I have written so many things over the last few weeks, but have had trouble finishing. I apologize for the delay.
The summer before I was starting junior high, we moved across town from where we had been living. I was not sure if I would know anyone there. I found exactly one person I knew and that was my hunting partner, Kevin. Kevin’s dad and my dad hunted together, therefore Kevin and I hunted together. We did not do much hanging out on our own, but he invited me to sit with him in the cafeteria at lunch on day one and I was so grateful to not have to sit alone.
I was thirteen, I pretty much had a new crush every day, but my first junior high crush really stands out.
I saw Kristi the first day of junior high after leaving my first class in nineteen eighty-two. I do not recall what she was wearing specifically that day, but she often wore a bow tie or a long polo tie, with a nice button down polo shirt. Her posture was perfect, which later made sense as she was a violin player and a ballet dancer. Her hair was shoulder length, dark brown, big and feathered. She was always surrounded by friends that were all dressed in expensive brands, mainly izod and polo. I looked at the cool boys shoes and noticed Puma were a big brand. I was wearing Kmart brand sneakers.
Even though Kristi was my first junior high crush, I never considered trying to know her. It was just too far away. Any time I would see her, angels would sing, but I made exactly zero effort to work my way into her world.
At some point early in that school year, my mom sat me down and had a talk with me. She told me I could not be wearing the same thing to school multiple times a week and especially back to back days. She said that was fine in elementary, but not in junior high. I told her, I had no choice, I had no clothes. She looked in my dresser and closet and was shocked to find that she agreed. She took me to the mall and spent a little over a hundred dollars on clothes for me. I got two pairs of Ocean Pacific corduroy shorts, two or three Ocean Pacific t-shirts and a couple of other cool looking t-shirts that had checkerboard on them.
While we were in the Hallmark store looking at other things, my mom noticed I was not carrying the bags of clothes she had bought me. I had accidentally put them down somewhere. We frantically back-tracked and spent a long time looking for them, asking lost and found, store clerks, but we never found them. She was very angry and I was very sad. I still had no clothes, I knew my mom did not have the money to buy me those clothes and it was my fault.
That Christmas I asked for only one thing, Puma shoes. I needed to have cool shoes. Christmas morning came and I already knew I had the shoes because I had picked them out, but now I would get to actually wear them. They were exactly like these pictured, but white leather, a blue puma logo and dark gray soles. I expected these shoes to change my status. They largely went unnoticed, but one kid that had a locker next to mine commented after about a week of wearing them. “I’ve never seen those with gray soles” he said, and that made my day.
When I first began songwriting in my early twenties, one of the first girls I wanted to write about was Kristi. I wrote these lyrics, but I never recorded the song. I was new to songwriting and therefore was just stealing melodies from other songs. In my head, these lyrics were sung mostly to the melody of, “Twin Falls,” by Built to Spill. When I wrote something I knew I could not use, I just marked it up as a writing exercise and moved on.
YOUTUBE - TWIN FALLS - BUILT TO SPILL
A weird thing to write, being in my mid-twenties. I was so dramatic, but I still am I suppose.
My parents divorced when I was six. It was not a smooth divorce and it was not a pleasant household at the time. I went to the same church all of my youth. In the divorce my mom, along with my sister and I got to keep the church. My dad needed to find a new place to go to church if he wanted to go.
Some would disagree with this, but my father was an alcoholic. He was just a fun drunk more often that he was a bad drunk, but he was pretty much some level of drunk any time I was around him. It was the main reason for my parents divorce. He even took his own alcohol to restaurants that did not serve alcohol and they knew him well enough to just let it slide. He would drink and drive with me and my sister on road-trips. His favorite joke was conveying how far a trip was by how many beers he drank. Someone would ask how far a trip was and he’d say, “About eight beers”. My mom got angry when she found he was drinking with us in the car and yelled at him that he was not allowed to do that. This seems crazy today, but in the seventies it was pretty standard. The next time we went on a road trip with him, my mom asked me if he drank on the trip. I said, no he was on a real health kick and just drank gallons of orange juice. She knew better and tore him a new asshole over the phone.
My dad grew up with a preacher for a father and my dads brother became a preacher as well. When he was single he never really went to church. Then he started dating a woman that went to church, so he started going again.
