Segment 1: When a Third World Came West
The night I met Sam, which is when this story starts, I had been partying a lot with my friends, letting loose, dancing and just not caring in general. This was pretty typical of me. I had just come home for summer vacation from a small private school in North Carolina. There were tons of schools up there which reveled in sororities and fraternities and I didn’t like those, but I really liked to have a good time. I liked, looking at hot guys, and losing myself as the night wore on. It was so much fun for the most part. But, I didn’t know where I was headed for, and I guess that made my family feel kind of queasy about me and my sense of direction. I really didn’t think from one moment to the next, nor did I connect my previous behaviors with their present consequences, which weren’t always good. Like grades. I was fascinated with programs like the Liberal Arts Forum, which brought speakers to present at our school. I spoke for Gloria Steinem right after she got married and spoke out in our gym. I could write a great short story high, in our new Belk Library and I was usually right on when I criticized my creative writing teachers about the poems they’d read at a reading the night before. I got through okay. But I was wild, I was searching and searching for something exciting and a lot of times I found it at the Lighthouse (a bar), or at the West End (another bar). But my GPA wasn’t alright., I wasn’t ambitious about getting even B’s in my classes and I wasn’t thinking towards the future about how that would affect graduate school. I was living from one party to the next and I guess that’s how I met Sam. In this first segment of my story I head to my friend Robbie’s house and meet them out at a bar covered in red velvet where some guy was trying to sell birth control as ecstasy. Hope you enjoy…
I had just heard the sound of the double front doors shutting against the heavy rubber catch, with my parents out the door and with me riffling through my closet to find something to wear. Whenever they left and whenever I could hear the door close, the garage door open and the car back out to leave, I got a surge of energy at the thought of being able to run out through the living room and down the short step making an echo through the Mexican style tiled floors to the glass entertainment stand where I could turn on the radio.
With the thought of music on the way I got ahead of myself, opened the full length mirrored closet doors that my mom had chosen for her closet as well as mine and began going through my clothes, pulling back the packed shirts and hangars stretched from blouses that were too heavy and searched through pants stubbornly with their cheap metal hangars to look for something to where to Robbie’s. I pulled passed more shirts and this dress and those pair of pants until I was drawn in by the look of a velvet almond colored tank that was scrunched up and down the middle to look like a braid. I took the hangar out of my closet, plopped the tank on my bed and went through my closet five more times until I found a thin Indian cotton skirt with brown and white little petals all through it. I set that down too next to the top and ran out, through the living room and down the Mexican tile steps to the stereo to turn the music to a song that set me in a trance, louder, aware of the two elderly couples that lived on either side of us, turning my back on my thinking twice for loud music, because weren’t they almost deaf at this age? Just as I was passing the couch I heard my cell phone ring, realizing that I was probably late and that I hadn’t eaten dinner. I thought about skipping it since the music was on and I was wound up, excited to see Robbie and the four guys I’d met last time at his house in addition to the tons of other people who seemed to show up randomly to drink and mix on his dusty wooden floor, to lean their shoulders on the wall next to his cluttered kitchen.
A half and hour later and dressed and in my parent’s 1989 Volvo, I was tilting my rear view mirror to glimpse at my makeup and sighed at the disproportionate ringlets in my hair. I’d cut it a few weeks before the summer started because the girl I’d paid to chop it, cut one side shorter than the other and watching it too many times in the mirror while scrubbing my teeth, I thought one snip could fix it. I took matters into my own hands. My best-friend at school saw my haircut one day and said something about it, wanting to cut it up to my chin. A snip here, another there and before I’d known it my hair was short, short, short. Though now it had grown to the bony clavicle blade that stuck out of my thin chest and I knew that if I kept starring at it in the mirror that I’d bump into the end of some grumpy middle aged man’s car. I backed out of my driveway and drove passed my parents silver two-door Celica and was on my way to Robbie’s, fifteen minutes away.
Once there, I pulled into a driveway made up of rocks mulch, overgrown grass and ferns, pulled my gears into park, and got out. I walked too fast in the humidity, trying to overcompensate for my bulky heeled espadrilles. I pierced my raisin lipstick as I walked up the cement steps and onto the portico to Robbie’s door. A woman I’d never seen before, a medium-height flashy, Columbian looking thirty-year old dressed in a skirt that fell just above bulky calves, smiled and opened the door. She had on a lot of eye make-up, though I thought I had just eyed that because she looked like she had been more patient with the mascara wand or eyebrow tweezers and eye shadow shades than I.
I walked through the door and through the living room where I plopped onto the white couch where I’d sat on Bobby’s lap a few times before, watching his favorite re-runs that made me want to haggle with him for the remote. I could hear his voice passed the dining room and through the saloon style white plantation shutter wooden doors where he was in his kitchen doing the illegal things he liked.
Bobby came out a few minutes later from the cupboard doors looking like a misfit in a mountain town bar meant for rustic westerners, with a roommate that I recognized and his roommate’s girlfriend who had wet long blond hair from a shower. The roommate’s girlfriend came to sit beside me, wearing a thin blue and pink skirt with a wavy paisley scrawl across it, smiling sincerely. “We just got to wait for a few more people. It’s only 9 o’clock,” She’d said. “Tracy, come here, sit down,” Bobby barked. I squirmed a bit, smiled, looked down, pushing my back into Robbie’s couch pillows. He was like this, shouting out thoughts he had in front of everyone, embarrassing anyone that he’d singled out in particular.
An hour later and with five or more people coming through the entrance to the house, sighing and wanting more pink, blue and green flashing lights or something shining down their rhythm through beating sounds. All of us seemed hungry for wanting to be around people so the four of us including me, got into Bobby’s two-door 1993 mustang and pulled out for entertainment.
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