I'm a little better now after eating a hearty meal of Campbells soup, Pringles, and Diet Coke. Sounds like a meal my father would serve - oy. Seriously, I'm ready to REwrite my entry now, although it won't be the same as it was before... Once the emotion is out, it's out, and if the product isn't there to prove it, I guess I'm just fucked...
So.
I began that entry because I turned on the radio to hear Lisa Loeb singing "Stay (I missed you)." It reminded me of one night in 1994 that I stayed up until all hours making a mix-tape for Jayden's birthday. And that just started a flood of memories going... I'll try to re-remember them now...
I don't remember meeting Jayden. We were in first grade together, and I only have two memories of first grade. The first was of me desperately trying to catch up to the other kids in math; I'd gone to another kindergarten, and, while all the other kids knew addition and subtraction, I was lost, and I remember throwing away as many math assignments as I could without getting caught. The rest of the time, I copied off whomever was sitting next to me. My second memory of first grade was at the end of the year: cleaning out my desk. Mine was the messiest in the class, and Jayden was assigned to help me clean it out, because hers was immaculate.
Basically, it's been that way ever since...
Jayden and I were sort-of-friends in sixth grade. We were in the same study hall, and we ate lunch together. But that was middle school, and I was the biggest damn loser in the universe. Jayden had a few friends, and most of those friends thought I was a loser, so Jayden's relationship with me was kind of an undercover one, which was really only there during study hall. I did not and do not blame her for choosing popularity over me for a little while -- I would have done the same thing if I'd had the opportunity. Eventually, things got better -- she and I and some people at the cafeteria table collaborated on a story called "Herbert the Duck," which I transcribed into my pocket notebook, and which made me slightly more accepted by the little group.
("Herbert..." was actually a very sick and demented story, by the way... I've come a long way since then...)
Study halls were great. Jayden and I were made to be friends. With her, I felt cool - accepted - for the first time in my life. She could appreciate my weird behavior; she laughed until she almost passed out when I handed our teacher a fake mouse and we watched her shriek in terror. I'd spent my whole life alone and somewhat ridiculed by our peers. Meeting and being friends with Jayden is the only thing I really remember about those years, mostly because the rest is very painful. My classmates had broken me - for some reason, Jayden took it upon herself to put me back together.
We really were the perfect friends, though. While the other girls were concerned with their hair and getting boyfriends and getting boobs and all of that, we were content to bitch about our teachers, decide what we were going to do with our lives, and... okay, okay, we did talk an awful lot about boys. She was in love with this guy, Peter or something, who was in the high school, god love him, and I was in love with this guy Aaron, who hated me and thought I was an evil stalker, which I was. Jayden and I decided that year that we were both going to be psychiatrists, and were going to have practices next door to each other, so that when we got sick of our clients, we could send them to each other, or something to that effect. We never made that childhood vow of going to the same college, sharing a dorm room, marrying twin brothers and living next door to each other, but sometimes I think we should have.
If a stranger asked me how long I've been friends with Jayden, I'd say, "since first grade," but that isn't really true. Despite the desk-cleaning project in first grade, and our teacher reprimanding us constantly to shut the hell up during sixth grade study hall, we drifted apart, our friendship the victim of middle school politics and our really rotten class schedules.
I remember the day our friendship was sealed in stone, though. It was eighth grade. I saw her sitting alone at a table in the cafeteria. Her middle-school crowd was gone; one moved away someplace and disappeared into the great unknown; one moved away and got her tongue pierced (this was only eighth grade, mind you...); one was just a stupid bitch anyway; and two others, who were sisters, had family problems or something and were absent most of the time. Tentatively, I sat near Jayden, hoping she wouldn't think I was too much of a geek. She was eating some possibly-nutritious macaroni-and-cafeteria-mush, and I was eating two Little Debbies and a bag of popcorn.
