The Crew

This past weekend, I attended a big, awesome, fun wedding, joining my friends Bryce and Heather.  This one had been on my radar for awhile, as weddings tend to do, but it was also something noteworthy for me because I remember reading the news of their engagement last Easter while I was in the hospital.  So, being able to attend was a big bonus for me.

Also being a good friend of the whole family, I was asked to help a little with the prep-work (along with a few other close friends, or "The Band," as we soon dubbed ourselves.)  We gladly got to the reception hall/barn early and helped set up various tables, pictures, flowers, water jars, a microphone stand, etc, little odds and ends that add up to a lot of work in the end.  The kicker is that, despite the blistering heat and ticking clock, not one of us complained.  Even me, and I can whine like a little bitch when I want to.

But not when it's worth it.  Not when you're working for a good cause, and for people you care about.  And okay, I get a charge out of it.  It was really fun to help out, and to be part of something.  Part of the crew.  Weddings obviously bring out a lot of different emotions in people, so this is what I got out of it.  And not being married myself, and not being attached at 36 and not knowing if I will ever really be married, I may feel differently than some, but here goes; I was talking to the groom's sister and her husband the day after, and they said that they don't have "great friends like this" where they live.  I told them that a handful of years ago, I didn't even know most of these people but now  they are friends.  We are now members of a crew now.  I have crazy opinions about marriage and what it means, but the wedding itself, I'll admit, I love it, because it is the joining of two people in front of friends and family, so to be one of those friends, in that select group, especially with people that I didn't know not too long ago, means a lot.  it means that you've established lasting friendships over that short amount of time, and what is a marriage if not a lasting friendship?

The Band

There's a line in "Goodfellas" about bring part of a crew, and I can't remember it or find it now, but it ran though my head over the weekend.  When Bryce and Heather made their way to my table to thank me for coming, I turned around and thanked them for having me.  Bryce said, "Why wouldn't we have you?"  I replied, "Because I'm just some weird guy you know."  instead of blowing it off and saying, "Nah, you're not a weird guy," he said, "We're all weird guys."  A whole crew of weird guys (and by "guys," I also mean the girls.  We certainly do not discriminate in this crew.)

That's why I gladly helped with the set-up.  That's why this crew all still ask how I am feeling, and some even visited me in the hospital last year.  We all party together, and drink together.  And this may sound like a stretch, but most of us are on the same kickball team year and year, and this year, we are undefeated, and basically mowing most of the league down.  We are a team.  A band. 

A crew.

If I could Go Back... Retrospective Part II

Doing a little more self-discovery, and I recently found something I had written way back in 1997.  It was a really long-ass story about my relationship at the time, which was tumultuous to say the least.  Writing it as the whole thing was going on colored my opinions in a very odd way, and probably not a good one.  Still, it did help me remember all the little details because, reading it 15 years later, I realized my memory really isn’t very good.  Most definitely the booze is to blame on that one.

First, the background: around 1996, through my friend, Brian, met this girl Audra.  Even though Brian was courting her at the time, I was young and angry and stupid, and I heard she thought I was cute, so I tried to insert myself right in the middle of it.  The second Brian told me they were finished, I got her number and asked her on a date.  We pseudo-dated for a couple months, but perhaps because of the way I had won her, I was always very timid about the whole thing (despite most of my friends rightly telling me to just go for it.)  I never even considered her my girlfriend until she told me that she had cheated on me (with a man that I had always assumed was gay.) How could she cheat on me if we weren’t going out, right?  So, because I was young and angry and stupid, I forgave that one and we got “back together.”   As I recall, she slept with him again, and I started to finally get mad and we broke up but stayed friends, and eventually, we got back together yet again.

