catch

This morning I found The Cure's catch online. Catch always catches me off-guard when I hear it because a long time ago it was one of the theme songs to The Tim and Kelly Show.

The Tim and Kelly Show ran from roughly 1990 to 1994. I met Kelly through my friend Aaron when I was 16 and she was 15. We attended different schools in neighboring Wisconsin towns. She is the first girl that I was a fucking maniac over. Not only was she tall, blonde, crazy smart and super hot... but we had virtually the exact same personality, thought the same shit was funny, liked the same music, had like-minded friends and were attracted to each other. We quickly became good friends. What made it better was that we were good friends who were 16 and wanted to get naked with each other.

Kelly and I dated through the rest of my time in high school. She was my first real girlfriend (8th grade girlfriends don't count), and we were super fun together. Sometimes we'd drive around smoking pot in the car and drive up to parks full of children. We'd call them over to the car to offer up candy, cigarettes and sometimes Kelly blew weed smoke at them. We'd ask their name and address, and then tell them that they had bad parents and that they were super stupid for approaching a stranger's car, accepted candy and had given their names and addresses. We'd yell YOU'RE FUCKING STUPID! and sometimes they'd cry.

Kelly's parents were extremely lighthanded about allowing me to sleep over at their house in Kelly's room in her bed with her. Her father was a push over who kept quiet, and her mom was (in hindsight) a wack job who knowingly allowed me to fuck her daughter in her house while she was home. She also used to buy us liquor. Sometimes Kelly and I would get fucked up, fuck around and then go drive around in the middle of the night naked. One time I ate half a bottle of Flintstone's vitamins (because they tasted pretty good!!) to make Kelly smile at me. I started to feel kind of jittery, so we called the Ask A Nurse hotline. The nurse on the other end of the phone laughed at me and told me that I'd probably be alright. I pissed florescent yellow for two days.

The Cure's "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" was one of our mutual favorite CDs back in the day, and "catch" is one of the songs that we liked to listen to together. I remember dancing with her to it in her room and her smile. We also listened to a lot of New Order, Nine Inch Nails, The Smiths, Happy Mondays, Ice Cube and Pearl Jam.

When I graduated from high school, I went off to college while Kelly had a year of school left. We still dated through the first year of college/high school girlfriend at home thing, and I remember only a couple of drunk hook ups that didn't go beyond making out. I always felt like a fucking asshole afterwards, but I didn't say anything to Kelly about it because I was in love with her and knew that I'd messed up.

I hated the small college that I attended my freshman year. It was so small that seniors lived in dorms. I thought that it was fucking pathetic that 23 year old men lived in a dorm with resident assistants on the floor telling them to shut up at two in the morning. The whole summer between freshman and sophomore year I knew that I didn't want to go back, and wanted to go to Madison instead. Friends from high school were there, and Kelly was an entering freshman. I went back to my college for sophomore year, looked around, and said FUCK THIS SHIT. I set up a meeting with a dean or whoever and formally dropped out a week into my sophomore year. I spent the next few days drinking and fucking off with my college friends, and then that weekend my friend Frank came and picked me and all my shit up and I moved to Madison.

That year was fucked up. My parents were pissed at me and cut me off. I didn't enroll in school. I got a job working part time at a record store and dove into the 19 year old college dropout druggie lifestyle with vigor. I decided that the only time in my life that I'd be able to get away with this was the present.

Kelly, however, took a different route. She had an older brother named Todd who was fucking piece of shit asshole yuppie motherfucker (at age 18) who was this ass licker frat boy at UW-Madison, and obviously promoted this scene for Kelly and her impressionable new freshman friends. I remember one time when I was actually allowed to enter one of Todd's asshole fucknut frat parties with Kelly. The frat house had fucking hired security at the door with a guest list. Their deal was that they'd let in anything with a pussy off the street, but all male attendees were reduced to frat members and this fucking guest list of approved strokes. Kelly got into the party and I stood outside for about 20 minutes before Kelly and Todd appeared at the door and Todd asked me if I wanted to come in. I wanted to break his fucking arm for being such a fucking cock smoke.

The party was super lame. They weren't allowed to have kegs in the house, so they had dozens of cases of Huber beer. I saw lots of khaki and birkenstocks... all meticulously pressed and polished. I fucking hated just about everything I saw and heard. I overheard motherfuckers asking some kid what his dad did for a living. It was like a gathering of young republicans.

