Mary Sunshine

Who was I at age twenty?

This forces me to cull the memories.  Forced perspective.  I remember learning to speak Spanish from the girls at the factory.  Bantay anos, Yo tengo bantay anos.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life so I worked a graveyard shift at the factory, slept a little, and went to a part time job at the everything store before I went to the factory, again. 

The everything store, you know the kind, right?  The store is small but has a little of everything, but never the one exact thing a person is looking for.  Dollar items, tchotckies, sewing kits, stale packaged food past its expiration date.

I rented the bottom half of a house in Midway, Utah with a friend from school who was deeply in denial about being a homosexual.  I did not press him about it, because I loved him, though not in a romantic way.  I was also deeply in denial about being a homosexual.  We were brought up Mormon.  His friend Pascal stayed with us so regularly it was like we had a third roommate who did not pay rent, utilities, or help buy food, or liquor, though he was very good at consuming space and resources and often made the shower run cold.  I wasn’t bitter about it.  Only mildly curious about why my friend and Pascal slept in the same bed and played ‘wrestling’ without their shirts on.

At twenty, my best friend S was recovering from an addiction to meth and faced felony charges for drug possession.  He had entered a world I knew very little about, and I didn’t know how to help him.  I didn’t ever do anything serious, though I started smoking when I left my parents home because I had lived my life breathing their second-hand smoke and experienced withdrawals from it.  So I smoked, and drank a little, but not often. 

I remember this being a very lonely period because S was busy being a meth head and then a recovering meth head, and my friend Shaz wasn’t speaking to me.  We had a few arguments about my choice to not be religious anymore, though she would later change her mind and after a good deal of sobbing and inner reflection become a quasi-Atheist.  I saw her last night; we went for a hike at Red Butte Gardens, and afterward went for frozen yogurt.  Wild and crazy times for two over thirties.  If I were to talk to my twenty-year old self I would tell her not to worry about Shaz because things will work out.  As I said, this was a lonely period.  My parents lived across the Provo River in Heber, but I rarely saw them.   I still had not figured out that my alcoholic father was a real asshole, because you forgive your parents when you’re a kid.  I knew I didn’t want to be around him, though.  My brother was still alive and a senior in high school.  He took a girl named Eowyn Flynn to the prom, and S and I teased him by calling his girlfriend “Spew-o-wyn Phlegm.”  We were still babies, then, even if we did pay rent on an apartment, and even if one of us was facing possible time in prison.

S was given a first-offender type of sentence, just so you know.  No prison time.  He kicked the habit.  He’s been accepted to the University of Utah Law program for fall, so I guess if I had a time machine I would tell him, too, not to panic, things work out.  I would also tell him I love him, because I do, and I’m glad we’re still friends.

The boy I lived with eventually moved to New York, and then to L.A.  He’s in Malibu living with a man he loves, and I’m glad.  Shaz got married last year and helps her husband keep bees.  I got married one year after the period I’m remembering, at twenty-one, and had a baby by twenty-two.  I remember not knowing what to do with my hands in this period.  I allowed my family to convince me if I got married and had children my life would have purpose, but at twenty, I should have packed one suitcase of the things that mattered most to me, and I should have left Utah for New York, or Paris, or Montreal.  Somewhere other than small town Utah, where I shoe-horned myself into small town Utah life and married and had a baby and resigned to a life I knew I didn’t want, but did not have the wisdom to see what I wanted, yet.

I didn’t know at age twenty that I would become an artist, a writer, and creative type.  I also didn’t know that life has a way of working out.  Then, and now, I worried about things I had no control over.

I’m so glad I’m not twenty anymore, though.

Popular songs from my twentieth year: Semi-Charmed Life - Third Eye Blind, Song 2 - Blur, Your Woman - White Town, MMMBop - Hansen, I Believe I Can Fly - R. Kelly.  It was kind of a shit time for music.

What I listened to in my twentieth year: Alphaville - B-sides and 12” Mixes, Ashley MacIsaac - Ciamar a tha sibh?, KMFDM, Ministry, NIN, Tori Amos - Boys for Pele, Depeche Mode (too much), Roxy Music - Avalon, Alan Wilder/Recoil - Hydrology, Frank Black - self-titled.

Do I listen to any of those artists now, at 33?: No.  Except for Frank Black.

Popular movies: I don’t remember.  But we watched Trainspotting.

What I did when I wasn’t at one of my two jobs: went to a goth club in Salt Lake for under 21s, sneaked into a goth club in Salt Lake with a liquor license on occasion and depending on the bouncer, listened to music alone in my room, read Tarot cards for people and freaked them out with uncanny insights (because I’m perceptive, not because of any ‘power of the cards’), wrote awful poetry that I’m glad has not survived thirteen years hence.

What were you like at 20?