No spoiler, but this is a true story.
My mom and my Godfather, Uncle D., who was fairly fresh out of minimum security prison, made the two hour drive from my white-flight neighbourhood, Indian Meadows (nicknamed Indian Ghettos) to the University of Missouri, Columbia, (nicknamed Mizzou). I was in the front seat on account of a handy tendency for car-sickness, my feet dustin’ up the dash. I kept my baseball hat low down, pointing due south so as not to be recognised on arrival as the girl in the crappy car riding shotgun with the felon. (As the kids in the neighbourhood were fond to recite, “You can tell’un, he’s a felon”.) I was crying in a whisper all the ride long. Every time I thought of saying goodbye to my sixteen year old boyfriend back home, my heart popped like a bunch of balloons kissed one by one by the tip of a pin.
With me to my dorm room came a state-of-the-art five hundred dollar stereo – the first-place prize I’d scooped from winning a Rap & Rhyme contest at the Northwest Plaza Mall in St. Louis. I’d entered at the last minute, thanks to my brainy friend, Carol D. who thought my poetry skills would naturally extend to rapping, no problem. So I went on stage while she clapped her hands for a beat. I danced a rhythm-free rag-time jig and recited a skilfully explicit poem about watching my Weight-Watcher neighbours go forth and multiply. Fat-a-tat-tat). As it turned out, I had a certain white-trash panache meets NWA delivery and I won.
The stereo aside, I had nonetheless failed to arrive at my freshman year with the requisite Lanz of Salzburg nightgown (a passport to upper class sleepovers and midnight snacks in canopy beds). If you didn’t have one of these it was pretty much a given that you’d walked into college life holding a bag of cheap shit layaway clothes on a pair of motel feet that had never known hotel marble. Yeah, it showed. Broken homes and food stamps are like a pissed-off skunk’s sayonara – you can wash and spray perfume on top but there’s always an unmistakable whiff of poor.
What I did have, however, that stood between me and (non-psychedelic) ego death, was a large Louis Vuitton handbag. Even back then, you would need to put three zeros on your card to own one. Mine was fake, but impossible to tell. I’d tested it a few times at a Louis Vuitton store and shop assistants had reassuringly tried to sell me the matching wallet and luggage. “Already got it at home,” I’d avow. I was not prone to lying, but an extreme aversion to being called out on food stamp candidacy won out.
In my own defence, I was a straight-A kid in every way, paying the bills with a special full-time work permit as young as the State of Missouri would allow. I was as loyal as a de-thorned lion, funny like no child should be, with the wit of the damned. I’d surely cussed out God in a previous life and come back to regret it. In this life, at twelve years old, I’d also said goodbye to my dad in a manner slightly low on savoir faire: Intended as, “See ya later, alligator,” it somehow came out like, “Fuck you, sir.” (Such a fine line between the two…) This was after he stole what little there was of our savings and everything else he could get his hands on while my brother, my mom and I spent the day out at the Six Flags Over Mid-America amusement park. While we rode the Screamin’ Eagle roller coaster and sucked snow cones from blue back into their native white, he kidnapped our childhoods.
Not one week after a successful heist on his own home, he drove into Indian Ghettos in a brand new red Cadillac Coupe de Ville, white interior, thereafter known as Exhibit A. He pulled up in front of the house on Grandview Dr. he was never to lay eyes on again and offered to take us for a spin. You mother fucker. Kid, dog and mortgage fucker. “Leather seats,” he’d said to all those gathered around to see the car that cost more than either the house or his fifty percent of DNA were worth. I shook my head, no-thank-you, went back inside, peeled my life-size David Cassidy poster off the wall and watched my mom cry all over that perfectly fine summer night about how sorry she was that my daddy was gone. “Truthfully,” I told her, “I never liked the guy.”
