Читать книгу Ten Twenty Ten - Stephen Polando - Страница 4

On July 2, 2005, my childhood home in Chandler burned down. It started on that patio where my friends and I spent so many nights together. I was 20 years old. I have found this to be a pivotal moment in my life, and therefore that is where this story truly begins ...

*Phone ringing*

Hello?

Stephen? It’s Betsy. Why is your house on fire?

What? Who is this?

Betsy, Alyssa’s friend. Your house is on fire!

I’m in my apartment. What are you talking about?

*(Inaudible chatter)*

Steph, it’s Alyssa. Your house is on fire.

It hit me differently when she said it. Alyssa was the girl I took to my senior prom. One of the first girls I ever really loved. Unknown to her, she is also the person that taught me that the best measurement to use in figuring out how I feel about a person is to gauge how it makes me feel when I make them laugh. I always made Alyssa laugh. She is still one of my closest friends in the world. Her mother will almost certainly be the first person to buy this book. Her brother and sister are two of my favorite people as well. They all lived right down the street my whole life. If Alyssa says my house is on fire, then it is a certainty that my house is on fire.

It was 1:16 in the afternoon. The call woke me up. I don’t truly remember the final words of that call. I was still a little drunk from the night before, but I felt real sober, real quick. I walked into the living room of my shitty apartment, which I had just moved into in June, and saw my brother. Nicholas had slept on my couch for the very first time, otherwise, he would have been sleeping in the house that was currently on fire.

“Hey, did you get a call about the house being on fire?”

“Yeah, like 5 minutes ago,” he said with an exceptionally numb look on his face.

In a very frustrated tone I asked, “You didn’t think maybe you should wake me up for that?”

We quickly headed down the stairs to the parking lot to get into my brand new black Toyota Corolla, which I had bought for my 20th birthday a few months earlier. I lit a cigarette while Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love” played loudly. We had to drive seven miles, mostly going south on the 101 freeway from Broadway to Warner.

The moment I remember most from this day was not actually seeing our house ablaze. It was at Elliot Road and the 101, nearly two miles away from our home, when we saw the black and white smoke soaring upwards into the sky. Nicholas and I just looked into each other’s eyes. We didn’t say anything. But the moment became very real. To this day it one of most real, saddest, and impossible moments to describe. Both of us surely raced through the scenarios of what we would find below that smoke.

When we arrived, we actually had to park pretty far away, maybe a quarter-mile. Apparently many people in the neighborhood decided to take their Saturday afternoon to go watch our house burn down. That really pissed me off at the time. Honestly, the rest of that day is kind of a blur. The fire was mostly extinguished by the time we arrived, but the smell lingered. That smell still lingers in my mind. It was essentially just charred wood. It was like a campfire smell, except in this case, it included the scents of all the things you found most important. It wasn’t the smell of the campfire itself, it was the smell of your clothes after a campfire. The way the smoke soaks into you and remains on that hoodie until you’ve washed it. I have smelled many fires since that day. All of them take me back to my home.

People were asking, “What are you going to do now?” People were hugging me and saying shit about everything being okay, but I didn’t care. I vividly remember Luis hugging me and crying that day. I got to a point where I just wanted to find my mom. I was so sad. I finally remember finding her at a neighbor’s house. She was already on the phone with the insurance company. I remember hugging her tightly. That was the first piece of normal I felt that day. That was what had survived the fire.

Love.

I have digested this day for 15 years now. Here is what you need to know about a house fire:

Nothing that burns up or gets destroyed matters. It is all just shit. It is truly irrelevant. What you really lose, or what I feel like I lost, is the setting of so many memories. The setting of my childhood. It is wiped off of the earth, never to be replicated or returned.

That fucked me up for a really long time. I moved out of the house to my first apartment only a month prior to this day. I was undoubtedly the luckiest of the three of us. I had my bed that night. Most of my stuff was out of the house. The stuff like my clothes, my TV, my Xbox, the stupid things you think are important as a 20-year-old. However, it was actually none of my important stuff. Not the things that mean so much that they belong in the family home.

