For some reason, autumn has always been a time of change for me, and a time of particular restlessness.
So I've joined AgeMatch.com so that I may trawl the internet in search of more mature male totty, as opposed to the disappointing PlentyOfFish catch - one-liner cavemen, most of them.
My profile is suitably erudite and intelligent-sounding, though I stumble when I have to rate my attractiveness given the following options 'Hot', 'Quite Hot', 'Good Looking', 'Some People Think I'm OK' and 'Downright Hideous'. I settle for 'Good Looking'.
You have to put up photos as well, because men are supposedly more visual than women. Most women put up photos of themselves lounging around in bikinis and/or trying to look sultry. I've got those as well...somewhere...but to weed out the male Barbies, I put up photos of myself crossing raging torrents with a massive rucksack, catching lobsters with my bare hands, and one of myself in full combat gear before a paintballing session. It would take a very secure man not to be frightened off by 'dwarf of war'.
My ideal match?
I’m looking to connect with a worldly, independent, open-minded, self-aware, ambitious and mentally stimulating human being who will challenge my outlook on life with their own, who can hold their ground in a debate and who possesses a sharp wit and a sense of humour – a tall order, I know!
(Technically, the above has always been true, so how on earth I ended up with more than one insolvent, immature, unambitious and emotionally damaged male is beyond me..)
A variety of interests are essential; I like a man who is passionate about something - even if it's stamp collecting! Your interests don’t have to coincide with my own, though it helps to have some common ground.
(I've certainly gone out with passionate people before - passionate about certain illegal substances, for instance).
I keep an open mind as far as ethnicity, culture and age is concerned, though I tend to be attracted to older men (as in, 20-30 years older than me). Experience has taught me that older men tend to be less insecure, have less to prove and have greater life experience. I must confess that I also like facial hair - goatees, beards, proper mustaches, stubble...I'm a very tactile person and I like the textures. If you feel that the above describes you, get in touch. Or grow a mustache and get in touch.(The first part of the first sentence is not quite the bare-faced lie it once used to be: I will try not to apply the 'affirmative action' principle to my relationships. Clean-shaven men may also apply but only if they have a plethora of character attributes to outweigh the hairlessness).
Two hits straight away.
Hello.l found your profile very interesting and l would love to know u better.l am a mature older man 55 y.old who loves young girls like u.I hope you like older men too..I am single and looking for friendship relation or serious relation..What do u think if we meet and spend some time together to see if we can match?Please send me your pics and you e-mail, tell me some things about u .
It's from a dumpy-looking man from Paradis, Lousiana. How can I reject someone who lives one letter away from heaven? Wait a minute - there are letters missing elsewhere: a whole bunch of 'y's and 'o's, for starters. Not a good sign. Also, he clearly hasn't read my profile and when I check out his, it turns out that he's after anything, including marriage, his only criteria being that the other party is between the ages of 18-25. As I said, he clearly hasn't read my profile. I may look like I'm twelve, but these days I hardly qualify as a 'young girl'. Next!
The other one is more thought-provoking:
...If nothing else it's refreshing and rare to find a cogent profile written by someone who clearly knows herself and can express it. That first caught my passing attention but then your personality and looks made me focus in a very specific way. I share a number character traits and some interests with you and broadly meet the specification you set out for your men (but no facial hair - I might sometimes indulge you with stubble!) but there are differences in circumstances and approach which could offer a vibrant and secure but flexible relationship, depending on what you are looking for. I'm within traveling distance and I'm a much-better-than-average example, physically and in terms of attitudes, of a guy in his 60s, or 50s come to that...
Okay, so he's a teensy bit older than I'd normally go for, but he sounds articulate and intelligent and he's prepared to make concessions to my love of facial hair - bonus!
I wonder what a 'vibrant and secure but flexible relationship' would consist of.
I shall make further enquiries.
Saturday, 16 October 2010
Saturday, 17 July 2010
A curious proposal.
A couple of days ago, Delilah* came round ours for dinner since she hadn’t seen our mutual university friend for a decade. I went out with her to get takeaway, and somehow our conversation got onto the subject of lesbianism. She told me that she and a friend have a lesbian joke going on at work, whereby she bounces her friend on her knee in the staff room. After a little while, male colleagues make excuses and escape elsewhere, presumably to relieve themselves.
“Would you ever do it with a woman?” I asked and Delilah* allowed that she’s keeping an open mind and willing to be swept off her feet by the right person.
I was in a most peculiar mood that evening. Perhaps it’s because I’d been taking an extended ‘sabbatical’ since my last relationship, and the frustration was suddenly catching up with me, but I found myself contemplating Delilah* from a different angle. “Is it wrong to find Delilah* attractive?” I asked Gabriel*, freshly divorced from her, and he didn’t think so, though he accused me of trying to make a move on his ex-wife ‘while the marital bed was still warm’. I wasn’t really; all I did was stroke her arm, and invite her to sit on my knee, but combined with my other behaviour that evening – making numerous remarks laden with innuendo, clawing Gabriel’s* leg and biting a wooden chair due to an overflowing of…something – it led Delilah* to believe that I really was hitting on her. She’s probably still traumatised. As for me, to borrow Isabel Allende’s words, I’m suffocating in the hair shirt of my own skin.
Though I’ve found women attractive since I was seventeen, I’ve never done anything about it because I find attractive women far more intimidating than men. Men are more straightforward, and as someone impervious to subtlety, I find them to be more on my wavelength. I also find it far easier to discuss sexually explicit matters with my male friends than with female ones, since the latter fall roughly into two categories: respectable married women or virgins. Triệu Thị Trinh* is an exception, she may be married, but ‘respectable’ she ain’t; she’s the bluntest, most graphic person I know. The other night, our household was assembled in our living room, and our newest housemate, eyes wide open, was listening to Triệu Thị Trinh* talk very matter-of-factly about how she doesn’t care to wear underwear and she doesn’t like to shave down there, either, before moving onto the topic of sex toys. That’s just Triệu Thị Trinh*; she doesn’t believe in self-sensorship; if her accidental audience doesn’t like what it’s hearing, it can go hang.
Tonight we were in London, having dinner with Hector* and his girlfriend Persephone*, whom I'd never met. I hadn’t seen Hector* for a year, and he emailed me recently to invite me to crash at theirs, saying that Persephone* was curious to meet me. She and I got on very well, sharing mugging stories (we’ve both been mugged by teenagers), visa denial stories (I was ‘removed’ from the United States, while she had to go before the king of Morocco after overstaying her visa), modelling stories (we were both nude models at our respective universities) and Jamaica anecdotes – it seems that Hector* has told her about our wild time in the Caribbean, four years ago.
Hector* popped out for a cigarette, and I received the following text message: “Threesome?” I thought it was a jokey allusion to our incestuous household in Jamaica, when he had something going on with another intern but was showing a considerable interest in me at the same time, which didn’t amount to much, since I was also involved with another intern, as well as feeling guilty about a long-distance relationship with Forrest, and fending off the advances of a randy fifteen year old boy at the same time.
When we left the restaurant, Hector* and Persephone* suggested going for another drink, so I let Gabriel* go home and resigned myself to staggering drunkenly through the underground – the only likely outcome of an encounter with three glasses of wine.
When Hector* went out for another cigarette, Persephone* leaned towards me. “Hector* and I wanted to meet up with you because we’re interested in having a threesome and we’re wondering how you feel about it.”
Gosh. The last time this happened, I was twenty one and it was after some crazy night in London, when I was too late to catch a train back to Cambridge for some reason and ended up crashing at Rio’s, the clothing optional ‘health spa’ at Kentish Town. I slept in a lawn chair, wrapped in towels, and found myself at a nearby café in the morning, being plied with coffee and croissants by a pleasant middle-aged couple, who talked about how nice it’d be to ‘get together sometime’. I accepted the coffee and fled.
Persephone* was refreshingly straightforward. She explained that she’s been wanting to try a threesome for a while, that she’s talked Hector* into it (difficult as that may have been), but that they didn’t really have much in the way of open-minded friends, and apparently ‘open-minded’ was an adjective used when he described me to her. He was also rather flattering in his physical description of me. I confessed that I wasn’t against the idea, but wanted a week to mull it over. Since none of us have ever participated in a threesome, we pondered the practicalities of it all – how much attention to pay to whom, what lines not to cross (i.e. no extreme pain or golden showers)…how it would all work, really. One of my exes told me about a threesome he took part in. It was him and two girls; in his own words, “it was bloody hard work”, trying to please two women at the same time. He gave me the impression that it’s something a man tries once, because it sounds like fun, and never again.
I warned Persephone* that in spite of my self-proclaimed bisexuality, I’ve had less experience with women than my sister (who had to snog another girl onstage during some drama production), which is a bit embarrassing, really. Does this make me a faux-bisexual? Persephone* hasn’t had any experience with women either, hence the curiosity. “I love the female form, especially breasts,” she told me, and I admitted that I like breasts too – one of my favourite words is ‘boobies’; I see them as fun objects and would probably go around groping my female friends if it weren’t for certain social conventions and if they didn’t seek to clobber me for it.
The offer’s on the table. My friends are not an unattractive couple, but I have to be clear about my reasons for either going through with it or not. It would be out of curiosity rather than desire, a clumsy and entertaining experience, perhaps, rather than an intense private one, but then again, I’m all for experimentation. Perhaps I should indeed have sex sometime soon before I forget which bit goes where.
“Would you ever do it with a woman?” I asked and Delilah* allowed that she’s keeping an open mind and willing to be swept off her feet by the right person.
I was in a most peculiar mood that evening. Perhaps it’s because I’d been taking an extended ‘sabbatical’ since my last relationship, and the frustration was suddenly catching up with me, but I found myself contemplating Delilah* from a different angle. “Is it wrong to find Delilah* attractive?” I asked Gabriel*, freshly divorced from her, and he didn’t think so, though he accused me of trying to make a move on his ex-wife ‘while the marital bed was still warm’. I wasn’t really; all I did was stroke her arm, and invite her to sit on my knee, but combined with my other behaviour that evening – making numerous remarks laden with innuendo, clawing Gabriel’s* leg and biting a wooden chair due to an overflowing of…something – it led Delilah* to believe that I really was hitting on her. She’s probably still traumatised. As for me, to borrow Isabel Allende’s words, I’m suffocating in the hair shirt of my own skin.
Though I’ve found women attractive since I was seventeen, I’ve never done anything about it because I find attractive women far more intimidating than men. Men are more straightforward, and as someone impervious to subtlety, I find them to be more on my wavelength. I also find it far easier to discuss sexually explicit matters with my male friends than with female ones, since the latter fall roughly into two categories: respectable married women or virgins. Triệu Thị Trinh* is an exception, she may be married, but ‘respectable’ she ain’t; she’s the bluntest, most graphic person I know. The other night, our household was assembled in our living room, and our newest housemate, eyes wide open, was listening to Triệu Thị Trinh* talk very matter-of-factly about how she doesn’t care to wear underwear and she doesn’t like to shave down there, either, before moving onto the topic of sex toys. That’s just Triệu Thị Trinh*; she doesn’t believe in self-sensorship; if her accidental audience doesn’t like what it’s hearing, it can go hang.
Tonight we were in London, having dinner with Hector* and his girlfriend Persephone*, whom I'd never met. I hadn’t seen Hector* for a year, and he emailed me recently to invite me to crash at theirs, saying that Persephone* was curious to meet me. She and I got on very well, sharing mugging stories (we’ve both been mugged by teenagers), visa denial stories (I was ‘removed’ from the United States, while she had to go before the king of Morocco after overstaying her visa), modelling stories (we were both nude models at our respective universities) and Jamaica anecdotes – it seems that Hector* has told her about our wild time in the Caribbean, four years ago.
Hector* popped out for a cigarette, and I received the following text message: “Threesome?” I thought it was a jokey allusion to our incestuous household in Jamaica, when he had something going on with another intern but was showing a considerable interest in me at the same time, which didn’t amount to much, since I was also involved with another intern, as well as feeling guilty about a long-distance relationship with Forrest, and fending off the advances of a randy fifteen year old boy at the same time.
When we left the restaurant, Hector* and Persephone* suggested going for another drink, so I let Gabriel* go home and resigned myself to staggering drunkenly through the underground – the only likely outcome of an encounter with three glasses of wine.
When Hector* went out for another cigarette, Persephone* leaned towards me. “Hector* and I wanted to meet up with you because we’re interested in having a threesome and we’re wondering how you feel about it.”
Gosh. The last time this happened, I was twenty one and it was after some crazy night in London, when I was too late to catch a train back to Cambridge for some reason and ended up crashing at Rio’s, the clothing optional ‘health spa’ at Kentish Town. I slept in a lawn chair, wrapped in towels, and found myself at a nearby café in the morning, being plied with coffee and croissants by a pleasant middle-aged couple, who talked about how nice it’d be to ‘get together sometime’. I accepted the coffee and fled.
Persephone* was refreshingly straightforward. She explained that she’s been wanting to try a threesome for a while, that she’s talked Hector* into it (difficult as that may have been), but that they didn’t really have much in the way of open-minded friends, and apparently ‘open-minded’ was an adjective used when he described me to her. He was also rather flattering in his physical description of me. I confessed that I wasn’t against the idea, but wanted a week to mull it over. Since none of us have ever participated in a threesome, we pondered the practicalities of it all – how much attention to pay to whom, what lines not to cross (i.e. no extreme pain or golden showers)…how it would all work, really. One of my exes told me about a threesome he took part in. It was him and two girls; in his own words, “it was bloody hard work”, trying to please two women at the same time. He gave me the impression that it’s something a man tries once, because it sounds like fun, and never again.
I warned Persephone* that in spite of my self-proclaimed bisexuality, I’ve had less experience with women than my sister (who had to snog another girl onstage during some drama production), which is a bit embarrassing, really. Does this make me a faux-bisexual? Persephone* hasn’t had any experience with women either, hence the curiosity. “I love the female form, especially breasts,” she told me, and I admitted that I like breasts too – one of my favourite words is ‘boobies’; I see them as fun objects and would probably go around groping my female friends if it weren’t for certain social conventions and if they didn’t seek to clobber me for it.
The offer’s on the table. My friends are not an unattractive couple, but I have to be clear about my reasons for either going through with it or not. It would be out of curiosity rather than desire, a clumsy and entertaining experience, perhaps, rather than an intense private one, but then again, I’m all for experimentation. Perhaps I should indeed have sex sometime soon before I forget which bit goes where.
Saturday, 10 July 2010
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.
Thus complained Mick Jagger in one of The Stones’ biggest hits. I can relate to that.
The day before I fly home from Peru, I go on a quasi-date with Leo, my guide from Nazca, who happens to be in Lima on business. As luck would have it, he calls me just when I get to the dentist, and I’m two hours late due to having a crown fitted. Leo waits for me by the fountains of Larcomar with Peruvian patience and Hermes* takes off after the initial introductions so as to not cramp my style.
Those who know me well are perhaps not surprised that I developed crush on my guide back in Nazca while standing in the middle of the desert, surrounded by human skulls and fragments of bones. Appropriate, really. When Leo invited me to his house and we sat in his room, watching TV, I had to resist the temptation to run my fingers along the scar on the inside of his right arm. Not particularly because I wanted to trigger something of a sexual nature, but because I’m enthralled by different textures and I wanted to know what the scar felt like. As Hermes* and Gabriel* will testify, sometimes I rub my cheek against theirs, feline-like, because I love the abrasive texture of stubble, but randomly stroking the skin of someone I’d just met would perhaps have sent the wrong message…
I now understand why many people consider me cute because of my height; small people are cute. Leo’s adorably compact: he’s only two or three inches taller than me! I tend to like men who are taller than me (just as well, really, because otherwise I’d have to develop a passion for midgets), and Leo qualifies. Just.
What I initially liked about Leo was his passion for his job, his thirst for learning (he taught himself English and Italian, not having had funds to go to university) and his incredible local knowledge that made the ruins and the desert come to life for me. I was also touched by his humility and the touch of resignation when he talked about how when he retires, he won’t have the luxury of travelling around Europe the way his wealthy Western counterparts might travel around South America. I bet he’d get so much out of it, too; he’d love the ruins of Pompeii, the Sistine chapel, the English castles… “Oh well, for me, there’s always Google Earth”, Leo said, and I vowed there and then that if I can, if I ever wield power and influence, I’ll help Leo visit Europe sometime in the future.
When I told Leo that I’d like to treat him to lunch, I hadn’t envisaged the food court at one of Lima’s most touristy shopping malls, but I did tell him that it was his choice. It’s just that after he’d taken me to all the best local places in Nazca, going somewhere super-touristy is a bit of a comedown.
The lunch is pleasant enough. He tells me that he couldn’t sort out his retirement payments today because his paperwork was not all in order, so he’ll have to come back to Lima. He promises to take me to lunch the next time I’m in Nazca; “I’ll have my pension money by then!” he grins. When I started seeing Forrest, nine years ago, Xerxes* commented: “Now you can start killing your beaus and running off with their pension money.” Not quite true then, but spot-on now. I don't know whether I should be concerned that the age gap seems to be growing rather than shrinking. Xerxes* is convinced that I'll end up practicing necrophilia: "I knew it! I just knew it! You'll end up marrying a mummy!"
When the conversation touches on where Leo would like to travel, given the chance, he expresses the desire to go to New York and visit the Statue of Liberty. To me, that sounds rather…ordinary. I must’ve been expecting something more profound.
When Leo turns to leave, he gives me a hug, takes my hands in his and makes me promise to write to him. He then leans towards me, pssibly aiming to kiss me on the cheek, but managing to half-catch my lips. Hmm. I then realise that I’d forgotten to take a picture of him and sprint after him. He asks a taxi driver to take a photo of us. Afterwards, I turn to him to say goodbye, and he plants a smacker right on my lips, presumably encouraged by the fact that I didn’t run away screaming the first time. As I turn to leave, I see his hand reaching towards me out of the corner of my eye, but I’m already gone.
And just like that, the power balance shifts. The body language in the photo is quite revealing; Leo’s got his arms wrapped around me in a proprietary fashion, and though I’m leaning towards him, I’ve got my hand on his chest, partly to steady myself and partly pushing him away.
I wander off with a spring in my step, but my mind is churning with unbidden thoughts. Take a long walk along the misty cliffs of Miraflores as an equivalent of a cold shower. Gabriel* has told me on several occasions that he’d like to spend a day in my head, convinced that I live in some alternate universe, so I shall attempt to record my thought process.
Leo kissed me. That was nice. He’s clearly interested. I could probably have my wicked way with him if I wanted to. But now that the imaginary scenario in my head has the potential of becoming a reality, do I even want it? The thrill of the chase is over.
At lunch he was looking at me as if I were a unicorn. I’ve seen that look before. What if he’s falling for me? He should be wary of me. I’m bad candy. I’m a heartbreaker. I won’t be able to return his feelings. He’ll end up pining away and hurting, and it’ll all be my fault.
