Florissant is a smallish town outside of St. Louis Missouri – try to imagine a picturesque town where you would like to grow up and then add a river – and a few meth labs. It’s a place where you don’t have to lock the doors, but probably should just because – well because it’s common sense and I never understand why people DON’T lock their doors – it doesn’t equate with being safe to me, it just equates with stupidity or pride or both. Anyways, this is where I grew up and for most of my life I suppose I never realized that being treated to McDonald’s every couple of weeks was just that – a treat – this is because I grew up ostensibly poor. But it was an ignorance that I had… more like a naiveté I suppose. Stupid stupid stupid. This is a shitty way to begin talking about my life.
I am not even sure where I would actually start. Maybe with my parents divorce? My brother being born? The first time I was put into the “bad chair” in preschool? That’s kind of a good one. More just like a funny story. Not even that. It basically boiled down to the fact that when you eat paste as a child it is funny…. for a little while…then it becomes unhealthy…and then it becomes a problem…then you get put into the “bad chair” even though the only reason you ate the fucking paste was because it smelled delicious and becaue the cute girls in the class laughed at these paste smorgosborgs I would have in the corner of the classroom (even back then I had a weakness for girls in catholic school jumpers, go figure!). Catholic school was something of a an anomaly to me because I can remember certain instances that would always sit with me in some sort of profound way, but never really meant anything (I assume). I remember the way a girl named Kristen looked in Friday mass, the way the stained glass reflected off of her ebony brown hair, shoulder length. Though at the time I would not have described her hair as ebony but probably something more to the effect of…. lets say…poop. Yeah that sounds about right. There wasn’t anything remarkable about this girl and often she sickened me when we ate lunch, due to the fact that she constantly ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which obligatorily would become tangled in her teeth as she smiled at me. Come to think of it I am not sure why I was so taken by this image of her sitting in church…I guess it was just one of those things…actually now that I am here writing this I realize what it was…it was the my first memory of something being beautiful…and that image has always stayed with me…and to this day when I sit in church and stare at the various depictions of saints and stories from the bible I am reminded of Kristen and that morning in church, the first thing I realized that this very thing I was looking at was beautiful. But that all changed when I met Lisa…I still hold onto the image of the church, but now my memories seem to change and fade into one another and it as though Lisa is there with the reds and gold and deep blues shining off of her perfectly spun hair…that is beauty now…there is no more peanut butter, but that holy image is now juxtaposed with the only woman that I was ever supposed to love. My Lisa. Its when I lie awake when my childhood and the rest of my life seem to meld together and all at once I feel that Lisa has always been my best friend…that she was always there…I like to think that, that she was just around the corner, maybe she watched me play and maybe I tried to look up her skirt…its all relative…its all the time its all the same.
There was a an incident involving my first grade teacher whose name I can’t recall and a very large rail road tie that she kept in her desk. And this particular incident also involved a nebbish titty sucking boy named Matt who was frequently picked on (no doubt he evolved into a closet homosexual who dressed in offbeat colors…probably lots of corduroy and suede) and this boy was raising hell about something, more than likely the fact that he was not being paid attention to. So my teacher produced this massive spike from her desk and threatened to nail his ass to his seat, though im sure she said butt, maybe not even something that explicit. Whereupon he began to cry and we had a good laugh…man kids can be so cruel…apparently so can first grade catholic schoolteachers.
I cant recall seeing a pack of cigarettes in my second grade teachers purse and being completely shocked, I assumed that teachers were some higher power, robots, or some sort of special being that didn’t indulge in such habits, I was completely shocked. But I think she knew that I knew her little secret, because while other kids might leave apples for a teacher I began to leave packs of matches and lighters that I would take from my older brother. My little ploy seemed so intelligent, so sly, so remarkable…she would never know it was me AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
So sitting there in the principal’s office, waiting for my mother arrive I suddenly didn’t feel so intelligent…my teacher and principal were now convinced that I was a prepubescent arsonist with intentions to set fire to the school…its hard to shake a wrap like that as a kid…Corey Kloos the paste easting fire starter…thank God kids weren’t clever enough to rhyme my name to these particular claims
Ok so that’s not a particularly good story but I am sure there are others that I will find.