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| 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.
