You're Not Really Going To Fuck That, Are You?

(Note: I'm writing this about 20 hours after giving myself alcohol poisoning at Gran Bar Danzon, so if the normally corpulent prose is lacking that certain pop, it's because I'm almost dead.)

I met Maricella about a month and a half ago at a small get together I threw in my downtown apartment. My place is way too big for just me so I try to have people over as much as possible. However, back then I really didn't know anyone so the "party" consisted of Augustina, the young Paraguayan immigrant who works at the corner store, two of her gay sidekicks, Rodrigo and Diego, and Maricella. I had the bar stocked and ready for a gathering of at least twenty, so with only five people in total, we weren't wanting for booze.

I had a little interest in Augustina. A nice girl of around twenty-three, she's a Paraguayan, which automatically means she's attractive. But when she brought Maricella my compass was thrown off. I remember that she was tall with big brown eyes and a large smile that seemed like a nice contrast to my negative disposition. I also noticed when she told me she was only eighteen. Now, If my math is correct, eighteen is the very definition of the term, "barely legal," it is also a giant red light that signals any rational adult to change course. There just wasn't much I could do to make it work. I mean, I couldn't start telling everyone I was nineteen, but unfortunately everyone who knows me has already figured out that I'm 30.  Even though the legal age of consent in Argentina is 16 (the only liberal viewpoint in this country I shy completely away from) eighteen was still too young. I could talk to her, get to know her as a friend and admire her from a distance... but I couldn't sleep with her.

About three hours later, after sleeping with her for the first time, I lied awake next to her in bed considering my behavior. It wasn't that I didn't like her, on the contrary I thought she was sweeter than Dulce de Leche and decided that I was very lucky she ended up liking me. I was just worried about what it would lead to if it continued. But maybe it would lead to nothing. I wondered if it was just the one night for her. I had been in a few situations in the U.S. where women have woken up next to me hungover and completely sickened with themselves. On top of being a wonderful feeling knowing that you were someone else's drunken mistake, the other certainty is that you'll never see or hear from them again. Half of it is because, unlike Zach Effron, I am not young, physically attractive, wealthy, successful or even intelligent for that matter. In fact I have strikingly few redeemable qualities, if any at all. Therefore I can't fault the women that are nauseated at the mere idea they let me enter them in a blackout. The other factor is cultural. The United States is a tad more puritanical than most other developed nations and there is still a stigma attached to sex. If a woman in the U.S. sleeps with someone the first night they meet them then they are more likely to beat themselves up about it than they are in other cultures. Which makes absolutely no sense at all.

Unfortunately Maricella was not repulsed at the site of me the next morning, nor did she feel she made any kind of mistake. After that it was out of my hands, I was dating an 18-year-old. I was like Hugh Hefner without any of the actual achievements. Things were bound to get interesting. 

Actually we got along surprisingly well and fell into an easy routine. She worked six days a week waxing wealthy Portenas at a salon in Belgrano while I slept in, watched cable, drank and didn't write. She would come to my place around 9:30 and I would make dinner and then we would have sex on every piece of furniture in my apartment. After that she would go to sleep and I would stay up watching movies on my computer while killing bottles of Malbec. I would stumble up to bed around four or five in the morning, she would wake up when I lied down and then we would have sex again. Thinking back on it, not only was it an easy routine, but awesome, too.

Reality hit home one day when I went to my English-for-Spanish exchange that I do with a therapist in Palermo. Once a week I take the train to her place where I edit documents and e-mails to her North American clients. In Exchange she gives me Spanish lessons. Sometimes, if she's had a particularly long day at the office listening to expat businessmen from Connecticut complain about not being able to find a good housekeeper or ball washer, she passes the buck to her 11-year old son, Mauro. My time on this earth is rife with incidents of abject humiliation but there's nothing quite as degrading as being yelled at by a chubby pre-teen for not knowing the present continuous of the verb "Traer". One evening as the child held my hand through some painful vocabulary exercises, I looked at him and realized that, age wise, it made more sense for Mauro the 11-year-old to be dating Maricella than it did for me to be dating her. He was that much closer to her age than I was.

But I liked her. I actually liked her staying at my place most nights and enjoyed having someone to sleep next to. And being a hot-blooded Latina, her body was exceedingly warm. She was also fun. At eighteen she wasn't weighed down by life and self-loathing like me and whenever I looked at her I saw a person infused with the joy and innocence of youth and in her eyes I always saw the promise of happiness in her future. She didn’t know anything about loss or failure or love or heartbreak. She only knew how to have fun and be pleasant. In other words, she had yet to take her first steps in this life. But I still couldn't take the next step. Whenever it would come up I evaded the topic or got off it as quickly as possible with a simple, "I can't have a serious girlfriend now. I'm not good for anyone." Those words were irrefutable truth that a statement can be both true and complete bullshit at the exact same time.

Her nineteenth birthday was on a Wednesday but we had the party at my place because it made more sense. I stocked the bar, bought the cake and got her a bag from a boutique as a gift. I've never had a long-term relationship with a girl (other than frighteningly protracted casual partners) and had only been with a girl on her birthday one other time. That one ended abruptly and I wanted this to be better. I wanted to make it special for her. 

I think it was. About twenty people showed up to the party with the birthday girl in a fairly stunning blue dress. The group were all friends of hers and really good people that I enjoyed talking to. I think they even enjoyed talking to me, despite my broken Spanish and being close to a decade older than all of them. Everyone got drunk on Gancia, Martinis, Quilmes and Vodka and gay Diego turned my television area into a nightclub after he threw on a Michael Jackson CD, which got the girls onto the makeshift dance floor. A couple hours later everyone sang the Spanish version of "Happy Birthday" (I really can't remember the words and didn't understand them anyway) and she blew out the candles on her chocolate cake. A few hours later the party died down and a little while after that I dragged my drunk ass up to bed. That night I slept alone.

The next morning I woke up around noon to the sounds of Maricella cleaning the kitchen. She was doing the previous evening's dirty dishes, even resorting to cleaning the plastic cups and stacking them in a pyramid on the counter. I was too hungover to make the trek downstairs so when she was done I called down to her. She came up and lied on the bed next to me. 

"Did you have a good birthday?" I asked, tired and smiling.

"Yes, I was with friends."

"I'm glad," I said. And  I meant it.

She told me her mother wanted to see her so she had to hurry out the door in order to catch a bus to the provinces. I let her out and kissed her goodbye. I told her I'd talk to her Monday. 

I never saw or heard from her again.

I was reading an article in some magazine I can't remember that was written by a terrible writer. The tip off was that the story had no substance and the ending was even worse. Not having an actual end to his piece, he resorted to what I call the "Hemingway Hail Mary". Don't have an ending? No problem, write a couple simple declarative sentences that don't mean anything but sound deep.

 

EX: 

I watched her go and then went upstairs and brushed my teeth. I never saw her again.

She wanted more than I could give, so she left. Then I brushed my teeth. In the rain.

She was with another man and I didn't care. And then I watched the bullfight. And it was good.

Those aren't endings. they're just pieces of bullshit. In the true end I realized that I will miss her more than I thought. For many reasons. Because I didn't appreciate her as much as I should have when we were together. I didn't give as much as I should have. Because she was a genuinely fun time.

She'll cross my thoughts every now and then, and I'll miss her almost as much as I miss my own youth, which is just as dead as that fledgling relationship.

But I was still dating a fucking 18-year-old. I should have my goddamned head examined.