And so here we were at college, bones grown and grades got after many a summer night switched off like a firefly – just me and mom unpacking my belongings from a suitcase and a black Hefty bag. “You can just fit so much more in these things,” mom had said of the latter with the evanescent enthusiasm of a Willy Loman.
My uncle waited by the car in the campus parking lot with the serene patience of the un-incarcerated, doing to time what it had once done to him – killing it happily. Meanwhile, my mom made up my bed, helped me hang a few posters and reminded me about making A’s so I could get a scholarship and transfer over to Washington University (where she worked) in two years. But she was sucking at the inside of her cheek, and diverting tears into all kinds of places tears don’t normally reside, under her cheeks and beneath her temples – the bones of her face shoring up and tightening against the skin with raw grief filling the marrow.
“I should get going,” she said. “No, mama, no,” I held back, against all inclination. I couldn’t make that woman cry. She’d sacrificed her life for mine in slow motion every day since my dad left. And I’d rewarded her for this by declaring, weekly at least (and once in a Mother’s Day card with unicorns on the front) that when I grew up, I would never be so cruel as to push a child from my womb into this ramshackle life. As she was a woman of most elegant thought, all my mom would ever say back was, “Well I hope you change your mind one day, Lili, because loving you has been the greatest thing that ever happened to me.” To which I would enquire, I regret earnestly, “Exactly how old do you have to be to get a hysterectomy?”
At every opportunity, I’d implored the lord, the categorical gods, destiny’s original child, Fortuna – whoever up there was in charge of, say, small-scale national disasters – to dispose of my shitty home with the flooded basement (you call it a ‘rathskeller’ if your house is on the market). To facilitate its destruction, I’d twist metal hangers together to fashion a lightning rod which I’d push out through my bedroom window and up to the roof whenever a storm brewed and the clouds flashed. “God hear my prayers and strike this house! Leave nothing save the humble folk mopping up the foot of water in the fucking basement!”…“Though come to think of it, you may take my brother if you need proof of purchase.” (But that’s another story.)
I’d waved down passing tornadoes, and there were hundreds, in the same manner as the shipwrecked jump up and down, crossing and uncrossing their palms in the air at the sight of a rescue boat or plane. Hail to the twister, my bestest long-lost friend: “Hey, here I am. Over here!” And as the funnel inevitably hit my lucky neighbour’s house, soon to get a new shag-carpeted den, and shimmied on to trailer parks and hospitals, how I would cry, stranded, “Oh, no, wait! Come back my ‘ol tornado buddy. We woulda had so much fun-nel together.” I was the wizard of Oz-enfreude, inviting pleasure at my own demise. No real power, just an ever ready pun to keep the facts from seeming too dark.
So my mom and I said goodbye at the elevator on the 7th floor of my freshman dorm. It was at this moment I figured out that the only thing worse than wanting to leave home is when your home leaves you. I’d spent most of my life trying to get away or bring hellfire down upon it and yet my emancipation left a hole in my chest large enough to park a red Caddy Coupe de Ville. Some holes never close.
My Louis Vuitton bag, my stereo and I had just started college.
That very first night, a girl from my high-school, M., was going to something called a ‘little sister rush party’ at the Sigma Chi Fraternity house. I had no idea what any of this meant but since my heart was leaning on the rails and mimicking a myocardial infarction each time my head ran past it waving a poster of my mom or my boyfriend back home, I told M. that I’d come along with her. She was very excited, almost covertly so. Apparently, being a Sigma Chi little sister was the highest social status attainable, nearly equivalent to getting into a sorority. M. and I made a deal to stick together at the party, but it wasn’t a draw and swap, so retrospectively, no blood pact, no contractual binding. I get that now.
We had to walk for 20 minutes or so until we arrived at a Gone With The Wind kind of mansion with the front lawn populated by a Ralph Lauren magazine spread with kegs. The girls wore more hair ribbons than an Ozark Mountain child bride. And the boys, oh those Sigma Chi brothers, had enough polo ponies on their shirts and shorts to make the Kentucky Derby thoroughbreds feel like country cousins.
