THE JUDE

For better or worse, I am probably best described as, “The Jude’s daughter.” One of the Jude’s high school friends met me, we hit it off and he commented later to her that I was exactly what he always thought her daughter would be like. It was one of the best compliments I have ever been given.

Most people view the similarities to their parents as their cross to bear in life. However, with all the upheaval in my life and all the conscious decisions about what I do and do not allow into my adult life, having made the conscious choice to embrace the similarities between my folks and I as well as pursuing an adult friendship with my mother, I embrace the idea that I’m “just like my mother.” Frankly, it is precisely because my mother offered me the clarity of vision and always raised me to make my own choices, that I think I am so comfortable embracing the pieces of me that are clearly her. I can think of no one more compassionate or more passionate about being a mom than my mom. It is not that she is empirically without flaws (no one is and who would want to be?) but it is the way in which she embraces humanity and does the damned best she can manage in the most selfless manner possible that makes her amazing to me. All that is good and compassionate in my personality, I can honestly say I received from my mother. All that is clinical, decisive and unflinching I got from my father.

To be totally honest, no one knows me better than the Jude (barring my father, with whom I have no and will have no adult relationship) as no mentor could possibly understand me on the genetic level she does. She simply understands both my nature and my nurture as she is the source of half of the former and most of the latter.

To me, nowhere is this more evident than “the voice inside my head.” Frankly, as an adult, it has always been the Jude and it will always be her. When things go awry, it is her voice that pops into my head to offer guidance, consolation or humor to the situation. Usually, it’s all three in a single quote. And if she’s not directly speaking to me, she’s at least given me the tools to be entertained with the great passion I have for men. I inherited my rather unwavering affection towards men from the one woman on the planet who might love men more than me. So, when she’s got no direct words of advice, she’s taught me to love men enough to use my real life examples that fit the moment.

On Friday (6/8) I had, empirically speaking, the worst date in the history of my dating life; and I’ve had some winners. For about two months, I had been chatting online with a Former Marine (I love the armed forces but it takes a special crazy to make a Marine; it’s not always a “bad” crazy and it’s not always a “good” crazy, but it is always a “special” crazy) who was born in China to Chinese and Japanese parents, moved to the US when he was a teen and then moved back to China for business. His kind of crazy seemed to be working well with my kind of crazy and he was just a pleasure to speak with. In spite of myself, I found myself rushing home and extending my online time just to have a few more minutes to talk with him. I had made no mention of it until now for two reasons; 1. It seemed too good to be true and 2. I am incredibly skeptical of dating via the internet. However, I was simply hooked. I found myself staying up until two in the morning just to continue to talk, despite my 6am wake-up call. And, a couple of nights, I over-embraced my exhaustion to skip the gym and chat with him. Frankly, the relief of having found a man who understood both the culture I come from and the culture I live in to such an extent that he was able to offer me insight into my own experience made me euphoric.

And then on Tuesday (6/5) he asked what I was doing for the weekend.

“Nothing” I lied, knowing I could clear my schedule if he wanted to call or something.

“Good. I’m coming to visit.” He typed.

And there it was; what I wanted more than anything.

And it terrified me. There were too many “what if”s and more than anything I wanted not to lose this friendship.

But, he had made up his mind and he was coming.

So, on Friday, I hopped the shuttle to the airport and waited for his plane.

He arrived and immediately my antennae started twitching. There was just something about his demeanor that set off all sorts of very subtle “Hmm” messages from my gut. For me, “Hmm” always ends up becoming the louder, “Uh, no.”

He immediately declared that he was in a foul mood from the plane and it would take him a few minutes to settle down.

“Okay,” I thought, “You’re just responding to his foul mood.”

And then we made our way over to the cabs to take one back to the city and he started angrily negotiating with the cabbies. Now, in China, the men definitely need to show their aggression with other men to be treated with respect but it just seemed a bit much. While I was turned off, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and entertain the notion that this showing was not indicative of his nature and perhaps this was just one of his worse moments truly ill timed. In that moment, I promised myself I wasn’t going to be alone with this man until he had been kind enough for long enough to make me forget how aggressive he can get in his rage.

Nevertheless, there was nothing to be done as I needed to get into a cab anyhow to get home. It was a public place and we were going to a public place. I felt safe as long as there were other people around.

Finally, he settled on a cab and we climbed in. He started chain smoking, despite claiming that he only smoked “once in a while” and suddenly his hand was around mine.

