“Eric!” my dad shouted from downstairs. “Phone!”
It was about seven or eight at night, in June. A year before things got really bad.
My room was in the attic of our house on Thirty-fourth Street in Canton, Ohio.
The closest phone was in the den one floor below.
I’d spent the evening before raiding my pill stash and washing it down with a warm twelve-pack of Wiedemann, drooling for a while, and then throwing the bottles over the neighbor’s roof. I hadn’t left my room at all that day, mostly because I couldn’t work up the courage. Leaving meant walking by the door to the spare room. My family rarely went in there, except to get Christmas decorations, wrapping paper, or whatever else was stored in its closets and crawlspaces. The door was always closed. It was always dark in there, and terribly hot in summer. Of course, my room was the same way, just on the opposite side of the hall. But it wasn’t the heat or the dinginess I minded.
The spare room was where She was.
Usually, when I could tell She was there, I’d summon the strength to run by the door before She could realize I was just an arm’s length away. This morning I wondered if She could simply reach out and grab me as I ran by. I’d never thought of that before. Therefore, I just sat there, too scared to find out the answer to my new question.
Earlier that day, I’d thought I heard Her moving around on the other side of the door. I had slowly walked out of my room into the hallway, barely breathing so that I could hear any other telltale noise. I told myself that I was going to walk right up to the door, call Her out, swing the door open suddenly, and have this over with. But of course, I never did. Instead, I used the phone call as an excuse to chicken-shit out and run past the door and down the stairs. Nothing reached out and grabbed me. Despite the fact that my fear had kept me captive for more than twelve hours, pissing in empty soda bottles to avoid having to go downstairs to a bathroom, as I rounded the landing to head downstairs, I’d already forgotten all about it.
I was surprised that my father was even willing to speak to me to let me know I had a phone call. My parents and I had just had a big fight over my “unacceptable behavior” at a cookout they’d hosted. At some point during the gathering, someone had pulled out a camera to take a few photos. I leapt up and asked them to stop taking my picture.
I’d noticed my parents immediately start to squirm. I’d previously announced to my family that I did not want any photographs taken of me. I had read somewhere that American Indians did not like having their photographs taken because they felt the process stole part of their soul. At the time, I needed every bit of my soul I could hold on to. So every time a camera appeared, I disappeared or asked that whoever was holding it not take my picture.
Not that I was really much you’d want to photograph.
I’d fallen in love with thrift stores before I was old enough to drive myself to them. I bought as many old suits, hats, and coats as I could get with the lawn-mowing money I had left over after buying records. Even though I had no idea how to sew things together, I routinely tried to alter my clothing by cutting pieces off collars, sleeves, pockets. Eventually I graduated to saving up money for the annual rummage sale in the prop and costume department of the local community theater, which allowed me to expand into pirate gear and military uniforms. I loved vintage clothes but hated ironing, so most of what I bought eventually ended up looking like it had spent the previous three decades stuffed in a shoe box.
For most of my teens, I wore my hair long to hide from my parents a variety of piercings. (In the days before it was routine for men to have any earrings, I had no idea there were such things as starter or piercing earrings, so I gave myself multiple piercings by pushing regular earring posts through my earlobes.) I’d taken to cutting out sections of my hair in order to make it spike up straighter, so all my piercings were eventually discovered. Then I discovered hair dye. Then I discovered how to make your own hair dye with Kool-Aid mix and bleach.
Whenever “Punk Day” or the impossibly politically incorrect “Hobo Day” would pop up during Homecoming Week, someone would invariably compliment my costume even though I was just wearing my normal clothes.
Even my parents would have to admit that by graduation I’d started to tone down my look considerably. Rather than wanting to be instantly recognizable as an individual, by then I simply wanted to disappear.
“Hello,” I said into the phone as I plopped down on the den couch, slightly out of breath from my run down from the attic.
It was my friend Cassandra. She was a “friend” the way that former “girlfriends” become “friends,” especially when the “girlfriend” is the one who would rather just be your “friend.” Honestly, Cassandra was never really my girlfriend, just someone I openly and repeatedly tried to trick into being my girlfriend. A few dates. A few hand-holding incidents at football games. I’m not sure there was ever even a kiss involved in the torrid affair I had tried to create.
As in most of my friendships lately, there was strain. It had been a while since I’d spoken to Cassandra.
There was a time when my friends found my antics charming, maybe even exciting. They thought I was a fun person to be around because I seemed to have so few boundaries and was always “acting wacky.” To me there was nothing particularly wild about suddenly speaking in gibberish or wearing a Halloween costume to the grocery store in the middle of summer. If it was eccentric, it was the most tepid, safe form of eccentricity imaginable.