Before you could say, “Seattle Slew,” M. bolted from my side and started talking to a sophomore Sig Chi guy called P. who had a vague resemblance to Jeff Colby from the tv show, Dynasty. I ambled over and introduced myself, discovering that they already knew one another from some summer job they both had. And, as I would later be told, she’d been saving up her virginity in a cherry jar with his name on the label and a panty lace doily banded on the lid.
Kismet…
I strayed from them, ever so briefly, to get a plastic cup of fresh beer. When I returned to the spot where I’d fleetingly interloped their platonic Summer of Love reunion, M. and P. were gone. I looked for them everywhere, at first in the kind of manner that you would look for misplaced keys, squeezing your pockets here and there, lifting up the books on the kitchen table, and then the coat you wore to the store – yet confident they’d surely be somewhere, as you’d let yourself in with them. But as the sun dropped down to the ground like the undone needlepoint belts on the jeans of frat boys all over campus, my scout for M. began to resemble that of a mom who’d turned her back in the toy store for just a moment too long and couldn’t see her kid.
For upwards of forty-five minutes, I frantically asked everyone I saw if they knew where to find M. and P. Finally, someone who enjoyed the idea of where my search was headed and the spectacle of what it was bound to reveal, pointed to the window of a room upstairs in the frat house.
As I made my way up, I was crying and apologising to God for inviting natural disasters and ruination to my childhood home which was now two hours and as many light years away.
I got to P.’s floor and a guy nicknamed ‘Jake the Snake’, showed me to P.’s door. “Here ya go,” he said, “but I wouldn’t try and go in.” I thought about it, or maybe I didn’t, and whilst M. was conceivably getting knocked up on the other side, I biffed the door.
There are knocks and then there are knocks. First you got the soft, “Hey honey, is your headache any better?” variety and then you have the, “You gotta get the fuck out ‘cause there’s a gas leak” model favoured by firemen and sometimes angry, clever folks who know that their spouse is on the other side of the door being neighbourly in a way that usually leads to divorce or a fatal gunshot wound.
I employed the latter, side-knuckle style accompanied by a pleading and uniquely accented verbal montage. “M!” I shouted, “M! Ya’ll need to come outta there so’s you ‘kin start walkin’ home with me now!” No answer. “M.!, I know you’re in there, Ah don’t know where our dang dorm is, we was fixin’ to stick together, but ya dint, I’m pleadin’ with ya, I need t’git home and call my mama, she was cryin’ earlier, I plum forgot ta tell ya, she was cryin’ somethin’ awful”. When I get upset, I start talking like the little kid in Shane. It’s a bad habit I traded for my childhood.
“Go away!”, M.’s voice was muffled and I knew that she was under the covers with her true lover Dynasty doppelganger, having the kind of night (until I entered the narrative) she’d been fantasising about for a year (bar a bit of pain and maybe a minor Rorschach test blood stain to the sheets). She’d be wearing some special bra ‘n panty combo and have done a whole lotta optimistic pre-coital flossing and leg-shaving.
But, truth is, I just didn’t give a shit. I was forlorn, wanting to go home at any cost and she was my only means. So I knocked some more. This was a classic police drug bust knock that normally pancakes the door down. I was a dick, I was the home-sick pussy police. Then P.’s voice reached through the door, taking me by the neck, “What’s your fucking problem? Are you crazy? Can’t you just fuck off?” (all of it, clearly rhetorical, but) he was 19, with his prick in the pie and I’d just introduced him to impotence. Life is not a bowl of cherries, or even a single cherry red Cadillac, white interior. Seminal holes, thrust open, never close.
This was bad. I slunk to the floor with my back on the door, knowing I had made a seriously bad impression on everyone in the frat house who happened to walk by and see me bawling, shouting in a fake Western drawl and stopping nature from taking its (inter)course.