And all sorts of things flared up in me. Anxiety settled in around me but I couldn’t sort out why. When I get overwhelmed by feelings, I tend to freak out and so the panic tends to feed on itself and I know that. It takes a lot of effort but I do my best to calm myself down and sort out the panic from the initial emotion. I may be close to thirty but the sensation of a mans fingers laced through mine still sets off all sorts of “I can’t think” things and so I need a lot of time to move from hand holding to much else. And, after the extensive period of time I’ve had without so much as a hand-holding session with even Z, I’ve grown accustomed to feeling intense emotions long before anything physical happens. So, putting the cart before the horse was definitely discombobulating and unnerving especially as he clearly wanted some sort of emotional commitment and not just a fuck. Committing my body is one thing, committing my heart is a very different story.

In the moment, I’m incredibly slow moving and I loathe being pushed because I’m not good at moving at anyone else’s speed but my own. So, I did all I could think of and sorted through my rolodex of girlfriends to figure out what they would feel about this moment.

Frankly, I’m Western and so gauging the moment by how my Chinese girls would gauge it isn’t going to work. Hell, most of my girlfriends in any country think entirely too highly to approve of my sexuality in real time; no man will ever be good enough for me and any moves will always be too fast. My Brazilian Angel is the rare case of girlfriend who doesn’t need me to remain a vestal virgin and would insist that I use this moment as a good one-night-stand to get my sexual deprivation out of my system. However, she and I have very different taste in men and our kinds of sexuality are very different. Not to mention the issue that he keeps joking about me marrying him so I didn’t think casual sex was going to be in these cards.

So, I decided to try to enjoy the moment and did the best I could to push aside rising anxiety in my gut. Frankly, it was really nice to have a man who had no girlfriend and no wife touching my hand. I haven’t had the overt physical attentions of a single man in over a year and it’s killing me.

As we rode in the cab, he kept looking at me like he was going to kiss me but I knew I wasn’t ready for that and so I didn’t look at him very much. Not to mention, the idea of a man deciding between my lips and the butt of a cigarette wasn’t very appealing.

We finally made it into town and found a bar. We made our way to the roof of the bar and it was just beautiful. The breeze was warm, the lights of the ancient walls twinkled in the night haze, the glow of the South rose from the massive plaza off the opposite side of the roof and the music wasn’t so loud you couldn’t hear each other. I didn’t feel like talking; I felt like luxuriating in the moment.

“I really, really like you. I don’t want to say I love you yet but I really, really like you. You know what I mean?” He asked, interrupting my lovely headspace.

“What?” I asked, confused by this confession of love.

“We had a good first impression at the airport. I don’t want to say I love you yet but I really, really like you.” He repeated himself, as he would continue to do throughout the night.

“Huh. That’s a lot of way-over-committed-crazy.” I thought. But then I corrected myself, thinking that it shouldn’t be so harsh on him for believing in love at first sight.

“You know what I mean?” He asked again.

I nodded, knowing he was talking about his thought that we had a love at first sight moment at the airport.

“And I know you really, really like me.” He whispered, hushed as he reached out to push my hair behind my ear.

Flinching, I pulled away. I don’t like strangers touching my ears or my neck and he did both with a single gesture.

Claiming to still be tweaking, we got some beers and he said once he was properly sauced, everything would be better.

“Hmm,” I thought. I made excuses for him but the fact is that I don’t like anyone who feels so comfortable with their alcohol relationship that when trying to make the best first impression they’re comfortable declaring what they need is to be hammered. I’m not in college anymore and the appeal of being shitfaced has long-ago evaporated.

Nevertheless, we had had some seriously fantastic conversations via the internet and I was looking to recapture some of that. I found that I was making all these excuses for him under the premise that we would have more of the kind of conversations we had on the internet, so I needed a little payoff for my constant excuse making.

“I came because I’m so fucking sick of typing. Always typing. In the amount of time I spent typing, I could have said a million things and laughed without writing ‘haha’.” He answered me, bitter about having had to invest so much time in the one aspect of our relationship I really, really liked.

Gutturally, the Jude rose up from some part of my brain that could actually keep up with the moment. She once told me a story about a friend of her parents who, at some point not long after she got married, her husband slapped her on the ass, told her, “Roll over” and proceeded to completely ignore foreplay. When the woman asked her new husband, “What happened to the romance?” his response was something to the effect of, “We’re married now. I don’t have to pretend anymore.”

With the presence of the Jude, I suddenly reclaimed my parameters. I found my voice in the moment the Jude made herself present. It was like someone pressed the pause button again to release me from being overwhelmed.

