Categories > Celebrities > Fall Out Boy > Lets Do This Shit!
1. SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY
I hated how my mother moved. So far we had lived in three different states of the USA. Nineteen different homes since I was eleven, which has got to be a world record, all of our moves were over a period of five years, five years of which has left my education severely fragmented.
I was barely surviving as my average student profile.
We moved so often, that I started this game with myself.
I would pretend to be someone I wasn’t for three and a half months before the next move.
It gets me a valuable insight to how humans work, how the shallow cretins that I was institutionalized with for educations sake lived alongside an either overwhelmingly high status personal, or, a working class poor kid that didn’t have a Daddy.
I have a whole notebook of documentary type notes, one thing I knew for certain was that my schooling as never going to help me out in the future, so I taught myself the fundamentals of what I believed were important in life.
My notebook was like an encyclopedia of personalities.
I was an author, I was a movie maker, I was an actress and I was a debater.
I am Zillah Smylee; Born on a Wednesday night to a single mother on the unemployment benefit in a public hospital on the 12th of April 1992 somewhere in the Pacific region of planet Earth.
Now tell me about yourself?
I don’t know who my dad is, I have never met him or talked to him or seen him even seen a photo of him, but I know that every birthday the lump sum in my savings rises healthily and my mother has never needed a job.
My mother… tut tut, what a touchy subject.
She is a mentally unstable woman that needs someone in her life to keep her lightheadedness and her airy fairy ways securely bolted to the floor. She was selfish to the extreme. Sure she gave me almost everything I could ever want material wise—but she missed the concept of being able to say "yeah sure i grew up normal."
It was all I ever wanted to do and here I am.
Normal is the opposite direction to where I’m heading.
Where are we heading exactly? Well the last time I checked which was five seconds ago and felt like a million hours, we had just crossed into the… I don’t even know what to classify this place as, it wasn’t a city. Chicago was a city, it wasn’t a town, Auckland was a town, and it wasn’t a village… or was it.
It was Barrington.
Simple
We had crossed the line and landed in Barrington.
To me, it looked like nothing but red brick houses and sculptured hedges.
A nice enough little place but, it was just like every other place I had lived.
The roads were packed full of SUVs. We stopped at a red light and I looked at the sky. When I got out of bed this morning at a cheap motel and had McDonalds for breakfast at six this morning the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Twelve hours later, the wipers on our small little car were flying by like bees wings. The rain made this town look sad, depressing, gloomy, miserable, unhappy, dull and loserish. I didn’t want to be here; just like I didn’t want to be anywhere my mother chose to live.
Three and a half months Z, you’ll be out of here soon.
I just hoped the house we were moving into was better than this copy-cat, street-side, garden-club crap that I was looking at through the fat sky tears that were making me sad.
“Can we turn around and go back to Chicago? I don’t like it here already.” I mumbled to myself.
The light turned green finally and we turned left into one of the neatest streets of houses I have ever had the misfortune of coming upon.
Even the rain fell in a designated ground-absorption placement pattern on the road! I didn’t like it. The organization of nature made me queasy.
I spied a house a hundred meters away, the lights weren’t on and it made my heart plummet.
I wanted to throw up when I saw the hedges… dolphins.
I wanted to slit my wrists when I saw the neighbors… because that was it, I could see the neighbors.
Not even a two foot fence divided us… gulp from them. Cue the Jaws music.
The driveway was a smooth pavement that lead up to a neat garage door.
Kill me now in the most painful way possible
No such luck there, buddy.
She turned the car ignition off and we both sat there for a moment. I didn’t want to get in that house…ever!!!
She didn’t want to get wet.
I knew that we had bought the house pre-furnished. When you have to move as many times as us, there is no point in packing your house up and shifting it across the state line to un-pack it and then re-pack it again in three months time. It just wasn’t sensible.
I had my two suitcases full of clothes, my laptop and my library.
That’s all I needed. I never had anything of any sentimental value so I never had to worry about things like that.
My mother sighed.
If it’s not obvious to you, my blind readers, my mother and I do not have a very sweet relationship.
