Stand Up Little Girl, A Broken Heart Can't Be That Bad, When It's Through, It's Through, Fate Will Twist The Both Of You
--"To Be With You", Mr. Big
"I promise you, DeAnn, if you'll just give me a blowjob I'll shut up," I said plainly, as if statements such as that were commonplace and not at all inappropriate. To her credit, she ignored me and my request because to humor such a sentiment normally would have been a recipe for disaster. I never thought about it from her end of the conversation at the time--so focused as I was on getting what I wanted--but to contemplate it now, I figured she was thinking that if she ignored me I would just go away. She was probably thinking that feigning a desire to sleep and letting the problem go would make it go away.
Maybe normally she would have been right. Maybe normally I would have calmed down and let the matter drop, but on that night and in the instance, I was determined.
"Are you listening to me? Are you sleeping?" I again asked her, even though she was laying down only inches from my body.
"Just go to bed, Patrick. Please," she answered, not even acknowledging my query in the least.
It was Christmas Day, I guess. That probably was the first contributing factor. I had spent the previous evening with the extended family waiting on a vague promise that she would come home early from her parents' house so we could salvage some of that holiday night together. She never did. I'd come home at maybe eleven, expecting her to be there waiting for me or not far behind me in meeting me at home. Even after I'd called her a couple of times, asking when she was going to leave, she still didn't end up showing until three hours later. I can only say that had a hand in raising my ire, rationally or irrationally as that line of thinking may be. The second contributing factor was the fact that we hadn't done it quite some time. I don't know--we'd been having sex pretty regularly from the first day we met and those last few months had been mostly filled with my wanting something that we once shared but apparently had stopped sharing. To hear her explain it many years later, something inside her had died towards the end of our relationship--of which Christmas Eve fell pretty much smack dab in the middle of it--and since reaching that point it'd been her way of punishing me. After all the times of making her feel alien for her wanting to have sex more than me, she had finally had found a way to turn the tables on me by denying me any sex at all for months by then.
Lastly, the only justification I can bring in as a possible excuse as to why that night turned out as it did was the biggest reason of all. We'd broken up only weeks before. Yet we were still living together, as the last few weeks of our lease ran out. That should have been our first warning sign. Looking back now, it's impossible to continue to co-exist with someone with whom you once shared something special once with and with whom all warmth has all but died. Maybe we could have gone on well and good if we'd just broken up and moved out right away. She could have gone her way and I could have gone mine. By doing that, we might have established some sort of peace that may have continued to flourish to even this day, but we didn't. We tried to make it "work." We were trying to prove we were mature enough to handle our unravelling responsibly. So what if we were no longer a couple? That didn't mean we couldn't still be roommates. That didn't mean we couldn't continue to be close friends, right? In the end, it may have just been both our stubborn prides that insisted that we stick out those last few days. I'd already given up a girlfriend, I'd be damned if I gave up a roommate too.
I don't even remember how it started. I might have asked if we could do it one more time, for "old times sakes." I might have seen something on cable that night that might have reminded exactly how long it had been since she had gone down on me. Or I might have just been frustrated in the worst possible way from having waited hours for her and spending a good bulk of my Christmas Eve holiday alone. Whatever it was, I almost thought better of what I wanted to ask her. That night could have turned out vastly different if I'd just listened to the advice that many people had given me all my life up until that point. That night could have turned out alright if I'd just learned to let things go with a little more ease.
"Please, DeAnn. I just really want to tonight," I remember saying to her a few minutes later. It was bad enough that my common sense had given way to begging, but the fact I thought my desire was enough to convince her at that stage in our history together was ludicrous. She didn't owe me anything. The point in her love for me where my telling her that it would make me happy would be enough to change her mind had long since been forgotten. I was a man with a keen sense that what I wanted from her and what wanted to give me would never again be exactly the same.
She turned me down a few times after that, each time her patience wearing down just a little bit more.
However, I was focused on the prize. I was determined. I wasn't about to give up that easily.
By that point it wasn't even about the blowjob any more. The discussion shifted to what it always shifted to when I spoke to DeAnn for the bulk of our relationship, getting her to do something that she'd already said no to. It wasn't about the act itself. It was about proving I was more strong-willed than her, enough to turn her mind around on a subject she'd been adamant about at the beginning of the end. That was my goal. To prove my superiority as I had proven my superiority time and time again in the history of us, by making her give in by sheer will alone.
That magic was gone, though. That was the night it really sunk in that I had no pull left with her whatsoever.