Does he like for my charm, my wit, my radiant inner beauty, or is it because my skin still fits me pretty snugly and he hasn’t had much attention lately from anyone under the age of thirty? What if he sees me as just a nice piece of meat? What if I see him as just a nice piece of meat?
The age difference is a concern. For Leo to be described as middle aged now, he’d have to live to be one hundred and thirty. That’s a bit older than I normally go for, though since he was born the same year as my father, I technically wouldn’t be breaking the ‘no older than my parents’ rule…Why do I even have that rule? Does age even matter? Well, maybe for procreation purposes, but otherwise… I’m curious…do people in their mid-sixties even have sex? Surely they must call it a day at some point. Technically, women can keep going forever, but men? What if I give him a heart attack? That’d be a fun one to explain to Peruvian authorities.
What do I want? A bit of slap and tickle, a profound mental and emotional connection. Am I likely to get it from Leo? Maybe the slap and tickle, but probably no more than that. Am I getting cold feet because he’s taken the initiative and therefore control? Hermes* reckons I should wrest that control back by taking the initiative myself by booking a hotel room and dragging Leo in with me. Now there's an idea.
I’m wondering if what I’d enjoyed in the desert in Nazca was, in fact, just the feeling of longing and being next to a man made attractive by what I’d perceived of his personality, coupled with the desert setting and the familiar darkness of Leonard Cohen’s music. Leo even visually resembles a short, bespectacled, Quechua Cohen, but I should do well to remember that he’s a real human being and not the embodiment of the spirit of the desert, or that of dark, powerful music. That’s a heck of a burden to project onto a diminutive Peruvian.
And so it continues, this endless cycle of thoughts, with my alternating between taking responsibility for the hypothetical feelings of someone who barely knows me, and pondering the ethics and practicalities of actually getting him into bed; whether I actually want a fling that’ll go nowhere and thus be ultimately unsatisfying. Gabriel* is wrong: my wondering whether Leo will fall for me and whether I’d ultimately end up hurting him is not a manifestation of great arrogance. I don’t think I’m all that. It’s a manifestation of my control-freakism, my trying to take control over something that I have no control over.
I like this man, and he likes me, so what the hell is my problem? When I was in his house, and he wasn’t showing any overt interest, I was dissatisfied. When he kissed me, I was dissatisfied for different reasons. Am I simply doomed to perpetual dissatisfaction? In fact, have I ever felt satisfaction in any of my romantic entanglements? The short answer to that is ‘no’. The long answer is ‘nooooooooooooooooo’. Angst? Yes. Stress? Monumental amounts of, yes. Happiness? Hmm. During the most deluded periods of my life I may have persuaded myself that I was ‘happy’ with Forrest or Pantera, but I honestly can’t remember. Had I even asked myself that question during that time, I’m not convinced I would have been able to answer them:
There you are, you think you’re high
You can’t ask yourself, ‘cause you’ll only lie…
Prince, “The Holy River”
My past love life seemed to fall roughly into two categories: either I went out with troubled men with psychological problems, and feel no great loss when they finally vacated my life, or I fell in love with amazing people, like, say, Apollonia* from afar, knowing full well that I’d never do anything about it because I became acutely aware of my inadequacies and limitations when around them:
You see, I’m just another snowman, standing in the rain and sleet
Who loved you with his frozen love, his second-hand physique…
Leonard Cohen, “A Thousand Kisses Deep”
Also, they were too important, and I was not willing to risk anything that would compromise their place in my life, nor could I cope with their rejection, whereas the people who fell into the former category ultimately mattered little.
Where does Leo fit into this? I like him, and I think we could be friends. I’ve been taking a long sabbatical since the unravelling of my last relationship, and though I did buy a pack on condoms in December, with the full intention of using them before their expiry date (i.e. in the next 18 months), that’s not reason enough to rush into anything. In his latest email to me, Leo promises that ‘we will spend more time alone together’ in the Nazca desert, and though there’s nothing like being surrounded by sand dunes and human remains to get one feeling a bit frisky, luckily, it’s not a decision I’ll have to grapple with for some time.
The day before I fly home from Peru, I go on a quasi-date with Leo, my guide from Nazca, who happens to be in Lima on business. As luck would have it, he calls me just when I get to the dentist, and I’m two hours late due to having a crown fitted. Leo waits for me by the fountains of Larcomar with Peruvian patience and Hermes* takes off after the initial introductions so as to not cramp my style.
Those who know me well are perhaps not surprised that I developed crush on my guide back in Nazca while standing in the middle of the desert, surrounded by human skulls and fragments of bones. Appropriate, really. When Leo invited me to his house and we sat in his room, watching TV, I had to resist the temptation to run my fingers along the scar on the inside of his right arm. Not particularly because I wanted to trigger something of a sexual nature, but because I’m enthralled by different textures and I wanted to know what the scar felt like. As Hermes* and Gabriel* will testify, sometimes I rub my cheek against theirs, feline-like, because I love the abrasive texture of stubble, but randomly stroking the skin of someone I’d just met would perhaps have sent the wrong message…
I now understand why many people consider me cute because of my height; small people are cute. Leo’s adorably compact: he’s only two or three inches taller than me! I tend to like men who are taller than me (just as well, really, because otherwise I’d have to develop a passion for midgets), and Leo qualifies. Just.
What I initially liked about Leo was his passion for his job, his thirst for learning (he taught himself English and Italian, not having had funds to go to university) and his incredible local knowledge that made the ruins and the desert come to life for me. I was also touched by his humility and the touch of resignation when he talked about how when he retires, he won’t have the luxury of travelling around Europe the way his wealthy Western counterparts might travel around South America. I bet he’d get so much out of it, too; he’d love the ruins of Pompeii, the Sistine chapel, the English castles… “Oh well, for me, there’s always Google Earth”, Leo said, and I vowed there and then that if I can, if I ever wield power and influence, I’ll help Leo visit Europe sometime in the future.
When I told Leo that I’d like to treat him to lunch, I hadn’t envisaged the food court at one of Lima’s most touristy shopping malls, but I did tell him that it was his choice. It’s just that after he’d taken me to all the best local places in Nazca, going somewhere super-touristy is a bit of a comedown.
The lunch is pleasant enough. He tells me that he couldn’t sort out his retirement payments today because his paperwork was not all in order, so he’ll have to come back to Lima. He promises to take me to lunch the next time I’m in Nazca; “I’ll have my pension money by then!” he grins. When I started seeing Forrest, nine years ago, Xerxes* commented: “Now you can start killing your beaus and running off with their pension money.” Not quite true then, but spot-on now. I don't know whether I should be concerned that the age gap seems to be growing rather than shrinking. Xerxes* is convinced that I'll end up practicing necrophilia: "I knew it! I just knew it! You'll end up marrying a mummy!"
When the conversation touches on where Leo would like to travel, given the chance, he expresses the desire to go to New York and visit the Statue of Liberty. To me, that sounds rather…ordinary. I must’ve been expecting something more profound.
When Leo turns to leave, he gives me a hug, takes my hands in his and makes me promise to write to him. He then leans towards me, pssibly aiming to kiss me on the cheek, but managing to half-catch my lips. Hmm. I then realise that I’d forgotten to take a picture of him and sprint after him. He asks a taxi driver to take a photo of us. Afterwards, I turn to him to say goodbye, and he plants a smacker right on my lips, presumably encouraged by the fact that I didn’t run away screaming the first time. As I turn to leave, I see his hand reaching towards me out of the corner of my eye, but I’m already gone.
And just like that, the power balance shifts. The body language in the photo is quite revealing; Leo’s got his arms wrapped around me in a proprietary fashion, and though I’m leaning towards him, I’ve got my hand on his chest, partly to steady myself and partly pushing him away.
I wander off with a spring in my step, but my mind is churning with unbidden thoughts. Take a long walk along the misty cliffs of Miraflores as an equivalent of a cold shower. Gabriel* has told me on several occasions that he’d like to spend a day in my head, convinced that I live in some alternate universe, so I shall attempt to record my thought process.
Leo kissed me. That was nice. He’s clearly interested. I could probably have my wicked way with him if I wanted to. But now that the imaginary scenario in my head has the potential of becoming a reality, do I even want it? The thrill of the chase is over.
At lunch he was looking at me as if I were a unicorn. I’ve seen that look before. What if he’s falling for me? He should be wary of me. I’m bad candy. I’m a heartbreaker. I won’t be able to return his feelings. He’ll end up pining away and hurting, and it’ll all be my fault.
Does he like for my charm, my wit, my radiant inner beauty, or is it because my skin still fits me pretty snugly and he hasn’t had much attention lately from anyone under the age of thirty? What if he sees me as just a nice piece of meat? What if I see him as just a nice piece of meat?
The age difference is a concern. For Leo to be described as middle aged now, he’d have to live to be one hundred and thirty. That’s a bit older than I normally go for, though since he was born the same year as my father, I technically wouldn’t be breaking the ‘no older than my parents’ rule…Why do I even have that rule? Does age even matter? Well, maybe for procreation purposes, but otherwise… I’m curious…do people in their mid-sixties even have sex? Surely they must call it a day at some point. Technically, women can keep going forever, but men? What if I give him a heart attack? That’d be a fun one to explain to Peruvian authorities.
What do I want? A bit of slap and tickle, a profound mental and emotional connection. Am I likely to get it from Leo? Maybe the slap and tickle, but probably no more than that. Am I getting cold feet because he’s taken the initiative and therefore control? Hermes* reckons I should wrest that control back by taking the initiative myself by booking a hotel room and dragging Leo in with me. Now there's an idea.
I’m wondering if what I’d enjoyed in the desert in Nazca was, in fact, just the feeling of longing and being next to a man made attractive by what I’d perceived of his personality, coupled with the desert setting and the familiar darkness of Leonard Cohen’s music. Leo even visually resembles a short, bespectacled, Quechua Cohen, but I should do well to remember that he’s a real human being and not the embodiment of the spirit of the desert, or that of dark, powerful music. That’s a heck of a burden to project onto a diminutive Peruvian.
And so it continues, this endless cycle of thoughts, with my alternating between taking responsibility for the hypothetical feelings of someone who barely knows me, and pondering the ethics and practicalities of actually getting him into bed; whether I actually want a fling that’ll go nowhere and thus be ultimately unsatisfying. Gabriel* is wrong: my wondering whether Leo will fall for me and whether I’d ultimately end up hurting him is not a manifestation of great arrogance. I don’t think I’m all that. It’s a manifestation of my control-freakism, my trying to take control over something that I have no control over.
I like this man, and he likes me, so what the hell is my problem? When I was in his house, and he wasn’t showing any overt interest, I was dissatisfied. When he kissed me, I was dissatisfied for different reasons. Am I simply doomed to perpetual dissatisfaction? In fact, have I ever felt satisfaction in any of my romantic entanglements? The short answer to that is ‘no’. The long answer is ‘nooooooooooooooooo’. Angst? Yes. Stress? Monumental amounts of, yes. Happiness? Hmm. During the most deluded periods of my life I may have persuaded myself that I was ‘happy’ with Forrest or Pantera, but I honestly can’t remember. Had I even asked myself that question during that time, I’m not convinced I would have been able to answer them:
There you are, you think you’re high
You can’t ask yourself, ‘cause you’ll only lie…
Prince, “The Holy River”
My past love life seemed to fall roughly into two categories: either I went out with troubled men with psychological problems, and feel no great loss when they finally vacated my life, or I fell in love with amazing people, like, say, Apollonia* from afar, knowing full well that I’d never do anything about it because I became acutely aware of my inadequacies and limitations when around them:
You see, I’m just another snowman, standing in the rain and sleet
Who loved you with his frozen love, his second-hand physique…
Leonard Cohen, “A Thousand Kisses Deep”
Also, they were too important, and I was not willing to risk anything that would compromise their place in my life, nor could I cope with their rejection, whereas the people who fell into the former category ultimately mattered little.
Where does Leo fit into this? I like him, and I think we could be friends. I’ve been taking a long sabbatical since the unravelling of my last relationship, and though I did buy a pack on condoms in December, with the full intention of using them before their expiry date (i.e. in the next 18 months), that’s not reason enough to rush into anything. In his latest email to me, Leo promises that ‘we will spend more time alone together’ in the Nazca desert, and though there’s nothing like being surrounded by sand dunes and human remains to get one feeling a bit frisky, luckily, it’s not a decision I’ll have to grapple with for some time.
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do…”
Thus begins one of Harun Al-Rashid’s* favourite poems by Philip Larkin. Recently I’ve become aware of the genetic straitjacket that I’ve been wearing for years, without fully realising it.
After the Nightmare on Enniskillen Street (see older entry), Lloyd un-Friends me on Facebook. Not just un-Friends me, but blocks me, just in case I’d try to be his ‘friend’ again. You know how serious that is: when you’re no longer friends on Facebook, that’s the end of the frickin’ line.
Facebook must be pretty dreadful for people with insufficient self-esteem, because when you notice the number of your ‘friends’ dwindling, it doesn’t tell you who un-Friended you, and you can’t help but think: “Who hates me?? Who thinks so little of me that they don’t even want to be my virtual friend??” In my case, after that unfortunate Friday night, I had a pretty clear idea who disappeared from my Facebook page, and thus from my life.
During my turbulent youth, certain circumstances would trigger specific feelings and I’d blindly react on them, not being able to analyse why I felt (or reacted) the way I did. Now I can.
Lloyd un-Friends me.
How do I feel? Indignant. Hey, if anyone should be un-Friending anyone, it should be the other way round! I’m the offended party here!
Disbelieving. Has he really un-Friended and blocked me? Maybe he’s just removed his profile from the site… I double- and triple-check that I can’t reach his Facebook profile and that it still exists.
Regretful, because I’ve been rather fond of Lloyd. Maybe the bad, awkward ending could have been avoided, had I acted differently.
What do I feel like doing? A part of me feels like calling him, or emailing him, to tell him that even though he was out of line, I’m willing to forgive him if he apologises.
I catch myself.
This is too familiar. It’s not the first time that someone’s wronged me and I was the one to proffer the olive branch.
Why?
Because I don’t want to be abandoned.
Do I particularly want to see Lloyd again? Not really. What would we possibly say to one another now?
So does it matter who puts an end to this ‘friendship’, if that’s what both parties want anyway?
Yes.
Why?
Because he made that decision, not I.
Perhaps it won’t surprise anyone who knows me to hear me admit that I’m a control freak; I’ve known this about myself for a while. Perhaps it’s my genetic predisposition, given that both my parents are control freaks in their own way, or perhaps it’s my reaction to the circumstances I found myself in.
"They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you…”
My father has always felt the need to exert control over the only people he could control – us, his immediate family. Presumably he was just reacting to the lack of power he’d had over his own life – having to bang his head against a glass ceiling, time and time again, due to the institutional anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, or having writer’s block – and it felt good to bend at least somebody to his will, to pass on the misery that he himself was feeling in order to make up for this overall impotence. My mother is a cleanliness freak. She may not feel like she has control over many areas of her life, but she can and will control the amount of dust and dirt in her house.
“For they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats…”
As for me, this need for control has dominated my life for as long as I can remember. It caused me to rebel against my parents’ irrational and erratic way of doing things, to get a job as soon I was legally allowed to work to break my father’s financial control over me, to finally change my name to one I’m happy with. It has defined my relationship patterns with men – keeping them at arm’s length, ostensibly so that they wouldn’t have much of a hold over me (though that didn’t work, for reasons I’m about to explain), choosing men who on the surface seemed as different from my father as they could be, in a kneejerk reaction to my turbulent relationship with him, and freaking out when they made certain decisions because my other weakness is my fear or rejection and abandonment, which I’ve only just become full aware of. Sometimes, being a control freak is no bad thing; I have no physical addictions and I do nothing to excess - I don't drink much and I don't overeat, because I'll be damned if anything has too much of a hold on me.
The Lloyd fiasco and my reaction to him un-Friending me reminded me of my first ever breakup at the age of sixteen. Even though I could tell after several days that my romance with Fred* wasn’t going to win prizes for romance of the century, I still held on, thinking that maybe things change with time. They didn’t, and he broke up with me. I didn’t take it too well, even though logically, I knew that we had to break up. Fred’s* a really lovely guy and he was concerned that he broke my heart. He didn’t, but the whole episode bruised my ego and triggered the first response of its kind – the feeling of loss of control and despair over the breakup, precisely because he made that decision, and not I.
I also remember clearly an instance in which Ed the Nudist, after visiting me at university, inexplicably took off in the morning without a word, ignoring my running after his car. When he didn’t return my calls afterwards, I felt a paralysing fear. “What if he was dead?! What if I never see him again?! What if he never wants to see me again?!”
It was exactly the same paralysing fear, the same cold, sick feeling in my stomach, the same panic that I felt as an eight year old, when I was left at Frankfurt airport to look after the luggage cart while my family disappeared somewhere. As far as I was concerned, they would never come back: something terrible had happened to them on their way to the bathroom, and I was left all alone in the world.
When I was nine or ten, I had the same pre-bedtime routine. I would ask my mum the same questions and in exactly the same order (I’ve got a touch of OCD, you see). “You’re not going to go away, are you? You’re not going to die, are you?” And my mother, because she loves me, lied to me and promised the impossible.
With Ed the Nudist, getting in touch with him became all-important and I must’ve left a zillion messages on his answering machine. Likewise, when Pantera threatened to run to Griselle when I wouldn’t do his bidding, my first impulse was to placate him in any way possible. Why? Surely, being abandoned by Ed the Nudist or Pantera should’ve been a cause for celebration rather than concern?
I now realise that the men in question were immaterial; it was the idea of abandonment, full stop, that I couldn’t deal with. No wonder I was so cut up about a friend’s death last year, for what’s death but the ultimate abandonment?
Where does all this fear come from? When I worked in Ukraine an investigative assistant five years ago, my friend Natasha the psychiatrist suggested that I read “A General Theory of Love”. The book gathered dust on my shelf for three years before I read it, and when I did, it illuminated some of my distinctive behavioural patterns and helped me to make sense of them.
It spoke of relationship patterns built over the first few months and years of a child’s life, and how one’s early relationship with one’s parents inescapably affects one’s adult relationships…unless you do something about it. It gave three examples: the consistent mother, who knows exactly when to support and comfort her child, and when to let them be independent, so the child grows up confident and independent; the erratic mother, who means well, who is mostly affectionate and supportive, but sometimes not around, so the child often displays fear and clinginess; and finally the neglectful mother, who ignores her child and its needs, and who grows up often unable to build good relationships with other because they were never given the tools.
