Memories of The Queen

Our teenage monarchy was ruled by a queen. Her black widow lipstick and waterfall onyx hair over her left eye, wrists punched thru t-shirts to made them large and worn thin. Black leggings on thick Latina thighs with knee high boots laced tightly still race through my mind. You don’t understand, but everyone loved Valentina. Her name could leave a left a watermark on your heart if her half hidden smile didn’t.

Hey, I said its all right.. you know I won’t forget all the time I waited patiently for you..

In the frame house with wooden floors the walls were filled with gold rimmed picture frames with cardboard backing. They were the kind you would buy at the dime store to put your school portraits with crossed eyes and missing teeth and seriously bad hair in. These pictures were taken at various times of life ranging for the sickeningly sweet age of 5 or 6 to the zit riddled awkwardness of early pre-teen, to the cap and gown with fake bookshelves behind you. All three girls had their own spot on various walls. It felt like home even though you were only a visitor. It was where you‘d raid the fridge, watch the tube, sneak cigarettes in the back yard and get holy water thrown on you periodically by the mother who shook her head and begged God to bless these creatures that had taken over her daughter’s life with Mohawks, safety pins, black hair dye and music that sounded like the opening of old tombs in the graveyard. It was only later when I got older and had my own beautiful daughter that I understood the gesture of the holy water as benign. There was nothing better than having a house full of teenagers eating my food and filling the bedrooms with laughter long into the stretching fall evenings of suburbia.

I’m not sure how I fit in those days. I was a girl, but my budding had yet to really blossom. I was rallying around the ugly duckling story for almost 16 years and nothing ever became of that happy ending. I tried in vain to follow her cues, bought the same looking clothes, but couldn’t help that the t-shirts didn’t fall as gracefully off my chest and that the leggings hugged my dimpling fat and would roll over the mound of my stomach filled with Yoo hoo and tiny chocolate donuts. My constant struggle made me tug  She had unknowingly made every nuance of femininity follow her.   It clung to her hips and sparkled in her one visible, not covered with a waterfall of hair eye. Her hands were like bird wings ever scribbling in her secret notebooks filled with poetry and lust, when they weren’t pushing away her shock of bangs away from her face. I have to say I felt like a 2 X 4 standing next to her, but I was totally in love with every strange and charming thing she ever said and did. If I would have been older and could have seen the eyes of every person I called my friend light up when she walked in the room I could have been president of her fan club and the membership would be forever growing in numbers.

On this one particular afternoon we stood shirtless in her bedroom carefully tearing, cutting and safety pinning our t shirts to make them more acceptable. Her best stretch was when she would take her knee and shove it into the arm pit of the poor pitiful rag and pull, teeth gritting with all her might, hearing the satisfying crackle of seams splitting, causing unraveling black threads to slowly domino out of their carefully sewn rows.

My memories flash to different moments, now that I am older and can't remember the things she said to me, only the look she reserved for my dumbest moments. It was the loving way she kept me around even though I was always completely clueless. I can see her swinging wildly from the swing set at Kidsville park at night. Stumbling over the piles of rock gravel under the wooded playsets we would run up and down and hide in. Smoking a black cloves in the winter night under a streetlight. The back of her mane bobbing up and down behind the wheel of her car as I sat in the back trying hard to fit between boys on our way to Deep Ellum. Making out with her blonde curly haired boyfriend. Yelling at her sisters in the family driveway. Flirting with my boyfriend and wishing it was me she was flirting with..never being mad at her but almost always envious. 

Some people have muses that follow them for the rest of their creative life. I can't shake her and I never want to. You see, she is gone now, and it must be at least 10 years since she passed. It was 10 years or more before that we  lost touch. We grew up and took our own turns in life, far away from the places and situations that were once all we really knew about life. She grew up much faster than I, and I was left behind for the mundane life of a boring first marriage, about a gain of 100 pounds, an illness and a divorce. I was already a mom and raising a teenager when I wanted to know what had ever happened to my Gothic china girl. 

The very day I found her son on myspace was a month to the day that she had passed. Cancer. 

I met her grown son and young daughter a month after that..her boy with the same hairdo and torn t-shirt..

Yeah, I said it's all right
I won't forget
All the times I waited patiently for you
I think you'll do (just what) you choose to do
And I will be alone again tonight my dear

Yeah, I heard a funny thing
Somebody said to me
You know that I could be in love, with almost everyone
I think that people are the greatest fun
And I will be alone again tonight, my dear

Yeah, I heard a funny thing
Somebody said to me
You know that I could be in love with almost everyone
I think that people are the greatest fun
And I will be alone again tonight, my dear

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