I was having some major internal conflict that Saturday morning. Before Christina had come to Pittsburgh, the plan was that I would drive back to Cincinnati with her the following Saturday morning, spend the weekend there, and come back on Sunday. But, and this is so corny, in the three years that Henry and I had been dating, I had never spent a weekend away from him.

Who would cook for me? Who would pander to my every wish and demand?

Christina, apparently.

The ride to Cincinnati was fun. We listened to music, talked, laughed – a lot. We listened to the mix CD she brought with her, and her music was starting to grow on me. It was upbeat and happy, the perfect soundtrack for a car ride with a new friend. The good thing was that we were both very open to new music, so music became something we shared with each other, right from the start. And we both really liked The Used, I discovered; slowly, I was finding things we had in common.

Music was definitely the backbone of our friendship.

I remember sitting in the car, in front of train tracks, and asking, “Who sings this again?”

“Fall Out Boy,” Christina answered.

“I really like them!” Oh boy, what I was thinking? At least it was 2004, before they turned all-the-way lame. (OK, no – that didn’t make me feel better at all.)

That’s one of those vignettes that stands out so prominently in my mind, like it was just yesterday she was a passenger in my silver Sentra and my stomach, all these years later, automatically mimics the  reeling it was experiencing at the thought of spending a weekend in a stranger’s home. Isn’t it funny how one small, seemingly insignificant moment that was over quicker than Ben Roethlisberger targeting an underage co-ed can become so permanently etched in your memory.

Christina ranted a lot about Sylvia as we drove past plain Ohio scenery and frightening God-fearing billboards. This was when I learned that Sylvia had a forked-tongue, a hunch back, inverted nipples, and that Christina didn’t even like to kiss her. And I was expected to meet her that night, knowing all these intimate details about her body. Fantastic!

Christina lived in a townhouse with her mom and younger sister, Cynthia. I don’t like meeting people’s parents. I never have. I get uncomfortable and immediately lose about 90% of my personality. But luckily, her mom was at work, so I only had to deal with meeting Cynthia, Cynthia’s teen-mom friend Sammie, and the infamous Steve, who was laying on top of Cynthia’s bunk beds.

When he lifted his head to greet me, I took in his pretty face and wondered what the hell he was doing clandestinely fucking Christina.

After Christina made me listen to a recording of her giving a spine-tingling sermon at some scary cult of a church (it was so frightening, I had to beg her to turn it off), we all got in the car and went to Jungle Jim’s, which is nothing more than a giant super market offering international goods along with your traditional American fare.  But Christina felt it was awesome enough to double as a tourist attraction, and I have to admit that Jungle Jim’s became one of the future perks of visiting her. I bought some medieval weapon of a fruit called a durian and it became a Really Big Deal, the definitive highlight of the trip.

Meanwhile, as we caroused the aisles with me pointing and oohing at the international sundry, tension was brewing. Apparently, Sammie was getting too close to Steve, and Christina was on the verge of having a Jerry Springer meltdown, because bitch, that’s HER man.

“None of us even like her,” Christina explained. “But she’s just always around.” I didn’t like her much either, to be honest, but she was easy to ignore.

The more time I spent around Steve, though, the more gay he seemed to me, so I wondered if Christina’s jealousy was all for naught anyway.

(And yes, Steve wound up being gay, but I’m sure Christina already knew that.)

Guess who was waiting for us back at Christina’s house? OMG, SYLVIA! She was oozing possessiveness, insane jealousy, and boiled rabbits all over Christina’s couch like a ginger Jabba the Hut. The introduction was awkward, fake. I have never felt more sized up, like a bloody cow carcass hanging from a meat hook. Sylvia had this high-pitched baby voice and I knew immediately there was nothing either of us was going to have in common. In Christina’s room, Sylvia and Steve lounged on her bed, texting each other back and forth, behind my back, laughing raucously every so often.

Welcome to Ohio, Erin! Just like being back in high school and hearing assholes whisper about you at the next lunch table.

Those two never bothered to talk to me, really. Not that I wanted them too, but it maybe would have made for less awkward intervals when Christina would leave the room.

I sat at Christina’s desk, with my back to Sylvia, Steve and Sammie, while Christina ran around like a wild woman trying to entertain/impress/wow me. She told me this secret about how she had met some girl, Amanda, online and for the past year had been leading Amanda on to believe that she was really a boy. “The name I use is Scotty Hotty,” she said, laughing. “And Amanda thinks we’re dating.” Apparently, Amanda would call the house and have actual conversations with Christina, thinking the whole time that it was a boy, her boyfriend even.  That she had enough mental imbalance to pull off a deviant scheme like that for over a year should have made me grab my purse and run like hell. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe because that asshole part of my brain thought it was funny. In that case, I deserved to get fucked over by her.

Christina’s sister, who was 18 at the time, was a little sycophant who apparently liked me almost as much as her sister did.

“Here, I drew you this picture,” Cynthia said, pushing a sheet of paper across the desk with such flourish that I expected to take in my hands a future inductee to the Louvre.

It was a crudely drawn house. I assumed it was crudely drawn on purpose, and decided to go along with it.

“Wow!” I patronized. “Very nice!”

Apparently, sarcasm wasn’t the proper tool to pull out of the shed, because Cynthia started to cry.

At first, I thought she was joking, so I laughed.

She began to then cry harder. She wound up crying so fucking hard that I actually thought she was laughing, so I started laughing too. Then she ran out of the room, the sound of things being slammed and broken followed in her wake. I was left sitting alone at the desk, frozen in incredulity.

“I’ll go talk to her!” Sylvia shouted, seizing the opportunity to be all large-and-in-charge, all the while reaffirming the unspoken fact that I was a bitch who pulled the trigger on Cynthia’s bi-polar laser gun. That a simple crayon-sketched house could birth A Scene was something that should have made me feel at home, since it was something of which I could see myself being on the other end. The other less-stable, tear-squirting, fist-flailing end.

But never had I felt more uncomfortable, unwanted, out of place. I glanced at the clock. It was after midnight. There would be next to no cars on the road. I could probably make it make to Pittsburgh in record time.

But Christina convinced me to stay. She assured me it wasn’t my fault, that sometimes Cynthia overreacts, that she was just trying too hard to impress me.

“I’ll take care of it,” Christina promised. “Please don’t leave.”

And so I sat there, shoulders scrunched up in anxiety, while Christina went off to diffuse the bomb that was Cynthia. While she was at it, she confronted Sylvia about the inhospitable way she had been treating me. She told me later that she screamed at her and told her, “Henry’s kids treated me with more respect than you’re giving Erin!”

You know how in some music videos, or movies, they’ll show a person sitting still in the center of a room, while a maelstrom of activity is unfolding around them, double-time? I feel that’s how it must have looked if I could have drifted out of my body. Maybe then I could have laughed about it, but instead I sat there, stock-still, thinking, “All these people around me are crying, when I’m the one who really wants to cry.

While Christina was talking Cynthia off the ledge, Sylvia came back into Christina’s room and offered me a mint from her Care Bears tin. I guess it was a peace offering but there was little sincerity backing it.

What it taught me was that Sylvia really liked Care Bears.

I tried to make conversation with her. I asked her what kind of music she liked. As expected, it was Top 40 garbage. “I’m trying to like the stuff Christina is into,” she said in that childish tone of hers. Christina told me later that she very emphatically did not want Sylvia to ever like the music she likes. I thought that was a pretty glaring indication of their incompatibility, because sharing music was always something I enjoyed doing with people I dated. (To the point where I will force it down Henry’s ear canals, like Ipecac for the shit he previously liked before meeting me.)

That weekend was still a part of the Great Pregnancy Scare of 2004, and after filling everyone in about the horrors of waiting for my period to hopefully stumble home, I launched into a neurotic monologue about how terrified I was of child birth.

This made Sammie, the resident baby-birther, flip out.  Kneeling very Regan-like on Christina’s bed, she started ranting about how I know nothing about what it’s like. “I HAVE A KID, I WOULD KNOW!” she shouted brattily. “I’m basically an expert!”

Yes, bravo. You had a baby when you were 16. Too bad MTV missed out on that one.

{Ed. Note: I’m not dogging on teen moms. Just teens who think they know everything.]

After everyone left that night, Christina and I sat on her bed while she cried. She felt horrible about the way I had been treated, and admitted her doubts that I’d still want to be friends.

“Yeah, everyone acted like psychotic indigents who have never been around another human being, but you were still nice to me, and that’s all that matter,” I assured her. She had gone out of her way to make sure I was as comfortable as possible, knowing that I was homesick and that I hadn’t slept without Henry in years. On her clock radio, she scrolled through the stations until she found soft rock. She knew that I liked to fall asleep to soft rock! She made sure I had two pillows. She checked repeatedly to see if I needed a drink. Cynthia, feeling badly for earlier, even brought me a cat stuffed animal.

“You can pretend it’s Marcy,” she explained. And it was kind of touching, that these two girls were trying so hard to make me feel like I was home.

Christina slept in Cynthia’s room, to alleviate any potentially awkward bed-sharing mishaps.

I didn’t sleep well. I missed Henry. I still felt awkward, and hurt by the way their friends had treated me.

