When I was growing up with my father and stepmother, herefore referred to as Sicko and Nutcase, were….how do I put this nicely? Psycho. I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or normal clothes like any teenager would wear (like tank tops and low-rise jeans. Or even heels that didn’t look like they came from some little old ladies garage sale for that matter) or have a cell phone that could call someone that wasn’t programmed into one of its three major buttons until I was almost eighteen. And I didn’t have a driver’s permit until I was almost twenty. It was like being a Amish, without that grace period at sixteen when you can go off and do whatever you wanted to with no repricusions. When I turned thirteen, my brother offered to buy me condoms. For the next five years it was a constant refrain “Layne, do you need condoms? Do you need condoms? I’ll get them for you if you want me to! Do you need condoms?” well, seeing as how I never had the time or the freedom to kiss a boy, let alone sleep with one, I didn’t need them until I was almost eighteen. Then, after I had been sleeping with the guy for about two weeks and my father had found the condoms in my room and taken them away from me (like that’s really going to keep me from having sex? That would just keep me from having protected sex) , I asked my brother for them. His response? “Who’s the motherfucker? I’ll kill him!”
The one bad thing about dating in a small school is that it’s so incestuous. Everyone that you would ever date has dated or kissed or fooled around with someone who you know, go to class with, or are friends with. You look at that girl who is in your Gym class much differently when you know that she got caught giving your boyfriend a blowjob one day- no matter the fact that it was in seventh grade. My friends and I , luckily, generally didn’t have the same taste. My friend Amanda and I were the only ones that really liked the same kind of guys: scruffy rocker guys who had some brains to them. Unfortunately, that was all that it took.
At John and Lesley’s house, there was no such thing as “dating”. My brother, as he did many other things as well, screwed that up for me- and people say that God has no sense of humor? He made my brother the oldest and me the youngest- and, come to think about it, screwed it up for himself as well. He didn’t date officially until he was fifteen or sixteen. I can remember him shimmying out of the window in his room down to the top of the tool chest that was maybe six or seven feet under his window. Tom Cruise look out, we’ve got someone who is actually more nuts than you are- scary, right? For the entire time that I was in high school, I didn’t date, or if I did, I waited until I was with my mom for the weekend and then went out on dates. In college, though, it was a completely different story.
‘Twas three nights after Christmas and all through the house, you could hear John’s muscles and bones creaking and threatening to break as he did his nightly workouts, and Lesley’s screeching (the woman had one volume: loud. There was no happy or sad, no angry or excited. There was just loud.) After having my best friend Donald come over to the house with alcohol (and don’t say that Mike’s Hard Lemonade is a bitch drink. It got me through many a rough night at that house. And it made everything really funny after a few.) and a copy of The Godfather, I was ready to get out of the house. So I came up with a brilliant plan: I would climb out of one of the windows that were on the front of the house. Now, this sounds like a really stupid idea until you realize the layout of the house and the insanity that was my parents. Since John and Lesley’s room had been overrun by cats many, many years before, they had taken to sleeping in the kitchen on two glorified park benches that they covered with a comforter and covers. (As if this would make the reality that much better.) So, just walking out of the back door was out. In addition to this, since cat’s urine is as corrosive as acid, and since the cat’s had pissed on everything in the entire damn house for at least ten or eleven years before this, the front door would not open. Or close. No, I’m not shitting you. I’m dead serious. So, the front door was out. Now most kids would just crawl out of their bedroom windows, but I’m five foot three, the windows were about eight feet above the ground without anything to grab onto on the way down. No, I’m not that stupid. So about all that was left was to just crawl out of the front window. Let me just tell you that Donald was a gentleman: he held open the window for me to both crawl out and in. I’ll also tell you that it takes a man who really loves you to help you do that at least half a dozen times because, no matter how much you love the girl, that is NOT a flattering angle. And it's already hard enough to do that, but I was wearing three inch heels. Can you say flexible? (Even though, that might have come in handy when I decided that I wanted to be a hooker and had to spin around that pole in those six inch heels; I was just three inches away from that!)
Don’t get me wrong, I probably had more guys that I dated in college than in most of high school. And, no, it wasn’t just because I would actually sleep with them in college. The only problem was that I would sneak them into the house (before I learned the joys of sneaking out of the house) which looked like a disaster area by this time. Most of them, since John and Lesley slept in the kitchen, ended up jumping off of the roof that lead from the front of the house to a huge oak in the front yard. (And you wonder the things that boys will do for a piece of ass? Put that at the top of the list as probably one of the stupider things that they would do.) One time, John came home while my current boyfriend, Donald was in the house and stormed upstairs, demanding that I give him back my phone (yes, you heard right, he demanded that I give him my phone.) Donald hid in the closet, staring at the door while my father tore my room apart, miraculously not opening the closet door. And, might I say, god bless the nerdy boys that are so hopelessly devoted that they will sit in their girlfriend’s closet for three hours while her police officer father tears up her room just outside of the door.
Of course, if the guys didn’t jump out of the window, the fun was always trying to get them out of the house. But, by the time that I left, I had a system in place that was foolproof (my proof of this? The fact that I didn’t ever get caught sneaking out or sneaking boys into the house until I was in my second year of college when my boyfriend was a total idiot and my father was on crack and up at all hours of the night.) I would keep them in my room, which was upstairs with the door that I kept locked if I was inside of it, until I heard John and Lesley go into their room to get ready. Then it was an odd tango down the stairs, keeping out of the way of all of the cats, and an even odder one through the living room where all of the furniture from both the living and dining rooms were piled. After that, generally it was cake.
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