Fiction "Losing it" {Lenny's story: 8th Grade part 1}

I've been writing all day and night, and it still isn't right. But I'm going to hit publish anyway because it's a start, and I've told myself I have to keep writing even if it's shit. Here is another part to Lenny's story. It's choppy and may not flow as well, but I had to break it into parts because it just kept growing and growing. This is the first part, which is a lot of back story that will build up to part 2 next week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

 "Losing It"

 

That's me in the corner

That's me in the spotlight

Losing my religion

Trying to keep up with you

-R.E.M 1991

In eighth grade, friendship is the closest thing you will ever have to religion and faith. The simple act of being accepted by a group can make you feel invincible and give you the faith and courage to do almost anything. I was abandoned by my former group of friends two weeks into my eighth grade year. It happened so suddenly, it was like an illness that came along over night. One day were were the best of friends and the next day they were ignoring me at the lockers.

In the beginning, there were four of us, Sheila and Isabelle, who I had met in our “College Prep” classes, and Deb, who had been their friend since kindergarten. I didn’t have that kind of friendship history with anyone at that point in my life. I went to a school that was mostly populated with migrant farm worker families, and they moved with the harvest. In sixth grade, I decided I wanted to go to junior high in a different district. After years of using Esperanza's address so she could take care of me after school, Mom and I decided that Cal Valley Junior High was better for me academically. The decision broke Esperanza's heart as she had been watching me since I was an infant. Mom found herself relieved that she didn't have to rely on Esperanza as much anymore.

I met Sheila and Isabelle on the first day. We had three college prep classes together. I sat behind Isabelle in Home Room, and she was warm and inviting and oddly enough shook my hand when she introduced herself. She also looked like a fashion model. Tall and slender, her black, shiny hair hung like a curtain down her back. Her skin was so smooth and fair that it was such a contrast with all her hair. Sheila was almost as tall, but fuller around the hips and bust. She appeared more womanly than our waif of a homeroom teacher. She was loud and brash and wore her thick blond hair in a braid everyday with it falling out around her face by third period PE, which coincidentally, we had together as well. They invited me to sit with them at lunch, and that is where I met Deb.

Deb was a force before she even opened her mouth. It was the early nineties and Deb was a vision of denim and lace. She wore the right sneakers with the two Velcro strips across the ankle, and they were pink. Her jeans were cuffed perfectly and her shirt was hot pink and peeked out in the space of her open jean jacket that had white lace on the back. It was as if she had stepped out of a copy of Seventeen. Her hair was a light brown and curly, she wore it gelled and sprayed within an inch of it’s life, and instead of a boring navy Jansport backpack like I was wearing, she carried a tote bag that said “ESPRIT”.

“Deb, this is Lenny. Lenny, Deb. She can eat with us right?”, Sheila said in her almost clipped dialogue.

“Hey. How’s it going?”, Deb offered as she concentrated on opening a package of chips.

“Hi. Thanks for letting me join you”, I replied. Embarrassed that I didn’t have more to offer. I was wearing khaki pants, a floral printed blouse, and navy Keds. My hair was pushed out of my face with a headband, and unlike Deb and Isabelle, I wore no make up. Even Sheila had applied gloss after PE. I had a tube of Avon chap stick. I had a lot to learn about Junior High.

I spend the entire seventh grade with Deb and the girls. Isabelle taught me how to apply eyeliner and how to pick out the right lipstick. Sheila taught me to speak up for myself and how to survive algebra. Deb taught me the rest. She gave me my first Sassy magazine. She gave me her hand me downs, though none of them fit very well since she was almost a foot taller than me. She introduced me to Beverly Hills 90210, and we bonded over a shared love and knowledge of Saturday Night Live. Deb showed me how to watch for trends in Seventeen Magazine and on MTV to make sure we were always in style. It was easy to be Deb’s friend, and I fell under her trance. It didn’t take long for her to invite me to sleep over at her house, which was an experience in itself. Deb’s family ate at the table for every meal, I didn’t know families still did that anymore. My family never ate at the table unless we were at Esperanza’s. It was an entirely different world as Deb’s friend and I would have stayed there forever.

