I never thought that at age twenty-five I would be living with my mother in the county I grew up in, working part-time as a daytime bartender. Oh... my... GOD. As I wrote that sentence my eyes started filling up with tears. (Note to self: no deep reflective moments while PMSing.) I mean, what the fuck HAPPENED to me??? The other day a girl from my high school class came in to my bar. During lunch, there are never any customers. I stand there cutting limes and reluctantly making painful conversation with the one-maybe-two homeless guys who have scrounged up enough change to sit on a ragged bar stool all day and make my life miserable. Sometimes standing behind that counter and having to be nice to these people makes me think I know something about how prostitutes feel. Except that they make a shit-ton of money, and all I get is the fifty-cent piece from 1952 that the guy rolled across the counter to me as a tip. Oh, and I got spit on by that one ninety-year-old dude who refused to pay for his beer and then tried to kickbox me across the bar. I'm so used to it at this point that I think I was yawning, unfortunately, when the spitting happened, and a drop of decrepit saliva landed on my unimpressed tongue.
Anyway, so this girl came in whom I recognized from high school. She looked exactly the same. I however, have gained at least forty pounds in the last seven years, have changed my hair color a hundred times and chopped it off, and was standing in a dive bar in the middle of the day arguing with a drunken pirate when she walked in. I could not have been more different from the last time she'd seen me. I watched her and her most-likely boyfriend take a seat at the bar. She smiled at me and ordered a drink. I tried to smile, forcing one side of my mouth to spasm upwards at least for a second. "Marge?? Wow. It's me, (singlewhitefemale)." She stared at me with an expression as blank as a cow passing gas. "(singlewhitefemale... female)." Her ears perked up at my last name.
"No way. (singlewhitefemale)??!!! You are the LAST person I would EVER have expected to see here." She didn't say it with malice. She said it like an innocent baby would say it: very matter-of-factly, with no filter or concern for my interpretation. My mind started spiraling out of control with possible meanings, foaming at the mouth with insecurity. Clearly she meant that she never thought I would fail so utterly that I would stoop to return to the cow town that I came from once I'd left it years ago... when I was "going places." I remembered Marge in high school. She was the one who started dating at a really young age. I used to tutor her in Spanish during study hall. I helped her conjugate verbs to the imperfect tense while she told me how perfect her boyfriend was. We were sixteen. At that age, I was basically a saint. I'd never smoked, never had a sip of alcohol, and the only time I'd ever been kissed by a boy I had held my tongue away from him in my mouth so that he was essentially licking my stale lunch air until he gave up and decided never to try it again. I was such a goody-two-shoes that Marge's stories about partying and handjobs made me blush and giggle at all the wrong moments because I didn't actually understand anything that she was talking about. One day she informed me that the name "Kevin" was tattooed in Sharpie across her left ass cheek because she'd fallen asleep with him after he made her "so tired," and he'd graffiti'd her. I didn't say anything, but she could see her comment had had the desired effect. I was blushing and erasing pencil marks off my desk with my head down as I put together the puzzle pieces illuminating the situation that hey, they must've had sex and that's why she was a.) TIRED and b.) NAKED. I really hated it. I couldn't beLIEVE people MY age were trying to deal already with GROWN-UP things!! The nerve.
Because I wasn't busy dealing with penises and beer, I was a very focused student in high school. I graduated with a 4.02 GPA and left immediately in the fall for college life at UCSB. I was bright, optimistic, creative, and relatively thin when I left our high school campus for the last time. Now, staring at Marge and her boyfriend (who I finally recognized as a guy two grades older than us and the ONLY person my brother has EVER gotten into a fight with) I felt a surge of all the teenage insecurities well up within me. Well, shit. Did I really have to be THIS overweight right now?? And did I have to wear my shapeless lesbian flannel shirt and forget to even LOOK at my hair before I left the house??? But then... amazingly... as we attempted to chat about lost time and the few things we could think of to say to each other... I realized that ultimately... it didn't matter. Since there were no other customers, I was forced to stand in their vicinity and make small-talk to the best of my socially awkward abilities... but I knew that neither one of us really cared what the other was saying. I knew that I was thinking, "Wow, I don't care about you. At all." and I bet she was thinking, "Wow, you weigh like a million pounds." But other than that... so what? I no longer feared her sexual prowess, and I couldn't care less if she still didn't know how to count to diez. Yes... seeing ANYONE from high school in this town is definitely my biggest nightmare.... But I felt oddly relieved to realize that even if I am in the middle of a quarter-life crisis and have relatively little to show for the last seven years of my life... well... I think deep-down I am still proud of myself for the things I have learned and experienced and who I have become. I know it is so close-minded and straight-up BITCHY of me to think that somehow I'm better than the people who never left here, the people who stayed and married each other and had babies before we could even legally purchase alcohol. It's awful. But hey, it's not like I came from a fairy-tale family with parents who taught us how to have successful lives or anything. I think the fact that I feel full-on SHAME at being back here, empty-handed, is a GOOD sign, because it's probably the only thing keeping me at least remotely interested in still figuring out a way to do well for myself in this life. So, sorry Marge if I looked down on you in high school and if I looked down on you at my bar because actually I remember now that your new boyfriend was the biggest wuss in the whole world and I wanted to KILL him when he tried to fight my brother. Sorry if I still feel like we are worlds apart and that I hope my future is splitting away from yours in drastic perpendiculars. I have no right to feel superior. But I'll be damned if I'll be serving your beers seven years from now.
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