Despite me being an only child, her being the only parent and the amount of time that we spend together, more that we are forced together due to the extremely long periods in a confined vehicle at frequent intervals throughout the year when we are moving.
Oh goodness believe me she can't stand the distance I put between us, she tries to be the best mother in the world. But then she freaks out…
Save that story for a glummer time, right now this is a very angry time.
“Honey, we’re home.” She smiled at her own shitty attempt at a joke, I rolled my eyes.
“Ooh come on darling,” she turned to me in her seat and took off her glasses. She had these wire frame glasses that she wears day in day out. Her eyes were this watery blue color and her hair was wavy blond; the picture perfect house wife; plain old Jane Smylee.
“I suppose I can live with it right? We’ll be out of here before I’m seventeen anyways… that gives you—” I counted on my fingers “—just under four months to find us a new place to live. I can hate this place until then.”
Her shoulders slumped and she put her glasses back on.
“We’ll see” Was her quiet answer.
The rain had lightened to barely a falling mist. So I jumped out of the car and pulled all of our bags out while she opened the house.
I stopped on the doorstep and looked in the door before entering.
The light was switched on and the first thing I hated was the carpet.
Champaign Crème pukes.
I walked in and closed the door. The house was pale but with a warm gold tinge from the crystal chandeliers, there was a mahogany staircase that sat quite perfectly.
I wandered upstairs.
Two bedrooms… two bathrooms, that’s when I saw the attic entrance.
I pulled the stairs down and dodged the giant dust cloud that attacked me.
Miraculously there was a working light when I pulled the cord.
I liked what I saw!
The roof rafters met at a beam running down the center and making it physically possible to walk around comfortably. There was no hideous vomit-material off white carpet; instead, the dark chocolate floorboards were visible at the edges of an ancient moth eaten woven mat from back in the 1800s or something close.
Loving it!
The walls were wooden panels, the front wall being a huge domed window where I would put my bed right there.
I made a rectangle with my hands and smiled at my ingeniousness.
There was a stack of sheet covered goodies in the corner for me to explore tomorrow when I returned from the ‘institution.’
Why did people always leave their stuff behind when they moved?
“You are the strangest kid on the planet.” She [mother Jane] commented later that night when I had some how (super-humanly infact) hauled one of the beds up into the attic.
And a chest of drawers.
And a desk.
And a pot plant just incase I needed a friend to produce me some oxygen
And a couch; it was an old chesterfield from in the ‘office’ where I also borrowed my desk from.
Man I was strong.
“Why thank you.” Actually she helped me get it all up there and didn’t complain when I took the desk
What a good mother.
“Okay, now what?” I asked her.
“Dinner?” she suggested.
I nodded.
Unfortunately we would have no food in our house until tomorrow when Jane goes shopping so tonight, we find some family restaurant to eat at and tomorrow morning I take a twenty to school and hope the cafeteria food isn’t cardboard.
We ended up outside your average Joes Pizza bar, Barrington Style.
It was a red brick building (shock horror bet you didn’t expect that one) with an Italian flag, or was it Spanish? Or French?
I had no idea, so we walked inside and it still didnt become clear to me.
There was a banner of almost every flag in the world chopped up in segments and made into one massive pizza and it was pinned to the roof.
“I think I like this place.” I mumbled as we moved forward to the counter.
It wasn’t that crowded. I suppose Sunday night wouldn’t have a place like this packed to the rafters. It seemed more like a colorful hang out spot.
We took our seats at a comfy booth and I buried my head in the menu.
Hmmm… cheesy, meaty, veggie, chicken or nachos?
Sometimes the choices in life were just so darn hard. I settled for the apricot chicken and Jane chose veggie.
While we waited for the waiter, it was an awkward silence.
There was soft music in the background of the restaurant. I looked around; there was an old couple in the booth on the opposite side of the room, slowly cutting down the hugest plate of nachos I had seen in my life. Then there was a family of six devouring three pizzas next to us; four young boys, a dad and a sour faced mother.
And then there was some random asleep in the center booth with one of his knees up and his elbow over his eyes.
“I need to go to the girlies room Honey, order for us will you?”
Jane made eye contact with someone at the counter and smiled, and then she got up and walked over to the counter again.