But slowly it started to unravel.

It started in the Summer. Isabelle invited Deb and Sheila to join her family at the Boardwalk for a weekend. It’s something they had been doing for years. Deb was more apologetic than the rest of them, telling me she would miss me and wished she could take me along. It didn’t stop her from going. That weekend yielded inside jokes that i didn't understand, memories that didn’t include me, and a weird exclusion that started to manifest in funny ways. I’d call Isabelle and invite her over to our apartment and she’d make an excuse why she couldn’t come, then I’d invite Sheila and she would say the same. Later Deb would call and invite me to meet her and the girls at Thrifty’s for ice cream. It was clear they had spent the majority of the day together. Then we got our school schedules mailed to us, and as luck would have it, I was the only one of us with fifth period lunch. Don’t worry they said, it won’t be that bad, but all I could think of was eating lunch alone.

I didn’t eat lunch alone that first day, thankfully Erin Saunders had fifth period lunch too. We had two college prep classes together this year and the last. She was sweet and quiet, but she too was fearful of eating alone. At lunch that day we figured out that many of our fellow college preppers had fifth period lunch too. Sofie Pearson and Hannah Green. Brothers Alex (eighth grade) and Adam (seventh grade) Moorehouse. Best buddies Kevin Mackey and Sam Gould. I didn’t know them all that well, but they made me feel comfortable and welcomed. We all sat together on the grass behind the gym. Laughing and talking about our summers that were mostly spent watching 90210 (the girls) and Major League Baseball (the boys). That day would turn into every day, and soon I found a comfort zone, outside of my original one with Deb and the girls.

As it turned out, my new comfort zone destroyed my old one. New friends served as the main reason I was dumped by Deb and the girls. They became suspicious of my friendships with my fifth period lunch friends. They accused me of acting differently after a weekend spent with Hannah Green and her sister Caroline. Caroline worked for Contempo Casusals in the mall and gave us a box full of hand me downs when I spent the night at her house the first Friday of the school year. I went to school on Monday wearing floral print leggings and a magenta tunic, which was met with disgust and jealously at Deb's locker. Then Sofie Pearson asked me if I wanted to walk to the "Ice Castle" after school for milkshakes the following Wednesday. I accepted and didn’t ride the bus home. Mom picked me up from the "Ice Castle" after work and when we got home the phone was already ringing. I picked it up to Deb who had a million questions as to why I had missed the bus. When I told her, she got very quiet, and made up an excuse to get off the phone. My attempts to call her back that night went bust. She was cold and ignored me for the rest of the week.

By Monday we weren’t friends anymore. Sheila and Isabelle refused to talk to me in class, which became a problem when we got grouped together for a project. I tried to start multiple conversations with Deb, but she would just look through me or over my head. I made a good solid effort for two days, but by Wednesday morning I was exhausted. I tried to fake an illness so I could get a break from all the embarrassment of losing all my friends, but mom put her foot down.

"It's your turn Lenny. You ignore them. You look past them. And when they see you with your new friends smile as big as you can", Mom lectured in the car on the way to school. I didn't think I would survive another bus ride to school with them talking bad about me three seats away. "You're going to have to put on a brave face and grow thick skin", Mom added as she kissed me good-bye. "You can do it, babe".

I spent the next few months of school wearing my brave face and growing a thick skin. I spent more time in and out of school with my lunch friends. I loved Sofie and Hannah. I loved eating lunch on the grass behind the gym. I loved the sleep overs and the study sessions and the group projects that we worked on together. Still, it didn’t make up for the ache I had for Deb and the girls. I missed them desperately. I would see them in the halls and they would giggle as they passed. I grieved the friendship that was now being destroyed by gossip and rumors about me and my mom. They told people I lived in the trailer park. That I couldn’t afford clothes, so that’s why we shopped at Goodwill. They told Sofie and Hannah about Benny, and that he was in rehab (which was usually true). They wrote notes to me that said I was a cow, that I had a fat ass, that I was an ugly four eyed bitch. All things that I already thought about myself. All things that seemed much truer in writing. All things that could ruin any reputation in eighth grade.

