On Sunday, March 22nd, I will celebrate my twenty-fifth birthday. Not only does this mean that an entire quarter of a century has passed since I made my bald, underdressed, and typically hostile debut into the world (“well, no, Mrs. Bunting, I don’t think I have ever heard a newborn scream ‘who do I have to fuck to get a drink around here,’ but it hasn’t affected her Apgar score”) – it also means I can rent a car. You’ll pardon me if this feeble rite of passage does not inspire a rousing chorus of “Zippety Doo Dah” to spring forth from the depths of my soul. Milestones of previous birthdays brought with them the heady sensation of doing forbidden adult things while still basically a kid, but this birthday gives me the decidedly uncomfortable feeling that, if I want to sit at the grown-ups’ table, I have to stop banging my fork and learn how to converse on grown-up topics like rental prices in the Hamptons and 401k plans and things I heard while listening to NPR, when I would much rather clamber into the bathtub and shotgun a beer with the other kids.

Birthdays scare me now. Why? Um, consider the other grown-ups with whom I share my birthday. First, we have Marcel Marceau, the world’s most famous mime. Since mimes rank just ahead of serial killers, law students, and Andrew McCarthy on the list of people useful to and respected by our society, I don’t find this coincidence particularly auspicious. The patron saint of scenery-chewing, William Shatner, also blows out a bunch of candles on March 22nd. Just to review briefly – I came into the world on the same day as William Shatner, Captain James Tiberius Kirk, T.J. Hooker, hero to hundreds of thousands of obsessive man-children who consider Pez a food group and still wear sneakers that fasten with Velcro. I shouldn’t think too deeply on that one, I suppose, but I seem to have the same knack for attracting abject geeks, and apparently we have the same middle name as well, which leads me to believe that in forty years I will have a Hair Club rug more obvious than the OJ defense and walk around saying things like “there’s something . . . on . . . THE WING!” Oh, goody. Not.

As a kid, though, I looked forward to my birthday as much as any other kid – probably more, because I skipped second grade, so each birthday let me “catch up” just a little bit. The years went by and the class bully stopped the “baby, baby, stick your head in gravy, wrap it up in bubble gum and send it to the Navy” chant that she found so witty – well, actually, she got expelled, otherwise I probably would have had to endure another eight years of that oh-so-insightful ditty, although she ended up getting grotesquely fat and apparently endured far worse torture at the hands of her peers than she ever doled out to me, so let this stand as a warning to everyone who ever made fun of me that WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND. Anyhow. The years went by and the age difference mattered less . . . until other girls in my class started turning seventeen and driving everywhere.

On the other hand, I remember every detail of my seventeenth birthday. I remember getting up and attiring myself in the shortest and tightest black spandex mini that Benetton had to offer, and dashing downstairs when Bob tooted the horn. (Bob, my driving teacher, had to escort me to the test because my family didn’t have a “regulation test car.”) I remember explaining to Bob that if his excellent teaching hadn’t done the trick, my nubile tights-clad inner thighs would finish the job. I remember Bob wondering what would happen if I drew a female examiner, and I remember telling Bob to shut up. I remember getting to the test site and taking the eye test and hopping back in the car, and I made sure to flash the examiner – a man, thank god – some serious leg, and then I pulled out onto the road and the examiner said, “Well, I would tell you to change lanes, but I see you’ve ALREADY DONE THAT,” which loosely translated meant that I had already failed one required element on the driving test, namely turning into the nearest lane, which I had blatantly not done, and I remember telling myself not to panic and then panicking anyway, and while panicking I successfully negotiatied a left turn, a K turn, and a yield sign and I parallel parked the car with no problem on my second try, and my stone-faced examiner told me sternly to drive back to the testing site, and I had just begun to tear up in an attempt to crumble his defenses with a tidal wave of hysterical sobbing when he informed me that I had passed the test and I should have a very happy birthday, and we got back to the test site and I leaped out of the car and gave Bob, a fussy guy who came up to my armpit and looked exactly, and I mean exactly, like the “in-con-THEE-vable” guy from The Princess Bride, a huge hug, and I remember that he insisted on driving me to the DMV station to get my license made even though I had just passed the damn test, but I didn’t care because I had finally entered a world worth living in, a world where I could drive, and as soon as Bob dropped me off at home I dashed through the house and yelled “I passed it – going over to Jenn’s – bye” to my understandably terrified parents as I Dopplered out the back door and leaped into the car with my favorite mix tape in hand to drive over to my best friend’s house so that I could drive HER around and do nothing for a change, and I pulled up in front of her house and leaned on the horn and she ran out and jumped into the passenger seat and looked around for a second and said, “Passenger seat. Weird. Hit it,” but I think to this day she really meant to say “MISTER SULU, TAKE US TO WARP FACTOR FIVE!”

