Boxed Wine

We woke up at Brandon’s house. I had slept on the floor of his room in a pile of blankets, Brandon in his bed, Steve either in The Reno Room or in someone else's bed or on the floor next to. I had mostly slept through my hangover, so I felt pretty okay, standing up and venturing out into the "Pussy Pad" at large.

For the record, it should be stated that Brandon started saying that things he liked were "pussy" around this time. “That is so pussy”, he would say. I think it started on a group trip to Jenner around Easter weekend. John patented the phrase and B ushered it gracefully into the vernacular. It was one of those things that maybe should have stayed in Jenner but us girls (Morgan, Persephone and I) wouldn't let it die and Brandon probably liked it a little too much to let it go anyway, and now he’s unhappy that I’m telling you about it, right? Sorry, B. I am so sure. Surely, this is not the origin of the "Pussy Pad’s” name, but I like to think I was maybe remotely involved.

I walked into the kitchen and found Steve holding a pot of coffee, or maybe just a cup of coffee, but when I asked him how long he'd been up and what he'd been doing, he said, "I drank a pot of coffee!" in this way he has of sounding completely surprised by himself, like he's revealing the information to you and he both for the first time and yes, it is baffling, isn't it?

This quality is incredibly endearing and no one can resist it, no matter how hard you're trying not to like him (because he's your friend's ex boyfriend), let alone fall in love with him.

He poured me a cup of coffee, or I think he would have if he hadn't drunk the whole pot already and somehow we got to the subject of boxed wine. It was about 11am, maybe noon. We had stayed up ‘til at least an hour after sunrise the night before, belting out Kelly Clarkson songs and crowd surfing one another to punkrock music, the Ramones and The Descendents, in a crowd of 5, stomping down the matted, brown shag carpet and slamming our floppy bodies against the Reno Room's wood paneling while it was still dark. Then talking all kinds of stupid shit and chain-smoking on the back steps as it began to get light, before stumbling off to beds and floors.

It was uncomfortable how easily Steve and I joked together, one line after another. We were...riffing. Isn’t that what comedians say? Ugh (maybe). I was enjoying myself a little too much. I knew I should not be enjoying the company of this person but I was, to a surprising and overwhelming extent and that was confusing. I wanted to look around and ask, "Are ya gettin this? Are ya? Cuz this is solid GOLD!"

He was still wearing the white wife-beater with the phrase, "something something.....ROCK" scrawled across it in sharpie. I can't remember what the shirt said exactly, probably something inspired by Bruce Springsteen. In one of the photos documenting the night there's Steve glaring at someone off camera, with scrawny arms crossed in fake displeasure, super pale and then rosy pink at the elbows, hiding all of the message but the word "ROCK". Someone, a girl, had drawn it on Steve's chest the night before. I remember feeling a pang of jealousy and quickly battling it back into the nether regions where exasperated, feral cats dwell and pace and chew repressed things into chimeric, figgity other things that then become gobs of expectorated poetic business.

I'm in the foreground wearing this 60's mini dress, all white & brown & pink like neopolitan ice cream, more girlie than what I’m used to, mascara smeared, eyes half-lidded, gesturing, probably making some slurred pronouncement. Terrible posture all around.

I got in so much trouble for that photo. It went up on flickr and burnt its way through the internet's bowels all the way to New Mexico where my friend was living temporarily in a stucco house in the desert, having left San Francisco behind "for good". She was upset, what was I doing in the same frame with Steve, the one who...? It's not fair to say that I got in trouble. My friend was legitimately upset. On the other hand, I was legitimately sure that I was very happy about everything that was upsetting her--this association with her past--which confused me. Something that had brought me joy was causing someone that I cared about pain.

