I think I start at least three sentences a day with “When I was little..” I guess a lot of weird stuff happened when I was little. One guy I dated (a lot of sentences start that way, too) would physically brace himself when I started a sentence that way, because who the hell knew what would be coming out of my hamburger-stuffed mouth if I started out that way. Could be some dark stuff. Could be how I ate a bug. Luck of the memory draw on that one.

Anyway, when I was little my mom used to leave us with different people fairly often. She’d call them our relatives, but we weren’t related to them at all. This one woman, Aunt Jane, had hair like a horse’s main and hips like a freight train. She was mean and crude, and she gave people tattoos in her living room with india ink.

So, once Jane and her husband, Greg, who I remember little about other than white t-shirts and a mustache, took us out to run some errands and on the way back to their house, we picked up McDonald’s. Man, did I love McDonald’s. My whole body would shake as I stuffed all my fries in my mouth at once.

So, we get to McDonald’s and Greg asks Jane what she wants and all she wants is a hamburger. Which, what? A woman that size? Didn’t add up to me. So when Greg ran into the McD’s to order our food while we sat out in the car, I asked Jane, “Why are you only getting a hamburger?”

Jane told me she was on a diet. I kind of knew what that meant. My mom was always on a diet. I was 4 years old at the time, so my definition of a diet was a thing that fat women did where they ate less for a few days. But, I gotta say, I didn’t see much point in it. Why would you do that to yourself? And I also thought that any food was going to turn into fat, anyway.

So, I said to Jane, “But if you eat that hamburger, you’re still going to be fat.”

I probably deserved that massive swinging slap on my face. I didn’t even get to explain myself, but what would I have said?

We got back to the house and Jane and Greg made me stand in the corner and they wouldn’t let me eat my happy meal, but my brother and sister sat there crying and eventually they joined me in the corner and protested by not eating their meals.

Solidarity.

There are all these small moments in life that hit me in the face with vivid memories of how something felt. This morning my co-worker and I walked over to the hospital next to our building. We were hungry and it’s the nearest place to grab a bite to eat. We were chatting, doing fine, and then I saw this gift shop and I turned pale and stood still.

The rest of my day was super-charged with sadness. Because of a memory.

Sometimes you’re inside a place for so long that you’re sure when you leave that place, every part of you is going to go flying off in different directions. Jail, for instance. You get released at 4:30 am, and some friend of yours has to pick you up, and you go eat your breakfast, but the world is too big for you, and you’re not sure how to act.

When I was 12 and on my 3rd stay in a mental hospital they wouldn’t give me my clothes back for 2 weeks. They needed to be sure I wasn’t suicidal. Your clothing is a privilege in a place like that.This woman came in, some outside do-gooder, and like, wanted to give everyone make overs. Mary Kay. She was a round-faced, sweet woman who’d imagined that a little bit of toner would improve the quality of the lives of the mentally ill. I remember how uncomfortable she was looking at my face, how it registered that I was a child. I was a child in a hospital gown without a will to live.

That place sucked. My roommate was an obese stinky old woman who kept punching me in the tit. The staff would take away my soda privileges for making jokes about death. There’s no room for humor in mental wards. They want you to learn to cope by taking pills and deep breaths.

Once I demonstrated to them that I could handle myself, they let me have visitors. Or visitor. I only had one. Debbie. She was my case worker. I’d been there two months, and they said that for Debbie’s visit I could go off-unit to the gift shop.

Once we got there I felt like that stupid little shop was the biggest place I’d been in my whole life and I started to cry because I knew I’d always be alone in the way I felt. I’d always feel a thing nobody could possibly understand. Debbie bought me a bookmark with some quote about the importance of life.

A month later I got to go back to the group home and back to school. The lights were brighter than I’d remembered and while I didn’t want to actively try to kill myself,life still didn’t seem important. Bookmarks aren’t always right.

There's no way I'm making it under the limbo stick.

My mother’s third husband used to throw us these bang-up birthday parties when we were kids. He went all-out with a scavenger hunt, pin the tail on the donkey, that dart balloon game, and a pinata. It was this massive event, and all of my classmates came, and I wonder what they thought of our tiny, roach infested apartment turned into a temporary carnival.

