My Almost First Loves

Anthony

I gave Anthony piggyback rides.  He was five-years-old, and I was six. He was also small, delicate, and asthmatic. He had black, slanted eyes like his Japanese father and a rebellious spirit like his Hawaiian mother, who combed her hair out in an afro, dressed in muumuus, and wore white Ked sneakers-

Like Anthony, I was wild. My hair was long, uncombed, and curly, and my cheeks were always red from running and playing. When his mother babysat my sister and me at her house in #Queens, Anthony played only with me. When he jumped on my back and pulled my ponytail, I charged around his unlit living room, with the dusty, covered furniture, like a mustang that needed to be broken (it didn’t help that my mother gave my sister and me daily drinks of energizing Kombucha—before it was all the health rage--as way of strengthening our immune systems for harsh #New York City winters).

We stopped running when Anthony’s mechanic father got home from work, or when his whiny sister, Geraldine demanded we stop making noise (I feared and hated Geraldine’s kicking, screaming tantrums, which reminded me of my parents’ violence towards each other).  

When my strict Catholic mother came to get my sister and me, she shrieked at my unladylike behavior. “Only whores act like you do,” she said, pointing at me as I ran around the living room with Anthony on my back.  I didn’t know what a whore was neither did I care, and it gave me tremendous pleasure to make her chase us up the stairs to the attic, where she tore us apart, grabbed me by the hair, and led me down the stairs and out the door to our house next door.

Herbie

It was the mid-1970s and I was attending a strict Baptist school in #Miami, where my family had moved to from New York City a year before.  

I had barely survived Mrs. Wilkin’s paddling in the fourth grade, which I had just completed.  Every Friday, I attended, along with all the other students grades k-4 through 12, #Calvinist-like revivals lasting over four hours and sermonizing on hell, fire, brimstone, and demons.  Already, I had walked up to the pulpit every chapel service since I had started at the school to accept the #Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior, just in case the last time didn’t take. 

At home, my violent parents now included my sister and me in their cussing, screaming, hitting, pushing, and spitting, and now we were not allowed to have friends or to talk to anyone on the telephone. On the rare occasion we did have a friend over to play we had to beg them beforehand to be allowed such a visit.  

Life looked bleak, except there was the kind, smiling Mrs. Bonham, my fifth- grade teacher; Elizabeth and Barbara, my best friends--friendships I kept a secret from my parents; and Herbie, my new-found crush-- also a secret.  I had fallen in love with Herbie, by surprise, when he handed me the math book I accidentally dropped on the floor in the hallway.

I was a strange, sensitive, and shy girl who dared not look or talk to a boy, especially one as beautiful as Herbie, a seventh grader with a bouncy step and sad, brown eyes.   He was like a character from one of my favorite Disney movies, who like me needed to run away to #Witch Mountain, where we would both be free. When he smiled at me in the hall, I blushed and looked away.

Mostly, I was curious about how he got away with keeping his brown, wavy hair mid-length, which did not meet the school’s dress and appearance regulations (I had been sent home several times after a hall monitor and her ruler determined my skirt was an inch above my knee bone):  Boys were required to have razor-short haircuts right above the tip of their ears.  Still, Herbie was unfazed, always smiling and shaking his beautiful head of hair in the style of one of the Beatles as if the rules didn’t apply to him.  

The day he mustered up the courage to speak to me in the cafeteria, he asked why I liked Butterfingers, the chocolate bar I bought for lunch every day.   His question shocked me; he had appeared from nowhere like a rabbit in a magic hat. Blushing, I dropped my lunch tray, spilling my hamburger and fries on the floor.   I quickly knelt down to pick it up, my face red and hot from humiliation and my cheeks wet  from tears.  When he knelt down beside me the cafeteria lady shooed him away so that she could mop up the mess. 

I never saw Herbie after the cafeteria fiasco and figured that his rebellious, devil-may-care hair had gotten him expelled from school.  Still, I missed him.

