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...
Friday, 7 May 2010
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?
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