Donorboy (11 page)

That sounds kind of harsh. I am sorry Mom, but I guess it is true, except if I am talking to you then I guess I don't really believe it because it sounds too harsh to say you are dead even if you are dead and it feels harsh too and I still think you're going to be mad at me for saying you can't be proud of me and this is another conundrum I guess.

I don't know anything. I am not worrying about lunch anymore because if I can't please my moms I don't give a shit about pleasing Sasha or Kate or whoever. I am going to smoke my cigarette and eat wherever I feel like and I am not making a schedule even though I did start doing that in my notebook trying to be like how can I sit at both tables equally like week A it's three days and week B it's two days or something and how dumb is that that I actually started drawing this thing but that is just too dumb. I am sitting where I feel like and they can get over it.

MINIDISC #72: RECORDED 11/13/04.

Good evening, or should I say good morning. I am talking into the minidisc recorder just like Scott Simon from NPR uses because I don't know who else to talk to. Dave would say he didn't mind, but I hate to be the wussy pal who calls in the middle of the night, so I am going to try to get through this particular crisis with just me and the recorder. Just to bring you up to speed, I just got a call from Mrs. or possibly Ms. Cervenka, who by the way sounds very cute on the phone, asking me if Rosalind and Sasha were here because she just checked on them and found them missing.

It is now one a.m. I don't know where my child is. I am vacillating between anger and terror, and right now anger seems to have the upper hand. Why is she doing this to me? I mean, I certainly try, I bought all the burritos, I stuck up for her in meetings, and I feel like I get this kind of kick in the teeth in response.

Shit!

(
Thumping sounds.
)

That series of thumps, by the way, was the sound of me punching the couch. It was quite unsatisfying and made me feel silly.

I am going to die if anything happens to her. I will kill myself if Karen and possibly Ros's grandmother and uncle Mike don't do it for me. I suspect she is probably fine, probably at some party again, and I'd really like to go out and drive around walking distance from Sasha's house looking for parties, but then if she came here, she … but of course it is Sasha's house they are going to be sneaking into.

Can I really go haul her out of a party? Didn't someone's father do that in
Weird Science
? or
Sixteen Candles
? Some John Hughes movie, anyway. I suppose that would make her a social pariah, with the popular kids pointing and laughing and eventually electing her prom queen and dumping pig blood on her.

Then again, I do recall about eight years ago that a girl died of alcohol poisoning while the other partygoers stepped over her at a party like this.

Then again, most kids who go to parties don't end up dead, they just end up drunk.

All right, I can't just sit here waiting for the phone to ring. I am getting in the car.

STOP.

Okay, I am here in the car and I feel like some kind of deranged stalker. Perhaps that is what fatherhood is all about. So far it seems to be about sleeping poorly on the weekends and worrying a great deal. I am not sure I am cut out for it.

In any case, I am sitting here in my car listening to my Pixies mix for the hundredth time and watching the teens exit the party, which I did locate with very little difficulty and which I cannot understand why Charlesborough police are allowing to continue. Especially since I phoned in a noise complaint. In any case, I am hoping to nab her as she exits. I suppose this is my compromise, that I will only embarrass her in front of her friend instead of the whole school.

I have no idea if I am doing the right thing, or if I am overreacting, but I am starting to feel actually physically sick from anxiety. It appears to be similar to drinking a quadruple espresso. Except it tastes much less like coffee and more like bile. I am jittery and my heart is pounding and my stomach feels sour.

I am going to … okay, there she is. Bye.