Once I returned to the moment, I thought “[Bill] wouldn’t find anything wrong with taking the time to write things out. In fact, he would find this evening perfect with the weather, the breeze and the beautiful lights. He would linger in all the right ways. God, the way he lingers is sexy.” Immediately, I had a flash of my brief moment pressed up against Bill at the Tang Paradise. The comfort, the complete lack of pressure and the companionship of that day will always stay with me; it was perfection. The warmth of the summer breeze coupled with the ancient wall looming over the rooftop bar not a block from the site of our first dinner together so many months ago made me want to know the specificity of the softness of Bill’s lips. India, the latest sight of his latest job, never felt further.

Outside my head, I said, “I like the pace of typing. It gives me time to think. I don’t like to rush things.” I also took that moment to put his hands back on his own legs and move my legs around so his knee wasn’t pressed up into my crotch.

“But if we waited for you to be ready, nothing would ever happen.” He teased me in the ‘it’s a joke but not really’ sort of way.

“Hey!” I declared, mock-offended, despite fully understanding the underlying issues, “I will fight you!” and I play-punched his arm, noticing that his body certainly has not gone to pot since his time in the Marines. There was clearly no way I could possibly put up a fight against this man. It’s hard for anyone to beat me physically for two reasons; 1. I’m strong as a motherfucker and 2. I’m very honest with myself about my odds in a fight.

“You think you can fight me?” He said, fully serious and clearly challenged and clearly willing to let me find out just how of my league I would be. It was the first time in my life I met a man who clearly had no qualms about physically putting a woman in her place.

“[Tank] could bench press me despite being half my height but when I play hit him, he feigns pain. It never remotely occurs to him that we might actually fight. He would never actually fight me. He could kill me effortlessly but he would sooner let me kill him than raise a hand to me. The thought of his own destruction is nothing compared to the mere thought of wounding me. The one time I mentioned my own brothers hitting me back when I hit them got him highly agitated.” I thought, thinking about my Tank and how just my presence makes him smile while my presence makes the Former Marine stare at me with cannibalistic eyes while saying things like “I know I spoil you” after having bought me one beer. The fact that my Brazilian Angel was at the gym while I was at the bar and the first words out of Tank’s mouth to her were not “Hello” but “Where’s Christina” seems to sum up the error in my judgment.

At some point, the Marine leaned over to kiss me. It was the strangest moment of my life. There was no shift in the look in his eyes. There was no sense of submission to the moment. There was no moment of being overwhelmed by us. His black hole, ravenous cannibal eyes just continued their glare. Part of what I love about kissing is the way the whole world shifts just a little bit before a kiss but this time there was nothing. I love the way the shift in a look makes my capacity for life functions rank at “breathing is a serious effort.”

“He’s kissing me.” I thought, quite removed from the moment. I did not kiss him back and I didn’t really understand how the kiss happened. There’s always some sort of climactic moment just before a kiss but not this time. I couldn’t even glance at him without his constant, cannibal stare and somehow by simply glancing at him, his lips were on mine.

He then felt comfortable to start putting his hands on my body and my neck to pull me in close to him. I did my best to pull away and remove his hands from my body but it took quite a lot of effort to do so.

I tried to slow the moment down by talking with the people who were sitting with us but his cannibal presence consumed that entire conversation as well. Suddenly a casual conversation was this huge, guffawing affair complete with the mortifying moment of lifting of his shirt to flash his chest, which no one but he found funny.

When no one but he laughed, he lifted his shirt again. “I’m on a date with Borat,” I thought. “He’s just starts out horrifically awful and then makes things worse.” Our bar mates then turned to each other and talked amongst themselves like we weren’t there.

I placed a light hand on his arm and said quietly, “Let’s just leave our clothes on.”

“You will never do that again.” Reflexively shot out of him, cold as ice and definitely not to be fucked with. I’ve never been threatened like that before in my adult life.

“Excuse me?” I asked, doing my best to remove the New York Bitch from that statement, as it was clear to me he was barely able to control his violent impulses in a very public place on a the first two hours of the first date. Not to mention the fact that his Chinese is far better than mine. And, in a date-type situation without girlfriends around to protect me, whatever he explained to the waitstaff about what was going on between us would be respected and I would be left without protection. Thank god for the Chinese misogyny.

In that moment, I decided that with a militarily trained man clearly stronger than I with serious alcohol dependency and violent impulse control issues, it was best that I roll over, play innocently dead and get out of there as soon as possible. The Jude popped up and spoke to me, “She stoops to conquer.”

