018 - Whole Lotta Love

In late July, I went back to spend a month — yes, a month — with her. The change in her parents’ perception of me ratcheted up one more level; my stock continued to rise and I could feel them trying to divine just what V and I were meant to be. In the dark about the romantic aspects of our relationship, V told me that before I arrived, her mom had broached the subject, asking V if she had feelings for me beyond the platonic. V shrugged it off and said no, and in her playfully innocent tone, her mom replied “Okayyyyy, but he is pretty cute”.

Her dad played the other side of the ball. One Saturday, V and her mom had to go somewhere — I think to buy birthday presents for somebody — and V’s dad asked if I wanted to go to the Taproom with him. With nothing better to do, I agreed. It wasn’t anything fancy, nor was it a dive. A concrete floor covered in metallic resin, a long bar against the North wall, and a dozen small tables surrounded by stools, this high-ceilinged establishment was purely functional. Nestled in a strip mall, it carried a dozen rotating local craft beers, which you could also bring home by the growler. The lone television was playing a rerun of a college football game from the previous season with the sound off. Nearly alone, her dad and I ordered our first drinks and I went to the jukebox, one of the 21st-Century-Download-Our-App type. I picked a half-dozen of my favorite Led Zeppelin songs, and as I walked back to the bar, the opening riff to Whole Lotta Love rang out over our deserted watering hole.

He asked if I put it on, and prompted a discussion of classic rock: Zeppelin, Hendrix, The Stones — all things I grew up on from my dad. One beer became two, became three, and his liquid courage soon took over as navigator. He put his arm around my shoulders and turned down a road of commendation, voicing his approval for me, ending on the point that I was the kind of man he hoped V would find for herself. It felt awkward. I didn’t show it, but I was immensely uncomfortable with any praise or flattery of myself at that age. I was also secretly dating and fucking his daughter, so...yeah.

V’s parents were desperate, I think. I don’t think they knew what to do about their twenty-year-old daughter. Their son had everything going for him — college, in the Marines, had a car, self-sufficient — but V was another story entirely. One of the greatest hurdles they faced was her utter lack of ability to reasonably respond to criticism. Even the most well-phrased constructive comment from a  loving place registered as an attack.

V put loyalty above all else. If you do something for her once, expect to do it always. If she had a problem with someone, or something, you had to have it too. She would get into fights with her parents, and would reprimand me for continuing to be nice to them, failing to give them the same cold shoulder she was. She and her brother once were in the middle of an argument and she mispronounced a word — both he and I laughed, the stupid circumstances of their petty squabble defused by by her foible. That should have been good, right?

She later scolded me in private, how could I take his side, laughing at her? My compromise was then to plead the fifth any time objectivity ran perpendicular to V. Any time she found herself in a familial disagreement, I simply kept my mouth shut and opinions to myself, because nearly every time I agreed with them. While not always perfect angels descending to deliver the good news, they weren’t the enemies V made them out to be. They were trying to help, but V’s meter did not often register their intentions properly.

She once became very angry at her mom after her mom inquired as to when V would be ready to start driving school — politely. Instead of hearing the true intent, which was “Hey, it would be a good idea to take steps toward independence and agency soon”, V’s brain rewrote it as ‘Yo, you lazy good-for-nothing child, are you ready to grow the fuck up or not?” V lashed out at the very people who tried to help her the most, and did not have a strong grasp of the concept of tough love. Not even tough love — if it was a steak, maybe medium-well. Perfectly palatable, but to V it had to be rare. She truly, and it pains me to commit this into writing, wanted to do nothing herself. If someone else could do it or pay for it or arrange it or plan it, she wanted them to. And if they turned it around and suggested maybe she should, that was an attack. “Do you not care about me?”

I think as a coping mechanism, she developed a bizarre system of preposterous absolutes. A system of evers and nevers that did have a fair deal of logical soundness, but zero practical effectiveness. It eliminated all possible variables that could lead to the ridicule she so feared. That was its purpose. But the byproduct was entitlement. I remember, venting to me about that driving school debacle, V said there was no point to her even getting a license, because her parents couldn’t afford a car for her. I disagreed, sure they could scrape together a couple grand for a journeyman’s jalopy, but she replied in disbelief:

“You think I would drive some shitty ten-year-old car? No way. I want it to be new, and black. Like a Tahoe or something. So nobody can say shit to me.”

If V could have laughed at herself, if she could have taken herself less seriously, if she could have let the little things go, I think she would have had a happy life. But like all of us, she was her own worst enemy. Just as I was mine.

While I didn’t know it at that time, the wheels were already coming off our relationship by the end of that summer. I had started doing medical studies to make cash on the side, a hundred dollars here and there to support my frequent Florida flights and time away from work. I was spending one quarter of my time in Miami, so work-study alone wouldn’t cut it. V wasn’t doing...anything. She would wake up at whatever-the-fuck o’clock, then spend the day scrolling through Facebook, online window-shopping for things she couldn’t afford, to later beg her parents to buy, playing World of Warcraft, and watching TV.

