I’m off to a monastery for a few days because MY HEART IS A DESERT and I need to go sit by the sea and be quiet near some trees, but I want you to all talk about the most dirtbag summers of your lives and what you did then. If you were never a dirtbag, talk about your favorite Wikipedia K-hole! Okay, I love you, back soon!
When I was ~17 I finally pulled the greatest divorce-kid trick out of my sleeve and went around telling each parent I was sleeping at the others’ house, while really staying out all night with my friends.
This act of badassery is only slightly belittled by the fact that we mostly spent our time chastely hitting up the 24-hour Burger King and playing Super Mario Bros.
I pulled a version of this where several other girls and I all told our parents we were sleeping over at each other’s houses and stayed out all night! I think we win the Non-Dirtbaggy Dirtbag Activities contest, though, we ended up at the closed gate of a state park trying to watch a meteor shower but not seeing anything because it was too cloudy.
Edit: actually now that I think about it we did get into the liquor cabinet at one girl’s house first, never mind, we were dirtbags indeed.
The last year of HS, I would regularly spend the night at Caribou until it closed and then Denny’s until, like, 5 am. I told my parents this, and Mom asked my older sister what I was *really* doing. Sadly, I was telling the truth.
I did once, when I was 13, tell her I was going to the aquarium when I was actually going to Warped Tour.
We went bowling so much we started having to give our parents receipts because they thought we were lying.
Caribou until close, chain diner as late as possible… Oh, Minnesota. The Perkins we dirtbagged at (Riverside) started closing at midnight because of gang activity apparently?
I did a super-dirtbaggy version of this by borrowing my friend’s key to her house while she was out of town for the weekend with her parents, and then sneaking into her house with my boyfriend and cavorting there all weekend.
Great use of “cavorting”, let’s all use that word more.
I got dirtbaggy in the basement of a house being foreclosed on that was mostly empty for a while there, and once in the basement of a rental house because there was a red velvet couch in it (which I ended up buying & owning for the next decade plus).
I loved when this was happening on twitter and I’m glad it’s here now.
I would say it was either A. the summer I was 14 when my friends and I spent way too many days at the Six Flags in my town. We all had season passes and no jobs and the ride workers recognized us all by the end of summer and were like oh these assholes again. None of us had jobs and everything was expensive so we would often end up paying for cheese fries in all change at the end of the day and pissing off everyone.
Or B. the summer after college. I graduated in early May but the lease on my apartment was through July. I worked three hours a day and spent the rest of my time either walking on the beach by myself or bothering my roommate at work to give me free/discount food. We also spent almost the entire months of June and July wearing only underwear, eating cold pizza for every meal, and living on a futon mattress on the floor because the actual frame wouldn’t go flat anymore but we still wanted to lay. It was great.
Were you on the north side??
I was! Rogers Park/Edgewater, which probably tells you where I went to college. After that I moved further inland and it was no longer a 5 minute walk to the beach,.I had to take a bus like some kind of heathen and it was terrible.
I once paid for a $1.00 box of Dare ginger snaps entirely with pennies at the Key Foods in the East Village. It did not endear me to the two checkout ladies. But what can I say, I was broke.
The summer after high school my mom wanted me to get a FULL TIME job, but I only took a PART TIME job so I could go out with my friends and dog-sit for my grandma and watch her cable until 3am (we didn’t have cable at home) and sleep until noon and then work my stupid shift at the Gap. That was it, my teenaged rebellion. It was a difficult period in my life. Amazingly we all got through it.
Probably the one when I was 15. Pub visits, fully clothed swimming in the sea post-pub, things I’m not talking about on tinternet, and my first music festival. I’m the one in the red stripey tights, I was there with the two girls next to me and we met these dudes there when we joined in their orange cricket game. I got thrown to the top of a human pyramid.
The summer before I turned sixteen my parents shipped me off to England and Germany. Presumably it was so I could visit relatives, but I’m pretty sure it was mostly to get rid of me for a few months because I was just so insufferable and melodramatic.
My dirtbaggery pretty much consisted of just being a moody teenager who’d much rather read alone than engage with distant relatives/family friends that I hadn’t seen since I was a toddler. So not that dirtbaggy? I regret it in hindsight though because some of those people died not long afterwards and the clock is ticking for some of the others and I could have gotten so much more out of it. Also I probably could’ve had much better tea. The prim, elderly Germans deserved so much more than my disagreeable, ungrateful self who could really only focus on the fact that the tv was black and white and only like a foot across and only showing the Deutsch equivalent of PBS and how many war memorials can we visit before I explode. There were also way too many naked people for comfort. On the plus side, I essentially ate nothing but Nutella and gummi cokes for months and discovered Terry Pratchett. I was massive and pimply (ok, so it was one red dot on my forehead, but in my mind I looked like a pizza) and awkward and had a haircut that I thought was edgy, but really it just made me look a bit like a hobbit. Then I went back to the states and spent the rest of the summer sitting around the little New England harbor town that I lived in with my far more dirtbagish friends, watching tourists trip over cracks in the sidewalk and writing bad fanfic.
Fifteen year olds…
Your opening statement reminds me of my theory that the Amish “rumspringa” is actually derived from “Romespringa”, which is when Germans ship their teenagers off to Rome/Italy in the fall so that they can have some peace at home.
To be fair, those gummy colas are pretty good…
The summer before my senior year of high school was spent half heartedly looking for jobs, moodily smoking (or pretending to smoke, tbh) on the porch of my parents house in the wee-hours of the morning, casually breaking overly-earnest teenage boys’ hearts, & discovering Milan Kundera. Followed up by a trip to the UK during which I was melodramatic about everything.
Oh, adolescence. Dirtbaggery abounds.
I had just broken up with the first major love of my life. He was working out of state, his mom on vacation. I HOUSE-SAT free for the entire summer. Nothing like living in a person’s house alone and drowning your sorrows in cigarettes and M&Ms while wearing his clothes to get you through a breakup.
cigarettes and candy, oh man.
Summer between 2nd and 3rd year of college (California). I returned back to Cook County to live with my parents and save up money for the next year of college. Although he and I had gone through a bitter long-distance breakup earlier that spring (winter?), this boy and I had decided to just “go with things” after the death of a close friend that spring brought us back together (maybe?). He had just begun an apprenticeship as a tattoo artist. YEAH.
I got a job in the city as a DATING SERVICE phone representative. The place was called High Life Adventures and me and the other gals working the phones would sit in the AC, read magazines, encourage people to sign up and go play ultimate frisbee or drink at Cubs games. Things I remember: smoking Camel No. 9’s on the fire escape with my boss and on the hot as balls Clybourn Metra platform after work. The boy lived with my best friends in a second story walkup where they paid $200 a month each and I’d tell my parents it was “more convenient” to stay there with my “friends” and instead get drunk with them and sleep in a way too hot room, making out with said boy who now had giant gauges.
I rode the bus a lot and ate Wendys and drove out to DeKalb on my days off to drink white russians with my high school best friend or go see really shitty hardcore shows. Best/worst moment: work trip to INDIANA BEACH (there is more than just corn in Indiana!) where even though I was not 21, I got drunk on a party bus on the way with screwdrivers and keystone lights. I can assure you, being drunk in a “lake” in central Indiana surrounded by co-workers is… something. But I made a fuckton of commission at that job.
I did have so much fun that I didn’t want to go back to college, though, so WOO.
It’s the best part of Americana!
I cannot even explain what it is like to just be chaining menthol parliaments in wet swimsuit bottoms while waiting for shitty carnival nachos and staring at said grimy lake.
this is somehow SUCH a chicago story and i love it. my dirtbag story above also took place in chicago and while i was excited to move somewhere new, man do i miss being 3 blocks from lake michigan.
Chicago is dirtbag city, yo. Even now I feel like secretly indulging!
Ooooof this just flashed me back to a dirt bag summer I had long forgotten, between high school and college. I was dating an older college boy who lived in Chicago, and I would take the Megabus down from Milwaukee to visit him. He lived in Bridgeport and he would go buy beer while I waited around the corner (being underage and all) and we would get drunk on his fire escape and dance around the kitchen to Tusk with his super dirt-baggy creepy BFF/roommate. I would come home from Chicago weekends and give my friends knowing looks like, “I’m dating an ADULT now, what do you know about ANYTHING?” He came up to visit once or twice and my dad made him sleep on the couch.
The summer after college I went off to “work” (I got paid in only room and board) at a wilderness school. I slept on the floor of a log cabin with no running water and that was heated by a cast iron stove. We ate paleo but like on steroids, so no seasonings or anything either. I think I wanted to, like, find myself or something, but at the end of the summer I realized that no I really wanted to live close to my friends and eat bread and stuff, so I went home and got a real job.
Reading these always makes me feel incredibly uncool because I never really had a dirtbag period – I was pretty depressed in my late teens/early 20s and so spent a lot of time in bed doing nothing, and my second year at university I once got drunk enough to throw up/be hungover once (at the English Society dinner for my college. I blame all the port), but otherwise I can’t really think of anything. I went to school and did my homework and had basically no social life and spent a lot of time reading and going on the internet
Aged about 14 I was doing my Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Award and got as far as the practice expedition stage, spent the entire time crying, and then pulled out of the actual expedition at the last minute because I just couldn’t face it, and spent several hours being shouted at by my parents and/or crying. Possibly dirtbaggy? I also was very grumpy about not wanting to go to gigs/music festivals, JUST LET ME STAY AT HOME (I was generally dragged out anyway).
Oh god I did all of DofE bronze except the final expedition! My inability to read a map, the horrible blisters, general hatred of camping and difficulty in strapping the backpack across my giant teenage boobs killed it for me. My parents didn’t care as it’d been my decision (and my money) up to that point.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one! Especially as I also had problems with the rucksack and giant teenage boobs (the guy in charge of showing us how to do them up put mine on me and told me to look at how the waist strap fastened. I could not see his hands fastening the waist strap because my breasts were in the way. It was awful). It was mainly social stuff that was my problem, I think – I was with people from my friendship group, so it should have been fine, but interacting with them frequently made me feel left out and unwanted, and the expedition environment made it completely unbearable. I slept in my sister’s tent instead of with my own group and cried a lot.
I wish my parents hadn’t cared; they were furious. (But despite no DofE award I got into Oxford anyway, and now nobody will ever care about my lack of it, so it all worked out.)
