A Sad Tale

In the sense that one needs to place blame for everything in their life so that they don`t have to take any personal responsibility for their actions, or the consequences thereof, I blame Alison for this mess.

Last week she felt the need to probe the depths of my knowledge on a subject which I am not the least bit qualified to discourse, let alone dispense sage like advice, even if I am doing it in Yoda voice.

She wanted to know what love is. I will give you a moment to get foreigner out of your head.

Ok, all better now?

I am the last person you want to make to think about love. Mainly because I have either never truly been in love, or, more succinctly, never had anyone in love with me, in any sense of the word.

I am not going to get sucked down the rabbit hole of talking about my parents and their lack of whatever. This isn`t about that. This is a love story, in so much as it is full of hate, anger, jealousy and death.

Picture if you will, a young headstrong boy. He has been on his own for a little but, unless you count his roommate. They have created a thriving little enterprise in pharmaceuticals distribution.

One day, the young man, we will call him Dave Notme.....ok fine, we will call him me. Anyway, so I am hanging out at home when I should be at school. It`s a warm day in May, so I am just chillin`with my homies, as they say.

In walks an unfortunately named girl, Martha. Martha is heroin skinny. She is tall and lanky, and she has small boobs and a big nose. The one thing she has going for her is that she is a twin, and neither Ian, nor myself had climbed that mountain. We had done several favours for her in the past in hopes that she and her twin would show back up to the spot to get it on in the Barry White sense.

I was clumsily dating Kristina at the time. She was just trying to piss her mom off by dating the guy from the wrong side of the tracks, and it would not last much more than a month after this day. She cheated on me with a stocky guy named Chris. I gavce him a pass because of the irony factor.

Where was I? Oh yeah, so Martha comes in and says her sister wants to meet us. Ian and I are immediately at attention, in more ways than one, assuming our day had finally come. Instead she tells us that it is not her twin, but her older sister that we have to meet. She wants to buy weight.

Normally, this is one of those discussions that makes a person feel uncomfortable. A pretty usual trick of the police is to catch a little fish and get them to introduce the big fish to their "cousin" from out of town. We told her to invite her sister to a party we were having on friday night. She did.

Now we had to spring in to action. First, we had to get a party together for friday night. Then we dispatched Little Big Bill to Martha's place, he had been having the sex with the other sister for a bit, so he could get in and find out if there was a big sister. Turns out there was, and we owed Bill big time, cause he didn't really want to admit he was having the sex with the sister. I think we loaned him the town crotch, and some anti biotics.

Ok so friday night came and Ian and I were nowhere to be found. Josh handled the party cause he was a mainstay in that area. He told us all went well, but she was disappointed that she didn't get to see us. We promised to meet with her the next day.

The next day I remember like few other days. The first thing that happened was that our apartment, the shack in the alleyway, instantly smelled like peculliu. I was kind of upset because that was hippy smell.

She did not disappoint either. She was wearing an olive green tank top, and ripped jeans. Her hair was in a pony tail, and she was beautiful. Brown hair, green eyes, and perfect. Not skinny, not fat, just right. She had boobs, unlike her sisters, and her nose was appropriately sized for her face.

Ian knew me very well, and knew that I didn't have to pee on her to mark her as mine. He backed off. She bought a quarter pound of pot. To this day, I have no idea what the hell she did with it, but frankly, I don't really care. It was the first, and last time she ever bought drugs from us.

She was a year older than myself, so that made it all naughty and fetishy.

I'd like to say she succumb to my wilds immediately, but that isn't the case. She did start talking with me on a regular basis. She would come over, hang out, get high and shoot the shit.

Eventually that didn't cut it, and we started hanging out away from the others. One of our favourite things was to go to the park off Augusta and Baldwin and hang out on the swing set and just talk, especially at night.

We flirted. A lot. Not that cheap little teenage flirtation of two people who don't know how to close the deal, but that flirtation of two people who would rather be making the love.

