Awkwardly Social

We were staying in an apartment we rented from a stranger who solicited us in the train station in Prague.  We took the subway from a station 2 blocks away from our apartment to all the must see places listed in our Berkley guide to Eastern Europe in the Prague section.  That day we were supposed to meet Lara at 7pm at an Irish pub before we went out dancing with some cute ex-pats we met at an American bar watching the NBA finals. That morning we heard about OJ Simpson and his car chase.  We missed every frame of it.  We had no idea what our mom was talking about.  It sounded so… unimportant.

We were in an Irish pub when Ireland beat Italy, when Lara finally met us, 2 hours late, and said, “Y’all, we were robbed!”  Surreal?  I don’t know.  I remember feeling at the time that it was an important thing to be doing and experiencing, so far away from home, so grown up, so fucking clueless.

I’ve been listening to NPR in the morning and they’re doing a feature on people’s World Cup memories.  Mine are all about that summer in Eastern Europe when I was just a kid, traveling across countries I could barely point to on a map a month before.  Watching a sport I hadn’t cared about since I was a kid on the AYSO team, the Burros.  One time, as a Burro, we were told our uniforms didn’t fit with AYSO uniform standards because our team name was printed on the front of the uniform.  We, both girls and boys, stood around doing stretches and warming up, without our shirts on while our mothers hastily patched over the team name.  I distinctly remember feeling like it wasn’t fair that the boys didn’t really care that they weren’t wearing shirts, and we girls, did.  I remember wishing I could crawl under the grass so no one would look at me.  Shirtless.

Will I remember anything about this World Cup?  I hope not.  I want this one to remain as uneventful as all the others since 1994.

And there were margaritas.

(And I wrote this weeks ago and never published it, I guess my lunchtime margaritas made me hit save instead of publish?  So very unlike Drunk Tamara…)

I guess it shouldn’t bother me that the person who was so Catholic that he refused to have sex with me (unless it was anal) rejected my friend request on Facebook, but right now I’m kind of irritated.  I mean, come on!  We were actually really close friends in high school.  In college (when he was still a virgin), I tried to get him to do it with me and he refused, and then tried to do it up the butt.  Catholics are fucked up.

Then 5 years later, his wife thought I was hitting on him at our ten year reunion…  Which is kind of funny because I barely spoke to him!  No really.  I know those of you who know me in real life are laughing at me right now, and “the lady doth protest too much”ing me, but I’m serious!  She gave me the evil eye when I gave him a hug (because I hadn’t seen him in several years) and I sort of got drunk and forgot he was there for the rest of the night.  It wasn’t until much later that he told me he couldn’t talk to me anymore because his wife, I think the exact words were, “didn’t approve of our friendship,” which, by the way, at that point, was pretty much non-existent.   I lived in Los Angeles.  I would call him on his birthday.  That was the extent of our contact.

After the phone call where he told me he couldn’t talk to me anymore, he called me from a hotel room in Denver, because he didn’t want his wife to know.

Oh shit, I just told my office that he denied my friend request, so now everyone here is friending him.

hee!

I was at the gym today, doing my 3.5 mile run when I looked up to the second level and saw a super familiar face.  There was a guy on the treadmill, red hair, thick neck, widely placed eyes.  I started wracking my brain for his name.  I went to high school with him, so I’m trying to figure his name and the only way I can do it in my oxygen deprived state is by association.  The results were stuttery.

My high school was small, so I knew pretty much everyone at least by face.  But this kid, I knew by name.  I start to beat myself up because of all the years of drinking, and doing drugs and that one year that I got an ill advised tattoo.  I don’t know why all of this is crashing down on me as I’m running on a treadmill staring at a dude on a stair machine, but it is.  The tattoo somehow means I’m retarded.  Or at least I’ve killed enough brain cells to not only forget someone I went to high school with’s first name but also enough brain cells to get a tattoo of a frog.  On my ankle.  To be fair, my senior year, I did a lot of drugs.  Like,  A LOT.

Anyway, I’m running down names, Jim, Ryan, David when finally one sticks.  Jared.  I know for sure his name is Jared.  But I can only come up with Jared Cooley, who is not this Jared.  Jared Cooley was in my sister’s grade and this kid was someone who I could only picture on the football team with Steve.  And Steve only played varsity from his junior year on, so he was never on the team with Jared Cooley.  So that was the wrong Jared.  Besides, even though I have only a small portion of my brain left after all the booze, this wasn’t that Jared.   The only other image I could get of this Jared, the not Jared Cooley Jared, was of him dating one of the fluffy haired girls.  My senior year, there were all of these girls with blond hair that seemed to be impossibly fluffy.  I think half of them were named Jamie.  But I was running through all the fluffy haired girls that he could have dated and it wasn’t any of the Jamies.  And then it hit me.  Holy shit, he dated one of my best friends.  Robin.  He dated Robin!  Why couldn’t I come up with his name?  At about this point I realized I was staring at someone.  Someone who was clearly trying to avoid looking at me.  Someone who may or may not have gone to a tiny high school in Arizona.  Someone who was just trying to get a workout in without some panting sweating girl who had an insane hairdo going on because of her issues with bouncing ponytails and bangs touching her forehead.

