Redneck in the Suburbs

The weather out in the country the last few years has really taken its toll on cattle production, so I thought I'd sell the farm and move into the city. Well, the suburbs, I guess. It wasn't anything I wanted to do, but I was able to get a job at Tractor Supply and Feed and it seemed like it would all work out okay. I quickly learned that things work a bit differently here. I've been fighting with my homeowner's association since Day One, pretty much.

I had a lot of things I wanted to put in outdoor storage. Seems that whatever it is has to be shorter than the fence height. And you had to have a permit. So I got one. No problem, I thought. I had to get the covered storage back there anyway, so I pulled down the 6 foot fence with my truck. The cops were upset that I blocked up the street for a few minutes getting it dragged out. I showed them the permit, though, and they left. After that misunderstanding, I went ahead and got the truck in the backyard. It didn't take me long to put up the new 10-foot, 5-strand barbed wire fence, so I moved all my stuff into storage.

I got a nasty letter stating that a barbed wire fence is not compliant and that it's a safety hazard. Apparently a 1979 Ford doesn't constitute a "storage shed," either. I don't know what's wrong with these people, because they began complaining about EPA regulations and contamination, so the truck had to go. And my new fence.

I decided to spiffy up the front yard with some landscaping and plants. I heard somewhere that native plantings are easier on the environment and cut down on water consumption. Since a lack of water was what caused me to move out here in the first place, it sounded like a great idea. I also read about raised flowerbeds and thought it would look nice. I found a big plastic rectangular shell and figured I could use that, and edge it with rocks or something. Next thing I know, I got another strongly-worded letter saying that an old truck bed liner is not an approved landscaping material, that the weeds I'd been growing in the aforementioned bed liner were considered an eyesore, and that crushed concrete is considered commercial waste and, therefore, not allowed in landscaping. I tried to reason with them and tell them that they weren't "weeds," that they were native wildflowers and scrub brush, but they threatened to fine me if I didn't get rid of it. So that had to go.

Then they complained about the dead patch of grass where the bed liner had been. It was a mandate that I re-sod that area. I guess you just can't make these people happy around here.

I guess the dirt and sod I picked up had seeds of some sort in it, because then I ended up with real weeds popping up all over the place. Since the grass was dying anyway (yes, due to lack of rain), I let them grow. They were green and had pretty yellow flowers. I was outside admiring the pop of color when the HOA monitor stopped by and told me I had to remove them. Given they were so worried about chemical contamination and whatnot, I decided the best way was to just cover them up, so I dragged an old rug outside and put it on top of my pretty yellow flowers. I mean, hell, all the grass was dying at that point. A few days should have done it, but I came home the next day to a warning notice on my door telling me that household furnishing are not allowed in the front yard. Once again, I had to abandon my foolproof plan. I rolled the rug up and put it out by my trashcan.

I got another notice on the door stating that heavy trash is only once a month, and the rug had to be removed until three weeks later. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Since I had to remove my storage idea from the backyard, I decided maybe I needed an addition to my garage. Again, I had to have a permit, so I got one. I cut out part of the wall to my garage (inside my backyard, behind my new fucking fence), removed the fence again, and put the new prefab addition on. I put the fence back. Next thing I know, I've got a committee of four representatives paying me a visit, telling me that an old Airstream trailer is not an approved addition, regardless of the fact that you can't see it over the fence, and housing additions don't need to be below the fence line. I was also told that, no, just putting roof matching the house on top of the Airstream wasn't acceptable. Seriously? How many hoops does this neighborhood want me to jump through?!

I had to take down the fence again, remove my Airstream, put the fence back up (at this point, it was rather rickety and I had to keep it up by using baling wire and secure it to the nearby tree), and was given 2 weeks notice to restore the hole in the side of my garage. And was ticketed for my repeated fence offenses, specifically in regards to the baling wire. For fuck's sake!