When my sister was born, I was three years old, and my mother had to raise us with virtually no help at all; my father was always at work, there were no relatives nearby, and half the time was spent trying to obtain common household goods. It was the Soviet Union, after all. My sister was very demanding when she was small, and consequently my mother had little time or energy for me and I was often left to my own devices. One of my first memories consists of sitting in the snow and trying to dig out my little snow boot, which had gotten stuck. I was playing alone, which was often the case. This had the effect of forcing me to become independent, but also creating irrational fears and complexes that I’ve only started to acknowledge and deal with recently.
For about a decade, my sister and I fought like cat and dog because I was unable to vocalise what I subconsciously felt. It’s such a common problem between siblings and it made me laugh at how absurdly simple the explanation for it was when I recently watched an episode of “Frasier” where Frasier and Niles were discussing the very same thing. “You stole my mummy!” Frasier shouted. So obvious.
When my sister and I compared notes recently, it was interesting to note that even though she had 95% of our mother’s attention as a child, we both exhibited symptoms of the second scenario – that of an erratic mother. The damage is not irreparable, of course – my sister and I are very close now, and I no longer have a fear of water or the telephone, among other things. When I was younger, I hated calling people on the phone or – even worse – answering the phone if complete strangers called. An older friend tried to cure me of this, and she was successful. Now not only do I not think twice about calling complete strangers, but I can do so in three languages!
The negative relationship patterns don’t disappear overnight, but becoming aware of them is the first step towards breaking out of a destructive loop. That’s not to say that there isn’t the odd irrational flare-up, but now I can identify it for what it is, and ride it out.
If abstract abandonment is difficult for me to deal with, then perceived abandonment and rejection by someone who’d played a large and positive role in my life can be even more difficult to cope with. When an older friend of mine came back into my life after several years absence, saying that she’d like us to be in touch again, I was overjoyed, because her positive input into my life had been beyond measure when I was a troubled teenager. Yet when after that, she deferred from meeting and then stopped responding to my messages altogether, it left me completely bewildered and triggered the predictable stream of irrational thoughts: “What have I done to push her away? Am I so hideous? Is my company so unbearable?”
It particularly stung because many years ago, she’d paid me one of the greatest compliments of my life, saying that if she’d had a daughter, she’d have imagined her to be like me. Since I was far from being the ideal daughter to my own parents, to know that I was the image of the ideal daughter for someone whom I greatly respected was simply incredible.
The difference is that now, unlike before, the rational explanation overrides the irrational thoughts of abandonment and I am able to understand that my feelings and reality don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. She has an entire life that I know nothing about and which has nothing to do with me, and there are dozens of explanations as to why we haven’t as yet met up for a catch-up drink.
In his poem, Philip Larkin goes on to conclude that because you’ve been screwed up by your parents, you will undoubtedly do the same to your kids, so you should refrain from procreating:
“Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.”
I don’t agree with the last part. Though subconscious parental influence can be difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult to shake off completely, it’s certainly not impossible. Besides, pretty much everyone’s parents pass on some kind of negative influence or crippling neurosis, so do we give up procreating altogether? My concerns as to whether or not I’d make a good mother due to the host of neuroses I could potentially pass on to my offspring does not automatically mean that I’d make a decent parent or disqualify me from motherhood; if said offspring can identify those neuroses, they can fight them.
I’ve acknowledged my Achilles’s heel, my twin hobbles of the need for control and my fear of abandonment, but they alone do not account for my persistence in seeking out and trying to maintain dysfunctional relationships. Time to dig deeper….
They may not mean to, but they do…”
Thus begins one of Harun Al-Rashid’s* favourite poems by Philip Larkin. Recently I’ve become aware of the genetic straitjacket that I’ve been wearing for years, without fully realising it.
After the Nightmare on Enniskillen Street (see older entry), Lloyd un-Friends me on Facebook. Not just un-Friends me, but blocks me, just in case I’d try to be his ‘friend’ again. You know how serious that is: when you’re no longer friends on Facebook, that’s the end of the frickin’ line.
Facebook must be pretty dreadful for people with insufficient self-esteem, because when you notice the number of your ‘friends’ dwindling, it doesn’t tell you who un-Friended you, and you can’t help but think: “Who hates me?? Who thinks so little of me that they don’t even want to be my virtual friend??” In my case, after that unfortunate Friday night, I had a pretty clear idea who disappeared from my Facebook page, and thus from my life.
During my turbulent youth, certain circumstances would trigger specific feelings and I’d blindly react on them, not being able to analyse why I felt (or reacted) the way I did. Now I can.
Lloyd un-Friends me.
How do I feel? Indignant. Hey, if anyone should be un-Friending anyone, it should be the other way round! I’m the offended party here!
Disbelieving. Has he really un-Friended and blocked me? Maybe he’s just removed his profile from the site… I double- and triple-check that I can’t reach his Facebook profile and that it still exists.
Regretful, because I’ve been rather fond of Lloyd. Maybe the bad, awkward ending could have been avoided, had I acted differently.
What do I feel like doing? A part of me feels like calling him, or emailing him, to tell him that even though he was out of line, I’m willing to forgive him if he apologises.
I catch myself.
This is too familiar. It’s not the first time that someone’s wronged me and I was the one to proffer the olive branch.
Why?
Because I don’t want to be abandoned.
Do I particularly want to see Lloyd again? Not really. What would we possibly say to one another now?
So does it matter who puts an end to this ‘friendship’, if that’s what both parties want anyway?
Yes.
Why?
Because he made that decision, not I.
Perhaps it won’t surprise anyone who knows me to hear me admit that I’m a control freak; I’ve known this about myself for a while. Perhaps it’s my genetic predisposition, given that both my parents are control freaks in their own way, or perhaps it’s my reaction to the circumstances I found myself in.
"They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you…”
My father has always felt the need to exert control over the only people he could control – us, his immediate family. Presumably he was just reacting to the lack of power he’d had over his own life – having to bang his head against a glass ceiling, time and time again, due to the institutional anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, or having writer’s block – and it felt good to bend at least somebody to his will, to pass on the misery that he himself was feeling in order to make up for this overall impotence. My mother is a cleanliness freak. She may not feel like she has control over many areas of her life, but she can and will control the amount of dust and dirt in her house.
“For they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats…”
As for me, this need for control has dominated my life for as long as I can remember. It caused me to rebel against my parents’ irrational and erratic way of doing things, to get a job as soon I was legally allowed to work to break my father’s financial control over me, to finally change my name to one I’m happy with. It has defined my relationship patterns with men – keeping them at arm’s length, ostensibly so that they wouldn’t have much of a hold over me (though that didn’t work, for reasons I’m about to explain), choosing men who on the surface seemed as different from my father as they could be, in a kneejerk reaction to my turbulent relationship with him, and freaking out when they made certain decisions because my other weakness is my fear or rejection and abandonment, which I’ve only just become full aware of. Sometimes, being a control freak is no bad thing; I have no physical addictions and I do nothing to excess - I don't drink much and I don't overeat, because I'll be damned if anything has too much of a hold on me.
The Lloyd fiasco and my reaction to him un-Friending me reminded me of my first ever breakup at the age of sixteen. Even though I could tell after several days that my romance with Fred* wasn’t going to win prizes for romance of the century, I still held on, thinking that maybe things change with time. They didn’t, and he broke up with me. I didn’t take it too well, even though logically, I knew that we had to break up. Fred’s* a really lovely guy and he was concerned that he broke my heart. He didn’t, but the whole episode bruised my ego and triggered the first response of its kind – the feeling of loss of control and despair over the breakup, precisely because he made that decision, and not I.
I also remember clearly an instance in which Ed the Nudist, after visiting me at university, inexplicably took off in the morning without a word, ignoring my running after his car. When he didn’t return my calls afterwards, I felt a paralysing fear. “What if he was dead?! What if I never see him again?! What if he never wants to see me again?!”
It was exactly the same paralysing fear, the same cold, sick feeling in my stomach, the same panic that I felt as an eight year old, when I was left at Frankfurt airport to look after the luggage cart while my family disappeared somewhere. As far as I was concerned, they would never come back: something terrible had happened to them on their way to the bathroom, and I was left all alone in the world.
When I was nine or ten, I had the same pre-bedtime routine. I would ask my mum the same questions and in exactly the same order (I’ve got a touch of OCD, you see). “You’re not going to go away, are you? You’re not going to die, are you?” And my mother, because she loves me, lied to me and promised the impossible.
With Ed the Nudist, getting in touch with him became all-important and I must’ve left a zillion messages on his answering machine. Likewise, when Pantera threatened to run to Griselle when I wouldn’t do his bidding, my first impulse was to placate him in any way possible. Why? Surely, being abandoned by Ed the Nudist or Pantera should’ve been a cause for celebration rather than concern?
I now realise that the men in question were immaterial; it was the idea of abandonment, full stop, that I couldn’t deal with. No wonder I was so cut up about a friend’s death last year, for what’s death but the ultimate abandonment?
Where does all this fear come from? When I worked in Ukraine an investigative assistant five years ago, my friend Natasha the psychiatrist suggested that I read “A General Theory of Love”. The book gathered dust on my shelf for three years before I read it, and when I did, it illuminated some of my distinctive behavioural patterns and helped me to make sense of them.
It spoke of relationship patterns built over the first few months and years of a child’s life, and how one’s early relationship with one’s parents inescapably affects one’s adult relationships…unless you do something about it. It gave three examples: the consistent mother, who knows exactly when to support and comfort her child, and when to let them be independent, so the child grows up confident and independent; the erratic mother, who means well, who is mostly affectionate and supportive, but sometimes not around, so the child often displays fear and clinginess; and finally the neglectful mother, who ignores her child and its needs, and who grows up often unable to build good relationships with other because they were never given the tools.
When my sister was born, I was three years old, and my mother had to raise us with virtually no help at all; my father was always at work, there were no relatives nearby, and half the time was spent trying to obtain common household goods. It was the Soviet Union, after all. My sister was very demanding when she was small, and consequently my mother had little time or energy for me and I was often left to my own devices. One of my first memories consists of sitting in the snow and trying to dig out my little snow boot, which had gotten stuck. I was playing alone, which was often the case. This had the effect of forcing me to become independent, but also creating irrational fears and complexes that I’ve only started to acknowledge and deal with recently.
For about a decade, my sister and I fought like cat and dog because I was unable to vocalise what I subconsciously felt. It’s such a common problem between siblings and it made me laugh at how absurdly simple the explanation for it was when I recently watched an episode of “Frasier” where Frasier and Niles were discussing the very same thing. “You stole my mummy!” Frasier shouted. So obvious.
When my sister and I compared notes recently, it was interesting to note that even though she had 95% of our mother’s attention as a child, we both exhibited symptoms of the second scenario – that of an erratic mother. The damage is not irreparable, of course – my sister and I are very close now, and I no longer have a fear of water or the telephone, among other things. When I was younger, I hated calling people on the phone or – even worse – answering the phone if complete strangers called. An older friend tried to cure me of this, and she was successful. Now not only do I not think twice about calling complete strangers, but I can do so in three languages!
The negative relationship patterns don’t disappear overnight, but becoming aware of them is the first step towards breaking out of a destructive loop. That’s not to say that there isn’t the odd irrational flare-up, but now I can identify it for what it is, and ride it out.
If abstract abandonment is difficult for me to deal with, then perceived abandonment and rejection by someone who’d played a large and positive role in my life can be even more difficult to cope with. When an older friend of mine came back into my life after several years absence, saying that she’d like us to be in touch again, I was overjoyed, because her positive input into my life had been beyond measure when I was a troubled teenager. Yet when after that, she deferred from meeting and then stopped responding to my messages altogether, it left me completely bewildered and triggered the predictable stream of irrational thoughts: “What have I done to push her away? Am I so hideous? Is my company so unbearable?”
It particularly stung because many years ago, she’d paid me one of the greatest compliments of my life, saying that if she’d had a daughter, she’d have imagined her to be like me. Since I was far from being the ideal daughter to my own parents, to know that I was the image of the ideal daughter for someone whom I greatly respected was simply incredible.
The difference is that now, unlike before, the rational explanation overrides the irrational thoughts of abandonment and I am able to understand that my feelings and reality don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. She has an entire life that I know nothing about and which has nothing to do with me, and there are dozens of explanations as to why we haven’t as yet met up for a catch-up drink.
In his poem, Philip Larkin goes on to conclude that because you’ve been screwed up by your parents, you will undoubtedly do the same to your kids, so you should refrain from procreating:
“Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.”
I don’t agree with the last part. Though subconscious parental influence can be difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult to shake off completely, it’s certainly not impossible. Besides, pretty much everyone’s parents pass on some kind of negative influence or crippling neurosis, so do we give up procreating altogether? My concerns as to whether or not I’d make a good mother due to the host of neuroses I could potentially pass on to my offspring does not automatically mean that I’d make a decent parent or disqualify me from motherhood; if said offspring can identify those neuroses, they can fight them.
I’ve acknowledged my Achilles’s heel, my twin hobbles of the need for control and my fear of abandonment, but they alone do not account for my persistence in seeking out and trying to maintain dysfunctional relationships. Time to dig deeper….
Sunday, 20 June 2010
A mixed catch...
The search for cyber love (or just plain old entertainment) continues, with mixed results.
Recently, Gabriel* caught what looked like a potential sea bass but it turned out to be a crab. At first, he was quite enthusiastic about KKN (Kitty Kitty Northern)*; he liked that she had interests of her own, seemed to be independent and, more importantly, was really rather keen on him. Their first date was ‘the best ever’ in her opinion, she was a no-nonsense, straight-talking northern lass, and though some of her opinions were ‘a little provincial’, Gabriel* enjoyed her company and could see himself dating her, even if it wasn’t looking like a long-term thing. Then suddenly, she became evasive and non-committal, and cancelled their dinner without explanation. It later transpired that she’d been keeping an eye on his Facebook page and had become jealous of a platonic female friend with whom he danced at a recent wedding. Heck, if that was enough to trigger a jealousy attack, then she’d have a real cow if she saw the photo of Gabriel* and myself dancing slow and close at Fred* and Daphne’s* wedding, as that was sensual bordering on obscene…
Gabriel* said: “I’d rather have a bit of a honeymoon period pre-squabbling, to be honest,” and I think that’s perfectly reasonable thing to expect. So farewell, Kitty Kitty Northern* and hello Overbite Girl*. The unfortunate nickname stems from my heartless comment; when shown her profile picture, I told Gabriel*: “She seems quite nice, but she’s got a bit of an overbite.” Their first date was postponed because Overbite Girl* had just had an operation on her jaw (to correct said overbite, perhaps) and because she had to drink her dinner through a straw for a week. When they finally did get together, Gabriel* summed up the whole experience by saying: “One date is enough.” Not quite in the same league of direness as Delroy the Soap Boy, but she didn’t have very much to say for herself, apparently.
As for me, I’ve also had a mixed catch, most of which I’ve thrown back in because they were too dull (“We haven’t spoken in a while.” That’s because I wasn’t interested and didn’t reply to your message in the first place), too overfamiliar (“Hi honey, how was your weekend?” I don’t know you, so why should I tell you), not sufficiently physically attractive (read: too pale, though I’m trying to keep an open mind with regard to ethnic diversity), or too desperate (“Pleeeeeeeeease write back to me.” Men shouldn’t show vulnerability, because women are like sharks: they then go in for the kill if they sense weakness).
Then there was a bank holiday message from Jayzet*: “I’ll be hanging out at Castle and would love for you to join me. Interested?” That’s better. He doesn’t beat around the bush, he displays definite interest in meeting in person, as opposed to bloody cyberchatting, and he is easy on the eyes – tall, dark and handsome, clean-cut, in a nicely tailored suit. I like a man who scrubs up nicely. I emailed him back to tell him that I’m abroad but that I wouldn’t be opposed to meeting up upon my return.
Then today, SweetSoulBoy77* has sent me the following:
"I find you most intriguing.
I'd like to know more about you.
How should we proceed from here...?
1. chat on here
2. chat on msn
3. a quick chat on the phone
4. meet for a coffee
5. meet at the airport and fly to a hot country for a week
6. get married online
It's your choice..."
Good opening email. He seems to be interested in my personality (as opposed to going on about how pretty my eyes are and generally trying to flatter me), the email is sufficiently light-hearted, and he gives me a variety of choices. I like choices. His photo is a bit blurry, but I think he looks a bit like that guy out of a Diet Coke commercial (i.e. nice physique) and that he’s got dark hair and goatee (I like facial hair). I veto the top two choices, explaining that I have short, stubby fingers and find it difficult to type quickly, tell him that I’m already in a hot country and suggest that marriage might be a little premature, but that I wouldn’t be adverse to meeting for a meal. I now have his phone number, so SweetSoulBoy77* and I are all set for a hot date when I get back home.
However, the person who seems to have fared best in the cyber jungle is Fred*. A week after his soon-to-be-ex-wife Daphne* called it quits, he went out on two dates, both with girls he’d met online, and seems to have found lasting romance with Lois*, a girl who made a real effort to drive down to see him. An avocado-related near-death experience aside, things are going smoothly and they’ve even invested in a luxury tent which will be their home for the duration of the Big Chill. Daphne* hated music festivals and camping, so it looks like Fred’s* onto a good long-term thing with Lois*. How does he do it?
In the immortal words of The Lion King theme song: “Some of us sail through our troubles, and some have to live with the scars.” Fred* clearly belongs to the first kind...
Recently, Gabriel* caught what looked like a potential sea bass but it turned out to be a crab. At first, he was quite enthusiastic about KKN (Kitty Kitty Northern)*; he liked that she had interests of her own, seemed to be independent and, more importantly, was really rather keen on him. Their first date was ‘the best ever’ in her opinion, she was a no-nonsense, straight-talking northern lass, and though some of her opinions were ‘a little provincial’, Gabriel* enjoyed her company and could see himself dating her, even if it wasn’t looking like a long-term thing. Then suddenly, she became evasive and non-committal, and cancelled their dinner without explanation. It later transpired that she’d been keeping an eye on his Facebook page and had become jealous of a platonic female friend with whom he danced at a recent wedding. Heck, if that was enough to trigger a jealousy attack, then she’d have a real cow if she saw the photo of Gabriel* and myself dancing slow and close at Fred* and Daphne’s* wedding, as that was sensual bordering on obscene…
Gabriel* said: “I’d rather have a bit of a honeymoon period pre-squabbling, to be honest,” and I think that’s perfectly reasonable thing to expect. So farewell, Kitty Kitty Northern* and hello Overbite Girl*. The unfortunate nickname stems from my heartless comment; when shown her profile picture, I told Gabriel*: “She seems quite nice, but she’s got a bit of an overbite.” Their first date was postponed because Overbite Girl* had just had an operation on her jaw (to correct said overbite, perhaps) and because she had to drink her dinner through a straw for a week. When they finally did get together, Gabriel* summed up the whole experience by saying: “One date is enough.” Not quite in the same league of direness as Delroy the Soap Boy, but she didn’t have very much to say for herself, apparently.
