Tag Archives: married man

Feb16

X Factor

Posted on by
Standard

I’d just found out the man who kissed me on Lundi Gras was married. Now I understood why he never game me his home number, why he never called me, why he hadn’t asked me out on a date. I was sad…sad to still be without a boyfriend, sad to still be unloved and alone. I didn’t want to feel sad so I tried to drown my sadness with alcohol.

It started with a box of wine. Some of the guys who lived in my dorm, Iberville Suites, played on an intermural softball team. They had a game that Friday afternoon, and they were we going to prepare for the game by drinking boxed wine. I chipped in a couple of bucks, so the alcohol belonged to me too. The box and two cans of spray paint were taken outside. First the entire box was painted silver, then a black x was painted on each side. The wine was no longer simply wine; it was X Factor.

I drank my fair share of the X Factor and was pretty well drunk when I walked over to the softball field. I’m not exactly sure what happened next, but I have a vague memory of heckling a member of the opposing team by insinuating he was gay. I was relying on the guy’s own homophobia to make him uncomfortable, but I should have really kept my big mouth shut.

One of the guys from the dorm was pretty drunk too, and he was also heckling the opposing team. He got kicked out of the whole area for his efforts; the umpire said he couldn’t even sit in the stands and watch the game.

The next thing I remember was thinking it was a good idea to call my mother and share my woes. Yes, that’s right, I was drunk and thought it was reasonable to call my mother and discuss my newfound knowledge of the marital status of the man I’d thought was into me. For some ill-conceived reason, I called her from the pay phone in the lobby of my dorm and proceeded to broadcast my business in front of God and everybody. It was as if I wanted the whole world to know what a loser I was.

I don’t think I told my mother I’d been drinking. Maybe she pretended she didn’t know what was going on. (My mother has always been very good with denial.) In any case, I told her all about the guy with his smooth DJ voice and his fake DJ name and his wife.

At your age, my mother said, you don’t need this.

She was right, I realized, although I think it’s more accurate that no woman needs to be involved with a married man at any age. Although I knew my mom was right, my heart was still broken, so I kept drinking.

My friends decided we needed more alcohol, so we got into a car and went to the grocery store. I remember standing in a brightly lit aisle, picking out bottles of Boone’s Farm soda pop-sweet wine. In those days a bottle could be had for $1.75, a good price even on a college student’s budget.

While we were out and about, I convinced my friends to take me to Tower Records so I could buy a cassette tape featuring the Ugly Kid Joe song “I Hate Everything About You.” I was feeling a lot of negative emotion and longed for music that would allow me to wallow.

I had a bit of a crisis at the cash register when I found out Tower accepted Visa and MasterCard but not Discover, which was the only form of payment I had on me. Luckily one of my friends agreed to pay for the tape when I said I could pay him back after I went to the credit union on Monday. I’m sure he was willing to do anything in his power to avoid witnessing me meltdown in the middle of the record store.

Back at the dorm, we drank, and my friends tried to cheer me up, although I was really inconsolable. People sing about drinking to forget, but alcohol never helped me to forget. All alcohol did was help me remember my problems in vivid Technicolor detail.

Oh shit! In the middle of the drinking and the moaning, I remembered something important. I was scheduled to work the dorm’s front desk from 4am to 7am that very morning. I sloppily confided my problem to my friend who also worked the desk in the dorm. What was I going to do?

It was about 2am, too late to call anyone and ask him or her to cover my shift. I was going to have to work, drunk or not.

My coworker friend (who’d also been drinking but held her liquor better than I ever did) devised a plan. I would drink a big glass of water, go to my room, lie down in my bed, and try to nap for a couple of hours. She would stay awake but quit drinking. At 3:55, she’d come and get me, and we’d go down to the lobby and work the shift together. It seemed like the best I could do, so I went to my bed and lay down. A couple hours later, my friend and I were in the lobby. I sat behind the desk and tried to hold my head upright and stay awake, while my friend sat on a couch and dozed.

