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Back To: The Tyranny of Materiality
7th or 8th Grade, pretending to climb the pegboard . . . look closely at my smile: I wore braces on my teeth for at least four years . . . one of my nicknames was *Jaws* because I had three rows of teeth within my bottom jaw though the braces homogenized these three rows into one . . . Yvonne (left), Tracy (right) . . . I have no idea where they are today . . . if either of you see this, please email me to say hello . . . Yvonne wanted to be a writer . . . I wrote a poem for Tracy [click here to read it] around this temporal period . . . Tracy covered for me when I slept out in the cabin with my first love, Craig . . . I still lived at my mother's so I was thirteen or fourteen . . . this was such a chance, though I did it anyway . . . Craig and I slept on the top bunk . . . Shawn [it was his cabin], Mike Bk., Scott were there too . . . I remember a glow in the dark poster with a turtle on it, though can't remember the significance other than being picked on after the fact by people saying "Turtle" . . . Craig and I didn't have sex in the cabin: I think the thrill of the forbidden was enough for us at the time . . . I was going to stay a second night but remember hiding under the bed because Shawn thought his mother was coming . . . I ended up calling my father and asking him to pick me up and I spent the night on the couch . . . I was never caught in the lies, though told my mother years [many many years] later . . .
Jump to Image Group Twentynine: Craig
Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital again . . . propaganda shot for their newsletter . . . I wore makeup back then . . . high maintenance . . . though if I stared at someone long enough he or she would look away . . . I could make my brother Gordon cringe by looking at him when we were young . . . I was with Brian(1) though he was in college in Florida at the time . . . he sent me all the cards hanging on the wall behind me . . .
High School hell: The primacy of the image is inescapable in this context . . . everyone had to have Nike sneakers . . . mine were purple . . . Nike's didn't cost as much then . . . how exploited were the sneaker builders at that time? My image was accepted as positive during the early '80s . . . after my injury everything changed . . . Elyse (far left), Sharon, me(?), Dyane (far right) . . . I should call Dyane: she lives about ten minutes away and I haven't seen her since 1984 . . . how inexplicably tangled our four lives were . . . [years before this image] Craig broke up with me and went out with Elyse . . . a year or two later Craig and Sharon hooked up and eventually married . . . I always loved Craig but loved Sharon too . . . I remember they got into an argument at a basketball game and Sharon left to go walk home . . . Stephanie, Mike C. and I caught up with her on Route 28 but she wouldn't get in the car with us . . . I got out and walked with her, probably two miles or so, to her house . . . I don't think I ever saw her so pissed, though have no memory of what the argument was about . . . Craig and I almost got into a fist fight when he showed up to get his keys because I told him what an asshole he was to Sharon . . . everyone used to say that we'd kill each other eventually though I'm still alive and Craig died in 1998 when he hit a tree on his snowmobile . . . Elyse and I argued over something and I remember her mother calling my step-mother to tell her that I was harassing Elyse . . . Dyane and I got in a fight in Doubleday parking lot; I forgot what was so important . . . we started to wrestle around and I gave her a huge black eye . . . JA and I were together: I got back into the car and was pumped . . . he said something like "So you think you're tough?" and I punched him in the mouth . . . there was a party at Bear's in Hartwick where I discovered JA and Dyane together . . . I got a ride to Cooperstown and went to her boyfriend Bob's house and told him . . . I remember that Bob punched the cement wall . . .
Probably fifteen-ish . . . this was my favorite shirt of all time . . . I wonder where it went . . . when I came home from the hospital in late '84 most of my things were gone . . . they moved . . . I never asked my step-mother where my stuff went . . . it doesn't matter now. I haven't seen Wanda since 1985.
I was thin . . . proportioned, you could say . . . almost thinner than my shadow (so where's the truth / reality of this image? Perspective? The fallibility of sight?!) . . . I have no sensory memory of standing upright . . .