Brandon and Alli were broken up, Morgan and David had just broken up, various combinations of people were maybe still messing around, all the poets were messing around with all of the poets, Persephone was back from L.A. attempting to scrabble her way up the side of alchoholism, I hadn't had sex in 9 months, unless my timing is off here, and thought I might tear someone apart, while generally trying to recover sanity after immersing myself headlong into a narrative of what? the scorned lover? Eh, something more many-headed than that, I think, though in the end reducible to simple, common, traceable feelings related to repressed material from my childhood, as I would learn via my newly acquired and soon to beloved therapy. Honestly, describing the narrative of my actual winter and the narrative I was attempting to construct, takes getting back into a thought process, which thankfully is difficult to sink into now, partly because of it’s way of doubling back on itself, moving too quickly to notice holes, jumping from pained moment, to swooning remembrance with only a dots of ellipses to connect the two. I know that rage filled in the gaps in its subterranean way. The gaps were silent, spaced out chunks filled only with the kind of vertigo inducing anxiety that reminds you that you are not allowed to have that thought, and so you don’t. I didn’t. Let’s not dissociate just now, Lindsey.

Everything was a mess, really a mess, but there was this weird sublime quality to it, I think because I had friends and we were all being a mess together.

This was the lesson of the year: People cause other people pain, what's worse, some action or decision that gives, nourishes and excites one person can depleat, discourage and ravage their loved one. The summer previous to the present of this particular story, two summers ago now, BB and I had been drunk in his and Alli's kitchen, after one of the after-after parties, sitting at the wooden table and smoking out of the window. I was telling him about my hesitations about dating his friend (our friend), Matthew. The conversation went something like this:

Lindsey: I just don't want to hurt anyone and I don't want anyone to hurt me, yunno?

Brandon: Yeah, word. (Sigh)

(pause for meaningful look)

Brandon: But that's what people do.

Lindsey: Hurt each other.

Both: Yeah.

And that is what happened on all sides with it seemed like everyone I knew at once and we came to know this well and to understand things about it and etc.

The time stamp on the comment that John left about the photo of Steve and I on flickr, "Steve's arms", reads "Posted 12 months ago". That's so much later than I thought. I was so in love with my friends.

I did not buy into my friends’ care at first. These were relatively new friends. I was afraid to love them all. At some point it became clear to me out of stark necessity that I had little choice but to accept it, to buy into it, to bank on it, to put all my stock in it, to invest and to have faith in its fluctuating economy. I knew that as dramatic as it sounds, I might die without. If I continued to hold the wall, only venturing what I knew for sure would be received and reciprocated, I’d be back in Olympia, a denizen of the downstairs half of my (and here I stumble on the correct phrase) folks’ house, slithering in complacent depression, having given up.

So, in the kitchen, Steve and I were jabbering again, this time in contrast to the picture of the night before, less slurred, quicker and gesturing, waving our scrawny arms and disproportionately large hands or long fingers, in my case, to describe the space of the refrigerator that would hold the boxed wine.

I had devised a meal plan built entirely around boxed wine: white for breakfast, rosé for lunch, red for dinner. I described to Steve a refrigerator filled with boxes, organized into four shelves, one for white, labeled "breakfast", one for rosé labled "lunch" and one for red labeled, "dinner", the last shelf was Steve's idea: boxes of 7up, for...mixing.

The whole thing cracked me up. I couldn't get over it. I thought I was a genius for thinking of it and that Steve was probably a genius too. I pictured someone opening the door of their refrigerator and explaining to a friend or relative their “meal-plan” in a very matter of fact way that just killed me. This happens to me a lot. I think I am so hilarious and crack myself up. There are certain jokes that can only be fully appreciated within the context of the entire scope of my life and ridiculous being, or so I think. The jokes aren’t really that funny, objectively. You probably experience this too, with your own inside jokes—the truly inside ones. You can’t get more inside than that. The addition of 7up seemed at first incongruous because it had not come from my own brain but then perfect.

I felt uncomfortable. A number of things: Steve might be funnier than me, or that we might be really funny together, and how would that work if we were supposed to be so off-limits to each other. The off-limits problem would make it difficult for us to enter dance competitions and write vaudeville acts together.

We scrounged around the kitchen and found a paper and pen, cleared a space of half empty beer cans on the counter and began to draw first the refrigerator, having to run into the closet where Brandon and the ladies kept their refrigerator (behind a beaded curtain, mind you) to get the proportions right, then Steve adding the 7up box at the bottom as Brandon emerged from his room, still wearing the Vivianne Girl's band T-shirt from the night before and rubbing the sleep from his no-glasses eyes. We began explaining our drawing, "Look! Brandon! Boxed wine!"

