Life As I Blow It

by Sarah Colonna

  She worked at a rival newspaper, so she and Dad would drink coffee in the morning and talk about what was wrong with each other’s paper. They had kind of a love-hate relationship, mostly consisting of hate. There was one thing I liked about Carol and that was that she let me drink wine. I think she was just doing what she could to get through our summer visits. It was half-water/half-wine, but it was better than nothing. She always let Jennifer and me have it with dinner, under the expectation that we wouldn’t go home and tell our mom that her twelve- and fifteen-year-old daughters were allowed to drink when we went to California. That wasn’t going to be a problem. We certainly weren’t going to open our mouths and ruin our fun.

  I remember once she took me shopping with her so that she could buy an outfit for some sort of opening of some sort of library. She purchased a $2,000 silk suit and some shoes that ran about $450. My feelings were mixed with shock and awe. Spending that kind of money on one outfit would have sent my mother to a mental institution. I was sure she’d be in a ton of trouble when she got home, and I was kind of looking forward to watching Dad yell at her, especially since she had denied me a really cute pair of jeans.

  When we got back, I noticed she didn’t mention it to him. He just asked if she found what she needed, she said that she had, and that was the end of that. I later let the price of her outfit slip out on purpose, but Dad seemed unfazed. “It’s her money,” he said flatly. He had no idea how much that one statement would impact me forever. It wasn’t “their money,” it was “her money.” She could do whatever she wanted to do because she made her own money. Good to know.

  I then became even more pissed that she didn’t spring for the sixty-dollar jeans I wanted, and decided to expect some pretty good shit for Christmas from her that year.

  Halfway through my senior year of high school my dad took my sister and me on a cruise with him and Carol. We were both pretty excited. This was when I thought cruises were cool, before I discovered that vacationing with hundreds of people and doing group aerobics on a deck was pretty humiliating.

  The cruise was going to Mexico, and up to that point the only part of Mexico we’d seen was Tijuana, which was only good for stocking up on cheap dolls and maracas to show off back home. We managed to have a lot of fun on the ship, the highlight of the cruise being the Rod Stewart impersonator. He ran around in a Speedo bathing suit with spiky blond hair and an amazing tan. My sister and I found him highly entertaining and did our best to hang out with him. I didn’t know he was an impersonator until the last night during the talent show, though. Prior to that, I just thought he was Rod Stewart.

  There was a nightclub on the ship, and my dad gave them a credit card to keep open for the three-day stint. He told us to “go nuts,” but I don’t think he knew what we were capable of. At the time Jennifer was twenty, so she could legally drink since we were A) on water and B) headed to Mexico. I was still not old enough to drink, but my face was ahead of its time (a positive then, but now not so much), so nobody asked. We stayed up late every night with Fake Rod Stewart earning prestigious “Night Owl” badges and talking to people about all the athletes we’d rubbed elbows with in our short lives. Jennifer woke up every morning with a hangover; she was drinking specialty cocktails and frozen drinks. I woke up feeling fine; I was drinking bourbon and water. I knew better than to mix. My older sister was such a rookie.

  When my father finally got his bar bill for the three days, he looked at us in shock. He went through each tab that was attached to it asking if that was one of our signatures. We confirmed all but one … one was Fake Rod Stewart’s, but we had told him that his drinks were on you, Dad. I shut my eyes and waited for him to yell. My dad is a ton of fun, but when he gets mad it isn’t pretty. I felt his hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes to see him smiling. “That’s my girls,” he said, then he signed the tab.

  Toward the end of my summer visits with Dad I would start to miss my family and friends. I would usually get the pang when I still had a week or so left to go, making the last seven days almost unbearable. I’d spent enough time in the pool, at the beach, at nice restaurants and sporting events; now it was time to go home and tell everybody how much better my summer was than theirs.

