Rita P.:coworker at a mexican restaurant

I had never met anyone from India before. Rita's accent was British, almost proper like a tape you would listen to in order to mimic someone from the UK.
I never crushed on her or had any sort of kissing type ideas about her. However, I did find her mesmerising. When she spoke I stopped dead in my tracks and gave up any effort towards what I was doing and focused on her words. Her eyes were these huge root beer barrels of brown sparkle and her hair was shiny shiny licorice. When she spoke it felt smart and posture adjusting.
We worked together at Amigo's for about a year. She was my manager during the shifts I worked at the restaurant. It was a Mexican restaurant on the west side of town. I tutored the owner's kids a few times a week too. They were a Greek family whose love of food was only surpassed by their love of arguing at ear splitting decibels. Screaming was their inside voice. (they are another few entries all to themselves.)
Rita stood about 4 feet eleven inches IF she wore the stupid visor required by our superiors.

At night, while washing dishes or mopping the food off of the floor, Rita would tell me stories about the places she had lived. Her family lived in a magical sounding place called Hounslow, just outside of London. She also grew up mostly in India. The colours and exotic stories made my swabbing with grey water fun and a passable task. Rita talked about her families parties and the outfits and dancing. I could tell her family were very close. They ran the motor in just up the highway about 5 minutes from the restaurant. This was in a seedy neighbourhood with most customers being the types who just needed a room for a few hours, if you know what I mean.
Without fail, her father or brother would bring her to work each shift at exactly three minutes until starting.  At the end of her scheduled time, they would be waiting in the car as close to the front door as possible to pick her up. Sometimes her brother Hardeep would get out of the Cutlass and bop around on his bright yellow sports Walkman. Her father would just sit in the car, peering at everyone and everything he surveyed.
After a few months, Rita got her license and drove herself sometimes. The wardenless freedom really suited her. As time passed things relaxed and she opened up. Her chattiness became the noise to which our work followed. It was hard to let things like customers and preparing food get in the way of her tales of elephants and monkeys in her old yard back home.

Its safe to say that Rita was a beautiful girl. I did not think of her as such, as I was entangled in my first girlfriend. I looked at her as a smarter older sister with a funny accent.

Rita began taking martial arts lessons. I didn't know until one day she came out of the breakroom in a karategi. 

She started blathering on about the classes and how her father wanted her to learn self defense. Her sister had been robbed at the hotel. The robbers tied her up and locked her in a closet. I was surprised that her dad didn't disappear the women altogether back to India.

After some time in the classes, her instructor Steve became a super frequent visitor to Amigo's. He was a really  nice guy who reminded me of a cut rate Chuck Norris with his scrappy beard and wispy dirty brown hair.

Rita was glowing and giddy when Steve was around. I could tell she liked him. It was nice to see her acting like a person, not stiff or referencing her strict parents in every sentence.

I found out they were involved when I was emptying the trash after her shift. It had been about two hours after her quitting time but I noticed her car still parked by the building. Before I could go over, Steve backhopped out and I saw him lean in to kiss her.  Both of them shot me looks, frozen in the moment.

Given my big mouth and the small pond that was the restaurant, word got around. Rita had a boyfriend!

At some point the next day she explained to me and Bernice, the other girl we worked with what this meant to her.
"My parents would kill me. I am not allowed to have a boyfriend, much less a non Indian.  I can never let them know."'
We asked several questions, being newbies to cross culture pollination.
"Can you marry? What if you had kids? Would your Dad try to fight him?

These brought up many other things.
Her parents had promised her to a family back in England. She was to marry when the son was 25. She was also promised to be a virgin. Rita had only seen a picture of this boy she was to marry.

I could not imagine.
My head and heart kind of spun for her.
I could not imagine the scrutiny this twenty two year old had been under her whole life.

She told us of having separate outfits at friends houses in school and basically living a total separate personage from what her parents knew.

The newness of her affair wore off and we resumed our taco factory duties.

Some weeks later out of nowhere, I was in the back mopping the toilets and I heard yelling.
I turned the corner of the dining room to the main entrance to spy Rita's brother and father at the register. Smoke and fire seemed to be billowing out of their mouths and eyes.
I could not make out the words, only the emotions.

"SIR I DON'T KNOW WHERE SHE IS, SIR"
"My daughter was supposed be off four hours ago!"
"SHE'S BEEN OFF FOR TWO DAYS! TAKE IT UP WITH HER!!!"

Uh-oh. This did not seem good for Rita or Steve.

The men eventually left after much peering and interrogating of everyone in the place.
I told them I knew nothing and no I did not know if she had any other friends.

The next day, I walked in, ready to start work.  There was a pile of shirts and hats on the table by the schedule board. I'd never seen a sadder stack of t-shirts.
Rita's brother had dropped off her stuff and quit for her.

A day or two later,  Steve appeared at the restaurant. He was a mess. The poor guy was crying and moaning in agony. Through tears and stiff silent loathing, he told us what happened.
They were madly in love and had been planning to run away.
I kinda swooned at the romance of the notion.