I finished running before he finished climbing stairs and I was too chicken to go over to him, because even though I KNEW his name was Jared, I wasn’t sure if he was actually the Jared I knew.

By the time I got home and showered I had completly forgotten about the mystery Jared at the gym.  So we went to dinner. I had Seth drive my car home from the restaurant, because I had two margaritas with my shitty chicken soft tacos and I’m nothing now if not a responsible drinker.  (That is a damned lie!  But whatever, I don’t drink and DRIVE anymore, so I’m SORT OF a responsible drinker.)  Seth doesn’t drink now, so when we got pulled over for swerving (I told him a million times that his relationship with lanes is weak) at least I wasn’t at the wheel. (THANK FUCKING GOD!)  This actually has nothing to do with the story other than I was relieved that I didn’t get a DUI tonight.  Phew.

So we got home and Seth had some business to take care of (show biz!  It knows no hours!) so I plopped open my year book and there he was, plain as day.  JARED.  Howard!  So, Jared Howard, formerly of Camp Verde, Arizona.  Do you work out at 24 Hour Fitness in Los Angeles?  If so, hi.  You’ve aged so well you look exactly like you did in high school.  Which makes me think, hmmm, maybe it wasn’t you after all.

This story really has no point other than it’s weird to see people from your small home town doing the stair machine across the gym from you when you’re trying to get your mile to under 9 and a half minutes.  I would say it’s awkward, but that’s really besides the point.  Awkward would have been if I went up to him and asked him if he went to Camp Verde High School.  Which I’m totally going to do.  If I ever see him again.  Stay tuned!

I wrote everyone this long dorky letter about how I needed money for my thesis film.  He was the least likely candidate to respond, but when I got his e-mail asking me to call him, all the way in the northern reaches of Alaska I did.

He was my dad’s first cousin, and he asked me what the movie was about.  I told him it was about girls and weddings and it was going to be something that helped me.  He said that Alaska was devoid of all the things I was talking about but he would consider supporting my efforts.  After all, I was family.  I was living the dream.

He had long red hair that he kept in braids.  He laid the Mexican tile in the upstairs of our house.  He was quiet and funny and he lost part of his pointer finger in a fishing accident in Alaska.  He told me it was so cold he didn’t even feel it, that another longshoreman told him he was bleeding and when he looked down he realized part of his finger was gone.

He died today.  Cirrohis beyond repair.  He was my cousin Pete.  59 years old.  And I’m glad I got to know him as briefly as I did.  He had the voice of an angel and when he and his brother sang and played the guitar I felt like I knew what talent was.

It’s hard to say I’m going to miss him, because I haven’t spoken to him in about 4 years.  But I’m sorry one more of the good ones is gone.

R.I.P cousin Pete.  You were one of the good ones.

As I was driving home I hovered at a stop light, a small rise in front of me, and then a dramatic dip beyond it showing off the crooked towers of Century City.  It was a dark clear night with a crispness to the air that we find so cold and wintery here in the Southwest.  The radio was on, and Nirvana was playing.  My feet caressed the clutch in and the brake on stopping me from my slight rocking back and I thought of the way it felt to first learn to drive, all those hundreds of years ago.  And how far away it all seemed, but how one slight rise in the road could bring it all flooding back.

My father insisted I learn to drive a manual transmission before an automatic. We had a big field behind our house and I would drive our yellow Volvo station in circles, shifting from first to second, stalling incessantly, getting hot and dusty in the only car in Arizona with rust creeping around the edges of the frame and no air conditioning. Finally after watching me do circles in a sad little field my dad took pity on me and told me it was time to take a trip around the block.

I thought he was going to pull the car out of the field for me, there was a steep hill that you had to drive up to get to our dusty ungrated dirt road. He told me I had to learn sometime. I can still feel the way the gravel slipped beneath the tires and gave way as I tried to gun it up the steep grade out onto the dirt road that ran in a mile long loop around our subdivision. I might be remembering wrong but I made it out on the first try.