  We are all made up of two totally different people. Sometimes you live with them both, sometimes you don’t. I don’t know what it’s like to live in an angry household, because my parents did the smart thing (in my opinion) when they knew it wasn’t working: They walked away. Some people stay together for “the sake of the kids,” but then the kids just get stuck thinking that people who are married are supposed to hate each other. My parents made sure I grew up in a house where people loved each other, even if for a few years it was just us girls. And even if one of them loved many different people.

  No matter how we are raised or what values we are taught, we still have both of our parents’ DNA. That’s not a bad thing … it makes us who we are. I grew up in a small town. We canned our own green beans and fed apples to our horses on Christmas morning. It was a really nice life. It was a life you had if you raised a family, and you all lived close to each other, and you all remembered each other’s birthday. It was completely different than the way it was at Dad’s house. In his world people went to the beach and dressed up and had cocktail parties. I wanted to do that. I wanted to spend my own money on clothes that were too expensive and not have anybody yell at me about it.

  Back home, watching parents drag kids to a spaghetti supper and knowing it was probably the highlight of their week freaked me out. They seemed happy, so why didn’t I want it? One side of my family volunteered every day, at times putting their lives on the line to help others while I slumped around pissed off that I had to get up early on a Saturday. I felt like such an asshole. If someone wanted to live a perfectly normal Southern family life, who was I to judge? Something about the thought of it all made me cringe. I wasn’t judging other people’s happiness; I was judging myself for not understanding theirs. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that I didn’t like about it. Whatever it was, I knew I had a different idea of fun and from what I understood, you couldn’t take a baby to a bar.

  HYMEN GO SEEK

  In Farmington there isn’t a ton to do on the weekends. Well, there isn’t a ton to do anytime. We had to make our own excitement. That usually meant driving out to a remote spot and drinking whatever we could get our hands on. When I turned sixteen I was actually able to buy beer myself instead of making someone’s older sibling do it. I never got carded. That was something I was really proud of. It wasn’t until much later that I figured out it was an insult.

  I blame the fact that my face aged faster than me on the time I was visiting my dad in California and we fell asleep on the beach. I came back to Arkansas with a blistered face and my mom yelled about how she wasn’t sure my face would ever recover.

  “You might need surgery!” she yelled.

  I was in a panic. It healed completely, but I’ve still always looked ten years older than I am. I’m positive it has nothing to do with smoking and drinking at an early age. No way.

  My favorite place to hang out in high school was called Muddy Fork. It was a fork in the road, and it was muddy. There wasn’t a lot of effort put into naming our hangouts, which is very similar to how my mother named our pets. We had a dog that liked to dig holes; his name was Digby. We had a cat that was afraid of everything; his name was Fraidy Cat. We had a kitten that we found that was tiny—“like a chigger,” my mom said. So she named him Chigger. You get the idea. If you don’t know what a chigger is, be grateful. They really itch.

  Weekend destination spots had to be changed once the local cop caught on. It was always a sad moment. Lots of memories had been built in those places and we didn’t want to have to start over. Also, we were lazy.

  I remember distinctly the night that we had to leave Muddy Fork for good. My friend Jason was playing “Life Is a Highway” (not the Rascal Flatts version, the other one) on his brand-ne
w fifteen-inch woofers. There was a period when I was in high school that the bigger your speakers, the bigger your popularity, so all the guys tried to outdo each other. He kept screaming “I’m gonna ride it all night long.” I didn’t know if he was talking about his truck or his drunk girlfriend, but he was loud. Blue lights flashed, we all got in our cars, and Muddy Fork was left in the dust. We always found a new place, though. After Muddy Fork we had the Power Lines, which, in retrospect, was incredibly unsafe.

  The next destination that became popular was The Woods. It was a place in the woods. You’ll catch on soon. The Woods was where we went after the Twin Bridges—the spot in the middle of town with two bridges that looked exactly the same—was no longer cool. We decided to have a bonfire there. You’d think coming from a family of volunteer firefighters I’d put up a little resistance to the idea, but instead I just said “Hell yeah!” and helped throw wood and trash into a huge pile. We had to stop going there one night after a guy we called “Hippie” caught his face and ponytail on fire when he tried to light the bonfire with a Bic lighter.

