Diana and Joe 1: Here We Go Again

But this time, it's not about ME having sex, so feel free to snigger publicly.

The time was the summer of 93. We had a pretty good house, and a set of pretty good lives, and we didn't need a lot of money (which was good, because nobody was really doing a lot of job hunting). We had friends, and more importantly, we had a few female friends who would eventually get frustrated because there was no toilet paper, or nothing to eat, and would arrive laden with groceries. This sounds like a fairy tale, I know, especially since none of us were in rock bands or anything, but I swear, it happened regularly. And by "regularly," I mean, like, 3 times. But that makes you feel good, boys and girls, because that means someone cares enough to want you to stay alive--whereas the rest of the presents I've gotten in my life (from cocaine and crystal to Jim Beam and Kid Rock records) have all tended to shorten it.

So we were feeling good, my roommates and I. It was an old two bedroom house, with one bathroom which was accessible only through the bedrooms, and the fuses would blow if you tried to run two air conditioners at once, but we loved it. In retrospect, there was a sense of community there that I don't think I've ever recovered, til the Burn.

In the North Bedroom (from North to South): Joe and me. Joe was a sort of proto-goth (in that he liked large doses of LSD and Skinny Puppy, and dyed his hair purple) that I'd met at New Orleans Cafe, somehow. Joe drove a 68 LTD, maroon and rust, and had spent the money for fixing the headlights and brakes on something called a "Bass Cannon," which was some sort of subwoofer that made the back seat of the car fairly unliveable unless you had previously ingested LSD. Which was fine by me.

In the South Bedroom (also wik): Bob and Jim. Jim, being the first of the roommates to arrive, had appropriated the spot near the south window, which will come into play later when I tell you the story of the guy who attempted to steal my weedeater. Jim you already know, or know of, through a few other stories here.

Bob was a bit of an enigma. His claim to fame was that he had a head shaped almost identically to Butthead's, except with a slightly less offensive sneer on his face. Bob was older than we were, but didn't look like it--in fact, he looked younger and inoffensive, almost...innocent. This belied the fact that by far, he was the most amoral among us, and prone to the oddest eccentricities. He loved fucking with people who were inebriated, and to that end, he'd often start drinking late in the party, just to make sure he had the edge. Occasionally, he would disappear for a week or so, and return to his ex wife, where they would try once again to make a go of a relationship that probably kept foundering on his sheer perversity.

All of these guys, in other words, were people of my own stripe.

Jim was dating a girl named Becky, and Becky had a couple of friends named Diana and Jessie (actually, that's not Jessie's real name, but I've been sitting here for 10 minutes and I can't think of it, so Jessie she is), and Diana had a friend named Jennifer. These were the main features, so to speak, along with Tiffany the Younger and Lisa, AKA Peppermint Patty, who were both New Orleans Cafe kids.

[For those obsessively keeping track of names here, TTY is called that to differentiate her from TFTSOK (Tiffany from the Story of Kim)]

Now, it's important to realize that these girls were sort of off limits sexually, for various reasons. I can't speak for the other boys, but for me, they were either dumb, obsessively...moral (by which I mean they were still intent on being virgins til their wedding night, which is fine, really, but it kind of weirds me out in a way I can't describe without even MORE parenthetical expressions and obscure punctuation)...or had some extremely annoying characteristic (which I'll get to in a bit). Also, yes, none of them seemed too inclined to sleep with us (at least, initially).

So it was a happy summer, full of drugs and gallon jugs of wine, loud Ministry and Fugazi and Prodigy. Looking back, I honestly can't remember a time that summer when there was sexual tension between me and ANY of these women, except for...well, come to think of it, there was quite a bit, but this will be a long story.