I loved those parties so much, because I felt so damn special. Those are the earliest birthdays I remember, especially remarkable because that particular step-father had been a Jehovah’s Witness when my mother first married him. For a few years we didn’t celebrate a damn thing. Then, once he denounced his faith, he went balls-to-the-wall with every single holiday.

I would open my gifts from my classmates delicately, softly pulling the tape away so I could save the gift wrap. No matter what the present was, I would loudly declare that it was exactly what I’d wanted, feeling some new bond between myself and the giver. Even Megan, who’d been on my shit-list since she reprimanded me for kicking Phillip under the table in kindergarten, was transformed into my closest friend as I opened the transistor radio she gave me in second grade. Such a thoughtful gift indicated that Megan knew of my deep love for listening to the radio. Megan, I had you all wrong.

Later, when the cake was eaten and the friends had left, I would smell the paper, imagine their mothers’ hands pressing the creases, hear the pull of the tape. I would picture them at the store with their parents, choosing the perfect gift, considering me as a person. “I think-,” they’d tell their parents, “actually, I am sure I hear her say she doesn’t like the color yellow. How about something in blue?”

Sometimes I woud re-wrap the gifts and open them all again, pretending that each classmate presented the gift to me along with a speech about the kind of friend I’d been to them. I’d wave their sentiments away in gestures indicating that really, it was nothing! That time I gave you my animal crackers at snack? Forget about it. Or I’d engage in eye contact, clutching my chest, eyes full of tears, as they talked about how close we’d become.

Truthfully, I didn’t have any friends. Probably because I was a goddam weirdo who sat in my room play-acting scenarios in which I was loved. Or it could have been because I ate my crayons and cut off my eyelashes at school. Maybe also because I was always dirty with my hair sticking up, and in the winter I’d come to school with baked potatoes in my pockets. Maybe also because I claimed to be a powerful witch- a thing I’d prove by swinging as high as the top of the swingset and jump off, landing on my feet.

But, on my birthday I had every friend in class. They all came to our apartment, and they brought things to me, and they sang to me, and I was the queen of everything. And that was the bar at which birthdays were set for me. And then, any year after that, when my birthday was forgotten, or when it was remembered but there wasn’t any celebration, my queen of everything heart was crushed.

At some point, I stopped worrying about my birthday so much and started to try to recreate that feeling I had as a child for other people. It was rewarding to see them feel really special. I love throwing parties for my kids and for my friends, complete with a speech about how much they mean to me.

On the 15th, I’ll be 34. This time last year I was in the midst of serious illness, and on my birthday Tim came over and we ate pho and I threw it up and went back to sleep.

This year I was going to plan something big as a way to celebrate not being full of cancer anymore. I was going to make my own Queen of Everything celebration, instead of hoping that at some point a bunch of people were going to show up and say “We remembered and we got you a blue transistor radio and a hamburger!”

I think, instead, I’m going to spend the day in a different way. I think I’m going to find my way down to the ocean, stare out across the water, and have a day of thanksgiving and reflection. This year’s been kinder than it’s been cruel, and the dust is just starting to settle. I’ll have just completed my first week at a new, wonderful job, after all. And this year has taught me that I don’t need to be the queen of anything at all. I am content with my small speck of a place in the massive world.

But, I will be taking a hamburger with me to the ocean-side. I may even stick a candle in the burger, make a wish, and laugh at the giant weirdo I’ve been all my life.

I miss talking to you. You’re kind of the best to talk to, you know? I’m sure you do. So, I’ll just ramble at you. How’s that?

I bet you’re happy about the chill in the air these days. Sweater weather, and girls in boots. The air is like crisp apples. You grew up here, and it’s so strange to think that you never went through the same sort of season changes that I did. I thought once about people in Alaska, how they see the rest of the world. I thought about people who have never seen the ocean, much as I hadn’t for 27 years, and how there are some people who grew up seeing the ocean, and how such very simple differences are a huge part of who we are.

