Erin

Erin and I are both gossips. When we lived together, we were always discussing and speculating about everyone else’s lives. She was a nervous talker who disdained silence, so I always had the inside scoop on whatever was going on with the old college dorm crew through which we had met, even though I had sort of drifted from them by then. I guess gossiping was what we shared most in common, but at the time it seemed very beside the point.

For no identifiable reason, I began to intensely care about Erin’s well-being even before we lived together. I used to have recurring nightmares about her death and would worry about her incessantly when I hadn't seen her in a couple days. My catharsis for this was to rearrange my creepy ventriloquist doll into Chuckie-like poses and leave him for her to find when she got home after I had left for work.

Being anything other than just friends would have been silly and was never a temptation, but I do remember nights while sharing a bedroom that I contemplated crawling into her bed just so we could snuggle. I decided that would be crossing the line even though we had a habit of kissing good-night.

Erin had no identifiable interests or goals. This was very unlike me, and I pondered it often. She seemed perfectly content living on fried fishsticks, McDonald’s hamburgers plain with ketchup, Marlboro Lights, cheap beer and weed. I guess we played a lot of hacky sack and she got pretty into the psilocybins for awhile, but Erin was a simple, predictable sort.

Erin had a string of boyfriends; all super nice guys. Well, there was that first odd one whose catchphrase was “Talladega,” and once, out of the blue in a conversational lull, uttered matter-of-factly “I like the smell of gasoline.” But mostly she was just one of the guys. I spent a lot of the first spring/summer we lived together hanging out with Erin, Matt and Andy. She was dating Matt, but it was obvious to me that Andy was painfully in love with her. I wondered to what an extent a There’s Something about Mary effect was going on with all the guys she was hanging out with. She also used to hang out with Bret a lot, but during those times I tended to hang out with Bret’s roommate Cullen.

We had always shared our two-bedroom apartment with other roommates, so when it was finally just the two of us in our own separate bedrooms, I thought it was great. That lasted about a month, and then she invited an old dorm acquaintance Ryan to move back from Colorado and live with us with without asking me first. (Years later, I would lose two friends by telling them one could not live with us after my roommates had said it was okay despite my objections.) Ryan was the Zen Master of Deadheads. I liked Ryan, but sharing a bedroom with him was too much. In May, I moved into the house with my bandmates and Erin, Bret, Ryan and Bret’s other roommate Lannie moved into a house just over the city line in Waterloo. Bret and Erin are now married.