I have received a number of comments and emails asking my why, if Navy is such a good guy, do I not go out with him?

There are a few reasons and I sort of feel obliged to explain myself, since I made him sound so nice and all. Not that he isn’t nice, but…

1. He is, after all, Tim’s brother. And in a slightly drunken conversation (on Tim’s part, rather; I was completely sober), Tim specifically asked me not to go out with his brother. Of course, then he told me that Navy really needed to get laid, and I wonder why he felt compelled to mention that to me.
2. Navy needs to get laid because, according to Tim, he hasn’t since his mad ex-wife left him two years ago and pretty much scarred him forever.
3. Yeah, the ex-wife. Navy is only 26 and he did not want to get divorced. He’s a happily-ever-after kind of guy. Since he didn’t get that with the girl he loved, he grows more bitter by the day. Maybe by the hour – I haven’t timed him yet.
4. He has a four-year old daughter who happens to be the most beautiful, sweet little girl in the world. I know her because she’s Tim’s niece and she’s wonderful and we have fun together but still… it could be a confusing thing to deal with, especially when her mom is apparently some sort of redneck psycho.
5. He bottles up rage and almost lets loose often, but never has. Yet.

But I do quite like him because:

1. We’ve always gotten along since we first met.
2. I can talk to him. Love and relationships, what we want versus what we have, the inability to trust someone enough to believe they won’t just leave you (E? I knew it was coming. Eventually. It always does, eventually. I’m a fatalist like that).
3. He’s not afraid to admit that he’s lonely, or that he’s afraid to find another person to be not-lonely with.
4. He doesn’t judge me for saying the same thing. Most guys don’t want to hear that a girl is lonely, that she wants to find The Right Guy and have The Loving Relationship that lasts forever and ever. That makes most guys want to run and hide in a fridge full of beer.
5. That’s very nice.
6. Military uniforms are HOT. He hasn’t been on active duty for a couple of years but still. Hot.

So maybe List #2 outnumbers List #1. But this isn’t that “Friends” episode. The crap part is that if we were dating, I think we might slowly self-destruct together. I bottle up rage too, and I let loose by breaking things. He’s terrified of falling for someone who will hurt him again. I’m terrified of falling for someone and then freaking out at the last minute and hurting him again. I just don’t think there can be a successful relationship between two people who are perhaps too scared to help each other make it through the rough times.

And family gatherings? Hah. It would be funny though, considering the fact that that first time I went to a family thing with Tim, his niece (not Navy’s daughter) climbed up into my lap and said “My mommy says you’re going to be my auntie!” First. Time. With. The Family.

Although it’s highly unlikely, this situation has the potential to be hugely ironic.

#10, Michael Owen. Striker. Yummy yummy yummy. Tore his ACL in the first minute of play against Sweden in the 2006 World Cup. Out for the rest of the season and the first part of the next.

It appears that my time-out as a Bitter Newlydumped is now over and I am now expected to play like a normal single girl again.

I’ve been pegged for two blind dates and my best friend has been bothered for my number from a guy she knows who was too shy to ask me. One blind date was turned down because I do not like blind dates, another was accepted because it’s actually fill-in-the-blank sort of date with a friend’s boyfriend’s friend and there is a guaranteed nice dinner involved. I’m glad my friend did not give my number to Shy Boy because I was sloshed when I met him and honestly don’t remember what he looked like (or much beyond the fact that he does not like what he calls Toby Keith’s “blind patriotism”), and because if you’re too shy to ask my drunk self for my number (and in that state it is usually given freely), we might have communication issues.

That was the uncomplicated bit.

Friday night at the JB, drinking beer with the friends. Among others, the group includes Tim, two of his eleventy hundred brothers and some of their friends. They’re good boys and generally acceptable in polite company, but I know them because I dated Tim and that’s how they know me. There’s always a his-and-hers friend thing in breakups, and these were obviously his. Eighteen months have thoroughly blurred the lines though, and all is well with everyone.

It’s still strange, though, when your ex-boyfriend’s brother feels you up, and one of his friends flirts with you all night and then…

“Fireman stole my phone number!” I said to Mel the next day.

“How did he STEAL it?”

“He just picked up my phone, called his own phone, and saved the number.”

Mel and her husband burst out laughing. Take note, gentlemen – that was pretty damn slick. No friend-bothering for him, Fireman’s got MOVES.

The three of us go on to chat about the events of the night and I make some offhand comment along the lines of why-would-Fireman-want-my-phone-number, surely he was just kidding around, etc. I also fill them in about Tim’s brother (Navy) getting rather handsy with me at the bar after they left, wondering what that was all about.

“Yep, I could’ve told you that was coming,” says Mel’s husband.

