What have we done to each other?
The school year had just started and you showed up out of the blue and managed to worm your way into the loser’s circle within a week. I hated your guts for that, I really did, I never told you that but I did, at first. It took me a whole summer of listening to music I really couldn’t give a fuck about, stenciling creepy looking faces and words onto clothes I had to hide from my Dad just to get the losers to let me in.
I was an imposter and they all knew it, but you were the real deal, ahead of the trend, you brought a Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees tape and got Jim Reardon to play it on his boombox while we sat in a circle smoking ditch weed. The losers were all buying black hair dye and scoring Bauhaus and Yaz on vinyl by Halloween.
Was that really twelve years ago? Thirteen now? What the fuck happened to us?
Christmas break that year, you and I were alone, hanging out in that abandoned house by the cemetery. I tried to kiss you and you laughed and pushed me away. You looked at the peeling wall paper and told me, “Love is dead, stupid.”
I tried not to look hurt, I tried to find something, anything else to look at until I didn’t feel like I was going to cry like a little kid. I never tried to kiss anyone before, I figured that by hanging out with the losers I was condemned to finish high school a virgin, and that cold afternoon in that abandoned house seemed to seal the deal.
You looked at me and said, “Let me see it.”
I stared at you like you were speaking a foreign language until you pointed at my crotch, “Pull it out, let me see it.”
I was terrified, mostly because I knew you were serious. You licked your lips at me, it was predatory, unsettling, and yeah, I dug it, almost as much as it scared me shitless.
I pulled it out, trying to tug on it, making it look bigger in some way. It had to be about forty-five degrees in that old house and it all looked like two withered plums packed in walnut skin topped by a hotdog that someone had unfortunately microwaved just a little too long.
You laughed at me, it was awful. You didn’t just laugh either, it was a fucking witch cackle, and you weren’t forcing it, the slight apology in your eyes told me the laugh was automatic and heartfelt.
I didn’t even bother tucking my junk back in, with the cold it was hardly needed. I just turned and ran. You and your witch cackle followed me out into the yard and over to the old tombstones that marked the civil war era graves.
You weren’t laughing anymore by the time I reached the tomb stones, you were calling my name, “Robbie, come on. It was funny! I’m not going to apologize, it’s just your dick, who cares? My stuff looks like hairy roast beef and smells like a homeless guy’s armpit.”
You caught up with me and grabbed at the cheap denim jacket I bought second hand and mutilated, with your help of course. I turned on you and you didn’t shy away, you didn’t even blink. “If you want to hit me go ahead, my dad used to before he moved out, but I won’t sleep with you if you hit me.”
I was completely lost for words and still so angry that’s pretty much all I wanted to do. After a few minutes of just standing there, staring at the grass I said the only thing that came to mind, “That was mean, like really mean.”
You reached out and pulled my chin up so that I was looking at you instead of the grass, “I’m mean, like really mean. If you want to be with me, that’s the deal.”
I tried to kiss you again and you aimed my mouth at your neck. “Kiss that if you need to kiss something, and here’s the other deal, if you cum inside me I will climb in through your window tonight and stab you to death.”
That was us. The story of Robbie and Lisa started on a slab of granite in a graveyard.
Just look at us now.
You’re lying next to me on the living room carpet. You probably don’t want to be anywhere near me but you’re dead, so for once you don’t get a say. I don’t want to turn you over or move you at all, I don’t want to look at your face and it’s not even because that’s where most of the damage is. I don’t want to look into your dead eyes and still see all that hate for me. I wish I had planned this differently. Twenty, twenty hindsight and all. We could have had one last, slow argument as our words slurred and our blood soaked into the carpeting. On second thought, maybe it’s better this way.
This is the end though, it’s a shitty place to start while I reminisce and feel myself spreading out on the carpet next to you.
You loved pranks, almost as much as you loved shitty horror movies and the color black. We spent the last six months of high school being the terror couple of Eisenhower high but I don’t need to remind you of that. You were always the mastermind, I was just along for the ride. Even through the detentions and the one suspension, I was the straight man of our little dark comedy. Don’t get me wrong though, I wasn’t just your accomplice, I was your biggest victim and yeah, I learned to get off on the rush of it just as much as you did.
Remember the time you convinced Eddie Spencer that I was bumping uglies with his sister? Six stitches over my right eye, an eye that wouldn’t open for nearly a week. I never knew what hit me either, the biggest, meanest, mad dog football player in high school was just waiting there for me by the basketball courts on my way to meet you. I kept the note you gave me from lunch for weeks after that. I would take it out and read it and try to piece together how it was funny to send a guy after me who nearly punched my face in before he got spooked by some teachers walking to their cars.
