Dolly Parton - Jolene

I moved to New York City on something like a whim.

I’d spent several months prior in my hometown of Miami, a muggy place I’d always hated, withering away in a Ph.D. program I also hated, which didn’t support me or my research.  My grandparents, who raised me, announced that they were planning on moving four hours north.  This was a shock to the system, as I’d just moved back home, in large part, to be close to them.  It was the first time since I’d graduated high school that I lived a quick drive away, as opposed to an hours-long roadtrip or flight, and here they were, planning to uproot.  One of my best friends threw himself in front of a car and died right there in the road on a busy thoroughfare I used every day to get to school.

I decided there was nothing left there for me.  I walked out of my office on a Friday and told everyone I’d see them Monday.  I put my things into my car, with a small U-Haul trailer attached because I was, and am, obsessed with my bed and couldn’t bear to leave it behind.  I drove up the west coast of Florida, through Georgia and Tennessee with stops along the way to visit friends, and then veered over and up the east coast.  I found my new apartment in a densely populated city across the Hudson from Manhattan and knocked the bumper off a car as I tried to park.

I realized soon after I arrived that I had less than a handful of friends.  Finding a job was proving impossible.  I was running out of money.  It got to a point where I was so broke that my friends from the internet helped pay my rent one month.

I started hanging out at a bar on the Upper West Side where the liquor was cheap, the country music was loud, and there was no shortage of free drinks, thanks to the heavily-male patronage.  The scantily-clad bartenders danced on the bar and I did too.  They poured sweet liqueur down my throat straight from the bottle.  They blew fire; they de-bloused and stuck lit matches to their nipples as they sang happy birthday to patrons.  I found out later that the man who owned this bar also owned the one that indirectly inspired Elizabeth Gilbert’s article in GQ about the Coyote Ugly Saloon, which was later made into the movie we lesbians all know and love.

I made friends.  There was Mo, who was well-dressed and articulate, but he had too many opinions and couldn’t take no for an answer.  Sheik was ripped and gorgeous.  Kenny was a big guy, who always bought the drinks and helped me stage numerous jukebox takeovers.  Saul was a pastry chef at the bakery down the street.  He was shy, but begged me to let him take me out.  In most cases, their motivations aside, these guys protected me and made me laugh.

Even if they hadn’t seen me yet, the guys all knew I was around when the jukebox switched from Johnny Cash and Toby Keith to Trisha Yearwood, Shania Twain, and Dolly Parton.  I played this song, selection #1591, every time I walked into that bar.  Women were sorely underrepresented there, and I tried to do my part.

I started to make mistakes.

One night, I got so wasted that I took a near-stranger home with me.  When the condom broke before he even got it on, I had sex with him anyway.  I spent the next day at Planned Parenthood.  I got tested.  The guy who took my blood laughed as the tears rolled down my face, surprised that I was so scared of the needle when I had several visible tattoos.  The doctor wrote me a prescription for Plan B.  I remember being afraid that it would make me ill, but I took the doses twelve hours apart, as instructed.

I saw the guy again a couple months later.  He asked me if I was pregnant, and when I looked at him incredulously and replied in the negative, he asked if I wanted to go home with him.  I declined his offer.

Another night, Kenny and I went shot for shot.  There were Nutty Irishmen (Baileys, Frangelico), Dirty Girl Scouts (Baileys, Kahlua, Rumpleminze), Red Headed Sluts (Peach schnapps, Jager, cranberry), and straight shooters of Wild Turkey Honey.  We kept count, and we’d each downed over thirty shots.  In retrospect, I have no idea how I lived through that, or how I got through it without puking.  I knew I’d never be able to navigate my way back to Jersey, which required, at minimum, a train to Port Authority, a bus through the tunnel, and a taxi home.

Kenny offered to let me stay at his place.  He told me I’d be safe, and that he wouldn’t cross any boundaries.  I remember taking off my bra and my pants and crawling into bed.  I remember him rubbing my back.  There are parts I don’t remember, some time I lost.  I remember him naked, thrusting, his round belly.  I know I didn’t say no, but I don’t remember saying yes, either.  Though my girlfriend recently speculated that this was rape, I look at it as my very own Coyote Ugly moment.  It could have been far worse than waking up next to a fat man and doing the walk of shame.

