Telling Her Story
“Sue, this is Adam. He used to work here.”
Upon walking through the door at the record store where I once previously stood in her same spot, I’d been greeted by the gaunt cashier, the faded pink in her blonde hair resting against her modestly decorated neck. Unaware of who she was, I caught up with my old boss prior to the introduction to a woman who had left the store a decade beforehand to triumphantly transition from spending her free time writing, hosting, and editing a public access interview show to begin getting paid by a local network affiliate to reach far more viewers from inside their modernized studio. When we met, she wasn’t then the person who I would come to know—submissive and diffident, her quintessential effervescence and positivity-no-matter-the-odds philosophy on an extended sabbatical—but she was undeniably eye-catching and memorable, nonetheless. I told her how, despite being unfamiliar with her career as an on-air entertainment reporter, I’d heard her name from co-workers and customers in the past, which yielded a smile, one hiding the fact that her failed marriage had brought her back to her hometown, a place where she was known by many because she still looked exactly like her iconoclastic teenage self. And she asked me about Chappelle’s Show, the DVD set I was purchasing, a potential new viewing option accompanied by cheap vodka and cheaper champagne in her childhood bedroom.
That same marriage would furnish endless entertainment for the years we watched the show Burn Notice together, a spy series whose protagonist shared her ex-husband’s name (Michael, not Fuckface, the latter the one she referred to him by). Each time we turned on an episode, Sue would first open her current college-ruled television notebook—volume after volume chronicling each episode she watched in turquoise ink—and make three columns: one titled M-Word, one Mike, and the other Mikey. No hourlong show’s writer’s room has ever forced its ensemble to refer to the main character by name as frequently as Burn Notice did, but her initial resentment morphed into the method that conquered him holding power over her anymore. “Blebbz, I think we’re gonna set a new record!” she announced once as history was about to be made, thrilled as we entered the first commercial break with eleven M-Words, four Mikes, and two Mikeys. Television was not a passive exercise for Sue, the onscreen ongoings perpetually enlivening her thoughts and spilling into numerous aspects of her daily existence. Time with the television signified an immersion in safety throughout her life, like those astigmatic nights sitting on her elbows with her hands under her chin and her imaginary friends in tow—Harold the leader, Kukar the troublemaker—as the invisible companions were forced to mimic their tomboy-ish leader and press their faces inches from a staticky Pinky Tuscadero.
“When I was obsessed with Happy Days,” Sue told me, “I used to make my mother stand in my doorway wearing sunglasses and pretend to pop the collar on her invisible leather jacket while pointing at me and saying ‘Heyyyy!’ before turning off my light so I’d go to sleep. A few times she forgot, and I kept yelling ‘Maaaa! Do the Fohhhnz!’ at her or else I wouldn’t go to bed!”
Forever embarrassed by it, Sue revealed that her first celebrity crush was on Sherman Hemsley, the closeted homosexual actor who starred on The Jeffersons, her longtime amorous impulses leading her to conclude that she was a gay queen trapped in a woman’s body. Conversely, she tried to coin herself Chrissy in honor of Suzanne Somers’s portrayal of the character on Three’s Company, a cognomen that her friends thankfully didn’t let stick. She only knew about trumpet player Herb Alpert due to the unpleasant fact that one of his songs soundtracked Luke raping Laura on General Hospital. I’ll forgo the innumerable other examples.
In her sober years sugar replaced alcohol, Sue claiming in her final months that the dependency fed the cancer cells germinating in her esophagus. We would relax on her bed to watch a show before she’d raise a finger and say “Wait!” while hurrying to her closet. The top half of it displayed carefully arranged color-coded shirts whereas a sizable chunk of the floor was covered with disorganized boxes and a purple laundry basket overflowing with candy. She fell in love with a limited-edition green apple and caramel licorice flavor, leading to her buying dozens of bags from various stores any time they were on sale. When one sour hard candy she consumed regularly was discontinued, she ordered what amounted to a pallet of them from eBay. There were stints with Nerds Ropes, seasonal Mike & Ike flavors like buttered popcorn and cherry cola, and extended hunts for inexplicably elusive Bottle Caps. When I grabbed a box of Runts from the candy closet assuming she’d already replenished her supply, she said, “You can have some…but not the grape ones!” She paused. “Okay, fine, but, like, maybe two or three?” “Wait, not four?!” “Dude, no! They fuckin’ ruuule!”
