At some point, I told a friend of mine about the count. Since none of my friends liked Pam, it was only a matter of time before this friend told a few others. To embarrass me at any time they’d ask, “How many times has it been now?”
When my relationship with Pam ended bitterly, the count was over. The final number was sixty-three. Eventually, after I started seeing other girls, I felt disgusted by the number. Sometimes, just to put me in my place, a friend of mine would still smile and laugh and say to me, “Sixty-three times.”
Vodka and Squirt
Even though I seemed immune to pot, I found other ways to alter my consciousness. It took a while though, as I had to get over the ingrained fears of brain damage and eternal damnation from a Catholic God. Sobriety was something I took pride in as a teen. There were other kids in high school who were infamous drunkards and potheads, but I kept a safe distance from them.
The first time I gave in to drink was a couple of nights before my high school graduation. I went over to Deanna and Jim’s apartment after work.
Their place had that uncomfortable decor that happens when an older guy hooks up with a younger girl. Teddy bears and angel imagery mingled with mirrors that had whiskey logos on them. High school yearbooks from the early seventies sitting next to ones from the mid-eighties.
That night we sat in beanbag chairs and drank sweet mixed drinks (like cheap vodka and Squirt) through straws. Jim started telling really crude sexual jokes and I could tell it was making Deanna really uncomfortable. But the more I drank, the more I laughed along with Jim. I drank myself into a spinning night of sleep on their couch and woke up with a furry blanket on top of me. I was hot and felt sick. I looked at the clock and saw that I was late for my graduation rehearsal. I got up and slumped outside.
I looked around for my car and then realized I had left it at Big Momma’s. I had to walk about twenty blocks to my high school. My hangover made me not care so much about being late for the rehearsal. Maurice was probably the only one who would notice I wasn’t there anyway. The heat was getting to me and I did that thing with my T-shirt where you pull the front up over your head but keep the sleeves around your arms. Suddenly I felt the sickness come up and I heaved the sour throw-up next to a tree in someone’s front yard. I wiped my mouth with a leaf and kept walking in the direction of my school. I started to feel self-conscious, speed walking with my shirt up like that, my face melting like a sick drunk’s. People were driving by me on Garfield Avenue, probably wondering why I wasn’t at school. A couple of blocks later, my legs buckled. I rested on one knee and quickly vomited between a STOP sign and a storm drain. Before I reached the school, there was one more retching moment between cars in a church parking lot.
Maurice looked at me harshly when I finally got there toward the end of rehearsal. He could somehow tell that I’d been drinking, but instead of lecturing me he said that he too was going out to get drunk that night. I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of reverse psychology on his part. Maybe he was jealous because I didn’t get drunk with him. Nonetheless, it made our graduation night stressful. Maurice was probably my only true friend in my class and now there was tension.
On graduation night, there was a big Las Vegas–themed party in the high school gym for us, the triumphant Class of 1985. Maurice told me later that it was really fun and it lasted until three in the morning. I went home immediately after throwing my graduation cap into the air. I locked myself in my bedroom and listened to music on my headphones, wondering what to do next. My mind was blank.
Homemade Clothes
One day I wore an especially effeminate shirt that Mom had made for me. Dad saw it and freaked out. It didn’t help that I had recently pierced both my ears (by myself, using the potato method[1]) and constantly ratted my bangs too. “Why don’t you just go ahead and turn him into a girl?” Dad said. Some of my guy friends I hung out with were worse. A couple of them actually did wear skirts.
At the time, I was really into paisley. Mom made me dress jackets that looked like they came from Prince’s wardrobe if he were on the show
One time my friend John, who was fairly normal looking compared to the rest of our friends, was over at our house. When he left, Dad shook his head sadly and said something about John wearing mascara. But John didn’t wear mascara. He just had pretty eyes.
The Palace
That summer, after graduation, I started to hang out at this place called the Bingo Palace. A couple of my friends actually worked there, calling out numbers and letters to the weeknight gatherings of oldsters. I thought it was a cool job and I was a little jealous. But the coolest thing about the Palace was the Friday night all-ages dances. After the brutal breakup with Pam, I decided that I had had enough self-pity and disgust. I was finally feeling confident about who I was, and besides that, it was a good place to show off my fashion sense.
About a hundred or more pimply minors would go there every week, and it wasn’t just Kennewick kids. You’d see the Richland punkers and preppies and the Pasco jocks and break-dancers hanging out too. The dance floor used to be a skating rink, so it was pretty big. Around the perimeter of that was a carpeted area with four big mushroom-shaped seats where each clique claimed their space. The far back corner was where all the New Wave kids hung out, stuffing their trench coats under the mushroom and filling the air with clove smoke. Since the different cliques of people didn’t mingle, there were never any fights. But many of the jocks and a lot of the Wavers were weekly regulars and they would sometimes exchange dirty looks or sarcastic comments. The DJ would have to play a wide mix of music to please everyone there. Whenever songs by Love and Rockets or ABC came on, the floor would belong to the Wavers. Then Def Leppard would signal the return of the jocks and everyone else. Sometimes the DJ would slip in Anita Baker or that love song from
The Friday night dances became the highlight of my week. I met many of my longtime friends at the Palace that year and I discovered a love for dancing. I even thought to myself: Dancing is my life! I live to dance! Maybe dressing up and dancing to my favorite songs was as close as I would come to being a pop star, so I went for it, and I felt euphoric afterward. I was starting to really feel myself physically in the world, self-conscious in a good way. Living in the moments of music. I remember being at the Palace and thinking about how sad it would have been to be somewhere else. All those people at home. All the people at work. Anyone, anywhere else but here—I felt sorry for them.
Water Softeners
I didn’t have a job for a couple of months and I was starting to run out of money. I had a pretty large collection of records (in milk crates) and cassettes (in fruit boxes) and I felt a voracious need to buy music. A friend gave me a tip on a job where all you had to do was call people on the phone. I didn’t realize at the time how painfully monotonous it was going to be.
