The Truth About The Red-Haired Boy

The first boy I ever kissed, without tongue, had red hair and freckles. I’d dreamed of kissing him ever since he’d asked me to dance to “I’m Turning Japanese” by The Vapors at a summer dance when I was in fifth grade.

I loved him. I was sure of it.

Shortly after my dad died, we moved to a condo that was part of a three-block spread of single moms raising kids or remarried moms raising kids from first marriages and more kids from second marriages. The red-haired boy lived one street down from me and I could see his bedroom window from my own.

The red-haired boy had a pet snake. One day he rang my doorbell. When I opened the door, he had his hands behind his back and a grin on his face. When I leaned in closer, the red-haired boy whipped out his snake and held it two inches from my face. I screamed. Yep, I was scared of the red-haired boy’s snake. Do with that what you will.

One day, at the park with the tire swing, our kiss happened exactly as it was meant to: completely pre-meditated in a game of Truth or Dare. A bunch of the neighborhood kids sat together in a circle on the ground as the red-haired boy leaned across the dirt to press his mouth to mine. His lips were soft and had freckles on them. He tasted like gummy bears. The kiss lasted two seconds and made us blush.

The red-haired boy walked me home. He held my hand and gave me another quick peck at my front door.

I was totally going to marry him. I was sure of it.

As soon as I got to my room, I wrote all about the kiss in my Hello Kitty diary.

The next day, the red-haired boy’s brother found out about the kiss. He didn’t like it. He had always been aggressive and not for any reason that I could figure out. That afternoon, while my friends and I choreographed roller skating routines to the Grease soundtrack, the red-haired boy’s brother walked up to me, looking mad and on a mission. He grabbed me by the collar of my O.P. shirt and spit.

In my face.

He had chewed up Chips Ahoy cookies in his mouth and the remnants of them hit my chin and oozed down my neck and into my shirt. More of it splattered out across my chest. The spit was coated in the mucous that collects when you eat things like chocolate chip cookies, and it stuck to the flowers on my shirt, looking greasy.

He laughed and walked away.

The red-haired boy watched from the curb across the street. He said nothing.

The weeks slipped by and I didn’t see the red-haired boy as often because school had started up again and we were in different classes. Sometimes, I would look from my window to his, wondering what he was doing.

The school year carried on.

The pages of my Hello Kitty diary filled up with new stories about boys with feathered hair, braces and Members Only jackets.

But I could still see the red-haired boy's window from my room. He was still right there when I drew back the curtains.

Until, through the darkness of the early morning hours of a school day, my room suddenly lit up with flashing lights. Reds and blues sliced through the darkness and bounced off the mirror that hung above my dresser. I crept to the sliding glass door of my balcony and peered outside. I saw a line of fire trucks, police cars and an ambulance on the street below. There were police officers walking in the grassy area between the red-haired boy’s condo and the one next door. Yellow caution tape wrapped from one end of his house to the other. A helicopter hovered overhead, flashing a searchlight on to the ground below.

Because, that night, while the red-haired boy slept in his bed, his mom came into his room and shot him dead.

I wouldn’t see the red-haired boy ever again.

Of course first kisses are only first kisses. And people disappear into the world and live their lives. But somehow it’s comforting to think they’re still out there somewhere. It’s nice to think that maybe they’ll show up on Facebook or at the supermarket in our hometown or on some random interview on television where we pause and think, No way! That’s the first boy I ever kissed. Look at him now. He’s a grown up. And he’s lived a life and it’s been full and significant. And maybe, sometimes, he thinks about that time he kissed that girl who was afraid of his snake…


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved

The Truth About My Shaun Cassidy Poster

I mean duh. Shaun Cassidy, right? How have I not addressed this until now? My friends and I would choreograph entire routines to his albums every day after school, either in our bedrooms or on roller skates in the driveway.

We’d come home, eat a snack, and retreat to one of our houses to put on blue eye shadow and lipstick so that we would look famous; we had a community make up kit that we’d all donated to. It was available for “dress up purposes only" but it eventually ended up in the trash when one of us got pink eye.

Hairbrushes in hand, we’d stand in front of a mirror and practice our moves. Who would spin in when? Who would grab who for the spin? Who would do the cool parted fingers across the eyes thing? And who would jut their hands out to the side and travel them upwards from their hips and wave them back and forth in the air?

We were spectacular.

