by Jake Brown
I did get in trouble again though for seeing Damien when we WENT away one Saturday to Port Jefferson, Long Island. And in my mom’s defense, I told her I was going to be somewhere else with Penny, and ended up taking the Long Island Railroad out there. When we got in Damien and I hitched a ride out to the sand dunes and it was a really gloomy overcast day. So I felt like I was lost away in some fantasy where I didn’t have to check with my mom to go to the bathroom or worry about her wire tapping my phone line for a day. It really felt like an escape for us, and I didn’t feel like leaving, and almost didn’t for a minute. Damien and I actually contemplated for a few magical moments running away, but we were old enough to know the idea was silly. Kids run away to New York City, not from New York City, and when we finally decided to head back in, to no surprise, my mother was angrily waiting for me at the train station. We had one of our usual fights and I really had to hold my tongue because if I had told her of my intention to run away that day, she would have locked me away in a dungeon somewhere. She still would have interrogated me about the imaginary guys she suspected me of prostituting with. Eventually, my mother’s overbearing ways broke up the relationship, because Damien had a freedom I couldn’t be compatible with, given the restrictions of my home life. He was very patient with me, but after a while, he got tired of waiting for my mom to loosen the reigns, and at one point, he even spoke with her to try and reassure her that she could trust me with him. He broke up with me in the spring of my senior year, and it wasn’t Damien who broke my heart in the end, it was my mom. He was one of the nicest people I’d met in that chapter of my life, and I still remember him fondly to this day.
In high school, I had a head for being organized and being in control. I got a challenge out of being industrious, and remember I used to make these friendship bracelets, and sit out on 8th Street and 6th Avenue and sell them. I would make $800 to $1000 selling them because I would go buy a huge plastic thing full of ones that were already made.Then I would sit on the street and make my own, in addition, and people passing by would think I’d made all of them, and be that much more compelled to buy one from me. I’d get all the Jersey people and tourists — the B&T (Bridge and Tunnel) crowd. I could sell quite a few in a given sitting. When I got to the end of my senior year, it was hard to figure out what direction I wanted to head in as far as college because my mother had always wanted me to become a lawyer. She preached at me so much about it that it almost convinced me that was what I wanted. Usually, if a parent says something loud enough times, the kid comes to believe it and she filled my head with enough of that about becoming an attorney that I started out with that in mind. She was also so busy putting me down socially, like saying the only people who carried pagers were prostitutes and drug dealers that I didn’t know what I wanted. No matter what I did at that point, it wasn’t ever good enough for my mom, so maybe I was motivated on some level to become an attorney to try and please her? I don’t know, but I headed off into my first year of college without a fucking clue personally as to what I wanted to study. On top of that, my freshman year was spent at Schiller International University in London, where my mom sent me to get away from New York.
She didn’t want me to be around boys with the kind of freedom that college can provide. To her credit, there weren’t many metal-heads at Schiller — so I started using Hit Parader Magazine’s Penpal section to write back and forth with guys. In London, I lived with my mom’s sister, so I was still under a pretty watchful eye anyway. Schiller University was an international university, with campuses in Germany, France, and so forth. I really liked it, and did really well in my classes, and liked everyone, but it was kind of weird for me because there weren’t any Americans, and definitely weren’t any long haired men. So I just stayed in school for the most part. My best friends were these girls named Nasrin and Rosita, the latter of whom was from the Fiji Islands. I also eventually met these two headbangers Patrick and Michael, two brothers from New York. Anyway, it was not your average freshman year — there were no sororities, no keg parties, and because I stayed with my aunt, I was pretty much under constant surveillance. She wasn’t as protective as my mom, but it was still restrictive. After a while, I got homesick for New York and knew I belonged back there, and wanted to travel to Brazil (every experience there was the BEST) as well. I think the event that finally sent me back to NY was my mother coming to England to visit me and staying for a month, and going as far as to escort me to class each day. She would ride to school with me on the trolley, sit in the back of class basically chaperone me. I figured I had a better chance of avoiding that kind of thing repeating itself if I went to school back in the States.
After my freshman year, I came back to New York and enrolled in Columbia University, where I finished out my undergraduate degree. I wanted to go to an Ivy League school, figuring it might shut my mom up, which it didn’t, but I had no regrets about the school. I had already taken some AP courses at Columbia while I was still in high school, so it was a pretty comfortable environment for me already. So when I got settled in, I made my major Business and my minor French. I had some really nerdy classes — Philosophy, French and German, and International Politics. I was there 3 ½ years, and despite rumors, I didn’t blow anyone for my grades. I probably didn’t fit in very well with the traditional Columbia mold because they didn’t have very many headbangers and by that time, I was a big-time rocker. My best friend there was another headbanger named Elise Carter, who was a film student. My first acting job actually was doing an independent film for her that we shot in the middle of freezing winter in Times Square wearing a mini-skirt, which was a lot of fun. Of course, my mother insisted I stay living at home while I went to college, which considering I enrolled at 17, and was a sophomore by 18 I guess wasn’t that hard to understand in one light. So I took the train to school every day, and you’d be on crack to think my mom backed off while I was in college. I guess she wanted to keep more an eye on me than ever because she was intent on molding me into what she was professionally, so at first I thought about majoring in Business Law, but didn’t want to.
