EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Last Night There Was A War Inside My Head

Last night there was a war inside my head. I got up this morning after a night full of memories of things I experienced decades ago. I sat in the same spot I did when I was young, stared out my bedroom window, and asked myself, “Emily—how in the actual ever living fuck did you survive?”

I went downstairs. Amelia was already working on her computer in Mom’s living room. She knew by the way I walked down the stairs that something wasn’t right. I didn’t have to say anything. She immediately got up, walked over, gave me a hug, and said, “I know.”

I sat on the end of the blue couch I had delivered to mom’s house to replace the salmon colored one that mom claimed was where my conception had taken place.

Amelia asked me what it was this time. I told her about the call where someone had decided to wipe out their entire family.

Toward the latter years of my career, I saw an uptick in violence-related calls. This man had decided to get drunk. Then he shot and killed his entire family, including the dog, before heading outside and trying to take a shot at the responding units. He was shot by law enforcement, who had been escorting me and my partner.

It was one of a handful of calls that I still think about years later and still cannot fully process because the violence was senseless.

What I couldn’t understand this morning was why that memory had come back last night. I had gone out with Nora and had an amazing time. I had met new people. I had laughed. I had been happy. It had been an ordinary night in my life now, and somewhere between going to bed and waking up this morning, my mind had decided to take me back decades.

I told her that last night Nora and I had gone out to John’s and had an amazing time. I told her that I had met some really nice people and that Nora had introduced me to one of her friends, an alternative gothic woman who worked at the Sunoco here in Stamford.

When I was in the Wilderness group at summer camp, I took a single climbing carabiner with me. While the contractors were busy restoring Mom’s garage, I came across that old carabiner, still clipped to an eye screw where I had left it decades ago.

I kept it.

I still own things that no longer serve any practical purpose. A railroad lantern. Cameras that smell faintly of machine oil. A pocketknife with more history than edge. Objects collect fingerprints long after they stop collecting usefulness.

Nora came into my bedroom and sat in the chair across from mine. I told her about the nightmares I had all night and said I hoped I hadn’t kept her up or woken her.

We had gone to John’s last night and lived it up. I kept getting refills of Coke while she got her Genesee. I spent ten dollars in the jukebox.

Someone had tossed a bright pink silicone dildo into the yard behind John’s Tavern. Nobody wanted to touch it. I offered to dispose of it, but only if they could provide me with a pair of disposable gloves. They declined my offer.

The dildo instead became a conversation piece. Every time a patron walked in and didn’t notice it, someone would point it out. As night fell, someone went out to their vehicle to retrieve a flashlight so that it could be seen. Everyone had their theories as to how it got there.

Nora and I talked well into the night. Then she asked if I had anything to eat because she was hungry. She ended up looking through Mom’s freezer and found two frozen Stouffer’s lasagnas, which she ate before finally heading off to bed. She has been staying in the bedroom off mom and dad’s room where Arturo used to stay when he visited.

This morning, I texted my best friend Maddie to let her know what had happened. Not that long ago, she had mentioned that I never, ever ask for help. I told her that this morning I almost did.

I told her I had experienced a horrible bout of PTSD during the night and that instead of sleeping, I had been inside a war. In lieu of asking her for help, I told her that Amelia and Nora were spending the day with me and that I would be okay. Mostly, I wanted Maddie to know that Amelia and I think very highly of her and that I hoped she had the greatest day ever.

Aside from my wife Amelia, Nora and Maddie have been the absolute greatest friends I’ve had in my entire life.

Maddie wrote back, “I’m so sorry Em. How often does this happen to you?”

I told her the truth. It varies. Sometimes I am fine for weeks or months. Sometimes it happens all the time. It is something I generally don’t talk about.

She told me she hoped it would go away so I could get some good rest tonight. She was glad Amelia and Nora were keeping me company for the day, and then she said, “Let me know if you ever need anything!”

I thanked Maddie for being such an incredible friend and told her how much I appreciated her.

Later, I started telling Nora about all the crazy things I had done when I was younger. Dad had forbidden me from having a girl over, so when my parents went on vacation, I had sex on my father’s side of their bed, then on their dining room table. A year later, I had lesbian sex in a Norfolk Southern rail yard. The train crews were driving their engines out of the yard at a snail’s pace while cheering out the windows.

Nora asked if I would still help her move a keyboard. I agreed, and we drove up the hill to Crescent Avenue in Stamford.

It ended up being an electric piano. Nora and I put the piano together and we seemed to work surprisingly well together.

