Archive for June, 2010

I had a bummer of a weekend. I was supposed to go see the Windy City Rollers Championship and instead had a seizure, whacked my head into the kitchen counter, and wound up with yet another lump on my head and yet another possible concussion. Then my blood pressure dropped down to practically nothing, and I spent the weekend passing out and puking and sleeping. Lovely.

Today I am feeling marginally better, which means it’s time to answer more questions.

Eileen asks a few in tandem, so I’m just going to post her entire comment: “So if I comment I get an orgasm? I’m down with that. What is life going to be like in the new place? Will you have your own basement or will you be allowed up in the house this time? Will the J-man have to change schools? Will you miss the neighbor with the caddy? Will you miss the kid from down the street? What will you leave him as a going away present? Will you start a rumor that your basement is haunted and there are several bodies buried down there? There you go, want my orgasm now. Send Bruce Springsteen.”

To start, yes, the J-Man is going to be changing schools. I feel it would be asinine to continue to send him to St. Farqhuar’s and have my mom drive him both ways when a bus stops practically right outside my stepdad’s house to ship the kids off to the public school. Plus the public schools in Buttfuck, IN are purported to be really, really good.

Will I miss the kid from down the street?

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Can I tell you what that child did the other day? The other day, he picked up a golf club and dented the holy fuck out of my neighbor’s steel door. Then he blamed my kid for it. I don’t know what is wrong with his brain.

The J-Man certainly will miss him, though, for some reason; and for that I feel badly. Despite the hole he knocked in my wall (Oh, did I mention the little shit knocked a huge hole in my wall?) and the countless cans of Febreze I have had to purchase to cover up his questionable stench, they have been pretty good friends, and I think J. is going to be pretty sad when we leave.

And YES, I am going to miss my neighbor with the Caddy! If you have no idea who the hell I’m talking about, it’s my neighbor across the street. He has a beautiful Cadillac that he frequently can be found polishing and washing, and every time he goes out for a drive, I sing the Shaft theme song. You damn right.

As far as the new house goes, I love it. It’s a bi-level, which means that the entire lower level is finished, so I will have gone from living in the TranceCave to a veritable TrancePalace, complete with my own TranceBathroom!

Oh yes, a bathroom of my very own. A bathroom that no small boy has touched with grubby little hands. A bathroom with no long blond mom-hairs all over the place. Mine. All mine. I weep with joy.

I’m pretty stoked about the house, which has a very large kitchen, an enormous fenced in yard (we are planning on getting a pool, but don’t tell the J-Man), a nice basketball hoop in the driveway, and get this – separate bedrooms for my mom and my stepdad, because obviously we are living in the fifties he snores.

The separate bedroom thing totally creeps me out, by the way. I think it’s weird.

I have no idea what life is going to be like in the sticks. In a way, it will be cool, because there is a ton of stuff within walking distance for both J. and I – a bowling alley with a big arcade, a karaoke bar, a pizza joint, a hardware store, a grocery store, and a hair salon, which is somewhere I could possibly sell jewelry. The neighborhood seems really nice, and I hope to do a lot of walking around and checking things out with J., and possibly volunteering at the local nursing home.

I’m not going to start a rumor that the basement is haunted, because damn, I want this house to sell. My greatest fear in life has now become that the house is not going to sell. There is a house across the street that has been on the market for about two years. The house next door was on the market for approximately two weeks. I have no idea what the difference between these two places was, so I am convinced it is mojo. I am all about creating house mojo. This house MUST SELL. Quickly.

So that’s my spiel for today. Eileen, I am sending The Boss over to your house wrapped in a big bow. Prepare for your orgasm.

Happy Monday.

Kevin asks: “Of all the nights you went out to clubs and danced your fool head off, what’s the single-best night out you can remember having?”

This is easy. I don’t remember the exact year, but boy do I remember the night. It was sometime around 2000 or 2001, and legendary DJ Carl Cox was playing the Crobar.