There was a video of me playing as child, afraid of birds while on the neighbor’s lawn in my diaper. That single video is the only thing I truly want back. It was a precious memory. I wanted my wife and kids to see it one day. All of my mom’s photos, and there were tons of them, were recovered and only slightly damaged. That is what I am most thankful for.

The most important thing I can share is this: What makes a home special is the unconditional love that lives inside of it. The place doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have the love to give it such importance. That’s why the memories are cherished. Because they are full of love and laughter and happiness. The very best part about this otherwise catastrophic family experience is that love cannot be burned down. Its transferable from one location to the next. So very little of actual importance was destroyed the day our home burned down. It certainly doesn’t feel that way in the moment. It takes years of reflection to gain this perspective.

The first question to this story is always the same: “How did it happen?” In what can only be described as a truly fluke accident, my mother was smoking a cigarette on the back patio. To put my mother’s smoking in perspective, it was about a pack per week, from age 43 to 46. She smoked an ultra-light cigarette. So, on the spectrum of smokers, she was in the “I hardly ever smoke but sometimes I want a weak cigarette” category. Anyhow, she ashed the cigarette out, and talked on the phone for 10 more minutes. Then she dumped the ashtray into a trash can. She went inside for another 10 minutes and then left the house. She received a phone call about the smoke about 30 minutes later. The coals smoldered in the bottom of the trash can for well over a half an hour before catching everything else.

My mom took it pretty hard. For many years, she claimed to have burned the house down. But let me tell you something about Jean Polando. She is an absolute saint. People often say that about their mothers, but Jean is friends with nearly everyone she has ever known.

When our parents got divorced, I was a freshman in high school. I would argue that my dad had a midlife crisis. He definitely did not bear the burden of responsibility after the divorce. Jean, however, busted her ass and had her best years as a Realtor to provide for us. She gave us a very good life when I was in high school. I was not oblivious to the fact that once my dad left, it seemed like we suddenly had more money than ever before.

If Jean wanted to burn the house down, well, it was hers to do so.

Obviously she was mortified that this happened. Nicholas and I never once felt any type of resentment toward her. You could never in a million years convince me it was her fault. Frankly, I got very upset when she continued to blame herself. The house was meant to go – to keep her from smoking and to teach us the most important lesson about the irrelevance of material objects. You can’t really pay for that kind of education.

It was a big price to pay for a lesson that has made us better people and brought us a lot closer together. Maybe not right away, but over time it has been a source of love and comfort just to be able to talk about it together.

The night my house burned down was the first time I ever got drunk to cope with sadness. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.

The Tempe apartment complex I lived in was filled with drug users. Weed, meth, cocaine, and alcohol were everywhere. I was dating a girl named Tiffany, and it was hands down the worst relationship I have ever been in. Fully toxic, and so I managed to drag that out for a little over four years.

Tiffany liked to drink nightly. When we met, I was really an only-on-weekends kind of drinker. However, by the time we started living together in this apartment, I had fully committed to this new lifestyle. I was smoking weed as well. That allowed me to not go to bed sober, but not always be hung over from drinking. I liked to drink, but I also know that at this time I was not really wanting to drink every night.

My first apartment was on the second floor of a two-story complex. A couple of doors down lived a black guy with glasses named Manny. We quickly connected, as he was a huge sports fan. He is actually a cousin of boxer Floyd Mayweather. They were also from Michigan. So to put it in perspective, I met a guy who smoked weed and played Madden every day, that loved sports as much as me, and was also from Michigan, and he lived two doors away. Clearly, we were going to spend a lot of time together.

He also had all kinds of wisdom and we shared a lot of our perspectives on life with one another. Manny and I are still friends. We recently reconnected after about 10 years of not being in touch, and we picked up right where we left off. Aside from Manny, we also had some friends move into the place right next door to us after a couple months. So it was like our own version of the show “Friends” on the top floor of this apartment building … if the friends on “Friends” had gotten drunk most nights and used recreational drugs pretty often.

I never used anything more than marijuana and alcohol. The only other thing I remember being prevalent was Xanax. I’m sure cocaine was used occasionally. I just never had interest in coke. I saw the movie “Blow” when I was 18 and immediately became obsessed with the topic of cocaine. I realized that, based on my addictive personality, it was best if I never tried it. I never did any hard drugs; in my head I was too smart to go down that road.

