Life As I Blow It (7 page)

I got home, dripping wet, and told Mom that I was an official member of the Baptist Church. I hoped she wasn't going to be mad. She was Methodist and I didn't want her to feel I was going against her, even though I had no idea if I had.

“Do you know what it means to be Baptist?” she asked.

“Sort of.”

She looked like she had something to say, but she bit her tongue. “You're free to believe in anything you want to believe in. But I suggest you put on a new T-shirt before you catch a cold.”

I went to church for a couple more weeks. I knew that
Farmington was a “dry” town but you could buy alcohol when you got five miles down the road into Fayetteville. I also knew that in both towns no liquor was sold on Sunday. I used to solve that by driving to Missouri on Sundays to buy beer. It would have been easier to just stock up on Saturday nights, but that was my way of not accepting the rules. It was not until I went to church and started hanging out with the Baptists that I realized
they
were responsible for the weird liquor rules. They had a lot of rules that I was not expecting, but I was trying to roll with it.

One day the pastor told me that I was going to have to quit drill team. I thought he was joking.

Apparently Baptists in Farmington didn't believe in dancing. I explained to him that it was my senior year and that I'd probably make captain, which is as prestigious as you can get. Surely he didn't expect me to hang up my pom-pons for a church, especially this late in the game. He explained that in his religion, which was now my religion, they don't believe in dancing for amusement; it had to be for a purpose.

“It is for a purpose. It's for halftime,” I fired back.

He wouldn't budge. “It just isn't something that we can condone.”

“But all of the cheerleaders are Baptists. How'd they get around this?”

“They don't dance. They cheer,” he said confidently.

“But they do the splits and climb on top of each other to make a pyramid. Is that for a purpose?”

He sighed and told me to make my decision. I was furious. I thought about all of our school dances. Those girls were always there, and always dancing. When nobody was watching, they did what they wanted. The pastor didn't show
up for dances, but he sure showed up for the football games. I felt like I was surrounded by a bunch of hypocrites.

There was no way I was giving up the one thing I loved doing to keep a bunch of people from sneering at me. I was pretty sure that God didn't care if I did the Running Man. I figured He just wanted me to be a good person.

I decided that my relationship with God was solid enough that I could dance and believe in him at the same time. I'd seen
Footloose
and I didn't have a train yard to run out to and do my routine in in secret, so I just stopped going to church. I didn't really quit that church just to remain on drill team, even if that is a better story. I quit because I felt like people weren't honest about what they did when they weren't in church. I don't see the point of only believing in something on Sundays.

My senior year I made captain. My team gave me a whistle with my name engraved on it, which I wore proudly. I was still getting hounded by Bucky, but at least he'd graduated so he wasn't at school every day. He occasionally left notes on my car, but it was not as frequent since it now required a special trip for him.

I started dating a guy named Tony. He and I were good friends but he was also close with Bucky. We decided to be together, even though we knew it was going to affect their friendship. Tony told me that our song was “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams. It was used in the movie
Robin Hood
and it was all about how a guy's love for this woman was worth fighting for, just like Tony thought ours was. I didn't think it was a perfect song choice but in the romance department it certainly beat anything by Too $hort.

“Is that our song or is that your song with all of your girlfriends?” I challenged.

“What? It's
our
song. What kind of person would have the same song for every girlfriend?”

I kissed him.

Bucky heard about me and Tony, but neither of us would admit to him that it was true. Because of that, Bucky spent his free time trying to prove it. When our class took a trip to the state fair, he tailed the bus hoping to catch Tony and me hanging out together. He was behind us the whole time, thinking nobody would notice him. He still drove an El Camino—everybody noticed. He even went into the fair and attempted to talk to me. Every time I looked behind me, he was approaching. We just kept turning corners to lose him. I'd run into a bathroom while Tony got in line for a funnel cake. I was so embarrassed, and all I really wanted was to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl.

Finally Bucky's letters to me became so rambling and off track that I told Tony I thought he might be clinically insane or on drugs. Tony said that he didn't think Bucky was on drugs.

