record our memories

Where are you? I don’t even know where you’re going to be this summer.

I often think about that awesome sketch diary you had with you when we were staying at my grandparent’s house the December our parents got married. You would draw something every day to depict what you did or how you felt that day. My favorite drawing was one you did of our parents engulfed in flames; your mom was in a wedding dress and my dad was wearing a sombrero and they were proclaiming, “Welcome to Hell!” It was amazing, and it summed up everything we were feeling at the time. Do you still have it? I miss you!

These are pretty embarassing, but that’s what happens when you’re thirteen:

10. Remember that photo album you had with pictures from summer camp and your early middle school years (the last day of school mostly)? In the majority of these pictures, Taylor is wearing a bright yellow Cheerios t-shirt. I would ask you to see it all the time so I could run my lustful fingers over his hard body and shit. Were we BFFs with him yet? Somehow a joint fantasy emerged between us involving him ripping off that shirt (which actually belonged to Clayton, no?) to reveal his hairless, athletic chest. I hope to god he forgot about my 43 Things because you know he’d tell everyone at the dinner table.

11. Remember the time you were at my house and we got into an argument over whether Tay’s eyes were blue or green? Are they green? I don’t remember which side I was on. So we’re sitting on the couch upstairs and decide to CALL HIM and ask. Probably my idea, because I’m an idiot. We call, but Clayton answers the phone and says he isn’t there. He was probably doing something athletic. So, one of us (probably me, the idiot) explains the situation and asks for a verification on his brother’s eye color. Clayton described it in a very flowery manner, something involving specklings of amber and streaks of goldenrod on top of the blue or green, and then asked “Any other questions about distinguishing characteristics or marks?” He thinks we’re freaks, Marie.

15 & 16. Remember the time we decided to accompanying Tay to the elementary school? He was meeting Clayton, who was a senior and mentored kids after school or something. Along the way, we crossed paths with some guy named Stephen Berg before finally reaching the parking lot. We loitered there next to Clayton’s car while Tay found a rubberband between the front seats and attempted to use it as traction for opening a bottle of black nailpolish. He was going through a Carson Daily-influenced phase of painting his thumbnails only at the time. This distracted him for a while, and then he got bored and used his finger to write “Penis” in the dust and dirt on the car. We were aghast (oh my god, a bad word!) but he was like, “Oh, I do this to him all the time.” Could we try? Soon the entire back end of the car was covered in the word, and we were joyous. Clayton finally came out, inspected the back of his car chuckling, and pointed to one, which probably had a heart over the “i” and exclaimed, “My, that’s a girly penis!” which was the height of entertainment to use for the rest of the year. His car was then referred to as the Penismobile until he sold it shortly after. I made you cut out the ad in the paper because I was so in L-U-V with him, as I am with all Kennedyz.

When I was packing up I found the first page of a really old list of “Ourside Jokes” cataloging all of our inside jokes from October 2000 to November 2001. We should have added explanations or something, because I have no idea what half of them mean, but I’m going to try my hand at a few. Oh, AND 99% INVOLVE ME SEXUALLY HARASSING YOU:
1: “Is that your elbow?”
One of our first. :) We were lying down (the first time we ever slept in the same bed?) and I purposely or on accident grabbed your ass. It was boney, and it was dark. I don’t remember if I really knew what it was, but I asked, “Is that your elbow?”
5: “Scooping them up in teaspoons”
Was this on your birthday? I think I remember Karen being there. You had a spoon that somehow involved the maintainence of your tarantula, and possibly the crickets that you fed it. Somehow I ended up sticking it up your shirt (again, lying down; we were such little lesbians) and declaring that I was scooping your breasts up with a teaspoon. What?
40: Yom Kippur
All of these memories just demonstrate what a terrible friend I am. I was in Texas, and you called me on August 5th. I answered the hall phone and stretched the cord around the corner so I could see what my parents were watching on TV (“The Family Man,” on HBO; I don’t know how the hell I remember that) and heard you on the other end asking, “Guess what day it is?” You said it was a very important day and I was stumped.
“Yom Kippur?” I guessed.
“No, it’s my birthday!”

Remember the time I was visiting you, and it was night time, and you had a test (vocabulary?) the next day, so you studied as I cried for you to play with me, and finally you closed your binder and came over to my sleeping bag nest on the left of your little bed, and posed for pictures? I was very meticulous. I must’ve been going through my goth phase, because there was black eyeliner, and you got done up with some thick, horrible Cleopatra-style make-up, and I arranged a (pink?) blanket over the side of the bed and had you sit in front of the backdrop and furiously pick at your braces with your fingernails? Yeah, I don’t know either.
You went to brush your teeth and apparently, started laughing and spewing foamy shit everywhere, and I took this picture. The next day I got to go to school with you and wander around, and I really wanted to show Mr. Volker, who we both had huge crushes on, and you kept protesting but I did it anyway. :( Man, he was hot. Is he still married?