I’ve done even less than you; I am the biggest goody two shoes in the world. The only thing I ever lied to my Mom about, growing up, was that time I took the bus with my friend to go to the public library. #rebel
Of course, I did spend my late teens/early 20s in a clinical depression that led to a lot of behaviors that MIGHT be described as rebellious or dirtbag-esque. I skipped school, I couldn’t hang onto a job, I went into debt. But there’s nothing cool or rebellious about the way I did them. I skipped school to go to the cemetery and cry over my mother’s grave. I lost jobs because I couldn’t get the will to get out of bed and spend another soul-sucking day selling people Guess jeans. I never had enough self-esteem to take pride in my rebellions, because they were only failures to me.
Now that I’m older, I’m a lot more relaxed and have a healthy level of self-esteem. But …I’m still obsessed with shit like having a good credit score and paying off loans early and getting a good performance review. Not a dirtbag bone in my body.
Ugh…Port. (shudder)
I was too scared of my parents’ anger to be a dirtbag, basically. I am still scared of my parents’ anger now.
In 11th or 12th grade, the health teacher and I got into a disagreement because her definition of “easy to get alcohol” was could you grab one out of the fridge when your parents weren’t around or paying attention, full stop, and my definition was could I grab one with a 100% guarantee that my parents would never notice they were one short, which, absolutely not.
I never broke any rules as a teenager either. My parents were on the young side and reminded me several times that they weren’t stupid and I wouldn’t get away with anything. Also: my dad had an unpredictable temper and quite frankly, I was terrified of him. I wasn’t allowed to argue–the kind of talking-back and shouting that my friends did would have gotten me screamed at and hit, at a bare minimum.
Needless to say I didn’t get into any trouble. Even when I was with friends I was convinced he would somehow know.
Honestly, that says something about your parents’ level of anger. When you were 14 and too sad to go on a trip that ought to have been fun but actually was awful, they were furious and yelled at you for hours. They should have acknowledged how hard you’d tried, and they should have checked up on you to find out why you were so sad. And there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do that justifies screaming at them for hours while they cry. That’s like kicking someone who’s already lying down. I wouldn’t treat an adult like that, especially not someone I loved (because I’d hate to see them be that sad), and absolutely not a kid. That’s a really, really punishing thing to do. No wonder you didn’t dare to do anything. I seriously don’t blame you for still being conditioned to be scared of them. They know how to push your buttons – they installed them. Let’s just say I can relate to your experiences.
I feel kinda the same. I never had what felt like “wild” teenage years, I only watched my brother do the stupid / dangerous stuff and decided, no thanks, I’d rather not ruin my health. And as long as we acted responsible and didn’t lie about what we were up to, it was ok with our parents. So music festivals, dying my hair blue, hanging out with metalheads, skipping school a day for conventions and the like were no act of rebellion.
I read quite a lot, too.
Same boat. I suffer from depression and PCOS, so as a teen I definitely caused some problems in my house because I was just one big walking hormonal/chemical imbalance (this did get better once I started taking the appropriate medication). But I never rebelled. I mostly sat around and cried a lot. I remember crying in my therapist’s office my senior year of HS because I couldn’t think of anything to write about for my college essays, because I had no life experiences, having spent the past few years sitting around my house doing nothing. Not that “I Sat Around Doing Nothing” wouldn’t have made a hilariously perplexing essay for the admissions folk to read.
In the summers during college I worked at the Friendly’s at the beach. The dirtbaggiest thing about it was maybe that my dad (who was between jobs at the time) had to spend 10 minutes each way driving me there and back because I was too anxious to get a driver’s license.
I feel you. I did some dirtbaggy things in my time, but none of them were very interesting and few actually happened in the summer.
It is NEVER too late
I spent one summer working part time at the Aquarium, so I was clean-cut in chinos and a polo at work, and then spent basically all the rest of the time high as fuck and smoking clove cigarettes, hanging out in Harvard Sq pretending to be tough or hanging out at Friendly’s (where half my friends worked) pretending to be tough.
Cloves made dirtbags of us all, I swear.
They totally did. We felt so cool, so sophisticated sneaking them, and your parents almost never caught on because you didn’t smell like cigarettes.
Even now, smelling cloves immediately takes me back to high school. It is the smell of being a teenage dirtbag.
AMEN.
TRUTH.
I was definitely not much of a dirtbag (too boring) but the summer I was 15 I went on a church mission trip states away for like 3 weeks and only called my parents once (I left a message which they replayed a bunch of times to drive home horror/terror I created. It was basically me going “I’m not dead. I’m eating. Okay g2g.” Peak teen moment). The actual trip we did mission-y stuff (built pews, I think, that kind of stuff) but mostly I made out with a youth group guy I had a major crush on (we snuck out of the motel 6 we were staying at on the way back home to meet up at the Waffle House across the street in the middle of the night) and we may have lightly been mean to some of the younger kids in the group. Teens, man. Same summer I went to Latin Nationals with my friends (also states away), so no supervision, many hijinks there.
Latin Nationals was always the peak of my misconduct each summer. But I was also on my state JCL board so I feared being found out and impeached the whole time
True story, I was a 20-year-old dirtbag. Highlights from that summer included showing up late (and hungover) every day for the morning shift at Tim Horton’s; trying (unsuccessfully) to pawn a pearl bracelet; trying (successfully) to pawn various DVDs; and working for a week at a call centre that was very obviously scamming the elderly. Oh, and my roommate was in a lesbian love triangle, which led to non-stop drama. Also, there was a whole thing with cough syrup that I am not comfortable discussing publicly. Actually there are a lot of things about that summer that I am not comfortable discussing publicly, but trust me, other dirtbag activities unfolded.
Me too! Highlights include losing my job selling t-shirts to tourists because I was always late, hungover, and reading sullenly instead of paying attention to the customers. Finally fired when my boss saw me nonchalantly observing two women dressing up their pursedog in baby onesies, and then putting said onesies back on the display rack. Also “40 sundays,” on which we would scour in the couch cushions to put together enough loose change to buy 40s at the corner store and start drinking at 9.
I’m pretty sure I was a 23 year old dirtbag, except I had a full-time professional job, and my dirtbagness wasn’t just limited to a summer. I too don’t necessarily want to provide details, but thank you for reminding me that I in fact DID have a dirtbag time period.
Yeah, mine was more of a dirtbag year, tbh, but that summer was Peak Dirtbag.
Summer before my senior year of college. I was supposed to be working at a summer job in my hometown. But I blew off the job all the time to go into the city and hang out with my college friends. We hung around in filthy summer housing rooms and altered our consciousness. I messily made out in public with at least two of my gay male friends (I am a girl). I flirted with random dudes only to have lesbian crisis feelings in the middle and run away. One time I puked all over a guys bathroom, “cleaned” it up with dorm toilet paper, took a shower and never saw him again.
I wandered around. I don’t think I ate food. I no showed my shifts at Starbucks and got fired over the phone.
In the end I had my first hookup with a woman on the day Madonna’s “Music” video premiered and that started to solve a lot of my problems. But not before I had a phase that fall of asking everyone to play fight me.
So glad to not be 20 anymore.
Wow, you really crammed a lot in that summer. Strong work.
15. I started smoking weed and hanging out in the woods. My uniform was usually a fraying tank top, those cotton Soffee-brand shorts you could get 10 pairs of for like $5 at Target, multiple hemp jewelry items and disgusting flip flops/no shoes. My male friends all wore black band t-shirts covered in holes and paid homeless people to buy alcohol, which we’d hide our parents on a shelf below a sewer grate on a suburban street. I took electric guitar lessons from a 20-year-old metalhead who smelled terrible, and eventually quit because I didn’t practice enough to learn anything but Green Day and Nirvana chords. I was also a lifeguard at the pool down the street, so my job was literally spending hours slumped in a chair looking miserable and trying desperately to feel cool.
It was great.
Soffee shorts!! Oh man, do they still sell those? I still have a black and white pair from when I was 12, and the elastic is barely hanging in, but they make my butt look great.
This is a great description of dirtbaggery.
I love Soffe shorts TO THIS DAY.
hiding booze on a shelf below a sewer grate on a suburban street might just win you this little competition.
Summer between middle school and high school (age 14). My friend Steph and I, along with whatever other friends were available, would ride our bikes around town and just get into whatever. Some highlights:
— Riding our bikes through the Dairy Queen drive-through like a couple of badasses.
–Hanging out at the community pool, where we were probably the oldest people there who weren’t parents.
–Being real rebels, going to the July 4th carnival after dark. It was a small town, so no less than two relatives saw us and reported back to my mom. (Also I came home covered in funnel cake powdered sugar, soooooo)
–Hanging out at the mall (obviously. small town.), writing swear words on every Etch-a-Sketch and Magnadoodle.
–INTENDED to jump off “the Trestle,” the train bridge off which jumping into the river was a bit of a dirtbag right of passage. Unfortunately, my mom heard me talking about it and yelled at me a bunch until I was too scared to even go by the Trestle for the rest of the summer. I was a real amateur dirtbag.
The swear words on the Etch-a-Sketch and Magnadoodle are 100% perfection and are going to make me smile periodically today, so thank you for that.
Wait, are you supposed to NOT ride bikes through a drive-through? I totally do this, like, all the time.
Oh, maybe?? I think I remember them telling us not to do it again, though. But the DQ in question was not really easily accessible by bikes, so it might of just been uncommon for them.
Most drive-throughs have rules against bicycles. It was a big deal here in Portland (OR) when a local chain made the decision to allow them.
The summer when I was 15 going on 16. I lived in a very rural area, but I had finally made friends with two boys who each lived about a mile from me in opposite directions. Since I was the central house, they would both come over every day and we would explore the woods or play video games. It felt like we were always getting into trouble that summer, but it mostly consisted of getting caught accidentally trespassing on neighbors’ property, which never seemed like a huge deal as all that land clearly belonged to the deer and elk anyway. I’m not sure my parents ever even knew that I spent my days hanging out with teenaged boys without any supervision.
I had a couple dirty faux-hippy summers in high school, but mostly summers have been the dirtbags, not me. My entire 20s was just a string of miserable summers: shitty internships, broken hearts, being broke, having a colicky baby, innumerable stressful moves to new cities, miscarriage. Blargh.
Summer before my senior year of college. I was supposed to be working at a summer job in my hometown. But I blew off the job all the time to go into the city and hang out with my college friends. We hung around in filthy summer housing rooms and altered our consciousness. I messily made out in public with at least two of my gay male friends (I am a girl). I flirted with random dudes only to have lesbian crisis feelings in the middle and run away. One time I puked all over a guys bathroom, “cleaned” it up with dorm toilet paper, took a shower and never saw him again.
This hermitage is my life goal. Also, this sentence from the Wiki on the monks: “The hermitage makes and ships its own fruitcake and date-nut cake based on a recipe developed by the monks. The proceeds help to support the hermitage. They also have begun to produce a granola product called “Holy Granola”.”
holy granola
Spending time there is now on my bucket list!
