26 June 2002 ~ "The history of them all," or, love and mistakes, part two...

...Okay now, where was I? Honestly, this list isn't so long that I truly NEED two parts; these folks just deserve more than a casual mentioning, that's all. So... here we go: part TWO of Helena's former loves, former mistakes, and so forth...

....but we have to go back a year or two, because I missed some stuff....

Age 17 ~ 1997 ~ The PCCR
"P.C.C.R." is short for Parlour City Commons Rats. The PCCR were the kids who bummed around behind Java Joe's, rolling cigarettes, drinking forties in the alley, having sex on the rooftops, and making a general nuisance of themselves. Fantastic bunch of kids, if you ask me. I've never met anybody else like them. Anyway, during the time when we were kind of a cohesive group, we created and maintained a good standard of debauchery... Rachel and I both had something like crushes on Neil -- rather, I had the crush, and she was in love with him, but he mostly ignored her in favor of his girlfriend. So, to get even -- or SOMETHING -- Rachel and I would regularly find someplace relatively freaky to make out. First, it was the couch in my dad's living room. We were watching "Rocky Horror" and it only seemed appropriate. Then, it was her mom's basement; her mom was ultra-Christian -- like, she answered the phone "Jesus is Lo-ord!" instead of "Hello." The fear of getting caught making out with Rachel in this woman's basement was damn near enough to convince myself I was a lesbian. THEN, one day we coincidentally met up at Neil's apartment, the Murray Street Crackhouse, but he wasn't around, so we went through his stuff and then made out on his bed. And one final time, the two of us got drunk at David's house (see part one), and made out on his bed while his room-mate of the time, Meg, was in the bathroom cleansing her stomach. Ah, Rachel; I made so much trouble with that girl. I can't wait until she turns 21 and I can buy her a glass of wine -- uh, legally.

...And of course, there was Neil. Neil was insane, of course -- and I don't mean "insanely jealous," or "insanely strange," or anything as tame as that -- and nobody EVER figured out what was going on in his head. But that was the mystery of Neil; that was what made him so freaking beautiful. Maybe Neil and I were always secretly in love with each other, despite the fact that we would have made a laughably shitty couple. He was the free spirit; I was the girl who had to constantly possess twenty notebooks and a computer with Microsoft Word on it. Neil was around for a long time in 1997, and then disappeared to wander the country, in search of love and adventure. I almost caught up with him twice, before he returned to Binghamton in 2001 for an evening and spent the night holding my hand and talking to me about the weather in Tacoma. It wouldn't exactly surprise me if I never saw him again, but regardless of that -- and the fact that he's nuts -- Neil's going to be around in my life for a long, long time...

And of course, there were Bennie, Josh, and J.H.. Take a bunch of bored kids. Take some raging hormones. Add to a very small town in which there are many alleys, bridges, and abandonned stairwells. Stir. Bennie was drinking in the alley. Josh took me down to the river because he thought he was in love with me; eventually, he realized he wasn't, and he ALSO realized he was bisexual and obsessed with Ayn Rand. (And a couple of years later, he fell in love with my boyfriend, a self-declared pinko; it was a match destined never to work...) And J.H. -- he was just horny, and had a friend who had a cool staircase up to his apartment; he wanted to show me the staircase and make out. REAL suave.

Okay, moving forward.....

Age 20 ~ 2000 ~ Chris
Chris was not my boyfriend. Chris was a friend and acquaintance who probably should have STAYED a friend and acquaintance. It all started when Chris moved into an apartment two blocks away from MY apartment. In between our respective apartments was a laundromat. And since it SUCKS to do laundry alone, and since you were VERY likely to get ripped off if you left while your laundry was running, Chris and I made a pact to call each other whenever one of us had to do laundry. And, I mean, one thing led to another, and we were gonna like, help each other, like, FOLD or something (duh...), and we broke out a bottle of Bully Hill wine, and... the rest was history. Chris and I decided we could be friends AND, uh... laundry-buddies, so we never really dated... And it's a damned good thing, too; we screwed each other up enough as it was. Particularly since we both travelled with most of the same people, and ended up, in the end, working at the same coffeehouse. Small, small, small town. Oh yeah, and then Chris and I ended up moving into the same apartment building, with the laundry room in the basement. Laundry rooms still make me feel weird... Maybe not in a BAD way, but weird nonetheless...

