The Wanton Life of My Friend Dave

by Tristan Wood

Dave is fourteen when his uncle teaches him how to pick up girls.
Izzy reads tarot cards.
Dave becomes a romantic lothario.
Izzy never stops being a skeptical clairvoyant.
He tries to find himself in a life of debauchery, drugs, and alcohol.
She’s lost in a world of secrets, unspeakable ghosts, and intuitive knowledge.
He’s looking for the other half of his heart.
She’s the piece of his soul he didn’t know he was missing.
The first time they meet, Izzy reads Dave his fortune and he tries his luck with her.
They part thinking they will never see each other again.
Until six months later, when chance brings them together on the other side of the world.
Then everything changes…

*  *  *

  And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free romance excerpt:

Prologue

The first time Dave and I met, we had a spread of tarot cards between us. If I were to say that everything changed from that moment on, I would be lying, because it took us six months and the other side of the world for that to happen.

One thing you need to know, though, is that Dave and I were never lovers—and we never, ever were meant to be.

We were soul mates of another kind.

 

Part 1

Becoming Dave

 

Chapter 1

The Poes

The thing about families is that you rarely get to choose them since you tend to be born into one and be a part of it. The family, on the other hand, tends to choose you and become a part of you, whether or not you grow to like it or will yourself to want.

The Poes weren’t much different. They too chose you, but you were either a Poe or you weren’t. You could never become one.

Dave was a Poe.

He was the middle child of an upper-middle-class couple who got married because they mistook shared interests for love and ended up divorced after Dave’s father’s more-than-expected midlife crisis. As a result, Dave grew up in that misplaced piece of attention that is reserved for middle children, wedged between a gifted older brother who inhabited a world of his own and a gay younger brother who strangely fulfilled his mother’s need for a daughter. Dave’s upbringing, however, was never one of neglect or lack of love.

Dave’s mother was an eccentric woman who breezed through life with no sense of guilt or awkwardness, purposely oblivious to anything that would pose as a hindrance to her perception of the world. Or so she seemed, I mean, as I came to realize during the years that I had the pleasure of knowing her.

She was, in fact, a very singular woman. She would constantly project an image of herself that would make everyone around her think that she was futile and fragile, vain even, and that she was unavailable to see beyond the obvious, that she was incapable of any deeper perception other than what was unequivocally laid down for her. And this would lead everyone through a presumptuous path of disdain toward her capacities, making others feel safe and unaware of her every conquest of their concealed thoughts and secrets … until it was too late. They finally realized that sometimes they had been utterly exposed to her and that, at some strange level, she owned a fragment of them. It was bewildering; I can tell you from experience.

Dave’s mother took upon educating her three sons with the same resolve that she put on making a shopping list or choosing new curtains for the living room. To her, there were no middle terms, only will, so whether curtains or her sons’ education, everything mattered. She loved her sons more than anything in her life. There was no doubt that she was to every one of them the self-image of kindness and fragility and their imprinted ideal of what a woman should be. And there lay a part of the problem, as I came to realize, since she was one of a kind. She was a single soul that no one could have ever matched or tried to measure up to, because no one can take the place of a perfect mother who gives you the world as you know it and makes you believe that it is yours to take.

Dave always spoke of his mother with that almost worshipful tone that parents use to speak of their children, which made me wonder if he had ever suspected that sometimes she could see right through him.

He told me stories of his childhood, such as when his mother nurtured his younger brother’s homosexuality by dressing the three boys in her clothes and highest heels so that they would know how difficult it was to be anything different than what they were expected to be. Or how she would take them to every museum and library to appease Dave’s older brother’s need of knowledge. And how she would let Dave have an entire chocolate cake for dinner when she forgot to pick him up from school. Or even how, to Dave’s father discontent, she would call their school and tell their teachers that they all had gotten the flu so they wouldn’t be attending classes that day, and then she would take them on a trip somewhere or invent a game that would last all day.

She really was one of a kind, but never a Poe.

Despite Dave’s mother’s strong will to give the children everything she thought made a good home and a sense of world—her world—the boys were often wrapped in the whirlwind of events that was their parents’ marriage.

