My (Not So) Bloody Valentine

Lover's Tryst

*Around midnight, guy in a [insert random fast food joint name here] uniform is making the evening deposit at a deserted ATM, or so he thinks.*

“Don’t turn around and don’t say anything. Now drop the money, that’s it nice and easy. Be a good boy and you won’t get hurt.”

“You probably shouldn’t have said that.”

“Shut up! You make another noise and I’ll kill your sorry ass.”

“Is that even a real gun? We don’t own a gun, and ease up a little would’ya. You’re going to leave a bruise.”

“I said…wait, what the hell are you talking about. You don’t know me.”

“’Be a good boy and you won’t get hurt’ hah, like you’ve never said that in bed. You sound just as sexy holding me up as you do naked. Maybe we should try this later tonight.”

“Shit, I didn’t even realize. God this is nerve-wracking. And now I went and said the Lord’s name in vain, crap. ”

“This is what you worry about while you’re holding someone up? Man you’re adorable, and what does it matter if I recognized you? You were going to tell me anyway, right?”

“Well, I hadn’t planned on it, plausible deniability and all that.”

“Well yeah but after, don’t you think I would have wondered where you got all the money suddenly?”

“I mean I’m not going to spend it all at once, you know what this doesn’t even matter, I’ll just see you at home and please, please don’t tell babe. I can’t believe you recognized me, this really sucks.”

“Well….you know I’ve never been a really good liar…”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?!”

“It means that I’m probably going to be in a ton of trouble for losing the money, and they’re going to be all concerned and I have to talk to the police and stuff all night, and they’re probably going to send me to therapy and I have to say stuff about how I’m afraid to walk alone at night now or whatever. This is a huge inconvenience for me. It’s definitely going to cost you.”

“Oh very cute, ok, what is it going to cost me? You really want me to try this on you again a little later? Maybe even tie you up?”

“Hmm. That sounds fun. Maybe, but I want a new PS 3.”

“I mean, how much money is in there? Can’t be buying things all willy-nilly, that money’s got to help pay the rent too you know.”

“You’re such a dork, who even says willy-nilly? And I dunno, probably $1900, maybe more.”

“Oh ok well then…Jesus Christ! I can’t believe the dumb bitch is honking the freaking horn, like hello we’re committing a felony, yeah it’s taking awhile but you don’t honk the GD horn. I gotta run before she starts flashing the lights and yelling ‘Here we are cops!’”

“I’m definitely getting the Playstation right?”

“Yeah. Yeah. You’re getting the Playstation. Love you!”

“Love you too babe.”

Writing About Place

It was a bumpy car ride over the pot hole filled parking lot between the two dusty brown football fields. I walked up the peeling red steps to the pasty yellow main entrance, unease mounting. Inside, the fading painted cement walls peeled, the floors were scuffed and the fluorescent lights made the place look like a grimy, back alley free clinic. Outside, row upon row of dismal, dull yellow, one-story buildings were clustered around the black-top “lunch area.” It was a massive, table-less expanse of gravel and dirt bordered on one side by the fire lane and the other by a steep hill leading up to the small dingy gym. The entire place was surrounded by a tall chain link fence. It was warm at least, 75 degrees and sunny in January. It was a shame the only clothes in my suitcase were turtlenecks, jeans and thermals. This place was a far cry from the snow frosted, three-story, red brick stately buildings of General H.H. Arnold American High School. My mother kept shooting sidelong glances at me as my unease turned to clear dread. Nausea had plagued me almost constantly since I’d seen Barstow again, getting closer as the car made its way through the brown desert covered with the stubble of tiny dry shrubs. This was home now and this was my new high school.

(As an extra treat I've included a little video clip on the wonders of Barstow California. Everything in it is accurate, trust me.)

Comments and Whatnot

I commented on Andrew's blog because of our mutual place of employment and desire to travel to/live in the UK. I really hope he does the thing I suggested when he gets there, but he probably won't. Especially if he ever figures out it means.

