Little Bot
a memoir.
I am sitting on his sofa. It’s long and organized in his own candor. I want to leave an imprint of my ass on the cushion when I leave. Tomorrow is Monday. Monday Monday. Will I be having the blues? We’ll see. Try not to think about it. So I listen to the clacking sound coming from the dryer.
It’s got all my clean clothes in it I brought-a week’s worth, all tumbling together. I need time to tell them apart. How does a week last so long and so short is beyond me. He’s busy aligning books in his bag, cleaning out the garbage from dinner, filing his anticipation for tomorrow’s big day of going back to the grind. And I’m leaving again, driving to Texas this time to visit my cousin. We only live once so that’s why I came here, to see if this man’s heart was worth the sacrifice of not having to say goodbye anymore.
“I gotta take this,” he says to me, holding his cell phone in his hand and pointing to it at the same time. I know he does, he doesn’t have to tell me this, I’ve known it all along. All week I’ve silently watched him collect the time with fragments of past loves still wedged inside. It doesn’t make me angry. Just disappointed.
“Sure you do,” I smile playfully. Then I blow him a kiss. It makes a scratching sound in my headphones as I record the exchange. Then I listen to the clacking sound coming from the dryer.
Feeling creative is fleeting. Anyone who is fond of making things has said this once or twice. I’m always thinking about some way to nurture that missing gap when my hands are empty. Sometimes I wake up early. Sometimes I force myself to sing, especially after running. I get discouraged easily. I don’t know exactly what I’m afraid of. Maybe it’s getting older and losing my soul, the one that forced me to write things down almost daily in the name of suffering, the soul that picked me up and lead me to the mic after a beating. Problem is now things don't hurt as much. So it’s okay, I think...?
I remember a quote on my friend Laura’s Myspace page, back in ‘04, when she said who she was interested in meeting. People with talent. People with REAL talent. I mean it, it has to be GOOD! And how I had stared at it for a long time, thinking the only way to have real talent was to have more of it than her. Classic case for me when I was only 23.
I first met Laura...actually, I never met Laura. She was just some girl from the Internet. But it feels weird just phrasing her that way. Most of those profile photos on Myspace were of real people, myself included, and it felt so quaint and ideal to be able to scan through lists of them and find the ones you shared the things in common with. In the case of Laura, she found me, through the shared connection of her ex-boyfriend. He first got my attention because he said he played guitar in a punk rock band. He dressed like a future business man. Perhaps the potential missing link to my post-punk category.
But it never went in that direction. I met him once and we decided pretty quickly that neither of us were interested. Still, the idea of it drove Laura a little crazy, enough to find my screen name on IM and interrogate me. I diffused her eventually, but her persistence to keep in touch lead me to believe early on that the best way to neutralize me as a threat was to become my friend.
After awhile, I didn’t really mind it. I kept her at arm’s length like I did most people. It's easy to do when you move around a lot.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try and assuage the feeling of envy, especially when I finally got a look at her face after she sent a Myspace request. It was totally not what I was expecting, which was a slightly trashy, slightly abandoned cat with a hint of charm to hail from middle Georgia. Instead she was as sleek as a pedigree kitten, with piercing blue eyes adorning hair of different shades. A chameleon. Charismatic. Like one day, this girl was definitely going to be famous. It’s so hard to instantly love someone like that. It took me time to grow my own leg to stand on before I could appreciate that quality in her.
I wasn’t ugly, but I wasn’t beautiful like. I could sing though, and I clung to it as my final saving grace. How well or how talented I was considered was completely up in the air. All I knew was that it was about the only thing that made me feel OK during the tumultuous period of my 20's.
Our shared connection, her business ex-boyfriend? He was her first love. She loved others, as I did, albeit none of the same. She went to school to become an opera singer, and the boys she shared herself with usually came from the music variety. Skinny boys in bands, some loves and others friends. I know she had admirers. She probably had plenty. I didn’t want to guess how many.
