Intro to Storytelling Showcase featuring Gabe Cotton

This episode features Gabe Cotton, a student in Campfire’s Intro to Storytelling class. You can learn more about Gabe Cotton on the Campfire website, https://cmpfr.com/events/intro-to-storytelling-showcase-spring-2019/.

These episodes of The Campfire Storytelling Podcast showcase students who went through our Intro to Storytelling class. These students take a six-week class to prepare to tell a story about life and how they live it. Students told stories around “unsaid things.” 

This episode was originally performed in April 2019, produced by Jeff Allen, and recorded live at The Stage at KDHX.

Transcript

Steven Harowitz:   0:12
Hello, Internet. I'm Steven Harowitz, Executive Director of Campfire, and you are listening to Campfire at Home. It's our way of bringing the live experience to you, whether that be listening and reflecting by yourself or experiencing it with friends. Each Campfire invites listeners into life and how we live it. Before we get too deep into Campfire at Home, I want to share a few opportunities for you to get involved beyond our live show. We offer classes and workshops on public speaking, story construction and group facilitation to answer the big questions in your life or at work. If you or your organization are interested, you can visit cmpfr.com. That's c m p f r dot com. Each Campfire Season poses a life question that's explored by our Campfire Fellows together with our audiences. For our Intro to Storytelling showcase students, they take this question and turn into a theme. This Season their theme was things left unsaid. Let's go to the stage at KDHX to listen to these stories.  

Unknown:   1:09
Please help me welcome Gabe to the Campfire.