How to Write a True War Story

Hey Mom
Just wanted to drop a quick line and let you know I got that package. Thanks! For once the fruit snacks didn’t melt together, I think that little fan you sent was like a good luck charm or something. So Chris and Ange decided to get married after all huh? Man I really wish I could make that, if only so I could rub it in how Freshman year he asked her out and she said no and we started dating instead. Haha remember that? Ah well, I guess the best man won, they’re really good for each other. Would you do me favor and get them a wedding present from me. I’ll send you the money but the PX is a lot better for beef jerky and BDU’s than wedding gifts. Anyway, tell Steph I love her and she better get straight A’s on her finals and tell dad I miss him and I love him and thanks again for the box but mom seriously, I have enough socks now. Seriously. I love you. Oh and give Rudolph a big ol’ kiss for me. Hah.
Brandon

I fired off a quick reply and dropped the Blackberry into my bag adding his requests to my mental list and leaving off the one where he wanted me to kiss his big, mangy dog. This was a good day; it was a good day email. The emails after he got goodie boxes usually were. Most of them were actually, which made the other ones harder. The good emails talked about the USO show and how he wishes Demi Moore had said “I want to blow shit up” in Striptease instead because that would make it the hottest movie ever, hands down; and the little kids who gave them big hugs after they played football with them or gave them treats; and how much better he was getting at Madden because in between convoys all they did was play Playstation. I wasn’t happy after reading them because I wouldn’t be happy until he was home with me for good. It was just a kind of relief, because I knew how to answer these letters. I don’t know how to answer the other ones.

There should be a box for unwanted memories. A little box in your mind where you can lock up the things you never want to look at again, one that really works. Because I thought I had them locked up, and then Brandon decided he wanted to join the army and suddenly something let loose in my mind and I saw it all, all over again. The first time they came in a rush but nowadays they come when I’m not even thinking about anything like that. They come when I’m tying my shoes or using the bathroom or washing dishes and it’s always just one, and suddenly I can’t breathe.

There’s the memory of my senior year of high school doing laundry and the doorbell ringing and my mom moan-screaming in that godawful, inhuman way. The soldiers saying sorry and even though they were trying not to, looking just like they said it a hundred times before. My dad was the funniest guy you could ever hope to meet, he stopped making jokes after that. And sometimes there’s the letter memory, but I don’t let that one come up.

I don’t know what to do about the other emails, the bad day emails. The ones that talk about nightmares and days that last months and how sometimes it’s so hot you just want to stop breathing because it hurts your nose and your lungs and how the worst sound in the world is like two feather pillows being smacked together. That’s the sound the IEDs make when they land 3 feet away from you and the only reason they didn’t explode, the only reason you’re not dead is because the sand was so soft and fine and powdery from all the tanks rolling over it, that the IED didn’t hit hard enough to go off. I reply to those emails, and I try to be heartfelt and understanding and whatever the hell else it is you’re supposed to be when your 19 year old baby is upset and far away and you can’t hold him or tell him it’s going to be ok because that would be a lie and he’s too old for those lies now and you don’t even really understand any of it.

There’s that memory of my first year in college when I was getting some deodorant and eyeliner from the Walgreens and there was a soldier in his uniform who looked about the same age Curt would have been if he hadn’t gotten killed. Some guys I recognized as anti-war protestors from campus walked over and I knew what was going to happen like I was a psychic or something and I knew I had to stop it.

“Baby Killer, you should have died in Nam,” and then he spit and I stepped in front of it. I took it full in the face and turned to look at the soldier and I wanted my eyes to say “this is my sacrifice for you because of the terrible sacrifice you made over there.” But I don’t think they did because he took one look at me and yelled “how the fuck do you go off spitting on a woman!” and he was defending me and punching the protestor in the face. The guy’s friends jumped him started beating him up and he was a fighter but he couldn’t fight off all of them at once and people were screaming and the store clerks were running over to break it up and I tore out of that store as fast as I could. I wanted to make things better, and all I did was make them worse. I still had that unpaid for deodorant in my hand when I got back to my dorm, I threw it away and then I threw up. Sometimes, there’s the memory about the letter and I fight it. That’s the only one I can still fight because I think if I didn’t I would go crazy.

Sometimes when I picture Brandon, he’s not in a desert with massive spiders, leaning on a dirt colored tank. Sometimes he’s in a jungle and it’s wet and dark and humid. The worst emails, the ones I make my husband answer because I can barely look at them, are the ones that only say three tiny, agonizing words.

“Sometimes I’m scared.”

I know some of what he’s scared of. I know he’s scared about dying and what it would be like to never come home. I know he’s more scared of what it will be like when he does come home. I know he’s scared of how he’s not ashamed anymore when there’s gunfire and people yelling and smoke and something gets blown up right next to you because this time the IED hit and you shit your pants. You’re not ashamed because you know everyone does it but what kind of person isn’t ashamed when they shit their pants? I know he’s scared because he laughs at things he would have never laughed at before, because if you don’t laugh you might go crazy. Curt used to talk about that stuff, and in the very last letter he ever sent me he wrote “Sometimes I’m scared.”