Many of the books I had read to this point involved a lot of hard drug use. The book to “Blow,” obviously. “The Dirt,” a four-way autobiography of Motley Crue, and several books about the very obvious murder of Kurt Cobain. In hindsight, drugs were all I read about. But I had a good head on my shoulders. I had no desire to be a drug addict. Although most people are curious, and I was for sure, I just didn’t think the pros could outweigh the cons.

I had worked at Albertsons in Chandler from age 16 to 22. I started bagging groceries, became a cashier, and later bounced around the service deli and produce departments, before ending up on the night shift stocking. Right around the time I got to the night shift, the store announced it would be closing. Which was great, because I needed to get the fuck out of that job. I hated it, and although I was a really dependable and reliable employee for a long time, I was no longer motivated there. I had been passed up for some promotions that I felt I deserved. So what I did was, I started stealing a bunch of shit pretty regularly. Mostly booze when I wasn’t of age to buy it. I never would have been the kind of person to steal from a friend or any average person. I definitely wouldn’t have ever considered shoplifting from another store.

It’s just that when you work somewhere, and you know how to cheat the system, there is no real chance of getting caught. There is very little to risk and seemingly a whole lot to gain.

After Albertsons, I moved to delivering pizza for Papa John’s. I delivered in the smallest delivery area of any Arizona store. It was on the campus of Arizona State University and the surrounding area. I worked this job from age 21 to 24, and to be blunt, it’s a fucking great job for a college-aged kid. A sense of urgency goes a long way when you deliver pizza. If you get pizza to its destination quickly, you will probably get a better tip. If you say something funny, better tip. If you play beer pong with the customer, better tip. Not to mention, you meet a lot of chicks. I was actually faithful to Tiffany, despite having a job that threw temptation at me almost daily. So you can imagine my resentment when it later came out that she was not being faithful to me.

Tiffany was about 5-foot-5 with dark brown hair. “A loud, crazy, bitch” was her most common self-description. She was a waitress and/or bartender during all of the four years we dated. After it ended, Guy summed it all up best by saying, “She was a one-night stand that you turned into a four-year relationship.” This could not be more true.

I caught Tiffany cheating once, but I would probably bet it happened more than that. We fought a lot, we drank a lot, we were young, dumb, and broke. I know deep down I did a lot to help her. I would argue that I was a pretty good boyfriend, despite it all. However, I am not perfect, and certainly bear some responsibility for it being a bad relationship.

When we met, I was 19 and she was about to be. She was about to move back into her parents’ house. They lived in North Phoenix, about 40 minutes from Chandler. Her car broke down for good in the first month we dated. That left me going back and forth a lot to make it work. My car actually broke down the night of our first date. What a sign that was. I brushed it aside and borrowed my friend Luis’s car. We saw “Dodgeball,” then she had people over and we made out a lot. I was actually a virgin until I was 19. Tiffany would receive my virginity on her 19th birthday. How thoughtful I was.

Tiffany epitomized the word irresponsible. The night before she was to move back to Tempe after six months at her parents’ house, she broke down and claimed she lost $50, and then proceeded to borrow $200 from me. I actually woke up my mom to go to the ATM and borrow it from her. I solved the problem, without hesitation. After a couple months Tiffany punched her best friend and they moved out of the new place. She also got arrested twice in a month for warrants on shoplifting charges and something else I can’t remember. I bailed her out for one of the two.

After breaking the lease with her friend, she stayed with her other best friend, Megan, in the same complex for a few months before getting a new apartment. This apartment is the one I would eventually move into. I was wildly blinded by love. It stresses me out to roll through these memories and look at how naive I was. I honestly don’t have any resentment or ill will toward Tiffany so I’m not really trying to rip her in this book.

The honest reality is that we were in a situation caused by shitty decisions she made, and I tried to help us escape from it. When I claim to have been a good boyfriend, it’s because I did things like this. At one point, she got evicted from another apartment, so I lived with her in a shitty motel for a month. Motels and hotels are two very different places. This was the kind of motel where meth is prevalent, and a lot of people stay night to night. We couldn’t afford the next night so we would often move out at checkout and then move back in after we had both made some cash at work. I was actually living at my mom’s at that time. I didn’t need to be going through that shit. But I did. I stuck by her side and loved her unconditionally.

