Let Go

St. Louis.  STL. So many memories, so much history.  The ghosts of the good mixed with the bad.  Mostly bad, heh.

I remember the slow nights, hanging out at Ted Drewes, trying to figure out how the frozen custard stays rock hard but melts as soon as you push your spoon into it.  Driving through downtown, the river on one side, the St. Louis Arch on the other.  The fights, the sharp spiteful words exchanged by both sides.  But in it all, the warmth, the intimacy forced by necessity, the sense of care that spawned from time and friendship.

The Summer of 2000.  I was about to turn 16.  I was pushing forward in my youth.  In a sense, I was stretching my arms and legs, having moved away from the harshness of the ghetto I grew up in until 2 years before.  Perhaps it was a way of shedding the burdens that I carried with me indirectly since childhood.  But as with many things, the past continues to chase us like a jealous child until we acknowledge its twisted sense of self-worth.

She was a childhood friend.  We grew up on the same dusty street in Los Angeles littered with spent needles.  I remember my anger rising as I purchased the plane ticket.  How dare he.  How dare he.  Her tearful whispers resonated on the phone still.  He had taken her trust, in a way that I could not express even through my initial shock.  The next day, I read the news.  He had gunned down her mother’s two lovers, before shooting himself in the chest on the way home.  This man, he was supposed to be her father.

In a very real sense, I still was quite innocent.  Understanding the larger forces in the world was still beyond me.  I felt invincible, that I could take anything into my hands and create something good from it with impunity.

Mafia.  Sicilians.  I still cringe to this day whenever I think in retrospect.

The next few months of the summer I spent taking care of her brother and spending time with her.  Those quiet nights with just us three, while her mother drowned herself in alcohol and spent our money on gambling.  I remember those tired nights, having to blink twice at the shadow leaning against the column leading up to the front door, where he used to smoke.  The happy nights of laughter were punctuated by heavy choices I wouldn’t want anyone to go through, teenager or not.  The constant police contact, wanting to ask this question, that question, how much I knew about her father, how little I knew about her father.  Sicilians.  They were connected to, it was a whole big family.

The blissfulness of teaching her how to drive too, when she turned 16 a few months behind me.  The fireworks booming and crashing over our heads on the 4th of July.  Her little brother’s laughter piercing the air when I bought him a second-hand bike and polished it up really good.  The slow rolling evenings on the balcony above the basement with candles and wine.  Our quiet lovemaking when we decided we were obviously soulmates.  The friendship, the trust.

How figuratively cruel it was when one of our trusted friends, a cop, twisted us apart to serve his own sense of loss over losing his own daughter and son because of his bi-polar outbursts.  We hadn’t talked for a few years after that, until we turned 18, and even after then, only sparingly.

And now, 10 years later, I find myself again in this familiar yet strange town.  We hardly talk anymore, after I cut her out last year for disrespecting me by proxy because her current boyfriend had decided that he could not stand our history together.  But here I am.  Her brother had got into an accident, and tracing my fingers along the ground by the river, twisting the blades of grass in my fingertips, it comes roaring back.  It’s hard to escape the past, especially when you have got emotional investment into something.  My decisions continue to shape my sense of being and the future; my decision to come as soon as possible when I received word about her brother, even though we hadn’t spoken for the last year.

She’s different now.  Gone was that shy girl who dreamed big things.  Harsh, pessimistic, too “out there.”  It’s as if the light had left her eyes long ago.  Life has shaped her too.

What I ask myself, is if I should keep the good memories, excising the bad like a cancer, or just let go.  But with many things, even through remission, the cancer can rebound even with a single surviving damaged cell.

I let go.

Lesson #2

Slow down to my first year in high school.

I was one of those idealistic guys, full of hope and ambition.  Football took up a large chunk of my life, as did the multitude of clubs and organizations I was in.  I was the epitome of what a scholar-athlete should have been: the perfect jock to my coaches, yet still making good grades in classes.  I tried pretty hard to fit into the grouping of rich kids; not many understood, much less knew my background growing up.  By day, I was the ideal college prep kid, but by night, I moonlighted with my brothers and sisters, enjoying all the pleasures and vices that the greater Los Angeles area had to offer.

Then she happened.

I remember I had just turned 14.  Coming off of one of the best summers in my life, my world gave me a natural high that I rode for what it was worth.  She was 16, the darling of the school.  Young, beautiful, priss, and oh so damn sassy; the kind of girl every guy was after.

I was young, naive, and stupid.  I still subscribed to the old school way of thought.  I was to be the gallant Knight in Shining Armor, and was going to carry off the beautiful princess back to my castle.  And yeah, I remember she was so beautiful.  At that age, I thought that I had finally seen an angel incarnate.

So I didn’t know any better when she started paying more attention to me than to the other guys.  I was brimming from confidence, pushed off the ledge and pulled back.  It was all a game, and I knew it, but the more tastes I got of it, the more I wanted it.

It seems so silly now, over a decade later, but I mistook that puppy love for something more tangible.  It was so very real to me.

***

We were at a party.  She had called me out, beeping me on my pager.  Remember those little cheezy pager messages people used to do with the limited numbers?  Yup.  That was it.  And so I went.

I don’t remember how much alcohol I had that night.  When we were young, all we really had access to were those cheap vodkas and rum.  But before long my head was spinning.  Until then, I had never made out so heavily with anyone in my life, silly as that sounds for my age at the time.  Our lips locked, our hands were on the prowl, her legs were locked tightly behind the small of my back.  In the background, we could hear the drunken karaoke the other people were singing to in the next room.

Despite my protests about saving everything until marriage, she slid her hand down to the crotch of my jeans.  I think I can understand how silly young people think now, when I hear stories from my younger cousins or friends’ younger siblings.  Somehow we ended up in an empty bedroom.

***

The next morning, I woke up to the sun glaring in my eyes, and no clothes.  She was awake next to me watching TV.  When she realized I was awake, she asked me how “it was,” laughing raucously, almost piercingly.  She exclaimed that she had “done the impossible.”  That was the moment heaven flipped for me.  Apparently there was an ongoing bet with the girls in her group about who could break my virginity first.  To them, I was the goal that was untouchable.  The guy who was so principled that I could not be broken.

She gave me a kiss, smirked, put her clothes back on, and laughed as she left.

***

In the weeks following, I was so confused.  Were we together or not?  We had shared something intimate, so of course we were, right?  Yet all I got in return was to be ignored.

It was only months later that I got my concrete reply: “J. give up.  I just wanted to see how it was to get you, and that’s it.”

My heart sunk.  My world flipped upside-down.  My angel turned into a devil.  I was made into a mockery.

***

It’s silly now to have had those principles.  Saving it for marriage.  Saving it for “The One.”

They say that the younger a guy is when he has his first experience, the more he understands how to obtain it from women.  It is pretty true.  Now, over a decade, and dozens of women later, I know very well how to obtain intimacy, yet I don’t know how to love, or rather, I’m too scared to love.

Maybe it’s wrong to blame it on that experience, but our experiences do shape us as people.

And this was my Lesson #2.