As for me, I’ve also had a mixed catch, most of which I’ve thrown back in because they were too dull (“We haven’t spoken in a while.” That’s because I wasn’t interested and didn’t reply to your message in the first place), too overfamiliar (“Hi honey, how was your weekend?” I don’t know you, so why should I tell you), not sufficiently physically attractive (read: too pale, though I’m trying to keep an open mind with regard to ethnic diversity), or too desperate (“Pleeeeeeeeease write back to me.” Men shouldn’t show vulnerability, because women are like sharks: they then go in for the kill if they sense weakness).
Then there was a bank holiday message from Jayzet*: “I’ll be hanging out at Castle and would love for you to join me. Interested?” That’s better. He doesn’t beat around the bush, he displays definite interest in meeting in person, as opposed to bloody cyberchatting, and he is easy on the eyes – tall, dark and handsome, clean-cut, in a nicely tailored suit. I like a man who scrubs up nicely. I emailed him back to tell him that I’m abroad but that I wouldn’t be opposed to meeting up upon my return.
Then today, SweetSoulBoy77* has sent me the following:
"I find you most intriguing.
I'd like to know more about you.
How should we proceed from here...?
1. chat on here
2. chat on msn
3. a quick chat on the phone
4. meet for a coffee
5. meet at the airport and fly to a hot country for a week
6. get married online
It's your choice..."
Good opening email. He seems to be interested in my personality (as opposed to going on about how pretty my eyes are and generally trying to flatter me), the email is sufficiently light-hearted, and he gives me a variety of choices. I like choices. His photo is a bit blurry, but I think he looks a bit like that guy out of a Diet Coke commercial (i.e. nice physique) and that he’s got dark hair and goatee (I like facial hair). I veto the top two choices, explaining that I have short, stubby fingers and find it difficult to type quickly, tell him that I’m already in a hot country and suggest that marriage might be a little premature, but that I wouldn’t be adverse to meeting for a meal. I now have his phone number, so SweetSoulBoy77* and I are all set for a hot date when I get back home.
However, the person who seems to have fared best in the cyber jungle is Fred*. A week after his soon-to-be-ex-wife Daphne* called it quits, he went out on two dates, both with girls he’d met online, and seems to have found lasting romance with Lois*, a girl who made a real effort to drive down to see him. An avocado-related near-death experience aside, things are going smoothly and they’ve even invested in a luxury tent which will be their home for the duration of the Big Chill. Daphne* hated music festivals and camping, so it looks like Fred’s* onto a good long-term thing with Lois*. How does he do it?
In the immortal words of The Lion King theme song: “Some of us sail through our troubles, and some have to live with the scars.” Fred* clearly belongs to the first kind...
Thursday, 3 June 2010
Enter the Bad Men, Part 3, or How I Became a San Quentin Pin-up.
As one of my friends used to say, none of my experiences count as negative ones, as long as they contributed to a positive whole, and I agree. If it hadn’t been for Antonio, then I probably wouldn’t have met my friend Saturnus*; when we were on a Greyhound bus from New York to Toronto, Antonio, bless his unfaithful little Jehovah’s Witness socks, went over to say hello to Saturnus*, one black man to another, and it turned out that Saturnus* and I had way more in common and are still friends, nine years on. Ed the Nudist introduced me to Rio’s, where I met Tony, my on-off dial-a-shag, whom I was rather fond of for a long time. My involvement with Forrest indirectly led to friendships and work with some of the most interesting legal minds in the US criminal law profession, while Pantera prepared me for Bill.
Bill (or Billy, as he now likes to be called, because it makes him sound friendly and approachable), the last Bad Man I’m going to introduce, isn’t exactly an ex of mine, but we were kind of involved and he ended up playing a greater role in my life than expected. He was one of my death row inmate pen pals; I started writing to him in the spring of 2004, rather by accident. In correspondence, as in my personal life, I used to practise positive discrimination: out of the seven men that I wrote to, six happened to be African-American and the seventh – a Mexican national who looked like Apollonia’s* twin brother in his profile photo. I’d like to think that I’m not entirely shallow: José’s profile was well-written and entertaining, and I found it difficult to reconcile this sensitive, earnest young man with the teenage gang member who took part in a gang rape and murder of two teenage girls; we remained firm friends until his execution in August 2008.
Anyway, Bill’s case caught my attention because a) it received a lot of coverage on the two death row pen pal websites (it later turned out that he’d been given a prime spot of the German one because he’d been romantically involved with the woman who ran the site) and b) because from his case summary, it seemed that he’d been accused on committing two murders which he couldn’t have been present at, since he had rock-solid alibis for both murders. Later, when I’d done my research, it turned out that he was not accused of committing the murders himself – he was accused of masterminding them and getting other people to carry them out, which is much harder to prove (or to disprove) and that he’s the only man on San Quentin’s death row who isn’t accused of killing anyone himself.
Bill came across as intelligent, articulate, and sensitive. In the photos, he was very attractive – tall, dark and handsome, with golden skin, hazel eyes and a neat moustache. I didn’t even realise that he was black until I’d read his profile because his skin was the same colour as mine after I’ve been out in the sun for a bit.
I was touched by his plea; he spoke eloquently of the ‘touch of a woman, be it emotional, spiritual or physical’ missing from his life. He sounded like someone who’d have a lot to say for himself, and I just couldn’t believe that he was on death row in spite of the alibis, so I wrote to him, wanting to know more about him and his predicament.
When I introduced myself, I told him that I couldn’t abide small talk and that I’m happy to answer questions about myself - if someone asks me probing and direct questions, they get Brownie points for it and that I answer all personal questions openly and honestly. He wrote me a long letter, telling me that he was exactly the same, and asking me to send him a photo of myself. I did, and he responded by saying that because I came across as very intelligent, he thought that I couldn’t possibly be stunningly beautiful as well, but I was! That though he had several other pen pals my age, I was ‘way more mature than any of them’. It seems that yours truly is somewhat susceptible to flattery; I eagerly lapped it up the compliments because most of them tallied with my own view of myself. Why, of course my mental and emotional maturity is light years beyond that of my peers. Why, of course I’m very intelligent. Not intelligent enough to spot a flatterer, it seems.
Since I’d expressed the desire to meet him in person that summer, in his second letter, Bill explained to me through use of diagrams how it was possible for two consenting adults to ‘have some fun’ during prison visits: since the visiting area was split into ‘cages’, the bottom halves of which were made of sheet metal, as long as your heads were visible through the wire mesh that started at shoulder level, you could get away with some groping under the table or whatever. If you came on a ‘legal visit’, i.e. if you were introduced as a paralegal, you were given way more privacy, with only one guard stationed at the end of the room with his back to you… That was all a ‘by the way’, just in case I felt like it, you know – no pressure. He was funny, charming and graphic. I was a frisky twenty three-year old and at the beginning I really enjoyed Bill’s graphic letters telling me how amazingly beautiful I was and what he’d do to me, given the chance. Rereading the letters, it’s clear that he was ‘grooming’ me, but it was fun at the time.
By the time I turned up at San Quentin, it was pretty much a certainty that something would happen if he turned out to be as charismatic in person as he was on paper. Imagine my surprise when I, having booked an extended four-hour visit, was told that I had just an hour to speak to Bill and that the visit would take place behind glass. Due to some infringement of prison rules on his part, Bill was placed on ‘B’ status, meaning that he was temporarily deprived of various privileges, including contact visits. We still had an entertaining chat through the glass, our ears glued to the prison ‘phones’. Bill seemed nervous and kept licking his lips. But his physical presence was overwhelming; in my life, I’ve only felt this instantaneous electricity, a hyperawareness of the other person, a kind of sexual bristling, only twice: with Bill and with Tom Tavares-Finson, a hotshot lawyer in Jamaica. An overpowering Alpha maleness, and with it, the certain knowledge that the other person is no good for you, but you can’t help wanting them anyway.
I wanna love you but I better not touch
I wanna hold you but my senses tell me to stop
I wanna kiss you but I want it too much
I wanna taste you but your lips are venomous poison
“Poison”, Groove Coverage
At one point during our visit, Bill whipped out his huge wang and demonstrated that it was in full working order with a smile on his face, as if to say: “This could all be yours, sweetie, if you play your cards right.” Humongous penises are kind of like train wrecks – you can’t help but stare at them, but they’re not going anywhere. He really was very charming in person and my visits were hugely entertaining at first, though in retrospect, I am really glad that I only ever saw him behind glass and didn’t get the opportunity to do more than one thing that I’d regretted.
I quickly discovered that Bill’s favourite conversation topic was sex. He could’ve asked me anything about myself, but he was primarily interested in my sexual preferences, and enjoyed talking at length and in detail about the various encounters he enjoyed during the course of his life. At first, it was entertaining, but it became apparent quite soon that there was little else.
His tastes were somewhat unconventional: he enjoyed watching his girlfriends have sex with other men; he got off on the jealousy, he explained, and on the power-tripping – the fact that the women would do that for him when they wouldn’t do it for any of their other boyfriends. My views on sex are very liberal; paedophilia aside, I believe that no sex is ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ as long as the parties concerned are consenting and they enjoy it, but some of what he told me just wasn’t my thing. I also began to wonder how those women would feel if they knew that their intimate details were being told to a complete stranger. I could well believe that the women would do for Bill what they wouldn’t normally do; Bill was very persuasive, and after leaving San Quentin post-visit, I’d shake my head as if to clear it because it seemed to me that I was a different person in his presence; his charisma weaved a temporary spell.
Bill was trying to make it as a writer. He’d read the Harry Potter books and became convinced that he could easily become a success as well. He didn’t seem to understand that to be a writer, you have to love to write, whereas his thoughts focused on spin-off merchandise, film rights and making millions. Like many inmates, he wrote rhyming stuff that he called poetry. I suffered through his attempts at rhyming stories, and came to realise that he wasn’t looking for constructive criticism. He believed that he was a great writer and the slightest criticism was interpreted as an all-out attack on him personally, clearly fuelled by my jealousy of his talent.
When Gabriel* did a story on me and my inmates for the Cambridge Town Crier, using Bill’s case as an example of the people I was trying to help, Bill read into the article what he wanted to, and came to believe that the article was in support of him, personally, rather than a ‘human interest’ article.
For reasons unknown, Bill assumed that Gabriel* was some sort of media mogul who could help him to get published as a writer, so he sucked up to him by sending him a card (Bill’s an excellent cartoonist) which said that ‘Anna’s living proof that angels do exist.’ Gabriel* took the piss out of me for months for that one. After I’d acquired a certain amount of notoriety thanks to a double-page spread in the Cambridge Evening News, to the point where my hospital colleagues would stop me in the corridors and tell me that what I was doing was great, and I began to get recognised in the street, Gabriel* told me that he’d ‘created a monster’. After some guy shook my hand in a pub and offered to buy me a drink, Gabriel* forever asked me for my autograph and generally mocked me.
It’s not the only time I’ve been called an angel. I’ve had a few comments from PlentyofFish.com users, saying that I looked like one, Forrest once called me his ‘guardian angel’ after some botched attempt to save him from himself, and Harun Al-Rashid* once referred to me as ‘the angel of death’ after I’d complained to him that in my nursing work, I get the interesting people, but only when they’re at death’s door; he insinuated that they know they’re going to die when they’re left to my tender mercies.
In February 2005, I did something really stupid. I was staying with Forrest in San Diego, but I popped over the San Francisco for a few days to do some prison visits and Bill asked me for some, erm, compromising photos of myself, saying what a ‘precious gift’ it would be and promising that they’ll be ‘for his eyes only’. I had a bad gut feeling about it all, and I regretted it as soon as I’d sent them to him, but I rationalised it by thinking that he’s in a terrible situation, on death row, he’s got little support…who was I to begrudge him a flash of skin on some shiny paper? I’m not rich or famous, so he wouldn’t exactly be able to sell them to some glossy mag and live happily ever after on the proceeds, could he?
In April 2005, two things happened: I decided that I wanted the photos back because I wasn’t comfortable about him having them, and I told Bill in person that I couldn’t be romantically involved with him because I loved Forrest. The last bit was probably a convenient excuse because Forrest and I were not ‘exclusive’ and Bill certainly wouldn’t have minded being ‘the other man’, but in spite of his charisma, I was going off him mentally. Pantera had the same charisma, the same persuasive nature, but that only works for a little while before cracks appear in the façade and you recognise that the person beneath isn’t all that interesting and is monumentally insecure. Bill did his best to run a harem from his prison cell, and if what he told me is to be believed, numerous women came to San Quentin just to have sex with him, including a sixty-something married woman from the UK who flew out several times a year and who allegedly was the most uninhibited of them all. He then went on to say that though she was the most attractive, I was even more attractive than her, which immediately made me think of the Pantera/Griselle scenario – that I should be grateful he’s choosing me above all these other interested parties.
I was interested in his background, but it only served to confirm my misgivings about him. Bill was a manic depressive and a career criminal, whose legitimate business ventures fell through, and who turned to forgery as a way of making a living. Unlike my other death row guys, by the time he’d ended up in San Quentin, he was 37 years old and had done time in prison for forgery before but hadn’t learned his lesson. He liked the easy money and he liked chasing women; that seemed to sum him up. He’d been married twice and had three or four children, but he was an absent father for the most part, and he didn’t even know about his eldest child until she was grown up. He couldn’t really explain why he got married, given that he never gave up womanising, though I could explain why women wanted to marry him – they wanted to pin him down, to own him or at least a part of hime, to have something concrete, and he gave them what they wanted – a ring and a certificate – without giving up his lifestyle.
On one hand, I was glad that he was honest with me, but on the other, what he told me repelled me. He was generally good at being ‘all things to all women’, but he couldn’t read me, and therefore when he told me what he thought I wanted to hear, he was way off the mark. His younger daughter got back in touch with him after fifteen years incommunicado (he blamed his wives for keeping the kids away from him) and he showed me her letter, in which she bitterly blamed him for not being there, for their mum struggling to bring them up by herself. He’d read those words but be unable to take them in; his second wife put up with his womanising, but on one condition: that he be home in the morning when the kids wake up. When he failed to turn up one time, she had the guts to throw him out. His reason? He was with some woman and couldn’t be bothered to come home; in the same breath, he’d tell me what a great father and husband he was, completely believing himself.
He bragged about the number of women he’s been with, forgetting that I’m not a fellow male prisoner and therefore not terribly likely to be impressed. When he told me that he’d only used a condom once in his life, I thought that it was irresponsible beyond belief. I’m well aware of STD statistics, and given that 25% of all sexually active Americans are Herpes carriers (whether they’re symptomatic or not), it was very likely that he was one if he’d had lots of unprotected sex with strangers. I was just amazed that in this day and age he’d take such risks, so if I originally had any thoughts about getting frisky with him, that put an end to that.
It bugged me that he used to slag off his exes, his wives, and his other pen pals while being all sweetness and light to them on paper and in person. I knew full well that he would quite easily do the same to me, regardless of his assurances to the contrary.
When I told him that I didn’t wish to be involved with him, that I only wished to be his friend, he took it as a complete rejection of himself, and I wasn’t prepared for the underhanded ire and the outpouring of bitterness that followed over the next couple of years. He couldn’t believe that I’d chosen a crack addict over him. Bill thought himself superior to Forrest, even though the latter had worked hard (on the right side of the law) all his life and hadn’t neglected his responsibilities as a parent, unlike Bill, but being rational is not Bill’s strongest suit.
As for the photos, he flatly refused to give them back and was aghast at my selfishness. How could I give him something so precious and then cruelly take away his reason for living? (Bill was big on hyperbole, too). We reached a stalemate: he thought I was selfish for wanting them back and I thought he was selfish for holding on to them after seeing how unhappy it made me. Cajoling, threatening – none of it worked, because Bill thrived on conflict, and when I received a particularly abusive letter from him while working in Jamaica that insinuated that the only reason I was still living with my parents was because clearly I was sleeping with my father, I put an end to our correspondence. The comment itself wasn’t a big deal – he was clumsily trying to get a reaction out of me – but by that point, we were just trading insults and the negativity wasn’t good for either of us. Bill also sent me a photocopy made of one of my photos by another stupid female pen pal – and that’s after promising that no one would ever see my photos apart from him!
I thought I was being very clever by sending him the Mary Chapin Carpenter lyrics to ‘The Last Word’:
You can have it, I don’t want it
When you got it, I’ll be gone
It won’t matter what you’re saying
When the damage has all been done
Bill and I both suffer from last-word-itis, and I thought that this way, I won both ways: if he responded, then I’d already told him that it didn’t matter if he had the last word, and if he didn’t, then I’d have the last word. Of course, when he responded, I promptly ruined the effect by then answering him. It’s kind of like the time when my friend and former housemate Sonia* yelled at Tim the Grim (another housemate), who’d insulted her boyfriend, and made a dramatic exit by slamming the door, only to discover that she’d forgotten her handbag and had to go back and retrieve it.
A year later, I heard from Bill again, by which point I wasn’t angry anymore. We discussed my reasons for feeling angry, he discussed why he felt upset about my choosing Forrest over him and I felt that perhaps we could resolve things as adults, and maybe even build a friendship. He still wouldn’t give back the photos, but after months of bitterness I understood that the photos only had as much power over me as I gave them. Once I came to realise that they weren’t important, Bill’s hold over me diminished greatly and his ‘victory’ over me was illusory.
I guess that his showing the photos to his fellow inmates shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and while I wasn’t too bothered about becoming San Quentin ‘pin-up of the year’, when another pen pal of mine informed me that Bill’s been trying to rent them out for a fee or for favours, I flipped. If anyone was going to benefit from compromising photos of yours truly, surely it should been me! When I questioned Bill about it, he lied outright, venting his fury on my other pen pal, and refusing to explain how James knew what the photos consisted of if he’d never seen them. I probably would’ve been prepared to accept an insincere apology, but there was none forthcoming. He then asked me for new copies, because his had gotten worn out, and basically told me that either I can make the copies, or he’ll get someone else to do it – and that’s after the apologies, the declarations of friendship, whatever!
At that point, it sank in that we’ll never see eye to eye. I used to believe that if you explain something to someone clearly enough, they’ll eventually get it, but with Bill, I ran into a brick wall. His world view was very different from mine, and he was simply incapable, in spite of his reasonably high IQ, of understanding another person’s point of view or of empathising with them. He was supremely selfish, delusional, and completely unable to face himself. I realised that he won’t change, that he’ll never be a better man because he doesn’t believe he needs to change. As far as he’s concerned, everyone else has got a problem, not him. He’s not responsible for his current predicament – the justice system is. His estrangement from his children is his wives’ fault – never mind that the children are grown up now and can get in touch with him if they want to.