I raise my eyebrows.

“They were both asking about you at JB.”

“Asking what?”

“You know, status, situation… I told them both ‘Hey, she’s cute, she’s single, go for it… but remember whose seconds you’ll be taking.’”

“Thanks for reminding everyone,” I say wryly.

“OBVIOUSLY they didn’t mind,” he points out.

Navy is Tim’s younger brother. The day I met him, a group of us were out and Tim went to another table to talk to a friend. When Tim came back and asked Navy what we were talking about, he said “We’re talking about how I’m going to keep your girlfriend company when you’re deployed.” Oh, Tim was LIVID. I thought it was funny at the time. So you can imagine how hilarious it was to me when Navy started getting all feely with me at the bar. Everything is pretty humorous when I’ve been drinking, but the idea of hooking up with Tim’s brother was kind of laughable even in a sober state of mind. Really, come on. His BROTHER. Hahahahaha!

Um, except it was sort of nice. Yeah, I was sort of drunk, but it was nice. Navy can be a sweet guy, and he had a pretty good buzz going on as well. But of course at one point…

“Tim’s such an idiot. I can’t believe he’d break up with you.”

“Good thing for you he did.”

“Why?”

“Cause if he hadn’t, you might be trying to feel up your sister-in-law right now.”

See? Laughs all around.

The troublesome part is that I am now sober and they both have my number. Navy and I have been texting a bit and Fireman called me today. It’s so fun to flirt and so fun to have cute boys make a little fuss over me, but this is an exceeeedingly shallow dating pool I’m swimming in, and I am well aware that trouble lurks in these waters.

As another Friday approaches, it occurs to me that I completely forgot to write about my antics last Friday. And since my weekend wasn’t entirely lame for once, I think I should share.

Tim was hassled into participating in his annual parish musical. I’ve known Tim for 2 years and I dated him for about 8 months of that time, and I have never been able to picture the boy singing and dancing. I know he’s done theater in the past but… he’s stoic and square-shouldered and was in the military. He drinks Budweiser and plays pool and drives a truck. He’s not the guy you’d expect to give his regards to Broadway.

So of course Mel and I had to go see this spectacle. Friday night at 7:00 we trooped into the school gymnasium and sat in the very back.

“I’m going to go get us some beer,” Mel said.

“Here?”

“Duh, these are Catholics,” she pointed out. “See, those people have wine. There will be beer.”

She went to the concession stand and came back with two cups of wine and a pissed-off look. “No beer,” she grumbled, handing me a cup. “This is going to be impossible without more booze.”

After a moment’s discussion, I handed her the keys to the Jeep and she took off, leaving me alone in a gym full of sober Catholics while Father Whoever prattled on about the history of the parish and how all the numbers in this musical revue were part of the parish history and blar-dee-blar-blar-blar. When the curtain finally came up, Mel still hadn’t come back. The revue started at the beginning of the 20th century and ostensibly followed the journey of three generations of a family growing up in the parish, telling stories through popular songs. Tim came onstage in 1928.

Oh. My God. He was wearing an argyle sweater and some sort of fedora, and I don’t know if he forgot to change into his dress shoes or what but the man was wearing SNEAKERS with his khakis. I almost choked on what was left of my crappy wine. And then he started singing “Ain’t We Got Fun” and danced the Charleston. I could never have imagined it in my wildest dreams – and back in the day, I had some wild dreams about that boy.

Mel arrived back sometime in the middle of the Great Depression, and thank God Prohibition was over because she’d brought a pack of cranberry martinis in little bottles. Woo!

Scenes passed and we worked our way through the booze. When Tim came onstage in the 1950s wearing a white dinner jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, we picked up our phones and started texting.

“That jacket is pretty damn sexy!” I said. “Those glasses are HOT!” Mel wrote.

In the 1960s he sang part of “The Twist” in a montage and we almost fell over when he did a pretty decent Chubby Checker voice neither of us imagined he had in him. Mel wrote him after that number, saying we wanted to throw our panties on the stage but we were sitting too far back.

The cast geared up for the 1970s by lining up behind the audience while the narrator spoke onstage. “He’s right behind us!” I told Mel. “On my right! Should we wave?”

“Nah, he probably doesn’t have his phone on so he didn’t get our texts. He probably doesn’t know we’re here.”

The cast became flower children and hippies and pranced – PRANCED, I tell you – up onto the stage and sang “Let the Sun Shine In.” In the eighties, he was the policeman in the Village People for “YMCA,” and Mel and I were the only ones in the whole audience who made the letters with our arms and sang along.

We were also probably the only people in the audience under forty, and definitely the only ones who’d had cranberry martinis in little bottles.

