dang, dang, da-da-da-da-daaaang

Atomic Dustbin

My junior year prom date was named Zach. I really didn’t know him. He used to sit behind me in CCD (that’s bible school for Catholics, peeps) and bag groceries at the grocery store. I sort of knew who he was.

He called my house and told my mother that he’d like to ask me on a date. My mother gave me the message, so I called back and he asked me to prom. For that very same night. Why not?

I was out somewhere during the day, and it must have been a pool or something because when I came home I was super sunburned. Zach was there already, sitting on the porch swing with my mother in a gray suit he’d bought at the Bargain Hut for $11 after I’d said yes to prom. While I got dressed, he and my mother made a most gorgeous corsage for me out of lilacs from the back yard, and he pinned it to my dress. We took pictures, and we’re both smiling uncontrollably and I’m red as a lobster.

We went to prom. We danced and stuff. Then we went to Fort Wayne, the nearest metropolis about an hour away, and still in our prom threads, and went to an underground punk bar named Monkey Lust. It was fabulous amounts of badass fun. He lifted me up on his shoulders so I could see the band, and I gave him a fake tattoo in the parking lot. Then we drove down Hoosier country roads, the narrow ones with the dips where the tall grass flattens as you zoom through. They had an enormous trampoline in the back yard. We jumped on the trampoline in the middle of the night in our prom clothes, then we laid down on the trampoline and ate ice cream out of the container. The sky was black and full of stars and more stars the longer you looked at it, just millions of them.

We became great friends. I went to Europe that summer and he sent me giant packages with mixed tapes (Fugazi, Nine Inch Nails, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Nirvana). Four months passed till I saw him again, and I was dating a boy named Ted. Ted and I dated and Zach and I were friends. Once, home from college for Christmas, Ted and I were having troubles. Zach and I went to a party and drank too much and kissed. And we both felt weird. So, whatever, we were drunk and it was stupid and we agreed to pretend it never happened, and I pretended I didn’t hear him say he loved me. Maybe he didn’t say it at all, but I’m pretty sure he did.

I dated Ted more. Then Ted and I broke up. I wanted to date Zach, but he was dating Anna. All summer Zach and I went swimming and ate ice cream and lounged in a hammock. He dated Anna, and Anna was beautiful and wonderful and I liked her. Once, a bunch of us were swimming at his house, and for reason we were in his bedroom (the whole big attic) and I don’t know how it happened, we hugged or something, and we could have kissed. But we didn’t.

Then I went to Europe again, to study, and he sent me letters. The old fashioned kind, remember? Hand written on notebook paper with clippings from the small town newspaper that he thought were funny. “Pig Falls from Three Story Window.”

In the first letter, he said he had broken up with Anna. I sent him jam from Herrods and pictures of books that I thought were beautiful and he sent me collages and pictures of the awards he won at art shows—he was always winning awards at art shows because his art was fabulous.

I was gone again for four months. I went to Prague the weekend before finals with my friend Erin, from Oxford. We were talking about Zach and she convinced me that this crazy him-loving-me-when-I’m-not-available and me-loving-him-when-he’s-not-available stuff had gone on long enough. What? FOUR years? She was right: When I got home, I would tell him enough was enough. I loved him. And he loved me. It’s time. Yes, I would do it.

When Erin and I got back to school, there was a letter from him waiting for me.

He was engaged. To a woman named Erica.

I did it anyway. It was hard. I didn’t tell him we should be together. I took him to a park and I remember that I was wearing something hooded, because I kept stalling and pulling the hood down over my face because I couldn’t look at him. I said something like…. I promised myself I’d tell you this before I knew about Erica, and I’m going to tell you anyway. But I want you to know that I’m not intending to upset anything, or to date you, or to harm your relationship. I’m telling you because I need to tell you. If you want to marry her, I want you to, too. I love you. And I’ve loved you since the ice cream on the trampoline.

And now he’s married and has two kids. We aren’t friends.

I wish him well. And I can’t smell lilacs or eat chunky monkey or listen to Gray Cells Green without thinking about what a really great guy he is.

The end.

Ten things I love about my mother: A very incomplete list

She names her plants.

She tells dirty jokes.

She’s brilliant, both enlightened and creative.

She gets rural Hoosiers to appreciate and create art.

The woman is a domestic magician. She got candle wax out of my favorite skirt. She can pack a huge load of stuff into a single suitcase. She can make an awesome set of curtains out of two rags and a stick pin. Her lasagna? Wow.

She’s thrifty.

She married the best man ever.

When my heart got broken, she asked me what I needed, and when I said, “Get me out of this country,” she did.

At Notre Dame football games, she’s the loudest person in the crowd.

She's the Trivial Pursuit champion of the world. And I'm so jealous.

For a different party, she made a miniskirt out of fruit rollups.

Here's one for the “That Was Suppposed to be a Joke and Now It’s on the Internet?!?!” Files

My best friend sent me an email yesterday with the subject “OH MY GOD.” Last winter she went to a costume party. I don’t know what the theme was, exactly—some sort of construction-worker-meets-Burning-Man-artist kind of thing. She made a fringy miniskirt out of containment straps (used in building) and a sort of a tank top… with much less covered up than a tank top. It was iridescent orange, revealing and, while it sounds scary, it was fun and, well, strappy and not something one would be caught dead in anywhere but a theme party among friends.