From a very young age, Dave and his brothers were accustomed to seeing their father ignore their mother’s tantrums when she demanded from him the love that he never felt for her. She was, Dave told me, quite dramatic on her quest, but she would always succumb to a bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates presented by her husband. Then the late hours at the office and his constant absence would be forgotten, because his romantic gestures numbed the certainty of her unrequited love.

Despite all, Dave’s father was not an absent parent. Well, he was, but not in the literal sense of the word. Notwithstanding Dave’s mother complaints, his father spent a lot of his free time with his sons, and he was considerate enough to engage with them in activities that they all appreciated, such as sports and going to the cinema or a concert.

He just didn’t truly mean it, and he’d do it out of obligation rather than out of love or will. He loved his sons because they were his, but for nothing else. And that was why he knew that if he could go back in time, he would not have gotten married or had them. In the course of time, all his sons, and Dave in particular, began to feel the burden of their father’s regretful love on their shoulders.

Fortunately, the lack of understanding wherewith God blesses the innocent allowed Dave and his brothers to ignore this painful truth about their father most of the time while they were growing up. Sadly for his father, and for Dave himself, Dave matured faster than the usual boy and became aware of his father’s regrets far too young. That, along with Dave’s perception of his father’s lack of love for his mother, made Dave’s relationship with his father a tough one, where forgiveness was never an option.

However, not even that prevented him from being a Poe.

Dave was born on one of those cold days of February, looking like a ball of fat littered with hair. He was, as his grandmother put it, “no angel to see.” Eventually, he grew up to become a squab brown-haired boy with crooked teeth and a mischievous smile that accompanied him through life.

He did have the “bad boy” thing going for him, but he was not what you would call a beautiful child. In fact, the first time I saw Dave’s yellowish old childhood pictures, I recall thinking him rather tubby, and I could not hold back the surprise that hit me when I realized how distant from those images he had grown. Years later, while looking back at those pictures, I was even more surprised when I learned that Dave’s first sexual experience had occurred at the innocent age of six. Not that his looks at the time had anything to do with it, but then again, I was always the one to make the weirdest synapses.

Dave was already in first grade, he told me, when his mother started attending some ceramic classes every other afternoon and left him to the cares of an older cousin when he wasn’t at school. His brothers were saved by the piano lessons that Dave himself refused to attend. The older cousin, who was facing extreme hormonal puberty at the young age of twelve, was very keen about playing house in a literal sense. Dave told me, with that crooked smile of his plastered all over his face, that she said she was going to teach him how to “be a good daddy.” Then, in a childish way, she would let her wild pubescent imagination take the lead and perform her very own impersonation of the birds and the bees. No flowers were involved, though according to Dave, his “love stick” took part in it. Dave and I would never refer to his penis in any other way than that, since that was the bashful—and very much mocked by me—term that Dave used the first time he recounted one of his sexual adventures to me. So we kind of decided that we would stick to it. Pun intended.

“Dave, did you just tell me that you were abused? Have you ever told this to anyone else?” I asked, half-amused and half-astonished, for I knew that my friend wasn’t revealing a dark secret; he was bragging.

“What? Abused? No!” Dave barked, as if such a thought had never crossed his mind before.

“Then what do you call that? Lovemaking at the age of six?” I teased, unsuccessfully trying to keep my curiosity at bay. “Which of your cousins was it? Was it that one that seems to have something dark going on?”

“What? No! And it wasn’t like that. I didn’t feel abused. I kind of liked it at the time, you know? I didn’t like all of it. Some parts I recall being uncomfortable … and kind of stupid, when I think of it. Two brats in a situation like that … You can picture the whole mess, can’t you, Izzy?” Dave wrinkled his nose at me.

“And you never told anyone this?” I asked, raising a doubtful brow at him.

“Of course I did! I told my friends. I was the first one of the group to get laid!” he replied proudly.

“I don’t think that that counts as getting laid. And you told me that you lost your virginity when you were fifteen, at the city park …”

“At six o’clock in the morning, on the thirteenth of June, on the bench farthest from the kiosk that sold ice cream,” he said, cutting me off.

“Sooo?” I urged him.

“So I lost my virginity at fifteen. That’s it. At six, I just got laid,” Dave said this matter-of-factly.

“That is not getting laid!” I almost shouted, eyeing him sternly and crossing my arms as if preparing to charge.

“Well, technically, it was. It just doesn’t count as losing my virginity, because I didn’t come,” he said dismissively.