Sometime earlier in the night, I’d heard that the fellow who’d gotten kicked out of the softball game had ended up in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning. I’d been vaguely worried, but hadn’t thought much about it until he sauntered into the dorm around 4:45 in the morning.

Oh my god! I gushed. I heard you went to the hospital. Are you ok?

I’m fine, he shrugged. After they pumped my stomach, I went out drinking again.

I could not believe this fool. This chain of events was one of the dumbest things I’d ever heard.

I jumped to my feet, but didn’t stop there. I stood up on my chair and proclaimed, You are a stupid motherfucker! That’s the official Iberville Suites opinion of you!

He just laughed as he got on the elevator, while my friend talked me down from my perch.

The rest of the shift was uneventful. Time crawled by and I struggled to remain alert. My friend sat in the lobby with me the whole time. At 7am, she opened the curtains and unlocked the front door. We’d fulfilled our obligation, and I didn’t get myself fired. We went up to our rooms to pass out for a few hours until it was time to start our Saturday.

Feb13

Married Man

Posted on by
Standard

I called the DJ I’d met on Lundi Gras a few times at his work. We chatted amicably, but he never gave me his home number or asked me out on a date.

The third or fourth time we talked, he said, You know I’m married, right?

Well no, in fact I did not know he was married. How would I know? It hadn’t occurred to me to check his finger for a ring because I naively assumed a married man would not be kissing a young woman he’d just met in the French Quarter. Evidently I was wrong.

I told him good-bye, hung up the phone, and proceeded to get very, very drunk.

There was a box of wine involved and an intramural softball game where I heckled the members of the opposing team. Later there was a trip to the grocery store where my friends and I bought bottles of Boone’s Farm sangria and Strawberry Hill. Before we drank in a dorm room, I convinced the driver to go to Tower Records so I could buy the cassette tape by Ugly Kid Joe featuring the song “I Hate Everything About You.”

After the softball game and before the trip to the grocery store and Tower Records, I called my mother from the payphone in the lobby of my dorm.

I told her what happened. This man…phone number…married. I don’t remember if I told her about the kiss.

At your age, she told me, you don’t need this.

As if at some other age it might make sense to get involved with a married man? It was a strange way to phrase the advice, but I think she meant, You’ve got your whole life ahead of you; don’t fuck it up so soon.

I honed in on you don’t need this and realized she was right. This man barely seemed interested in me and he was married? Forget it!

(In retrospect, I wonder if he was trying to find a young woman who would pursue him, someone he could blame if his marriage fell apart. Honey, it wasn’t really what I wanted, I imagine him telling his wife. She kept after me until I was worn down.)

I never called the DJ again, and he never called me.

Several months later, I was working retail. We were allowed to listen to the radio, but only the local country music station. I usually worked nights, but one week I picked up a day shift to help out a coworker. The country music station was blasting from the speakers and guess who the DJ was. Yep, the married man who’d kissed me on Lundi Gras. He talked about his wife and his new baby. What? Baby? Yep, he sure was smitten with his new baby and the wonderful wife who’d produced it for him.

Had his wife been pregnant when he kissed me? I did some quick math. Yes, she had. She had certainly been pregnant the night he kissed me. She’d been pregnant when I called him at work. She’d been pregnant when he told me he was married.

What kind of game had he been playing? I thought about calling him and demanding answers but decided I was better off not talking to him.

My mom was right. At my age, I didn’t need such complications.

Now I’m glad I didn’t call and demand answers, didn’t make a scene, didn’t make his life difficult. While I don’t think he should have kissed me while he was married to someone else (especially a pregnant someone else), I hope I was a blip on the screen of an otherwise happy relationship.

So strange to think his baby is now older than I was at the time her father kissed me.

So strange to think I followed my mother’s advice and I’m glad I did.

Feb12

Lundi Gras

Posted on by
Standard

It was Lundi Gras, the day before Mardi Gras, and the entire city was in party mode. It was the perfect time for kissing a stranger in the French Quarter and bringing a stranger home to share my bed.

