comes out that she thought he said 'black eyes' rather than 'black guys'. And the guy who accosted us keeps saying he knows we are on drugs and flashing this big wad of cash and asking us to go away with him.

A friend of mine and I are sitting in this travel agency. He got this invitation to listen to a pitch for a travel club. The travel agent keeps telling my friend how nifty and economical the club is. I explain to the agent that my friend is saving up for an engagement ring. "But don't you think this offer is so worthwhile?" the agent asks. "Don't you think I'm worthwhile?" I reply, "are you saying I'm ugly?"

Mostly, my fond memories of the years from 1989 to 1991 involve making scenes in public places. I remember the loud, joyous proclamations of our freakdom, our otherness, our willingness to be different. So what if we horrified the neighbors; we exulted in one another. Of course sometimes the humor was unnecessarily cruel and hostile. We had fun at the expense of others because we had nothing of our own to spend. And of course I was hungry a lot. I was in the middle of a personal bankruptcy. My parents and college friends seemed disappointed by my abrupt loss of ambition. I was broken-hearted over my long-term college boyfriend. I dated men who I disliked upon acquaintance, loathed after one date, got naked with after two dates and dumped before the third. I was writing a lot, but I never had real paying work so I couldn't afford tranqs. I would have killed myself except that I had all these really great friends I knew I could depend on and anyway hunger sapped my energy.