“If we’re going down that road, I can come up with some seriously twisted logic and tell you that you technically lost your virginity to your right hand … Wait, you’re not left-handed on those matters, are you?”

“Hmm … Just when I pretend that someone else is doing it to me.” He let a faint smirk escape from his lips.

“Does that really work? Honestly, does that happen or is it just some sort of manly joke?” I asked, truly interested as to the outcome of that.

“Izzy, you’ll just have to find out that one for yourself,” he said with a wink and a stupid smile plastered all over his face.

Despite this or due to this incident, as I referred to it (and honestly, I was never really able to make up my mind on the subject), I never doubted that Dave grew carefree and rather happy within his abnormally large and hormonal family.

Dave’s family was far from being limited to his parents and his two brothers. In fact, Dave’s family was almost a community by itself, with an uncountable number of cousins, several crazy uncles and aunts, and, go figure, very conservative grandparents.

From what I learned myself and from what Dave told me himself, his family could not be described as less than, for lack of a better word, eclectic. Many of his relatives seemed to have come out of a novel. From a maiden aunt of seventy who kept a wedding dress in the closet and wore it on her birthday every year, to an uncle who farted in public and excused himself by saying that he had to give the farts away since nobody was willing to buy them, Dave had all sorts of uncommon relatives. As a result, his sense of family bonds and boundaries was completely misfit or, in some situations, inexistent. This made his ability to restrain himself from hooking up with a cousin—voluntarily, I mean—until he was twelve, the age when puberty struck him hard, a most impressive feat.

In fact, as Dave used to put it, he didn’t pass by puberty; puberty moved in with him. And it was not the unruly growth of facial hair, the pimples, or the voice changes. It was actually a bad case of sexual urges and untamable hormones, with all the implications that that had among Dave’s family.

Dave’s sexual education, if you could call it that, was initiated by one of his great-uncles who, noticing Dave’s unequivocal stares at all passing pairs of breasts, decided to take upon himself Dave’s tutoring on the birds and the bees. Unfortunately, Dave’s great-uncle was not very literate when it came to birds and bees, since he had been breeding cows for most of his life, so he had to adapt a bit.

“Dave, come here. It is time for us to have a men’s conversation.”

Dave froze when he heard his great-uncle’s serious voice calling him to what he would recall as one of the most awkward sex talks of his life.

“You know, Dave, you are becoming a young man. I see that you are starting to notice women.” There was a long pause that allowed Dave to feel overwhelmed with the fear of anticipation over what was about to come next. “Have you seen a woman yet, Dave?” And as Dave stood there staring, not knowing what he was expected to answer, his great-uncle kept on going. “I mean, do you know what a woman is?” he asked, letting Dave know that things just weren’t getting any easier.

“I guess,” Dave decided to say, as he would say anything that would stop the course of wherever that conversation was heading for.

“You know, Dave, women are like flowers,” Dave’s great-uncle said, probably sensing that his lack of knowledge on flowers might compromise the intents of the analogy he was trying to pull off to explain to his grandnephew the mysteries of womanhood. “I know that things are changing in you now, and that you are noticing women and that makes you feel … things that you didn’t feel before, and that make you want to do things or think things …” As the old man fumbled, panic must have been obvious in Dave’s eyes, because his great-uncle decided to go for a not-so-straightforward approach.

“Bulls know when cows are ready, Dave. Have you seen the bull near the cow when it’s mating time? The bull goes to the cow and releases his seed in her …” While saying this, Dave’s great-uncle made sure his message was coming through by mimicking the act and passing one of his arms through an imaginary channel and opening his hand while saying the word “releases.”

Dave remained mute and silently prayed to all saints he’d heard of that all the awkwardness of the moment washed away. But it didn’t, because his great-uncle kept on going.

“I was young too, you know? And I remember when I was your age and when I started noticing women. I remember seeing your great-aunt for the first time … Ah, the things we did when nobody was watching us! Back in those days, we didn’t have the freedom you young boys have nowadays. We had to be creative. And we weren’t less naughty because of that.” At this point, Dave was certain that his great-uncle had lost his focus somewhere, but the old man was nowhere near stopping.

