I’ve prided myself, most of my life, on knowing I was right. And I was many times. I’d hear what others thought, were going to do about this, that or the other and realized they had it ass-backwards, upside down and 180 degrees the other way. When I told them to correct that, they looked at me like I was nuts. They thought they were right. Then many times I’d see them crash and burn. Quietly in my head I’d say after witnessing it, “You stupid fuck.” Add to that was my dismissiveness to anyone else’s suggestions about a problem I may have been facing. I’d listen to the first twelve words of it and I’d knee jerk react the second I felt they were wrong and reject their whole idea. Not to their face mind you, but in my head. I was polite enough not to shout them down and calling them half-wits.
**
I didn’t know Melba all that well. She was the girlfriend of my friend’s brother. I’d see her often enough around town or say at parties but we rarely ever sat down to chat and learn about one another. So be it. That happens all the time. Melba was tall with dirty blonde hair that she wore in a looser 80s fashion w/o all that AquaNet. She was one of those women who was born thin and would remain so no matter how many tacos she could choose to eat. Her packing on the weight was not going to happen. Some girls are born lucky in some ways.
She, for reasons I still don’t know, was unfortunately pegged as a dumb blonde. Her nick name was “’tupid.” I saw her face once when one of us guys said it right to her. She just took the insult, kept a poker face and let the moment slide onto the next one. I hadn’t managed to know her well enough to make any judgment about her but seeing someone say that to her face was unjust I felt. It’s also pretty loutish and typical of some of the white trash I knew around here. At that age, we crude guys knew little of the shit women had to put up with and did it w/o complaint.
In my early 20’s, like a million others, I was searching for a direction in my life. What career? Where’s that girl? Should I leave and start over in Telluride, Colorado? Every answer to those questions I came up with seemed right till a day later when I debunked them for some other reason. But I do remember feeling mildly unsatisfied with the way things were as nothing was happening fast enough. Due to my ever cautious nature (which has a very real basis as I found life can be god damned dangerous at times) I would twist and turn ideas over again and again w/o acting on them till I was assured of success, or at least not go down in flames trying. Who wants that? These reflections of then were not my sitting down thinking logically about it all, it was more of ‘feel my way through’ tactic. I know that way is more obscure and shapeless but when you don’t have hard facts, it’s the next best thing. You grope your way through the dark. I’ll know a correct answer because it’ll feel “right.”
One hot, sweaty June summer morning, I was sitting on the front steps with Mike and we were just talking. Melba was there as well. The subject shifted to what each of us was hoping to do for the summer and then even beyond that. Mike had got up to go in the house for something leaving Melba and I to talk further on what we wanted out of life.
She was straddling a 10 speed bike she loved to ride everywhere and finally looks at me, cants her head and says:
“Ronnie, you’re so close to blossoming. I can see it. You’re ready. Why not just take a shot and do it? I know you want too. It’s time to make that jump.”
“Well” she goes on, “I’m going for my ride, if you guys go to JR’s tonight, I might be there too.”
She peddles on off.
I sat there wholly stunned.
“How the FUCK does she know what I’ve been thinking about for months and months? I was never close enough to her to tell her anything of my private thoughts! Hell, I didn’t tell anyone! How could she possibly know that?” And to top it off as I thought on what she told me...she was right.
There are those moments when you finally do learn something about another person. That morning was one heavy one. Afterwards, I never thought of Melba as a dumb blond and that nickname was wholly and utterly incorrect estimation of her abilities. Ever since then, my evaluation of her was held on a much higher plain. To this day I think of that summer morning on those front steps and how she revealed to me who she really was, and how very little I knew about myself..and how much more she knew.
**
Women speak of that one guy that ruined them. I have heard of that all the time. Guys can have that too as well, a women that ruins them.
I’ll call her Shelby. She was the most fun, exciting roller coaster ride/relationship I had ever been on. I have written of her here before so there’s no need to get too deep into again. Leave it to say she was the most playful girlfriend I had ever had.
How was I ruined by her? After it all ended, I kept trying to replicate that in others, trying to repeat it again...to no avail. All women are different no matter how much you try to reshape them into something they are not. There was only ONE Shelby.
Shelby was tall, blonde and had one of those mile-wide toothy smiles that lit her face up when she did grin. Her whole countenance would change when she smiled and became immediately attractive to anyone around her. She was also took far more risks than I would and that was a large part of my attraction to her. She managed to coax me onto some of life’s carnival rides I would never have tried. I’m glad she did. I had the time of my life.
As I got to know her, I found her not stupid but pretty uneducated. She was raised blue collar in a home with no books and the parents had no aspirations of sending any of their daughters to college. In Shelby’s very early 20’s, it was low wage service jobs for her with no plans on improving her job skills just yet.
At Scarborough beach one late spring, we were sitting on the benches looking across the ocean. I had gotten up to lean on the rails that lined the boardwalk and continued watching the waves slump one after another.
Shelby breaks our silence by saying...
“Those are strato-cumulus clouds on the horizon. There’s a layer of dry air above them that stops them from growing higher.”
