For the Summer Solstice, in this year of the Wood Dragon, I will write about a certain relationship I have to masculinity: I have long been "one of the guys". It's not entirely due to one thing, I think. It's not like I was just some Melissa P. Hundred Strokes of the Brush slut waiting around with her retinue of men, wondering who was going to spin me round that night; but it's not like I never was her. It's also not like I was always just the girl that could compete with the opposite sex. It's also not like I was always just the girl who didn't care about not being a boy. It's like all of these, combined. I just never cared much about being a girl growing up; it hardly dawned on me that men were even different from me. We were all just PEOPLE, kids: boys and girls together. Not like boys vs. girls or, yuck, boys have coodies, or even no-boys-allowed. I just never felt that kind of detestation or delineation; but I also never quite felt the draw of men early on, either.
I never had a brother. My sister and I were both fairly gender-neutral, not being overly obsessed with dolls or guns or anything much. Really, we really, really liked ANIMALS back then; like, liked them a lil too much. Yes, the 90's were about the fauna for my sister and I. We would reenact the Simba-being-held-up-by-Rafiki scene in the Lion King with our stuffed animals, then our animal figurines, then we upgraded to Playmobil animals, a superior toy brand if there ever was one (I still have some of it, in pristine condition btw).
But yeah, me n my sibling pretended we were, and played with, animals our whole childhood. So much so that by the tail end of this stage of our lives, our cousins were like, uhhhhhh, yeah we don't want to play with Macy and Caitlin anymore, they're too obsessed with pretending to be animals... So suffice to say, I wasn't terribly interested in people, let alone boys vs. girls, back then.
I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, northeast of the city in a small town called Snellville. Dumb name, right? Yeah, we think so, too. It was supposed to be heralded with the utmost prestige and called New London, but somewhere along the way, things got sticky and stupid, as they are wont to do in Snellville. Apparently some census-taker asked the first person in town when they came up on it what our fair land was called. This person happened to be from one of the old Snellville families, the Snells. Now, this trickster Snell-person told the census taker that the town was named Snellville, after his family, and thus it has even been, robbed of its dignity by some snickering, self-involved Snell. Anyway, yeah, I grew up in a place with a ridiculous name.
I lived in this ridiculously-named place in a much more genteel area known as Brookwood, specifically Brookwood Manor, my childhood neighborhood. I lived at the end of the left-turn block, on the left-hand side of the cul-de-sac, at 1530 Blythe Walk. It was paradise as a child: a whole round-robin kaleidoscope of neighborhood kids, a big front and back yard, and a creek to keep us all occupied when we weren't smushing those little strawberries that grow in regular grass into "ink" or sucking on honeysuckles.
My crew back then was me, my sister Caitlin, our next door neighbors, Priya and Ankur, and then the younger Vigliotti boys, Joey and Josh. There were some sheltered, slightly creepy, indoors-only sisters on the other side of our house, opposite Priya's, named Christina and Andrea. We didn't see them much and I have no real memories that feature these two. But me and Joey and Josh and Priya and my sister all hung out daily, back before playdates and all that over-scheduled, formal bs kinds nowadays deal with (Ankur was special needs, so we didn't actually play with him much, outside of making him be It during tag...ummm sry...it was the 90s...). We just knocked on each other's doors and asked so-and-so to come out and play. It was glorious and perfect and everything childhood should be.
So, I grew up around guys, to some degree. Joey was a "big" boy and Josh was very thin, an anomaly in his family: a large group of larger, gas-station-owning Italians. Now, I don't know if Josh is out yet, doesn't seem to be, but when we were growing up, he loved to play "dress up". He would wear our dresses and shawls and hats and shit. I was little, so I didn't think anything of it, I was just like yeah, Josh is playing dress up. That's how you do it. But now I know that when Josh would call my (eventual) step brother "just to chat" when they were like 8, and when he wasn't at our house, Joshy wasn't interested in only chatting.
Anyway, the point is, I grew up around "guys". I say that with quotes because obviously Josh had a huge feminine side and Joey was partial to being the kid who cried about losing or being poked fun of and then taking his ball and going home. So while I was comfortable around boys from the get go, I also knew who they really were: people.