In the midwest, the fall can start as early as August. The leaves change and everyone talks about how beautiful it is, and the smell of the air is darker and heavier, like dirt settling on dirt settling on dirt that never had a chance to get tilled. Everything feels like it was meant to be tended to at the thaw, but the summer came on too sudden and hot to get around to it. Giant, hand spray-painted signs advertise pumpkins, firewood, hayrides. You can buy local made apple pies at gas stations. There’s one place, an orchard I’ve long forgotten the name of, where you can buy pie that baked in a bag. The bag is made of some kind of wax paper, and baking it in the bag keeps the fruit moist; keeps the fruit’s flavor from flying out into the oven walls; keeps the crust crisp. Once, during a nervous breakdown, I’d driven to this orchard unintentionally. I’d napped in the parking lot while watching families haul pumpkins to their Subarus. When I woke up, I went into their store and bought a pie in a bag, which they then put in a brown paper bag. I couldn’t stop laughing and saying “It’s a pie in a bag in a bag.” I paid for the pie with a check that I knew would bounce. I threw the pie in a ditch on the drive home. Shortly after that I was hospitalized because I’d been found sitting in the dark, using pumpkin carving tools to dig deep into my upper thigh.

I think global warming has maybe changed things, but when I was living there, it was just a matter of a few short months before the autumn in the Midwest turned to winter. This happens in mid to late October. The sky is black by 5:30 pm, the ground is frozen, the windows get covered in plastic or your house will never stay warm. Once it got so cold that a window in our 100 year old apartment shattered. Our landlord didn’t fix the window for a week. And personally, in all that time that leads up to winter, my dread of cold hands and isolation increases to a point that I feel like I might shatter.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I think I expected autumn would never bother me again. The effect isn’t as profound. The dark isn’t as immediate. Things still grow. There is still light. And I have blankets warm enough, and people warm enough. But, it still steps on my heart a little bit. I feel like everything gets further away. I feel like I am distant, and not myself. I feel like I am not anyone at all, and sometimes I can’t get up. And I wait for Spring.

Some Buddhist at some point said that depression is dwelling on the past, anxiety is worrying about the future, and we’re supposed to be living in the present. I’m sure he was right. Buddhists aren’t usually wrong. Or maybe they are. Maybe we only hear about the right stuff they say, kind of like how we only see flattering photos of people and think they’re so photogenic. Maybe there’s a bunch of stuff these Buddhist gurus say that’s absolute horseshit. “If you take a man a bucket of water, you must leave with a bucket of fire.” “That doesn’t make any fucking sense.” “It’s a work in progress.” “No, it’s just stupid. You’re just making up things because they sound cool.”

Anyway, Ted, I miss talking to you. And I hope you’re out there loving all this cold.

My 1st favorite holiday is this week, followed by:

2- Your birthday. (I love everyone else’s birthdays so much. How fun is it to celebrate one person? Very.)

3- Valentine’s day. It’s about LOVE, and I love LOVE. Even when I’ve been single on… oh. I’ve never been single on Valentine’s Day. So. Well, maybe that’s why I like it so much.

Don't feel bad. Turkeys are into that sort of thing.

But, number one is Thanksgiving. Not only do I get to do that thing I love to do; spend a few days in the kitchen cooking, singing songs, and feeling great, but the whole day is about recognizing the things in our lives that we’re thankful for. It’s a day where your insides and outsides get a huge HUG.

I don’t have a very traditional family. For as much as I’ve talked about some of the darker parts of my childhood, I actually am very fortunate to have some very wonderful people in my life. Not only are my ex-in-laws still a part of my life, and people who I really value so much, as well as my ex-husbands, and my ex-husband’s new wife, but through the years I’ve managed to become bonded to so many exceptional people that my lack of cynicism hinges completely on how often I’ve known the true greatness of humanity.

My mother married multiple times, and a few times she managed to trick some pretty great men into marrying her. One such man stayed a constant part of my life and, when I talk about my dad, I’m talking about him.

His name is Bill, and in some ways he reminds me of Red from “That 70s Show”. I absolutely loved it, as a teenager, when he would grumble “Quick dicking around!” at my brother and I, who were, to be fair, quite amazing at dicking around. I believe it was probably the amount of time we spent engaged in dicking around activities, that made us such experts. And Dad would always catch us, and he’d grumble “Quick dicking around!” and we’d laugh and make empty promises that the dicking around would stop. Sometimes I’d flick him in the ears just to hear him yell at me. I was never afraid of him- he was the first man in my life who I never felt unsafe around. I somehow always understood that his love would be a constant.

Bill’s family is massive, and wonderful. They’re these real people who’ve lived real lives with all sorts of wonderful moments, all sorts of difficult moments, and so many times that they’ve banded together to support each other. They’d joke, at every family function, that by the time you were done hugging everyone goodbye, so much time had passed that you’d need to start again.

