The isolated threesome
Thursday, December 14th, 2006All things come in flashes. You take pictures of time in your mind, memories of moments, and freeze them, like a camera, until some days its all you have left.
Our hermit years, 5 or so years after moving out of the rooftop apartment, are like that. In these years, we set the cornerstone for our family.
—
BJ and I couldn’t afford to live on our own with my piddling Pizza Hut income without going into debt, which is something we didn’t want to do. If we moved back into her parents house, we could try to go back to school, and get some kind of worthwhile job.
Gabe was tickled to be living with Mamaw and Papaw, although he was still just a year or so old.
Wait… hmm… set a calendar now. Get the facts straight…
February 1996 - BJ and I began
November 1996 - Gabe was born
March 1997 - Moved to rooftop apt.
August 1997 - Moved to BJ’s folks house.
Right, there you go. So he wasn’t a year old yet. Good old facts!
—
We were back in BJ’s bedroom, although the world wasn’t quite as small. Because we were back at her parents house, friends still came over, but not nearly as much. We’d sequester ourselves in her bedroom as much as possible when Gabe was asleep, watching TV, or playing on the computer.
Gabe loved it. He grew quickly. Flashes of time are all I have from that era.
I recall one day, he and I were out on the front porch. Everything still felt like a chore, because I was impatient, so we’d go out on the front porch, or outside, and I’d wait for him to get fidgety, or bored, and we’d head back in the house so I could do something else. I loved the boy, but didn’t yet appreciate being a Dad.
Anyway, we were on the front porch, along with a hornets nest. Normally, we stayed away from the part of the porch that had the hornets, but I turned my back to look at something, and with the celerity only belonging to the toddler heading for danger, Gabe was gone. I turned around and found him, sitting on a step, surrounded by frenzied hornets.
PANIC.
I grew up the son of a beekeeper, so I know the rules for bees. No snap movements, not necessarily slow, but fluid. I wasn’t sure if that worked for hornets, but it doesn’t matter, because before I could realize what I was doing, I was in the mass of hornets, trying to shield Gabe with my body, and get him the hell out of there.
I watched one of those bastards land on his little fat hand, and sting it. I was running away, and it was in slow motion, the plunge of the stinger, Gabe’s reaction. He received no other stings, and I was unstung. I seem to have a freaky luck to not bear the burdens of my family that I’d rather endure than see them endure.
Anyway, Gabe was freaking out. Screaming, snot pouring, hand swelling up, we brought him inside, and took care of him.
Thats one of those flashes.
—
Another is a New Years party at a friends house in Norris, BJ and I there, drinking. She got sick, and I helped clean her up. Poor girl.
Another year, during that era, same house, same time, BJ and I were watching a friend we didn’t know too well sledding down the hill in back yard. We watched him sail down into the woods, past our view, and heard the crash and yell of a drunken guy hitting a tree on a sled. Good stuff.
Unfortunately, that guy died a few years later, in a car wreck. I didn’t know him, but knew him well enough to mourn him a bit. His name was Dee.
—
All the moments of tenderness still run together. Holding her hand, kissing her forehead, all these things are things that I feel like I’ve done all my life. They don’t stand out, other than to be what the rest of my life was sweetened by.
—
After a year or so living there, we were really itching to get out. We had talked with a friend who lived in low-income housing in Clinton, and got on the waiting list. A few months later, we had an apartment, for $10 a month.
BJ and I were both students, going to Roane State. We had done a play together, driving from Andersonville to Harriman every day for a month, to be in “The Good Doctor”. I, ha ha, had the lead role. BJ played my wife in a few skits, and we even had a pretty well received singing duet as an old couple. I don’t remember the words, but it was awesome. I always meant to do another play with her, but we just never had the chance.
I digress.. apartment, right.
We moved into Gatemanor in Clinton, and were thrilled to be there. Gabe was 2ish by then, I don’t remember exactly when we moved in there, but I know he turned three when we lived there.
These years were golden. We set up the place, we had a dining table, we had a bedroom for both of us, we had our own bathroom. We were able to invite family over. We made friends with neighbors, but still didn’t have that party place atmosphere. There were a few reasons for this, one was because the friends we had that were in high school the previous years were now in college, and it was a pretty long drive. Another reason was because we were settling down, and content to do this.
I started growing my hair out long. BJ got a job at the Store of Knowledge in Knoxville, and learned how to juggle devil sticks. Theres a video on Youtube of her doing it, but it doesn’t do justice to her skills, because she wasn’t used to the weight and feel of the ones she was borrowing. She’d be able to toss it 20 feet in the air, of throw it across the room to me, and catch the stick her her sticks when I threw it back. She’d juggle the stick unconsciously, while talking to me, or distracted some other way. She was so proud to have found a talent!
By now, she had quit school, and my slacker nature (as well as the need to have somebody watching Gabe while BJ worked) found me quitting before too long also. Over the next few semesters, I re-enrolled once or twice, but never got more than a semester or two before quitting.
I was being a “Mr Mom” and loving it.
Gabe, now about 3, and I would go on long walks. We’d walk out of the complex, across the train tracks to a gas station, where we’d get a drink or a candy (if I had some change) and sit on the benches outside and wait for a ‘monster truck’ to pass by. This being Clinton, TN, we were usually happy. Then we’d walk down the road a quarter of a mile or so, past the Pizza Hut where I’d worked, pass a few other shops, pass the fire station which sometimes let Gabe in to look at (or, gasp, climb on) the big red trucks. We’d head to Big Lots, and look at toys. Then we’d walk back home on the train tracks, looking for interesting rocks.
