I wish I could still get away with rockin’ sweater dresses. I’d try it, but I have a sinking suspicion I’d look more like a mountain of scrotum covered by a rumpled sack than a cute 80s throwback with whom you’d want to double dutch. Maybe if I crimped my hair and decked my crown with a neon green floppy bow, it might distract from my stumpy legs.

Finding this photo made me think about all the other dumb fashion trends I bought into (read: my aunt Sharon bought into and projected onto me). Along with side ponytails and Punky Brewster hi-tops, I used to collect these cute and colorful plastic charms.  They either were from Kinney’s or David Weiss, but each charm had a tiny bell and clip that allowed them to be attached to a strand of coordinating multi-colored plastic links. I took pride in my blooming collection of unnecessary trinkets, ranging from a cuckoo clock to a can of hair spray. When I wasn’t using the clunky strand of plastic as a whip or trying to garrot my baby brother with it,  I would belt a jean skirt with i and jingle my way through a day of Kindergarten.

I had forgotten all about that fucking annoying leash of neon plastic until my grandma unearthed it a few months ago. Most of the charms had fallen off years ago, being in the brutal hands of a destructive child, but about eight charms remained intact on a short fragment of the chain.

Well, that was until I brought it home to Chooch’s lair. He’s since ripped every platsticized piece of 80’s nostalgia from the chain. Occasionally, I step on one and kick it under the couch in frustration because it’s like by having a child, I was duped into signing some secret contract, with a calligraphy pen wetted by afterbirth, stating that I will do nothing but pick up fucking toys all day long and that if I do not have a stooped back by my thirty-second birthday, I am fucking up my duty as a mother and will be relegated henceforth to the nearest Fantastic Sam’s where I will be drugged and supplied with the standard close-cropped Mom Bob.

Last night, we were chilling out on the couch, rubbing our meat fists together with fervor as we anticipated the start of the twenty-fifth VMAs, when Chooch (completely speaking out of turn, that little bastard will be mopping the basement floor tonight) said, “Mommy, look!”

Now, by seven in the PM, I have heard the pairing of the words “mommy” and “look” more times than my sanity is realistically able to comprehend, and I just don’t think any two words should ever commingle that much, unless they go by the names “sex” and “party”.  So, keeping my glazed eyes suctioned to the gyrating images and pornography of color and sonic diabetes that MTV spoon feeds me daily, I mumbled, “That’s great, Chooch.” But he kept chanting it over and over, louder and louder, angrier and angriest, until I began subconsciously flinching because I’ve grown so accustomed to having chunky pieces of toy parts chucked at my cheek bones. Fearing another bruise, I looked to see what he was desperate to show me.

A tiny plastic revolver charm.

I used to wear a cute little replica of a weapon around my waist. To school. To Kindergarten. I probably wore that to church at some point too. And how people probably wouldn’t have batted a lash at it. I mean, it was sold in kids’ clothing stores.

So I laughed about that for awhile, and joked that it could have been the catalyst to my present obsession with death and murder and violence.  Then I laughed while thinking about a kid nowadays, in the year 2008, sporting the likeness of a revolver to school and not having it turn into a Very Big Deal.

Tell me about YOUR childhood fashion style!

Some of my earliest memories center around the stereo room in my grandparent’s house, a.k.a my grandma’s clown room. Listening to a plucky rendition of Dr.

Zhivago’s Theme play from a music box, rifling through my mom’s and her sister’s old record collection (and always pulling out Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl”), carefully dusting around the clowns with a feather duster for money and thinking I was such a big help.

I’d like to use my (hopefully brief) employment hiatus to do some kind of project in this room, but my damn aunt is fucking possessive about the house now that I’m not sure if I can find a way around her.

It would be fun to have people dressed as clowns, chilling out around the fake ones. Hiding in corners, rolling blunts on the chessboard.

I need to send my aunt to a fucking day spa and get this done.

My aunt seriously hounded me all weekend about coming to visit, but then as soon as she caught me taking pictures in the clown room, she got all flustered and pushed us out of the house. She must have fucking Hoffa hidden under the floor boards or something.

Today, I got to hang out with Lisa. She’s visiting from Colorado and I was lucky to rank high enough on her social ladder to score a visit with her. Over iced Chai tea and strawberry cake, we talked about how I should have one more kid (Lisa’s suggestion, and it made me laugh myself to death), we talked about the varying hues of menstrual blood, about how she couldn’t taste the strawberries in her cake yet mine was bursting with succulence, and we talked about how we’re going to party like heathens when she moves back to Pittsburgh in hopefully less than a year. (OK, that was mainly my suggestion, at which Lisa laughed herself to death.)

I birthed an entire being made of joy and g-spots when I saw an announcement for the upcoming Chiodos show in one our city papers. Lisa, annoyed that I interrupted our grown-up conversation with a fan-girly shriek straight from the pages of Teen Beat, was like, “OK. I don’t know who that is.” I hated her for a little while after that, but then she distracted me with, “Hey, you look good, by the way,” which opened the gates for an ecstatic sermon on the Gospel of Jump Rope. I seriously might die without that fucking rope. Or WITH it, due to my jumping mania and fury.