Dear Fluffy:

I think I am under house arrest. Anyway Sean is wicked mad (I wonder if I could say “mad mad” but that sounds dumb so maybe mad angry or mad heated) because Sasha's mom decided to check on us and I swear to God I feel like we are the only two people on earth whose parents don't like completely ignore them as soon as they shut their door. But anyway, we snuck out to a party that some guy from Sasha's math class was having, or anyway him and his older brother, and there were a ton of people there and ironically enough it was actually not fun, and I don't know if that is like dramatic irony or situational irony or whatever kinds of irony Westerberg thinks we should know about, but anyway I am in deep shit because I went to a party that wasn't fun because I guess I got too drunk too fast or something but instead of forgetting about being sad like last time I actually got more sad, and I kept drinking to make it go away but it just got worse, and so I am there on the lawn crying with Sasha hugging me and it was embarrassing because now I am the girl who punched a kid and makes a scene at a party, all crying can't handle her booze whatever. Probably everybody will be convinced I am a psycho now, but I guess maybe they were already. So as soon as I could talk I was like I want to go home and we walk out and there was Sean the stalker all “get in the car” and driving us home and not saying anything and turning the music off until we dropped Sasha off.

And then he totally starts yelling at me, really like I have never seen him before, all he was worried sick “literally sick, Rosalind!” which sounded kind of funny and maybe I will put that on a bingo card for next time, but anyway, I was like whatever, what's the big deal and he was like because alcohol can make you make bad decisions, all There are boys there who want to get you drunk and blah blah.

I was totally like that is your heterosexist bias how do you even know that I care if boys are hitting on me and that shut him up for a while but then he was all quiet like, “I guess that's not really the issue. It's just that I care about you and I don't know what to do if I can't trust you.”

Boo hoo, poor guy, but I don't really care, except I just wrote it down so maybe I do, so now whatever I am bad again and I make people mad and sad and I was glad he didn't call Karen again, but you know he's going to tell her and then I will have to hear it from her, all what are you doing and what I am doing is just trying to not feel sad for five minutes because I am so tired of always being sad, and I thought being drunk would help me be not sad, and I know Westerberg it is a cruel irony that it didn't work is what kind of irony it is. Anyway, I just want to feel good like normal kids, like all those Abercrombie kids who walked around me all laughing and holding their red plastic cups. Which I guess I am wearing Abercrombie too so shut up. I don't get why they get to have fun and I have to sit on the grass and cry, all I want to do is feel good and I guess I don't think that is so terrible but I guess I am all alone on this one.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Party all the time

Yes, as in my girl wants to.

I just don't know what the hell I am supposed to do here. I am completely at a loss. Rosalind sneaked out again, this time from her friend Sasha's house. I got a species of angry I don't believe I have ever gotten before. I went slightly insane. Or else I was a wonderful parent. In any case, I figured if the party was big, it would not be that difficult to locate, so I drove around in about a mile radius from her friend's house until I located said party and then monitored the exits because, as angry as I was, I still did not want to humiliate her by dragging her out of the party.

Actually, that's only partially true. I also, at age thirty-five, did not want a house full of drunken fifteen-year-olds to be looking at me as a dorky, overprotective father. Don't ask me why my image with a bunch of half-soused hormone-crazed teens is important to me, as I do not have an answer. Thankfully she did not die of alcohol poisoning or get date-raped by some curvy-baseball-cap wearing, Korn-listening senior boy. If either of those things had happened, then I would have had a lifetime to examine my mixed motives for not entering the actual party. As it was, I nabbed her and her friend on their exit from the party and returned her friend to her house. (A depressing side note to this little adventure is that said friend's mother sounds very attractive on the phone, and I was mindful of your comment about single moms on the playground, so I was very disappointed upon my arrival to find that she is, shall we say, somewhat less than very attractive in person. Actually she is far less than very attractive. I believe the colloquial term is “fugly.”)