I knew all the words to all the songs even though I didn’t have a Shaun Cassidy record of my own. I coveted my friends’ albums and the posters on their walls. The poster of Shaun Cassidy eating a bowl of popcorn? Loved it. He’s just a regular guy, I’d think as I stared at him all moon-eyed, and he wants to wish me a happy new year!

My own room was still baby girl pink and had wallpaper with pastel flowers running up and down it. I was in that weird phase where I didn’t want to be a baby anymore but I didn’t quite understand why teenage girls screamed when Shaun Cassidy swiveled his hips in white satin pants on The Midnight Special T.V. show.

But I knew that I wanted a Shaun Cassidy album of my own.

I needed a Shaun Cassidy album of my own.

One sunny Saturday afternoon, I convinced my dad to take me over to Licorice Pizza at the mall so that I could buy my very own Shaun Cassidy album with the money my grandmother had sent me for Christmas.

I eagerly walked up to the register to pay for my record, grinning at the teenage boy behind the counter who had long hair, a moustache and smelled like cigarettes.

Surely not a Shaun Cassidy fan.

When I got home, I ran up to my room and tore off the plastic wrap, eager to play my record on my Holly Hobbie record player. I shoved my hands into the album pocket and pulled out my record, but something else came out along with the vinyl.

The pièce de résistance.

A poster!

My. Very. Own. Shaun. Cassidy. Poster!

Yes! A totally rockin’ picture of Shaun had been folded into a 5X7 rectangle and shoved into the album pocket. I unfolded it, spread it out across my pink-and-white-checkered bedspread and smoothed out the creases. I took in Shaun and all his blonde mop-haired glory. In my memory, the poster had his autograph and was signed “with love,” but that could very well have been a poster on my friend’s wall. Doesn’t matter. That’s a sweet memory!

I called out to my dad.

“Daddy! I need to hang up my Shaun Cassidy poster!”

I still remember the look on my dad's face when he came into my room. It was this look that asked when did my little girl start wanting pictures of teen heartthrobs on her wall?

I bet it broke his heart a little.

My dad instructed me to go ask my mom for some of the thumbtacks from the bulletin board that hung  by the phone in the kitchen. I raced downstairs, breathless, and told her I needed thumbtacks to hang up my poster. She eyed me suspiciously and told me not to make too many holes in my wall as she dropped four tacks into my hand.

“They’re sharp,” she called out to me as I ran back upstairs.

I handed the tacks over to my dad and told him I wanted my poster on the wall above my bed so that it would be the first thing I saw when I walked into my room. He said no. I asked him if I could put it on my closet door. He told me the thumbtacks weren’t strong enough, plus they would leave holes that he couldn’t patch up. My eyes darted around my room, trying to find the perfect spot when he told me he knew exactly where it should go.

He crossed the room to the far corner by my door, and hoisted up the poster until the top of it was even with the crease between the wall and the ceiling and the wall and the wall. When I opened the door to my room, half of the poster was covered.

I tried to argue that I couldn’t really see my poster there but he insisted it was just right. He pressed his thumbs against the tacks, pushing them into the poster at all four corners.

And so it was that Shaun Cassidy hung, all alone, among the rows of the pastel-colored flowers of my wallpaper.

At night, when my door was closed, I could see him.

“I love you,” Shaun told me.

“Sweet dreams,” he said as I drifted off to sleep.

A few years later, my dad passed away. My poster still hung in the corner of my room, fading and collecting dust, still the only poster on my wall, long forgotten because I could barely see it all the way up there in the corner. It was just a memory of what once was.

As the months passed, I eventually outgrew Shaun Cassidy altogether. He was for babies, I’d decided. Blondie was cooler. I wanted to be Deborah Harry.

So one afternoon, bright pink marker in hand, I took to defacing Shaun Cassidy’s self-titled album cover. Look at him there in that silly hat, looking like he’s ready to head out for a game of tennis. Please. How lame. I drew zits on him. I stuck pieces of paper to his face that ended up making him look like he’d cut himself shaving a bazillion times. I wrote clever things like “You will barf if you see barf because he is a barf” on the cover. 

When my mom came in and saw what I’d done, she yelled at me.

“Your dad bought you that record! How could you ruin it like that? It’s special!”

My glee over marring the face of a teen heartthrob quickly gave way to guilt. I sat there in my room and remembered the day my dad and I had gone to the mall together. I’d clutched my new record in one hand and my dad’s hand in the other; a confusing combo that waffled between child and a girl who was growing up. We’d gone to Baskin Robbins and he’d gotten his favorite flavor: Pralines and Cream. It reminded him of the praline candies that his Cajun mother had made for him when he was a little boy on the bayou. I got something chocolate and messy that had melted and run down my arm. Afterwards, we drove home together in his bright orange MG with the top down and the wind whipping through our hair.