It seemed like a dream, but it wasn’t. It seemed that one day I had friends and faith in things like trust, passed notes in the hall, and Bonnie Bell lip balm. Then with little explanation or reason it was all gone. It was like they didn’t even know who I was. They acted as if I had never existed. They were gone, and even with a thicker skin, I still felt like I was losing.

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Read all the other Musical Monday posts HERE

Lenny's Story {Fiction} #MusicMondays

Dear Readers,
This is a piece of fiction I've been working on for almost a year. It comes and goes but never really leaves. In an effort to write more and get the story out, I've decided to start linking up with My So Called Chaos and Music Mondays. That way I will have a goal of writing every week, and then you all can critique it every week since I don't have money for a proper editor as of now. I have some ideas on how I want it to go, but writing always takes me to different places. I hope you like it and as always, be honest. I'd love any and all feed back.
Thank you,
Megan

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Ah, look at all the lonely people…

-”Eleanor Rigby”, The Beatles

John Lennon died on my second birthday. For most people this wouldn’t be a big deal. For most people, the death of a music legend, would just be something cool about the day they were born. For me, John Lennon has never been just some guy who died on my birthday. You can’t be born to my parents and think that John Lennon was just a guy who made music. I’ve been listening to The Beatles since conception. My mother never sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, instead she sang Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane. My father sent me birthday cards that were little more than the lyrics to Hey Jude and Yellow Submarine, until the year he actually sent me a model of a yellow submarine. You don’t just grow up, celebrating your birthday on December 8th, and think that John Lennon is just some guy. Especially if you name is Eleanor Lennon Estrada.

I don’t remember anything about my second birthday. My mother has never really liked to talk about it. My assumption is that it has more to do with my father’s absence and less to do with Lennon’s untimely death. I have one photo, and one story told to me by a very drunk Tia Carmen when I was nine. Carmen said that on the night of my second birthday, my mother was very distraught. Always holding high hopes that my father would surprise us all with his presence. Carmen said that my mother was late getting to Abuelita Esperanza’s house, and by the time she arrived with my birthday cake, we had finished dinner hours before. My mother had spend the day and part of the evening working at her important office job at the local hospital. My father, according to Carmen, was “on the road”, a term I had learned early on in my life really meant “no where to be found”. My mother brought the cake and the tears and by seven forty five, I was crying too. Tia Carmen says that she begged my mother to leave me with Abuelita and go to Herman’s bar around the corner to watch the end of the football game. Monday night football was a big draw in the tiny farming town apparently. My mother resisted saying that I needed my sleep and she needed a nice long bath. So Carmen walked us out, and while we drove home, Carmen sat at Herman’s with a whiskey sour as the news broke that Lennon was dead.

According to Tia Carmen, this was why my mother has cried every year on my birthday. Why she listens to Eleanor Rigby on the stereo while she drinking her morning coffee every December 8th. And while the tears fall silently down her cheeks that she still thinks of my father’s call that night, and how maybe, just maybe things could have been different.

Ahh… Look at all the lonely people…

On my fifteenth birthday, I sat down next to my mother on the couch with Eleanor Rigby playing in the background. I didn’t look at her, but just grabbed her hand in mine. Then, in a voice just loud enough to hear her, I asked her, tell me about that night. Tell me about the night he died. It was like I was asking about a relative, and though I wasn’t, somehow I was. Mom squeezed my hand, and said, “Your dad missed that too”.

Mom told me that the phone was ringing off the hook as she opened the apartment door. She knew who it was on the line. Benny, my father. Even though she had left messages for him for weeks, she knew he was going to miss my birthday. Like the year before when he sent a wagon, from the Sears catalog three weeks after my first birthday party with the words, “Sorry, I was on the road”, written in the card. This late night phone call was no surprise.

“She’s asleep Benny. You missed it”

“Mary Elizabeth. Lizzie. Liz. Turn on Monday Night Football”, Esteban “Benny” Estrada choked out through one too many Coors originals. “Just turn on the game”.

“Benny, what in the world..”

“Lizzie. He’s dead. Lennon. Is. Dead”.

