At Least They're Committed

My folks didn’t pay for my college. Scripps Howard payed a little bit — enough for tuition and a little bit of food — but the rest was up to me. To save money, Mariko, my Siamese cat, and I had moved out of the beautiful old house that had been converted into apartments and moved in with my friend Michelle and her family. They also had a beautiful old house, but their restaurant had recently closed and they were struggling financially and it helped to have the little bit of rent I could contribute. I can’t remember if their scary @$$ old grandma lived there or if Michelle told me so many stories of when she did that I remember it that way. If she was there, she didn’t come out of her room.

My room was on the top of the stairs and to the right. The parents had two poodles and if I didn’t keep my door closed tight, which wasn’t easy because it was off kilter, one of them would go into my room and shit on my bed. No matter how often I washed the sheets or scoured that damn place, the whole upstairs always had that old-lady-dried-dog-shit-covered-with-detergent smell. Maybe that’s because if the dog couldn’t get into my room, it would just find another spot on the blue and green shag carpet to crap. The lighting was bad, he went in the corners, chances are if that house still stands there’s still poodle poop embedded in the floorboards.

Michelle’s folks were nice enough. They were people who wanted to be flashier and hipper than they were, but that’s OK. When they were finally resigned to not being able to make a go of it in Trinidad, they set out to the big city, to Denver, to rebuild. They took the poodles and grandma if she wasn’t already dead. And there was much rejoicing. Michelle, Mariko and I had the house to ourselves. And there was much rejoicing. What I paid for ‘rent’ each month would essentially be what Michelle would live on and, oh, by the way we needed to stay out of the freezer. When the restaurant had folded, the folks had myriad steaks, scads of shrimp and loads of lobster locked away. Once they got something started in Denver, they would come back and retrieve the menu.

Right.

We kept it pretty cool, really. No Animal House antics for us. My boyfriend was around: Mitch, the baseball player who was mildly psychotic and one of those on-again-off-again things. We never broke up officially, though, because we were at the very worst friends with fringes and at best . . . um, not much more, but still together because once I’m done that’s it. Anyway, he would come over with Wally, who ended up playing for the Braves for awhile, and some of the other ball players. Wally’s real name was Paul, but he looked like Wally Cleaver and still, when I hear the name Paul, I think of the shortened version as Wally. Anyway, Wally was hung! I just noticed during strip poker once. Oh, and Tony and Danny came over, too. They were our gay friends, but they weren’t a couple. Michelle’s boyfriend, John, was going to college elsewhere, which worked well for her.

It was in the kitchen of Michelle’s house that Mitch, Tony, Michelle and Danny slipped me some acid because I was such a saint and they thought it would be wicked fun. I was on Mitch’s lap and the dining area suddenly went into cartoon: I was sitting in the Flintstones’ kitchen, rounded sandstone counters and cabinets thickly outlined with dark brown crayon. My friends went into cartoon-mode, too, with exaggerated smiles and bright gold and rich chocolate hair. . . except for Mitch. I turned and looked at him, confused. “Mitch! You’re Pete Rose!” He, who had taken acid intentionally, thought that was awesome. “I am? Freaky!” OK, so Mitch was 6-4, about 230 and looked absolutely nothing like Pete Rose. Bad trip.

Michelle and I tried, really we did, to stay out of the freezer, but c’mon. When we could use the rent money at the Placebo, the 3.2 bar, instead of groceries? Let’s be real. Hard to believe that we actually got tired of steak and shrimp and lobster. I remember Mariko politely sitting on the chair next to me and me feeding her chunks of lobster off the end of a fine silver fork. Quite the change from when I had to have boyfriends smuggle food out of the college cafeteria for me to survive.

Michelle’s big brother came around sometimes. I don’t know if he was working in another town or what. I knew at the time. Think maybe he worked on the oil rigs for weeks at a time. It was his room that I had taken over so after the folks and maybe grandma left he slept in the downstairs room by the bathroom formerly inhabited by the crazy old woman. He wanted to sleep with me, but I didn’t let him.

He had a 2-foot jar of pennies dotted with various forms of silver in his (my) room. Now, I never have been any kind of princess nor prom queen nor any kind of pageant type: I would have loved and loathed the attention. But somehow, I got nominated for Miss Placebo, the college bar’s annual ‘beauty’ competition and fund-raiser (no, it wasn’t cuz I spent THAT much time there, sheesh. It was a whole college-wide thing). The person who got the most change was awarded this esteemed distinction, a cheesy tiera and a free pitcher of beer . . . or something like that. There was a Mr. Placebo (same prizes, cept a crown instead of a tiera) competition, too, and the winning couple would dance romantically as admirers looked on and sighed.

Mr. Placebo was locked up early. A tall basketball player with a strong chin named Keith or Kyle or Kirk or something like that. Miss Placebo was down to me and a girl named Renee who had dissed Michelle at some point and who also had a severe crush on Keith or Kyle or Kirk. Renee was scrambling to get all those final pennies to pass me over for that faux tiera and the man. Well, like I said, she’d at some point been unkind to Michelle. Enter Michelle’s Brother’s 2-Foot Jar of change. When I was laughing about this last night, I told my husband (who has been very, very good lately, btw, so I have decided not to divorce him after all) that Big Brother volunteered the change, but thinking back on it, I think maybe we just stole it.

So there you have it. Another proud moment. The disco ball sending colors dancing across Renee’s stricken face (shouldn’t o’ called my sista a ho’), among the circle of drunken “admirers,” pointy plastic and sequins slipping off my perfectly permed poorly cut hair, twirling on the smoky dance floor wrapped in Keith or Kyle or Kirk’s arms for my shining moment of glory as Miss Placebo.

Happy Easter! 🙂