Though my mother divorced Bill in 2001, our bond was always and will always be strong, and the family has remained my family. I have many happy Thanksgiving memories at the farm, when Grandma Fitz would hide three almonds in the meal and whoever found the almonds won a prize. Or over at Grandma Ebbots, and after we ate Dad an Ken would get out the guitars and we’d all listen to them play. Or my first Thanskgiving with them, when I met my step-brother Jason, who would help guide me to listen to good music, and gave me my first copy of “Cather in The Rye.” Or over at Aunt Suzy’s, everyone gathered in the living room, yelling support for the Packers, Aunt Peggy showing us her latest amazing pieces of artwork. All of my cousins in this huge varied family are such amazing people, every one of them turning into great adults. I am so lucky to have met them, and to have become one of them.

Usually, around Thanksgiving I go back to the midwest, whenever the tickets are cheap. I cook a meal for whoever can attend, then I’m back in LA for Thanksgiving, where I can cook for all of my friends. It’s the best of both worlds. This year, while I couldn’t afford to go back to see anyone, and Dad says he’s disappointed to be missing out on my turkey, I’ll still be here cooking for my friends. I’d thought I wasn’t going to be able to, but Peter Zachos helped make it possible. (Peter, I used your full name so that when people inevitably google “Peter Zachos is a turkey”, they’ll land here. This will get me tons of traffic.)

For years now, I’ve been perfecting my turkey. And here’s how it’s done.

BASICS: They say buy a turkey big enough that you have one pound for each guest. I say, bullocks to that. Than you’re out of leftover turkey and that’s one of the best things about baking a turkey. So, buy a big fat turkey.

Take a look at this turkey time chart for instructions on how long to cook your turkey.

Some people do their dressing inside the turkey. I’ve never liked mushy dressing, but keep in mind that the turkey’s got a hole right there. Put that hole to use. Stuff something with some flavor in that hole. Those are words to live by, right?

BRINING YOUR TURKEY

Brining is such a wonderful way to make sure that your turkey isn’t dry. I brine my turkey for two days. Turkey must be thawed completely before you brine.

1 gallon water         1 cup salt

1 cup sugar             1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, roughed up a bit

1/4 cup rosemary    1 cup apple juice

1 fish tank bucket and one heavy plate

1. Cook the water, salt sugar, and apple juice in a pot until they dissolve. Allow to cool completely.
2. Rinse turkey and pat dry
3. Toss turkey into bucket, add the brine and herbs, add two trays of ice. Add enough cold water to cover the turkey.
4. Use the plate to weight the turkey down so it doesn’t float.
5. VERY IMPORTANT! DON’T KILL PEOPLE! READ THIS. Store the turkey bucket on a cool porch, in your cool basement, in a fridge, or in a cool location. Each day twice a day, add ice. If the water level is an issue, you can also use ice packs so long as you clean the ice packs each time you return them to the bucket. You need to keep the turkey cool so it doesn’t get bacteria laden.

Turkey Time!

1 package of thick cut bacon                  1 lemon

2 shallots, diced                                        1 white onion, peeled, whole

1 stalk rosemary, minced                       3 cloves garlic

1 stick salted butter                                  1 cup olive oil

salt & pepper

Preheat oven to 325

• Combine softened butter, olive oil, minced garlic, rosemary, diced shallots, and a pinch of salt and pepper and mix well
• Remove turkey from brine, pat dry
• Use your hand to gently pull the skin away from the meat of the turkey
• Put your oil/butter mixture under the skin of the turkey. Work to make sure that you hit all spots well.
• gently pat the skin down around the oil/butter
• Lay your turkey, breast side up, in the roasting pan. Shove that whole onion and the lemon cut in 1/2 into the turkey hole.
• Use some string to do a little turkey bondage by tying its legs together. Don’t worry. Turkeys are into that kind of thing.
• Now it’s bacon time. So, you should announce loudly that it’s bacon time.
• Lay the bacon strips all over the outside of the turkey. If you don’t want to do this, I don’t care. You don’t have to. But, give it a shot some time. It’s damn good.
• Slap that baby in the oven. Don’t even worry about basting it. The bacon fat and oil and butter are basting it.
• During the final 30 minutes, delicately remove the bacon from the skin. That way, the skin will crisp, which always makes the skin lovers happy.
• This step is optional. If  you want a pretty great smokey flavor, let your turkey cook for the final half hour on a grill with smoking hickory chips.
• Let the turkey rest for at least 20 minutes so the juiciness sucks back into it. Then make a guy carve it, because it seems like a manly sort of job.