A lifelong bent toward excess prodded her to eat candy as she fell asleep watching cartoons, once awakening to a minefield of Junior Mints that led to the assumption that her cat had shit the bed…until she curiously bit into one. At the height of her shame, powerless to resist the nearby sweets, she relocated the candy to a Tupperware bin by the oven in her kitchen. Soon thereafter, she emerged from a borderline somnambulant daze to uncover her indomitable candy craver within digging through plastic bags for a pocketful of Swedish Fish and a fistful of flavor-of-the-week Oreos, a couple forlorn fallen soldiers sometimes located by the rusted pots and pans drawer in the morning. Cavities and headaches, or sugar hangovers as she called them, caused her to move the candy stash from the kitchen to her basement, too afraid to tiptoe down a second set of stairs after taking her sleeping pill, although one night she did and in her characteristic klutzy fashion nearly plummeted face first into the patch of sour kids, instead diverting onto a box of wrapping paper to break her fall, the bent tubes resembling a group of pool noodles cannonballed by a sumo wrestler.
Sue loved loving things before acknowledging that other people were infatuated with them too, loving them in a way that she sensed was somehow more genuine because she was first, insisting she knew she would love something the moment she saw it or heard about it, not relying on logic or considering the overzealous and absurdly myopic implications. This applied to anything worth being coveted, and along with stuffed animals, her longest-reigning passion was trains.
“Does your wife know you’re here with her?” an older man asked me cheekily while sitting beside us on one train ride.
“The wife told me to get out of the house for the day,” I said. “She didn’t say what I could or couldn’t do, though.”
The man chuckled as Sue whispered, “He definitely thinks you’re paying me for sex. And now that I think of it, nobody’s stopping you.”
Another time, I tried to quit smoking cigarettes the week of a vacation, and in her commitment to embracing forced kindness rather than troublesome sincerity, Sue refrained for a couple days from telling me how I’d been an asshole during the drive to New Hampshire for a lengthy train ride. I would’ve refused to let anyone tarnish one of my treasured pastimes, but she was able to set her feelings aside, her belief that complaining would simply serve to further damage the occasion. It was the unfathomable degree of her graciousness that fueled my obsequious devotion, a friend of Sue’s once criticizing her for secretly wanting the men who loved her to worship her. “Who doesn’t like to be worshiped?” I replied, dumbfounded by the blatant envy and provoking awkward silence.
In addition to burning all her journals, Sue tasked me with one other mission following her death. She had saved a box with all the cards, desiccated flower petals, hotel stationery notes and the corresponding pens used to write them, matchbooks, a tee shirt, and other mementos of the man who had the starring role as Love of Her Life in the first half of her romantic career—the Rod Serling to my Jordan Peele to invoke a confusing televisual analogy about reboots—and requested that I not look inside it, get in touch with him, and hand deliver it.
“Do you know that we had to take a fucking train ride to Orlando and back cuz of how much she loved trains?” Steve would tell me about a Disney World vacation when I invited him to my house two days after Sue died.
“Oh yeah, I know that story. Back when she wore tube tops to ‘get tanner,’ right?”
“She told you everything, huh?”
“Indeed. Thing is, I don’t think she expected me to remember all of it.”
Steve looked at the poster-size framed photo of Sue in sunglasses with her tongue sticking out and flashing a peace sign at us from the living room wall.
“By the way, that’s the perfect image to show who Sue DiFranco was!”
“You always call her by her full name. Why?”
“Because. She’s SUE DIFRANCO!” He paused for a few seconds. “Back to what you said, though: Did she ever tell you why she broke it off before I was supposed to move to L.A. with her?”
My first encounter with Steve took place during one of his sporadic trips to shop at the same record store where I would work again after meeting Sue. He managed the kitchen at the nursing home where Sue’s mother Marge stayed for a while, a role Steve credited Sue for urging him to pursue, and once when visiting her mom, Sue asked if I would be comfortable going with her to say hi to Steve. (“You began dating when I was three years old,” my go-to line. “How could I possibly care?”) Sue and I took a walk with him looping around the property several times while catching up as he told us how he prayed by Marge’s bedside each day. I’d never been jealous of him or resented the fact that she continued loving him so much, telling her that she didn’t need to explain her feelings. As a high school senior, she’d frozen in place when eyeing Steve aka Honey, the nickname one I learned from the many captions in her scrapbooks starring the man, the couple both often sporting tank tops and jean shorts. He was walking in the hallway early in his freshman year and she instinctively recognized that innate fire in her heart exploding out a love bubble asserting how they belonged together. My favorite Steve story occurred when Sue had shown up at the high school in a stretch limousine on the guy’s sixteenth birthday so they could commence celebrating the second the school day ended, a hint that maybe she liked reciprocating the worship.
