Suicide and Everything After

May 17, 1999, my best friend killed herself with a shotgun in her mom's bedroom.  Or at least, that’s what I imagine. I don’t know where she shot herself, if it was that room, or her bedroom, resting her back against the wood paneling of her water bed, or with her bare feet pressed into the smooth tile of the kitchen floor. I guess I’ve always imagined it happening in the room where the gun came from because I know she was scared. She had to work up the guts to go through with a Decision like Suicide, at age fourteen, before her life had even begun to take shape (what we don't know when we're fourteen...fuck). And if she pondered it, in that moment, long enough to wander through the apartment, holding the cold neck of the gun in her small hands, with the thought of something as big as Life also in those small hands, she might have chickened out.

About two weeks earlier, Nicole was on the other end of the receiver, choking between sobs. She told me she wanted to die. The reasoning was complicated regardless, but for a couple of fourteen-year-olds, I felt for her in this particular mess of circumstances. She had not long before come out to her family, maybe not as a lesbian, but at least bisexual. She wasn’t sure. Her Christian mother and stepfather were of course completely shocked and unreceptive to reason. No, was their response. No you are not gay, and no more slumber parties, so you can forget about your weekend social escapades. On top of that, her girlfriend had broken up with her, the girl who she’d recognized her own complicated sexuality with had just abandoned her for someone else, a BOY. What the fuck, was all that came out of her mouth. What the fuck, and I want to die. This is never going to feel better. I’ve never been happier than I was then and now I will never feel worse. This is it for me, I can’t make it. It genuinely felt like this was the End of the World, her world. And that afternoon on the phone, I’d calmed her down, somehow made the world seem at least a bit more worthwhile so that she promised me she wouldn’t kill herself so long as I didn’t tell anyone. I promised.

A couple weekends later, we were going to go shopping for eighth-grade graduation dresses. But I was busy with my boyfriend, so I kind of blew her off, said we still had time to go during the week or the next weekend. She yelled at me, telling me I was so caught up in my own life and Josh and that I wasn’t being a good friend. Couldn’t I live without seeing him for just one day to hang out with my best friend? Well, I was fourteen, and I didn’t like anyone telling me I was doing anything wrong. So, I told her to just chill out and we would go next week.

I’m sure you can imagine where this is going. On Monday, when Nicole wasn’t in school, the second I got home I ran to the phone (the age before cell phones) and called her. Her stepdad answered. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what he said. I know he called me “sweetie” and I could hear a lot of crying in the background. I know I slumped to the floor and started screaming, bawling, dropped the phone as the realness of that pain rushed into my body and all around me. My mom ran in, confused, and by then, I’m sure the receiver was beeping.

I have never been a person who is huge on anniversaries. I don’t set aside time every May 17^th to reflect. To be honest, I don’t pay attention to the date all that much. Today, it was late afternoon before I looked up at the calendar and registered the date in my head. I texted Brandon about it, and he asked me if I was ok. Yeah, I’m ok. It’s been twelve years since I wept next to the cabinets on the kitchen floor of my parent’s house in Milwaukee, struggling to breathe, wondering if it was my fault, if my actions had led to my best friend’s suicide. 

What I think about now is all the time that has passed, the person I am now, the person I was then.  I was at the cusp of adulthood— adult emotions, adult situations, adult decisions. I’d experienced almost none of what I would now consider to be BIG life events. In fact, that was the first. I think about everything Nicole never got to do, all the wonderful and horrible things that happen to us in our teens and twenties that make us feel on top of the world, or at the bottom of it, or ingloriously in the middle. I think about the fact that twelve years ago, I was a person that I still can recognize as myself, a more naïve and inexperienced version of me, but not a child (which seems separate). I feel both old, (twelve years and my memory of that day still comes back instantaneously), and young, knowing that in another five, ten, twenty years, I’ll be looking back at where I am now and where I was then in completely different ways.

seventh grade, we were so cool.

I remember the winter night, it must have been 1997 or 1998, I was sleeping over at Nicole's when she closed her bedroom door, whispered that she had to tell me something. She said, "If you want to go home after I tell you, I understand." And then she told me that she was pretty sure she was gay, and she had been recently experimenting with this newfound discovery with someone. Maybe I was a little surprised (we'd been boycrazy for awhile by this point in our lives), but I didn't want to go home. OF COURSE I didn't want to go home. I laughed that she'd even thought I would react that way. "Well, we do share the same bed when you sleep over, so I didn't know if you'd be uncomfortable," was her response. Then we probably put on Hanson, or Silverchair, or Third Eye Blind and danced and put makeup on each other and talked and talked and talked before eventually falling asleep. Livin' the dream.

Yeah, I’m ok, but heavy and nostalgic and wise and confused and melancholic and calm. I scratch Luna behind her ears as she lets out a big, sleepy sigh--it feels especially meaningful, and I don't know why.

My First Time

Last night, I went to a strip club for the first time in my life. My friends have friends visiting from out of town, and because Portland is so “open-minded and free-spirited,” strip clubs are aplenty and come in lots of crazy varieties. Finding a good one is often high up on lots of tourists' Portland-Things-To-Do-list. Portland does everything WEIRD; Portland prides itself on this. Why should strip clubs be the exception? The weird strip club we went to last night was called Devil’s Point, and Sunday’s at 9pm they host stripper karaoke, or Stripparoke (not sure of the spelling, but that’s not really the point, is it?).

