queen of the crazies, part 2

As you can imagine, I was shocked and quite frankly, scared.

I immediately text The Ex to tell him and ask him why she would do that and what to do. Here is the background that I was given. (If you hate detail, skip it.)

He met her at a party through some friends sometime in mid-September, and very intoxicatedly listened to her sob stories and made out with her a bit. The week that followed consisted mostly of her following him around everywhere he went, and him not wanting to be an asshole so allowing this to go on (I never said he wasn't a pushover). Eventually he fessed up and told her he didn't feel that way about her.

That evening, as they hung out at one of their friend's houses drinking, she sobbed through self-harming threats and locked herself in the bathroom with a butcher knife she found in the kitchen. With everyone panicking, he finally broke in through the window and found she had been making small, deep cuts in her thigh. Whether or not they were in the shape of his name is still in question.

This behavior continued for a week or so before the whole group of friends unanimously decided she was not ever to be invited to any social function ever again, and she eventually left them alone for the most part, but the suicide-threatening phone calls at 3am didn't cease on his end. He refused to talk to her besides the times she swore she was sitting there with a knife. After awhile, he refused to talk to her, period. So, the phone calls stopped.

'Til one day, a couple weeks later, when he got a phone call from Crazimort (oh! I promised an explanation of her name. All of the girls in his social group were very much into Harry Potter at the time, and after saying 'she who must not be named' every time they referred to her, they came up with something more efficient.) who was sitting outside his front door. Did I mention she lived 45 minutes away? She swore up and down that she was "all better" and holding two bottles of expensive Pinot (I know, never a good excuse, but we learn from our mistakes) pretty much insisted that she come in and "talk."

As I'm sure you have guessed, talking led to drinking, and drinking led to blacking out (worsened by the fact that she hardly drank any at all but poured it very generously for him), drinking led to touching, and touching led to, as he surmised the next morning as he put the pieces together, sex. (If you're not humming Portions For Foxes at this point, something is wrong.) When I say pieces, I mean waking up naked in a bed with a girl (also naked) who's completely obsessed with you, and as you eye the floor frantically for a condom wrapper said girl telling you that you didn't use one, and now she is "worried." And she tells you she'll take a morning after pill. (Boys: If this ever happens, watch her swallow it.)

Five days (I kid you not) go by before she calls him in a panic because she is pregnant. No, really! I had no idea that there were pregnancy tests that could tell you that soon! Ugh. So being a young, naive, terrified 19 year old boy he believes it. As this horror unfolds, he begins to question her, asking if he can go to doctors visits with her or see some paperwork, which she aggressively denies and produces some papers clearly printed off the Planned Parenthood website, respectively.

Which brings us (almost) up to speed, when I met her on Halloween (a month and a half after their first meeting) as she professed her "pregnancy" as loudly as her need for a cigarette. So fast forward to when the Ex and I start talking, and he is telling me this and I'm trying to process it and figure out what to do about the 16 missed calls.

I listen to the voicemail, in which she very sweetly says, "hey it's me! Just calling to say hi. Oh, also I have a question for you. Can you call me back when you get a chance? Thanks!"

So I, fearfully if we're going to be honest here, IMed her instead. She starts unloading her version of reality, fit for a TV movie, where she thought that she and I were destined to become best friends, but now I've betrayed her by liking the guy who has impregnated-and-then-abandoned her, and now we'll never have that chance. Then she's telling me how she's very much in love with him and that he's in love with her too, but he's using me to try to make her jealous; that they have some "issues" to work out but that they're going to be getting back together, no doubt about it. She explains that the pregnancy was on purpose, because they want to start having children together already. Then she transitions into a description of how awful a guy he is and how he's out to lie, cheat and steal (and impregnate, I guess), and how he's plotting to do that to me too. She tells me how needy he is, and that's why she broke up with him. She ends it with a grotesque description of the abortion she's going to get to terminate the fetus he "helped" to create. In short, she goes through every nutcase story in the book, though none of them matched up. Unfalteringly, I let her know that I appreciate her concern but I will figure things out for myself, and proceed to block her screen name. (And also the 5 more she uses to IM me after said blockage.)