After getting laid off from her second local reporting gig in her mid-twenties, Sue divined that it was a sign to go make it out west, which she planned to do with Steve. They drove across the country via Route 66, the iconic road another endless love of hers, as she demanded they take breaks at landmarks in part to buy copious souvenirs for future scrapbooking purposes. When she was settled, Steve flew home intending to join her in a couple months. It would shock him when Sue called to end the relationship, a fatal conversation her closest friends have speculated was mandatory because she required a clean break with no attachments to the hometown she’d resented for years. The break-up was a rare item she abstained from discussing with me, but as I searched through her healthcare notebooks after she died, I unearthed an envelope containing her most cherished photos of Steve as well as a couple folded pieces of unlined paper adorned in her messy, diagonal handwriting wrestling with her need for forgiveness when confronted by her maker about the unending regret, not quite able to fully reconcile her choice, the type of behavior I had assumed she was incapable of permitting to let eat her alive. She may not have believed she was wrong, but the way in which she severed ties was her signature moment of doubt and pain, an action that led to Sue abandoning her first stint with sobriety to begin drinking “only on the weekends” once she began dating a new man in California, the last sip taken seventeen years later from an uncontrollably shaking hand prior to checking herself into the hospital jaundiced and near death.
As he stood in my living room, Steve bemoaned how churlish he’d been when they stopped at the Grand Canyon, tired from the interminable drive and so close to Sherman Oaks—the city she had picked to begin their new life—that he appreciated nothing about its extraordinary spectacle, barely forcing smiles in the pictures they’d taken. “I went back three times after she broke up with me,” he added about how on each new trip he won an increasingly more difficult internal struggle against his tortured psyche imploring him to keep driving west to surprise Sue, too terrified he’d find her with another man, a revelation that would’ve re-broken his healing heart. Unwilling to lie to him, I said that I wasn’t privy to the particular reason she called it off but got the impression that as the resolute visionary she could be, it may have been to avoid the potential for, and perhaps inevitable, devastation transpiring in her dream locale, their relationship marred by far too many frustrating monthslong intervals spent apart. Attempting to lighten the mood, I admitted how I couldn’t forget his birthday since it was the day after my anniversary with Sue, and we traded mutually beloved quirks about her like how disdainful she’d become when handing over a piece of gum from her pack, Sue certain the chewer would promptly transmogrify into a mouth-breathing, bubble-blowing caveman who drove her to the brink of rock-chucking homicidal ideation. I also joked about her incomprehensible opinion that Steve’s identical twin brother looked nothing like him, a wacky window into her dialectical approach that might make a different man less inclined to question the sagacity of her decision-making processes.
“You really didn’t look in this box? You weren’t tempted?”
“No, sir. She made me promise not to, so I didn’t.”
“Man, I would’ve opened it.”
Steve trailed me to the basement to look at the box’s contents then we viewed some photo albums, it dawning on him as he started flipping through one that he had the same three-ring binder at his house. Sue had printed quadruples of many photos so she could make his and hers scrapbooks and have leftover copies just in case, a similar type of hoarder’s strategy employed when later stockpiling her candy closet, those damn Runts notwithstanding. Steve said he’d hidden a comparable box full of Sue keepsakes in his attic to prevent his wife from discarding them, too frightened of her justifiable reaction if he told the truth. Sensing the moment was right for it, I told him a story about Matt, his best friend since childhood who dated Sue before I did. Matt had requested Steve’s permission to date her, which Steve defiantly spurned, but then Matt did it anyway.
“Three months before she broke up with Matt, I asked her to tape a stand-up comedy special for me. I was going to pick up the videotape, but she said we should watch it together. Later that night, we hooked up for the first time. I mean, I felt bad about it, but…I really wanted to fuck her!”
I cannot begin to describe the look of pure elation that registered on my Eskimo brother’s face. Matt would message me the next morning to say how he was glad that Sue and I ended up a duo, even calling me a great and caring person. In sharing these details with Jessica, the realtor who had quickly become an essential confidante of mine in Sue’s absence, she divulged a startling piece of news: “I was in Steve’s wedding!”
