Day 02 - Your first love, in great detail
I feel kind of weird telling you that my ex-husband was my first love. In high school, I was busy--busy with jobs, busy with clubs, busy with classes and being everyone's friend. I had one great enduring crush and a thousand shorter ones, but that particular heady rush, the rain-drenched kiss under streetlights in SoHo, the crazy jealousy and inability to be apart for three minutes--for all the good and bad that it encompasses, Rocky was my first love, and I was his.
The first time we met, I had gone to the Angelika Film Center with John (now Zoe), Ira and Patrick to see "Vanya on 42nd Street" on opening night. We all got to say hello to Andre Gregory and shake his hand; when he asked, "How are you?" of Zoe she replied, in a deadpan way that perfectly encapsulated who she (I get really hung up on pronouns when I am talking about the past, with her, but "she" feels more right) was at the time: "Persisting." Even Andre Gregory was a bit taken aback, but the four of us laughed all the way down the escalators.
At the door of the theater, two of the ushers were double-checking tickets. (I would learn later that when movies sold out, people would just buy a ticket for anything else that was playing, and sneak in that way. The problem was that when the Angelika was sold out, it was sold out, and things could quickly turn into fire hazards with people blocking the aisles and sitting on the floor.) I was so wrapped up in talking about Art and Literature and Film with my new Writer Friends--it was October, 1994, and I'd been at NYU for about six weeks--that I didn't pay much attention as we all slowly filed into the theater.
Once we did get to the door, my ticket stub was collected by the boy on the right, a skinny thing with dark, pretty eyes, fantastic clothes, and a shock of bright blue hair. His name tag, because those boys were all assholes, read "Sandro."
The Real Sandro: Far left. Not-Sandro: Front.
Quite apart from the facts that I was 18 years old and basically a walking hormone to begin with, and that I found him incredibly good-looking, and that his blue hair kind of lit up this secret inner freak I have--and hadn't realized, until that very moment, the girl who likes weird hair and tattoos and piercings--the thing is, when our hands brushed, I felt sparks. I've met a lot of people since then, had a lot of dates and flirtations and courtships and even whole relationships. But that kind of *pop!*spark!*bang!*--that doesn't happen every day, or every time.
Months later, back after a horrible Christmas break, I had to find a job. My roommate Joanna had started working at that same theater just a few weeks before, and she brought me to work with her one night because she had a hunch that Frank, the general manager, would love me on sight. She was right; he did. Frank reminded me of nothing so much as Santa in an ugly olive suit--he had twinkling blue eyes and rosy cheeks and probably drank too much and had the very best laugh of anyone I've ever known. We sat and talked for a couple of hours, about movies and music--both of our biggest loves--and as we were saying goodbye, he offered me a job. He didn't have any cashier positions open, but he did need an usher, and it could be me if I wanted it to be.
I liked Frank so much it would have been dumb to say no, plus: Free movies. And on my first day, after I was outfitted with a horrible vest and a nametag with my actual name on it, I was led downstairs and thrown into the pit of testosterone that was the usher crew.
And ooooh, those guys hated me, for a long time. They didn't like that their boys' club had been crashed by a girl, and they didn't like that Frank gave me all the hours I asked for (he did blatantly play favorites), and they generally hazed me for a lot longer than was probably necessary. Some were nicer than others. My friend Gil was always a sweetheart, and defended me a lot. And Not-Sandro, whose name turned out to be Rocky, spent a lot of time with me. Over the next couple of months it grew into this crush with a mind of its own--I couldn't even think about anything else because I was so busy trying to decode the tangle of signals he was sending me. He ignored me last night--he hates me! But wait, just two days ago he had me sitting on his lap while we both collected tickets.
First love is so confusing! I mean, even moreso than all the loves that follow it!
Finally, one night in May--on the first anniversary of the day my grandmother had died, in fact--Rocky cut out of work early, and I, pleading a transparently phony headache, begged off a few minutes later too. I didn't know what was going to happen, exactly, but it felt like... something would. I caught up with Rocky at the corner, waiting for the light to change, and before I could even say anything, he'd turned around and kissed me.
Then we were inseparable, and then he was moving in, and then I was pregnant, and then we were married. I guess things happen kind of fast when there's no one around to stop you, and we were both pretty much on our own at that point. Getting married was never my idea, and I spent our whole wedding day in varying states of tears. Looking back, that probably wasn't a very good omen.
