I was pretty broke at the time. I remember toying with the idea of pawning my television in order to fund that initial trip out there. The price they offered was well below what I had paid so I decided to come up with the funds another way. I did make it to California when I needed to. I don’t recall what that other way was but somehow it worked out. It always does.
A friend of mine has said that I live my life the way that I play Triopoly (which, for those that don’t know is the best game ever: Monopoly on three levels). I put everything in and hope for the best. I buy and buy and buy, even when I am down to my last bit of money I will continue to build my property up believing that when I roll the dice, I will somehow avoid all the pitfalls of the opponents’ built up properties. I will mortgage property to buy another if it is worth it. I roll for hundreds instead of tens when I am in Vegas or Atlantic City (seriously people there is gambling in this game, check it out sometime). It doesn’t always work out to my best advantage but the percentage is really quite astounding. Those of you that have played Triopoly with me can attest.
I do the same thing in life and love. I remember being a poor college student and refusing to ask my parents for help, until there was no other resort. I would sleep in the library, or I would walk those 80-something blocks home from the West Village to the Upper West Side hoping that the next day I would have a paycheck in my account so that I could afford a metro pass. I would drive on a donut for three weeks with the hope that it would last until my next paycheck came in for me to buy a new tire. Karma works, not all the time. I’m lucky to have had great parents to pick up the slack for me when my karma has failed but overall, I trust in my karma. Those broke days as a youth, I did what I had to, to survive. My karma has gotten me out of many dire situations. This trip was one of them.
What I remember most is travelling across the country on St. Patrick’s Day after going to the festival with her and my roommate. I remember saying goodbye and being a little bummed that I couldn’t go out and party with them on a holiday. I would be driving to the west coast in one day with little to no money for lodging in hopes that one of the two apartments that I had arranged to look at would be suitable to live in. She called me frequently that night and said that she already missed me. I couldn’t understand how since it hadn’t been a day but I wasn’t thinking about the drunken emotions that were surging from all of the green beer and car bombs. I entertained her as much as I could but my mission was to reach Victorville in a day so that I would not have to shell out the cash for a hotel room. I parted ways with her voice when I stopped to get gas in Vegas and continued down the road. It was close to 3:00 am when I arrived at the hotel just off 70. The woman at the front desk informed me that I would still be charged for the night until 4:00 am and suggested that I take a nap in the car until it turned morning. I followed her advice and then slept in until close to noon.
The first apartment was pretty far from civilization out in the desert by some boarded up homes near a gas station. I knew I was not interested in staying there the moment I stepped in and saw that putrid green colored carpet that lined the entrance and the main living room. The carpet was coming up in certain areas and the entire apartment smelled like mold. The owner’s son was the designated salesman for the family. He told me about some of the details of the apartment and showed me the different rooms but stopped at a door that was padlocked.
“This is my father’s room”, he said. “He may stay here every once in awhile but not very often. So you can use the whole house, except this room.”
I wasn’t a fan of the place when it was all mine, but this (as the son put it) “minor detail” put things way over on the “hell no” scale of things for me. I was left with only one other apartment that I had found in my price range. It would have to work and it did. Karma was on my side. The house, which I would be renting a room in, was built a few years prior; it was located near everything that the town had to offer, (karaoke bars, In and out and a mall) the place was fairly neat. There were high ceilings a backyard and grill already set up plus… it was in my price range. There was someone already living there but the owner insisted that we would get along because he was a snowboarder and just nice guy. I gave her half of the deposit and assured her she would get the rest when I returned from Colorado with my girlfriend in a few weeks. I set my blankets, television and gaming console on the floor in the master bedroom and started what would be my first home after the army. I had finally made it to California. A few weeks later, I would be bringing the rest of the house back with me… and a girl.
I met her at a friend’s house. She was his cousin. I watched football with my friend an entire day that first time I met her, even though the game I really cared about had come and passed early in the afternoon. I bought pizza and wings and felt my heart jump a little when her black leggings slightly rubbed against my jeans. No matter how many dates I go on, or girls I smooch I am always overtaken by their power those first moments that I am around them. I am and always will be a nervous boy. It’s something I keep waiting to grow out of, like one day I will just be smooth and have all the right witty things to say at the right moments and I won’t be nervous at all, not one bit. I won’t fumble over my words or talk too much or say anything retarded. For some reason I’ll be wearing a tuxedo too and I’ll have eye-catching cuff links. Until that day comes I am left with buffoon of a person that I become every time I am around a female I find attractive. Just as I will always Do the Whirlwind those first few days… weeks… months… whatever when we first get together.
And did we ever whirlwind. We met in October. We decided “be with each other” on Halloween. She came home to meet my family that Christmas. I bought her a ring. Shit was serious. We even argued like we had been together for years. I don’t even remember what the arguments were about or when they occurred but they were frequent those first few months. Funny thing about it is: I almost never argue with my girlfriends. In fact, I think she was the first I ever argued with. Yet, a few months into our relationship and I had already thrown grated cheese at my living room wall and stumbled to a pub in my pajamas at 1:00 am to drink away my relationship woes. She drove me nuts, absolutely nuts. I think that is what I liked most about her during our courtship. She brought out the crazy in me. This was definitely no storybook romance but it was some kind of romance.
