JEREMY deserves more than a passing mention, I guess. I know he's stable and sensible and much more committed (Mom: "......than that Hansen fellow-- Me: It's 'Olson,' Mother, please."), but I just can't seem to get into him, even with my boyfriend's being so preoccupied with his future lately.
I hate to say it, but Jere reminds me a lot, in essense, of Cindy's brother Chuck in my virginal days. (Donna: "Like a rape artist?" Me: "No, I wouldn't quite put it that way.) They used to live in this rambling Victorian mansion in Chula Vista that was built by the town mayor and is a historical landmark. At the time I saw it, en route to a camping trip on the coast, her energized type-e mother cum free lance writer was in the process of remodeling it. It's since become their summer house. Cindy has eight brothers and sisters, all in various stages of overweight. Thus there were two large reefers in the high-ceilinged, thirty-foot long kitchen facing the conservatory, plus a chest freezer in the butler's pantry, soon to be the new laundry room. Her office manager father, a quiet authoritarian type who only intruded when necessary, set up shop in the study, formerly the front parlor. We never saw him.
Chuck, his third oldest son, was the equivalent of a college senior but out of school and working hard as a mechanic. Very blue-collar. He was instantly taken with me and had no bones, so to speak, about showing it. Like the Jermeister, he's husky, with fashionable long sideburns and not bad looking, but about five eleven. The first time we met, he had his cute auburn-haired stud of a friend Josh Smith lift up my foot like a horse, nonchalantly remove my boot, and toss it up on the high, steeply-pitched roof.
"Just trying to get a rise out of you," the guys teased, obviously having been briefed by Cindy about my personality "flaws".
"She's so calm," said Chuck, tching like my old-fashioned cousin Dielle.
They had to go through the attic to retrieve it. It used to be the servants' quarters and hadn't been touched since the turn of the last century. It gave me the fuckin' creeps with its vast empty chambers and numerous black cast iron garment hooks protruding from the low sloped ceiling, its tight meandering staircase tumbling all the way down to the backyard like a secret tunnel. I could picture dead bodies hanging from those hooks, Texas Chainsaw Massacre style; at least, you might lose an eye on one.
Sophomore year when Cindy and Sue and I made a stab at living together in an off-campus student apartment complex, Chuck visited a few times and tried to date me, driving up from his bachelor pad in Chino, where he lived with his best friend. But he was too aggressive and put me off, jaw flapping nonstop about all the girlfriends he'd gotten knocked up as we zigzagged in the dark up to the lake in his muscular rebuilt vette, his calloused hand fidgeting on my wary thigh the whole time. It was so cold and black we couldn't even see the water, like walking into a wall of darkness, so we just got out of the car, stretched our legs, and turned back around. He almost bought a brand-new cadillac for cheap, he revealed on the way home, cuz the owner committed suicide in it and wasn't found for almost ten days. However, no one could get rid of the cloying reek without tearing out all the upholstery, an expense Chuck just couldn't afford, not with child support for two high school girlfriends. The story chilled me through.
Back at the apartment he kept picking me up and swinging me around like a doll, and I quickly saw the disadvantages of being petite and newly slender. I was being totally manhandled.
"Just wait until you girls bed down for the night! I'm gonna break through that locked door of yours, Tina, and have my way with ya!" Chuck teased all day. "That's right, rape. I'll getcha, you little daunting damsel!!!!!!!!!!"
He never touched me sexually though after one awkward kiss.
Chuck took us trampolining at _______ Park but it wasn't exactly my thing, his glaring at my boobs bouncing up and down or waiting for my top to rise up, so Sue and I took off for the ferris wheel. To our chagrin, we were the only ones on it that time of night and Chuck talked the ride conductor into giving us several extra turns. We thought we'd never stop. Each time we got to the bottom and waited for the wheel to slow, it would gain momentum again and head back up, while Cindy's l'infante terrible and cheap date extraordinaire of a brother laughed and waved. He would've left us stalled at the top for an hour if it weren't against park regulations, he joked.
But the final blow was his asking to borrow my credit card. For a boat. Knowing he'd stick me with the payments, I had to give him a heart-to-heart, the familiar fearsome one-two, Cindy's brother or no, and he never came to campus again, not while I was there.
I said to later to Chelle, "The bugger was so potent, I was afraid to sit in the same jacuzzi with him!"
She smiled. "You haven't met enough older guys, yet. Wait until you date one with bucks."
"That dismal, eh?"
"Well, lemme say it this way: Life isn't exactly like a Harlequin romance novel."
I wanted to say Chuck expected me to give myself to him for nothing, but remained silent. He never asked me out to dinner or anything like that. He was probably the type that wouldn't pay unless you put out. Each girl was a closet prostitute.
Recent Comments