Life As I Blow It (4 page)

This is the same man who offered to get a second job just to make sure I could go to college, so you'd think I could have come clean about whose fault it was, but I was a teenager and I found the whole thing really ridiculous. What was the point of volunteering? There were firefighters who
got paid, after all. Let them risk their lives and let's stay home and enjoy Kung Fu Pasta like a normal family.

My family also gathered yearly to chop wood for the winter. It wasn't until I moved to California that I learned about gas fireplaces. It would have been pretty fucking nice to have had one of those growing up. I could've gotten a lot more sleep during that one Saturday in the winter and I never would have had to know what size I wore in wood-chopping gloves. My mom's side of the family obviously has a thing for fire. Maybe I shouldn't complain about something I only had to do once a year, but I was a teenager. I didn't think I should be out in the woods unless I was drinking bourbon or having teenage sex. I really needed to get out of this situation. My dad never did any manual labor, so I decided to look further into that.

Dad lived in sunny California. Visiting him in the summer was always a win-win. That was back when kids on a plane were treated like they were special. They'd let me and Jennifer, who is three years older than me, see the cockpit before takeoff and give us a pin shaped like wings. Maybe that was because my mom warned them that every time that I flew I threw up. That didn't stop until I was in college, by the way.

The flight attendants always told Jennifer and me that we were honorary co-pilots. They never took me up on my offer to actually help out when it was time for takeoff, but I was pretty sure they respected me as their peer. It always made me feel so cool. Nobody else I went to school with had that kind of experience. Sure, their families were still together, but we were racking up airline miles. And none of them knew about my compulsive vomiting.
Colonna Sisters 1, Everybody Else 0
.

My dad was a newspaper sports editor. When my parents first split up, he was working for the
Dallas Morning News
. Then while I was in about the fifth grade, he got a promotion and moved to California to work at the
Orange County Register
. By the time I was in high school he had moved on to the
Los Angeles Times
. He was always moving up and his job seemed to pay well because he had a pool that was not above the ground.

I know that lots of kids from divorced families hate leaving their friends for the summer, but I wasn't one of those kids. I enjoyed spinning tales of California and the ocean and all of the movie stars' houses that I'd seen on the “Map of the Stars' Homes” tour. Sometimes all you'd see was a bunch of trees and the tour guide would just assure you that Brad Pitt's house was on the other side, which is probably why my dad would lecture me that it was a rip-off. I didn't really care. I was fine being lied to as long as I got a relaxing trolley ride out of it. Plus I had already decided that one day I was going to be a famous actress. I needed to familiarize myself with the neighborhood. When I did finally move to Hollywood, I couldn't afford to live in the places that they showed me on that tour. I suffered in a tiny one-bedroom with no air-conditioning. It was behind Grauman's Chinese Theatre, which is a huge tourist trap. I could barely get out of my driveway without having to brake for a guy in a worn-out Spider-Man costume who was on his way to make money by disappointing children with his dirty tights and frail figure. Finally one day I decided that I deserved better. So for now I rent a decent condo in what's known as “the Valley.” And I have central air.

One summer I took my picture with a cardboard cutout of Patrick Swayze for ten dollars across from Grauman's. It
was so worth the money; I was sure that all of the morons I went to high school with would believe I had actually met Patrick Swayze. Unfortunately only one person bought my story. She was the same girl who thought that if you took a bath after sex you wouldn't get pregnant. She now has five kids. I never got to meet Patrick Swayze.

There weren't many rules at my dad's. From what I could gather, money equaled fun. Not that we were poor and struggling back home; my mom and Eric made enough money and took great care of us. But whatever my dad had going on certainly afforded him a lot more luxuries than I was used to. You know, things that don't matter but are fantastic to have. My mom was also a neat freak and didn't really understand sleeping in. At Dad's nobody ever woke me up early on a Saturday morning with a vacuum, and the only kind of pancake breakfasts I ever attended with him were at the International House of Pancakes. I actually don't remember ever seeing him do any sort of housework. His place was always really clean so someone must have done it. My mom would scoff at this notion.

