Faaaall On Meeeee!
When I wasn’t visiting college friends, I tried to stay entertained at home. I couldn’t just sit around drinking with my non-drinking family, and I hadn’t kept in touch with many people from high school.
Covertly I drank from my parents’ wine stash. The bottles were “hidden” under the stairs in the basement, where I now lived. Gifts to my parents from long-ago dinner guests, they’d been forgotten. I’d chug a little wine and then add water to the bottle from the basement sink.
After a week, the bottles contained mostly water that smelled like wine. Since my parents didn’t drink, I figured no one would ever know.
Apparently my parents gave that “wine” to future dinner guests. Oops.
Drinking was unusual, though. I slept until afternoon every day. When I finally crawled out of my bed, I only made it as far as the backyard. I took cigarettes, a blanket, my boombox and my new R.E.M. cassette tape. I sprawled in the yard until well past midnight, loudly singing every song over and over.
Fall on Me was my favorite, its lyrics offering the sky a chance to fall right out of space to crush me, right there in my parents’ backyard. I’d stare into the void and sing at the top of my lungs, daring that sky to “faaaall on meeeee!”
I didn’t realize until years later that the lyrics actually told the sky: “Don’t fall on me.”
I was a doomsday seeker from way back; it never occurred to me that the sky wasn’t coming down.
While I lay there in the yard, night after glorious summer night, I started to realize that there was something beyond cigarettes and a falling sky. I started to notice that someone young and beautiful was nearby.
Quite literally, I discovered the boy next door. He wandered by an open window, listening to my music (along with the rest of the neighborhood) and I started to pay attention to what he was doing – which, from what I could tell, was not much of anything. He’d walk back and forth in front of his open window, disappearing and reappearing, sometimes shirtless on a warm summer evening, and I grew intrigued.
I mentioned him to my mom, asking if she knew his name, and she did not. But – given that anyone was better than Larry – she encouraged me to walk over and knock on the door and ask his name.
After several days of total boredom, I did just that. Rob answered the door and told me that he was part of the National Guard (which was very cool) and so he only worked during certain days of each month. He made me laugh in our two-minute conversation, so when he then asked me out, I said yes.
Rob took me to a nice dinner where he made me laugh and laugh and laugh until my stomach hurt and my cheekbones ached and I thought: I could never date a comedian and we kissed for an hour at his house, still laughing.
I went home and closed my door and hid in the basement so that I would never, ever be subjected to the constant laughter that Rob caused ever again.
Of course he found me; I was literally next door. So I had to tell him I didn’t think it was going to work out between us, which was fine because he was shipping out to somewhere to take care of some national emergency anyway.
Rob left, and I went back to lying in the yard and wailing at the sky.