Lisa and I have drifted apart several times over the years, mostly because we consistently choose different paths. She chose “graduate”; I chose “drop out”. She chose “Christianity”; I chose “none.” She chose “abstinance”; I chose “like rabbits”. Our lifestyles have clashed at times. She left my nineteenth birthday party marathon because it was lewd, debacherous, drug-laden, and overpopulated with underage drinking. I rarely visited her at Bible College because happy people would try to hold my hand and I couldn’t smoke anywhere on campus.

But through the past few years, we’ve come closer to meeting in the middle. I thought she would have freaked at the idea of me having a bastard son, but she never once criticized me, or judged me. She loves my Chooch and is a huge Henry advocate.

Between sips of her latte, she was telling me today about an issue she had with some guy she met, how she emailed him and prefaced it with, “As your sister in Christ…” followed by a dissertation on faith. A few years ago, I might have once laughed at her for being such a God homo. But today, I have a greater respect for her as a person and for all that she’s accomplished, so I just laughed inside my head.

I love Lisa.  I love her so much that I use a song she absolutely abhors as her personalized ring  tone on my Blackberry. And THAT is how you know I love you – through torture.

To commemorate my day with Lisa:

 My favorite Lisa memory is circa 1997, during the spring of my senior year of high school. I was tooling around town with my friends Jon and Justin, killing time before meeting up with the rest of our motley crew later that night.  Justin came to a realization.

“Shit! ICP is playing at Laga tonight. We should go.”

Being a yo-girl at heart, I had no objections to his spontaneous suggestion, until our previous engagements crept into mind.

“But we’re supposed to go over Melissa’s tonight and watch movies with her and Lisa, remember?” A far cry from the havoc we could potentially wreak at a concert, but an obligation nonetheless.

“We’ll just get everyone to meet us at Laga instead.” Jon’s solution seemed so simple, but he was forgetting something very important.

“Lisa’s not going to go for that,” I sighed. The aforementioned Lisa was, and still is, a Christian who just could not get down with the likes of ICP. Becoming a juggalo was not something Jesus would do. (Maybe not her Jesus. My Jesus would have helped pen some of their rhymes.)

 “I have a plan,” Justin said. He dialed Lisa’s number and confidently urged her to put movie night on hold in favor of what could potentially go down in the annals of Very Special High School Moments.

“What is an ICP?” Lisa asked suspiciously.

“They’re a band. It stands for…Intensely Christian…Punks.” Lisa, having a soft spot for non-secular punk bands, called everyone else and informed them of the changed plans.

There were six of us that night, all sardined into Jon’s car. Half of us were giddy to be going to a concert; the other half were giddy because we got away with a lie in order to go to the concert in the first place.

As soon as ICP took the stage, Lisa was chagrinned. “They don’t look like punks…?” she yelled above the crowd of undulating and rioting juggalos. Once they started rapping and she heard their lyrics, she edged back from the stage. Once they started spraying the crowd with Faygo, accompanied by lewd and suggestive gestures, she migrated back some more until a wall prevented her from retreating further. She probably had quite a few dialogues with God that evening.

When the show was over, we all tiptoed over the puddles of Faygo left to coagulate into sugary stains. Lisa, the bottom of her Vans slick with the liquid, slipped and fell down the steps.

Best night ever.

My parents were in the process of having a back porch built onto our house. This was a big deal for my brother Ryan and me, because stalking one of the workers became the sole reason we got out of bed each day. I mean really, who wants to swim and lay out in the sun when you can be violating someone’s privacy?

There was no real reason why we felt so intrinsically drawn to the sweaty laborer. He wasn’t good-looking, he didn’t sport a peg-leg, he wasn’t albino. He was just your average forty-something year old porch-builder with tinted eyeglasses, a farmer’s tan and a bushy moustache. I don’t even think he ever spoke to us. I mean, would you?

We would run from window to window, snapping pictures of him. Pictures from the kitchen, pictures from our parent’s bedroom, pictures bent around tree trunks. One day, Ryan even chased his truck up the street as he departed for home after a long grueling day of hammering nails and chugging Schlitz under the shade of a maple. I often wondered if our porch-builder had a good broad with a nice plump behind to nail, maybe cook him up a nice thick stew.

I’ll never forget the day we discovered his name was Gary. We ran into the house, erupting into shrieks and giggles. Our mom’s reaction was something akin to “Yeah, so?” accompanied by an eye brow raise. She always raised the eyebrow that bore a scar from when she was a baby and rolled off her bed, banging her face off the corner of the nightstand. I still can’t believe she never made up a better story, like how she was nicked by a gypsy’s butterfly knife the time she tried to steal cantaloupes off their wagon. When I was fourteen and viciously mauled by our psycho rabbit, you better believe I went back to school with a yarn about getting stabbed during gang initiation.

