I Remember Halloween

 "Halloween" (1978)

I don’t generally like reading or writing little autobiographical musings about past relationships – these stories are usually so “So what?” to me, and are also usually written in the David Sedaris-style narrative that only David Sedaris should use.  However, I'm writing a piece like that right here, right now, because lately I’ve started going to a video store in South Pasadena, and it’s a place that I used to go to with an old friend I’ll call Max  -- it’s made me think fleetingly about the time I spent with him, which was the saddest phase of my social life.  Anyway, this is more of a Shaggy Dog story.

Max and I hung out for a month or so after I was done with my short outpatient stint at a mental hospital, where I’d met him but almost always managed to avoid conversation.  He was the tedious type of emotionally fragile, like Norman Bates in Psycho, someone whose long stories you have to listen to because you don’t want your hostility to be the reason they kill themselves.  Naturally, I preferred the attractive type of emotional fragility, like Marion Crane in Psycho, a beautiful criminal who keeps her secrets.

Speaking of Hitchcock movies, one of the saddest things we ever did together was watching this short art film he’d made – it was a loop of three seconds of footage from a Hitchcock movie in which James Stewart slaps a woman in the face and her blond hair sweeps beautifully around as her head recoils from the impact of his hand.  These three seconds of footage were repeated at least 30 times in a row.  It was a cool little film he’d made, but horrible to watch.  It wasn’t some passive aggressive intimation of male frustration, like it sounds.  It was clear he identified with the slapped woman.  I think the Stewart character who was slapping her represented Max’s dad or something.  I don’t know what his technical diagnosis was, but I know he was a serious guy who tried and failed at levity, a smart guy whose parents still treated him like an underachiever.  He was painfully skinny.  He was not ugly or square, though to me he seemed both those things; he liked a lot of the same bands I do, and Eightball comics, but it wasn’t fun to talk about these things with him.  It was just a drag.

 "Rear Window" (1954)

I gave him my telephone number when he asked for it on my last day at the hospital, and when he called that night, my stomach sank at the realization that I was already involved in the situation I’d hoped to avoid, that of being a girl he liked.  The first time we talked I let him know that I would become extremely uncomfortable if I ever got the feeling he was trying to get me romantically interested in him.  I said I knew he had a crush on me and that I didn’t like that feeling, but that as long as he had no expectations of reciprocity, it’d be nice to hang out as friends.  I always used to get glommed on to by sad people who burdened me with their sadness, without giving me the gift of being funny or inexplicably hopeful in return, so if I sound too mean towards him, I hope it doesn’t sound like mockery, because I did take him seriously.  I just feel resentment towards his dragging me down in the quicksand of despondency I’m always trying to sidestep.

Despite the tone of this first conversation, and my immediate follow up email letting him know that I was very serious about things being completely platonic, the first time we hung out would have been a perfect date for someone who like doing expensive things in South Pasadena.  We saw a movie about a loser winning the girl, then we had gelato, and went to a fancy Italian restaurant where the waitstaff knew and loved him. 

I didn’t like this type of thing, though.  I liked to go out drinking at night and spend my days off at home alone watching movies and eating cereal or ice cream.  Before me, he’d tried dating another crazy girl who was more suited to this type of date, and they both came from wealthy old South Pasadena families, and I thought he should have kept trying with her.  It was useless though because this other girl, who I only knew her as a blond mouth-breather who drooled after her treatments, was in fact a young woman whose dad forced these treatments on her.  Max knew her as a woman it was too hard to get along with, not because of her drooling quietness, but because of her anguished rage and paranoia in the times leading up to the treatments. 

After that first time, Max and I only hung out a few more times, at his grandfather’s house where he was living.  Each visit felt interminable though, and they were all filled with a combination of things I love and hate.  Like one time, when we ate grilled cheese sandwiches made from a sandwich press that toasted Hello Kitty’s face on the bread – so cute!  But while we ate these great sandwiches, we had to watch this Gus Van Sant movie, Elephant, about the fucking Columbine High School Massacre, and all these kids getting their heads shot off as they walk unassumingly to their lockers or the school library.

