1995 — ONE
Eve,
hey there groovy chick
What’s up chuck. dude on friday we should Jam
after school cause i was a brain storming And i
think that we should stay after for awhile then
go back to your jomomma’s house but anyway I’m
gonna hook your ass up, ok?
But tell me what you would be sayin for me
before you say it’s OK. hey and thanks for the
Jane’s Addiction. that shit was kewl.
Well I will talk to you
later BaBy.
I love you
bye bye
francis bean
The first note ever passed to me by Cadence Smith. We had been in French class together all year but did not make friends until sometime in the early Spring around the same time I started going out with James Trask, a boy who was a year older than me, but in a grade below.
Cadence was a girl who I had secretly thought of as cooler-than-anything for the whole year and was overjoyed when we began to get to know each other and discover we had a lot more in common than what was on the outside - we both were weird dressers. She was a year older than me but we were in the same grade. We got in so much trouble together our parents eventually banned us from hanging out or even talking on the phone so in order for us to call each other we made up code names to go by if one of our parents answered. I was Courtney and she was Francis (Bean).
In this note, I probably told her I would tell some boy she liked him, or be her wingman. And when I say some boy I mean Stephen Jones. But shhh… And in this note, the Jane’s Addiction reference was about a song I had dedicated to Cadence over the local ‘alternative’ rock radio station: “Been Caught Stealin”. Cadence had just been busted shoplifting (again). I had told her when to anticipate it, but I didn’t tell her what song it was. So it was a thrill to hear the title of the song and her name in the same sentance on the radio, except for that it came on when she was in the car with her mother and she told me her mom shot her the most pissed off look. We had both been caught for shoplifting at the mall that year. We both continued to do it everywhere else though. Stealth stealing skills were a prized trait amongst my social circle.
Our usual routine was to walk into town after school let out and loiter somewhere. We’d either steal or find someone over 18 to buy us cigarettes, hang out at the local pizzaria and split the $2.10 special, two slices and a soda. We always got the squirt of vanilla syrup in our Pepsi’s for an extra twenty five cents. Then one of our mothers or stepfathers (we both had stepfathers) would pick us up and we’d go to one of our houses. We spent hours changing outfits, smoking cigarettes while hanging half out her bathroom window, listening to music in my room, or in the loft area of the barn at my house which we had swept out and brought a boom box to.
I had a video camera which we used contstantly to document our own personal after-school-specials. We’d shoot in an old barn on my mother’s property, out in a field somewhere, or up in my room. There are videotapes of us floating around this earth some place I wish I knew, so I could properly destroy them all in total disregard to posterity. In them we are shamelessly acting like fools, talking like Bevis and Butthead (this was 1994), saying ‘dude’ and ‘man’ too much for our own good, wearing flannels and baggy jeans, slam dancing to nirvana and green day or the ramones, and acting out this kind of Bob Ross meets This Old House send-up, giving fake tours and descriptions of wherever we were at. I really do hope those tapes never surface.
