Tripping on Tears (6 page)

It didn’t take long after they exited the donut shop that Safia noticed me standing there by my car. She smiled at me, but looked a little puzzled. Kareena nudged her towards me. Taking that cue, Safia walked across the parking lot toward me, a slightly confused look on her face.

“I thought you’d be gone by now?” she said. “Is everything all right?”

“Not really,” I said.

I don’t know where I got the courage; I don’t know why I did it, but without any further hesitation, I put my arm around her, pulled her to me and kissed her. Much to my surprise and relief, she kissed me back.

I felt great.

CHAPTER
Six

MEETING
A
woman, someone special, changes a man. I mean we each probably change in different ways, but it does have an impact. Before we’re interested in someone, life is a little more carefree, our attitudes different – but afterwards, you find yourself focusing on the simplest things; things you would let slide if there wasn’t the prospect of moving from single guy to guy in a relationship. Suddenly I was focusing on little things like should I do the dishes or leave them overnight in the kitchen sink; should I vacuum the area rugs and dust, or do I really like the dust balls blowing across the living room like tumbleweeds in a Western? I was a big fan of Westerns growing up, but not quite sure if she was.

And what about my magazine collection?

Are they acceptable and proper if a young lady was over and flipping through them?

I guess I was lucky. I was raised by a Father who was a little more refined in his ways. As a young man he was a hell raiser, getting into a lot of fights and what not, at least based on what my brother and sister and I were told, but by the time he got married and became a father, he’d settled down. He was never the stereotypical baseball cap-wearing, pick-up truck driving, beer drinking, a ‘man’s got to be a man,’ and ‘men don’t cry’ kind of father. He showed us a lot of emotion and was always one for a good hug – one of the things I miss about him now that he’s gone. He was a big bear of a man and he could give you the best hugs ever.

As I was saying, by the time my Father had married and started having kids, he had settled down. He taught my brother and I to be gentlemen, so we never developed some of those male attributes I saw in other friends of mine whose fathers were definitely different. For instance, one friend, whose father seemed to spend his days drinking and living off of disability checks, was more inclined to drink himself. He was highly intelligent and well read, but with a rough and gruff father, I believe, he tried to convey that same image to the world of himself - and loved to drink. We’d get together at his place for a Sunday, maybe watch some football, and he’d spend all day drinking one beer after another; and it never looked like it affected him. If I did what he did, they’d be wiping me off the floor.

Another friend, my best friend in high school, well he grew up without a father. It was a rough upbringing, his mother worked hard and they had a nice apartment, but I found his attitude in regards to women, dating and marriage was a little unconventional. He was one of the
horndogs
always looking to get laid. And it seemed in this quest, he wasn’t too particular; as long as the individual was female, he was good to go – big, small, short, tall, it really didn’t matter. He was also interested more in pornography. I remember one time he was telling me he bought a couple of adult magazines and took them home. As he walked in the door his mother was there and asked him what he had bought. Seeing as he read stuff like
Heavy Metal
magazine and
Rolling Stone
he told her that’s what was in the bag, but this time she asked if she could see them. A surprise development that embarrassed him when he was forced to show her what he’d really bought. He just hadn’t been given enough time to get in the apartment and get the magazines under his mattress.

Everyone seemed to develop differently. As for me, I guess I developed in the middle ground – moderation being the key word here. Dad didn’t really drink much, so I didn’t drink much. Dad showed no interest in anything pornographic, so I guess I did the same. Dad never objectified women, so my brother and I were taught to follow suit. I guess my biggest flaw for any woman getting to know me in a relationship was my
Playboy
collection.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “I thought you didn’t objectify women?” I don’t, and I don’t think the true readers of
Playboy
magazine do either. I’d read some time ago, in a companion book full of
Playboy
magazine interviews and fiction, a quote from Hugh Hefner, who at the time of saying it was addressing a room full of
Playboy
Playmates, that, and I’m paraphrasing, “If it wasn’t for you guys, I’d be the publisher of a well-respected literary magazine today.” He was right. The old joke is, “I only buy the magazine for the articles.” To tell you the truth, that’s the only reason to buy the magazine. Let’s break it down. A typical issue has one pictorial before the Centerfold, the Centerfold, and then one pictorial after the Centerfold. There might be one more squeezed in there, but probably not. The pictorials only run about five to ten pages max, so that means about ninety percent of the magazine is articles and such. If looking at naked women is your goal, and solely your goal, you’re going to be sorely disappointed in buying a
Playboy
.

I guess my Father bought me my first
Playboy
when I was fifteen. There was someone on the cover that caught my attention, I believe it was one of their celebrity covers, and I innocently asked him if he’d buy it for me. He did, and, surprisingly, when my Mother found out he did, she didn’t even kick up a fuss. Of course, as a young man developing, I was very interested in the pictures, but once I got tired of looking at them, I started looking at the rest of the magazine. I think I started by reading the interview, which was with a political leader of the day. I then started exploring the articles. I was hooked. My one friend and I became
Playboy
aficionados, going to flea markets and used book stores looking for back issues – issues from the sixties and seventies, where the interviews were even more in-depth and interesting. We were introduced to an amazing and surprising world of intellectual discovery. We read fiction by Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, John Updike, and more. There were profiles on political leaders, celebrities, heads of industry and such, many of them composed by intellectuals of the day. And the
Playboy
Interview, well that was what my friend and I traded
Playboys
on, or spent our time looking for. It wasn’t a quest to find an issue with a particular Playmate in it, it was, “I found the
Playboy
with the Jimmy Carter interview,” or “I found the
Playboy
with the Frank Sinatra interview,” stuff like that. They were always in-depth and not only addressed their lives and career, but many of the social issues of the day. In many ways, for my friend and I,
Playboy
started us on the path to becoming well-read, introducing us to authors we would have otherwise ignored if we’d seen their books on the shelves.

