Oh, yeah. The curse thing. Might as well get to that.
I heard it at the bar down the street, a few months after Brent and I had started living together. We had just finished our first annual, last ever, get-to-know-the-roommate-better night when Brent brought it up. He had gone through close to a pitcher of beer; I don’t think he would have told me the story otherwise.
“Have I told you I’m cursed?” he asked me.
“Only three times tonight and every other time you can’t figure out why your life isn’t perfect.”
“Ah,” was all Brent said in reply. He wasn’t sober enough to catch my annoyance. “You want to know why?”
I looked at him over my glass of beer. “Sure,” I said, fairly certain I was going to regret it.
Without all of Brent’s whining and self-deprecation, the story goes something like this:
Brent may seem like a ‘goody-two shoes,’ but I don’t care who you are; at fourteen years old, hormones take over and you’ll give your left kidney for porn. And from the way he talked, I can only guess that drama-boy was quite the connoisseur. I’m not clear on just how he had gotten his videos, I think from some well-meaning corruptive friend, but he had gotten himself a stock-pile of five or six.
Brent still gets nervous about what his parents think. When he was in middle school, he was deathly afraid of them. Brent kept his porn hidden under his bed. Not exactly the most clandestine place, but he was fourteen, give him a break. Anyway, he actually lost sleep worrying about what his parents would do if they ever found them, or if he left one of the tapes in the VCR, or if they found one of the cases lying around, or if…if…if…
You get the idea.
Anyway, and he gets some ingenuity points for this one, Brent decided he’d hide them in plain sight; namely inside some old Disney tapes he had. Not just inside the covers, but inside the tapes themselves. One night, when his parents went to some party or something, he opened up Bambi, Snow White, and a few others he knew he’d never watch again, exchanged the magnetic tapes with his porn’s magnetic tapes, and then closed them back up. He threw out the left-over casings and packaging from the porn, sneaking the remains to the bottom of the trash cans outside. When his parents got home that night, he was sleeping peacefully and they never suspected a thing.
Even though, as far as anyone could tell from looking at them, they were the Disney tapes, Brent still kept them out of sight under his bed. The switched out packaging should have fooled his parents just in case they went sniffing around his room. He knew they’d long ago forgotten about all the Disney crap they had bought him when he was a kid.
The problem was that four years later, Brent forgot all about them, too.
So one day, after Brent had graduated from high school and was preparing to move on to college, his parents saw the sheer amount of stuff he was leaving behind and suggested a yard sale. They pulled things from every nook and cranny of their home, and piles of Brent’s childhood were laid out for sale to the highest bidder.
Including the Disney tapes.
They sold them. All of them. And the best part is, they seemed to have all gone to different people.
So a week later, an old family friend shows up on their front porch, waving a VHS tape and demanding to know why her five year old had found herself watching Debbie Does Dallas instead of Peter Pan. Brent hadn’t remembered either, not at first, but when he listened to the woman’s story it… all… came… back.
Well, Brent ‘fessed up for the one, admitting to his parents that he had, four years ago, switched the guts of the tapes. They asked if he had done more of them and, teeth gritted, he admitted to it. Though, he answered truthfully, he couldn’t remember how many, probably only about two more, maybe. The lady backed him up there too, saying that the other tape had been ‘just fine.’
Brent spent the next week jumping whenever a car drove into his driveway. He half expected people to begin popping into his house, swinging Disney classics and complaining about therapy bills for their children.
But no one ever did.
The last few weeks passed, painfully and slowly enough, and his parents drove him to college and dropped him off. They had forgiven him, for the most part, and let the matter slide, except for a few snide remarks to his roommates who, once they had gotten the full story out of him, all insisted on shaking his hand.
The problem was, Brent explained to me, those tapes that never came back. He knew he had at least five tapes, he had memorized the titles, but he had never heard about the other four. He could only assume that the owners of the others hadn’t remembered where they had bought them, or that they didn’t know what they had. Or if the buyers had children who were old enough to appreciate such things, they probably hadn’t even found out about the problem. I can only imagine the look on some baby-sitter’s face, sitting the kids and herself down to watch Cinderella for the evening, and then a BJ shot shows up on screen.
This is where the curse comes in. Brent thinks that there are three possibilities: First, that he had so offended God that the Almighty’s been raining misfortune down on him ever since. Second, that karma hasn’t finished smacking him around for the trauma he no doubt has caused the kids who had seen the tapes. Or lastly, that it was a Gypsy family that had gotten hold of the tapes, and unable to return them and get their money back, had satisfied themselves by cursing the causer of such misfortune.
When Brent finished his story, he sat there, grinning at me over his glass, like he had just provided me with some primal truth about the world.
“That’s it?” I asked.
Brent looked surprised. “What do you mean ‘that’s it?’”
“I mean, ‘that’s it.’ You did something bad, so now you’re cursed?”
Brent flushed a bit. “Well, everything’s gone wrong since! And there was a family there, and they looked like they might have been gypsies!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I said.
“It’s true!” he insisted.
“If you say so,” was all I said. I didn’t feel like arguing the point. It sounded more to me like Brent had finally found his way out from under his parents’ over-protective wings and had ran head first into life. When you have to pay your own bills, cope with professors, girl-friends, and roommates for the first time, of course it looks like everything’s going wrong. That was just how life was, though, and Brent had simply been too sheltered to have ever really experienced it before. He wasn’t cursed, just living.
But I wasn’t about to spend the last ten minutes the bar was open trying to tell him that.
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