Cad* was nine years older than me and at that time, I was still in high school. He was a drug using alcoholic, his wife had left him, he refused to go anywhere where he couldn’t take a smoke break in fifteen minutes, and smoked weed daily and casually because this was his “fanfare free” life. I thought him to be brilliant. A shiny cockroach of a man. A man heading nowhere and in no hurry.
I imagine my past self smelling like dial soap and cigarette smoke. I was so unawares and in the middle. Between my church persona and the self I was inventing. I didn’t think about it much (which 17 year old does) and instead devoted my energy, mind, and body to “having fun.” And that I did, in a precarious sort of way.
And unlike me, Cad was steadfast. He knew who he was, a cockroach. He was funny and like I said before, something shiny. I know it is a word that doesn’t describe much, but it was his distinctive and pervasive quality or character, if you will. His atmosphere. His big toothed grin. But there was more underneath his charming seediness. He was sad, defeated, and suicidal. I felt for him, and then like a silly girl, fell for him.
I had many notions of being a “Christian,” that were challenged in my time spent on his broken down couch inside his bare walled, one bedroom house. He use to laugh at me when I said that you can tell if a girl is a virgin by the way she carries herself or how in church that night someone asked me to rebuke the devil. He disliked me a bit, though, when I referred to myself as being “in rebellion.” He never fully trusted me after that. Something to do with how could I consider being myself “in rebellion” if I’m being myself. Then I must not be someone like him, but more on vacation, on tour.
As if I was on a bus. The tour guide on the intercom voice breaking through static, stating:
“If you look to your left, you can see the underbelly of the town. The white house with the VW van parked in front of the camo netting hanging by the porch–here resides the town loser, drunk and heroin addict. He lives alone and flirts with crime. He is going nowhere.”
Did I mention he was a heroin addict? No, well that came too, and with that, many deadbeat friends, but that was a different life lesson.
The charm is what I’m about right now and here’s what I learned from Cad:
Honesty. Cad was so honest it made me uncomfortable. Honest about how he was horny. Honest about why he liked me and how he wasn’t attracted to me. Honest about his loneliness and addiction. I had never met someone so raw. It changed how I talked to people. It changed how I was honest with the less attractive elements of myself –my inner cockroach.
And how God is love. No matter how strung out, ugly, smelly, cockroach-like we are. God does not smash us with a big boot or fumigate the street. Well, perhaps that’s because you can’t kill a cockroach? It is because I loved one that I know God loves cockroaches. God laughs at their jokes, hangs out on their broken down couches, and stares with them at their blank walls of existence.
Cad also taught me that you can’t tell someone’s virginity by the way they walk and that a lot of things I was taught about purity was silly, marmie stuff. Sure, he wanted to get into my pants, but he was right too. A bunch of self-righteous mambo jumbo.
He broke down my preconceptions and that freed me to walk down his porch into my life, and become someone more open-minded, a bit blunter, and a lot more impatient with self-righteous bullshit.
That is not to say I wasn’t in danger of being an addict myself, becoming pregnant with an addict’s unwanted child, or dying from an overdose. I’m looking back at our relationship for how it became an opportunity for growth. I do count myself blessed to have not ended up nowhere.
* He was a cad and I imagine still is a cad, wherever he may be, but he changed my point of view in numerous ways. Therefore, I most endearingly, with all the affection in me, call him, Cad.
He wasn’t fleeing from his past but trying to catch his meaning.
Clean for a dirty man.
