Page 64 of Torn
You want to know who I ended up with, right?
Or you think you know because with Walt gone, that left only Tom.
And, for a while, you were right.
It was Tom. After moving in together after his grandmother’s funeral, my little one-bedroom apartment on Fargo Avenue quickly became crowded with our stuff and our growing collection of strays, testimony to Tom’s kind heart and inability to say no. AJ was joined by two feline sisters, Jeruk and Alani, and then by a dog, Martha Wash, a bulldog mix.
Our apartment also became crowded with another kind of stray, also because of Tom’s kind heart and inability to say no, but this time it was to other men.
Lest you want to throw tomatoes at poor Tom for infidelity, know this—we embarked on an open relationship quickly after moving in together. It was a choice we made together. And for a while, it was fun.
But then, like all fun things, it was fun until it wasn’t.
And it became a problem not so much because of the other men in our bedroom (and on our living room couch, on our balcony, on our dining room table, and once, memorably, in the basement laundry room of the building), but because of Tom’s drinking.
See, Tom was the perfect poster boy for the old Alcoholics Anonymous saying “One is too many and a thousand is never enough.”
I didn’t notice right away because I was trying to keep up with him. But after a while, I grew tired of bleary-eyed nauseous mornings and a stranger or two in bed with us.
And I slowed down… and stopped. When we went out, I had club soda or a Coke.
Tom never even noticed my switch. And me, the classic enabler and conflict-avoider, never brought it up.
I simply watched. And counted. And grew more and more frustrated in silence.
So, you see, if you think I chose Tom as my forever man, you were wrong.
Fate took the decision out of my hands. I’d talked endlessly to Boutros about wanting to leave, the conversations usually ending up tearful (on my part) and disgusted (on his) as I wept, “But I love him.”
Only a year into our relationship, Tom left me. His departure was via driving into a concrete support for an overpass on his way home from the bars. He died instantly.
He may have fallen asleep at the wheel.
He may have simply swerved erratically, like that night long ago when he told me he’d played pinball with the cars on Clark Street after a night of heavy drinking at the Eagle.
He may have been groping, or being groped by, the young man in the car with him, someone he was perhaps bringing home to share with me, much as a cat drops a dead bird at its beloved owner’s front door. Oddly, that young man walked away without a scratch on him.
Whatever the cause, I got woken up by two Chicago police officers at around four o’clock in the morning to learn that my Tom was never coming home.
Now, if you’re a little on the heartless side, you might be thinking that I wasn’t too broken up. I wanted to leave him, anyway, right?
There was also the fact that none of my friends liked him. Too loud. Too boorish. An embarrassment. Beneath me. My mother couldn’t stand him. And I was sick to death of his behavior, especially when drunk.
But you’d be wrong. Tom’s death nearly killed me. I felt my grief so acutely that for months after, I’d burst into tears at the slightest memory. I had to move from the apartment we shared. I stayed out of the bars, not because I was no longer drinking, but because they reminded me so much of him.
I thought he left a hole in me that could never be filled again.
I was wrong.
See, during that time of mourning and loss, that time of feeling unmoored and that the world could never be made right again, someone stepped up to comfort me, without expecting anything in return.
Someone who’d always been there for me, my truest and best friend. He’d watched me put on and cast off so many men. He’d nursed me through many a heartbreak and was always my rock and my shoulder to cry on.
And he was there for me when I lost Tom.
He invited me to move into the apartment below him in his building, and together we’d walk along the Chicago River that bordered our neighborhood and we’d talk… and bicker. He made fun of me for my weakness, and he brought me stupid things like cupcakes and Popeyes’ fried chicken when I was really low.
He’d made me his mum’s best dessert—spotted dick—and joined me in laughing about the custard’s unfortunate name.