—
We lived, that first year, on $5000. Total income. Yes, we had food stamps, and assisted housing, but got no welfare, because we didn’t feel right taking it. We felt like kings. I remember that first Christmas, we didn’t have the money for gifts until Christmas Eve, and we went to the dollar store to buy stuff for each other.
I got BJ a crossword puzzle book, and bag of pens, a plastic box (thats still behind the TV, holding the superfluous remote controls) and a Kwanzaa doll christened ‘Kwanzaa Don’, and hung on the entrance to the bedroom/bathroom area of the house, to bless all that went under with his Kwanzaa blessing of whatever it is that Kwanzaa is.
We also eventually acquired his evil brother, Pedro, a marionette with six guns, a sombrero, and a sadistic smile, that was hung in the kitchen.
We wrapped the Christmas presents with the comics section of the previous weeks Sunday paper, and opened them that night. It was great.
—
Time passed, as is its wont. As time went on, we found our housing going up (because I wasn’t a student), so our discretionary funds went down. I finally figured I needed to get my ass a job.
I had computer skills from way back, but never on a professional level. I tried riding that big internet wave in the late 90’s, but found that I needed experience, and the willingness to work tons and tons of overtime at all hours of the day, and after my time at Ryans, I wasn’t inclined to sacrifice that much.
Eventually, I signed up with a headhunter job finding place, who lined me up with a job at Clientlogic, here in Oak Ridge, very shortly after it opened, doing DSL tech support.
A real job. This bad boy was paying 9 bucks an hour, which was a fortune!
BJ and I loved doing the math. At 9 X 40 hours, we could afford all sorts of stuff! We could get a real apartment!
Which we did, in Oak Ridge. We moved here in 2000, in a townhouse we found on Wakefield Rd. The landlord was a cop, a really cool guy, who ended up quitting the force after finding out about his wifes indiscretions with, well, the entire rest of the police force. And our neighbor. She was a bit of a whore.
We had stairs now, and two bathrooms (a luxury I miss today, in our 1 bath house). I had a real job, BJ could afford to quit the Store of Knowledge (the drive to Knoxville was a real pain), and Gabe was able to start going to the Oak Ridge Preschool, which did him a WORLD of good.
By now, friends rarely came over. We missed having the social contact, but didn’t really try to make friends. I’ve never been one to make personal friends out of co-workers, for reasons I still don’t really understand, and BJ didn’t really get out a whole lot. Her Corolla had died several years ago, and we had an 90s Subaru station wagon, but I took it to work, still leaving her with no ride. I worked the early shift, which I have preferred working to this day, from about 6 - 3.
I was good at my job (still am, I think), and got promoted pretty quickly. Eventually, I found out, I became the highest paid hourly worker there. I was offered a chance at management, but passed it up, again, because of the time demands. I just didn’t want to take that time away from my family, and I feel so completely justified by that. No matter what other grievances she’d be able to dig up on me (and believe me, she would) she wouldn’t be able to say that I held a job closer than her or Gabe.
Never.
—
Again, time went on. We made friends with the guy who owned the townhouses next door, and after 6 months living in our first townhouse, we moved into one of his. They were identical from the outside to the ones we were in, but because of a fire years ago (which claimed the lives of two poor little girls in one of the units, hiding in a closet) they had a much nicer interior, and a big assed back porch looking out on one of the greenbelts in town, protected woods. It was pristine. Sure, if you look in any other direction you see either townhouse, townhouse, or parking lot, but from the back, ahh, there were woods.
We’d go out there, every once in a while. Gabe and I, mostly, he’d be about 4, and we’d enjoy the walks in the woods. We’d walk down trails in the Greenbelt and end up a few roads down, then we’d walk back. There was a park on the way, and we’d often stop to get a drink from the fountain, and he’d play for a bit while I sat. He played by himself a lot, because there really weren’t many other kids in his life. Preschool helped him with that, and he didn’t, and doesn’t, seem to possess any of the social awkwardness I felt at his age.
By now BJ was working again, night shifts at the video store, which was a sweet gig on account of free rentals. I’d bring Gabe in every once in a while to watch her. She was a perfectionist. Videos had to be on the right shelf. They had to be neatly spaced. She’d do it quickly, but very throughly. Even up to her dying day, when she’d go to the video store, she’d bitch about the sloth applied to the videos. I’d laugh.
—
Around this point, we both realized that we were both thinking about the possibility of having another child. If we waited much longer, Gabe might be too old to have fun with the kid, and we’d lose that nice “getting rid of kids in our 40s” buffer we looked forward to. Both of us were leery of mentioning it to the other, for fear of getting shot down.
Yes folks, a planned child.
BJ even figured out the right time to start working on the kid, so that she’d give birth in the spring, so as to avoid a hot summer of pregnancy.
We finally quit smoking at this time, habits that we picked up before meeting each other. It was hard, but we both did it cold turkey. We survived, and were proud.
We also bought tickets to see Radiohead, which was its own tragic and horrible story. I wrote a review for it for a Radiohead fan website, you can see it here (look for the one signed by J). We didn’t realize it, but that child was about 2 weeks along during that ill fated trip to DC.
BJ was pregnant again. The threesome would end soon.
