That Time Everything Sucked

   In August 1980-something, Jim and I packed up everything we owned and headed for Houston, Texas. We packed  his motorcycle and everything  we owned in a UHaul, including the cat, and latched my  newly purchased Toyota Celica, with new tires and also packed, and headed south. Newly graduated from college, Jim was heading to work for his cousin. I was along for the ride, having stalled out a bit on my English degree at CU Denver, and thought a change of scenery might be nice.
   We stopped in Arlington, between Dallas and Ft. Worth, at a Ramada Inn. We took the cat and the guns and a suitcase of clothes into the room with us, and I slept poorly. When we woke up, the UHaul was gone. Vanished. Whoosh. Disappeared.With my car latched behind it.
   The UHaul with all of our sad, earthly possessions was now gone.
   My clothes.
   His newly purchased work clothes.
   The bed.
   The Dresser.
   A satchel with everything I had ever written.
   My high school letter jacket.
   His motorcycle.
   Towels, underwear,
   Leather jacket.
 
  You get it.
  Gone.
  Left with nothing but a cat, a suitcase and each other, we stood in the hotel lobby with the police and were told this was a "ring", they'd been hot wiring UHauls. Yet nobody was watching ours, so....cool. Thanks. Welcome to Texas, kryssi.
 
   Okay, I'm not going to bore you with police reports, or that Jim's motorcycle was used in a liquor store robbery in Dallas, or that renter's insurance doesn't cover you on the road, or that Prudential will consider you uninsurable for a year after getting all of your shit stolen, or the graciousness of family  or  or or....only that it sucked. Hard Core.  I was in an unfamiliar state with my boyfriend's family. Jim had a job, I did not. I had to find a job, we had to get an apartment, I had to buy clothes to go on job interviews, we had to figure out functioning with one car since he had his dealership car and mine was stolen, I had to figure out how to register and pay for college at UH as a non resident.
   Then, one day, I received a phone call from someone I did not know. The satchel with all my writing was found by a jogger (oh ya, the UHaul had been stripped, the car was stripped and our sad possessions strewn about a wooded area in search of some kind of gold the fuckwad thieves seemed to think we had.) My address in Lakewood was in the satchel, they tracked me down. They then mailed me the satchel, in Texas, out of nothing but kindness. These people did not have to do that.

   And so, in conclusion, all in all, to sum up: Thieves are fuckwads. Life sucks a lot. Adulting is more difficult than you imagine when you're 18. And as angry and bitter as you'd like to spin and blame and trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries, some rando with a heart will find your satchel with your poetry and journals and "novel", and mail it to you.

  I submitted those pieces from my "novel" to Edward Albee a year later, and was accepted to his playwriting class.

  That's all.