After a week of wasting film on this fine craftsman, we decided these clandestine snaps weren’t providing enough of a sociopathic rush. We needed more thrill, something that provided more of an instant gratification. When you’re young, you want souvenirs for everything you do: pocketed sugar packets from a truck stop diner, pebbles from the parking lot of the first sex shack your dad made you wait outside of, bloodied gauze from your first tooth extraction.

So the next obvious step clearly was to collect Gary’s cigarette butts and beer cans.

We waited until he’d go to his truck, then sprint out in the backyard like scavengers, picking through the grass in search of a butt or two. Once we accumulated enough to satiate our pursuant appetite, we brought our treasures in the house and stowed it underneath the couch in the family room. Like chipmunks storing acorns, crack heads hording rocks.

Stalking Gary consumed so much of our summer. So much that it infiltrated the summer of my friends, as well. My best friend Christy was out of town for some sort of academic camp. I wrote her a letter and enclosed one of Gary’s cigarettes butts for her to cherish as well. I just wanted her summer to be as rich as ours had become, thanks to Gary. I wrote letters to every one of my pen pals, detailing Gary’s every action and movement. Everyone clung to the Summer of Gary with bated breath.

Unfortunately, the fun and games ended when my dad unearthed our stash of purloined memorabilia under the couch. Now, any other dad would have rightfully accused us of smoking and drinking. Luckily for us, my dad recognized the extent of our weirdness long before this incident, so he believed our tale and we escaped punishment. The downside was that he forbade us to continue our game and pitched our pirated keepsake, muttering something about how we were embarrassing him or something.

I often wonder what Gary is doing these days, and if he knew he was being stalked. Was he flattered? I asked my mom: she said probably not.

I went through a short (five year) spell where I compulsively answered and posted personal ads for the sheer thrill of probable disaster. In the winter of 1999, a delightful man named Pete responded to one of my ads. After exchanging several cordial emails, I decided there was a fair chance he wasn’t keen on brandishing machetes, so I offered up my phone number.

He called me one night when my boyfriend Jeff was over. Jeff — yes, my boyfriend — was no stranger to my need to spread my wings of infidelity, so he busied himself with an episode of "Felicity" (the one where Brian Crackhouse raped the pink Power Ranger) while I carried on a merry conversation with Pete about all the various cereals we liked and how it was so hard to choose just one variety each morning.

Pete and I made plans to meet up one fine evening, and to be safe, I invited Janna over too. Because if he were to arrive wielding a chainsaw, at least I’d have a decoy. Minutes before Pete’s arrival, Janna called. "My mom won’t let me have the car because of the snow. I’m so sorry!" she whined, probably inwardly relieved that now she could stay home and watch PBS.

I tried to call Pete to cancel, but he had already left. I wondered about the possibility of him leaving the piano wire at home, on the kitchen counter, miles away from my vulnerable neck.

But he likes cereal so much, I pep-talked myself. It’s hard to imagine a serial killer enjoying a bowl of Apple Jacks, I assured myself, because that’s clearly grade A logic to apply.

When I opened the door for Pete, I was taken aback by his unexpected redneck visage. But once we got the handshaking out of the way, he settled down in a chair and conversation flowed freely. I was slightly irritated by his constant abbreviation for cigarette. "Let me light another ciggie," he’d announce, feeling the need to include me in his smoking schedule.

Then he pulled out a joint. I knew not to smoke it with him, because even when I’m with someone I’m supremely close to, my paranoia gets way out of control and of course every person in the tri-state area is vying to rape me. I want to sear my skin with a hot iron, leap from speeding vehicles, watch Olsen Twins videos.

So I did the rational thing in Erin’s World and joined him.

On TV, the news reports gave constant updates on the severe weather condition unraveling outside. I kept urging him to leave, and he would respond with obvious insinuations that he wanted to spend the night, which my marijuana-clouded mind translated as, "Imma treat ya like a pig, stuff an apple in yer mouth, and fuck ya silly from the bee-hind, you slutty broad. Who’s the cereal king now, ho?"

Oblivious to the pandemonium tap-dancing through my nervous system, he’d jiggle a cigarette between his fingers and say, "Just one more ciggie!" I sat on the couch, hunkered down among the pillows, arms protectively covering my boobs, legs bouncing with the verve and RPM of a bridge-dwelling paranoiac. I had cotton mouth and I wanted to go to bed. Maybe eat a PB&J.

He finally left after I completely closed off and started answering his questions with irate outbursts. I never heard from him again, which is a shame because we could have maybe made beautiful cereal together.

Sharing Harlan Coben books.

Weekend Players & The Flir.

Choking on chlorine.

Firecracker trips to Ohio.

Horror movies on humid nights.

Amaretto sours & A/C at McCoys.

Loving the Decemberists, hating bronchitis.

Pink Disney Princess phone.

