xtcian

our second act

4/26/04

I would encourage anybody who knows my family to go read Michelle's blog (Apr 25 entry) about someone most of you don't know: my sister-in-law Melissa. Michelle does an excellent job of extolling somebody who had an ENORMOUS impact on my life, and is probably responsible for 10% of the way I think.

When I was 14, I was yanked from London back to the cornfields of Iowa, back to the place where I had been (and was further to be) brutalized by assholes at Franklin Junior High School in Cedar Rapids. I retreated into an incontrovertible silence so hermetically sealed that I didn't talk for an entire month. These days you would call that "depression" and treat it with "therapy" and perhaps "drugs" - but back then, all I had was Melissa. (see here for an early blog on the subject)

Long before marrying my brother Kent was considered an option, Melissa was at our house every day, playing board games and cards, and taking me to her mom's second-hand clothes store off Mt. Vernon Road. When my parents started remodeling the kitchen – and then took off to Europe for a month – she painted a giant calendar on the wall for the fun things we'd all do. She also stuck broken cigarettes up there, as a token to her quitting smoking.

Thanksgiving '78 - Melissa is turning around, closest to the camera. Read more about this picture

At some point in the 80s, after her marriage to Kent and the beginning of her own family, it seemed like she was less psyched to hang out with us. To be expected, really. But pretty soon, years would go by without us getting a chance to talk like we used to, and by the time I got to Los Angeles in 1997, I barely knew how she felt about any of us.

And here's where it got nasty: Sean and I let a young Iowa City couple move into our house on Beachwood, sight unseen, because they had been friends with Kent & Melissa. I'd hung out with the dude several years earlier, and he seemed like a decent fellow. Six months into it, they snuck out of the house while we were away for Thanksgiving - owing us a thousand dollars in rent and bills - and fucking disappeared. He turned out to be a blithering moron, and his girlfriend revealed her true colors as an unbalanced, witless banshee.

We tried to keep Kent out of it, as it had nothing to do with him. But this guy (who is unbelievably lucky I don't post his name here) did something worse than bilk us out of money: he went back to Iowa and told Melissa a litany of bullshit things we'd supposedly said about her.

This – along with another family element – is why we haven't seen Melissa as much as we want, and now that I know the extent of it, I totally understand why. There are many things she hasn't done with the family, and I'm here to say, "I get it."

But I hope she also gets that she will always be tremendously important to me, and that we love her. She taught me to always buy all the property you can in Monopoly, the meaning of the word "pubic," and gave me my first copy of "Catcher in the Rye." What more could you ask of the best babysitter you ever had?