Joyride

Getting put out of Number Two's house at 3 a.m. wasn't enough to make me break up with him. One week later, we were back together. Only now I kept my belongings in my dorm room and trusted him a whole lot less.

And so our relationship continued for two more months, until the whole thing took what can only be described as a Pitiful N*gga turn.

It was Memorial Day. My sophomore year was winding down, and I was planning to spend the summer in New Haven with him instead of going back to Detroit.

Instead, I found myself lying next to him on his on-the-floor-with-no-bed-frame mattress, trying not to make a sound as there was a knock, knock, knock pounding at the door.

"New Haven Sheriff! Open up!"

I literally remember thinking, "I'm a Yale student. I don't belong here."

Eventually, the sheriff went away instead of kicking the door down, but it didn't take much longer before Number Two's dumb ass went to jail.

For taking his baby mama, Tay-Tay, joyriding in my car. For getting into an argument with her. For pulling over on I-95 and putting her out. And for driving away and leaving her on the shoulder of the busy expressway.

By the time she walked to a call box, she was so angry that she told the police he kidnapped her. And that's why the sheriff came a-knockin'.

They had yet another screaming, hollering match in my presence.

Then Number Two got arrested.

There's something really pitiful that happens to a man when he's locked up. Suddenly he loves you more than anything in the world. Suddenly you're the person he cares about, when he's shown very little evidence of giving a good God damn up until that point.

This fool had taken Tay-Tay riding in my car. He was still seeing that bitch.

And now he had a brilliant solution to his problem, since I was such a loving person.

Tay-Tay had agreed to drop the charges, all he needed was for her to show up in court. So I was to be a good little wifey and pick her up in my car and chauffeur her to the Milford court house so he could get out of jail.

Yeah, right.

I packed my belongings, got into my car and drove all the way to Detroit.

He got out of jail two or three weeks later.

(Number Two Diaries Part 5 of 8: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | Lessons Learned Parts 1-3: 1 2 3)

Howling at the Moon

My three-week romance with Number Two had already hit some interesting milestones: sex on the first date, sexual disempowerment and straight-up mind games, but as far as I was concerned, things were going well.

He was cute. I had a key to his apartment. I'd invested in my first answering machine so I could get voice messages from my increasingly vacant dorm room. And more and more of my CDs and personal belongings were making their way into Number Two's apartment as I spent more and more time there.

So I was caught completely off guard by what happened next.

One weekend, after performing in two shows, I made my way to his place.

He clearly wasn't expecting me.

Because he brought Tay-Tay, his baby mama/supposed ex-girlfriend over. The same one he dissed on our first date. Amidst much screaming, cursing and carrying on between him and Tay-Tay, he dragged me into his bathroom and looked at me through red-rimmed, tear-stained eyes.

He was sorry, he really did care about me and he didn't want to hurt me, but Tay-Tay was an asshole and something he just had to deal with, and could I please just leave.

At 3 a.m. in a crackhead city where a Yale student had been shot dead less than a week before.

Out the door I went, sobbing, with my CDs and miscellaneous belongings tucked into plastic grocery bags.

I had to hop a fence to cut through the parking lot on Broadway that separated his dark cubbyhole of an apartment from my dorm. One of the plastic bags ripped, scattering my CDs all over the concrete.

The city was silent, as still as death. Not a panhandler, crackhead or fellow Yalie in sight.

I looked up, and there was the moon. The biggest, roundest, yellowest full moon I'd ever seen in my life.

I stared at it as the tears streamed down my face.

Why was I so alone?

How come nobody loved me?

What was I doing wrong?

I had no answers, only questions.

It was one of the saddest, loneliest moments of my entire life.

(Number Two Diaries Part 4 of 8: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | Lessons Learned Parts 1-3: 1 2 3)

Criticism as a Form of Love

As much as it pains me to admit it, my head was completely twisted in knots when it came to love. I didn't know the difference between love and criticism. In fact, I thought that if you criticized me harshly, it meant you loved me. And I didn't even know that's what I thought.

Here's an example.

A week into our relationship, Number Two found an ingenious way to make me open up to him.

He'd already begun making fun of my glasses. As a welfare recipient from Detroit, I was used to picking out my all-purpose, utility frames from the Medicaid rack, and to tell the truth, I'd never given them much thought.

So he'd ask me why my glasses were so big and so out-of-fashion.

And then one day, he announced that he'd thrown my glasses away and that it would be a month before I'd be able to get new ones.

Instantly upset, I started cussing and carrying on.

Number Two calmly and shrewdly, in the midst of my emotional outburst, siezed the opportunity to ask me a bunch of personal questions.

Then he pulled my glasses out of his pocket and explained that he would never be inconsiderate enough to throw away anything of mine and that he just wanted to make me mad because "if I hadn't, would you have shared any of that stuff with me?"

He continued, "You don't talk to me, and that's not good. Communication is a very important part of any relationship."

How did I interpret that?

He truly does care about me.

Instead of being pissed off, indignant or offended, I was grateful. Because only someone who loved me would go through the trouble of making me mad in order to get to know me better.

(Number Two Diaries Part 3 of 8: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | Lessons Learned Parts 1-3: 1 2 3)

Sexual Ickiness

When you're new to sex, you don't understand that sex can be sticky, funky, smelly, nasty and just plain icky. You think it's going to be like a 1938 black-and-white movie – all rushing waterfalls and blasts of steam and heaving bosoms and breathtaking beauty.

Not so with Number Two and me.

The first nasty icky came about two days after our first sexual encounter. I was in his tiny closet of a bathroom taking a pee and when I wiped, out slid the condom we had used on our first date.

Having an active imagination, my first thought was that toxic plastic had been trapped inside me for two days, polluting my privates with germs and carcinogens. My second thought was that I might be pregnant or AIDS-ridden. And my third thought was, why didn't he tell me the condom slipped off and why did he leave it to rot inside my body?

I never asked Number Two for an answer. I never mentioned it to him. I just flushed the condom away and left the unanswered question to rot and fester in my own mind. Because asking it would have forced me to confront the unconfrontable: that my new boyfriend, who I desperately wanted to love, didn't give a good god damn about my well-being.

Things were moving too fast and going too well for me to start asking questions or making demands. Within three days of sleeping together, I already had keys to his apartment. I was spending an inordinate amount of time with him and basking in the glow of us "going together."

Losing my virginity to Latin Muslim had been an unromantic, push-and-shove, grunt-once-and-we're-done affair that hadn't left me feeling much in the way of enjoyment. Number Two was an improvement, more playful, more experimental, more sexually arousing.

So one night, after round one, I was hungry for more and started instigating round two. Only instead of happily obliging or playfully putting me off, Number Two glared at me and declared that I was like an Eveready battery, I always wanted more.

That word, Eveready, reverberated around and around in my skull like the dirty, pus-filled accusation it was.

I was a nympho.

I drained men dry.

Something was wrong with me.

I was not normal.

I was an Eveready, and Eveready was not a compliment.

This second instance of sexual ickiness led to the third and worst one: Number Two liked the sexual position most associated with male homosexuality, and I didn't know how to just say no. So on top of being an Eveready, I was also apparently really nasty, because I was doing nasty things that nice girls just didn't do.

We didn't talk about sodomy, just like we didn't talk about the mystery of the missing condom.

It became yet another internal injury left to clot and bleed, until many months later, when I threw it up in his face in a cloud of volcanic rage.

(Number Two Diaries Part 2 of 8: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | Lessons Learned Parts 1-3: 1 2 3)