“Did he ever do any around you?”

“No way,” I explained. “I won't tolerate any drugs.”

“But I smoke pot,” he said.

“Oh, pot is fine. I smoke that sometimes when I'm in the mood. I just won't do drug-drugs.”

“Like what? Cocaine?”

“Cocaine is the worst! Have you ever read any of the Sweet Valley High novels? In one of them this girl Regina decided to try cocaine for the first time and her heart stopped. I mean, she died the first time she tried it! I told Bucky about
that, so I don't think he'd ever do cocaine. Did you read that one?”

“Can't say that I have read any of those. Sounds pretty intense.”

“Oh, you have no idea. You can borrow some if you want. I have them all.”

“I'm good. I don't really like books.”

Eventually I broke up with Tony. I knew I was going to college the next year and I didn't want to be tied down. I had big dreams and I couldn't let a man stand in my way. I also knew Tony was not going to college, since you couldn't major in pot. I decided to spare him what I went through when I was a sophomore and Brent Jackson went away to college. We had tried to stay boyfriend and girlfriend but eventually we grew apart. I was not interested in a boyfriend who couldn't be in town to take me to PG-13 movies and Taco Bell.

When graduation day finally came around, my dad was a no-show. He had always said that he'd be there, but work was too busy and he couldn't make it. I was disappointed, but I sort of got it. What was he going to do in Farmington? He wore a suit and tie and was probably afraid of cowboy hats. And it was a long trip for something not that rare; most people in the world accomplish graduating at some point. It actually taught me a good lesson: If you have kids, you may unknowingly disappoint them. It seemed like it was smarter to not overcommit yourself, then nobody could say you'd let them down. If you do what you want to do, you're the only person who can feel slighted.

Bucky still didn't give up when I started college. He heard, most likely through a phone tap, that Tony and I had
broken it off. He thought now that I was out of high school maybe we could start dating again. I don't think he realized that starting college meant I was moving forward rather than backward. He heard I was majoring in theater, so he called me up and told me that he was going to audition for a local production of
Romeo and Juliet
.

“They are holding auditions soon. I think I'd be a good Romeo since I have a lot of love in me. Plus I'm good at football.”

“But Romeo doesn't play football …”

“He does now.”

I don't have to explain to you what a rather large man with a mustache would look like running around in tights trying to speak in iambic pentameter. But since the only thing Bucky ever followed through on was not leaving me alone, the audition never happened.

After many phone calls I gave in and agreed to meet him for lunch. I was no longer working at Hardee's. I had moved on to a respectable job at a real restaurant named Bert's Grill & Bakery. It was like a chain restaurant, but
not
a chain. The owner was a recovering alcoholic, so the place didn't serve alcohol. I always thought that was really selfish of him; it wasn't his customers' fault that he couldn't control himself around tequila. I decided Bert's would be a good place to meet Bucky for lunch. Since I hadn't seen him in about a year, a public place where I knew people seemed like the right call.

When he walked in my stomach sank. He had a big fat gut and his mustache looked like it was growing toward it. I couldn't remember why I had agreed to this meeting. He greeted me with a big smile and I attempted one in return. I
then told him we should sit down before it got busy, which was code for “Let's get in and out of here before anybody else spots us.”

We sat down at the table and one of my co-workers, Logan, came to take our order. He and I were good friends so I asked him to take care of us in case shit started to go south.

I immediately started to wonder if Bucky had ever been to a sit-down restaurant before. Questions like “What would you like on your baked potato?” and “What kind of dressing do you want on your salad?” threw him for a loop. He looked at me with panic in his eyes. He just kept answering, “Ranch.”

“You want ranch dressing on your baked potato?” Logan asked with a smirk.

“Yes, unless you think Thousand Island is better.”

I took over the ordering. “Just give him a baked potato with everything on it. And see if they can rush the food.”