Then from down the hall, someone who had been watching the whole scene ambled over. He was shaking his head and smiling the kind of smile we save for people who are dumber than us, but have provided unintended amusement. He had Darwin’s Superbowl Sunday grin, reserved for the kind of folks who shoot themselves dead with their shotgun whilst impersonating a baton-twirling marionette in a marching band. And yet, here there was also affection.
“Hi, I’m Brad Pitt, ” he said.
He was beautiful at a time when you had to be born that way, and beauty knew it had a job for life with this boy. His face was a gateway drug. His legs, a registered weapon against Planned Parenthood. His smile had a molecular structure – C11 H15 NO2. I felt like I needed to get on a guest list just to talk back.
As he knelt down, he rested his hand on my shoulder. “Look, kid,” he said, “you and I both know what’s going on in that room. You don’t belong in there, you don’t belong out here and the last thing you want is for either of them to come out right about now.”
He was beautiful and wise.
“What was your name again?” I asked. “Brad Pitt,” he said, “from Springfield, Missouri. I’m the social chairman here.”
“I’m Lili,” I told him, “from St. Louis, and I just got here today.” He nodded sagely, his eyes closed just for a second. I took him to be recalling a shiver of his own first day at college that had pushed past his pretty smile and stuck in his heart. “Ok, Lili from St. Louis,” he said, extending a hand to help me up, “why don’t you come with me and we can talk about you maybe being a little sister one day – if you can promise not to carry out any more vice raids – and then I’ll get one of the guys to walk you home.”
Which is just what happened. This boy with the feathered blond hair and the kind of blue eyes that poets lament will be repossessed young by God’s bailiff Mister Death, talked to me about his own life and my life. I may have even mentioned something about why I hated red Cadillacs. He was a gentleman, had a girlfriend called J.R. (foretelling a future role on Dallas), an affinity for Tom Selleck from Magnum, P.I. and, true to his word, he not only got me home, but also invited me to the next little sister rush party in just a few days’ time.
It would be so great if the story ended there; if M. hadn’t come to my dorm room the next day and deployed an official White House government level knock due to the Deflower-Gate scandal that had occurred the night before. I let her in, as she had let P. in, tentatively and braced for medium-level discomfort – so you could look at it like there was some commonality in our experience – though she was not to see it that way. She said, she was yelling again, that I had ‘ruined her night, a night bigger than prom.’ (Bigger than prom! What? prom was small beans. Everything was bigger than prom. A mouse shits bigger than prom). And ‘probably ruined her whole (hole)(ah ha) relationship with P.’ And how she ‘most likely wasn’t gonna get to be a little sister,’ all thanks to me.
There was no purchase in my saying to her, “Well, little sisters probably shouldn’t have sex with their big brothers,” as incest analogies don’t tend to make for a tight defensive line, even as quasi pun-zone cautionary tales. So I just kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I’m so sorry.” And she said, “I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you.” She left at that, and I cried, well, I was crying before she left, but I was discovering that the ‘ol college cry just doesn’t put as much gas in the tank or get you as far as a gallon of high school tears might have done.
You can guess, then, that I didn’t go to the next Sigma Chi Little Sister Rush party with her. I went with a girl from my dorm called Patty. Her sister Rosanna was, I later found out, the little sister of none other than the Brad Pitt guy from Springfield, Missouri.
This rainy little sister night was a pyjama party theme. I walked to the downstairs of the Sig Chi house and saw Brad from across the room wearing a pair of pink and white footie pjs. He opened his arms, tilted his head to the side and shouted over to me, “Ah, she made it!” Just as I went up to say hi, I realised that next to him stood P., M.’s P.! dressed in the inverse white and pink footie pj combo of Brad. The only thing bigger than Brad’s smile was P.’s bite mark. “Oh, right,” P. said, turning hard into me, “the bitch is back. I’m surprised you’d show your face around here again when there’s gotta be an anti-abortion rally you’d rather be at.”
