What Not to Date (three)

I broke up with Aaron on March 9th, the Monday after my infamous co-ed party, where it was decided that I would go out with Tony Hernandaz.  This was my first real party.  My dad was out of town and my brother and sister went to friends’ houses, so it was just my mom supervising, who, for a mom, was pretty damn cool.  For the most part, she just stayed in her room. We played spin the bottle in the living room.  My mom walked out once and as she walked by, seeing my best friend Ginger Ito in a battle of tonsil hockey with her boyfriend Tom, said, “just make sure you use protection.”  My friends and I gasped, then giggled ourselves silly.  Of course, she didn’t mean it, but as mother of four children, by the time I was around, she had figured it out and knew where to draw the line and when to give me freedom.  As the youngest of four, with my oldest sister nine years older than me, I had been afforded luxuries other kids my age only dreamed of.  I watched MTV and soap operas and stayed up late enough to watch “Saturday Night Live.”  I have vivid memories of dancing around my room as a seven year old singing George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.”  Sex is natural, sex is fun.  Sex is best when it’s one-on-one.  I had no idea what he meant by most of those lyrics, but the tune was catchy, and anything that mentioned sex must be good, or it wouldn’t be so forbidden by everyone else.  My older sisters relished in making me watch Pet Cemetery and laughing when I was so scared I cried.  By this time, my mom had figured out that these weren’t the things that would ruin me.  Plus, she knew my friends, and most of their parents, and that they were a good group of kids. 

It was at this party that Sam Morales made out with Emily, despite the fact that he was, and had been since the middle of sixth grade, going out with Ashley Whitley.  Everyone was talking about it, and the two of them decided it would be best to tell Ashley the truth on Monday when he broke up with her to go out with Emily.  He did end up telling Ashley about it, not in order to break up with her, but rather in an attempt to beg her forgiveness.  They went out for what seemed like eternity—throughout the rest of middle school and into freshmen year—but like most middle school couples, broke up for a couple days about every other month.

Another “game” we played at this party was “list the five people you like the most.”  Who came up with  this idea or why we all agreed that it was a good idea, I still do not know.  But I played along and I listed, in no particular order: Tony Hernandaz, Kach Morales, Kory Bauer, Rob Kent, and Sean McKay.  These were all people everyone knew I kind of liked.  Two of them, Rob and Sean, were boys every girl had a crush on, but who were just too cool to have girlfriends.  The year before, my friends had taken it upon themselves to try to find me a boyfriend, and at different times asked out both Sean and Rob on my behalf.  They, however, forgot to mention this to me until after they had asked and the boys, who each said no.  As I knew they would, which is why I never asked in the first place.   The other three were boys who everyone knew kind of liked me.  Of course, I didn’t reveal my true crush, Tom Lancaster, who happened to be my best guy friend, and who also happened to be going out with my very best friend Ginger.  My friends all discussed it and decided that Tony was the best choice and that he and I should go out.  So we agreed—I mean, why not?  It was also decided that we should kiss, but Tony, wanting to be a gentleman (his words) wouldn’t kiss me or officially go out with me while I was still going out with Aaron.  On Monday I went to school and my friends graciously told Aaron that I wanted to break up.  He didn’t seem to care much.  If he cared about me that much, he would have come to my party in the first place.  I mean, not going to a middle school party with your boy/girlfriend is the kiss of death for your relationship.  It is inevitable that s/he will make out with someone else.  If you’re single, there’s no guarantee that you will get anywhere; but if you have a boy/girlfriend, you are guaranteed to get some action whether or not s/he is there.  That same day, Tony was instructed to formally ask me out, and by lunch, we were an official couple.  This is great, Ginger and I said.  Two best friends going out with two best friends!  What could be better? 

Well, for starters, it could be better if I had a boyfriend who actually talked to me.  In the three months that Tony and I went out, we spoke a total of ten times—which for me was a step up from the previous boys that year.  Twice we kissed behind “the big green thing,” a large electrical box between two of the school’s buildings.  Sometimes we’d all hang out at lunch together; after eating we’d all congregate in front of the Discovery Building, waiting for the bell to ring.  Mostly Ginger and the gals and I talked while Tony and Tom and the boys talked, but at least we were in the same vicinity as each other.  It wasn’t that Tony wasn’t a cool.  Tony was probably the coolest boyfriend I’d had thus far, with no criminal tendencies or sexual deviances.  He was cute—short, but cute—smart, considerate.  He just paid me no attention—a quality which would repeat itself in numerous boyfriends to come.  I waited until after school was out in June to finally call and break up with him.  Looking back, I shouldn’t have bothered and just taken the hint from what he wrote in my yearbook: HI MICHELLE! do what you want over the summer see you next year.