In truth, the longer it went on, the worse it got. She eventually got hired at Hooters. She had A cups but her personality was a great fit. Loud, obnoxious, and flirty plays well at an almost strip club. A perfect match. We had finally seemed to put an end to the constant crises of our living situation. After a year in a condo with our gay friend David, we moved to a house with two guys that I met through Tiffany. They had become two of my best friends at the time, Blaze and Eddie. They were stoners, sports fans, and poker players. Three things that I enjoyed.

Right after moving in, Tiffany and I had gone for a couple drinks when she got off work one night. While having a good time, one of her former co-workers, Katelyn, approached our table to stop by and stir up a quite a ruckus.

“Stephen, you’re a good guy and you deserve to know that Tiffany slept with Eamon,” she claimed.

Eamon was a mutual friend of ours who had worked with both Tiffany and Katelyn at a bar called The Vine in Tempe. Anybody that went to ASU has probably been there on a Wednesday night for dollar “you-call-its.” But at the moment of this revelation, I had Tiffany’s back. Of course, she had an excuse as to why Katelyn would try to start some shit like that. Obviously, in the coming days I did some digging. Sure enough, a couple days later, Eddie would pass on some knowledge he heard that would confirm what Katelyn had said.

My first action was to go get a pint-sized bottle of Southern Comfort and get fucked up. Tiffany came home from work that night and found me passed out. When she woke me up, I just said, “I know.” She knew what I meant. She started crying and left.

I was heartbroken. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been. I should have rejoiced over the freedom. I should have bought Eamon a beer for helping get me out of this toxic relationship. Unfortunately, that’s not how love works. I invested a lot into this. She was the only girl I had ever been with. I guess in my hopeless-romantic mind I liked that story. We had been through a lot of shit. We had been on and off a couple times. One of those times she had slept with another guy and called me crying at like 5 am to tell me. My brilliant idea in that moment was to take her back.

She had supported me emotionally after my house burned down. I overvalued that. In reality, that’s what any good person would do. I later came to find out that the night Tiffany had cheated, I was actually passed out in the other room. Furthermore, I gave Eamon a ride home the next morning. Pretty ballsy.

So naturally, I took Tiffany back after this, too. Despite all the reasons I shouldn’t have. I ruined what could have been an amazing bachelor pad and managed to take the next six months and turn everyone against me, instead of against her. The cheating was really the straw that broke the camel’s back for my drinking. I was young and having fun. I drank too much, and too often, but there was no dependency before this incident.

That would not be the case after, however. I drank in the morning, before work, at work, after work. I was just drinking all the time now. I resented Tiffany constantly. I have no idea why I tried to make it work. There was no trust. The whole thing wrecked me and definitely wore down my friends. We had a 23^rd birthday party for me at the house and I was done and passed out by midnight. I was just spiraling out of control and every day seemed worse than before.

But in reality, this wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg of my relationship with alcohol. My car ended up getting repossessed the day before, which is obviously not ideal for a pizza delivery guy. Luckily a friend at work sold me his beat-up old car for $500 to help me get by. Unfortunately, when you buy a $500 car, you know it’s a time bomb. It gave me only a couple months. After that, I showed up drunk to work, because I was also a time bomb at that point.

I was fired, or I quit; I’m honestly not even sure how it went down. I just never went back and I don’t recall anybody being surprised I didn’t show up again. I had made a lot of friends and a lot of money at this job. I should have handled the exit better.

I want to make something clear. I didn’t become an alcoholic because my house burned down or because my girlfriend cheated on me. I became an alcoholic because I chose alcohol to be the best way to handle these types of adversities. Did I start drinking more because I dated Tiffany? Undoubtedly, that is true. However, nobody ever poured alcohol down my throat. I was a willing participant and it escalated from there.

The major life heartbreaks were a fork in the road – and I chose the path of self-pity and overindulgence. That is very clearly my own fault and only my fault.

