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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years ago

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Life Story - Part 27

Ava, Sarah and I used to go to the end of Kendrick and spend our early summers swimming in a swimming hole in the creek. We would get there early, and then leave in the early evening. It was one of the most pleasant and simple times of my entire life. My belly hurt from laughing just about every day I came home. Katie wouldn't step foot in that water so she didn't go with us on these trips, and now that I am an adult, I can certainly appreciate her reasons. Upstream not too far there was a cattle ranch, and the cows just freely did their thing in that squalid little area – all to be washed down into the swimming hole where us young maiden swam and splashed. When my older sister Maria had been a teenager, she had once let herself sink a little. Her foot went straight into the bloated gut of a dead animal that had sunk to the bottom. Just thinking of this, I can feel the depth of slime on my own foot somehow. In my naive, thirteen going on fourteen year old mind – things that had no human value to me at the moment could just as easily not exist. Logic meant very little to me. I found this very valid reason to not swim in the swimming hole at the end of town painfully intrusive to my personal enjoyment. I was really having quite a good summer that year, and I have always absolutely loved swimming so why would I want to ruin it on account of microscopic bacteria that I couldn't even see.

After swimming, we would go up to Sarah's house, get changed, and go downtown. We would go down there just to sit, and people watch. I tried to draw a few times, but whenever I try to draw outside on bright summer days, the paper will always hurt my eyes. We would find strange games to play. One game that Ava and I made up that I particularly remember was 'Guess their name'. Incredibly obnoxious, and fun if you are into that sort of thing. Basically, as you and your friend sit in front of the store or somewhere public where people are coming and going, when someone was getting into their car, you just started shouting out names to see which one they responded to you on. Eventually the person would look over like you were crazy. But whoever had shouted the name that they looked over at us puzzled to, that was the name that person had. If you guessed it, that was your point. If your friend guessed it, they got the point. We got really competitive, and when you do this, you will end up saying the same obscure name over and over, like Olaf or Margot. I remember my brain was stuck on the name Boris, which is not a common name. So it ended up a lot of men's names were Boris.

After that, we would all head up to Sarah's house where we would sit around the table, draw and listen to music. It was very entertaining for me, and I was never ever lonely back in those days. Carol had troubles with Ava being at the house. Ava was extremely loud, and every time she walked into Sarah's house she would knock the lamp over. Also, Ava had this undying need to drink milk. She would drink an entire gallon of milk in a single day. Both Sarah and I were asked by our parents to stop drinking so much milk, not realizing that it was almost entirely upon Ava. I just would quietly take the blame, knowing that Ava would have a meltdown of insecurity and accusations if I even suggested she not drink all the milk.

Katie was very distant with us. She was going through something very strange, and she was never really all that honest with me about what that was. I had to look for her often. Her mother worked as the receptionist at the small dental clinic. Sometimes she would be in there. She seemed depressed but like she was hiding it and saying things she didn't mean and smiling even though her eyes were unhappy. As the person I am today, I would have done more to coax her to letting me know what was wrong, but back then, I was really just wondering why she was intentionally missing out on all the fun. I didn't realize that Ava had been spoonfeeding her things that she made up that we had said. I didn't really understand why someone would do that. I think to a degree also Katie was feeling jealous. Samantha had her first boyfriend. She was the first one of us to have a boyfriend, and Katie felt this was unfair since she was older. I don't remember the chaps name that Sam was with at the time, and it doesn't really matter since there were many more to come. Samantha was dating another guy a week later. Katie was jealous, and I remember she started calling Samantha a slut. Which made me mad, because though I wasn't sex positive in those days, I wasn't that sex negative either and I didn't think it was nice.

Katie started wearing make up and when she talked she seemed to not be talking to the person who was talking to. She had this extremely fake laugh that upset me and made me feel a strange dissonance. I wanted to know what was wrong. She seemed like she was about to crack in two. I think she was feeling ugly and maybe like she didn't belong – and maybe she didn't in some ways that seem more obvious to me in retrospect. Perhaps she was comparing herself to others. I didn't really know because I was so obsessed with what I was up to. Sarah was also kind of in a funk, though a soft peaceful one that didn't really surface most of the time. It felt strange to me, because in a lot of ways it felt like Ava and I were incredibly enthusiastic about being alive, and Sarah and Katie, the people who I had been kind of trained to look up to, well they both seemed to be kind of distant and lost. Sarah wasn't full blown depressed. She just wasn't as excited as Ava and I was and I was having this blast of a time. Life felt hysterical, like a whimsical upbeat costume party with over 100 people. Sarah had given up on dating Rex. Rex had taken a popular girl named Amy to the prom, and it just hit a switch in Sarah's mind I guess. Amy went on to be one of the top ten contestants to be Miss Idaho in the Miss America pageants one year, and sometimes in the Moscow mall for years later I would see her stock photo picture. Sarah probably felt outclassed.