Somehow I didn’t recognize writing in my yearbook as a valid break-up—today’s equivalent of breaking up via text message .  Luckily I had Ginger to support me, writing next to his comment, “Yeah, she will!  She didn’t want to do anything with you anyway!” I called him in early June to formally break up with him, and he showed the same enthusiasm as he had in my yearbook.  "Okay" he said.  And that was that.
 

What Not to Date (two)

Sixth grade was the start of middle school for me.  Now here’s where the action starts.  As the year started, I continued hanging out with my same friends from Aiken Elementary, and my small group began adding friends from other elementaries as well.  The beginning of middle school is a new experience, with everyone trying to figure out all the rules and guidelines and dos and don’ts.   In sixth grade, racial segregation hadn’t set in, and the whites and Hispanics still all hung out together without reservation.  So, because of who I was friends with at Aiken, I acquired a large base of Hispanic friends.  This lead to my first boyfriend of middle school—Luis Vega.  Who is now a convicted sex offender and was at some point in time on the Malheur County’s Most Wanted list.  So thus far, my boyfriends consist of a devil worshiper and a sex offender.  But at the time, Luis Vega was cool.  He was boyishly cute, even for a twelve-year-old, but was a rebel—a perfect combination.  It’s not that any of my friends did anything actually bad—they weren’t doing drugs or in a gang—but they were definitely headed in that direction (as noted above).  Luis and I went out for a long time—months, I’m sure.  We held hands at school and walked home together (okay, partway home, since my house was not in the same neighborhood as his) and sometimes hung out together at Leann Johnson’s house, whose parents never seemed to be around.  Then it happened.  My mom dropped Maria and me off at the movies to see Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.  Luis met us there.  After the movie we were the last ones to leave.  Standing at the top of the stairs at the Pix Theater, we kissed.  A real French kiss.  My first.  The next evening, at Religious Education, Maria and I made a big deal of telling Ramiro about it.  We giggled and laughed and waited for just the right moment to break the big news.  “So,” he replied.  Like French kissing was no big deal.  Like people just do it all the time.  Like Luis just did it all the time. 

Sometime after Luis, I went out with Samuel Feeney, who was my most frequent boyfriend of all time, us going out and breaking up a total of six times.  The fifth time we broke up was because I talked to Carlie, who said that she had just found out that her boyfriend was going out with some girl from Payette.  Who’s your boyfriend, I asked.  Sam Feeney.  Well, let’s both go break up with him together, because I’m going out with Sam Feeney, too.  She and I waited for the next break between classes and both walked up to Sam.  You could see the realization in his eyes as he registered the two of us together, walking toward him.  “Um, we’re breaking up with you,” we said together, and walked off.  For some reason, I went out with him again after that.  But the sixth time was it, and after that we were just friends.  A recent online article from my hometown news station informed me that Samuel Feeney was arrested on charges of video voyeurism—he had a hidden camera placed in his bathroom, despite being married.  Apparently one woman still isn’t enough for him.

In seventh grade, I went out with Joe Snyder, who was in the eighth grade, for a week or two.  I’m sure he was a great guy, but we quite literally never talked.   I’d see him at lunch, or before or after school, but we never ever spoke.  I wanted to, but I was embarrassed—what if he didn’t like me?  Of course, the notion that he wouldn’t have asked me out if he didn’t like me never crossed my mind.  I was afraid and self-conscious, nervous to approach my own boyfriend.  He asked someone to ask me out, then a while later, I asked someone to tell him I wanted to break up.  After Joe, I went out with Aaron Jensen, who sometime after this supposedly told his friends that he wanted to lose his virginity soon so he would be able to have sex with one of us girls who didn’t yet have any pubic hair.  Classy. 

Let’s tally here—devil worshiper, sex offender, cheater, mute, and pervert—I’m on a roll, baby! 

What Not to Date (one)

With the exception of my husband and my senior year sweetheart, every boyfriend I’ve ever had has been a loser.  Even the ones who were kind of cool as people were losers as boyfriends.  In nights of reminiscing about old times, I’ve often asked my best friend why the hell she let me date those guys.  Seriously, Ginger.  Lance Naito.  Really?  How could you?