By the time I'd resorted to tears and getting on my knees to plead with her by the bedside, I could hear the irritation in her voice. She was irritated--with me, with the situation she'd put herself into, and, indeed, with the whole context of the argument itself. It was an escalation of events that neither one of us could have forseen that night. Even though I'd be irritated with her for not coming home early, when she had, I'd still pretended that it hadn't bothered me as much as it had. I still asked the placating questions to make it seem like I was glad she had fun with her parents. We'd even spent the last hour or so before bed watching Swordfish together. Nothing in those minutes gave any sort of indication how far I would eventually go. Nothing hinted at the twisting that I would inflict on both our lives in a few hours.
After again being rebuffed, I had started the yelling. When I say yelling, I mean I was yelling loud enough at two or three in the morning to wake the neighbors. People often use that figure of speech figuratively, but that night it was quite literal. I'd tried the soft approach--crying and begging. I suppose I figured taking the opposite tact might produce more conducive results to the outcome I was hoping for. It didn't. All it did was prompt an even more dedicated response from her to shut down completely. Whereas her first few answers had ranged from, "maybe in the morning or tomorrow sometime," she'd ended up answering me with, "maybe I should just sleep up at my parents" or "maybe I should think about moving our before the end of the lease." Eventually, she stopped being nice at all and began yelling back. By that point she didn't even try to lower her voice or instruct me to lower mine. She'd seen that I was willing to make our spat public, that I was willing to make a spectacle of myself for some silly desire for sex, and she'd had enough. She started giving as good as she got. Pretty soon we were raising a riot enough to wake up not some of the neighbors, but to wake up all of our neighbors. Even at that point, we still had time to reel it back. Sure, it might have taken a few weeks, maybe even until we moved out, to repair the rift between us as friends, but believe it or not that wasn't even our worst argument up until that point. There still was some hope that all hope had not been completely lost.
That is, until I started hitting myself with my metal staff.
Of all the idiotic things I've ever done, I'm sure that must have provided the most surreal visual image to her. There I was, actually telling her that I was going to beat myself bloody until she relented, until she started sucking me off. Like I said, when I told Breanne (who pretty much is the only person I ever told in full detail about this incident until now) she couldn't believe how I could possibly have thought that plan would have succeeded. I admit, it doesn't even make sense to me now. It was a moment of desperation. It was my last ditch effort to demonstrate how serious I was about achieving my goal of her full surrender to my demands. It was the last vestiges of purpose from an individual who obviously felt he had nothing else left to lose.
When she called 911, saying that I was trying to kill myself I shouldn't have been surprised. That was the next logical step, after all.
When I hung up the phone for her, she had every right to be scared. Hell, I can admit I was even scaring myself. I mean--I'd pushed things one step too far with her many times before that day, but that day I really topped myself. That day she felt compelled enough to act in her own self-defense to call the cops on me. Even though they hadn't got the full story from her half phone call, they'd gotten enough to justify sending a patrol out to the front door of our apartment.
They'd heard enough to justifiably come inside with DeAnn's permission.
They'd heard enough to come within a hair's breath of arresting me.
They'd heard enough to conclude that I was a danger to her and to myself.
I've sunk pretty low in my life. Many of those times I've chronicled here. It's all been alright because I've never been that ashamed to admit that I'm a very impulsive and highly temperamental guy. Everything I've written about has always been how I made these huge mistakes--done the wrong thing, said the wrong words, and basically fucked myself over--and yet still lived to tell the tale. I've always approached my past as a teaching tool for the present, as a way to remind myself that mistakes have been made on my part, but nothing so hugely awful as to make me thing I'm less than human. However, this anecdote I've always held close to the vest, I've always been one space too embarrassed to ever want to share with anyone. I could never quite own up to my own failings to ever want to bring this tale to light. The only reason I bring it up now is because I think it's been enough of a gap for it to seem like it happened to someone else. The old apartment seems nothing more than a mark on a map right now and the life of times of the couple who used to live seem nothing more than a tale I tell every now and then. The whole incident doesn't seem real, it doesn't seem like it actually happened.
That's why I thought it about time I put it down on paper once and for all. It needs to be born as a way to be free. I can't keep holding it inside me as some deep, dark secret that I can't let anyone know for fear that I might engage in such behavior again. I can't keep pretending that that sort of demon wasn't who I was once. I can't keep up the facade that I'm not troubled by how I acted that night and pretty much all the time with DeAnn.
It is a story that needed telling if only because by telling it now, here, I never have to worry about someone else finding out somehow. Once it's out here in the open, I never need be afraid of it ever again.