On our first full date we went to a place called Boondocks, which is kind of meant for kids but is really fun to go as an adult. There was a haunted house and laser tag and batting cages and and and… we did all it. I realized I liked her more than I should when we were driving these slick go-karts around and hers was slow so she wildly swerved back and forth to block all the other cars from passing me, all the while laughing this freak show haunted house laugh. Not too long after, sometime before Christmas was the moment that I point to as the moment when I realized that I could love this girl some day.
I don’t think many people will understand or agree with this but for me, at that moment in time, there wasn’t anything more that she could do to draw me to her than the action I am about to describe. There was a car that had been parking in a handicapped spot with no handicapped sign, repeatedly. We knew that the lady was a young agile woman without any need to park in this spot. She had no disability and she never had a sign showing in her window. She was just lazy and felt that rules did not apply to her. This was the time period that I was frequently chucking things off my balcony onto cars or at the ugly light bulb building across the way. This is also around the same time that I had peed in an open Porsche window inside a garage one night after drinking, and jumped out of my window and into my sunroof going 80 down the highway. I was a fan of a certain type of action at that time. So when I heard that she had forced a vomit all over this person’s car for a mere fifteen dollars to show her a lesson, it was love in the making.
By February we were already breaking things off because I needed to be free. Truth is, there was another girl, Jen. Jen had come to my place with a few of my friends after going out to the bars, a frequent occurrence at that time because we lived downtown. I was pretty drunk and could only remember her lips that next morning. I didn’t kiss them but I desperately wanted to. She was blonde, around my height with the pouty lips that were just begging for mine and I refrained, because of her. So I broke things off.
“You’re a dumb, dumb boy”, she said to me the morning she stormed out of my apartment.
I felt terrible, so I called Jen and she invited me to her place. She lived downtown as well, in an area I had never been and what should have taken me ten minutes to get to ended up taking like an hour. I think she was a little annoyed because she was a nurse and had to work the next day but she hung out for a little anyway. I made out with her in the kitchen that night, awkwardly no doubt and decided right then, I wanted her back. Jen was okay, but she was boring, just like the girl I was dating when I met her. In the past six months I had gone from boring to chaotic to boring again. I wanted chaotic back.
Oh, it was just before Valentines Day that I broke up with her… I forgot to mention that. I showed up to her door with a dozen roses and a build-a-bear and asked if I could come inside. She told me she’d take me back and that she was talking to an Air Force recruiter because she wasn’t sure what to do with her life after I broke up with her (we had already been talking about moving to the UK together). We ended up drinking and she showed me some yoga stretches and all in all, it was one of the more “good” memorable nights that we had together.
The day she and I left for California she sat in her room among her half-packed items crying. When I arrived she was completely stagnant. Her room was in disarray and it appeared as though nothing at all was packed. I came to find it was maybe half… maybe. And was supposed to have all of it packed already because we would have to on the road early to avoid the storms and get to the house without having to stay in a hotel. I gathered her clothes in garbage bags, (some of which would sit in a hallway in our new house for months after) and filled whatever boxes were packed and fit them into the crevices of space between my things. The hard part was getting her up and out. She had never left the great state of Colorado to live before. She would be far from her friends and family and living with some dude that she argued with all of the time. This was her first fresh start and all that she had to hold onto was… me. I have to admit, this is not something that I could not recall ever feeling the way she felt about this when I left. I do remember being depressed my first year away and missing my girlfriend and not having any friends… that sucked. But I don’t ever remember clinging to my home as though I would be lost out there in the wild. I have always been excited about the next thing. I’m not always as excited when I get there, though I usually am, but this feeling was new to me. I didn’t really know what to say to her. I tried to tell her everything will be fine. I offered to let her stay, asked if she was sure she wanted to go. It seemed like everything I said was wrong. I would learn that this is a trap that women set for guys frequently over the next four years that we lived together but that first day moving, that was the first I had encountered it.
Somehow we did get everything packed that morning and we made it to California in one day. We hit some snow in the Rockies along the way but nothing too terrible to navigate. I liked watching our young love develop into a household those next few months. I liked how she took areas of the house and made them hers with the minimal items that she brought with her. I liked how she clung to some of possessions as though they were people she cherished from a time passed. For the first time in my life there was someone to come home to besides one of my crazy ass roommates. The arguments didn’t stop. And I forgot for a while that I contemplated breaking up with her on many a drive home. The only reason I even remember them now are because they are alive in songs "Yours to Keep" by Teddybears Stockholm (there’s a lyric that she says something like “So I hear that you want to ditch me, don’t you know I’m not such a bad seed” and Audio Karate’s "Catch and Release". Something kept us together. It may have been because of the situation, maybe. I’d like to think that it was something else though, at least the time spent in California. I remember jumping up on a table and declaring my love for her at a party and saying that I will jump in the pool even though it was in the 30s or 40s outside to prove it. I remember her jumping me when I got home as though she had been waiting all day for me to get home. I think it may have been the only time that we were together where the nice memories outnumbered the bad. San Diego fills my heart with joy to this day when I think of it, regardless of all the cheating and lies that followed and led to our demise. Things have come a long way since those early days of romance. I trust that one day karma will throw me the “true-love-bone” and I will throw everything all of myself into it the way that I always do, with no regard for real consequences of my actions, trusting that karma or whatever will see me through, trusting in the fates so to speak.
