Kevin Sampsell - A Common Pornography - A Memoir

My old high school friend Maurice called me one day and asked if he could come up and stay with me for a couple of weeks. Ever since graduation, things had been weird with Maurice and me. After being so antidrug, antidrinking during our high school years, Maurice had somehow become a total souse, drinking cheap beer all the time and always passing out or getting sick. I felt like I had to let him stay with me. Maybe it would help to mend our relationship.

Maurice mostly stayed on my couch those two weeks, drinking Stroh’s, his cheap brew of choice. He would stack the empty cans on the windowsill and never clean up. I drank with him a few times but he always drank faster. As he got more drunk, he got more mean. Even though he had little experience with girls, he would say the worst things about my old girlfriends, especially Holly, who he called a fat cow.

One night, INXS was playing at the Coliseum. It was the height of their popularity and Darren came up from the Tri-Cities to go with me to the show. I had an extra ticket for Maurice, hoping that a nice gesture would make his stay more tolerable. I almost begged him to go with us, even just to get him out of my apartment. “No,” he said. “I just bought some beer. I’m going to enjoy myself just fine.” He stretched out the last two words sarcastically.

Darren and I walked down to the show, barely speaking a word. I looked at the extra ticket in my hand and couldn’t believe that Maurice had elected to stay home and drink by himself. There was a strange sad mood in the night air, like a close relative had just died.

On the verylast day of broadcasting school, I wasted no time getting out of Spokane. I decided I was going to move to Seattle, where a few of my Tri-Cities friends had moved. There was a Ron Bailey school there too, so I thought they could help me get a radio job.

I packed up my car with the few things I owned at the time (the furniture stayed—it was a “furnished apartment”). I gave the place a quick clean and left my key on the kitchen counter. It was just after midnight, but before I could leave for good, I decided that I would finally leave my own message for the guy down the hall, the one who always complained that I was parking in his spot. I took a bar of soap and wrote some nasty things all over his car. I did it quickly and nervously. I scrawled something like: COME SEE ME! APARTMENT 4. And then I quietly rolled out of there with my headlights off. When I pulled into the street, I turned on my headlights and eventually began to laugh to myself as I got on the freeway to Seattle. I was having some sweet revenge. Too bad no one else could see it.

When I firstmoved to Seattle, I was living with about five other guys in a mess of an old house. I didn’t have my own room so I slept in my friend James’s room, in his walk-in closet. I was seeing a girl I knew briefly from Spokane. She had worked at a vintage clothing store where I bought a leather motorcycle jacket on layaway. I must have gone through a phase where I had crushes on anyone who looked like a famous actress—this girl looked like Rae Dawn Chong. Her parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses and she wasn’t allowed to see me, so we snuck around. One night, when her parents were out of town, I went to visit her. She was living with them until she could afford her own place. I was nervous the whole time I was there and kept waking up through the night. There was religious stuff everywhere and photos of the family. Her large black father and her humorless-looking white mother sneered at me judgmentally. I couldn’t deal with the stress and eventually broke up with her.

One night, while I was out on a rare barhopping night with friends, I met a girl named Erin. She was skinny and boyish and we joked around a lot, her whole mouth opening with every bright laugh. She was nineteen but had a fake ID that looked nothing like her. Her laid-back hippie demeanor intrigued me and made me feel like I didn’t have to impress her—at least that’s how I perceived it, being someone who never knew any real hippies. We danced to Fun Boy Three and then went home together. She played Cat Stevens the next morning and made coffee on a stove. I stayed wrapped in her blankets, on the futon on the floor.

I felt right away that I could openly express myself with her and I cried the first morning we spent together. For a while there, I would cry at anything. Songs. Letters. Movies.

(My crying jags would become an initiation for any girl I dated for the next ten years—we’d get to know each other, sleep with each other, and then I would start using her pillow as a handkerchief.)

Three months later, I moved into an apartment with Erin and her best friend, Mary. I had a scooter at the time and Erin and I would ride around at night when we couldn’t sleep. She was a very restless sleeper. She even had a strict rule for us in bed. She didn’t want to feel my knees touching her, my feet touching her, or my butt touching her. She said the sensation of those body parts felt cold and foreign, like they were dead fish or something. This rule simply became: NO KNEES, NO BUTT, NO FEET (NKNBNF). But I was not annoyed by this. I was charmed.

I also learned that she became easily jealous. She made me burn a pile of some of my old photos one night. We precariously made a bonfire of my past girlfriends on the ledge of our window. She blew the hot ashes into the air as the images melted away.

After a yearin Seattle, Erin and I moved back to Spokane so she could finish some credits at Whitworth College. I wasn’t excited about going back to eastern Washington but I knew I had to go somewhere I could get a radio job. The only DJ job I had in Seattle was with a mobile music company. I’d get hired every other weekend to play records at high school dances, receptions, birthday parties, and old folks homes. Besides that, I worked at a 7-Eleven and then waited tables at an oyster bar in Pike Place Market.

A career in broadcasting meant you had to work your way up from smaller towns to bigger cities, so even though I didn’t like Spokane the first time around, I tried to see it as a stepping stone in my radio career. My brother Matt had finished college by this time and he was about to move to Columbus, Ohio, for a sportscaster job after being the sports anchorman in Kennewick for a couple of years. Later, he’d get jobs in Seattle and then Houston—that’s how a broadcasting career was supposed to go: small market, medium market, and then big markets. I was hired again at the AM country music station and began filling in sometimes on the FM Top 40 side of the building too. I worked at a record store most of the time though.

Just a couple of months after moving to Spokane, Erin found out that she was pregnant. Although our relationship was serious, we decided we were too young to have a baby. We solemnly arranged an abortion at a clinic on the other side of town. I drove her there but she didn’t want me to go inside. We sat in the car and, without saying a word, we both stared at the building and cried. One of her girlfriends was going to come back and pick her up and take care of her. She needed to be with another woman for that part, she said.

I sat in my car for a while after she went inside. I imagined the uncomfortable waiting room. I imagined everyone trying slyly to catch a glimpse of the other women there. I wondered if that helped each woman, to see the others and for a moment think that at least they weren’t alone. I wondered if there were any men sitting in there.

Later, Erin told me how it went. The nurse took her in and weighed her and measured her. They said she was two inches shorter than she is. Erin was unusually bothered about this and argued with the nurse about the two inches until the doctor came in. They got her into position and gave her something to knock her out. “And then I was having a really peaceful dream,” she said. “I was walking through a forest and I found a pool of water. I put my hands in the water and was making little waves, like a kid playing. I cupped my hands and lifted some out and watched it drip through my fingers.”