One time she called me while I was in California, tucked away in Ocean Beach. I had only been there a week. Her phone voice caught me off guard. It was dark, hoarse and raspy, like a weathered jazz singer instead of the crispy clean blonde soprano I had imagined from her pictures. She asked me if I wanted to come and play with her in LA. Eat, drink, and sleep on her friend’s couch like she was doing, because she had decided at the last minute to fly to LA from Georgia. I can’t lie that I felt a little baffled when she called, she was the last person I expected to hear from in the entire world, and I was unsure if she still hated me for briefly seeing her ex. I politely rejected because I did have to work.
Later she went off to get her Master’s degree, another step up the music food chain, so she moved to Texas. There, I didn’t hear from her as much, and we had started using Facebook by then which did all the work for keeping in touch. I read her updates when they came up. I saw all her new pictures. Every one of them was so aesthetically effortless. She mastered the pose better than most people, and I refused to admit she was pretty. She was like an elf or a fairy, waif-like and fragile, even if she was standing on her head or galloping on a bicycle during Critical Mass. Where was she on an off-day? Did she have one of those? Lord knows I had plenty of them.
One day Laura got engaged to a boy named Andrew. They collaborated bits for one or two songs on a page called Little Bot. The photo for Little Bot was a juxtaposition of her pearly Naomi Watts face with Andrew’s Japanese features, their musical love child. It looked so real.
I don’t think it lasted very long though, because some time after I read an update from her claiming there was nothing worse than coming home from a trip to find your drunk ex-fiancee passed out in the bed you share, with some other drunk girl and having to kick them out. That was the last I ever heard about Andrew, as she even deleted the update soon after she had posted it.
She started dating another boy not long after, but this time a little less publicly. His name was Jonathan.
I dated boys of my own after that ill-fated meet-up with Laura’s business ex-boyfriend. I went for musicians too. Guitarists, drummers and bassists. And a pianist once. His hands really were delicate. He told me I was sweet once after he went down on me in San Francisco. I held onto that one for a long time then eventually let go of it. I let go of a lot of people to be honest. I forced myself to say goodbye to many loves. Him. The Russian boy in China. Greg from Ocean Beach. It gets both easier and harder at the same time. Then there was the boy I came to visit near New Orleans. Maybe stepping foot inside those city limits would reignite a fire inside. I remembered it from three years before, when we spent a summer getting closer and closer until bam, I had to leave and return to Spain. And the night before I left I let him inside and as soon as I did I didn’t want to leave. Sometimes it still made my bones ache like before the rain.
Now I’m sitting on his couch after a week. My distracted lover. Perhaps I need too much. Better to not need at all. I ponder it all and keep recording. I can’t be anything more than disappointed.
Laura and her business ex-boyfriend both confided in me separately in 2004 that they had had a child together when she was only 19. They gave it up for adoption, and the pain and stress of all that was the final nail in the coffin of their doomed relationship. He tried again and gave her roses after an opera recital. He told me about it. It drove her crazy inside her tiny frame, that looked like it had never seen the light of pregnancy. Laura knew what it was like to grow something inside and make a life. She’s probably a teenager by now, Laura and her business ex-boyfriend’s tiny baby.
I don’t know what that’s like, to birth something so tangible. I just try to do it in song. I try and I try, and then I get discouraged. But not tonight for some reason, things are just falling into place. I love moments like these, aside from the sadness and disappointment that this attractive, kindhearted man probably wasn't going to love me the way that I wanted, while he’s away in his room talking on the phone I’m sitting here on his sofa, recording. Layers upon layers of lightly-brushed melodies. Humming. Plucking harmonic guitar strings. The clacking sound coming from the dryer. Miraculously, it’s all working tonight. Finally I’m making a song worth keeping.
I titled it “Moths” later, after I had left New Orleans the next day and drove to see my cousin. I let my hair go back to brown from blonde, even when Laura had insisted through an older photo comment that I should never not be blonde :) I sent the final copy to him and he understood everything I meant without me having to explain.
Months later I got a friend request from an unrecognizable woman named Katherine. I clicked on her picture to see that Laura was our only thing in common. She was Laura's mother. Her daughter was dead. A drunk driver hit the car Jonathan was driving while Laura was asleep in the backseat. This was the night I sat on his sofa, recording the clacking sound coming from the dryer.