I was clearly out of place. I was a college drop out with no real plans or focused goals, no direction. I was dating this hot chick who was interested in joining a white bread sorority and was getting hit on constantly by this obnoxious breed of yuppie fuck. We were getting older and we were growing in opposite directions. It started slowly and developed painfully.

Kelly wasn't always nice (just as I'm not always nice), and the first chip away came on my 20th birthday when she dumped me in her dorm room. It was March, it was cold and wet in Madison, and she made me cry. I think she cried a little bit too, but I was more focused on my own grief. Maybe I'm giving her too much credit; she might not have cried at all. For a long time when I'd think of her, I'd think "you dumped me on my birthday." That night I got fucked up with my friend Eric and became sick and violent.

Because of co-dependence we kept dating and breaking up. My self esteem fucking dropped through the floor. I didn't trust her, and I think that she thought that I was a loser going nowhere. We entered that emotionally damaging and bad period when a relationship goes wrong where you're fucking each other to hold on to each other, but that spiritually it's doing more bad than good. To top this off, it was the first time I was experiencing this sort of pain and self doubt. I was estranged from my family and developing damaging chemical habits.

My friends -- who were friends with me and Kelly throughout high school -- fucking hated her now. They thought that she had evolved from a funny hot girl into a mean-spirited cunt. They'd tell me to get rid of her. I had a very hard time letting go, and I feared that I was losing their respect.

Eventually I found out that Kelly had started seeing someone on the side. Some 24 year old motherfucker from England. I never got the full story, because I ended it. We had fucked with each other's head for so long that we had no trust and no connection beyond the occasional late night hook up. We sat on a pier on Lake Mendota one night and saw a couple our age playfully wrestling with each other. Kelly said to me "we're not like that anymore." That summer night in 1994 was the last time that I ever saw or spoke to her.

By the end of that school year, three of the four friends from high school that I lived with had dropped out of college and were doing jack shit. Madison was kind of over for me and I wanted to get out. I moved back to my parent's house and got a job at a warehouse that stocked 6' x 40' sheets of UV paneling. I worked with all white trash. We Listened to Alice In Chains: Dirt and several hours of country music radio daily. To this day -- even with that much exposure -- I fucking hate country music. A couple of the guys were on Huber Law (sentenced to stay at the County Jail, but allowed to work during the day) for various offenses... one kid who was my age was on Huber because he'd taken a hammer to another kid during a drunken fight at a party. There was no air conditioning in the warehouse, and temperatures rose above 90 degrees daily. At one point I consciously thought "my youth has died here in this heat."

That fall I was sick of being at my parent's house, sick of my life, sick of how fucked up all my friend's lives had gotten (Frank's dad had just died of cancer -- after his mom had died of cancer in high school... Bob had lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, now had a prosthetic and was dealing high volumes of weed and acid to fuckwads... and Eric was saving cash to move to Arizona), and needed an escape. I applied to colleges and was accepted into the spring semester. I called Kelly's house around that Christmas break because she hadn't left my mind or my broken heart. Her mom knew goddamn well who's voice was on the phone, but asked who was calling for Kelly anyways. I told her that I was going away to college in a couple of weeks and wanted to talk to her. Kelly's mom told me that she was "visiting her boyfriend in England, but that she'd be sure to tell her that I'd called." I never called again.

Every couple of years after that I'd get an email from Kelly asking me how I was. I'd reply and I'd be nice. We traded phone numbers but never called each other. I learned that she had moved to England after college for a few years and then to NYC where she worked in marketing for DKNY. The last email I received from her a couple of years ago she wrote that she was contemplating moving to California, and asked if I had moved to Los Angeles like I had been thinking about. That was it.

She's been a ghost inside for a long time. She was my first real girlfriend, my first sex, my first love and my first heartbreak. When I hear the cure's "catch" I think of the start of all of these things.

This relationship has shaped me for better and for worse in regards to how I've behaved and handled all of the girlfriends I've had since then. And the experience pushed me in the direction to where I am right now. I wouldn't be sitting on my ass in an air conditioned office writing ads and brochures for a paycheck in a skyscraper in downtown Chicago if I hadn't made some of the decisions I made over ten years ago.

Kelly will be 30 years old on May 25th.

I know that when she hears catch... she thinks of me too.