Frankie Teardrop — Bigger Than Christmas

I’ve written about Nery already. But to such a small degree. And I need to say more. And I can’t just focus on the Frankie Teardrop part of what happened between us. There was the magical Nick Cave show and our first kiss at the Beyonce show and how it just ended on a dime on my birthday a year after going out with her for the first time.

She’s owed so much more. And so am I. No one has done such a thorough scrambling of my heart and soul like Nery did. And it’s only recently that I realize I must have done a number on her too.

We met through hate. I was talking to a new friend on Facebook one night, and she became very energized about some chick named Nery that she just couldn’t stand. A braggart. A know-it-all. A psychic of all things. She asked me to check out her page while we were on the phone to share in her splendor. Now this person is a good friend of mine. She still is. And, as it turned out, she wasn’t entirely off the mark. But I navigated to Nery’s page, and I was immediately transfixed. She was beautiful, but she had the crazy confidence, and everything I’d railed against for years within my cloak of arrogant cynism was what seemed to create her entire persona. She was an astrologer (ist?), a psychic, an anti-vax; she was everything I’d mocked for years rolled into one package with a fucking beautiful ass. The ass stuck out to me from the get-go. Plus, I noticed she’d be arguing against typical feminist causes; she was surely the first woman or man, for that matter, who claimed that Amber Herd was the actual abuser in that deal. So, anyway, my friend’s plan didn’t quite pan out. I became intrigued.

I sent her a friend request, and she answered back right away. She said she was somewhat surprised because she’d reached out to me a year earlier, and I’d turned her down. I had no memory of that, nor have I ever said no to a Facebook friend request.

She was having a “full moon” party in a week, and she invited me. I assumed it would be me, her and 4 lesbian witches. Well, I took two friends, so the numbers got thrown off. It was in her backyard. A little house a mile away from my own right over the hill into Highland park. She read some tarot cards around the fire. We ate snacks, and I was just truly obsessed with bending her over the folding table, lifting her floral dress and just spending a week there. I was smitten,

But she was so not so like anyone I’d ever gone out with. She was Spanish and Columbian. She had no accent at all, but she misspoke all the time as if she was having an aneurysm. That just endeared me to her more.

A few nights later, I messaged her and asked if she wanted to go with some friends and me to see the one-night showing of the Nick Cave doc, “One more time with Feeling.” She said yes, and the four of us ate tapas before going to the theatre in Pasadena. We had to jam ourselves into the back of my friend’s car, and she made some comment about her “Spanish ass” and how she’d be fine. God trickles little flowers on your heart and cock every so often just to let you know he’s still there. We went to the movie, and at one point, she put her head on my shoulder and fell asleep for a few minutes. That’s all it took. I’ll love you so Goddamned, completely, I thought.

I took her to see Beyonce a couple nights later as our first real date, and I remember just stopping talking and taking and grabbing her face (gently) and kissing her. It shocked both of us. We spoke for hours, and at the end of the night, when I asked her if we could go out again, she said, “You are such a glowing red neon Bright red flag, but I’m gonna risk it because we talk well together.” And so the best and worst year of my life started

I’ve written a lot about her and this year, but there are things I need to get straight for myself. Nery was an intensely jealous woman. I’d never experienced anything like it. One of our first dates ended with her asking me why I was giving such “energy” to the woman sitting next to me. As God is my witness, I KNOW I was sitting next to an elderly guy in a parka. But she saw things the way she did and never questioned anything because she was a psychic and, therefore, infallible. That should have been such a screaming red flag, but her jealousy sorta turned me on. I never figured I’d be worth jealously, and here it was. And so we got past it. She had a daughter who I won’t name, who was 14. They pretty much just fought all the time. She was at that age. She told her Mom that “I was too old and my hair was too long.”

I can go on and on about her jealousy and rage and near hysterical blackouts, but there was this other side of her too. And I’d never even come close to experiencing that; she loved me like I’d just never been loved before. She supported every idea or interest I had. She was the first to tell me I could do anything, and she single handily cleaned out my garage and got it started into the workshop it is now. She did all that, Fuck, the love she was able to give was only matched by the vitriol and hate that would come out of her roughly every 10 days.

And the sex. It was just a whole new level of dirty, filthy, primal animalistic sweaty unshowered entanglement that just kept coming and cuming

Nery was the woman who loved me the most deeply. I don’t even wonder about that, and yet, when it ended, it took my therapist a few weeks to make me buy into the idea that I had been classically abused. It’s hard for men to own up to that. It feels so weak and powerless, and yet, all the signs were there. I’d also never considered that one might abuse another without even realizing it, as if abuse was always a conscious aim in and of itself.

` Whenever I tell the story of how we broke up, I always leave one part out. I’ve convinced myself that it pales by comparison to the jealous rage, but I did something which threw a wrench into the whole delicate clockwork. One day I was driving to DUI school, and I got a text from a number I didn’t know. They simply said they had blues and if I wanted any. I reflexively said yes. I knew that blues were 30 mg oxycodones. I was about two miles away, so I just said yes and went there and got a few.

Ultimately that’s what ruined us. She was in the middle of trying to find the perfect wedding dress, and I just wanted relief from “Jack.”

You don’t even know about Jack yet. But Jack was the part of me that had a huge role in destroying her and me, and as much as she tried her best to, Jack was destroying her too. I’ve never admitted this part of history. Fuck, I’d rather tell you about fucking some guy in a shower stall.

We called him Jack as a way to externalize him and get some answers for him. This was her idea. She so truly wanted to free me of this.