Eventually, Brian came back into our lives, and pretty soon, she was sleeping with him.  According to what I had written in my story, after I found out, he and I talked it over and in his mind, we agreed that we would both walk away from Audra and preserve our friendship.  I don’t recall that, but I do recall calling her up soon after and asking what the Hell was going on.  Brian, as the story goes, then got mad at me for lying to him and betraying him, even though he had technically slept with my girlfriend.  Still, I had sort of stolen her away, even though they never really were going out.  It's all very nebulous as far as who was actually dating who.  This was way before the saying “Bros before ho’s” came into being, but I’m pretty sure this event was the reason it did.

Anyway, long story short, she and I dated off and on for about two years, and she cheated on me numerous times, with a gay dude and with one of my best friends.  In October of 1998, I found out that Keri was into me and so I broke it off to explore a more viable option.  It was a break-up that was long overdue, and yet it seemed to come as a huge shock to Audra, despite all the fucking around she had done.  See, I had told her for two years that I would always love her, and I guess she was holding me to that.  I’m not going to say it was pillow talk, because at the time I did think I would always love her, and I thought that love was about forgiveness and loving someone despite of all their faults.  I have since learned that while it is about those things, it’s not about treating the person who loves you like crap.  I’m not even totally blaming her in all this, because in retrospect, she was probably battling undiagnosed depression and was covering it up by getting guys to like her.  She was also bulimic, so you do the math.  Thing is, I did love her, even with all her horrible mistakes, so if she had shown me even the slightest bit of affection in return, I would have stayed.  We had already been through a lifetime of crap in just two years, so all she had to do was play nice, and I would probably be with her right now.  It would be a horrible existence, but I would be there.  But I guess she thought that I would always love her, as I said, so she could be a bitch, or even worse, just phone it in and I would always be there.  Because I was the good guy.

Well, I ain’t that good.  I am the nice guy, sure, but I'm not a sap.  The question is who is to blame? Obviously, she wasn't very faithful, so it's easy to just look at the situation in black-and-white and say she was.  But was she simply reacting to a guy who was rather hopelessly in love with her, and neither of us really knew what to do with that?  To be honest, part of me thinks that her final infidelity really was her final infidelity, and it did occur while I was spending my final semester of under-grad in Los Angeles, and I wasn't even sure I was going to come back, so we had decided that we would just see where we stood after the semester was over.  I honestly think she was actually growing up at that point.

And while it was shitty to sleep with Brian, it was probably equally shitty of me to steal her away from him in the first place (karma and all that), so I don't have a lot of moral high-ground there.  Sleeping with the gay dude, well, okay, that sucked, but back then, it was hard to tell where we stood at any given time because we were breaking up and remaining friends and getting back together for awhile there.  So, it was at least partly my fault for not nailing that down, so to speak, and for being so wishy-washy.

In the end, I guess it doesn't matter who is to blame, but since I'm on this kick of trying to figure this stuff out, it was on my mind.  Clearly, all this messed me up as far as relationships go, because I'm pretty sure that I would never put up with that kind of bullshit again.  But have I gone too far with that line of thinking?  Am I now unwilling to put up with just about anything?  Have these experiences made me unable to compromise on anything?  

All that I can really glean from all of it was that we were not meant for each other, even though at the time I was sure we were.  In the end, as the song goes, she just kind of wasted my precious time.  So, once again, when people ask what I would change if I had a Way-Back Machine, I would leave Audra after the first time she cheated on me, and honestly, I would have to think about if I would even date her at all.  Because when people say things like, "Yeah but all those things made you who you are and brought you to this place," I can't help but wonder if either of those are good things, and a good place.

Retrospective: Part I

Not sure if there will ever be a Part II, but we'll see.  Anyway, I've started looking back on a lot of things that I had glossed over in my memory, for whatever reason (usually because it's an embarrassing or painful memory, in fact.)  This one came up recently, and I finally decided to give it some thought.