I was wearing a faux satin nightgown that I’d borrowed from someone, and once again very suddenly found myself wanting to return to the long, dusty, fatherless summers of my childhood where at least someone other than me was doing the majority of the fucking up. And unfortunately, my eyes started to fill like our leaky ghetto basement and I cried the mother of all storms – a record September rainfall for a Missouri college town girl. And to think, I hadn’t even cried when my daddy left nor once since, until my first day of college not long past.
P. surprised me then. Fire sale, Milton Friedman free lunch anomaly, nickel draw refreshment. He cut me the deal of all deals and hugged me. He took my hand, and like Brad had done only 48 hours or so before, he said, “Come with me, let’s talk.” We stayed up all night doing no more and no less. The hem of my gown stayed down, his lips did not mine do part. I learned the secret password to the Magnum, P.I. room. And as he walked me home we stomped in the rain through the flooded town gutters. Happy floods. Some floods are for mops and buckets and the clean-up of the damned, but others are for bare feet and sweet rolled up dawns.
It was kinda lost on me then, but not forever, how the grace of two college boys could so swiftly untangle the twisted metal from a v8 Cadillac running over the fantasy of father-daughter dances and into single-mother sweet sixteen parties, limited crowd, in a damp rathskeller (so called if you’ve got guests).
Does it help to know that P. came back to my room, took off the cuff wet jeans he’d walked me home in, and climbed cold into my bed to fall asleep listening to James Taylor’s Greatest Hits on my soft porn-won stereo? Is it of more than a passing interest to say that M. stopped by at 8:00 am and let herself into my room without any kind of knock because she’d seen me talking to P. the night before and was proper vexed? And what she saw was 100 percent innocent, but not the 110 percent innocent required for those tender early days of virginity lost.
There was screaming (Her). And crying (both Her and Me). There was southern twanged contrition (Me). Apology (Me). Apoplexy (Her). The moist buds of misogyny (P). The violent throwing across the room of a certain exceedingly innocent Louis Vuitton bag (Her). Righteous indignation (the LV bag). The soft sung line of irony, “Ain’t it good to know you’ve got a friend” (James Taylor). A sense of injustice at un-knocked trickery and failure to perform its duties (the door).
But the real climax was the next day, at the Mizzou McDonald’s, one of the largest in the world. It stood in a part of campus known as ‘FacePlace’, as you went there to see and be seen. I was wrung out, done with Columbia, Missouri life after only a few days. Misstepping left and right like Mama Cass on a minefield of buried sandwiches. I was sitting in a plastic booth, lonesome, failing at college before taking my first test. Gaining succour only from large fries and a Filet o’Fish ordered properly, with the tarter sauce on the side so they have to make it fresh. This was so when you lifted the bun for the solemn sauce-filet union, there would be a puff o’ steam – the eighth wonder of the world for poor people. But I digress, as the next moment still gets me in the gut:
Halfway through my happy ritual, a voice rang out across the packed McDonald’s: It was M., and despite not having had any high school Debate or Drama Club experience, her projection was phenomenal: “Whore! She’s a whore,” (pointing at me, obviously), “take a good look! Her name’s Lili – keep her away from your boyfriend!” Talk about a fry-by. I was seriously starting to long for my old Indian Ghettos’ days when, whether someone fired a gun as they drove past, or robbed your house wearing a ski mask, or busted through your windows with baseball bats – it wasn’t taken personally. It was just a sign’o the times.
I ran outside, sat down on a step, put on the dark shades that someone generous had given me as a graduation present and stared right into the sun. Sun of a gun. I was really gonna need those straight-A grades to transfer the hell out of this college as soon as possible. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and a familiar voice asked, “Hey, are those Persol glasses?” “Yep, they are,” I answered, and Brad Pitt said to me, “Then keep them on for a while and you’ll be just fine.” He sat down beside me, and I was.
The End