Sarah and I were sitting in her mom's computer room one day, and Sarah showed me that she had been talking to boys in Orofino, just like Samantha. She said she really just wanted a boyfriend. I was probably a little rude about it. After asking Sarah a bunch of questions, I think I told her that it was stupid and forced. Though I was right in a way. Sarah was just trying to fill a void and she thought she would naturally like anyone she connected with – in hopes perhaps to be like Samantha. It was wrong of me to put such a negative spin on things however. It is so easy for me to downgrade other people. I am in the gray area between sexual and asexual, and from my personal perspective, it has never dawned on me to go out looking for a boyfriend, the way you might go out looking for a car or a breakfast. It comes to you or it doesn't, and when it doesn't I don't think about it. Which isn't the way it is for other people. Other people have this void and an instinct to be in a relationship. The same goes for me and having babies. I have maybe felt the urge to procreate once, kinda. It was not very strong and seemed like a terrible idea so I ignored it and it went away. But other girls I meet, and I think guys have their own urge, will just want kids. I've learned not to judge people. I am the weird one.

The conversation she had with this 14-16 year old young male from Orofino Idaho was quite dull. He wouldn't stop sending her pictures of his chest in between dull conversation at the most inappropriate times.. They never talked about anything meaningful. Sarah went with Sam one weekend to meet this guy – it was the big day, I think his name was Phil or something, and as soon as Sarah saw him she was very sorry she had ever spoken to him. He was just terrible in every way, so I am told. She had to run away from him coldly but he just kept following her around trying to impress her the entire evening, asking for her phone number and such. But not in a romantic way. More like in an 'I want to get laid please, please, please look at my muscly chest I'm a man not a boy!' kind of way. When she came back to talk to me about it, I sort of smirked that I had told her so.

Meanwhile, Orlando Bloom got the lead role in Pirates of the Caribbean and the first movie was out for the summer. I was not convinced it was going to be any good at all, but Ava was of course ecstatic to see her beloved Orlando once more. Soon she had printed out several pictures of him in his seafaring get up and had them all over her purple walls. We went to see it together one time and I was quite right by my estimation to assume the worst. I was hoping Johnny Depp would save it, but I gotta say, I absolutely hate Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. He grosses me out. To this day, I really do not like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and I have avoided them ever since. Ava took me with her to see that movie in theaters four times. And she went over ten times just by herself.

I ended up we going to Ava's house many times that summer, despite the dangers of her moods or her mother's moods and the miles and miles of pale yellow nothing that stretched on wards into the dull sky. Sometimes her mom would randomly get angry for no reason and drive me back to Kendrick. But then I would be invited back up the next day – there was never and explanation other than I think it was some kind of empty battle for control and I was but a pawn on that board. Ava and I would go swimming in her pond. It was so full of catfish they were swimming all over one another at the bottom. And the water was slimy. Honestly, I don't recommend swimming in stagnant pools of catfish in 100 degrees. The bottom was this pure fowl mush of god only knows what and it felt so gross squishing between your toes. If you stayed in one place for any length of time, the catfish would swarm all over you and just start nibbling on you. I remember one time Ava decided to just sit in the pond and see what the catfish would do to her skin. When she got out of the pond, her entire leg was red from the biting.

Certain friends I have had in my life I have gone to for some stability – instinctively as I don't consciously think about it most of the time, and there are friends that – when I am with I end up unleashing terrible things that lurk in my nature that never come out generally. Ava was the latter type of comrade. That summer, I did some unthinkably cruel to one of the catfish that we caught. To my credit, I had been told growing up that fish don't have feelings and so I had the impression that the fish was essentially not alive by my definition. Plus, I used to eat meat, so it's a slipperly slope when you look at the life of an animal's value when you are in the business of making some of them your meal. I know now that fish can feel. I am a vegan now, and when I think about this stuff, I just make a mental note that I will never tell other vegans I meet in life about my former self.

