Left for Garbage

my personal life, and that’s the way I want to keep it. I see all the questions and snide-ass comments about me all over the Internet.
    You want to hear my music mixes? Then welcome to my professional life but I’d really appreciate it if my personal shit could just be left out of it. I’m embarrassed to have my name connected with such a kid killing. I just need to be known for my music, nothing more.

Bobby Rightman
    (Ex-boyfriend of Denise Brown)

    It’s all so sad and terrible. I mean , I’ve still got my personal relationship with God, and I’ve got my family, but what I no longer have is any belief in myself or my own judgment.
    I mean, who am I? What kind of person falls in love with a child killer? The same kind of guy who , when a girl says she is pregnant after you date for a month, says, ‘Great, let’s get married’? The same kind of guy who, when he finds out the girl was telling the truth about being pregnant by some other guy, still says, ‘Alright, great, let’s still get married’?
    This is the sort of guy lots of people might call a fool.
    My dad says this kind of thing is going to happen if you forget where you come from, if you forget your faith and indulge in sin, which I did, no two ways about it. It’s hard, though, growing up Christian in today’s world. Temptation is everywhere and I’m as human as the next guy, and Denise Brown was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. She’s still the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.
    People who grow up Christian, like me, are told more what not to do before we’re told what we can do. And it’s okay when you’re a little kid. I mean, I never wanted to steal anything and I really love my folks, so honoring them came naturally, but when I hit fourteen it got a lot harder.
    I started thinking about girls all the time, and at school , if you don’t listen to rap and wear sags and stuff, then the kind of girls who make a guy sweat won’t give you the time of day, and the Christian girls from church and my youth group, well this is hard to say because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but they never exactly made me sweat.
    Not that it would have mattered if they had , because with girls like that and a guy like me their answer is always going to be no anyway. So, when Denise acted like she wanted me, I said yes, and when she told me we were going to have a baby together, I said yes again.
    Then, because I hadn’t totally forgotten where I came from, I asked her to marry me and she said yes.
    As soon as my parents heard about the engagement, things started to slow down a little. I mean, my mom she had a hard time with the idea of a grandbaby coming, one who hadn’t been created in marriage, but she kept pretty quiet about what she was thinking - my dad not so much.
    He’s a great guy, my dad, sort of bigger than life; he was the head of the state troopers back in Ohio. And then he got the calling and became a minister. So, while he’s very connected to our Savior, he’s also still got a lot of cop in him and he’s used to being in command of situations. So, when he heard about the baby and the marriage, he wasn’t happy.
    I was used to hi m speaking his mind, but Denise, she had a different kind of set-up with her folks, and because of that my dad got her back up right away.
    Since we couldn’t be together at my house , we spent a lot of time at her place. I don’t think her parents liked me any more than mine liked her, but Denise ran things around the Brown place, so they didn’t really say anything.
    I mean, once after Denise accepted my proposal, she said she wanted a big wedding. All girls do , I guess, and I was fine if that was what she wanted to do. I mean, I was looking forward to showing her off and she would have been a totally gorgeous bride. So, anyway, there she was, cutting stuff out of brides’ magazines and talking about a reception at the Ritz and maybe an engagement party at Universal.
    When one day her mom kind of started to laugh and asked us how we planned to pay for it, she was pretty mean about it. She said, “Denise you’d better get more realistic about your little plans there, what with Bobby’s big security guard salary and your nine dollars an hour snapping pictures money. Shouldn’t you two be thinking more along the lines of Bobby’s father marrying you and then some punch and cookies in the basement of that church they go to?”
    Wow , when her mom said that, you should have