I couldn't bear myself to accept her suffering mother's friend invitation and admit to her that I had never known her daughter. So instead I found the mixed CD she made me for Christmas in 2004 and finally gave it a listen. On the front of the CD she wrote in wobbly handwriting, from your mystery friend.
It’s got all my clean clothes in it I brought-a week’s worth, all tumbling together. I need time to tell them apart. How does a week last so long and so short is beyond me. He’s busy aligning books in his bag, cleaning out the garbage from dinner, filing his anticipation for tomorrow’s big day of going back to the grind. And I’m leaving again, driving to Texas this time to visit my cousin. We only live once so that’s why I came here, to see if this man’s heart was worth the sacrifice of not having to say goodbye anymore.
“I gotta take this,” he says to me, holding his cell phone in his hand and pointing to it at the same time. I know he does, he doesn’t have to tell me this, I’ve known it all along. All week I’ve silently watched him collect the time with fragments of past loves still wedged inside. It doesn’t make me angry. Just disappointed.
“Sure you do,” I smile playfully. Then I blow him a kiss. It makes a scratching sound in my headphones as I record the exchange. Then I listen to the clacking sound coming from the dryer.
Feeling creative is fleeting. Anyone who is fond of making things has said this once or twice. I’m always thinking about some way to nurture that missing gap when my hands are empty. Sometimes I wake up early. Sometimes I force myself to sing, especially after running. I get discouraged easily. I don’t know exactly what I’m afraid of. Maybe it’s getting older and losing my soul, the one that forced me to write things down almost daily in the name of suffering, the soul that picked me up and lead me to the mic after a beating. Problem is now things don't hurt as much. So it’s okay, I think...?
I remember a quote on my friend Laura’s Myspace page, back in ‘04, when she said who she was interested in meeting. People with talent. People with REAL talent. I mean it, it has to be GOOD! And how I had stared at it for a long time, thinking the only way to have real talent was to have more of it than her. Classic case for me when I was only 23.
I first met Laura...actually, I never met Laura. She was just some girl from the Internet. But it feels weird just phrasing her that way. Most of those profile photos on Myspace were of real people, myself included, and it felt so quaint and ideal to be able to scan through lists of them and find the ones you shared the things in common with. In the case of Laura, she found me, through the shared connection of her ex-boyfriend. He first got my attention because he said he played guitar in a punk rock band. He dressed like a future business man. Perhaps the potential missing link to my post-punk category.
But it never went in that direction. I met him once and we decided pretty quickly that neither of us were interested. Still, the idea of it drove Laura a little crazy, enough to find my screen name on IM and interrogate me. I diffused her eventually, but her persistence to keep in touch lead me to believe early on that the best way to neutralize me as a threat was to become my friend.
After awhile, I didn’t really mind it. I kept her at arm’s length like I did most people. It's easy to do when you move around a lot.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try and assuage the feeling of envy, especially when I finally got a look at her face after she sent a Myspace request. It was totally not what I was expecting, which was a slightly trashy, slightly abandoned cat with a hint of charm to hail from middle Georgia. Instead she was as sleek as a pedigree kitten, with piercing blue eyes adorning hair of different shades. A chameleon. Charismatic. Like one day, this girl was definitely going to be famous. It’s so hard to instantly love someone like that. It took me time to grow my own leg to stand on before I could appreciate that quality in her.
I wasn’t ugly, but I wasn’t beautiful like. I could sing though, and I clung to it as my final saving grace. How well or how talented I was considered was completely up in the air. All I knew was that it was about the only thing that made me feel OK during the tumultuous period of my 20's.
Our shared connection, her business ex-boyfriend? He was her first love. She loved others, as I did, albeit none of the same. She went to school to become an opera singer, and the boys she shared herself with usually came from the music variety. Skinny boys in bands, some loves and others friends. I know she had admirers. She probably had plenty. I didn’t want to guess how many.
One time she called me while I was in California, tucked away in Ocean Beach. I had only been there a week. Her phone voice caught me off guard. It was dark, hoarse and raspy, like a weathered jazz singer instead of the crispy clean blonde soprano I had imagined from her pictures. She asked me if I wanted to come and play with her in LA. Eat, drink, and sleep on her friend’s couch like she was doing, because she had decided at the last minute to fly to LA from Georgia. I can’t lie that I felt a little baffled when she called, she was the last person I expected to hear from in the entire world, and I was unsure if she still hated me for briefly seeing her ex. I politely rejected because I did have to work.
