Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: The Peanut Gallery

There’s no-one in town and Robin and I wanted to get out for a bit so we went to a local bar that had this play for fun poker tournament. Robin got second place and a seat at the regional poker tournament. This Thanksgiving I’m thankful for the fact that my girlfriend rocks.

A little novel update that I found funny – one of my characters is going to switch race mid-story. I’ll go back and change it in the second draft but for the sake of doing the first draft in a month I just need to plough through. I realized he works better as a black man. There’s also a character I talked about in the first chapter that I never brought back in and I have to do it, I think. Not sure if I’m going to do it now or just put him in the second draft. It’s funny how much shit changes when you finally find your story.

Hope you’re all having a good Thanksgiving.
__________________

Steph was my homegirl throughout junior and senior year. She was an RA with me, 9th floor west tower (I was 4th floor west tower, us “westies” kept it tight). She was Massachusetts personified. Cute looking girl, heavy-ass accent, addicted to shopping, catholic and grew up in some suburb that only people from Massachusetts can pronounce properly like Worchester (Whist-ah) or Peabody (Pea-biddy).

There was always a little physical-attraction there for me, a manageable one, mainly because she was a) hot and b) fun which is really all I need. But it never really surfaced, no awkward drunk moments where I told her I loved her or anything stupid like that (although I did let out a HUMONGOUS drunken fart in front of her once). She was just a cool chick.

We all kind of dug her like that, we would talk about it when she wasn’t around, about how she was the kind of girl you’re perfectly OK being friends with but given the chance you’d go Al Green on her.

She had some fun quirks. She was addicted to Fluff, for starters. This girl was wicked fit, always working out, always jogging. I love to jog and I went jogging one day with her and she dusted me as if I was crawling on my belly. She ate salads, drank her water – stayed away from the excessive junk food. Despite all of this, Steph would eat a jar of fluff in one sitting. No peanut butter, no bread, no banana – just a spoon and a jar of fluff – she’d put it down within a half-hour and not even feel guilty about it.

When I stole a tub of fluff from the dining hall it had to be the happiest moment of her life. She’d invite me up to her room to watch a movie just so I’d bring the fluff with me. She’d stuff her face with spoonfuls of fluff while we watched our movie; if I didn’t pull it away from her she’d likely eat the whole thing.

I was more of a fluffanutter kind of guy. So I’d spoon the fluff on some bread and occasionally redip the spoon. Because of this, an accumulation of stale breadcrumbs begin to gather in the tub of fluff. I remember one day, sitting with this tub of old, crumb filled tub of fluff and telling Steph that we should likely throw it out, it was kind of gross. She resisted like you wouldn’t believe, claiming we can just scrape off the top and it’ll be as good as new.

She was also a good RA, probably one of the better ones in Towers if not the best. And I mean good as in fair, responsible and rule-abiding, not good as in letting her residents get away with everything (like I did). As a result, she had residents who didn’t jive with her too much whereas mine built shrines to me. It made the job tough for her; she was stressed out about it from time to time (and obviously used her stress as an excuse to get her hands on my tub of fluff).

It didn’t help that her lifestyle didn’t jive with a lot of college kids. She wasn’t really a valley girl but she was basically a J. Crew commercial. In college we were all “seize the day, fuck Republicans” style and Steph was more…well…more me and my friends now. She thought it was adorable that her floor was 9-West, for instance, and made welcome signs for her residents that were shaped like shoes (for those whose girlfriends don’t take them shoe shopping, 9 West is a shoe store). She thought it was the coolest thing in the world, a good share of her residents likely thought she was a slave to capitalist pigs.

It’s actually amazing that we got along so well – she really was from a different world. She was the girl I made fun of in High School, no doubt. But her sweetness and energy shone through and it didn’t take long to realize she wasn’t your typical shopgirl (much like Robin who, when we recently moved, donated about three-quarters of her wardrobe to Goodwill and still can’t fit all of her shit into the walk-in-closet I let her have all to herself when we moved in – my closet’s in the fucking office).

Even Robin didn’t really get why I liked her so much. Robin liked her fine but Steph was definitely an anomaly when compared to the rest of my friends. Robin knows I had a wicked crush on her and she attributed my feelings towards Steph on the crush – truth was, though, she was just cool as shit. There was no-one else I would have rather hung with during junior year.

Except for Pat Sajak because that would have been awesome.

Labels: mitc

The Peanut Gallery – Steph

Thursday, November 24, 2005

0 Comments

Previous Posts