He was a raver in the nineties and I don’t even remember what else. Mel and I stood up and cheered the loudest when the curtain went down, then went out to the lobby to see if he’d come out. After a few minutes we got impatient, figured he hadn’t checked his phone, and walked outside.

“There’s his truck. We could just wait there like groupies and he’ll feel special.”

“Is it locked?” We try the doors. “Damn.”

“Why?”

“We should sit in there and make out. That would be funny.”

Yes, Mel was drunker than I was, for once. We settled for scribbling notes on the back of the program and sticking it under the windshield wiper. Tim did come out and see us and we got hugs – I think he was pretty surprised we had come. No one really goes to those things, he said, and pointed out that he’d told me last week I didn’t have to come.

“I don’t have to listen to you anymore, ” I said with a wink. “And I loved it and wouldn’t have missed it. Did you know we were here?”

“I got the text messages and I thought BEN was here,” he said, naming Mel’s husband and his best friend.

“You didn’t check and see who they were from?” we asked.

“Well I figured if you guys were here he had to be here.”

“Hmph,” Mel said. “He wouldn’t show his face at one of these things. You’re stuck with us.”

Kiss on the cheek, and Tim’s off to a cast party and Mel and I head to the bar to meet some of her work friends… and that’s another fun story.

It’s nice to know you can become friends with not only someone who happens to be your ex-boyfriend, but who also happens to be the person who hurt you the deepest you’ve ever been hurt in your life. You guys think I’m in some pain about E? Pssht. I was off the deep end and dead to the world because of Tim, for months on end. It’s been a year and a half now, and time heals a little. We have to be civil to one another at least, because my best friend and his best friend happen to be husband and wife, and at first even civil was hard – for me anyway. But now I can spend the first half of a Friday night getting tanked in a school gymnasium, watching him in a goofy musical and loving it, railing on him afterward, and then dropping a kiss on his cheek while I go off to a bar to flirt with strangers.

Maybe there is hope.

Got my headlights shining
Down an old dirt road
Smoke my cigarettes, I should quit I know

I’m not a smoker, really, in the sense that I’ve never said “Damn, I need a smoke.” I went to a hookah bar a couple of times when I had friends that liked the hummus and pita there. Once in awhile, my then-boyfriend Alan and I used to sit out on his porch, thread our legs through the rungs of the railing and share a cigar on a nice night. I don’t particularly care for cigars, but on the nights when he’d have a feel for one, those were always the nights to relax. They were so few and far between for us.

The radio’s playing
Old country songs
Someone’s leavin’, someone’s cheatin’, on and on

Tim secretly wanted to be a cowboy and he still refuses to admit it. He owns a Stetson that he won’t ever wear because it’s too precious, and he smoked like the Marlboro man. His ringtone is Big and Rich’s “Save a Horse, Ride A Cowboy,” but he probably hasn’t ridden a horse since he was a kid visiting an apple farm with tame pony rides for a dollar. Tim is also the one who got me started on country music. I joke sometimes that it’s the one good thing he left me out of that relationship. We listened to it on the radio the night we met, when I ended up riding with him to the next bar the group was hitting. As we began to see each other more I really didn’t mind it, but I know it didn’t escape his notice that I, a loud-and-proud car singer, didn’t know any of the words and never had any on when I drove. Until, that is, I started singing along with Rascal Flatts’ “Life is a Highway” in his truck one day.

“When did you start singing with country?” he asked incredulously.

“Come on,” I said. “Everyone knows this song. Tom Cochrane. Sixth grade.”

But then I sang with The Wreckers on “Leave the Pieces.” And then Montgomery Gentry. And Sugarland. And Toby Keith. When I next plugged the iPod into the car stereo, I surprised him Rascal Flatts’ “Me and My Gang,” which made him smile while he blew his cigarette smoke out the window.

I think I might like
The quiet nights
Of this empty life

After Tim and I broke up, I couldn’t listen to country music for a little while. Everything was a song we sang with, especially the song on my phone that served as his ringtone: Kenny Chesney’s “Summertime,” which was the perfect song to describe that summer we were together, bare feet on the dashboard and young love in an old Ford. He was the first guy I dated who was a real smoker, and it surprised me a bit that it really wasn’t such a bone of contention as I had thought. Never in the house, of course, and the military had made him quite fastidious about his hygiene, so he never smelled like it. I swear, the guy showered three times a day. But ever after, whenever I went into a bar and smelled cigarettes, I smelled him. He always said he was going to quit.