The pattern had been reoccurring for years. Once I fell in love with a woman, Jack would appear, and he’d always create the same scenario, which I’d buy into fully. I’d become fixated on some random, casual sex they’d had before meeting me, and I’d view it as the pinnacle of sexual abandon and primal hedonism. There was just no way I could compete with Jack. I’d tell myself that I had enough good qualities that they’d want to be with me, but they’d made a bargain with themselves to forgo intense sexual pleasure in order to have me cook for them or buy them things or love their kids or care about their pain. But they knew that real sex was over for them, And that killed me, and it would always turn into a classic OCD pattern of rumination, anxiety, questioning, and then a doubling of the pain. And it always lands on them. No matter how much they told me, these experiences ranged from awful to forgettable, I knew. I knew a bargain when I heard it.

In Nery’s case, she’d told me she’d met a guy on tinder who I knew really well. The kind of guy that, well, is no one you’d want to know the love of your life had been with. I kept bringing it up and magnifying it in my head. It became debilitating.

All I can see is her getting undressed for bed after we got engaged, with both of us smiling and counting the milliseconds until we could hold each other and say how much we loved each other. That’s what I see right now. How perfect her naked body was and that beautiful face and the knowledge that he’d seen and used all of that as well. My underlying distrust and attempts at pretending jack was gone would just mock me in those moments as she stood naked under the one ceiling light with one bulb always burnt out,

Nery had nothing to do with Jack short of trying to understand him. She endured so many questions and my gradual loss of identity. She’d tell me repeatedly that they just went out once and just “fooled around.” Not that she even owed me this much history. Who was I to demand answers.? She just tried everything she could imagine. She’d take me out to the garage and tell me to lick and fuck her. This was a gift. She knew this was such a fetish of mine. To be told to taste and use her in the most non-sequitur moments was and still is such a thing with me. One day I was watching the Orioles, and she just got up, stood in front of me, pulled down her panties and bent over the table and offered herself. The point of all this detail isn’t to titillate but to show how well she knew me and how willing she was to make that part of me feel understood and validated.

And so one day, someone from my past offered something that I thought might give me a few hours of relief, and I said yes,

And no matter how I spin it, that’s what started those last awful 6 weeks. She found out purely from her psychic ability. I have no other explanation for it. And she went mad with rage. And who am I to blame her? My drug history and sobriety were incredibly important to her. To who would they not be? Her father and stepfather had both destroyed her with their drinking, and here it was happening all over again.

I’m sure we could have worked the thing out, but it wasn’t up to me. Throughout the entire Jack period, she kept assuring me that she only “fooled around” with this one guy one time. And then on the porch one day, in the noon sun as we were just talking about whatever, she turned to me and very calmly and casually said, “and I fucked him more than once. And he didn’t need a coach” I just collapsed like a kid when you tell them not only Christmas but even birthdays aren’t real. I just got up and left and wondered how someone could be so calculatingly cruel. And yet, I’ve never considered my own cruelness in it all this time.

We found ways to hurt each other that neither of us had ever conceived of before. I was being punished, and it just kept escalating. I had to allow her access to all of my phones and devices and computers and would be grilled about any random girl she’d come across.

I was talking to Jaymee on the phone later on the day that she told me she’d fucked that guy multiple times and that “he didn’t need a coach.” I’m not sure what that meant exactly, but I know it was calculated to eviscerate me. And it worked. I still see and feel and hear that moment. I was in some sort of panic. I had nowhere to go. Jaymee very calmly said, “If you stay in this relationship, you’re going to die.” Maybe he meant heroin, Maybe suicide, Maybe it was a metaphor.

And so I went into the house, and she was sitting at the table on the back patio. I just told her I couldn’t live like this anymore, And I was leaving. She was furious, and for the first time, I just didn’t engage and just left. She told me I was a pathological liar and that I’d done nothing but cheat and lie to her our whole time together. This just wasn’t true. She also told me that when she gets angry or afraid, her method is to cause as much pain in the other person as possible. None of it was by mistake. She said it was all conscious and well-considered.

And so I left and went to my Mom’s house. I stayed there for a few days while Nery moved all her stuff out. I arranged for movers to come to do the work. I saw her one more time in my life. About two months later, I saw her in a parking lot near Trader Joe’s. She walked past me, and I said hi. She said nothing but smirked and kept walking

It’s been 3 or 4 years since the last day I saw her. I just left my house and never saw her again except for that moment in the parking lot. I think about her all the time. She gets all confused with women I’ve loved before her and since. She’s become a specter and an angel wrapped in diaphanous floral prints and pulled-down panties.

It was such a singular experience that there’s no recognition of it in any other beautiful entanglement. I suppose I’m lucky to have felt that level of passion, but I fear it will mark the end of my life. Not that I’m destined to die alone, but isn’t that all our core fear?

I’ve told this story about how Nery and I broke up while planning our wedding so many times it feels scripted by now. But I always leave my part out. I lie by omission as to what I did that unleashed all of her trauma, rage, and fear, And I have to have everyone know this part. Otherwise, I’m just making her a witch and myself a saint. And neither of us were either.

One more thing that’s so interesting to me in these matters is that it’s so easy to only remember the beautiful parts. The pulled-down panties, the fact that she’d take pictures of every dinner I cooked for us. That she once bought our four dogs at least 100 little stuffed toys to play with as we just dumped the whole bag onto their happy and excited little heads. They went mad. I remember all of this, and I’d take her back in a second, but then I start remembering the other stuff, which gets confusing. There’s cognitive dissonance. The Nery I loved I still love with all my heart, and the Nery who tried so hard to hurt me and did quite well at it, I kind of love her even more because I know what people have been doing to her for her whole entire life. And I was just another one who came along and broke her trust. I know I’m not a monster, but I have to be honest about my part in all of this beautiful mess. I just couldn’t handle it anymore than Frankie could.