the key to inside my crazy

Tuesday, apr. 18, 2006   |   0 comments

I locked myself out of the house yesterday, and the second it dawned on me what I’d done, my stomach sank so hard and so fast, harder and faster than really the situation warranted (even considering that I had a nutty dog with me and also an empty stomach, and yet no wallet); it went right past the normal disappointment that comes from sudden, schedule-obliterating inconvenience, down, down to where childhood things live.

I was a latchkey girl, a slapdash latchkey girl who always switched bags and outfits at the very last minute, thereby always managing to leave my keys, wallet, and homework in the altogether wrong pockets (I kind of still do this, actually). The bus would drop me off after school, and I’d be walking along in relative happiness, but then the instant I saw my house, it would hit me. My body would go all deboned and defeated, and my bag would plop loosely to the ground, and I would just stand there, slumped and glaring up at my brain, fuming at it for letting me down AGAIN.

Usually when I got locked out it meant I had about two hours to kill until someone got home. Most of the time it wasn’t really that bad: pretty much that’s all you do anyway when you’re that old, just slaughter and maim the endless stretch of time that trickles from the age of twelve to when you finally get your driver’s licence. I seem to remember walking up to Handyman a lot, Handyman being the huge hardware store on the corner (now a Circuit City, sad), and burning up the hours by pressing all the buttons of their “theme music doorbell” display (which I’m pretty sure the employees loved). Whenever nature called, I’d go over to the model homes at a nearby condo complex and use their bathrooms, tiptoeing my way from room to dustless taupe room.

Those lock-out memories hold a nice, 110-film glow for me, like scenes from a meandering, slightly mournful retro-recent film featuring Chloe Sevigny, only sans all the awkward underaged sexing. But the times that being locked out really and truly stunk were when the phone started ringing. THE PHONE STARTED RINGING! Those were the days before answering machines, so people (i.e., other teen-aged friends with a vacuum of time to fill) would and could let the phone ring infinity times. Once, as I sat there out on the patio, I counted the rings: one hundred and two. Impossible! It was so spectacularly frustrating, I felt like my skin was melting from the inside, like my neck was sucking into my shoulders with the wanting to die of it. You know something, it just occurred to me…maybe that’s why I now can not STAND the sound of instant messages gone unchecked? That totally is it. The kind of frantic I feel when I hear the chimes of AIM, it really is the sort of thing that can only comes from those very fertile soils of childhood experience! Huh.

Anyway yesterday it turns out that I had my cellphone with me, and in a stroke of fantastic luck, Marco was actually doing some work in the area, so he stopped by and let me in. All told, I was shut out for only about an hour, the end. Oh except that thinking of the twin peeves of the unchecked phone ringing and the chalkboard scratch of AIM SFX reminds me: Introducing Peevepile, the brain flower of friend Will (who, incidentally, just emailed to report that he is a Fireman’s Carry)!