A moment later a friendly looking plump woman in an apron bustled around. Her hair was streaked with silver and in a loose bun on the top of her head.
“So very sorry, my son is lazy; I have no idea where he’s hiding.” Her voice was heavily accented with Spanish when she spoke. She pulled a little note pad and a pen from her apron pocket.
I made a little cough into my fist and pointed to the sleeper in booth 6.
She sighed and tutted disapprovingly.
“Very sorry Miss, one moment please.” She turned around to the other booth and whacked the kid on the head with the note pad.
“levántese usted chico perezoso, se levanta o yo le tendré trabaja aquí hasta que usted sea treinta!” she shrieked in rapid Spanish and threw the paper at him then slapped him on the head.
“Geez Ma!” he sat up and rubbed his head and watched after her as she bustled back to the kitchen after smiling warmly at me.
I snorted.
He looked over at our table and frowned. Then he so obviously reluctantly lifted himself from the seat that I almost felt bad for the guy.
Not.
“Good evening and welcome to Saporta Spanish Style Pizza Palace. What would you like?” his voice was so bored that I almost fell asleep.
He stared at me funnily while I said the orders
“Sorry, did I wake you?” I asked, annoyed with his staring.
“Actually, you didn’t. I was only resting.” He replied in sarcasm with a sick fake smile on his face.
He dropped the smile immediately and turned wrote on his paper, “Any thing else ma’am?”
My mother was the easiest customer ever. She never complained, wanted a refund, or asked for anything other than what she ordered. So that’s why she strategically went to the bahroom and let me do it.
“Yes please. A cola if you don’t mind.”
He kept staring.
“And a flat white latté,” I said glancing at the drinks list.
“So that is one pizza, half veggie, half BBQ chicken and a cola… and a flat white?” he looked up form his list and stared at me with his dark almond shaped eyes.
“No that was apricot chicken not BBQ thanks.” I said in my politest voice, not flinching my baby blues.
He sighed heavily and dramatically. “Sorry.”
I couldn’t help it. I had to speak up. “Are you always nasty when you wake up?”
He rolled his eyes, “I dunno, you tell me. Are you always this annoying when you go out to dinner?”
I smiled. “I don’t know, you tell me.”
“Yes.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I bet.”
“¡Gabriel! ¡Pare coquetear con la chica bonita y consiga esa orden arriba aquí ahora antes que yo le abofetee otra vez!” His mother yelled at him from the kitchen. No one else in the restaurant seemed to notice much that there was a screaming Spanish woman in the building; they must all be locals I thought.
He flushed a delicate pink under his golden skin and stormed off to the kitchen. I looked around the booth and saw the woman slap him again over the head.
I chuckled to myself quietly and Jane looked at me funnily when she came back from the bathroom.
The food was delivered on the classic wooden Pizza shovel and it was divine!
The Apricot was so nicely sweet and savory at the same time that the flavors just erupted in my mouth. I saw Jane’s eyes pop as well when she took a bite.
Jane finished before me and went to go pay.
I devoured my pizza and cola in half an hour and let out a burp that no one heard because they had all diffused from the restaurant.
“Charming.” He commented, popping up from behind my seat.
I got a fright.
Had he been sleeping in the booth behind us? What a creep.
“Catching up on beauty sleep?”
“Trying to.”
“Don’t let Mother catch you. I really would hate for you to have to work here until you are thirty,”
He looked surprised. “You know Spanish?”
I nodded, “parts.”
“So are you just passing through or a newbie?” he asked, hanging one elbow over the top of the seat.
I wiped my hand and put it out to shake his. “I’m Zillah, new Barrington Resident.”
He nodded and smiled, “poor you, I’m Gabe. This is my family’s restaurant.”
I nodded and scanned the room again.
“It’s nice.”
“So, are you going to school here or what?”
I nodded… again.
He nodded too.
Then we were both awkwardly silent.
There was quiet chatter coming down the aisle and Gabe leapt up and started cleaning up the dishes before his mother saw him slacking off again.
As we got up to leave, Gabe, gave a ‘see you around' nod. I smiled and left the restaurant with my mother and we drove home in silence.