He calls me later, and tells me that although he isn't 100% (or even 10%) sure that she was really pregnant, he wanted to do the "right thing" so he met up with her at a coffee shop to give her the $400 it cost for her (fake) abortion that she had supposedly had only minutes prior. He reasoned that at least this way, it was off of his hands and we could be rid of her for good.

Or could we?

Queen of the Crazies (and the beginning of The Ex), Part 1

As promised, a frightening little look down memory lane.

Put simply, I met The Ex 4 years ago through mutual friends. But more specifically, my friend and I had been at a concert, and had very briefly chatted with this seemingly-nice-enough girl who he recognized from Myspace. A week later, when we were out and about partying it up for Halloween, she texted my friend and turned out to be a block away. When we met up with her she was with a group of 8 or 9 people, and one of them was The Ex. I was instantly attracted to him, and after spending all night with them, I had a full blown crush.

Though he was extremely shy, this girl was quite the opposite, and spent the night loudly slurring obscenities, talking to strangers, smoking like a chimney, and being generally sloppy-drunk. Eventually she had to use the restroom. We walked into a house party and they pointed us in the right direction, though there was someone using it. We all waited with her outside the door, when she started yelling to the occupant. "Hurry the fuck up! Pregnant girl out here has to pee!" Of course I was initially shocked (pregnant? after the 1/2 a bottle of rum and the 2 packs of cigarettes? and who would sleep with you anyway? [sidenote: this girl is what some would refer to as an 12-pack on her best night... just being honest]) but when everyone laughed awkwardly I figured it must be a joke and forgot about it.

Sometime during the next week, I found The Ex on Myspace and we started messaging each other back and forth. He asked me if I would be at a mutual friend's concert that weekend in LA (which was halfway between each of us, since we lived a couple hours from each other), which I very quickly affirmed. I was late to the concert and ended up missing the whole show, but my real motivation was to see him, so it didn't matter to me. She was there too (along with all the people from Halloween), and was super friendly to me (and had also added me on Myspace I believe at this point). We all headed over to Toi Thai and I made a point of sitting next to him. We laughed and talked and flirted through the whole meal, and everyone was having a great time.... except for her. Who I will now be referring to as Crazimort, which I'll explain in a sec. She spent the whole meal either A. with her face buried in her folded arms, sobbing on the table; B. checking her temperature with the back of her hand; or C. dramatically getting up and going outside for air. The thing that was really striking was the fact that out of a whole table of her friends, not one asked her what was wrong or paid any attention to her obvious plea for attention.

When we walked out she insisted that The Ex be the one to drive her back to where everyone lived, and all of a sudden seemed to be feeling loads better. She apologized very sweetly to me for her behavior, and explained that she felt like she might be bleeding internally. (Wtf?? Right?) I told her I hoped she felt better and the three of us walked to our cars which were right next to each other. With a big smile, The Ex said his cute goodbyes and gave me a big hug, while Crazimort sat and pouted in his passenger seat.

The next morning, I had a Myspace message from her apologizing again for the way she had been acting at dinner, and telling me how she was so upset she'd wasted that time she could have been hanging out with me (because... all of a sudden we were really good friends? I wasn't aware). She said she was having a very rough time, what with the pregnancy and lots of "other things" going on in her life. She hoped I understood. I told her I did, and didn't comment on anything. She was starting to weird me out.

A few days later, I emailed The Ex and said the following (I never said I wasn't ballsy):

Hi :)
I had a great time last night.
I totally have a crush on you,
but I would never ever tell you.
<3 B

He wrote back and said something about how he thought I was really cute and it was too bad we lived so far apart. We exchanged a ton of messages and eventually moved to Instant Messenger, where we ended up talking until 4am and realized we were very much into each other. We figured out the soonest possible time that we could hang out and excitedly set a date for our first date. We left each other cute Myspace comments (yes, I know, it's totally nerdy, but I was 19 years old so cut me some slack) about how we couldn't wait to see each other and were both completely giddy about the whole thing.

.... And woke up the next morning to 16 missed calls, and one voicemail, from her number.

Dun dun dun.... To be continued. :)

Well-bred, Ill-spoken

I've never gotten over how strange it is to run into someone from what seems like a past life.