I’ve never really known if my father knew it was my birthday. I don’t think he realized it right away. He was just calling my mother to break the terrible and awful news that something in their lives had died. A part of their childhood, their teenage years, perhaps even their love. In the years following, Benny’s calls were always short, and sometimes sweet. I never really knew if it was me that made him so sad, or Lennon. Still, he called, sometimes at three minutes to midnight, but he called.

The only picture from my second birthday, the evidence that it actually happened, I’m sitting in my mother’s lap. There is a cake, which for years I thought had a sad clown, but upon further investigation have found is actually a really ugly Santa Claus. It took years and my cousin Mando’s magnifying glass in fourth grade to figure that out. My mother still has on her trench coat that she wore every winter until I was thirteen and it literally fell apart. She looks very classy and business like in it, despite the hair that is escaping from her once pristine bun. I’m crying, my mouth open wide, saliva dripping from my chin. I’m wearing red overalls and a white turtle neck, my hair in pig tails. My mother is smiling so big, that the only conclusion I could draw was that she was trying to overcompensate for her crying child and absent fiance. It’s a smile that would repeat itself in many a picture for the rest of my life.

Now as an adult, my mother calls me on the morning of my birthday, her nose a little stuffed. Emotion clouding her voice. I know without asking that she has listened to Eleanor Rigby with her coffee. I also know that she has probably shed many of those tears for my father, who she will always love.

Ah, look at all the lonely people….

Sometimes I wish I had a different name.

It’s hard to grow up as Eleanor Lennon Estrada and not hate your name sometimes. My mother says that Benny begged her to name me Lennon whether I was a boy or a girl. She may have, except he was on the road when I was born. Photographing The Clark Hammond Experience. Today the “experience” is just a memory, but Pete Clark is a legend of rock and roll, and my father was his first photographer. How he landed that job I will never know, but my mom says it has something to do with “the right place at the right time”. Unfortunately that turned out to be the wrong time for my mother, since someone had to be responsible. My mother left her life in San Francisco, returned home to a sleepy little farming town in California and had me. She will tell you that she had a good life too, that I was all she ever needed, but I think that’s only true because I was Benny’s daughter, and he was the absolute love of her life.

Mary Elizabeth Shaw met Esteban “Benny” Estrada when she was sixteen at the bowling alley. She wasn’t supposed to be there, not on that side of town. Her father was a farmer, with acres of lettuce, among other things, and Benny was a Mexican, who spent his summers working in those fields. Benny was also the younger brother of my mother’s best friend Carmen Estrada. So when Carmen invited Mary Elizabeth to tag along to her cousin Frank’s fourteenth birthday, my mother accepted. She liked Carmen, and Carmen liked The Beatles, which I think made them instant best friends. My mother had no idea she would meet a boy like Benny. So sure of himself and his camera, that he had gotten for Christmas that year. Benny wasn’t like the boys Mary Elizabeth knew. The ones who played football and baseball and drove their father’s cars to Roy’s hamburger stand. Benny dressed in jeans and striped t-shirts like the surfer boys she saw on TV, She said he walked around like he was in on a private joke. Like he knew the punch line of life. And when he shook her hand, her stomach fell.

The following Monday, she found an envelope with a picture enclosed. She wasn’t looking at the camera, but for the first time in Mary Elizabeth’s life she thought she looked pretty. She felt she could be a person who took a good picture. On the back Benny had written “Lizzie Bean - 1969”.  My mother would keep those photos in her white vinyl jewelry box for the rest of her life.

Mary Elizabeth and Benny graduated from high school in 1970. As planned, my mom moved to San Francisco to go to Secretarial College. Benny stayed behind to work in the fields for his dad, who was a foreman at one of the farms, and start community college. She called Benny every night at six from the pay phone outside the apartment she shared with three other girls at the school. No matter what Benny was doing he made sure to be home for her call. When she called in December to tell him she’d be home in three days for Christmas, he told her he had a surprise for her. Benny had been accepted at the community college in San Francisco, his first semester tuition paid by his parents, and would Mary Elizabeth Shaw do him the honor of becoming his wife. It was the happiest Mary Elizabeth had ever been.