In 1990, the summer before my fifth grade year, my family moved from one small eastern Oregon town to another.  In many respects, Ontario was no different than La Grande.  They were both close to the same size, about 11,000.  They both had only one middle school and one high school.  They both had a large sprawling of out-of-town rural homes, and consisted of a lot of farm land and ranches.  Although small—painfully small for those of us living there—they were each the epicenter of the surrounding towns.  People from Elgin would drive the ten miles to “go into town”—La Grande.  People from Payette would drive across the river to spend their time cruising up and down SW 4th Avenue in Ontario—the place to be on a Friday night.  But the people, the people were different.  The girls in my fifth grade class curled their hair.  I’d never used a curling iron in my life.  I quickly began to play along, like any young girl, longing to fit in.  The first couple weeks of school, while my family was getting set up in our new house, with our new schedules and our new arrangements, my dad dropped me off at the house of his colleague, whose daughter, Danielle, attended the same school and was in the same grade as me.  On the second day of school, during lunch, after asking if I had watched last night’s episode of 90210 and my responding “What’s 90210?, Nancy Drake  said to me “You should curl your hair.  It’d look a lot better.”  This was the era of bangs, and boy oh boy, did these gals have some bangs.

 My late elementary-early middle school career was a giant competition as to who could get their bangs the biggest.  Big bangs existed in two styles—The Claw and The Wave.  The claw consisted of two to three impeccably rounded layers.  My best friend Ginger Ito had a perfect claw, rivaled only by Heather Hyde, who was blessed by the middle school gods and somehow managed to get in four layers.  The Wave consisted not of layers, but height.  One perfectly rounded layer covered the forehead.  The second layer went not on top of the first, but instead extended out from the part over in a much more vertical spread and was usually curled back, not under.   On the third day of school, I asked Danielle to curl my hair.  She was a pro—she flattened or curled her hair every day, and often did her little sister’s hair as well.    But the universe tried to give me a hint, subtly letting me know that high-maintenance hair would never be my thing, and, with a big clump of hair packed in the tongs, Danielle dropped the burning-hot curling iron, leaving it dangling from my bangs.  After standing there in shock for a minute, Danielle grabbed the curling iron and released me and my bangs.  Luckily, I escaped unharmed.  And although I tried for many years, my bangs never looked half as good as Ginger or Heather’s. 

Their heightened sense of style was only the beginning.  These girls had boyfriends.  They talked about sex.  I'd never had a boyfriend, and I didn’t really know what sex was.  Like most ten-year-old girls, I had little understanding of sex education.  But these girls knew something I didn’t know.  They talked about sex like it was something any of them might just do one of these days.  They joked about how the boys probably thought it just slipped right in.  What slipped right in? I thought.  Where is it slipping into?  I understood that for sex, people rubbed their privates together, but was unaware of the specific physics of the act.  I thought you just laid in bed, man on top of woman, bouncing and rubbing against one another.  I also knew that this somehow caused pregnancy.  But I also knew it took more than one time to get pregnant, and I imagined people just doing this over and over and over in a day’s time--bouncing around in the bed for a few minutes, stopping, then bouncing around again for a few more minutes, hoping to get it right. 

The first stone in my path of loser boyfriends began early, with this new move and my newfound friends.  Roger Thomas.  I don’t remember how it came about, but by the middle of the year, Roger and I were boyfriend and girlfriend.  One day at recess we held hands.  My mom was confused at the idea of me “going out with” someone in the fifth grade. What does that even mean? she asked.   Where are you going to go out to?  You can’t drive.  You can’t go anywhere without me.  Roger and I went out for all of a week (surprisingly, not my shortest relationship) before he told Ramiro Rodriguez to tell Nancy Drake to tell me he wanted to break up.  Rumor had it Roger worshiped the devil.  Yes, that’s right; my first boyfriend ever was a devil worshiper.  And it just got better after that. 

Snuggle Bunny (2001)

Some people like to cuddle, to fall asleep in the arms of a lover, limbs intertwined like the branches of an old walnut tree.  Some don’t want to touch the other, don’t want to feel their breath like the odorous summer wind of Ontario, don’t want to feel them twitch and shake, hear them snort and groan.  Some like a happy medium, a head rested on a chest, one arm gently placed around, close enough to feel desired but with enough room to not feel smothered.

It’s 3:30 am on a Saturday night (Sunday morning) and I am still a little drunk.  The party’s ended and everyone has headed their separate ways, in small groups of two and fours, with the occasional third wheel, to various rooms.  I’ve had my fun, I’ve had my sex, and now I just want to sleep.  I’d like to wrap myself up in a cuddly warm blanket, rest my head on a fluffy smooth pillow, and fall asleep to the motion of a spinning room.  Available is a bed—I think it’s really a hardwood floor, cleverly disguised to the average drunk as a bed.  It’s a soiled blanket atop a once thick, now flattened and dingy, sleeping bag.  But at 3:30 when you’re half drunk, anything will do.  So my date and I lie down, assumedly to get some sleep.  But as the night goes on, my goal becomes harder and harder to achieve. 