So that was my one flaw, I’m sure, as far as women were concerned. Eventually, they were going to stumble across my
Playboy
collection, and based on branding, were going to jump to a lot of conclusions regarding it
.
They’d assume it was all about the
Playboy
Bunny, and not know the truth, and because the joke, “I only read it because of the articles,” has been out there forever, if you make that claim it is only met with laughter and disbelief. Now, I don’t have this collection in full view, or easily accessible in my apartment. I don’t think that would be wise. I did have a roommate once, a friend who was really into pornography and had a collection of hardcore magazines that he’d collected over the years. When we set up our apartment, he actually put those hardcore magazines on a book shelf in our living room. I thought he was insane. These magazines were out in the open, where my Mother could see them when she came to visit; they weren’t the type that I’d look at, and they just weren’t appropriate. My Mother could deal with
Playboy
, and had actually, from time to time, flipped through an issue I was reading as a teenager, and found something in there to read herself, but not the magazines he was reading – no, forget that, not reading – looking through, or God knows what. He ended up moving out after a year, and I was glad to see those magazines out of my living room.

I know if things went well with Safia, as they had so far, she was eventually going to come over to my place and at some point stumble across my
Playboy
collection, and at that point, judge me – is he a pervert or not? She wasn’t going to stumble across some weird prescriptions in my medicine cabinet, or a store room full of too many empty beer bottles that would suggest I had a problem, no, just a
Playboy
magazine collection.

Over the years, I had considered throwing them out, but couldn’t. They, like a lot of things, were a part of my development, and they were classics, collectibles. Unfortunately, time has not been good to the
Playboy
brand, probably for all the reasons I mentioned above, and the magazine, while still entertaining to a degree, doesn’t hold the same weight that it once did. To account for today’s short attention spans, the interview is no longer as long and in-depth as it used to be, and the articles somehow less exciting. So by preserving the older issues, I was holding onto a time and era for that publication that would probably never come back around again. Is that not honorable of me?

So this was how Safia was changing me. I started making sure the apartment was cleaner. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t live in my own filth at other times; just that I took that little extra care to make sure things looked proper now. And once again, I began to question whether or not I should throw out my
Playboy
collection. I didn’t want her to be offended, and I really didn’t want her to judge me. That’s how I knew she was important to me, that and the fact she was always on my mind, which wasn’t helping me focus on my book - Safia versus Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? While I can appreciate the contribution the latter two made to the world, neither one of them had a smile that could turn my feet to jelly, like Safia did. Sorry guys.

Safia opened my eyes in other ways as well. As I mentioned before, I had been a journalist, but focusing primarily on entertainment journalism. I had initially wanted to be a regular reporter, covering general news or a foreign correspondent, but while in college studying the craft, I and a few of my classmates had been sent out on a story that changed everything. It seems that several years before, a young six-year-old girl had gone missing. For some reason, it was believed her body might be found in a field close to the college campus. Every week, if we weren’t actively working on the school newspaper, which was on a rotation basis, we were sent out into the real world to write stories and hone our craft; we’d go out in the morning or afternoon and have a five o’clock deadline to submit the story to our professor. That particular week we were assigned to visit the mother of that little girl and question her regarding her thoughts concerning the planned police search of the field and surrounding area. When we got to the mother’s place, she took us to her daughter’s bedroom, which she hadn’t touched or changed since her daughter’s disappearance. It was kind of sad, this little girl’s room, a reminder to her mother that her daughter had once existed, but was now gone – a shrine that served no purpose but to prolong the memory and pain of her loss. After looking at the room, me and my fellow students sat down in her living room to conduct the interview, and, of course, the main question on everyone’s mind was, “Do you hope they find the body of your daughter? Do you want that closure?” Let’s face it; if the police were searching a field for the little girl, they weren’t looking for a live little girl, but her remains. It was a tough question to get around to, because there, in that living room, that woman’s home, it all became too real – the tragedy. To us this was an assignment, but for her it was reality and a dark reality at that.

We got through the interview, but it had a profound effect on me. Then we had a visiting instructor for a couple of classes; a journalist with one of the leading newspapers, and he was talking about the importance of getting to the relatives of a victim of some sort of tragedy first and scooping the story from the competition. For instance, if over the long weekend there was a tragic accident in which some teenagers lost their lives in a car accident, it was imperative to get to their homes as quickly as possible to get their parent’s reaction; while there, it was good idea to get some photos of the deceased; the good photos that maybe then wouldn’t be available to the competition. I realized if that were true, I was making a business out of someone else’s tragedy. I was being an intrusion at a time when most people were hurting the most, and it was probably because they were hurting and not thinking properly – vulnerable – that I was able to take advantage of them. It just didn’t seem right. It made me second-guess what I’d be doing for a living, and its value to my own sense of right and wrong. It was then I decided to move in a different direction; seeing as I wasn’t big on sports, I focused my attention on the world of entertainment. I figured what’s the worst that could happen there, a bad movie review? I wasn’t the type to take entertainment too seriously, so it seemed like a harmless area to focus my attention on – and I, of course, was a big fan of movies and music anyway, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t schooled in those areas; or wouldn’t find some pleasure in focusing on them. And the worst thing that could happen was a celebrity death, the need to write an obituary-type article about someone’s passing, whether by natural causes or misadventure – and that wasn’t too common an occurrence. Entertainment was harmless and that’s where I landed.