I also realised that I didn’t believe in his innocence – that actually, it’s perfectly plausible that he did mastermind a computer store robbery that went wrong (that his younger brother is doing life in prison for), that he didn’t think anyone would get hurt, and was genuinely sorry that someone got killed – but as far as he was concerned, it’s not his fault or his responsibility. It’s also plausible that his ex-girlfriend, to please Bill, then bumped off another ex-girlfriend who’d decided to testify against him because she had legal problems of her own. I’m not saying that that’s what happened, and I’m aware that the prosecution used a number of illegal manoeuvres in order to secure Bill’s conviction (which was based on circumstantial evidence only and therefore should not have been enough under the eyes of the law), but the scenario they presented was not out of the realm of possibility. I don’t think he’s an evil mastermind, but his complete lack of responsibility was worrying and I had an issue with corresponding with a man who didn’t strive to better himself and on whose word I couldn’t rely.
It was a mutual decision to end correspondence in 2008, though a year later, I got another letter from him, saying that he missed me and asking if there was a second chance at friendship. I responded by saying that I wish him well, that he should read “A General Theory of Love”, because it changed my life, but that I don’t want to correspond with him – that I’m happy to wish him well from a distance. He sent me a bitter missive, saying that he wouldn’t write to me in a million years, and asking me to never write to him again. I obliged.
I’ve often wondered how I’d react if I were allowed back into the States, if I went back to visit my other San Quentin inmates, and Bill were in the visiting room. Would I ignore him? Would I nod at him courteously? Would I be overcome by old feelings? Would he knock me off-balance again? I know for a fact that regardless of what he said last year, he’d be thrilled to see me. I’m the one who got away, the one who ultimately wasn’t bowled over by him.
For Bill, I’m a scab that he can’t help but pick at, just as for me, he’d been like an itch I couldn’t scratch, somewhere at the back of my mind, just like Pantera had been before him. Why? Why did those two have such a hold on me for so long?
Bill (or Billy, as he now likes to be called, because it makes him sound friendly and approachable), the last Bad Man I’m going to introduce, isn’t exactly an ex of mine, but we were kind of involved and he ended up playing a greater role in my life than expected. He was one of my death row inmate pen pals; I started writing to him in the spring of 2004, rather by accident. In correspondence, as in my personal life, I used to practise positive discrimination: out of the seven men that I wrote to, six happened to be African-American and the seventh – a Mexican national who looked like Apollonia’s* twin brother in his profile photo. I’d like to think that I’m not entirely shallow: José’s profile was well-written and entertaining, and I found it difficult to reconcile this sensitive, earnest young man with the teenage gang member who took part in a gang rape and murder of two teenage girls; we remained firm friends until his execution in August 2008.
Anyway, Bill’s case caught my attention because a) it received a lot of coverage on the two death row pen pal websites (it later turned out that he’d been given a prime spot of the German one because he’d been romantically involved with the woman who ran the site) and b) because from his case summary, it seemed that he’d been accused on committing two murders which he couldn’t have been present at, since he had rock-solid alibis for both murders. Later, when I’d done my research, it turned out that he was not accused of committing the murders himself – he was accused of masterminding them and getting other people to carry them out, which is much harder to prove (or to disprove) and that he’s the only man on San Quentin’s death row who isn’t accused of killing anyone himself.
Bill came across as intelligent, articulate, and sensitive. In the photos, he was very attractive – tall, dark and handsome, with golden skin, hazel eyes and a neat moustache. I didn’t even realise that he was black until I’d read his profile because his skin was the same colour as mine after I’ve been out in the sun for a bit.
I was touched by his plea; he spoke eloquently of the ‘touch of a woman, be it emotional, spiritual or physical’ missing from his life. He sounded like someone who’d have a lot to say for himself, and I just couldn’t believe that he was on death row in spite of the alibis, so I wrote to him, wanting to know more about him and his predicament.
When I introduced myself, I told him that I couldn’t abide small talk and that I’m happy to answer questions about myself - if someone asks me probing and direct questions, they get Brownie points for it and that I answer all personal questions openly and honestly. He wrote me a long letter, telling me that he was exactly the same, and asking me to send him a photo of myself. I did, and he responded by saying that because I came across as very intelligent, he thought that I couldn’t possibly be stunningly beautiful as well, but I was! That though he had several other pen pals my age, I was ‘way more mature than any of them’. It seems that yours truly is somewhat susceptible to flattery; I eagerly lapped it up the compliments because most of them tallied with my own view of myself. Why, of course my mental and emotional maturity is light years beyond that of my peers. Why, of course I’m very intelligent. Not intelligent enough to spot a flatterer, it seems.
Since I’d expressed the desire to meet him in person that summer, in his second letter, Bill explained to me through use of diagrams how it was possible for two consenting adults to ‘have some fun’ during prison visits: since the visiting area was split into ‘cages’, the bottom halves of which were made of sheet metal, as long as your heads were visible through the wire mesh that started at shoulder level, you could get away with some groping under the table or whatever. If you came on a ‘legal visit’, i.e. if you were introduced as a paralegal, you were given way more privacy, with only one guard stationed at the end of the room with his back to you… That was all a ‘by the way’, just in case I felt like it, you know – no pressure. He was funny, charming and graphic. I was a frisky twenty three-year old and at the beginning I really enjoyed Bill’s graphic letters telling me how amazingly beautiful I was and what he’d do to me, given the chance. Rereading the letters, it’s clear that he was ‘grooming’ me, but it was fun at the time.
By the time I turned up at San Quentin, it was pretty much a certainty that something would happen if he turned out to be as charismatic in person as he was on paper. Imagine my surprise when I, having booked an extended four-hour visit, was told that I had just an hour to speak to Bill and that the visit would take place behind glass. Due to some infringement of prison rules on his part, Bill was placed on ‘B’ status, meaning that he was temporarily deprived of various privileges, including contact visits. We still had an entertaining chat through the glass, our ears glued to the prison ‘phones’. Bill seemed nervous and kept licking his lips. But his physical presence was overwhelming; in my life, I’ve only felt this instantaneous electricity, a hyperawareness of the other person, a kind of sexual bristling, only twice: with Bill and with Tom Tavares-Finson, a hotshot lawyer in Jamaica. An overpowering Alpha maleness, and with it, the certain knowledge that the other person is no good for you, but you can’t help wanting them anyway.
I wanna love you but I better not touch
I wanna hold you but my senses tell me to stop
I wanna kiss you but I want it too much
I wanna taste you but your lips are venomous poison
“Poison”, Groove Coverage
At one point during our visit, Bill whipped out his huge wang and demonstrated that it was in full working order with a smile on his face, as if to say: “This could all be yours, sweetie, if you play your cards right.” Humongous penises are kind of like train wrecks – you can’t help but stare at them, but they’re not going anywhere. He really was very charming in person and my visits were hugely entertaining at first, though in retrospect, I am really glad that I only ever saw him behind glass and didn’t get the opportunity to do more than one thing that I’d regretted.
I quickly discovered that Bill’s favourite conversation topic was sex. He could’ve asked me anything about myself, but he was primarily interested in my sexual preferences, and enjoyed talking at length and in detail about the various encounters he enjoyed during the course of his life. At first, it was entertaining, but it became apparent quite soon that there was little else.
His tastes were somewhat unconventional: he enjoyed watching his girlfriends have sex with other men; he got off on the jealousy, he explained, and on the power-tripping – the fact that the women would do that for him when they wouldn’t do it for any of their other boyfriends. My views on sex are very liberal; paedophilia aside, I believe that no sex is ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ as long as the parties concerned are consenting and they enjoy it, but some of what he told me just wasn’t my thing. I also began to wonder how those women would feel if they knew that their intimate details were being told to a complete stranger. I could well believe that the women would do for Bill what they wouldn’t normally do; Bill was very persuasive, and after leaving San Quentin post-visit, I’d shake my head as if to clear it because it seemed to me that I was a different person in his presence; his charisma weaved a temporary spell.
Bill was trying to make it as a writer. He’d read the Harry Potter books and became convinced that he could easily become a success as well. He didn’t seem to understand that to be a writer, you have to love to write, whereas his thoughts focused on spin-off merchandise, film rights and making millions. Like many inmates, he wrote rhyming stuff that he called poetry. I suffered through his attempts at rhyming stories, and came to realise that he wasn’t looking for constructive criticism. He believed that he was a great writer and the slightest criticism was interpreted as an all-out attack on him personally, clearly fuelled by my jealousy of his talent.
When Gabriel* did a story on me and my inmates for the Cambridge Town Crier, using Bill’s case as an example of the people I was trying to help, Bill read into the article what he wanted to, and came to believe that the article was in support of him, personally, rather than a ‘human interest’ article.
For reasons unknown, Bill assumed that Gabriel* was some sort of media mogul who could help him to get published as a writer, so he sucked up to him by sending him a card (Bill’s an excellent cartoonist) which said that ‘Anna’s living proof that angels do exist.’ Gabriel* took the piss out of me for months for that one. After I’d acquired a certain amount of notoriety thanks to a double-page spread in the Cambridge Evening News, to the point where my hospital colleagues would stop me in the corridors and tell me that what I was doing was great, and I began to get recognised in the street, Gabriel* told me that he’d ‘created a monster’. After some guy shook my hand in a pub and offered to buy me a drink, Gabriel* forever asked me for my autograph and generally mocked me.
It’s not the only time I’ve been called an angel. I’ve had a few comments from PlentyofFish.com users, saying that I looked like one, Forrest once called me his ‘guardian angel’ after some botched attempt to save him from himself, and Harun Al-Rashid* once referred to me as ‘the angel of death’ after I’d complained to him that in my nursing work, I get the interesting people, but only when they’re at death’s door; he insinuated that they know they’re going to die when they’re left to my tender mercies.
In February 2005, I did something really stupid. I was staying with Forrest in San Diego, but I popped over the San Francisco for a few days to do some prison visits and Bill asked me for some, erm, compromising photos of myself, saying what a ‘precious gift’ it would be and promising that they’ll be ‘for his eyes only’. I had a bad gut feeling about it all, and I regretted it as soon as I’d sent them to him, but I rationalised it by thinking that he’s in a terrible situation, on death row, he’s got little support…who was I to begrudge him a flash of skin on some shiny paper? I’m not rich or famous, so he wouldn’t exactly be able to sell them to some glossy mag and live happily ever after on the proceeds, could he?
In April 2005, two things happened: I decided that I wanted the photos back because I wasn’t comfortable about him having them, and I told Bill in person that I couldn’t be romantically involved with him because I loved Forrest. The last bit was probably a convenient excuse because Forrest and I were not ‘exclusive’ and Bill certainly wouldn’t have minded being ‘the other man’, but in spite of his charisma, I was going off him mentally. Pantera had the same charisma, the same persuasive nature, but that only works for a little while before cracks appear in the façade and you recognise that the person beneath isn’t all that interesting and is monumentally insecure. Bill did his best to run a harem from his prison cell, and if what he told me is to be believed, numerous women came to San Quentin just to have sex with him, including a sixty-something married woman from the UK who flew out several times a year and who allegedly was the most uninhibited of them all. He then went on to say that though she was the most attractive, I was even more attractive than her, which immediately made me think of the Pantera/Griselle scenario – that I should be grateful he’s choosing me above all these other interested parties.
I was interested in his background, but it only served to confirm my misgivings about him. Bill was a manic depressive and a career criminal, whose legitimate business ventures fell through, and who turned to forgery as a way of making a living. Unlike my other death row guys, by the time he’d ended up in San Quentin, he was 37 years old and had done time in prison for forgery before but hadn’t learned his lesson. He liked the easy money and he liked chasing women; that seemed to sum him up. He’d been married twice and had three or four children, but he was an absent father for the most part, and he didn’t even know about his eldest child until she was grown up. He couldn’t really explain why he got married, given that he never gave up womanising, though I could explain why women wanted to marry him – they wanted to pin him down, to own him or at least a part of hime, to have something concrete, and he gave them what they wanted – a ring and a certificate – without giving up his lifestyle.
On one hand, I was glad that he was honest with me, but on the other, what he told me repelled me. He was generally good at being ‘all things to all women’, but he couldn’t read me, and therefore when he told me what he thought I wanted to hear, he was way off the mark. His younger daughter got back in touch with him after fifteen years incommunicado (he blamed his wives for keeping the kids away from him) and he showed me her letter, in which she bitterly blamed him for not being there, for their mum struggling to bring them up by herself. He’d read those words but be unable to take them in; his second wife put up with his womanising, but on one condition: that he be home in the morning when the kids wake up. When he failed to turn up one time, she had the guts to throw him out. His reason? He was with some woman and couldn’t be bothered to come home; in the same breath, he’d tell me what a great father and husband he was, completely believing himself.
He bragged about the number of women he’s been with, forgetting that I’m not a fellow male prisoner and therefore not terribly likely to be impressed. When he told me that he’d only used a condom once in his life, I thought that it was irresponsible beyond belief. I’m well aware of STD statistics, and given that 25% of all sexually active Americans are Herpes carriers (whether they’re symptomatic or not), it was very likely that he was one if he’d had lots of unprotected sex with strangers. I was just amazed that in this day and age he’d take such risks, so if I originally had any thoughts about getting frisky with him, that put an end to that.
It bugged me that he used to slag off his exes, his wives, and his other pen pals while being all sweetness and light to them on paper and in person. I knew full well that he would quite easily do the same to me, regardless of his assurances to the contrary.
When I told him that I didn’t wish to be involved with him, that I only wished to be his friend, he took it as a complete rejection of himself, and I wasn’t prepared for the underhanded ire and the outpouring of bitterness that followed over the next couple of years. He couldn’t believe that I’d chosen a crack addict over him. Bill thought himself superior to Forrest, even though the latter had worked hard (on the right side of the law) all his life and hadn’t neglected his responsibilities as a parent, unlike Bill, but being rational is not Bill’s strongest suit.
As for the photos, he flatly refused to give them back and was aghast at my selfishness. How could I give him something so precious and then cruelly take away his reason for living? (Bill was big on hyperbole, too). We reached a stalemate: he thought I was selfish for wanting them back and I thought he was selfish for holding on to them after seeing how unhappy it made me. Cajoling, threatening – none of it worked, because Bill thrived on conflict, and when I received a particularly abusive letter from him while working in Jamaica that insinuated that the only reason I was still living with my parents was because clearly I was sleeping with my father, I put an end to our correspondence. The comment itself wasn’t a big deal – he was clumsily trying to get a reaction out of me – but by that point, we were just trading insults and the negativity wasn’t good for either of us. Bill also sent me a photocopy made of one of my photos by another stupid female pen pal – and that’s after promising that no one would ever see my photos apart from him!
I thought I was being very clever by sending him the Mary Chapin Carpenter lyrics to ‘The Last Word’:
You can have it, I don’t want it
When you got it, I’ll be gone
It won’t matter what you’re saying
When the damage has all been done
Bill and I both suffer from last-word-itis, and I thought that this way, I won both ways: if he responded, then I’d already told him that it didn’t matter if he had the last word, and if he didn’t, then I’d have the last word. Of course, when he responded, I promptly ruined the effect by then answering him. It’s kind of like the time when my friend and former housemate Sonia* yelled at Tim the Grim (another housemate), who’d insulted her boyfriend, and made a dramatic exit by slamming the door, only to discover that she’d forgotten her handbag and had to go back and retrieve it.
A year later, I heard from Bill again, by which point I wasn’t angry anymore. We discussed my reasons for feeling angry, he discussed why he felt upset about my choosing Forrest over him and I felt that perhaps we could resolve things as adults, and maybe even build a friendship. He still wouldn’t give back the photos, but after months of bitterness I understood that the photos only had as much power over me as I gave them. Once I came to realise that they weren’t important, Bill’s hold over me diminished greatly and his ‘victory’ over me was illusory.
I guess that his showing the photos to his fellow inmates shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and while I wasn’t too bothered about becoming San Quentin ‘pin-up of the year’, when another pen pal of mine informed me that Bill’s been trying to rent them out for a fee or for favours, I flipped. If anyone was going to benefit from compromising photos of yours truly, surely it should been me! When I questioned Bill about it, he lied outright, venting his fury on my other pen pal, and refusing to explain how James knew what the photos consisted of if he’d never seen them. I probably would’ve been prepared to accept an insincere apology, but there was none forthcoming. He then asked me for new copies, because his had gotten worn out, and basically told me that either I can make the copies, or he’ll get someone else to do it – and that’s after the apologies, the declarations of friendship, whatever!
At that point, it sank in that we’ll never see eye to eye. I used to believe that if you explain something to someone clearly enough, they’ll eventually get it, but with Bill, I ran into a brick wall. His world view was very different from mine, and he was simply incapable, in spite of his reasonably high IQ, of understanding another person’s point of view or of empathising with them. He was supremely selfish, delusional, and completely unable to face himself. I realised that he won’t change, that he’ll never be a better man because he doesn’t believe he needs to change. As far as he’s concerned, everyone else has got a problem, not him. He’s not responsible for his current predicament – the justice system is. His estrangement from his children is his wives’ fault – never mind that the children are grown up now and can get in touch with him if they want to.
I also realised that I didn’t believe in his innocence – that actually, it’s perfectly plausible that he did mastermind a computer store robbery that went wrong (that his younger brother is doing life in prison for), that he didn’t think anyone would get hurt, and was genuinely sorry that someone got killed – but as far as he was concerned, it’s not his fault or his responsibility. It’s also plausible that his ex-girlfriend, to please Bill, then bumped off another ex-girlfriend who’d decided to testify against him because she had legal problems of her own. I’m not saying that that’s what happened, and I’m aware that the prosecution used a number of illegal manoeuvres in order to secure Bill’s conviction (which was based on circumstantial evidence only and therefore should not have been enough under the eyes of the law), but the scenario they presented was not out of the realm of possibility. I don’t think he’s an evil mastermind, but his complete lack of responsibility was worrying and I had an issue with corresponding with a man who didn’t strive to better himself and on whose word I couldn’t rely.
It was a mutual decision to end correspondence in 2008, though a year later, I got another letter from him, saying that he missed me and asking if there was a second chance at friendship. I responded by saying that I wish him well, that he should read “A General Theory of Love”, because it changed my life, but that I don’t want to correspond with him – that I’m happy to wish him well from a distance. He sent me a bitter missive, saying that he wouldn’t write to me in a million years, and asking me to never write to him again. I obliged.
I’ve often wondered how I’d react if I were allowed back into the States, if I went back to visit my other San Quentin inmates, and Bill were in the visiting room. Would I ignore him? Would I nod at him courteously? Would I be overcome by old feelings? Would he knock me off-balance again? I know for a fact that regardless of what he said last year, he’d be thrilled to see me. I’m the one who got away, the one who ultimately wasn’t bowled over by him.
For Bill, I’m a scab that he can’t help but pick at, just as for me, he’d been like an itch I couldn’t scratch, somewhere at the back of my mind, just like Pantera had been before him. Why? Why did those two have such a hold on me for so long?
Friday, 7 May 2010
Escape.