But at a certain point, as I felt less and less connected to the world around me, those mild antics stopped feeling like enough to express myself. I just kept pushing. I used my behavior as a smokescreen, worried that if I wasn’t being wacky, people might see me as I felt I really was. The more cut off I felt, the more desperate and outrageous I felt I had to be. My friends grew less and less enthused about spending time with me when I started throwing food or stuffing tree leaves into my mouth or flipping over drinks on a restaurant table or forcing myself to vomit in public or lighting bags of garbage on fire. My antics weren’t so funny anymore.
I was just about to make something up in order to get off the phone when Cassandra blurted out, “There’s someone here who wants to say hello.”
Fumbling phone noise.
“Hey,” announced a girl’s voice.
“It’s me.”
Still clueless.
“I just got back last week, and we were wondering what you were doing.”
“Oh … I’m just … umm,” I answered.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“Sure I do,” I lied.
“It’s Laura,” she said.
“Laura,” I replied, as if saying the word out loud would pluck the connection out of the haze for me.
“Laura Patterson,” she said, getting a little testy. “Did you even know I was gone?”
“Sure I did,” I said, telling the truth this time. I knew she had been on some exchange program to some foreign country and had been gone the whole school year.
I had met Laura in junior high, where she was a year behind me. At the time, she was “going with” my friend Timmy. Outside of note passing and the occasional tight-lipped kiss after school events, “going together” in seventh grade was pretty meaningless. You couldn’t drive, had nowhere to go, and either weren’t allowed or couldn’t afford to do anything. It was kind of like being an old married couple, except you could control your bowels and stay awake past 8 P.M.
Even with these limited expectations, Timmy wasn’t really up to the task. He even had me break up with Laura on his behalf. It had been a crisp spring morning in front of Walter C. Crenshaw Junior High School.
“Hey, Patterson,” I yelled as I walked past her before school one morning. “I just talked to your boyfriend Timmy yesterday.”
“Oh yeah?” she replied.
“Yeah … See, that’s the thing … He said he doesn’t want to go with you anymore.”
Laura looked like a tomboyish pixie: short hair, small features, and big dark eyes. At that moment, she looked like a tomboyish pixie who was about to cry.
“It’s no big deal,” I consoled her. “He really didn’t like you that much anyhow.”
It seemed like a comforting thing to say at the time.
She ran away and didn’t speak to me for a year or so.
We ended up at the same high school and exchanged occasional hallway greetings, which sometimes had a tendency to linger for a bit. We’d catch each other’s glance at pep rallies or assemblies. However, I didn’t make much of an effort to get to know her until she started dating this guy named James, who I really hated.
Some friends and I had pulled off an amazing prank against our assistant principal, which I won’t discuss here because of Ohio’s liberal statute of limitations. James and his friends spread rumors that they had been the real perps. I figured the best way to get him back was to flirt openly with his new girlfriend.
Laura and I had study hall at the same time. This was the perfect opportunity to make my move. By this time Laura had grown into the perfect little fresh-faced A student. She wore cute sweaters, Docksiders, and peg-legged jeans.
After we started talking at study hall, I was surprised at how witty she was. Previously, she’d come across as quiet, almost painfully shy. But the more time I spent around her, the more brightness emerged. She was funnier than me (not a high mark, but I was still impressed), she was way smarter (again, not a tough standard), she knew more about music and books than I did (which really got to me), and she had a comeback for every smart remark I volleyed in her direction. Eventually we were sitting together every day and talking about everything: politics, religion, the twisted imbecile logic of people, whatever. James was pissed, but that stopped being the point, and he’d soon be out of the picture anyhow.
I never seriously thought of her as anyone I would date or see outside of school; she was just someone fun to pass time with. The summer after her sophomore year she left to spend her junior year abroad, and since I knew I’d graduate before she got back, I figured that was the end of it. There are times when injecting even the smallest amount of separation into a friendship makes reconnecting uncomfortable.
I fumbled with the phone to buy a second or two to think of something to say.
“So how was …”
“Finland?” she replied.
“Yeah, how was Finland?”
“Finland was fine,” she said. “I spent a lot of time traveling. I visited eleven countries.”
“Eleven, huh?” I said, trying not to sound impressed. Outside of one summer in Jamaica and a trip to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, I’d never been outside the United States. I hadn’t even visited my fifth state yet.
“In Europe they have tons of music festivals, so I saw a lot of bands. Incredible bands.”
While I was drinking, masturbating, and being haunted by the Little Girl, Laura was widening her lead on cool music. I needed to instantly juice my cred.
“Yeah, well, I’m in a band now.”
This, technically, was not a lie. Jimmy and I had put an ad in the local record store looking for bandmates. Despite a list of “influences” that clearly set out that we were destined for punk-rock greatness, the only calls we’d gotten were from heavy-metal wannabes. What we wanted were punk-rock wannabes, but we were patient.
“Oh really? What’s it called?”
“Ritzo Forte.”
“Really?”