I have no real memories about boys from elementary school, except for this one "bad" kid who ironically had the last name Hart. No one wanted to work with him except me. I'm not sure why I even did, except that no one else would, and I found this sad and unacceptable. The first boy I remember "liking" was this kid named Chris. I remember nothing about him except our talking once on the playground about showering. I thought this was very scandalous at the time because we were mentioning a time when we were naked. I guess this is as close as kids get to dirty talk when they're that age. Looking back, the only thing I think I can say now about this person is that in hindsight Chris seems really basic and probably had dirty blonde hair.
I can remember having no feelings about being a girl or even not-a-boy ever, really. My sister, though, said she felt a bit guilty in life for not having been born a boy. Idk.
I guess I should talk about middle school here. At the start of middle school, I did not give any fucks about being a girl. I spent my 6th grade year in competition with my best friend, Cassie Hagg, for first place in Accelerated Reader. I'm not sure why exactly books held such sway over me at this time, but they certainly did. I read it all, everywhere, all the time. I did not care for fashion, hair styles, or social norms much.
I can, however, remember sitting on the "boys' side" of some sixth grade class. Granted, I was doing that to be near a guy I had a crush on (Ryan Glenn ;), but still, I was defying thousands of years of social programming at most, and at the very least, I was being radically weird acting like I didn't care about being a girl at a time when everyone else cared deeply about gender. Just think about it: ALL the girls sat on one side of the room and ALL the boys sat on the other, except me. It was weird: I mean, remember sixth grade? It was so, so segregated by gender: this was the introduction of "dressing out" in separate locker rooms for gym, different underwear with the introduction of bras and thongs, and the whole menstruation thing started happening. Hormones, puberty, feeling and urges and longing came into play. It was also a lot of "this is what girls do now" and "this is what boys do now" and I was just not having it; or rather, I just didn't super care that much about all that jazz.
At some point in middle school, I became a kayaker. I'm not sure what drove me to do this originally, but I super did it. Like, wake up early on a Saturday, drive 45 min up to the boathouse, run a mile, lunge a quarter mile, do 200 sit ups and 100 push ups and then go kayak like 5 miles- did it. While there were girls that did this, it was largely a male-dominated sport, so I was rolling with a bunch of dudes outside of school at that time. I guess I was good because once, I raced with the boys, in an "official capacity". I have no idea why or how it happened or who thought of this in the first place, but yea, I competed with the men in one race of my kayaking career. It was nuts, obviously, but what was even more nuts was how well I did: I almost placed. Like, I nearly tied for third place with some guy. I just barely got fourth. I remember being bummed about this: I recall wanting to stand up on the podium with other dudes and be like yeah, I placed in YOUR race, bros.
Then after the bevvy of kayaking boys came TIP. Previous to this summer camp experience, I had attended Hollymont Christian Summer Camp for Girls for all the years before this. When I took the SAT in 7th grade and got a good enough score to place into the Duke TIP program, my mother made me go. I remember I cried and begged her not to make me go to any other camp besides my precious Hollymont. Little did I know, that a campus full of cute, smart, swarthy MEN awaited me. So, against my will, I went to Boone, North Carolina to attend Duke University's summer camp for individuals they identified as talented, at Appalachian State University when I was turning 13. It was also glorious. This was before I identified as "beautiful" (yeah, I do- TAKE IT...) and had placed in two beauty pageants. Prior to this experience, I had never seen myself as good-looking. I didn't think I was ugly or anything, I just hadn't considered my appearance much before then. I wasn't into fashion yet, or make up, or the intricate dance of adolescent flirtation...I was basically clueless.