Gabe Cotton:   1:22
So it was 1995 and I was 16 years old and I was like, I was in line for a concert at a place called The Other World down near where the City Museum is now. Me and my friends, we're gonna go see a band called Letters to Cleo, who were on tour because of a hit album they had out. That was also the night that I met Christina. She was in line in front of us, wearing baggy skater jeans, an over-sized flannel shirt and a gray knit stocking cap. She looked like Gwen Stefani, who a lot of you probably know from The Voice. But I knew her from the band No Doubt. Um, she had long, thin blond hair, gray piercing eyes and a face that looked like a porcelain doll. As far as I was concerned, she was too pretty to talk to, but this community happens in concert lines. She started talking to me and my friends. Throughout the concert we spent a lot of time hanging out, talking about music and bands, and after the show was over, she gave me her phone number and told me to call her. I was not going to say no to her smile, so we started talking on the phone all the time, every couple of days. I can't believe how much time I used to talk on the phone. It's ridiculous, sharing who we were and where we were from. I lived with my parents in South City at the time, and she lived in Mascoutah, Illinois, with her sister and brother-in-law. Her mom lived in Springfield, Missouri, but she was with her sister because of the family stuff that comes from broken homes and bad choices. A couple of months down the road, I convinced my dad to let me borrow the car to go pick her up and bring her back to the city for the day. We drove through the flatlands of Illinois and we got to a neighborhood right near Scott Air Force Base, and we found her address and I parked the car. I got up and I got out, and I walked up and knocked on the door. Almost immediately, the door opened, and I loved the way the smile spread across her face, and I can still feel the way that she threw her arms around my neck and just shoved her face right into my cheek. So we got back to St. Louis, and my dad gave me a couple bucks and we went and caught the number 11 Chippewa bi-state bus out to Crestwood Plaza. It was the nineties and we were teenagers and you hang out at the mall and it was a really fun day. She had this energy about her like she had never been to the city before, and everything was interesting and she was enthusiastic, and it was just, it was a blast, just hanging out and interacting in person and spending time together. The bus ride back was different. She was kind of exhausted, and we just sat next to each other with her head on my shoulder, holding my hand in her lap with both of hers. When we got back to my parent's house, she called her sister to come pick her up. They were gonna be about an hour. She got off the phone. She looked right at me and kissed me. It wasn't the most comfortable kiss. She had really thin lips and she tasted like cigarettes. I hadn't kissed a lot of girls at that point, but it was probably still one of the most passionate and sensual and urgent kisses that I've ever received. It was a kind of kiss that makes you feel taller than you are. It was a kind of kiss that makes you feel wanted. She took my breath for me and I was floating, and I think she liked me. So months had passed and she moved back with her mom in Springfield, and the following Spring Break I went down there to visit her for the week. It was a week that went by way too quickly. We spent the time walking around the college town of Springfield, hanging out at coffee shops. We went and saw the band The Urge at a place called The Regency, and it was a different dynamic being around her and all her other friends. She was always the center of attention, and I was not the extrovert that she was. The last night I was there, we had a party at her mom's house, and after the party was over, I was sitting on the couch, getting ready to go to sleep, listening to the hushed murmur of conversation coming from the bedroom as she hung out in there talking to some other dude that was cooler and more good looking than I was. The truth was we were not together in any official capacity, and this was the universe reminding me of that. But I still felt hurt and I felt rejected. And I felt like I wasn't enough, so I kind of I kind of got sad about it. And I decided I was gonna leave a day early, the night late. The next morning, I woke her up and I told her that I needed her to take me to the Greyhound bus station. I was ready to go back to home, and she cried and told me she wanted me to stay. But I was immature, and I was jealous and I wasn't gonna be constructive about what I was feeling. So she took me to the bus station. The whole way there, driving her mom's truck, she held my hand. When we got in there, she put her arms around me and just clung to me, and I was still upset and I gave her a hug and I got on the bus and I came home and I thought about her a lot for some time after that, but we didn't talk on the phone anymore. Late one night in August 1997, one of my sisters came downstairs to wake me up and said a girl had just called for me. She said she had been at a Phish concert out at River Port, and believe it or not, the people she was traveling with left without her, so she needed a place to crash. I knew it was Christina. About an hour later, the car pulled up and I watched from the front window. She got out and walked up to the house. Now it had been a year and half so the feelings that I had of desire and sadness had pretty much fizzled out. But when I opened that door and she came in and just fell into me in an exhausted hug, I felt everything, everything flooding back into me. So I just stood there in hell there for a little while, we talked for bit, and I gave her a towel and clean clothes, and she went and took a bath, and when she got out, we went downstairs to my room and we just laid down for a while and I held her while she fell asleep. It was my parents house, so I put a blanket over her and I went upstairs and slept on the couch. Okay, so the next morning, I woke up and I told her that I had to go to work, but I was gonna take it to the bus station and send her back to Springfield to her mom's, where she ought to be. She argued with me. She said there were some people she met at the concert last night that she wanted to meet up with today for that day. And I told her she could start walking. With a, with a defeated smirk, she gave in and we left for the bus station. After I bought her a ticket, we sat down on the benches there, and they were stiff and uncomfortable like church pews. So we decided we needed to both go smoke a cigarette. We went outside, and with tears in her eyes, she told me that she was sorry she made me upset and that she missed me. I told her that it didn't matter and I told her that I loved her and that I wish that she lived closer so that we could be together and she said she wouldn't be good for me and she was right. I wasn't the kind of guy that she wanted in her life. I was more along the lines of the kind of guy she needed. So I gave her a hug and she wrapped her arms around me, shoved her cheek, her face right into my cheek, and I can still feel that hug, and got on the bus and left. That was the last time I saw her. I was going through a box of things a couple of years back, and I came across some pictures that she had sent me the weekend that I left Springfield when I was upset and she had written some notes on the back, and I thought, "I'm gonna look her up." I was involved with somebody at the time, so I wasn't, I wasn't looking to spark some romantic relationship, but I wanted to find out that she was doing well. She had had a challenging childhood and I wanted to make sure that she would had made it out all right, and she was living her best life, and I came across an article about an honors psychology student at the University of Massachusetts that was succeeding academically and living her best life. And it was Christina. But she was suddenly faced with some challenges, some of the probably, the biggest challenge that most anyone could ever face. She had been getting migraines, and she had had some tests done, and it turned out she had a tumor in her brain. Um, it was a rare form of cancer that is typically found between, in children between the ages of five and 10 and she'd probably been carrying it her whole life. About a year before I came across those pictures, she died at the age of 31. So my unsaid thing is that I will never get to tell her that the energy she had, the fearlessness that she had, her boldness is, was inspiring to me. It was something I didn't have in me. It was a strength to be able to shout your name from the rooftops. And I always, I was always impressed by that, and I would thank her. I would thank her for teaching me that you can't make people be who you want them to be, that you have to let them live their life and walk their path and be who they are, even if they're kind of a gypsy, no matter what you want or what you think might be best for them, especially if you're just some 18 year old, 18 year old boy that thinks that he's the center of the universe. Thank you.

Steven Harowitz:   12:54
If you want, you can see the answers to this Season's question as written by audience members from each Campfire by visiting our Facebook page at facebook. com/campfireSTL. That's c a m p f i r e s t l. A big thank you to the Campfire team, our photographers and videographers, and a special thanks to KDHX Community Media for being our partners on this journey. If you want to learn more about Campfire and the work we do, you can visit cmpfr.com. That's c m p f r dot com. And if you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts, because it really helps. Until next time.