When I heard the bar was closing on October 4, 2008, I made sure to drop by with my date.  I ran into Mo and Sheik.  I didn’t stay long, but long enough that I got a chance to say hello and goodbye to those boys and to that bar and saluted them all with a cheap beer.

Iron and Wine - Fever Dream

June 26, 2006.

She’d broken up with me the week before, then dangled her love in front of me like a carrot: if we get back together, I will do whatever I want (in this case, hang out with the girl she cheated on me with—alone), and I will give you my love again.  If x, then y.

I tried to accept this.  I felt helpless.  I’d stopped eating.  She shoved McDonald’s down my throat every day, and made fun of me when I said I wasn’t hungry.

“Oh, right.  You don’t eat anymore.”

I guess one or both of us had worked that morning.  I remember us sitting in a booth in my favorite section, having lunch together.  There was a certain tone she took with me that made me feel like a child she’d rather have aborted.  I found myself repeating this question to her like a mantra during that time: “Could you please not speak to me that way?”

She continued.  I grabbed my car keys and I left.  I’d bought a car the year before for the sole purpose of escape.  When our arguments got too hairy, I’d drive.  This escalated into suicidal fantasies about driving off bridges.  We lived in rural Tennessee, and there were so many perfect places.  One night the year before I’d even set a plan in motion, but she came home and stopped me.  I’d ruined her Halloween.  That became one of many ticks on a very long list of ways in which I’d wronged her over time.  She knew this list by heart, and could recite it to me at the drop of a hat.

I went back to our apartment.  I was frantic.  I spent three years frantic.  I needed her love so badly.

She came home, packed some things, and told me she was going out.  I knew where to.  She’d told me that they were going to have drinks.  Alone.  Without me, without the other girl’s girlfriend, who could tell something was going on.  She stayed silent, but I saw it very clearly in her eyes one day while we were at the grocery store shopping for dinner supplies.  We’d left them at the apartment, couldn’t remember an item, and called.  Neither picked up their phones.  The sheer panic in her eyes that day was proof enough that she was suspicious.

I begged her not to go.  I cried.  I tore at her shirt.

When I get angry enough, there’s a tangible physical effect: I feel an intense pressure in my chest.  I remember throwing the things she’d packed into our front yard.

I cried these heaving sobs that were likely audible at either end of the street we lived on.  The other girl’s girlfriend showed up, knocked on my door, and sat on my porch for an hour before giving up.

I paced.  I waited.  I cried more.  I tried to watch TV.  Harry Potter was on when the ambulance showed up later.

I remember feeling like it would be impossible for me to live if our relationship ended.  I couldn’t function with it, and I didn’t know how I could function without it, either.  I’d spent weeks sitting on our porch listening to the trains pass, willing myself to lie down on the tracks and wait.  Weeks writing in my journal, trying to work up the willpower to make deeper cuts with the razor blades I’d become so familiar with over the years.  The skin on my arms is like a road map.

Hours passed, and I felt like I was going to combust.  There is no way to properly put this kind of crazy into words.  When I think about it, I can still remember the feeling exactly.  It’s not something easily imagined or empathized with, I don’t think.  I don’t know many people who, after I describe this thing I felt, can say, “Yes, exactly.”

I called.  I called again.  And again.  I think I felt like I would die if I couldn’t hear her voice.  Eventually, she picked up and I screamed her name, begged her to come home.  She said no, that she wouldn’t be home that evening.  I screamed more.  I was in absolute terror of being alone.  My best friends lived across the country, and she’d made me so afraid to lean on my local friends, telling me, “You’re turning them against me.”

I begged and pleaded and screamed and threatened suicide, and I meant it all.  She hung up for the last time.  Her phone went straight to voice mail.

I had a bottle of painkillers because I’d hurt my back at work the week before.  I had a bottle of wine.  I had a razor blade, which I’d already put to use that evening.