Later she went off to get her Master’s degree, another step up the music food chain, so she moved to Texas. There, I didn’t hear from her as much, and we had started using Facebook by then which did all the work for keeping in touch. I read her updates when they came up. I saw all her new pictures. Every one of them was so aesthetically effortless. She mastered the pose better than most people, and I refused to admit she was pretty. She was like an elf or a fairy, waif-like and fragile, even if she was standing on her head or galloping on a bicycle during Critical Mass. Where was she on an off-day? Did she have one of those? Lord knows I had plenty of them.
One day Laura got engaged to a boy named Andrew. They collaborated bits for one or two songs on a page called Little Bot. The photo for Little Bot was a juxtaposition of her pearly Naomi Watts face with Andrew’s Japanese features, their musical love child. It looked so real.
I don’t think it lasted very long though, because some time after I read an update from her claiming there was nothing worse than coming home from a trip to find your drunk ex-fiancee passed out in the bed you share, with some other drunk girl and having to kick them out. That was the last I ever heard about Andrew, as she even deleted the update soon after she had posted it.
She started dating another boy not long after, but this time a little less publicly. His name was Jonathan.
I dated boys of my own after that ill-fated meet-up with Laura’s business ex-boyfriend. I went for musicians too. Guitarists, drummers and bassists. And a pianist once. His hands really were delicate. He told me I was sweet once after he went down on me in San Francisco. I held onto that one for a long time then eventually let go of it. I let go of a lot of people to be honest. I forced myself to say goodbye to many loves. Him. The Russian boy in China. Greg from Ocean Beach. It gets both easier and harder at the same time. Then there was the boy I came to visit near New Orleans. Maybe stepping foot inside those city limits would reignite a fire inside. I remembered it from three years before, when we spent a summer getting closer and closer until bam, I had to leave and return to Spain. And the night before I left I let him inside and as soon as I did I didn’t want to leave. Sometimes it still made my bones ache like before the rain.
Now I’m sitting on his couch after a week. My distracted lover. Perhaps I need too much. Better to not need at all. I ponder it all and keep recording. I can’t be anything more than disappointed.
Laura and her business ex-boyfriend both confided in me separately in 2004 that they had had a child together when she was only 19. They gave it up for adoption, and the pain and stress of all that was the final nail in the coffin of their doomed relationship. He tried again and gave her roses after an opera recital. He told me about it. It drove her crazy inside her tiny frame, that looked like it had never seen the light of pregnancy. Laura knew what it was like to grow something inside and make a life. She’s probably a teenager by now, Laura and her business ex-boyfriend’s tiny baby.
I don’t know what that’s like, to birth something so tangible. I just try to do it in song. I try and I try, and then I get discouraged. But not tonight for some reason, things are just falling into place. I love moments like these, aside from the sadness and disappointment that this attractive, kindhearted man probably wasn't going to love me the way that I wanted, while he’s away in his room talking on the phone I’m sitting here on his sofa, recording. Layers upon layers of lightly-brushed melodies. Humming. Plucking harmonic guitar strings. The clacking sound coming from the dryer. Miraculously, it’s all working tonight. Finally I’m making a song worth keeping.
I titled it “Moths” later, after I had left New Orleans the next day and drove to see my cousin. I let my hair go back to brown from blonde, even when Laura had insisted through an older photo comment that I should never not be blonde :) I sent the final copy to him and he understood everything I meant without me having to explain.
Months later I got a friend request from an unrecognizable woman named Katherine. I clicked on her picture to see that Laura was our only thing in common. She was Laura's mother. Her daughter was dead. A drunk driver hit the car Jonathan was driving while Laura was asleep in the backseat. This was the night I sat on his sofa, recording the clacking sound coming from the dryer.
I couldn't bear myself to accept her suffering mother's friend invitation and admit to her that I had never known her daughter. So instead I found the mixed CD she made me for Christmas in 2004 and finally gave it a listen. On the front of the CD she wrote in wobbly handwriting, from your mystery friend.