Everyone in the universe was there, a few key players in my danger zone life. My comedy of errors with cake provided by You Bet Your Ass We're Good bakery. No one made any sense, everyone looked and sounded wrong, I wanted to be alone with my 8-tracks and spiral notebooks. The black pens were beckoning with their seductive possibilities. Snake swallowing its swollen tail. No end to this gut twisting process.
My mom was the deejay. She was spinning tracks by Jars of Clay and Mother Goose.
"Skinny Puppy!" I screamed from the corner.
"That sounds Satanic," Mom said with a self-righteous sniff.
I've always loved Mother, but her mind...I would not want to camp out there for any length of time, even with a substantial supply of s'mores and Vienna sausages. All the beer in the world...no. Would not be my kind of bowling alley.
They were there, the parents I picked out for my fetus as it grew in my uterus that fortune laden fall. The wind fucked with the golden and crimson leaves and we caravanned to West Texas the night of the eclipse. I was in the car I had been given. Mother was in her SUV. Dave was in the U-Haul truck. My daughter was there in my uterus, sucking her thumb thinking everything was cool.
The parents were there but my daughter was invisible. The last time I saw her she had a golden ponytail and she was trying to trick her little sister out of her animal crackers. I knew she would be okay when I saw the mischievous Rainwater gleam in her sapphire eyes. She had xmas eyes, North Pole eyes. Her eyes let me know everything would be cool.
My grandparents were the conscience of the surprise birthday party that I was in on. It was a party for me but it was more horror show than soiree. I'm always in on things, I'm never surprised, my Mercury in Pisces and moon in Virgo make sure of that. Quite. My grandparents were the moral center of the party but they were quiet so they were of no use.
Dave was there and I did not want him to be. He shows up to these things like bad clockwork and I do not have a screwdriver, the necessary implement with which to remove the batteries. He was there and he was telling me things. Dave is always telling me things about myself. Like I need to be reminded that I am a whore at heart, an unscrupulous taker of things, a grabber of balls, a schemer of the lowest order. I can't even pass remedial math. I could not be a nail technician because I would rather stick needles in my eyeballs than touch strange creamy hands and shoot the shit about Reese Witherspoon's wedding to the Mate of Her Soul. I cannot wait tables. I cannot stick my hands in hot dirty water, feel all that floating meat, watch my hands turn bright pink as my co-workers sing George Strait songs.
He, the stepfather Mother chose for me in my tenth year of life, told me he wanted to stick his hand inside my cunt and pull all the evil out. I was a bad girl with bad posters on the walls and bad cassettes in the stereo and bad boys on my mind. My hand was forever inside my size zero jeans. I reeked of Wanting Everything Bad in the Entire World With a Little Bit Extra Just For Giggles. Dave handed me a list torn from my favorite spiral notebook. He listed these tiny truths about his favorite girl:
1. You're lazy.
2. You're selfish.
3. Your smell teases my nose.
4. You've got slut hair.
5. You've got whore eyes.
6. Your cunt is much too vivid in my imagination.
I wanted Dave to be disinvited from the surprise birthday party that I was in on. I did not want him to see me getting older. I did not want to share my cake and ebullience with this man who put a diamond ring on my mother's finger when I was a ten-year old flower girl with buck teeth and bony knees. My sister was always smarter and plumper and less aware of the smell of things. My brother was a boy, shiny with personality and innocent love for tadpoles and football statistics. I was Misti The Muddled, itchy in my corner, manic in my little goofy Texas girl way.
The fact is this. Dave will never leave the party. The fact of Dave eclipses the fact of me. He is present. I am invisible. I do not pick the songs.
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