But my eyes were opened that summer. Not only was I called beautiful for the first time, and *seriously* pursued by boys, but I had my first kiss. It was sort of funny, really. Some idiot named Jonathan Horowitz gave me my first kiss in the stairwell of one of the dorms at App State. He was the first guy to comment positively on my appearance thus far, at that time. I remember I heard of this compliment through the grapevine via all the gossipy girls. He told someone I was "really pretty", who told someone, who told me? Idk, I don't even know if that's what he said, exactly, but this Jon person was The Guy to me then; in the way your first "love" is your all and everything and all that crap I don't buy into much now. He tried to kiss me in the stairwell on his floor, I think, but I was laughing too hard to really do it. We went up a flight, I think, still in the stairwell, where we kissed for my first time. I have no specific memory of the actual event, but I remember it was like a thing everyone at camp found out about me that I'd "never been kissed" and several guys were dying to do it, and this Jonathan person just happened to get there first. *sigh*
Anyway, that summer I learned the pleasure of male company. I learned that if I played male games like Ultimate Frisbee, pool, and air hockey, I got to hang out with them. And this I did. Then I discovered that if I was good at these man-games then these men would be man-pressed. I became for the first time, a bit, "one of the guys". I mean, kinda; hardly, really. It wasn't typical or anything, like some sexless tomboy hanging with her crusty dudes, or even some slut slutting it up with other sluts who happened to be men. It was more like a curious young girl looking for her first time through the herd of men available to her, as she moved among them, playing their games sporadically and competently.
I also remember The Bus in middle school, after this eye-opening camp experience. It was a bit much, actually. The bus would stop first at the high school and then come to the middle school to pick up kids that all lived in the same neighborhood. At the end of my "middle school career", some of the high school guys noticed me on this bus. And they began to talk to me, and flirt with me, and ask me to sit with them. Suddenly, it became a thing: when I got on the bus in the afternoons, these boys would be waiting with, like, bated breath for my arrival. It was dramatic, too. Some of them would be like, Yesssss! She's here today! and do a fist pump thing when they saw me and like, high-five each other. It was a lot, but, really, this is just another instance of my hanging with the homies, aka the men.
My first year in high school I switched schools and went to Buford High School because I wanted a "better education" and wasn't getting it at West Hall, which was ranked very low in the state, which itself was ranked low in the nation. So I insisted on a change and got it; but I may have gotten more than I bargained for by attending Buford. First off, by this time I had fully blossomed: at 14 I was a Numba One Stunna, having gotten second at the 8th grade beauty pageant at my middle school behind my bestie: the incomparable Brazilian Beauty Georgia Couch. Then I came into my new school and crushed the "competition" there in that pageant, as well. And so not only was I new to that school, and sassy, and smart, but I was just so, so beautiful. Like, it breaks my heart a bit to think of it, and how it's all a bit lost, and how I never will be so young and pristine and fresh ever again...
So, needless to say, at that time of life and society (2002) I had no end of boys. There were the regular boys my age, as well as the older boys in school. There were church boys and youth group boys, kayaking boys, boys I met through other boys, just like, boys galore. And I would hang with them all, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone or just a few of us. I'm sure they all wanted to nail me, but I never slept with anyone till I was 17.5 years old, and this is 14-year-old Macy we're talking about. I would just hang. Eventually I started dating the "bad boy" John Groves, a senior at the time. He was head of a motley crew I would hang out with and scenes quite like what used to happen to me on the bus occurred daily. He and his homies would wait for my arrival every morning by the front door of the school and John would like, also fist-pump when I showed up, which I always did, never missing much school given my Dragon-health.
It was kinda weird though, because John's boys would a bit hit on me behind his back and really, he was taken when we met. It was weird: his girlfriend was some sexless redhead whatever-bitch that he instantly left for me. What's weirder is that John's cousin, Brey, was a good friend of mine at the time. Before John and I got together but were still talking, I was meant to go to homecoming with Brey, but that was weird, too. For some reason, he just didn't show up at the pre-dance dinner all the cool kids went to that I was *for some reason* invited to. But it was a magical night anyway: seeing that I was distressed and date-less some popular, stag, attractive guy offered to escort me: Matt Pridemore. For some reason, I'd never seen him before, not having spent *too* much time among the cool kids. But he was good-looking and nice and "rescued" me from being alone at my first high school dance. Plus, after the dance, I went bowling with him and the most popular guy in school and his date, which was pretty rad, actually. Kinda fairy tale shit actually. ;)
But I was in the midst of talking to one John Groves and so I didn't pursue Matt or take him up on his pursuit of me, much to his (and eventually my) chagrin. I went with John because not only was he funny and crunchy and dynamic, he was "dark" and "twisty" and "bad". I guess he was good-looking, but I've been with way hotter guys... I remember he was a Muy Thai fighter and took me to cage matches where I saw scantily-clad ring girls and some dude's head turn purple from being nearly choked to death. He would write me notes and I would type him out love letters, all gooey, dumb shit high school kids think is so deep. *sigh* But he had a lot of homies and I rolled with them all.