Ava and caught this catfish, and we wanted to see what it's insides looked like. We took the fish up to one of her barns. We cut open it's belly, and we named it The Colonel. Because I kept calling him a trooper, on account that, we had his entire innards on display, but he still was desperately trying to breath. The thing is about catfish, they are very hearty creatures. They can live without water for a certain period of time. They can survive in muck. We pulled out it's lungs, inspected its stomach, took out it's intestines. Absentmindedly I grabbed it's bladder in my fingers, and popped it. When I did this, yellow stuff went everywhere. It was so freaking sick. The poor thing stayed alive too. Eventually Ava and I started feeling weird about the fact that it was alive, as we took out it's beating heart and felt it in our hands. It was so strange to feel this little being heart pumping still. I freaked out and Ava and I decided to squash the poor fish, just to put it out of it's misery. We both had pushed each other into doing it – feeding off of some innate cruelty that we both possessed, and now we both felt badly. We decided not to tell anyone about what we had done.

Probably the most prominent component of that summer though, something I rarely like talking about due to embarrassment, is my complete and total adoration for bands like Good Charlotte and Simple Plan. I fucking loved Good Charlotte in particular. I owned both their albums at the time. Planned on getting a tattoo. When I turned eighteen I swore I would start a band just so our band could tour with their band, and then maybe, just maybe I could hook up with one of them. And at first, I was obsessed with the main singer - Joel. But then as the summer progressed, I realized that I was actually in love with Benji – his punkier twin brother. Both had these awful nasally voices – just thinking of it now as the person I am, I used to really feel their songs and everything and it's just cringy.

Why did anyone like Good Charlotte so much? Why was I so obsessed? They were the absolute worst. I think in a way, Joel Madden was like a surrogate to Kyle in my subconscious. Kyle vaguely looked like Joel Madden, and then I moved over to Benji at some point since he had a better smile and seemed edgier. I was convinced that I was going to marry Benji someday. I was really invested. I saw my life as a series of steps to get to that point. I seemed to overlook the fact that there were tens of thousands of girls in their own bedrooms fantasizing about the day that Benji and they would wed. So many girls named babexforxbenji and various monikers online.

I thought about Good Charlotte about half the time honestly, how awesomely attractive they were, how cool and free they were. In my limited understanding of teen rebellion, Good Charlotte was really pushin' the envelope as to how rebellious a person could be – their gimicky image was as far as my small little perspective could comprehend. In my mind, they represented everything I wanted to be. This of course, is exactly what the marketers in some board room in a sky scraper somewhere wanted me to feel. They took the elements of punk that were genuine, and they put it on a boy band – essentially – but really it was just fratboy music. I believed they stuck up for the 'me's' in the world, and I bought every single poster of Good Charlotte that was out. And I bought every single teen magazine that was available at the little grocery store downtown, just to get little clippings of them, and sometimes they sold these small posters in the teen magazines.

I covered my walls with them. Above my bed, I took the clippings of every lame pop punk band that was in these magazines, and I taped it to my wall. It was the most teenybopping wall collage there ever was and as I had moved rooms again, I took a room that had twelve foot ceilings. The early 00's teenybopper collage almost reached up that high. I wished that I had taken just one picture. It had Ashton Kutcher here and there. Blink 182. Green Day. Evanescence, All of 13 ½ year old Renee's favorites. There was one very special picture of Benji though that I kept in my pocket at all times. It was my absolute favorite. I would take it out and look at it so much that the crinkles had almost made the picture disappear. And I tell you this now, not because I am proud. But this was who I was – a necessary part of my development I suppose. Faultlessly, my father thought it was ridiculous, but since it really wasn't ruining the wall in any way, he let it be and didn't actually make me feel too bad about it.

I was staying the night at Ava's house, and she decided that we were going to go on fake dates with Benji and Orlando. She dressed me up as a pop punk school girl, and herself in something else – I don't remember what, and then she took a photograph of us in our outfits. There is a part of me that wants to talk to her on facebook and ask her if she still has that photo. Half of me wants to see it, and the other half would be relieved if it disappeared.