  My favorite thing about high school was being on drill team. I was pretty amazing at doing the Running Man so I was a shoo-in the first year I auditioned. I took it pretty seriously.

  The main reason to be on drill team instead of cheer-leading was that the girls were a lot more fun than the cheerleaders, and by “fun” I mean “slutty.” Also, you didn’t have to do a backflip, which I couldn’t. Most of the cheerleaders went to the Baptist church on Sundays and loved to talk about their virginity. By the way, most of them got knocked up right after high school. I guess holding off from sex for four years made those girls go nuts the second they graduated. I was smart: I had sex in high school so that I knew what I was doing once I got out in the real world.

  Like any teenage girl, I had my share of heartbreaks. Most of my high school years were spent in love with a guy named Bucky. His real name was Daniel, but he preferred to be called Bucky. His dad went by Butch and his brother went by Buddy, so he isn’t really to blame. He also didn’t even have buck teeth, so the whole nickname was a real waste. In my defense, he was on the football team and he had a mustache. You can’t stop that kind of destiny. The Southern girl in me thought I needed to eventually settle down, be stable and be in love, and Bucky was the one.

  To this day, or at least to the day I finished this chapter, my mother still works at the funeral home. There aren’t many in town, so pretty much everybody who has a family member who dies goes to Moore’s Chapel. It’s how I get to keep up with people from my past. She was thrilled to call me the day that Bucky came in for his aunt’s funeral to tell me how things had turned out for him.

  “From what it sounds like, he lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his wife and four children.”

  The Southern girl in me dodged a bullet.

  Bucky was kind of a ladies’ man, which was directly related to being able to grow a mustache at sixteen. He drove an El Camino because he thought it was mysterious. He believed that it was cool because nobody really knew if it was a car or a truck. He had a pair of the big woofer speakers like the other guys, but there wasn’t a place to put them in an El Camino, so he had them installed behind the seat. Anytime I rode with him and he turned the music up I was thrown violently forward. But I just kept smiling.

  He didn’t seem to have a lot of interest in me at first, which made me really like him. We were “going together” on and off, but it took several rounds of dating for Bucky to finally refer to me as his girlfriend at school. Although my friends would try to tell me that he was not worth it, I just wrote it all off as commitment issues. I knew the type—my dad was one of them. Bucky just needed to play the field a little, but eventually he’d give in to our obvious passion and we would light the world on fire.

  Even though we were technically together, I didn’t feel like I really had Bucky’s attention. I thought for sure there was something I wasn’t giving him. I went through it over and over in my head and realized that the one thing I hadn’t given him—my virginity—was standing in our way. If this relationship was going to go further, I was going to need to hand over my vagina.

  Bucky chewed. It’s common in the South. I’ve seen toddlers do it. His tobacco of choice was Copenhagen. Men who chew always keep a spit cup handy. They use the same one and empty it when it’s full. It’s disgusting. Bucky kept one in his bedroom on his windowsill. He said that way he could just dump it out when it was ready. It seemed to me it would have been much easier to just spit out the window.

  Once I decided that he’d be my first, there was no going back. Almost all of the other girls in my class had already had sex, with the exception of the Baptists. I had waited long enough—I was fifteen and I wasn’t getting any younger. Bucky was very open to the idea of being my first, so it didn’t take much for him to come up with the place and time. His parents were going away for the weekend, and since he was seventeen and a senior in high school, they trusted him to be alone. We immediately planned our rendezvous.

  I was nervous when I got to his place. I wasn’t old enough to drive yet, so Lindsay dropped me off. This was one of the moments I was irritated that my mom put me in kindergarten when I was four. Apparently she couldn’t wait to get me out of the house, but I hated being younger than all of my friends.

  When we pulled up to Bucky’s driveway, she and I sat silently in the car for a moment.

  “You sure?” she asked.

  “I’m sure,” I told her.

  “Make sure he wears something,” she reminded me.