Still, after a bumpy little adjustment period, after Adam was born, things were really, really good, for a couple of months, until suddenly they really, really weren't.
This was probably the first picture of the three of us, July 1996 at my parents' beach house. Adam was about six weeks old.
I'm going to pass over the "great detail" part of the bad times. They lasted too long and they were wholly destructive, for all three of us. If I could do things again, I'd do them differently. But I'm a lot stronger and a lot smarter now than I was when I was 20, 21, 22.
It has been a very long time since Rocky and I parted ways for good--eleven years now, really, although for another two years we'd keep trying to make half-assed gos of repairing things. That was never going to work. We'd broken each other.
The night after my 30th birthday, my ex-husband took me to dinner at his favorite Thai restaurant in Manhattan. We talked about his new marriage and work and my most recent relationship crash and burn, and we talked about ourselves. I finally told him, for the very first time, that when I saw him again after we started working together, I remembered the first time we'd really met, when even brushing his hand made me feel like I was on fire. He couldn't believe I'd never told him that before. Neither could I. And I said, toward the end of the evening, that I thought, if we were to meet for the first time that day, nothing would ever have happened. That we had a chance and we lost it, and that we were both smarter now. I think in all the years we'd known each other, that was the most I'd ever hurt him, and the thing was--I was trying to be kind.
There is a very quiet kind of peace between us now. For the longest time, I thought we would keep buzzing around each other like flies, one or the other of us never quite satisfied that it was really over. But sometime when I wasn't paying attention, it all faded away. All the bad things faded into distant memories, weird and scary stories I can retell without any emotion at all most of the time. The good ones are the ones that sneak up on me and tug at my heart. By the time our divorce was finalized--weirdly enough, nine years to the day from that very first time we'd met--it didn't hurt anymore. It felt good for us both to be free again.
These days, he is a wonderful father and a good husband. He still works in the same movie theater where we met, managing the cafe. He makes more money than I do. I still find him almost absurdly good-looking, and except for the fact that we have biological evidence of that relationship, I don't think I would believe it had ever happened. I don't understand anymore what either of us was thinking.
Except that maybe we were thinking that we loved each other, and we loved our baby boy, and maybe we were thinking that would always be enough.
The first time we met, I had gone to the Angelika Film Center with John (now Zoe), Ira and Patrick to see "Vanya on 42nd Street" on opening night. We all got to say hello to Andre Gregory and shake his hand; when he asked, "How are you?" of Zoe she replied, in a deadpan way that perfectly encapsulated who she (I get really hung up on pronouns when I am talking about the past, with her, but "she" feels more right) was at the time: "Persisting." Even Andre Gregory was a bit taken aback, but the four of us laughed all the way down the escalators.
At the door of the theater, two of the ushers were double-checking tickets. (I would learn later that when movies sold out, people would just buy a ticket for anything else that was playing, and sneak in that way. The problem was that when the Angelika was sold out, it was sold out, and things could quickly turn into fire hazards with people blocking the aisles and sitting on the floor.) I was so wrapped up in talking about Art and Literature and Film with my new Writer Friends--it was October, 1994, and I'd been at NYU for about six weeks--that I didn't pay much attention as we all slowly filed into the theater.
Once we did get to the door, my ticket stub was collected by the boy on the right, a skinny thing with dark, pretty eyes, fantastic clothes, and a shock of bright blue hair. His name tag, because those boys were all assholes, read "Sandro."
The Real Sandro: Far left. Not-Sandro: Front.
Quite apart from the facts that I was 18 years old and basically a walking hormone to begin with, and that I found him incredibly good-looking, and that his blue hair kind of lit up this secret inner freak I have--and hadn't realized, until that very moment, the girl who likes weird hair and tattoos and piercings--the thing is, when our hands brushed, I felt sparks. I've met a lot of people since then, had a lot of dates and flirtations and courtships and even whole relationships. But that kind of *pop!*spark!*bang!*--that doesn't happen every day, or every time.