Once her friend was safely out of the car, I yelled at Rosalind like I never had before, and she dug in her heels and told me I was a heterosexist for assuming that she would care about guys hitting on her. This brought me up short. (I decided that she may have been right, and also that I have no idea if there are predatory, curvy-baseball-cap wearing, Korn … no—I don't know, is there an angry lesbian metal band? Is this a market niche?—lesbian senior girls who try to get fourteen-year-old girls drunk at house parties and take advantage of them. I have no evidence, but I strongly suspect this is not the case.) But I ultimately told her that the problem was that I care so much about her and hate that I can't trust her. I did not bother explaining how I care so much that I am literally having panic attacks—sweat, palpitations, shortness of breath—when I don't know what's happening to her. This sucks, my friend. I am once again questioning the wisdom of my decision here. Not only because I don't appear to be doing very well by her, but because becoming a father in a real sense has not brought me the kind of fulfillment I had hoped it would. It seems that in the normal course of events, you have children and they are these cute little bundles of joy for several years and you bank that joy against the time when they will be pain-in-the-ass teenagers who will break your heart. And I have so very little joy in the bank. Just more heartbreak.

All right, that sounded maudlin even to me. In any event, Rosalind is grounded until the next millennium, though I can't imagine that is going to stop her if she is determined to misbehave.

I am sad. Encourage me.

—Sean

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Party all the time

Sean—

You are right. That was maudlin. And let me correct your misconception here. Babies are cute little bundles of joy, and you bank that joy against the time when they are screaming for no reason at three a.m., puking on you, and covering you in liquid shit. Also, as they age, throwing things, saying they hate you, and having a seemingly unerring instinct to stomp your nuts. Well, maybe that last part is just Max, who, at age six, keeps giving me shots to the nads that I think might not always be accidental. Anyway, it's always joy and pain like sunshine and rain or whatever that crappy song was, and no, Mr. Rock Critic, I do not want to hear about what you think of the songs I don't consider crappy.

I'm sorry this is so hard. I hate to say I told you so—okay, that is a total lie. I hate to see you sad, but the upside for me is that I get to say I told you so. I told you it was going to be hard in ways you couldn't imagine, and you said you didn't care, that this was the right thing to do, that this is what you wanted to do, that it didn't matter if it was hard, because it needed to be done. That was a good argument. It convinced me. But that might just be that I am a gym teacher in the sticks and am easily swayed by your fasttalkin' big city lawyerin' ways. Don't give up, and please go see a doctor about the panic attacks.

—Dave

Dear Fluffy:

Well, house arrest is kind of a joke, I mean to say it's like I get full Fluffy access but I have to hand over my phone when I get home and I once again don't have any IM access. But I don't know, Fluffy, if I really want to talk to anybody that bad anyway. Mostly when I get home or whatever you want to call this place, Sean's apartment, my apartment, my place where I live with my donor, I just start feeling sad and I just want to read and maybe talk to you Fluffy, and I just don't want to talk to anybody from school because I can just about convince myself that school is not completely ridiculous when I'm there but once I'm home it's like who cares.

But anyway house arrest is also a joke because school gets out at 2:42 and Sean gets home at 6, and I guess that's why 4:20 is so popular, though it's not popular around here like that.

But anyway today something kind of good happened which is that Jen and Kate and Terri who is another bitch with problems even though she seems really nice and I don't know what her problem is but anyway they go to this gross diner I never even noticed before for coffee after school every day, and today they asked me and at first I was like well I am grounded but then I was like well I can be home by 5 and still not have the warden find out, so that is cool. I liked it there because there were just diner people there and not Starbucks people, and so I didn't miss Mom or Mommy there because we never used to be diner people, we were definitely Starbucks people, vente hot chocolate for me please, no not thinking that not thinking about it anyway I drank coffee which probably is making my breath fresh as a summer breeze douche or something when you combine it with the cigarettes, but we just sat there and I mostly listened while they talked about music and guys and stuff and one thing that was kind of funny is that they sounded like Sasha or Kristen or somebody except that they were talking about guys who I guess were way older and not even in high school and probably not in college either and yeah I still find that kinda scary. Which is kind of sad I guess, but whatever. I mean, it's not sad, I guess it feels okay to be scared of hanging out with guys that old because then you totally end up on Jerry Springer having Steve hold your kid while you try to scratch your best friend's eyes out for stealing your man or something.