I turn around with this astonished look on my face. She was right.
“How do you…” and she cuts me off.
“Didn’t you know that stuff? My apartment is full of weather tech!”
It was. There were barometers on the wall. A rain gauge outside her porch in a garden. On a birdhouse near it a weather vane with a speed indicator as well. Back inside on the coffee table a hygrometer (humidity) indicator. I had thought all that stuff was just New Englandy, maritime kitch you decorate a summer vacation shack by the beach with. No, they were real instruments that worked.
She goes on. “I’ve always been into meteorology...not sure why, just so interesting ya know?”
I just stared at her. I had no idea. From the way she had acted for the longest time as we went out, how she allowed me to use her as fuck toy, as a party girl, her risky behavior...and my now learning this about her and how incongruous it seemed….I now was perplexed at who I was with. And I wondered why would she hide this from me and….what else didn’t I know about?
An hour later riding home, I had asked her this, why did she not let me in about her other sides, her other delights and interests. She smiled at me and said nothing. It was like she was keeping an ages old secret men were never to know or be told.
You grow up, you mature, you learn. I had learned then that women of depth open up like onions, layer after layer, as they feel confident to do so. As I got deeper, I had learned of more surprising, fun and cool things about her and of other women I knew in general once I was now aware and would look for this. How women are able, to completely shield their innermost aspects was an eye opener to me. It’s a talent most guys do not have. What You See Is What You Get...is mostly true for men, mostly...at least for the more open and evident of us.
That little awakening about her changed how looked at her, how I acted too. This girl was far more complicated than I knew and this previously shallow, party-time summer fling took a deeper turn where I had to mature as well if I was to navigate those deeper canyons within her.
Shelby may have come off as a Boy Toy, but she wasn’t just that at all as she proved she could stand just as high and confident I was, and in more in ways I had no clue about too.
**
At a social service job I once had, they had hired a hippy/diaphanous girl named Gloria. She was close to my age and as I worked with her, I learned she was completely fucked up in the head, a real emotional basket case. This was an awful hire but a body is a body, no matter how much they suck, but if they routinely show up for work each day, that seemed to be more important than the shitty job they did once there.
I had to bring her up to speed, train her, repeatedly on how to deal with clients with psychiatric/developmental issues and how some day to day normal responses to them would not work. You had to use other ways, that may have seemed odd, to get them to calm down and comply with living in a group setting.
Gloria barely could remember the training, she just went off on her own, not maliciously, but stupidly setting off the clients...and that made my work day harder as I had to put out the fires she was setting. She sure as hell had no idea how to extinguish them.
Fun.
I took a dislike to her and then, all of her and wrote her off as a “nothing” in my mind. “I don’t like you and I consider you ‘worthless.’ That was a pretty strong global conviction of her but I was getting sick of fixing her fuck ups.
As the months passed, we got to know one another. She was the product of the States Foster Care program as the courts stripped her parents of their right to raise her. Dad was a drug abuser and Mom just preferred to party and leave her six year old at home to fend for herself. Gloria was bounced from one foster home to another and when at 18, they deem you “cured” and the State dumps you on the streets to live your own adult life.
I had then knew why she was the way she was.
One day, we were talking and she opines...”You know...you display orphan behavior…you raised yourself...didn’t you?”
“Huh” I said, sort of shocked.
“You never listen to anyone else you don’t respect, completely writing them off... you are sooo independent, never ask for help and try to do everything on your own...you’re stubborn as hell too. You won’t change your mind because you think you’re right.” she tells me.
I took an immediate offense to that and denied it hard. It was part of an old tactic of mine to seem as normal as possible, even though I had a Mom who was in and out of psychiatric hospitals and a Dad who was permanently ensconced in his corporate job in Providence. Our family was not as normal as the ones I knew around here and tried to keep those ugly secrets buried as deep as I could. I learned at an early age that you try to “fit in” as well as you can and knew what would make the neighbors gossip...and judge. So you put the best foot forward….Image! Image! Image!
One day Gloria just quit the job. Oh well, another one flew in then flew away, it’s the nature of the occupation.
It wasn’t till a few months later when I was thinking about what she had said and then it dawned on me. She was right. She readily saw through me so easily as she had been brought up with a bunch of other waywards in the system which taught her a few things. She had seen time and time again how people act with little biological parental influence. She was so damned observant and perceptive that day when she made those comments to my face. Any personality quirks I had, their source and genesis, I thought were hidden well inside of me where they belonged. And here came this women, who I thought was wrecked by the State foster system, who opened me up as easily as a can of tuna with a can opener.
At my old age, I can still be as intransigent about what I think is right and blow off damn near everyone else’s ideas. I’m a guy, infected with that male pride that isn’t so easily doffed when it gets in the way of living life successfully. But one trick I have learned when faced with this, tell my story to a woman. The answer I can get back can be one I had never thought of.
Even now I can still be surprised
(After reading this again, this is soo truncated. I could expand on 5 topics i brought up here but that would take days and you'd have to read 11 more pages. Ah, I'll leave it as it is..)
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