At the young tender age of 22, I had carved quite a life for myself. I was committed to not follow in my mothers footsteps and I refused to go into debt. I skipped that whole college thing, and went straight to makin the big bucks. Unfortunately, the only way to make the big bucks with a high school diploma, and no other specialized skills is to be either a drug dealer or a stripper. And as you know, I choose the latter. I had a lot of free time on my hands. I had no schedule to keep, no alarm to set and I certainly did not have a slue of colleagues to to advise me, when my placement on the beam of reality, was drifting off balance.
I began engaging in what I would now consider to be ridiculous, codependent and pathetic behaviors, such as doing Garps laundry, trying to play nurse when he was sick, and filling my every waking moment with thoughts and dreams of him. And that was just within the first 24 hours of our first date.
Over the course of the next few days, we spent every night together, and he began every morning with beer and pills. The pills he took were some sort of anti-anxiety, anti depressant, but at that point they were more probably more like an anti-liver. My memories of that time, are like tiny photographic glimpses of what happened. They encapsulate the moments that defined our rock and roll lifestyles. Each picture is like a page in one of those flip books, where if you thumb through too fast, you’ll miss the whole thing. We thought we were so cool, so tough. We were rebels. Only immature youth can pull off that kinda shenanigans, and believe it to be desirable and glamourous. We played music together. He would play his guitar, and I would sing the words to his songs. We would sit on the couch in his apartment for hours. I reach that scared, meditative, musical zone, that made me feel like I was untouchable. It made me feel like everything in my world was perfect. There was a lot of drinking. Upon meeting him my drinking increased because if he drank, I drank. Which is not to say I didn't do my share of daily wine drinking before meeting him. Drinking beer and having sex in the shower was as customary as using soap. The money I spent on condoms during that time went down the drain as fast as the soapy water. His house never had toilet paper.
We would wake up, he would crack a beer, put on the Deftones and we would hop in the shower and the party had just begun.
There was something powerful and cathartic about that kind of entanglement. I surrendered my reality to the segregated nature of such raw sex, yet, I was quite comfortable with whom I was relinquishing my reality to. I didn't mind being a sex object. At that time, it was practically the only thing I could see about myself, that was worth anything anyway. I didn't have any awareness of how the relationship was not sustainable. I felt like he wanted a fun, crazy, low maintenance partner who wouldn't judge or criticize him. So thats what I was. It worked for both of us. I felt like I was special, and he, didn't have to control his drinking. Sometimes it was hard to keep up with the pace. His house mate had started a change basket specifically for when Garp ran out of beer money. They lived right across the street from a liquor store. Coincidently, when he moved out of that house, that store went out of business.
From the corner of Bay and mission we walked all the way to the Ye old Watering Hole, at Swift Street to meet my friend for a drink (obviously), and drank many of this foo foo drink called hot cinnamon toast. It was her favorite drink, 151 with cinnamon and it was set on fire. He and I couldn't seem to get enough of each other. Any location was fair game for on-the-spot physical displays of passion, including that bars bathroom. On the way home,we made our way down Mission, which at that time was perpetually under construction, kicking and thrashing orange cones as we stubbled home. It seemed like when we were together, we released some sort of pressure valve, that let all that angst, and love, and wild human energy just pour out of us. That tiny alcove under Larrys Photography sign, yeah we did it there too. We got to his drive way and laid down right on the concrete. He got his guitar and played music until we retired to his bed.
What happened next was something I never expected. Devastating, confusing and absolutely heart breaking. A few days later, I went over to his house and right as I walked in the door, he clear out of the blue, said that he didn't want to see me anymore. He said that for past week, he was just on a complete bender and he barely remembered it anyway. I didn’t know what to say. I was in shock. He said he needed to put the plug in the jug for a while and pull himself back together. What could I do? What could I say? I felt as if I just blindly sat down and didn't realize that instead of sitting on the chair I was expecting, I actually just sat down right off the edge of a 100 story building. I had never been so confused in my life. I was dumbfounded. How could I have been so wrong? How could I have been so taken by a compete farce? I was so deeply hurt, and I made a pact with myself that I would not contact him. The truth was, that regardless of what he remembered, he inspired me. He brought out a piece of me that I had never experienced before. I bought a the piano at Goodwill and began writing some of my own songs, and they were all about him.
Two weeks later he called me asking if I wanted to come over. And before I could even catch my breath, I was out the door.
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