Apparently her parents found a letter from Rita to Steve which laid out the subterfuge. Leading up to the men appearing at Amigo"s, they had spent the previous day/night together and had been making up a schedule of fake work days. Their happy times led to errors.

Upon storming into his dojo, Steve told us the brother and father threatened to kill him and her if he tried to interfere. His calls to Rita went unreturned. Then, according to Steve, the whole family left town and were gone.

After Steve left, I called the number to the hotel. The number was out of service.
Rita was gone and so was her family. I can only imagine what she had been through.
I have always hoped she found some way to happiness. I like to think she did anyway.

Jake R.: friend from high school

We played basketball every chance we got.
I had a work schedule. Jake got allowance and had chores around the house.
His parents had set aside times that he had to be inside the house. James and Nancy were  hell bent on him being indoors at randomly selected times that seemed to be hinged on whatever fun activity our fifteen year old heads had in mind.
To be very nice and g-rated his parents did not like me. The number of times he defied them increased once we met and grew exponentially as our association wore on. I showed him what vodka could do to you. He in turn showed them what drunken vomit did to new furniture. I took him to his first punk show. He showed his parents what a mohawk looked like the next day.
We both moved to the subdivision by the Navy hospital around the same time in the latter part of our sophomore year.
I met Jake on a hot, soupy late spring afternoon as we both cut behind the small reservoir at the edge of the neighborhood.

"Hey man."
"Hey. You going to play basketball?" he replied
"No, I'm bouncing this orange thing to Kmart."
"Right. Haha!"
His nervous chuckle disarmed me.  Something about his nebbishness made me like him enough to not veer off.

We were now crisply walking together, a pair of macho strangers.

"Do you listen to punk rock?"
"No." he said.
"Sorry. Your loss"' I laughed.
 He snickered.
"Do you listen to Judas Priest? Maiden?"

"No. I'm not a head."
**"Head was a term used in the eighties by teens. It meant burnout or more directly "pothead" These boys and girls usually hung in clumps, smoking cigarettes and sucking down any pills or cough syrup they could get their hands on.


In a quick forty minutes or so of shooting the ball that followed, we were friendly. We played several games of 21. During the course of the games we talked and taunted one another about whatever boys talked about then. To highlight, I think we ragged on one another's shoes, music taste, clothes, accents and former hometowns in no real order.

During the next few days, Jake and I became friends in a fast manner. Our ball games became often and carried over into school. Somehow we now found each other between classes and at lunch time. We also found daytime drinking at school. I was able to procure this stuff rather easily as I looked 32. Most people, rather those at liquor stores, assumed I had a wife, two kids and a mortgage.

The time drug on and at school we became known as a pair as in "Where's Jake" or "Where's Gus" if the other was not present.

More and more there was drinking and listening to music. When I could get off work, we saw some bands play and often stay out til the late late night hours.
His mother and father eventually tired of the disobedience. They gnawed at him to curb our friendship and hide in their suburban family bunker. Jake enjoyed the squabbles as first, realising that his tight-assed father was paying attention to him instead of chasing women at work.

It wasn't long  before girls came into the picture. Monique was maybe the first girl who singled Jake out. I think she was his first kiss if not his first go at 'outercourse.'
Jake and Monique became flatly inseparable. As it usually happens, I was the odd man out. Jake disappeared.
I didn't realise that people could kiss so much. Jake spent hours on the phone with her.
I made new basketball friends. My jobs increased as I took more on. In addition to tutoring these chubby Greek kids and working at their parents Mexican restaurant, I started bar tending on the weekends to make extra cash.
I noticed his absence but in the flurry to work, drink and keep myself together, it was not as pronounced. I had a full plate. Jake  had a place for his hands and I had a stepfather who quit giving my mother money.

As a side note, I was interested, albeit tepidly, in girls. Don't get me wrong, I liked them and thought things about the ladies of my senior high time period. There was Shannon, Lori, Lisa and a few others that appeared on my ceiling from time to time.
In the "women I would never get the chance to impress" department, I think I had some very intense make believe dalliances with Elisabeth Shue, Winona Ryder and that girl from Weird Science. None of these girls spoke to me enough to make me pause music or stop hustling for cash.  

Eventually there was conflict. Not only had Jake's parents decided that I was an unfit friend, but Monique had voiced her disapproval of my  association.

I remember Jake telling me as we made our way to an assembly. Our school was about to begin selling gummy bears to raise money for something like a greenhouse or computers for Africa. This called for 90 minutes of sweating in a gym without a/c.

"Um, Monique doesn't want me to hang out with you. And my ma and dad say we can't hang out anymore at night."
The pause was long. I focused the sting in my head.
"Wow.  What? Are you kidding?"
I was instantly blind with hatred.
"And what did you say? Did you tell them to bite it?"
"No. I gotta play by their rules, man."
"Yeah. Right. What about your WIFE?"
"Um, Dude, she's my girlfriend. Wife. Ha. You're just jealous!"
"Me? Jealous of that manatee? She's a lunchlady!"
I paused to load my gun with bigger bullets.
I took a deep breath.