“Forte means loud,” I explained. Having been to eleven European countries, I assumed she would know that. “Ritzo just sounds good with forte.”
“So, when you aren’t rocking out, what do you do with yourself?”
“Now that school is over?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“I have a shit job as a janitor at T.J. Maxx.”
“Is it really a shit job? Do you have to clean up shit?”
I could hear some giggling in the background from Cassandra and no doubt some other girls who had egged Laura into talking to me in the first place.
“Actually, I do. The other day I got a call from the women’s fitting room. A woman had gone into the back stall and, well, you know.”
“And you had to clean it up?”
“Well, first I went into the actual bathroom, which was twenty yards away, if she had even asked, and threw up. Then I went back and cleaned it up.”
“Do they pay you extra for that?”
“What? For cleaning up human waste in a fitting room or because I puked?”
“No, the cleaning.”
“No, that’s included in the $3.35 an hour they pay me.”
After a few more minutes of back and forth, we decided to get together the next afternoon. I was given some very clear instructions about picking her up. I was to drive to her parents’ house and wait. I was not to get out of the car, approach the house, or knock on the door—just show up when I was supposed to and sit there.
I got there a little early. Laura’s house was small—really small—maybe three or four rooms. Even if the attic had been finished, I couldn’t quite get my head around how Laura, her two parents, and her two brothers could fit into that space. Her house sat in a neighborhood that looked like it had been built all at once during the 1950s. The homes had rarely been updated since. There wasn’t a lot of landscaping or trees. In our study-hall conversations before she went to Finland, it was obvious that Laura cared about her family, but she equally went out of her way to avoid talking about them. She only shared what she wanted to share, which was little. Her mom was a social worker and her dad did some kind of construction work that often had him away from home for long stretches. I also knew that she had a large extended family that had lived in the area for generations. But even that took some prodding.
I also knew Laura had gone to a special grade school for gifted students. The gifted kids came from two extremes of the spectrum: affluent families, who expected their kids to excel, and poor families, where the kids stuck out so much that they ended up in the gifted program. To kids like Laura, the program was a way out, not an expectation.
I put the seat back and shoved a tape into the deck: The Smiths, Meat Is Murder. It seemed like a good choice to demonstrate my coolness. I found three warm beers in the backseat and started on one. I’d begun to doze off when I heard the door open quickly and slam shut. I looked over and was shocked out of my light buzz by this smiling thing in my passenger seat.
Her hair was jet black, lying dead flat in some areas, wildly askew in others. It was cut to different lengths, looking like she had trimmed it herself without a mirror (which, I’d soon learn, was the truth). It hung over her face, completely covering one of her eyes, which were underscored with thick black eyeliner. She wore a ratty white T-shirt that had things written on it in Magic Marker that I couldn’t read, despite a preponderance of exclamation marks next to the words. Her black jeans looked like they’d been put through a tree mulcher, then taped and pinned back together. But she still wore the Docksiders I remembered her for.
She looked as if someone had brined her in a vat of punk rock, then forgotten to rinse her off afterward. It was a metamorphosis. I didn’t want her to know how mesmerized I was.
“Looks like you had an interesting year” was the only thing I could think to say.
“What makes you think so?”
“Come on,” I challenged. “Who are you? I mean, I almost thought you were a homeless person about to steal my car.”
“I’m just me. Maybe you never noticed before.”
“Fine. Where are we going?” I asked.
“Wherever.”
“That’s very helpful.”
“Why don’t we go someplace you want to go?” she offered.
We rolled down the windows and started off. We just drove.
Once we pulled away from the curb, I can’t remember a single word we said to each other for the rest of the day. I don’t even remember enough to reconstruct what might have been said. Even if I could remember, how do you describe a moment like that? A moment that simply stuns you. A moment when everything seems to suddenly freeze and explode. Perhaps you just discovered the best friend you’ll ever have, or perhaps you just fell in love, or perhaps everything you thought you knew suddenly changed.
We left her house as minor-league acquaintances and returned several hours later as best friends. Even though I remember a lot of other times with her, that day has been put somewhere where I’m not allowed to access it. It’s like my memory wanted me to simply keep a few images of that day and that’s all.
I remember that it was sunny and warm and the sky was blue.
I remember her hair flapping in the wind.
I remember noticing, for the first time, that she had very small teeth.
I remember that the roar through all the windows meant we had to yell our entire conversation.
I remember that I kept making jokes and she laughed a lot.
I remember that she’d always try to push her hair behind her ears whenever she was about to make a point.
I remember fumbling a lot with the tape player.
I remember that she punched my arm at least three times for making smartass comments.
I remember that I didn’t think once about getting high or about the Little Girl in a Blue Dress.
I remember that when I dropped her off at home, we exchanged tapes. She gave me a dub of Killing Joke’s Fire Dances, and I gave her my copy of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.
I remember knowing, even then, that I’d remember that day for the rest of my life.