I think it’s been a pretty amazing year, so far, hasn’t it? I know I’ll be thinking about how thankful I am for a lot of things, and even though I won’t be at the Fitzsimmons/Ebbot family Thanksgivings this year, I am so glad to call them all my family.

Stick with me on this. I have a point.

Between the ages of 11 and 26, I spent a great deal of time in mental hospitals. I think that’s super weird now, because I don’t know why the fuck that was always the way they handled me. It was like, I’d get really fucking depressed because, come on, I had a bunch of shit to feel depressed about. And I would tell everyone how depressed I was, and they would tell me to shake it off. Or they’d increase therapy and try to get me to draw pictures of my inner feelings.

Have you ever been depressed? So, imagine you’re depressed, and some therapist named Becky or Mary Lou who’s wearing a bolo tie and a gypsy skirt is telling you that you should draw pictures of your inner feeling. And, really, most of the time you don’t have any feelings at all. And you certainly can’t create anything, and that’s part of what’s depressing you. So, you draw a fucking picture, and the picture sucks a lot, and now you’re stuck staring at a piece of bullshit and knowing that you aren’t any good at anything. You can’t even draw your shitty feelings. You suck.

So, I’d be telling everyone how depressed I was, and I was a shitty artist, and I couldn’t figure my way out of whatever, and I would cut the fuck out of my wrists, or run out in the middle of a busy street trying to get run over, or stockpile my pills for a few months and then take them all. Or drink cleaning solutions. And they’d stick my dumb, sad ass in the mental hospital.

Have you ever been in a mental hospital? So, imagine you’re depressed, and some intake worker named Cindy or Sharon who’s wearing a cute teddy bear patterned nursing shirt is running you through the intake paperwork, explaining that once you prove you’re no longer a danger to yourself you can have your own clothes back, taking you to your room that stinks of overstarching and vegetable soup, and you meet your roommate. Most of the time your roommate is old, an all of the time your roommate is tragic. If she’s not tragic it’s because they’re about to discharge her, so her meds are working. And you look around at all the people who are perpetually sad, insane, fucked up, and you know that this is part of your problem. You are far too aware that Michael Stype was right. EVERYmotherfuckingbody hurts. And so, you know there’s no point in living.

Mental hospitals are the worst place to put a depressed person. (more…)

I used to have a Teddy Ruxpin when I was little. I’d found him in the trash, I guess because he smelled funky, and the bit of plastic that held his batteries in his butt was missing. But, you don’t pass up a free Teddy Ruxpin. I didn’t have any Teddy Ruxpin tapes, though, so instead I put Mexican love ballad tapes in him and watched the way his eyelids moved real slow, like he was really singing to me.

I told Ted about this, because I’m sitting at home, high on medicinal weed, and his name is Ted. So, he clearly wanted to hear about my Teddy Ruxpin. Ted’s got some decent insights into things I’ve never thought much about. Do you know anyone like that? The sort of person whose follow up questions take a memory you’ve had since you were four and add a perfect detail? Well, Ted’s that guy. And his follow up to the Teddy Ruxpin bit was to point out that it was kind of bizarre that I had Mexican love ballad tapes.

The thing is, I spent a good deal of time hitting the free boxes at rummage sales. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I spent a ton of time wandering around alone when I was a kid. It creeps me out how often I was alone, and I’m pretty convinced my parents were just trying to get me kidnapped. I’d wander around Harvard, Illinois when I was 4, 5, 6 years old, completely alone. And frequently I would hit up rummage sales and raid the free boxes.

This meant I owned a lot of very weird stuff. Mexican love ballad cassette tapes were the least of it. I remember giving out funeral sympathy cards in 1st grade instead of valentines. I had a bunch of broken toys, dried up markers, automotive magazines. If I knew it was going to be someone’s birthday at school, I’d gift them one of my free box items, and think I was pretty clever for doing it.

