PROTECT ME, DEMONS
My high school girlfriend Stephanie was alienated like me, but she had her own reasons. Her mom was a southern beauty queen who became a lawyer and had already been through a few husbands. When Stephanie was getting ready for school in the morning, her stepdad used to fill a bucket with ice water, sneak into the bathroom while she was showering, and dump the ice water on her. He apparently did this every day, and while he was already out of the picture by the time I met her, I always wondered if there was more to this perversion than she told me.
They had a small crew working on some improvements in their nice house, expanding the master bedroom closet. One of the workers had to cut some material with a sharp blade and carelessly grabbed a nearby magazine as a cutting surface. It turns out the magazine was a vintage Penthouse featuring Stephanie's mom in a pictorial, and the worker sliced it into ribbons. Apparently the mom freaked out on the spot and fired the whole crew, and the project went unfinished. Both mother and daughter insisted the worker found the magazine, read it, realized it was her in the pictorial (15+ years prior), and purposely slashed it as a sort of sado-sexual vandalism. I never saw the pictorial, but I did see the trashed magazine with drywall dust all over it because he was using it for work.
Like me, Stephanie sought refuge from her family problems through underground music, and we both fantasized about living together so we could integrate our record collections in alphabetical order without ownership. We talked a lot about bands with romantically involved members, and I encouraged her to play her bass so we could have a band together. She had an electric bass with no amplifier - the loneliest instrument in the world - and one Christmas me and her mom teamed up to buy her an amp. She was like “oh great”. It sat there unused, like gifted exercise equipment, cursed by the giving. In fact her mother had previously gifted her an expensive elliptical machine, and it sat there growing cobwebs because she took the gift as an affront.
In retrospect we were probably both too clouded by our complicated inner lives to achieve real communication as a couple. We argued about what "our song" was, but never agreed because we both wanted to choose. Her favorite was “Protect Me You”, with Kim Gordon sounding haunted and vulnerable, a perfect choice.