Send Down the Rain(40)
“That was you?”
“I had made up my mind to come home. To finally talk with you rather than just spy on you. I was listed in a fight. Big payoff. The more I hurt him, the more I got paid. So I hurt the guy. I got arrested, and that started what I like to call my Prison Period.”
“You went to prison?”
“Five years. And while I didn’t like it, prison was where I saw what hatred does to guys. Which was good. Most of my life, I’d been a people watcher. Given my tendency not to trust others, I grew up that way. A personality trait that would help keep me alive in dangerous places. Prison forced me to sit back and evaluate what I’d learned from all the people watching. To not just sketch their faces, but read what the lines were telling me. When I got out, I started my Business and Womanizing Period—I was trying to replace your face with others, trying to forget you.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Not very well. When I was released from prison, my parole officer got me a job at the zoo. Literally walking behind the elephants, picking up what they dropped, and they could drop a lot. Maybe I’d taken too many blows to the head or been near too many bombs when they exploded, but that got me to thinking. It’s just poop. So I started a portable toilet company called the Poop Coop.”
Allie burst out laughing. “You can’t be serious.”
“Totally. Our tagline was You poop it, we scoop it.”
Her laughter grew. I continued, “I learned that the poop business was a profitable one, so business grew. Eight states. I was on the road a good bit, learned to drive semis. We supported big outdoor venues, a hundred or more units at a time. We would deliver, set up, wash, pump, clean, whatever. It didn’t bother me. It could never be as nasty as what I’d seen over there, so I started making money hand over fist. A cash cow. Years passed, I guess this was in my late thirties, and then a guy came along and offered me four times book. I said thank you very much, have a nice day, here’s the key. I sold it, banked the money along with a decade’s worth of residuals in which I made three times what he’d paid me for the company.
“So I turned forty. Alone. Found myself driving a Porsche ’cause that’s what rich, lonely, compensating, unmarried men do. And, if I’m being honest, I thought it would impress you. I’d swoop in and knock you off your feet. I’d been living in Miami, and by the time I got my courage up, I was on my way to the island. Had the flowers in the passenger seat. Driving up the toll road. A guy cut me off, shot me the bird, and I went total spider monkey on him. I ran him down and beat him senseless. The news the next day said he was on life support, and it took him three months to wake up. That’s when I had my first thought that maybe prison hadn’t cured me, and I knew I couldn’t bring that man home to you.
“So I climbed into a bottle, wrecked my Porsche, bought another one, wrecked it, and started my Boozing Period. One night, drunk out of my mind, I got my third Porsche up to about 160 and tried to kill myself. To make the bad man stop. I flipped the car ten or eleven times and walked away. By then I was having some pretty bad night terrors. Flashbacks. I’d wake up in strange places. One day I was coming down the elevator of a high-rise where a girl I was seeing lived. An Asian guy, slanted eyes, shorter than me, started speaking into his phone. When they sent me down into the tunnels, I had to go with no light, so I followed the sound of their voices. That guy started talking in the elevator and I was back in a dark tunnel. So . . . I came unhinged. When the elevator door opened, he lay in a puddle on the floor. Breathing, but barely. I climbed further into a bottle and stayed there for the better part of a decade.
“You, in the meantime, had poured yourself into the restaurant. You looked good, you were working out. Paying down debt. I would dress up like someone else, wig, glasses, hat, and come into the restaurant and order dinner. If I’m honest, I just wanted to smell you. You have this beautiful thing about you that when you start to sweat and then it mixes with your Chanel—” I blushed.
“Jo-Jo, are you blushing?”
I laughed. “You would walk by and I’d close my eyes and just breathe. And when I got my nerve up to take off the wig, I’d look at my hands, at the cuts, the scars, and then I’d look inside and see all the scars there, and I knew there wasn’t enough water in that ocean to wash them clean. I kept quiet because I didn’t want you to know who I’d become.”
Her voice cracked. “Why?”
“Because if there was any part of you that still wished for me, I wanted you to wish for the guy that went away, not the guy that had come home. I was spending so much time around there that I rented an apartment. I knew your schedule. I knew when you went to dance lessons every week, and I knew if Seth the dance instructor put his hand on your butt one more time I was going to break it off.”
She laughed out loud. “Yeah, he kind of creeped me out. A little too touchy.” She rested her hand on my arm. Her touch was gentle. “You were watching over me?”
It was both a question and a statement.
“Then there were those group dance nights, when you’d get all gussied up and put on four times the normal amount of makeup, and I can honestly say I was both hoping you’d find one you liked and hoping you wouldn’t. That maybe if you could just wait a little longer I could get my collective stuff together long enough to be a man you could love and who could love you back.