My revenge for that was garbage, you saw it coming from a mile away and headed it off at the pass. I think that was the first time we actually kissed, it was a consolation prize and it felt like one. It was your way of saying “sorry about your eye.”
Next came the ants. I still to this day don’t know how you got them all to swarm like that, you were always alert in science class, I used it as a nap period. You stuffed the book about ants and the pamphlet about buying ants for ant farms in my desk while I was out cold but to this day I don’t know if you just raised your hand and mentioned seeing the stuff in my desk when the principle went from classroom to classroom demanding to know who baited his office or if you conned some other kid into doing it.
One minute I was out cold, in the back row hiding behind a book rack getting a solid thirty minutes of nap time in, and the next I had principle McGruder slamming his fist down on my desk and telling me to follow him to his office. I saw you as I was marched out of class, you had that same, predatory smile on your face that you had back at the abandoned house. That smile told me everything I needed to know.
Three days of suspension was nothing compared to having my Dad pick me up from school. There was no convincing him that it wasn’t me, there was also no talking to him about it. We rode home in silence and I listened in silence as he lectured me. I spent the next four weekends cleaning out garages and moving furniture. I don’t think there was anyone on my block who didn’t get offered my services for free the rest of that month. You made a point to complain about our lack of time together every weekend and at least once each week during my extended period of forced labor grounding. You made it obvious, you never made anything obvious, that should have been my clue. I was a slow learner.
The third weekend you came by my house, I was covered in dirt and cobwebs, standing in the hallway listening to my Dad tell you that I wasn’t allowed to see anyone or go anywhere until the end of the month and I heard you tell him, “Well just let Robbie know that I can’t see him anymore then, I met someone who actually has time to spend with me.”
Three years later I would have been howling with laughter at that knee slapper. Seven years later and I might have had my Dad geared up to inform you that I was actually thinking the same thing and that he was instructed to let you know that I too, was seeing someone else already, but we didn’t have our ground game figured out yet.
My heart stopped, I know people say that metaphorically but no really, my fucking heart stopped. I couldn’t breathe, my left arm started feeling numb. You broke up with my Dad, you left him there standing with the front door open like some sort of shitty, nineteen eighty version of an answering machine recording what it misinterpreted as happy news.
“Hey Robbie, good news, kiddo, the side show freak doesn’t want you wasting any more time on her. Maybe now you can find a real girl to muck about with.”
I hid for three days. I convinced my Mom I was sick using a heating pad and the general malaise of being a heartbroken teenager. I sat and listened to music, your music, for hours on repeat and thought about how easy it would be to draw a scalding hot bath and slip in a razor blade or my Mom’s valium prescription as an added bonus.
It was only after my Dad intervened that I returned to school, square in my resolve to find convenient excuses to be early or late, skip lunch and ditch science class, my already dwindling GPA be damned.
Imagine my surprise when I found you waiting for me near the stairs by the shop and automotive classes. You weren’t dressed for class, or anything even remotely resembling what someone should be wearing outdoors. Without that old leather jacket, it would have classified as lingerie. That image got used a lot later on while we screwed. At the time though I was so heartsick and upset that I tried to walk around the building and away from those stairs. You didn’t think twice about stalking after me, “Oh come on, Robbie, laugh, this is us, this is our thing! Laugh already so we can screw, make up sex is so much better.”
I didn’t laugh though, I sulked and you walked over and took my hand and you led me off in the direction of the football field. You were right, make up sex really is better. I don’t know how or even why you put up with me in those first few months, hell, all the way through those last months of high school and even into that next summer really. I was a slow study in learning how we worked.
I didn’t really get you back until that summer. I didn’t rush it that time, I didn’t waste time on the obvious. We were both looking at colleges and trying to figure out where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do. I found my personal watermark on pranking with that one, and again I’m so sorry. I know you had your heart set on Amherst even though you were pretty sure they wouldn’t take you, I wasn’t subtle about the reveal on that one either.
They probably would have taken you, that was the part I never mentioned, but after I signed your name to a few organizational newsletters and made a few concerned calls to people you didn’t just get a rejection letter, you got a visit from the local police.
You showed up in the middle of the night with a suitcase, knocking on my window. You didn’t cry, or blow up at me, you never did, but you were pissed, seething really, your mom wasn’t pleased by having the police drop by, she was even less pleased when they mentioned your apparent involvement in fringe political groups and your propensity for mailing rambling manifestos to local authorities.