It had been a moment. And something I should have cherished. The times I’d gotten to spend with him like that had been limited. Each one was a precious piece of the father-daughter relationship that had been cut short.

Guilt.

That’s all that I felt.

My mom was right. That Shaun Cassidy album should’ve been cherished, god dammit! After that, every single thing my dad had ever purchased for me took on a deeper significance because there would be no other things. Ever. The gold heart necklace. The “Happy Birthday” picture book. My Shaun Cassidy album.

I still have it.

I've since ripped the little pieces of paper off his face so that he looks more like Shaun again. The pink marker graffiti is still there but it’s not as bad on the picture on the front as it is on the back. And I’m not gonna lie, “That’s Rock and Roll” still gets me dancing on the inside, its bubble gum pop-iness chipping away at the full-blown cynic that I have become.

Seriously. I’m choreographing a routine in my head right now…

So what was the first poster you hung on the wall of your room?

© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved

Writers I Like: Lori Culwell

Here’s what I love about Lori Culwell: she’s funny.

In both of her novels, Hollywood Carwash and The Dirt, Lori Culwell’s writing is smart, clever and will make you laugh out loud. Whether it’s rising Hollywood starlet, Amy Spencer, getting a glam makeover in Hollywood Carwash or Lucy Whitley navigating the unraveling of family secrets in The Dirt, Culwell finds humor in the absurd without banging you over the head with it.

First off, there’s Hollywood Carwash. I read this book in a lounge chair by a swimming pool just as Lori Culwell had intended. This book is the perfect summer read, people. And with June approaching fast, it’s my first choice book for you to toss into your beach bag. The story follows Midwesterner, Amy Spencer, as she is plucked from her college campus and whisked to L.A. to join the cast of an already-on-the-air television series that sounds a lot like an infamous show about verbose teens that you might’ve watched back in the day. Not only are the series regulars wary of Amy, her managerial team insists she be made over to fit the Hollywood ideal. Almost overnight, Amy transforms from girl-next-door to Hollywood famer. Her “hollywood carwash” includes weight loss, veneers, colonics, cosmetic surgery, name changes and a fake A-List boyfriend. It’s an inside peek at Hollywood that almost feels scandalous. It’s obvious that Culwell did her research and her book is a fascinating insider look at the ugly underbelly of fame that nobody talks about. It’s also a great escape and laugh-out-loud funny.

In The Dirt, we learn early on that the Whitley family has some secrets. Specifically: a family scandal. On the day that Lucy Whitley’s dad is set to re-marry, Lucy’s long-lost sister, Megan (aka Freak Girl), shows up in the middle of the ceremony all gothed out. Her arrival brings more questions than answers, firstly rousing suspicion in Lucy that Megan isn’t even who she says she is. Worse yet, the fantasy that nerdy-but-lovable Lucy has about escaping all of her drama in the desert for a boarding school in Connecticut might’ve just gone up in flames. Megan and Lucy do manage to find some common ground after a family trip but things really get weird back home when older sister, Sloane, member of the snotty “Pretty Girl” club, begins acting suspiciously friendly to Lucy and Megan. You’ll keep turning pages to find out what she’s up to and how the Whitley family will land. Again, Culwell’s writing is intimate and as a reader, you almost feel like you’re spying on a family that doesn’t know you’re there. The Dirt effortlessly mixes family drama, mean girls, mysteries, cute boys and laughs into one fun package. As a reader, I became completely invested in each character. Add this one to the beach bag!


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved

Farting With No Apologies

So I’m standing on the corner with a friend yesterday morning, chatting and whatever, when this guy walks by and farts rightatthemoment that he passes rightbyus. The thing that was weird was that there was not one single other person around for at least a block in either direction of us. He could’ve held it in, I think. So why then? Why righatthemoment that he was rightbyus did he choose to cut the cheese?

What has to happen for a person to get to that point in their life that they don’t mind free range farting in front of total strangers? It takes balls, does it not? And there’s something, in this very weird way, which I admire about it. How awesome must that be to chugga chugga toot toot through life without a care?

I mean he didn’t even seem embarrassed.