Blue floppy beach hat to stay incognito.

Death by riding mower.

Instead of working, I’m flipping through an old notebook I kept when I was sixteen; a scrapbook of decoupaged pages of magazine clippings and ads for haunted houses, stream-of-consciousness scribblings, and my signature brand of really stupid poems. Also apparently I was running a CD rental program and kept a log of who had what and when it was returned.

It seems on one really special occasion, I felt compelled to list my idols at the top of one the pages.

1. Michael Myers
2. Jason Voorhees
3. Ellen DeGeneres
4. Bizzie Bone, of Bone Thugs n Harmony fame
5. Jennifer Aniston
6. DaBrat
7. El DeBarge

No wonder my parents are so proud of me.

Hopefully, I still have time to become a lesbian psychopathic (just a few breakdowns away!) killer with awesome flow, a penchant for chainsaws, and perfect hair before falling into obscurity (seriously, El, where did you go?). Luckily, I already have the ‘brat’ part mastered.

I don’t have any idols anymore.

If there was one moment in my life I’d love to be able to re-watch with a bowl of popcorn, it would be that day in fifth grade when Mike Harrison called Mrs. Glumac — the  obligatory meanest, nastiest, wartiest, tan-quilted-parka-in-the-winter wearingest lunch lady at our school — a bitch in the middle of a high stakes game of kickball, after she called him out unfairly.  Before she even had a chance to threaten him with a paddle, he took that rubber ball and hurled it at her face with the might of a thousand scorned bipolar women, smashing and breaking her glasses against her face.

He smashed them for every kid holding their piss on that playground, every kid that Mrs.

Glumac brought to tears in the cafeteria and every kid whose peaceful sleep was ever jarred into a fitful nightmare of hair nets and deadened eyes and Glumacian orders to line against the wall.

I remember how everyone just got really quiet, and Mrs. Glumac and Mike just stood there at a standstill, both in shock, we were all in shock. Mike was legendary in our eyes after that, having done what every kid thinks of doing, dreams of doing, wishes someone else would do to the cruel lunch lady who makes penises worldwide cower when she walks into a room. It was fucking awesome. I had a crush on him for real after that.

He totally got in so much trouble.

I used to keep a little log of daily happenings back then, just a little miniature spiral-topped notebook that I would write things like, “Spring is wearing a ponytail today — she’s going to be mean!” and “Oops, I have to sharpen my pencil!” It wasn’t a private diary, it was pine green, and everyone knew about it; so when we came back in from recess, everyone was all, “Erin, did you write about it yet, let us read what you wrote about it!” I believe all it said was a very succint “Mike H. called Mrs. Glumac a bitch then broke her glasses!” and everyone cheered when they saw the word “bitch” in actual penciled handwriting.

When I was growing up, my mom would tell me stories about Green Man’s Tunnel. According to her, the Green Man lived in an abandoned train tunnel in a suburban town south of Pittsburgh called South Park. He was green because he had the horrible misfortune of getting struck by lightning. Electrocuted by a toaster while bathing.  Stuck his dick in Gumby’s light socket. He was green, OK?

I would argue with people for years, spitting in their faces that it wasn’t an urban legend, that the Green Man was real, that my mom went to school with the Green Man, that her best friend went to the prom with the Green Man, that I SAW HIM WITH MY OWN EYES.

(I never really saw him.)

Then there were the people who believed in the legend (hello, it’s TRUTH, not legend) but insisted that the tunnel was located in other wooded areas, next to a creek in another town, on a pot-holed rural lane in a different county. My friend Keri insisted it was in a town called Dravosburg. "Remember when me, you, and Dan went to Green Man’s Tunnel to set off firecrackers?" she’d start. I would shrug. "Yeah you do. Dan got hit in the face with one of them, remember? He had that big welt on his cheek?" I would stubbornly say, "Well Keri, I remember the time we went to a tunnel in Dravosburg, but not Green Man’s Tunnel. THAT tunnel is in South Park." For years, I wouldn’t acknowedge the memory of that day until she quit calling it Green Man’s Tunnel.

My mom would drive us out there, my brother Ryan and me, repeating the story in case we forgot how tragic and green the Green Man really was. "He was so nice, really good looking too, until he got turned green." Before we’d reach the part of the road where his rusted, graffiti’d, abandoned train tunnel could be seen, we’d have to first drive through a long underpass; a creek flowed along one side. Some people’s version of the story claim that when you’re in this tunnel at night, your headlights go out. Your car just shuts off, completely dies. The Green Man comes and steals your electricity and then I don’t know what. Fucks you with it? Shoots down planes with it?

Sometimes, in the tunnel, my mom would slow to a halt, the headlights would go out. My brother Ryan would cry, but I knew that the lights were out because my mom turned them off to scare us. My chest would tighten, palms would moisten, even though I knew that part of the story wasn’t real, that the Green Man was sad and just wanted some friends. Just wanted some friends to bring him some Hustler and maybe a forty of Miller Lite.