I lay down on my half of the bed.  He too lies down on my half of the bed.  If there were two more people who needed a place to sleep, I wouldn’t mind sharing my quarters.  But there is no one else.  Everyone else has already fallen asleep.  They’ve all snuggled up or sprawled out on their makeshift beds, and are now comfortably snoring, moving freely in their sleep, dreaming that the room is standing still, praying that the soon coming hangover will be a mild one.  I scoot over, an inch at a time, but like a magnet, he scoots along with me.  Eventually I’m wedged between a wall and a guy.  I can taste the dirty film of the wall, smell the layers of dust and mold, maintained by a house of college boys refusing, unable, to clean.  My other choice of smell isn’t much more appealing.  The smell of mold outweighs the smell of beer-breath and my mouth remains suctioned to the wall.  The feel of his warm breath on my cold bare arm is pleasant, but not pleasant enough to ignore the stench it reveals.  Like a rubber band, his arms wrap around me, tighter and tighter, each squeeze cutting off circulation.  I’m not sure how comfortable this is for him.  I wouldn’t think at all.  Isn’t his arm falling asleep under the weight of my alcohol-filled stomach?  Apparently not because it isn’t moving.  At least something is getting some sleep.  Wait…it’s not just his arm that’s asleep—I can tell by the snot-infested wheezing he too is asleep.  Perhaps now the death grip will loosen and I can resume breathing.

No such luck.  So I bear the pain.

I move around slightly, shifting my leg here or there, an arm up or down, attempt to roll onto my back, then to my stomach.  He doesn’t seem to notice my restlessness and continues to cling to me like a child to his teddy bear.  As time progresses, I begin to fall asleep in twenty minute intervals.  I sleep, wake up, shift, and sleep again.  My sleeping time begins to get longer, but the restlessness, agitation between sleep increases too.  My sleep isn’t real sleep.  It’s that half-sleep, the first stage of sleep, where I still hear sounds around me, rustling of blankets, breathing of friends, feel any movement of the being next to me.  I’m easily awakened by his muffled snore, a frantic twitch of his leg.  My body is in pain—a constant, mild pain.  If I could just ignore it, it might go away.  But all I can do is think of it, complaining, agonizing over my uncomfortablness.  Eventually I fall asleep, into the deepest sleep currently possible, what for now will pass as real sleep.

When I awake, it's morning.  The sun is blazing through the window, and like a raccoon I blink rapidly at its rays, cover my eyes with the corner of blanket.  I hear birds chirping, more annoyingly than usual.  Their morning songs beckon me to wake, to skip outside and bask in the glow of the sun.  But I’m still as tired as I was four hours ago.  I’d like to draw the shades, if there were any, and shoot each individual bird with a BB gun, if I had one.  But there aren’t any and I don’t have one.  Even if there were and I did, I’d be unable to release myself from my chains to get to the window.  So I attempt to bury my face in what little bit of pillow I have retained and whimper myself back to sleep.

Again I wake up, and, seemingly for the first time, he wakes up too.  I’ve made the mistake of shifting into the dreaded morning position: my back to his front.  I don’t notice he’s awake until I feel his hands gently working their way up my shirt.  Our shirts are slightly ruffed up, and I can feel the tangled hair of his stomach scratching my back, making me itch, irritating my skin and my sanity.  I wonder how long I can lay here pretending to still be asleep.  Pretty damn long.  Too damn long. 

I am not a morning person, and do not want to have to do anything in the morning.  When I wake up, regardless of how late in the morning it might be or how early in the night I went to bed, I’m still sleepy.  I’m grumpy.  I don’t want to cuddle—or anything else for that matter—and the stench of moldy cheese breath does not positively influence me to join in.  I understand that when we wake up, breath is not great; I’m not expecting it to be. But it needs to be fresh enough to not induce vomiting upon inhalation.  Especially this morning, at 8:30, with the slightest bit of a hangover and only five hours of “sleep,” all I want to do is doze off.  I’ve become immune to the surrounding filth.  I can no longer notice the growls from my neighbors, I can’t smell the mildew penetrating from the walls.  But I still can’t ignore this beast next to me and really fall asleep.  He continues to attempt to cuddle, and not wanting to be bluntly rude, I continue to shift, attempting to make it difficult for him to be enjoying himself.  Like a typical male, he doesn’t seem to notice my subtle rejections.  Finally I move enough that he’s uncomfortable.  Now maybe I can get some sleep.

I speak too soon.  He’s shifting, trying to shift me, and finally I’ve had enough.  Finally, I’m going to take a chance to express my true view on sleeping next to someone else.  But like myself, I do it in the most vague and non-threatening way possible. 

“I’m not a morning person.  All I want to do in the morning is sleep.  And I’m really uncomfortable like this.”

“Oh, okay,” he replies.

Well, that was simple.  Why don’t I ever just speak my mind from the get-go?  He turns over, our backs and feet gently touch, and for the first time in five hours, I fall into a deep sleep.