I could tell Logan was getting a real kick out of the whole situation. In fact, all of the waiters snickered in the back, asking me who my date was. I should have taken him to a place that was dark and quiet and nobody knew who I was. When Bucky got up to use the restroom, I told Logan that he'd been in an accident and that he had suffered brain damage.

“I'm so sorry, Sarah. I didn't realize. But it explains a lot.”

“It's fine. Just please tell the others not to laugh at him. It's rude,” I warned.

I suffered through the meal, finding comfort in knowing that this would be the last time I saw him. He suffered through his baked potato, uncertain why tiny green things
were chopped up on top of it. I attempted to explain what a chive was but gave up when he said he had once gotten the chives from taking medication.

I guess he didn't realize how poorly the whole thing went because he still called a few times after. Eventually he gave up, the clincher being when I changed my phone number. He left word through our mutual friends that I was missing out. He was going to be extremely successful with his new venture, which was the opening of a venetian blind cleaning business.

I
t was only a fifteen-minute drive to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville from my parents' house in Farmington, but once I discovered Café Santa Fe's Long Island Iced Teas served by the carafe, that drive became way too long. I had one of my sister's expired driver's licenses but, as usual, I never had to use it since nobody ever asked me for my ID. A taxi was definitely not something that you could just grab, especially to Farmington. In fact, the only consistently reliable source of public transportation in Fayetteville was the Fayetteville Trolley, and that only took you up and down the town square. Fun when you're drunk, but not functional for getting a lift home. I had another option of a place to crash, since I was having sex with one of the waiters who worked at Café Santa Fe. When you're eighteen and you
don't have to pay for your own drinks, thirty-something waiters named Gary can be irresistible. Unfortunately that ended abruptly one night when we were having sex and he pulled a gun out from underneath his pillow and laid it on my chest.

“Oh my God, are you going to kill me?”

“No, I just think guns are sexy. Don't you?”

“No.”

“Well, that's too bad.”

“So now are you going to kill me?”

We didn't go out for long.

If I was going to continue to have college-style fun while still maintaining my status as a daughter who had her shit together, I was going to need to get my own place. Plus I was getting too old to be calling my mother and asking her if it was cool to crash on a friend's couch.

One of the best things about college was the people I met. I had two different worlds. In my classes, I had people around me who had similar dreams of acting and doing stand-up and going to Hollywood. Working at Bert's, I had a bunch of sorority girls and fraternity guys around me who had similar dreams of finishing our shifts and getting drunk. Like Patrick, who went to the walk-in cooler every Sunday morning and sniffed all of the nitrous oxide out of the cans of whipped cream.

When I hung out with my work friends I went to awful parties and carried around red plastic cups. When I hung out with my theater friends I went to awful parties and carried around badly rolled joints. After play rehearsals we would go to the bar down the street from the theater, named Fuzzy's, where they had giant frozen beer mugs and served
pitchers for three dollars. There was one guy named Marty in our group who only had money once a month, when he got paid from a job. Nobody understood what he did but we knew it involved a tractor. We'd all buy his drinks for three weeks, then on payday he'd take us to Fuzzy's and spend his entire paycheck. Then the next day he'd be penniless again and the cycle would start all over. After work at Bert's, we'd go to a place called My Pleasure, a dark and loungey bar that served drinks with various fruit garnishes and you had to sign a guest book to get in.

These were the kinds of people I was dealing with, and I liked it. I never brought a theater friend to a work party, and vice versa. I rarely mixed the two groups together; the thought of it gave me a rash. I discovered that in college, with these two groups of friends, I could be who I wanted to be at any given time. It was similar to having the two different parents. On some nights I was the girl who was serious about theater and life goals and loved to read plays, and on other nights I was the girl who was serious about getting laid and mastering a keg stand. Both of those girls were me but I didn't feel confident that one side would be accepted by the other. I figured out my own way to balance it all—work, friends, fun, and school. Or so I thought. Later in life I'd find that balancing those things while trying to maintain a real relationship would also be a challenge.