My father was horrible to me the summer of 03'. His relationship had not panned out as he had hoped, and he was listening to a lot of really angry conservative talk radio, Michael Savage was one of his favs and I think he was using that anger and his own personal sense of disappointment to somehow 'blame the liberals'. He talked on and on how women were what was wrong with America. He kept accusing me of being high when I would come home. I was too much in my Good Charlotte world to pay him any serious mind, but in these moments were actually really tense. He was living in some kind of hellish fury beneath the surface. He was TNT that wanted to explode and a lot of his aggression, having no one else to blame and seeing me bopping around, was aimed directly at me. If I was listening to music, he would come in and shut it off in a really aggressive manner that made me nervous. At random times, he would ground me, and there was never a clear reason for why.

He resented being used by Jodi, and so he decided that this all stemmed down to her being a woman. And he resented me because I was not a child anymore and didn't really have a lot of faith in him anymore. And now I was a woman, deserving of equal punishment. I didn't say anything out of line to him – I would have been too afraid for my well being to ever fight back at all. I was not the kind of teenager with outward mood swings. I wasn't snotty to him. I wasn't even allowed to cry in his presence, with the exception of a few things like an extreme injury or a rare occasion where it made sense to him. But he just knew I resented him and he was losing control of me, and that festered in his thoughts often. I could hear it behind the shouting of the radio when I walked passed. But I think more than anything, he had more resentment for himself. And since he had always put himself on a pedestal when I was young and impressionable, the concept that I had seen through the curtain at the confused and angry and ultimately forgivable human being that he really was made him hate himself a lot. He couldn't process his own guilt. All he knew was that I brought on a sense of self doubt that he had about himself, and without having the proper coping mechanisms, all he could think to do was smite me.

He seemed to actually hate himself a lot more than I ever did for that matter. And because I was consciously aware of him and had kept him accountable for his inconsistencies, I represented everything he hated about himself. If I could just not exist, then perhaps he could muffle out how weak and heartbroken he felt about his perceived failings. I think the idea of me forgiving him for flaws that he didn't even want me to know existed, that he had demonstrated before me made him even madder. If I am to be the forgiver, than in his eyes, I am the one in control – not him.

But honestly, I just wanted to have fun. I wasn't doing drugs. I just wanted to go swimming and read silly articles about boys in bands and tape them on my wall. I wasn't interested in his bank money, his relationship status.

And this goes to show something sort of crazy about the guy. He never has any interest in anyone around him unless they have something directly to offer him – or he can somehow relate. At his best, he is a curious person and if you peak his curiosity, he may under the right circumstances open up to a new idea to a limited degree. If he cannot, he assumes that the activities and ideas of that other person are pointless and a threat to civility in some fashion. Which is why he resented philosophers and people of that nature. If there is one or two writers that he did like, such as Steinbeck or Carl Sagan – they instantly were claimed as somehow owned by him. Me being as divergent as I am had already become a major issue for him.

One of the things that he made this really outlandishly crazy deal about were the clothes pins that held up our clothes out on the line to dry. He became obsessed with the fact that I pulled the pins violently off the line when I didn't. I put them on in a way that he thought looked like I had pulled them, but I was very delicate. In fact, I thought I was doing a good job. This was actually because I was snapping them on in a certain way (I will not go into detail about the physics behind this very mundane task), and he was insistent that I was ripping my clothes off the line nonetheless. He grounded me for a week. It ruined a bunch of plans I had with my friends. And in that time, I tried even harder to make the pins right, which only made them look in his eyes like I had pulled them. He said I would have to be grounded all summer. I cried and pleaded with him to actually go out there with me so I could show him what I was doing. I tried to be reasonable. But in his mind, I was just as bad as Maria or Roxanne. I was just as bad as my mother, or Jodi. And he was going to teach all of them a lesson by teaching me a lesson.

It took me three weeks, but I finally figured out what he was seeing that made him think I was pulling the clothing. This entire thing was pitifully stupid, because for one, he was not able to ground me when he wasn't there eighty percent of the time to enforce it. And also, wooden clothes pins are cheap. And why would I have ruined my own summer just to pull my clothes off the line? I eventually became consciously aware of how it was I was putting them on the line, and it connected to how I was kind of shorter than the line. So I was finally able to put them the way he liked, by compensating for my reach. I don't believe he ever believed me though. In the mean time, July had passed and I had spent half of it angry in my room feeling wrongly accused by the unstable psycho in the kitchen chiming on to Michael Savage on conservative talk radio.