On the side, I started modeling, did some small ads for Benetton, some catalog work, but my main focus was always school. I wanted to run a business, but my mom really didn’t like anything I had to say about that idea. So in a minor way, modeling was an escape of sorts for me, because it also gave me what money I had since my mom kept most of my money from me at that time in an obvious attempt to limit my freedom even further. Another escape of mine was going to art museums, which dated back to when I was a child. My favorite artists are Van Gogh, Monet, and Pissarro, and I would always be making things — be it jewelry, or those friendship bracelets — whatever, as a creative outlet, which I would also sell for extra money. At one point I bought these Pennaflax Water Color pencils, and drew things that blended into others, I guess trying to imitate my heroes. It never turned into anything more than fun, but I wasn’t really raised to be competitive, I was raised to be a shark. My mom had raised me to always reserve my comments toward other people’s feelings, for instance, someone’s musical tastes. If they disagree with yours, you don’t tell them that, you just say it’s not for me. She also raised me to always be independent, never to rely on a man for anything, to always have independence financially. Basically my mom brought me up to never rely on anyone for anything. In spite of her Nazi teenage parenting dictatorship, I admired her as a woman for being very independent, strong, smart and beautiful; she kept herself in really great shape, and was a lot of fun to do things with. She really took me to cool places as a kid, be it Connecticut, or the Hamptons, or museums, plays, and so forth. I was pretty sheltered in terms of men, which gave me a dangerous naivety when I got involved with Dick Pelicanose, but I was very enlightened from a young age on all things cultural, which drove me to experience every artistic thing I could throughout my formative years. Some of them I tried to turn commercial, or into little businesses — for instance my aforementioned friendship
bracelet business — but others were just in the spirit of the whole idea.
All throughout college, even after I was enrolled at Columbia, I still traveled, such that I still went to London, Paris, Brazil — everywhere. I was still very shy in college though, at least on campus, because I didn’t fit in with the typical Columbia mold; they were mostly corn-fed pieces of shit who think they are hot because of where they go to school. Also, I hated the school’s campus because I felt it was a totally artificial environment in relation what New York was really about, and for example, where NYU’s campus, by contrast, was basically the East Village, Columbia had a very model-like design to theirs. You don’t get to see what’s out there, so I gravitated toward the headbangers and the odd ball students who were clearly feeling the way I was about the campus, and believe me, we all stood out. One of my best friends in college, for example, was in the Russian Mafia, but was a really cool person. Going to college in New York I would say was a healthy thing overall as opposed to doing it all in Europe. I definitely found myself in New York, but I also didn’t in many ways because my mother worked so hard to define me in her terms.Thankfully, even at that age, I was determined to live life on my own.
clockwise from toP left: Jasmin and her Grandfather; Jasmin as a baby on the beach in St Croix US Virgin Islands; Jasmin as an infant with her favorite stuffed animal; Jasmin as a baby.
clockwise from toP left: Jasmin as a small child; Jasmin with her mother as a little girl; Jasmin in early school years; Jasmin in grade school.
toP: Jasmin with her Brooklyn Friends grade school class (top row, far left); bottom: Jasmin with her 9th Grade Class (plaid shirt, 3rd right, 2nd row from top).
Jasmin as a Metal Head Teen.
Part ii
The Toys!! The Toys!!! My Painful Descent Into Hell…
While I was still in college, I met the aforementioned asshole, Dick, who worked in a store called It’s Only Rock n’ Roll in the Village (he was the first of many dysfunctional relationships) which was like a record/ collectibles store.The owners were Mark and Debbie Zacharin, and they seemed pretty cool. I would pass by there every day on my way to and from my job at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City, New Jersey, where I took classified ads over the phone. I was 18 at this point and one day I went into the store and we actually started talking more personally, beyond just hello and ‘How are you?’ kind of stuff. For whatever reason, I thought he was cute. He had black, curly (poofy,) long hair, and a LONG, railthin nose, like a Pelican or a coke-addict’s (although I didn’t know one way or the other if he did that shit at the time.) He wasn’t a bad boy, but thought he was. His mother was deaf, and was a Jehovah’s Witness, and he lived with her in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Anyway, Dick worked directly for Mark in various capacities, one being he was driving errands for him for Mark’s side business, which was dealing marijuana. That was a back-of-the-store operation, so Dick did a mix of things — legal and otherwise — for Mark. Anyway, I would go into that store every day after work because I was hanging out in the Village a lot at that point — it was a hip, happening place, where Heavy Metal was king. It was maybe the closest thing you would have found at the time to the Sunset Strip in L.A. but nowhere near as exclusively themed around hair metal. Still, for New York, it was a very cool place to hang out.
