Kiss Off
The summer of '83. I drove around all summer just reeling with how in love I was with Leslie. Leslie, who I barely knew. I met her through my friend Darren who was dating her younger sister Marion. She was just this spectral angel flapping in the background whenever I'd wrangle myself a trip over to their house with Darren, hoping to see her. But she was older, and I was a shorts-wearing chubby kid with glasses and homemade Meat Puppets shirts. But she had this wild black hair that defied gravity and curled and swayed in all manner of acrobatics, just begging to be grabbed and swirled in sweaty hands and wet tongues. She was always in a short black mini-skirt and a homemade white t-shirt with illegible hieroglyphics etched into the cotton with thin Sharpie points.
I listened to that first Violent Femmes record on repeat all that summer with Lou Reed's Berlin on the opposite side of the cassette. The Violent Femmes perfectly put into words what I felt about Leslie. "Why can't I get just one fuck? Guess it's got somethin' to do with luck." The cassette would flip every 45 minutes or so, and I'd just drive every day after a hot summer job drinking beer and listening. My brown Chevette gliding through Maryland country roads, growing darker and drunker before sliding home to start all over again. These nights were most powerful when I was alone and not afraid to cry or just feel anything out loud. Driving down the dark country, tree-canopied back roads, tears ran down my face with how real it all felt and how distant I was from her. But I knew. I knew I'd get her.
I couldn't imagine any other future which didn't involve me in her bed and telling her I loved her, as awkward and pathetic a lover as I was at that age. She once asked me, "why are so so timid? Just fuck me!" It cut like a knife. It ultimately led to the almost sex-offender style of connection I've forged over the years; it hit so hard.
These big strong feelings were uncaged, which allowed me to fall asleep to fantasies of sex and heroin and love. By my teenage years, I'd become obsessed with heroin. I'd never seen it, but I knew it was the magic substance that led everyone I looked up to create the things that yanked at my heart. Lou reed and Keith Richards, and Nick Cave. Surely heroin was the secret. And so many purloined painkillers from my parent's medicine cabinets clued me in on just what substance filled that God-shaped hole in me. Opiates. Narcotics. Dope. Falling in love with Leslie. This record changed my world.
I thought of only Leslie and my lack of Leslie. The first VF record was perfect for this, even after the 1000th time. This record wrapped around me like a bandage and like armor. This record. This record became everything I dreamed about Leslie and where it might take us. And here we were in some backwoods Maryland farmland dreaming of anything other than what was offered us and hardly the same things as each other hoped for. But we got there. Somehow we would up sitting on the roof of my Chevette in the dark parking lot behind Hickory elementary school, and we kissed, and other things happened, and she started to cry. I disintegrated. I can't remember what she said, but it pulled me together, and we went and forged ahead like a team of two against the world. At least, that's how I imagined it.
Four years later, and a million playings of that first Vilionet Femmes record, I graduated college with two fruitless degrees and Leslie, and I moved to Hollywood, and whole new worlds of wonder and pain awaited us. Life dispensed with country roads and the simple power of a song like this. We were free to fuck like we wanted and to feel things we'd only dreamed about. If on;y we'd dreamed about the same things.