Needless to say, I had many other male friends and make-out-partners in high school, but I wasn't much of one-of-the-guys at that time. I was too focused on romantic male attention. But during senior year, Chris Shane happened. It was weird, though. When I first started going to Woodward Academy after I left my one year at Buford because all the girls were vicious gossips and bullying me for all the male attention I got (and, of course, Woodward was far superior in terms of education, being a premier private school in south Atlanta) I had thought Chris was very cute. I remember when I first saw him in Chemistry and thought him good-looking and obviously smart, because we were in the honors class. I remember I asked him to be my lab partner that very first day or something and he agreed. I don't remember working together or anything at all about him then, except nothing came of it. I remember for that year we would say hi to each other (a big thing in high school: who one says hi to in the halls) but I also remember commenting to my one friend at the time that he "had the personality of wallpaper" and "talked like a Valley Girl" being kinda from LA (his dad lived there). But little did I know that his wallpaper was like, snoozberry flavored. Anyway, we quit saying hi to each other by junior year and nothing was between us at all: we had no classes or friends in common. He wasn't very extra-curricular oriented and he didn't play any sports. He was vaguely popular but didn't seem to have any real friends much. I do remember my sophomore year, I think, I would borrow his AP American History book in homeroom to study from, because he would underline the important stuff for the quizzes we had every week.
But senior year, Chris and I had honors English together and ended up sitting next to one another in this most-interesting class taught by one Coach Crook. I probably remember more about this class and it's curriculum than any other in all of high school. It is so salient in my mind not only because I love English and ended up loving Chris, but because of what Coach Crook taught us about English. He did this thing where he divided the year between literature about the South and literature about Evil, eventually combining the two in Flannery O'Connor's work The Misfit, which is genius. We also read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and I decided then that I liked black writers. We read excerpts from Paradise Lost and watch The Godfather. I loved Satan's soliloquy and made art about him that year. I learned about color symbolism from the use of the color orange in The Godfather. I remember Coach Crook talking about what O'Connor's book title Everything That Rises Must Converge meant (it means that those who rise eventually merge, as the path to ascension is communal and convalescing). I remember my friend Alex writing her final essay on how women were used for evil in our curricula, as in Appolonia's case in The Godfather, or Eve in Paradise Lost. But what I remember most was a moment with Chris.
I don't know what the question could have been, but Chris, and Chris alone, answered with "Sympathy for the Devil", the song by whoever. I had never heard of this song, or even this concept, at the time, and I thought it was way nifty that he knew the answer, knew this song (with it's far-out idea of sympathizing with Satan), and was the only one in the class who knew all of that, and then answered so readily and nonchalantly. Basically, I was smitten. Plus when he got the highest SAT score in our class, a near perfect score, off by one question, I was down and out for the count. Plus, he had a really cool car that like, matched mine: we both drove Mercedes'.
So when Chris Shane asked Phil Afftuck for my number (I think Phil and I tried to be study-buddies for a hot second) and called me one Friday night to invite me to a party, I was more than willing to ditch my best friend and our lame football-game-destination. The night was "magical" with his spilling his sad guts all over me about his sad mom and her sad alcoholism and my thinking his brooding pain was so romantic and sexy and me kissing him on the spot so I could take it all away because it was so romantic and sexy that I could? Idk, I was like 17. I have long been over that whole pain-is-hot shit, but at the time, I couldn't get enough of his "broody, moody good-looks". He had a square jaw and nice eyes and a decent build. Now, I think he looks like Jim Morrison and may, actually, be a projection of this dumb fuck... He would write me these wonderful, clever, rhyming, angsty poems about how I was mad at him all the time and it made him sad... One time he wrote me like a ten page letter on blue paper that contained an anagrammatic puzzle and an actual reference to the Lizard King. But, back to the point, Chris had a whole crew and I hung with them a lot.