  “If he forgets, I’ll just take a long bath. Kristy says that works.”

  I got out of the car, tightened my scrunchie, smoothed out my floral spandex shorts, and headed for his front door. Lindsay backed slowly out of the driveway, and I could hear the Thelma & Louise soundtrack coming from her speakers.

  “You’re a part of me, I’m a part of you …” Glenn Frey crooned.

  I turned to the front door and knocked. It was now or never.

  Bucky answered the door wearing football pants and a do-rag. He smiled, spit into a plastic cup, and motioned for me to come in. I’d been in his house before, but this time everything seemed different. I knew his family didn’t have a lot of money, but suddenly instead of “poor” they seemed “quaint.” Instead of “dirty” the house just looked “unkempt.” I was giving him excuses for the way that he lived. I still do that; I’m working on it. But at that point he was leading me to his bedroom. And I really needed to like him before we got there.

  There was no time wasted on Bucky’s side. I was there to fuck him, and he was in a time crunch. On the way to his room, he stopped only once, to show me his football helmet that his dad had mounted on the wall. On the front it said “Wheat.” I didn’t understand.

  “Shouldn’t you have gotten your name put on the front of the helmet? And if you wanted to use the name of a bread, why not everybody’s favorite, ‘Wonder’?”

  He scoffed at my ignorance. “Wheat is short for Buckwheat, which was derived from Bucky, which is my name.”

  “Actually your name is Daniel.”

  “My name is Bucky.”

  “Bucky is a nickname. You nicknamed your nickname?”

  “Whatever, Miss Straight-A’s. Let’s go get down.”

  We continued on to the bedroom and Bucky pushed the door open, then stepped aside so that I could enter. The smell of chewing tobacco wafted past me. Bucky led me by the hand to his bed. I was in a daze. He gently pushed me down, then awkwardly fell on top of me. He was pretty heavy and I couldn’t breathe.

  “So … heavy … just can you … ouch,” I muttered. My air was being cut off.

  “Sorry, baby.” Then he moved more to the side. “Hold on, I have a surprise for you.”

  Bucky stood up and went to his dresser. He got out a condom and winked at me. He then rummaged through a few cassette tapes, found the one he wanted, and popped it into his ghetto blaster. He pushed “
play” and the lyrics to Too $hort’s “Don’t Fight the Feelin’ ” filled the room:

  Say ho

  yeah you

  Can I ask you a question

  You like to fuck?

  Oh, you don’t want me to talk to you like that

  Will you like to make love?

  “Our song,” Bucky whispered into my ear. I racked my brain trying to remember why this was our song. It didn’t seem that romantic. I was also pretty sure we didn’t have a song.

  I saw you walking down the street, and I had to stop

  Turn up the radio and drop the top

  I see you look so good, and you’re so fine

  Young tender, would you be mine.…

  I shook my head. “I don’t think this is our song.”

  “Of course it is. It’s always the song that is our song when I have a girlfriend.”

  “So it’s your song and when you have a girlfriend it’s their song, too?”

  “Not their song, it’s our song.”

  “But then it isn’t our song if it’s your song with all of your ex-girlfriends.” I started to tear up. This wasn’t going as planned.

  “No, baby, this is for you. I’ve never played it for a virgin before,” he said proudly.

  Suddenly he was on top of me. He pulled down his pants, then mine, and before I knew what was happening I had lost my virginity. I looked up and noticed that he had knocked his spit cup over. Brown saliva trickled down his window as the Too $hort song continued:

  Your name is yuck mouth, you don’t brush

  Gotta cover your mouth like this

  They call you yuck mouth

  You refuse to brush, no sweetheart you can keep that kiss.

  I wriggled to get free from Bucky’s grasp. This was really embarrassing. I just wanted to get out of the way of the fallen saliva moving directly toward my head. Unfortunately I didn’t make it in time. Bucky jumped up and got me a towel, one of the only caring things he’d done that day, and probably during our entire relationship. Right after he wiped his armpits with it, he handed me the towel to clean the spit off my face.