A few years ago, while I was still in college, I had met this guy on campus while I was studying in the language lab. I'd noticed him immediately as he entered - we'll call him Model Todd- he was hard to miss. He was especially good-looking, though not my typical "look" (not usually into the blond hair and blue eyes situation), great build, very sharply dressed, and struck up a conversation with me about the professors in the Spanish department. Though initially very handsome, when he spoke something changed. I'm the first to admit that confidence is super sexy, but there was something very socially stunted about the way he talked. It was almost as if his timing was off-kilter. His responses seemed delayed and choppy, and the conversation was generally just very awkward. I figured he was nervous (which is kind of charming in its own right), and when he asked to take me out for dinner the next night I accepted. I like to give people a fair chance, especially after a bold display of cajones.

The next night I drove to Model Todd's house to meet him for dinner. He lived on a cliff overlooking the ocean with an amazing view and a friendly roommate. When I got there (10 minutes late... as always) his roommate said he was getting ready and went to tell him I was there. So I sat waiting for 25 minutes while he "finished his hair." I kid you not - that was the explanation he gave me (lacking apology or even notice of my own late arrival) when he finally emerged from the bathroom with expertly coiffed spikes.

We took off for dinner in my car, because it turned out he didn't have one. He chose a pretty cool new restaurant that had a live jazz band that night and a great martini list. Our chat over dinner was almost identical to the one in the language lab, and it became hard to believe it was just nerves. Over the course of the conversation, he told me that he was born and raised in Connecticut, and moved out to Southern California to pursue his modeling career, which he does part time along with his college classes. I started to realize that the only time he was engaged in our conversation was while he was talking about modeling (as there was nothing else he liked talking about), and any time it was my turn to talk his eyes got more glazed than donuts. I'm sure we've all had one of those conversations that's just one of the people sitting there waiting 'til it's their turn to talk, right?

It got to a point where he would ask me some bland, generic question and visibly space out while I attempted to answer it quickly enough to keep his interest. Eventually, I gave up. The rest of the evening I learned about the diet, sleep schedule, and workout routine of any successful male model, why every guy with nice abs should wear only Armani button-ups, and why it's absolutely essential that I have my own airbrush tanning kit at home. Snore.

We paid (and split the bill, eat your heart out) and left. I was ready to bail as soon as I dropped him off, but he wanted me to see his portfolio. The potential image of this aggressively attractive 20-something guy in underwear was enough to convince me to park and hang out for a bit. And to be honest, the pictures were totally worth it. I left without kissing him goodnight or plans to contact him again, and that feeling was mutual. We didn't speak for years.

Up until, of course! Saturday, when I ran into him at the specialty grocery store down the road from my house. Apparently we've both moved to the same area. This time, he seemed completely different; he was now poised, confident, and smooth. It was hard to believe this was even the same Model Todd I had gone out with years ago. He had no problem making conversation, and seemed so interested in what I had been up to. He told me he'd always really regretted not seeing me again and wanted to hang out and catch up. How could I turn that down?

So Sunday night he came and picked me up (he now has a car... guess that modeling career finally paid off) and took me to the wine bar across the street. Apparently I was a little off about this new and improved version of Model Todd, as he still adores talking about himself. Much of it was review from the last date, and I was strongly reminded why I didn't want to hang out with him again the first time. But I graciously conversed, split the bill again, and went home.

Normal, right?

'Til the past few days, when he's called me quite a few times. I pick up every once in awhile, talk to him for a minute or two, and say I have things to get done and I'll talk to him later. I've politely turned down his requests to hang out. For some reason, he isn't getting the hint.

So I get to work today, and as I'm with my first client of the day I'm told by the receptionist that I have a "visitor." Go ahead. Guess who it was.

So here I am, in the middle of giving someone what's supposed to be a stress-relieving scalp-massage/shampoo, while I have Model Todd sitting on the next shampoo bowl talking to me. Embarrassing. I told him I'd be done in an hour if he wanted to come back, and he didn't even take that hint. He was still sitting a foot away from me, talking, when I finished blowdrying my second client, and I finally had to tell him that I'd call him later. Ugh!