Crobar was a favorite haunt of mine. It was always packed to the max, particularly during the weekends and on Bondage Night, but my friends and I knew half the staff and could always score a quick trip past the ropes and free, strong Red Bull and vodkas. We sashayed our way up to the VIP area as if we owned the place.

In a way, we sort of did. We were young and dressed to the nines and ready to party. Who’s to say we didn’t own the world?

Carl Cox was unreal, sometimes spinning on as many as five turntables at once, egging the crowd on to ridiculous heights. This was during the heydays of ecstasy and glow sticks, and people were rolling like mad, whirling on platforms, dancing in Crobar’s famed cages, spinning, thrashing, going wild.

I was definitely in the thick of it all, feeling that music as if it resonated from my skull – which after a while, it did.

Crobar stayed open until four AM, and I don’t think I sat out one song that night. It was epic. I was drenched in sweat and drank nothing but water to keep me going.

I miss that. I miss that freedom of stomping out onto the dance floor in huge black boots and going totally fucking insane. It was fabulous.

I feel like such an old mom when I think about shit like that. Lately when I dance it’s just the white girl bop, but man, I used to really go off.

That’s how I got the nickname “Trance”, incidentally.

Ah, to be young again…

Happy Friday. Tomorrow I’m going to the Windy City Roller’s Ivy King Cup Championship Bout. I can’t freaking wait.

Since so many of you were interesting in hearing about The Shit, I thought I would start there with a little Shit Manifesto, if you will. Don’t worry, though, I will definitely get to all of your questions, and thank you for asking.

I met The Shit when both of us were working at a big box home improvement store that rhymes with Foam People. I worked for several of their stores for about seven years, doing bookkeeping and computer maintenance. It was actually a great job with very choice pay, benefits, and stock options, but the good pay could just be because I was formerly an accounting manager and basically demanded top dollar during my interview. At the time, I knew that the company had money to spend.

Anyway, I was newly installed in the brand-new 87th Street store, and so was The Shit. He was the newly minted manager of the garden department, and we became fast friends.

There was a lot of flirting. I mean, a lot. We had to try to keep it on the down-low, because any sort of goings-on between management and employees was strictly verboten, but we frequently took cigarette breaks together and he was usually the person I called to verify the large iron safe that I counted down every morning and afternoon.

I should probably preface all of this by saying that The Shit really wasn’t my type, physically. He was my height, sort of chunky, and had this terribly loud, scratchy voice that resonated through the hallowed halls of the big box, but Lord, was he funny. Unfortunately, funny gets me every time.

We started seeing each other outside of work, occasionally going out to clubs and ball games and what not. Nothing really happened, physically, but there was definitely a spark there.

Then one night, on Labor Day, a bunch of people stayed after the store closed and got some beers and hung out in the parking lot to drink and smoke and talk. (Again, strictly forbidden.) We sat in The Shit’s car and talked for hours, about his parents, who had emigrated from Cuba; about his two children, who lived in Florida and who he rarely got to see; and about everything else under the sun.

The next thing I knew, I was making out with The Shit. Heavily. It was starting to get pretty ridiculous when he suggested that we go inside the store.

We wound up having some pretty crazy sex on my boss’s office floor. With a condom. That did not break.

However, it must have been some old-ass condom, because my child was conceived in a Foam People store office.

You may laugh now.

That was the one and only time we had sex. We continued to hang out after that for a while, but things were sort of weird, and I had begun to realize that I just wasn’t that interested, and maybe he did too.

About a month or two months later, I got very sick. I was throwing up, occasionally passing out (once into the iron safe at work – that was a treat), and feeling so tired it was as if all the energy had been completely leached from my body.

After a week or so of this, I went to my family doctor, assuming that I had mono or some other such ailment. It wasn’t so far-fetched to think such a thing. I was always sick with pneumonia or strep throat or bad asthma at the time from partying too much – could mono be far behind?

I peed in a cup and then sat in the exam room in my little paper gown, feeling vaguely nauseous but not at all nervous and waited for the nurse or doctor to tell me what was wrong so I could score some antibiotics and get back to my life.

