The year I left Chicago (1983) was full of drama.
In January, I broke up with my boyfriend Charlie. He was a great guy, and I have often regretted not staying with him. But at age 21, I didn’t want to be tied down ~ I had already developed a crush on a new classmate besides. His name was Mark, and he was odd. (I don’t see why I can’t use real first names on a blog barely anyone reads.) I have always been attracted to weird men, the more psycho the better. Why? No idea. Mark and I used to ad lib wacky tales of adventures to amuse the other students. We were in a six month computer programming course for post college age peeps, to turn us into nerds who would make the megabux. LOL
A bunch of us, including Mark, used to get together after class on Fridays to hit the bars around Rush Street. This was a lot of fun, and sometimes we would dance. I usually didn’t eat anything beforehand, so I would get buzzed faster. (I only ever used public transportation in Chi-town, so no worries there.) My crush deepened, and on my birthday (April), Mark took me out for a fun date and kissed me at the end of the night. In May, I heard him say to a mutual friend that while it could be hard to remain friends with someone you’ve dated, it’s even harder to turn a friend into a date.
In June, Mark and I were hanging out at Mike’s place after school and impulsively decided to stay overnight. Mike’s girlfriend lent me a cute yellow outfit, and we hit the bars. At one point we stopped for gyros. Around 1am, the bar we were in said it was last call and played Lionel Ritchie’s “You Are the Sun.” Mike told us to dance, so we did. Slow danced. Mark kissed me again. I fell in love… or what I thought was love back then. We slept cuddled up together on the floor at Mike’s.
Mark and I began dating, and even though I knew we weren’t exclusive, I had a great time. I also knew that I wasn’t his physical type ~ he was on the shorter side and preferred very petite girls. Regardless, I believed he truly liked me because our personalities meshed well. He would come over to go swimming; I sometimes made dinner. Once I threw a party for all the peeps, and my dad developed a little crush on Mike’s girlfriend, who was an advocate for prison reform or something. Mark was impressed that I was one of the few people who got a job right after “graduation,” but it was only clerical ~ I mostly reformatted floppy disks all day.
On a Sunday in July, I walked to the drugstore to buy a notebook. I did that a lot, believing that starting a fresh pile of pages was the key to everything. I still tend to believe this, though nowadays I use a Word document. My mom had made dinner ~ meatloaf, potatoes, and veggies ~ nothing unusual, and while I was eating, my hand began to feel itchy. Soon it turned purplish. Then my throat felt itchy. I struggled to breathe properly and went to lie down. My mom called the paramedics who took me to the hospital. Naturally, they all thought I was on drugs. The ER doctor said I was going into anaphylactic shock, treated me for that, and by process of elimination he decided I had been stung by a bee. Since the treatment worked, this seemed reasonable, but I had not seen a bee that day nor felt a sting. There was no mark on my hand from a stinger either. I guess it must have been one of those silent invisible bees with ouchless stings.
In August, Mark asked me to go camping in Canada for a week, but I told him I didn’t have any vacation days yet. He took another girl. My father found a new job in California, where he and my mom had been wanting to move to for some time. They assumed I would go with them, but I liked my new job (floppy disks!) and also the idea of getting an apartment with my friend Kathy. Around this time, I bumped into a former coworker who had assaulted me on a date a couple years before, and we both said hello and pretended that nothing had happened. Afterwards, I wished I had said something clever and cutting. Kathy told me she couldn’t get an apartment together after all because she’d used all her money to buy a car.
So, I decided to move to California.
~*~
Inspired by John Holton’s Writer’s Workshop.
The year I was born!
ReplyDeleteI'm gonna go with a dead bee squished between the pages of the book, with a still dangerous stinger. Or maybe just the stinger left. Rest of the bee fell out as mummy dust when another customer last picked up that book. That's my theory.
ReplyDeleteAs I read this, I kept comparing your 1983 to my 1983, (it was nice of you to make your post all about me,) and suddenly realized that every person who was alive in 1983 had a whole year's worth of experience and subsequent memories of how the universe in their heads played out that year, and how big the world must be to have all those years in it, in just one year.
ReplyDeletePerhaps I've been reading too many weird books.