What I Learned About Boys (Part 4)

BPH showed up at the pool hall/arcade out of the blue one day. His leather jacket and his longish black hair gave him a bad-boy appeal that wasn’t actually there. A few patrons and I were taking turns playing winner on the air hockey machine. He came in and stacked his tokens in line. He was utterly alone. Really, this was part of what made him so attractive to me. He blew into town in his Toyota pickup from out of state and just wandered in to a social experience without even a twitch of anxiety. When he was up, I was out. I watched him play his round and lose horribly to the faceless person that had beaten me as well. Being that he was the outsider on my turf I had no problem what-so-ever standing as close to him as I dared and asking his name. He was around six years my senior, which was a pretty big gap back then. It meant things that it doesn’t mean when you’re 23 with a 29 year old.

We made a few flirtatious exchanges. When he left his key chain on the table I snatched it up, inspecting the photo tag with a girl’s picture on the side facing up. I asked him who she was, and he told me it was his sister. He had a guilty grin on his face so I flipped the key tag over to see a picture of him locking lips with said sibling. “Close family,” I told him. I should have turned my back. I should have stopped talking to him completely. But I was even more intrigued.

BPH was a world class juggler, and I’m not talking bowling pins. I shared him with at least four other girls and never found out until I had stopped caring. It was amazing that a girl I knew had pretty much the same relationship with him as I did, and was shocked that I didn’t know he belonged to her. He built a necessity for secrecy. It was about his age, or the friends he was staying with, or the Mormon Church (to which he belonged), or about his girlfriend back home, or about what people would say. I’m sure each one of us was convinced that to keep him, we had to keep him a secret.

I didn’t actually date BPH until over a year later. He disappeared for a while. Apparently had married the keychain girlfriend, and moved her here to live with him. She left him soon enough after for them to apply for an annulment. After she left he found a room with a man who can only be described as a “chicken-hawk.” Doug (we’ll call him) bought booze and expensive gifts for teenage boys in exchange for drunken romps in the bedroom he used to share with a wife. The man was over forty years old, but the boys I saw there and spoke to knew exactly what was going on. They claimed no one was being victimized and that it was a pretty sweet deal, so I turned a blind eye. I had fun with the boys. Most weekends a couple of them would be there and we’d play pool, smoke cigarettes, and drink Mike’s lemonade.

Up until we actually started dating, BPH and I had just spent our time together making out and watching movies together. What changed when he showed up on my doorstep at exactly the right moment for me to be single was that he took me out. It wasn’t a secret. We were out in public holding hands. The first night we went out, we went back to his place and put in a movie. That first night, he told me he loved me.  And my life was changed completely. Up until that night the sex I’d had hadn’t been “completely satisfying.” I didn’t know that it wasn’t at the time, but I was about to find out how sub-par every other time had been.

Many men claim that their only endeavor is to pleasure a woman. They act like they aren’t out to get their own rocks off. It’s bullshit. BPH took his job seriously. He was always completely in the moment, hearing every sigh, adjusting to every heartbeat. He enjoyed every moment of it. He never even asked for reciprocation.

I was with BPH when a dear friend of mine died, and it wore our relationship down to the nubs. I was manic with grief, and he was actually diagnosed bipolar. There was little either of us could say to one another that wasn’t taken the wrong way. “We should have Chinese tonight” turned into an argument about “I’m not your ex. Your ex was the one who loved Chinese.” Everything became an indicator of unhappiness and discontent in the relationship. Everything meant something, and we both were guilty of making these assumptions. We thrust our fingers at one another and decided to spend a few days apart.

Over New Years that year, I cheated on BPH. It was the third (and last) three day love affair I had with this boy who specialized in three day love affairs. When the Holiday was over BPH came over to talk before I could even call him. He sat on my Hello Kitty bed while I confessed. We decided to end the relationship. He didn’t seem hurt, and that should have been my first clue that he had been sleeping with a girl that had showed up at his door crying one night while we were together. She was younger than I, and even more emotionally unstable. He told me himself that she was a wreck, so when I found out that he had been with her, I started to think about what that meant about him.

Back then, I didn’t think about what it meant about BPH that he liked me. My perception was that to be liked by an older guy can only say something about me. I thought that I must be very mature for my age to be on the same level as this guy, an idea not conceived of my own illusions, but one he whispered into my ear now and again. The “maturity” card, I’ve come to understand as the ultimate compliment you could give to a teenage girl, and somehow older dudes all know it. Tell the pretty girl she’s smart, tell the smart girl she’s pretty, and tell the party girl she’s mature. Works like a charm.

Now I know, I figured it out when I got to be the age that BPH was when we were together, that if a guy that age dated a girl who was still in high school, he’d be about the biggest loser on the planet. There were a number of factors that disputed BPH’s loser status: he was employed, had his own place, and his own wheels. Really, he could have actually gotten a girl his own age… if that had been what he wanted. The fact that he wanted damaged young girls like me, and a handful of others I know of, meant something far worse than loser. It meant predator. This really made me realize that while I had been the one to pursue him initially, it was he that showed up at my door once a year until I moved out of my parent’s house. And while I certainly wasn’t a “victim” in the traditional sense, I was undoubtedly his “prey”.