The nurse entered the room and looked at me, smilingly. “You’re pregnant.”

“No, I’m not,” I said calmly. “Impossible. Run the test again.”

To her credit, she ran it again.

When she returned, less smilingly, I asked her to run it again. She hesitated, but upon seeing the look on my face, left the room. I doubt she actually ran it again, but she waited a few minutes and then came back.

“Ma’am, you are pregnant, and you’re severely dehydrated. We need to get you on an IV. Ma’am?”

I was already dressed and out the door.

I got into my car and drove. I drove down I-80 for about an hour and a half, until I didn’t know where the fuck I was and didn’t care, and then I turned around and drove back.

What the fuck was I going to do with a baby?

I was twenty-three years old, and I had never even held a baby.

After several days of stewing and freaking out, I decided to call The Shit. He was living with another manager at the time, a woman, and allegedly using her for her money (as a store manager, she had buckets) so that he could bring his kids out from Florida.

I called and without any hemming and hawing said, “I’m pregnant.”

“Well,” he said, “you need to take care of it.”

I was slightly stunned. After all, he had kids.

“I’m not going to ‘take care of it’.”

“I’m not having shit to do with this. You need to have an abortion.”

“OK then. Goodbye.”

I hung up, and it was pretty much the last time we spoke, save one short conversation we had when I was seven months pregnant that I will get to later.

Abortion was never really an option for me. I’m not against it. I believe it should be readily available for those who need it. For me, though, at that time, it was not the right choice. Adoption wasn’t going to cut it either, maybe because I myself am adopted. Whatever the case, I knew I wanted that baby. And I knew that The Shit most certainly did not.

I went to work every day and watched him carefully avoid me, just like I carefully avoided questions about my baby’s paternity. As far as everyone I knew was concerned, this was a virgin birth.

Still, I knew I had to prepare for my child’s future, and I knew that part of that future should include child support. I had to do something. I had to get his social security number.

I asked another manager, one I knew and trusted, to go into the boss’s office and get me the digits. It wasn’t a lot to ask, and he was happy to do it without asking a lot of questions. I knew that if I had the number I could eventually nail him down for support. He had a great job making great money, and there was absolutely no reason he couldn’t pay support even if he was unwilling to be around.

Unfortunately the manager I asked was a Dudley Do-Right motherfucker who figured out exactly why I was asking and told the boss.

Yeah.

They actually flew in human resources assholes from Corporate in Atlanta to talk to me. I cried. I begged them not to fire The Shit, because I knew that if they did A) he would blame me, and B) there would go all hope of ever getting child support.

They fucking fired him anyway.

The fallout was ugly. The Shit was well-liked in the store, and people viewed me as a white Jezebel who got him fired on purpose. I slunk around that store like a pregnant pariah for months, sick and tired.

When I was seven months pregnant, on short-term disability from work, The Shit called me. It would be the last time we would ever speak.

“You fucking bitch. You ruined my life.”

Then he hung up.

It was a fitting end to a lovely relationship.

Since then The Shit has only paid support for one year, when J. was about three, and his tax returns were docked last year and this year, so I received a sum from those. I once found him on MySpace, where he bragged that he made one hundred thousand dollars a year and listed the company where he worked. I called the Child Support Bureau and turned him in and received two months of support before he quit his job and made his MySpace profile private. I believe he works for cash now or something.

All I know about him is that he lives in Florida, and is married. I showed J. the MySpace photos of him and his wife because he has always wanted to see what his father looked like, and he cried. I told him that in no way is that man worth crying over, but God, do I feel his pain. As someone who has a great relationship with her own father, I feel it every day. I felt it acutely, again, when he asked me why I didn’t marry Bullshit.

I feel it more than he will ever know.

So that is The Shit. People always ask me whether I think he will ever pull his head out of his ass and decide he wants to see the J-Man.

The answer is no. No, I really don’t think so.

Happy Thursday.