SATMATC 1: Alethea

When I was 20 years old, I ended my first live-in relationship, with a girl named Alethea. This isn't precisely her story, but I have to give you a bit of background to make everything fall into place.

Jeebus. This is a story I really want to tell, as evinced by the fact that I just deleted two paragraphs of superfluous background material that was pretty damn good. Just too far back. Let's try this again:

In August of 1992, Alethea and I moved from our apartment on the far west side of town to a more...centrally located area. We got a cheap house ($225/month), and she spent the better part of the summer decoratin' it all up and playing married. I can't even remember what caused the relationship to deteriorate, now. She was crazy, but not irredeemably crazy, and she didn't like how much I worked, but there's no point in the relationship that I could point to and say "this is what went wrong." It just went wrong. During an ill-fated "trial separation," in which we basically tried to go out and fuck other people without the other one knowing, she left most of her stuff there at my house. And since it was ALL her stuff, that made life easier on me. Her one request, and the one I abided by, was "don't sleep with other girls on our bed," which seemed to me a little melodromatic, but then again maybe that's why I'm still living alone, 12 years later.

Anyway. I did hook up with a very attractive young woman named Mary (this is Mary #2, if you've somehow gotten ahold of an earlier version of something I wrote entitled "Girls"), but was able to do the business with her in a variety of other places. I promise, this comes into play later on (much later on). This is not a sex blog. Yet.

Things began to get hairy in September or October, for a lot of reasons. I was dealing with being alone for the first time in my life, and I didn't really have any friends to speak of. My work people were great guys, but let's face it: they cut grass for a living. Not much interesting there. Jim had actually been fooling around with Alethea, so I was in kind of a weird place with him (in retrospect, it's funny, but at the time I felt betrayed). I turned to writing bad poetry on an old IBM XT clone (sucker would get up to 8Mhz if you punched the turbo button), and drinking lots and lots of beer. It's prose now, and Todd has got me drinking more vodka, but other than that, not much has changed.

It all finally came to a head in late October; I was miserably alone, I hated my job, and I was in a terrible financial spot facing the winter in a freezing old house in a strange part of town (the house on 36th Street). I decided that the thing to do was go on vacation. That's what vacations are for, right? Recharging, getting away from all our mundane problems, getting some perspective. Yes, that's what I needed.

Now, it's interesting. I was an adult, living by myself, working and supporting myself, but I planned my excursion in such a way that it would not be evident to my mother that I was not in the state. I have a rather opinionated mother, who would no doubt offer all sorts of pointed reasons why I shouldn't do this, and since I was only 2 years out of her house, I'm sure she'd want me to check in with her every night. So, instead of deal with the arguments that would ensue, I just sneaked out of town. In some ways, I guess I wasn't as old as I thought.

Oh, and there was also this sheet of LSD I was going to sell. There was a financial aspect involved, too.