I live in Big Sur. The Hermitage is really, really beautiful and peaceful and amazing. I sell their fruitcake and granola at my gift shop! Both are excellent.
The summer I turned 21, which was also the summer after my semester abroad. I was not only dealing with a surprisingly bad case of reverse culture shock, I had also just been dumped by my long-term boyfriend. I was subletting a room that literally had no windows, and I spent a lot of time… uh, not in that room. My favorite thing to do was a weekly karaoke night where the first hour after the bar opened its doors, the bar would have kegs of free beer. Naturally, my friends and I loved to compete over who could drink the most. I rarely “won,” but I frequently got runner-up. During this time I fell in love with a young man affectionately dubbed “Sad Steve” by these same friends, and unsuccessfully tried to seduce him away from his girlfriend, who seemed like a very cool and talented lady who did not deserve a boyfriend that was buying several rounds of cheap whiskey for a sad newly-21-year-old on a weekly basis. The peak of this experience was me leaning on my friends as they were slowly escorting me out of the bar, empty solo cups in each hand, lamenting Sad Steve’s lack of interest in leaving his girlfriend despite his willingness to try to make out with me on the dance floor (which I resisted, clinging on to the very last shred of my dignity), loudly crying out, “BUT I’M A CLASSY LADY!”
Toasties, this summer ended very badly, but I’m going to end on the slightly funny note rather than a deeply sad one. <3
(Okay, so, between this thread and Nikki’s question about childhood literary crushes on twitter, the morning’s productivity is gone)
My dirtbag summer was all about a boy: we were 18, both lived at home, and spent the entire summer cruising around on our bikes after dark, and fooling around & more in every single park in our neighbourhood. I’d bike home, panickly missing my self-imposed curfew, and my parents would be like “oh, we trust you!” and I’d think, “probably shouldn’t”
Also, I worked at a coffee place and had a 630am shift I biked to every morning, which is still one of my more impressive accomplishments.
Picture it! Summer of 2001: I go on a first date to the movies with a guy I like. When we get there, I insist that we need to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I guess no more need be said. XD
That’s not dirtbag, that’s just nerdy! (Nerdbag?)
Geez, people, my dirtbag summer was when I was 22. How did you guys manage it so early? Mine was the summer I was “being a professional musician.” It was awesome. Details are too sordid to disclose, even anonymously.
When I was 19 I worked as a bartender in an Italian hostel in Positano. I was terrible at making drinks, consistently gave away free ones and got drunk on the job. Instead of wages I got a free mattress, which I moved to the roof of the hostel, and spent most days on the beach. For food during the day I helped myself to the hostel’s kitchen, which I justified as NOT stealing because I made no attempt to do it sneakily or subtly. sketchiest moment was making out with a 40 year old Italian man because he had coughed up 2 euros for a pair of beach chairs and I felt vaguely grateful. It was, however, horrendous to have him periodically break for air, look at me, lick his lips, and say ‘Belliiiissiiima’. The teenage dirtbagness of it was accentuated by the fact that out shower was disgusting and so I resigned myself to being encrusted with salt water for two months straight.
That sounds great. I wish I hadn’t missed my window to work in a hostel.
Sometime after high school but before I was 21 I spent a summer mostly drinking cheap beer and smoking on a friend’s porch. Her parents were cool with this, but they were not cool with us using their bathroom. I got to be a real pro at peeing behind bushes.
I find the parental likes and dislikes to be very confusing.
The eternal summer of middle school, probably. As soon as the weather got nice enough, dirtbag bestie and I would get off the school bus at the wrong stop and then go raid her pantry for Mountain Dew, Jif pb, and graham crackers (my house only had like unsalted nuts and dried fruit) and then bike without our helmets to the old quarry to put stuff on the tracks for trains to squish, or over to the little league fields to buy cheap hot dogs and ruin our dinners. And if the weather wasn’t nice enough, we’d stay inside and “prank” people on AIM and watch Wayne’s World for the umpteenth time. We had a joint Freewebs account, a joint Neopets account, and posted stuff dedicated to each other on DeviantArt.
It was young and gentle dirtbaggery, before we both went our separate dirtbag ways. Now she does the whole EDM festival/hooping thing and I have gone yuppie-dirtbag, being a vegetarian yoga/climbing enthusiast and stuff… I kind of regret that our friendship didn’t survive but I’m not sure we could have matured together.
My first summer home from college, my parents wanted me to get a job. So I joined a local bar band called Buzzbomb and played classic rock cover sets (and one original song!) 4 hours a night for $40. Everyone else in the band was in their 40’s. I was 19.
We were actually really good—they insisted on practicing the entire set twice a week. So much that they only ended up booking 2 shows before I had to go back to school. So I made $80 over 3 months playing bass in the scummiest bars in Palm Bay, Florida. When my mom came to see us, the band snuck me beer and I had to try and drink it onstage without her seeing.
Oh my god, this rules!! Have you seen Ricki and the Flash? If you remember that experience fondly (which it sounds like you do), I think you will like that movie.
I haven’t seen it but I’ll put it on my list! It was one of the greatest summers of all time, followed by one of the worst autumns, as my parents had no qualms about sending me back to school broke as hell.
In high school, I went through a weird phase wherein I decided I was a Rastafarian hippie and wanted to live my life at the beach (please note: I am a white Christian woman and knew nothing of what a cultural appropriation asshole I was being, so please bear with me). I stopped brushing my hair for about 6 weeks so that it was totally matted and heinous to look at, and would walk down to the beach every day – wearing a bikini and flip fops and bringing nothing else with me but my own smug sense of self-actualization – and would spend the next 4-5 hours napping in the sand. I would walk to the shore where the water met the sand, plop down and sleep. That’s it. All summer long. I was also obsessed with zebra stripes and wore red, yellow and green beaded anklets. UGH.
I was fourteen, the summer between middle and high school. My best friend and I snuck out of her mom’s house, went joyriding (friend was also 14), clubbing at the under-21 nights in town, shoplifting outfits from Wet Seal for said clubbing, and getting banned from various AOL teen chatrooms for having such sign-off messages as, ‘life is like a dick: when it gets hard, fuck it.’
She moved away shortly thereafter, otherwise I’d probably have a juvie record.
The summer after I finished university. I was living with my parents, working a shitty but easy job that was a relief after three years of unrelenting stress. Friday to Sunday I’d go off and do my own thing in London – when my mum asked, I always told her I was seeing uni friends, but I was actually mostly going to BDSM parties. It was a strange time.
Mmm the year I was living at home and going to community college- staying out til 4AM almost every night, chain smoking, skipping class, sleeping til 1PM and complaining when my parents asked me in to pitch in around the house in any way but also taking their money for gas and food and beer.
UGH. DIRTBAG 19 YEAR OLD BOB. MONSTER.
I am loving everyone’s stories!
I was lucky enough to spend six weeks of the summer of 1987 in Italy. We had a foreign exchange student stay with us during my junior year of high school and I left with her when she went home. I wasn’t a rebellious teen (I was too lazy to be rebellious, honestly), but in Italy, i could be who I wanted. Which meant I started drinking, smoking cigarettes, and kissing boys who didn’t even speak English (and one Canadian with whom I corresponded for several months afterward). I packed my dirtbag side away for my senior year (I had other things to do), but once I left for college, it was all dirtbag all the time–a trend that continues to this day.
Uh, the summer I worked in a sandwich shop by the beach making $8.50/hour (this isn’t that bad but I had a different, more boring job opportunity that would have made me $15/hour) and only working 20 hours a week out of laziness while also pretending to be “saving up to move”, and generally having a great time? The dirtbag part is probably that I hangover-barfed in the employee bathroom multiple times. Standing up for 6 hours while packing sandwiches (not touching food, thankfully) and slowly going through all the stages of a hangover while vertical- WOULD NOT RECOMMEND.
I dropped out of university and started a podcast. Dropping out was a good decision; the course was terrible and I hated everything about the place (I started a much better university a few months later). The podcast was. . . not so much a good decision.
We mostly just drank and shouted at each other. We were all 18 or 19 and we didn’t have a single well thought out opinion between us. The high water mark of all this shit was when the girlfriend of one of my ‘co-hosts’ was house sitting for somebody, so we all went to this total strangers living room and recorded our terrible podcast. Naturally, I was strung out on (necessary and legitimately prescribed) painkillers at the time.
Honestly, I was a total dirtbag for a good couple of years there. I grew up a little around the time I turned 20, thank God.
I sold ice cream at a cart at various festivals and events. I started dating my supervisor, and every time he would come around with new loads of ice cream, we’d smoke a joint. Then I could eat ice cream all afternoon, just keeping the boxes to count them as “damaged.” We had sex in the depot office, in the van, in a park and sometimes at his place if his folks weren’t home. We hotboxed the empty freezer at the end of the summer. We got my underage friend into a club, I don’t even remember how. I cheated on him once, but I had a chance for a threesome in a VW microbus with a hippie couple, fueled by mushrooms and Ænima .
Realizing I took most of my summers off from being a dirtbag the rest of year, from high school through most of college. And maybe selected parts of grad school.
Yeah, I’m realizing that I spent my summers working full-time and hanging out with my family I think? And reverted to full-dirtbag when I went back to college/all of grad school.
I was on too short a leash as a teen to be true to my dirtbag heart (don’t worry, it beats in me still) but the summer between junior & senior years of college I had a tedious temp job where all I did was listen to another admin talk about scrapbooking & her drug addict ex, burn CDs of Radiohead concerts & make semi-professional cover art for them, and get extremely stoned on long lunch break drives by the ocean. Outside of work, I drove around getting extremely stoned, went to parties & on road trips to procure weed with old high school friends, and fought with my parents (this was an extreme low point for us, as they’d recently read my diary and found out I had done drugs and slept with girls, and Mom was at peak menopause, which in my family brings out the crazy — she was constantly mumbling to herself about how I looked like a “punk rock boy” like it was a disgusting infection). I remember it all quite fondly.
OH I FORGOT also at that crap temp job, I was working on this truly insane novel that was heavily inspired by Infinite Jest, which I had actually read twice the preceding year, and included a terrorist attack on the Statue of Liberty — and this was the summer BEFORE 9/11. Marijuana is a hell of a drug.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as dirtbag, but I regularly snuck out of my house for three years to illegally work at a library shelving books. I think I was 13?