In previous battle with parents of my former friends, I had always lost.
And I'd read enough to know that in spite of sitcoms and John Hughes movies that  "bro's rarely come before ho's."

I stopped walking.
I looked at him and said, "OK. I hope she shits all over you and freeze dries your heart. Don't come crawling to me once her gash gives you some rotting disease and you have no friends left."
I paused again.
"And you better give me back my Husker Du tape!"

I like to think I said this, or at least something like this. I forget the exact wording. I know I was mad and hurt.

And that was it. For a few months.

Hormones fleeing and the chemicals of attraction lessening, Monique moved on from Jake. She hooked up with some albino kid named Lance. Lance always seemed to be sweating but never was anything but nice to me. I was glad to hear Lance found a girl, as he seemed pretty lonely and off to himself. They married pretty quickly and divorced almost as quick but not before much jerry springeresque fireworks and public fighting.


Jake hooked up with another girl and resumed the pattern of isolation. We did manage to become friends again, very gingerly. I was more distant, now that I think about it.  I had started to drink more and more with a different, smaller more left field crowd. We did a few things together, however,  and I even socialised with the two of them on occasion.

Jake married this girl. I think they are still married.
I was not invited to the wedding as his mother feared I would do something embarrassing. Years later Jake found me on a social networking site. I am too petty to forgive, I guess as the first thing I thought about was being left out of his nuptials. I did not respond to Jake, nor to his wife who found me not long afterwards. My words for him were gone, stuck back somewhere in the twilight of high school in the few deep breaths we all took before assimilating to adulthood. I had nothing to say. Our paths were very different.
Its amazing how people can have such an impact on your life at certain times and then in a split second its as if your bond never mattered.

And I never got that tape back!

Ben A.: cousin of Joe

Ben was tall, somewhere over six feet give or take. When I met him at age 5 or 6, I felt short and small. I was a little guy with not much hair and my movement was limited. I had been out of the hospital a short time. The kid in me wanted to run and play but the repair from the surgeries and other trauma had yet to heal. I sat most days and read. There were odd times where I did play or try to run. Sometimes I had no problem; other times I retched and became bluiesh  to the point of seizure.

Joe and my mother had been married or having a relationship of sort for nearly a year I guess, when I recollect on the maths. They met at a motor inn as we passed through a town called Perry, Florida on the way to a commune my mother knew of in Louisiana. We never made the commune but there were always cigarettes and plenty of convenience store snacks to fill the hippie void.

Remembering as best as I can, Ben's  accent was as long and drawn out as he was. His lanky frame and disco ball braces in his mouth framed a drawl  born of the upper foothills of South Carolina that would mark him either a full blown carny voiced redneck or a man making fun of Southerners. He added syllables where there were none. Men were called "buck" or 'bubba" while women were "ma'am" or "mama" with more heinous vowels inserted.

I was in awe of Ben. I only knew my Mom and her husband, being in transit and hospitals pruned what people I came into contact with. There were no other kids around. Ben was not a kid to me but a towering grown up who seemed interested in hanging out with me. I felt really short and young around him.

He took me into his room and showed me his things. I'd never seen such a big room with such fancy things. In a rapid fire auctioneer staccato he showed me his stuff. Cleats, bb gun, stereo, Atari, Kiss records, Kiss posters, Ted Nugent record, cologne and nearly every other object he could find. I sat there, whirling in my head, not imagining having, much less keeping this much stuff. Who has so many things? It was odd. Ben then said we should go into his old room.

Old room? What is that? He needed a new room? It did not compute.

We crossed the house to the living room, to a door in the rear corner. His father, Robert  sat in a big poofy chair drinking a beer while watching television. He did not acknowledge our motions and disruption of his quiet drinking.

Ben flung the door open and the lights on with great ceremony.

Check it out! Dig around and find some stuff to play with!

I was stunned. In all of my wild shopping lust and looking at fancy Sears catalogues I had never seen such a morass of the coolest, shiniest, most random toys that a boy could ever conjure. There were GI Joes, Legos, Tonka trucks and so many Hot Wheel cars it looked like someone had stolen the toy department at a Kmart and hid it in Ben's old room. I swan dived right in and was a tiger running myself into butter. I had never seen such soiled goodness. He had a planet of the apes village. He had the apes dolls AND the human dolls. I had never even touched a General Urko!

Sometime later, I fell asleep into a pile of cars and blocks. I must have been worn out to lose the chance to play at this Olympic level. Maybe the adults enjoyed the peace and quiet? I was not a loud boy. My noise was tempered by fierce reprimand.
I felt Ben nudge me and I could hear Joe's furnace of a voice telling me we were leaving.
I sat up, unsticking blocks and dragsters from my person. Secretly I wanted to stay in that room and play until the world ended. I felt like a kid in the deluge of amusements.

We drove back to Lexington. I was excited to have met my new cousin (for lack of any other label available).  For the next few years I visited Joe's people up there. I learned a lot about work but that's a different paragraph or two.

After leaving for Florida, I heard that Ben died in a car crash not long after I graduated high school. He was the first teenager I ever knew.