It wasn't a normal crew, by any means, though. It was kinda mixed between our grade and the one below us. His friends in our grade were also fringe-popular guys like Karl Krimer and Alex Busko and Eric Lioy. Karl was actually really beautiful with nice, even skin and very blond, silky hair but a bad attitude and was part of some malfunctioning triplet situation. His two triplet sisters were somehow in this lower grade and kinda crazy: one washed her face so obsessively that it had some permanent sheen on it all the time that made her face look actually really oily. They both seemed anorexic and Karl was just so foul-tempered that I figured there just wasn't enough like, amniotic fluid to go around in their three-way womb to give them all sanity and sparkling personalities. Plus their mom was addicted to coke and crazy-thin herself...
Chris sort of hero-worshiped this guy Busko and I never saw why: he was also bitchy with nothing to back it up: he lived in the least-nice house in the neighborhood we all lived in and I don't think his parents were anything special. Nor was he, really: decent looking in that sour-skater way kids were back then, and, I can't remember exactly why, but he had some sort of injury or illness and missed a lot of school that year, and when he came back his legs were crazy thin and spindly and seemed to hardly support him.
Lioy was in and out of the actual hang-out sessions these guys had, as he was a bit more popular and attended other, more "interesting" events than just sitting around with these fools, getting high, and jumping off of roofs. He wasn't very good looking with a sort of elongated face, dark features, and a big, goofy nose. I do remember Lioy got his girlfriend pregnant and she had an abortion, which I found out later when Christ got me pregnant I had an abortion.
There was also some guy we didn't hang with much whose name I don't remember. What I do remember was his dad owned lastminutetravel.com and I once bluffed him out of a great hand in poker. We were at his house in the neighborhood we all lived in (Ansley) and playing poker. Now, I was way new to poker and had never bluffed, and I still don't do it really ever when I play today. But for some reason, this day, and with this hand (which was something ridiculous like jack two) I bluffed, hard. Still don't know why. But God had my BACK, baby. It was nuts. I think the flop had a king, and I raised or something. The guy called, and then the next card was whatever, I think, but the river was also a king, and I super raised, and he got scared. I remember him looking at his hand with the boys and being like, "I mean..." and then HE FOLDED. It was glorious. Like, glory itself. I think he had like pocket aces as well. The man folded top pair, best hand at the table, to my shit hand, because I bluffed him out of it. It was probably the best moment of my life and I've never forgotten it, obviously. :)))
The lower grade guys were kinda interesting, though. I feel like there were more than the two I remember, but these are Pierce Spencer and Ian Ker-Seymour. Oh yeah, then there was Patrick Head or something, but I think he was from another school? Anyway, Pierce was my friend Avril's brother and quite smart, but lost in drugs and selling fake IDs. He ended up being my neighbor when we moved into the house next to his in college, and he is an example of someone I know dating someone that goes by their same name: he was Pierce dating a girl named Pearce at one point or some shit. I also recall him spending a whole night carving his name into a picnic table in our neighborhood but realizing he had forgotten the "r" because he was too high: that table now just reads "Piece". lol. I do remember Pierce confessed to me one time when he was way high that he was *secretly* in love with his "friend", a girl in his grade, Jordan Tiramani, who had the prettiest hair I still have ever seen. I literally think about it: it was reddish brown mostly, but in the front, nearly all at her crown, was a blonde streak that, when she put her hair up, would like, fan out very attractively over the rest of her hair, creating these contrasting veins of light hair over the rest of her darker brunette hair. Plus the bitch was way beautiful besides, and way popular, and in possession of something that turned even my head: a David Yurman ring. It was big and yellow and had pave diamonds all around the stone, which was probably citrine. At the time, no one else had anything near as nice that they wore everyday to fucking school. But I will say, though this person had all this going for them, I would see her out at clubs wasted off her ass with dudes being bad to her, and I would hear tell of dudes "slapping her with their dick" and her not knowing this was not cool. But yeah, as soon as Pierce told me he loved Jordan, I told her about it. Lol. High school.