I couldn’t provide him those things, the booze and the porn, but I was determined to give him companionship, friendship, a membership to the Erin Rulz 4 Lyfe club. So one night I prepared a small sandwich bag of assorted candies. Tootsie rolls and Lifesavers and some mini Snickers, and in that bag, among all the candy, I tucked in a note that I wrote on a piece of blue paper. My mom drove me out to his tunnel. I had intended on taking the bag right up to his tunnel, right up to entrance, where I would then knock on the steel door and he would take me in and we’d sit down and drink some cans of Coke and talk about how tough it is, not fitting in, and then I’d give him half of a best friend pendant and we’d keep in touch and twenty years later he’d be my son’s Godfather.

Instead, I completely flipped my shit when I got close to the ominous tunnel, saw the "condemned" sign on the gate, heard fluttering noises in the patch of woods above the unused tracks, and I chugged my ass back down to the road where my mom idled in the car. Tossed the baggie of treats into the small gravel lot across the street and ended up back in the passenger seat, eyes closed and fighting to catch my breath.

"I thought you weren’t scared of him," my mom said as the tunnel became smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. And then she did what she did best when I was in distress: laugh at me.

I always wondered if he got the care package, my carefully prepared snack pack of love and frienship. I wondered if he ate the candy before a woodland creature scampered over from the other side of the creek and devoured it. I wondered if the Tootsie Rolls got stuck in his teeth and if he used his tongue to pry it from his molars and I wondered, was his tongue green too?

Today, while I was getting my hair done, my stylist Lucia was talking about her boyfriend’s sister.

"She lives out by Green Man’s Tunnel." She paused, waiting for a sign of recognition. I didn’t say anything, but my body stiffened, hoping she’d give the right answer.

When she added, "Out in South Park," I lit up.

"OK, I know exactly where that is," I smiled.

Just another reason I love Lucia — she knows the right story.

"What are you looking at?" I asked when I noticed my mom casting an excessive series of glances into the rear view mirror. I asked her again when she didn’t respond.

"Nothing," she said flippantly, but her eyes went right back to the mirror. I twisted in the passenger seat, squinting out the back window to see what sort of exciting scene had her attention so tightly bound. The light turned green; as the Explorer began to accelerate, I noticed that a man was crossing the street behind us. He looked around my mom’s age and his head was wrapped snugly in a black and gold bandanna.

I snickered. "Oh my God, you were totally checking out that guy crossing the street behind us. That’s what you were looking at!" The thought of my mom preening in the rear view mirror at the sight of some sloppy stranger made me spit out my beverage.

"I was not," she denied haughtily. But it was too late, giddiness had set in and I was already construing a tale of dramatic (dis)proportions to be passed on for generations. Undaunted by the rest of my family’s failure to see the humor in the story, I couldn’t wait to tell everyone at school. I had a hard time sleeping that night, scenarios of their reactions playing out behind my eyes.

At school the next morning, I still wasn’t over the excitement. I tried to relay the scene to some of the kids in my eighth grade homeroom, but they seemed confused. The ones who knew me well enough knew to ignore me, but the others seemed like they really wanted to understand, like they desperately  needed to be in on the joke that had me crying with laughter.

Thinking a diagram of the situation would paint a better picture, I stood at the chalkboard and drew a crude version of my mom with heart-shaped pupils intently watching the man crossing the street.

"Is that supposed to be a pirate?" someone asked.

"No, just some dude in a bandanna," I explained.

"Looks like a pirate."

I brushed it off and tried unsuccessfully to re-tell the story using my chalky story board. I had to pause after every third word because laughter would start to strangle me.

"I don’t get why this is funny," someone interjected, annoyed.

"You’re a fucking sped." That came from Scott Ash. We would start dating a year later.

"Sit down, Erin," Mr. Rubinsack begged, paired with his standard temple-rub. Teachers did that a lot when dealing with me…? Mr. Rubinsack remains my favorite teacher of all time. He made me sit in the hall when I got on his nerves. (Not as often as you’d think.)

My friend Keri used to get especially annoyed when I would tell this story. She would assuage confusion by explaining, "Don’t bother trying to understand her. She’s a fucking idiot. It’s only funny to her, in her head."

It took me months to be able to keep a straight face when recounting it.

A year or so later, my mom picked Keri and me up from the mall. Sitting at a red light, I glanced out the window, and in a moment of sheer serendipity, I saw him. With his head swaddled in a taut bandanna, I saw the Man Who Crossed the Street, well, crossing the street. There he was, slowly schlepping along in his worn jacket and scruffy beard.

"Oh my God! Oh my God, look who it is!" I jabbed my finger excitedly out the window. "It’s—"

"Huh, it’s my step-father," Keri finished my sentence with detached ambivalence.

"——yeah. It’s your…..step-father. That’s exactly who it is, wow," I quickly covered. A wave of nausea pummeled over me. What an awkward, unexpected twist to a saga, a year in the making. I didn’t really hang out much at Keri’s house back then, and had only met her step-dad once, in passing. There was no way I would have made the connection.