I was glad the way things ended, because it’d been his decision.  He saw hickies on my neck from my now-husband one time and told me he didn’t think we should keep hanging out. 

"Elephant" (2003) 

When I was a kid, mom usually took me trick or treating in South Pasadena, because it was her theory that rich people gave better candy, and also, some scenes from the original Halloween movie (1978) had been shot in that part of town, adding the importance of cinematic history to our walk up and down the streets.  She was always drunk on Halloween though, and one time when we were doing our Halloween night South Pasadena route, she decided to stop at the house of her recently deceased boyfriend’s parents, unannounced and with two preteens dressed like Rocky Horror characters (me and my friend Andrea) in tow.  The dead man’s parents opened the door to a mixture of ‘trick or treat’ and mom’s half apology for stopping by unannounced.  They were rich and nice and bereft of joy.  I think their son may have mentioned me to them once or twice because there was some kind recognition of my identity when I said hello.  I’m sure I didn’t think to say anything about being sorry for their loss, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t ask for candy.  Me and Andrea were going to our first midnight screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show later that night so I had a case of nerves that made everything else that night seem muted.

 

"Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975)

Being a Young Woman During the Time of My Life

my favorite of our old Olympia houses.  I like to see it through the eyes of Google Maps.  It's that little gray thing hiding behind trees with a billboard on its lawn.

When I was 18 through 22, I lived in Olympia, Washington.  I’d moved there ostensibly to attend The Evergreen State College, but my true reason was the town itself, which was the starting place and still-center for the punk community I’d read so much about since my early teens.  I only applied to one other college, which was prestigious and at which I was accepted.  With  Evergreen State College, I bombarded them with several fine points and essays in my application, and received an early notice of acceptance as well as a full-tuition freshman year scholarship, which I won based on my work on the zines I’d written throughout Junior High and High school, and my extracurricular activity of being in a punk band that played in a few L.A. venues. 

There are so many stories that I want to tell someday -- about depression in college, some of them--  also about a major heartbreak that, when it turned into more of a sentimental friendship, involved so many little scenes of bitter sweetly crossed wires and unexpected, genuine rewards of loyalty and alliance in return for my years of pining.  I want to explain as completely as possible the depth and wildness of my most important female friendships, and just being, FEELING, so young, so wild and free.

But the memories I keep having of those four years, instances I hope to explain beautifully and loyal to the facts someday, are, importantly, instances of experiences so wholly unfamiliar to me, as a Los Angeles native – glimpses in many cases that I think would be considered mundane by others.  I remember some things that were just so identical to dream scenes, never things I could get used to or forget.  I remember a little house with a bright silver Airstream parked in their driveway – the lush lawn was dotted with children’s toys.  These items, covered in rain drops, were the kind of American family accouterments that I thought must be magical.

There was a burned down house I came upon one time with photo books among the rubble that hadn’t burned.  They were still full of pictures of the family who’d lived there.

One Fourth of July, I walked up and down a few of the streets in a neighborhood full of nuclear families, and feeling that the barbecues they were having would be a nice thing to know firsthand.  They had built-in friends and biographers in the family around them, and their lifelong friends (I imagined).  They looked normal.  Sometimes I want to be around a normal person, and in fact, sometimes I just want a normal person to take me completely in hand, to feed me something healthy and demand I go on a walk and that I stop moping.  The dependable-seeming mothers at these barbecues – it would have been nice to be able to spend a night in a guest room in one of these houses, with the guarantee of coffee and a functional shower the next morning.

I loved the garage sales there, especially the ones that elderly people gave.  The old women had costume jewelry and coats, and the men often had a box of belts and belt buckles that’d become tongue-in-cheek riding on our hips, NRA belt buckles, or a cast iron likeness of a bald eagle, or a hawk.

There was a garage sale we went to in a beautiful part of town, and it turned about that there was a bear roaming the streets.  Nobody ran for cover but I think we all turned just turned our backs and wished it away.