Age 20-22 ~ 2000-2002 ~ Norman
I fell in love with Norman maybe four times. When I was fifteen (aka JAILBAIT), my mom would take me to Lost Dog for mocha lattés and portabella mushroom sandwiches every weekend. And Norman would be sitting at the counter, staring into space over a book, wearing a stupid hat that ONLY he can make look cool, and blowing smoke out one nostril. I knew he was a little bit older, but I figured he was still young enough for me to have a mild crush on. Naturally, because Norman isn't a pedophile except when it comes to Britney Spears, he didn't notice me. Things actually started to get good when I was 20, and I pulled that stupid old "Hey, you ever see 'Eraserhead'?" trick on him. When we accidentally ran into each other at a five-hour driving course and walked home together. When he took me to see "Chicken Run," played me in a game of billiards (he won), and kissed me quite passionately, as we were leaving the pool hall. That was the night he took me to his apartment; we watched SNL, he played me a little song, and while he was in the bathroom, I became transfixed by this photograph on his wall of his torso... There was this birthmark... And all I wanted in that moment, was to see it. I wanted absolutely nothing more in the world than to see that birthmark. We fell in love that night, this warm summer night standing on the roof of his building, looking out over the courthouse, my hands in his hair... It still makes me tingle... Then, for the next few months, things were sort of goodish, and sort of baddish, and Norman was off in space a lot, and I was whiny a lot... But there was always the music, and there were always the movies... One night, it was this Carlos-something-or-other piece ALL fucking night. One night, Norman played me his copy of Low's "I Could Live In Hope," and we lay on his futon together, not speaking, just listening. For several months, we decided to watch every horror movie ever made, which included "Bloodsucking Freaks," (DON'T SEE IT!!!) and "The Amityville Horror," for which Norman wrote a song based on the theme-song. One night, his band played that song at Lost Dog, and they got a standing ovation, and all these stuffy old people were screaming for more... One night, Norman played me "Harvest Moon" on his guitar and it made me weepy. One night, he played me a lullaby version of "Highway to Hell." (Seriously, it's beautiful...) All those nights -- and ALL the nights we laid around watching Twin Peaks over and over and over again -- we were in love, despite all the shit. When we moved in together, though, we moved in as room-mates. We didn't share a bed anymore; we didn't eat together very often; I stopped going to most of the Lost Dog gigs... We'd decided we were crappy as a couple, and I really had been a pretty big bitch... Until one evening maybe three months before I moved to Olympia, when we were watching a crappy movie on TV, and we looked each other in the eyes, made ferocious love, and I realized I'd actually fallen madly in love with this man, maybe REALLY for the first time. In all honesty, I'm still in love with Norman; maybe I always will be. In any case, I'm not ready NOT to be. I still throw crying fits and punch walls when I think about the 3,000 miles between us. I suppose Norman's done a pretty good job of moving on and all -- he manages to refer to me as his ex-girlfriend by now -- and by all appearances, so have I... But really, I often feel like little more than crash-and-burned wreckage; I don't want to be Norman's ex-girlfriend. I want to be in Seattle with him, watching the boats go by, and the sun go down, and the Space Needle light up.

Age 21 ~ 2002 ~ Mike-O
Mike-O and I "met" online. His hero was Twin Peaks' own Agent Cooper, he knew everything there is to know about serial murderers, and he was obsessed with Seattle. So, one day, I took a bus to Seattle to meet him. We met at a coffeehouse, took a walk ALL over Seattle in search of someplace that sold cherry pie (and when we found a place with pie, he wouldn't eat it; real freaky kid, that Mike-O...), saw "Lost Highway" at a theater with midnight showings of cool movies, and spent the night together. (Heh; Helena, you slut...) Later, he told me that he didn't eat pie because he was diabetic. HE had been the one who WANTED TO GO GET PIE! It seemed to me, once I'd caught him hiding such a trivial matter as a blood sugar disorder, that Mike-O was kind of a freaky kid. He said it was a source of embarrassment for him, and he didn't want anybody to know about it and, like, treat him like an invalid. Something to that effect. Now, I didn't give a damn if he had diabetes, or male-pattern baldness, or a big scaly rash in his armpits, or what-have-you, so long as he didn't have anything contagious, and so long as he wasn't in any pain... And because I'm a sweetheart, I decided to PROVE I didn't care, by making him a cherry pie, sugar-free. I mean, hell; both my grandfathers got diabetes, and I'm not going to make a big deal about anything, RIGHT? Of course right. The fellow says he wants pie, and I like him and I like to cook, so I will get him pie, and I won't even poison him with it. I started stealing Nutra-sweet packets from the cafeteria; like, thirty per night. Come hell or high water, I was going to make Mike-O a cherry pie he could eat, because I liked him, and I wanted him to trust me with things like not teasing him about his blood sugar. Duh. Is there anybody in this world who taunts diabetics still??? Gahd, Mike-O was neurotic... Anyway, plans were underway for this Special Magic cherry pie, when Mike-O called and told me that he was moving to California to be with his ex-girlfriend, whom he'd been in love with for like, years or something, and whom he'd never told me about. I believe I flushed the Nutra-sweet packets down the toilet then, but things are kind of hazy now because I then went two days without sleep, and wandered around campus all night looking for the woodpecker I always saw in this certain tree, and reading Allen Ginsberg poetry to myself, out loud. I don't take well to being dumped, especially not after I make plans to make a pie for a man. You don't mess with a woman who's hardcore enough to make you a pie. But after I took a nap and grumbled about it a lot (and got rid of the rest of those lousy packets), I felt fine and was over it.

Age 21 ~ 2002 ~ Dracor
I do not know what I was thinking. Really, I don't. Mostly, I guess I was thinking, "hell, I'm lonely, and horny..." Dracor was an 18-year-old who lived on my floor in the dorms. Dracor believed in dragons. Once, while Dracor and I were having, as my room-mate Louise might have called it, a "tender moment," a gust of wind blew the window open in my room. Dracor insisted it was one of his dragons (they were invisible, FYI; only he could see them), and asked if Louise would allow the dragon to sleep on her bed for the night. Dracor held a conversation of several minutes with the dragon, before petting it lightly on the head (yes, I'm QUITE serious), and saying, "Goodnight, buddy..." Now, I'm okay with freaks and all (see above, and part one), but I was NOT okay with a freak who not only talked to dragons nobody else could see, but also was 18, and whose friends tormented me mercilessly. And in the end, Dracor told me I was "getting too attached" (???), and elected to "tone things down a notch." I never did figure out quite what "toning it down a notch" meant, because shortly thereafter, Dracor moved home to Tacoma and barely spoke to me again. Have I mentioned yet, you guys, that Tacoma-natives are REALLY, REALLY weird? Every single individual I've met who is from Tacoma is a total freak. I don't know why; I think it's something in the water. And I don't think native Olympians have it much better; hence the term "Special Olympians."

...So those are my former boyfriends, former lovers, former whatevers...

...Do you guys still respect me?

~Helena*