Life As I Blow It (6 page)

Bucky chewed. It's common in the South. I've seen toddlers do it. His tobacco of choice was Copenhagen. Men who chew always keep a spit cup handy. They use the same one and empty it when it's full. It's disgusting. Bucky kept one in his bedroom on his windowsill. He said that way he could just dump it out when it was ready. It seemed to me it would have been much easier to just spit out the window.

Once I decided that he'd be my first, there was no going back. Almost all of the other girls in my class had already had sex, with the exception of the Baptists. I had waited long enough—I was fifteen and I wasn't getting any younger. Bucky was very open to the idea of being my first, so it didn't take much for him to come up with the place and time. His parents were going away for the weekend, and since he was seventeen and a senior in high school, they trusted him to be alone. We immediately planned our rendezvous.

I was nervous when I got to his place. I wasn't old enough to drive yet, so Lindsay dropped me off. This was one of the moments I was irritated that my mom put me in kindergarten when I was four. Apparently she couldn't wait to get me out of the house, but I hated being younger than all of my friends.

When we pulled up to Bucky's driveway, she and I sat silently in the car for a moment.

“You sure?” she asked.

“I'm sure,” I told her.

“Make sure he wears something,” she reminded me.

“If he forgets, I'll just take a long bath. Kristy says that works.”

I got out of the car, tightened my scrunchie, smoothed out my floral spandex shorts, and headed for his front door. Lindsay backed slowly out of the driveway, and I could hear the
Thelma & Louise
soundtrack coming from her speakers.

“You're a part of me, I'm a part of you …” Glenn Frey crooned.

I turned to the front door and knocked. It was now or never.

Bucky answered the door wearing football pants and a do-rag. He smiled, spit into a plastic cup, and motioned for me to come in. I'd been in his house before, but this time everything seemed different. I knew his family didn't have a lot of money, but suddenly instead of “poor” they seemed “quaint.” Instead of “dirty” the house just looked “unkempt.” I was giving him excuses for the way that he lived. I still do that; I'm working on it. But at that point he was leading me to his bedroom. And I really needed to like him before we got there.

There was no time wasted on Bucky's side. I was there to fuck him, and he was in a time crunch. On the way to his room, he stopped only once, to show me his football helmet that his dad had mounted on the wall. On the front it said “Wheat.” I didn't understand.

“Shouldn't you have gotten your name put on the front of the helmet? And if you wanted to use the name of a bread, why not everybody's favorite, ‘Wonder'?”

He scoffed at my ignorance. “Wheat is short for Buckwheat, which was derived from Bucky, which is my name.”

“Actually your name is Daniel.”

“My name is Bucky.”

“Bucky is a nickname. You nicknamed your nickname?”

“Whatever, Miss Straight-A's. Let's go get down.”

We continued on to the bedroom and Bucky pushed the door open, then stepped aside so that I could enter. The smell of chewing tobacco wafted past me. Bucky led me by the hand to his bed. I was in a daze. He gently pushed me down, then awkwardly fell on top of me. He was pretty heavy and I couldn't breathe.

“So … heavy … just can you … ouch,” I muttered. My air was being cut off.

“Sorry, baby.” Then he moved more to the side. “Hold on, I have a surprise for you.”

Bucky stood up and went to his dresser. He got out a condom and winked at me. He then rummaged through a few cassette tapes, found the one he wanted, and popped it into his ghetto blaster. He pushed “play” and the lyrics to Too $hort's “Don't Fight the Feelin' ” filled the room:

“Our song,” Bucky whispered into my ear. I racked my brain trying to remember why this was our song. It didn't seem that romantic. I was also pretty sure we didn't have a song.

I shook my head. “I don't think this is our song.”

“Of course it is. It's always the song that is
our
song when I have a girlfriend.”

“So it's
your
song and when you have a girlfriend it's
their
song, too?”

“Not
their
song, it's our song.”

“But then it isn't our song if it's your song with all of your ex-girlfriends.” I started to tear up. This wasn't going as planned.

“No, baby, this is for you. I've never played it for a virgin before,” he said proudly.

Suddenly he was on top of me. He pulled down his pants, then mine, and before I knew what was happening I had lost my virginity. I looked up and noticed that he had knocked his spit cup over. Brown saliva trickled down his window as the Too $hort song continued:

I wriggled to get free from Bucky's grasp. This was really embarrassing. I just wanted to get out of the way of the fallen saliva moving directly toward my head. Unfortunately I didn't make it in time. Bucky jumped up and got me a towel, one of the only caring things he'd done that day, and probably during our entire relationship. Right after he wiped his armpits with it, he handed me the towel to clean the spit off my face.

If you've never had sex for the first time with someone
playing trashy rap with a mouth full of chew, keep it that way. I passed it off as fine because I had nothing to compare it to. Now the whole thing reminds me of a crime scene. I still have nightmares.

From that night on, Bucky and I became a real couple. Much like Ricky Walden, he didn't waste time telling people at school what had occurred between us the night before. I had every right to be upset with him, but I wasn't. He pacified the whole thing by presenting me with his class ring. It was about ten sizes too big for me. I wrapped tons of yarn around the base of it so that it would fit my finger. I decided that him giving me his ring meant that me giving him my hymen was okay. We were officially together. The only thing that scared me was that he was a senior and I was a junior. I couldn't imagine what school would be like next year without him.

