Letter to a Girl I Knew Once. Well, More Than Once, but Rather a Long Time Ago... Recently.

Loren Victory


This is going to be hard to do. I’m not very well practiced in admitting my not so favorable qualities. In fact, much of the time, I’m trying as best I can to either distract people from recognizing them or I just avoid them coming up all together. It’s like if I were to have deformed toes, which I don’t.
I mean, I can say that with some certainty.
If I did, though, I would simply refrain from wearing sandals.
In any case, if I were somehow seen in my bare feet and my toes were deformed and saw that someone had glanced down and was taking a longer than normal look, I may spontaneously vomit or throw something through a window to break their concentration.
More to the point... given that we have had a relationship of sorts, and promises were made, that is to say that on those first dates you asked me questions about my work and upbringing and I told you stories about my “boss” and “company picnics” and that my parents had wanted me to attend Vassar, so as to facilitate my talent as painter, but that I opted for a “life” education, traveling Europe and later accepted an apprenticeship with an architecture firm out of Caracas based on some drawings I had done while crewing a charter boat in the Caribbean.
Meaning, I guess you expected certain things based on things I said.

Really, as much as I would like to deflect blame and say, “well, you should never idealize others, especially people you meet while speed dating, or pouring change into one of those machines that spits out a voucher for food. I mean, really, don’t overanalyze your relationships. Stop playing games. I’m not here to live up to your expectations, just as you are not here to live up to mine,” it is true that you found out things about me before I had a chance to undo them or somehow counterfeit paperwork that might support my claims.

When we “bumped” into each other at the Laundromat and you were accompanied by that older gentleman, I was certain that you were trying to make me jealous or that I had indeed caught you in some act that would have made me a cuckold. So, my infantile jabs at his paunchy belly and the purple-greenish veins reaching out from under his black socks towards his pleated plaid shorts, were really only attempts to either
a) improvise a “jealous” reaction that would enhance the “scene” we were enacting. (I did a “workshop” while in camp one summer. It comes as naturally to me, but I have no stomach for Hollywood)
Or b) protect myself from a hurt that I did not want to imagine nor endure. I do tend to jump to conclusions and that you were suddenly unwilling to continue your commitment to what were ultimately my delusions of a future, left me shaken and unable to see how we could still be friends.

As for the money, well, I know that in discussing my offer to turn your small nest egg into a windfall of cash, you were somewhat skeptical. I do, however, appreciate your eagerness to learn how soft shell crab farms were the the new silicon and I realize much of my “financial” jargon was beyond the scope of your... well, let’s just use the phrase “interest”, seeing that the bar was quite loud that day and you had had much to drink. But, really, to use the older gentleman as some sort of ‘checks and balances’ to my strictly unselfish desire to see you well provided for was beyond cruel and embarrassing. He obviously comes from a different school of thought than I do. Central American banking systems work in a much more simple and at the same time “abstract” fashion than say your normal run of the mill Adam Smith and his “Wealth of Nations” or any classical definition of macroeconomics. I did, however, feel that his laughter was more of a mechanism to mask his own insecurities and the fact Eisenhower was dead and the Second Great War and the accomplishments of his generations were slowly fading.

So, to sum up, let me just explain that you will not be seeing me around much at the events anymore. As is the case with many people like me... relating mostly to the quote from Einstein about dealing with the opposition of mediocre minds, I have found a “foxhole” or a “bunker” perhaps in the arms of nebbish, yet sexually dynamic and cat-like woman who I met while waiting for the Blue-line Number 10. Her meth addiction withstanding, we are really connected in a way that you and I never found, regardless of the countless egg timers we have turned over together.
I will avoid all Crate & Barrel’s, seeing as I’m not sure exactly which one you work at, and I remember that Karaoke at Sharky’s was a favorite haunt of yours, so I will forgo my hours of practice and shelve what was to be an epic rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Ben”, as I looked forward to you someday telling me where exactly this Sharky’s could be found.

Please take this as an apology for what were ultimately my short comings. I am a man. But, a human man. A man who makes mistakes and is not perfect. And though I was somewhat intimidated by my own dreams and desires, I hope that we can at least be friends until I at least find accommodations that might be better suited to us rekindling our “relationship.”

Sincerely yours,
The Guy in the Christopher Cross T-shirt