In predictable smalltown form, Jessica would tell me how her older sister had briefly dated Matt as a teen and that Steve’s wife was her childhood best friend. “It didn’t fully register who Sue was when I first met you guys, but I pieced it together,” she said during one of many stops at my house for chitchat paired with a cup of tea and a snack. Jessica said how she wouldn’t be reporting any of this to Steve’s wife, another form of graciousness that my bitchy inner instigator would have found irresistible if our roles were reversed. As the months went by, Jessica took me to dinner so I could meet her husband (a professional musician who I admired for that fact alone), traveled to a book reading and to Maine with me as Sue’s substitute, and invited me to her house for Thanksgiving, among countless other acts of generosity, none more important to my daily mindset, a scattered see-saw from grief to gratitude, than our email dialogue where she cared deeply about and commented on the plethora of self-indulgent minutiae I’d grown accustomed to sharing with Sue. A proud talker and an exceptionally skilled listener and reader, Jessica was also a former bookstore owner and committed book club member, the literary disclosures from her accomplished resume earning a playfully exasperated “This bitch!” from Sue when Jessica mentioned it the day we got the keys to the house we rented with her expert assistance. Jessica came to know Sue as if she’d watched a nonchronological documentary by letting me spontaneously share any memory that surfaced, proof I missed my calling as a scatterbrained narrator. As the symbiosis blossomed, I would eventually gift her Sue’s Taylor Swift “Eras” concert tee shirt along with a Masters-branded bucket hat for her side gig as a beekeeper, two sacred artifacts I couldn’t see any point in burying in a box when a loving friend wanted to celebrate a woman whose life inspired her.
For a belated birthday present, I asked Jessica, a fellow slavish acolyte, if she wanted to attend a recent performance of Hamilton with me. Unsurprisingly, she said she’d treat to dinner, where we split vegetable tempura whose insides were hotter than Farrah Fawcett on a bygone pubescent teenager’s wall, three kinds of sushi rolls (peanut and avocado the clear winner), and a plate of twice-cooked pork with mixed vegetables, the sauteed spinach flash fried flawlessly so that the leaves didn’t transmute into squishy, gulp-inducing slop. (Apologies for the onomatopoeia overload.)
“Have I told you how into escape rooms I am now?” she asked while I sipped some green tea.
“No! How did that happen?”
“Man, we need to catch up,” she said while detailing how another one of her close friends, currently weathering divorce proceedings, had become her newest sidekick in need of a recurring pick-me-up, Jessica possessing a preternatural power to uplift the downtrodden much like the woman whose tee shirt she now confessed to wearing to bed nightly.
“You know, you are an amazing person to have as a friend when grieving some awful shit,” I said to state the obvious.
“Another friend said the same thing not too long ago. Yet I got into modern country music heavily for a few months. Sean was worried.”
“Wait, really?!”
“Yeah. I’d be singing along to Morgan Wallen while cooking us dinner and Sean would hesitantly poke his head into the kitchen like he didn’t know who I was anymore.”
“What is Morgan Wallen’s grand appeal? I don’t get it.”
“I don’t know either. His lyrics just had me in their spell!”
“Sue said he was the type of guy who would eat your pussy in the bathroom of a dive bar then go outside to smoke a cigarette without washing his face.”
“She would know, huh?” Jessica said in jest as she crunched on a sliver of red pepper.
When we arrived at the parking garage, Jessica let her car idle as I discussed one ongoing personal issue, my inability to compartmentalize my feelings and achieve closure haunting me.
“I don’t mean to make this about myself,” she said, “but that’s the only way I know how to do this.” She told me a story about her mentally ill father and the battle to process things with him until it all clicked, that giving up wasn’t a loss but a means of self-preservation. It echoed Sue’s penchant for being a balm, the panacea I’d been certain nobody but her could provide as it concerned the impasse, allowing me to cede my analytical powers to a new woman who cared so much that to forsake her insight would be an act of remonstration against my own mental health. On our walk to the theater, I spotted a five-dollar bill on the ground. Sure, it wasn’t Hamilton’s portrait on the currency, but it felt more fitting that a man known for his candor materialized in the wake of receiving such profoundly real advice.
Once we reached our seats, a recap of election results led to Jessica telling me how a local politician’s teenage daughter had sex on the roof of our hometown post office thirty years ago, Jessica and her friends lying to police officers to protect the deviant’s whereabouts. Having both beheld a Hamilton performance on Broadway—I later apologized for excess humblebrags about seeing the original cast (“There you go again, dickhead!”)—Jessica commented that the stage setup was identical despite how much larger the current theater appeared to be, astutely guessing that it was double the capacity, a fact we verified on my phone. When the lady in front of us handed her can of beer to her mother and told her not to spill it like she’d done at dinner, I said, “Guzzle it all down now!” while they laughed as the daughter removed her puffy coat, my self-monitored daily quota to entertain strangers fulfilled.