I'm pretty sure it was early 1999, and I was still a rather fresh college graduate, and had a semi-fresh girlfriend of 4-5 months.  She was also semi-young, for while I was a bright 22 year-old, ready to conquer the world, she was a spritely 17, ready to conquer high school.  At the time, it wasn't that big a deal as far as our personalities, because I got act youngish while I was with her.  Technically, she wasn't "legal," as they say, but waiting until her next birthday was simply not an option.  Still, it should be noted that, despite our great mutual attraction, we did not rush into anything.  It was actually almost two months before we actually went all the way.

If I haven't grossed everyone out yet, get ready for it.  One Sunday morning, her parents were out, so she and I took advantage out the opportunity (a couple times, in fact.)  And then it happened.  Every young man's fear at that stage of their lives.  We got caught.  Her father came home from church(!) and saw us having sex on the living room floor.  Even writing this now makes my skin crawl, when i see his face in my mind.  It was literally the most embarrassing thing I have ever done.  I wanted to run out of the house immediately and never return.

Oddly enough, as irrational as my girlfriend could be at times, in that moment, she was unbelievably calm, and said that we should just go talk to him, and that he was probably just as embarrassed as we were (although I highly doubted that.)  She had a very complex relationship with her father (sometimes despising him, most times pitying him), so I had no idea which way this would go, but I trusted her judgment, and we apologized, and soon enough, the matter passed and it was never brought up again, until now, I suppose.  Actually, it has become, like so many other incidents of my misspent love-life, the stuff of bar stories, tales I tell to my drunken friends to get a laugh as we try to top each other in a Most-Embarrassing Moment Contest.

Looking back with a lot of perspective now, I put myself in his shoes.  Maybe he was as embarrassed as we were, but there was probably a lot more going through his head than that.  No matter how complex their relationship was, here was his only daughter, his smart, beautiful, funny, creative, caring (underage) daughter, who volunteered at a home for developmentally disabled adults and had spent a summer in Ecuador building homes after an earthquake, getting pounded on his living room floor by some hairy Neanderthal who was five years older than her.  He had every right to kill me, but he did not.  I mean, I know he liked me and all, but what was he really thinking?   Part of him was maybe glad that his daughter seemed happy with me.  Part of him may have been embarrassed because he probably assumed we were having sex (he might have even known she was on the pill), but would rather not have seen it.

But maybe, more than embarrassed, part of him felt old, that his little girl was all grown up.  yet another instance of the passage of time.  Sure, in numbers she was 17, and he was probably in his mid-40's (maybe ten years older than I am now, interestingly enough), but he maybe didn't feel like all that much time had passed since she was born, until he saw her all grown up with his own eyes.  And I was at least partly responsible for that.  Fifty percent, I guess.  looking back, I don't feel like it was that long ago, and it was thirteen years.  I was just a stupid, arrogant kid who never thought this would happen.

About four years later, I broke up with his daughter, and my life certainly began to unravel.  However, since we were living together at the time, she had to eventually move back home with her parents.  The complex relationship completely exploded, helped in no small part by her fragile state after the break-up (my life unraveled, but she hit rock bottom, which is a whole other story.) Her mother threw her father out, and they eventually divorced.  I have no idea where any of them are now, or what they are doing, but I obviously still remember them, and wonder if they remember me.  Probably not as fondly, as I was the guy who indirectly ruined a marriage and destroyed an innocent young girl.  All these years later, I'm probably just some dude who got caught having sex on their floor, just like in my bar stories, where she is simply the girl I got caught having sex with. 

I know that time heals all wounds and all that, but looking back on it, and putting the emotion back into the scenario, it makes me wonder a lot things.  What was he thinking at that moment?  What would I have done were I him?  Did he think of it every time he saw me?  More importantly, for my own benefit, why did I even do it, knowing he was coming home soon?  And most importantly of all, why did I laugh it off all these years as just another crazy thing that happened to me?

When I get into those conversations where people say that they wouldn't change anything if they could go back in time, I now fervently disagree.  They then ask, "What would you change?"

"Everything," I say.