I remember the first woman to buy me magnum condoms. She said I needed em. She was only my second partner. She was seven years older than I was. She jokingly called me her pool boy. We both worked at an ice cream shop together in an abandoned railway station. She had liked my arms, the way they looked through my white t-shirt when I swept. She had broken up with her boyfriend a couple weeks after I started. She said her ex-boyfriend wasn't into sex, owned a gun and had anger issues. She said her mom had a one night stand in Turkey while in the military and that was how she came to be conceived. Life hadn't been kind to her but she was still kind back. One of those people who cheers everyone else up and instantly becomes their friend, to make better use of the madness than most of us.
There are kids who get hit and smile. There are kids who get yelled at and yell back. I was neither of them. I still have a body raging inside my chest that churns like an ocean whose tide book I rarely get to read. I do nothing but navigate the underwater energy, quietly, away from people. There, in Vermont, I was still inundated by the borderline visions and leading the rescue team of, the woman who birthed me.
She would buy me a Vitamin water and drive me to her rundown house. She lived in a basement beneath a family I never met. They farmed goats on their property. I never tried the goat milk, never tried the cheese. I would go outside in the summer rain and piss beneath an evergreen. There was a hole there where an animal lived, I always felt vindicated peeing nearby it. It rained all that summer when it wasn't not raining and her bed was a mat on the floor. She eventually got her own apartment above a gas station where her bed on the floor moved to another floor, newspapers covering the windows until she could buy curtains.
I had to end things with her when I did because I was uncomfortable with everything. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be the person I was, in the situation I wasn't. I feared getting her pregnant when she begged to try it without the condoms. I just wanted to be a person I was told I had to be, even though no one I ever knew had ever been close to achieving him. Mother, mother, all those crooked Hollywood dreams you whispered into my ears before fleeing across the continent yourself. I have been living their nightmare and counting my moral victories ever since.
It was that Christmas in Vermont when her ex-boyfriend called me at the Victorian house in the center of town and threatened my life. He called me the pool boy, said he'd kill me. Evidently he had read her diary, she had emailed some time later apologizing. I told my mom I had to go back to Los Angeles, to pursue her dreams and to save my life. That, she understood.
I never got to thank the young woman for setting me free, back into the nightmare another person had dreamt up for me. Somewhere along the way it became all mine. Somewhere along the way I can now call my mom and she isn't afraid to tell me that it's not to late to do another thing. But it's mine now, it's all mine.
The other day in Atwater Village, after donating a couple of shrunken in the dryer t-shirts, I grabbed a handful of regular-sized free condoms from the front counter at the Out of the Closet thrift shop. The shop clerk said to take ten, that they were finger toys.