When I first began writing my tongue-in-cheek account of the perils of dating ‘evil’ men, I had a set plan about what I wanted to put down, but now it seems to be warping into a creature of its own. I don’t have much of an idea as to what I’m going to write until I do. It’s both exciting and disconcerting.
In the summer of 2003, I went into self-imposed exile. The fallout from the Pantera experience was enormous, though it was only obvious to myself, and hardly noticeable from the outside.
I wasn’t odd or strange, just quietly rearranged
Sometimes the biggest change stays out of sight
‘The Dreaming Road’, Mary Chapin Carpenter
It was my dream to go island-hopping in the Caribbean, and so I did, covering ten islands in a month. Most of my memories are dim: I vaguely recall attending a Carnival on St Vincent and walking out halfway through because I got bored of the bumping and grinding; following Lonely Planet’s advice to the letter, taking aimless bus rides along breakneck coastal roads in St Kitts, St Lucia; hiking to the Boiling Lake on Dominica; eating my dinner alone amidst honeymooning couples; taking part in the semblance of a fling in Barbados – dancing to oldie love songs, taking a stroll on a moonlit beach, taking half-hearted part in an ill-advised one-night stand, which would come back to haunt me because the man in question emailed me for months afterwards, claiming to be in love with me. My heart wasn’t in any of it, and while I appreciate that it’s not my heart that was required for the last bit, it wasn’t really fair on the other party, because he didn’t even qualify as a rebound: I was too…elsewhere…to even be properly distracted by him. I did manage to feel guilty about the whole thing and beat myself up over it afterwards, taking responsibility for a complete stranger’s feelings, until Xerxes* quite sensibly pointed out that the guy clearly didn’t know the meaning of love, and that in any case, how he felt about the one-night stand was not my problem.
I felt as if I was going through the motions: hike up to that fort ruin; tick. Take a catamaran out to the Tobago Cays and go snorkelling; tick. Eat; tick. Sleep; tick. Never before or since had travel seemed so lacklustre. On Carriacou, I didn’t even leave my room.
Travel had always had an element of escape for me, but never to that extent. When I spent my university summers backpacking around the States and Canada, it was partly in search of adventure and excitement, and partly as means of breaking free of the intense claustrophobia I felt each time I came home at the end of term. When I first came to Warwick, for the first time in a decade I found myself in an entirely peaceful environment: no more unpredictability, no more public rows, no more lying awake, dreading the slam of the door that indicated that my father was home. There was other turmoil at university, of course, but that was mostly generated by my suspect choice of men. The unpleasantness at home continued, but I was no longer around to witness them.
When I was a teenager - I must’ve been around thirteen or fourteen at the time - I used to physically escape by plugging into my Walkman and wandering the streets at night. One night I remember trespassing on my school’s property and lying on my back on the Lower School field, looking at the stars. Another time I had this idea of taking a round bin to the top of the only hill in Cambridge, getting inside it and rolling down the hill – kind of like ‘zorbing’, but without the cushioning effect - but in the end I was either too lazy or too sensible to do it. One night I left the house by climbing out of the first floor window, dangling by my fingertips from the windowsill and dropping down into the bushes below. Another time I shimmied down the drainpipe from the bathroom window. Why I couldn’t have left by the front door, I couldn’t tell you.
Why my school? I suppose because to me it represented peace and stability – the opposite of my anarchic home. After school, I’d linger at my friends’ or pester my long-suffering teachers. I defied my father’s wishes to have me go to another Sixth Form, because I knew instinctively that deprived of my source of stability, I would implode, go off the rails completely, and become just another teenage statistic. I got a job at a nearby hospital laundry for two nights a week, which is where I met the incomparable Apollonia* and began to question my sexuality. When we moved across town, I took to pacing new streets. Then I went to university, and simultaneously, instead of escaping out of the house, I took to escaping abroad.
When I told an old friend of this, while showing him my photos of past adventures one time, he was surprised: “I thought that your travels were a wholly positive experience.” They were, but the ‘escape’ aspect contributed to their allure, whether I was consciously aware of it at the time or not.
There’s two lanes running down this road
Whichever side you’re on
Accounts for where you want to go
Or what you’re running from
“The Moon and St Christopher”, Mary Chapin Carpenter
Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
Nor could I stay in one place for more than a few days; one of the thing I loved the most about those summers was the constant feeling of motion. Spending hours or even days on a bus is not my friends’ idea of a good time, but I was content. Besides, my Greyhound journeys gave me a real sense of comradeship with the weird, the poor and the crazy who rode those buses, and I’ve had some memorable chance meetings and conversations. Even now, on the rare occasions when I’m on holiday, as opposed to working, I feel the need to be doing something and find it difficult to be still. To me, relaxation is often synonymous with frenzy of activity.
The most vivid thing about the Caribbean was the insomnia. I’d wake up around 4am and toss and turn, unable to sleep for hours. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, you see, and I was finally reacting to everything unpleasant that transpired with Pantera months before. I’d lie there, fuming, thinking “I let him say what to me?! I let him do what?!” On and on it went, on a loop, my twenty-one year old brain unable to glean anything positive out of all that ruminating. I wallowed in anger, in shame, in disgust, perversely content to beat myself up over it all endlessly. After all, there’s only so long that you can blame a man for being a complete bastard, but you can blame yourself endless for putting up with bastardly behaviour.
In that time I acquired a new understanding of my mother’s situation, which was far more difficult than mine, and with which I'd previously had little patience - getting angry at her for putting up with poor behaviour from my father, defending him, following him whenever he walked out, declaring dramatically: "I'm leaving forever!" only to be back days later when the dirty laundry needed doing. I got involved with Pantera knowing full well that I had a trapdoor that I could escape through: my imminent departure for the UK. If I were living and studying in Puerto Rico indefinitely, it wouldn’t have happened. I can’t exactly compare getting involved with the neighbourhood ‘bad boy’ with being married to an abusive man, moving abroad with him with two small children, and having no one to turn to for support due to not having a job and all my friends left behind in a different country. I’m sure that had we stayed in the Soviet Union, my mother would’ve divorced my father. But then, my life would also have been different – and worse- in ways that I cannot even imagine. I don’t have my mother’s patience (or resilience, or resignation…) and because my instinct of fight-or-flight is far better developed, there’s no way I would’ve put up with daily browbeating and being ground down for months or years; I suspect that I would’ve snapped and turned to extreme violence, or simply left. Luckily, I’ll never have to find out.
I began to appreciate how easy it had been not just to find myself in an unpleasant situation, but to actually put up with the pattern of psychological violence as a fact of daily life. Unlike my mother, however, I never believed that I deserved any of it. There was none of this ‘maybe I haven’t been a good enough wife, maybe I haven’t been understanding enough, supportive enough’ rationalisation: I knew that it wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, and though I was letting things slide, I hadn’t accepted it as my lot in life. I don't buy into the ‘he’s only mean to me because he loves me’ way of thinking; I have no idea how Pantera really felt about me. Pawel* told me years later that Pantera still wistfully reminisced about me, but that’s not saying much. Neither do I believe in karmic debt - suffering in order to pay off some obscure past sins – beyond rationalising that if you treat people well, you’re likely to get similar treatment from them, or if you treat them badly, you’re likely to get your comeuppance, which is why much of my time with Pantera was spent vacillating between feeling cross and bewildered. I’m a decent human being who treated him well, so where was all this crap coming from and why?
So why did I not do anything earlier? During the second half of my relationship with Pantera, I believed that the main reason I was holding on was because I loaned Pantera all my spare cash, and had to put up with him in order to get my money back. That’s not a good enough reason; if need be, my friends would have fronted me enough money to get home. There’s more to it than that...
In the summer of 2003, I went into self-imposed exile. The fallout from the Pantera experience was enormous, though it was only obvious to myself, and hardly noticeable from the outside.
I wasn’t odd or strange, just quietly rearranged
Sometimes the biggest change stays out of sight
‘The Dreaming Road’, Mary Chapin Carpenter
It was my dream to go island-hopping in the Caribbean, and so I did, covering ten islands in a month. Most of my memories are dim: I vaguely recall attending a Carnival on St Vincent and walking out halfway through because I got bored of the bumping and grinding; following Lonely Planet’s advice to the letter, taking aimless bus rides along breakneck coastal roads in St Kitts, St Lucia; hiking to the Boiling Lake on Dominica; eating my dinner alone amidst honeymooning couples; taking part in the semblance of a fling in Barbados – dancing to oldie love songs, taking a stroll on a moonlit beach, taking half-hearted part in an ill-advised one-night stand, which would come back to haunt me because the man in question emailed me for months afterwards, claiming to be in love with me. My heart wasn’t in any of it, and while I appreciate that it’s not my heart that was required for the last bit, it wasn’t really fair on the other party, because he didn’t even qualify as a rebound: I was too…elsewhere…to even be properly distracted by him. I did manage to feel guilty about the whole thing and beat myself up over it afterwards, taking responsibility for a complete stranger’s feelings, until Xerxes* quite sensibly pointed out that the guy clearly didn’t know the meaning of love, and that in any case, how he felt about the one-night stand was not my problem.
I felt as if I was going through the motions: hike up to that fort ruin; tick. Take a catamaran out to the Tobago Cays and go snorkelling; tick. Eat; tick. Sleep; tick. Never before or since had travel seemed so lacklustre. On Carriacou, I didn’t even leave my room.
Travel had always had an element of escape for me, but never to that extent. When I spent my university summers backpacking around the States and Canada, it was partly in search of adventure and excitement, and partly as means of breaking free of the intense claustrophobia I felt each time I came home at the end of term. When I first came to Warwick, for the first time in a decade I found myself in an entirely peaceful environment: no more unpredictability, no more public rows, no more lying awake, dreading the slam of the door that indicated that my father was home. There was other turmoil at university, of course, but that was mostly generated by my suspect choice of men. The unpleasantness at home continued, but I was no longer around to witness them.
When I was a teenager - I must’ve been around thirteen or fourteen at the time - I used to physically escape by plugging into my Walkman and wandering the streets at night. One night I remember trespassing on my school’s property and lying on my back on the Lower School field, looking at the stars. Another time I had this idea of taking a round bin to the top of the only hill in Cambridge, getting inside it and rolling down the hill – kind of like ‘zorbing’, but without the cushioning effect - but in the end I was either too lazy or too sensible to do it. One night I left the house by climbing out of the first floor window, dangling by my fingertips from the windowsill and dropping down into the bushes below. Another time I shimmied down the drainpipe from the bathroom window. Why I couldn’t have left by the front door, I couldn’t tell you.
Why my school? I suppose because to me it represented peace and stability – the opposite of my anarchic home. After school, I’d linger at my friends’ or pester my long-suffering teachers. I defied my father’s wishes to have me go to another Sixth Form, because I knew instinctively that deprived of my source of stability, I would implode, go off the rails completely, and become just another teenage statistic. I got a job at a nearby hospital laundry for two nights a week, which is where I met the incomparable Apollonia* and began to question my sexuality. When we moved across town, I took to pacing new streets. Then I went to university, and simultaneously, instead of escaping out of the house, I took to escaping abroad.
When I told an old friend of this, while showing him my photos of past adventures one time, he was surprised: “I thought that your travels were a wholly positive experience.” They were, but the ‘escape’ aspect contributed to their allure, whether I was consciously aware of it at the time or not.
There’s two lanes running down this road
Whichever side you’re on
Accounts for where you want to go
Or what you’re running from
“The Moon and St Christopher”, Mary Chapin Carpenter
Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
Nor could I stay in one place for more than a few days; one of the thing I loved the most about those summers was the constant feeling of motion. Spending hours or even days on a bus is not my friends’ idea of a good time, but I was content. Besides, my Greyhound journeys gave me a real sense of comradeship with the weird, the poor and the crazy who rode those buses, and I’ve had some memorable chance meetings and conversations. Even now, on the rare occasions when I’m on holiday, as opposed to working, I feel the need to be doing something and find it difficult to be still. To me, relaxation is often synonymous with frenzy of activity.
The most vivid thing about the Caribbean was the insomnia. I’d wake up around 4am and toss and turn, unable to sleep for hours. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, you see, and I was finally reacting to everything unpleasant that transpired with Pantera months before. I’d lie there, fuming, thinking “I let him say what to me?! I let him do what?!” On and on it went, on a loop, my twenty-one year old brain unable to glean anything positive out of all that ruminating. I wallowed in anger, in shame, in disgust, perversely content to beat myself up over it all endlessly. After all, there’s only so long that you can blame a man for being a complete bastard, but you can blame yourself endless for putting up with bastardly behaviour.
In that time I acquired a new understanding of my mother’s situation, which was far more difficult than mine, and with which I'd previously had little patience - getting angry at her for putting up with poor behaviour from my father, defending him, following him whenever he walked out, declaring dramatically: "I'm leaving forever!" only to be back days later when the dirty laundry needed doing. I got involved with Pantera knowing full well that I had a trapdoor that I could escape through: my imminent departure for the UK. If I were living and studying in Puerto Rico indefinitely, it wouldn’t have happened. I can’t exactly compare getting involved with the neighbourhood ‘bad boy’ with being married to an abusive man, moving abroad with him with two small children, and having no one to turn to for support due to not having a job and all my friends left behind in a different country. I’m sure that had we stayed in the Soviet Union, my mother would’ve divorced my father. But then, my life would also have been different – and worse- in ways that I cannot even imagine. I don’t have my mother’s patience (or resilience, or resignation…) and because my instinct of fight-or-flight is far better developed, there’s no way I would’ve put up with daily browbeating and being ground down for months or years; I suspect that I would’ve snapped and turned to extreme violence, or simply left. Luckily, I’ll never have to find out.
I began to appreciate how easy it had been not just to find myself in an unpleasant situation, but to actually put up with the pattern of psychological violence as a fact of daily life. Unlike my mother, however, I never believed that I deserved any of it. There was none of this ‘maybe I haven’t been a good enough wife, maybe I haven’t been understanding enough, supportive enough’ rationalisation: I knew that it wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, and though I was letting things slide, I hadn’t accepted it as my lot in life. I don't buy into the ‘he’s only mean to me because he loves me’ way of thinking; I have no idea how Pantera really felt about me. Pawel* told me years later that Pantera still wistfully reminisced about me, but that’s not saying much. Neither do I believe in karmic debt - suffering in order to pay off some obscure past sins – beyond rationalising that if you treat people well, you’re likely to get similar treatment from them, or if you treat them badly, you’re likely to get your comeuppance, which is why much of my time with Pantera was spent vacillating between feeling cross and bewildered. I’m a decent human being who treated him well, so where was all this crap coming from and why?
So why did I not do anything earlier? During the second half of my relationship with Pantera, I believed that the main reason I was holding on was because I loaned Pantera all my spare cash, and had to put up with him in order to get my money back. That’s not a good enough reason; if need be, my friends would have fronted me enough money to get home. There’s more to it than that...
Monday, 3 May 2010
Enter the Bad Men, Part 2.
I had to go crazy to love you
I had to let everything fall
I had to be people I hated
I had to be no one at all
“Crazy To Love You”, Anjani Thomas
Allow me to introduce Bad Man no. 2, the one I affectionately refer to as my Evil Ex – Pantera. He’s wasn’t truly evil – just selfish, greedy and very opportunistic. Some of you have already had the un-pleasure of meeting him, and for that I owe you, Pawel*, Christian and Richard, a massive apology and cannot thank you enough for putting up with both myself, and Pantera by extension, during that period of time.
He came into my life because I was bored, and still at the stage when I sought out drama and excitement whenever my existence seemed a little dull. One evening during my second semester at University of Puerto Rico, Pawel* and I had vague plans to go to the movies, but he was nowhere to be found. I was in one of my restless moods, unable to concentrate on anything and longing for something – anything – to happen, for some excitement to break the monotony of my daily life. So I set off from Torre del Norte, our student residence, towards Walgreens at the end of the street, in the thrilling pursuit of some ice cream. The area around the University of Puerto Rico was considered pretty rough; Pawel* was once mugged at gunpoint, gun shots were heard at night, and Avenida Universidad that I was walking on smelled of pee after the rain and was populated by local ‘characters’. One such character sat outside the laundry which doubled up as a drinking hole, talking to some guy.
I recognised him: he’d often hold court outside Torre Norte in the evenings (though I hadn’t noticed him during my first semester at all), when people would gather on the stone benches after the day’s heat, play guitar, play chess, or just smoke and yak. Pantera wasn’t pretty – he was a stocky, beefy forty-something black guy whose face reminded me a bit of Tom Jones (the singer) and thus also my paternal grandmother. But he did have the gift of the gab, otherwise why would he be surrounded by a bunch of my classmates, hanging on to whatever it is he was telling them. Or maybe he just wouldn’t let them get a word in. I don’t know whether they actually liked him; one of the girls, Nashma, hated him because whenever he saw her, he’d pantomime sneezing loudly. Another one of my classmates, Cynara, seemed to get on well with him. Pawel* thought that Cynara was full of crap because she thought that everything was just ‘soooooo profound’, and I agreed with him, though she was a nice enough girl from Louisiana who previously went to an all-black college, who had the telltale marks of a self-harmer on the insides of her wrists and who ended up in hospital for two weeks because she’d cut herself up pretty badly.
Anyway, to this day I don’t know what possessed me to put off my search for ice cream, and to stop and say to this man: “So, you’re Cynara’s friend.”
“I’m her father,” came the defiant answer.
“Her real father?”
“Does it matter?”
We ended up sitting outside Torre and talking – what about, I don’t remember at all – all night until daybreak. That had never happened to me before. At one point during the night he asked if he could paint my nails and in the morning light I looked as if I’d dipped my fingers in some red paint. Pantera suggested we go get some breakfast at Denny's, so we did. Once again, I don’t know how this happened, but both breakfasts were at my expense – an occasion that was to repeat itself, time and time again, in the weeks that followed.
Pantera then introduced me to his home. At the time, he was ‘between jobs’ and has some kind of weird living arrangement, staying rent-free in the basement of a grotty house a couple of blocks behind Torre, in exchange for ‘looking after’ the old guy who lived in a clutter-filled room on the second floor, who allegedly owned the place.
The musty, peeling basement smelled of stale smoke because Pantera was a smoker, and had little in the way of furniture – a mattress, a heavy wooden table piled with knick-knacks, an unplugged rusty fridge, a fan and a wardrobe full of clothes that Pantera never wore. Loo? A tin bucket covered with an old shirt? Shower? A garden hose out back. At first, he used to apologise for his humble dwelling, but soon he stopped and expected me to sleep there, which I hated because he wouldn’t let me open the windows because either he really did have enemies who’d spy on him, or it was just pure paranoia. Either way, having a fan blow stale air around is not the same as fresh air.
I officially went out with him for ten weeks, but it seemed like far, far longer. Afterwards, I was reminded of the following joke:
The doctor tells a man that he’s got a terminal illness and six months left to live. “What shall I do, doctor?”
“I suggest moving in with your in-laws; these six months will seem to last forever.”