And then again with the weeds. I finally said "fuck it," and decided to go back to basics. It was a clear day with no wind, so I pulled out my drip torch and got a buddy to stand by with the hose, just in case. The burn was going as planned, and I couldn't wait to see all the new growth pop up within the next few weeks, but before I could complete it, the damned fire department showed up and I got a rather large ticket. Apparently even a controlled burn isn't allowed. What the hell? People do it all the time to eradicate weeds and invasive plants! At least I didn't use diesel fuel! There is just no understanding of plant succession around here, I guess. I'm fighting that ticket...

The neighbors around here are a little frail, I guess. They're not used to being outside like I am. Every time I see them, they're eyes are all squinted into a scowl, like the light's too bright. They must be a little blinded, too, because they never wave back. They should get out more so the sun doesn't mess with them so much.

Christmas was coming up, so I was excited to decorate. That's what I needed, was a little Christmas cheer, after being messed with all year. I put up the lights around the gutters but thought the yard needed a little something extra. I put out my old International Harvester tractor, put a Santa in the seat, and lit it all up. With the new year I got busy, so I put away Old Saint Nick and left for a week to go hunting. When I got back, my door was plastered with notices about the tractor. I called City Hall and told them that I'd been out of town and I'd get to it that weekend. Since I'd been given 48 hours notice 4 days ago, I received a few tickets in the mail. This was really beginning to piss me off.

I guess I managed to use up all the ink in the HOA's pens, because they left me alone for awhile. A couple of months later I was told that the Christmas lights had to come down! Imagine that! I thought the white lights made it sort of cheery, like the other kinds of landscape lights the neighbors used. Seems it's perfectly okay for some people to have colored lights in their flowerbeds, but I can't have white lights around my roofline. So I unplugged them just to make everyone happy.  But I got another notice on the door a few weeks later, saying that the holiday season was over months ago, and the lights were against code. WHAT THE HELL? I'm just going to have to get back up on a ladder, narrowly escaping death, all over again in three months! Well, that's just not going to happen.

Fuck all this stupid shit. I'm moving back to the country, even if I have to live in that damned Airstream!


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Coffee and Coke

Mike showed up at just the right time in my life. I had been in a string of short, meaningless flings for a few months after leaving my boyfriend of one year. At 17, that had seemed like an eternity. I played house and was somehow surprised when he left me for a woman his age. I had a hard time moving on at first; sleeping in my truck, hanging out anywhere I could in our neighborhood, crashing on random couches, just because I couldn't stand to be back at my parents' house.

A couple of weeks after the breakup, a new coffee shop opened up and they were very welcoming to the throngs of teen runaways, junkies, slackers, and night kids. The owner had transformed an old 3 bedroom bungalow into an inviting hangout. Inside, it was dark, smokey, and comfortable. The scent of the espresso was relaxing yet invigorating. The patio outside was spacious and always crowded. When I close my eyes, I can still remember the summer nights with the busy street and crowded sidewalks, where I watched the world go by, my sense of time only marked by the coffee cup.

As expected, I became friends with the employees. We were the same kind of people. When the place closed down at 3 AM, we'd go over to the burned-out restaurant next door, sit on the porch all night and drink 32 ounce bottles of Bud. We were always the same crowd but then, one night, we had a newcomer: Mike. His roommate and one of our regulars, Todd, introduced us. Mike had just moved in with Todd into a seedy fully-furnished, rent-by-the-week apartment complex.

Mike came from a damned good family but was a typical rebel: he was all about "screw conformity, money's evil, I'm embarrassed of my family because they sold their souls to be rich," so on and so forth. He was tall, average build with biceps that just begged to be caressed. Mike's eyes were deep, inky blue lakes in the midnight, sprinkled with glints of stars reflected on their surface. That's what I remember most. His hair was close-cut, so blond it was almost clear. He would get a 5 o'clock shadow (of course, it was 5 in the morning) that showed only the slightest hint of Irish descent when the occasional whisker caught the glow of the sunrise. I loved watching his lips as he took long drags off his cigarettes, gently pursed as he exhaled the smoke.