He didn’t blush. He didn’t guffaw or apologize. He didn’t look back over his shoulder to see if we noticed. He didn’t suddenly turn a corner, speed up his gait or pretend like he had to deliver a letter at the post office. Nope. He just kept walking right along. He had places to go. No fart was going to slow him down. He was probably happy to leave it behind him.

With me.

And somehow, in this whole scenario, my friend and I were the ones who were mortified. We waited until he was out of earshot to laugh and ask, “Did that really just happen?”

Why?

Why was I, the innocent bystander, protecting the feelings of the free range farter? 

And then I went to another place, my I very often have low self esteem place, and decided it was done as a total affront. As total commentary on just exactly what he thought of me.

See that chick up there? I don’t like her. Pffft. Let ‘er rip.

As far as I know, babies and really old people are the only ones who get to fart without apology in this world, right? And so I wonder, what if farting was one of those things that people just did any old time? Would that be liberating somehow?

What would the world be like, aside from smelly, if people felt free to fart, toot, cut the cheese, break wind, make anal acoustics, bust ass, step on a duck, rip one, toot their own horn, tear arse or bake brownies whenever or wherever they felt like it? 


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved

The Truth About The Crate & Barrel Box

When my husband and I got married, we didn’t have a pot to piss in. Or at least that’s how my mom oh-so-eloquently described us to my aunts and uncles when they inquired about which gifts from our wedding registry would be the most helpful. My husband and I had both just finished graduate school and had rented a cool old Victorian house in L.A. for next to nothing. Since our savings were dwindling, it was a huge relief when my husband got hired at a local school just two days before our wedding. The honeymoon was cut short as we tossed my wedding dress into the back of his Honda and booked it back to L.A. just in time for him to start his first day of school.

In our house, we had a futon, a bookshelf and a 13” television set.

After my husband went off to his first day, I unpacked wedding gifts from Crate & Barrel boxes.

Now we also had champagne flutes with hand-painted stems, everyday china, crystal candlestick holders, a killer knife set, CorningWare, a roasting pan, a blender, a mixer, new dishtowels and a coffeemaker.

We did not have a dining room table.

We did not have a bed.

We did not drink coffee.

We had a wok, nonstick cookie sheets, airtight food storage containers, mixing bowls, fancy pots and pans, bath towels and a gravy boat.

We did not have a cookbook.

We both had a graduate degree.

I did not have a driver’s license.

When I’d finished unpacking all the boxes, I shoved them into a pile in the laundry room.

We did not have a washer and dryer.

I updated my résumé and contemplated what to make for dinner. Just like any other girl who grew up in Southern California, tacos were the first meal I ever learned to prepare. So tacos it was. Making tacos meant I wouldn’t sweat too much in a house without AC when it was a sweltering 90 degrees outside.

I put on a sundress with spaghetti straps and walked through the late afternoon smog and heat to the nearby grocery store to pick up all of my ingredients. When I got home, I chopped onions and grated cheese. I sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce and mashed avocados for guacamole. I sorted the taco toppings into matching bowls and lined them up along the kitchen counter. I pulled a freshly washed 10” cooking pan from the cupboard and went to marinating my ground beef and taco seasonings.

Our house smelled like a home as the scents of dinner cooking took over.

We still did not have a dining room table.

I dragged the biggest Crate and Barrel box I could find from my pile in the laundry room and set it up as a makeshift table. I folded linen napkins in the fancy way I’d learned to fold linen napkins in the restaurant I’d worked at in college. I set silverware aside our plates and stacked salad bowls on top. I arranged the crystal candlestick holders, stuck some flowers I’d picked from the front yard into a vase and lit the candles just as my husband walked through the front door.

As newlyweds, we sat down at my makeshift table and toasted my husband’s new job. We lingered over dinner as though we were at a fancy restaurant overlooking the canals of Venice.

Before I got married, my wise best friend (who had nine months on me in the marriage department) told me that love was about small moments, not big expressions; it was allowed to be little not grandiose. While my husband and I have come a long way since living in a nearly empty house with no furniture, we still don’t live large. Instead we live simply to be able to continue to do what we love. He teaches. I teach. He makes art. I write. When those times come that I wish we had a bigger house or a swanky car or a month-long European vacation, I remember that taco dinner atop our Crate & Barrel box to remind myself of how rich I really am.

Oh, and I still make tacos for my husband every year on his first day of school.

We do have a dining room table now.


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved

The Truth About My Short Boyfriend

There were two things I loved when I was in sixth grade: my very first boyfriend and my white roller skates with the neon pink wheels and the rainbow heart shoe laces. 