It was my turn to laugh but I didn’t want to and I didn’t dare. We were both eighteen and even after spending the last six months of my high school career fucking off and acting like a delinquent I was set and ready to go to UMass. Moving out of my folk’s place that week felt like a new lease on life even as they begged me not to move in with that girl.
I remember the studio behind Mrs. Spearson’s house like it was yesterday. It was little more than a converted carriage house, it always smelled faintly of mold. I worked part time after school and you got that job at the flower shop and between us we just barely managed to survive. The place was a total shithole but it was our shithole and I waited until after you showed up and had a faux meltdown at my work to reveal my one big prank from the previous year.
I was floored by you, the temerity and the stupidity of it all, we were holding onto our lives by a financial thread and you decided to prank me at work, trying to get me fired for a goof. We were sitting on the brown shag carpet in that shithole studio, passing a bottle of two buck back and forth and I let it slip because you looked so pleased with yourself. “I signed you up for the white supremacist and communist stuff, I even typed up a manifesto and sent it to the recruiter at Amherst.”
There was a moment, a blink of an eye really, where I thought you were going to turn the wine bottle around and crack me in the face with it, but the moment passed and you smiled at me. It wasn’t predatory like it usually was, it was a genuine smile. You downed the last three gulps of wine and climbed on top of me on that dirty shag carpet. I was never sure if or when you were going to hurt me but I assumed it was coming, instead you made noises that I had never heard you make before and have only heard you make a few times since. It was passion, animalistic, do or die fucking. That was us.
Us wasn’t working though, not at that moment. Us, wasn’t safe. I nearly did get fired from my shitty job and we nearly did wind up living out of suitcases by the Y. We made a pact that worked, really well in fact, at least for a while.
Most young couples spend their time getting wasted together at parties, screwing the wrong people, arguing about money and accidently getting knocked up. Not us, we got busy having a wonderful time at the expense of others. We decided that our lives, our prosperity, was out of bounds but the rest of the world around us was fair game and we started with kindly old Mrs. Spearman. It was easy work, something that barely kept your interest. “Have you kids seen my cat.” “I think those blacks around the block are stealing my mail again.” “Have you kids seen any of those black kids around my house?” “Have you kids been in the house when I’m gone?”
Right around the time she found the cat again and started reminding us that the main house was off limits we knew it was time to start choosing other targets, and really, gas lighting an eighty-three-year-old racist was way too easy.
Remember Kimberly? Good lord, what a mess that was. Nearly two years invested into school and I was stark raving terrified of not only losing everything I had worked for but going to jail and there you were, sitting in that wicker moon chair we had on the porch of that apartment over on Olive Ave. You were puffing away on one of those clove cigarettes you smoked at the time and telling me, “Neither of us told her to do that, Robbie. She made up her mind, weak willed woman, she could have just as easily packed a suitcase and moved out.”
I was still pointing at the phone in the living room like it was a coiled snake, “She called you because she found out who told Donald about the affair. The one we pushed her into. What if she left a note, what if she called him and told him that it was us the whole time.”
You looked at me and I withered, it wasn’t the first time I felt you hating me for not rising to the occasion but that was the first time I didn’t just drop things and agree with you. We were complicit in a suicide, nearly as there as if we had opened the bottle of wine and pills for her and drawn the bath. The similarity to how Kimberly chose to leave this world and how I had thought about doing the same when you joked about leaving me left me angry and breathless.
I was sick with the knowledge that one of our little pranks drove someone to kill themselves. What I should have felt was guilty, instead I was just angry, angry that we nearly got found out, angry that you weren’t taking my worries about it to heart, angry at you all over again for a prank played so long ago. Angry most of all at my Dad all over again, remembering the smug look on his face as he told me to forget all about you. As if I ever could.
You stubbed out your smoke and walked over to me. “I know that look, so let me remind you, you start hitting me and we’re through. If you can’t manage to rise above and think instead of react then you aren’t the person I hoped you would be.”
I was so miserable that words escaped me. I was speechless and all I wanted to do was scream, to yell at you, smack you around like my folks used to do to each other, to get all that misery and hate out, turn it around on someone else so I didn’t have to feel it all alone.
Thinking about how dysfunctional my folks used to be gave me my answer and that was the moment that I stopped being a devotee in our little church of human misery. That was the night that I stepped up and initiated as one of the faithful. I looked at you and smiled and I felt something other than love beginning to creep in behind that smile.