We discussed "the group," and how Mary had moved away and Kim had a tongue piercing, and Maureen and Helen were probably psychotic, and LeighAnn was just a stupid ho, anyway. The conversation hit a lull - I really couldn't complain that any of them were gone, because they'd been Jayden's friends, not mine. There was an awkward silence. "So, do you still like Aaron?" she asked. "Yeah," I replied. We began talking about boys. It wasn't a completely safe subject, of course: boys are NEVER a completely safe subject, but it was easier. "You know," she said to me, in an almost-confidential tone, "I read this book of spells that told you how you can get a guy to be yours!" And that was what started it. We talked about that spell, and how spells worked, and witches, and magic, and UFO's, and everything else you can imagine that could be packed into a 30-minute lunch period. By the time lunch had ended, I was no longer a loser, she was no longer sitting alone, and we were disappointed to hear the bell ring. Usually, I welcomed the bell; at least when the bell rang, I could go endure a class instead of enduring half an hour in the cafeteria pretending I was happier sitting alone.
For French class, I had an assignment to make a French food dish. I made a soufflé, which looked like canned dog food (I am dead serious). My locker, just like my desk in first grade, was a mess, and I stashed the dog-food cake in her locker. When she found it, she looked ready to slaughter me and threatened to put the cake in the middle of the hallway. "It's a sacrificial offering," I told her. "To Tori Amos." Tori was her favorite singer; I barely knew anything about Tori, but it was a good thing to say to get her not to throw my cake in the middle of the hallway. I looked at her locker briefly, and Peter's name caught my attention, written on the locker door in black marker. Of course, while I maintained my crush on Aaron, she maintained hers with the illustrious Peter. "It's a sacrificial offering to Peter the locker god," I amended. That was good enough. She let me keep the dog food cake there, and I think we even split a piece of it before my class.
Every day, Jayden and I exchanged notes. She started it, just after that witchcraft conversation: she wrote down some spell for me. Eventually, it just became habit. Both of us were too damn smart for our classes, so we managed to scribble a few lines to each other every morning. I was always bitterly disappointed when she'd had a test and hadn't written me a note. Hers were always so damn amusing. We wrote each other questions, like, "if you ever have kids, who will the godparents be?" and "okay, you're on a desert island with two people and two things; who are the people and what are the things?" Even on her depressed days, like when she thought she hadn't made the school musical and was pretty much homicidal, the notes always brought a ray of sunshine to my days. I have every one of them saved, even now.
We were going to have a band. It was going to be called The Produce Section. She wrote a song about pickles for the band, which was actually quite good, and I wrote one about parsnips or green beans or something. She was going to sing for the band, and play piano. We never did figure out what I was going to do, but it was a cute idea that really thrived for a couple of days.
She started a book. It wasn't the greatest book in the world, although I KNOW worse has been published by college professors. It was mostly non-fiction, although all the names were changed so no one could sue her. The main plot of the book was people walking by her locker and the two of us overhearing things they said. If you'd lived it, it would have been fascinating. *I* found it fascinating. And although I told her it needed a little more action in it, I was enormously jealous of her talent.
Our birthdays are four days apart. Mine is earlier than hers is, and I was forever picking on her that I would get my driver's permit before her. But the year we turned 14 was great! She gave me a book called "Gypsy Love Spells," a bottle of "love potion" that smelled like nail polish remover, and the best card I have ever gotten for my birthday. She'd actually gotten Aaron, my crush, who thought I was a total loser, to sign that card. Of course, Aaron didn't know the card was for me, but Jayden had totally outdone herself.
I made her a mix-tape for her birthday. I stayed up ALL night that week, listening to the Top 40 for her then-favorite song, "Mr. Jones" by the Counting Crows. I listened mostly to my parents' old records, like Simon and Garfunkel, and Dire Straits, so making that mix-tape was awfully difficult. The only song we had in common was "Stay (I Missed You)" by Lisa Loeb. After I put it on that mix-tape for her, she typed up the words for me, and we spent FOREVER analyzing how it related to our lives, which, in retrospect, I don't think it did. I realized that her taste in music really wasn't so bad. And, since she quoted a Simon and Garfunkel song in HER online journal not so long ago, I suppose it worked both ways...