“A man has his needs, Dave, and you must always show women who is in charge. Women like men who take the lead and know how to boss them around. One day you will have to say to your wife to iron your shirt, to prepare your dinner, or to lie down in bed and fool around with you. It’s a man’s prerogative, Dave. A man’s prerogative!” As he emphasized this, Dave looked for an escape out of this talk of shame.

Eventually, one of his cousins saved Dave, but the conversation would be engraved in his memory for as long as he lived—first as an embarrassing moment and afterward, when maturity overcame puberty, as a good story. And what’s the purpose of a good story if you can’t share it with anyone?

As Dave told me once, despite the uselessness of his great-uncle’s awkward conversation, most of his insights on women came from his family. Not that he realized it at the time, but his family behavior ended up being an inexhaustible source of knowledge in that aspect, and it was the catalyst to many of Dave’s destructive behaviors as well.

By the age of ten, Dave knew for sure that at least three of his uncles had extramarital affairs, one of which was with one of his elder cousins. He also knew that his grandparents from his father’s side did not sleep together and that one of his single aunts liked to kiss women. He just wasn’t aware of the meaning of it all at the time.

Dave’s grandparents from his father’s side started to sleep in separate rooms when Dave’s grandmother was confronted with the strange devotion of Dave’s grandfather for her younger sister. This happened way before Dave was born, so when he was growing up, he didn’t find it odd that his grandparents inhabited different rooms in their house. In fact, for a long time, he took for granted that elder people lived like that, and since his grandparents from his mother’s side had passed away before he was born, he couldn’t quite compare situations. He was an adult already when we gained full knowledge of the strange love triangle that was his grandparents’ life story.

Dave’s grandfather was a young lawyer when he saw Dave’s grandmother for the first time. He was at the churchyard with some friends when Dave’s grandmother was closing a window at her father’s house, just across from the church, and for a brief moment, their eyes met. Many things were said about the women of that house, kept under lock and key by their father, but he had never laid eyes on one of them before. When he did, it took him just one single look, that one glimpse that fate allowed him to have, to have her grave face and the abandonment in her eyes carved in his soul forever. His life therefore irreparably changed. He thought he was in love, maybe because there was something noble and detached about her that made her seem almost ethereal.

Three days later, he was knocking on her door and requesting her father’s permission to court her. Fortune, or the lack of it, made her father like him and agree with the courting. After all, she was his eldest and the only one the old man had intended to marry. He had other plans for the other daughters. This was how Dave’s grandfather started attending the house to visit his bride, and he soon realized that his infatuation was all but love. Love, and lust in particular, came after, when he met his fifteen-year-old soon-to-be sister-in-law, only to learn that he could never have her. That was not his father-in-law’s plan for her, nor was Dave’s grandfather in a position to exchange brides honestly. So Dave’s grandfather did the only thing a man in his situation could do: he married the available sister, hoping to come closer to the unavailable one under the sacred protection of holy matrimony.

Family bonds proved to be tight, and eventually, upon his father-in-law’s death, Dave’s grandfather took under his and his wife’s care and roof his beloved single sister-in-law. As a sign of gratitude, she cared for her nephews and nieces, helped with the house, kept her sister company, and loved her brother-in-law whenever chance gave them the opportunity. This arrangement lasted years and was only broken when an unfortunate lapse from Dave’s grandmother occurred and she inadvertently caught them in what could be called a compromising position. She didn’t mean to, and mostly she didn’t want or intend to catch them. She’d always known it, she’d complied with it, and she did whatever she could and was in her power to ignore it. However, once faced with the facts, Dave’s grandmother couldn’t keep up with the pretense, nor could she fail to react as she was expected to. So she did the only thing that seemed fitting and moved her husband’s things to another room, this way silently ending their marriage but keeping up the appearances.

No one asked questions since no answers were supposed to be delivered, and no one really had doubts regarding the doings, so things happened as if actually programmed and order was not disturbed. In the silence of her room, Dave’s grandmother grieved her nights of solitude, though. It was not the loss of her marriage or of her love that upset her. Truly, she had never loved her husband or cared that he had made her sister his mistress. She missed his warmth in bed at night and the assurance of his company to fight the demons and ghosts that tormented her during the night.