I was a student at a university in New Orleans, adrift in-between boyfriends. I’d recently freed myself from my controlling high school sweetheart who’d thwarted my plan to slowly drift apart when I went off to college by following me there. I was looking for love but settling for sex in those party days of my early 20s.

I’d gotten a temporary job for the Mardi Gras season through a friend of a friend. The t-shirt shop where I worked was tucked into a quiet corner of the Quarter and was only open during daylight hours. After closing up shop, the woman I was working with and I met our mutual friend and took our party to the streets.

Our first stop was the convenience store where cans of cheap beer floated in a tall cooler filled with slushy ice. The beer was nasty, but the price was right for working-class collage students at only a dollar for not just one but two cans. I downed one of my beers quickly, while it was still icy cold. I enjoyed the way the alchohol went straight to my head.

Where all did we walk that night? I have a hazy memory of the fountain at the Riverwalk and crowds of people packed in to listen to Dr. John play. It was too much for us, or maybe we didn’t see anyone we knew, but for whatever reason, we wandered back to the Quarter.

I think I met the DJ on Jackson Square. We met in some quiet place, because I was able to hear him when he spoke. He was a DJ at a local radio station. Although his radio name was the same as a classic rock legend, the DJ worked at a country music station. At some point during our conversation, he leaned over and kissed me. It was a rather chaste kiss, but it made my head spin as much as the beer had. He liked me! He was an older man (maybe even 30!), an adult with a real job, and he liked me! Usually my friends got all the guys, but this grown-ass man liked me.

My friends quickly got bored and urged me to come on! There was to be more from this night than me getting kissed. There was bound to be more exitement around the next corner.

I said good-bye to this exciting man who I expected to change my life.

Call me at the radio station, he said to me and told me the hours he worked. I was too naive to know that a man who really liked me would scribble his home phone number on a scrap of paper and press it into my hand.

We hadn’t gone far before we ran into the two boys* from Chicago in town from Mardi Gras. My friend had met them somewhere (a bar probably) a night or two before and befriended them. They were maybe even crashing on my friend’s floor. My memory is fuzzy after all these years. They were dressed like they’d come from the video for a song by the Black Crows–all patched pants and nouveau hippie.

The one guy had dark hair. He was nice enough, but I don’t remember his name or much about him. His friend, however, was lovely. His name was Michael and he looked like a nouveau hippie angel. His blondish hair was longish and curly, but he looked more like a cherub than a Greek god. He was good-looking, but attainable.

The five of us hung out the rest of the night, walking the streets of the Quarter. At some point I’d drunk my second 50 cent beer, but I don’t think I’d had any more alcohol than that. I was tipsy but not sloppy, and I was having a great time.

The more I hung out Michael, the more I liked him, and the more I liked him, the more I wanted him in a carnal way. Emboldened by the alcohol and the earlier kiss from a stranger (which proved I was desirable), I decided I was going to ask this young man to come home (and by home, I mean dorm) with me.

I waited until we were stopped on the sidewalk so my friends could talk to someone they knew and I didn’t. Michael’s friend had wandered out of earshot, and the two of us were standing there a little awkwardly, two wallflowers at the world’s biggest party.

I turned to him and smiled. Would you think I was a terrible person if I asked you to come home with me?

He grinned at me, said, I wouldn’t think that at all, and hugged me.

Michael and I spent the rest of the evening out grinning at each other. We knew what was going to happen next, even if our friends were still clueless.

I don’t remember how we got back to my dorm, but I remember us going to my room where my roommate thankfully was not. We had friendy sex, them grabbed a few hours of sleep next to each other in my single bed. In the morning, I walked him downstairs and watched him leave through the big glass doors at the front of the building.

I never saw or heard from Michael again, but I’ll never forget the Lundi Gras when I was kissed by a stranger and slept with an angel.

* by “boys” I mean two young men old enough to consent

Photo courtesy of The Library of Congress