The biggest battle was about my income. I felt incredibly used by both my dad and my mom when it came to babysitting. I had never asked for any money in return for the time I spent. Sure, Allison and David were easy to babysit – sometimes. But this still meant that I missed out on a lot of fun. There were a lot of things I could never go out and do. They both had to work and they couldn't help that. I could hardly fault them for this, but their working was ironically their excuse to not pay me one cent. This setup that had been going on for two years then meant that I really only had the freedom to go out and about twice a week and all of the days I could have gone out in July had been taken by the clothes pin deal. I felt it was unfair that I was not allowed any compensation for my time. So I formed some courage, and I asked my dad if he would pay me for babysitting. He yelled at me and told me that it was my mom's job to pay me since she had bailed on me, not him, but I reminded him that two of those days were days where I was under his custody. This made him fly into a rage. He called me disgusting and a spoiled fucking brat that he was sorry he ever had. He made it sound like my request was absurd. What was the amount I was asking for? Three dollars a week. A laughable price even then.

I just wanted to be able to buy music, or maybe a blue Pepsi (that was a drink back in those days and it tasted like cotton candy). I had never been allowed to have any money at all. I remember asking my father for five cents once, and he had turned me down. This was one of the first times that I actually talked back to him. He threw a huge fit over it which devolved into him screaming at me in the corner as I held myself crying. This was absolutely insane, which, especially as an adult now, I know it could not have been the amount I was asking for at all. I thought I was being reasonable. He spent 500$ on Jodi's Christmas present alone. His income was 18$ an hour and that was even more when you consider inflation since 03'. He could afford paying me twelve dollars a month. If I had gone through his wallet and stolen it, he would never have known. No, what he wanted was mindless subservience of a dog. He was angry that I had even developed enough self esteem to consider what I asked for and he was attempting to beat that self esteem out of me.

To give him some credit, he must have thought about what I had asked more than it had seemed initially. By the end of the summer, he bought me a box from Ross that was 20$ that he thought would fit all my drawings into. He told me that this was what he was giving me in compensation for the babysitting of the previous two years. I accepted it. I didn't ever think he was going to pay me for previous years of babysitting, so there was no harm in accepting this. He also told me, as we were in the car, that he was going to pay me 20$ every three weeks, which was a lot more than what I had asked for. I was very happy about this. And I didn't end up spending almost any of that money. It just grew over time in the credit union. So in a way, I did win. It wasn't what I deserved, but it was a huge improvement from what I had.

I will concede one thing for my dad that summer though. Later that summer, we got in another fight. I don't remember what it was about, but I remember sitting in my room feeling furious and resentful, him two rooms away in the kitchen. (Oh this is embarrassing). In order to let him know how I felt, I decided to listen to 'Perfect' by Simple Plan over and over again. It's a barely listenable tune. It's essentially a pop punk song to the singer's dad. I put it in my fancy cd changer that I had gotten as my main gift for Christmas, and I let it go on as loud as it could go, on repeat. It played twelve times in a row, ringing through the house. I honestly thought the song was that powerful I guess at the time. In that fight, I might have been right. But if my dad ever had a good reason to strangle me to death, that would have been the time. And he didn't, and he must have known. I mean, when you hear a song like that you cannot ignore it, try as you may to.

PART 26 - http://tinyurl.com/y73nvl73

PART 25 - http://tinyurl.com/y6v6pgoj

PART 24 - http://tinyurl.com/ycak5d8r

PART 23 - http://tinyurl.com/yac6sk3g

PART 22 - http://tinyurl.com/yat6cfnw

PART 21 - http://tinyurl.com/y783egno

PART 20 - http://tinyurl.com/y8jskymt

PART 19 - http://tinyurl.com/rfhbms8

PART 18 - http://tinyurl.com/ycrznrwk

PART 17 - http://tinyurl.com/y77unlng

PART 16 - http://tinyurl.com/yadpsv8c

PART 15 - http://tinyurl.com/yb3lt6k5

PART 14 - http://tinyurl.com/yb4cfedq

PART 13 - http://tinyurl.com/yalanq9s

PART 12 - http://tinyurl.com/yc79mw94

PART 11 - http://tinyurl.com/yc9qhj84

PART 10 - http://tinyurl.com/yb734w24

PART 9 - http://tinyurl.com/yc2t6vfw

PART 8 - http://tinyurl.com/ybl37utq

PART 7 - http://tinyurl.com/ybvo283g

PART 6 - http://tinyurl.com/kbc9dwu

PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

PART 4 - http://tinyurl.com/k9x8esg

PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

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