Cancer
In 2009 I went to a musical festival in Portland aptly named Smmr Bmmr (summer bummer-vowels were simply not done in 2009). I went up there with about 15 other people from Sacramento, and all but a few of us got Swine Flu. I was sick for two weeks. In 2016 I went to the Burger Boogaloo festival with Kevin. We were slated to move in together in about 3 days. We were drinking overpriced cocktails out of plastic cups in the glaring sun, and the band we came to see was just phoning it in. Kevin and I got in a terrible fight, unmatched in ferocity in our relationship history before or since. Later we realized that the music festival atmosphere brought out the absolute worst in us, and we promised not to ever attend another one. Burger Boogaloo has come around again. I’ve been looking at everyone’s social media posts of themselves sweating profusely in leopard print with their cat eye sunglasses. They look like they are having fun but all I can think is “I have escaped another terrible calamity.”
In 1994 or 95 my dad brought home an Amway salesperson and his wife. Their names were Brian and Melissa, maybe. I remember them both wearing burgundy suits, but hers was a skirt suit. She had ropey caramel hair. He was tall and blonde and sported a luxurious-looking mustache. They were good-looking people, and they sat on the couch with my parents and touched them here and there as they talked about the products. My parents never made me go to my room or anything when company was over because, well, for one thing, company was pretty rare, and anyway I was quiet and would just sit there taking it all in, not disturbing anyone. They came over a few times, always dressed in business attire, always subtly flirtatious. On of of these occasions we all went out to eat at a fancy Japanese restaurant. It was darkly lit and very stylish. It was the first time I tried tempura vegetables and sushi. I found my meal to be supremely delicious. I thought that maybe suddenly the Scott family had become quite sophisticated. We didn’t see them again. I figured that my dad decided not to sell Amway and that was the end of it. Evidently Brian and Melissa had also made it explicitly known that, interest in Amway notwithstanding, group sex was something else they were offering. So these are some things that I occasionally think about when I’m biting into a spider roll: pyramid schemes, open marriages.
.. but we wrote this together and I laughed so hard I figured it needed to be on the internet somewhere.
Kevin and Rachel met at Beers Books when Van Masdidou called in sick after making a batch of bad beans. He was a bit of a weiner. In any case, Rachel was called in to cover his shift. He had also called an electrician to come in and fix some godawful light fixtures at the store that same day. Rachel immediately noticed Kevin’s tough-talking east coast attitude and the large bulge in his penis area. Kevin assumed Rachel was a lesbian with an ass that wouldn’t quit, but took a crack at her anyway.
I went to a K thru 8 school where the uniform was a white knit polo and pleated, yes pleated navy blue dockers. Whether you needed some sort of support garment or not, an undershirt was necessary due to the near translucence of the knit polo. I wore an undershirt until 6th grade when the visibility of my nipples became an outsize issue of self consciousness, and I traded up to a sports bra. The school bully (bless her, she was my initiate into so many things humiliating and pubescent) would come around to snap my sports bra and whisper disdainfully, “Why do you wear that? You don’t even have anything.” I was at a sleepover with her once– she already had a woman’s body and a matching red lace bra and panty set to go with it. It was far far too sexy for a girl of 11 to be wearing– what the hell was going on there?– but on the opposite end of the spectrum my just-starting-to-be-noticable breasts were almost more than I could bear, and smashing what little was there down with a bunch of spandex seemed the only course of action. The summer before 7th grade my mom unceremoniously presented me with some training bras by stuffing them in my underwear drawer. They were white and flimsy, but not at all alluring– more like something issued along with a hospital gown. I wore them for about a year, thinking I was right on track when my mother embarrassed me terribly by presenting, again unceremoniously, some new bras because, “everyone can see your nipples.” Her solution I guess what to head in the opposite direction with some bras so heavily padded and so oddly dowdy that even I might forget I had nipples in there somewhere. On the plus side, they probably added two full cup sizes, but they were so weirdly shaped it would still be a shame if another living human ever saw me in them. They clasped in the front, had a strange, old-lady brocade pattern, were nurses-uniform white, and gave me a 1950s semi-conical silhouette, covering my whole chest. It was 1998. I don’t know where my mother managed to track down something so old fashioned. Perhaps they were from a catalog of modesty garments for very religious women. I can’t know what my mom was thinking. On the one hand she seemed embarrassed of my small chest and thought I should enlarge it with the help of a stuffed animal’s worth of cotton padding, and on the other hand she seemed to want to minimize and cover the legitimate changes taking place in my body. From 1999 through 2015 I’m pretty sure I wore the wrong size bra. I don’t know what I’m getting at here– perhaps only that it’s been a long journey toward’s body acceptance, if my floundering in the mud of weird wacky ill-fitting bras is any indication. I labored under the delusion that my breasts were some shameful nuisance or inappropriately sexual signals. I am glad those days are behind me.
