Newport News, Virginia
March 02, 2009
I've been shallow my entire life. I distinctly remember being envious of my brothers friends on account of them being better looking than mine.
I started to play with a boy that lived on the same street as me. One day I wanted to borrow a movie, and so we went to ask his mother.
His mother was wheelchair ridden and grossly obese. She kept it dark in her house and smoked cigarettes, and coughed so that her legs kicked up from their little metal foot rest.
No he can't borrow a movie because remember last time mommy loaned a movie to a little boy and that little boy never brought it back? No. Mommy just told you why.
He'll return it mom, he's our new neighbor.
Of course I would return it, I lived two houses down and my parents went to church on Sunday.
She blew cigarette smoke out of her nostrils and crushed the butt out in a little glass ashtray on the table. Go outside and play with your sister.
This was to become my archetype for creepy.
The sisters name was Holly, and she had deodorant smeared in waxy strokes under her arms. She shared her mothers yellow hair, her oval face. I don't remember the boys name, even though he was my age and the reason, supposedly, for my visits to that house.
Holly looked at me in a way that boys didn't, in a way that made me pretend to be her brothers friend. Later in life I would learn that a girl becomes her mother, more or less.
There was another kid, pudgy and pug nosed with yellow hair, that I played with on occasion. He was awkwardly American with his catchers mitt from K-mart, his overweight dad that was going to teach him to play someday.
My mother used to tease me sometimes when I cried. My lower lip trembled, and she would say things like Oh boy, here goes the lip quivering. Look out, here come the waterworks. It's funny the things you remember.
I had friends, even close ones. But they came and went too fast, like summer vacation.
By the time I was a teenager, my dreamy, antisocial sullenness had developed into full on, suicidal depression.
I made a pact with a friend of mine. We wouldn't kill ourselves unless we were still depressed when we were eighteen. Later, we extended it to twenty one. I reasoned that if worse came to worse, we could just be alcoholics.
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