For the past 6 months I’ve been in a pretty steady FWB (Friends with benefits) scenario with a man I talk to almost daily.
Well, actually “talk” is a stretch.
We text.
If I’m being honest, we’ve talked on the phone 3 times, or maybe it was only twice?
I can’t really recall.
The second time we ever spoke on the phone he was changing in the locker room at work. I could hear his fellow officers chatting in the background.
He is LAPD.
He was explaining to me how he’d taken down a violent sex offender the night before, helicopter spotlight and all.
“We just ran the plate of a shitty looking car and the screen blasted red, so we had to call in backup.”
I could tell he was still high from the rush, his normally calm demeanor was exploding, he was vocal and excited.
If he were a chicken, his feathers would have been fluffed and his legs kicking wildly, reeling from the excitement of the day.
He was still on a kick.
Normally, he was a rather subdued man, so it was exciting to hear him be so expressive.
He’d only shared this level of excitement when we discussed topics like, goat fucking, or region specific Columbian dance (Bambuco).
His sense of humor was the darkest and truest match to my own that I’ve experienced yet.
His attention to detail was unfathomable, perhaps his line of work lent well to that.
He took up Krav Maga once only to be disappointed in the amount of hipsters in his class.
He thought he was a bad ass when the girls in his Muay Thai class told him he was a strong striker- so he took up boxing only to find out he was weak for a man.
One night, following coitus, I lay in his arms, his hand rubbing my back, he told me a story about how he was forced to bury 6 dead puppies in the backyard of his LA home.
A neighborhood dog had crawled into his backyard and given birth under his childhood porch and in a twist of fate, that only nature could provide, she killed them all.
He was the only man in the house and because of that, was elected to clean up the mess.
He was 8.
I hugged him tighter.
He understood pain.
I understood none of it.
We were from vastly different worlds.
He was a marine, I was a mariner (my high school mascot).
He had never celebrated Thanksgiving, I learned this, as I was in a comatose state, rubbing my belly, enjoying the vast fruits of my families communal meal prep labor and that reality of his shot through my stomach like the beanbag gun he’d fired at his most recent perp.
“You’ve never celebrated Thanksgiving?” I asked, feeling even worse about my gluttonous rampage which left nothing in it’s trail except a mutilated plate of Turkey grease and bread crumbs.
My mouth was the Spanish inquisition and my plate the villages of South America.
Of course, I wasn’t ignorant, I knew that not every person could afford a lavish Thanksgiving, but even still, a pack of sliced turkey meat and a can of cranberries cooked on a stovetop could equal a makeshift Thanksgiving Dinner.
I also wondered where all those frozen turkey’s I’d donated every year were going -if not to families like his.
I questioned his mother. He said that she just didn’t think it was important and that she decided to work on Thanksgiving instead.
I also found out she didn’t believe in Halloween, which I thought was ridiculous, since it’s a holiday built on charity.
If any holiday should be celebrated, the ones that give out free food should be at the top of the list. If our disbelief in holidays is a financial motivated move, of course.
After I hung up the phone, I was overwhelmed that someone could be living such a dramatically fulfilling lifestyle, chasing bad guys through south central, with police backup and still somehow be watching my cat while I was out of town.