When I turned sixteen and needed my first job, Bucky put in a word for me where he was working, which was at Hardee's. It felt really romantic to be working side by side with my boyfriend. We were in the trenches together. We already had Friday night football and now we had fast food.

I started as a cashier. I took people's orders and filled their bags with cheeseburgers and thanked them for choosing Hardee's. It didn't take long for me to get restless; I really wanted to work the drive-thru. Bucky scoffed at me.

“Everybody wants to work drive-thru. That's where the respect is.”

“Okay, well, can you train me? I think I can pick it up pretty fast. I hate working the counter. It's too much interacting with people.” Later in life, when I had to wait tables for a good fifteen years, this would really wear on me.

“You're joking, right?” Bucky asked. “You think you
can just waltz in here and work drive-thru? You ain't even done fry detail yet. Just wait your turn.”

I couldn't understand what the big deal was. I wanted to wear that headset so bad. I couldn't stand having to talk to people face-to-face anymore. Plus, at the drive-thru window you could slip free burgers and drinks to your friends. It was a position of power.

Bucky wasn't a ton of help in moving me up at work. He told the manager that I should learn to make biscuits like everyone else. For weeks I had to come in to work at 5
A.M.
on Saturdays and Sundays to fill aluminum trays with biscuit mix. It was much worse than the breakfasts at the fire department. At least at those all I had to do was serve. Now suddenly I was a cook, too?
This is bullshit
.

At school we had something called “Colors Day.” It was like homecoming, but for basketball. I was voted onto the “Colors Day Court” as a Junior Maid. This was a really big fucking deal in my mind. It meant people liked me. It meant that even though I wasn't one of the Baptists, I was accepted. I had to buy a nice dress, get my hair done, and have someone to dance with during the “royalty number” at the big dance that took place after school. Of course, I asked Bucky.

Between the game, having to sit on a makeshift throne for three hours, and the dance, I felt wiped out from my big evening. I went home immediately after the dance, opting to skip the after party at Rhonda Lewis's house. Bucky said he was still going to go; my exhaustion certainly didn't need to ruin his good time.

The next morning Bucky came wandering in to Hardee's with a giant hickey on his neck.

“What the fuck is that?” I yelled the second that I saw him.

“What?”

“That.”
I pointed to the purple bruise. “That
hickey
. What did you do!” I started to cry.

“Oh, that. That's not a hickey. Clint Pearson and I were messing around, and he pinched me.”

“Clint Pearson doesn't have a thumb,” I yelled. “You can't effectively pinch somebody if you don't have a thumb!”

I dragged Bucky back into dry storage and demanded the truth. He confessed that he had made out with Rhonda Lewis. I was appalled. Rhonda Lewis was the most unattractive, manliest-looking girl you could ever imagine. Back then she was the queen of the basketball courts and I'm sure by now she's the queen of some other woman's vagina.

I became enraged. I started throwing thirty-two-ounce plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cups at him and calling him every name in the book, including Daniel, because I knew that would really get under his skin.

Having your boyfriend cheat on you at sixteen is devastating, especially when he is your first and you're still trying to figure out how to get on the pill without telling your mom. You feel like all of the trust and air has been taken out of you. There was no way I was going to be the dumb girl that worked it out with my crappy boyfriend. I was simply going to move on and have sex with another guy as soon as possible to put this whole thing behind me.

Bucky was not happy that I broke up with him over the “incident” with Rhonda Lewis. Suddenly he was madly in love with me and couldn't bear to face the idea of losing me. He stalked, called, and wrote terrible poetry that he left on my car. I saved all of them. I was sure I'd need them one day in court, or in a book about how dumb I was. Here's to the latter:

Is that an apology?
I was sure that he was losing his mind. He called me crying, begging for us to get back together. He said I should be his wife and we were meant to be. I don't know what turned him this way; I assume it was guilt. I think it's common for people to take things for granted until they're gone, which was something I had learned from the band Cinderella and their song “Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone).” Bucky was also just about to graduate from high school and no colleges were interested in his 2.7 GPA or his barely impressive football skills. He was coming unraveled.

I was becoming slightly unraveled too, but I didn't know it. I started paying attention to the Baptists at school. Those girls seemed so happy. They didn't ever look hungover, and I was pretty sure none of them had ever had a urinary tract infection, which I was certain I had gotten because Bucky had been unfaithful. One Sunday I suggested to Lindsay that we attend the First Baptist Church.

Sitting in that church was an odd experience. Suddenly all the Baptists were saying hello to me, much more friendly than usual. They were welcoming me and Lindsay and letting us know that if we needed anything, to call them. I thanked them but assured them I wouldn't need to call. I knew where
the church was and as long as I showed up on Sundays, shit would start turning around for me.

The second time I went, I cried throughout the whole sermon. It felt like the right thing to do. At the end the preacher asked if anybody needed to be saved. I started having flashbacks to my night with Penny. I crossed my fingers and prayed that people didn't start writhing on the floor. Then I felt myself stand up. I raised my hand and walked toward the front of the church. I needed to be saved.
I have sinned
. I wasn't supposed to have sex, let alone a bladder infection. Maybe the preacher could wash all of that away. I turned to look for Lindsay and she was following me. I smiled—we were in this together.

Getting dunked backward into a tub of lukewarm water was not something I was expecting to do that day. I was definitely not dressed for it. There were plenty of people who I knew that were in attendance, and now I was committing to a religion I barely knew anything about right in front of them. Regardless, Lindsay and I were both officially cleared of our sins and could start our lives over.