“Oh he's big-time now. He probably has a maid. But at least I don't have to be his maid anymore,” she'd remind me as she stood on my bed dusting my ceiling fan and explaining to me the dust wouldn't be falling on my head if I'd just get the fuck up. That was usually around 7:45
A.M.
She was scheduled to vacuum at eight and everyone knows you always dust before you vacuum.

“Maybe you should get a maid,” I told her no less than a million times.

“Never.”

My mom now has a housekeeper. In Arkansas you can get one once every couple of weeks for the reasonable price
of $35.99. I'm glad she figured out that she deserves to relax after work. But she still cleans up on the day the woman is supposed to come so that the housekeeper doesn't see her house dirty. I think she has a problem.

Since Farmington
was
such a small town everybody knew everybody. My mom's brothers and their wives lived within a couple of miles from us. So did my grandparents and their friends. We were a tight-knit group. My entire life there, every birthday was celebrated with a gathering. It still is. I get cakes in my thirties just like I did when I was a kid; the only difference is now they aren't shaped like a bunny rabbit with licorice for the whiskers. For every single member of the family's birthday, we all got together and there was pizza and cake and little to no booze. My mom's side of the family was a lot different than my dad's. When I was visiting my dad, parties were fun. When I was home at my mom's, parties were tame. The loveliness of it all escaped me and I just wanted to know when it would be over so I could go in my room and talk on the phone and listen to Def Leppard. The most exciting part of any gathering was when a fire would erupt and I'd watch every person in the house scatter. I'd then help myself to the remainder of the pizza and ponder who would be there for me if that house went up in flames.

Dad's family was different. The only person I was close to on his side of our family was his mom. She was wonderful. She'd take the Greyhound all the way from California to visit my sister and me in Arkansas. She lived alone and was a big drinker. I think at some point she drank rubbing alcohol, so she might have been more than just a drinker. She used to send me pictures of herself that she took with a Polaroid. She'd use the handle of a flyswatter to push the button
on the camera, so every photo she sent had this long white handle stemming from her arm. It was a reminder to me that she lived alone. Her husband was remarried and she was not, but she was always smiling. Maybe it was the vodka, but all I knew was that she looked happy.

When Dad wasn't married, he usually had a girlfriend, sometimes two. I really didn't want to have to hang out with these women. It seemed like such a waste to buddy up with someone who obviously had no idea what she was up against. The odds of things working out for the two of them were never in her favor. I have to give it to Dad, though—he always tried. You could tell he really loved these people, or at least thought he did. He was probably just in love with the idea of being in love, but at that age I hadn't yet been to therapy, so I couldn't offer him that sort of insight. He's now been happily married for fifteen years to a wonderful woman, by the way. I guess sometimes it just takes a few tries to find your perfect match. And he tried four times.

One time when Jennifer and I went to visit him in California he had a new girlfriend named Candy. She was exactly what you'd expect you'd get from a woman with that name. Blond, big boobs, stupid. We hadn't met her yet, so Dad decided to bring her with him to pick us up at the airport. I was pretty annoyed: I hadn't seen him in a year and now I had to put up with this disaster all the way to his house. She tried to talk to me, so I pretended to fall asleep and left my sister to maintain the conversation. When we got to Dad's house I pretended to wake up and we got our bags and went inside. Dad then went back out to the car with Candy.

“I'm going to take her home. I'll be back in a little bit.”

“What? We just got here!” I whined.

“I'll be right back!” With that he and Candy drove off into the night.

I couldn't understand why he didn't just drop her off before we got home. Wouldn't that have made more sense than leaving us there by ourselves? Jennifer explained that he probably wanted to have sex with her and it would be easier at her place.

“Gross! Her boobs are gross. I hate her.”

