by Jeni Birr
I remember it rained on the day I left. I said goodbye to Oreo, the dog that had been mine since seventh grade that went with my dad when he moved; and then stopped by my dad’s work to say my final goodbyes to him. I cried. I said “thanks for all the fish,” which was a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of his favorites, and I wrote a song about it on the way back. Yes, while I was driving, pen and paper, shame on me.
Daddy’s Song*2006
I cried harder than the skies
As I drove off towards the horizon
Not even knowin, where I was goin
My eyes always were the prize on
Tired of taking two steps back
For every one that I took forward
Sun rising in the distance
Guess that’s what I’m headed toward
And I know that you’ll be there when I return
‘Cuz I’m always gonna be your little girl
Don’t yet know just what it is
That I’m running from or to
But I know wherever I may go
I’m followed by the love of you
And it might be my job right now to go explore the world
But I’m always gonna be your little girl
And daddy, I love you
So much more than words can say
You gave me a home
Taught me all I know
And gave me wings to fly away
Still gonna need my daddy
Even when I’m fully grown
Still gonna call you daddy
Even when I have children of my own
Sometimes I get naïve and think I’ve figured out the world
But I’m always gonna be your little girl
I know I’m always gonna be
You’re little girl
~*~
I didn’t have any extra money and couldn’t afford to live on my own (and would have been completely opposed to doing so at this time) so, logically, I ended up moving in with Eric, who was now staying with our friends, Chris and Jess. I went back to work for my old boss from Cosi, but he was at Einstein Bagels now, so I went there. I continued to try to make art, and painted the windows at Einstein’s a few times, but I was barely able to pay my portion of rent and utilities on what I was making, so I went back to work at Cosi in the evenings. There were plenty of days where I would wake up around 5:00am to be to Einstein’s by 6:00am, would work until 2:30pm, drive to Cosi, take a nap in my car, and then go in and work from 4:00pm until 10:00pm. This eventually caught up to me and I woke up one morning, and couldn’t even stand up for more than a minute without feeling like I was going to black out. I still went in to work, at 6:00am, but I requested if they didn’t really need me, I’d like to go home. Apparently, they ended up getting slammed that day and then wrote nasty things about me in the manager’s log, but I told them I would stay if they needed me. I knew it wasn’t their fault I was suffering from exhaustion, and I have the craziest sense of work ethic. I have never called off a shift.
This is also about the time I applied to be on the TV show “Survivor,” the first time. I filled out a twenty page questionnaire about who I was, what I did for a living, what my hobbies and passions were, and who I wanted to come visit me if I made it on the show. I put down Blair, my dad, and Eric. Blair was a huge “Survivor” fan as well; so much so that I remember he called me one morning, while I was in Design I class the day after the season finale and he left me a message that said “Pixie, if you see me or call me, DO NOT TELL ME WHO WON SURVIVOR! I haven’t watched it yet, but I will in the next day or two.” We were both diehards for the show. I sent in a silly video with the questionnaire, but I overnighted it the day before it was due, so I like to tell myself they never got it, because I never got a call.
We stayed with Chris and Jess a few more months, but Eric ultimately decided we needed our own place and we moved into a house we couldn’t really afford, a few miles over, in Berkley. Fortunately, maybe a month later, I got a promotion, at Cosi, and went there full time. I still helped out at Einstein’s on Saturdays, but only for a few months. My new position at Cosi was the Catering Coordinator, and I loved it. Best restaurant position I’ve ever held. I generally worked about 8am til 2pm, set up all the catering, including the dessert platters, which I loved arranging, delivered it all, helped through the lunch rush when I got back, and then left. Some days there was quite a bit of catering and it was very stressful, but most days there was only a reasonable amount, and there was an hourly raise involved, and I started taking home an extra couple hundred dollars a week in tips. It was great.
The following March, Eric called me one day while I was out on a delivery and said “I need $300, but I can’t tell you what it’s for.” Obviously, as the money handler of this relationship, I could not let this slide and eventually found out he wanted to adopt a puppy from the humane society. Now, I LOVE animals. I was even vegetarian for five years and vegan for one of them back in high school and college, and I love puppies, LOVE THEM, but I did not think it was a good time for us to be getting a dog. Eric always knew what to say to get me to see things his way and next thing I knew, we were at the humane society that night. The original pup we went to see was supposedly half German Shepherd and half Rottweiler, but I think they just tell people every dog has some German Shepherd in it because they told us the other puppies we looked at were half German Shepherd and half Chow Chow. The two we played with together were brothers of the same litter. One was very chill and almost all black. The other had way more spunk, and better coloring, and we ultimately went with him. He was a little sick though and we had to come back in a few days to finalize the adoption and take him home. It ended up being St. Patrick’s Day when we brought him home. We wanted to name him something Irish accordingly. My vote was for “Whiskey” as that’s what he reminded me of, when you hold a glass of whisky up to the light, the striations matched his highlights exactly. Eric wanted to name him Apollo, which isn’t even Irish. It was a full week before he had a name. Eventually, we went to the Royal Oak brewery, with our friend Thommy, made a list of about twenty names, a few of which were as eccentric as Doctor Gonzo, and polled the whole bar, and ultimately, “Apollo” was chosen. I lost. But that’s okay, because he is pretty much the coolest dog on the planet; I don’t care what any of you say. Except for those navy seal dogs, they’re super bad ass.