I am not here to shit on anyone’s hobbies or pursuits. While prevailing attitudes have changed greatly in the last decade and half-decade about video games, I will still always go to bat for my fellow keyboard warriors. I don’t really play games much anymore, but the friends and memories I have from losing myself in Warcraft will be something I forever hold dear. Like drugs or any other dopamine pursuit we unfulfilled primates use to supplement our life, it’s not the game, it’s the player. It’s not the drug, it’s the user.

V was doing fuck all with her life. She got me back into the game briefly, before Spring Break when I retired once more. It just wasn’t fun for me — my glory days of obsessive play, putting in the hours to do all the things and be the best were past; the zeitgeist of that game was long elapsed, and it felt boringly repetitive. Remember when Arena Football was a thing? That’s what it felt like.  I had found better ways of pushing and challenging myself as an adult. Things that had more staying power than a handful of pretty pixels or inter-nerd bragging rights.

In the five years I played that game, my focus was always social, it was about making friends, having fun, playing a game. Escaping from the real world for a night. It’s why I have such fond memories and still talk to and hang out with the people I met as a fourteen-year old. For V, it was very real. Much like away from the keyboard, her desktop disposition took things deadly serious. She would meet new people and make friends, but then maybe they wouldn’t be online when she was or they’d forget to show up, or they’d go do something with someone else, and she’d lose it. It was Mean Girls with swords and spells. Drama followed her everywhere as she drove people away. Her desire to do and acquire everything seemed exhausting. We are talking about one-percent drop chances on things you can only kill once a week, and like a job she had a schedule. Hours and hours of time spent for digital dice rolls that might take months, if not a year or more, to come out in her favor. Sure, if she had been having fun, like most people who play video games, it would be a different story. But it was an obsession.

For the uninitiated, I will give you the most boiled-down version of World of Warcraft: every six months or so, new content comes out, and your group of ten friends log on at the same time each week to try and kill all the bosses and collect all the new items. Those who do it better and faster get to stroll around the in-game world with the inflated electronic ego of being a cut above the rest, until the next update when all you did previously becomes yesteryear’s news.

If that isn’t the opiate for insecurity, I don’t know what is. It’s a microcosm of the real world, where you can bask in the glory of success in a linear system with clearly defined objectives and singular indicators of accomplishment and status. It’s why for me, as a fifteen and sixteen-year old, I would sometimes spend upwards of thirty to forty hours a week playing. Because I could run away from the things I struggled to control. I could hide from my failures, and instead use my standing in a fantasy world to subsidize that lack of self-satisfaction. As a teenager, that makes some sense. Life is awkward, you’re not in control, everything that “matters” won’t mean anything in just a couple years — you’re still in training for adult life; the clock hasn’t started; you don’t yet have agency.

Like modeling or being thin, it was a pursuit of perfection. Of immunity. So like a Disney Princes, she would be the invulnerable envied entity. As with her other endeavors, she took the path of least resistance. She’d rather starve than exercise to look fit. She’d rather apply herself in a virtual world than the real one. She’d rather beg her parents for money to buy clothes or shoes than earn it herself. And I don’t fully know why. She didn’t choose to be that way — none of us choose our self-destruction so explicitly. We don’t wake-up and put on our unhappy pants to walk through life unfulfilled. We just do what we’ve always done, until one day we hopefully open our eyes and realize we’ve been going in circles.

V never told me she loved me, because she didn’t. At the time it wasn’t something I paid much mind to. We all have a different relationship to those three little words, and some of us must overcome much reluctance before they can be said. She did care about me, she wasn’t a monster. For all the bad times, there was good. Laying together in her bed, listening to narrated scary stories on YouTube in the dark, watching movies, going to the Cuban bakery for macarons, driving to the beach in the dead of night, me running headlong into the black ocean waves, stubbornly dismissing V’s advice to the contrary — it can’t be that cold, it’s seventy-seven degrees out! Fuck was it cold. It got in my eyes, my mouth; I grew up on an inland freshwater sea called Lake Michigan, so I had no idea just how salty the ocean was. I guess that’s why they call it saltwater. Shivering from the breeze and my beach baptism, heat blasting in the car, laughing, listening to music, driving with nothing but us and the street lights.

When I was with her, there was no school, no work, no bills, no worries. Florida had become Narnia, and Delta the wardrobe. But just like in C.S. Lewis’ world, our paradise was in peril. V’s insecurity, entitlement, and complacency were the White Witch of our world. And after that vacation, I decided I had to defeat them. If I could just get her to understand, if I could change her, if I could make her grow up, everything would be perfect. Except life isn’t one of those fantasy books I read as a kid. More often than not, the fire-breathing dragons and evil armies are within ourselves. The cave the brave knight walks into to face the beast is not in some far-off land, it’s within himself.

William of Ockham would not have agreed with my plan. Nor would I now. But on a somber car ride home from a Panic! At the Disco concert, I wasn’t left with many options.