So now I have an entire salon full of girls wanting to know A. WHO that guy was and how I know him, and B. how on EARTH I can be so uninterested in one of the studliest men on the planet.

I don't know where to begin.

Relics from the Past

It's funny to look at where I am now, and look at where I've come from, and realize that since the third grade, nothing has changed.

How many frogs has a girl got to kiss in her life to find a prince?


I could literally sit here and list every guy I've ever had some insurmountable crush on, but since you probably don't have 45 minutes to read a list of names you've never heard, I'll save you the time and tell you only the very best.

Timmy Slevin - 3rd/4th Grade

Fig. A - Cursive Practice, circa 1994

Jason Covella - 3rd-6th Grade
He was a year younger than myself, but that didn't stop my daydreamed love affair with the strawberry blond hottie in the classroom next door. At one point the school was putting on a play, "The Will," and knowing he was going to get the male lead, I spent the week before auditions praying to the love gods that I would get the female lead, which he would "kiss" at the end. Unfortunately I got the part of the villian (a much more substantial role, but nothing could console me at that point) and was painfully jealous of this girl Tracy for too long of a time.
8th grade rolled around and I was throwing the Birthday party to end all Birthday parties. At Party Time my mom and I were ordering some kind of balloon-made archway masterpiece from the woman behind the counter, who asked how old I was turning. "Oh, you're my son's age. You might know him." "What's his name?" "Jason Covella." I almost dropped dead.
I haven't seen him since.

Huey Rufenaught - 7th-10th Grade
The first day of Junior High was a stressful one, but upon sitting down in my health class at a table with two very cute boys (A. Huey and B. Nick Rossi [more on him in a minute]) life seemed to be ok again. As it turned out, our table mates were our new groups for all the projects in the upcoming semester, and all the better for me. Huey, a Vietnamese/Swiss wrestling stud, had me at "Hello." I spent every morning waiting impatiently for that class. Who knew health would be so fun? And likewise, who had any idea I was such a wrestling fan? I went to every match I could manage, even through my high school years. Fast forward to the day in 9th grade when the Marines hung out in our quad trying to show all the boys why it was cool to be in the military, and Huey kicked every other guy's ass at both pull-ups and sit-ups. And did so without his shirt on. I was unable to move, let alone look away.

Nick Rossi - 7th Grade
Nick and Huey became friends, and although Huey had some magical essence about him, Nick was adorable and for me a lot less intimidating. He and I talked and flirted endlessly in our Literature class 5th period, and none of my friends could understand how he could be so nice to me when I guess he was sort of a big jerk otherwise. We developed a very innocent flirtation relation, which involved me wearing his sweatshirt. Totes the big deal at the time. Come summer he went away to a camp for a few months but wrote me a few sweet postcards and signed them "Love, Nick". When 8th grade rolled around, we hadn't seen each other in months and there was a flirtation no more. Sigh.

Josh Pometta -10th/11th Grade
After my freshman year I transferred to a different high school in the area, where I found Josh. He was kind of a bad-ass, which is totally not my type, but I found him excruciatingly sexy for some reason. Word quickly got around, and his girlfriend Jessica (who happened to the the captain of the cheerleading squad) was all but excited about it. He loved the attention, apparently, and went out of his way to flirt and hang out with me at every available opportunity, which I absolutely ate up. We always had at least a couple classes together which made school that much more enjoyable, 'til I ended up in a history class with his girlfriend. She confronted me in class one day over a little hot-tub get together I was having that night, which she'd found out he'd RSVPed to. I couldn't help but wonder why she wasn't more mad at him that he had decided to go.
In 11th grade my best friend and I were sitting around joking about this ridiculous crush I had and decided, just as a funny stupid idea, to make a little shrine thing. I bought his football pin (a fundraiser where they take a photo of each of the players and make each one his own pins, which they sell for a few bucks a piece) and put it in there, along with a few pictures of the two of us from different times in class, at parties, etc. He'd left his t-shirt at my house the night of the hot-tub party which I put in there too, along with a necklace he had broken in class and had given to me to fix.
Eventually, when said best friend started dating him (I've never gotten over that, by the way. Thanks a lot.) I threw all that shit in a bag and left it on her doorstep in a fit of jealousy and resentment. Oh high school... those were the good ol' days.