That spring there was an incident that turned everyone against me. Or it seemed to, in that moment. We planned a day trip on the Salt River, where you basically float down a river in an innertube in 105-degree weather and get drunk. Sign me up. On that day – you guessed it – I drank too much. We all did. I don’t remember a lot of things. I do remember us all taking a pretty rough spill on the rapids and hitting some rocks, though. Everybody got kind of beaten up. I don’t remember the ride home that day. It just seemed like a regular amount of debauchery, and I knew Tiffany and I were pissed at each other.

A couple days later a house meeting was called. Much to my surprise, this was pretty much an intervention directed at me, but not about drinking. On the ride home after the river, Tiffany broke down and told everyone that I had pushed her down in the parking lot and that’s why she was crying and that’s how she actually had come to be so bruised that day. Considering I knew nothing about any of this, I can’t sit here and confirm or deny this account.

But the situation has haunted me for over a decade, just the uncertainty of it and the fact there was such an accusation. I can honestly say there are times I really fucking hated Tiffany when I was drunk. Times that I do remember – and hitting or pushing her was never a thought that crossed my mind. I can also say that the river is pretty well policed, and a dude pushing a girl down in the parking lot certainly wouldn’t go unnoticed. In fact, it would probably end up with me in handcuffs. Lastly, and make no mistake I’ve saved this last bullet for exactly this moment, Tiffany’s single biggest flaw was that she was a pathological liar. She used to tell people ridiculous things like she grew up in London, or that she beat cancer as a child. Honestly, she confessed that both those were lies to me over the course of our relationship, at times when it would best benefit her to do so. She would also embellish things into stories that involved me that had not actually happened, just expecting me to go along with it. It was bizarre. Shortly after this incident we finally broke up for good.

At the end of the day, I should never have put myself in such a position. To my knowledge, nobody saw it happen. I honestly don’t trust her word against mine. I know that she punched me in the face shortly after that, though. I didn’t swing back; I just put my hands up to avoid getting a combo to the chin. I highly doubt I ever pushed her down in the parking lot that day. I am not naive to the fact that my words paint me as an overwhelming good guy, and make her a villain, in all but this one incident. I was not perfect. I was young and stupid, too. I certainly handled situations poorly and got jealous and probably said some mean shit at times. I just believe in my heart that I was and am still a good person and she was not that. I have no other ex-girlfriends I would say that about. Tiffany will not be the last girl I talk about in this book. However, she will be only one I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about. She earned that. In the same way all of the other girls I have loved earned the praise they will receive. That’s how life works. If you treat people well, they speak fondly of you. If you treat them like shit, they don’t really go out of their way to defend you or your actions. It’s not that complicated. It is what it is.

After we broke up Tiffany moved to California. She happened to live in a town with a family friend of mine. She dated his friend and when they broke up, she claimed to everyone around her that he had been physical with her as well. My friend says there was no way that happened. I obviously could relate. I don’t know where Tiffany is in the world, but I would bet all that I have that she is still doing a lot of the same shit, and she is still the victim of each and every situation that doesn’t go her way.

The real problem for me going forward wasn’t Tiffany, though. It was me. I had encountered two major life events in the last couple years. Both of them had resulted in the same type of reaction from me. I drank a lot more.

In the summer of 2008 I moved back home to live with my mom after Tiffany and I broke up. It was the best possible place for me to get my life back on track, or so I thought. What I remember most about this time is just talking with my mom nightly, while also having a few drinks, and watching the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing together. The house had been rebuilt after the fire. It was beautiful, and new, and different. I loved it; unfortunately, my mom was about to lose it in a short sale. So, if memory serves me correctly, we only spent about six weeks living together. We had great conversations. We were honest about a lot and she was my best friend after the breakup. She would enable my alcohol problem, too. She would give me money to get us drinks, and I would always get more for myself then I led on. Plus, the house always had plenty in it, in case I ran out.