Ashamed at his blatant threat, he shook his head, closed his eyes and for the first time all night, his serial killer gaze was hidden from me in an act of contrition. I took the moment to inspect him but then he opened his eyes again and saw me watching him.

He kissed me again, this time with tongue and I pushed him away.

“No, this is just too fast. I can’t do this so fast.” I said everything I wanted to say but kept qualifying each statement with “so fast.” So, “I can’t do this” became “I can’t do this so fast.” I wasn’t about to shoot him down while he could put his hands on me.

“But if we had to wait for you, nothing would ever happen.” He declared again for the umpteenth time in the hour and change since we had met.

“I’m sorry but it’s just too fast.” I said, feigning hurt as I pulled away. I also kept saying “I’m sorry” and dropped the “you feel that way, asshole” in order to make him think I was upset about disappointing him. He clearly saw me as an innocent and if that was going to keep me safe, I was going to use that for all it was worth. As the Jude says, she stoops to conquer!

“You know, we can just sleep together tonight. Nothing has to happen.” He looked at me, desperately. “You know, I don’t need to have sex with you. We can just lie together and I can hold you. I won’t have sex with you if you don’t want. I won’t rape you. Sex with you if you don’t want it is like rape. I won’t rape you. You believe me don’t you? You have to believe me. I don’t have to have sex with you.” He told me as I looked away. The Former Marine was having serious St. Augustine issues; he was constantly denying precisely what he wanted. In some way, people who deny their baser instincts like that are worse than addicts who completely submit to it; they not only have to admit they have a problem but they also have to admit they want it. They obliterate all other conversation except the one about how they don’t want the thing they want so badly they can’t breathe.

I did my best not to laugh as the Jude’s “I just want to lay it on your belly” story came to mind. One of the Jude’s nursing school friends had a date with a guy who kept insisting that they go back to his place. He didn’t want to have sex; he just wanted to “lay it on [her] belly.”

“Yeah, right. I just want to lay it on your belly” The Jude would always comment and roll her eyes.

In that moment I saw the Jude roll her eyes and speak, “Yeah, right. I just want to lay it on your belly.”

I bit my lip at the thought of the Jude and got myself together. As no piece of what he was offering appealed to me, I saw that scenario clearly play out before me. I would go to his hotel room. He would let me sleep a little. In my sleep I would indicate by the way I twitched my nose or the way my index finger on my left hand shifted to the right that I needed sex right then, I would get raped and then things would get seriously ugly as guilt consumed him. Frankly, I’m not so stupid I’m hemorrhaging from the ears so the idea of going to an anonymous hotel room with a highly trained killing machine with impulse control issues and a serious guilt complex didn’t seem like a good idea.

Frankly, I was more than a little disappointed. Had he not been as crazy as he clearly was or had he not begun declaring his great love for me, I would have totally been up for a fling. Clearly this was not a long-term love for me; he simply could not enjoy the silence nor the moment. However, I am doing my best not to scratch my eyeballs out for lack of a lover. Regardless of how much beggars cannot be choosers, I am not about to put my safety at risk to get laid.

“Of course I believe you.” I lied through my pearly whites. “I just am not ready for things to move this quickly. I’m sorry. It’s just too fast.”

Fending off the millionth “Don’t you want to save me money on a hotel and let me come back to your apartment?” request (because I want to die on the rock hard shitty mattress the school bought me in the apartment the school owns) to not be found until early Tuesday morning when they sort out the key/lock issue, I told him I was very tired and I needed to head home. I promised we’d meet up early Saturday morning and I headed off after some more fake concern for him.

I went home and collapsed in bed. It’s amazing how much “not getting raped and killed” can exhaust you.

Early Saturday, I woke up, completely freaked out at the prospect of having to deal with this again. “Fuck, it wasn’t just a nightmare,” I said out loud as I lay in my bed trying to sort things out.

I texted my girl Cakes and the Jude and each woman called me back, helping me sort things out.

Not surprisingly, the Jude said most of what I heard her say in my head the night before but also not surprisingly, she had quite a bit more insight to add. She helped steady me and make things okay. She rehashed enough to help reassure me that I was safe and in that real time conversation, I was able to find enough courage to straight out reject him in lieu of hiding in my apartment until the weekend was over and hope that he wasn’t able to track me down on the scant information he may or may not have remembered about me.

Frankly, if I’m ever lucky enough to have healthy kids, I hope that they feel a fraction of what I feel for the Jude. Even when she’s on the other side of the world, completely unaware, she still protects me, helps me and keeps me balanced.