My First *Almost* Girlfriend
Carisa (“Reese”)
Depending on what mood you found her in, which was based on and measured by how much she’d had to drink, Reese was variably convinced that I was either god’s gift to short, sexy, tough, hot-blooded Cuban lesbians with daddy issues, or a succubus intent on stealing her soul.
But she didn’t know how not to send mixed signals.
She was just that mixed up.
She threw herself at me in my presence, and in my absence pined over me to her best friend, Liam.
She was incurably hopeless, and yet still had this mind-boggling way of always getting whatever she wanted. I really don’t think of myself as a pushover at all, but, you’d just have to know her to understand how everyone around her constantly found themselves giving in to her… I guess it pays to be cute when you’re annoyingly persistent pertinacious. She managed to drag me out dancing once when I was home sick with a fever of 101°. I just knew that if I didn’t, she’d walk the 18 blocks from her apartment to mine, and stand under my third floor unit hollering up at me and throwing rocks at my window until I let her in. She was a Cuban-chick Ferris Bueller to my Cameron.
But she was trouble.
We once nearly got thrown out of a Perkins at 3 in the morning for her rowdy exclamations that she wanted blueberry pussy.
I knew she wanted more from me, but I could never really let me guard down completely, not to someone who couldn’t live without alcohol. I couldn’t afford to be that vulnerable… I guess I have daddy issues of my own in that respect, but, I couldn’t allow myself to get that close, because, I knew, if I started to go there, I would never come back. I was sure with her there was no part-way option… I could fall completely in, be consumed by her, and never see the light of day again.
So, I loved her, but I always kept an impenetrable distance between us. This was a source of great distress for her that she alternately either raged or cried over.
I loved her, but we were never any more than friends.
One night when she was feeling particularly weighted down by the emotional impasse between us, she called me, drunk, and first demanded, then pleaded, when it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be pushed, that I come over and hang out with her. Neither of us had cars (we both lived downtown at the time, walking distance from most everywhere), but there were only 18 blocks between us, so I could bridge the gap in a 20-minute walk if I was motivated to do so. That particular night, though, I knew we were both in a space where sharing each other’s company wasn’t going to do either of us any good. When she had exhausted all her best avenues of persuasion, and I would not be moved, she gave up and called Liam, and begged him to come over. Ever the consummate extrovert, she never did well on her own. She pulled every trick in her playbook to get him to come take her to The Club, but, he was a family man first, and couldn’t get out of his obligations for the evening, so she started scheming how she could make it across town. He told her she was in no state to be social with anyone, and she should stay home that night, and wait for Mick, and work things out (I don’t know if that was good advice… I’m not sure what there was for us to work out, since I was pretty much the one with my feet firmly planted on the matter).
She didn’t.
She rode the bus to St. Paul, and met her next girlfriend, a plump young redhead who considered herself bisexual, but had never had a relationship with a woman.
Three months after the anniversary of their first date, and the last night I turned her down, Reese got married in the park to the very next girl she picked up, at the spot I’d taken her to on our first excursion around town. The ceremony was performed by an FTM UU minister friend of mine I hooked them up with, Liam walked her down the aisle, I gave her wife away to her, sang the unity candle ceremony song I wrote, and we threw them the mother-of-all-reception-bashes in our ¾ acre back yard. They ran away together to Miami a few months later, and settled into the tumultuous life of a marriage where neither partner ever really thought the whole thing through quite clearly beforehand, much like most every other married couple I know.
The rest is history.