The next morning, Christina took me back to Jungle Jim’s. I had planned on staying most of the afternoon, but I was homesick to the point of throwing up. All I could think about was Henry, what Henry was doing, if Henry missed me, what Henry was making that night for dinner.

As I got all of my stuff together, Christina cried a little. “Now that I’ve met you, I don’t want to let you go!” she said, trying to play it off like she was just being cute, but there was sadness in her eyes. It made me feel bad that I wasn’t as upset about leaving as she was about me leaving, and I won’t lie – it made me feel a little weird too, that someone who barely knew me could like me so much. But I just couldn’t hang around there any longer, so far out of my comfort zone. She asked if I would ever come back. I lied and said yes without hesitation, but the events of the night before were actually pretty traumatic for me, especially when I’m not very good with meeting people to begin with. I knew I definitely did not want to ever cross paths with Sylvia again.

Despite the social pandemonium that occurred in Christina’s bedroom that night, the beginning bricks of a friendship were laid that weekend; from sharing music and a mutual dislike for Sammie to cherry Coke at Big Boy’s and a stinky durian from Jungle Jim’s, the events of that weekend became the punchline of many inside jokes. Before I left, Christina gave me the mixed CD she made for her to trip to Pittsburgh and I listened to it the whole way home.

That night in my journal, I wrote:

While I loved spending time with Christina, I was eager to leave the next day. I did 85mph all the way through Ohio and made it home around 4:00. I was stuck to Henry like a magnet. We went to Giant Eagle and I literally could not get close enough to him. I never want to leave him again!

It was only inevitable that she’d want to meet one day. The Greyhound was scheduled to arrive on a Thursday evening in March of 2004, and I must have been excited for her arrival because in my journal that day at work, I wrote: Christina is coming. I’m excited.

The bus got to Pittsburgh before I was done with work, so I told her to walk down the street to Eide’s, which is one of my favorite music stores in all of the land. I figured there’d be enough for her to look at, plus it would give me a reason to have to go there. Not that I ever needed a reason.

Henry pulled up along the curb and waited in the car while I ran inside.

I saw her immediately. And was taken aback.

Friends, I know that sometimes people can be quite slick with their self-photography, but Christina was clearly a master magician, her medium being cleverly forgiving angles. I am not a shallow person. I have never been embarrassed to be seen with any of my friends. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been parading Henry all around town since 2001! But I guess there’s always an exception to everything because I felt my face grow warm and couldn’t stop thinking that she looked like a troll. That’s horrible, right? I just wasn’t prepared for this; I don’t know if I thought she was going to be taller? Would that have made a difference? She was concentrated into a squat stature and short tightly-curled brown hair framed her big duck-lipped face. I don’t really know how else to describe her, and the way I felt seeing her for the first time. I could extrapolate, but then I run the risk of sounding mean just for the sake of being mean.

Hugging her in the middle of the store, in front of the entire two customers, I instantly felt like an asshole for having that moment of superficiality. But still, I broke apart from her embrace and led her outside to the car, where I flashed Henry with a saucer-eyed look of alarm. I knew he was internally gloating, as he always did when one of my Internet meet-ups went awry.

Driving across the Liberty Bridge, Christina leaned between the seats and said, “Here. Put this on,” as she handed over a mix CD. It was full of emo, pop-punk, mostly stuff I didn’t listen to as I was in the throes of my pretentious indie/dance-punk/post-punk/no-wave phase.

“Fuck, we have nothing in common,” I realized.

We drove straight to Denny’s, as none of us had eaten dinner yet. Christina entertained with stories of the scandalous Greyhound underworld, while I inhaled my veggie burger.  I noticed that she didn’t do so much eating of her food, but pushed it around a lot on the plate, and then excused herself to go to the restroom. It was the first chance I got to ask Henry what he thought of her.

“She seems nice, very out-going,” he said with a mouthful of burger and semen. (No really, that’s the mayo in Henry’s land.)

“Yeah, she wasn’t quite what I was expecting visually-speaking, but she makes me feel comfortable. I like her,” I agreed, thinking that it was odd I wasn’t stuttering in front of her or using my fake Nice Erin voice. There was a vibe about her that disabled my social awkwardness and allowed me to behave the way I would around people I’ve known for years. And you know, not stiff and reserved like I tend to get around people for the first time.

While Henry slept that night, we stayed up late talking on the couch about everything, including painful childhood traumas. I found that, in person, she was just as easy to confide in as she was that night over the phone, only this time she shared extremely personal details with me as well. Eventually, she had tears streaming down her face. “I never talk about this shit with anyone,” she admitted.

“I feel like this isn’t the first time I’ve met her,” I wrote later in my journal.

***

Christina’s visit was smack in the middle of the Great Pregnancy Scare of ’04. While I was at work the next day, she took a walk around my neighborhood and bought me flowers at a local florist. Beneath the standard “Congratulations!” on the card, she had written “Hope you get your period!” A bouquet of flowers was not exactly what I was expecting to come home to that Friday, not from Henry and especially not from a girl. Henry didn’t seem very delighted by this, and left to pick up his sons, Blake and Robbie, who spent every other weekend with us at the time.

Sylvia evidently wasn’t very delighted either.  Her girlfriend (they were in their 16th go-around at this point) had run off to Pittsburgh to meet the strange blond chick she was always hitting on via LiveJournal comments. I asked Christina what the deal was with that, why Sylvia was so jealous.

“She thinks we’re going to make fun of her,” Christina said disgustedly, with an eye roll.

“Well, we have been.” And we laughed.

Christina had updated her LiveJournal while I was at work that day, stating that she had taken a walk “a la Gothic Carl.” (She was actually confusing Gothic Carl with Big Headed Gordon, who, during his visit, would leave my house surreptitiously to walk around the neighborhood;  I had told her about both of them the night before.)

And this is what Sylvia wrote in her’s:

Its hard because right now Christina is with “gothic
Carl” I am sure that it is not anyone but the fact
that she is with someone I have never heard of,
instead of me, makes me jealous. Is that so wrong? I
think it is. Some times I think she is just trying to
see if I get jealous. My bet is he is just one of
[Henry’s] kids or something. MAYBE it is the friend of
Erin’s that Christina told me about, that was going to
come over and meet her. But I would think that that
person was going to come over when she was there too.
Is Erin trying to hook Christina up with someone else?
What if Erin knows about her true feelings about me?

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What if Christina does not like me as much as I think
she is starting to? I need to stop. I know that
Christina cares and loves me. I know that no matter
what we will always be a friend even though that is
what Erin is trying to do. * Sighs*

This, after Christina had spent an hour talking – nay, swooning – about her younger sister’s friend Steve, how she was secretly in love with him and that’s how she knew she wasn’t a lesbian. That she and Steve would secretly fuck behind locked doors and once, her sister almost caught them.

That was the part about Christina that was frustrating, even back then. It was like she was so ashamed of herself, who she really was. She wasn’t yet to the point where she could look at herself in the mirror and say, “You know what, I like girls. It doesn’t define me. The end.” So she was constantly trying to convince everyone that even though she had this rag doll named Sylvia, she was completely hetero.

“Have you ever thought that maybe you’re bisexual?” I asked.

“No, I’m sure I’m straight. I’m in love with Steve.” She said it with such certainty, and we moved on from there. I’m nobody’s therapist and it didn’t affect me one way or the other. I don’t choose friends based on their sexual preferences, but I just wanted her to be OK with herself because it seemed to be a topic that came up every time we talked.

That night, things got light-hearted again when Janna and my brother Corey came over to meet Christina. Corey was going through this stage where he was obsessed with playing a didgeridoo so he brought that with him and performed for us. Only, no one was allowed to watch him play.

Since it was Christina’s first time in Pittsburgh, we took two cars to Mt. Washington: Henry and his kids in one; Janna, Christina, Corey and me in the other.

Mt. Washington is directly across the river from downtown river, providing the best unobstructed views of the skyline, bridges and Heinz Field if you’re into that football shit.

Plus, there are two inclines which is always fun for idiots like me to board and commence acting out a scene from the yet-to-be-written DoucheBag’s Big Day Out.

Typically, it’s me acting out while my friends are inching away, embarrassed to be associated with me. My giddiness is oftentimes confused with extreme public intoxication, resulting in Henry gripping my elbow and dragging me back to the car.

But instead of shying away from this behavior, Christina joined in. We didn’t realize it at the time, but this would wind up being her first of many gigs as my sidekick. And of course, Henry’s kids (who were only 10 and 12 at the time, I think) were acting a fool too, and Henry was so completely pissed off.

I wanted a group photo, so we all pushed and shoved each other, trying to position ourselves around some stupid memorial on one of the overlooks. Someone walked past and said to Henry, “Here, let me take that for you so you can get in the picture, too.”

“I’m not with them,” Henry muttered.

On the way back to the car, Christina performed for Henry’s kids and Corey one of the raps she had written. I wasn’t paying attention but Corey told me later that it was directed to a man, and it was about stealing his girlfriend from him.

2003 went out with a horribly traumatic bang for me. There were a bunch of us at my mom’s house for New Years Eve, and somehow Henry and I wound up on opposing Trivial Pursuit teams. I can’t remember–or maybe it’s more that I won’t remember–the gritty details, but there might have been a skirmish between Henry and me revolving around the video game character Yoshi, and perhaps it culminated in me lunging at him from across the top of my mom’s coffee table while all my friends watched with scared eyes as I called him a mother fucker amongst a shimmering array of death threats that all but came out in the backwards tongue of Satan.