In the middle of the first act, Jessica ostentatiously waved the candy I’d snuck in—“I’ve never delighted in a Turk,” she texted me when I sent her a photo of a Turkish Delight bar to tease our stealthy mid-show provisions—and pinched my forearm upon discovering the hard-jellied tastiness lurking inside the chocolate shell. As the song “Helpless” ended, I said how it was one of my favorites, Jessica replying that “Satisfied,” the subsequent tune, was her choice cut as I glimpsed the 143 tattoo on her middle finger, a tribute to her hero, Mr. Rogers, and what Sue and I texted one another to mix up how we said “I love you.”
Recapping the first act during the intermission—Jessica called the diminutive man playing Aaron Burr (sir) a “short king”—one man in our row complimented my girly bracelets, half of them on loan from Sue’s collection, the eleven on each wrist meant to honor Veterans Day (now doing double duty as Rainbow Remembrance Day), the day Sue died. When I later informed Jessica how I was in disbelief that a straight man was capable of such courtesy, she nonchalantly responded, “I can’t believe you think he was straight.” Sue would’ve been slightly less insulted than if I’d hinted at getting rid of cable. Midway through the second act, one woman exited our row then reappeared fifteen-ish minutes later and quietly said something to Jessica.
“Did you hear that?” Jessica asked me?
“No. What?”
“She told me she had to ‘pee like a racehorse.’ Yeah, right, lady. I know you were taking a shit!”
As a personal rule, I try to avoid listening to the Hamilton soundtrack for fear of it getting stuck in my head for weeks. However, upon hearing the plangent final line, when the cast collectively asks who tells your story before Eliza, Hamilton’s wife, sobs as the stage goes dark, the brutality hit me harder than ever. My best friend had commented on how long it took me to write about Sue without uniformly glorifying her, a fact I was mindful of but in my worship couldn’t bring myself to undo, to let her be human. It seemed unfair to a woman who, even on her darkest days, persisted in being benevolent and trusting, not once dictating what I wrote about her. Rewind: After Jessica described the post office romp as a means of indicating the girl’s father was a failure, I offered, “When Sue came home to visit her parents after breaking up with her boyfriend in Los Angeles, she ran into a dude she’d hooked up with as a teenager. They wound up having sex in the dark on a bridge not far from her parents’ house. She lamented how the guy was a racist scumbag, but that night she needed the drunken validation more than he needed a civics lesson. She said she had the worst rugburn of her life the entire flight back the next day. But I don’t think that makes her dad a piece’uh shit, ya know?”
As the cast member who played Angelica Schuyler thanked the audience, she solicited donations to a charity supporting people with AIDS, our cue to leave.
“As Sarah Silverman says, when life gives you AIDS, make lemon AIDS,” I said to Jessica in the mixed egress, her howling for a few seconds.
“Oh shit, that was way too loud!” she said a second later. “I’m laughing at people with AIDS!” Still a bit pungent, but hey, I laughed in return.
On the ride home, we made a pact to see the show again any time a touring company performs it in our home state. And Jessica agreed to come by the house for tea and sweets at Christmastime to recap a trip she and her husband were taking the following morning from Miami to Mexico and back aboard a heavy metal-themed cruise ship. Two pairs of Sue’s old slippers, now guest slippers, will await her in the mudroom, Jessica having to choose between the ones that look like tiger heads and the ones that look like the three-toed, horn-nailed feet of Sulley from Monsters, Inc. I’ll tell her a story about going out to eat to celebrate Sue’s two-year deathiversary, first requesting a bong for the table then haranguing the waiter to try the diner’s coconut custard pie, a slice he served sans whipped cream, it tasting so good anyway that I ultimately said how upon my return, I’d ask that he be my server again so I could dim the lights and pull the chain of a single exposed lightbulb above us, removing a pack of Parliament Lights from my suit jacket pocket for us to smoke together as I interrogated him until he told me the truth about how he now concurred that it was the best dessert in the world, some oddly specific foreshadowing of the preposterous fulfillment of the long lineage of Harrison-Friday gumshoes. At one point, a glimmering beam of crepuscular late autumn light could inevitably flash through the blinds onto a shiny gumball machine ornament hooked on Sue’s fake Christmas tree, the resulting iridescent reflection a vivid reminder that she remains alive in the ongoing story.
“Guess that’s a sign to ask the most important question,” Jessica might say. “What sweets are on tap?”
“Would you believe there’s licorice and cookies in the cupboard?” I’d say back.
That would be enough.