“Me too,” Jennifer decided. “By the way, nice fake sleeping in the car. Way to leave me stuck talking to Candy Cane.”

“Sorry, I'm just a really good actress.”

The rest of the summer we didn't see much of Candy. She went out to dinner with us one night the week that we arrived, and I could see that Dad was already losing interest in her. Maybe her stupidity was only fun for a few days? I hoped that was the case, but I didn't want to bring it up. I figured I'd count her absence as a blessing and leave it at that. It would have been too embarrassing to have a stepmom named Candy.

Regardless of who my dad was dating or married to when I came to visit, I got to do cool shit and meet interesting people. Since he was in sports, I was able to meet a handful of famous athletes, although I didn't know who most of them were. Most of my sports interest was in Friday night football at my school, and my halftime dance with the drill team. Regardless, I'd go home and brag to the guys in my class that I got to meet Jack Youngblood, whoever that was. They were impressed. Mission accomplished.

The only thing I really paid attention to in the professional sports world was baseball. I always liked going to Angels' games with my dad in the summer. That was when
they were the California Angels, before they were the Anaheim Angels, and way before they became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Don't get me started.

We usually had to watch the game from a press suite, which meant tons of free food and sneaking little bottles of booze when nobody was looking. I'd take my Coke that I had spiked with bourbon out to one of the seats and watch the game from there with the rest of the loyal fans. What were these press people doing inside chatting when they could be outside taking in the game and all of the players' nice asses? My teenage hormones really loved baseball.

Those summers I sat in the stands and dreamed of being a baseball wife. Sure, I heard stories about the kind of life that those people lived. Baseball wives put on a smile and clapped in the stands, but inside they were sad. Their husbands were always gone. They got tired of being alone so they'd try to go to all of the games, including away games. Then they'd get tired of being on the road. They'd go back home but then they'd hear heartbreaking rumors about who was having an affair with whom so they'd drink chardonnay and take on lovers to hide the pain. I thought it sounded awesome. Still do. I really need to stop watching Lifetime.

Unfortunately I never met any guys when I was visiting Dad. I had a few girlfriends in California, but most were daughters of people who Dad worked with. This one girl, Stephanie, was really impressive to me. She was a full-on California girl. She grew up there and she had the tan to prove it. I'm sure now she has the sun damage and wrinkles to prove it, but I bet she doesn't care. She also liked to smoke, which piqued my interest. We spent several afternoons together; we usually had her mom or my dad drop us
off at the mall. We'd walk around for a while, taking the occasional smoke break. She told me stories of going to junior high in California. She said that people had parties at their parents' houses and took a bunch of Dramamine. Apparently the right amount of it made you hallucinate. I told her I had taken “my fair share” of Dramamine and she seemed impressed. I didn't bother to explain that it was never more than two and it was because of the in-flight vomiting.

Stephanie had an older sister, Brie. She was Jennifer's age and they were friends. I don't know what they did during their hang-out time together, but I think it was more impressive than looking for tank tops at Express and smoking. At one point my sister was out with Brie and she met a guy. He was in the army or something. I didn't know exactly what he did, I just knew he had a short haircut and talked about tough training. Jennifer decided that she was in love with him. She spoke tragically of the upcoming end to the summer and how she'd have to go back to Arkansas and leave her true love in California. She told me that “Right Here Waiting” by Richard Marx was their song.

“Oceans apart, day after day, and I slowly go insane …”
Jennifer would recite the words of the song to me while she cried about leaving him. I felt bad for her, but I was more interested in what ocean she thought separated California and Arkansas. I guessed that Eric wasn't helping her with geography.

When we returned home after the summer, Jennifer announced to Mom that she was in love, that her new boyfriend was coming to visit for a week, and that he'd be staying with us. His name was Greg and he was going to be Mom's
son-in-law when Jennifer turned eighteen, so she might as well welcome him with open arms. My mom stared at her for a long time, then simply said, “Fine.”