Once Dick started talking to me and gave me his number, I saw the (201) area code, and should have seen that as my first red flag, because
37
38 what the hell was i thinking?!! New York people try not to mix with Bridge and Tunnel people (i.e. those from New Jersey and Long Island.) So one day, he asked me if I wanted to go out to lunch and ‘hang out,’ so he had a pretty cool Pontiac Firebird at the time, so I thought that was cool enough to hang out for a day, and the dick ALMOST ended up standing me up. He claimed he’d gotten home late from work, and after waiting on him for about an hour, I was ready to leave the store when he called, and begged me to wait for him. Having no self-esteem at that point in my life because of my inexperience with men, I — like a jackass — agreed to wait some more for him. Finally, when he showed up another hour later, he showed up with a flower and then we went to some Howard Johnson’s-type shithole to eat. So that was our first date. So we started hanging out after that, and I think on our second date, basically went from the store straight back to Fort Lee, New Jersey to his friend’s house, had sex, and that was it. He wasn’t my first sexual experience, but only the second guy I had been involved with physically up to that point. Anyway, he seemed more into hanging out with his friends at that point than anything else and this became a running theme in our relationship in time. His friends were scum bags, and basically after we’d finished having sex that day, he drove me almost immediately back to Manhattan and left me there feeling like total shit about myself.
Our next date was basically the same routine — I’d meet him late at night after work or somewhere late on a Saturday, but I put up with it because I thought he was the best I could do for myself at that time. There really wasn’t ever much for us to do, we usually went back to New Jersey, hung out, had sex and listened to records. It was really boring, and though I hadn’t done an extensive amount of dating up to that point, the guys I had dated were much more exciting than he was. What was more frustrating as time went on was finding out that he regularly cheated on me with all these slutty, trashy women — and I don’t say that out of some lingering bitterness over it — they were truly ground hogs. These were all girls he had dated before me, but he would keep their numbers and photos around, in open, plain view of me. It was truly pathetic, on his part to do it, and mine in that I tolerated it. So for the first two months we were dating, this was our routine. Then I met this Westie named Tommy, an Irish Mafia member, who I started seeing on the side because Dick wasn’t giving me enough attention. He’d only see me on the weekends and Tommy was an authentic bad boy, which I was very attracted to, but also wanted to spend every waking minute with me. He had long, brown hair and tattoos, very cute, and he basically beat people’s asses for a living for the Irish Mob. I remember one day I had to stitch him up right on 5th Avenue after some fight. He had some nasty gash in his chest, and told me to meet him with Butterfly stitches, but I was very attracted to that bad boy aspect. Anyway, I started dating Tommy on the side in July and did so while seeing Dick for 3 or 4 months into the fall. During this period, things only got worse with Dick. He got me pregnant at one point, made me go get an abortion (I HAD NO OBJECTIONS,) and then that same night, made me go with him to some trashy Jersey bar and openly flirted with other women in front of me. He was a real piece of shit. That was probably one of the shittiest feelings I’d ever had in my life and I obviously couldn’t tell my mom about it, because she would have disowned me.
Between she and Dick constantly criticizing me, I rarely got a break, which I guess is one of the reasons I kept seeing Tommy because he was my escape from all that. For a 19 year old girl who was pretty naïve to the world to begin with, even growing up in New York, trying to carry a full load at Columbia, juggling two men, dodging my mom whenever possible, ( in terms of keeping tabs on my life) plus keep a job, I definitely had my hands full. Dick and I over the summer had started the bizarre pastime of attending a lot of antique/collectible conventions, where every item you could possibly imagine was sold or traded. In our case, it was usually rarity pop culture items — be they Barbie or Kiss Dolls, and I learned quickly that there was quite a market for this business. It’s one thing to see it in a Village specialty store, but these shows went on every weekend all over the East Coast, and Dick regularly dragged me along to them. Anyway, since I was being dragged along to these without a choice, I figured I’d express a genuine interest to see if it would help our relationship improve — maybe thinking Dick would take more of an interest in me? I don’t know, but he was still his regular old piece-of-CRAP self, flirting with other girls at Kiss Conventions in front of me, you name it. I did like going to work the Kiss Conventions because
I loved the atmosphere, there were a lot of cute guys with long hair there, which was a nice distraction from asshole. He never let me talk to anyone though, other than when I was making sales. I remember one convention, in particular, when Dick had disappeared as usual, and at some point in the day, I wound up playing pinball with this little nerdy kid who had bought a bunch of stuff from us. It was funny to me, because the kid was a zit-faced teenager who could have been my kid brother. He was 15 at the oldest, and our crime was playing a Kiss Pinball game. Well, needless to say, when Dick saw this