Those ten weeks did seem like ten years: the first couple were the ‘honeymoon period’, when things were nice, and we were getting to know each other. During weeks three and four came the first signs of trouble; by week five, I was wondering what I’d gotten myself into, but it was too late, and the rest of the time, I was just grimly holding on, knowing that I would shortly be going home.
What did I know about him? Only what he told me. That his real name was not Pantera: it was Eric Williams, and he was from Philadelphia. That he kept the boxing moniker from his youth because he didn’t like his birth name. That his mother was an angry, bitter woman and that he was glad when she died. That he had siblings but hadn’t seen them in many years. That he followed a Puerto Rican sweetheart to Puerto Rico, stayed here and learned Spanish. That he had three children whom he also hadn’t seen in years and didn’t even know where they were; that same sweetheart took them back to the mainland and took a restraining order out on him; he wouldn’t explain why, but his volatile temper may have had something to do with it. That he loved animals, and had kept dogs and cats in the past. That he’d spent two years in prison after getting into a fight with some guy who thought that Pantera was sleeping with his wife. That he’d once had sex with a thirteen year-old; apparently she was very well-developed and he thought she was eighteen. That he went through a period of having great wealth and that he always treated his woman ‘like a queen’ when he could afford to. That he occasionally smoked crack but wasn’t addicted to it. I never knew what was actually true and what he was saying to wind me up. He was a good liar and a button-pusher and I happen to be the world’s most gullible person.
The first Pantera threw a hissy fit was when I was buying us some groceries and I refused to buy something expensive, pointing out that he was perfectly happy with cheese sandwiches just last week. He stormed out and I tried to placate him. In the end he apologised and hugged me, but that was the beginning of a pattern: rows, then apologies, followed by my forgiving him. He’d say: “A guy would have to be a real bastard to treat someone like you badly,” and then go ahead and do just that. Sometimes he was mean: when I came down with dengue fever and spent three days in my room at Torre, sleeping around the clock and eating watermelon in the few instances when I was awake, he was not pleased because I couldn’t cook for him. “Even when you’re not ill, you make me sick,” he told me. I let it slide.
Pantera was jealous and possessive – even more so after he’d asked me how many men I’ve been with before him and I gave him an honest answer. One time, I got fed up of being cooped up in his basement, and went back to Torre to do my homework, but ran into Pawel* and we made on-the-spot plans to go get milkshakes at Denny's. We were only sitting down for a few minutes before Pantera walked in, accompanied by a friend of his, a young man from the Dominican Republic. He clearly followed us and had a grim look on his face as he came towards us. Then his bluff, jolly manner returned; he shook hands with Pawel* and joked about ‘catching us in the act’, only he wasn’t joking, as Pawel* told me later – his Spanish was a lot better than mine and Pantera kept talking about it all the way back to Torre. He made veiled threats about how if a girlfriend was to cheat on him with a man he knows, he’d blame the woman. Apparently, if an attached woman wants to mess about with another guy and the other guy knows that she’s attached, he not really to blame; guys have needs and if he decides to go for it, well, that’s understandable. But the woman should know better.
When Pawel* and I went to see ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ at the movies, I had to explain myself to Pantera later; we were supposed to go with Kate, another classmate, but she’d already been with the girls’ football team. Pantera was convinced that I was sneaking around with Pawel* and in the end I got Kate to back me up. Then when a bunch of us went camping on the uninhabited Isla Mona for spring break, Pantera wasn’t keen on my going, but couldn’t outright forbid me to go. When I came back, he asked me how many guys I slept with while on Isla Mona and I snapped: “All of them. I just spread my legs and told them to form an orderly queue.” He laughed, but I could tell that the idea bothered him. He told me that while I was away, Griselle came to see him. To this day I don’t know whether this woman actually existed or whether he made her up, but according to him, this wealthy middle-aged woman was crazy about him and every now and then turned up to ‘reclaim’ him, and no matter who he was with, he’d go with her because she was so attractive. But this time he resisted, he said, insinuating how special I am to him and therefore how grateful I must therefore feel. In future, whenever I said or did something he didn’t like, he’d come out with: “Don’t make me run to Griselle!”
Pantera didn’t like my style; he called me a ‘diamond in the rough’ and sought to change me. He didn’t like the way I walked – my purposeful, determined strides reminded him of a ‘marching soldier’. He didn’t like the way I sat on the bench – like a guy, legs wide open. ‘Unladylike’, he called it, and told me to sit with my knees together. I didn’t see what the big deal was; I was wearing trousers, not skirts. I didn’t wear makeup, so one evening he took me round to see a ‘friend’ of his, a skinny, frenetic woman who was most likely a crack addict. She put tons of gel in my hair and garish makeup on my face – bright red lipstick, heaps of eyeliner. I thought I looked like a child prostitute. Pantera thought I looked adorable. He didn’t like my footwear; I wore my hiking sandals – the most comfortable thing to wear in the tropics. He got me to buy some cheapo girly sandals that lasted only a couple of days before they broke but still managed to give me blisters. He'd take offence at random stuff I said: when I commented that the musty smell and the half-rotten cabbages at Doña Ana's grocery shop made me homesick for the Soviet Union, he berated me for being offensive about Puerto Rico.
Money was an issue. I don’t know what he did with his time – some small-time hustling, I suppose – but he never had any money and always tried to borrow some – from me, from my friends. He kept saying that he was trying to get his Social Security sorted, and after that happened, he could get work in construction. Meantime, I ended up taking him out for meals, or cooking for him. Concerned with his wellbeing, I often forgot to eat myself, and ended up losing a lot of weight. He’d always find cause for ‘celebration’ – getting his Social Security, getting some construction work…and dinner was always on me. He kept saying that when ‘his ship came in’, he’d ‘treat me like a princess’, and guilt-tripped me, saying that if our situations were reversed, he’d be doing all he can to help me. “When I’m doing good, my woman don’t want for nothing.” In the first two weeks of our knowing each other, he even convinced me to get him a TV, saying that he’ll get a job soon and pay back every penny. He got some construction work for a few days but after that, he couldn't be bothered to go back.
Even though Christian and Richard didn’t like him, they tolerated him for my sake, and I spent a lot of time either making excuses for his behaviour or apologising for him. He came with us to Richard’s house on his birthday, and managed to ask him for money then. Richard loaned it to him, and I ended up paying him back, of course. We stayed in the downstairs lounge of Richard's house one time, and in the middle of the night Pantera got peckish and wanted me to go and fix his some food. “I can’t do that; the guys are asleep upstairs.” “’Can’t’ or ‘won’t?” “Won’t.” By that time, I was getting thoroughly fed up with him and we were constantly bickering.
He even had the bloody cheek to make disparaging remarks about my sexual performance (the only man ever to do so, I must add)! “You’re lazy, selfish, and don’t know how to fuck,” he once told me and instead of using that opportunity to tell him to bugger himself with a pitchfork, I just glowered at him and stayed silent. As every man surely knows, a woman’s biggest erogenous zone is her brain; capture the mind, and the body will follow. So once he’d begun to repel me as a person, I just couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm about getting physical with him, and kept making textbook excuses: I’ve got an early lecture tomorrow/I’ve got a headache/I’ve eaten something that doesn’t agree with me and have explosive diarrhoea. He just thought that meant I was secretly seeing Pawel* behind his back.
I think that Pantera thrived on drama and enjoyed making a scene. He also enjoyed pushing my buttons, which were clearly on obvious display at the time. Apart from my father, Pantera was the only man to make me not just angry, but to push me over the line into incandescent rage. I think of rage, true rage, as a kind madness, because up to a certain point, when you feel a fireball building up in your stomach, you have some control, but once you make the decision to let go and relinquish that control, that fireball bursts forth, and then there’s no control over your actions: it’s as if a powerful elemental creature takes over your body. I clearly remember an instant when something he said enraged me to such an extent that I threw the heavy wooden table across the room as if it weighed nothing. Though I was later ashamed of my uncharacteristic loss of self-control, the adrenalin felt great at the time. It’s ironic that I cannot actually remember what he said to drive me to temporary madness in the first place.
After ten weeks with Pantera, my life was a disaster. I’d loaned him all the money I had, so when I flew back to New York at the end of the semester, I had exactly $1.50 to my name – just enough to get a Subway ticket to my cousin’s place in Upper Manhattan. I barely saw my friends because they weren’t keen to be around me when I was with him, which was most of the time. A Columbian guy – Lismeleth – who really liked me (and who still writes to me sometimes) backed off completely and would barely greet me. I hadn’t gone to the beach or anywhere else for ages because Pantera didn’t like going anywhere, and conversely, he didn’t like me going anywhere without him. I ended up missing one of my end-of-semester exams because of something Pantera-related and had to make up some excuse (though luckily my teacher let me re-sit it). My credit card got stolen and, funnily enough, used in all the places that Pantera and I frequented, making me think that he took it and convinced people to accept it since he was my boyfriend and the legality of using someone else’s card wasn’t a big deal in Puerto Rico. I’d had to have an emergency appointment with the campus doctor for a morning after pill and a full STD scan (which came back all clear; whew!) due to an uncharacteristic lapse in personal safety with a man whose idea of ‘safe sex’ was to tell his partner: “If you give me an STD, I’ll kill you.” I was completely mentally exhausted and after I left Puerto Rico, it was the one time in my life that I was so glad to come home, to be free of my self-inflicted hell, that I believe I actually kissed the ground at Heathrow. Though I wasn’t yet ready to face the magnitude of what had happened at that point, I was dimly aware that I’d somehow managed to become part of An Abusive Relationship – something I vowed would never happen to me after witnessing my parents’ marriage.
At one point, I remember thinking: “On my god, I’m turning into my mother.” I don’t mean the circumstances, because my mum would never have gone for someone like Pantera, but rather the putting up silently with bad treatment. Originally, I thought that if you just ignore poor behaviour on someone’s part, and rise above it, it shows inner strength and resilience, but at what point do you stop being a strong person and turn into a ‘doormat’ who’ll swallow all kinds of abuse just to keep the peace?
Actually, come to think about it, Pantera and my father had their similarities: both were volatile, had a rotten temper, were more than prepared to row in front of other people, were unreasonable and demanding, had major psychological issues, and were prone to violence. Pantera never tried to hit me, but I’ve no doubt that had our relationship lasted longer than ten weeks, he would’ve pushed that boundary as well, just to see what he could get away with, and I wonder what I would’ve done then. Would I have then fought back, and hit him, or would I have just stood there in shock, unable to believe that it was happening to me, and allowed myself to be placated later with heartfelt apologies…until the next time?
How was this possible? How did this happen – this erosion of my life, of my personality, of everything that I believed to be important? How and why did I find myself in this situation in the first place and why didn't I get out at the first signs of trouble?
I had to let everything fall
I had to be people I hated
I had to be no one at all
“Crazy To Love You”, Anjani Thomas
Allow me to introduce Bad Man no. 2, the one I affectionately refer to as my Evil Ex – Pantera. He’s wasn’t truly evil – just selfish, greedy and very opportunistic. Some of you have already had the un-pleasure of meeting him, and for that I owe you, Pawel*, Christian and Richard, a massive apology and cannot thank you enough for putting up with both myself, and Pantera by extension, during that period of time.
He came into my life because I was bored, and still at the stage when I sought out drama and excitement whenever my existence seemed a little dull. One evening during my second semester at University of Puerto Rico, Pawel* and I had vague plans to go to the movies, but he was nowhere to be found. I was in one of my restless moods, unable to concentrate on anything and longing for something – anything – to happen, for some excitement to break the monotony of my daily life. So I set off from Torre del Norte, our student residence, towards Walgreens at the end of the street, in the thrilling pursuit of some ice cream. The area around the University of Puerto Rico was considered pretty rough; Pawel* was once mugged at gunpoint, gun shots were heard at night, and Avenida Universidad that I was walking on smelled of pee after the rain and was populated by local ‘characters’. One such character sat outside the laundry which doubled up as a drinking hole, talking to some guy.
I recognised him: he’d often hold court outside Torre Norte in the evenings (though I hadn’t noticed him during my first semester at all), when people would gather on the stone benches after the day’s heat, play guitar, play chess, or just smoke and yak. Pantera wasn’t pretty – he was a stocky, beefy forty-something black guy whose face reminded me a bit of Tom Jones (the singer) and thus also my paternal grandmother. But he did have the gift of the gab, otherwise why would he be surrounded by a bunch of my classmates, hanging on to whatever it is he was telling them. Or maybe he just wouldn’t let them get a word in. I don’t know whether they actually liked him; one of the girls, Nashma, hated him because whenever he saw her, he’d pantomime sneezing loudly. Another one of my classmates, Cynara, seemed to get on well with him. Pawel* thought that Cynara was full of crap because she thought that everything was just ‘soooooo profound’, and I agreed with him, though she was a nice enough girl from Louisiana who previously went to an all-black college, who had the telltale marks of a self-harmer on the insides of her wrists and who ended up in hospital for two weeks because she’d cut herself up pretty badly.
Anyway, to this day I don’t know what possessed me to put off my search for ice cream, and to stop and say to this man: “So, you’re Cynara’s friend.”
“I’m her father,” came the defiant answer.
“Her real father?”
“Does it matter?”
We ended up sitting outside Torre and talking – what about, I don’t remember at all – all night until daybreak. That had never happened to me before. At one point during the night he asked if he could paint my nails and in the morning light I looked as if I’d dipped my fingers in some red paint. Pantera suggested we go get some breakfast at Denny's, so we did. Once again, I don’t know how this happened, but both breakfasts were at my expense – an occasion that was to repeat itself, time and time again, in the weeks that followed.
Pantera then introduced me to his home. At the time, he was ‘between jobs’ and has some kind of weird living arrangement, staying rent-free in the basement of a grotty house a couple of blocks behind Torre, in exchange for ‘looking after’ the old guy who lived in a clutter-filled room on the second floor, who allegedly owned the place.
The musty, peeling basement smelled of stale smoke because Pantera was a smoker, and had little in the way of furniture – a mattress, a heavy wooden table piled with knick-knacks, an unplugged rusty fridge, a fan and a wardrobe full of clothes that Pantera never wore. Loo? A tin bucket covered with an old shirt? Shower? A garden hose out back. At first, he used to apologise for his humble dwelling, but soon he stopped and expected me to sleep there, which I hated because he wouldn’t let me open the windows because either he really did have enemies who’d spy on him, or it was just pure paranoia. Either way, having a fan blow stale air around is not the same as fresh air.
I officially went out with him for ten weeks, but it seemed like far, far longer. Afterwards, I was reminded of the following joke:
The doctor tells a man that he’s got a terminal illness and six months left to live. “What shall I do, doctor?”
“I suggest moving in with your in-laws; these six months will seem to last forever.”
Those ten weeks did seem like ten years: the first couple were the ‘honeymoon period’, when things were nice, and we were getting to know each other. During weeks three and four came the first signs of trouble; by week five, I was wondering what I’d gotten myself into, but it was too late, and the rest of the time, I was just grimly holding on, knowing that I would shortly be going home.
What did I know about him? Only what he told me. That his real name was not Pantera: it was Eric Williams, and he was from Philadelphia. That he kept the boxing moniker from his youth because he didn’t like his birth name. That his mother was an angry, bitter woman and that he was glad when she died. That he had siblings but hadn’t seen them in many years. That he followed a Puerto Rican sweetheart to Puerto Rico, stayed here and learned Spanish. That he had three children whom he also hadn’t seen in years and didn’t even know where they were; that same sweetheart took them back to the mainland and took a restraining order out on him; he wouldn’t explain why, but his volatile temper may have had something to do with it. That he loved animals, and had kept dogs and cats in the past. That he’d spent two years in prison after getting into a fight with some guy who thought that Pantera was sleeping with his wife. That he’d once had sex with a thirteen year-old; apparently she was very well-developed and he thought she was eighteen. That he went through a period of having great wealth and that he always treated his woman ‘like a queen’ when he could afford to. That he occasionally smoked crack but wasn’t addicted to it. I never knew what was actually true and what he was saying to wind me up. He was a good liar and a button-pusher and I happen to be the world’s most gullible person.
The first Pantera threw a hissy fit was when I was buying us some groceries and I refused to buy something expensive, pointing out that he was perfectly happy with cheese sandwiches just last week. He stormed out and I tried to placate him. In the end he apologised and hugged me, but that was the beginning of a pattern: rows, then apologies, followed by my forgiving him. He’d say: “A guy would have to be a real bastard to treat someone like you badly,” and then go ahead and do just that. Sometimes he was mean: when I came down with dengue fever and spent three days in my room at Torre, sleeping around the clock and eating watermelon in the few instances when I was awake, he was not pleased because I couldn’t cook for him. “Even when you’re not ill, you make me sick,” he told me. I let it slide.
Pantera was jealous and possessive – even more so after he’d asked me how many men I’ve been with before him and I gave him an honest answer. One time, I got fed up of being cooped up in his basement, and went back to Torre to do my homework, but ran into Pawel* and we made on-the-spot plans to go get milkshakes at Denny's. We were only sitting down for a few minutes before Pantera walked in, accompanied by a friend of his, a young man from the Dominican Republic. He clearly followed us and had a grim look on his face as he came towards us. Then his bluff, jolly manner returned; he shook hands with Pawel* and joked about ‘catching us in the act’, only he wasn’t joking, as Pawel* told me later – his Spanish was a lot better than mine and Pantera kept talking about it all the way back to Torre. He made veiled threats about how if a girlfriend was to cheat on him with a man he knows, he’d blame the woman. Apparently, if an attached woman wants to mess about with another guy and the other guy knows that she’s attached, he not really to blame; guys have needs and if he decides to go for it, well, that’s understandable. But the woman should know better.
When Pawel* and I went to see ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ at the movies, I had to explain myself to Pantera later; we were supposed to go with Kate, another classmate, but she’d already been with the girls’ football team. Pantera was convinced that I was sneaking around with Pawel* and in the end I got Kate to back me up. Then when a bunch of us went camping on the uninhabited Isla Mona for spring break, Pantera wasn’t keen on my going, but couldn’t outright forbid me to go. When I came back, he asked me how many guys I slept with while on Isla Mona and I snapped: “All of them. I just spread my legs and told them to form an orderly queue.” He laughed, but I could tell that the idea bothered him. He told me that while I was away, Griselle came to see him. To this day I don’t know whether this woman actually existed or whether he made her up, but according to him, this wealthy middle-aged woman was crazy about him and every now and then turned up to ‘reclaim’ him, and no matter who he was with, he’d go with her because she was so attractive. But this time he resisted, he said, insinuating how special I am to him and therefore how grateful I must therefore feel. In future, whenever I said or did something he didn’t like, he’d come out with: “Don’t make me run to Griselle!”