We had really long talks sitting on the covered porch of the charred, charcoal-scented pizzeria. The buzz from the caffeine and beer made for mellow evenings of shared laughs, one-upping our stories and, sometimes, just sitting and staring at the empty streets, hiding in the shadows from the homeless and the hookers. We were forming a very special bond, and we both felt the chemistry brewing.

Mike didn't seem to sleep very much and Todd confided in me that Mike had diabetes and Addison's disease. In a way, it endeared him to me even more. He was one of those nice guys that seemed to have everything and, at my age, I deeply respected him for walking away from a privileged life for the sake of being true to himself. Knowing his medical history made me admire him even more for his willingness to handle it all on his own.

I asked him about his family once. He said, "They call me Drew. My first name is Andrew, and I've always hated it. I've gone by my middle name my entire life to everyone else, but they always call me Drew. They don't even care enough to use the name I prefer."

I met his mother once. He was right. She called him Drew and seemed to be extremely pretentious, uptight, and very condescending to him. I can understand a little about why she was less than cheery - she had to check up on her boy - but I tried being nice to her and it didn't work. I know now that she blamed me - and all his friends - for the way everything went down.

Eventually I got a job working in a nightclub and worked from 8 in the evening until 3 in the morning. It still worked out quite well for hanging out with the coffee crowd. Despite my new support system, I was still self-destructive in my drinking and, admittedly, I had a pretty strong addiction to ephedrine. The club had the type of crowd that threw money around. It was the new, hip place to be. Celebrities came to our club when they were in town. Local celebrities spent their evenings at our bar. Most of them had more money than sense and thrived off their flamboyancy and image. I was tipped well, but not always with cash. As we accumulated regulars, I began accumulating customers that preferred to tip me with coke instead of cash. I was all too willing to accept.

I began to see characteristics in Mike that I recognized in myself. The all-day coke rush to stay awake, the drinking at night during the come-down. One night after work, as we were baring our souls, I confessed to the coke use. He did too. We never did it together; neither of us was proud. We wanted our time together to be different; to be a more innocent form of connection, rather than one bound by controlled substances. We kept that part of our lives out of our friendship. For a girl who gave herself away to anyone who wanted it, just to feel like someone cared, even if it was for just a few hours, this was different. I knew I wanted him, but I also knew I didn't want to ruin it. I had a pretty sneaking suspicion the feeling was mutual, but I wasn't going to be the one to take the chance and find out I might be wrong. To me, he was worth waiting for. For once, I felt like it was okay to let him come to me, if that was the way it was supposed to work out. Regardless of my feelings for him, the friendship I had with Mike had kept me from going crazy at a time I was just about ready to give up on everything. It was never spoken, but I'm fairly sure he knew.

After a particularly busy Sunday night for me at the club and a rather low-key night for him at the shop, we were doing our front-porch sitting. The weather was turning colder and the evening sky was clear. The neon and the streetlights obscured all but the moon, which was full with a silvery glow. Years later, the words still echo in my head. "You know, Angie...I've been thinking. We spend a lot of really good time together, but maybe we should, you know...go out somewhere. Would you want to go out with me? Like, on a date or something?"

Back to the present, for one moment. For many years, I could remember exactly how it sounded when he said those words. The tone, the inflection, the sound of his voice. Somewhere through the years, Mike's actual voice has slipped out of my mind, and that makes me very sad. Okay. Back to 1994.

Todd approached me the next day, beaming from ear to ear. Mike told him about our date for that Wednesday. He was just as excited as I was, I think. I'd known Todd for quite some time and he was thrilled that his two friends decided to finally get together. "I just knew it would happen! From the moment I introduced you two! What took you so fucking long?!"

