Big Love

I write stories with real characters who have marked my life and who hold very dear places in my heart. Tony is one of those people. I am certain we love each other as much today as when we first met even if we are no longer in-touch. My love for him is unchangeable, something on a soul-level. If we were to meet again, we would be able to communicate in an un-barred, true vulnerable human state, no masks. This is how we met. When I was 14 years old, I was beginning to stretch my limits, take risks: break the law, play with drugs and alcohol, hurt my body, rebel against authority. Some of these adventures I have written about in other stories.

Tony was my second official boyfriend. My first one, Scooter, lasted 3 months and then he broke up with me. He had mentioned several times I was too self-deprecating and self-loathing and he could no longer bear it. I was constantly saying awful things about myself, but I had adopted this attitude in response to my unsolicited reputation as a snob. For whatever reason, boys were saying that I was stuck-up. This came as a shock to me. I had no interactions with boys, so why did they think this about me? I had not had any boys try to talk to me or ask me to “go out” with them. In fact, no one ever asked me to dance at the school dances. I felt left out. So, not wanting people to think I was a snob, I decided I would put myself down, tell people I thought I was ugly, and it seemed to reverse the public opinion from snob to girl with low self-esteem. It didn’t feel good doing this and it was wearing on my friends and family. They began to worry about me.

I felt social pressure to have a boyfriend. I had never kissed a boy before Scooter and frankly, I was not ready for an intimate relationship. I could have easily waited another year or two. For whatever reasons, people in my social circle felt I should get together with Scooter. The consensus was we would make a cute couple. He was popular even though he was eccentric. He was skinny, with curly blonde hair he had shaved into a Mohawk, hollow cheeks that were often flushed, and he wore ripped cloth around his wrists to hide how thin he was. He wore a black leather jacket that smelled strong and it made noise when he moved. I thought he looked ridiculous and unattractive. One day after school my friend Elise and I were hanging out at her home. She decided to call Scooter and tell him I liked him. He said he needed to hear it from me, so she put me on the phone.
Terrified I took the phone, “Hello?” I asked.
“Hey, so, you like me?” he asked with a voice deeper than I expected.
“Yeah,” I replied timidly.
“Well, I need to hear it from you,” he said. Wow, he had major balls to ask me to say this plus I didn’t really like him.
“It’s true”, I said, “I like you.” The idea of having a boyfriend was thrilling so it would be worth the lie.
“Okay, cool. Can I call you tonight?” he asked. I gave him my number and for several nights we spoke over the phone. We had a lot in common and he was very down-to-earth and in-touch with his feminine-side. He spoke highly of his mother and had a close relationship to her. Soon we became girlfriend and boyfriend. People considered us the “popular couple” and younger kids were eager to say hi to me as I walked down the hall which surprised me. It came as a shock to me when Scooter broke up with me. I literally wailed for days in my locked bedroom with music so loud it was banging through the walls.

No one in my family could console me. It was one of my first heartbreaks. I was determined to fill my loss quickly. I had started hanging out with bad girl Shauna (for our adventures, visit my post Jan 2010 "Welcome to Bad Ass School") and she said she had the perfect guy for me, Tony. She said he was Mexican. He was a year younger. Between classes, Shauna pointed him out to me. He wore a green football jersey, he was short and muscular and had bright blue eyes and looked happy and innocent. I liked how he looked and wrote him a letter saying he was cute. Letter writing was a big activity during junior high school and an important part of our development I believe. I was very good at writing sexy letters full of steamy promises and compliments. So, after several letters, I asked if we could chat over the phone.

Tony lived in well-fare housing and did not have a phone. He had a creepy step-dad who was from Peru. Tony’s mother had made him and his brother and sister use the step-dad’s name, Fernandez. They referred to their step-dad as “The Peruvian Porch Monkey.” Everyone thought Tony and his siblings were Mexican because of their last name, but they were not. This added to my excitement of dating him. I was perceived as rebellious. He lived in a building with mainly Mexicans and a couple refugee families from Laos. Tony had to sneak outside and head to the gas station to make phone calls. I liked knowing someone who had such a different life than mine. He seemed to need me and it made me feel important. One day, I asked him to meet me outside after lunch and we embraced each other instantly as if we had been waiting an eternity for this moment, kissing in front of everyone. How could I have had such intense feelings for someone at the age of 14? I loved him down to the roots of my soul.

Tony had an older brother Max, who was extremely smart, quiet and sarcastic. He had brown shiny hair and long bangs that hid part of his face. He walked with a cool stride that appeared innate rather than the strange bouncy one adolescent boys usually are trying on for size. He was dark and mysterious. School was a joke to him. I had made fun of him before I was with Tony, so he never warmed up to me. Even worse, he ignored me. Tony was often with him. He looked up to Max tremendously; it was his only real parental figure. Max had issues too though he expressed his differently than Tony. Diane and I once witnessed Max throwing a three month old kitten into the wall repeatedly. Each time the kitten would get up, dizzy, eyes crossed, he would pick the kitten up and slam him into the wall again with a hollow laugh. This incident still haunts me. Diane and I were screaming for him to stop. He sat slouched over on his bed, laughing without making eye contact with anyone. Tony had an older sister Corinne who was painfully withdrawn and who took refuge in her boyfriend. She walked with pigeon toes and was not very present.