After we dropped Keri off, I turned to my mom and exhaled melodramatically. "Wow, that was a close one, huh?" I let out a terse laugh.

"What was?" my mom asked, not sounding like she really cared much for an answer.

"That Keri’s step-dad is the Man Who Crossed the Street." Did I have to spell it out for her? I scoffed inwardly.

"The who?" My mom sounded impatient. This was a normal tone for her. I actually had to re-tell the story from that fateful afternoon a year before. She looked at me blankly.

It was my turn to be impatient. "You know, the guy I was obsessed with, like, forever?" She rolled her eyes.

For weeks, I couldn’t make eye contact with Keri. How was I supposed to  tell her that I learned the identity of this man who I had clutched so snuggly against my heart for so long? This man that I had sketched pictures of, laughed about, wrote stories about, all this time it had been her step-father. Her step-father who she despised. I was so afraid that if she knew, she would be angry. Maybe she would find herself adverse to crossing streets, or looking at pictures drawn on chalkboards, or worst of all maybe she would run away to a home that wasn’t inhabited by the Step-Father Who Crossed the Street. Maybe she would start boozing it up with men who didn’t wear bandannas and didn’t resemble pirates when people tried to draw pictures of them.

I finally told her, years later. The air was heavy with tension that night, and I broached the subject with extreme caution and hesitation. She kept slicing through my nervous silences with aggravated sighs. "What?" she would prompt, churning her hands in a "speed-it-up" motion.

"Your step-dad Ron is the Man Who Crossed the Street"! I blurted out, wishing I had a shot of tequila to nurse my heart-rate back to normal.

She laughed. "That’s it?" she asked. "Why were you so afraid to tell me that? I thought you were pregnant or something."

An anti-climactic ending to such a cherished chapter of my life.

I wrote this story two years later when I going through a really awkward poetry phase. It would probably sound best if read above a jarring beat of a bongo.

THE MAN WHO CROSSED THE STREET

(A true story)

Once, many long years ago (two to be exact)

There was a woman in her car with her daughter at a red light.

It seemed to be an average, ordinary day.

Until the man crossed the street.

The woman quickly glanced at her reflection in the mirror

Making sure she looked alright.

Cuz [sic] the man was walking right behind her car.

It was love at first sight, the daughter could tell.

The woman blushed and denied it all.

But that short moment changed their lives forever.

The man who crossed the street will always be in their hearts.

 

Eventually, he quit being known to me as The Man Who Crossed the Street, becoming instead The Man Who Gets Me Served in Bars When I’m Underage.

According to flickr, this is my most popular photo, with a total of 396 views. I was stalking this strange, muscular man a few years ago at Burger King, with Henry’s kids as my accomplices.

I’m not sure what makes this photo so popular, but I wish I could find a way to learn this man’s identity because I bet he would be flattered to know.

This was Henry on the way home that day, all sparkly-eyed and Cheshire-smiles after a lovely afternoon of antagonizing strangers with a camera. I think Henry typically felt left out when lumped in with me and his kids, because that’s when his unabashed doofness was most apparent.

He locked the car windows on us that day. Now his kids are too busy getting tattoos and going to metal shows to join me in heckling their father, but at least they’ve found new ways to continue the Great Gray Hair Count.

I don’t know why Henry looks so annoyed in that picture because I can attest with absolute clarity that this day was nowhere near as humiliating for him as the day the cable guys were at our house and his kids and I were sneaking pictures of Henry trying to talk cable with them and generally act like he was some sort of George Clooney in a bandanna. Like maybe they wouldn’t see through his facade and invite him out for a brewsky and some sausage. We sat in the dining room and giggled every time the one cable guy would bend over and his crack would smile out at us. Henry would turn around and hiss for us to knock it off, but that would make us act even more assholey. His one son, Blake, stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and pretended to chug beer at one point, making Henry appear to be Father of the Millenium.

Hopefully when Chooch gets a little older, we can resurrect those golden days of watching gray hairs sprout from Henry’s scalp.

The first time I was there was the summer of 2000.

“There’s this Quaker cemetery out in Perryopolis. Supposed to be haunted or some shit. We should go.” It was one of those glimmering moments of spontaneity that, on a boring summer’s night, sounded a lot more interesting that the usual routine of getting drunk on my porch. I was a little wary that the person hatching this plan was my friend Justin, who had a bad track record of insisting he knew the exact coordinates of various haunted hot spots, and then like a bad repeating record, we’d inevitably wind up lost  with the gas tank on E and a few empty bags of Corn Nuts.

Our friend Keri wanted to accompany us, so I felt a little better because she was always the responsible one. If you were going to get lost, break down, get a condom lodged inside of you, Keri was the girl you’d want with you. She also didn’t scare easily, so I quietly planned to wedge myself between the two of them once (if) we arrived.