Monday evening I went to the shop to meet up with Mike when he got off work, but the shop was closed. All the lights were off, but I could see Todd sitting inside at a table, all by himself. When he saw my silhouette in the door, he got up, slowly, and shuffled to the door and opened it. His expression was one of emptiness. I knew immediately that something was horribly, horribly wrong.

"What happened, Todd? WHAT HAPPENED!?"

"Where have you been?" His voice was so low and hoarse I could barely make out his words. "I couldn't find you. You never called me back. Where did you sleep last night?"

I told him where I had been and explained that my pager battery had died. I asked him several times what had happened before he finally said the words I feared he'd say: "Mike died this morning."

He OD'd in their apartment and his failure to monitor his diabetes that day contributed to his death. He'd locked the door when Todd went to the store. When he got back, Mike wasn't coming to the door. Todd saw what was going on from outside, looking in through the window. He broke out the window but couldn't fit through it, so he sat there, wedged in the window, watching the whole thing happen while waiting for the ambulance. By the time the EMTs arrived, it was too late.

"But...we were going to go out," was the only thing I could say. "We had a date." Todd just stood there, arms limp by his side, and stared at me.

There's more to the story after that, but it doesn't matter much. Our group pretty much just fell apart after that. The owner renamed the coffee shop "Mike's Place," but it only stayed in business about another six months and went under. A tattoo shop now occupies the building. I haven't spoken to any of the guys since the funeral.

And in all the eulogies, they called him Drew.
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It's Just Love's Done Gone

First off, let me say thank you to a couple of my readers who were checking up on me lately. My life has been in such an upheaval...I've just been maintaining. This is going to be long, so either hang on, or go ahead and move on - I won't mind.

The Boy and I have been together for almost 2 years now. In that time, he's given me the whole "I don't know what I want" bullshit twice. The first time, toward the end of last school year, I flew off the handle and more or less broke up with him - I'm not sure he accepted that, because a few days later he acted as if everything were normal.

But there was this guy at work that had been flirting with me pretty hard - he's pretty playful anyway, so it was hard to know for sure - and he asked me to happy hour the next day right after The Boy had his little commitment glitch, and I said yes.

Bob and I started dating. Now, I had already told The Boy, "Fine. You don't know what you want? Then go out and see if you can find it, and so will I." And I was upfront with Bob from the beginning, and told him about The Boy and what was going on. Bob said there was no reason for us to rush into anything, anyway. So that was good.

Even after The Boy started acting all normal again, things got better for awhile, but the sex thing was still an issue. My drive is out of control and The Boy could probably live the rest of his life without sex ever again.  There are certain things he will not do and he's pretty conservative about sex in general. I'm a freak. I admit it. So we weren't having sex.

Bob and I, however, continued to see each other, and the sex was phenomenal. I told Bob that although I was still seeing The Boy, we weren't sleeping together, and I wasn't going to have sex with more than one person. He said he was okay with that, as long as I was always honest with him. I promised that I would do that.

Somehow, our principal found out we were seeing each other. She asked Greta, a co-worker who happened to be my best friend at the time, to tell her how serious we were. Well, I hadn't even told Greta. She was going through all kinds of problems with fertility and she didn't need to hear me whine about my relationship drama. Greta answered honestly when she said she didn't know. Then she called me and I told her that, yes, we were going out on occasion. Greta got very upset with me, told me I was being a total bitch for stringing Bob along, and on and on. She didn't seem to hear me when I told her about being honest with both of the guys and the full deal.

She also mentioned that my principal had it out for me, and she was totally against colleagues dating and that she would do whatever she could to get me out of the building if she thought it was going to be a problem. It wasn't ever going to BE a problem, because he works on the other end of the building, he's in a completely different section, and he teaches a totally different content. We literally never see each other at work unless we make it a point to do so.

