Why I Committed Suicide (12 page)

You know, as aggressive and comfortable with her body as she is, like all women I think Jen secretly needs me to take the initiative and suggest wild things to keep some electricity alive.
Boy, that wasn’t an egocentric statement was it?

Today we used Dan’s video camera to tape us having sex in my room on my 1960’s looking flower pattern sheets. We did every thing and every which way a person would want to do that thing. It was all very passionate and enjoyable and it seemed as if everything we did was intensified because we were always aware of someone watching. I guess the
someone
would be our future selves, but that gets a little too Star Trek-y. We were finally through after an hour or two so we smoked and watched the tape which started another round of lovemaking. Watching the tape, still out of breath from making it was very erotic. Not in a cheap exploitive kind of way either. Other than the mild embarrassment every girl feels about see- ing their body as others do, it really turned her on and that’s what it was supposed to do.

I transferred the Super 8 tapes to VHS and gave her the copies so she wouldn’t regret doing it later. It’s the only gentlemanly thing to do and I really don’t plan on ever running for public office anyway.

School is starting up again but my thirst for education isn’t ready to be quenched quite yet because I’m having the slacker summer of my dreams. Still it’s good to have some outside force motivating me so I don’t feel like a total bum. The house is starting to fill up with the smell of overpriced textbooks and lots of cool stuff. A regular four man bachelor pad of kitsch with things, that
other
people might consider tacky, everywhere. Barnum and Bailey circus posters, a giant Star Wars poster from an ancient “World” magazine and a truckload of Beastie Boys paraphernalia adorn the walls. We have a typical stoner pad I suppose, although Jerry and Dan don’t smoke pot they drink enough to feel the groovy vibes with us. I’ve got a $20 TV, that I bought off some student desperate for cash near the end of last semester, hooked up to a Super Nintendo (Jerry’s) near the entertainment center, so it’s on like mother fucking Donkey Kong baby! It’s cool to have a house I can molest with all my eclectic artistic enthusiasms. The walls of my room are slowly getting covered with the cool pictures I cut out in anticipation of future collages. My first year in college I made detailed flyers every week for a fake band I made up called “Smoking Tool.” I wrote reviews of the “Smoking Tool” shows for the local paper and I posted the upcoming show flyers all over town, which was a lot of fun until somebody saw me posting them and aggressively wanted to know why my band didn’t show up to such and such place as advertised. I guess some of the bars and clubs just let whoever makes a flyer play there on the slow nights. With my anonymity burnt, the band broke up and I learned that unless my creativity is directed or focused it often turns to mischief.

In my second year of college I made giant collages (that held weird secret subliminal messages under a black light) out of pictures, shaving cream, cigarette butts and lots of spray paint. I actively channeled my energy into those projects; defacing a large percentage of the dorm hallways and losing my deposit in the process until I entered a picture in an art show and watched it lose out to actual art students. I later learned that the art professors are the judges and
always
choose the winners based on their students’ projects. A lot of times they even give them the idea and help them develop it in class. I do not mind not winning, originally I was just thrilled to have a picture hanging in the UNT art show, but when I found out later that I didn’t even have a shot at winning because of the politics that are involved with being a successful artist, my enthusiasm for painting diminished a lot. Instead my ‘art for arts sake’ is much better, but more performance—oriented now. My creative energies are channeled into randomly (yet artistically) throwing eggs at the cars in the teacher parking spaces of the art building parking lot. That way the professors can help me with my projects too. My newest creation is to make their cars smell terrible to symbolize the oppression of the constricted establishment. Plus I like to throw eggs. I would say lately I’ve been more occupied and satisfied with experimenting on the canvas I live in. Life.