Perryopolis is around 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, but the trip didn’t take long in my Eagle Talon, considering my propensity for driving it like a dragster. As we approached the town of Perryopolis, I silently hoped that we would be unable to find the cemetery in the dark, of that it didn’t exist, or that the Earth opened up to engulf it every night after midnight. Maybe there would be a fence too dangerous to scale, Hounds of Hell snarling and tied to posts at the entrance, an after hours admission fee implemented by Satan.

The area was rural. We coasted past a few farms and even fewer houses. The uneven asphalt was littered with loose pebbles and sticks, which  clinked and snapped under the tires. The streetlights did little to alleviate my uneasiness. Unfortunately, Justin must have polished his navigational bearings, because after having me make a few turns, he told me to pull over.

“This is it,” he said, leaning in between the front seats and looking out my window. We kind of just sat there, real still, not speaking, until Keri finally went for the door handle. We all filed out and crossed the dark, quiet street. It was too dark to see the cemetery from where we stood, and after hesitating to see who would step up to lead us, we finally took the plunge in tandem and began climbing the slight hill before us.

Halfway up, we could make out a wrought iron fence, the kind you would expect to wreathe an old, small town cemetery. My eyes searched for the tombstones, the meat of the graveyard. That’s when I saw it, my first glimpse of the old stone house in the middle of the small plot of land. Suddenly, it wasn’t what lay beneath the ground that frightened me.

“I don’t like the looks of that place,” I whispered hoarsely to Keri and Justin.

“What the fuck is it, a church?” Justin asked no one in particular, squinting his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

“I’m not climbing no fucking fence,” Keri spat, arms crossed. She was always the kill joy of the group. Me, I’d go along with just about anything, no matter how terrified I was, mainly because my adrenaline would overtake my common sense every single time. But Keri, she’d get so far and then stop. Or conveniently conjure up a head ache. That girl has headaches more often than Seattle has rain.

Just then, the dull roar of an engine resounded from further down the road. We all turned to look. Headlights eventually appeared over the crest in the curving road, and the car began to decelerate. We continued to watch as it approached the base of the hill and slowed to a complete stop several yards away from my car, parked along the shoulder.

“Is it a cop?” Keri whispered.

The driver flashed the head lights. We were stapled to the soft ground under our feet. The driver blew the horn. We jumped. The driver laid on the horn, sending an atmosphere-rippling siren through the once-quiet night. All three of us screamed and turned to run back to my car. We shoved each other ruthlessly, none of us daring to be in the back.

My car was parked directly across the base of the hill. The rogue car still idled in the same position a few yards away on the opposite side of the road, continuing to blare the chilling horn. We made it to my car, slamming into the side of it. I fumbled for my keys. I dropped them on the road as I tried frantically to sort through the menagerie of plush over-sized key chains. Keri and Justin were swearing and screaming at me. I was crying.

The bully car continued to intimidate us with the horn-blaring while I unlocked my door and reached across the inside to unlock the passenger door. Keri and Justin both tried to get in my uterus-sized two-door Talon at once, prolonging their success. Once they were in, I gunned it, not even bothering to steal a look at the driver of the opposing car as we squealed past it.

We drove in silence until the poorly-lit country roads spilled us out onto the highway where we took refuge among the traffic.

Only then did anyone dare speak.

“I don’t know what you guys were so scared for. It was probably just some teenager having some fun, trying to scare us,” Justin said, leaning back with his fingers laced behind his head.

*****

The weather was unseasonably spring-like on Sunday, so Henry, Chooch and I piled into the car and drove south to take some pictures and enjoy the rare opportunity to drive with the windows down. Our plan was to go out to Uniontown, a small town at the base of the mountains, and get some nice country photographs.

We took Rt. 51, which leads straight from Pittsburgh to Uniontown. It also passes through Perryopolis on the way.

“Hey, there’s this old Quaker Cemetery out here. We should try to find it,” I casually suggested, recognizing that the right hand turn into farm country was coming up. What better way to spend a beautiful Sunday with the kid and manservant? Field trip  the haunted cemetery! C’mon boy, let’s get our desecratin’ on, I should have hollered to Chooch.

Henry found it without mishap (evidently the road it’s on is called Quaker Cemetery Road, so Henry figured it was a safe bet we were on the right road). When I reached the crest of the small hill, I spotted the stone house with it’s corrugated tin roof, ominously gaping front door and windows that stared out like empty eye sockets.

I wasn’t scared this time, finding bravery in the sunlight, and I marched right through the archway and started taking pictures. Probably, if I was someone other than myself, the first thing I’d do, I’d go straight inside that stone shack and start poking around. But I was cautious. I let Henry go inside first while I admired the various hues of beer bottle shards as they sparkled in the sun. The shards wrapped around the front of the house, like a moat in front of an alcoholic’s castle. I was sad that no one ever invites me to party in creepy cemetery houses.

