Film thoughts and scattered musings

I feel like every guy my mom dated was named either Rick, Greg, or Steve. For the most part, when I think about all of them, they are interchangeable. Just one endless conveyor belt of the same loser asshole, going round and round from the time I was born to the time I moved out. She was married to one of them for about five years, but even he has turned into a coked out faceless mass that I can barely distinguish from all the the rest.

Dave only stands out because he was the last straw. He showed up the summer I was sixteen. I was used to gross men being on my couch, but usually they made the minimal effort to put clothes on. His immediate comfort with having his flabby white body exposed was shocking to me. He wore white briefs. I hated him. Openly, for the most part.

He complained about me to my mom. I was on drugs, he said. I was not going to school very often, he said. He could hear me having sex with my boyfriend, he said. To all of these complaints my response was essentially “go fuck yourself.” But he pushed it too far. A fresh sack of speed I’d left out in my room vanished. On another occasion he stole fifty dollars from me. These infractions aside, having to watch him walk around almost nude was criminal enough. None of my complaints meant anything to my mother. They went unheard and unacknowledged.

I spent months telling her he had to go. I was going to move out, I told her. I had a job. I had a car. I took a test to get out of high school early about a week after my seventeenth birthday, not even half way through my senior year. I was very clear that I didn’t want to put up with Dave’s shit anymore. But there he was, in his underpants, day after day. Always sniffing and snuffling and smoking cheap menthol cigarettes.

So finally one day, while he and my mom were both gone, I asked some friends to help me move my stuff out. It took most of the day but everything was out by that evening. I locked the door from the outside and shoved the key back in under it. I went to my best friend’s house and settled in to my new room. The story I was later told was that my mom came home that night and had a breakdown when she saw my empty room. She cried and cried. She tried to call me at my new house for the next few weeks but I had decided I had nothing left to say.