Someday, maybe somebody will love me like I need
And someday, I won’t have to prove this, somebody will see
All my worth, but until then I’ll do just fine on my own
With my cigarettes and this old dirt road

Melissa – also not a smoker – and I used to duck out of work and take smoke breaks. We called them Mental Health Breaks, figuring that if smokers got to leave the building and indulge a vice, we shouldn’t be denied that fifteen-minute break just because we didn’t. But once in awhile, on a really bad day, we would bum cigarettes from people in the smoking area and pause for a little slow-down to offset whatever stress was driving us crazy that day. After Tim, I was stressed a lot and used those Marlboro Ultra Lights on the days when the Klonopin wasn’t enough.

“Is someone SMOKING in here?” asked one of the directors when we walked back to the department one day.

“Um, no, that’s us,” we said, not making eye contact. “We were just outside.”

“You guys SMOKE?”

“It’s been a rough day,” I said, “and it’s legal for us to step outside to inhale a few carcinogens. We have to do that since we’re not allowed to drink at work.”

See I left another
Good man tonight
I wonder if he’ll miss me, lord knows I tried

E is a smoker. When I worked at The Restaurant, we waitresses knew we could always find him out back if we had new tickets and he wasn’t in the kitchen. I never smoked at work there because I figured it wouldn’t be good for tips if I went up to my customers in a non-smoking restaurant reeking of cigarettes. The first night that E and I hung out after work, we walked down the street to a bar and he lit up after ordering our drinks. I made the “gimme” motion with my hand and he looked at me strangely.

“You smoke?” He gave me the eyebrow.

“Not usually. But it’s been a long day,” I said. He lit one for me with a pull on his own, and handed it over.

“You’re cooler than I thought,” he said while I sent a puff into the air.

A few months later, I backed up into him when he was holding a cigarette, and I accidentally burned my hand. The triangle-shaped burn settled into a heart-shaped scar that I still have today.

But I think that maybe
The thing that I did wrong
Was put up with his bullshit for far too long

In a candid picture from his friend’s wedding, E is behind the bride and groom, holding a cigarette and a pint of Guinness. This pretty much explains him. Most nights I would find E on the porch at some point, smoking a Marlboro Light, checking his voicemails and returning calls. If he wasn’t on the phone, I would sometimes join him but rarely have a smoke myself. I could tell by the way he was smoking if something – the voicemails, work, even me – was pissing him off. I always found him out on the porch after those last fights we had, either angrily sucking down the smoke or staring at the ash thoughtfully as it burned down. Always, he would flick the end of his cigarette off the porch and over my fence into the street with the practiced motion of one who had been doing it since he was fifteen.

I think I might like
The quiet nights
Of this empty life

A few nights ago at home, I sat on the porch and angrily blew smoke at the lantern lights I had put up to make it more romantic out there.

Someday, maybe somebody will love me like I need
And someday, I won’t have to prove this, somebody will see

Things fell apart with E right around the time Tim got his discharge from the Air Force and moved back here. He started coming over again. It’s usually after he’s been drinking; he’ll call me on his way home from wherever in the middle of the night, half thinking about a booty call and half just wanting someone to listen to him whine about how his life sucks.

“You’re still the only person who gets me,” he says.

“I know.”

We sit in silence for a minute while he half-heartedly tries to rub my leg seductively. When I don’t respond, he sighs and puts his arm around me, and I rest my head on his shoulder.

“Do you have a smoke?”

“You said you quit,” I say accusingly.

“I did. I just smoke when I’ve been drinking sometimes.”

I walk into the kitchen. “Here.”

“You don’t smoke Lights.”

“They’re E’s. He left them.”

“Have one with me?”

“I don’t really want one.” I let him go out to the porch alone.

All my worth, but until then I’ll do just fine on my own
With my cigarettes and this old dirt road

He lights up in the bar on Friday night; we’re there with Ben and Melissa just like old times. “Want one?” he asks.

“No, thanks.”

I drive him to the next bar, then back to his truck two hours later. When he gets out, I can smell the bar smoke that clings to both of us, in our hair and on our skin.

I don’t wanna sleep
I don’t wanna dream
About the things that I used to need
And I ain’t gonna cry
Or gonna live the lies
I’m just gonna drive

There’s a pack of Marlboro Ultras buried in the Jeep’s center console, and I fumble for them at a stoplight. I find them just before the green arrow, and pluck the matches I snitched from the bar out of my bag. It’s hard to light up with a match while I’m driving, and I wait until the next stop. I can see his headlights in my rearview mirror and I squint, forgetting the cigarette. The light turns green and I drive on while he follows me.

‘Cause someday, maybe somebody will love me
And someday, I won’t have to prove
All my worth, but until then I’ll do just fine on my own
With my cigarettes
Oh, and this old dirt road

————————————-
Song lyrics from “Cigarettes”

The Wreckers, Stand Still, Look Pretty