In the picture of the night before, Brandon and I stand next to each other. Brandon leans into the frame, his face and ears impossibly pink, from drink? or bad lighting, sorry B. He’s holding the camera and closer in the frame and therefore bigger-- with that awesome Rihanna pin on his lapel, looking into the camera, all gently, like “Hey, what’s up? I’m Brandon. I’m from Kansas City and I like poetry. I’m a real nice guy.”—all of which is true. I’m holding a coffee cup, peeking over the top in the way I learned looked best from flirting with musician types when I was a teenager, crouching into my sip, affecting a bashful huddle.

I don’t remember, but I think it’s safe to say, and friends you are welcome to correct me here, that Brandon was not especially interested in the caffeinated creative produce of his more wide-awake friends.

I don’t know where that drawing is. Shoot. I thought I would have kept it, rifled it away in a back pocket at least, but I think I left it on the counter of BB’s kitchen, feeling a little ashamed of my exuberance over such a silly joke. Brandon didn’t like my joke, “Waaa.” I vaguely remember looking for it casually when we returned to the apartment after a gluttonous breakfast at St. Francis of savory green onion and cheddar pancakes for BB and I with both syrup and a side of gravy (yes!) and eggs benedict for Steve, plus a bit of cavalier flirting with the waiter wearing cut-offs and a bewildering (for Steve, amusing for me) interaction with a woman who knew Steve, whom Steve did not remember knowing, in which she left the conversation with the impression that she should put in a good word for Steve with an old mutual friend of theirs who had recently become single.

I didn’t find the picture and I remember feeling a loss, like it would be an important artifact, which might just be hind-sight mythologizing the past and somehow comforting the present, but I do wish I had it in front of me now. It would still probably crack my shit up.

Did we at any point buy a box of wine and drink it? No we did not. Did we consider it? Probably. Did Delano’s Grocery have boxed wine? No. Would we have bought a box of wine instead of a bottle of champagne and a quart of orange juice if they had? Maybe.

From here on the story would get awkward, because its point of departure, the boxed wine, has passed, leaving me with plenty more to say but lacking a structure. I want you to know that things turned out very well for everyone. But yeah, I don't want to make things all neat and quaint because they're not.

I have learned not to turn life into stories too much. There is a lot more that I could say that would more perfectly setup my present for the reader. It is much easier to view life as a story if one does not want to face the full experience of it. Turning pain into inside jokes with myself and my intimates was the best way I knew at the time of this story, to frame otherwise bewildering, vertigo inducing experiences. Yes, of course it should have happened that way, because the narrative arc would go just so, the punch line would go just there. What am I doing now then, I wonder? What am I avoiding? My present? My present seems to always be very slippery.

Aack, though you should know that nearly everyone in this story ended up at David and Sara's that night for their house-warming party in Oakland. When asked if he would want to BART over with Brandon and I to the party, that morning over mimosas, Steve had said, "Oh HELL no. I'm not going to no poet party. Fuck THAT!"

But he showed up with John and Cat and we snuck more than our fair share of chicken finger sandwiches and Steve put one in his shirt pocket while eating another one and I thought that I never would have thought that someone could love chicken fingers as much as I do, and there was much dancing and merry-making and awkwardness and hijinks.

The End.

Crud

*Dear readers, I want you to know that I have not forgotten you. I am working on my story of the week, just for you, right now, it is in the window behind this one. It is, however, sprawling out of control. The truth is, I do not know how to end stories. I do not know how to shape them. When I began college, I thought I wanted to be a fiction writer, but I had no follow-through with plot and no interest in character development. Now, I find myself interested in every detail of my story, because it came from my own life, but with no hooks to hang its many hats on. It has a kernal nugget, and am trying to surround it in interesting padding, but the padding is getting out of hand.

Do I include the part about the waiter I hit on?
Do I give away the ending that exists outside the confines of the story?
Do I attempt dialog?

Eh, I apologize. I'm processing on you. I am not currently in therapy. I apologize.

Love,
Lindsey

R.I.P. "The Hammy"

* Dear Reader, I plan to write one story from my life each week for...a while. Here is the first. Names have not been changed but hopefully nothing will be deemed too incriminating. I have tried to and will try to incriminate myself as much as anyone else in this and the stories to come. Don't worry, there will be more from our resident sex blogger, Elle Bonin, again soon.