He wanted me to go to his new church with him and his girlfriend. He took me to an event at the church, maybe a carnival. I do not recall, but it was mainly for kids. I was in the church gymnasium and in walked Kristi. She knew me kind of, so she just came over and started talking to me like it was a totally normal thing to do. I nearly fainted. All of the sudden I wanted to go to this church every chance I got. Kristi and I hung out at church regularly an I even got used to it and stopped freaking out about it internally. It did not carry over to school. She was not snobby like that, so I do not think it was for any reason. We just did not have any classes together and our lockers were not near each others.
One morning, around 5am, my dad and I were heading out to duck hunt. The drive was around an hour to the place we normally hunted and it was still dark. We usually sat in silence, while Johnny Cash played while we rumbled down dirt roads in his two-tone Chevy Silverado truck. That morning out of the blue, he turned down the stereo and just casually told me he planned to die by the time he was sixty. He said it like this was a normal thing to tell a teenage boy. He told me he did not want to live through any physical hardships and would rather be gone by the time it came to that. He knew his drinking, smoking and diet would take a toll and he knew there was no winding back the clock, so he just wanted to just continue the way he was and enjoy the time he had left. I asked him how old he was and he probably said something like forty-seven or forty-eight and I thought, oh, sixty is a long time from now.
It was not too long after that that my father passed. He had a heart attack at a party. He was on the dance floor and just dropped. Aside from being way earlier than sixty and a buzzkill to the party goers, it was a perfect way for him to go.
When he passed, that marked the end of me going to that church and the end of seeing Kristi outside of school.
Later, I wrote another song about her and it would occasionally show up in a live set. After my album WOLF, I was having a bit of writers block. I was aching to get into the studio, so I decided I would record a bunch of songs that had never made it onto an album. I ended up making an album of some of those songs and calling it, Split Ends. I quietly nudged it out into the world.
This song about Kristi is my favorite performance on the album. I was running through a bunch of songs, solo in the studio to see what might stick. After finishing a take of another song that was satisfactory, the engineer talked into my headphones and asked what the next song was and I looked at my list and told him, “Pros of Divorce”. I delivered a take. The engineer came back in the headphones and said, well no need for another take, you’re not going to do any better. It made the album, because I feel like I really let the song swallow me whole and was surprised to find myself a bit emotional by the end of it.
While looking for Kristi in my old year books, I am reminded that I was graced with the nickname Cheryl for a while.
Recently I saw that Kristi passed away. I was a bit devastated by the news. I never knew her, so it feels weird to be devastated. Still, I feel like part of my childhood died with her, if that makes any sense. I would look at her obituary page that had no obituary and no comments. I did not know anything about her. Did she ever marry? Did she have kids? I knew somewhere people had to be mourning, but seeing an empty obituary page was making me so sad. I looked at it multiple times a day for a few weeks. Not one comment. I wanted to comment, but that seemed weird seeing that I did not actually know her. Then someone noted that their family had planted one hundred trees in her honor and that made me happy.
As you get older you really stop to ask yourself if you are a person who has made an impact on enough lives. I think ahead to my death. I think about the fact that my dad bought his wife a plot next to him before he passed. I think about the fact that she then transferred that plot to me as she moved away and was not going to use it. My mom was buried near my dad and my grandparents and great grandparents are all in this cemetery in a town none of us live in and rarely visit.
On one hand it would be cool to reside next to my dad as a bit of a brag that I lived longer than he did. One the other hand, nah.
This is a shitty detail to throw in at the end of this story, but my first day back to school after my dad died, my English teacher said to me in front of the class that I was going to end up drunk and dead, just like my father. Something I kept to myself at the time because had I told anyone, all hell would have broken loose and I desperately needed no more hell breaking loose. I walked out of class and went to the principals office, I told him I needed to move to a new class today and that I was not going to provide an explanation. He obliged. I did however have to see that bitch every Sunday in church for the next several years.
Here is the track about Kristi. I owe you a lighter story next time and now I am wondering if I said that the last time. Thank you for listening.
PROS OF DIVORCE
They painted a line down
Down the middle of the town
And we had to move out
When they sold the house
My mom got an old house
About a mile from the old house
My dad got an apartment
Across town
My dad got a new girlfriend
And they joined a new church
And every other weekend
They would take me there
And that’s where I saw her
And that’s when my heart sank
Pretty as a picture
If pictures are any gauge
One day in a black dress
At Sunday service
Her violin solo
Made me believe in love
It was the last time I saw her
Soon after my dad died
And I never stepped foot
In that church again
Kristi, front row, center.