And then I can’t fight the memory anymore. I’m taking a letter, addressed to me with my brother’s old platoon on it and it’s from one of his friend’s, the one they called Rat. I’m going outside to read it so I won’t be within hearing distance of my mom when I start crying because then she’ll ask to see it and if I ever hear her make that noise again I think I might tear my ears off. I read the whole thing and I’m crying and I’m missing Curt but most of all, I am furious! He knew my brother 6 months! Six fucking months! And he wants to tell me what a great guy my brother was and how close they were and how he had the right fucking attitude, how he made the war fun.

He. Never. Saw. Them.

He never saw the letters my brother sent me. He never saw the letters that said “I laugh at things I shouldn’t laugh at” and “what kind of person isn’t ashamed anymore when they shit their pants”, and “sometimes I’m scared.” I ripped it. I took the whole thing in my hands, envelope and all and ripped it into a million little pieces and left them sitting in there in the dirt like the pile of trash they were.

Then there was the day I realized what it was that I had done. It was the one time Brandon had really tried to explain what he was so scared of. There was another guy his age in his platoon, younger, and then he got killed. That wasn’t what scared him. What scared him was the guy who went dead inside, holding that dying kid in his arms. He looked up, and in the most horrible voice you could imagine said “I promised I would get him home.”

“He went home today mom, they sent him back because, I dunno, he was useless. But mom, I could be that guy. That’s the worst thing out here, they all need me and I could screw up and if I do someone could, someone could…

I really don’t know, sometimes this whole thing is just so fucked up. But hey mom I gotta run, tell everyone I love them, you know the drill. Love you.”

I knew what it had cost him, that guy they called Rat. I knew what he had thought when he poured his heart out in that letter, I could imagine what it took and what he was feeling but didn’t say. And I ripped it up and threw it away and now I wish to God I hadn’t. I sat down to write him a letter, a letter I’d never even be able to send but all I can think to say is “Thank You” and that’s pathetic, it’s not enough.

Characterization

It’s All in the Name, Literally

She bent her head over the test, gnawing her lip as she feverishly scribbled into the tiny bubbles. Her eyes darted upwards to gauge the time, the teacher was coming to the end of the carefully scripted directions. She scowled at the middle initial box, those people with middle names have all the luck. There was no such reprieve for her as she moved on to her second last name, trying to quickly calculate whether or not she would run out of bubbles. The personal information page was always the most difficult part of standardized tests, at least until freshman year when she stopped paying attention in math and consequently did terrible in it on every exam.
The name is her parent’s fault, as are most things in life. They both wanted to name her after their grandmothers but didn’t want one grandma to have all the glory of the first name while the other was relegated to the solitary bubble of the “middle initial here” wasteland. Two first names, two last names and a Spanish conjunction, thrown in, to round the whole mess out. An interesting sociological question arises, that age old problem of nature versus nurture. Did she love to read and write and craft legions of imaginary friends because her DNA programmed her for creativity? Or did needing to learn and pronounce all those letters lead to her near photographic memory and love for words that were so much less complicated. It would certainly explain the more common names of her imaginary friends; macaroni and monkey.
As she got older and began turning in assignments late all the time, was it a natural tendency toward laziness and procrastination or was she simply too exhausted after writing out the class, date, and her entire first and last name to move on to the assignment portion of the assignment? At least her talent for making things up came in handy when she needed excuses for those late assignments and the occasional skipped class. In fact, despite her love of writing, those excuses are the most complete and successful products of her creativity.
Perhaps the compromise her parents made for her name has allowed her to compromise when it comes to her conflicting passions. She’s able to be a super liberal near-hippy, while being a down home country girl who loves horse back riding and George Strait. An environmentalist who thinks the full-throated rumble of a Hemi pick-up is one of the sexiest sounds imaginable. A loyal friend and a terrible gossip, an intelligent debater who often talks to inanimate objects, someone who thinks tiny dogs are kind of useless and obnoxious but her mini Chihuahua/pug mix is the best dog ever and has nabbed the title of most adorable creature in the history of the universe. She’s sarcastic with a very inappropriate sense of humor but still gets teary eyed during Disney movies and insurance commercials. Oh she’s complicated alright, and it’s probably all because of that name. Or maybe everyone’s complicated and the name is just, well, a name. Somehow this was all going to relate to that whole nature versus nurture debate, but somewhere during her second beer the author forgot the connection.

