It's the middle of the night. I'm sitting on my couch where I've been sucking on orange tic-tacs for the past hour, getting lost inside my head. I do this a lot. Not the way people, say, play golf a lot. Those people mean to play golf. I think. I don't know.
I don't mean to get lost in my head. (And I think golf is STUPID! YEAH! YOU HEARD ME, BABY - GOLF IS FOR LOOOOOOOOOOOSSEEEEEERRRRRSSSSSS - BRING IT ON! I'LL HEADBUTT YOU!)
Often, when I get lost in my noggin, it's a memory. Usually something horrible, but it isn't always about my childhood. Tonight it was something special...
The place I moved to in Portland is in one of my favorite neighborhoods. I've spent most of the past decade in or around here. The fallout of that much time in a place you love that much is that there are probably some people walking around you'd rather avoid. And vice-versa.
One of the people I want to avoid in the same way I'd like to avoid getting my eye poked out with a 747 is this girl. I don't dare use her name. She's just... this girl.
This girl who... lives about half a block away. I knew that when I took this apartment, but I wasn't going to let... this girl... ruin anything for me. I was here long before she was, and I'm sure most of you know by now that I'm an extremely mature adult human being person who can handle living this close to this girl and be grownup about it and not make faces at her when I see her in the street but she can't see me.
But, the memory...
I'm not sure how to describe my status with this girl. I wouldn't say I was dating her. I also wouldn't say I wasn't sleeping with her. If I were to say I wasn't sleeping with her, then I'd be describing her boyfriend at the time. Who wasn't me. Because I wasn't even dating her. I just wouldn't say I wasn't sleeping with her.
He's English. While I wasn't not sleeping with her, he was in England. He was trying to get to the states, but an ocean got in the way.
She's American. And hot. And she was very charming.
I'll leave it at that for now. It's much more complicated if you include all the drama. Especially between her and her boyfriend. He had this irritating habit of calling when I was over.
Before continuing, by the by, I'm innocent in all this. She told me she was breaking up with him. But then she wasn't. But then she was. And then, after a few months of me not not sleeping with her, she was engaged to him, so breaking up was unlikely, but, she said, "...this doesn't change anything."
They're in for a long happy marriage. HA HA HA!
Anyway, yeah, things were seriously fekked.
I knew it. She knew it. Her boyfriend (fiance - whatever) knew it.
What really drove it home for me was a Sunday morning.
This girl and I had just gotten to sleep. It was about 9:00 AM, and I think I'd nodded off for about an hour. The normal course of action for a Sunday was that the boyfriend would call, and I'd go do drugs. It was so domestic.
What he had never done - at least not on one of the 847 nights I'd stayed at her place that summer - was call at 9:00 AM.
And, as far as I know, he never did.
It was her mom.
Woo! Aright! Woo!
Her mom lived two hours south of Portland. They had a little money, and her mom is an impulsive person. She paid cash for a Hummer one weekend because there was a package deal where the dealership threw in a few guns. I'm not kidding.
She also traveled around a lot. Impulsive. You know.
When this girl answered her phone (if you haven't figured it out by now with all the phone talk, her phone was ringing), she said some stuff that would have been followed by an exclamation point if I were writing it. But, if there's one thing I don't do, it's sully the reputation of a lady.
The interestingly-punctuated stuff was all in response to who wasn't calling. As in: it wasn't her boyfriend. Who wasn't me. I wasn't even dating her.
It was her mom. And her mom, I learned, as the girlfriend of the guy who wasn't there whose girlfriend I wasn't not sleeping with got dressed in a hurry, was downstairs.
Was mom supposed to be there? No.
Impulsive.
I was instructed to get dressed. Like, NOW, MISTER.
I was zipping my fly just as the door to the apartment opened. I had enough time to throw on a shirt. I decided to wear my own. This girl has fantastic taste in clothing, so I didn't have to wear my own shirt. I just wish, in retrospect, that I had gone out to meet her mother while wearing a torn women's size XXXXS tank-top with the Union flag on the front. Actually, for people who know me, that might not even have been all that strange. I wanted to make a good impression when meeting the family, though, so I put on my own shirt. It was more like a women's size XXXS black t-shirt. I looked handsome.
Her mom didn't warm up to me. I didn't expect her to. I was the boy who obviously wasn't not sleeping with her daughter, the boyfriend of whom (who wasn't me) was a dear, dear friend of the family.
But this is where it gets awesome beyond any recognizable shape of awesome in any of its colors, flavors, or preservative-free non-GMO organic offerings.
I sit down on the couch next to this girl, her mom sits down in a chair, and someone walks in from out in the hallway.
No - it's not the girl's boyfriend. That'd be too obvious.
No.
Who comes in to sit down with us? With the mother, the daughter, and the boy?
This is so great: a man who was not the husband of the woman or the father of the daughter, but who was absolutely not not sleeping with the mother, whose husband (who this man most certainly was not) was still back at home, probably driving around the property in a Hummer while blowing things away with the free guns.
Yep.
This girl was cheating on her boyfriend, the mother was cheating on her husband, the daughter's not-boyfriend was there, the mother's not-husband was there, and we all sat down that morning to watch TV together in a situation so tense and so uncomfortable that I much rather would have liked to have had my eye poked out by a 747.
We don't talk anymore.
[Gratuitous Links to my Homies - Not Part of the Post Above] [Learn More]
I'll come back and try to do this part in the morning. It's a miracle I even wrote a post. I did what, given my diagnosis from this past year suggests, was a sort of bipolar-crash-thing. Coming out of it. I think. Dunno. Stuff is weird.