That’s the thing with us bi-polars: you toss us in a roomful of people, some of whom we’re only pretending to like; place a bevy of alcoholic choices at our fingertips; top it off with the element of intense competition and watch our tops blow, mother fuckers. It starts off with nervous laughter, always. But it escalates, inexplicably and fast, like having your thalamus double-fisted by Charles Manson. It was a scene. Quite embarrassing after the fact, but while it was playing out, all I could comprehend was: I was PISSED, I was HURT, no one CARED, and I wanted to fucking KILL myself.

I drove home drunk that night. No one bothered to stop me, no one seemed to care at all, really. In fact, before I left, I overheard my mom griping to my friends, “Ugh, she always does this shit.”

Sometime after I got home that night, after I staggered through the door and collapsed in a pathetic Sybil-esque heap on the couch, Henry called me from my mom’s house and instead of asking how I was doing (NOT WELL, thanks for not asking), he had the audacity to say, “Your friend Lisa is really pissed off at you. You ruined her night.”

That right there? That caused me to hurl the cordless phone into the decorative fireplace that has pissed me off since I moved into this house in 1999 because in whose world is a fireplace a DECORATION? It’s a heat source, you fucking interior designing cunts.

It was a low point in my life. Maybe the lowest, but there are a few contenders for that title. I cried a lot. Quit talking to Lisa. Began reevaluating my other friendships and even my relationship with Henry. I knew I needed to talk to someone, probably (definitely) someone with a sturdy psych degree. But for now, at that moment, I needed a friend more than someone spouting off clinical “How does that make you feel?” ‘s and prescriptions for tiny blue pills.

That’s how I knew I was alone, as I sat on the couch a few days later and scrolled through the numbers in my phone. “I don’t want to talk to any of these assholes,” I thought. And then I remembered Christina, how she was always so supportive in the comments she left on my LiveJournal entries, how she went to Bible College. And maybe that was the kind of person I needed to talk to. Someone who had Christ on her side.

So I called her. I let it all out. I don’t open up very easily, if at all, yet I found myself I telling her things I never would have admitted to a therapist or any of those people programmed into my phone. We spoke of my abandonment issues, and how that past New Years Eve exemplified my fears. We spoke of my Pappap and my ability to consistently feel alone even in a crowded room. We spoke of everything that mattered. And instead of telling me what she thought I wanted to hear, she did something better: she made me feel understood, cared about, unalone. For the first time in a long time, I remembered what it felt like to have a friend. Sharing psychological horrors with a near-stranger will do that, I guess. But moreso, what I realized was that she was no longer laying on that bombastic persona with me. She sounded real now when we spoke on the phone. She wasn’t coating her words with smarmy humor and squirting the conversation with a creamy braggadocio filling; instead, the phony game show host voice was retired in favor for her true sincerity and I liked this girl. This was the Christina with whom I wanted to be friends, and hanging up with her day, I was suddenly very thankful to have met someone as fucked up as myself.

And it was completely unexpected, like scoring an STD after having protected sex and shouting at the doctor, “But I didn’t think it could happen to me!?”

“You’re not wearing any green,” Henry said, semi-accusatory after he saw my new Facebook profile picture.

“Uh, yeah. I kind of hate St. Patrick’s Day,” I said with a questioning intonation. I checked my mental calendar. Yep, nine years we’ve been together, that’s what I thought. And somehow he didn’t pick up on this?

“Why do you hate it?” he asked, probably thinking what everyone else thinks: But your name! It’s so Irish! You should be pissing shamrocks and fucking potatoes!

Newsflash! I’m not Irish. It starts with the name and ends there, too. I don’t even like BEER.

Well gosh, Henry. Draw your chair near, mama has a story to tell you!

St. Patrick’s Day, 1993. I was in eighth grade and dressed like the goddamn Blarney Stone itself birthed me. Hokey Irish sweatshirt, probably purchased from some god awful basement of disparity mall shop like Beer Tees; green leggings; green sequined suspenders; green sequined bow tie. I feel like I probably had some clover-inspired garbage entwined with my locks, as well.

In other words: I looked SUPER CUTE.

That evening after school, my mom wasn’t home for some reason. I’m going to say she was at her ceramics class, because that seems most plausible.  Her absence did not please me because my step-dad and I were embroiled in one of our infamous stand-offs, which is basically how I remember most of my childhood. He commanded me to set the table before dinner. My step-dad, the reason for my Irish name, was always on the prowl for a reason to start a fight with me. This particular evening, I didn’t set the table to his liking. Something was out of place, or he didn’t like my attitude, or I looked at him wrong.

Pick one.

We began screaming at each other, which was something of a tradition by that phase of my life. He hated, absolutely hated, that I would always stand up for myself.

I suppose he wanted me to retreat with my tail between my legs, whimpering and finding a dark corner in which to sit with my weak sense of femininity and brittle backbone.

There was distance between us during this confrontation, something like ten or fifteen feet. So when he picked up that fork to chuck at me, it had plenty of time to pick up speed before plunging between my knuckles. I’m sure though that in some parts of Ireland, this is part of the St. Paddy’s tradition, right before chugging Guinness but in between watching live rabbits boil in cauldrons and blowing up cars with pipe bombs.

There was no apology, not that I was expecting one. He went back to making dinner and I was still crying and cradling my hand by the time my mom came home.

Now Val, she never wanted to get involved in these fights. And the fact that it went beyond verbal was nothing new. He and I were known to get into some heavy fisticuffs, which is probably why I’m so aggressive toward men to this day.

I do NOT let a man fuck with me. I do NOT cower in front of a man, either. Val looked at  my hand, which was red and swollen, the simple God-given act of flexing ones fingers had become something that inspired cries of pain.

“It’s fine, it’s fine!” she insisted, but she knew, and I knew, that it wasn’t. She wrapped it for me, and made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone at school what happened.

I ended up having to get an X-ray. One of my knuckles had a slight fracture, but it was nothing severe enough to require a cast. The doctor wrapped it tight and eventually it healed, but for years, if you looked hard enough, you could see a little scar from where one of the tines had pierced through my flesh.

I don’t let things go very easily, and I never really cared much for St. Patrick’s Day after that. It’s just not the same without a fork protruding from my hand.

I know this might be hard to believe, but before Henry, there was another old man on the receiving end of my affections.

It was the summer of 1996 and I was on a Trafalgar tour of Italy with my aunt Sharon. She was the worst traveling companion because she always had to be the center of attention and would get snotty anytime someone on the tour had the gall to speak to me. Mostly, she would answer questions for me, which would make me rampant with teenage temper-flares and pout sessions. But on this trip, which would end up being our last trip together since I was soon  to become a disgrace to the family (i.e. a high school drop out), I decided to branch out on my own.

In previous years, my grandparents used to come with us and after day two, I’d be clinging to my Pappap, scowling when I would have to sit next to Sharon on the tour bus. When Sharon and I started to take these trips without them, it was hell for me. I would spend a lot of time crying on the bus because she was just so mean to me sometimes, and would put me down in front of the other travelers. She’d go off and make new friends with the other adults while I would have to be content with being the silent tag-a-long. And the thing with Sharon is that she lived for flaunting the fact that she was a “seasoned pro” at these European vacations, and would butt into people’s conversations to tell them where to get the best pasta in Rome or the best leather deals in Florence.

And she would do this thing, whenever the tour guide would share something that Sharon was already planning on including in her own tour book, she would close her eyes and nod her head knowingly, making her stupid fucking chandelier earrings tinkle with pretentiousness.

Oh my god, this is making me hate Sharon so bad.

My grandma’s brother Eddie and sister Donna were also on this particular trip with their respective spouses, which was awesome because I never really got to spend much time with them since my grandma got all weird a few years earlier about, oh I don’t know, having familial relations.  The four of them had already booked the trip when Sharon found out and decided it would be fun to surprise them. It was great for me to have them along because it allowed me to have allies in the very certain case that Sharon would try and ostracize me as usual.

Since I was 17 this time around, I was a little more secure in myself, had less complacency when it came to Sharon running the show. So I branched out. (I had tried this, mostly without success, on the trip prior to this one. Sharon caused a few scenes, but that’s another chapter involving a guy named Udo from Austria.) While she would be taking naps in the room, I’d wander down to the lobby in hopes of stumbling into some other people from our tour.

  In Lugano, I ran into Anahit, an Armenian lady from our group who Sharon hated. Probably because she was wild, extremely well-preserved for her age, and loved to drink the vino in excess every night at dinner. Since she was a single traveler, she was paired up with another single, Jackie. Jackie was in her 50s, wore fanny packs, and bore an uncanny resemblance to Nathan Lane. Sharon didn’t think very highly of Jackie either (“She gets on my fucking nerves” is what she’d hiss every time Jackie would breeze past us to her seat on the bus),

Our evening stroll took us down to Lake Como, where vendors were in abundance and the atmosphere was pregnant with romance and drunk laughter. I know, writing those words is extremely cheesy and out-of-character for me; but the truth is that I remember it so vividly, wishing I was older and there with a man. Not my mom’s possessive older sister and busful of retirees.