Ian Ker-Seymour wasn't too interesting, though he was pretty good-looking, in a petulant, semi-British, Abercrombie kinda way. I actually do think his mom was a Brit and his dad had a wild job: he was a toy designer! And so his basement hang-out was always stocked with fun shit like that; I recall Chris and I playing Battleship once there. He was galled that I "was one of those people who puts all their ships in a close bunch in one spot". I also remember once being in Ian's backyard with Chris and Lioy and seeing a little garden snake and their being like ahhhh! I was like: bitches, this ain't shit and I picked it up and they were like ohhhhh! Chris smiled and felt proud, I think, cuz he said something about my being "a snake charmer". As for Patrick, all I remember about him was he worked at Ruth Criss Stake House as a busboy and never made it to server as he wanted, and he was often the butt of the boys' jokes as they called him P Head and then just Head or something. But Chris Shane and I hung out with this crew a bunch and so being the only girl regularly present, I was once again, just one of the guys.
Then, there was Esteban. God, he was a whole thing. Ugh. Like some of the best and worst, and both, and all the other states of being in one person over one year. First of all, he was my first sexual partner after I "went nuts" (was diagnosed as Bipolar in 2007) and was therefore, a lot to me as I was to him. Of course we were young, I was like 19, he was 22? It's funny, I thought he was so old at the time... I remember I was like I'm dating and Older Man who can Buy Liquor... We met in the cafeteria at SCAD, this super-evil art school in Atlanta that started in Savannah, whose president "gets paid" (pays herself) more than any other college president??? Idk, but yes, we met eating lunch.
I don't exactly remember why, but I asked him to get me pizza. There was like, unlimited food at SCAD if you had a meal plan? Idk, but I would feed my bestie, Mon, pizza cuz you could get infinity pieces of pizza there. So I guess I just saw him eating pizza, like everyone else there? And then decide to ask him to get me a piece? IDK. But after I asked we had a lil showdown. His bestie, Sebastian, this Cajun-y black guy, was there and somehow Esteban, Sebastian, and I all kinda sat together and he gave me a sly eye or something and was like why should I get your a piece of pizza? I don't remember what I said or anything much, but he got me pizza eventually and we ate that pizza together. This is all funny now that I'm going over it, because I see pizza as sex now, and sex as a means of education and knowledge-gathering. Funny because I have said my relationship with Esteban was super "enlightening" and "I learned more from being with him than I ever did with anyone else". LOL. But I kinda did, but it was hardly "him", it was more like anyone at that time in my life (my mental "rebirth") would have "taught" me things.
Anyyyyyyway, the idea is that once we were talking, I ended up asking him what his race was. Now, he later told me he is often referred to as a Global Citizen, because he kinda looks like he could be from anywhere. He did have sort of slanting, lilting eyes that might have been Asian, and golden skin that could have been from the Philippines or Kuala Lumpur. So when I asked this, he looked at me slyly again, and a raspy, toned "Mexico" slid forth, said the Spanish way where the X sounds like an H. I was instantly alive, because I had once loved an Alejandro very well, who was also a Mexican, before this at a later year of TIP summer camp when younger. So when he said "Mexico" I said "We should date" very soon thereafter. He was, understandably, like "What?" and I changed it to the less intense, but still incredibly forward version: "We should go on a date". Not a question, an imperative. We SHOULD. He was like yeah, ok. So we did. It was ok? Our first date was nuts. I picked him up in my black truck, because he didn't have a car and was living at the dorms. I took him to my favorite restaurant since I was like 7, Eats, and we ate pasta (back when they had it- UGH). After this we ended up at the playground in Piedmont Park over by 10th Street, on that large, rubbery, hill/mound thing that was there back in 2008. Atop this situation, there was one point where he reached out and touched my limp hair and pulled it up a bit and was like "your hair is flat" or some shit. I was vaguely offended and, really, should have pulled back there, maybe, because it was something like that that ended us years and years later when we dated the second time.
Anyway, once Esteban and I got together we ended up spending a bunch of time with his friends, which was NOT GOOD, I'd say... they liked to fug up a room with purple haze and listen to The Doors under the baleful... I'd say "gaze" here, but he was dancing in the giant poster they had, of Jim Morrison. It was kinda lame. Things I remember about this bunch of crunchy Mexicans: we played poker and I wiped the floor with them, we played Guitar Hero and my just playing on Medium difficulty or whatever blew their minds. Sometimes I would get stoned and watch them play Gears of War. They sucked? Also, once, Esteban and I went on the fly to a cabin in Alabama his best friend, Fidel, had rented with his sister and her friends. It was kinda outta control. We all got wasted in the hot tub and the girls convinced me to jump in the lake with my dress on. I was into this idea so I ran out onto the jetty and jumped in full speed, drunk af, to a very shallow lake bed. It was not like the lake of my childhood and deep there. It was shallow. And I drunk-dove into like 7 inches of water with my ass. I'm sure there was bruising, as there was when Esteban and I visited SCAD Savannah and ghosts (or demons) touched us.