Eventually, the police told DeAnn to drive to her parents' home. They told me to have someone come over while she was gone so I "didn't do anything stupid to myself." I called my cousins. My cousins called my parents. In the thirty minutes I waited for my dad and brother to come over I had time to mull over how quickly I had allowed things to escalate. I thought of all the points in the evening where I could have gone in the other direction, said something completely different than what I did, and just given up the ghost. I thought of all the instances where I'd really made a mess of things that night and what a complete imbecile and reckless danger I had been.
DeAnn came knocking on the door in the middle of my reflection.
"I'll stay the night if you promise you're calm now and you're not going to hurt yourself any more."
I promised her and she went to hide in our bedroom.
By the time my dad had gotten there I'd begun to fully realize just how many people I'd dragged into my mess, how many lives now knew how completely violent I could get, how completely irrational I could become, how much of a monster truly laid beneath the surface. My dad didn't even have to chastise me that much. I was so angry with myself that his anger and his lack of understanding of what had happened paled in comparison to my anger and incomprehension. I pretty much just agreed with every piece of advice he gave me, nodded with every stern remark he made. I gave up to his every word. I know I'd fucked up. His being there and his trying to turn me around to the idea that I was a screw-up was completely unnecessary. I'd already begun punishing myself long before he could turn the screws on me.
When he and my brother finally left, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed with DeAnn and go to sleep. All thoughts of sex or whatever were completely forgotten. The sad or wonderful thing about the whole night was that, of anyone, she was the only one who understood how I could go through such mood swings. She was the only one to ever suffer the full brunt of my turning into a raging hulk one moment into a contrite mouse the next. I think she's the only person I know who could have accepted me into her arms that night, after what I'd put her through, and just hold me until I fell asleep.
That night i lost a lot of things--the hope for our friendship ever being the same, the idea that I was "not that bad," and the concept that DeAnn was the one who was being unfair to me--but I did gain one thing. I gained the knowledge that through it all, DeAnn never stopped caring about me.
She wasn't in love with me, of course.
But the whole idea that she was willing to sleep next to me after all that still amazes me to this day. With most of my friends like Breanne, like Toby, like Ilessa--they've never seen how dark I can really get. DeAnn saw the worst of me pretty much all in that one night, but on other occasions too. And yet she never fully gave up on me, I think. She really was one in a million.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
"I promise you, DeAnn, if you'll just give me a blowjob I'll shut up," I said plainly, as if statements such as that were commonplace and not at all inappropriate. To her credit, she ignored me and my request because to humor such a sentiment normally would have been a recipe for disaster. I never thought about it from her end of the conversation at the time--so focused as I was on getting what I wanted--but to contemplate it now, I figured she was thinking that if she ignored me I would just go away. She was probably thinking that feigning a desire to sleep and letting the problem go would make it go away.Maybe normally she would have been right. Maybe normally I would have calmed down and let the matter drop, but on that night and in the instance, I was determined.
"Are you listening to me? Are you sleeping?" I again asked her, even though she was laying down only inches from my body.
"Just go to bed, Patrick. Please," she answered, not even acknowledging my query in the least.
It was Christmas Day, I guess. That probably was the first contributing factor. I had spent the previous evening with the extended family waiting on a vague promise that she would come home early from her parents' house so we could salvage some of that holiday night together. She never did. I'd come home at maybe eleven, expecting her to be there waiting for me or not far behind me in meeting me at home. Even after I'd called her a couple of times, asking when she was going to leave, she still didn't end up showing until three hours later. I can only say that had a hand in raising my ire, rationally or irrationally as that line of thinking may be. The second contributing factor was the fact that we hadn't done it quite some time. I don't know--we'd been having sex pretty regularly from the first day we met and those last few months had been mostly filled with my wanting something that we once shared but apparently had stopped sharing. To hear her explain it many years later, something inside her had died towards the end of our relationship--of which Christmas Eve fell pretty much smack dab in the middle of it--and since reaching that point it'd been her way of punishing me. After all the times of making her feel alien for her wanting to have sex more than me, she had finally had found a way to turn the tables on me by denying me any sex at all for months by then.
Lastly, the only justification I can bring in as a possible excuse as to why that night turned out as it did was the biggest reason of all. We'd broken up only weeks before. Yet we were still living together, as the last few weeks of our lease ran out. That should have been our first warning sign. Looking back now, it's impossible to continue to co-exist with someone with whom you once shared something special once with and with whom all warmth has all but died. Maybe we could have gone on well and good if we'd just broken up and moved out right away. She could have gone her way and I could have gone mine. By doing that, we might have established some sort of peace that may have continued to flourish to even this day, but we didn't. We tried to make it "work." We were trying to prove we were mature enough to handle our unravelling responsibly. So what if we were no longer a couple? That didn't mean we couldn't still be roommates. That didn't mean we couldn't continue to be close friends, right? In the end, it may have just been both our stubborn prides that insisted that we stick out those last few days. I'd already given up a girlfriend, I'd be damned if I gave up a roommate too.
