July 12, 2002

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  Sex and yucky stuff in here.  Faint hearts and weak stomachs, beware.

  
  

  Statch was driving a cab when I met him. He drove me to work, then came back later for dinner, and started eating there regularly. He was there a lot after we got acquainted. He asked me out. He asked me repeatedly. I turned him down because I had a boyfriend, Earl. Earl was special. I was determined to keep him happy. So Statch became my friend. He might not have become my lover even if Earl had never been around. Statch wasn’t my type, didn’t turn me on.

  
  

  I can’t say why that was… he wasn’t bad looking, and he had charisma, but for me there was no chemistry. Back then, chemistry was everything. Redheads seem to have a stronger urge to breed than the rest of you. We’ve got a reputation for it, y’know? In my breeding years, the genetic imperative was a strong impulse in me. I didn’t think consciously about the parental potential of any of the men I went with. My hormones did the choosing and the guys’ pheromones determined my choice. I guess maybe Statch just didn’t smell right.

  
  

  He was generous and funny and smart, though, and he knew how to be a friend. Marie had gone off “temporarily” with Bobbi, and I wanted to get her back with me. I just didn’t know how to come up with the money to get a place of my own again, and find a full-time sitter I could afford. Most sitters made more an hour than I did and my tips would barely support me.

  
  

  I didn’t feel confident in my ability to keep winning at craps, and I wanted to avoid stealing as much as possible–too risky. I dealt with the problem by shoving it out of my mind. Statch and I would sit and kick around ideas until I couldn’t stand it any more. I’d say, “That’s enough! I’ll think about it tomorrow.” He started calling me Scarlett, after the heroine of Gone with the Wind: “Fiddle dee dee, tomorrow is another day.” Gently, he’d try to remind me that problems wouldn’t go away by themselves, but I couldn’t face that. I denied it. I believed a miracle would happen, my ship would come in.

  
  

  Statch’s real name was Larry Crissman. The nic was short for statutory, as in rape. I only heard the bare facts of the case that put him in jail for a while, not details, but he must have been pretty young at the time, because we were near the same age.

  
  

  Sometime that fall, he lost the cab job, I think for drinking on the job.

  
  

  I didn’t know then, and don’t think I questioned at the time, how he made his livelihood after that. When we talked, it was always about my troubles. Sometimes he drove his father’s truck, and I supposed he got support from his parents. Thinking back on some patterns in his lifestyle, I think he might have been stealing cars and taking them out of state. He also may have been pimping.

  
  

  He offered to pimp for me. He made the offer soon after we met, when he learned of my need for more cash. I rejected it and he never brought it up again. But after Dusty moved out and I fucked up and let the man Earl left to watch over me talk me into the sack, I brought it up to Statch. By then, he’d grown reluctant. I think he’d grown to want me all to himself, actually. But Statch was a realist. He assured me he wouldn’t stick me with someone kinky, and he found me a “date”.

  
  

  It was supposed to be an all-nighter. I barely made it through one time. It was another paunchy, balding “old” guy who smelled bad and had trouble getting it up. We were both embarrassed and I was crying when I told him I couldn’t stand to stay the night. He comforted me and made sure I understood he wasn’t going to pay for an all-nighter. I got out of there with $40.00. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. But I never realized until I started telling these stories just how much I did. When you’re in denial, you don’t know where you are.

  
  

  This occurred just days before Kennedy was shot. Like everyone else. I remember where I was. I heard about the shooting while the motorcade was on its way to Parkland Hospital and the president’s condition was still unknown. The radio was on a shelf over the chopping block in the back room of the Buggy Whip Drive-In, where I was slicing onions to make onion rings. Some of the initial reactions to the news were happy. Kennedy was not especially popular in Kansas. Talked funny, y’know? And a Papist!

  
  

  I found the apartment near work just as the eviction was up at the place Dusty and I had shared. The rent was more than my share of our pad had been, but I could cover it. Statch helped me move, and he came over once in a while to see me, but he was making long trips out of town for unspecified reasons. I didn’t see him often, but when he was in town there were sometimes two or three days in a row that he’d pick me up for lunch at the all-you-can-eat buffet, catch a matinee downtown, then take me to work. I was managing the Buggy Whip on the evening shift, cooking, ordering supplies and supervising two car hops. The raise in pay didn’t make up for the tips I lost, but I needed to take the less strenuous job. I’d been getting sick again.

  
  

  Pain, tingling, partial paralysis sometimes, especially upon waking… no conclusive diagnosis, but several scary possibilities such as MS and cranial aneurism. When similar symptoms had plagued me in school, the docs had called it glandular fever. One of them thought it was rheumatic fever. It had earned me an excuse from PE from 5th grade until I dropped out in my sophomore year. I’d gotten better during my first pregnancy, and even my lifelong hay fever had cleared up. The second pregnancy seemed to have undone whatever healing magic the first one had done, and I hadn’t been quite up to par since that third bout of chicken pox I’d shared with the girls the past January.