I think the way I used to see it, if I could make myself bleed, it meant that my pain was real.  If I could just see it, then I wasn’t crazy because it was right there for anyone to see.  If we could just see how much I hurt, then it would make sense.  I think it made the pressure in chest fade a little bit.  It made the panic lessen.  I know I wanted help, but I didn’t think there was anyone in the world who would be able to understand to start helping.  I didn’t feel equipped for life.

I hate swallowing pills.  I hate putting foreign chemicals into my body, with the exception of alcohol.  I hate the feeling of a pill traveling down my gullet, scratching the surface all the way down.

I don’t remember if I took them one by one or in twos or threes.  I don’t remember how many I took.  I washed them down with wine.  I drank more.  I sliced my inner forearms, my biceps, my thighs, my calves, my stomach.  My strokes were quick and light.  I’d hoped the pills would lessen the pain and the alcohol would make me heavy-handed.

I called again and again.  She picked up, and I begged her to come home.  She hung up on me, and two minutes later she called back.  She stayed on the phone.

There was banging on the door.  It was deafening and scary.  I opened the door and our small living room was suddenly full of police and paramedics asking me who I was.  I was sobbing and I couldn’t answer them.  I remember yelling that I hated her for abandoning me, for calling the police on me.  I remember ignoring the police officers and the paramedics.  Calling my mother.  I don’t know what I said.  Maybe that I didn’t know what to do.  She told me to put one of the officers on the phone, and I did.  When he handed the phone back, she told me to go willingly, that if I didn’t, they would cuff and Baker Act me.  She told me to use my education, to go through the motions, to give them the answers they wanted.  They wouldn’t let me get dressed.  I went to my computer and sent a message to one of my best friends telling her that I was going to a hospital, that the police were there.

I remember the ambulance being big and feeling equally as unnecessary.

In the hospital, they put me in a cold, white room.  I got little cell reception.  They left me alone for a long time.  Then they gave me a tetanus shot.  They took vials of my blood and lay them on my stomach, even though I told them I was terrified of needles.  They did a detailed psychiatric evaluation.  I told them what they wanted to hear.  They never checked my body thoroughly enough to know that what they saw on my forearms was just the beginning.  They never saw the blood smeared all over my body.

I exchanged text messages with the other girl’s girlfriend, who told me that my girlfriend was drunk, passed out on someone’s couch.  I spoke to my best friend.  I spoke to my mom, and gave her a friend’s number—the one friend she and I hadn’t shared.  I knew my friend had been having a party that night.  I was supposed to go.  I knew she was probably drunk, and in no condition to drive.

She had a friend drive her.  They released me to her under the condition that she stay the night with me.  She tucked me into the front seat of her friend’s Audi, which felt a lot like a spaceship.  We stopped at Taco Bell.

When we got back to her place, the party was still in full-swing.  She led me to her bedroom and I crawled into her bed, onto the side I always slept on during our sleepovers.  She told me I just needed sleep, and put on her sleepytime playlist.  I only remember this song.

The next morning, we wandered around town, in and out of stores.  I asked her to take me home.  She didn’t refuse me, but made her feelings known.

When I walked into my apartment, my girlfriend was on the couch, extremely disoriented.  She’d been given sedatives by the other girl.  When she finally came to, she asked where I’d been and told me she’d been on the phone looking for me at eight am, that she couldn’t find me, that she’d been so worried. I don’t know what happened after that.  The apartment was dark.  Harry Potter was on the TV.

We broke up for good two days later, exactly a day before our three year anniversary.

I found out three years later through unsavory means that, after she left our apartment that afternoon, she met up for drinks with the other girl.  Once her girlfriend gave up trying to console me from the porch, she joined them.  They drove to Knoxville, where my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend lived.  She’d told him to rent a motel room, that she wanted to fuck him.   The four of them converged on the motel.  My girlfriend sent the other two girls out for beer.  When i called, he had his hand down her pants.

