Griffin Stadium

Once upon a time, a boy thought he’d suck a movie scene out of my lips.

It was late at night after a film screening.

I don’t even remember the movie.

Coffy, maybe? Some exploitation thing.

Blame Tarantino.

We ended up on the football field, at the 50 yard line, even though he’d heard me complain at length about the false tribalism of sports fandom.

I didn’t matter.

He had a girl! In the right place! At the right time!

I’m sure that when he wrote it? The lights were all on.

Certainly, in the story in his head, he wasn’t a stupid boy with too-long hair in a fucking swamp.

He was sweaty. I’d bet anything the sweat didn’t end up in the re-telling.

So I didn’t swoon.

I failed him, twice, that same way.

The kisses on his home turf weren’t right.

Not at the airport when I’d gotten off the plane and he’d reeked of gin, and not in Griffin Stadium at midnight.

He was just so sweaty.

The script worked better in January, in Texas, when we’d met. Where his friends couldn’t judge. Where he’d lifted me off my feet, and I couldn’t actually physically confirm that he lived with his mom. Where I’d grabbed his hand in a dark club, all ripped black velvet and 20 Eye Docs, and dragged him down a spiral staircase to dance while Ministry played.

He had pictures.  He had a whole fairy tale to act out.  He had a note from his mom to wish him well on his journey of romance and self-discovery.

I saw that note.

I really did.

And, I disappointed his mom, too.

This is why that Manic Pixie Dream Girl doesn’t exist.

She always knows you sweat.  She doesn’t find your worrisome weed habit impressive, because she’s probably done narcotics that aren’t on the schedule, yet. She doesn’t know she belongs to you, so off-camera she’s making out with karaoke champions while you sit at home and memorize the Coen Brother’s scripts.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to be at the time, though.

The phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” didn’t exist.

He broke up with me. He dumped me.

At the time, I realized that it was because I didn’t fill in the details for the scene he’d had in his head.

It wasn’t a conscious choice on my part, which is what bothers me about Laurie Penny’s piece.

A few months after things didn’t work out, Sweaty Boy, the always-aspiring artist, the wannabe poet, blogged about me.

This was before 9-11.  It was still called an online journal then.

And, you know, I’d kept quiet. I’d let him alone.  I’d stalked the blog, sure. But I hadn’t commented.

But, he writes this entry–back when we were all figuring out how we actually navigated this sort of thing on the series of tubes–and I flipped my shit.

“This is what marginalized feels like. I’m a fucking anecdote. I’m just a footnote.”

He apologized.

That doesn’t change what those poetic boys do to you, though.

The only way around it is to be just as self-absorbed.

And to be a better writer.

For real, the only time I’ve ever been in a bathtub like that, it was at, and I quote: “The Freaky Freezer Dude’s House.”

Seriously.

Dude had a whole room full of deep freezers that he kept padlocked.

We decided it was Y2K storage.

Later, in 2002 or so, he burned the entire place to the ground.

I never said I was smart.

I swear, every time I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, Freaky Freezer Dude would magically appear in the hallway in sad, thin boxer shorts.

At the Freaky Freezer Dude’s house, spiders used to fall out of the ceiling on me while I listened to French house music and avoided the deranged cannibal landlord (who had opened bottles of Maker’s Mark FUCKING EVERYWHERE. Seriously. All over the place. It was crazy. And, he used to bring these sad women over, so as to ply them with Maker’s Mark. Jesus.)

Despite the spiders, I would sit and people-watch the whorehouse across the street.

It’s really was less cracked-out than it sounds.

…Kind of.

One day I did totally see a guy that had obviously been fishing in the downtown sewer ditches make his way back home with no catch.  And, there was this endless battle over stolen shopping carts between men that squatted in the old Victorians.

That area is totally gentrified now.  At the time it was about 4 blocks from my regular club, and 2 blocks from where the luxury lofts had just been developed.

Stories like this are why I salute the delay of the adoption of smartphones (PDA’s as they were called back in the day in the East Asian market) in the states.

It’s one thing to tell the story.

It’s another to have photographic evidence.

Betty Lou, 2004, Karen Kuehn

So, after posting the (probably incredibly ill-advised) virginity-themed erotic romance short, I ran across this pic.

Most of my early groping-toward-the-inevitable happened on back roads.

We were in 11th grade, and there was nowhere indoors to do that sort of thing. I lived in a double wide with seven other people, and my uncle and grandmother were right next door. He had a largely unemployed former-alcoholic-biker turned Pentecostal evangelist for a father. There was always someone with access to a firearm at home.

So, we took to dirt roads and the 15 minutes that could end up unaccounted for in any given trip from here to there.

He drove an orange 1977 F350 he called “The Beast.” Once upon a time it had been red, but by the mid 90′s it had definitely faded to a splotchy orange. The thing had mirrors like an 18-wheeler, reeked of old oil, and the door hinges slammed so hard it made the whole monster clang and vibrate. It was not a truck for sneaking around in.

It had a long bench seat. It was a stick shift, and without fail, I got to hear the sort of comments high school boys make about pretty much anything phallic. Despite the lewd comments, it was far better for teenage pawing than my car; I drove an early 80′s Pontiac 4-banger held together with gum and luck and bungee cords. If we had the truck on a given night, there was a good shot we’d end up on the side of the road.

If you’re wondering how long it takes a shy boy to get frustrated with only ever getting to third base, the answer is something like 6 weeks. We were in that big truck, on a long stretch of gravel between my family’s two-unit trailer park and huge, out-of-place Jehova’s Witness temple. Cows to the left and milo to the right. It’s flat out there. We lived so far out, that the FM signals from Dallas went intermittently fuzzy. You could see the floodlights at the temple, the cars going down the highway. The radiant light from the college town 20 miles off turned the clouds above purpley-orange.

We were doing what high school kids do. Or at least, what they used to do.

And, bra off, various things unzipped, and vertically arranged, I know I made some comment about the time. It was getting late.

This line?

(”We only go so far and no farther, and what’s the point, anymore?”)

That’s what he said.

Which is, of course, a foolish thing to say when you’re 18 and she’s 16, and you’re both virgins, and you actually want to get laid. I have no doubt that guilt-tripping has de-virginized many an American youth, but it wasn’t happening on that night.

“What’s the point?”

So I made him wait longer. Something like a month.

When his dad found condoms in the closet later that spring, he suddenly ended up driving a very cramped Geo.