I remember this one time, my sister got a bunch of foil flowers from the free box. They were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, dark red, shining, with sturdy pipe cleaner stems. I coveted those flowers, and she just left them in the closet in a cardboard box.

Once, when I was hanging out at the park by myself, (again, wtf parents????) I started to talk to this old guy who was sitting on a bench. He was really shakey and he had a giant, bumpy nose. He told me he used to fight in a war. I didn’t know what a war was, but I knew that when I fought with my sister things were pretty rough. I told him about that, thinking it would help bond us.

I asked him where he lived, and he told me he lived right there, on that bench. That freaked me right out. What about when it rains? What about when you’re changing your clothes? What about when you didn’t want anyone to talk to you? Living on a bench just seemed like a terrible thing.

So, I went back to our apartment and I looked around for something that might make bench life less of a drag. I decided that I had nothing of value, but those red foil flowers were perfect. And my sister wasn’t even using them, so she wouldn’t notice. I took a bouquet to the bench man with the big nose and he sat there, smiling.

Later that day, my sister saw that the flowers were missing and I confessed what had happened. She ratted me out to my step parents, and I tried to explain to them that the guy on the bench had been really happy to have the flowers, and I was sorry. They made me get in the car, and they drove me to the park. Then those jerks sat in the car and made me go get back the flowers from the man.

I remember his fingers, how they looked like Chick-o-Sticks, and they were holding those pipe cleaner stems so tightly. I had to say that I was sorry, that the flowers weren’t mine, that I had to take them back. And he was crying old guy tears and whimpering about how I’d given them to him. But I had to pry them out of his hands and run back to the car.

Man, did I ever feel like an ass for that. I thought about how you can be sitting there, living on a bench, having a rotten time of it, and then, even the small bit of happiness that life can hand you is actually just going to turn into something that makes your day even worse than it was already.

Thinking about things like that make being high a whole lot less fun, because it’s those things that can make me feel like this whole world is nothing but shit. It just about breaks my head sometimes, because I get stuck under it, a huge semi-truck of pointless misery sitting on my chest.

So, it’s time to watch some Jerry Springer videos and give myself the giggles for a bit.
Hah. That lady just said to the other lady who’s sleeping with her husband, “I oughta kick the both of yous outta my trailer”.

Why is this woman in her underwear?

I don’t deal well with weakness, especially in adults, and especially in men. And specifically with men I am dating.

Should a man I’m dating display signs of depression, or lack of motivation, or lack of follow-through, or addiction, it makes me feel like spitting on them.

I once watched this Doberman eat all of her puppies as soon as they came out of her. I stood at the screen door, pressing my face into the rust, looking out over the green paint peeling off the porch and I watched her lay on her side, watched the puppies drop out from her hips. She kept her nose down between those hips and just as soon as a puppy came out, she ate it.

I’d sat with her a few days before this and rubbed her belly and talked, and told stories, and even sang Wham! songs to the puppies inside of her. I was afraid that she was eating them because of something I’d said.

“Nope.” the adults explained, not bothered at all, “There’s something wrong with the babies. She knows they’re weak, so she’s eating them.”

I hated that dog after that. It seemed pretty damn selfish that the mother of anything would reject it just because it was weak. I was also pretty pissed because I was sure that she didn’t have to eat them. If she hadn’t, I would have taken care of them. I felt that she should have known that, based on me singing songs and talking to them while they were still inside her.

Once, when M and I were married, he told me he wanted to kill himself. Shit was really hard right then. Our kids were in foster care, I was smoking crack, and he was regularly failing drug tests because of weed. That’s the sort of stuff that will cause a bit of depression, and by a bit of depression, I mean, holy shit, just thinking about it makes me feel like I have a backhoe running over my chest.

He told me he wanted to kill himself, and he was crying in the bathtub. He had long hair back then, and a tiny, hairy body, and I looked at him in that bath water and even though he’d seen me in much worse condition, I found him repulsive. “Well, go to the hospital then.” I told him before leaving the apartment to try to score some E.

Who knows about those puppies, though. It turns out that they may have been born dead, and that’s why she ate them. Sometimes that happens, too.

When I was very young I saw my mother in a bathtub, drinking out of a bottle and moving her body and eyes too slow, like when Teddy Ruxpin’s batteries start to die. Sometimes she forgot to blink with both eyes. I was standing with my step-dad, who’d packed suitcases for my brother, sister and me. I remember him throwing a pack of leg shavers at her, and saying something about how if she wanted to kill herself to just do it already.

