He Was Real.
Afraid to show my true colors too soon, I asked Paul to pick me up at my parents’ house. He showed up for our first date – on time – in a sporty maroon Mazda.
He has a car AND a motorcycle?! I raced upstairs and changed out of my motorcycle boots. It never occurred to me that one person could own more than one vehicle.
What is important about Paul, though, is not that he had a car, or that he arrived on time. It’s not important that he worked in a science lab, that he was working toward his Masters degree, that he lifted weights every day in a makeshift gym in his closet, or that he ate tofu and eggless mayonnaise and spent an inordinate amount of time teaching me about healthy ways to live.
It’s not even important that Paul was 32 years old when I was 24 and that he had never been married, although that should have been a clue as to how our relationship would eventually end.
What’s important about Paul is that I worshipped him. He treated me with kindness and did not lie. Paul was bright – so much smarter than Gregg or Larry that I thought he was a genius. Paul made me laugh like no one had made me laugh in many years, and his dry humor was amazingly on-target.
Paul and I stayed together for almost years: The Forever One.
We had long, deep, philosophical conversations while lying on a rock on a riverbank in the summer sun.
He once went outside to the tiny garden he’d planted and snipped a few colorful flowers as I watched him through the window.
“For you” he mouthed through the window as I sighed. He smiled that incredible smile and I’d melt just watching him put those flowers in a vase.
He was humble and sweet and caring and brilliant and funny and gentle and considerate and generous and loving. His apartment was meticulously clean. He cared for himself in a way I’d never seen modeled before, so he was drop-dead gorgeous on the outside, too.
This man was everything I’d ever wanted, and he was real.
Paul lived alone, had a full-time job and never traveled. He paid a pittance of rent to his dad, a dentist who worked upstairs, so Paul had lots of money. Every week he would buy chicken salads from the Village Inn down the street. We’d sit at Paul’s kitchen table with our salads and clean glasses of water, and I found this to be heavenly.
When we met, I had two months sober. Paul had seven months sober after a seven-year stint in AA – and then a relapse. He had not lost any of his wisdom from those seven years so I considered him my guru. We went to meetings together regularly, and I went to meetings on my own sometimes, but my “higher power” was Paul.
I saw no reason to change that until it was way too late to do so.
The details of our relationship don’t matter. What matters is that I got out of rehab and immediately started worshipping a man. And he was human and fallible and imperfect and I summarily dismissed all of his flaws except when I started trying to change him into my model of perfection.
He was, after all, my living god.
While it is essential to recognize this flaw in my character as the primary reason that I did not get sober until 1992, this part of my story must be shortened accordingly.