While there, we ran into more people from our tour, one of whom was Stefan—a very handsome Australian with well-coiffed prematurely white hair. He was there with his two (less attractive) friends, David and Ted, who were absent from this lovely nighttime stroll. It was the first time on the trip that I had really been around him, and we wound up walking back to the hotel together, as everyone else had found themselves paired up. I was in a panic. What could I possibly say to this older man that wouldn’t make him think (nay, believe) that I was just an immature kid. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I’m sure at some point I said, “OMG I play tennis and love rap music! My bedroom has purple carpet!”

From that moment on, I had big plans for Stefan. I only wore my tightest shirts for the rest of the trip. During walking tours, I would try to weasel my way near him, find some excuse to talk to him. Stupid shit like, “Look what I bought today!” and the chance of it being something that didn’t reflect my age was about 1 in 1,000,000.

If you were to read my vacation journal, you would notice a suspicious lack of Stefan entries. This is mostly because that journal was passed around between Sharon and my aunts and uncles every day on the bus, wherein they would laugh at my exaggerations, which to me were fairly accurate depictions of my surroundings and the subsequent events of the trip. (Events like: “August 15th, Milan: Sharon pointed out a zit on my chin in front of a group of people from our tour; I found a seat in the back of the bus and cried.”) The thing with my family, any family really, is the moment they catch a whiff of some blossoming crush, you better go out and buy the biggest Lady Gaga-approved hat to die beneath. However, my journal does learn me that at dinner that night, my Uncle Eddie withdrew a stack of Steelers trading cards from his shirt pocket and tried to exchange them with the waiter for bigger portions.

Near the very end of the vacation, we were on a day trip in Siena, during which Sharon and I had one of our signature rows. I used this as an excuse to ditch her and I sought out Stefan, who was with David and Ted. In my very dramatic nature, I filled them in on the horrors that is traveling with Sharon, told them how she was always trying to keep me down when all I wanted to do was make friends with everyone on the tour. I remember, all these years later, that I was wearing a sheer white tank, under which the slightest hint of my bra could be detected. I hoped Stefan would notice.

(I hadn’t yet learned the definition of “tacky.”)

(Or “SLUTTY,” apparently. Don’t worry—Henry is a ticketing slut patrolman; he makes sure I don’t leave the house with my vagina hanging out nowaways.

)

Stefan and his friends took great delight in hearing my woes of Sharon and suggested that I fight her. We all laughed at this and I thought it was so amazing that I was just a kid, sharing an inside joke with these three men. Later, on the bus, Stefan made his way back to where Sharon and I were sitting to see if we were fighting yet. I laughed at this, probably with more gusto than it warranted, just to make Sharon question what was going on.

“Nothing,” I said, when I was able to talk again. “Just an inside joke.” My ego practically did a pole dance, it was so turned on to see Sharon feeling left out.

Later, on the bus, my Aunt Donna asked in her I’m-Going-Yell-Since-I’m-On-A-Submarine voice, “What’s that Australian’s name who had a birthday?”

“Ted,” I answered.

“Ken?”

“No, Ted.”

“Ten?!”

Sharon, unable to take anymore of this, hissed, “TED.”

“Oh!” Aunt Donna exclaimed. “Theodore! Now what about that handsome one up there with the white hair? That’s the one I like.”

Knowing the shade of my face was quickly on its way to matching the heat of a rolling boil, I mumbled, “Stefan.”

Loudly, real loud, she said, “Oh, STEFAN! I like the name, too!”

Meanwhile, Ted and David were sitting diagonally from us and were probably asking each other, “Why the fuck are these Yankee broads throwing our names around?”

This is why I never wanted anyone to know I was practically drawing up blueprints to find a way inside Stefan’s suitcase so I could go home with him and live a glorious life in Brisbane as his American concubine. Their mouths, they are loud. Every night at dinner, my Uncle Eddie would get all Heidi Fleiss and try to pawn me off on any waiter he deemed cute enough. This would send the rest of them into giddy histrionics, making them shout things like, “Oh, Erin, he’s a cute one! Look at his butt!” and drawing everyone’s attention to the young blond girl with the lobster-hued cheeks who was just trying to enjoy her caprese salad in peace.

The last day of the trip, everyone congregated in the lobby of the hotel in Rome, crying and hugging, promising to keep in touch. (No one ever does.) Some of the people had later flights, like Stefan, and didn’t make it down in time to say goodbye.

But Stefan did. He found me in the lobby, waiting for the airport shuttle, and came over to hug me goodbye. The tears were on their marks, getting ready and set to go, but I postponed the race in favor of allowing my hormones to throw a party against my pelvis because oh my GOD, I was in the arms of an older man.

I left Italy positive that I was in love with him.

***

When I found this photo, I was quick to point out to Henry that he wasn’t my first old man crush, and then proceeded to tell him all about Stefan.

“I think Sharon must have liked him too, because any time Stefan and I were together, Sharon would rush over with a reason to pull me away,” I said angrily, holding the picture of him adoringly.

“Or! Maybe she was pulling you away because you were only seventeen?” Henry hypothesized in that tone he uses when he thinks I’m stupid and that he knows everything.

“Oh, yeah. Or that.”

After exchanging several friendly messages through the personals, Giacomo suggested we meet. I wasn’t opposed to this: I had just broken up with my boyfriend Jeff (for the first time) and Giacomo was in a band.

“If it would make you feel more comfortable, why don’t you have a get together or something so your friends can be there,” Giacomo suggested, unaware that he was dealing with a girl who picked up hitch hikers as a weeknight hobby and made friends by inviting people in off the street. But who am I to turn down the opportunity to throw a party?

Like all my parties back then, I spent more time focusing on food pairings when I should have been considering the opposing personality types that made up my guest list. But like an asshole,  I invited Jeff, the guy I had JUST broken up with; Justin, the boy who broke my heart in my high school; Brian, the priest-in-training; Lisa,  the Christian who didn’t believe in Catholic ideologies; Cinn, the antagonizing Athiest; and a smattering of neutral personalities to make up the audience for when things eventually became heated.

Things went well at first. Giacomo arrived and I felt an immediate ease around him. There were no romantic sparks, but I felt that at the very least we could possibly be friends. Plus, he carried a toothbrush with him, and you know what they say about men with good oral hygiene.

But then Cinn arrived. And the thing with Cinn is that she doesn’t just demand attention, she COMMANDS it. So here she comes, breezing through the door with her shocking red spikes and faux-goth persona, interrupting conversation with her callous commentary. I think Janna was the only person she liked and everyone else immediately fell under her scrutiny. My ex-boyfriend Jeff was extremely intimidated by her, and he sunk down against me on the couch.

Cinn took a seat next to Lisa, who had yet to meet her. It was like spying on an angel and a devil, sitting together in a waiting room. I began to worry.

The subject of tattoos came up, and I had recently gotten the start of a large sun on my mid-to-lower back. When Giacomo asked to see it, I rose from the couch and began drawing my shirt up slightly. I was wearing a pink ankle-length skirt, fitted around the top. From across the room, Cinn heckled, “Suck it in, Erin!

”

I was humiliated.

Devastated.

Crushed.

The sad part is that I wasn’t even fat then; but when you’re a fat kid – even if that moment of your childhood is a fleeting window – you carry that chip with you. And that chip is double-fried in saturated fat, salted, and layered with ten strips of bacon. My face still gets flushed when I think of that moment. It will probably never stop hurting and the lucidity will likely never dull. The memory of it will forever outshine some of the best moments in my life thus far.

It shut me up. It shut the entire room up. Cinn was left to laugh alone in her chair while everyone else tugged at their collars awkwardly. Jeff reached over and squeezed my hand.  Eventually conversation resumed.

My ego was still smartin’ but I had a new guest to entertain. I tried to focus on immersing him into the dysfunctional circus that was my social circle, when I began picking up on a conversation from across the room that seemed to be steadily increasing in volume and tension.

A religious debate. Of course! What good is a party without people screaming over top of mini quiches and shrimp cocktail about Confession. Somehow, Cinn and Lisa had joined forces and were attacking Brian about the right and wrong ways to seek God’s forgiveness and I’m sitting there thinking, “Cinn doesn’t even BELIEVE in God, why is she doing this?” Cinn and Brian had never gotten along. From the very beginning of my friendship with Cinn, when she fooled me into believing she had a brain tumor (oh, is THAT a story for a rainy day!), Brian was 100% against it. “I just think it’s weird that you met her in some creepy gothic chatroom and that she has an expiration date on her life that’s fast approaching,” he explained one day, which of course made me want to meet her all the more. Brian’s instincts have pretty much been spot-on about everyone who has touched my life in one way or another, but taking his advice would be too easy, and I prefer long, drawn-out, painful bouts of drama.

So no, Brian and Cinn were never able to sit in the same room, breathing the same air, without firing verbal cannons at one another.

Cinn had backed Brian up against a wall with her religious crusade, insistent on tripping him up so she could accuse him of being a bad seminarian, a heathen, I don’t fucking know. But it was working, and he was getting visibly upset that she wouldn’t leave him alone, and every one in the room was silent and bristling uncomfortably.

I stood up and left. Left my own apartment, while my own party was going on. I bolted out the door, flung myself in the front seat of my good old Eagle Talon, and bawled against the steering wheel. Sure I was 19 years old, but you better believe I’d take the same route if it happened again tonight.