On the phone with him this morning (name withheld) said that I shouldn’t yell at him, because he doesn’t respond to being yelled at. He’d made a bunch of promises the night before about how hard he was going to try. And yet again, he’d broken his word, and here he was freaking out at me again and making me think of those puppies.

I told him I was pretty sure he was going to kill himself or at least ruin his life, and he said “Good. That’s what I want.”

And I thought of my mom in that tub, opened my mouth to say as much. Then I remembered that the last time I’d told him anything about my life he’d used it against me when he was angry. I didn’t need to tell him about my mom in the tub because it became pretty clear that my stories weren’t all that interesting to him anyway.

So, I told him what I’d heard my step dad say to my mother. I told him that if he wanted to kill himself, to go ahead and do it.

But, I added my own bit of advice on the end of that, maybe the bit of advice I’d have wanted to add to my own mother.
“Just try to do it quickly, because it’s no fun to watch.”

In choir he used to sing all of the songs in the voice of Bob Dylan. Only I didn’t know who Bob Dylan was, then, so I just thought he was doing a funny voice. Before choir we used to get really high, Steph and Buckshot and this guy I dated for about ten seconds and me. So, then, when he was singing all the songs like Bob Dylan, it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

I never understood the nickname Buckshot, but there was a thing we all called “Buckshot’s Disease”, which was a hacking kind of cough you’d get from smoking too much weed.

One night we all said we’d give him $50 to drink 6 month old bong water. He drank it, said it tasted like really strong coffee, and we gave him $6 and told him it was fifty.

He drove a Chevy impala and we were always digging up change for gas, driving that thing out in the country, parking and having sex next to old barns or these tiny little houses all over the ice. I asked him about those houses. It was crazy that people would live out in a tiny house on the ice. I couldn’t see how they’d even lay down at night. Buckshot kissed me and told me those were ice shanties. Those weren’t for living, they were for fishing. That was even more confusing to me, sitting there in red panties and a leather jacket in the back seat of the impala, wondering why people needed a house to go fishing.

He had a job at the local pizza place, Paul Revere’s pizza. I would just sit at the pizza place and wait for his shift to end so we could drive out to his buddy’s house and buy some weed.

I wasn’t allowed to go in his buddy’s house after the first time, because the first time I’d taken off all my clothes. He was really patient with me about how often I was taking off all my clothes. He’d tell me, “Sit here, in the car. And don’t take off your clothes.” But, then I’d sit there and drink or smoke and it just made more sense to take my clothes off. He never yelled at me about it, though. He’d find me wandering around, naked, and he’d throw me over his shoulder and put me back in the car.

Buckshot and I used to talk about our future like it was a sure thing. We were going to live in the car. I didn’t like the idea at first, but he made it sound pretty, and he promised he was going to build me a closet in his trunk, and fill it up with all sorts of clothes. We were going to have one kid, and we were going to smoke weed with our kid when he was 14.

Buckshot said he’d take our son out on the boat, and he’d pull out a bowl and he’d pack it and smoke it with our son. And that way, if our son ever had any weed, he’d share it with us, too. I loved the idea so much that for the rest of my teen-hood I told everyone I met that I was going to do that.

He came over to my house right after my mother married my step-dad. There was a reception in a church basement, then I got stoned with some cousins and went back to my house and called him. I thought my mother and step-dad were going to be away for a while, so we got high and naked in my bedroom. When I heard them pull up in the driveway, I threw some clothes on and ran to the kitchen to wash dishes.

You know in cartoons when you see someone trying to act not-guilty and they’re whistling and going out of their way to pull a nothing-to-see-here? Well, that was me. They stopped long enough to look at me, then Bill went back to my room. I heard him say “I think you should be going.”

Later, Buckshot told me that he’d gotten dressed but forgot to put his boxers on, then hid in my closet. When Bill opened the closet door, Buckshot was standing there holding his boxers and wondering if he was about to get his ass kicked.

A few days later I told Bill that I was going to marry Buckshot. I told him we had it all planned out and I just wanted to have his blessing. I said this with a certainly only a teenager could have. He looked at me and said “Well, best of luck to you.”, and I thought he was as serious as I was.