In the winter, around Christmas, there was nothing more bittersweet (I already KNEW, as I engaged in these vignettes) than walking around an unfamiliar neighborhood, taking a break from a party at someone’s house I didn't know well, to walk around looking at Christmas lights in freezing weather.

This that I’m describing now is a particular night in my sophomore year, a particularly huge party in an unfamiliar neighborhood.  I’d had to coax my short-lived boyfriend to go on this walk for me.  I said the type of whimsical thing I used to be known for, something like “oh it’s so beautiful, I feel like I’m in heaven.  I wish I could fly,” or something like that.  He wasn't receptive to such a line of bullshit.  Supposedly he’d told people he thought I looked like an European model, but he never showed real interest in me.  I remember one time when he was asleep in bed I wrote a poem that I later turned in to song lyrics with my band The Tantrums.  He always slept like a baby and I always stayed up all night, sometimes whispering a non-denominational and hopeless prayer, like “Oh please let him seriously start liking me.”  Fuck, that bedroom, that temple of selfishness, no room in the bed, no space heater, no food anywhere. 

These were the lyrics:  Sometimes I want not to eat but my stomach is so bare/It is a place all dead with magic/you have been in there – is it fair?!  Is it fair?!”

Anyway there were boys.  There was inebriation.  But there were one-person adventures.  It was an adventure to walk down to the gas station convenience store in the middle of the dark freezing night for a pack of smokes.  It was a solitary adventure to walk on a side street and notice a tiny little babbling brook  that nobody else said they knew about.  It was an adventure to walk across the street from our should-have-been-condemned $650 monthly house to the graveyard with the radio tower in the distance. It was an adventure, and a most wonderful and flattering thing to walk around and run into people I knew.  But I was a cutter and, in many other ways, a dime a dozen.  These boys needed their time away from us girls to practice their Pete Seeger cover bands and their Peter Pan shrugs.  We used our time for beautiful creations as well but allowed too many visits during these fits of epiphany.

The Mystery Girl

Here is a short story by Guinevere Durado, Matt Harrison, Kelli Williams, Melanie Hilliard, Joanna Thomas White, Geof Nowak and Mike Tucker.  Each of them wrote 3 sentences without having seen anything but the last 5 words of the writing that came before theirs. 

The man’s hair grew long and sparse and yellow-white like the sinews of a rump-roast.  His flannel shirt could not quite button over the expanse of his torso, which bulged in a grotesque game of peek-a-boo for the occasional customer.  The man sat behind the liquor counter while his little finger excavated his fuzzy exposed navel as he watched old NasCar races late into the night.  While the night also races across the earth, chasing the day or being chased depending upon your preferred point of view, it sits for a moment with a woman at Denny's, as she breathes fog onto the cool glass and doodles in it with a finger. The finger doodle is a code. 

Across the street, the code is received.

She blinked her eyes a few times as she tried to make out the words. A car buzzed by, its window down, its driver languidly looking over. "I have to get home to crack this. I can't just stand here on the street," she shoved the code in her pocket and buttoned her coat.  She hurried out the door to a street she no longer recognized. It was a mish-mashed whirlwind of places she had forgotten – her grandmother’s Nebraska farmhouse, the SOHO streets from her college days, the gleaming storefront of the grocery store bursting at the seams. And as time reared its ugly head against her shadow, she thought to raise her right arm, and grasped the chord of the silk hot air balloon that had been hovering all day, and was carried up into the sky.

I found myself face to face with the birds followed by the highest tops of the tallest trees. I felt the moisture on my skin as the atmosphere started to change. Just then the wind started to carry me higher.  In the midst of this Belforeium Conundrum, I could not resist but reminisce about Saaz, the Sherpa with whom I shared a brief but profound love.  He knew the precise angle to cut the cowlick on my right side.  I should have just stayed in that cave with him forever.  And that dreaded feeling that I won't survive. It's NOT the first time, for me, it's a rush at this point. All it says to me is "let's GO, I've got nothing to fear!”