Erica Rudnick Macalintal

Prologue to Revelations

I met you at my drug dealer’s house on the west side of College Park. I was twenty and trying to escape from under my parents any chance that I could. You were my dealer’s friend and supplier, and both of you sat on the stairs under the live oak’s Spanish moss as I walked up past you in my short skirt. My dealer told me later that you had noticed and asked about me, although I did not notice you.

I bought your weed the next time I saw you, and you asked me if I had a boyfriend and where I worked and if you could call me. Your voice was a deep and quiet rumble, and I had to lean forward to hear you as though we were sharing a secret. Your hair was long and red like your beard, fire against the whiteness of your skin. You were unlike anything I’d ever encountered. I did, in fact, have a boyfriend, but he’d just left me for a girl who looked just like me, and so I told my friend on Myspace to tell you to call me, and one afternoon, you did. Mom had a Parkinson’s diagnosis but was not yet sick enough for me to be less selfish, and I was desperate to get away from the reminder that soon she would be a terrifying husk of her former self, so I went to your place the next day.

We fucked on the floor of your empty apartment in Maitland until I got a urinary infection so bad that I pissed blood and had to stay at Sand Lake Hospital for ten hours. Mom sat and watched me for the entirety of those ten hours and was fully in the know that dirty marathon sex was the reason I was there, and I wanted nothing more than to run and hide from under her watchful eye. I wondered why she didn’t turn on the television in the hospital room to pass the time while I slept. She was adamant that I rest and stay home after I was finally released, but you called and asked me to come over again as soon as I was better. I couldn’t resist the deep rumble that was your voice and the excitement of the sex that had been so fierce that it injured me, and so I went back the next day.

A few weeks later, you were arrested in Merritt Island for selling ecstasy to an undercover cop. When I didn’t hear from you, something in me just knew that you’d been arrested, and I didn’t flinch or blink an eye. Instead, I said to myself that it would be the last time I fucked around with a man on that side of the law, but you called me when you were released and told me that you’d thought of me over that long weekend in jail and wondered if I’d come by soon to keep you company, and I was lonely and sad and needed to get high and drunk too, so I went back the next day.

About a month after that, you kicked me out of your house because we were fucking, and my phone wouldn’t stop ringing, and I told you to hold on so I could answer it. It had been my parents calling me because they’d gotten into an accident on I-4 near Plant City, and I was suddenly terrified that the progression of mom’s illness may have been hastened by the impact. You lay there furious and naked, wearing only your socks and the condom on your rapidly deflating cock, staring me dead in the face telling me how fucked up it was when girls “just stopped” like that. I muttered and stuttered and tried to find a graceful way out of there, but all I could do was take my exit when you reached for your clothes and told me that this would be the last time you’d see me. I left because that’s what girls in that situation are supposed to do, but a week later, you called me and apologized for your behavior and told me you wanted to see me, and truthfully, I’d been bruised by your rejection and was desperate for any kind of validation, so I went back the next day.

 And the next few years were a blur as I snorted Adderall through dollar bills and let some guy with a fetish massage my feet, and you said that he’d never be seen again had he taken his fingers any higher, so I guessed that meant I was your “girlfriend.” But being your girlfriend meant watching you sell weed and coke and drink a bottle of vodka every night and hearing you tell all your friends that I was still learning how to “act right.” So I drank it off in your apartment until you threw a packet of lukewarm ranch sauce in my face in front of everyone, and I got in my car and drove until I was pulled over and the cop said, “I smell alcohol on you, big time” but he let me go because I was near my parents’ home in Dr. Phillips and I guess I was white-passing enough for him to let me get away with it. I hit a trash can and took off my side-view mirror and screamed at you on the phone in my front yard until the neighbors and Mom came outside at five in the morning to wonder what this sad and inconsiderate girl was wallowing in now. 

And each time, I let it ride because you gave me free reign over your dominion and told me that I was queen to your king. As the months went by, I wandered through your world in Victoria Secret pajamas that your “partners” had stolen from local shipments, and I ate anything I wanted out of your fridge that was stocked with fresh mozzarella pearls and open bottles of Moet champagne and delicious Italian food that you had home-cooked yourself, and you taught me that living this kind of life meant that you as the provider had to be fierce. You stroked my face and petted my hair and read me The 48 Laws of Power and told me that the good in me was lovely and admirable but that it would do me no benefit were I not to understand the Machiavellian evils that inevitably awaited me – both outside your little realm and within. You soothed me and kissed me and fed me food and drinks and drugs and told me it was all alright. You would show me, and you would teach me, and I would be wise – though never as wise as you.

But then you kept chugging your chilled vodka with lemon juice out of that giant shot glass I brought you from Belize until you vomited on the wall and left it there because you said it was a mark of pride. I found condoms in your bed and pink sweaters in your closet, and when I caught you dancing with my friend at the Chillers, I punched you in the ribs so hard that you slung me out onto Church street in front of strangers and cops and told me that I was being stupid and that I’d ruined your good time, and I apologized over and over until it was the next day.