There was one time when I invited Esteban and all his ratchet friends over to my parents house when they went away and explicitly told me to get out and not come back. Like, my step dad didn't like us to stay at the house alone when he and my mom went travelling. HA! I showed them! Maybe if they'd just let me have a key to my own home and let me stay there when they went gallivanting off into bullshit and not insisted I inconvenience my one friend with an un-asked for invitation to stay with them for those nights, I wouldn't have let a mangy pack of Mexicans stroll through their precious home and steal my sister's money and use my toothbrush and drink my parents' beer. Ugh, it was a nightmare. First, we asked them not to drink the beer in the fridge because then my parent's would know that we'd been there then. They drank it, we tried to replace it, but it was a Sunday the next day and Georgia didn't sell alcohol on Sundays back then? Ugh, the south... Anyway, we pulled some crazy shit and like stole cans of the same beer and then poured the beer into the trash bottles and tried to put the tops back on... All seemed ok, but then my sister found money missing and then my parents informed me that the neighbors had seen all our cars parked over the weekend or whatever and we gots busted. :(
And this was after I had hung out with Fidel and Esteban alone at Fidel's house once. We were out back in the yard and I was lying on some lawn furniture, possibly with some part of me on Esteban, who was lying with me. Fidel was kicking a soccer ball about the yard around us. He was evidently jealous of me in an Iago-Othello way, I guess, because he decided to kick his soccer ball at me twice, or something? I can't super remember, but the fool just kicked the ball "in my general direction" twice and I guess I sat up one time or I don't even know, but I do know that one time I blocked that shit with some Jedi forearm move. I guess I just got hit the second time, idk, but I remember his kicking his dumb demon ball (soccer is EVIL, people) at me twice, and my blocking it once, though I don't remember being hit the second time or anything...
But yeah, it didn't go over well when I was one of Esteban's guys the first time. We actually dated like 8 years later when I left Alex and came home. He was living with a bunch of white guys then and I would hang with all of them. It was ok. I mostly remember their all liking me, smoking me out, and talking to each other about their weights, which varied greatly. There was Smitty, who was pretty big, but genial, and always gave me cigarettes. There was some clearly gay-but-not-out drummer/car salesman fool who was not super nice to me and was also pretty thick named Mitch. Then there was some thin, kinda artsy guy named Patrick? who, despite this, didn't want my Pamela Anderson painting hung in the public space in the house because it was "vulgar". The best thing I remember about them was this amazing ass game of beer pong they played once where the ball did spectacular things. The worst thing was once, at a party, one of their old roommates who was besties with Smitty said my car was ugly and I was so broken and raw at the time that I wanted to cry right there and then, because, being all symbol-oriented, I felt like he was saying my body was ugly... so, not great, both times being "one of the guys" with Esteban...
Next, I suppose would be Alex, my former fiancee and his friends, but that never felt much like I was one of the gang with him and his friends because his friends didn't hang en masse. He was more of a one-on-oner. We would have ppl come pick up and chill with us so there wasn't much "one of the guys" with him. I suppose I was kinda "one of the guys" with the local boys in Chehalis, especially when we would play penny can with a weed pot lol. After Alex, though, were the Broken Boys.
Oh..................those idiots. It all started with Josef on Tinder, I suppose. This was post Alex-breakup when I was sad and lost and vulnerable and thought turning to Tinder would help........ FOOL, I was.
Josef and I met on Tinder because we both said we liked metaphysics in our bios. He wouldn't pay for my meal the first time we went out and I remember my first impression of him was that he thought a lot of himself. We became friends (never hooked up-thank God) where I learned the truth behind his confidence-facade: he was a helpless mama's boy whose mama was abusive and crazy and fat af and had probably berated his dad to his actual death. So he was left with his mom, who was like 400 lb and would demand he serve her food and open her cans and get her napkins and shit. It was hard to watch and after dreaming about how his mom had fucked him up and then literally arguing with her that her son wasn't a piece of shit, I gave up. Josef, however, introduced me to his crew (one at a time).