After crushes upon crushes which were nothing but fruitless and frustrating, I finally had my first boyfriend just before I graduated from high school. It was the same old first relationship, I didn't really know what I was doing, but I liked him, he liked me, and we spent every second of time that we had together until we were so tired of being together that we broke up, but kept seeing each other every so often just to help dig that knife in a little further. I moved away to college and he'd come to visit every so often, we would hook up, I would remember why I had grown tired of him, we would fight, and he would leave.
I finally got over him the day I met the next crush, who, to this day, is still the most intense and dramatic crush I have ever lived to tell about.

Rob K. - Freshman year of college
We met online and it turned out he lived a few blocks from my dorm. I was only a little freshman, but he was a senior, with the same major as me, in the honors program, and on the rugby team. He was funny and charming, and in my opinion a total stud, and we had instant chemistry. Our first date, coffee, was supposed to be short and sweet but ended up lasting 4 hours. We realized we wanted to keep hanging out, so we drove to the top of a mountain and watched a meteor shower. I was done for.
The next month and a half were the most magical I had had in my 18 years. Thanksgiving weekend away from him was tediously long and we spent hours on the phone recounting how much we missed each other and how we wished we could fly to one another's houses. When we got back to school I couldn't have been happier to see him, but all of a sudden he felt like he couldn't be in a relationship because he'd be moving after he graduated. In JUNE. I was crushed. We didn't talk for a couple months and I felt I had moved on. After Christmas break it was his roommate's birthday party, and I decided to make an appearance. He spent the whole time staring at me, flirting with me, hugging me, and finally telling me how much he missed me. That's where it all went to shit.
I spent the next 3-4 months staying at his house almost every night, after he'd go out and get drunk. I thought I was completely head over heels in love with him and that he felt the same way. It was one sided.
One night I went over to hang out and a group of girls showed up. He disappeared into his room with one of them, all the other girls left, and I started to feel really odd sitting there in the living room with his roommates, wondering what was going on. When I got up to see, the door was closed and locked, and inside was my purse and dorm room key.
I sobbed violently for the next hour while his roommates banged on his door, tried picking his lock, and tried to climb through his window to get my purse for me. They yelled to him and called his phone and he didn't answer. He finally opened the door a crack and threw my purse out.
I spent the next 9 months on a steady stream of Vicodin from the moment I woke up until I went to bed; otherwise I couldn't stop crying. I sent him poems I wrote, lyrics to songs, music videos, more poems, more songs, letters, entries in my diary, pictures of us.... and whatever totally shameful things you should never EVER send someone who broke your heart. I would drive by his house to see if his car was there. I would look at his Myspace. Eventually I started sleeping with whoever wanted me, including his roommate, with the hope that a night of attention from some other guy would fill up the empty space I had in the pit of my stomach. It didn't.
Two nights before he was going to move to Washington D.C., he called me. I thought I was going to throw up. My heart was racing. He said he missed me, that he wanted to come over and see me before he left. He came over around 1 in the morning, completely shitfaced. He kept trying to have sex with me. I wanted to snuggle. He got angry and picked me up off my bed and threw me against the wall. I tried to get back on and he kept pushing me to the floor. I tried to stand up and he kicked me in the ribs. Finally he noticed I was bawling and let me back on and passed out. I woke up, covered in bruises, to find him scrambling to get dressed. "I have no idea how I got here. I have to go."
That was the last day I saw him, the last day I spoke to him, and the last day I ever missed him.

Sophomore/Junior Year of College
These were tough years for me because I always lived with a group of guys, anywhere from 5-14. And the guys in the town where I lived all looked like they should be modeling for Abercrombie (which a few of them actually did). I ended up hooking up with a few of them, others I would profess my love to and they would say it would never work because we lived together but would flirt to death with me, others had girlfriends... but in the end nothing of substance ever came out of those exchanges. Those two years were kind of a blur but I'm sure I was having a great time anyway.

Since then I've stuck with more normal relationships with guys. More like an actual dating, or serious relationships, and less like a star-struck mega crush that totally consumes me. I'll never forget how fast my heart would beat though, or how one smile could make the rest of my week disappear into obscurity.

Double sigh.