Henry went inside first, getting some digital shots of the interior. I asked him if he felt scared when he was in there and he gave me that “don’t be an asshole” sneer. Still, I lingered near the door while Henry and Chooch retreated somewhere in the back, behind the house. I thought I heard shuffling coming from inside the house, but I shook the idea out of my mind and went in.

The inside was sheltered by a roof made up of thin wooden slats. It looked unstable, like I could be buried under it at any given moment. The walls were mostly blue and covered in graffiti. I tried to read it all, as much as I could before my bravery reserve was drained, but there was nothing very interesting. No Hail Satans or Human Sacrifice FTW!s to be found; just an abundance of generic “_____ was here”s and ambiguous initials.

Each end of the room had a fireplace. Henry said later that he had wanted to get all up in it and see what was going on in the chimney’s guts, but he never said why he didn’t follow through. Because he was scared, that’s why. I can only imagine how much clenching he had to do to keep from shitting his pants when he was in there alone.

Still afraid of the being impaled by a collapsing slat of wood, I started to walk out. Henry completely doesn’t believe me, and probably no one else will either, but as I started to step through the doorway, I heard a chorus of whispering coming from \the left corner of the room. I SWEAR TO GOD. I swore to God when I was telling Henry about it too and he was like, “You can’t swear to something you don’t believe in” so I changed my pledge of honesty to Satan instead and Henry started in on that bullshit about how you can’t believe in one and not the other and I was like, “Shut up, stop acting like you’re religious” and he said if there was no God and just Satan, then the world would be way worse than it is now and I said, “No, Satan’s just lazy is all” and that’s about as deep as the two of us get into theological debates. Our next one is scheduled for 2030. As if Henry will still be living then.

After the whole whispering episode, I was pretty much in a huge hurry to leave. If you buy into legends and ghost stories, it’s said that the meeting house was where witches were taken to be killed. I really hope the whispering I heard belonged to Glinda.

Later that day, I was reading a website about the cemetery and it says, “There are also stories of certain graves being cursed, meaning that if you stand at them, or read the writing on the head stone, you could have bad luck or die.”

Awesome. Nice knowing you, Chooch.

[1]: Pickle Park: – an interstate rest area frequented by prostitutes, for those not up with the trucker lexicon.

• Home Cookin’, grilled muffins — open faced
• Shit shots at Cue & Cushion
• Overalls too long, covering the toes of pearlescent Vans
• Evan’s art show and stolen door knobs
• Blond hair with bangs
• The Great Gatsby
• Faux-documentaries and shredded jeans
• Getting stoned, dying Easter eggs
• Wasted bottle of white Zinfindel
• Purple fuzzy sweater

When you’re a little kid, the smallest happenings can seem like these life-stopping newsworthy events and you sit there with your mouth agape and your eyes so wide and grip the edge of your seat, waiting with bated breath to see what will happen.

Everything is a big deal when you’re a kid.

I was probably around four or five when my Pappap came home from work with the mail. It was a summer afternoon, so I was on the back patio, probably with either my grandma or my aunt Sharon. My Pappap rifled through the mail and noticed that his youngest daughter Susie had a letter.

He called up to her on the sunroof, and she shouted for him to try and toss it up. I remember sitting on a lawn chair, their lawn chairs had these taut vinyl slats in varying shades of green and white but sometimes the skin on my thighs would graze the scalding metal of the frame in between the slats and I would get tiny welts. I’m sitting on this lawn chair, playing chicken with the fiery metal, and thinking, just knowing, that this wasn’t going to pan out the way Susie would have liked.

I watched as my Pappap tried to toss the letter against the wind, hoping to get enough momentum that it would skim the top of the ledge, but instead it fell back and skidded straight into the gutter.

My Pappap had to throw himself into full MacGyver throttle  in order to rescue her precious letter, subscription notice, credit card bill. Who knows what it was. But even after he mounted a patio table and used the aid of scissors to guide the envelope from the dastardly clutches of the gutter, Susie still had to exert a modicum of energy to lean down and grab it.

And I’m watching this, from the green and white vinyl slats of the lawn chair, thinking that I’m a part of something big, something huge, a memory that we’ll all share together and laugh about at holidays. And everyone else went about their day, because things like this, they’re not enough to fill an adult with giddiness. They’re glitches in regularly scheduled programs, they’re "oopsies" moments that evoke a few chuckles but then get lost in the back of the mind while bills are being paid and the news is being watched, until the memory is eventually eradicated altogether. But not kids. Kids retain these things and latch on to them and call upon these tiny moments when they need something to smile about. Kids revel in it and wish everyone had seen it and kids inflate it into something so much bigger, larger than life. It becomes real life Saturday morning cartoons.

I don’t remember what the damn letter ended up being, or who it was that shared enough of my sentiments to treat this as the Kodak moment it truly was, and I don’t think we ever reminisced and hyucked about it over turkey legs and sweet potato pie, but I know that every time I see this picture, I laugh and remember being so small and watching something so big.