Nora’s mom asked me if I wanted to stay for dinner. I said sure. She made broccoli rabe and pasta with tomato sauce, along with Italian sausage.

After dinner, Nora and I stopped by Mom’s to say hi to Amelia before going next door to the carriage house to see some music acts.

The first act was guitarist Scott Helland.

Scott was absolutely fantastic! We talked after the show, traded stickers, and I handed him one of my cards and said I had taken some pictures.

The second act was some bizarre musical performance where a woman was playing two different songs on two separate 1980s-era toy keyboards while one played a demo. She would randomly scream into a microphone with an annoying echo behind it. She wouldn’t even turn off the special effects when she spoke about her life as a musician during the second set.

During the last part of her show, she brought out inflatable tube men that you would typically see as a warning sign in front of a used car lot where everything is on sale for no apparent reason. One had the word CRUSH on it, and the other had the word FEAR on it. They were bright red, and she tackled one to pantomime a fight with it, only to get part of the nylon fabric caught in the fan to the point that it made an awkward noise and made finding the off switch suddenly more important. During her last three songs, part of her act was to have people come onstage and battle these sock people with foam noodles.

I was very confused.

The last act involved someone standing at what looked like two web servers side-by side with a couple of homemade computer systems. The music was terrible. It started out as just barely understandable and then as the effects were added more and more during the duration of the performance, the lyrics got harder and harder to understand. As soon as he played one of his songs written in German underneath already barely decipherable lyrics, I decided that I had more than made my $20 admission fee worthwhile.

So I’m outside with Nora and Scott Helland walks outside and we start talking. He asks where I’m from and Nora and I instinctively point to my bedroom window at moms where I have the lights on all day whenever I’m staying here.

He asks where exactly. “From that direction…?”

To which I replied, no silly. That’s my actual childhood bedroom. Mom died last October and left me and my wife the house. I told him I was restoring it and please pardon the mess. I told him that the other day I thought it might be fun to put brand new energy efficient greenhouse windows in the carriage house behind mom’s house.

He asked if I was a contractor, to which I said that I had served two decades in the fire department and retired at age forty. I said that instead of working a regular job, I’m sleeping with female friends who happen to also be married to husbands.

He laughed about this.

Nora backed up my claims even though it wasn’t exactly necessary at the moment. I adore Nora.

After the show, Nora and I made our way down to John’s. I told her the story of when I took a metal wagon from the neighbors carriage house and sat in it then took a ride down the driveway while my next door neighbor and best friend and the time signaled for me to go when she saw that there were no cars coming. I ended up sailing down the driveway, only to have the wheels of the wagon make contact with the curb across the street which immediately sent me flying into the front door. I ended up with a couple bumps and scrapes but I immediately declared that the ride was awesome. My contractor found the wagon behind mom’s garage along with my childhood tricycle. In the decades since I was a small child, Mother Nature had made an attempt at reclaiming them only to realize she needed more time. The wagon still had the name Emily written huge on the underside. I sent them both for recycling.

So Nora and I are over at John’s and this guy named Larry comes over to me and immediately challenged me to a music battle that involved the jukebox. He said that if I could play better music than him that he would buy me my next drink. I said I don’t drink… To which he proclaimed, “Emily accepted the challenge!”

I didn’t accept any challenge, but figured it was hypothetical at best, and he was also obviously intoxicated as usual. The next thing you know, he tells me that he’s not wearing underwear and then drops his pants to his ankles.

I’m standing there in my shirt that says ‘Proud to be a lesbian’ while Larry is trying to impress me with what he figured was a great view of his male pelvic area. I tried hard not to laugh. Then I started laughing. Hard.

He asks, “you like what you see?”

To which I replied, see what? Whatever you had is questionable because it was shrouded in darkness because this is John’s tavern where half the lights are colorful party lights, and of those, a couple of them have been burnt out since last December.

So I played Comfortably Numb by Roger Waters, the live version, on the jukebox. Everyone in the bar starts singing along, including some drunk guy who was singing horribly off key. He had grabbed one of the tiny handheld American flags that had a Made In China gold foiled sticker on the handle, and was waving it around. In his drunken stupor he handed the flag, which was property of the bar to begin with, back to the bartender with the instructions to display it in a nice place. It existed in a great place since the Fourth of July this year till he came along.

He got really loud so instead of telling him to lower his voice which would have been an acceptable outcome, or demanding he stop singing altogether which would have been a preferable one, I asked him if he knew who the artist was.

When he was confused and said that he didn’t know who sings this song, I said that it would be amazing if he could keep it that way.