I spent that afternoon driving around our block. Something every kid dreams about learning how to do.  Or at least every kid who wants to learn to drive.

We had one wicked hill in town with a stop sign at the very top.  Every day at 3:02PM traffic at that stop sign would back up all the way down Pecan Lane as kids and teachers and buses would line up and wait to make it onto General Crook Trail.   It was murder if you were a kid with a manual and a father who told you using the emergency brake was for pussies.  I never once stalled on that hill, much to my own surprise.

The light changed on Olympic Blvd. and I dropped Afnuf into 1st, cruising back to home in Silver Lake, all those miles away from a tiny town in rural Arizona, and I thought even though I hate being stuck in brutal Los Angeles traffic with a stick shift, I love being transported back to a time when all I ever worried about was making it up CV hill without stalling my Subaru.

The first time I voted it was in a trailer out by a swap meet and I was the only person there besides my librarian who was the poll worker. I voted for Bill Clinton.

Then, things went down hill. I was in college, then grad school, and it wasn’t until this most recent primary election that I voted in California, and while I did a mail in ballot in the Bush/Kerry election, I hadn’t been to the polls in a National election since that time in the trailer next to the swap meet when I voted for Bill Clinton.

I pulled up to my polling place this morning and groaned. Long lines were in my future. I almost said, “Fuck it,” and kept on driving, but I knew that Prop 8 needed my vote, and while California is safely a blue state, I wanted to make sure I went on record, and that even though I didn’t vote for him in the primary, I am ready for him to be my President now.

So I lined up. A young Latina girl was standing in front of me. Then a young Latino dude walked up behind me in his Midway Auto dealership jacket. His employer was our polling place. He said, “Hey, Brenda, why are you voting? That’s so lame!” I started to bristle. “Come back here.” Brenda was all, “Nuh-uh, I have to vote.” And he was like, “No just come back here, it’s just one person back.” “What do you mean?” “Come stand by me, I have to vote too.” Then I stopped bristling. She moved behind me and I got to listen to their conversation for an hour.

Amidst talk about the kind of car Brenda should buy from him (he was a car salesman) and how she should come party with him, this gem popped out, “I’m gonna vote for those chickens. Prop 2. Those chickens gotta be able to walk around before I eat ‘em.” And then they talked about how the other dealership he worked at closed down, and how this dealership, once a Ford dealership, had just closed its service area and laid off 30 people. Then he said again, “God, I gotta vote for those chickens.”

It all started to strike me as something a speech writer would fabricate and put in a stump speech. But there I was, eavesdropping on an innocent conversation between a boy and a girl waiting in line to vote, getting progressively later for work, thinking about those birds in cages who never get to stretch their legs. And when it comes down to it, there’s no one here but us chickens.

Last night, I said there’s only one thing worse than losing the Presidential election, and that’s winning it. I said that because our country is in a hell of a spot. Massive recession, a war on two fronts, a nation divided down the middle on almost every single issue, and to be honest it’s exhausting just thinking about all the work our next President has to do. I also said, I don’t really know how my day to day life is going to be effected by having McCain vs. Obama in office. I know why I said it, I know that ultimately it isn’t entirely true. Believe me, I’m not naive when it comes to the man in the big chair and how his decisions effect my life. I just know that no matter what happens tonight, I’ll be able to snuggle up with my boyfriend and tell him some of my stories and hear him tell me some of his.

I have this distinct memory from childhood that I don’t think I’ve ever articulated to my mother.

We’re sitting at a table in one of our houses in Sedona, I always get those houses confused, and I have just come home from school, Montessori School, I’m guessing since that’s the only school I went to in Sedona, and it’s just the two of us in the house.

My mom asks me what I want for lunch and I say Spaghetti O’s. She prepares them in a yellow pot with a black bottom on the stove top and spoons them into a bowl. The house is quiet and I can hear the clink of my spoon against the porcelain as we sit together quietly at the kitchen table by the big picture window.

I don’t know if this is something that happened frequently, or a day that only happened once. Maybe it was a day that never happened, but it comes up in my memory file often. Just the two of us, in a perfectly quiet house, sitting across from each other at a table, Spaghetti O’s in a bowl. I feel so completely taken care of in that memory, and so much my mother’s daughter. I have very few memories of just the two of us from that age range, but that one, so simple, so perfect, so completely untouched by photographs or other people’s telling of it, feels the most special.

I have some things to tell you. If hearing women talk negatively about their bodies pisses you off (join the club, I am the Social Secretary - have a cocktail), you have been warned.