My roommate Eryn, that's a weird boy's way of spelling Erin, not Aaron but a sort of a mid-gendered spelling, had a hamster named "The Hammy" and we called him Hammy for short, the hamster not Eryn. Eryn and his ex-girlfriend Stephanie got Hammy together, named him together, raised him in a cage together, though I don’t think they ever lived together, and when they broke up, Hammy came to live in The Phoenix House with us. Hammy lived in this wire cage shaped like an old-fashioned bird cage, with a series of colorful plastic tubes and platforms running through it for Hammy to traverse. The cage lived in a small room off the kitchen, that we called the "dining room" because in Olympia irresponsible, broke, twenty-something kids could afford to live in real houses because the houses were real run-down and real cheap, hence The Phoenix House.

I feel like I didn't pay much attention to Hammy. When an animal lives in a cage, in a room labled "dining" in a house full of people who "dine" on the couch while watching reruns of "Friends" or "The Simpsons" or whatever was on channel 13, FOX, that animal doesn't get a lot of attention, at least not from me. The other animals in the house, Lucy the dog and Miette and Spark the kittens, got plenty of attention because they were mobile. If they needed attention, they walked up to you and asked for it. In Lucy's case, threw her body at you. If they didn't get enough attention, Lucy pooped on the carpet near the front door and Miette peed on your laundry. Hammy had no such recourse. This is not to say that Eryn did not care for Hammy, he did in both the emotional and physical sense. I just felt like admitting that I did not do much for Hammy. Hammy and his cage felt a lot like sculpture, something you might look at with interest sometimes but don't touch and the more you pass it during your daily routine, the more it becomes a cabinet and less a piece of art.

When you live in a real house but don't quite have real lives yet, you tend to collect a lot of really useless stuff. For instance, there was a dead yellow car in our backyard, left by a previous resident who had promised to "take care of it". At this point, it had been spray-painted red and had grown a hornet's nest. Our roommate Amber complained that, "No, we can't get rid of the car!" because she wanted to smash in its windows with a baseball bat first. This resulted in a big conflict with my boyfriend at the time, Keith, who wanted to have it towed so that he could sell it or some part of it or make money off of it in some way. If Amber smashed the car, that would render it unsaleable, hence the dispute. In the end, I think we rolled the car into the street and left it, but I might be making that up.

The crawl spaces and basement of the house were full of years of delinquent roommate detritus: prom photos, photographic equipment, motorcycle parts, a motorcycle, dead amps, lamps, cords of all kinds, bench seats from cars, ironic thrift store art, ironic self-made art, gear of all kinds, rusted things, moldy things, things that people had at one time thought they wanted or needed but turned out they did not. When you finally have a space of your own, a house of your own, or the tenuous belief that it's yours and belongs to you because no one else cares about it, you want to fill it with things and when you don't have money or taste or any sense of how to make a life for yourself you fill it with crap and in our case pets too.

That's not to say that Hammy was crap. Hammy was great. Hammy's coloring resembled a muted dreamsicle, mostly dusty orange with some well-placed white splotches. His nose was pink and wiggled and his whiskers wiggled too. He was cute--he was a hamster. I couldn't detect much personality, but like I said, Hammy and I didn't spend a lot of time together. I was more concerned with my new kitten, Miette, my newish boyfriend, Keith, my newish life as a college student, my old existential crisis and my new ways of describing and extending it thanks to college.

One day I came home from school, I think, and set about doing one of a few things that I did a lot during that time: either making a salad, doing dishes (there were always a ton of dishes and the sink never drained), guiltily watching TV instead of reading critical theory, staring into space with a book in my hand and a notebook on the table or some other activity that's been lost to memory. Honestly, I didn't spend that much time on the internet then. There wasn't much to do besides check my Friendster account and send emails. No one was home but Eryn, and the animals. I looked in on Hammy who was lying on his back in the cage, limbs waving slowing in the air above him.

"Eryn, I think something's wrong with Hammy."

We pulled him out of the cage and he didn't look well. He was a little chilly too. I remembered a story from a book by James Harriot, about an English country veterinarian who goes about the countryside making house calls to farmers and their families that I had read and reread as a child. I was thinking specifically about the story of a sickly newborn lamb. I had to google various combinations of the words "English" "country" "veterinary" "children" and "stories until the phrase, "english childrens stories about a country veterinarian" turned up the right name just now. James Harriot, the kindly country vet, had put the lamb in the oven to warm it, which even as a child I found ironic, and the lamb had quickly regained health.