Months later, back after a horrible Christmas break, I had to find a job. My roommate Joanna had started working at that same theater just a few weeks before, and she brought me to work with her one night because she had a hunch that Frank, the general manager, would love me on sight. She was right; he did. Frank reminded me of nothing so much as Santa in an ugly olive suit--he had twinkling blue eyes and rosy cheeks and probably drank too much and had the very best laugh of anyone I've ever known. We sat and talked for a couple of hours, about movies and music--both of our biggest loves--and as we were saying goodbye, he offered me a job. He didn't have any cashier positions open, but he did need an usher, and it could be me if I wanted it to be.
I liked Frank so much it would have been dumb to say no, plus: Free movies. And on my first day, after I was outfitted with a horrible vest and a nametag with my actual name on it, I was led downstairs and thrown into the pit of testosterone that was the usher crew.
And ooooh, those guys hated me, for a long time. They didn't like that their boys' club had been crashed by a girl, and they didn't like that Frank gave me all the hours I asked for (he did blatantly play favorites), and they generally hazed me for a lot longer than was probably necessary. Some were nicer than others. My friend Gil was always a sweetheart, and defended me a lot. And Not-Sandro, whose name turned out to be Rocky, spent a lot of time with me. Over the next couple of months it grew into this crush with a mind of its own--I couldn't even think about anything else because I was so busy trying to decode the tangle of signals he was sending me. He ignored me last night--he hates me! But wait, just two days ago he had me sitting on his lap while we both collected tickets.
First love is so confusing! I mean, even moreso than all the loves that follow it!
Finally, one night in May--on the first anniversary of the day my grandmother had died, in fact--Rocky cut out of work early, and I, pleading a transparently phony headache, begged off a few minutes later too. I didn't know what was going to happen, exactly, but it felt like... something would. I caught up with Rocky at the corner, waiting for the light to change, and before I could even say anything, he'd turned around and kissed me.
Then we were inseparable, and then he was moving in, and then I was pregnant, and then we were married. I guess things happen kind of fast when there's no one around to stop you, and we were both pretty much on our own at that point. Getting married was never my idea, and I spent our whole wedding day in varying states of tears. Looking back, that probably wasn't a very good omen.
Still, after a bumpy little adjustment period, after Adam was born, things were really, really good, for a couple of months, until suddenly they really, really weren't.
This was probably the first picture of the three of us, July 1996 at my parents' beach house. Adam was about six weeks old.
I'm going to pass over the "great detail" part of the bad times. They lasted too long and they were wholly destructive, for all three of us. If I could do things again, I'd do them differently. But I'm a lot stronger and a lot smarter now than I was when I was 20, 21, 22.
It has been a very long time since Rocky and I parted ways for good--eleven years now, really, although for another two years we'd keep trying to make half-assed gos of repairing things. That was never going to work. We'd broken each other.
The night after my 30th birthday, my ex-husband took me to dinner at his favorite Thai restaurant in Manhattan. We talked about his new marriage and work and my most recent relationship crash and burn, and we talked about ourselves. I finally told him, for the very first time, that when I saw him again after we started working together, I remembered the first time we'd really met, when even brushing his hand made me feel like I was on fire. He couldn't believe I'd never told him that before. Neither could I. And I said, toward the end of the evening, that I thought, if we were to meet for the first time that day, nothing would ever have happened. That we had a chance and we lost it, and that we were both smarter now. I think in all the years we'd known each other, that was the most I'd ever hurt him, and the thing was--I was trying to be kind.
There is a very quiet kind of peace between us now. For the longest time, I thought we would keep buzzing around each other like flies, one or the other of us never quite satisfied that it was really over. But sometime when I wasn't paying attention, it all faded away. All the bad things faded into distant memories, weird and scary stories I can retell without any emotion at all most of the time. The good ones are the ones that sneak up on me and tug at my heart. By the time our divorce was finalized--weirdly enough, nine years to the day from that very first time we'd met--it didn't hurt anymore. It felt good for us both to be free again.
These days, he is a wonderful father and a good husband. He still works in the same movie theater where we met, managing the cafe. He makes more money than I do. I still find him almost absurdly good-looking, and except for the fact that we have biological evidence of that relationship, I don't think I would believe it had ever happened. I don't understand anymore what either of us was thinking.
Except that maybe we were thinking that we loved each other, and we loved our baby boy, and maybe we were thinking that would always be enough.