I used crystal meth for a year and a half. I would go for days without eating. I didn’t use meth as an appetite suppressant, but it was a welcome side effect. I would tweak all night, take a nap on a Saturday morning, and go for a run Saturday afternoon. I don’t have many pictures from that time period, but there’s a Christmas photo of me that shows the deadness in my eyes quite perfectly. I remember my sister and I fighting about that photo shoot. And me thinking she was such a tool for wanting pictures of me with my Mom and my Grandma. Tweaking not only makes you skinny, it makes you a total raging bitch. I thought I was fat because size 8 jeans weren’t baggy enough on me, I wanted them to fall off. Not hang loosely on my hips.

One summer I spent 2 hours a day at the gym, met with a personal trainer once a week, ate cereal for breakfast and lunch, Twizzlers and Diet Coke for dinner, and was still so completely unhappy with my body I wanted to hide from the world.

I cannot take a compliment. If someone tells me I look thin or pretty, I think to myself, “Why are they such lying liars.”

I didn’t want to eat while I was training for the marathon, but when you’re running 20 to 30 miles a week, if you don’t eat, you’ll die. So I would eat bagels. And feel completely guilty. And wish I could just take a pill that would give me the calories so people wouldn’t see my fat ass eating a bagel.

I can see my rib cage in my collar bone area. I want to see my spine.

I haven’t worn a swimsuit without shame since I was in 5th grade.

I had toast and olives for dinner.

I’m not sure how to get over this fight between the reality of how I look and how I look in my head.

I want to wear smaller jeans.

I want to wear a swimsuit without worrying about the way my ass looks.

I want to tell you I have cellulite, but I’m afraid to even mention that word.

Here’s what I saw in the mirror this morning, I cursed myself for drinking that second glass of wine last night.

I hate that I’m such a cliché.

General wisdom is that most women can find an uncanny resemblance to their fathers in the men they’ve dated.  I’m sure that’s true.  Louie is an only child who loves nerdery in all its forms, tells punny jokes and gives the silent treatment like nobody’s business.  Hi, that’s my father.  Awesome.  But what about the guy that you rebelled with, your dad’s opposite?  Because that dude is popping up like crazy.

I didn’t realize until I took his shirt off that, aside from having a normal sized nose, he was him.  He was the boy I lost my virginity to.  It creeped me out a little.  I could have used a little warning.

He didn’t kiss me or touch me the way Bob did, so his flat stomach and boyish hips were where the similarities ended, but I couldn’t help thinking I had come all this way, weathered all these years, fucked all these dudes, and here I was back at square one.  What was the take-away lesson the universe wanted shoved down my craw?  I still don’t know.  Maybe that every once in a while your past is shoved in your face and you wind up kissing it in a stairwell?

It always makes me a little sad to think about Bob and what I did to him.  The revenge I took.  I really did love him.  I really did trust him and need him in my life.  But I also really needed him to step up and love me back, and if he did, he never let on.

I’m pretty sure my parents thought he was responsible for my wild behavior.  Little did they know my pot-smoking love interest was the least of their worries.  Well, not the least, he was responsible for the gigantic party I threw at my house during Spring Break while my parents were away.  But if he had his way, I would have never done crystal meth and been a nice little stoner chick who gave good head.  He didn’t have his way.  I did crystal meth and I’ve had a couple of dudes tell me I don’t give head for shit.  (Thanks for the honesty!  fuckers.) But that whole week, despite the fact that he stayed at my house, he wouldn’t sleep in the same bed with me.  I was tweaking and he was stoned and the two do not mix.  I don’t think he even wanted to kiss me.  He never understood meth, and he certainly never understood why I would want to stay up all night when we could get stoned and cuddle in my sister’s king sized bed.

When I came home from college for Christmas break, my best friend and Bob were the only two people I wanted to see.  I wanted Bob to kiss me and touch my ear.  He had a thing about ears.  He loved to have your ear lobe between his fingers.  I loved the way he kissed me.  He’s the reason I like to have one hand on my neck under my hair and the other at the small of my back pulling me close when I’m being kissed.  Does everyone like it that way?  If so, why don’t more dudes know this?  I actually had someone kind of lightly put their hand on my shoulder while they were kissing me.  And it kind of creeped me out.  If your tongue is in my mouth, why does it feel like I am getting a polite hug from my grandma’s best friend?