“So…Donald next? Or do you think that would be too conspicuous?”
You kissed me then, tasting and smelling like cloves and I was intoxicated. You kissed me again and again that night, and you meant it every time. It was sickness itself. We made fun of the woman we practically drove off a cliff into suicide and we did it while we screwed like rabbits.
Kimberly was our first scare, and our first real thrill, but it was one we both backed away from. We went back to our low-key pranks until my graduation. It’s funny but I never remembered the conversation where we decided to call off our truce on damaging or ruining each other’s lives? You can say…well I guess nothing now, but if I had asked you yesterday to explain to me once again how it was funny you would have pointed out the Amherst incident. My counter to that is we weren’t dumb kids anymore, we were married, our futures intertwined, good or bad, rich or poor, and to me it seemed that poor was your only plan for the two of us.
If you want to talk about being mean, really mean, let’s talk about Connelly and Barrowman, I had that job, it was in the bag, 32k to start, retirement package, options, a share at the lake house, it was our future, not just mine. You tanked that prospect and it was so easy. Maybe that was it, you saw such an easy opening and you took it because that was your nature, like a cat, claws out, ready to mangle a set of bouncing testicles on the bed set.
The infidelity hardly registered to me, and maybe that was the real alarm bell ringing away in my head. It wasn’t sleeping with my potential boss that bothered me, or your open admission of such a direct indiscretion, it was the gloating tone you used as you explained to me from the bedroom, while I was busy taking a dump, “I told Harry you thought beaners like him were only good for picking fruit.”
More than the original volley of extramarital activity, and even more than your killing my chosen job and our future with one carefully spoken, careless line, what really galled me was how sated you were in your revenge for my old Amherst prank. It wasn’t about those, precious little human moments anymore, not for you certainly and not for me, not after that night. We graduated to the big leagues from that moment on.
I wound up stuck entry level at a barely competing firm, riding a wave of veiled nods and stern looks from the other accountants who heard through the grapevine that I was a bigot. We were stuck renting an apartment on the wrong side of the tracks and you were busy dead ending in the realm of floristry. I didn’t dare bring up how little you contributed financially, any more than I dared to bring up your continued relationship with my old, potential boss.
Cuckold isn’t the right sentiment for what I became, it wasn’t like I envied Harry. We still screwed steadily, no one was neglected and neither of us were the jealous type, you didn’t need to leave telling motel receipts laying around the house and I was never made to watch him hump you like one dog humps another. What I did was backpedal, I stopped being an equal in our profane little church. I was back where you wanted me, always wondering, always guessing, always fearing…you. That was the point of ruining my career, and it was a point well made.
I didn’t want to admit that the game was getting old and I think you felt it too.
Where do you go after bolstering a suicide? On the meter of awful deeds how do you compete with a solid eight from the Russian judge?
I waited a year. A year of listening to you giggle, not so discreetly, on the phone with Harry. A year of you getting bored with taunting me and realizing that it wasn’t working anymore. I had to force a moratorium of boring, vanilla sex on us to keep you with Harry while I stewed, searched, and grew up for the next round of exams. The only other option was clear, there was no quitting, only losers give up, only losers settle it in court.
It was a Thursday afternoon and I was at work, feeling numb and waiting for the inevitable. What little benefits I had at the firm were already finished off and cashed out, without being obvious I had already cleared out my desk. I was plunking away on a mind-numbing sheet of figures when you pushed past the girl at the front desk making a run at me.
“You son of a bitch!”
You looked like one of those fierce women on Dallas, a spring-loaded drink away from wetting my face and you actually did try to slap me in outrage but I was already three weeks in the waiting for the obvious moves. I wasn’t the student becoming the master, I was never there, not even today as I get all logy and slow, bleeding out next to your corpse, but I got everything I needed from that exchange to become a tried and true partner in our joined enterprise.
You came at me and I had to hold you at bay until security arrived, I thought you were going to claw my eyes out as you howled, “You gave me herpes, you son of a whore!” There was none of your usual, wink and nod, predatory gaze, nothing at all to tell me you were still on the inside of the joke. It was the first time, even with Amherst and all, that I was the one actually directing our gory little tragedy.
I wasn’t happy though, there was no merriment or laughter, no “sorry about your eye here’s a kiss” not from the likes of me, not then anyway. I was no better geared towards victory at our games than I was at defeat. The whole thing wound up feeling sad as I smiled inwardly with the remainder of my personal items on my way out of the accounting firm I never wanted to work at to begin with.