It seems like for a period of time in my childhood, most of the adult women I encountered looked like they styled themselves after Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie. Poofy hair with lots of layered or feathered parts, big square glasses and high-necked rayon blouses. It was the early 90s, but these ladies had been issued their identities in the decade previous and, perhaps being in their 30s or 40s, felt no need to reassess. I had to get up out of bed to write this down, so disturbed was I by my failure to remember the face of my old neighbor, Carol Munsey. I spent the better part of my young childhood days playing with her son, Bobby, but all I can recall of her now apart from her voice is her feathered mouse-brown bangs and enormous square glasses frames floating above some teeth. I also remember that she would sometimes wear a blue terrycloth thing with a velcro closure– maybe it was just a towel with velcro– when she was out watering the lawn, and my mom had pink one but never wore it except immediately following a shower. Carol wore a look that was very popular from the late 70s through probably 1984, but this was the late 80s and early 90s. She couldn’t have been that old– why so checked out? I do recall her husband Bob may have been older than her. He had white hair and wore pork chop sideburns or a droopy cowboy mustache or both. I don’t remember ever seeing him wear anything other than an electric blue tank top in all weather. He and Carol slept in separate beds with some crappy little end table between them. The beds were adjustable like hospital beds. My child mind thought they were twin recliners. Both Bob and Carol smoked. Bob was an avid hunter and it wouldn’t be uncommon to show up at the Munsey house on a Saturday afternoon and find Bob plucking a wild turkey carcass with a lot of determination and more dead turkeys waiting and Annie the hunting dog pacing the yard. Perhaps Carol left her better days behind her back wherever she got her hairstyle and glasses.
I remember being partnered with a girl to do some project as part of an introductory creative writing class my freshman year of college. Mere minutes in, and without any kind of natural segue, she starts pulling up her top this way and that to show me, with evident delight, scars from where hooks afixxed to what could have only been her dorm room ceiling, tore at her skin during violent sex play. She dominated the rest of our class time providing me with further information on every kind of kink required to get her off. She had mouse brown hair scraped unflatteringly off her moon face, little eyes, and the doughy frame of a much much older woman. She had the too-loud voice common to students majoring in theater arts. As harsh as it is, I was struck less by her kinkiness and more by the fact that anyone would give her a second glance let alone engage in any style of sex act with her. I was a virgin at the time. I thought maybe a lot of sexually active people might talk about their sex lives in extreme detail, with complete strangers, and I was just not an initiate. I let the strangeness of this event pass.
Many years later at an older friend’s engagement party in San Francisco, a brash, swaggering British woman with two severely lazy eyes and her nebbish, frail American companion engaged me in conversation shortly after my arrival. I don’t even think names were exchanged before they launched into the sordid details of their sex life, and how much they like to fuck each other with all the windows open, or on their balcony. I remember thinking that he did not look healthy enough to withstand vigorous sex. I remember thinking that whatever was up with her eyeballs was faintly nauseating. Much like my experience with the girl in college, I didn’t think “Why the fuck are you telling me this?” but assumed that this normal behavior and that I was the weirdo.
Upon further reflection I realized that I am was not the weirdo then, I was merely judgmental about very average looking people being sexually active, and they had really bad boundaries.
Yesterday evening Kevin and I were watching some turtles and baby wood ducks in a pond. “I hope a baby wood duck gets up on the back of one of these turtles and takes a ride,” I said. Then it did! It really happened! Kevin said, “That was such a gift.”