I hated how my mother moved. So far we had lived in three different states of the USA. Nineteen different homes since I was eleven, which has got to be a world record, all of our moves were over a period of five years, five years of which has left my education severely fragmented.
I was barely surviving as my average student profile.
We moved so often, that I started this game with myself.
I would pretend to be someone I wasn’t for three and a half months before the next move.
It gets me a valuable insight to how humans work, how the shallow cretins that I was institutionalized with for educations sake lived alongside an either overwhelmingly high status personal, or, a working class poor kid that didn’t have a Daddy.
I have a whole notebook of documentary type notes, one thing I knew for certain was that my schooling as never going to help me out in the future, so I taught myself the fundamentals of what I believed were important in life.
My notebook was like an encyclopedia of personalities.
I was an author, I was a movie maker, I was an actress and I was a debater.
I am Zillah Smylee; Born on a Wednesday night to a single mother on the unemployment benefit in a public hospital on the 12th of April 1992 somewhere in the Pacific region of planet Earth.
Now tell me about yourself?
I don’t know who my dad is, I have never met him or talked to him or seen him even seen a photo of him, but I know that every birthday the lump sum in my savings rises healthily and my mother has never needed a job.
My mother… tut tut, what a touchy subject.
She is a mentally unstable woman that needs someone in her life to keep her lightheadedness and her airy fairy ways securely bolted to the floor. She was selfish to the extreme. Sure she gave me almost everything I could ever want material wise—but she missed the concept of being able to say "yeah sure i grew up normal."
It was all I ever wanted to do and here I am.
Normal is the opposite direction to where I’m heading.
Where are we heading exactly? Well the last time I checked which was five seconds ago and felt like a million hours, we had just crossed into the… I don’t even know what to classify this place as, it wasn’t a city. Chicago was a city, it wasn’t a town, Auckland was a town, and it wasn’t a village… or was it.
It was Barrington.
Simple
We had crossed the line and landed in Barrington.
To me, it looked like nothing but red brick houses and sculptured hedges.
A nice enough little place but, it was just like every other place I had lived.
The roads were packed full of SUVs. We stopped at a red light and I looked at the sky. When I got out of bed this morning at a cheap motel and had McDonalds for breakfast at six this morning the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Twelve hours later, the wipers on our small little car were flying by like bees wings. The rain made this town look sad, depressing, gloomy, miserable, unhappy, dull and loserish. I didn’t want to be here; just like I didn’t want to be anywhere my mother chose to live.
Three and a half months Z, you’ll be out of here soon.
I just hoped the house we were moving into was better than this copy-cat, street-side, garden-club crap that I was looking at through the fat sky tears that were making me sad.
“Can we turn around and go back to Chicago? I don’t like it here already.” I mumbled to myself.
The light turned green finally and we turned left into one of the neatest streets of houses I have ever had the misfortune of coming upon.
Even the rain fell in a designated ground-absorption placement pattern on the road! I didn’t like it. The organization of nature made me queasy.
I spied a house a hundred meters away, the lights weren’t on and it made my heart plummet.
I wanted to throw up when I saw the hedges… dolphins.
I wanted to slit my wrists when I saw the neighbors… because that was it, I could see the neighbors.
Not even a two foot fence divided us… gulp from them. Cue the Jaws music.
The driveway was a smooth pavement that lead up to a neat garage door.
Kill me now in the most painful way possible
No such luck there, buddy.
She turned the car ignition off and we both sat there for a moment. I didn’t want to get in that house…ever!!!
She didn’t want to get wet.
I knew that we had bought the house pre-furnished. When you have to move as many times as us, there is no point in packing your house up and shifting it across the state line to un-pack it and then re-pack it again in three months time. It just wasn’t sensible.
I had my two suitcases full of clothes, my laptop and my library.
That’s all I needed. I never had anything of any sentimental value so I never had to worry about things like that.
My mother sighed.
If it’s not obvious to you, my blind readers, my mother and I do not have a very sweet relationship.
Despite me being an only child, her being the only parent and the amount of time that we spend together, more that we are forced together due to the extremely long periods in a confined vehicle at frequent intervals throughout the year when we are moving.