Tony had a lot of anger inside him and expressed it by fighting. He would literally go out at night with a pack of dudes looking to pick a fight. Then, he would call me from the pay phone pumped with adrenaline, huffing and puffing as he tried to explain that he had been in a fight and put some guys in the hospital and was running from the police. I wouldn’t hear from him for days. Several times he was sent away to boys’ homes where he was overseen by a psychologist. He was respectful to the people running these places and participated in group activities. He wanted to be a good person. He wanted to work on his anger and abandonment issues. He had such a good heart. He just wanted to be loved. Sometimes his friends’ families would let him stay with them for extended periods of time. Parents were always saying how sorry they felt for his situation. At one point, his mother divorced the Peruvian Porch Monkey and left the three of them while she traveled in her van with her latest boyfriend across the country. I do not know how the three kids managed to feed themselves. Their mom used to leave for months at a time. Sometimes Tony would stay in a place called “Tough Love” where other kids his age and with similar situations were. I don’t know how he ended up there. Maybe he had a parole officer that put him there. Perhaps social services placed him there as he was so young and living without any parents. The situation was always confusing to me. I don’t recall his brother or sister ever being placed anywhere. Once Diane and I went over to Tony’s and all we could find to eat was a frozen block of cheese in the freezer.

Tony would sneak out of his house at midnight to meet me. Sometimes I would fill my bike bottle with hard liquor from my parent’s liquor cabinet, mainly rum and vodka, slip through my bedroom window, and bolt as fast as I could through my dark neighborhood to meet him somewhere far away from my home. We’d get drunk on someone’s lawn, laughing and kissing and rolling around in total bliss of each other’s company or just sit quietly smoking cigarettes. Sometimes I would sneak out and he wouldn’t show up. I would wait, drunk, for hours until I realized he must not have been able to leave. I remember putting bags of pennies together just to have enough money to get him into a dance club on the week-end. But, after several months together, I began to feel I had outgrown Tony. It felt like a dead end. I began to feel more like a mother than a girlfriend. I could take care of him and help him and love him. I wanted someone older than me, smarter, different. I broke up with him over the phone. He was shocked just like I had been when Scooter had broken up with me. I don’t know what he did after we got off the phone. Maybe he beat a poor soul into a mushy pulp but he was still nice to me when he saw me.

He dated other girls, I dated other boys, and very often if we saw each other at some bonfire party in the middle of nowhere, we would drunkenly kiss under some trees feeling that our random affairs trumped any other relationship we were in. I would tell Diane about these escapades and tell her I wasn’t cheating. It was Tony. It didn’t count. This happened often over the years and one night in high school after not having seen each other for ages, we went back to his empty apartment and into his bedroom, kissing and confessing our love, how we were soulmates. This felt like an epiphany. We had finally figured us out. When I left for college, I lost contact with him. I left our town and he stayed behind. I’m not sure if he graduated high school and if he did, I think it took him several extra years to get it done.

Many years later while I was living with my soon-to-be-husband, Tony called me. It came as a shock to hear his voice. He told me he was living in the same town and helping Max install carpets. He told me he still loved me. He said he would always love me. He told me if I wanted him to come visit, he would leave tomorrow. He said he would do anything for me, all I had to do was say the word.

I told him I would always love him too. When I got off the phone, I knew that it would be unfair to keep in touch with him. I loved him, but not the way he wanted to be loved by me. His life would not fit with mine. It hurt terribly to know that the best thing I could do for him was to lose contact with him, anything else would be leading him on. It made me sad, but I knew him so well and knew this was the best thing for him.

About a year later, it was the day of my wedding. I was alone in my hotel room getting ready and my phone rang.
“Hello?”, I answered.
“Hi”, said my dad in a weird voice, “It’s Tony”…
I just laughed and said “Dad!”
He laughed too and we hung up.
There was no need to say more.

Many years after that, I got an email from Tony asking how I was. He told me he was single, has not managed to find the right person, he lives near Max and works with him. Max has a little girl, therefore Tony is now proud “Uncle Tony”. He said he likes to spend most of his time alone. On his free time he goes fly fishing or into the mountains. He told me, “If you drop me off in the mountains alone and with nothing more than I knife, I will come out alive a week later.” After reading his email, I realized he had expressed himself like a true survivor, someone who had defended his own life for as long as he could remember, someone who could only rely on himself to get the job done. Tony rightly cannot trust another person enough to love or to be loved. I find myself sending him love often from the depths of my heart out into the ether. And I know he gets them. And I daringly say with confidence that if I needed him one day, he would come.