You moved out while I was busy cleaning out my desk. Two suitcases and a garment bag. I wasn’t sure where you had gone but I thought nothing of stretching out that night and getting some quality sleep. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. Remember, I refused to use the D word, never did, never will. It was the one prank neither of us ever pulled. I assumed Harry was right out, the true consolation prize of coming home to see your side of the closet and the sink cleared out was knowing that Harry, and his wife, also received the gift that just keeps on giving.
I also never told you how I contracted it. Later on, you never asked. Maybe it was too painful to bring up but just as likely I feel that if you had asked that question, or any question about that prank it would have added insult to the injury of your not seeing it coming.
After your break up with me in high school I spent three days living in the dark, suicidal and not knowing what to do or where to go. I waited just as long before I made one subtle inquiry at your work and I wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear that you had simply not shown up.
We both spent six years getting our kicks by slowly torturing and meddling in the lives or everyone around us. Our list of remaining dou...friends, had dwindled down to a cadre of gossips and tattletales, I didn’t dare call any of them and I knew that if some of them had known about what happened I wouldn’t have to wait long for their faux consolatory phone calls.
Peggy, by the way, that’s how I got herpes. Hell, maybe that’s why you never asked, you already knew. We were the ones that got her blottoed and loaded into a cab with the guy with that porn-stache on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t even ask her, I didn’t have to. Bless her heart though, as near to black out drunk as she was when I got her back to her place she wanted to let me know she had it, and that she was in a break out, and that it was, “a really naughty thing for us to be doing to Lisa.”
“Naughty?” What adult uses that word in casual conversation? Trust me, my screwing Peggy was me taking one for the team just as much as winning a tick mark on our little score card.
After I checked off the small list of possibilities I knew there was only one place to find you. I was instantly angry with myself and guilty that I didn’t move the chess game out to that conclusion. Would I have thought better of playing my dire little prank if I had? Maybe. Hindsight being what it is.
Of course, I was going to show up there and of course I drove all the way back home, and I didn’t even make the greeting original when I finally found you, copycat that I am.
I waited outside of your Mom’s house, I sat there and watched the wee hours of the morning give way to false dawn and then the real thing. I thought about what it must have taken for you to climb aboard a public bus and show up back there. We were so dirt broke back then, there was no way in hell you took a taxi. Picturing you on a bus was just depressing, thinking about how you must have begged that old gorgon for a place to stay, well, I pictured that cabin share and 32k a year just to keep the dreaded g word at bay.
You came out of that house dressed like a normie, jeans and a t-shirt, your hair pulled up in a bun. It took me a second to recognize you. I considered following you to your destination but the clothes already told me. Retail, Lisa, really? I wasn’t going to let you walk to whatever soul crushing in between life you had formed for yourself in the week since I came home and found your stuff gone.
I didn’t even get close, I was two maybe three cars lengths behind you and you were already yelling, “Go away, Robbie.”
I couldn’t help myself at that point. Of course, it was about getting you back, in my life yes, but also just plain back. “I would have gone with a rental car and a disguise but, you know, jobless and all…”
You turned around and I thought for sure you were going to lunge at the car like a wild animal.
I leaned over and opened the passenger side door, “Come on, Lisa, laugh, this is our thing! Laugh so we can screw, you know make up sex is so much better.”
You tried to stay there, standing still, ready to pounce at me, but I could see the smile building on your face. Once you started giggling you couldn’t stop, you reached out and took a hold of the car door and my heart skipped a beat, part of me was sure that was it, the end of us.
The old, home town, pharmacy didn’t have anything we wanted, the beer was provincial, the wine just one step above useful for cooking. They didn’t have anything even close to what you smoked. We made do with stew bum wine flavored like strawberry cough syrup and you never asked where we were going from there. You already knew. Make up sex is always better, even with your beloved wife whispering curses in your ear and reminding you that you gave her an STD while the football jocks point and crack jokes about how “your car’s gonna need new shocks.”
From the way you looked standing on the front porch I don’t think you even told your mother goodbye, you came out with your suitcases and that was that. We didn’t back down after that or tone things down. We didn’t go through another phase of building up to a scare and walking back away from it. The dog was off the leash between us but we got smarter about things and let’s face it, our mid-twenties hit us like a dump truck speeding down the road. I was tired of living in shitty apartments and you were bored to tears arranging flowers for a living and eating cheesy pasta every night.