Cinn came out to do what she does best: cleaning up the mess she made in a way that made me forget she made the mess in the first place and instead was a really great friend who just took care of me. Except I wouldn’t unlock the door. I asked her to please leave, which sounds much less polite when it comes out as a hysterical shriek and served on a platter of obscenities and death threats.

Jeff came out next. For him, I unlocked the door. We sat together in the dark, listening to synthpop, until my breathing lost the I’ve-just-been-crying stutter and I felt calm enough to go back inside and face the music.

I felt guilty about leaving Giacomo in there with all the flared tempers and awkward silences, but was pleased to see that he was doing card tricks for everyone. With Cinn gone, everyone was able to relax, enjoy the food, and get to know Giacomo, who ended up being a really cool guy. Before he left, he said, “Let’s do this again soon, just maybe without that red-haired chick.”

I agreed, and I genuinely meant it, but the trauma of that night got the best of me and I never did meet up with Giacomo again.

Nor did I ever wear that pink skirt again.

My own brother, a goddamn shit-sucking vampire. Oh, you wait till mom finds out, buddy.

I don’t normally get too invested in celebrities, but when I woke up this morning to Henry’s text saying that Corey Haim had died, I did NOT want to get out of bed. I’m laying there, crying, and Chooch (who is used to me crying over a leaf falling from a tree at this point) asked me what was wrong.

I didn’t know what to say, other than, “The Lost Boys finally killed Sam, Chooch.” And he was like, “Oh that sucks. Get me breakfast now.”

Like probably a billion other people, Corey Haim was the embodiment of my childhood. He was the first celebrity I crushed on who wasn’t gay! (Seriously: Freddie Mercury and Boy George, wtf.) And he was the only reason I ever made my mom buy me all those bubblegum magazines like Tiger Beat and Bop or whatever the fuck other fruity names those rags had.

I remember I was either in 5th or 6th grade when my mom let me order a giant poster of him that was advertised in the back of one of those ‘zines. Joey McIntyre? No thanks. I only had eyes for Corey Haim. When it arrived, my step-dad wrestled it from me, knowing that what lie within that poster cylinder was fuel for many dinner-time mockings to come. He embarrassed me so bad that I ended up stowing the poster behind the couch, dashing my dreams of falling asleep every night beneath Corey Haim’s crooked smile.

Motherfucker.

(It was worse than the time my step-dad bought me a heart-shaped Jason Priestley pillow as a gag gift and would try and smash it in my face. I’d get so furious, and finally one time I yelled, “HE’S NOT EVEN THE ONE I LIKE!

I LIKE LUKE PERRY!” causing a chorus of giddy “Ooooooh”s and kissy-sounds to erupt from my family. What assholes. I then re-gifted the pillow to our German Shepherd.)

When Corey Haim and Corey Feldman recently did that reality show together, it broke my heart to see him so downtrodden. I became obsessed with going to LA and saving him. But really, I don’t think anyone could have saved him.

It always happens to the ones who burn the brightest.

What are your favorite Corey Haim memories/movies/photos/etc?

My grandma was finally released from the nursing home yesterday. There’re both pros and cons to that, I guess, as nursing homes can be negligent and have proved that several times during her stay. However, being back home with my aunt Sharon isn’t really such a hot idea either, as she will likely fall right back into a routine of little movement and no outside interaction.

In any case, Sharon sought Henry’s shoveling skills so that the paramedics would be able to get my grandma safely into the house. Chooch and I went with him, because I had wanted to get some new pictures of Chooch anyway. It was sort of a bad idea. And I don’t even mean the fact that Chooch was being completely uncooperative and dickish with me. It was just sad being at that house. I grew up there, and to be outside of it, with the sunlight highlighting all the mossy overgrowth, broken lanterns, rusted railings and caved in gates? It was a bit much for me.  Especially when I followed Chooch into the backyard and saw how decrepit and forlorn the back patio looks, the pool nothing more than a gaping leaf-filled hole in the ground and the accompanying  shanny overtaken by weeds and God only knows what kind of wildlife.  That used to be the summer hot spot, right there, but since my Pappap died it has quite literally been consumed by nature. It breaks my heart to know that my kid will never get to have pool parties there like I did.

Maybe they should rent out their backyard to be used as a horror movie set. Because I honestly had the shivers being back there. And the back of the property is hugged by an expanse of woods, so God only knows how many bodies are buried there.  I used to walk out there daily when I was in high school and there were times when the hair on my arms would stand erect in ninety degree weather and my heels would instinctively fling me into a pirouette and send me running back home.

Chooch ate chicken nuggets while Henry teetered on the edge of Heart Attack Mountain in an attempt to break through blocks of ice on the front porch. Apparently, after the big fucking snowstorm that left Pittsburgh looking like Antarctica gave birth in its background, my aunt was trying to solve the problem by throwing salt on three feet of snow, which only resulted in layers of it melting and then freezing into sheets of ice. Which in turn became Henry’s problem. He should be used to cleaning up after me and my family by now, though. Like the time I tried to vacuum liquid from the bottom of the fridge and didn’t realize that it was pouring out of the hose and onto the kitchen floor behind me. Immediately became Henry’s problem.

While Henry was shoveling, Sharon called me from inside the house to inform me that Henry is an angel and that I better never let him go. This schmooze fest went on for a few minutes while I’m struggling to not blurt out, “He better never let ME go! I’m the awesome one in this arrangement!” but secretly I knew she was right. Goddammit. At one point she said he was god sent and I was like, “OK, I have to go.”

There’s a large shed that’s also in the back of the house. Chooch was like, “What the hell is this, a farm?” and I almost blurted out, “No, this is where I hid my boyfriend Mike when he ran away from home.” It was unlocked, but I was hesitant to open the door.

It just feels like everything is going to break if I touch it and I guess I would just rather remember it the way it used to be. And not some rotting cavity filled with broken down mowers, lawnchairs  and ATVs. And probably dead animals. Actually, after my Pappap died, a “family friend” broke into that shed and stole most of his stuff, anyway (and later fell from a ladder, broke his neck, and died). So it’s likely filled with nothing but stale air and shitty fucking karma.

He later bitched the whole way home because for some reason HIS PANTS WERE ALL WET, WAH.

I used to roller skate up and down this lane. There were speed bumps on it back then though, which my Pappap was responsible for. The story was that there was a family who lived at the end of the lane and their teenaged son used to get a little overzealous behind the wheel. Apparently he almost ran over my aunt Susie when she was a kid, so in went the speed bumps. Every one hated them, especially once my friends started driving, because no one ever thought to SLOW DOWN for the SPEED BUMPS and perhaps save the undercarriage of their cars, and I don’t know, a LIFE?

After my Pappap died, some of the neighbors got together and had the speed bumps taken out. Even though I had already moved off that street and into my own apartment by then, it really upset me. Like a piece of him had literally been ground into dust. Ew, I couldn’t stand it. I hate the fuckers who live on that street.

I shudder to think what will become of my grandparent’s house once my grandma is gone. Being there yesterday was kind of terrible.

9 comments

• coconut pie milkshakes & quicksand
• wearing your shirt to Taste of Chaos
• bang bang
• polka dot ties at the finger reception
• blue marbles & wings of pestilence
• bent forks at Hydes
• gaudy amulets & hocked plasma
• blue & yellow
• happy oinkin’ new year

Oh, this is terrible.

After the clusterfuck that is Mapquest directions and orange-barreled exits, Alisha and I didn’t get home from Cleveland until after 3am Sunday morning. And of course, I was too amped up by then to properly collapse in a snoring heap on the couch, so I wound up staying up until past 4am, trying to think of the name of some stupid rapper that Alisha had mentioned hours earlier.  I would like to take this moment to thank her again for that.

I got a little more than 3 hours sleep and was fatigued all afternoon, but refused to close my eyes during the Russian Olympic hockey game. And the next thing I knew, it was time to get Alisha and go to the Altar Bar to see one of my all-time favorite bands, Cold. This was my first time at the Altar Bar, and it was OK, I guess. A little too small for my liking, but when I got my hand stamped and looked around at all the Cold fans, it was honestly like coming home again. It’s not often that I get around to going to good old hard rock shows anymore, since I got swept away by the post-hardcore/screamo scene a few years back, and it felt amazing to not be the oldest person in the club.  I noticed a hearty collection of black hoodie-wearing men with long, bristling beards sculpted to a point and plenty of girls with ankh tattoos and smudged black liner (but not enough to be considered the raccoon eyes seen on page 56 of the scene kid style manual). I felt completely comfortable and forgot how much I liked being in that atmosphere.

The Canada-USA hockey game was being shown on the TVs behind the bar, so that kept me occupied during what seemed like an entire festival of opening bands. During Day of Fire, I made friends with two guys next to me, and we discussed the idiotic move of putting Brodeur in goal for Canada. Meanwhile, Alisha was a few feet ahead of me, being groped by sweaty porkchop hands. She was not happy and suggested that we find a new area to stand before Nonpoint came on.