Remember the time, for some reason, we really wanted to see What Women Want (“the Mel Gibson movie”) but my dad wasn’t going to be home in time to drive us to the showing, and we decided to walk to the movie theater? Normally this wouldn’t have been hard, as we walked across town to go to Hastings or Wal-Mart many times after that, but this was during winter and there were a couple feet of accumulated snow on the ground. On the sidewalks where the snow had been plowed off the street, there were these four foot tall snow banks, and I, being stupid and not accustomed to Missouri weather, tried to walk across one and sank like a rock, and you were like, “Why the hell did you do that?” We passed the middle and elementary schools and got about as far as the park across the way from your house, when we realized that our pants were soaking wet to the knees; we were cold, miserable, and our white socks had inexplicably turned PURPLE, so we turned back.
I also remember being in that park at a different time and seeing two squirrels humping on a tree and thinking this was the funniest thing EVER, and also that we saw, or imagined that we saw, a blow-up doll strapped in one of the parked cars, and you telling me a story about being in Kansas City with your mom and sisters, and Sarah seeing a similar sex doll in a car and bugging your mom to tell her what it was for.

I remember when we went to the zoo we stopped in the gift store. I was wandering around and looked over to see you throwing stuffed monkeys off of the shelves and on the floor. I walked up and said “Alex, what are you doing?!” You turned around only. . .it wasn’t you! It was an employee. She just stared at me and I walked away. I was so embarrassed.

Later on in the zoo there was a cage that we couldn’t see into because it was so overgrown with plants and stuff, but from inside we could hear this animal making weird sounds that were somewhere between sexual explosion and excruciating pain. Then this little kid goes “Hey dad! That sounds like you in the bath tub!!!”

Remember the first time I went to see you after you moved? I think it was spring break or something and I flew down on Midwest Express (now Midwest Airlines) because it was the only direct flight and my mom didn’t want me making connecting flights. I brought a rather large teddy bear as a carry on for a gift for you and you didn’t even care. It was so awkward seeing each other, we just sort of stared for a while and you kept telling me that your mom’s name was Stella (is it really Kim?). Then you’d bug her about your dad and she’s be all “I don’t want to talk about that man!” and you’d keep pushing it. I felt bad for her. Then you would sing Michael Jackson songs. We watched Oh Brother Where Art Thou and then layed in your driveway making up names for constellations. My personal favorite: “It’s pissing me off” because it’s the one that you can’t see if you look directly at it. It still pisses me off. Then on the plane ride back this old guy kept asking me if I wanted champagne or wine or something. Creepy. I also opened your present on the plane. A Weetzie Bat book and Under the Pink. So happy.

Remember the time the whole happy family went to a pumpkin patch—no, it was a Christmas tree farm! Fuck. Anyway, we went to this Christmas tree farm, and our big thing at the time was to sit in the cargo area in the back with our walkmans and “be rude,” which was our term for having headphones on around other people. Someone always had to sit in the back because the SUV didn’t have enough seats, so you and I would fight with Beth and Sarah over whose turn it was. So we went to the farm and as we were running through the fields, spotted my long-lost middle school crush, D.J., whom I immediately started following. I was all “Hiiiii,” and he was all “Please don’t talk to me” and ran off in his stupid windbreaker jacket. We drank cider in a barn and something happened involving “Paul’s Honey,” but hell if I can remember. All of the trees had huge spots missing branches and you really wanted to get the saddest Charlie Brown tree there. Also, as I was getting back into the trunk, you said, in front of EVERYONE, including the people who owned the farm and their children, “Alex…did you, um, brush your hair today?” I DID!!!! I DID!!!! I DID!!!!

Remember the time we decided to leave Taylor a huge message on the asphalt of the school parking lot so he’d see it when he showed up for his track meet, but we didn’t have chalk or we forgot the chalk so we walked all the way home to get some like TWO times. I remember grabbing an oreo from the cookie jar by the door before we left. So we walked all the way back to the school, and it was summer and hot, and you told me a story about the attendance lady’s son, who is a bad seed or something and drives a pick-up. We drew the chalk message, which I swear to my memory was signed “Love, Mazzy Star” and walked back home feeling very proud of this good thing we did, AND THEN HE DIDN’T EVEN SEE IT.

Remember the summer we were planning a yard sale so you could buy a drum set, and it was so hot every day we woke up sweating and spent all day in the the garage or the sun porch going through bags and boxes of stuff and putting price stickers on it? And I kept finding all of this really cool stuff, like eighties clothes and religious trinkets and putting it into a huge pile of stuff I wanted? You were scared of the brown recluse spiders that hid inside things and we discussed getting carpet and foam to sound proof the garage when you finally got your drums. One day we had a water fight and chased each other around the outside of the house…I remember having to jump over something that was lying across the grass every time we made a circle, but I don’t know it was. After we went inside, Sarah and her friend were playing in the muddy mess we made, and she called us outside, where we saw her walking very carefully to us across the driveway completely covered in mud and saying “Look, I’m African-American!” It was so PC and not at the same time, I died.