So, we put Hammy in the oven. We layed his weirdly contorted body on a round, mesh pizza tin and set the oven to "warm", and hesitated about whether to close the door. We closed the door. After about 5 minutes we checked on Hammy and he seemed to bit more perky and less contorted. I thought of the snow-white newborn lamb and how happy the children in the story had been when it had revived. I pictured their rosy cheeked faces beaming and clapping their chubby hands together while their mother looked on with mild pleasure, her rough farm hands folded in her white-aproned lap, either that or I'm just picturing it now.

We shut the door again for good measure. Eryn and I looked at each other hopefully and said something about how he looked a little better. We decided we should probably still take him to a vet, but who would treat a hamster? As Eryn held Hammy in his cupped hands and Hammy started to move a bit more normally, right side up now, I hauled out the phone book and started making calls. I was ready for veterinary disdain--these city vets were nothing like James Harriot and wouldn't think to care about a thing like Hammy. I was such a writhing ball of anxiety at the time, prone to panic attacks, especially when tasked with writing straight-forward, analytical prose essays in my college poetry classes, that my level-headed practicality in this situation was beginning to impress me. Not to be gruesome or to make use of Hammy's pain for dramatic and figurative affect, but psychologically, I felt like Hammy looked a lot of the time: both frozen and flailing. But here, in my kitchen, phone book in one hand, phone in the other, I thought of myself as the best person for the job. Eryn needed my help and I was being helpful. I came to one veterinary clinic that seemed sympathetic to our cause and jotted down the address. It was a ways away, out in Tumwater, the most remote of the three Thurston county towns Olympia-Lacy-Tumwater. It was the most rural of the three, with a somehow more pronounced feeling of quiet gloom and eeriness than the other two. Sometimes Eryn, Keith and I would venture out to Tumwater to go to an all-night diner called Cattins for their all-you-can-eat fish n’ chips special that we would try to sereptitiously share between the three of us. One of the waitresses’ there, Betty, had a fake nose and you could see it’s rubber starting to peel off on one side, which was fasciniating. Other than that there wasn’t much reason to go to Tumwater but I offered to go along because I was being helpful.

Eryn and I were friends, but didn't spend much time alone together. He and Keith, were more buddy-buddy, for instance, Keith had to tell Eryn not to look at pornography on my computer when we discovered his indiscretion because the photos were downloading directly to my desktop, using that brilliantly subtle way that men have that I will never be able to accomplish. I imagine it went something like this:

Keith: Hey dude, you know how when you click on a link to a picture on the internet and it downloads to your desktop?

Eryn: Yeah.

Keith: Yeah...

Eryn: Uh....oh.

Keith: Yeah, so...

Eryn: Oh, totally. Won’t happen again.

I would later bust Keith for the same thing via the same technological oversight and my twenty-one year old self would be full of righteous indignation and try to refuse to see the connection between his interest in pornography and our my disinterest in sex.

And Eryn was tall and handsome and kind in a humble sort of bashful way, not cocky like most of my musician dude friends were, which is probably why I felt a little uncomfortable around him. Yes, that is why I was uncomfortable around him because honestly, we probably would have dated if I hadn't already been with Keith and maybe all three of us knew it. But I wanted to help, so we piled into the giant Ford van that he and his band mates used to pack gear into for shows in Seattle and Portland and the odd West coast tour and I held Hammy while Eryn drove. It would have been better if I had driven and Eryn had held his hamster but I didn't have my license at yet, due to the same anxiety that kept me from doing anything normal and productive, partially due to a fear of becoming normal and productive, and wouldn't get it until the following summer when I turned 22 and moved to California in an attempt to escape the very same anxiety.

We drove mostly in silence, maybe chatting a bit, maybe listening to the radio or more likely an old tape, Eryn reaching over and petting Hammy’s belly with a finger every once in a while, but Hammy was starting to look a little beleaguered. His tiny pink feet clawed the air in slow motion, super slow motion like that really awkward way that people look when we’re trying to imitate slow motion on film, and I could feel his body clenching and unclenching in my hands, as his mouth opened wide, showing his pair of top and bottom teeth, long, thin,yellow, and paired to look like one big baby tooth on top and one big baby tooth on the bottom. I looked at Eryn, then back at Hammy.

"Um, Eryn, Hammy isn't looking so good."

Eryn looked down at Hammy then back at the road and we both said things back and forth that amounted to:

Lindsey: Uh...

Eryn: Uh.....

Lindsey: Uh......

Eryn: Uh...

Maybe Eryn sped up, I don’t remember but for dramatic affect let’s say that we peeled into the parking lot of the veterinary clinic, or the opposite of peeled because we were parking and hopped out of the van and half ran-half walked into the clinic, trying to look sort of normal but also trying to move fast because Hammy’s life was in our hands and he was maybe dying and kind of burst into the entryway of the office and looked down into my hands and Hammy was dead. He had frozen in one of his contorted slow motion swim strokes. We looked up at the woman behind the desk who might have been the sympathetic voice I had spoken to earlier, with her look of expectation and readiness to serve, and looked back to Hammy in my hands still dead, and sort of smiled weakly, shrugged our shoulders, and headed for the door.

“Oh...” I heard her say and then maybe, “Too late, I guess.”

I think I patted Eryn’s shoulder as we walked back to the car and said something like, “I’m sorry, dude.” or hopefully, “I’m sorry, Eryn.”

At some point I probably transferred Hammy to Eryn or maybe I held him in my lap on the drive home as we discussed the proper burial proceedings in that practical way that people have of going to logistics for comfort. Eryn would call Stephanie and what time would he probably do it so that I could make sure to help and maybe the evening would be best so that Keith and Amber could come too, but once we got home I was exhausted and a little overwhelmed and went straight to my room upstairs, the big one with the bathroom even though I was the youngest in the house, that cost $250/month, which is crazy to me now, and fell asleep. I slept through Hammy’s funeral and I think Eryn ended up burying him in the backyard by himself that night after dark, which sounds pretty maudlin. I know I felt guilty for missing it and the guilt seemed to somehow outweigh the good feelings of having helped earlier. Some of the guilt came from exactly that, the fact that I had felt so good about myself earlier. While Hammy was dying and Eryn was upset about his pet, I was feeling proud of my level-headedness and kind-heartedness and what a good friend I was and no I wasn’t attracted to Eryn because that would mean I was bad when I really wanted to be good and then I missed the funeral and was automatically, irreversibly bad. Bad all around. Bad friend, bad student (having spent valuable study time helping), bad girlfriend for feeling close to Eryn, which once you’re there you might as well just go all the way to bad daughter, bad sister, bad person, which is what my therapist at the time called "The Parrot" and "The Bug". The Parrot is good and The Bug is bad. You're either one or the other but nowhere in between.

In any case, Eryn was sad for a while, visibly depressed, but everyone seemed to be pretty mopey, not just in our house but generally speaking. If you weren't making ascerbic, cutting remarks about some jerk and their perceived over-enthusiastic attitude over a can of Pabst in a semi-dank semi-dark interior space, you were one of those jerks, which probably meant you weren't from Olympia.

But Hammy was a good Hamster. He did all the things that good Hamsters do, including die within his approximately 3 year lifespan of natural causes. Yes, I just googled the phrase "hamster lifespan".

R.I.P. "The Hammy". I don't know why I thought of you today.

Love,

Lindsey

Cool Sex Moves

I'm thinking of starting my very own SEX BLOG but I thought I'd try it here first. Here are some cool new moves to spice up your time in the bedroom! I hope you like them!

1. "The Figure 8". Once you've mastered this one, try flipping it horizontally for our next move...

2. "Infinity"

3. "Morse Code". Nothing says, "I love you" like saying it in Morse Code with a body part.
That's: .. .-.. --- ...- . -.-- --- ..- for any of you who don't know Morse Code.

4. "Flossing"

5. Try writing your lovers name in cursive. OR for an extra challenge, try bubble letters! Don't forget to dot any I's with a heart!

6. "Cub Scouts Honor"

7. "Scouts Honor"

8. "Eagle Scouts Honor"

One of the teachers at my school retired and I reaped the benefits