Text to Maria <3 <3: Andrew somthin??????
Another swig, another text. I couldn’t be stopped.
Text to Maria <3 <3: Ohhhh is it John Thompson & the BIG penis?
Text to Maria <3 <3: Fucking slut
Perhaps I haven’t been completely genuine in perpetuating that Maria was the only one acting wack-a-doo, had a screw loose, insane in the membrane, off her rocker—that she and only she was crraaaaaaZeeee. For months, we had engaged in the jealousy and counter-jealousy relationship war of attrition where our arguments had become entwined like a dirty, filthy, grimy tango from the barrio. You know what I mean, where your girlfriend perks up when a shirtless piece of man-meat pops onto the TV screen, so you perk up (perhaps in more ways than one) when the female eye candy pulls her shirt off over her head and flashes that look that turns even Mormons gooey.
Back and forth goes the dance: “Now you know how I feel!”
“If you got mad at me for doing it, why would you do it?!”
Until you’re scrolling through your text message archive like a monk and reading scripture—Aha! Here it is!—and delivering the ace up your sleeve in a dramatic rendition like you’re the narrator in a Ken Burns documentary: “June 16th, 2008, and so reads the text: I guess I think he’s hot.” Might as well’ve been the district attorney presenting the bloody knife to the jury.
But no one ever won—she’d bring up the time Stephanie Hinkle lingered on the hug in Rosenblatt’s basement and I’d bring up when she touched John Thompson on the arm that time he made her laugh and on it would go until…
“Eyy ohh, there he is,” said Tony’s roommate Mikey, still shirtless and somehow looking as if he’d acquired more tattoos since the party started. “Let me get a swig of that.” Mikey tilted back the whiskey until a bubble formed in the bottle and it was the first time I had ever witnessed the moment someone blacked out. “Eyy, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tone, where in Jersey are you guys from again? I got a cousin”—I didn’t bother prodding if this was a cousin or a cuzzo or a paisan, as Mikey was built of thick Sicilian stock—“down in South Hackensack. You guys close to that?”
“Uh, I’m not really sure,” Tony said—Tony had never taken an interest in our father’s atlas like I had.
“Kinda,” I said. “We’re more south, outside Newark.”
“Oh, right, like where those football players raped that retarded girl?”
Uproar—internal.
Tony gave an awkward laugh and took back the plastic handle of whiskey.
“Don’t use that word.” I said it looking down, and for a moment wished that I had said it soft enough that he didn’t hear it.
“Yo, what was that?”
You’ve dug yourself into quite the quandary here, Vito. “I said… I said, don’t uuuzze that word, chief.” I shouldn’t have added “chief.”
“Yo Vic, calm…”
I’m not sure who stepped up to whom first, but before Tony could finish his sentence, Mikey and I were so close I could see the grease on his nose he’d used to stop his overflowing beer suds.
“The fuck you just say to me, kid?”
It was then, shnozole to shnozole, that I understood the bone-quivering meaning of “fight or flight.” My cause was chivalrous—what’s more chivalrous than a sister’s honor?—and so, like my European forefathers, like my Norman blood, like an Essex County Don Quixote, I lowered my lance and elected to fight… and fall… and crash down the patio steps as if flung from the propeller of a windmill, banging my head on the railing and landing in a pool of projectile vomit as if subconsciously casting out a safety net to break my fall.
Text from Maria <3 <3: … We need to talk when you get home.
As soon as I came to in my hangover haze, I sent Maria a fire-string of pitiful messages, a digital tome of groveling nothings.
I’m sorry, Love me, Love me, Ria Ria Rie Rie Rie!
Disgusting.
All throughout the car ride and all throughout the stinkin’ Red Sox game, I mashed away on my RAZR keypad as I composed pseudo-sonnets with self-deprecating themes: I am nothing, but that which I am, that which we are, you and me as one, love of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul: Maria—I didn’t say they were original. And as my forefathers had done before me, I blamed my transgressions on the drink and resented—no—attacked alcohol like a prohibition evangelist: “America didn’t need repeal! She needed repent! She didn’t need rum! She needed righteousness! We don’t need jags! We need Jesus!”
But Maria, in all her grace and goodness and gratitude—I was a catchy tune, a power ballad, a hit single, perhaps, but she was music itself—forgave this sorry excuse of a boyfriend. Truly, she was so far evolved in the art of forgiveness, I should’ve replaced my Saint Anthony locket dangling from my neck with a cropped picture of Her.
But I didn’t just express adoration for my girlfriend in rhyme, prose, or verse. I got on my knees and I sought out her box like a heat-seeking missile—with tongue, with lips, with teeth.
And then it would be my beloved Maria on the receiving end of lingual pleasuring in the back seat of her SUV, reclined with her legs wrapped around my neck as her hands combed through my peroxide-blond hair.
As I watched her pull into our driveway, I felt like a child again, rushing down the basement steps on Christmas morning with a flutter in my stomach.
“Ohh, Victor…” Splish! Splash! I was like a kid in a puddle. “Victor…” I peeked up from my fleshy shackles to see Maria smiling, eyes closed, chin to the ceiling of the truck. “Are you excited for your birthday surprise? Ya know, I’ve never been to Medieval Times.”
Slish! Slosh! “Mmmhmmmm.”
Although sweet Rie had disclosed to me during a blowout that my birthday present was a trip to that institution in Lyndhurst (Yeah?!?! Well
