“I know your whole life through your exes. It’s like learning U.S. history through the presidents.”- Anonymous.
“I know your exes better than I know mine.”- A different anonymous.
I have no desire to grow up to be an eccentric. I do not like being labeled either weird or crazy, but this doesn’t mean I do not have eccentricities, or that at times, I don’t feel crazy or at times in the past I have not been labeled weird. All people at some time or another have seemed weird in one way or another to someone.
I think my parents are weird, yet in many ways they are very normal; it is their normalcy in my opinion that actually makes them slightly weird. Perhaps it’s knowing someone very well and when their behavior is slightly odd it makes us sit up and notice just how odd they are.
Around the age of seventeen, old things fascinated me; I liked old furniture and clothing, the older the better. I wandered the streets in my hometown browsing through antique stores; I could spend hours looking at crafted furniture and hemstitched silk nightgowns. Having no place of my own to house these beautifully crafted pieces of furniture (or the funds to purchase them), I instead bought clothing. I purchased bloomers and petticoats, an old velvet cape, and hit Laura Ashley’s sale rack for any Victorian style dress within my budget. I was nicknamed one Nora Bashly a morph of both the designer and the old lady with the crumpled up stockings that had fallen down to her heels from ‘last of the summer wine.’ My purse was a wicker basket, and I wore knee socks and Doc Marten boots to complete the ensemble. I looked like I belonged in another era, but I thought I looked awesome.
I worked nights and weekend at Tesco, the local supermarket, I’m sure my fellow workers thought I was mad as a hatter. The trainee manager was a tall and confident young man a couple of years older than me; he remains one of the funniest people I have ever met. My dream back then was to be an actress, and after being told that my voice was high-pitched and nasally, I worked very hard on using my lower register, which gave me a deep and sexy voice. I would use the intercom to ask for a price check, and the trainee manager would receive my request. “Eight-ounce Heinz baked beans?” I’d ask in my sultry voice.
Before the trainee manager and I were dating, however it was short-lived. On our first night together in his new house, I told him the reason I had shaved pubes was due to the fact that I had gotten crabs from my previous boyfriend, Glen, the Brian Ferry look-alike, who was so enamored by the singer and their similarity that he had framed clippings of the pop star and placed them around his house as if they were his own family portraits.
I was sixteen when I met Glen at Yesterdays Nightclub in Alderly Edge. I was out with the staff from a local wicker and pine furniture store I was working Saturdays at while at a sixth form college pretending to study for A levels. I spotted Glen at the bar, he was very good looking and I was very bored. I had observed the tall blond by his side but this did not deter me one bit. I slid in beside him when I noticed his date had left for the loos and asked if we had met before (yes, it’s not only men who have pick-up lines). “You look so familiar,” I continued, “Maybe you saw me playing, I’m a musician?” “I sing and act too.” I chipped in swiftly, hoping he would hurry up and ask me out before the blond came back. He did as I expected and scribbled down his number on a napkin, “call me.” A few nights later Glen took me out on our first date, the date ended up back at his place. I told my parents I was staying at my friends house for the night, they thought nothing of it until my boss called to ask if I could work, my parents attempts to track me down led to my lies and I came home from Glens to all of my belongings bagged in black dustbin bags on the front lawn. I was sixteen years old and now moving out for the first time and in with my new boyfriend Glen; the musician who turned out to be a dustbin man (waste transfer engineer), not yet divorced and twice my age.
It blows me away when I think of my own daughters and how in two weeks they will be sixteen. The idea of them behaving as I did is preposterous.
I moved back in with my parents a few months after meeting glen. I tried to study for A levels but the reality was; I wasn’t ready to take education or myself seriously. Instead I got a job at a jewelry store, and went on with my life falling in and out of love, not really knowing what I wanted, except really wanting to not live with my parents.
It would be more than two years before I decided to go back to college and study. In the meantime, I dated a twenty-four year old artist and busker named Chris (one) who looked like Maxx Headroom, he had grown up in a rough part of Stoke-on-Trent, played guitar on the street for money (even paid taxes on his earnings) and was a sex maniac. We would have sex all the time and it didn’t matter where we were; behind a tree, in the bathroom on the train, behind a building, down an alley, etc.
Chris had no understanding of conformity, although raised by extremely poor factory workers he had a first honors degree in fine art from the Royal College of Art, he was a wonderful musician, and writer. He wore vintage clothes; typically old pajama tops and 1940s suits. My parents found him to be a terrible catch; his manners at the dining table were not acceptable, he sang on the street and wore their parents old clothes, what could I possibly see in him?
Chris painted dozens of nude oil paintings of me, they were beautiful, but I don’t own any of them. He refused to sell his art, believing that his work would be worth more when he was dead, and he couldn’t bare the idea that he would have sold them for so little during his life.
We were together for six months, before meeting and falling head over heals in love with Chris two. I left the jewelers shortly before Chris one and I broke up, after losing the keys the first day of their grand sale. Head office had sent someone with a diamond drill to get us in the door and I was asked to recall my whereabouts from the night before which had included several pubs in both Macclesfield and Stoke-on-Trent; but the most humiliating part of the experience was being severely reprimanded by my angry mother in front of my work mates while we sat on the ground waiting for the diamond drill guy to break in.
When I opened my own store years later I made twenty copies of the keys, I have never been very good at keeping keys in my possession. My house does not own a set. As a teenage I was not given house keys, instead each day when I came home from school, right after morning registration, I would walk around the side of the house, take the ladder, and somersault onto my bed through the window I had left cracked.
I left the jewelers to go work in a factory that made fitted furniture for hotels. I was a telesales girl; calling clients with my sultry voice and asking for appointments to show them what our furniture could do for their hotel. It was there I met Chris two.
Chris one kept a journal, he took it everywhere with him, one day when we were riding the train together he left it on the seat, jumped off at his stop and I picked it up and began to read. Expecting to read tales of our lives together for the next two stops, I instead read about his ex coming to visit him, how she had landed on his doorstep and they had spent two days together making love, I was mortified. The next day Chris came to the jewelers on bended knee asking for forgiveness, I forgave him.
I was working at the factory a few weeks later and developing a crush on Chris two, his softly spoken voice and his watery blue eyes fascinated me, he came by the office each day to take our lunch orders and I flirted with him. The factory secretary was throwing a house party and I called my boyfriend Chris to let him know of the upcoming event, he said he couldn’t make it. I knew he was planning on meeting his ex, something didn’t feel right, so I marched into the factory and asked Chris two if he’d come out for a beer with me after work. He agreed, but said he needed to go home and change. I insisted we go straight from work, and that we didn’t need to dress up. Just as well really, because I came to know that Chris’s idea of dressing up meant bondage pants, a can of hairspray and lots and lots of make-up.
My mum asked Chris once, “Why do you wear women’s clothes?” By the time I saw him dressed in all of his gear I was already taken with him and in some strange way it was a turn on. Chris one tried to win me back, but it was over and I never saw him again.
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