But that really wasn't quite enough. I mean, considering that card and all, almost nothing would have been enough. So HER card was signed by our favorite local DJ, who was delighted to sign an autograph for his fans... (Little did he know that we'd been the obscene callers all that time... heh heh!) And! Just before any of this, I'd HAPPENED to see a show that Peter-the-locker-god was in -- I hadn't brought the card, but I had him sign the program for her. I even tried to stalk him and find him in the phone book so that I could get him to sign the actual card. Once, I thought I'd found him, but I got too nervous to say anything and had to hang up -- Peter-the-locker-god, was, after all, an amazingly gorgeous guy, and neither Jayden nor I was very good at dealing with gorgeous guys... So I sufficed to give her the card and the program, which thrilled her to no end.
She dragged me to an audition in June for a local production of "The Wizard of Oz." She'd gotten word that Peter was going to be in it, and wanted me to come along for moral support. She made it. I didn't. Somebody in the cast bailed and they called me and told me I was in. Jayden drooled over Peter. I drooled over the piano player, who turned out to be Peter's then-boyfriend David. When Jayden found out, she wrote me a letter, and we bitched for hours about the unfairness of the whole thing. Then we moped together. Okay, so we didn't marry twin brothers; it was enough to fall for boyfriends, right? Eventually, we got over it (well, she did), and our lives resumed.
I had an almost-fling with a guy from the backstage crew. Now, I wouldn't even bother talking about it, but at fourteen, never having had a boyfriend, and never having been touched in any way by a member of the male gender, it was a big deal. Jayden reprimanded me. "He's, like, 40," she said, "He's a pedophile!" Well, he was 21, and he was a weirdo, and he was nasty to Peter and David, which made my blood boil, because, even though they dared to choose each other over me and Jayden, they were cool. But I ignored Jayden's advice about the pedophile, who, I was convinced, was in love with me. Ten months later, I found out he had a live-in girlfriend ten years older than me. Jayden had been right. I was heartbroken. Jayden picked up the pieces.
I cried when she told me her family was moving away. She never knew how much I cried, but I did. Sometimes we didn't talk for weeks -- because we had other things to do, I guess, never because of any real tension between us. But I knew my life would never be the same without her there with me.
Still, I wrote her letters constantly. The letters became long enough to be books. We called each other once in awhile, when something important happened. I called her first when Erich asked me out. She said, "don't do it, he's gross." I didn't do it. I had a rendezvous with Aaron in the men's faculty bathroom of my high school. I called Jayden. She was a little grossed out, because -- okay, giving someone a blowjob in the bathroom is just gross, okay? -- but also a little relieved that she wouldn't have to hear about the tension between Aaron and me any longer. Jayden comforted me when Erich made me feel like a total whore about the whole Aaron thing... Peter, who was a pretty close friend by that point, merely asked, "is Aaron's cock big?" It was undeniably cute, but it was nice to have a female friend who offered me a bit more insight about the whole thing.
When I realized I was in love with Peter, I told Jayden; no one else. "Sometimes I think he loves me too," I told her, "And I know he couldn't, but sometimes it just seems..." She cut me off there and said she didn't want to hear about it. Peter-the-locker-god had been hers first, after all, despite everything. That was the only time Jayden ever really spoke to me harshly since sixth grade, and in sixth grade, she never really meant it. We didn't really fight - we were too mature to pull hair and scream and do the cold shoulder thing - but it did put a big block of tension between us.
I called Peter first when I lost my virginity, not Jayden. Peter told me about a sexual encounter he'd had that week, too, which had involved WAY TOO MANY JELL-O SHOTS, which I really didn't want to hear, and which caused me to lie on my floor in the dark for the next two hours with Tori Amos blasting at me. Then I told Jayden, who sympathized, both about me losing my virginity to Erich, and about the, um, Peter thing...