Alex

Alex handed me secret, handwritten notes in Biology class while the teacher lectured on pollination.

“What did you do this weekend?”  he wrote.

“Nothing,” I wrote back.

At first, he thought I was being mysterious, but I was a nervous-wreck around him, especially when he walked besides me after class as if he was my boyfriend.

Alex was always tanned from the sun. He went fishing every weekend in the waters of the Atlantic with his #Cuban father on his family’s boat, and I imagined that one day he would also handle a cigar as smoothly as his dad as I gathered from the pictures he showed me.  Even at 15, Alex was manly and self-assured with his clean pressed shirts perfectly tucked into his tailored pants.

Even though we attended a strict Baptist school, he was all smiles--all the time. And he really liked me, but I didn’t like myself.  #Puberty struck me hard that year with painful monthly cramps that sent me to bed at least two days a month.  My parent’s violence intensified, and their name-calling shriveled me up inside. 

My white #European father constantly rode me about my looks—my lips were too big, nose too wide, skin too brown… And my narcissistic mother pitted me against my father and sister with stories about how they had wronged her and how I needed to do something about it.

I developed a stutter, suffered from lack of self-esteem and low body image--even though I had been voted the best-looking legs in school that year by classmates in their secret “best of” notebook--and feared looking anyone in the eye, especially Alex who always tried to get me to open up.

He showed me pictures of the fish he’d caught on his weekend fishing trips and told me stories about his favorite superheroes and cartoons, and still I was lost to his charms.  All I could do was think about how my armpits were getting sweaty and smelly from dealing with the stress of his affections.  

After that term, Alex gave up on me and moved on to another girl who was just as happy as he was.

Joey

In 12^th grade, I attended North Miami Senior High because my parents couldn’t afford tuition at my private school.

By the time I was 17, I had become stoic about my inner pain. I was also shy, private, and afraid of most things. Yet, I was proud, never allowing anyone to close to me or sharing with anyone the horrors of my home life.  I was more like #“Alice Through the Looking Glass,” who saw things she could not fit into her world, make sense of,  or belong to--like the happy high school students who were members of the photography, journalism, #French,  #Spanish... clubs.  Those other students went to parties and football games and listened to ACDC and Aerosmith. I stayed at home and listened to Billy Holiday and Ben Webster. 

Yet, I was beautiful, with  sun-touched skin, full red lips, soft curves, and  big, brown, tell-all eyes, but I never believed it: Other boys told me so, like Peter who wrote in my Yearbook that he had skipped his 7^th period class to try to find me and Jimmy who left notes with his phone number in my locker.  To those boys, I must have seemed like an exotic bird from a fairy tale that was allowed to only appear and sing her song under the light of a rare blood moon, and still the bird's appearance or song weren't guaranteed to be seen or heard.

But Joey was pained like me; I could tell by his forced smile, which made his thin upper lip disappear into his gums, when his friends joked with him at his locker.  He was tired of the "scene," even though he was part of the in-group and beautiful girls always talked him up at his locker. I heard he had failed 12^th grade. I also saw him pricing the produce at the local supermarket where he worked, but we never spoke to each other.

We only gave each other fleeting glances as if we were the masters of unrequited love.  All we could do now was surrender to the straightjacket of a suffering that demanded we be loyal to its constant hurt, a hurt that also made us incapable of focusing on schoolwork (I was a solid "C" student) or dealing with everyday life.  

Like me, Joey suffered.  He also suffered like my parents, who couldn't help inflicting their pain on their daughters (I had heard their childhood stories of extreme poverty, abandonment, and violence). I could see sadness in Joey's brown eyes: even when he smiled, his pain was always present, like the soft glow of a candle that's about to burn out, yet I never learned the reason for his suffering.   

That year, he dropped out of 12^th grade before he failed it again, and my father died of a heart attack after I graduated from high school.