Off to the left of the bar area, there was a section with banquette seating and a perfect view. Alisha gave the area her seal of approval and she got comfortable on a section of the seating while the drunkest guy in the history of alcohol claimed the spot next to me and began a series of drunk-appropriate teetering and swaying. I feared that he was going to fall on me, so I kept side-stepping closer to Alisha until I was nearly in her lap, running off my Christmas wish list. He got even worse once Nonpoint came on (and oh my God, I forgot how much I liked them back in the day) and when the singer suggested that everyone jump.  I envisioned myself coated with Pabst-scented vomit, but he ended up stumbling away.

I should have not had the energy to go along with this business of jumping, but my sleep-deprivation had placed me on the precipice of insanity and I jumped until my bra straps began slipping down my shoulders; it felt fucking great.

Team USA ended up winning the hockey game and the entire club erupted in cheers.

There was some major technical difficulties after Nonpoint, and we ended up waiting a good 45 minutes for Cold to be able to come on. I was a nervous wreck. My heart was beating so fast, I was wringing my hands. There was a time not too far back in the past where I was sure I would never get the chance to see them again. But then they reunited in the fall of 2008, and last March, Henry took me to Cleveland (House of Blues, actually) to see them and I was an emotional awakening for me. It’s always like that with Cold, but last year? I was a sniveling mess.

I knew walking into the Altar Bar that there were probably going to be tears at some point. But since I was with Alisha, and she has never seen Cold with me before, I had hoped that I could try and stifle some of that. It’s embarrassing! To be That Girl who cries at shows? I wish I could put a cork in sometimes, but the reality is that I love the pain they cause me. Yeah, it’s like taking a melon baller to my heart, but at least it reminds me I’m real, I’m alive.

(I know, I say these same things, over and over, in a variety of ways. I apologize.)

But where does that  power come from when a man can walk on a stage and a simple “Hello” into the microphone has my eyes stinging and my tongue tasting salt on my lips? It’s all Scooter Ward has to do to reduce me to a trembling volcano of emotions zipped up in a skin suit. He is the most real, most genuine musician I have ever met and I wish that I could take advantage of that, rather than starting to approach him only to spin on my heels and run away in tears.

They played “Back Home.” An older man next to me asked me if I was OK, I was crying so hard. I nodded, laughed, and cried harder. But motherfucker, I was smiling.

Most people are like, “Oh, Cold? That nu-metal band?” And it’s like, “Yeah, I guess. That ‘nu-metal’ band.” Makes me feel like I’m slitting my wrists to fucking Staind or Disturbed. They’ve never been a “nu-metal” band to me. They’ve been a band that helped me through some shitty fucking times in my life, a series of traumatic events that happened at the place where Henry and I both used to work. They’ve been a band that literally soundtracked my life as I became an adult. And going to their shows was something that Henry and I always shared together. And Henry might not have known what to do every single time I would leave their shows sobbing to the point where I couldn’t breathe, but he never made me feel stupid for it either.

I was sad that he couldn’t come with us this time. If Henry and I ever break up, Moses can add to his Commandments that I shall not ever listen to Cold again.

The first time I ever saw them was May of 2000. Their second CD had been released around that time, and “No One” was being played a lot on the radio. I remember liking it enough to buy the CD, but I never really gave it much play. May of 2000, I was at a radio festival with my friend Wonka and my neighbor Vinetta, when we happened to be walking past the smallest, most out-of-the-way stage at the outdoors venue, just as Cold was starting. I stopped and said, “I have their CD. Let’s check them out for a minute.” By the end of the first live song I heard from them, my heart was in their hands and Wonka and I vowed to try and see as many of their shows from then on.

During last Sunday’s show, I thought about Wonka a lot, how for the first time in my life I had a friend to bond with over music. How we would have conversations for weeks after a show, filled with things like, “Oh and remember when Jeremy changed the colors in his dreads” or “How great was it when Scooter and Terry played an acoustic ‘Bleed’?” I actually did the bulk of my emotional blood-letting after the show, all last week. There’s some strong connection that band has to my past, they’re interwoven with a lot of memories. And it made me think a lot about my friendship with Wonka and how much I miss him (he lives in Texas now). And I thought a lot about the place of work I mentioned earlier. It’s where I was working when I first got into Cold, and  that’s also where I met Henry and then he in turn became a fan too. But it was always a joke to my boss. “Oh, are you listening to Hot again?” he’d come into my office and ask, before letting out a spittle-laced laugh at his own failed attempt of a joke.

There were so many Cold shows seen in that four year period, and all the guys at my job had grown accustomed to me coming in the next day and gushing about how amazing the Buffalo, NY show was, or how Scooter gave me a Starburst at the Hershey show, or how Henry had thrown a muffin at my face on the way home from the Norfolk, Virginia show.  In time, I had begun to associate Cold with that chapter of my life, the [Unknown Company] chapter. And I won’t get into the gory details here, but my employment at [Unknown Company] ended extremely badly and traumatically, involving a huge shouting match with my boss, and learning of the death of his son, with whom I had a very tumultuous working relationship, that occurred two days later (it was ruled accidental but we all believed it to be suicide). That chapter closed a few months later, when I filed a complaint with the EEOC, had to face my ex-boss for the first time in mediation, and was eventually rewarded a small settlement.

I have had some therapy since then, but I never really healed. And all last week, on the way to my job (which ended on Friday), I listened to my old Cold albums in the car and let myself remember that era and I cried a lot. And I mean, a lot. But crying is good for me. I need to cry every now and then and eventually it’s like a snake shedding its skin, and I can go on about my business and start new.

Thursday morning, my friend and ex-office mate from [Unknown Company] called and told me that our ex-boss’s wife had died the previous day. And I didn’t think it would affect me. Maybe I was just already so emotionally raw, but I’m having a hard time processing it. I can’t really do anything about it, send a card or whatever, because I’m sure the last person that man wants to receive sympathy from is the girl who refused to let shit go. I know I shouldn’t feel bad for him, he was a bastard to me, but his wife was a nice lady and I had gotten to know her well from the four years I worked there. I feel kind of disturbed, like I’m back in 2004 and everything is still there, fresh and bleeding, begging to be properly buried and I don’t know how to do that when it keeps coming back up and rearing its Jewish head in my face.

But at least Cold is back to help me get past this too.

You think you’re half as good as me

The only thing you’ll ever be

Is just a way for me to bleed on this stage.

The line outside of the House of Blues was not very long and we were blessed to not be surrounded by roiling assholes. Alisha kept saying she felt old, but it seemed to be that there was a pretty good mix of ages out there. I’ve been to much younger shows so I felt like a big sister standing in this line, instead of a den mother.

Once the doors opened and our persons were checked for weaponry, we headed upstairs to the balcony. I’ve seen The Used enough times to not care too much about being close to the stage, and Alisha was still bummed about last year’s show at a shitty Pittsburgh venue where we could barely see the stage no matter where we stood. So the balcony seemed like the best bet for us.

I had a feeling I was going to dislike the opening band as soon as the curtain was drawn to reveal a set decorated with anarchy propaganda. And then Drive A bounded onto the stage and started playing stale punk anthems that knocked off old school Greenday and I was immediately in hell. I hate Greenday and therefore I hated Drive A. They had BORING stage presence too. The singer felt the need to explain what every song was about and all that accomplished was taking up more time.

After their set, two guys klutzed in front of us to claim the seats next to me. Instant entertainment. They appeared to be in their late 20s and the dorkier one was wearing slacks. The one immediately next to me spoke in a way that screamed Card Carrying Dork and seemed intent on talking loudly about all the chicks he’d fucked lately. Alisha was more annoyed than me and she wasn’t even sitting next to him. “He’s trying to impress you,” she kept saying.

When Atreyu came on, I would then learn that my new friend was a very skilled and thorough multi-air instrumentalist. He even fist-sung a few times. I was impressed for real at that point and was hoping I could be the next chick he had sex with in the back of his dad’s van.

Atreyu was boring. I swear I liked them once in my life, maybe when their first album was released? But they just weren’t holding my attention. I was freezing in that building, and was using Alisha’s coat as a blanket at that point. Rock shows should not leave a person cold.

I hated this broad. I’m not sure what it was about her: the fact that she and her boyfriend were seconds away from reproducing from the moment they sat down, her hair that I envied,  or the cattiness I detected behind her eyes. I just sincerely couldn’t stand her. I laughed when her boyfriend rubbed her back protectively when Atreyu took the stage with a sound equivalent to 800 air horns going off at once.

It was during Atreyu when I first noticed the girl screaming behind me. I don’t mind loud noises when I’m at a show. That’s what shows are meant for – screaming and acting idiotic (to a degree; I don’t condone asshole-y behavior at shows). But this girl? My god the lungs on her. It sounded like a bag of babies screeching behind my head. I have never really been in a position to say that something was blood-curdling and mean it. But my blood was curdling all the way down to West Virginia. This was not an euphoric scream meant for shows; this was better reserved for expressing just how insanely painful it is when Leatherface nips your thigh with his chainsaw as you’re stumbling through trees in the the dark woods of Texas.

I fucking hated her and the way she made my left shoulder rise up to my ear, like she had it on a fucking string.

There was an incident in the crowd below, and one of the guitarists paused before starting the next song to ask the crowd to please help out the person who I imagine must have fallen. The singer of Atreyu very disinterestedly repeated, “Yeah, give him room. Security, get out there or something. OK the next song—” only to be interrupted again by the guitarist, who was pretty much refusing to continue the show until the person in need was helped.