The library had a rotating staff of volunteers who shelved and did other miscellaneous tasks, but I managed to talk my boss into paying me for the volunteer work under the table. I continued to get paid illegally until I could get a real work permit and a legal job. (As an adult I wonder whether there was a general library slush fund that she dipped into to pay me or whether she thought I was particularly precocious and paid me out of her own pocket. It is also possible that she noticed I never had lunch and was always wearing weather-inappropriate clothing and intuited that I could use some money.)
Also relevant is that my parents had no idea that I was sneaking out of the house to work illegally at the library, and I’ve never told them. They never asked why I always had money, or more likely never noticed.
Oh wait, I did have an actual dirtbag summer now that I think about it. The summer between junior and senior year, I and my friends:
– Regularly snuck into an abandoned building to hang out and read teen magazines.
– Got into a hit and run with a driver’s ed car (why would anyone do this, this was not smart.) Nobody was seriously injured, but I’m sure we scared the hell out of the girl who was having a driving lesson. My friend (who owned the car and was driving at the time) got into a whole mess of trouble and got her license suspended. I and my other buddies got off scot-free.
– A different friend and I stole one of those metal poles with a stop sign and a one way sign on it. We shoved it in my trunk, but it didn’t fit, so we left the trunk open with this giant pole sticking out and drove all around town looking for tools to remove the signs with. We bought tools at the hardware store and dismantled it in the parking lot, and explained that it was “art” when someone got mad at us. Also didn’t get in trouble for this, somehow.
– Worked in food service and regularly stole the food, never got caught. Was responsible for training a new person who was bad at being sneaky, he got caught and was fired. I continued to steal food with no repercussions.
I spent the summer I was seven at my grandma’s house in Florida, where I ate popsicles for two meals a day, was paid a dollar per lizard I removed from the house, and read the tabloids about JonBenet aloud for my Grandma and her friends.
Is it weird that this sounds like heaven to me?
This sounds like an amazing way to live life in Florida.
This is actually the star of an Alice Hoffman novel
This is the life.
I’m pretty non-dirtbag, but the year I did a high school exchange in Germany was the closest i ever got. All my exchange student friends and I would tell our host families we were staying at each other’s houses, then go book a hostel room in Dresden and drink our way through the neighborhood. The most memorable events were getting drunk in a playground at midnight, getting drunk while setting off fireworks for German new year’s celebrations, and sharing Pink Elephant cigarettes that smelled like vanilla. Going to hookah bars and making out with each other was another big one.
We were super classy, and I kind of miss it.
I have similar tales of my HS exchange in Germany, too, though I was often on the lesser, less-bold end of the spectrum of behavior that we Amis engaged in. I have no idea if (all of) these qualify as dirtbaggery, honestly, but I remember them with a flushed mix of fondness and absolute mortification, so that’s got to count for something, right?
Highlights?
* 30 American teenagers take over an entire hostel in a small German town for a month, prior to being outposted to our host families across the country. I convinced our group that performing “Summer Nights” at a future-dated meeting with the German Bundestag would be a great way to represent ourselves. We taught locals the Macarena at the weeklong (?) carnival/festival/circus thing that came to town. I fell (briefly – my attention span was very short at this point) for my best friend in the program; we spent most of the month making out, but also trying to convince everyone else we were just friends.
* Skipping school to travel to Cologne (about an hour and a half south of where I was placed), meet up with friends from the program, make out with their friends visiting from back home.
* Made my host sister hate me, through a mix of my own shyness (which came across as bitchy), making out with one of her friends, and a weird word-of-mouth misunderstanding perpetuated by another American on a similar program. Spent much of the remaining months in the attic “apartment” feeling lonely and misunderstood, reading books like _Sophie’s Welt_, and papering/repapering a diary. (To be fair, it’s likely that this would have been the case regardless of whether she’d liked me or not.)
* On Easter holiday, packed off from my normal host family to a different one, I had the opportunity to: request that my new host brother order a “Screaming Orgasm” for me; try my first, then second (and last-for-years) Long Island Iced Tea; wake up in the downstairs shower, fully clothed but incredibly confused as to how I got there (see the prior two for an explanation of “how”); met a Serbian bartender on a holiday island, and spent a week mostly misunderstanding each other charmingly, and picking up a smoking habit.
The summer between my first and second years of undergrad (2004). When I wasn’t at one of my two summer jobs (working at the bank during the day, working at the movie theatre at night), I was running around the suburbs in my mom’s silver Volvo station wagon with my best friend, his girlfriend, and at least two more of our mutual friends.
Highlights of the summer included:
* attempting to skinny-dip in the (polluted) river that ran through a local park and failing because there were always either families walking by on the bike path or cops driving past on the street
* going to the teen dance club for LGBT youth and standing outside smoking cloves
* breaking into partially-constructed houses in a new subdivision near the library and sitting inside talking about life, man
* watching Cecil B. Demented at least once a week the entire summer
There’s a lot of less-awesome stuff that came out of that summer, too, but increasingly, I’m able to look back on it all fondly.
Does it count as being a dirtbag if the summer I was 17, just before going off to a week of flute camp, I wrote a letter explaining that I was bi, I didn’t believe in Jesus, I had OCD, and I wanted to be vegetarian and then hid it under their bedspread so they wouldn’t find it until after they got back from taking me there? No? Didn’t think so.
I don’t care if you’re dirtbag or not, that was ballsy.
Don’t know about the dirtbaggery, but A+ Westing Game reference.
Summer after freshman year of college. I worked for eight weeks at a summer camp, where I was mostly interested in meeting boys. I finally found one two days before the end of camp and made out with him all night. It was GREAT. The scabies showed up like 6 weeks later, but whether it was from the boy or from spending so much time in the woods with grubby children I will never know.
The rest of the summer I put like a pinkie’s worth of effort into finding a part-time job. Most of my time was spent sleeping and watching Sex and the City thanks to my neighbor’s wifi.
Summer camps are the best/worst for dirtbaggery.
My dirtbaggiest summer was the one after I turned 21; I counted traffic for the college town that I was living in. Yes, that’s a real thing. There were two ways of doing this: 1) me and my partner (he had Terminator-style sunglasses) cruised around and went to specific blocks, found a telephone or light pole somewhere near the middle, padlocked a box to it, and stretched out a thin black hose (like the kind that used to be in gas stations that would ring a bell when someone drove in) across the street, nailing the other end to the asphalt. The next day, we’d pick it up to get a 24-hour traffic count for that block. If you’ve ever wondered what those were, well, now you know. The other way was to go to the intersection of major streets that were too big to stretch a hose across and manually count all the cars that went through it for an hour; we’d have these boards that had manual clickers for each lane, and would hit each one for every car that passed through. Tedious, but a great way to get a tan.
I don’t remember a lot about what I did during my off hours, because I was old enough to drink; I didn’t like beer much at that age, which is probably why I managed to get my degree in four years, but I liked vodka just fine. I sublet a student apartment for the summer and my roommate was one of the bro-est of bros, and we ended up getting into a drunken fight during which neither of us could land a punch with any force. He also liked to play his stereo really late at night, and since my room (really a converted entryway) had the circuit breakers, sometimes I’d turn the power to his room off so I could sleep. Good times, baby.
ETA: Ut! Almost forgot the punchline: I was hoping and expecting to be able to pick up the same gig the next summer, but no dice; I spent that summer (the first one after college graduation) looking for work. Not fun.
When I was 15, I thought I was hot shit because I did below-the-waist stuff (I was very sheltered), and had a brief, glorious summer where my boobs went up two cup sizes overnight but were not yet back pain big.
My dirtbaggiest moment was taking off my thong in public to pee in a fountain, then leaving it on a port-a-potty handle.
I’m just now realizing that I peed in a fountain when there was a port-a-potty available.
I have seen many a port a potty I have opted out of.
The summer I turned sixteen, which seems to be something that a lot of us have in common! I hung out with all of the pot-smoking alterna-kids, stayed out until 2 in the morning a lot, got yelled at by my mom a lot, wore mostly clothes from thrift stores and the Farm and Fleet, dyed chunks of my hair magenta, and devoured the stereotypical melodramatic adolescent canon courtesy the public library.
But my truly most dirtbag period was the late summer/fall after I graduated college. Stalking a band, eating-potatoes-broke, cut off all my hair, my roommate probably wanted to murder me (when we weren’t making out/trying to independently make out with said band), dumped my college nightmare boyfriend, wrote poetry god help me, showed up hungover to my genteel suburban public library job. I was delightfully awful and still owe people formal letters of apology, I think.
I think the closest thing I ever had to a “dirtbag” summer wasn’t very dirtbag at all? My sister and I spent every day at our friend’s house (making my Mom drive us on her lunch break which I guess tbf was pretty dirt-bagg-ish), swimming in her pool, making nachos, and watching either “Cats: The Musical” or the Backstreet Boys… Movie? Documentary? (IDK it was a tape about them, like, following them around I think, I just remember that at one point AJ listed his favorite McDonalds meal and to this day I still have it memorized. I also still have every single song from Cats memorized.) In between swimming we spent our time making up dances to BSB songs (I still remember the moves to the chorus of “The Call”), memorizing the dance routines from Cats, making a BSB board game on posterboard, playing with tarot cards, and making plans for our girl band which was going to be called Sky Blue Pink.
This was the prime of my teenage body too (before I started gaining wait) and I used to walk around in a bikini (ah, the two glorious summers I felt comfortable in a bikini) and try to catch the attention of my friend’s older brother and his cute friend (who we all had a crush on).
I was generally the boringest squarest kid on the block. In suburban Virginia. I mean, sure, I was part of the crowd that went to midnight showings of Rocky Horror on the regular, but that just basically means I was a goody two-shoes bookworm with torn fishnets.
I have a couple weirdly specific memories from the summer I was nineteen, though:
– Going to the now-defunct main gay club in DC with two friends, because one of them said he was straight but wanted us to come mostly so we could hold his stuff while he dance with guys. I remember driving back at maybe one or two in the morning, all the windows down, playing “Mad World” (the Gary Jules Donnie Darko version) on his car stereo, shouting dead baby jokes out into the darkness.
– Having an impromptu dance party in a train station parking lot well after dark one night, five girls dancing to Billy Idol and Nine Inch Nails played out of a car stereo. (90% of your coming of age where I grew up apparently involved music played from a car.) A bunch of teenage boys pulled up and parked about fifteen feet from us and got out to gawk at us and we stared them down like we knew we’d win in a fight (though we surely wouldn’t). But they backed down like they thought we would.
– Smoking cigars by a lake in a park at midnight. Someone called one of my friends to let her know that Lance Bass had just come out. (I might be the only person I know who actually remembers exactly where they were when they learned that. Trespassing on county property after dark to smoke cheap cigars.)
– I guess that was also the summer I met a male prostitute who greeted me by licking my face as he came home from work? But I mostly remember talking to him about Disney movies.