It's that type of flirting that dares you to create that awkward moment. That one moment in time where you look at each other and dare each other to kiss. That flirting where you play fight and touch each other in hopes of it turning into heavy petting.

Thing is, I never closed the deal. At first it was because of Kristina. Then Chantelle. Then one of the Jens. Then it was because of Odie.

Odie was a friend of the family you might say. He had been away for a time because of a botched robbery with one of Josh's brothers.

When he came back, we initiated him, and he became one of us. A huge mistake.

This was about a year after Joanne was in our little group. He came out and immediately went for her. Noone else had. Nonone else was stupid enough. They all knew she was marked, but he didn't give a shit.

He was also almost twice her age. Seriously. She was 17 he was 31.

I wanted to hurt him very very badly, but I owed the Fish family, so I let him be. Then he did something I will never be able to forgive. He cheated on my beloved. In front of me. With a 16 year old girl.

Joanne, never a stupid one, came to me with her suspiscion. We were sitting on the swingset about maybe 2am. I was shifty at that point. Trying to find a way out of the conversation. Big Bill came running over to tell me there was a problem at Raoul's. This was heaven sent, despite the fact Dale had hit someone with the butt end of a shotgun.

I told Bill my dilemma, he said, Jesus, what a dick for putting you in this position, you should do something. So I slept with the 16 year old. Odie's roommate, a dirt bag known only as weasel threatened to stab me. Apparently Odie and him had done a little time in the slammer.

I laughed at him. He walked away. Two night's later, he crushed a guy's skull in on the sidewalk in front of my place. Weasel disappeared after that. Odie went with him.

At this point, I finally told Joanne that I loved her. She was too distraught over the disappearance of Odie to listen.

We stayed friends. I would hold her when her dad beat her. I would comfort her when she was sad, I would laugh at her bad puns. I even let her use my shower, even though she used somehippy shampoo.

She would spend a lot of nights at my place. And we were the bestest of friends.

Then these fools we were beefing with destroyed her. They found her out late one night and took their time, and turns, on her.

There are some sights that are forever etched on to the back of a person's eyelids. Some sights that you cannot drink or drug away. Some memories that will be with you for the rest of your life.

The look in her eyes that night when I opened my door is one of those images.

I have always loved Joanne's eyes. They sparkled with a light that just read mischief and fun. Despite all of the beating she took for her sisters, the men who mistreated her, and the system that forgot her, she had a fire in her eyes. She was a fighter, a w2inner. This sparkle was dead that night. Her eyes were vacant, dead. They lacked emotion. She looked as much through me as at me.

It would take several hours to find out what had happened. Several days to get the full picture. I spent every moment of the next two weeks with her. Holding her, feeding her, listening, or just letting it be silent.

It was decided that she should move away. Go somewhere safe. My heart was crushed. The woman I loved was leaving me.

In an ironic twist, she was moving down to florida to be with an aunt, or was it an uncle in Atlanta. I can never remember these things. Anyway, after everything died down, say about two weeks, she called me.

I remember the life in her voice. I thought she would be sad, but the truth is, she wasn't. At first this hurt me, to think that getting away would have saved her and made her happy. How could she be happy without me?

Turns out, she couldn't/

She told me she loved me and she wanted to come home to be with me. She said she was leaving right away.

My love was coming!

She never made it. Her ride, a drunk had crashed the car. She died then and there. My love was gone.

Those two days were the happiest two days of my life though. The time between when she called, and when we got the message.

I spent those two days in love, and loved.

You see kids, this is why I am not qualified to tell anyone anything about love. I waited so long that I lost it. Had I grabbed it when I could, there would have been no Odie, no bad men, no drunks. There would have been love.

When you think you have it, you go for it. You don't wait to be sure.

There is tremendous risk in putting yourself out there for love, but what of the risk of waiting for the sure thing?

I doubt many will ever experience the pain I did, but even at half the price, can you afford to wait, or worse yet, let it walk on by like I did?