Perfectly 1993 Guy Part Ten: The Long Goodbye

 

After I put him on that birthday afterglow bus, I lived in the glow for a few days or a few weeks. I sat in my post-high-school job at Burger King (I would pretty much do anything to avoid a challenging job interview. Plus I’ve always loved tedium and discounted snacks!) daydreaming about his warm skin and soft hair and to-be-continued mixtape, looking out the drive thru window in a happy haze between customers. But then, just as the word “temporary” had derailed a lovely afternoon of our visit, three little words out of my face closed off whatever I thought might come next with him.

 

“I need you,” I found myself saying into my yellow landline phone. I would very much like to go back and unsay it, even if the results would still have been the same.

 

“You need me?” he wasn’t being harsh, just a little incredulous. “I can’t be…needed right now.”

 

His reasons were sound and to be expected, but that didn’t make the conversation any less devastating. He had just started college. There were girls there with purple hair and he wanted to be free to live his college life. Totally valid! But my heart both deflated and exploded into a fine, sad, messy mist.

 

For some reason, his guilt or my sentiment or both or just love, we decided to keep my planned visit a couple weeks after the breakup. To say goodbye I guess. I met the purple-haired girl there—I remember her name being Sloane but it’s possible she had only recommended the BAND Sloane to him. (“She was underwhelmed if that’s a word, I know it’s not ‘cause I looked it up, that’s one of the skills I learned in my schoooooool.”) She left Perfectly 1993 Guy and me alone to lay in his tiny dorm room, on a pleasingly narrow twin bed.

 

We stayed spooned up in that bed for a long time. I looked out the window at the pretty campus feeling romantically achey. The Get Up Kids wouldn’t be invented for two more years, but it was maybe the most emo weekend of my life. That is REALLY saying something.

 

We decided to go see a Dead Milkmen show a couple of hours away from campus by train. The club was at the beach so things did NOT get less emo despite the very silly music. As we walked from train to club to beach, he got grumbly because I was walking too close and kept walking into him. Nonetheless, I put my head in his lap and rested on the train ride back. I wanted him to be hard beneath my sleepy cheek so I would know his desire for me had been real. I was vigilant for it but don’t remember the results being decisive. What a sign to look for.

 

In his dorm room he had a childhood teddy bear named Clyde and I decided to take him home with me for consolation. He was a pretty big bear, dark brown with one of those really sincere faces that stuffed animals sometimes have. Perfectly 1993 Guy told me years later that he hadn’t wanted me to take Clyde, he just hadn’t known what to say. I feel such a longing to know what happened to Clyde, to hug him tight. (Confession: For the past few months I’ve slept with a stuffed peacock named Nancy, a platonic I-was-having-a-hard-day-post-attempted-coup gift from Sweetie.)

 

We tried to be friends, especially when I came that winter to a school a few hours away from his. I knew every day of my short photography school life (With darkrooms! And chemicals! Glad I tried it while I still could.) how close Perfectly 1993 Guy was by train. My first night at school, I used a big handful of change to call and let him know I had arrived. After a couple of will-we-or-won’t-we visits (More chaste, longing spooning with a little wrestling thrown in? Odd.) things got too snitty and he stopped taking my calls.

 

I called him a truly reprehensible number of times for a couple of months, including on Valentine’s night surrounded by the mylar balloons of my roommates’ more successful relationships. I imagined the phone ringing and ringing and ringing in that tiny room, knowing purple-haired girl would think I was pathetic. I definitely was.

 

Aside from nicely saucy letters from Pagan Boy, (RIP) my loneliness that winter and spring was abject. Eventually, by some miracle, Perfectly 1993 Guy did pick up the phone and we went comfily to a fantastic King Missile show where I got to hug John S. Hall and accidentally poke him with my spiky bracelet. (Another object I’s just LOVE to have today. Wonder how it’s doing?) We saw each other a few more friendly times but he was one of the few old friends/flames who didn’t make the real-life-to-MySpace-etc transition. I looked him up on LinkedIn a couple years ago. Without his Eddie Vedder hair he looks like a regular person, a regular BEAUTIFUL person.

 

I never won’t miss him. I’ll never forget that Bee Girl moment of being loved by him, of being wanted. It both went by so fast and lasted my whole life, like so many of the stories I tell you here. Thanks for listening dears, I’m all wistful and grateful.

My White Supremacist Mom, The End

 

Seriously get this book!

 

“God.” She said defiantly.

 

Mom said that the reason the country was so far astray (besides, presumably, Socialism) was that we’re “no longer” a Christian nation. (I remember seeing this “One nation under God” idea in second-cousiny Facebook feeds before I blocked them, but the violence of the sentiment never truly hit me until I started writing this.) I wish I had said something coherent about the founders or the Liberty Bell or Catholicism under Hitler, but I did not. I wish I’d said that forcing everyone into the same religion was not only counter to the values of Christianity (well.) but part of the very definition of fascism.

 

So that was the conversation that finally propelled us out the door. On the way out, I told mom not to contact me, not to send cards or anything, a directive that she (vexingly and also sort of touchingly) has ignored. In the car, I horror-movie screamed. Back in the Nineties, I was in a housefire and the small comfort of that day was that I got the line “Screaming like a David Lynch movie” on the news. This wasn’t that, wasn’t any aesthetically tortured wail, it was full horror. It was a scream of a lifetime of religious oppression, of standing in front of police cars, of friends boxed into riots when the street-fires were starting. It was a scream for the then-200,000 dead and those who were vicious and scared and stupid enough to deny the loss. Because it was a scream, I’m embarrassed and ashamed, but I can’t actually think of a more rational response.

 

As Sweetie (Never, anymore, afraid of a panic) drove us down the country roads to my sister’s, I did that five senses thing to quell the panic: I see mailboxes, road, a sparrow, a yellow stripe, my purse. I hear the car, my voice, Sweetie’s voice, my breath. I can touch the door, my scarf, my jeans. I can smell coffee and peach-pear fizzy water. I can taste gum.

 

By some miracle of compartmentalization, a skill that has never come naturally to me, we spent a lovely day with the niece and nephews. Our regular comic shop was closed, but we did thoroughly enjoy our traditional thrift store run. I bought way too many random things.

 

By the time Sweetie and I were picking up road trip coffee in our nearby old hometown (SO many feelings of love and beauty and loss there) I was posting through my feelings and starting to make estrangement official. I told my sister, brother, and dad the next day that I would be avoiding all mom-related activities for the foreseeable future.

 

For now, it’s not so bad, except those nauseating prayer cards on which I need to remember to write “refused”. I run the family Zooms and the Liberal Cousins Side Convo has been great at keeping in touch. I’ll feel guilty adding extra logistics to the family routine, but I’ll figure it out as I go.

 

I’ve never understood how people with Trumpian relatives can feel safe around them, even pre-Covid. I don’t know how anyone avoids feeling the violence of their beliefs all the way in their bones. Do they think that the violence the seditionists marinate in won’t come for them? Do they interpret violent beliefs toward black and brown and queer bodies as somehow not a real threat?  Or are they just too scared to do something about it? At any rate, I’m glad of these miserable years of trying to do something about it, even when that something is only to try and get myself safe.