I have never heard a more accurate description of my younger self than “a goody two-shoes bookworm with torn fishnets.” Glad to know that I wasn’t alone!
My teen dirtbag summer happened after I graduated from high school and was spending a year at home working at a Pizza Hut and “sneaking out” by taking a bus downtown to where the gay club was instead of thinking about college. I was very much a clueless queer, but immediately fell into a sort-of-relationship with a lesbian who was really into singing opera. She rented her own apartment, which I thought was the greatest thing and made her unimaginably mature. She also thought my blatant ripoffs of Indian art were cool, so she asked me to do A HUGE GAY MURAL ON HER BEDROOM WALL. There was literally a six-foot long rainbow and three couples of various skin tones making out underneath it (sadly we never took pictures). She told me later the landlord had seen it and made her paint over it, which I, a newly minted Baby Gay, took as proof that the landlord was a TYRANNIC HOMOPHOBE instead of someone who was no doubt very surprised to find an enormous gay porn mural on the wall of their rental apartment.
Longtime lurker, first time(ish) poster –
During the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, I got a sweet job working for a travel guide – basically I got living expenses(ish) to travel around parts of the UK and update the listings, and ideally hunt out another couple cool places.
Week 2 of 8: I meet a guy in a bar, spend the next 2 weeks sneaking him into hostels, smoking his weed, very awkwardly meeting his parents when he snuck me into his house (he lived at home), attempting to visit castles while high, watching him attempt to skateboard, and calling all the places I was supposed to actually visit to get hours and price info. I got an Official Talking-To from my editors, after which I stopped admitting to calling rather than visiting places and just made up my reports of visits.
For reference, during that time I got an email to let me know that I’d gotten straight A’s in my spring semester, so this was, let’s say, out of character.
Don’t worry, this travel guide is now well out of date, so nobody will be led astray by it.
I’m not sure I ever really had a dirtbag summer. I was super-tame and only did shit like stay on the internet till 4AM.
Ughhh I was a kid who liked pleasing authority figures, so my Peak Dirtbag times involved:
– sneaking out of my house to meet my incredibly sweet gamer nerd Older Man long-distance boyfriend of yore who’d drive from KY to VA to secretly visit me (ages 16-18)
– getting kicked out of Target for getting caught shoplifting makeup (age 13 or 14, only caught because of loitering with dirtbag friends) ((n.b. I was taught how to shoplift by my older brother, who learned from fellow Boy Scouts. Because their meetings were held close to a 7-11.))
– being kicked out of the National Junior Honor Society in 8th grade as a repercussion for being caught in school during our free period — free period due to taking advanced classes at the HS erry morning — after drinking wine in the girls’ bathroom, because my dirtbaggiest middle school friend was a terrible influence
– going to the mall with my brother (ages 13ish and 18ish, respectively) purely to flirt with the cute Older Man who worked at the knife store
My dirtbag summer was the summer after my freshman year of college, when I was 18 and working at a bakery and living at home. My friends and I would get wasted, smoke weed, break into the community pool, and throw parties. I was also going out with the King of the Dirtbags, who embodied every stereotype of a bad influence: smoked cigarettes, motorcycle jacket, kicked out of college, did a lot of drugs, etc.
I was having the time of my life but the whole teenage rebellion-lite thing took a toll on my relationship with my parents, which I regret. It could’ve been a lot worse, but it was a big contrast to the very square way I’d presented myself previously. I like to think I’ve matured since then and I got it all out of my system, but really who knows?
It’s not SUPER dirtbag but I roadtripped in Europe with friends for three weeks, wore the same bra every day and did no laundry, read the Decameron primarily for the sex scenes, basically only listened to music by Conor Oberst, ended up getting drunk up a mountain near Saltzberg with approximately 50 Austrians in dirndls and lederhosen for fourteen hours. We started at midday and someone drove us back down to the farmhouse with its “medicinal herb garden” (yeah) at 2am I think? where I spent the next two days with crippling stomach cramps from the “detox tea” and weird porridge they fed us. We were regularly getting through 1-2 bottles each of cheap wine every night so my alcohol tolerance went up like crazy.
I also had MAJOR crushes on the sister of one of the girls I was travelling with AND was sort of seeing a guy at home, so being as awful as I am I skipped dinner at least once to go back to the hostel and masturbate.
I guess I was at my dirtbagiest the summer after high school graduation, when some friends and I climbed a 7-foot fence at night so we could swim in the yacht club pool, despite the fact that 3 out of 5 of us had pools at home. After that we went to the playground attached to the town hall, which was also where our (two person) police station was and drank approximately one and a half beers each. Then I went home, because I had a shift at the bookstore in the morning.
Some A+ dirtbaggery right there.
Hmm. I was usually the least dirtbaggish of all my high school friends, but in general the summers went something like- go bother friends who worked at library, go bother friends who worked at ice cream store (and get free ice cream obvs), walk aimlessly around town, steal a road sign if the opportunity presented itself, head to a basement ska show if there was one happening, and if not set up a bonfire in someone’s back yard, get some marshmallows and/or hot dogs in case the neighbors (inevitably) called the cops (because “cooking fires” were legal in town, but regular fires were not?), spend the entire evening setting shit on fire.
The teenage girl core of my friends group was great, but they all had a talent for picking up the weirdest sketchy dudes. So like, kind-of-dating members of the local Juggalo population. It was definitely a time.
My dirtbaggiest time in my life was the semester I studied in Paris. Much douchebaggery went on: sneaking out of my host parents’ house, spending money I very definitely did not have, sleeping on the Metro/ airports/ in various people’s apartments, getting a crush on a girl in my program and bursting into tears all over her when she didn’t reciprocate (sorry Phoebe!!), showing up to every class 15 minutes late and hungover.
I’m not sure if you can be an adult dirtbag, but I spent June and the July I turned 21 in Leipzig, supercharging my German by spending most of the time I wasn’t in class either hooked to a karaoke microphone or on GayRomeo. I ended up microdating one and a half dudes and sleeping with about five more–a busy month, even for me at that age. it was also far and away the most time I’d spent drunk per day up to that point [not, unfortunately, even close to my record in the years since].
did wonders for my German, though.
Mine was after I graduated college and decided to move to Nantucket for the summer, without a job or a place to live lined up.
Jobs? Easy as pie to find. Affordable place to live? Not so much.
I lived in a room above a horse barn for a bit.
Then moved into a house with my bff and 7!!! guys. The dirtbagginess, it was so much.
When I was finally able to unpack the one bag I brought for the whole summer (lol) I realized it had been wet for so long (my friend’s car was rusted out and we originally drove to ‘tucket in a rainstorm) that I had to throw out 1/2 my clothes because they were moldy.
One roommate told me the fastest way to tan was to use motor oil. I did not test that out.
Saw maggots for the first time.
Had sex while someone else was definitely watching one time.
My bff, her boyf and I shared a room. He was so dirty. He puked in front of a running fan once. It was traumatic.
The house we lived in was on a street that very, very, very ironically had a “This is a drug free zone!” sign.
The day I left I had to shower using the hose outside because our shower was a cesspool of stagnant water.
I was pretty happy when my mom and sister picked me up from the mainland.
I’d do it all over again.
Ugh, I feel like I am still a dirtbag, like, most of the time, but I have become okay with it. My most dirtbaggy period was probably when I was 18, having juuuuust squeaked by highscool. Took off to southern Mexico for several months with some girlfriends to backpack, but lied to everyone about how much money I had (it was none) and spent the entire time in this little surf town, doing drugs and hanging on the beach, and working part time as a bartender at this wacky expat BBQ place. I didn’t have to wear shoes, and could smoke cigarettes while I was pouring.
Nearly ten years later, upon ending a horrible relationship and dropping out of grad school, I embarked on another amazing dirtbag summer, living with a a girl from school and working one day a week at the art gallery, and shotgunning beers behind shitty hipsters bars.
I was a dork, so my dirt baggiest summer(s) was when I started going out all night to the park with my friends, where we did such dirt baggy things like tell ghosts stories, eat cake from the 24 hour grocery store, and tell pedophiles to fuck off. (Also kept one friend AWAY from the pedophiles because she likes to make bad choices.)
Fifteen for me! Up to high school, I was the kid who didn’t fit anywhere (teacher’s pet-ish) and was mildly bullied, but high school is where I found my people and stopped caring what grownups thought of me. Still did well in school because I was the type who could with almost no effort, but summer was spent evading curfew and hitchhiking (none of my friends lived close to me). Started smoking, tried alcohol and drugs, bought heavy metal music and t-shirts, climbed out the window when I was grounded. Never got in any real trouble, just drove my very uptight girls-should-be-pleasant-and-obedient mother to great distraction.
Also twenty-one, sort of. During the summer between semesters I had two jobs but spent every spare evening out dancing and drinking with my friends. We had a set rotation of bars depending on who had Ladies Night on. So little sleep, so much fun!
The summer after junior year of college. I’d always be this straight-A, sheltered little person. Out of nowhere, when I was 20, I snapped and went off the rails a little bit. I dumped my chaste, Christian, boring high school sweet heart, took up smoking, got drunk a lot, slept around, and crashed almost nightly on friends’ couches even though I had a perfectly good apartment to go home to. It was just easier to pass out wherever I got drunk than it was to find a way to schlep my drunk ass across town at 3:30am. I think I worked during the day as a waitress? The sober moments are fuzzy. I was a terrible waitress. And not a very good friend, if I’m being honest. I don’t think of it as a high point in my history. But the sleeping around was fun.
Two words: Beer Fast.
DIRTBAG SUMMER!
It was after my first year of music school, so I was….28? I had a summer sublet in this crazy unit of an apartment complex in Glover Park, DC and worked in Dupont Circle so I walked every day and left my car parked where it was (holding on to places where I wouldn’t get a damned ticket). Glover Park is like right on the edge of a big chunk of Rock Creek Park so every night I walked home would be in a cloud of fireflies. I did a looooot of walking and sweating…and sleeping around. Oh man, slept around like whoah. Beyond that dirtbagness (I at least tried not to be too much of a douche sleeping around, but I’m sure I wasn’t totally successful), I was also not a very friendly roommate. Like, I was considerate and cleaned up after myself, but this one time, two of my roommates volunteered my car to help carry the furniture of some other dude who was going to become our fifth roommate and I was like “no, carry that shit yourself” because you can’t just volunteer my car. That fifth roommate was also a douche and was all, “my GIRLFRIEND” at every opportunity which I didn’t catch on to (because my sleeping around? was with men). Like this one time, he was all “I notice you don’t put the toilet seat down. Because you don’t have a girlfriend.” Which was factual, so I didn’t actually realize what he was trying to do, so I could respond with “yeah, I have boyfriends.” or whatever would have been a better zinger. I wish I had been a bigger dirtbag to that guy.
