valentine

Aunt Sue was the first to marry someone whose parents had a backyard in-ground swimming pool. When Pasadena was beginning to boom, millionaires lived close to the refineries, near the oil-building mecca. We overlooked the stink from the fresh cash. They bought a nice house, guns, hunting dogs, and went out dancing occasionally. Until the cancer. She moved after his death to a condo across the street from my high school and kept a stash of marijuana in the kitchen in a cookie jar in the upper cabinet. She taught me how to country line dance, dragging me to the dance floor of a country dive bar and leaving me to be rustled off by big buff drunk country men. I learned to two-step trying to get away. Then Gilley's closed down, then the metal bar closed down and people began to move away. I’d park my car at her condo, take breaks in between classes to walk across the street and smoke her pot. Replace later with a low-grade crappy kind. We had our first winter snow that year, took pictures and stole nativity scene babies. I learned that kittens crawl into car engines to warm up, by hearing one have its neck cut by a fan when the car wouldn’t start. Carmen, my age, tall, her dad in Vietnam and losing both his legs, and mom a cute hippie, lived next door. Not sure how we met. The library was down the street and an old tree in the parking lot of the condo. It was the post metal days and nineties. I should have stopped dating older men after Billy and losing the pizza job. I’d be a waitress for years to come, wearing thrift store clothes and someone’s dead mother’s jewelry. It was a year of midget Elvira, art class, and setting bathrooms on fire. We called in bomb threats to cancel school and smoked cigarettes back behind shop class; the punk rock girl and metal boys. A time of innocence, of hip hop breakdancing, church friends listening to Christian rock and having birthday parties full of boys, of metal magazines and new wave. Exchange students brought different culture here and there – it was the city, when we got bored, we’d just take the bus to another side of town.

The cul-de-sac was lit up with Christmas lights. For every string of color, I’d buy more black - black pants, a string of lights along the driveway, black shirt, a string of lights along the roof top, black trench-coat, a brightly lit reindeer standing in the front lawn. Candy land Christmas. I make myself throw up the beef for dinner - after I named him Bob and he came home dressed in white packaging and masking tape with red writing. Junior prom sucked because all the guys in school thought we were freaks, wearing stupid clothes and carrying around rats. So we took our best friends, and were labeled lesbian. God, we were hot together. And my uncle’s secretary brought me a hundred dollars party money for the after prom. That Christmas hell, the frat boys yelling obscenities and tossing things over the fence, me saying – I’ll cut you and eat your dog.

He should never have touched me, almost twice my age. She should have been a friend.

After Aaron shot himself in the head at a suburban party, little Aaron I used to drive to school in my fancy Olds-mo-beel. Carmen invited me to a ghetto party of wanna be gangstas, and her Hispanic boyfriend, and I was terrified of them so told her to hook me up with her cousin just to get out. Barry had a car and a job and I had no idea he was thirty to my eighteen. Andy transferred to art school after Melissa left for Nevada, because her mother was a topless dancer, and I made him pass out behind the flower shop. The day we thought we killed him and spent about 30 minutes paralyzed trying to figure out what to do with the body. Where does one dump the body of a teen - Flower shop dumpster, bayou, someone’s front ditch?

The creepy locusts chime in the trees, vines growing over and through chain link fences, water puddles sitting for hours in the sun; we watch creatures crawl to them, to squirm in the dirty pool.

As the snow began to melt, the fires dwindled and school resumed. It always felt as if someone was watching me, as if a neighbor or old man was just around the corner. We never knew who drove through the cul-de-sac, they came from miles around to see the lights. Blinking, moving heads of reindeer, waving Santa’s, and Christmas carols echoing through the dark night.

The garage doors were down; we were tucked away inside in our pajamas watching through the blinds. It was an Mtv New Year with gifts of stuffed animals that turned inside out. It’s a Beaver, and now it’s a yellow ball with writing on it, and you can stuff a t-shirt or pajamas into the Beavers butt.

I’m supposed to start college; creative writing classes, but keep trying to replace my prom date. Have a real high school. Shake that eerie feeling of someone watching.

Barry took us to eat Chinese food. Next door to the gymnastic center of tap and jazz and dance mats, next to the pizza place. The days of tight blue leotards and breasts that never grew in, just skinny limbs and a big fuzzy fro of eighties hair, always halfway between girl and boy. A roomful of halfway teens waiting to bloom, hoping to become something more – but mostly just awkward, too tall or too short or too fat for the parallel bars and high beam. Mats that smelt a cross between sweat, stinky feet, plastic, and cleaner – we did tumbles and flip-flops. It was the year of Frogger and Ms. Pac-Man - convenient stores and city suburbs in sprawl. They were building corridors and beltways around the city.

It was dark in the restaurant, he took us both, Carmen and I, and I took all the fortune cookies. Later that week was Valentines Day, I showed up early and she made snacks while waiting for a phone call, and I waiting for her cousin. So, we both sat in her room all night.

No one came.

Later around 10, she finally broke it to me – that her cousin had a girlfriend, someone nearer his age.

Fires are therapeutic – they’re great for burning old journals, secret letters to guys who fail to recognize your existence, garbage at grandpaps old house, trash-cans in school bathrooms, for writing your best friends name on the bathroom wall to impress her.

And for when you decide your friend sucks balls and you should remove your clothing, spray yourself with hairspray, and set yourself on fire in her room just to piss her off.

So it went.

A brief smelly hairspray fire, some screaming, a tad bit of singed hair, and a burnt nipple - for you Carmen, and your cousin and stoner mom and condominium and the swimming pool always full of leaves and debris and your goddamn O.C.Dism. fuck you.