Jenifer’s been sort of bummed out lately because she’s going to have to give up her apartment on Stella. We’re still together all the time, virtually inseparable, but her roommates have been flaking on helping pay the bills so she’ll be moving back home for a little while with her parents. I suppose the notion of being back with her dad has a lot to do with her being so depressed. Her house is beautiful and huge that it has to be the parental units bumming her out right? I’ll miss sleeping over in her private air-conditioned room but the summer will soon be over and my porch room is much cooler than it was. I told Jenifer that her and her snoopy dog can stay with me anytime, I guess it was something she was worried about because her eyes lit up in that provocative way she has about her. Shit, if I had my way I would have her move in and marry me and bare my idiot children: I sanely keep my mouth shut and enthusiasm contained.

Fourth of July today. Spent most of it by myself drunk. Very drunk I might add. Drunk now. Dan and Jay went to some family thing and Jenifer’s off somewhere. I bought a watermelon earlier this week and a bottle of Everclear and ‘made a watermelon’ if that makes sense. You know, cut a hole in the melon and pour all the liquor inside? So I’ve been sitting on the front lawn in a lawn chair wearing nothing but my skivvies, jamming to classic rock on the radio and trying to count cars while my brain is all fucked up.

I think everyone caught out because they knew I set this day aside to raise hell. I have to go inside to take a bong hit every once in a while but otherwise I’m crisping in the sun until I eat this whole fucking watermelon while celebrating America. How fucking 70’s. Fuck this journal, I’m going to get the BB gun out.

I woke up sicker than a mug today. Grain alcohol isn’t something to be trifled with and I will never eat watermelon again. Ugh. I won’t even reread what I wrote, I only vaguely remember doing it.

It wasn’t even July 4
th
.
Ouch my head.

I think I’m coming down with a cold. It might be good to de-fumigate the lungs for a few days but smoking out makes everything so much more interesting. Jenifer and I have been eating over at her parents’ house a lot lately. The fridge in my house just has a lot of condiments and beer, actual substantial food items don’t seem to stay around very long. Hopefully pizza will be included as one of the four main food groups soon. I love eating at her parents’ house because they always order out and I get to eat good food for a change. Even when we don’t eat take out they cook a lot of vegetables, homemade bread and a lot of other food I was raised on.

Jenifer’s parents cater to whatever eccentric food desires she verbalizes, probably because she’s an only child. It’s so cute to see her make faces and adamantly refuse to eat anything remotely foreign to her. Maybe later on in our life this will be a trait that grates on my nerves, but I’m so in love with her that I tend to find it delightfully enduring. I love getting a chance to cook for her, I try to introduce regular foods to her that I thought every American kid was required by law to like, and then I pretend to be hurt when she won’t eat a lot of whatever I cooked. It’s sick, but I live for the enjoyment of actually finding
something
she enjoys. It’s a very rare enjoyment though. Part of the
not eating thing
is that in her mind she’ll always hear the ballet instructors telling her she’s too fat, Jenifer would look even more stunningly voluptuous with a few extra pounds on her. Maybe it’s some secret male urge I have to fatten up the women so they’re easier to catch. I don’t know, I doubt it.

I was nervous the first time I went to eat at her parents’ house. Both of her parental units are polite and nice, despite the various horror stories I’ve heard about her obsessive-compulsive father. Jenifer’s mom is a librarian and Jenifer reveres her with all the “can do no wrong” enthusiasm usually reserved for a girl’s dad. Her mom is well read and I like her alright, but she looks or just reminds me of a short Sigourney Weaver. I keep expecting her to whip out a giant gun and kick some alien ass but she’s too subdued, in a way that only middle class white people can be, to really expect that. I’ve described the house before, I just feel like I should reiterate how much I dig eating lots of good hot food on their couch, facing the big windows that open to their backyard with all of its busy birdfeeders and watching the cable TV in the corner. It’s all very peaceful and serene, comfortable and hidden away like a Japanese garden. Jenifer always eats until she’s stuffed over at her parents’ house—which isn’t much—then she stretches out on the floor right in front of us and takes a nap. Her parents seem pretty used to her napping and even though it isn’t very proper of me, I always like to look at her sexy body when she’s lying there in front of us.

