the old-school guestbook archives
my amazon wish list... my favorite astrologer... my favorite artist... yerba mate revolution! erowid: a travel guide for interior journeys... no more war: MoveOn.org United for Peace and Justice True Majority seek the truth: Common Dreams Unamerican Activities The Nation people I adore, diaries I read: rev.raikes ariana cubiclegirl epiphany glitter333 laurakay wammo the music: the asylum street spankers backyard tire fire blue highway bill camplin wendy colonna freedom tribe joules graves guy forsyth band hamsa lila hanuman libby kirkpatrick leftover salmon pamela means medeski martin & wood the motet the nice outfit nickel creek open road rose polenzani railroad earth south austin jug band string cheese incident taarka tha musemeant the devil makes three tim o'brien band trolley wild sage keller williams yonder mountain string band |
september 22nd ~ September 22, 2006 - 9:18 p.m. september 22nd always has this weird resonance for me. I wrote a poem, when I was fifteen, called "september 22nd". when I was fifteen, almost all of my poetry was about randy, my first "real" boyfriend. in my parents' attic, there's a box of notebooks, all my journals from high school, and one of them is filled exclusively with "the randy poems". I was such a baby. man, fifteen. and I thought I was sooo sophistocated, so ahead of my time. I was really damn smart and self-aware, but I was also just such a baby. randy didn't know he was my first "real" boyfriend, my first makeout, my first oral sex. I very nearly lost my virginity to him, and to this day I wish I had. it would have been so much less depressing than the reality of how it went down, shortly after we broke up. randy was seventeen, and had a car. randy was a drummer, the first of many musicians to capture my heart. he played in a straightedge band called "silent scream" when we first got together. one of our first "dates" was one of their shows, and I couldn't believe I was actually dating the drummer in a band. I spent the summer riding in the passenger seat of his cutlass, my bare feet up on the dash. he was a little shy, kinda funny, curly brown hair and soft eyes that made me melt. he'd say things like you are going to be sooo beautiful. he was right, of course-- I was still growing into my beauty at fifteen, and we were both still learning to be comfortable in our own skin. one night, we dropped off a friend in some remote suburban area, and on a dark and quiet street, randy slammed on the brakes. there was a deer standing in the middle of the road, and it stood there in the headlights, frozen. we just sat there, stunned-- us watching the deer and the deer watching us. one long moment of intensity and awe, before it turned and bounded away. "ship of fools" by robert plant was my randy song, that summer. we listened to a lot of classic rock. "aqualung" came on the radio three times the first night we spent together, down on the couch in his mother's basement. randy's mom was quiet and tense, and I don't know if she and I ever actually spoke to each other. they lived together in a little house out in the suburbs. he'd had an older brother who'd killed himself, and I wondered if that was why she seemed so sad, so disconnected from randy. not that I was much more connected to my family, at the time. my parents were still drinking, and they were hardly around. likewise with my brother and sister. randy would come over and we'd make out in the living room, or in my bedroom, which was still making the transition from childhood. randy's presence was what inspired me to put my stuffed animals away, to splash black paint around. where is your family? randy asked me once. why are you always home alone? I just shrugged. I liked it better when they were gone. there was a night that summer when no one came home. I stayed up all night, and I kept wondering when someone would walk in the door. no one ever did. I watched tv, I made food, I played music on the stereo and danced in front of the mirror. bar time came and went, and still no one stumbled in the door. around dawn I was delirious, loopy. are they all dead? I wondered. I had plans, later that morning, to go to a friend's house and play dungeons and dragons. I was just on my way out when the doorbell rang. it was my dad. there was blood all down the front of his shirt, stitches on the bridge of his nose. dad, are you okay? I had a car accident. I'm okay. is the car okay? no, it's-- I don't know. I don't know. how... how did it happen? I hit a parked car. that wasn't what I'd meant, of course. i'd meant, were you drinking? but of course I knew he had been. it turned out my mom was out of town on a business trip, which no one had bothered to tell me. my brother and sister were out at a party that went all night. my sister told me recently that that night was the first time she blacked out drunk. so it was just me, and dad aching and hungover, with blood all over his clothes. I put him to bed and went to the drugstore for his pain prescription, bought him some reese's peanutbutter cups to cheer him up and went to my friend's house to play d&d. randy was home less often by then, and had less to say to me on the phone. once, he told me to hold on for a minute. I held on for ten minutes, and when he picked back up he was embarrassed. he'd gone down to the basement for something and started to play drums and forgot I was on the phone. by the week before school started, I knew he was avoiding me. I called him and told him we needed to talk. the first, but certainly not the last, time I ever had to use that tone with a man. he came and picked me up, and we drove down to the lake. I'd already been school shopping with my mom, and I was wearing my coolest new clothes and a free sample of "poison" perfume. I asked him if he'd been ignoring me and hoping I'd break up with him so he didn't have to. he denied it, said he'd been busy. we made out, and I thought it was all good. he broke up with me two weeks later. he *had* been hoping I'd break up with him, of course-- but that night down by the lake I'd been so cute... it wasn't until later, when one of the guys in the band let something slip, that I found out he'd broken up with me over his guilt for cheating on me. he'd had sex with a girl named tasha, who had this really cool hair. his words. to this day, I don't know what was so damn cool about her hair-- I never met her. was it aquamarine? liberty spikes? I'll never know. she had cool hair and she had sex and I had my rejection and a notebook full of angst-ridden poetry. anyway, september 22nd was going to have been our three-month anniversary. which I know because when it all began he'd told me to remember the date he asked me out. so we'd know the anniversary. he thought we'd make it that far. three months can be forever, when you're fifteen. the poem I wrote called "september 22nd" was about that. it began something like: it was going to have been forever tonight, such a baby I was. just so precious, the adolescent heart just discovering love and sex and betrayal. my parents both quit drinking, that fall-- right around the time that I began. I started going to basement keg parties, having sex with strangers. randy, later on, went a little crazy. he went to texas and had something like a nervous breakdown. something about a phobia of flags and voices in his head. he went on disability and partied like a rockstar, living in thrashed-out punk houses. we'd see each other at parties, and he acted like he barely knew me. but once upon a time, we were just kids. just kids trying to figure out what this love thing was all about. first of my musicians, first of all the boys. that's what september 22nd always makes me think about.
(((rings))) |