Probably the summer after my first year of college when I worked part-time at a coffee shop & had to show up at surprising times to get my boss to pay me, and I mooned over several boys at once and took to painting outdoors in a bikini while drinking white wine.
(Wait, was this the BEST summer of my life??)
Summer between junior and senior year of high school. I was an American girl living in Bogota, Colombia – daughter of lifelong and worldwide expats. My school in Bogota was only about 10% Americans, so although most of my friends were Colombian, I was also friends with ALL of the Americans.
That summer, we (the American kids) had all planned a trip around various parts of South America, including the Galapogos Islands. For reasons I still don’t remember, I couldn’t go – I think it was partially a scheduling thing, and partially a “you will be killed by all of the BAD GUYS of South America.” For lifelong expats, my parents had and continue to have no understanding of any culture other than American. ANYWAY.
Shortly before everyone was supposed to leave on the trip, there was a terrible car accident. I had been in the front seat, sitting on someone’s lap, and somehow acted as a human seat belt for that guy. Although we all survived it, some were more hurt than others, including Rob, who had shattered his leg. Rob’s girlfriend Jenny- who he had been sitting next to in the back seat – was less injured, and was able to go on the scheduled trip. Rob did not.
Here is the dirtbag part: Rob and I had a month long affair while everyone was gone. He was injured, so it was mostly fantastic makeout sessions – when we weren’t watching movies or just reading together. If there hadn’t been cheating involved, it would have been a cute teen romance story. We spent nearly every day together, sometimes making out and heavy petting, but mostly just hanging out.
When Jenny et al returned, we both acted like nothing happened. We shared many a knowing look and insidery glances, but we never hooked up again. We never told anyone, and it just remained a secret between us for the rest of high school. I have never seen either of them since I left Bogota, but imma gonna guess they didn’t stay together.
I was 18, dropped out of college and quit my job to go on tour with my boyfriend’s band in an ancient cargo van. Ran sound for them, spent an entire month camping across the country surviving on peanut butter and honey sandwiches, cut my own hair and stopped shaving, swam in the ocean whenever I could. Fairly tame but the best.
The next summer I moved by Greyhound 1,000 miles from home by myself with $200 to my name to live in a hostel, with three bags secured by padlocks. No sex or drugs but such a rush.
I also moved a million miles by Greyhound! Was it the best/worst for you, too?
Hoo yeah. Worst of times when a kid vomited all over the back of the bus outside Chicago. Best of times when I watched the sunrise in Denver and realized how incredible the light is and how spectacular the mountains.
Reading this was so stressful. I really admire people who can do stuff like that but the thought of making a big decision without having everything planned out makes me sweat.
When I first left school my mom said I would never go back. (I proved her wrong and then some by going for the PhD after I got a ton of that wanderlust out.) Before I left for the great unknown my whole family tried to stage an intervention. I think they were afraid I was about to be kidnapped or murdered. But I was a determined little cuss. If I had it to do over again I would!
this sounds like heaven to me. i want to do something like this one day.
It was reckless and awesome. I was a dreamer and a poet, and I had lived a very sheltered life. It was the only thing that felt right at the time.
Btw, this is still OoTheHumanities, I don’t remember my password and I am on my phone.
The summer after my junior year of college was pretty shady. I had a data-entry job on campus. I was really broke, though, so free time consisted of drinking PBR and watching Lifetime movies. Also, going to Costco for the sole purpose of eating as many free samples as possible.
My roommate and I lived in a really sketchy apartment with no a/c. Halfway through the summer, the deadbolt got stuck in the doorjamb, so we would enter and exit the apartment through the window. We did that for about 6 weeks.
Looking back, dirtbag summer of 2012 was one of the happiest times of my life.
2012 was one of my happy dirtbag summers too! Well, actually, I’d just gotten out of a very toxic, all-consuming relationship. I feel like I spent half my time crying and the other half drinking. I worked 7 to 3 at my college library but half the time I wouldn’t show up til 10 (HOW did I not get fired) and sometimes I would just lie on the floor and cry instead of shelving books.
Then, the guy I’d had a crush on for ages started dating my housemate. I was right there! But somehow he chose “cute and emotionally stable” over “having a complete breakdown.”
The house had no AC and when the power went out on the fourth of July, we went swimming in the creek to cool off. The landlord was horrible but my rent was $275 a month.
Peak Dirtbag happened when I got absolutely wrecked on tequila sunrises at a gay bar. Saw a girl dancing and thought she was like, a stripper? and started putting money in her clothes. She was just…another customer. Made my friend pull over at least 3 times on the drive home so that I could throw up.
When I say it like this it sounds awful but it was magical somehow.
Summer I turned 18, right before I left for university. I had a part time job at the library, was tutoring a kid in math, and sold jewelry at the beach. I was super fit and the most sun-kissed my super Irish freckly skin could manage.
Couldn’t believe the freedom I had after being so scheduled for all of high school. Spent pretty much everyday at the beach reading. Got high and drunk for the first and many subsequent times. Did a bunch of inappropriate making out with this super hot (for the Canadians: George Strombo in his prime-lookin’) guy who was about a decade older than me. Drove my parents Camry around listening to CD mixes that always included “Welcome to the Jungle.”
Didn’t really brush my hair ever. Wore only the following items: bandeau bikini from Target to be ready for beach/as underwear, purple t-shirt ft. Catwoman and the words “femme fatale” and jean cut-offs that had a giant hole under one of the back pockets (but because when I was standing you couldn’t see my ass I thought this was fine) held up by a white leather belt with rhinestone belt buckle I’d bought on a school trip to Italy. I just took the belt and shorts off as a unit so the white leather was only white where it was protected by the belt loops. Ocassionally I’d swap out the cut offs for a silk slip skirt I stole from a friend that was also full of holes.
It was the best the summer ever.
ETA: Only ever used to drink Coors Light and this malt liquor lemonade thing called Boomerang.
The summer before I went to college, I ran around with 7 of my friends pulling really stupid pranks. We would follow cars for the fun of it, use window paint markers to draw dicks and various miscellena on windshields, and sneak onto the mini-golf course late at night. Also, drink and stay the night over in one friend’s basement.
In the summer of 2013 (I think it was June), 15-year-old me took a week-long (or two weeks?) writing workshop and I was basically an obnoxious pseudo-hipster (I didn’t like being called a hipster though). Most embarrassingly, I remember saying that a certain white rapper who was big at the time was our generation’s Nirvana because I wanted to impress everyone with how I knew who Nirvana was, and now I live with the fear that I somehow influenced a group of impressionable kids to be fans of that guy.
(I actually contacted the two writers who taught the workshop and they were both super cool with it, and they said the kids probably don’t remember it and it’s unlikely I made them do anything they wouldn’t otherwise do. Now we’re friends on Facebook. So that’s nice.)
(Also, I’m terrified about what what I said says about me? I wasn’t a big fan despite what I said, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have given him a second thought if two music critics I really like and whose opinions I basically parroted at the time because it was easier than having opinions of my own hadn’t liked him (one more than the other), but what does that say about me? Are my opinions really my opinions? Are my memories even accurate? Am I just a simaculacrum of other people’s thoughts with nothing to contribute of my own?)
…this is way longer and more existential than I intended.
I was just kind of a general dirtbag in college and a little after, but the summer I worked at the pool at a country club was particularly messy. I showed up hungover and greasy for my shifts and stole French fries and Chipwiches from the snack stand while mooning after a super hot manny who spent hours at the pool with his three charges (all little girls who adored him, which made him that much hotter). I went on dates with gross dudes I met on MySpace, one of whom I dated for about a month but stopped talking to because he would regularly disappear on coke binges and reemerge with wounds from knife fights (?), and I didn’t do drugs at the time. But I also hooked up with a girl I really, really liked and threw an amazing housewarming party with my bff and our terrible roommates who we didn’t know were terrible yet, and smoked a ton of cigarettes and went out dancing all the time and was generally enjoying myself in between bouts of crazy depression. This might have also been the summer I seriously considered voluntarily committing myself to an institution for a few weeks. 19-24 were Some Years in My Life.
This is a tough one. I would have to say the summer between grade 8 and 9 when my friends and I set off a lot of fireworks, lit many things on fire (nothing too big), and broke into the tampon machines in public washrooms so we could take the quarters and spend them on candy.
During my late teenage years, I spent alot of time alone in my room, reading Ayn Rand. The end.
After a brief mid-twenties stint of attempted respectability, I went through a break-up and hit the dirt-bagging HARD. Made out loads at bus stops and in bars, spent all my days not at my shitty job at the river swimming and drinking beer, but the best dimmest memory was a night I was heading home drunk – from where? Can’t remember. Why? Don’t know. All I know is I ended up in a fancy sushi restaurant with three charming gay men, while we gorged ourselves on sashimi and drank expensive sake which I’m 90% sure I didn’t pay for. Never saw them again. There were more nights like that but that one was the best.
I received a $3000 internship grant from my college for this pretty cool fashion-y social media gig. My parents were paying my rent, so that money was all mine. I should have saved it. I should have spent it on practical things or set it aside for a rainy day (there have been many of those since then). But instead I spent the summer buying too many Lush products and “working” from home by smoking weed on the couch of my sweltering Chicago apartment. I felt like I was getting away with murder and loved every second of it.
Summer after sophomore year of college, everyone else had a jobs, internships, etc., and I. Did. Nothing. Like, absolutely nothing but sleeping till noon and staying up till 4 a.m. reading maybe? watching terrible TV? Nothing. It was the last time in my life I knew I could do Nothing and I milked it. Oh, did I milk it. Also, I came from a much lower income bracket than my peers, and my mom had a sense that this time was special. So I didn’t realize until later on that my mom could barely afford to subsidize me doing Nothing, I appreciate it as a giant gift to me.
I did a lot of typical teenage dirtbaggery–I was either the good kid among the real dirtbags or the dirtbag/bad influence among the sweet nerdy kids. It’s a good line to walk down.
Also, Mallory, have the most marvelous retreat. I just returned from a monastery and my life is glorious. Monks are the best.
The summer I was 16 I worked night shift at a 24-hour Tim Hortons with my best friend. The only other person working would be the night baker, and let’s just say that while many roads can lead a person to a career as a night baker at Tim Hortons, few of them are marked by respect for authority. By 3am, the only customers would be friends of ours who wanted free doughnuts and a few chain-smoking guys muttering to themselves about Jesus or aliens or weed or weed-smoking Alien Jesus. After a night of drinking all the coffee and playing Timbit hockey, we would head up the street to my friend’s house and sleep until dinner. Then we’d stash our uniforms in a bag and head out to a party until it was time for work. For three months, the only adults I interacted with were shift workers, insomniacs, and the homeless. It was amazing.