I don't even remember how it started. I might have asked if we could do it one more time, for "old times sakes." I might have seen something on cable that night that might have reminded exactly how long it had been since she had gone down on me. Or I might have just been frustrated in the worst possible way from having waited hours for her and spending a good bulk of my Christmas Eve holiday alone. Whatever it was, I almost thought better of what I wanted to ask her. That night could have turned out vastly different if I'd just listened to the advice that many people had given me all my life up until that point. That night could have turned out alright if I'd just learned to let things go with a little more ease.
"Please, DeAnn. I just really want to tonight," I remember saying to her a few minutes later. It was bad enough that my common sense had given way to begging, but the fact I thought my desire was enough to convince her at that stage in our history together was ludicrous. She didn't owe me anything. The point in her love for me where my telling her that it would make me happy would be enough to change her mind had long since been forgotten. I was a man with a keen sense that what I wanted from her and what wanted to give me would never again be exactly the same.
She turned me down a few times after that, each time her patience wearing down just a little bit more.
However, I was focused on the prize. I was determined. I wasn't about to give up that easily.
By that point it wasn't even about the blowjob any more. The discussion shifted to what it always shifted to when I spoke to DeAnn for the bulk of our relationship, getting her to do something that she'd already said no to. It wasn't about the act itself. It was about proving I was more strong-willed than her, enough to turn her mind around on a subject she'd been adamant about at the beginning of the end. That was my goal. To prove my superiority as I had proven my superiority time and time again in the history of us, by making her give in by sheer will alone.
That magic was gone, though. That was the night it really sunk in that I had no pull left with her whatsoever.
By the time I'd resorted to tears and getting on my knees to plead with her by the bedside, I could hear the irritation in her voice. She was irritated--with me, with the situation she'd put herself into, and, indeed, with the whole context of the argument itself. It was an escalation of events that neither one of us could have forseen that night. Even though I'd be irritated with her for not coming home early, when she had, I'd still pretended that it hadn't bothered me as much as it had. I still asked the placating questions to make it seem like I was glad she had fun with her parents. We'd even spent the last hour or so before bed watching Swordfish together. Nothing in those minutes gave any sort of indication how far I would eventually go. Nothing hinted at the twisting that I would inflict on both our lives in a few hours.
After again being rebuffed, I had started the yelling. When I say yelling, I mean I was yelling loud enough at two or three in the morning to wake the neighbors. People often use that figure of speech figuratively, but that night it was quite literal. I'd tried the soft approach--crying and begging. I suppose I figured taking the opposite tact might produce more conducive results to the outcome I was hoping for. It didn't. All it did was prompt an even more dedicated response from her to shut down completely. Whereas her first few answers had ranged from, "maybe in the morning or tomorrow sometime," she'd ended up answering me with, "maybe I should just sleep up at my parents" or "maybe I should think about moving our before the end of the lease." Eventually, she stopped being nice at all and began yelling back. By that point she didn't even try to lower her voice or instruct me to lower mine. She'd seen that I was willing to make our spat public, that I was willing to make a spectacle of myself for some silly desire for sex, and she'd had enough. She started giving as good as she got. Pretty soon we were raising a riot enough to wake up not some of the neighbors, but to wake up all of our neighbors. Even at that point, we still had time to reel it back. Sure, it might have taken a few weeks, maybe even until we moved out, to repair the rift between us as friends, but believe it or not that wasn't even our worst argument up until that point. There still was some hope that all hope had not been completely lost.
That is, until I started hitting myself with my metal staff.
Of all the idiotic things I've ever done, I'm sure that must have provided the most surreal visual image to her. There I was, actually telling her that I was going to beat myself bloody until she relented, until she started sucking me off. Like I said, when I told Breanne (who pretty much is the only person I ever told in full detail about this incident until now) she couldn't believe how I could possibly have thought that plan would have succeeded. I admit, it doesn't even make sense to me now. It was a moment of desperation. It was my last ditch effort to demonstrate how serious I was about achieving my goal of her full surrender to my demands. It was the last vestiges of purpose from an individual who obviously felt he had nothing else left to lose.