My first boyfriend was about a foot shorter than me but that didn’t really matter because most of our time together was spent on the phone as opposed to side by side. I attended the local public school while he went to an all-boys Catholic school in a neighboring town. The highlight of my morning would be if his carpool passed my friends and me as we walked to campus and he waved at me from his backseat window.

We were obviously so super sixth grade serious.

On most weekends, I would get my friends to call my short boyfriend on the phone and ask him what he liked about me. We’d usually write out elaborate lists of questions to ask. What slow song did he wish he could dance to with me? What was his favorite thing about me? How many kids did he want and what would we name them? These conversations happened in the days before cordless phones and mute buttons so I’d listen in from another room with my hand cupping the bottom half of the receiver so he couldn’t hear me.

There was always one question on the list: Does it bother you that she is so much taller than you? His answer was always no. I really don’t think it bothered him.

But it bothered me. A lot.

Our relationship happened before supermodels took over the world. It was a time when it still wasn’t exactly awesome to be a tall girl. I might’ve been the tallest girl in my entire elementary school, but I’m not going to get all celebrity sob story and tell you all the horrendous nicknames I got called. It’s easy for now-gorgeous celebs to share that kind of shit because they grew up to be, well, fucking famous. And beautiful.

But I just grew up to be me.

Anyway, we continued our “relationship” for many months, which was pretty impressive as far as sixth grade commitments go. Again, not seeing each other helped a lot. Where distance is the kiss of death for college relationships, it’s apparently the oxygen of sixth grade love affairs. Not only did he live too far away for me to be able to walk or bike to him, he also got in trouble a lot so he was almost always grounded.

But one warm Friday night, in between groundings, he was miraculously given permission to go to the Aquarius Roll-A-Rena during the 6:30-8:30 P.M. skate session. While I was excited to go to Aquarius with someone who would actually hold hands with me during the “Couples Skate,” I was also terrified. Now everyone would see how ridiculous we looked standing next to each other.

I had to come up with a plan.

But first I had to come up with an outfit.

I wore a neon green mesh shirt over a white T-shirt and Sergio Valente jeans. It looked rad. Trust me.

My boyfriend held my hand as we went inside. He had to rent skates, which I remember thinking was kind of lame, but I saw past it because he had shaggy blonde surfer hair and he’d just gotten his braces off.

We sat down on a bench and laced up our skates together. When we stood up, I towered over him but he confidently took my hand and led me to the rink. We were now as official as you could get in sixth grade: skating hand-in-hand in front of everyone. For a minute or two I forgot how tall I was.

For a minute.

But soon enough, I felt like everyone was staring at us even though they probably weren’t. So somewhere between doing the time warp and the backwards skate, I insisted on taking my skates off, blaming a blister. I rolled off the rink, digging my neon pink front stoppers into the carpeted floor to slow down. Then I sat down and unlaced my skates.

I assumed my boyfriend had followed me off the rink but he hadn’t. He actually kept skating. He circled past me and waved while I sat on a nearby bench, waiting for him. He just kept rolling by and rolling by, waving to me as he passed. He even skated the couples skate with another girl while I sat in a booth near the snack bar, eating nachos.

When he finally came to say hi again, I was still sitting at that booth. He took the seat across from me and dove into my nachos. I was so frustrated. I had taken my skates off so that we could be the same height. What did it matter that I had my skates off now if we were sitting down?

Nobody could see us.

I needed people to see us!

My boyfriend finished up my nachos and went back out to skate. I spent the rest of the night sulking in the corner while he socialized the shit out of the roller rink.

At 8:30, my mom picked us up and we climbed into the backseat together. My boyfriend held my hand, lightly tickling my palm with the pad of his thumb, all the way home. But I was pissed. I was pissed at myself. Even though he’d ignored me most of the night, it was totally my fault. We were doing just fine until I decided I couldn’t stand being tall anymore.

When we pulled up in front of his house, I mumbled a goodbye to him as he quickly swiped his lips across my cheek—a bold move considering that my mom was in the front seat. I watched all 5-feet-nothing of him walk up to his front door and my mom drove away once his mom waved to us and shut off the porch light.

Not surprisingly, our relationship didn’t last through the summer. By 7^th grade, when we finally attended the same junior high school as we’d always talked about, we didn’t even say hi when we passed each other in the hallways. He had a new girlfriend a few months later.

She was taller than me.

Lesson learned.


© Copyright 2012  Marisa Reichardt. All Rights Reserved