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| "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.
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| "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.
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| "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.
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| "Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975) |