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Is the focus going to be more on karaoke, or strippers? Amateurish, or the real deal? Is it primarily a bar, do they only have strippers for this one event, is it going to be kind of creepy like I’d heard rumors about from friends who’d been to strip clubs before? I didn’t even know what it was called, so I wasn’t able to prepare by looking at the website. Not that a website can answer these sorts of questions, necessarily.

Here are the answers. The focus was on the strippers, OBVIOUSLY. The karaoke was integral to the night, sure, but singers went up to the stage (a stage fully equipped with a pole, because it is in fact a strip club) and stood in the back corner singing while a dancer did her thing. These were not amateur dancers. There were four of them, and I thought the bar did a nice job of showcasing a variety that could appeal to any taste by choosing these four dancers for a particular night. What I mean is that their body types varied—big boobs and super curvy on one end and stick-thin, small-chested on the other end. Two were covered in tattoos, two with long hair, two with short hair, and different styles of dancing so the audience wasn’t watching the same thing all the time. The skinny-skinny one had some amazing acrobatic moves on the pole which were entertaining. One girl with lots of a tattoos and a punk-rock blue hairstyle was doing hand stands, as well as balancing her legs on some lucky shoulders, then flipping back up. Not that anyone would have cared what kind of dancing was going on, really. These girls were all attractive—not just their bodies, but cute faces, too. And they looked like they were having a good time, which makes for a pleasant atmosphere, as opposed to creepy and weird. I didn’t feel dirty being there because the dancers didn’t seem to feel dirty doing their job, and I think that’s important. Also, most of the people there were with a group of friends out to have a good time. Not saying there weren’t some guys who’d obviously come alone…but they were heavily outnumbered by the rest of us. I can’t speak for what this place is like the rest of the week, but for karaoke, it was a fun time in a semi-crowded bar. I call it a bar because aside from the stage with a pole in the middle of it, it looked like a regular, maybe even cool bar. Pool table, some walls were red which gave it a sort of rock ‘n’ roll feel, reasonably priced drinks ($2 pints of PBR, for example). Overall, just a chill place.

Something strange happened to me while I was sitting in this strip club, taking in the whole experience. The girls were so pretty and fit (ok, HOT) and confident, not to mention entertaining. I was watching all these guys ogle the dancers, and I think my instinct was to feel jealous. Not that I didn’t find them attractive and entertaining myself. And not that any of the guys, was my guy. But everyone knows that guys have fantasies about these types of girls, and what girl doesn’t want to be the subject of fantasies? Sometimes, I get carried away overthinking things, analyzing until I come up with some kind of logical sense. Never know when it's going to happen really, and amidst the sexy red glow and half-audible karaoke singers, I was lost in thought.

I thought about where my jealousy was coming from. For the last couple of years, I was in a relationship with someone who wouldn’t even call it a relationship. It follows, of course, that he never told me he loved me ( because he probably didn’t). That doesn’t mean that he didn’t act like he loved me, though. We did everything together, talked about everything together, like a couple, and it was amazing, enlightening, fun. We even moved to another country together for almost half a year, spending all of our time together acclimating, learning about ourselves and the world and each other. So, what then...? Why is this relevant to my strip club story?

I was totally in love with him. Imagine being in love with someone who won’t even acknowledge feelings for you, despite lots of actions that would seem to contradict that. Actions speak louder than words, right? Well, not exactly. I often felt uncertain, irresolute, maybe even scared. That uncertainty led me to a kind of overwhelming jealousy of every other girl he talked to, looked at, even the occasional sexy pic of a movie star as his laptop desktop background drove me crazy. I’m a confident person, so this jealousy that was growing in me felt so foreign and wrong. I hid it, I tried to fight it, reason it away, but it was still there. It wasn’t until last night at the strip club, as a superhot, tattooed & black-lace gartered dancer made eyes with me, pulled me against her, that I finally had the epiphany that I needed to wake me the fuck up. I wouldn’t feel jealous with someone who loved me, not only acting like it but saying it all the time, really being IN the whole god- damned beautiful thing, with someone who I could trust with those incredible and overwhelming love feelings.

This isn’t even about jealousy, but existing within the confines of an emotion that up until this point has been mostly vacant from my life, one that makes me feel neurotic and unhealthy, sucks, and isn’t worth it. Not for love, nor for anything. (Easier said than done, I know, but I’m trying…) At my best, I’m confident, I’m easygoing, I’m open-minded, I’m adventurous and warm and loving and well-rounded and fucking healthy. I don’t act like a psycho about some picture of a hot girl on your computer. If you love me, and I love you, we can do anything together. Including, but not limited to, going to Devil’s Point to sit at the rail and gawk at the girls together, giving them all our dollars before we go home and love each other some more.

I’m not completely blaming him for what happened between us, and what happened to me as a result. I have control over what occurs in my life, and I let it happen. For awhile, it really did make me happy to feel so much love for him, regardless of anything else. He was never dishonest with his words, but it’s hard to leave someone when you are so effing in love with him AND you have everything in common AND you spend ALL your time with him, when he still acts like he adores you, too.

Love is tricky business.  Some combination of the general strip club environment, watching some of my best friends, recently engaged and so in love, interact in that environment, and maybe sexy Sydystyc , too, dancing like a goddess above me, brought me to this long-needed epiphany. Life is so weird.