  
  

  There had been a quick trip to the ER one time in the fall. Severe pain in my side, found to be caused by an abandoned tampon–probably forgotten in the heat of passion. It had been pushed ‘way up in there and had fermented. PID stands for pelvic inflammatory disease. That was the first of three of those for me. Nasty, but on the bright side that first one was enough to teach me to remember to check for tampons in place before placing a fresh one, and before sex. The antibiotics I took for the PID made me sick, too. *sigh*

  
  

  In the ER I was tested for STD (it was still VD, then) and got a call one day to come into the VD clinic. The test had come back positive. (su-prize, su-prize) That trip and several more trips for penicillin shots took care of the gonorrhea. The worker who interviewed me got the dubious pleasure of trying to contact my seventeen named contacts from the preceding few months. Word got back to me through the grapevine that the wife of one of them had not been amused. Another lesson for Scarlett O’Hara in the hazards of promiscuity.

  
  

  I was paying rent on a furnished apartment by the week. I’d chosen it because they would accept weekly payment and also because the cost of utilities was included. I could not have paid a month’s rent and utility deposits, so I was shelling out more than a comparable place would have cost, for the privilege of doing so in smaller payments. One day I passed an old house with a “studio for rent” sign. On impulse I checked it out.

  
  

  The building could have used some paint inside and out. The carpet on the stairs was ragged and there was none in the upstairs hall. The toilet and bath were shared with two other upstairs residents, but the rent was less than half of what I paid at the other place, and it came with a TV. There was a full-size old iron bed in the main part, with the TV on the dresser at its foot. Through an archway was a small table, one chair, and a small fridge and stove.

  
  

  On my day off, Statch helped me move. As we were packing up at the old place, Statch made another of his occasional passes at me and I decided to give him a charity fuck. It wasn’t bad. The cuddle afterwards was very nice. There was some nuzzling and fondling as we completed the packing.

  
  

  A wizened old man peeked through lace curtains downstairs as we hauled my clothes and meager household items in. Upstairs, we met one of my neighbors in the hall. He was kinda creepy looking, and smelled like death, but he seemed friendly. Statch suggested that I try to avoid the guy. Didn’t “like his looks.” Neither did I, really.

  
  

  Statch was to leave the next day for one of his trips. The more I think about it, the more inclined I am to believe he was running a stolen vehicle to the next state. It wasn’t a pleasure trip, and the business was unstated. He could have, I suppose, been running anything over there. I’m a lot more curious about it now than I was then. It wasn’t my business so I didn’t bother my head about it. Hmmm. Who was that girl? She was so unlike me.

  
  

  My legs were burning and aching from so many trips up and down stairs and I felt a little feverish as I lay on the bed to watch The Outer Limits. It was about giant intelligent ants. I nodded off watching it and had a fever dream about *guess what*. When I woke, I couldn’t get out of bed. I faded in and out of consciousness a few times there. Eventually, I made it into the kitchen for a drink of water, and at some point I managed to get to the bathroom in the hall, by hanging onto the walls all the way.

  
  

  I completely lost track of time. When the fever went down and I was able to stand, I looked for something to eat. I had a box of tea bags, a few cups of sugar, and a bottle of ketchup. I lived on sweet tea and ketchup soup for a while. I slept a lot. After a few days of that, I was able to clean up the dried vomit down the side of the bed and on the floor. Then I slept a lot more.

  
  

  One day I heard someone bounding up the stairs two at a time, and then a pounding on the door and my name called out. It was Statch. He’d gone to my workplace first, and learned that no one had seen me since he had left. None of them knew my new address. My boss had hired someone to replace me. It had been over two weeks. I had lost close to thirty pounds.

  
  

  The first thing he did was go out and buy me three hamburgers. Yummmmy! By then, I was steadier on my feet and my appetite was back. We had a few days of companionable fun together and then he left on another trip.

  
  

  I found a day job Monday to Friday washing dishes at a cafe in the industrial district, and got back on carhopping at Town and Country at night. I found a 14-foot travel trailer with lights and plumbing, for rent in an alley just a block from my day job. The cook there, Mrs. Fields, taught me several of the culinary secrets that have helped to make me the prize-winning cook and baker I am now.

  
  

  Lots of time passed. One day a cab driver asked me if I’d heard about Statch and his friend. They had been killed in a car wreck on a mountain road in Colorado a few days after I’d last seen him.

  
  

  Thus ends the Statch story. What is notable about it for me is that I literally had not thought about Statch for years. I took on guilt for his death. In retrospect, that is absurd. As my mind worked at the time, it makes sense.

  
  

  It hurt to think about him, so I quit thinking about him. When I started writing this story, I couldn’t recall his real name. It came to me as I wrote, as did several details that had been “don’t recall” passages in my first draft. Now Statch’s voice and smile, and the way he threw his head back to get the hair out of his eyes, are vivid in my memory. I have no reason to forget him again. He lives in my heart.

  • 3:58 am
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