I realized the other day that Derek and I will have been together, in some form or another, for five years this January, and with our third anniversary a week away, it's only natural that I'd be up at night thinking about embarrassing interactions with men that aren't my husband.
The first boyfriend that I really took seriously was Richard Robinette. I've wondered more than a few times through the years if his last name was a lie, because I have never once been able to find him via any form of internet platform. LinkedIn? He is not. Facebook? No. Instagram? Nope. The only place I've found his name is the obits from several different states, but they were all WAY older than he would be, and unless he was a master of identity theft at such a young age, I have to assume that none of them are him. Also, as far as names go, his was particularly stupid to me, and it's possible I just forgot his real name and went with something made up that felt equally as ridiculous.
21 years ago, the hip shit to do was go home, crank on that dial up modem, and go cruise chatrooms. My friends and I were WAY hip. I cannot recall how, what kind of chatroom, or what the deal was, but I met Richard on the internet. This set up the idea that online was like a shopping mall of available dudes, because that's seriously how I've found 99% of my jump offs, and aside from my daughter's dad, all of my serious relationships. All three of them. In retrospect, I am the fucking LAZIEST when it comes to meeting men. I'd feel better if I had a better blend of real life meetings and okcupid hook ups, but here we fucking are. I did initially think online dating was WAY fucking weird. Like...really creepy weird. Clearly I changed my tune.
I met Richard, if that is his real name, in a chat room, and I think he lived in, like, Hialeah or some shit, because me making my way to him without having to explain to an adult that my 13 year old ass wanted to meet some strange boy from the internet would have been impossible (an older than me strange boy, at that. 15, I believe! Holy shit, look how mature I must have been at 13 to snag a 15 year old boy. Off of the internet. In south Florida. Where men are notoriously uncreepy and very smart and not at all fucking weird). Him making his way to me was the only conceivable option (though I really wish I had explored not meeting him as the third and wisest course of action), but because I had a curfew on school days, and also because my mom held the fervent belief that a penis near her daughter was a trumpet signaling the apocalypse, Richard had to travel down to meet me in Davie on a weekend, at my friend Angela's.
I barely remember what Richard looked like. I remember he had all of the world's freckles, which never bothered me, I fucking LOVE freckles and have always wished I had some. He was blond, I think he had spiky hair? Like all really cool kids did back in the 90s, and he wore baggy clothes over an obscenely tall, lanky frame. He was REALLY fucking tall. Like, 6'5. I remember he was the first person to ever make me feel truly short, and at 5'9, while doing the most to date men who are in the 6'2-6'3 range, I've always felt perfectly sized. Richard was a god damn giant. It looks like I remember more about him than I initially thought, but here's what I remember the most:
Richard.
Was.
The WEIRDEST.
Kisser.
EVER.
FUCKING.
INVENTED.
I don't know what I did in a past life to deserve this kind of madness at 13, but here's what kissing Richard was like. I didn't really want to kiss him; not because I didn't PHYSICALLY want to, but because I was afraid of being bad at it. A truth that I very shyly told him one night over the phone, and for all of his wisdom, he responded with, "JUST DO IT IT'LL BE FINE". Smooth AND comforting, what a winner! He wouldn't have been my first kiss, but I didn't get any kind of feedback from my first kiss, so obviously without a glowing Yelp review of my mouth, I assumed I was a horrible kisser, and I didn't deserve to kiss anybody ever again.
The next time I saw Richard, I went for it while HE was going for it, and with his gargantuan neck head swooping down to meet my far shorter neck head that had to crane upwards, disaster struck. And by disaster, I mean my head hit his chin and made a VERY audible KATHUNK sound, and I bit my tongue. Which...serves me fucking right, what kind of idiot goes in for a kiss tongue first? This girl, that's who. So after a laugh and a sit down so we'd be on a more level playing field, Richard goes for it again, and this time, I can see what it is that his face is doing.
Now, I've already explained that I only every kissed one boy before this. A good friend of mine named Jimmy Reyes asked me if he could kiss me while we were up in a tree, and I kinda wanted to get it over with and see what all the fuss was about, even though I didn't want to kiss Jimmy, I wanted to kiss Brian Croes. It wasn't a bad first kiss, as they go. He asked, I consented, we didn't bite each other, nobody did anything weird with their face. So I was fucking wholly unprepared for Richard to spring his facial reflexes on me. I didn't suspect a thing, and I was fucking shellshocked.
There is no way to adequately write out how it is that Richard's face moved when he was coming in for a kiss, but I'm going to try, and then I'm going to attach a vine that is the closest thing I can think of to demonstrating what I mean.
His chin would kind of...shrivel up into what I can now describe as goosepimpled testicle skin, but then couldn't really describe. His nose would twitch a little bit. But it was his eyes. His fucking eyes.
His eyelids would fucking flutter, revealing that the whites of his eyes and his irises were just rolling around in their sockets, going all kinds of crazy. Like this:
I kissed him, but it fucking freaked. me. out. I didn't like kissing him. I did my best to not. I seriously stopped hanging out with him as much as I could get away with, because his seizure eyeballs made my vagina really, really depressed. And I didn't know how to talk to him about it, so with all of the maturity of a woman half my age, I just ignored it and pretended I was just a glittering social butterfly with too much shit to do.
So he fucked my best friend.
I was pissed about it, I really was, because that's a bullshit move. Richard came over to apologize, and I told him that I wasn't surprised his mother had abandoned him, he was a useless piece of shit, and I understood not wanting to have anything to do with him like she did. I slammed the door in his face, and I have never felt more victorious in my life than in the moment I saw the tears well up in his eyes, and watched him bludgeon his hand on my concrete steps, punching them repeatedly. That was 21 years ago, and I seriously have never topped that moment of sadistic glee and satisfaction in seeing how capable I was of hurting someone.
In retrospect, that REALLY fucking saved me some trouble, because thinking about what kind of unholy contortions his body and face would make during climax makes me want to fucking scream, and my vagina is seriously dying a little bit at the edges right now. So I guess....I guess I really owe those two fartknockers a HUGE thank you for sparing me THAT reality. Ugh. Seriously, my uterus is blackening at the thought.
Late at night, when I'm really invested in hating myself, or my life is just going a little TOO well and my brain wants to teach me a bit of humility, I'm reminded of Richard Robinette and his horrible, horrible, would-make-Terry-Gilliam-tell-him-to-calm-his-fucking-tits, eyes, and I'm immediately put in my place. I'll make my weird noise, I'll panic my way through the bodily shiver, and then I'll have nightmares about someone with bees for eyes trying to kiss me. Nothing sets me straight like that.
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