I remember my eighteenth birthday with fondness also. It didn’t mean nearly as much as the seventeenth, but it did make me a voting adult, and it also allowed me to march into our town’s 7-Eleven and ask for cigarettes, which nobody bothered to do if they didn’t have at least five forms of valid ID, because Buddy, the big black seventy-year-old bad-ass who worked behind the counter at night, refused to sell cigarettes to anyone under the age of death without checking their ID first, despite the fact that he himself chain-smoked illegally in the store at all times and made no bones about the fact that he had not paid for the cigarettes, and if you tried to argue with him that no, really, you turned eighteen before Christmas, you just left your license at home, NO, REALLY, he would take you by the scruff of the neck and deposit you on the sidewalk out front and say, “‘Give me a break, Buddy. You know me, Buddy.’ Like I don’t hear that all damn day. I don’t give breaks and I don’t know shit. Now get out of my store or I don’t know what,” and you got out because you didn’t know what either and you didn’t want to find out. But when you turned eighteen, you went in and bought cigarettes, even if you didn’t smoke – you could buy them in memory of someone whom Buddy had negged, and then give them away or whatever. And when he asked you for ID, you pulled it out and laid it on the counter so that it made a little “click,” and he wished you a happy birthday and gave you some matches as a present. I haven’t seen Buddy in years and I never did find out if the legendary Buddy-cracked-a- guy-attempting-to-rob-the-safe-over-the-head-with-a-Duraflame-log story was true. But I still remember him telling me, “Happy birthday, young lady. You know, those things’ll kill you.”

And of course I remember the first beer I bought legally (Pete’s Wicked Ale). I have saved a couple of the bottle caps, actually. Naturally, the guy in the liquor store didn’t card me – the first time in my life I had a valid form of photo ID and not that crappy Times Square-vintage NYU ripoff that said “Teresa Mazzoni” on it, and he didn’t even ask. I leaned forward and said, “Don’t you want to see some ID?” and he looked at me as if this had already happened several times that week (which it probably had, now that I think about it) and said, “Let me guess. It’s your birthday.” And I said, “Yes, it is.” And he said, “If you really feel strongly about it, I’ll card you.” And I said, “If you don’t mind,” and he rolled his eyes and said, “Do you have some ID, miss?” and I whipped out my ID and he glanced at it and said, “Great. Happy birthday.” And I took my brown paper bag and went back to my dorm room and popped open a beer with my hallmate at three in the afternoon and told her the story and she said, “He could have at least pretended,” and an hour or two later my parents turned up and my father informed me that “your el cheapo parents got you some Rolling Rock,” and the whole family kicked back in my room with a cold one. After what seemed like an eternal penance of standing outside bars while my friends decided whether to go someplace where I stood a chance of getting in or to abandon me and get sloshed inside, I had at last arrived.

Now, all the “good” birthdays have already happened. (So have a couple of bad ones, like my tenth, when a guy mowing a lawn exposed himself to me as I walked home from my piano lesson, and my twenty-second, when my then-boyfriend’s father died of a massive heart attack, and I expected a call from my boyfriend but he didn’t call all day, and when I finally reached him I let him have it, and then he explained why he hadn’t called and I felt horrible and small.) I have nothing to look forward to now but insipid Cathy cards about my sagging butt-cheeks and jokes about how to fit eight bazillion candles onto my cake and mugs that say “39 and Counting” on them in purple and pink script. Please. I mean, I don’t really fear getting old – and, frankly, with the amount I smoke, I’ll probably drop dead of tar poisoning before I even get a wrinkle – but I do fear not being young anymore. I do fear not having as many years in front of me to make mistakes, and I do fear reaching an age where making mistakes becomes a sign of immaturity rather than willingness to take chances. When people in my office heard I had a birthday coming up, they joked around and said, “So how old will you be turning – twelve? Thirteen?” But twenty-five doesn’t have the elasticity of seventeen or nineteen or even twenty-three; something about crossing that line and leaving my early twenties behind gives me the creeps, because I’m still young, but perhaps not so young that I can still change my mind about what I want to do with my life every ten minutes, and then go out and hoist a pint or seven of Bass Ale and bore my friends to death talking big talk.

Speaking of which . . . I can’t put them away like I used to do, either. DAMMIT, JIM!

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