Letter to my Friends

Dear You,

I don’t think I’ve written anything that wasn’t for school or a scholarship since I was probably about 7. Back then, I desperately wanted to be a writer. Well, writer/doctor/actress/dolphin trainer, but I actually practiced the writer thing. The few stories from back then that I’ve found or remember writing make me incredibly happy. Clearly my mom’s independent spirit had rubbed off on me (I think I was too young to have developed an independent spirit of my own) because all my stories were about very determined young ladies. There was the one about the little girl living in the woods whose parents disappear, so she runs away from the now empty house to live on her own in a cave. Ok so maybe there was a plot hole or two but this cave she lived in was totally awesome. It had all these different rooms including one that could only be reached by a stone, trick wall-door thing (think the rotating bookcase in Indiana Jones Temple of Doom) that she could use as a panic room/escape hatch, and a room where the walls were all a wet clay-like substance (essential for making all her flatware and water jugs and shelves for the rest of the cave rooms). She also adopted a bear cub. Her parents were actually still alive and returned home to find their daughter missing but I’m not quite sure how it ends because I never finished it.

One winter around Christmas time my sister and I were with our dad scooping sand from the dry river bed into a big box to make our luminaries when I saw something really curious in a tree. It was on the bank of the dry river bed and the branches hung down to the ground and apparently made a cozy home for whatever awesome adventurer had their sleeping bag and all their treasures hidden underneath. When my dad explained that the tree was some homeless guys bedroom I started volunteering at the local homeless shelter and wrote another story. This one was about four homeless girls living together under a tree by a dry river bed. Apparently though I didn’t think that being homeless was bad enough, because I made one of them blind, one mute, one deaf and the last one had no legs. They sort of led each other around and worked together to solve their problems and the legless one got pushed in a Wal-Mart shopping cart. I never finished that story either. In fact, most of my stories end that same way. Clearly my heroines were much more determined than I was.

Reading though, reading is something I’ve always been completely passionate about. I still remember my favorite childhood book “But No Elephants” almost word for word. When I was little I refused to believe there was any book that was too old or mature for me. I read Clan of the Cave Bear (in which there are some very adult rape scenes) in fourth grade after three straight years of whining and trying to steal it off my mom’s shelf. The past couple of years I haven’t read much that wasn’t for a class, which I hate (especially because I’m a political science major). One of my New Years resolutions was to read for me more often this year. So far I’m doing pretty well with it, but lately I’ve preferred non-fiction to fiction. Reading fiction is starting to become like watching TV, I’m getting way too good at predicting what’s going to happen and I end up pissed off when I’m right. It’s possible I’ve just picked a bad couple of books, so I’ve decided to wait for some good recommendations (anyone?) and, in the meantime, try and write and maybe even finish a story or two.

As far as my writing abilities now, I’m clearly a big fan of run-on sentences and inadvertently spell words the English (as in UK) way instead of the American way despite never having been to England. I think I put a lot of my own personality into most of what I write, my voice usually comes out loud and clear which is probably a bad thing in fiction. I had it in my head that I wanted to write really fun, funny non-fiction science books and then I read Spook by Mary Roach and got really upset because she stole my idea before I thought of it. I remember one footnote in Spook (in a chapter on mediums and ectoplasm) that talked about a woman in England who got herself invited to court for being able to give birth to rabbits. It turned out she was just inserting the rabbits herself and then taking an herb to induce contractions and she wound up getting caught and I think put to death. As strange as this sounds, it related to what she was talking about at the time in the chapter and I remember reading it and thinking it was exactly the kind of thing I would have wanted to put in my book. I mean, who wouldn’t want to know about that lady?

So that’s me and my “literary” self so far. I absolutely love to read, can’t ever finish writing a story and intend to build a time machine, travel into the past and write and publish all of Mary Roach’s books before she gets the chance.

List for Living

Ethereal

Awkward

Pizazz

Fantastic

Mundane

Moxie

Tummy

Crazed

Majestic

Scruples

Vixen

Fuzzy

Vagabond

Obnoxious

Delectable

Intrigue

Mistress

Quaint

Naughty

Ingenue