Pantera didn’t like my style; he called me a ‘diamond in the rough’ and sought to change me. He didn’t like the way I walked – my purposeful, determined strides reminded him of a ‘marching soldier’. He didn’t like the way I sat on the bench – like a guy, legs wide open. ‘Unladylike’, he called it, and told me to sit with my knees together. I didn’t see what the big deal was; I was wearing trousers, not skirts. I didn’t wear makeup, so one evening he took me round to see a ‘friend’ of his, a skinny, frenetic woman who was most likely a crack addict. She put tons of gel in my hair and garish makeup on my face – bright red lipstick, heaps of eyeliner. I thought I looked like a child prostitute. Pantera thought I looked adorable. He didn’t like my footwear; I wore my hiking sandals – the most comfortable thing to wear in the tropics. He got me to buy some cheapo girly sandals that lasted only a couple of days before they broke but still managed to give me blisters. He'd take offence at random stuff I said: when I commented that the musty smell and the half-rotten cabbages at Doña Ana's grocery shop made me homesick for the Soviet Union, he berated me for being offensive about Puerto Rico.
Money was an issue. I don’t know what he did with his time – some small-time hustling, I suppose – but he never had any money and always tried to borrow some – from me, from my friends. He kept saying that he was trying to get his Social Security sorted, and after that happened, he could get work in construction. Meantime, I ended up taking him out for meals, or cooking for him. Concerned with his wellbeing, I often forgot to eat myself, and ended up losing a lot of weight. He’d always find cause for ‘celebration’ – getting his Social Security, getting some construction work…and dinner was always on me. He kept saying that when ‘his ship came in’, he’d ‘treat me like a princess’, and guilt-tripped me, saying that if our situations were reversed, he’d be doing all he can to help me. “When I’m doing good, my woman don’t want for nothing.” In the first two weeks of our knowing each other, he even convinced me to get him a TV, saying that he’ll get a job soon and pay back every penny. He got some construction work for a few days but after that, he couldn't be bothered to go back.
Even though Christian and Richard didn’t like him, they tolerated him for my sake, and I spent a lot of time either making excuses for his behaviour or apologising for him. He came with us to Richard’s house on his birthday, and managed to ask him for money then. Richard loaned it to him, and I ended up paying him back, of course. We stayed in the downstairs lounge of Richard's house one time, and in the middle of the night Pantera got peckish and wanted me to go and fix his some food. “I can’t do that; the guys are asleep upstairs.” “’Can’t’ or ‘won’t?” “Won’t.” By that time, I was getting thoroughly fed up with him and we were constantly bickering.
He even had the bloody cheek to make disparaging remarks about my sexual performance (the only man ever to do so, I must add)! “You’re lazy, selfish, and don’t know how to fuck,” he once told me and instead of using that opportunity to tell him to bugger himself with a pitchfork, I just glowered at him and stayed silent. As every man surely knows, a woman’s biggest erogenous zone is her brain; capture the mind, and the body will follow. So once he’d begun to repel me as a person, I just couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm about getting physical with him, and kept making textbook excuses: I’ve got an early lecture tomorrow/I’ve got a headache/I’ve eaten something that doesn’t agree with me and have explosive diarrhoea. He just thought that meant I was secretly seeing Pawel* behind his back.
I think that Pantera thrived on drama and enjoyed making a scene. He also enjoyed pushing my buttons, which were clearly on obvious display at the time. Apart from my father, Pantera was the only man to make me not just angry, but to push me over the line into incandescent rage. I think of rage, true rage, as a kind madness, because up to a certain point, when you feel a fireball building up in your stomach, you have some control, but once you make the decision to let go and relinquish that control, that fireball bursts forth, and then there’s no control over your actions: it’s as if a powerful elemental creature takes over your body. I clearly remember an instant when something he said enraged me to such an extent that I threw the heavy wooden table across the room as if it weighed nothing. Though I was later ashamed of my uncharacteristic loss of self-control, the adrenalin felt great at the time. It’s ironic that I cannot actually remember what he said to drive me to temporary madness in the first place.
After ten weeks with Pantera, my life was a disaster. I’d loaned him all the money I had, so when I flew back to New York at the end of the semester, I had exactly $1.50 to my name – just enough to get a Subway ticket to my cousin’s place in Upper Manhattan. I barely saw my friends because they weren’t keen to be around me when I was with him, which was most of the time. A Columbian guy – Lismeleth – who really liked me (and who still writes to me sometimes) backed off completely and would barely greet me. I hadn’t gone to the beach or anywhere else for ages because Pantera didn’t like going anywhere, and conversely, he didn’t like me going anywhere without him. I ended up missing one of my end-of-semester exams because of something Pantera-related and had to make up some excuse (though luckily my teacher let me re-sit it). My credit card got stolen and, funnily enough, used in all the places that Pantera and I frequented, making me think that he took it and convinced people to accept it since he was my boyfriend and the legality of using someone else’s card wasn’t a big deal in Puerto Rico. I’d had to have an emergency appointment with the campus doctor for a morning after pill and a full STD scan (which came back all clear; whew!) due to an uncharacteristic lapse in personal safety with a man whose idea of ‘safe sex’ was to tell his partner: “If you give me an STD, I’ll kill you.” I was completely mentally exhausted and after I left Puerto Rico, it was the one time in my life that I was so glad to come home, to be free of my self-inflicted hell, that I believe I actually kissed the ground at Heathrow. Though I wasn’t yet ready to face the magnitude of what had happened at that point, I was dimly aware that I’d somehow managed to become part of An Abusive Relationship – something I vowed would never happen to me after witnessing my parents’ marriage.
At one point, I remember thinking: “On my god, I’m turning into my mother.” I don’t mean the circumstances, because my mum would never have gone for someone like Pantera, but rather the putting up silently with bad treatment. Originally, I thought that if you just ignore poor behaviour on someone’s part, and rise above it, it shows inner strength and resilience, but at what point do you stop being a strong person and turn into a ‘doormat’ who’ll swallow all kinds of abuse just to keep the peace?
Actually, come to think about it, Pantera and my father had their similarities: both were volatile, had a rotten temper, were more than prepared to row in front of other people, were unreasonable and demanding, had major psychological issues, and were prone to violence. Pantera never tried to hit me, but I’ve no doubt that had our relationship lasted longer than ten weeks, he would’ve pushed that boundary as well, just to see what he could get away with, and I wonder what I would’ve done then. Would I have then fought back, and hit him, or would I have just stood there in shock, unable to believe that it was happening to me, and allowed myself to be placated later with heartfelt apologies…until the next time?
How was this possible? How did this happen – this erosion of my life, of my personality, of everything that I believed to be important? How and why did I find myself in this situation in the first place and why didn't I get out at the first signs of trouble?
Thursday, 22 April 2010
Enter the Bad Men, Part 1.
When it comes to relationships, my friends tell me that I’m a cautionary tale. While I may not necessarily agree with that assessment, I can kind of see where they’re coming from. You’ve already been introduced to Forrest, to Lloyd and to Antonio the bad Jehovah’s Witness. Allow me to introduce the first of the three of my other memorable exes, whose presence in my life helped to shape that kind of thinking.
Enter Ed the Nudist. I started seeing him during my first year at uni after meeting him on a website. That year, along with discovering that a number of males in my immediate vicinity found me attractive (which went to my head a bit) I also discovered dating websites – both the ones where you claim to look for ‘friends’ when you actually mean ‘sex with no strings attached’ and the ones where not only is sex on the menu, but you get to specify what kind of sex you’re after – dirty phone calls, an illicit affair, sado-masochism, threesomes…
I can’t remember which type of website Ed was from, but I can tell you that he was a petulant, stroppy 30-something year computer specialist who lived with his mother, whom he took on honeymoon with him when he got married, and who insisted on being nude as much as possible. Now, I’m no prude and have nothing against nudity: at uni I was a life model for the Warwick Art Society, which was the only time in my life I’ve ever been referred to as ‘the model’ and which was a very cold and uncomfortable way of earning £7.50/hour. Furthermore, one of the artists used me for her project, which was the most unflattering nude portrait imaginable. I had no idea that I had so many folds and wrinkles.
Also, when I was eighteen, I discovered naturist beaches. When I went to my first one – Wreck Beach in Vancouver – I was terribly self-conscious at first, convinced that everyone was staring at me, but then I realised that they weren’t (nude beach etiquette dictates that you shouldn’t look below the neck if you’re talking to a woman), and that it was the best way of enjoying the sun and the sea without getting half the sand on the beach inside one’s bikini, so whenever possible, I do seek out beaches where clothing is optional. The only unfortunate bit was when I got propositioned by a dodgy guy as I was leaving. To entice me, he told me that he hadn’t had sex for ages (angling for the sympathy vote) and said: “I don’t stick my dick in just anyone, you know” (that was to make me feel extra-special). To get away, I told him that my name was Zelda Pinwheel and gave him a wrong phone number.
Furthermore, I’m all about equal opportunities, and believe that women should be allowed to go topless in public in the summer, should they so desire, just as men are allowed to. However, I also believe that there’s a time and place for nudity, and I can’t quite forgive Ed for traumatising my then sixteen-year old sister, who caught him sunning himself in our parents’ garden in all his (modest) glory. Having never seen a naked man before (to the best of my knowledge) she later asked me: “Is he supposed to be well-endowed?” and I had to give her the facts: that no, given that the world average erection length is allegedly five inches, barely scraping the average is nothing to be proud of, especially if you’re a black man. She absorbed that information, wide-eyed.
(Actually, I’m not too sure that the statistics are accurate. Not too long ago, I did an erection survey out of scientific curiosity (i.e. my own personal amusement): I questioned my male friends regarding erection length and the degree of shrinkage/extension between the dormant and non-dormant state (my theory: if your ancestors come from warmer climes, there’d be less shrinkage/extension. My results: inconclusive) and from the erection length results I’ve concluded that either my friends are liars, or the accepted statistics are bogus. I mean, unless there’s actually been a mass worldwide erection study, how on earth can they say that five inches is the average? It reminds me of someone saying that no two snowflakes are the same – something I repeated as a kid, parrot-fashion, thinking it was really profound, until it occurred to me that there’s no way anyone could look at all the snow flakes in the world at the same time.)
In any case, Ed had hang-ups about his size and because of that, he enjoyed getting attention from random women. He introduced me to that den of iniquity and sin that is ‘Rios’, a so-called ‘clothing-optional health spa’ at Kentish Town in London. For the most part, it was alright; since it was very quiet on weekdays and women got free entry due to the gender imbalance, I’d stop off in London on my way to and from uni to have a peaceful soak in the Jacuzzis. However, when it was busy, it was a meat market, and you had to watch out for people who’d try and grope you underwater. Usually a swift kick and a glare did the trick, though. ‘Rios’ has several little rooms upstairs where people could retire for a ‘massage’ and you quickly learned to differentiate between people who were offering a straightforward back rub and those after a ‘massage’ massage. I had no objections to having the perpetual knots kneaded out of my shoulders, and on one occasion accepted an invitation from a young man who I thought was offering me a bona fide back rub.
The exchange went like this:
(We come into the little massage room)
Him: “On your knees!”
Me: “I beg your pardon?!” (He must’ve been watching a lot of porn in order to reach the erroneous conclusion that women like to be ordered around and enjoy giving head to random people they’ve just met).
Him: (less certainly) “Erm…on your knees?”
Me: (indignantly) “You haven’t offered to give me head first!”
Him: (looking down at his feet) “I’ve never given a woman head.”
Me: (sternly) “How old are you? Twenty-four?! Well, go away and learn!”
That incident kept me amused for a long time.
On Saturday nights, a large room would open up upstairs and Ed brought me along one time because it was ‘couples night’ only, which translated as ‘swingers’ night’. I wasn’t a participant; merely a spectator and it was certainly an eye opener. I couldn’t figure out how people could have unprotected sex with others they’ve just met; weren’t they afraid of catching STDs? Apparently not.
Now, Ed wanted some attention from a middle-aged woman who came along with her partner, a fat, hairy, balding guy, and it just wasn’t my thing. I didn’t have an issue with the woman touching Ed, but I wasn’t going to get anywhere near her remarkably unattractive partner, and said as much. We left with Ed in a huff, but not before the guy said: “Hope to see you again some time…when you’re more open to new experiences”, and laughed nastily. The whole thing made my skin crawl and I wanted to get out of ‘Rios’ as quickly as possible. It was 3am, and Ed said that he’d put me up at his place if it were a matter of life and death, but the thing is, he was renovating his bedroom and he had nowhere to put the giant teddy bear that his ex-wife had left him but on the other side of his bed, meaning there was no room. To be honest, I didn’t particularly want to be near him either at that point, so I told him to drop me off at Kings Cross, not realising that the train station wouldn’t open for another three hours. In the end, I curled up on the ground near some homeless people who were playing cards, and fell asleep. No one bothered me, but the incident really bothered Xerxes* who gave me a lecture on how dangerous it was and how foolish I’d been and that I should’ve called him.
That was in April, and yet it wasn’t until December of the same year that I cut Ed out off my life completely. The question is, why did it take me so long?
Enter Ed the Nudist. I started seeing him during my first year at uni after meeting him on a website. That year, along with discovering that a number of males in my immediate vicinity found me attractive (which went to my head a bit) I also discovered dating websites – both the ones where you claim to look for ‘friends’ when you actually mean ‘sex with no strings attached’ and the ones where not only is sex on the menu, but you get to specify what kind of sex you’re after – dirty phone calls, an illicit affair, sado-masochism, threesomes…
I can’t remember which type of website Ed was from, but I can tell you that he was a petulant, stroppy 30-something year computer specialist who lived with his mother, whom he took on honeymoon with him when he got married, and who insisted on being nude as much as possible. Now, I’m no prude and have nothing against nudity: at uni I was a life model for the Warwick Art Society, which was the only time in my life I’ve ever been referred to as ‘the model’ and which was a very cold and uncomfortable way of earning £7.50/hour. Furthermore, one of the artists used me for her project, which was the most unflattering nude portrait imaginable. I had no idea that I had so many folds and wrinkles.
Also, when I was eighteen, I discovered naturist beaches. When I went to my first one – Wreck Beach in Vancouver – I was terribly self-conscious at first, convinced that everyone was staring at me, but then I realised that they weren’t (nude beach etiquette dictates that you shouldn’t look below the neck if you’re talking to a woman), and that it was the best way of enjoying the sun and the sea without getting half the sand on the beach inside one’s bikini, so whenever possible, I do seek out beaches where clothing is optional. The only unfortunate bit was when I got propositioned by a dodgy guy as I was leaving. To entice me, he told me that he hadn’t had sex for ages (angling for the sympathy vote) and said: “I don’t stick my dick in just anyone, you know” (that was to make me feel extra-special). To get away, I told him that my name was Zelda Pinwheel and gave him a wrong phone number.
Furthermore, I’m all about equal opportunities, and believe that women should be allowed to go topless in public in the summer, should they so desire, just as men are allowed to. However, I also believe that there’s a time and place for nudity, and I can’t quite forgive Ed for traumatising my then sixteen-year old sister, who caught him sunning himself in our parents’ garden in all his (modest) glory. Having never seen a naked man before (to the best of my knowledge) she later asked me: “Is he supposed to be well-endowed?” and I had to give her the facts: that no, given that the world average erection length is allegedly five inches, barely scraping the average is nothing to be proud of, especially if you’re a black man. She absorbed that information, wide-eyed.
(Actually, I’m not too sure that the statistics are accurate. Not too long ago, I did an erection survey out of scientific curiosity (i.e. my own personal amusement): I questioned my male friends regarding erection length and the degree of shrinkage/extension between the dormant and non-dormant state (my theory: if your ancestors come from warmer climes, there’d be less shrinkage/extension. My results: inconclusive) and from the erection length results I’ve concluded that either my friends are liars, or the accepted statistics are bogus. I mean, unless there’s actually been a mass worldwide erection study, how on earth can they say that five inches is the average? It reminds me of someone saying that no two snowflakes are the same – something I repeated as a kid, parrot-fashion, thinking it was really profound, until it occurred to me that there’s no way anyone could look at all the snow flakes in the world at the same time.)
In any case, Ed had hang-ups about his size and because of that, he enjoyed getting attention from random women. He introduced me to that den of iniquity and sin that is ‘Rios’, a so-called ‘clothing-optional health spa’ at Kentish Town in London. For the most part, it was alright; since it was very quiet on weekdays and women got free entry due to the gender imbalance, I’d stop off in London on my way to and from uni to have a peaceful soak in the Jacuzzis. However, when it was busy, it was a meat market, and you had to watch out for people who’d try and grope you underwater. Usually a swift kick and a glare did the trick, though. ‘Rios’ has several little rooms upstairs where people could retire for a ‘massage’ and you quickly learned to differentiate between people who were offering a straightforward back rub and those after a ‘massage’ massage. I had no objections to having the perpetual knots kneaded out of my shoulders, and on one occasion accepted an invitation from a young man who I thought was offering me a bona fide back rub.
The exchange went like this:
(We come into the little massage room)
Him: “On your knees!”
Me: “I beg your pardon?!” (He must’ve been watching a lot of porn in order to reach the erroneous conclusion that women like to be ordered around and enjoy giving head to random people they’ve just met).
Him: (less certainly) “Erm…on your knees?”
Me: (indignantly) “You haven’t offered to give me head first!”
Him: (looking down at his feet) “I’ve never given a woman head.”
Me: (sternly) “How old are you? Twenty-four?! Well, go away and learn!”
That incident kept me amused for a long time.
On Saturday nights, a large room would open up upstairs and Ed brought me along one time because it was ‘couples night’ only, which translated as ‘swingers’ night’. I wasn’t a participant; merely a spectator and it was certainly an eye opener. I couldn’t figure out how people could have unprotected sex with others they’ve just met; weren’t they afraid of catching STDs? Apparently not.
Now, Ed wanted some attention from a middle-aged woman who came along with her partner, a fat, hairy, balding guy, and it just wasn’t my thing. I didn’t have an issue with the woman touching Ed, but I wasn’t going to get anywhere near her remarkably unattractive partner, and said as much. We left with Ed in a huff, but not before the guy said: “Hope to see you again some time…when you’re more open to new experiences”, and laughed nastily. The whole thing made my skin crawl and I wanted to get out of ‘Rios’ as quickly as possible. It was 3am, and Ed said that he’d put me up at his place if it were a matter of life and death, but the thing is, he was renovating his bedroom and he had nowhere to put the giant teddy bear that his ex-wife had left him but on the other side of his bed, meaning there was no room. To be honest, I didn’t particularly want to be near him either at that point, so I told him to drop me off at Kings Cross, not realising that the train station wouldn’t open for another three hours. In the end, I curled up on the ground near some homeless people who were playing cards, and fell asleep. No one bothered me, but the incident really bothered Xerxes* who gave me a lecture on how dangerous it was and how foolish I’d been and that I should’ve called him.
That was in April, and yet it wasn’t until December of the same year that I cut Ed out off my life completely. The question is, why did it take me so long?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