You see, Dave’s grandmother was one of those singular creatures that lived between two worlds, bridging them and listening to the solicitations of the dead. Unfortunately, and since she refused to nurse their requests or address their existence, the dead refused to make her nights peaceful. Dave’s grandfather’s skepticism seemed to calm Dave’s grandmother’s misery, and for that she missed him. He, regretfully, only missed the “ifs” that life hadn’t allowed him, and for that he blamed her. He blamed her for being the eldest, for her father’s despotic behaviors, and for her superior attitude that misled his feelings. Mostly, he blamed her for never letting him be able to love her.

As I came to realize over time, mistaking love with other things, or the inability to perceive love itself, was very common among the men of Dave’s family, and rather than a flaw in character, it was regarded as a character’s feature.

Dave shared the feature.

Chapter 2

The Art of War

Dave’s adolescence could be called a typical one. It summed up to the inevitable family awareness, seasoned with that pinch of teenage drama contemplating sex, drugs, and rock and roll. To this added a fruitless quest regarding the meaning of life around the age of eighteen, when, for all purposes, Dave was already supposed to be an adult.

By the age of fourteen, Dave’s concerns were undeniably girls, pot, and hearing the latest musical hits. But contrary to most teenage boys, sexuality was not a discovery to Dave. It came along with being a Poe. Sex and sexuality were a constant presence in Dave’s family. Either subtly or more overtly, they were there. It was almost as if every family member, family story, attitude, or event had a connection, no matter how apparently small, to sex or sexuality.

Dave had a bachelor uncle, his father’s younger brother, who was a charmer by flaw and a womanizer by virtue, as strange as it might sound. You should be advised, though, that neither Dave, who grew up knowing him, nor I, who grew by knowing him, were ever able to provide an unbiased opinion on the man. To me, he was a poet, but you must understand that to Dave he was a hero.

The man was the personification of charm. He walked, talked, and breathed charm. He was a devastatingly handsome man, but that was just a small detail, because he was so much more. Everything about him was charming. Everything he said or did was charming. It was inebriating.

After he introduced me to his uncle, Dave mocked me for weeks because I made a fool of myself cracking stupid jokes and laughing nervously. I even found myself giggling, which is actually one of my least favorite words in English; therefore, I avoid promoting such action in order to prevent the use of the word. But to my utter embarrassment, I giggled, because I had never seen such a fine specimen of Man. That’s right, capitalized—for he was the personification of manliness. Hell, he was every woman’s wet dream and more. It was so extreme that Dave and I just accepted as an irrefutable truth that he would be able to charm away the devil himself. Therefore, in its extreme, Dave’s uncle’s charms became a flaw and a hazard to women, for he loved them. All of them and everything about them, and, as the charmer he was, he could not help himself around them.

In his defense, I must say that he did not use or abuse women’s trust in him. He misled no one. He made no promises, nor fed any hopes. Moreover, in his peculiar way of loving, he truly loved every single woman with whom he got involved. He loved them because he meant to. He was in it heart and soul—every time. So it could last a day or it could last a year, but whoever she was, during that time, she had him all, no restraints, no restrictions, no reserves, and above all, no regrets.

When it ended, because it always ended, he just walked away. No explanations given, no excuses made, and no forgiveness asked.

Even the more desperate or heartbroken would not get more than an “I don’t love you anymore.” They never heard that he was sorry. He was never sorry, and neither should they be. He had no regrets. They eventually nurtured a few. He essentially couldn’t force himself to apologize for his feelings, or lack of them, since it was not up to him to control them. He knew every time that he would stop loving them eventually. Because he knew that, along with no restraints and no regrets also came no forever. Even so, he hoped every time to find his. And it was that hope that washed away any guilt, for he could not be blamed for stopping loving them when he believed, with all his strength, that the love that he’d found would last him a lifetime, even when he knew deep down that it wouldn’t.

As odd as it may sound, one thing that I came to respect about him was that though he didn’t need to be, he was a womanizer. Woman fell at his feet, but he felt compelled to chase them and pursue them, because he was, after all, a gentleman. Any other man in his position would have just taken the easy path and taken advantage of what life had so generously offered him. But not him. He wanted to earn it, because he wanted it to be real. You see, he was a romantic, as was Dave.

I always believed that that was why Dave was his favorite nephew. Somehow, despite all their differences, he saw himself in him. He had a lightness about him that Dave would never be able to sustain, but each shared, in his own particular way, the secret belief that he was meant for a love bigger than life. Or so he hoped.