I was kind of disgusted at that point, because the whole situation made the singer look like an insensitive prat and somewhere around that time I had also realized that from where I sat, he looked like Dunbar from the Real World: Sydney, so I double-hated him.

“I love how you have a talent for incorporating The Real World into your daily life,” Alisha said. At first, I thought she was being sarcastic but then I noticed she was shoving her Autograph pad at me.

When The Used came on, I was immediately overcome with mixed emotions. I so badly wanted to enjoy the show, but I couldn’t fight off the nostalgia; I felt really sad and frustrated and began to wonder if it was a good idea that I came at all. When I saw them last year, my friendship with Christina had ended (God only knows what do-over number that one was) and I was at a point where I had a lot of hate for her and the situation, so seeing The Used that time was like revenge in a way. Like, “Haha, this was our favorite band but I’m going to see them with someone else, you dumb bitch.” And it felt good, like a release.

But this time was different. I don’t have hate for her anymore. That has dissipated and left me with a very raw pain and an excruciating sense of betrayal and confusion. Being there in the House of Blues, especially when they played “Blue and Yellow,” it was like having our friendship play out in front of me, while being forced to drink kerosene.

I thought I was doing a good job keeping it together though, keeping my emotions in check. Until the very end, during the encore, when this drunk Napoleon with a God complex behind me started getting to me. I could feel my skin burning as my temper rose, and it’s a feeling I know all too well.

I did not want to lose my shit there, and I kept repeating that to myself over and over until I found myself pre-rage blackout, twisting around and spitting Angry Girl ire in this fucking frat boy’s face. We exchanged heated words in a cloud of alcohol-fumes and profanity until his girlfriend (who I’m pretty sure was the murder-scream girl) begged him to shut up.

I don’t even want to get into it, really, because it doesn’t make me feel proud of myself. It doesn’t make me look “cool” or “hard.” It just makes me upset every time I replay the situation in my mind, which is something I did A LOT that night and the next morning and the next day and yesterday and right now. And it sucks. To work that hard to be a good sport, to try so hard to mind my temper, only to waste all that on some doucheknob who instigated a situation that didn’t even deserve a response from me, that wasn’t even directed solely AT me. But no, I was already so tense, so confused in my head, that I let a complete stranger get the best of me, and I’m not stupid – I know I was projected. He gave me an opportunity to unleash and I took it when I should have bit my tongue and walked away.

I wanted him to hit me. I honest to god wanted that guy to hit me.

Just so I could feel pain on the outside instead of within.

Worst of all, it created a tiff between Alisha and me. She wasn’t mad, just worried that the situation was going to escalate and she wouldn’t be able to protect me if he got physical. So I stormed ahead and acted all angsty for a few minutes before realizing how stupid I must have looked. And we were good after that, but I fucking swear to god that really killed the night for me. I’ve spent all week being totally reflective about myself and the situation and my triggers, and it’s been exhausting. Just exhausting and traumatic. Perhaps that might be the last time I see The Used.

After getting lost after the show, we found an IHOP where the plastic cover to the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom stall opened up and fell onto my lap while I peed.

(Bathroom: 3, Erin 0.)

Sometime in high school, I made the implausible leap from gangsta rap-lovin’ yo-girl to a classic rock hussy. One particular band I had an intense liking for was .38 Special, of all bands. I would listen to the classic rock station all day with a blank tape on the ready, waiting for “Caught Up In You” to come on so I could dive into some finger-stubbing “record” action.

My friend Lisa, who was into more alternative music, was probably the happiest of all my friends when I retired my gritty urban flava mix tapes in favor for music that didn’t scare, offend and irritate her. So in 1997, when I asked her to go see .38 Special with me, she was more than happy to agree.

I’m sure it didn’t hurt that my mom was buying the tickets for us.

The day of the show, my boyfriend Psycho Mike came to my house. He didn’t want me to go to the concert and thought that starting a fight with me would suddenly make my head clear so I could understand the error of my ways.

“You’re going to end up fucking some drunk guy!” he yelled, his eyes getting that crazy glint to them, like the time he told me he was going to poke out my eyes and shove them up my vagina.

“Maybe even more than one!”

Yes, Mike. You’re right. Foiled again!

He left in a huff. Soon Lisa had arrived and we left for the Rostraver Ice Garden. Not surprisingly, we were the clear winners in the “Youngest Concert-Goers” category, and probably the only one who didn’t have the Harley-Davidson logo somewhere on their person.

During Molly Hatchet and another opening band that Lisa totally loved but I can’t remember anything other than their wildly crimped and Aqua Netted manes, we took in the sheer frenzy of shaking mullets, over-sized tie-dyed shirts, and leather-vested bikers showing off prison-quality ink on their forearms. I loved every second of it. It was fun and the energy of the crowd was contagious.

During the bands, we made friends with a completely blitzed cradle robber named Nelson and his slightly sober and calmer sidekick Nick.

Sadly, if I were to revenge-cheat on Psycho Mike, Nelson and Nick were probably the cream of the crop from that crowd. I think Nelson sloshed his beer on Lisa.

Goddammit I loved that shirt. It was metallic! I didn’t love that hair though. I remember I had gotten a horrible hair cut at Fantastic Sam’s of all places (the only time I ever deviated from the fluffy salons I usually go to and immediately learned why I pay so much to get my hair done – so it will look GOOD) and spent the next month and a half pulling what was left of my hair back into ponytails.

Side bar: A few years ago, I was riding in the car with Henry, my mom and Corey after a night of haunted houses. “Caught Up In You” came on the radio and I shouted, “Yes! I love this song!” My mom, ever so casually, goes, “Huh. This is the song that was on the radio when I was driving to the hospital after your father wrecked.” You know, the wreck that killed him 27 years ago, no biggie.

***

When I came home from Cleveland at 3:00 this morning, I was about to pass out on the couch when I noticed I had a voicemail from Lisa. It started out with her humming something vaguely discernible before belting out “So caught up in you, little girl!” She went on to sing for a few more seconds before stopping to add, “So I’m at a supermarket right now and this song came on; I had to call and sing it to you.

”

Not going to lie, that kind of meant the world to me.

Fourteen years ago today, my pappap died.

It doesn’t suck any less, but you know what? What good does it do to sit here and mope and be all darkly nostalgic like I usually am on this day?

He wouldn’t want that; he hasn’t wanted that. Christ, I get all somberly reflective about him on any other random day of the year.

 So this time, on this day, Alisha and I are going to Cleveland to see The Used and I think that’s exactly what I need.

This past week can be shoved in the FML bin, but I’m going to make today awesome.

Usually Henry is super quick to remove videos from the hard drive because he’s super protective of that “free space” shit on the computer, so I was surprised to find that this old movie thing my brother Corey and I made from Polaroids way back in like 2003 was still a workable link.

It’s seriously one of my favorite things ever, because my life lacks substance.

Click it!

I remember the day we took these pictures.

I had stopped over my mom’s after work and Corey had just gotten one of those trendy Polaroids that printed on tiny sticker things and I can’t believe I can’t remember what that camera was called. I had one too. It was fun. Anyway, I must have been supremely bored that day. I do remember getting pissed at my mom though because I wanted her to take a picture of Corey and me for one of the “movie frames” I was laying out in my head and she refused, wanted no part of our idiocy. I know I seem like such an even tempered sweetheart, but anytime I’m immersed in some sort of project, even one that doesn’t count for anything more than filler for a boring day, I will lose my shit faster than you can say Skullfucking Miley Cyrus. Probably even faster than that but I just wanted to have a reason to write “skullfucking Miley Cyrus” and now I just gave myself two reasons to type “skullfucking Miley Cyrus.” Oh shit, THREE reasons.

In other news, I really hate figure skating.

Friday, June 1, 2007

There are two of them ascending the steps to my front door, wrapped in a shroud woven of the Holy Word and sweat beads; long wool skirts shifting left and right against their panty hosed-calves. Their presence is announced not by the gentle rapping on the door, but by inflexible clodhoppers amplifying their chaste footfalls against the concrete.

Henry, in typical older male fashion reminiscent of our fathers, is splayed out on the couch in a striking pair of boxer briefs; he hurriedly stuffs a pillow onto his lap and coaxes me to get the door.

Balancing my kid on my hip, I open the screen door and nervously greet them. I learn that they are Mormon sisters which intrigues me as I have only ever encountered the elders;  they had not intended to stop at my house but happened to notice Chooch at the door and that little asshole smiled at them, which I guess is the Mormon code for “Someone in here needs some savin’! Come on down!”

I think I’ll make my child a Tamburitzen as his future penance.

I like to humor solicitors by feigning interest. Especially the Mormons, who have always amused me so. They provide me with human contact, doses just large enough to keep my society membership card from being revoked. And sometimes it does end up being interesting! There were two Elders who swung by once on a Saturday evening, many years ago, after I spotted them walking past my house and hysterically screamed for them to come say hi. They allowed me to video tape them as they commented on the party debris covering every flat surface of my living room. “The Christmas lights are lit, there’s beverage on the table, looks like a party to me!” the one hollered, channeling his best frat boy dialect which he probably picked up from the WB, while the other Elder stood nervously to the side. Then the bolder one took the camcorder just in time to pan onto me as I stumbled drunkenly onto the sidewalk, tripping all over my halter-topped slutiness. He was my favorite Elder. Strangely, I never saw him again. And after all that flirting, even?