17. I had a part-time job and a car, and my mom had a new husband so she wasn’t interested in patrolling my every move. I had Freedom and Money for the first time ever. And that car – it wasn’t really mine, it was my stepdad’s but he let me drive it – it was a white ’69 Thunderbird with a black top. It was HOT. I would drive into The City on hot Southern summer days and pick up my hot blonde best friend and we would drive away, wearing almost nothing and laughing like pretty teenage dirtbag girls, while her brother hung out the upstairs window and gawked at me, and her mother fumed at the thoughts of all the wicked things we were surely doing. Yeah. We were hanging out at used book stores and record stores and Talking To Older Boys and sometimes, at night? We’d play D&D with them. Our parents were certain we were Having The Sex but we were the virginest dirtbag virgins that ever virgined.
wow I’m overwhelmed by these stories, it’s like each of you has a YA novel living in your soul! As for me, I’ve got nothing and, to be honest, I didn’t think stories like all these happened very often in real life. But then again, I also didn’t even know of the existence of parties with alcohol, so you could say I was a bit out of the loop. Maybe this makes me a different kind of dirtbag? I probably came off as insufferable to all the cool kids that I didn’t dare talk to.
this was absolutely my life too, I keep reading this and thinking that I must have missed the memo? I spent a lot of my teen years learning linux and gchatting friends. sometimes I went hiking. we went ice skating too? definitely alcohol / drugs were not a thing I encountered, like, ever. until college, and then barely.
so yep, cheers to out-of-the-loop, adventures-of-our-own-kind types! =)
(though I do have all the retroactive anxiety about that “insufferable to all the cool kids” bit, I probably toootally was.)
The summer after seventh grade, right before I moved back to the States, my best friend and I would arrange “sleepovers” at each other’s houses and then sneak out to the local 7-11 to meet up with boys. All we did there was sit on the sidewalk and eat (legally purchased!) Doritos, but there was a guy with no legs who would occasionally show up in his wheelchair and talk to us about our lives. We would also spend a lot of time on Orchard Road trying on $900 shoes and then leaving because “we didn’t like them.” Annnnd I once almost shoplifted a Juicy Tube from the Lancome counter at Paragon, but I chickened out at the last minute.
I then went to high school in the US, where I spent most of my summers reading Russian novels in my grandparents’ basement and doing AP test prep.
Oh man. 17, went to work in the kitchen at a summer camp, which meant I got up still drunk at 7 am to do breakfast prep and spent the rest of the day recovering on the dock, only to do it again the next night. Was determined to lose my virginity and did so. Spent all the money I made (which was, ok, pretty minimal) on Mike’s Hard Lemonade (just…ugh). Did things totally out of character, both at that time, and in any subsequent iteration of myself, including doing body shots and dancing topless. Actually, when I think back on this camp, I’m alarmed at how dirtbaggy and drunk the entire staff was.
This is bringing back a flood of incredibly cringe-worthy memories!
In college I was a fairly uptight overachieving goody-goody, but had my dirtbag summer in 1990 between sophomore and junior year. I had just broken up with my sophomore year boyfriend and worked as a secretarial nobody in a government agency ($6/hour, whoo hoo!). That summer I went on dates with 6 co-workers and slept with 3 of them (ages 28, 30 and 33). My ex-boyfriend and I also tormented each other long distance and kept shagging when we got together. I drank and smoked loads, stayed out late most nights, and still managed to keep a pristine image with my boss at work.
At the end of the summer, I got on a plane to Europe for my junior year abroad and left all the men in the dust. I was 19.
I have always wished to do that. My grandfather used to regularly retreat at Manresa in Convent, LA every couple of years . He wasn’t even Catholic, but said it was refreshing.
Summer after high school graduation:
-saw Saving Private Ryan with my dirtbag friends while more than one of them was on LSD
-K’s parents were dealing so we hung out at his house a lot to buy pot from his parents and hang out in his garage.
-token random older boy lived in apartment building (exotic!) with an indoor pool (OOOH) so we went there constantly when his mom worked nights.
-Cheated on my wanna-be gangster bf with my fellow dirtbag dude bff, leading to a Very Dramatic Breakup the week before I left for college (bf’s solution to the cheating was for me to stay home and go to community college with him and we would get engaged)
-Conning friends to shoplift marb lights for me because I was only 17.
-being white kids who thought we were tough because we hung out in kent.
-far too many St Ides 22s under the power lines watching trains
-paging dealers from the Dairy Queen parking lot pay phone
I feel like I had even more dirtbag stories when I went to Dirtbag State (Evergreen), but I will refrain because a lot of those were me acting out my unchecked depression.
I spent a month with my internet best friend and his family the summer after my freshman year of college. (It was the first time we’d ever met.) We spent two weeks of that in a house on Great Diamond Island in Maine, drinking and hanging out watching Archer and drinking. I had never really drunk before, and my best friend and his family were very proud to be Irish, so…you can imagine how much I learned.
Best friend and his brothers were also in a band and recording an EP in the house. Spent a lot of time downstairs listening to one of them sing the same line over and over and swear a lot.
I was 19. Living at home for the summer. Hanging out with the skeeziest hippy dirtbag druggy boys.
I would weekly drive 2 1/2 hours from my rural Midwestern town to a slightly larger Midwestern town to buy enough cocaine that I could bring it back and sell it so my portion was free.
I basically lived at these guys house, in different bedrooms depending on the portion of the summer (I think I hooked up with 3 of them).
We did lots of drugs. I wore headscarves and tie-dye. We listened to jam bands really loudly.
By the end of the summer the guys were getting evicted and their power had been shut off. We thought it was funny and hosted candle lit parties (fun for the first night, drastically diminishing returns on fun)
I shudder whenever I run into this group of people now that I work in an elementary school and have a child of my own. Nonetheless, it was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire life.
It has to be the summer of 2008. I had just started a new job at a coffee shop and became friends with a bunch of hipster kids who for some reason liked me and wanted nothing more than to feed me drugs. I also went to Las Vegas for the first (and only time) and had all the attendant Las Vegas experiences. But mostly the drugs. All the drugs. It was fun while it lasted!
After high school, I did a semester with Sea Education Association, sailed Woods Hole Massachusetts to St Thomas USVI, and instead of flying home, I got on a freighter. The freighter was captained by a guy who knew my father, and crewed by dissipated American dirtbags of various stripes, all fleeing something. I was the only female on the (smallest, slowest, most bright red, most adorable) ship, out of 8 to begin with – doing deck work like busting rust (exactly what it sounds like, banging rusty spots with a hammer until it flakes off) and running checks in the Engine Room. I fell in love with an engine the size of my current living room, and the second mate. I made out with the third mate and the other deck hand. It was amazing and confusing and the stars were SO BRIGHT. We went all over the Caribbean, putting in at the working ports, making fun of the people who went past from the cruise ships – we called them slug boats – drinking a LOT of beer.
When I’d been on board a month, a bunch of people went home for Christmas and we were down to three people to stand watch, and me to steward, which basically means mother. I cooked, cleaned, organized, and then did it all again. Still making out with the third mate and once with the most beautiful dude ever, when we were in Trinidad. I drank an amazing amount of liquor, puked out of a porthole in Port au Prince Haiti on New Years eve, and broke the heart of the engineer who pissed me off so badly, and yearned after me so absurdly.
After five months of this I came home, and the re-entry shock was fierce.
I would like an entire Toast piece on this experience, please. All the “cruise on a freight ship” stuff fascinates me. I don’t want a mickey-shaped pool, I want to spend a week alone in a cabin staring into the abyss (literally).
This is what I wanted to do for a couple of years after graduating high school and I’m still sort of sad that I never did. I second the request for a whole Toast piece on this, so I can live vicariously through you and go on ship-related adventures when I retire.
The summer I turned 18 was pretty intense. My horse almost died and had to have 6 months of rehab following a two week hospital stay including exploratory surgery, I graduated high school, and competed at a national level horse show circuit. On top of all of this, my dad was on Jerry Springer during the height of the show’s popularity. It was the most-advertised episode in the show’s history at that point, and the only one to be pulled from airing by the network (except in Arizona.) It aired the Friday before graduation and was the planned entertainment at our senior class party.
I don’t have any specific memories of being a dirtbag myself, but I certainly remember feeling pretty shitty about life.
Your family was wealthy enough to own at least one horse. Also nuts enough to be on Jerry Springer. This must have been a fascinating upbringing!
In high school we were nerds with pretensions of dirtbaggery: we went OFF CAMPUS to EAT ICE CREAM and SCOPE BOYS. We went to THE GAY STORE and THE WITCHY STORE and carried a pair of tweezers to steal back our dollar parking if the pickup guy didn’t show up. We sneaked out to see boys. But mostly we watched old movies and went bowling and were huge chess playing nerds.
I cannot admit to the dirtbaggery I got up to from the day I turned 18 and drank my first bottle of alcohol to about the age of 25. I have Grown and Changed.
Oh god in my town I think THE GAY STORE and THE WITCHY STORE were the same store. They both smell of incense, right???
Actually the GAY STORE usually didn’t. However, about the only other place you could find queer paraphernalia was the WITCHY STORE.
We had a WITCHY STORE, too! There was a park across from my HS campus, and we’d go there to smoke, and then I’d convince people to go to the WITCHY store just down the way. I still miss that place (though HS, not so much).
My mom was kind of a dirtbag, too. She substitute taught at my HS the year after I graduated, and went off campus to smoke (cigarettes!) with a younger friend of mine… who I’d been suspended for going off campus with the year prior. Circle of dirtbag life.
The summer I was 20, I had an internship in an office 9-5 and then worked a bunch of nights and weekends as a TERRIBLE waitress. I’d drive back to my parents’ in my beat-up Volvo smelling like kitchen and if it was really hot sometimes I’d take my work tuxedo shirt off and drive home in my bra. Which felt, at the time, super dirtbaggy.
Took mushrooms at a Grateful Dead concert when I was 16- jumped into my car with a bunch of weirdos and drove overnight from Colorado to California to catch their next show the following night.
Broke into my Mormon grandparents beachside condo, invited over a bunch of dirty hippies for an after party and then got caught by my grandmother’s sister who was SHOCKED to walk in on a bunch of nude, stinking potheads ripping bongs and blasting The Doors. I didn’t know what to do (I was tripping) so I just ran out the back door and drove away.