Yesterday, she hopped onto the Web site for the organization that threw the party to look up an event date or something, and there she was, in all her glory: a GIANT photo of her in the orange strappy ensemble with one high-heeled-boot hiked up on the wall, give the camera man a (fake, joking) sultry dirty-girl look. On the internet. Yes indeed.

I wish I could post a link, but she’d KILL me. Hey: If you wear a bra made out of construction-worker-strappy things, chances are high that it'll end up online. Oh, it was very, very funny.

Shout out to the St. Paul Photoblog

This semester will be over in two days, 22 hours and 58 minutes.

How I Learned to Knit

I lived in my then apartment with my then husband who, then, comes home from work at 3 a.m. smelling like sweat and smoke and exotic dancer perfume.

My husband drops his clothes by the bed and curls behind me. The neighbors are screaming. They started at about three in the afternoon with vodka, I tell him, and were onto whiskey and with a break to walk to the bottle shop around 8 p.m.

The day we moved in, I locked myself out. I was outside trying to light the pilot for the water heater when the door slammed shut, and there I was in my shorts and bikini top and no shoes, and I needed to borrow a neighbor’s telephone book.

I didn’t know. How would I?

The biggest one, the fattest and hairiest, opened the door in his underwear. He said if I ever needed anything else, anything (wink), I could knock any time.

The locksmith took an hour to get there. I could’ve hugged the locksmith and kissed the top of his head. It took two hours to get the place open. My apartment was the hardest place he’d ever had to break into.

James was his name. The drunk neighbor with his gut hanging over the rim of his underwear.

I cleaned houses during the days, a cleaning lady. I took a calculator to the grocery store because I could spend no more than $45 on food for my husband and me for two weeks. At home alone until 3 a.m., I read books on the porch and hung wet socks over the backs of chairs to dry. I rubbed mold off the bathroom ceiling with a mop and swirled sand down the shower drain. The neighbors were drunk by 5 p.m. every bloody day, and sometimes they weren’t just drunk. But my apartment was the hardest one the locksmith had ever broken into, the locksmith said so.

Even half asleep I knew the sound of my husband’s car coming up the bump into the parking lot. I knew the sound of his door slamming and the sound change made in his pocket when he walked up the stairs. And my favorite sound: his key sliding into the deadbolt, and the turning of the lock.

Now, he curls behind me. It’s a big night for James and the boys. Now they are really screaming. There is body-shaped thud against the wall next to where I sleep. Someone is getting pounded.

My husband gets up. Enough, he says. You’re going to Penny’s, and I am calling the police. No, I say, I’m not leaving you here with them.

I was worried about him. I think about this now, not then.

Get dressed.

No.

Get dressed.

If they know you called the police they’ll kill you.

I agree to get dressed because my husband calls Tiny, the best bouncer they have where he works. He is not so Tiny at all, and he is our friend.

I ask to wait there long enough for the police to come, but my husband knows too much about the police here to allow that, and they’re outside now, the neighbors, I mean, and they’re thudding and punching and snapping the railing to the stairs into pieces. Something like a skull might have just cracked pavement.

Something Happened. The drunks are panicking. Suddenly Penny is honking out front and someone yells Get Rid of It and they thump back inside their place.

From our place, we have to cross their door to get out. Now we can make a run for it, outside past their door with my husband and Tiny—when did Tiny get here?—on either side of me, toward the car. They do this for a living, but I am not a stripper and these aren’t everyday drunks. My sandal slips and I yelp and Tiny yanks me up by the arm so I don’t fall. A hunk of hair runs down the steps in the blood like a mouse in a flood.

Turn around. Through the apartment now, I hoist a leg over the balcony and I am down the fire escape and jump the last 10 feet. Penny’s car goes slow, and I look out the back window at my apartment, where my husband and Tiny are. It is all very quiet.

Penny is my husband's friend, but I have met her once before. My sticky sandals are out on the steps by the screen door. She offers me a beer and I say no. I cross my legs on a pillow on the floor. She makes me tea, and adds a splash of whiskey.

Penny’s house is pink and yellow inside, and she has big pillows and fresh flowers and some music playing that should make me feel better. I sip the drink and Penny declares: I'm going to teach you how to knit.

She sits across from me, and I mirror her because I am left handed. She teaches me to cast on, and I don’t get it, so I try a few times, then how to stitch. Maybe a pot holder, or a scarf, or, you know, it doesn’t have to be anything right now.

So I start, and I’m still sniffling, and the needles click and she goes quite fast. I click and click without thinking and then I stop for the first time and look at it. What have I done? I have made a mess of things—loose loops and holes and tight spots all the way through. She says I have to unravel and start again from the beginning.

I go for a bit without stopping, but can’t go a stitch further once I see I’ve only repeated the same mistakes as before. I unravel and start over and unravel and start over and I don’t feel like I’m getting any better at this. I am slow and concentrating very hard and it is always a mess. I undo my work. I begin again. The telephone rings at dawn.

"The Root Problems of the writer...

...are personality problems. He or she cannot get started, or starts a story well then gets lost or loses heart, or writes very well some of the time and badly the rest of the time, or writes brilliantly but after one supurb story or novel cannot write again, or writes brilliantly while the creative writing course lasts but after it is over can no longer write. The root problems, in other words, are problems of confidence, self-respect, freedom: The writer's demon is imprisoned by the various ghosts in the unconscious."

a quote from John Gardner (in the Forward), Becoming a Writer

[Substitute "writer" for artist or "anyone trying to do what they really, really love."] Discuss: