He stopped hanging out with me as often so he could hang out with his love. And so I, alone for a time, clung to Dave, my portable potable supply of new music and friendship.
Dave has long blond hair with numerous split ends. But even though you tell him that, he still doesn’t cut them. Nope, won’t cut his hair, he says, and he doesn’t. A man true to his word, I guess, which is more than I can say for myself, at least sometimes. Dave likes to garden, and hang out in the yard for extremely long amounts of time. Dave can also be awfully quiet sometimes, a quality which has made it really hard for me to deal with him as a confidant. Travis will often give numerous words of wisdom, whereas, Dave the wily and pernicious one that he is, will simply listen to my numerous grievances and then go on with something else. Dave is like that, and that is unfortunate, because Dave is one of my few Houston friends that are around anymore.
Did I mention that things were getting chilly around here in Houston?
Well, they are.
Last time I was there, an year and a half ago, my parents were yelling at me, telling me that I need to get on the ball or I’ll be stuck with them for the rest of my life.
The problem is, I AM stuck with them for the rest of the my life.
Parental units, they are another matter. I have recently learned in my college classes that parents are necessary for preservation of society, but I am not sure. I’d like to think that we could all just kind of skip the years between our first pimple and our first mortgage, hence rendering real parenting (that nitty-gritty “Listen to me, Sean, either you’re going to hear what I have to say or you’re out of here”-type of thing) obsolete.
Only in the past year did my home life become bearable. Prior to that, there was a fight daily about just about anything. Religion was the number one thing to argue about in my family. I’ve been through such bad experiences with church, religion and the associated attitudes that I don’t believe I can ever return (if return is the apt word) to a normal God-faring life.
Take for example, the ongoing argument about the family devotions. I told Mom and Dad that I hated them, because I didn’t think that I was in any mood to hang around and tell them, (and God) my frustrations. I knew my frustrations, and they were my parents!
So when I attempted to tell them that, they shit. And well, I ended up in a fist fight with my father, where my father and I began biting and clawing at each other [He still has a scar, but my neck abrasions have since went away]. And he used to be on my side about religion! My stupid, p-whipped dad. I’m going to grow up to be just like him. Ergh.
No I’m not, I thought again.
I think he changed his opinion soon after my mom went on a vaction without him. He missed her terribly, much, much worse than I missed Julie when she left to go to Boston, or worse than I missed my home in the fourth grade… he was so miserable that he paid to have her fly back early. I love Mom too, but- it was just two weeks. Two weeks! I guess, though, if you’ve spent every day in 24 years with someone and they leave, you freak. Well, he did. So, needless to say, within a couple months he had reversed his church stand (which had been a quaint worship ceremony involving sheets and a bed and the closing of eyes) and started waking up, going to church. But it wasn’t a problem until Ninth Grade, when they started going to Second Baptist. And boy, boy oh boy, did I love Second Baptist. I loved feeling out of place in the huge Sunday school, I loved feeling out of place in the stadium/cathedral, ohh, I loved it all. I loved it so much that I told my parents
they could stick the Baptistdome where the sun didn’t shine. And that’s when the fights broke out.
If I didn’t go, I couldn’t get my license.
If I didn’t go, they wouldn’t take me to see my girlfriend.
If I didn’t go, I’d be grounded for the whole week.
The problem with grounding was that getting away from my parents was my favorite pastime, and the amount of fighting dramatically increased as the amount of time I spent at home increased.
At one point, after a fight, I crawled behind the Corvette so that my father couldn’t leave until he promised that he would take me to get a haircut. Meanwhile, Christie just sat there, miserable, knowing that the family was being torn apart.
“If God is perfect, how come everything that he makes–dies?” I would ask them. I would get out “Why I am not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell out and read it at the dinner table. I did everything. I took my Composition Book to church and wrote.
Things die to release them from the pain of living, I’ve heard. If this is true, then why be born in the first place?
And that’s how I released tensions. I knew I was right, I knew they were full of crap. So I rolled with it. There were many, many turbulent days, but they ended within the first few months of counseling.
But how the heck did we go start going to counseling? Well, my sister started becoming depressed often. So she went, and then I went in one week because I decide it’d be fun. Fun. Sure, what the hell, let’s see what will happen, I said. Besides, there were always aspects of my personality I was never to fond of, let’s see what we can do about them. And that’s when it all started, because everything I didn’t like about me was pretty much the result of unvented frustration brewed up between my father and I. And so on and so forth.
When I was young and an angry firebrand, I did some awfully stupid things, stupid things that used to upset my parents. Things like the fact that I ate food in my room, or that I borrowed things without asking… minor things, but things that nonetheless bugged them. “You’ll start little and then… then you’ll be doing bigger things…” Well, I am proud to say that my parents were full of shit. Full of SHIT. You see, I never, ever, ever, have done anything that I didn’t want to do. I’ve never let any stupid ‘friends’ push me around into getting me to do what they wanted me to do. And I never let peer pressure get the best of me. I am not a nameless individual. I am Sean
McCormick, and I stand alone. My parents must have reasoned that I was brainless, something I will never forgive them for. I am not a meathead. I have an idea of what I want, and it will be done when I want it. I am in control of my own destiny. So fuck you Dad, thinking that I am going to take your stupid Corvette. I’ve never even driven it, and I’ve been capable of driving for almost four years (I got my permit the day I turned 15). And fuck you, Mom, for thinking I don’t know what I am doing when I take the day off
.
When parents recognize adulthood in spite of disagreements in judgment, that is the time to buy them flowers and talk to them about how much you love them. But in the meantime, give ‘em hell. You know that most parents mean well, even if the only fruit of their labor is a bad seed. I love my stupid parents, even though they aren’t stupid, nor are they mine… they’ve become Travis’s…
So, when your done with your parents, given them to Travis. They’ll like him, and then he’ll live at your house, too.
But enough of all that. I have been released from the bonds of parental difficulty and now aspire to new heights. Like– well, like wondering all sorts of things. Like just what is jumbo shrimp?
That’s a little heavy for a lighthearted novel about how I, Sean Ryan Mc-Corrr-mick, manage to survive this incredible loss of vitality in my present residence. So suffice to say that isn’t supposed to be a lighthearted novel about how Sean Ryan Mc-Corrr-mick manages to survive this incredible loss. This is supposed to be about coming of age, of realizing destiny, of seeing your way through the dark tunnels of life, hoping for a light at the end of a long distant tunnel. Problem is, most of the time you find this sort of light, it turns out to be a train coming your way…
Yet life goes on. And on, and on, and on. To be certain, life is a lot like the Energizer bunny… except that it takes more than a dead battery to kill a man. And normally you don’t get to be in as many commercials.
Okay, actually, life isn’t quite like the Energizer bunny. Life is far more real and–well, it’s sillier than that most of the time. Like take for instance my experience at U of H…
(at this point, Kermit the Frog waves his puppet arms and says, “Yeeeaaaah” as the curtain rolls back)
You can see both the Medical Center and downtown from here, I think to myself, staring blankly out the window. I have about five minutes until my next class, and I am sitting here in the PGH, on the third floor. I look down at my Composition book and begin to write something about the banality of nature when I hear the chime of the elevator stopping on my floor.
(At this point, the elevator door opens and Kool and the Gang come out, in classic seventies attire, singing “Celebrate, good times, come on… Waaaahoo!”)
And suddenly, my fashionable 90’s shoes turn into white thick heeled disco boots, my brand new jeans turn into green disco bellbottoms with white frill at the bottom and a lovely gold chain now hangs out of my pants pocket. A gold lame shirt replaces my Judybats T-shirt and my hair foofs up as the individual floor tiles begin to light up in patterns. For a moment I think I’m standing on the Tic-Tac-Dough game board until I realize that the Dragon hasn’t reared its ugly head nor has anyone said, “I’ll take ‘men with perms’ for a block, Wink.”
Then the lights dim and I realize that my chin has developed an enormous dimple in its center, making me want to exclaim, “Sandy!” (oops, wrong movie). So I do what any other self-respecting man would do–I put on my rainbow chef’s hat, my butterfly collared creme jacket and I- I- I- hear Donna Summer in the distance–I put up my finger and I boogie- a serious boogie- and I am hot, sexy– my individual chest hairs stand on end as the testosterone pumps– I am alive, everyone is staring at me, totally engrossed in my presence. Then I realize, as I do my backflip superfly disco turns- I realize that I am alone on the dance floor. And suddenly, the music stops and a small, wrinkled up, hole-punched card falls gracefully from the disco ball, fluttering and landing on a single lit square of the floor. It is my dance card.
I awoke the next morning in a daze. I surveyed my room; there were many indications that I had had a restless sleep. The sheets were everywhere and I was facing the wrong direction. The computer table too was in shambles: diskettes, pens, markers, even the Jolly Ranchers were in disarray. What happened? I thought to myself. I rubbed my eyes as I remembered. I was in Exile.
It was not as if I not been in Exile before, in fact, in the past, I had disappeared from the public scene of Gerry, Scottie and even Travis for many days, even months. But this Exile seemed different. This was not sitting at home on a summer day, thinking about how much fun I would have if I didn’t hang around those people for a while. This Exile was artificial, and strangely painful. It was only 10:30am and already I was in an uncomfortable state of mind. But I woke up, ate breakfast and went for a long walk with my brother. He asked me when the end of world was coming. The end of the world? I thought, he’s only 14. And he’s not even in Exile. I hugged him and told him that it wasn’t for a long time, that is, unless of course he’d like it to be sooner, in which case I could arrange a visit from David Parajon for him. And so we talked on, about Christie, about the true status of his “girlfriend,” and about trees. He cheered me up with his descriptions of Mom and Dad as we walked home.
Exile, and homesickness for that matter, is always, always, always worst at night. Memories of strange dreams I had had while camping in the Fourth Grade still disturb me to this day. I feared that the mere thought of knowing that I was in Exile would drive me into deep silence that night.
I was on FM 1093 when I started to go into deep silence. I first thought of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The paranoia and delusion of Raskolnikov seemed so real that for a moment I felt like him. The sickening chaos of insanity looming ever closer… Raskolnikov was lost. Lost in his world for the person he was and for what he had done. And like Raskolnikov, I too felt lost. In the dark, barren wastelands of eastern Fort Bend county, it was not hard to understand why he had gone insane.
But before I could descent much further into the abyssal depths of moodiness, I began to think about the past two weeks.
It was chilly the other night, and as the wind blew all around, the words to “Stwisted” fell into place:
got a strong case of weakness-a rich worthless love
i tell you straight out that it’s twisted
a crack flash of lightning struck from above
knocked down a cow and i kissed ya
Why make my heart go to bed at night hungry?
Why make my heart go to bed at night cold?
Why make my heart go to bed at night — beating alone?
It was as if I was holding my breath. It was as if I were holding my breath, attempting to forget that I was turning blue and getting lightheaded, all the while thinking how much I would desperately like to inhale. But I didn’t, because to inhale prematurely would mean the death of the best laid plans of mice and men. Besides, I reasoned, perhaps if you hold your breath for long enough, you won’t need oxygen anymore.
A long time ago, when I used to hang with my “band fag” friends in high school, I would spend long hours over at
Meredith Braden’s house. Meredith and I were really good friends, and one morning, out of the blue, after an all night party, I came downstairs, put on “Mr. Jones”, and danced. She just watched me, laughing. But I didn’t care, I was so happy– I had just broken up with Staci, but I had my friends–the self declared Big Parade. And I was Mr. Jones… everybody saw what had happened, they felt bad, and so they became my support group. This was the beginning of the regular Saturday Night Party. “Mr. Jones will stick around/he’s everybody’s friend!”
As leader of the Big Parade, I carried the baton. Meredith had gone to New Orleans and gotten me one of those custom books that was called “The Big Parade,” about how I, Sean McCormick, was honorary mayor of Cypresswood for a day (thus began my campaign) and I was to lead the Big Parade that year.
They call for Mr. Jones
They put him in charge
Mr. Jones will help us out
He’s a lucky guy…
The Society for the Preservation of Sean Ryan McCormick, though, did not last much longer. Unfortunately, as my job as “culture advocate” became more and more successful (I got them, total nerds, if you will, to become hip), they became more and more open-minded. My support group decided that they could support me and still hang out with Staci…
So I dropped the baton and left them to their fate.
And just where did fate take them? Off to college, the likes of UT, Sam Houston, A&M, while I sat there in Houston, writing my memoirs.
Nowadays, when I hear “Mr. Jones,” I sadly think of that first morning, running downstairs and dancing while Meredith ironed. Friends can really be something, can’t they?
“Though the wind may whisper and moan sometimes
we all need a kind place to live
Though the wind may whisper and howl at your door
we all need the comfort of friends.”
My, doesn’t the wind whisper and moan around Houston more than ever…
It began one night when I went up to see Julie (my girlfriend) and Julie had to go to Dallas to see her aunt. Well, so, never short of companion, hung out with Jamie, one of Julie’s friends who seemed to bond well with me during my previous visits.
So Jamie took me over to the apartment of her friend, Anna. Actually, it was more along the lines of me taking Jamie over, being that Jamie wasn’t quite herself, and I had
a car. Anna has really cool wallpaper, or so said Jamie,, so, orange juice in hand, Jamie and I went over and we all talked over a glass of wine. Of course, this was not before Anna and I talked about how we both liked Kix cereal while I ate a bowl in her kitchen.
Kix cereal, by the way, is really great. From a childhood standpoint, I remember quite specifically being amazed at how well they floated, and how they stayed crunchy for along time. I would go answer the door or answer the telephone, and when I came back, my Kix would still be crunchy. Who would call a Kindergartner on the phone, you ask? Well, I still remember this one. The very first call I ever got on the telephone was from this girl who was in my class, her name was Stacy. She was cute, I remember that. I also remember getting beaten up by her in the Second Grade after she found out that I told a couple people that I liked her. I seriously think this was foreshadowing of the kind of things that would happen to me in high school. Of course, what this all has to do with Kix cereal is uncertain.
So, anyway, Anna and I talked about how cool cereal was, Kix specifically, and then she made me a pancake. Now if you know me, you’ll say, “But Sean, you hate pancakes!” Well, I have to admit, those in the know are right. I can’t stand pancakes. Except that I was willing to try something new, and I have to admit, this one was the best one I have ever had. This pancake was about the size of the pan, hence this thing was literally a pancake. And I thanked her voraciously for it, because, well, hell, you tend to thank people voraciously when they feed you, so I did.
So we were sitting there in her really nice apartment and we were talking, Anna, Clay, myself, Jamie, and Jose, Winter’s boyfriend, and drinking. Just consuming wine, just talking. And someone says something about going out with a whole slew of girls, and well, I pipe up, because, being bored, I do a lot of unnecessary things, like count my toes and sit on the toilet until my legs fall asleep. And one of those times while I was sitting on the toilet, waiting for my legs to go to sleep, I started jotting down a list of everyone I had ever kissed. Later, being even more bored, I put it into my computer.
This, the concept of a kiss list, gave Anna the idea to make her own. And she came up with ten. Of course, then, having the names in her hand, she went over them with a fine tooth comb.
It was neat that way; I could never go over my girlfriends like that.
Then we went over to Clay’s apartment and had many shots of Vodka then numerous Poppers until I was throughly intoxicated. At this point, drawing on the fact that she had wrested from me my middle name, Ryan, she began to ask me, Sean Ryan McCormick, if I didn’t think I shouldn’t have another drink. And I said no, not really.
But in that thick Irish accent that she managed to obtain out of her Southern twang, she asked me if my name, Sean Ryan Mc-Cor-mick, wasn’t Irish, and if I shouldn’t consider having more to drink. Taken, I agreed. Since then, I have come to realize that anyone that can get me to drink more than what I would normally drink obviously has either superhuman powers, or some truly amazing powers of persuasion.
In her case, it was a bit of both. This 5′10 redhead had a truly remarkable character–divaesque, she was the kind of person who could instantly recognize your faults and attack you on them before she even knew your name. And, she did. She recognized my insecurity, my sense of purposelessness, and, in her case, the strong amount of lust that I exhibited toward her all that night. Yet never once did she kiss me: she wanted me to make that mistake on my own. Perhaps she figured I would, if so, she was wrong. Of the few things that I do remember from that night, one of them was her numerous attempts to convince me that my girlfriend was a real bitch, or I’d be with her that night, instead of on my own in Waco.
I pondered in my drunkenness… how come it’s so much easier to write to people when there is utter turmoil? I think it is a phenomemon found throughout humanity. Take a look at all the progress made because of wars. Or at the progress made because of unrequitted love… But I digress.
I went back to Brian and Winter’s apartment and threw up.