We lived on a corner lot in our new rental house, and the yard was fenced with chain link, so anyone walking down the sidewalk could see our whole yard as they were walking by, and it sure seemed like everyone in Berkley had a dog, and boy did they love Apollo. He was the sweetest puppy, loved people, and never barked at anything! He was so playful, and smart! He knew he wasn’t supposed to chew on sticks, so he had this habit of lying in the corner of the yard, looking like he was chewing on his bone, only to find out he was really chewing on a stick hiding behind his bone. Or the time we came home from work to find a puddle of pee just outside his crate because he figured out he could lift his leg and aim it away. Never before have I been simultaneously so mad and so proud! It took probably a few months before I really fell in love with that puppy and didn’t want to kill him half the time, (like when he destroyed my favorite shirt, or my phone charger, or my crocks) but now I would literally give a limb for him. He’s like our child.
That spring, my brother graduated from Wayne State and we threw him a graduation BBQ in our back yard and my dad came up and stayed with us, and my mother came up from Savannah and stayed with friends because she couldn’t stay in a “house of sin.” Let me also interject here that she had loved Matt. He had gone out of his way to blow smoke up her ass and be the son she never had (because Tom sure wasn’t going to call her and talk to her for an hour) so she loved him like her own son and I think she was more devastated than I was when we split. In her mind, it was Eric’s fault, and she couldn’t stand him for it. I’m sure it also didn’t help that the family didn’t know I was now sm
oking and drinking until they came to our house for the BBQ and she blamed Eric for that as well, which was also not his fault. I was already doing these things before him, I just failed to mention it on the phone because really, how do you tell your mother you started smoking and drinking, especially when she’s so religious, and everything you do is a sin already. She didn’t speak to him or even say “thank you” for the hospitality, or cooking, or throwing the party for her son. Eric didn’t take too kindly to this and doesn’t speak to her to this day.
I was making better money than I ever had, and Eric was doing pretty well, but he’d been at his current job going on five years and hadn’t had a raise. He was a mechanic at a local, privately owned dealership, where he had started as basically the oil change boy who swept the floors and took out the trash but was now a certified mechanic working on vehicles. He was told he’d get a raise once he got certified, but this would have taken money away from one of the other techs, so it didn’t end up happening. He got yelled at for being late, but then when he tried to go in early, he got yelled at for being TOO early. He came home one day after a particularly stressful shift and announced that he was ready for a change and thought that we should move to Jacksonville. After much discussion, we ultimately decided this is what we would do in several months when our lease was up.
We had a lot of stuff at this point in our lives and we sold it all. Furniture, studio equipment, his turntables and mixer, most of his records, a couple guitars of mine, my very expensive microphones, everything, including my car because it was black and had no air conditioning. I loved that car too. I called her “Jujubee.” Apparently, people are always moving south and never moving north, so it is quite a bit more money to rent a moving truck to go south one way than it is to go north. So we just sold everything and moved down in what we could fit in his dad’s minivan. I went down about a week before to scout apartments and try to find a job before we got there so we’d have somewhere to live and at least one of us would be working. My dad had since moved to Gainesville, Florida, but that was only about an hour and a half drive to Jacksonville, so he let me stay with him and borrow his car for the duration of my trip. I did manage to procure us an apartment, and me a job, with Quiznos Subs, as an assistant manager. I thought the ad said sixteen dollars per hour, but it was actually sixteen thousand per year salary. The district manager I interviewed with, Wayne, thankfully brought this up in the interview and I initially turned the job down as that was about half of what I was currently making at Cosi and I felt I could do better. He spent the next half hour drawing me a map of the city and telling me where all the best restaurants and shopping were and where to go and where to stay away from. It was super helpful and really nice. The next day he called back and told me he could start me at 24,000 and once I got promoted to full General Manager it could go up to more like 28,000, so I accepted.
CHAPTER 6
We got lucky with our apartment; it was originally going to be on the ground floor facing the parking lot, but some mix-up moved us to the second floor over-looking the lagoon area in the back for the same amount. Even though they supposedly sprayed for bugs and spiders every week, there were spiders bigger than I’d ever seen in the breezeway outside our door and I just remember hurrying in and out the door all the time.
Eric had a friend, Mike, who had moved to the South Florida area a couple years prior who came up to visit us a few weeks after we arrived. We made the very unfortunate mistake of leaving Apollo out of his crate while we went out for a few hours. I sure wish we’d taken pictures of the destruction when we returned because it was monumental! We thought we had put everything locked in the bedroom, but Eric had a backpack in the corner that got shredded, with a box of Mrs. Grass chicken noodle soup, which was all over the dining room. He also shredded two umbrellas and pulled every single vertical blind out of their clips and proceeded to shred them. I felt bad because there was blood on the blinds and I knew it was our fault for leaving him out before he was ready. He never touched a thing that wasn’t his when we were home, but if we left him home alone, he was not happy about it, and he would let you know it. He would bark loud enough for China to hear him every time he went in his crate. By about five months after we moved there, a neighbor apparently complained to the office and we were essentially evicted. We had only signed a seven month lease and were planning to move anyway so they just let us move at six months instead so it wasn’t a big deal, but it was still embarrassing.