One summer my friends and I “built” (poorly tacked together) a (shanty) town in the (scrawny excuse for) woods by a river (though it hardly qualified as such at that particular stretch) in our neighborhood, out of materials we stole from construction sites after-hours, in a vague tribute to BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA. Then we promptly abandoned it once school started again. I’m not sure that ranks on the dirtbag scale, but it’s all I’ve got. I was to stuck in my own head and my books to cause too much trouble at that age….
Oh man. The year was 2011. My car was a baby blue Thunderbird that I had inherited from my grandmother. The Evil Boy music video had just come out and I watched it at least once a day. My parents figured 17 was old enough to drink and that as long as we didn’t get the cops called on us all of my friends could come over and get 4Loko wasted whenever we wanted. My best friend lived a town over and it wasn’t unusual for me to disappear for the whole weekend. We went to raves in an unmarked warehouse called DarkSide After Hours, which due to zoning issues tried to rebrand itself as a church. We stopped going when, while we were rolling face dancing in a cage in our underwear, they stopped everything and turned on the lights to have a moment of prayer on the dance floor. My backseat was full of art supplies and shit I stole from construction sites and referred to as art supplies. It’s a miracle I never went to jail. I wore snapbacks, sometimes. I smoked one Camel Turkish Royal per day after my parents went to bed and did charcoal self-portraits of myself as Audrey Hepburn.
I miss being a Dirtbag Teen.
The summer I was 23, I was living in Berlin, partying the entire summer. Berlin seemed like a good place to shed my sheltered, upper-middle class upbringing and make my way through the metropolis of vice. This included, but was not limited to, ignoring my standing student loans, spending literal days in Berghain (the fabled techno club situated in the former Soviet sector), showing up regularly at my café job while still high or coming down from any number of recreational drugs, stealing amounts of up to 100 euros from the register on a daily basis (to buy myself a new pair of Nikes to dance in), cruising for sex in any number of the parks throughout the city, performing in a queer music festival, and experiencing a K-hole where I thought I was a tree. All of this was going on while I was paying rent on a weekly basis (that’s all I could afford) and at one point subsiding for a week on nothing but potatoes, beer, and speed. The party ended with the summer, but what a summer it was. I have no regrets.
The summer I was 15 my childhood nemesis and I joined forces in favor of terrorizing the yuppies subdividing the woods all over our town. We bought model rocket engines for the high quality black powder, and took apart fireworks for fuses, magnesium, and more black powder, and made little grenade – like bombs using pillbox ties and duct tape. These we set off it the yuppies ‘ yards with glee. On one memorable occasion, one went off with a boom the echoed up and down the valley, and my brother got plastic shards in his leg. We couldn’t wait to be 18 to buy black powder by the carton from the gun store.
Summer when I was 16 was when I fell in love for the first time. Lots of canoodling and sneaking about and it was the best.
Summer when I was 17 I had just finished high school and said first love had died earlier that year. Lots of drinking in parks, lots of making abominable friends. Highlights from the year of abominable friends include having to chase out a sexual predator from that group because no one else saw a reason to and having to restrain a guy for two hours who was having a psychotic episode at a party and the host was adamant we not call the police and I was too young and stupid not to listen.
I do not speak to any of those people, I don’t drink and I am much much happier that way
My dirtbag years have come late, as I was an anxious Christian until mid-college. But in grad school I had a glorious summer of hedonism with my new best friend. We would teach in the mornings, then head to her hot, cockroach-filled apartment after picking up movies and absolute garbage food for lunch. Her freeloader boyfriend would pack up pipes and we would get stoned and watch movies all. Day. Long. At least two and usually three a day. We’d order pizza for dinner and then I’d go home to sleep, only to do it all again the next day. It was glorious and one of the best summers of my life.
This is all extremely familiar to me.
2005: I worked at a tanning salon. Sometimes I would wear a hot pink shirt that said “daddy’s girl” printed in cursive across the chest. Gaucho pants were in. I took selfies with a webcam hooked to my PC. We took klonopin, got high, or stayed up all night taking adderall. I didn’t miss my sorority sisters. Except for the one I secretly wanted to have sex with.
Why were so many of you dirtbags in german speaking countries? Are you all Liz Lemon?
1994, in NZ for the year. Mostly on a benefit, with about $20 spare after rent and bills. I lived in a warehouse, went underage to the pub, and had everything stolen by junkies, I left that flat and travelled the country, stayed on couches, went to gigs. Lots of hitching with friends, hiking for 2 weeks at a time, doing hairwraps in markets for money.
Summer came and a mob of us rented an ex Jehovah’s Witness hall off an old Hungarian guy, who unbeknownst to us just wanted to piss off his neighbour. There were many hot lazy days drinking fortified apple wine at the river. I remember walking in the long grass by the side of the road, and looking at the low golden light, the golden grass, the motley gorgeous bunch of kids with silly haircuts and tutus and facepaint and dogs on ropes, walking against the green hills- my own Gus Van Sant moment…
My dirbag summer was after graduating college I lived half at my parent’s house being barefoot and driving my aunt’s truck across fields to do beach clean up and never wearing anything but ratty tank tops, half in the world’s crappiest basement apartment with friends, drinking constantly and working at a test grading company that kept the AC on artic. Like 6 stupid entanglements with boys I would meet at karaoke, seduced some one with the lotr cartoon movie and then later stole his best friend with Father Ted, that summer ended with me getting a deeply unattractive haircut so I would stop with the boys and got a temp job at a bank that sucked me in for two years
This comment is not about a dirtbag summer, it is about the fact that ZOMG Mallory! I live in Big Sur! My ex is the chef at the Hermitage! When you have had enough peace and quiet and epic gorgeous ocean views, come visit me the Big Sur Garden Gallery. I promise not to fangirl too hard on you. And I will also totally tell you where the secret beach trail is.
When the zenith of my club kid experience intersected with my junior year in college and I didn’t have a single friend who wasn’t a gay man. I am not sure how much I drank, it’s lucky I can remember anything at all.
So I’m an only child with an overly protective mom who is a really light sleeper and a dad with an unpredictable temper. I had few opportunities for dirtbaggery. I got sent to educational summer camps and later to community college during my middle and high school summers.
But I did manage to get away with some shenanigans:
The Halloween of my freshman year, my best friend and I snuck onto the the golf course that our neighborhood surrounds. In keeping with the neighborhood rite of passage, I sawed away two marker flags using my friend’s dad’s swiss army knife. One for me and one for her. We almost got caught too, but I guess the security guard didn’t factor in two cross country runners. The flag is still tacked over my desk at home.
The April of my senior year of high school, when I was making college decisions, my dad and I spent about two weeks fighting/screaming about where “we should go” (Barnard vs the place that I currently attend). I reached such a level of misery this particular Friday evening that I went downstairs, filled half a water glass with my mom’s favorite whipped cream flavored vodka and chugged it. I rinsed my mouth and the glass with water to mask the smell and went upstairs as if nothing had happened. I managed to have a civil conversation with my father and noticed how his words slowly lost their importance as the alcohol slowly took effect. My parents never realized that I was extremely intoxicated. Neither did my high school English teachers, who received a suspiciously crooked illustration of King Duncan haunting Macbeth on Monday for a National Poetry Month poster contest.
I won a Chipotle giftcard.
And the smell of whipped cream vodka still makes me nauseous.
I can relate to having a light-sleeping mom…no sneaking out for me! Also, screwing around at my town’s golf course in the dark brought back a bunch of fun memories.
I am still hoping to some day have the guts to have a dirtbag summer. Maybe this is the year. I will turn 36 in July.
The summer of approx. my junior year in college I went to a birthday party for one of my roommates' boyfriends in Ridgewood, New Jersey. This was like a 3 day long birthday party where the birthday boy's entire frat had descended on his parents' house to get drunk and swim in the pool. Somehow, one of those nights, I found myself lost and drunk in a residential neighborhood in New Jersey, in a clump of frat boys and sorority girls, none of us knowing where we were or how to get back to the home base, following a gigantic 6 foot tall bro who was wearing gym shorts, flip flops, and a white t-shirt and carrying (and drinking out of) a full handle of SoCo and who also didn't know the way back, thus leading us in drunken, unproductive, circles. The dirtbagness of that moment was substantial enough to make it the most dirtbag day, week, and summer of my life. [My general existence, I like to think, is fairly low-dirtbag.]
I spent one summer with all my metalhead friends in their disgusting mouse-infested hoarder house that should have been condemned, truly convinced that I didn’t smell like weed all the time. We would wake up around 2 pm and go to sleep around 6 in the morning. I consistently wore some kind of metal shirt and basketball shorts with flip flops and did jack shit with my hair. It was gross, and I’m ashamed at how pointless I was to society, but it was so much fun.
Sneaking around to shelve books at a library AND persuading an adult to fund your child labor is the most beautiful dirtbaggery ever, in my world.
I know I'm too late for this party but I must contribute my dirtbag winter break so I can loll in nostalgia as I write it.
My friends and I didn't see the sun for almost a month when we discovered the internet in the 90s. We (legitimately – I'm not much of a dirtbag) had keys to a university computer lab and spent all night in chat rooms. Each of us would run between three or four computers at a time, chatting as multiple invented personas. We'd start absurd religious arguments with each other and lure others to get involved, inciting passionate flame wars. I convinced people I was a psychic nun because we had so many fabricated personas at hand to act amazed when I divined things about them.
We went on walks down the middle of snowy streets, feeling like we owned the city. On the weekends we drove to a city 120 miles away to go to a dance club and loiter in 24 hour diners with one cup of coffee and lots of free lemonade (water, lemon wedge, sugar). Acid and ecstasy were ridiculously abundant at the club, so it wasn't entirely wholesome (although my own drug use was limited to dabbling with antidepressants).
For some reason I can't fathom now, the six or seven of us piled together to sleep in one tiny dorm room every day. We thought we had some kind of badass vitamin deficiency due to our nocturnal lifestyle, but it turned out to be bedbugs.
When I was 19, I felt so ABANDONED and MISUNDERSTOOD by my parents’ divorce that I moved to a new city to live with my high school girlfriend for the summer after my freshman year of college. I spent the whole time crying in the pantry because it was the only place in the tiny apartment she lived in (with me + 2 roommates) where I could be alone. This meant no one was comfortable coming in to get food. I paid no rent but felt comfortable whining all the time about how none of the others cleaned up after themselves, even though they all worked full time and I only worked part time.
The summer I was 20, I was unemployed and depressed and lived on my mom’s couch in her one bedroom apartment.
One of those is probably my most dirtbag summer.