I started thinking: Maybe forever. I swear I only started contemplating suicide so I wouldn’t have to deal with her any longer. I could see the headline on the front page of the New York Post the next day: Man, Early Twenties, Strangles Self in Central Park.
Finally—finally!—we started talking again—about her plans for the future, of all things. How fun. She rambled on and on about how she wanted to go to law school or something. Her goddamn plans annoyed me, so I tuned out.
My eyes began to rove, and then I was bewitched by a girl I saw. An angel, actually. She was short—only about five-foot one or two. And what wonderful hair. It was the color of anthracite coal, shiny and black, whipping in the wind she created with her speed. She was walking briskly, like she had to get someplace in a hurry, on the right side of the pathway across from the side I was sitting, dodging the people marching toward her.
And she had brown eyes, too. I could tell.
Her breasts were large, but in perfect proportion to her petite, compact body. She was a sleek black Stealth Bomber, parading uninterrupted and unnoticed by all except me. She was a miniature but glamorous model dressed in tiny white shorts that barely covered her ass. She was the type of girl who could make any man grovel on his knees, begging for her love.
I can’t adequately explain how I felt when I saw this girl. My mind began racing so fast. I remember breaking out into a cold sweat. All at once, I felt both love and hatred—both obsession and revulsion—for this girl I’d never even seen before. She was sexy, yet cute; confident, yet timid; mature, yet callow. She looked just like Maria. And she walked right by me as swiftly as she had arrived.
Chapter 2
Dancing in the Dark
The thing about Maria is that I think about her all the time. Sounds like a load of shit, huh? Hell, lots of people think of lots of stuff “all the time,” right? But—and this must be made perfectly clear before I go on—I literally think about Maria all the time. No thought in my head is absent of Maria altogether.
It’s hard not to, because she was my first and last love, my first and last real girlfriend. Sometimes I think about her for a second or two—like if I hear a song that we danced to or pass by a restaurant we ate in—and a moment later I’ll think about her in a different way. But usually, like that day in the park, tons of stuff pops and flashes and echoes through my mind, like fireworks blowing up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon at midnight. It’s like I’m on an acid trip until someone pinches me. Actually, it’s more like a bad movie that you just have to sit in the dark and watch until it’s finally finished—and then, just when you think it’s finished, it starts up again, and you have to watch it all over.
It’s impossible to get Maria out of my mind when that happens. It’s almost as if I have to re-live my whole relationship with her, from beginning to end, before my mind finally moves on to something else. And that something else is always Maria.
As cliché as it sounds, Maria changed my life. Had I not met her, I would’ve wound up a total geek or an alcoholic. Probably the latter.
In high school, when all these losers were dating lots of girls and getting laid, I never saw myself as much of a player. I guess I was pretty good-looking. And I think I usually got along pretty well with girls initially because of that. But still, in the end it was usually the more socially attractive guys—the goddamn jocks and hoods, especially—that got the girls, and not me. It always seemed that the bigger the asshole the guy was, the more the girls liked him.
Honestly, beyond my initial attraction, after a few minutes of conversation most chicks began to bore me. Nervously, I’d start cracking jokes about their hair or clothing, fearful that there was nothing else worth talking about. They weren’t always funny jokes, though. Having a sense of humor is a good thing, and that always helped me get girls to pay attention to me, on top of my looks. But what I mean is that more often than not my joking would become demeaning, as if I was blaming the girl for my boredom. I’m not sure if I noticed it before I met Maria, but I certainly noticed it today.
Marriage was a frightening thought, always. If I ever fell in love with a girl, how the hell would we manage to stay interested in each other for maybe thirty, forty, or fifty years? My friend Mike tells me that his parents, married over thirty years now, have developed a rut. Basically, they’ve had the same jobs since they were married; they go on vacation the same time each year to the same place; and they spend every possible weekend at his trailer in Upstate New York.
But Mike speaks of this rut fondly, as if it’s okay to have a predictable relationship with the only changes being his Mom’s ass swelling and Dad’s hairline receding more and more each year. Frankly, the thought of getting to know a chick so well that you could detect her fart a mile away was pathetic. It made me want to vomit.
With such fears embedded in my mind, I always found it hard to justify being civil to a girl for more than five minutes after I met her. Occasionally, I’d date a girl just to have a girlfriend, because that was the cool thing to do. But I knew that after a few months of relentless conversation and ho-hum dates, a rut would develop and one of us would decide to break it off.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that before Maria, I never believed in love.
I met Maria at the first high school dance of the new year, on February 2, 1992, with about four months left to go in my junior year. Back then, everybody went to the dances. Once a month, that was the place to be.
After getting dropped off by our parents, every month we’d spend three hours stuffed in a muggy gymnasium, all hoping to leave later that night with a phone number. Singing “I got her number, I got her number,” hoods would skip out of the dance at eleven, showing off to their buddies. How I longed to be one of those guys.
With their sloppy hair and wide, baggy jeans that generally hung low enough to show a little ass crack, they were neither admired like jocks nor dissed like nerds. It was as if the Guidos of the late ’80s had morphed into a similar animal of a different species. Pot- and cigarette-smoking, hip-hop-dancing losers, they wore colorful baseball caps, always backwards, of teams they’d never heard of, and drank forties of bitter malt liquor on street corners all over Queens. And they always seemed to walk hunkered over, like hunch backs, like hound dogs following a scent on the pavement. With their dark, floppy clothing and multicolored caps, hoods resembled homeless circus clowns to those who despised them. Nobody ever put these guys in charge of St. Ann’s, or any other high school for that matter, and yet somehow they ran the place. Everybody stood in awe of the hoods. No—we feared them. And we scorned them if only because they couldn’t be them.
Rebels without clues, my small circle of friends and I refused to join the ranks of the faddish hoods, opting instead to maintain the Guido style of the late-80s. Donning my Cavaricci jeans and a white turtleneck, I sat amongst my pals in the cafeteria dance after dance during my first three years of high school. Sipping Cokes and sweating to death, I’d think: Damn, why did I where a turtleneck? And then: Because it looks good, that’s why. The sweat would dribble off my brow and create a puddle between my chalk white Nike sneakers. I remember seeing that puddle many times.