However, I have a really terrible tendency to laugh in their faces, only partially because I’m an asshole. From birth, I’ve been tagged as an Inappropriate Laugher. Even when I actually was religious (truth!) and cheered when I was blessed with a Sunday School teacher who deemed it necessary to give us exams, I would still rip open the insides of my cheeks with my molars in awkward attempts to stop laughing during mass.

So when one of the two sisters enters a coital-like trance and begins her spiel, I start to relive the day Henry and I attended baptism class. It’s like my bottom lip is trying to mount the top one, like humping earthworms, causing them both to contort in jackass-y smirks and lewd leers. I laugh hard and try to project it all onto  Chooch, hoping they’ll interpret my uncomfortable display of giddiness as the universal sign for a mother’s joy. Look at me! I am so happy to be the mother of this sticky kid that I just can’t stop twisting my face into sneers better reserved for serial killers! Oh-ho, will the laughter never stop?

They pause in between glory be’s to acknowledge my giggles with interjections like “Yeah! Uh huh!” as though I’m that delirious from their recount of Joseph Smith’s vision that I am losing my mind in a God-loving fervor.

And then, as I’m in the height of my seasonal lesbianism, it dawns on me just how hot this here Sister McRae really is, with the natural highlights sparkling in the sun’s heat and her cute little sweater vest enveloping her in innocence. Her words begin to perform a strip tease on her tongue, grinding to the hottest ecclesiastical club anthems, and making me want to collapse in a fit of immature giggles.

A thousand knee-slappers whir through my mind, the kinds that have made the Elders crack smiles; but as past instances have pointed out, I can’t flirt with girls. My tongue gets caught and I end up spitting out sociopathic flag-raisers like, “I have cats!” (Another truth, and possibly one of my darker moments on the playing field.)

The more marmish-looking one asks me if I know that Mormons have a living prophet.

Do I. I’ve watched Big Love.

It is clear that she is the no nonsense, get-convertin’ one of the pair, so I deep-six all eye contact from that point and focus on Sister McRae’s perfectly plucked eyebrows.

During all of this talk of Joseph Smith and light pillars (which I already know about thanks to the last time I was approached), I have been inadvertently leaning back on the front door, causing it to open wider and expose Henry and his Fruit-of-the-Loomed nut sack. He is very unnerved by this because the ugly Sister keeps staring at him (he swears she is only looking at his face, and I kind of believe him because who’d want to gawk at Henry’s package?).

The couch becomes his Iron Maiden.

My cat Marcy slips out through the crack I left in the front door and proceeds to weave in and out under the stauncher Sister’s skirt, pausing underneath to look up. Marcy has a long tail, which is erect and wagging like a large feathered quill, dusting the cobwebs. I bet that’s considered first base back on the compound. Stifling back chuckles, I give Marcy halfhearted scoldings and fight the urge to regress to a fifth grade mindset.

Fifteen minutes and lots of unintentional laughs later, the pretty Sister picks up on my dire need to retreat into the house (or else her love for Jesus isn’t strong enough to keep her standing in the ninety degree heat for more than twenty minute intervals). She asks if they can come back another time. I happily agree because I love torturing myself. She pencils me in for Monday at 1 and gifts me with a church pamphlet, which I am told to study in the meantime.

I am sad to see that the Jesus depicted on the cover is of the gentle, lamb-cradling shepherd variety, one that I just had no right picturing in sweaty, pretzel-bodied trysts. No, a date with this one would probably be jam-packed with seed scattering and roof thatching. Maybe a few blessings before dinner and then a reenactment of the apple scene by the local youth group.

Unless there’s some back scratching and strawberry shortcake involved, I’ll pass.

Henry shot off a torrent of disbelief. He asks me things like why I invited them to come back and if I’m really going to attend their mass like I said I would. I ignore him as I flip through my Mormon study guide and laugh at pictures portraying loving families and content hand-holding parishioners.

I will undoubtedly spend my weekend daydreaming about what Mormon mass is like and how quickly I get myself blacklisted. Will they at least serve  doughnuts and orange drink first? Can I wear a bonnet? I hope to make lots of friends there so I have more people to invite to future game nights. Then I’ll put them in a room with my friends who are adamant debaters of opposing religions and have them all sic each other.

At least they didn’t make me pray with them.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Henry is home from work early. On his way upstairs for a nap, he reminds me that I have a date with the Mormons.

By 12:45, my front door is barricaded, the windows pulled closed and robed by curtains, and the volume on the TV lowered. I’m on lock down. I even bite off one of my nails in a fretful fit.

1:00 comes and goes, and I feel abandoned and unloved. Am I so pathetic that even religious recruiters stand me up? I go upstairs in search of consoling from my napping partner, but he shuns me, so I return to the living room and make snarly expressions with my mouth until I’m distracted by a Ciara video.

The clock turns to 1:35 and my ears perk at the sound of Christ-like exaltations growing louder outside my door. I swear that I even hear the heavenly notes of harps helmed by cherubs, but it might just be the sound of my own angelic breathing. Suddenly, I’m consumed by an animalistic danger response and I flee to the bedroom, tripping over my flip flops on the way.

This is my mother’s fault. I grew up hiding with her in the attic as Jehovah’s Witnesses circled around our house like crows; PTA member Donna Thomas made spontaneous visits to try and get her to type programs or bake cookies or be a room mother; and my uncle’s insane girlfriend Stella would appear for impromptu cups of tea, her psychosis only thinly veiled as she choked on tears and hysterical laughter (she once hid under the bed for a week because she wanted my uncle to assume she had gone off and killed herself). I’d pretend whoever my mom had us hiding from on that particular day had shotguns and that if I lifted my head, my brain would explode like Gallagher’s watermelon and sound like a moist sponge as it splattered against the wall and dripped down into a gelatinous pile of blood and skull fragments. It was exhilarating.

As I spy between the slats of the blinds, Henry asks me through a sleep-coated slur what I’m doing and in my best hushed tones, I inform him that the Mormons hath returned and I’m hiding. I haven’t even read their literature! The only term I learned was Aaronic Priesthood, and that’s only because it topped the list. I didn’t even complete the study questions at the end! Did Jesus’s Apostles know that an apostasy would occur? I don’t know!

Henry shakes his head and rolls over, rejecting me with his back.

I cower in the dark sanctity of my bedroom corner until I’m certain they’ve left. They pull out of the driveway in what appears to be a brand new Camry in golden hues, probably meant to mimic a halo’s tint. I then briefly consider converting, until Henry informs me that the car is likely owned by the church and not two Mormon hustlers who don’t have jobs. But then I start to think of other scenarios that could afford them a car, like drug dealing. Mormonism is starting to sound scandalously tempting. I could probably get used to the itchy wool caressing my thighs if it meant reaping the rewards of Christ’s drug deals. The scratchy caresses might even be an improvement on Henry.

Do Mormons engage in self-flagellation?

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

I’m hanging out in the living room with Henry and Chooch, enjoying a block of music videos that teach my son to call girls bitches and hoes and to fuck them barebacked to see if they really are a wonder woman. To keep our wandering child in one room, we pull out our chaise and use it to block the entrance to the dining room, since it’s too wide of an area for a standard baby gate to cross. Henry is presently laying across it on his stomach in a position he hopes will make him look younger than he really is. How is he going to slip his hand down his pants with his jock pressed against the chair? I wonder.

In my peripheral, I catch two wool-skirted smudges through the open front door. The Mormon Sisters have nearly reached the front porch, but I’m not opposed to obvious dodgings. In what feels like slow-motion, I leap up from the couch and lurch into a scissor-kicked hurdle over top of Henry’s lazy form on the chair. I pause briefly once I land, impressed with the height I reached on that one, but then I sprint like I’m being chased by the muthafuckin’ popo until I’m swaddled in safety’s sweet embrace at the top of the steps.

I hear the soft rapping upon the front door. I hear the door open. I hear Henry’s gruff voice. Though I can’t hear it well, I imagine his voice all but paints a portrait of his chagrined state.

I hear silence.

And then, Henry is standing at the bottom of the steps.

He hisses for me to get my ass downstairs.

No, I hiss back, slinking further into the shadows.

This is your doing, he seethes. Tell them you’re not interested.

But I won’t, and he knows he can’t make me.

He shuffles off to do my dirty work. I wait a few moments after I hear the closing of the door before I come out of hiding.

Henry tells me smugly that they’re coming back tomorrow. I hope they come in time to spectate the simulated baby sacrifice that I perform on Chooch. He loves it so much that he laughs until he vomits.

I love the thrill of the chase, the sensation of being stalked; I love how my heart palpitates wildly and I feel my blood rushing, in a nervous race to hide from the word of the Lord. Sometimes I call myself Susie and pretend that I’m in the Witness Protection Program. Other times I pretend my house is a forest bathed in moonlight and I’m fleeing from a chainsaw-brandishing Jason Voorhees, tree branches snagging my camp shirt and jagger bushes carving thin trenches into my flesh. What really provides good cardio is envisioning that they’re rapists saddled with 12-inch barbed-wired and hot sauce-ensconced dildos, pelvises thrusted and jutting, ready to penetrate.

I can’t wait for them to come back.