Nickel Creek - Out of the Woods

A girl gave me this song on a mix tape once.  We were a false start, she and I.  I was broken and lonely and smothered by the Texas sun.  Our paths crossed for an intense three weeks in the summer of 2006, and before I saved us from making the mistake of crossing state lines and signing our names to a lease we would’ve broken, I fell for her and her sweet voice.  It never could’ve been enough.

We’re not friends anymore, but I miss her.  She was kind to the world and to me, but she got caught up in the rebound cycle and I didn’t want to do anymore damage than I already had.  I remember saying goodbye to her for good at a gas station outside of the town we shared and how her eyes welled-up.  I played this song on her mix over and over as I stared out my windshield at the bluest sky I’ve ever seen and drove far, far away.

I used to think it was bad to recycle songs, but I recently realized that you can’t let the music die, and if someone can resuscitate a beautiful song and give it new meaning, then so be it.  Songs don’t land themselves in hospitals.  Songs don’t sign do-not-revive orders.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided it was too cold to wait for the bus, that I could make it to my destination on foot and spend less time shivering.  I fired up my iPod, set it to shuffle, and this song played.  I remember exactly where I was when it hit me like a lightning bolt that this was the song I wanted to dance to at my wedding, and with the girl I share my life with now—not the girl whose wishful thinking set this song deep down in me.

Admittedly, I spend a lot of time looking at wedding photography these days.  In fact, I already know who I want to photograph my wedding, but never, prior to that moment, did I envision this fantastical wedding that I might someday take part in. Who’s to say why?  There are the legal issues and the self-worth issues.  I didn’t spend my entire childhood waiting for Prince(ss) Charming to show and sweep me off my feet.  My future had always been a mystery to me.  All I knew was that I wanted to be an artist, and that was all I cared about.

But this idea, it was a warm seed of wanting in my stomach that night: an early evening ceremony in a barn out in an open field.  We’ll both wear dresses, mine black and hers white, with Chuck Taylors.  Our guests will dress casually.  The light will be perfect, the accents vintage and mismatched.  I went home that night and as we sat at the kitchen table talking, I told her, fearfully, my crazy idea.  To my surprise, she agreed.  We both know it’s not time yet, but the seeds have been sown.

Def Leppard - Pour Some Sugar on Me

after my dad died, i bought plane tickets.  one each for my mother and i, and the plan was that i’d fly to raleigh from new york and we’d catch the same plane home, to miami.  it didn’t work out that way.  my flight got changed.  my mom got stuck in raleigh.  i remember waiting in the miami international airport bar for a ride.

i got through two watered down bloody marys before my grandparents picked me up.  this was back before our house got foreclosed on—just before it—and i knew that i’d not only be saying goodbye to my father that week, but that i’d also be saying goodbye to my childhood, my home base.  it was early april and muggy in miami, a stark difference from the crisp cold of new york.  having to lug my winter coat around felt like salt in a wound.

we drove the forty-five minutes home to have to go back to the airport for my mother a few hours later.  i don’t know what we did to pass the time.  we must have sat at the table and talked, avoiding my dead dad, the elephant in the room.  inevitably, my grandmother tried to feed me.  maybe i napped, but i probably didn’t.

it had been a month since he died.  the prison system is full of bureaucratic red tape, even in death.  there was transporting the body, the autopsy, proving next-of-kin status, the paperwork for his cremation, and all the time spent on hold while i was transferred from person to person, one never having any more answers than the next.  i couldn’t fly down there to sort things out until his ashes had made their way home safely.  it took all that time.

when my mom finally made it, she borrowed her best friend’s car for the week.  it was a fancy car, a lexus maybe.  one of those deals where you don’t actually have to put the key in the ignition, you just have to have it in the car with you.  there was a def leppard album in the cd player.  my mom is proof that hair metal lives on in the hearts of all those quaalude poppin’, aquanet-drenched hotties turned moms.  what i mean to say is that when the opening licks of “pour some sugar on me” filtered through the speakers, she cranked the volume way up.

we listened to the song over and over.

(SO THAT YOU KNOW, this is not finished.  i just needed to stop for a minute.)