The night I ran away from home, I hitchhiked into town wearing shorts and a t-shirt in a snow storm. I called Buckshot, who called Wigger Bill, and they picked me up and drove me out to some house half-way to Madison, WI. The snow storm got pretty bad, and it took us three hours to get there, and I kept telling Buckshot that I’d never see him again.

When he dropped me off, he gave this guy a bag of weed, and he said “That’s my girl in there. Don’t do anything stupid, and don’t let her smoke any of this.” But, of course, we smoked it. And of course, we did plenty of stupid things.

Four years later, when I came back to that small town with my baby, I looked him up. I was engaged to Mitch, I told him over the phone, and we were going to live in Whitewater, I told him over the phone, and what ever happened to you?, I asked him over the phone, talking the way I’d seen grown ups in movies talk to people they reconnected with.

He and his sister were living in a trailer in Janesville. He was working, I think at a factory, and no, he didn’t still have the Impala. But, what about my closet? What about us living there? He put on a big act about being heart broken, saying I was supposed to have married him.

According to Facebook, he’s married now. Looks like he has a kid, too. He looks the same as he did when we were in high school, and I wonder if anyone still calls him Buckshot. I don’t know why I need to hear from him, or why it matters to me that he remember anything we used to do.

I guess it’s that I was mostly unhappy, both in a typical angsty teenager way, and in a more specific rough-past way. I guess when I think about any of the friendships or boyfreindships I had growing up, they were all wrought with melodrama, fights, me overdosing, them having to chase me down and stop me from doing crazy shit. So, he stands out, because he was the one person I never had any of that with.

He rolled with it in an easy way, and we never fought, and he never made a big deal out of the shit I did that was stupid. So, I suppose, to date, Buckshot has been the only guy who really had what it took to handle me, because he never made me feel like I needed to be handled.

Ongoing list of what kind of a weird little kid I was.

Today’s list is taken from a time in my life when things were going pretty damn poorly. Yet, thinking about the kind of kid I was, I still want to go back in time and give myself a stomp on the foot.

• In fifth grade I planned a lip synching routine to “Nasty Boys” that would end in me ripping off my three sizes too big suit jacket to reveal a dayglo bikini. At the time I was developing this routine, it seemed like it was destined to be the coolest thing anyone had ever done or seen. Come the day of the performance, when I tried to give my Janet Jackson tape to our choir teacher, she reminded me that we were meant to actually sing a song ourselves. Taking it in stride, I made the best possible choice (in my mind), and still performed the whole routine, only instead of lip synching, I sang that bitch a capella and still went for my epic bikini revealing finale. I was extremely surprised when, instead of wild applause, the whole auditorium was filled with horrified faces. Nobody even laughed. They just sat there. I grabbed my jacket, exited the stage, and instead of- oh, I don’t know, logically feeling embarrassed, I immediately began to formulate a new routine that might be better received. Luckily, I changed schools shortly after that.
• That same year, but at a different school, I wrote a play to perform for our D.A.R.E. cop. The major premise of the play was that my friends and I were hookers. There wasn’t much about drugs in the plot. I remember it kind of dragged at the end. I played the sweet, dumb hooker.
• That same year, when my best friend Shannon told me that she wasn’t best friends with me anymore, because her new best friend was Michelle, who lived next door and had just gotten a trampoline, I reacted by locking myself in Shannon’s house, threatening to stab myself in the heart with a knife, then swallowing three bottles of tylenol. I then spent a few days in a regular hospital in a bed next to a woman who was having a hysterectomy. Back then, if you had anything not right with the downstairs, they just went in and chopped out your uterus. I recall being extremely chatty with this incredibly gracious woman about how I had just tried to kill myself. Looking back, I try to imagine what I would feel like laying in a hospital bed post surgery, listening to an 11 year old talk about suicide.
• I had started smoking cigarettes around then, and my 15 year old next door neighbor would smoke with me in my step-grandma’s house until right before she got home. Then one day, for absolutely no reason at all, I went over to the girl’s house, asked earnestly to speak to her mother, then told her mother that I was afraid the girl would get lung cancer or possibly start to use drugs, so I needed to tell the mother in person that her daughter was addicted to cigarettes. The girl’s mother, who was a stripper who had the kind of face that said “I’m too tired for this shit”, seemed pretty bugged by my heart-to-heart about her daughter’s lung health.