But Greta kept putting pressure on me, making me feel bad about myself and my choices. After all the problems I'd had with my principal over the year, I was a little frightened that my situation was going to get even worse if I kept dating Bob. I discussed this with him often and, even though we'd both confided in a couple of people at work about us, we eventually decided to take a break before school started, to kind of feel things out at work before we decided what to do. He seemed to me like he was getting a little too serious too fast anyway, and that scared me.

About three weeks after school started, I emailed Bob at work to ask him to return a cooler he'd borrowed over the summer. I gave him the option to just drop it off on my porch or put it in the bed of my truck, but he gave me his number again and said we'd work it out.

That same night, I got some vile, hateful texts from Greta, telling me how much of a liar I was and how I was so selfish, that I'd never stopped seeing Bob. Now, how in the HELL would she know we'd been in contact again? I know. My principal had been monitoring my emails and then reported back to my "friend," Greta. I tried to explain to her that I hadn't been talking to him at all, that I was just asking for something he'd borrowed months before, but she never would reply. That was in October, and I haven't spoken to her since. I figured if she wasn't even going to believe the truth, after being my friend for 6 years and having me as a bridesmaid, then fuck her.

Bob insisted on delivering the cooler to me while I was there, about two weeks after the email. We lounged on the couch and talked for about 3 hours. We decided to get back to the dating thing but we also decided we would keep it private from people at work because neither of us needed the problems. He keeps joking, even now, that he stole me away from my best friend, and I keep telling him that she's the one that caused us to end our friendship, not him.

So The Boy and I are still seeing each other and we're still not having sex. He's not a liar, and I know where he is pretty much every minute of the day. His dad was a liar and a cheater and I know with all my heart that if he weren't happy with me, he would just break up with me before he would ever cheat on me, so that's not it. If he were interested in seeing someone else, he would just tell me so. He's a good man like that. But he's also mildly Autistic and has a tendency to be extremely selfish. His back-and-forth with the "I don't know what I want" crap is him feeling like it would be easier on him if he were just alone.

His business is failing and he has to get help from his mother every month to make his mortgage and taxes. He took a job offshore and was gone 14 days at a time. I couldn't handle it. I missed him so much. This was before Bob and I even started dating. I had to find a way to be okay with being alone all the time and I had to find a way to deal with the fact that he was okay with being gone for two weeks at a time. Eventually he quit because he couldn't do whatever he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. Throughout all this time, The Boy has been trying to find alternative ways to earn income.

He started to put together some products we use in the racing stuff, and it's starting to pay off. But I also get maybe twenty minutes of conversation with him a day and, even on the weekends, I don't see him much because he's so wrapped up in working on this new thing. He's also extremely insensitive with the things he says - like, no tact - and my doctor says that's part of his autism. Nice, huh?

And, here we go again, with Stillie learning to be alone but wishing I could do things with someone important to me. Bob and I have been spending more time together. I've met all his friends, I hang out with him and his mom and aunt, we take his aunt's awesome Borzoi on walks, he introduced me to the best place to get authentic Chicago-style Italian beef in the whole city...we're having a good time getting to know each other better.

Today, we had this conversation. It started off something like him saying, "I know you see a psychiatrist and you were very honest with me about how you're working through some of your issues, so here's me, learning to work through some of mine: I'm going to be better at communication, so let's talk." We discussed our relationship and he told me that he was totally committed to me and had no desire to see anyone else. He wanted me to understand that his schedule is busy (i knew that), but he loves spending time with me and says I make him very happy. He said he's ready to get a bit more serious.

In the meantime, The Boy seems to be trying to keep a distance from me and put distance between us, and it almost seems as if he's fallen out of love with me, even though he says it pretty often. Reminds me of that song, "Love Done Gone" by Billy Currington.

Wow. So, anyway, I'm not sure what the point of all this was, except that while The Boy does everything he can to pull away from me, I've got another guy who's actually interested in doing the opposite. I'm not sure what's going to happen.

I have a lot of decisions to make.
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