I wasn't very excited about getting my driver's permit, so I waited until I was 16 and a half before I went for my test. I didn't tell Jayden about that. but sure enough, we compared calendars later, and she'd gotten her permit four days after me.
We went to see Tori Amos together in 1996. Jayden stayed at my house for a day, and it was fabulous. We took a cab downtown -- our cabbie was a little nuts, and kept talking about turkey-hunting or something -- and had coffee at all my favorite places. On a mission to stalk Tori, we searched downtown thoroughly, missing only one place: the Hotel DeVille, which Tori later wrote a song about, and which was directly across the street from Java's, where we had coffee.
Jayden was in town the day Peter left for Texas. I tried not to let her see that I was ready to kill something, preferably myself. If it hadn't been for her, and for David, who also happened to show up out of the blue, I would have spent the day sobbing, with Erich trying as hard as possible to make me feel worse about Peter's departure. What can I say? Some people are just negative. And others are what happens when the clouds lift. Jayden is one of the latter, always has been, and always will be.
I've never really understood Jayden, why she stuck around, how I managed to find and keep such a wonderful friend, how, even though I'm four days older than her, she's a millenium more advanced than me in almost everything else. I've never really understood why she admires me, why she gave up trying to be one of the cool kids and hung out with me. Sometimes I think I'm a circus lion and she's my trainer, constantly getting me out of my own messes and setting a responsible example. I has the messy desk, she cleaned mine. I ate the Little Debbies, she ate the cafeteria lunches. She lent me locker-space for my dog food cake because I was too much of a slob to have room for it. She's been the objective advice-giver in all my relationships, most of which have ended in an ugly way because I didn't listen to her. And she forgave me for kinda-sorta stealing her sixth grade crush. She picked up the pieces when Peter and I had a huge fight -- over David, of all things, but that's another entry -- and she was there after I ignored her all last summer because I was too busy being drunk and unhappy to remember she was there. I have never been able to do a thing for Jayden. I have never felt worthy of having a friend as loyal and honest and REAL as she is. I haven't been there when I should have been - I'm the one getting into trouble most of the time, so when she has a problem, I'm off in the clouds somewhere, dealing with my own shit.
Sometimes, I really think she's invincible. To have survived me so long, to still be around and cleaning up the mess when I dribble down my chin over some stupid boy who isn't worth it, to still be around at all when almost everyone else gave up a long time ago... How could anybody but an angel do that? AND be amazingly talented at everything she does, AND know what's going on 99% of the time, AND fulfill obligations to friends and family, AND still have time to write the occasional journal entry? It's funny - those journal entries give me the same strength and put the same smile on my face as her notes used to in eighth grade. I really don't know how she does it, how she manages to be who she is, how I was blessed enough to meet such a beautiful person...
I have a surprise for Jayden. Of course, I can't tell what it is yet. But I am bound and determined to make up for years of leaching off her support and love without returning half of what I should have. Watch out, girlfriend, because on your birthday, you're going to get one hell of a cool card from me...
*grin*
Love Always,
~Helena*
Inexpressably cooler than mine...
"'I've got your mind,' I said. She said, 'I've your voice.' I said, 'You don't need my voice, girl, you have your own!' But you never thought it was enough of... So they went, years and years, like sisters, blanket girls, always there through that and this. 'There's nothing we cannot ever fix,' I said." --Tori Amos, "Bells For Her." (Which was written in a town near me!!!)
"In this world of many people, you and I live and love on many lands. We dance, we fly, we laugh, we cry. the river of our life flows. Through the changing waters, a shining truth we see: we will always strive to be friends, friends for life..." --Julee Cruise, "Friends for Life." (And I confess, here, even the great and powerful words of David Lynch seem inadequate...)