I walked into your bedroom one night to find you making crack, struggling with some apparatus and chemical composition and a new entrepreneurial spirit that you swore would take your money in a fresh and exciting direction. I was frightened and alarmed, and I’d never seen this side of you before and I started to think that this was spiraling out of what little control I had, but you put down that strange pipe-like device and took my face in your hands and told me it was only an experiment and it would be just this one time and that I had nothing to worry about. You kissed my brow, and I nodded, and we put it all away for the next day.

The woman who was your estranged wife began to come around – often – with a small child, that to me, looked more like you as the months and years went by. And while you claimed that it was nothing, they slept in your bed, and she told me I was probably not the best girl for you because I “wasn’t your kind.” She was Puerto Rican, and you were white, and I was half of each of these, so I was confused as to how I wound up on the wrong turf. I believed love had no boundaries, and there was no reason I couldn’t love you from across the divide that was the suburb of west Sand Lake Road and even further south of the city-splitting Colonial Drive. You let her stay in your apartment and told me that she was your priority, and when I told you that this kind of life wasn’t for me, you told me that Life wouldn’t be any kinder to me than you were being right now and that I should stop being so childish and toughen up.

And you told me that you loved me, and you promised me you’d change, and you said you’d divorce her and you’d stop dealing and you’d try for a life with me but that my standards were too high, and I was foolish to look for love with someone like you even though you just couldn’t—wouldn’t—couldn’t let me go free.

And I believed you, and I kept coming around, and I ripped my hair out despite Mom’s shaky hands trying to stop me and threw too-silent phones against the wall to see them shatter and begged you to fuck me so I could be on your good side. Some strange animal magnetism or wordless gravity kept me running away from my mother’s love and orbiting around you instead no matter which of your girls tried to muscle me out, and it filled me with a longing that was without reason or logic, and it left careless devastation in its wake and aroused a violent and unyielding love that would have killed me. Had I stayed.

The first time I left you, I got 24 text messages during the night and 17 the second night and 36 the next night. Drunk and rambling and full of “fuck you u little cunt you owe me $200 for that hotel in cocoa” and “I did everything u asked me to do you stupid little bitch and u have the nerve to leave me without giving us a real chance” and telling friends that I’d better “watch out” because I’d done you so wrong there was no telling what you might do, and then I was hiding in friends’ houses for a month so not even Mom knew where to find me.

 And I met you in the TGI Friday’s parking lot at Millenia Mall, and you held me in your arms, and there was that tenderness that I knew was in there hidden from me, and I said, “I don’t know what to do,” and you whispered, “come back to me.” And so, I went back the next day.

 And over the next month, we tried to make it work, and you began to treat me with a modicum of respect, but your wife was still there, and we fell back to our old and violent ways, and you swore if I didn’t behave you would “stop being so nice to me.” And every time you threatened this, I jumped like a fucking cocker spaniel and shut my mouth and hoped that someone would see how much I loved this remarkable, wretched, broken man and the devastation that it was causing me. I hoped that they would tell you to wise up because love was a privilege, not a right, and that it hurt me to love you just as badly as it had to leave you.

 But instead, they told you I was a brat and a spoiled little girl who’d never really known pain or struggle and that you needed a street chick who understood you and why did you ever leave your wife? She was perfect for you, oh yes, because you’d caught her in your closet and assumed she was choosing one of your guns to murder you with, so you’d thrown her to the floor and “just slapped her around a few times” and then she was gone, but for the last time you fucked her a few weeks after you first let me into your house.

And my life was slipping away from me, and I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t define myself through your eyes, and there was soon nothing more of mine that I could sneak out of your apartment, so I left you for the second time and final time. And this time, I snapped my flip-phone in half and threw it out the window on the highway and had to explain to the girl at Cingular that I was leaving a bad man and yes, I could pay the fucking number-change fee if she would just figure out how to facilitate it please, and I didn’t speak to you again for six months and after that it was only to scream at you and remind you that you never loved me while you cried on the other side of the phone and told me that you missed the green in my eyes when my eyes had always been dark brown.

And I held in my hands the wish of your demise. It permeated my existence and was the monumental force behind my every aspiration. I became famous among our circle of friends for my hatred of you and for my refusal to forgive, and I relished in the piousness that it brought me. I strove to embody the cruelty that all your lessons had taught me and how they matured me and ripened me into the inhuman machine I longed to be, how I sensed your condemnation from a great distance and forced myself higher and higher and higher because you’d told me I was nothing.

And eventually you faded into my background and a decade flew by during which Mom got sicker, and every day I thought about ways that I could prove to you that I was the stronger one. And I continued to seethe and fantasize about how to annihilate you and show you that I would surpass you in your cruelty and hunger for power, and as my obsession grew, I checked your Facebook every few months to see if you were dead yet.

And one day when I look for you, I see a GoFundMe account begging people for donations towards your liver transplant. I click the second tab and see update stating that you had taken your last breath at sunrise, and I exhale.

I exhale.

Bio

Erica Rudnick Macalintal holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Central Florida. Her works explore the juxtapositions of self, mental illness, spirituality, and escapism as they are processed in the immediacy. She is currently working on an essay collection about generational trauma and racial identity.