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[07 May 2028|05:20pm] |
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![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) longport |
[18 Jan 2020|06:18pm] |
scene requests & ooc comments
aim or threating. emails and texts. random scenes welcome.
[current location: longport, new jersey]
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[05 Jan 2009|10:36pm] |
The decision to move to Los Angeles was a long time coming. But I suppose that starting with the move is by far getting ahead of myself, so let me back track a little and go back to the start. And by the start I mean the very start.
My name is Kemper Logan Graham and I was born on the fourteenth of February. While the day is usually widely regarded as a day of love, love had nothing to do with my conception or my delivery or any aspect of my life from there on out in regards to my mother. My dad left her before she even know she was going to have me and she was already raising one child. Mary Elizabeth, my older sister, was nine when I came into the picture and I'm fairly certain that without her I would have been one of those kids that never made it out of childhood. There was very little interest in me from either my mother or the endless string of boyfriends that paraded through our small, Vermont home. For the most part she was interested in their money or their drugs and they were interested in a free place to stay with a woman who was fairly easy. You might think it's harsh that I can talk about my mother like that but really, I don't think of her as anything but as the woman who carried me for nine months and then wanted nothing to do with me afterward. Mary Elizabeth changed me and taught me all the important things I'd ever need to know. And when it came time for me to go to school she was the one who got me up in the mornings and made sure I was clean and dressed and fed before I was shuffled off to school. I owe the entirety of my upbringing to her and I honestly would not be the person I am today if it weren't for her.
The hardest part of my childhood had to be letting go of Mary Elizabeth. I was nine the year she turned eighteen. The year that she decided she couldn't take living at home anymore. Really, I can't blame her. If I had been in her position I probably wouldn't have been able to hold out as long as she did. In the end she graduated and got the hell out of dodge. At that point I would have never looked back but she sent me money and kept me from starving and having clothes that were too small as I grew out of them. When she published her first novel she sent me a letter and a car magazine and told me to learn everything I could be about fixing cars because she wasn't going to have the money to buy me a nice one when I turned sixteen but that didn't mean I wouldn't be able to make a used one nice. That started my obsession. I read the car magazine from cover to cover and then went to the library to get my hands onto any other car book that I could find. For four years I spent all of my time focusing on cars. Learning the ins and outs of engines and figuring out what made them run. By the time I was finally sixteen I could take an engine apart with my eyes closed, clean it, and put it back together again. I really wasn't expecting anything grand but on the day of my birthday I got a fed ex package in the mail that had a set of keys in it and an address.
The 1960 Dodge Challenger was the epitome of cool. Or it would have been if it hadn't been rusted through and falling apart at the seams. I prayed the entire way home, just asking God that he would keep the car from falling apart before I could even get it back to the house. Once it was there I set to work on fixing it up as best I could. I didn't go to school for two days. But at the end of it I had the car at least running so that it could go to and from school and on whatever errands my mother sent me out on so that she could get me out of her hair. Cars probably saved my life. Instead of running around and making a menace of myself I spent all of my time focusing fixing cars and on how to make myself useful. When I finally got my first car I spent every waking moment out of school working on it. Fixing the engine, putting new tires on, changing the upholstery, installing seat belts. Making her perfect. When I turned eighteen I was ready to get the hell away from my mother so I barely scraped by finishing high school and then I hightailed it out of Vermont. New York was the next biggest city over so that was where my feet took me. Or that was where my car took me, anyway.
New York was short lived. I managed to find a place to stay and I landed myself a pretty nice job working as a mechanic. My roommate was a stripper and he kept really odd hours so I was pretty much alone the entire time that I was there. Not that it bothered me. I was out of New York after a year, having decided that the city was a little too busy and a little too expensive. I moved out of New York and down to New Jersey where I spent a few years living in Longport. A few years which changed me. Whether they were for the better or the worse it's very hard to say but I walked away with a few close friends that I will never really forget about. In fact they are really part of the reason that I made the move to Los Angeles, but I'm still getting ahead of myself. Shortly after my arrival at Longport I came into a little bit of money so I ended up buying a house as opposed to renting an apartment. It seemed like a better investment in the long run. Of course that was how I ended up meeting Kit. He was my neighbor and though he was a little bit odd I hit it off with him and we got along pretty well. He fed my cigarette addiction and I indulged his porn addiction. It really worked out. Or at least it did until I met his best friend Leigh. The second I laid eyes on that girl I was in love. Which was problematic on account of the fact that she was pretty in love with Kit and Kit was pretty clueless about love in general.
To make a long story just a little bit longer, Leigh ended up moving in with me. That was after we dated for the grand total of one week and then she left me for Kit. I was a little bitter, but not so bitter that I'd leave her out on the street when she needed a place to stay. Eventually they broke up, though they lasted a lot longer than we did the first time out of the gates. We kicked around the idea of getting back together for a little while but in the end we decided we'd be better off as roommates. Roommates who were obsessively possessive of each other and who more often than not ended up sleeping together, whether it was in her room or mine. And I could tell you about the drunken night we spent in Atlantic City where we very nearly were married to one another and were saved last minute by a Justice of the Peace who realized we were a little bit too smashed for our own good. He told us to come back when we were sober. Leigh and I stayed the hell away from Atlantic City after that.
In the end it was Kit and his boyfriend Toby that spelled our moving to Los Angeles. There was very little tying Leigh and I down to Longport and when I kicked the idea to Mary Elizabeth of us coming out to LA she thought that it was a perfect idea. And because Leigh was living with me at the time I invited her along for the ride. After all, her best friend was going, her roommate (and sometimes more than roommate) was going, so what was she going to do? Stay behind in Longport? We packed up all of our shit and she and I made our way across the country in my Challenger. All of our stuff came behind us in a moving truck and my two other cars went into storage. I still haven't figured out when I'm going to have the time to go back for them or if it is even feasible to have them sent here. Either way, we moved out to Burbank and into a small, two bedroom apartment. I'm fairly certain we're going to have to get something bigger or we'll kill each other. Or the pets will kill us. Either way, here we are. Finally in Los Angeles. Finally in a place we might be able to call home.
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