We looked at several places, including a duplex I really liked with a fenced yard, but ended up in a townhouse we couldn’t really afford, a running theme in our relationship. I will say, it was very nice. It was two stories with the living room open to the loft-style stairway, two big bedrooms, a kitchen larger than we ever would have needed, a dining room we almost never used, and the tiniest possible patio, which was fenced in but Apollo wouldn’t even pee in because it was all rocks beyond the pavement so we still had to walk him a handful of times a day. We had so many problems with this place.
In the summer, in Florida, it rains every afternoon, usually for only twenty minutes, and then goes back to being beautiful and sunny; but our townhouse was on the end of the unit, at the lower end of a downslope, so all the water ended up on our roof, and there was apparently a crack in some seam somewhere because it poured in through our kitchen light fixture every time it rained. We let management know about this and they sent maintenance guys out a couple times, but it never fixed the issue. It continued to rain in our kitchen, and mold grew in the closets, the pantry and the air vents. Clearly, we broke the lease on this property and moved out.
For the year we were in Florida, I hated it for the first few months, I’m not going to lie about that. I missed my friends and my open-mic scene and hadn’t discovered the arts and music of Jacksonville yet, and I was working a mandatory six-day work week with Quiznos. After about two months, the manager of the Riverside store got caught stealing from the company, was promptly fired, and I got his store and my first raise. I LOVED Riverside. It was just like Ferndale with little shops and cafes, a walking path through the park and along the river, with Spanish moss hanging all over everything; my kind of area. What I did not love was working so much. A week after I took over the Riverside branch, I learned my assistant manager was on the registered sex offenders list, and not for something excusable, like taking a piss in public; something unforgivable, and he had failed to mention that on his original application, so I fired him. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the man I had trained and ready to take over his position hadn’t stopped showing up to work two days later. I had two key holders, who knew the basics of closing, but no one that knew how to do any paperwork, inventory, ordering, scheduling, or anything else managerial but me. There was a span of five weeks that I worked every day. Most Saturdays I would go in, open up and leave within an hour or two, but all the other days were full shifts, including my weekly open to close on Tuesdays. The only good that came from this is my District Manager saw how dedicated I was and gave me a second raise after a month at that store.
Eric got a job with a flagship golf course, the headquarters of the PGA Tour, TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra, Florida which was right outside Jacksonville. I never thought he’d make it because he was required to be there by 5:30am most mornings, but he surprised me. He loved it. He was always on time. Like me, he would rather go to work very early and get out early. Problem with this job though is that he worked with a lot of younger guys, and they would very frequently go to the bar when they got out of work. I’m probably exaggerating this a bit, but it sure felt like at least three days a week they would end up at Lynch’s, a pretty neat little Irish pub by the beach. We definitely had some good times at Lynch’s, including our collective birthday party because they’re only five days apart.
The other bar that I think we spent equally, if not more time at, was Sneakers. It was a big chain sports bar where all the servers wore cheerleader outfits or jerseys. We were both s
mokers at this point, and they had a very nice patio bar with TV’s all over that you could smoke at, while never missing a football game, which Eric is VERY into. This is where we met the majority of our Florida friends, the patio bar of the Southside location of Sneakers. I don’t think any of them were even from Florida. They were all transplanted there, as more than half of Jacksonville residents were, many from Wisconsin, a couple from Pittsburgh. Eric had his Sawgrass crew, I had my Riverside crew, and we both had our Sneakers crew.
All of these people became very crucial when Eric informed me we should move back to Michigan about ten months into our stay. Initially, I agreed, but the more I thought about it, I was happy where we were. Yes, I still missed Blair and Leah and my Detroit crew, but I had made new friends and I liked the Florida weather way better. Eric and I had been having problems, we were not communicating worth a damn, and I ultimately told him I was staying in Florida. We didn’t really speak for a few days other than to figure out who was going to stay in the townhouse with the dog, and who was going to crash with a friend; which was me, on Jamie’s couch. This one hurt the worst so far though and we got together a few days later to try to work it out, appropriately, at Sneakers. I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say we each brought stipulations to the table, most were agreed to, decided to get back together and move back to Michigan. I lost that one too.
Funny side note story: When I called my mother to tell her that we were moving back to Michigan, the conversation went as follows: “I have some bad news and you’re not going to like it very much” to which her reaction was “oh my God, you’re getting married!” Clearly, I informed her this was not the case, and that we were only moving back to Michigan, which to her, was just as bad. I just couldn’t believe that her first conclusion to jump to when I said “I have BAD news” would be that I was getting married. This is how much she still disapproved of Eric at the time.