I was taken with Mason immediately because he was SOOOoo smart. Like the FBI tried to recruit him because of his hacking skillz smart and then he was smart enough to be like nahhhh to them, as well. Mason was, however, fully broken, as, really, all these boys are. His father had left him ON his 7th birthday I think, and his mother had subjected him to the worst kinds of boyfriends, I also think. He won't talk about it all much, but I'm pretty sure there was all kinds of abuse. He's very, very clever and makes jokes with like, three different angles and layers and meanings. I loved him crazy hard for years. We hooked up once, after I confessed my love for him like four years in, but it was not great. Due to his having smoked for like, ever, his tongue was all bumpy and nasty and kinda reflected his tendency to be a searing asshole with it. He was also blonde, which, like, what self-respecting man is blonde??? Annnnnd he also liked another fucking blonde FUCK: trump, though when I asked him, he couldn't say why or what trump had done for him to like him :((((( he also got his black gf pregnant after refusing to wear a condom or pull out and then told her she couldn't get an abortion. Oh yeah, he also thinks "until men have a say" abortion should be illegal. putz.
Mason introduced me to his neighbor Travis who is also like 300 lb. He's great, makes me think and see things I've never noticed before even in places I've gone forever, very amicable and personable (when he wants to be), but a projection of a "harmless" Harvey Weinstein and I feel weird about that. They looked the same when younger and someone literally said he looked like a movie producer once while he was smoking a cigar. He's very smart and kinda kind and sorta giving, but he's crippled by his image: he's just so fat. It makes him sad and when we first hung out, he kept saying shit like "I wanna die" and "I'll kill myself". When he began to extend his self-hate to me and randomly started to insult me, I had to step up and tell him I respect myself AND him too much to hear him speak to me or himself that way. We "broke up" a while back though, on his birthday :(, when his buddy Josh wouldn't just give me a tiny nug to go, which just seemed churlish at the time. We had some text battle thereafter and he called me butt-hurt and I was just like whatever. Whatever, I'm better off: he's a sad, basement-dwelling bitch whose one ex-girlfriend died in tragic and sordid circumstances (though, really, I hate that).
Then there was some homeless guy who was friends with Josef I took in for a while. Then there was fucking RAY. Ugh. I'm still traumatized. I think he and Josef worked together at some point. He was the absolute WORST. Like, Freemason-projection living-in-my-house terrible. Like, drawing symbols on the shower wall we shared with stuff I couldn't identify that wouldn't go away horrible. Yeah, I lived with this fool. Ugh. I don't even want to talk about it, but just imagine the best and worst man you've ever known and multiply it by like 666 and you'd get Ray. Plus, he was doing METH IN MY HOUSE the whole time, unbeknownst to me. :((((( And he was weird about sex: we hooked up a few times, but before we actually got down to it, the asshole teased the fuck outta me like 5 times and would pull away and be like "No, I'm going to be GOOD" like sex is bad. Then after one night of this, he rolled over and asked to fuck me that morning, to which I was like YES PLEASE, finally! Then he just did his business and rolled off me. It was terrible and later, the fucker told everyone I initiated that, that I like, "raped" him. Ugh. Pissant faggot. Sry gay guys, but rly...
The whole point to all this, though, is that I was very much "one of the guys" to these "men". I think Ray even said that to me once. But this was not satisfying at all. They were all a bit proprietary toward me and annoyingly competitive, though not nearly as bad as they could have been for sure. But they're all mostly out of the picture now.
In summary: it's a mixed bag being "one of the guys" to be sure. Recently, I shaved my head. This has lead me to feel much more butch and manly and, really, to realize I may be non-binary and just half dude. As soon as I did it, I felt like working out and getting bulky and fucking bitches lol. I could listen to much harder music, gave away all my hair products and hair bows and clips, and didn't know if I could wear a dress anymore... But I can!!!
Yes, I may be "one of the guys" or I may just be half "a guy"...
I'll keep you posted...
and... Happy Solstice!!
