She bleached her hair. And her eyebrows to match. That way the illusion of her being a blonde was much more convincing. She admitted the ruse to me a long time before I would learn firsthand that the carpet didn’t match the drapes, and so I was forced to wonder if she really meant it when she said “I love you” before she boarded the 737 that would take her out of my life forever.
It’s embarrassing, really, to think of those two kids all those years ago, standing there in an airport with their hair teased so high that their heads were twice as big as those of normal humans, wearing ripped jeans and leather jackets, with their makeup starting to run as small tears formed in the corners of their eyes. Two kids playing rock-and-roll dress-up and passionately kissing like the shameless exhibitionists they wanted to be—and yet I wondered if her feelings were real because she was actually a natural brunette.
That 737 really did take her out of my life forever, you know. She said she’d be back in the spring, but I knew she’d never return. Not because of me, but not for me either. It was just who she was. We both knew it, and that gave us the freedom to say the L-word out loud with impunity, as strangers late for their connections scurried by, surreptitiously glancing our way with voyeuristic curiosity.
I hid the major waterworks from her until she had boarded the plane, saving them for the drive back from Chicago to Carbondale in the freezing cold of a piece-of-shit Chevy Monza with a busted heater. I fiddled with the FM dial desperately trying to find something other than Top 40, eventually landing on a station playing Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. I laughed out loud as I realized that I had just recreated the intro to the song in real time, right there in my own car. It was one of those “Don’t make me laugh” laughs, a contrived line from some bubblegum movie where the squeaky-clean best friend tries to cheer up the suffering and reluctant hero who just wants to be left alone in his misery. Goddammit, my glorious, breaking, heavy metal heart just got turned into a film starring Anthony Michael Hall.
We played the letter writing game for a while until the moment of lost contact had passed by us imperceptibly, and then I had grown up and got married and had had kids and my pants had gotten wider than they were long and the piece-of-shit Monza had long since turned into a minivan with plenty of heat and a DVD player to boot.
Then one day it happens, right out of the blue. My thirteen-going-on-thirty-year-old daughter comes into the living room while I’m watching Jeopardy! and asks me if she can color her hair blonde, and all of a sudden there I am in a Chevy Monza driving through the gray, flat landscape of northern Illinois in October of nineteen eighty-something, salty black streams of tears mixed with eyeliner flowing down my cheeks as I try to keep it together and not plow into the back of a semi.
My daughter asks me again, thinking I didn’t hear her the first time. I argue for a little bit, pretending like I actually give a crap about the color of her hair, but in reality I’m just secretly thankful she didn’t ask me to buy her a hundred-dollar ticket to see some godawful boy band or a six pack of lacey thongs or some other painfully stereotypical thing that makes thirteen-going-on-thirty-year-old girls utterly unbearable. Eventually I “give in” and let her bask in the glow of her imagined victory. But the damage has already been done and now I can’t shake the image of those two young punks splitting their timeline into two new universes twenty-some odd years ago at Gate B6 of O’Hare International Airport.
I know better, but I do it anyway. This whole internet thing that sprung up between then and now could let me find her and send her a little note telling her that my suburban domestication had become so complete and irreversible that I actually liked it and wouldn’t trade it for the world and by the way how have you been all these years and what is it that you do now and are you married and are there any kids and on and on.
I hesitate before typing her name into the search engine, wondering if this is the moment I turn into Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty, and then I convince myself that no it’s not, that I really am content with my minivan and with shopping at box stores on the weekends and the whole nine yards. I’m not looking to hook up, no midlife crisis, none of that. I just want to know that that other parallel universe that split off from mine is still out there living its life, that’s all—any life, whether that be the life of a billionaire’s trophy wife, a devout Sufi mystic…or maybe she’s still single and the same carefree little sprite she was back in the day.
I can’t find her. No e-mail address, no Facebook, nothing. I think, “Good for her”, and congratulate her on her somehow being able to stay off the grid.
But of course now I really have to know. She’s become a mystery, one I’ve got to solve so that it won’t gnaw at me every time I see my thirteen-going-on-thirty-year-old daughter brushing her counterfeit golden locks and making snide remarks about my bad taste in music. My bad taste in music. The nerve.
Eventually some convoluted clicking of link after link brought about by I-can’t-remember-what bizarre combination of search words eventually lands me on an archived newspaper column from February of 1993 about the Denver music scene. She’s mentioned almost parenthetically in the last two paragraphs of a not-very-well-written piece, mostly chronicling the rise and fall of some grunge band with “Pirate” in its name:
Christine Clay, 25, a cocktail waitress at the Hornet’s Nest, passed away at home last Wednesday morning, apparently as a result of a heroin overdose.
“She was not a junkie, she was not a drug addict,” says Rick Trumbaugh, Clay’s brother-in-law. “ There are a lot of questions, but apparently someone had seen a rig in her purse the night before and said, ‘What are you doing, what is this?’ And she said she just had to get it out of her system, and she was only going to do it this one time. She was alone when she did it. There are no answers to this.”
I immediately think about the bittersweet last week we spent together before she left, ending the Sunday morning I rolled over and gently woke her up. I think about how we got dressed in silence and how the long drive to O’Hare didn’t bring us any words either. I think about waiting with her at the gate before she boarded, about the announcer calling her seat, our subsequent kiss and embrace, about her looking up to me and saying between simpers, “I love you, Sandy,” for the first and last time in her life. I remember standing there watching, frozen by the fear of my continued existence without her, as she walked down the gangway without turning to look back. I think about what things could have transpired in the few short years that remained in her life after that moment, and about how much or how little she thought of me in those last years. I picture her shooting up while sitting on a used couch in a dingy Denver apartment, and I think about whether she was frightened as she died alone, or if she just painlessly slipped into unconsciousness.
It’s then that I realize that Eros isn’t the graceful, master archer of Greek mythology, but a seedy tattoo artist who indelibly etches images of pinups into your hippocampus. And that love can never be forgiven, only forgotten—if you should live long enough to forget, that is.
So there I am just having learned of the death of my little not-natural-blonde more than twenty years after the fact—trying not to completely fall apart from the barrage of melancholia that the belated news has brought on—when little miss thirteen-going-on-thirty somehow walks in without my seeing her and says “Dad…”, startling me so much that I nearly jump straight up into the air. The worry that my impressionable young daughter will see me crying black, makeup-soaked tears besieges me, and I smile nervously in a sloppy attempt to mask my feelings. I start to giggle a little when I realize that I haven’t worn a smack of eyeliner since Gate B6.
Then the little giggle breaks out into a full uncontrollable laugh as miss thirteen-going-on-thirty indignantly asks me, “Daddy! Are you looking at porn?”
I fucking hate Anthony Michael Hall movies.