The boy that had Bob’s 19 year old body pulled me back in time.  And I thought about how horrible it felt to lose my virginity with a Rush record playing in the background.  Having Rush play felt even worse than the fact that I was on a dirty couch in the living room of a two room trailer while my best friend and her boyfriend were screwing in the other room that didn’t even have a door.  Welcome to my psyche, it is a white trash romantic.  I don’t know what music I hoped would be playing, but I certainly didn’t want it to be Rush.  And I was way too into grunge to have it be something like Boyz to Men, but can’t a girl get a little Smashing Pumpkins or even Nirvana?  (God, reading those band names and thinking about how bad that first time was makes me chuckle.)

I wonder if I’ll ever see Bob again.  I hope I get the chance.  I google stalked him and I know where he’s living and who he’s married to.  I don’t know what I’d say to him if I do get to see him, except maybe, “Thank you.” Thank you for not blowing my mind with the hot, hot sex our first time. Lowered expectations have certainly been a help.  But also, I want to thank him for setting the bar for fun so incredibly high.  He always made me want to jump off a cliff without knowing what’s below, and that’s something I’ve been missing the past few years.  I just kind of hope I don’t break my hip.  I’m a lot older than I used to be.

I know it’s bad form to point out the fact that your blog post has no focus and the ending doesn’t tie up the beginning.  It’s the first rule of Fight Club, but god.  I don’t know what I’m doing here and I have cramps.  So, don’t fuck with me.  Oops, I meant, don’t judge me.  These pretzels are making me thirsty! 

I was a pretty good kid until I started drinking. Until then, I followed the rules, or at least attempted to make it look like I knew what the rules were. Then alcohol made its way into my life and boy was I rotten. I struggled with all the normal teenaged girl bullshit - the ever changing cast of friends, the girls who love you one day and the next don’t answer your calls, the mysterious entry into the ranks of womanhood and all the games that come with it - but I always wanted to be badass. I know I tried being a girly girl for a while, but when it came down to it, I wanted boys and girls and parents and teachers to fear me. I have no idea what that says about me, other than I’m pretty sure if an apocalypse happens, I’m the chick you want on your side.

The biggest obstacle to my badassery back then was that I was (still am) kind of a chicken. I don’t know how my parents did it. None of my friends had the same fear. I’m pretty sure even the girl who got beaten with a belt until she was 17 wasn’t even afraid of her step-dad. Me? My mom looked at me wrong and I started crying.

I snapped that picture of the 15 on the street light last weekend while I was sitting outside with my big ass 75mm-300mm zoom lens looking for inspiration, and my first experience with that rush you get when you plan and execute and don’t get caught came rushing back. I have a sneaking suspicion if parental circumstances were different, my life today would be that of a criminal. And come to think of it, I’d probably be having a fuck-load more fun.

When you turn 15 and a half in Arizona, you’re allowed to get your driver’s permit. Which means you can legally drive a car as long as you have a licensed driver accompanying you.

Or, if you’re me, you pretend it means you can legally steal your parents’ car while they are out of the house for the night, drive it to ‘town,’ smoke Marlboro cigarettes with all the windows down and drink wine coolers while wishing, someone, anyone will ask you to the dance because they recognize how clearly badass you are. There are many things I’d like to tell my 15 year old self, (like no one will ever respect a wannabe badass who drinks fucking wine coolers) but one of the main ones is, dances are fucking lame, and feeling some 15 year old boy’s sad little erection pressed against your thigh while slow dancing to Journey is never going to be as amazing as you imagined while reading all those bodice ripping romance novels.

It was a Friday night. My sister was away at college. My parents were going to be at a concert in Cottonwood, about a 30 minute drive away from my home town. And I wanted to hang out with my friends. On main street. In my parents’ Subaru. I don’t know, if you’re from a small town, it’s the law that teenagers must hang out in parking lots and talk about the same things they talk about while they’re hanging out at school. What those things were? God. Let’s see here… hmmm. Which boy just drove by? Who had a hickey? Where’s the party was at? Who had a fake ID? I don’t remember. It was boring. I did it anyway.

My driver’s permit was folded up neatly in my wallet. I pulled the Subaru out of the field we kept it parked in, careful to not make any new tracks. I drove to town following all posted traffic signs. Not a very badass move to drive the speed limit, but I was certainly not taking any chances with Camp Verde’s finest. I sat in that parking lot with the back hatch open and the windows down and talked to girls who were talking to boys but never talked to the boys myself, and I thought about the time ticking away. The time slipping through my fingers as I sat there. Turning 16 was going to mean freedom, but it was also going to mean that sitting there in that parking lot with those girls who talked to boys was going to be my national pastime. There wasn’t anything else. There wasn’t going to be anything better.

I drove home with the windows down, airing out the car as I smoked my friend’s mom’s Marlboro lights. I felt victorious. I had stolen a car. I had driven without a license. I had nothing else to do.

15.