I took Jenifer to eat at
my
parents’ house and felt embarrassed about their stupid sit down dinner structure after witnessing Jenifer’s parents treat her like an actual adult person. Maybe my parents still feel like they have to try and set an example for my little sister Alecia but they need to fucking relax with all of us every once in a while. My mom even gave me that same melodic teasing “Sam’s got a girlfriend” bullshit I got all through high school. I don’t mind though, Jenifer will likely be my wife one day. I think Jenifer’s nose ring scared them a lot at first and I’m glad. Shock ‘em into the nineties I say, it’s sexy on the cool. My little sister made me angry by confiding she didn’t like Jenifer as much as my old GF Melanie, but I’m inclined to think it was just the unfamiliarity of integrating a new person. I can tell Alecia is warming up to an older sister figure that treats her as an equal. I would say it’s cute but I don’t want to be too repetitious.
So now our families have accepted us, what’s next?

PART II
 

TRAVEL, HABITS and
LIFE
 

Hey again me! Guess what? I finally did it. I cut the long shaggy mane that I’ve been keeping in a ponytail and tucked under my Baskin-Robbins hat for too long. I finally figured out that I wasn’t going to use it to shag the ladies anymore and it’s so hot that it was no-longer convenient to sacrifice style for comfort. Cutting off the hair has been on my mind for a while and I must have been whining about it a bit, because Jenifer point blank asked me if she could cut it. Probably just to shut me up.

I could tell that cutting hair is something that Jenifer really feels like she should be able to do and that this was very important to her. Not only would I be trusting her with my hair, it would also be synonymous with the trust we have placed in each other and in this relationship. You know how girls can equate the weirdest things with the status of feelings for each other? Jenifer is a cool girl but you can’t overcome biology and female “hormonics.” “Hormonics” is my new word that mixes dynamics with hormones as pertained to females in relationships.

I did make sure to ask her about what her initial cutting approach was going to be and offered some pointers. Hey, when you are a guy with long hair you get all kinds of shit and it takes really long fucking time to grow and look halfway decent. My mom has been giving me crappy bowl cuts for years, so I’m entitled to be nervous when a hair chopping virgin is going in for their first time.

We did this the other night on the front porch of the house so I wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of finding a broom. The hair can breakdown and fertilize the lawn with its leftover traces of marijuana and LSD for all I care. I got a camera and took pictures so I could do a before-and-after kind of montage and make it into one of my art collage projects. I got the “before” picture just fine, and notice how I’ve only mentioned Jenifer
attempted
to cut my hair shorter. Who would have thought that it actually takes practice and a modicum of skill to merely cut hair? I sort of suspected that this might turn out badly and if I wasn’t slightly prepared to take it (“it” being my motherfucking wig) all off before hand, I wouldn’t even have brought it up as a suggestion.

We combed my long dirty blonde hair all down in the back first, making it sort of resemble a country stock-car racing fan hair-do. Then Jen took the scissors and while the hair hung in mid-air, poised for one last show of Nordic sexiness, she cut a straight line right across the back removing the longest portion all in one neat swoop. Well that was the intent anyway. In reality she fucked it all up with our dull and rusty kitchen scissors leaving me with a half chopped back head with an uneven line. A little adjusting on one side led to more adjusting on the other side until most of it was gone. The blood from my lovingly nicked ear gave it a tad bit of color and fun though. I am in love and thus my patience is near eternal. I say that as I write this later because I’m fairly sure I squealed like a stuck pig when it happened.

As any girl will tell you, the process of cutting long hair to short hair is a BIG deal that goes far beyond the actual hour or so it takes to physically cut the hair. The psychological preparation and after-effects of any radical change of appearance are predictably long-reaching for women and men, but it’s a thousand times worse for women. Cosmo probably has received a thousand tearful letters from women across the country about occurrences with hair stylists after cutting off their long locks, and most of those women have had the luxury of having their hair cut by a professional. I certainly didn’t maliciously want Jenifer to fail, more for her psyche than for the preservation of my overindulged image, but her “it looks so easy” quickly turned into apologies. Jenifer was in tears by the time she quit in frustration, thinking I was angry with her, and my fucked up grinning shaggy head wasn’t doing much in the way of being comforting.