At home for Christmas, Liz and Benny decided that it would be smarted to live together in the city. Mom called her mentor at the secretarial college and she put her in touch with her brother who was a landlord. They sealed the deal over the phone with Benny’s dad, Armando offering a sizable deposit by December 28th that was over two months rent. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until Liz went home to tell her folks. It was 1971 and Grandpa Shaw was a traditionalist. No daughter of his was going to be shacking up with some Mexican as he put it. He also let mom know that he couldn’t abide by no Mexican son in law, and if she moved to San Francisco, she didn’t have a home to come back to. Grandma Shaw cried with a broken heart, but didn’t offer a word otherwise to her husband. Mom packed up what she could in some old warehouse boxes and packed her little car. She didn’t even offer a goodbye because she didn’t want her voice to crack.

Benny’s parents Armando and Esperanza were overjoyed. Mary Elizabeth had been a part of their family since Carmen had invited her to cousin Frank’s fourteenth birthday party. Mary Elizabeth had spent countless nights sleeping over and enjoying Esperanza’s famous enchiladas. Armando and Esperanza offered to pay for the wedding before the love birds left for the big city, but Mary Elizabeth and Benny wanted to wait. Let us get settled they said, let us finish school they argued.  

They did both, and neither.

My mother graduated from the Secretarial College and landed a very solid and good paying job at City Hall. She worked for someone who worked for the Mayor or something like that. My father got tired of going to school and left his job to work at a hotel bar. That’s where he met Pete Clark and David Hammond. Soon Lizzie Bean and Benny were going out every night, listening to every gig Clark and Hammond played until they were discovered with a house band at the Fillmore. Soon The Clark Hammond Experience needed a photo for a Rolling Stone debut article, and it was Benny Estrada’s photo that was printed next to the article. From there Benny went on the road, and by 1977, he lived on tour buses and in hotels in foreign lands, while my mother lived in their walk up and worked overtime to make sure the rent was paid. On one of Benny’s stops in San Francisco in 1977, my mother became pregnant. When she told Benny, he promised her that he’d be back after The Clark Hammond Experience played their Midwest tour. Mom moved back to Salinas after Benny called from Flint to say he missed her, but that the tour was going to be extended.

Much to her embarrassment, she found herself with no job and no place to live when she arrived home. She stopped at Carmen’s new apartment to tell her the news about Benny and the baby. Carmen said she could stay there on the couch until she figured it out, but that didn’t last once Esperanza found out. Esperanza said that Elizabeth needed a proper bed, and the baby a crib. Esperanza opened her home and rearranged the room Carmen had just vacated. Carmen helped her move in and Armando brought home a crib he had bought at Sears. Overwhelmed my mother spent her first three days in the Estrada home in her bed, crying and pining for Benny. Benny spent those days in Chicago with an underage groupie and cocaine.

Mary Elizabeth found a new job and a new life in Salinas. A stellar recommendation from the Mayor’s office helped her get a job in the administration building at the hospital. Along with the job she was able to find an apartment, much to Esperanza’s dismay, and by her third trimester she was living a brand new life. Eventually Benny tracked her down. He begged her to come home, although he was living in the hotel he formerly worked. He offered to come to her, but she always said no. It was easier this way. It was better this way. In her heart she knew Benny was in no shape to be a father.

In the early morning hours of December 8th, 1978, Mary Elizabeth awoke to find her water broken. She called Carmen, and Carmen drove her to the hospital in her green Volkswagen beetle. Carmen held my mother’s hand, fed her ice chips, and cried with her when the pain was too much to bare. Mary Elizabeth accepted no pain medication, as her punishment for loving Benny Estrada the way she did. Instead she sang every Beatles song she knew from memory starting with I wanna hold your hand. She would start and stop with each contraction. Somewhere around noon, she had started singing her favorite, “Eleanor Rigby”, and in between pushes and screaming she would silently whisper, “Ah, look at all the lonely people, where do they all come from”. I was born after the second chorus, and given the name Eleanor Lennon Estrada. 

Which makes it impossible for me to escape my name and the soundtrack of my life.

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My So Called Chaos