When she called 911, saying that I was trying to kill myself I shouldn't have been surprised. That was the next logical step, after all.
When I hung up the phone for her, she had every right to be scared. Hell, I can admit I was even scaring myself. I mean--I'd pushed things one step too far with her many times before that day, but that day I really topped myself. That day she felt compelled enough to act in her own self-defense to call the cops on me. Even though they hadn't got the full story from her half phone call, they'd gotten enough to justify sending a patrol out to the front door of our apartment.
They'd heard enough to justifiably come inside with DeAnn's permission.
They'd heard enough to come within a hair's breath of arresting me.
They'd heard enough to conclude that I was a danger to her and to myself.
I've sunk pretty low in my life. Many of those times I've chronicled here. It's all been alright because I've never been that ashamed to admit that I'm a very impulsive and highly temperamental guy. Everything I've written about has always been how I made these huge mistakes--done the wrong thing, said the wrong words, and basically fucked myself over--and yet still lived to tell the tale. I've always approached my past as a teaching tool for the present, as a way to remind myself that mistakes have been made on my part, but nothing so hugely awful as to make me thing I'm less than human. However, this anecdote I've always held close to the vest, I've always been one space too embarrassed to ever want to share with anyone. I could never quite own up to my own failings to ever want to bring this tale to light. The only reason I bring it up now is because I think it's been enough of a gap for it to seem like it happened to someone else. The old apartment seems nothing more than a mark on a map right now and the life of times of the couple who used to live seem nothing more than a tale I tell every now and then. The whole incident doesn't seem real, it doesn't seem like it actually happened.
That's why I thought it about time I put it down on paper once and for all. It needs to be born as a way to be free. I can't keep holding it inside me as some deep, dark secret that I can't let anyone know for fear that I might engage in such behavior again. I can't keep pretending that that sort of demon wasn't who I was once. I can't keep up the facade that I'm not troubled by how I acted that night and pretty much all the time with DeAnn.
It is a story that needed telling if only because by telling it now, here, I never have to worry about someone else finding out somehow. Once it's out here in the open, I never need be afraid of it ever again.
Eventually, the police told DeAnn to drive to her parents' home. They told me to have someone come over while she was gone so I "didn't do anything stupid to myself." I called my cousins. My cousins called my parents. In the thirty minutes I waited for my dad and brother to come over I had time to mull over how quickly I had allowed things to escalate. I thought of all the points in the evening where I could have gone in the other direction, said something completely different than what I did, and just given up the ghost. I thought of all the instances where I'd really made a mess of things that night and what a complete imbecile and reckless danger I had been.
DeAnn came knocking on the door in the middle of my reflection.
"I'll stay the night if you promise you're calm now and you're not going to hurt yourself any more."
I promised her and she went to hide in our bedroom.
By the time my dad had gotten there I'd begun to fully realize just how many people I'd dragged into my mess, how many lives now knew how completely violent I could get, how completely irrational I could become, how much of a monster truly laid beneath the surface. My dad didn't even have to chastise me that much. I was so angry with myself that his anger and his lack of understanding of what had happened paled in comparison to my anger and incomprehension. I pretty much just agreed with every piece of advice he gave me, nodded with every stern remark he made. I gave up to his every word. I know I'd fucked up. His being there and his trying to turn me around to the idea that I was a screw-up was completely unnecessary. I'd already begun punishing myself long before he could turn the screws on me.
When he and my brother finally left, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed with DeAnn and go to sleep. All thoughts of sex or whatever were completely forgotten. The sad or wonderful thing about the whole night was that, of anyone, she was the only one who understood how I could go through such mood swings. She was the only one to ever suffer the full brunt of my turning into a raging hulk one moment into a contrite mouse the next. I think she's the only person I know who could have accepted me into her arms that night, after what I'd put her through, and just hold me until I fell asleep.
That night i lost a lot of things--the hope for our friendship ever being the same, the idea that I was "not that bad," and the concept that DeAnn was the one who was being unfair to me--but I did gain one thing. I gained the knowledge that through it all, DeAnn never stopped caring about me.
She wasn't in love with me, of course.
But the whole idea that she was willing to sleep next to me after all that still amazes me to this day. With most of my friends like Breanne, like Toby, like Ilessa--they've never seen how dark I can really get. DeAnn saw the worst of me pretty much all in that one night, but on other occasions too. And yet she never fully gave up on me, I think. She really was one in a million.
Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers
Labels: conviction, DeAnn, Mr. Big, stubborness, Temper
posted by mojo shivers @ 11:18 PM
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