I have always cherished those six weeks with my mom. Never underestimate a parent’s ability to help pick you up when you are feeling most down. I feel very fortunate that both my parents have stepped up to the plate for me at times in this way. My mom loves the Olympics. Especially the gymnastics in the Summer Games. These Summer Games had the incredible eight gold medals from swimmer Michael Phelps, but more incredible was watching the 4x100 relay when the American men made the incredible comeback against the French after the French had talked some shit. One thing that makes the Olympics so special is the way it brings the country together. So often sports get unnecessarily patriotic, but in the Olympics it’s all warranted. We stayed up until midnight every night just watching. We would sit outside and have drinks and talk. I would smoke cigarettes; we were both very conscious that they were watered down at the end.

No matter what has been going on in my life, my mom has always made sure I knew I was loved beyond the known limits of what love is. I have never not been certain that this woman loves me and my brother more than everything else in the world combined. As a parent, I think that’s how you hope your kids feel. I will be a better parent in life because of how my mom loved me.

When I lived with my mom, I was working at The Vine, the same place Tiffany, Katelyn, and Eamon had once worked together. I was cooking for about $8 an hour because of my pizza experience. It was a massive pay cut from the tips I made in pizza delivery or the $15 an hour I had made at Albertsons. I would end up getting an apartment with a guy from Craigslist named Ian. That ended up working out exactly how you would expect.

I would also make a little cash helping Ian run some errands. Ian was from Iowa and had lived in Los Angeles before hitting the jackpot on a roommate search on Craigslist with me. He was in the first wave of hipsters to ever exist. He was always at the apartment, and he was pretty messy, to be honest. I’m not really one to talk any shit about Ian, though. He was consistently put into awful situations by me.

But for the moment it was great, because it ended up fully furnished with all my mom’s nice shit, since she was going to live with a friend. The real problem, though, was that I was now a person that had a legitimate drinking problem – and I was working at a bar. That’s not that uncommon, I don’t think. For me, however, it was like going swimming in the Bermuda Triangle without a life jacket. It was like a treasure chest of temptation when you got off work every day.

I could always find a way to do some side work for a waitress for some free drinks. Not to mention, at the time I worked there, they were doing dollar “you-call-its” three times a week. Not long into my employment, I blacked out and ended staying the night on the floor of an apartment of some guy I barely knew from many years earlier. Another night, I was left on the patio in winter and the bartender had turned a picnic table over to cover me.

I kept showing up and doing my job well. I just always went too far after work. I had also stolen Tiffany’s best friend, who lived very close to The Vine. So I would stay at her place a lot, and she also cooked at The Vine. Her name was Megan and she was from Peach Tree City, Georgia. Megan became my best friend, and my biggest drinking buddy over the next year and a half. We shared a disdain for Tiffany at this point, and we liked a lot of the same places. Megan was a lesbian, so we also both liked chicks. Although after Tiffany, I only slept with one person until my next relationship several years later. It was a casual thing with a girl who often came to The Vine. It was short-lived and irrelevant to the story except that I learned I’m just not a casual-sex person. I’m 100-percent relationship material, which is why when I was not that person, I made no attempts at being in one.

In actuality, alcohol was my relationship for the next two years. There is really no other way to put it. I put most of my energy into making sure I could drink each night. I used people, I stole change, and I even asked people to buy me drinks. A person too shy to ask girls for their phone number had no problem asking people for a drink. My brother was also now living in a party house of his own in Tempe, in the same area as Megan and The Vine. He had three girl roommates. All hot ASU students. They had a lot of parties. I never missed one and I always got too fucked up. Many nights after drinking, I would just jump the fence to his backyard and sleep on a couch outside his room. His house always had alcohol. I had not only escalated my consumption but also my willingness to do shitty things.

I had learned that alcohol is kept in the same general area of everybody’s house. In the freezer, in a bar, in a cabinet, on top of the fridge, etc. So when I found moments alone, I would drink some. Almost everywhere I went. If you went to the bathroom, I opened your freezer, chugged some vodka, maybe even poured a cup, and put it back, before you came back to the room. In hindsight it was so absurd and illogical. Addiction throws logic out the window. You are well past giving a fuck what people think about you. Furthermore, you always think you have an excuse if you get caught. I was also now sleeping behind dumpsters to stay closer to the bar for when I could wake up and drink more. I was well past the point of judgment. It was like I desperately needed something to wake me the fuck up and put a stop to this madness.

In 2009 I got that wake-up call.