Oh goodness believe me she can't stand the distance I put between us, she tries to be the best mother in the world. But then she freaks out…
Save that story for a glummer time, right now this is a very angry time.
“Honey, we’re home.” She smiled at her own shitty attempt at a joke, I rolled my eyes.
“Ooh come on darling,” she turned to me in her seat and took off her glasses. She had these wire frame glasses that she wears day in day out. Her eyes were this watery blue color and her hair was wavy blond; the picture perfect house wife; plain old Jane Smylee.
“I suppose I can live with it right? We’ll be out of here before I’m seventeen anyways… that gives you—” I counted on my fingers “—just under four months to find us a new place to live. I can hate this place until then.”
Her shoulders slumped and she put her glasses back on.
“We’ll see” Was her quiet answer.
The rain had lightened to barely a falling mist. So I jumped out of the car and pulled all of our bags out while she opened the house.
I stopped on the doorstep and looked in the door before entering.
The light was switched on and the first thing I hated was the carpet.
Champaign Crème pukes.
I walked in and closed the door. The house was pale but with a warm gold tinge from the crystal chandeliers, there was a mahogany staircase that sat quite perfectly.
I wandered upstairs.
Two bedrooms… two bathrooms, that’s when I saw the attic entrance.
I pulled the stairs down and dodged the giant dust cloud that attacked me.
Miraculously there was a working light when I pulled the cord.
I liked what I saw!
The roof rafters met at a beam running down the center and making it physically possible to walk around comfortably. There was no hideous vomit-material off white carpet; instead, the dark chocolate floorboards were visible at the edges of an ancient moth eaten woven mat from back in the 1800s or something close.
Loving it!
The walls were wooden panels, the front wall being a huge domed window where I would put my bed right there.
I made a rectangle with my hands and smiled at my ingeniousness.
There was a stack of sheet covered goodies in the corner for me to explore tomorrow when I returned from the ‘institution.’
Why did people always leave their stuff behind when they moved?
“You are the strangest kid on the planet.” She [mother Jane] commented later that night when I had some how (super-humanly infact) hauled one of the beds up into the attic.
And a chest of drawers.
And a desk.
And a pot plant just incase I needed a friend to produce me some oxygen
And a couch; it was an old chesterfield from in the ‘office’ where I also borrowed my desk from.
Man I was strong.
“Why thank you.” Actually she helped me get it all up there and didn’t complain when I took the desk
What a good mother.
“Okay, now what?” I asked her.
“Dinner?” she suggested.
I nodded.
Unfortunately we would have no food in our house until tomorrow when Jane goes shopping so tonight, we find some family restaurant to eat at and tomorrow morning I take a twenty to school and hope the cafeteria food isn’t cardboard.
We ended up outside your average Joes Pizza bar, Barrington Style.
It was a red brick building (shock horror bet you didn’t expect that one) with an Italian flag, or was it Spanish? Or French?
I had no idea, so we walked inside and it still didnt become clear to me.
There was a banner of almost every flag in the world chopped up in segments and made into one massive pizza and it was pinned to the roof.
“I think I like this place.” I mumbled as we moved forward to the counter.
It wasn’t that crowded. I suppose Sunday night wouldn’t have a place like this packed to the rafters. It seemed more like a colorful hang out spot.
We took our seats at a comfy booth and I buried my head in the menu.
Hmmm… cheesy, meaty, veggie, chicken or nachos?
Sometimes the choices in life were just so darn hard. I settled for the apricot chicken and Jane chose veggie.
While we waited for the waiter, it was an awkward silence.
There was soft music in the background of the restaurant. I looked around; there was an old couple in the booth on the opposite side of the room, slowly cutting down the hugest plate of nachos I had seen in my life. Then there was a family of six devouring three pizzas next to us; four young boys, a dad and a sour faced mother.
And then there was some random asleep in the center booth with one of his knees up and his elbow over his eyes.
“I need to go to the girlies room Honey, order for us will you?”
Jane made eye contact with someone at the counter and smiled, and then she got up and walked over to the counter again.
A moment later a friendly looking plump woman in an apron bustled around. Her hair was streaked with silver and in a loose bun on the top of her head.
“So very sorry, my son is lazy; I have no idea where he’s hiding.” Her voice was heavily accented with Spanish when she spoke. She pulled a little note pad and a pen from her apron pocket.
I made a little cough into my fist and pointed to the sleeper in booth 6.
She sighed and tutted disapprovingly.
“Very sorry Miss, one moment please.” She turned around to the other booth and whacked the kid on the head with the note pad.
“levántese usted chico perezoso, se levanta o yo le tendré trabaja aquí hasta que usted sea treinta!” she shrieked in rapid Spanish and threw the paper at him then slapped him on the head.
“Geez Ma!” he sat up and rubbed his head and watched after her as she bustled back to the kitchen after smiling warmly at me.
I snorted.
He looked over at our table and frowned. Then he so obviously reluctantly lifted himself from the seat that I almost felt bad for the guy.
Not.
“Good evening and welcome to Saporta Spanish Style Pizza Palace. What would you like?” his voice was so bored that I almost fell asleep.
He stared at me funnily while I said the orders
“Sorry, did I wake you?” I asked, annoyed with his staring.
“Actually, you didn’t. I was only resting.” He replied in sarcasm with a sick fake smile on his face.
He dropped the smile immediately and turned wrote on his paper, “Any thing else ma’am?”
My mother was the easiest customer ever. She never complained, wanted a refund, or asked for anything other than what she ordered. So that’s why she strategically went to the bahroom and let me do it.
“Yes please. A cola if you don’t mind.”
He kept staring.
“And a flat white latté,” I said glancing at the drinks list.
“So that is one pizza, half veggie, half BBQ chicken and a cola… and a flat white?” he looked up form his list and stared at me with his dark almond shaped eyes.
“No that was apricot chicken not BBQ thanks.” I said in my politest voice, not flinching my baby blues.
He sighed heavily and dramatically. “Sorry.”
I couldn’t help it. I had to speak up. “Are you always nasty when you wake up?”
He rolled his eyes, “I dunno, you tell me. Are you always this annoying when you go out to dinner?”
I smiled. “I don’t know, you tell me.”
“Yes.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I bet.”
“¡Gabriel! ¡Pare coquetear con la chica bonita y consiga esa orden arriba aquí ahora antes que yo le abofetee otra vez!” His mother yelled at him from the kitchen. No one else in the restaurant seemed to notice much that there was a screaming Spanish woman in the building; they must all be locals I thought.
He flushed a delicate pink under his golden skin and stormed off to the kitchen. I looked around the booth and saw the woman slap him again over the head.
I chuckled to myself quietly and Jane looked at me funnily when she came back from the bathroom.
The food was delivered on the classic wooden Pizza shovel and it was divine!
The Apricot was so nicely sweet and savory at the same time that the flavors just erupted in my mouth. I saw Jane’s eyes pop as well when she took a bite.
Jane finished before me and went to go pay.
I devoured my pizza and cola in half an hour and let out a burp that no one heard because they had all diffused from the restaurant.
“Charming.” He commented, popping up from behind my seat.
I got a fright.
Had he been sleeping in the booth behind us? What a creep.
“Catching up on beauty sleep?”
“Trying to.”
“Don’t let Mother catch you. I really would hate for you to have to work here until you are thirty,”
He looked surprised. “You know Spanish?”
I nodded, “parts.”
“So are you just passing through or a newbie?” he asked, hanging one elbow over the top of the seat.
I wiped my hand and put it out to shake his. “I’m Zillah, new Barrington Resident.”
He nodded and smiled, “poor you, I’m Gabe. This is my family’s restaurant.”
I nodded and scanned the room again.
“It’s nice.”
“So, are you going to school here or what?”
I nodded… again.
He nodded too.
Then we were both awkwardly silent.
There was quiet chatter coming down the aisle and Gabe leapt up and started cleaning up the dishes before his mother saw him slacking off again.
As we got up to leave, Gabe, gave a ‘see you around' nod. I smiled and left the restaurant with my mother and we drove home in silence.
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