“I’m working the graveyard shift Friday night if you
can come by, maybe bring something for dinner and we can eat together on my
break?” my boyfriend at the time flashing me that smile that only he could, the
one that made me vibrate, like from the balls of my feet, in a way I was just
beginning to discover was even possible. We had been dating just about six
months, our first date being my 21st birthday…..just months after
his 42nd, and we worked together. Talk about your recipe for painful
and gloriously dramatic disaster. Howie, his name was Howie and despite his
horrifically archaic ideas about women even though he had been raised by a
single mother, in south central Los Angeles, and the fact that he was “sort of"
married and had 5 kids, (none of which from the wife on the way out by the way)
he had…well he had me tightly spun around his dark and calloused fingers.
Howie wore the swagger of a confident man but not at
all like I’d seen in the high backed, educated rigidness of my mother’s father,
and not in the way that the guys I snuck out late at night to run away from
where I was from, and get lost in a world where I didn’t belong did. It wasn’t
fake and it wasn’t inspired by righteousness or the belief he was better than
anyone. He spoke low and mostly when spoken to. He spent his lunch breaks,
before he met me, taking a quick run and doing pull ups beneath the tarp
covered scaffolding that he would wheel from one refrigerated shipping container
to another to make the repairs his union paid him to. Big grin, firm dark body
that looked, and felt, like it was at least fifteen years younger than 42. And
that swagger….
One night after far too many gin fizzes I felt a
large rough palm gently grab my jaw in the elevator ride as I was being walked
back to the, “No guests allowed” apartment where I lived with my mother, son
and sister. A warm mouth sucked in the bottom half of mine that was left agape
and stunned…terrified with wanting and fear. My lip growing as swollen as my
desire and absolute terror as to what was to be waiting on the other side of
that door when I returned from the date my mother hated, seriously hated, me
being on. Powerful hands digging at the fabric of my shirt, the sounds in the
tiny elevator shifting from wanting soaked groans to the banging of a vintage
box carrying us up the shaft of a dumpy apartment structure. The vitriolic spitting
of humiliating rage from a sad woman, the scent of hair wax and fresh sweat and
for the first time actually craving something to make me feel good. I didn’t
really drink, didn’t fuck around with drugs and before that moment I had only
craved sex as a means to my own power, this time what was biting at me was the
willingness to give into his. My fingers stretching and trembling as I flipped
the toggle that would suspend us, in time and between apartment floors.
“Erica let me borrow one of the pickups and I got us
some Carl’s Jr for dinner” big smile as I flipped up the thick blue canvas to
Howie’s scaffold and was met with that grin that oozed sheer primal want and
the mild arrogance that came with knowing he was going to get. I had driven the
borrowed pickup truck, the one he taught me to drive as my mother would not,
the length of the terminal. It was dark for the most part, just a few graveyard
guys working on chassis and reefer units as well as the guys working the
towering cranes that plucked stuffed steel containers from the massive ships
that rested upon the docks. I could hear the bits of chatter over the truck’s
intercom system as the soft wheels of my chariot drove me to find the man with
the hunger I was desperate to feed. I rested the oily sack on the planking of the
scaffold and pulled myself up to him by tugging on the thick metal bars that
would hold our night in their grip. As I climbed back in the tiny pickup truck
an hour later, my entire body saturated, weary and leaking the kind of
exhaustion that was actually exhilarating it dawned on me, Howie’s confidence wasn’t
in the money he was making down there at the harbor, it didn’t come from being
better than so many at his trade, (although he was) or even in the fact that he
had a woman, (at least one) half his age breaking all the rules she knew to be
with him. No, it was in his knowing how fucking good he was. At working hard,
traversing hardship and adversity, at staying focused and driven, at teaching a
young girl that she was worth the effort and fight he would endure with
coworkers and her mother….showing her what it felt like behind the wheel of a
car, the freedom to push against the possible life crippling shackles of “Oh I
came from here and made these mistakes so I’m fucked”. Howie taught me that if
you are willing to work just a little bit harder, like stretching for that
toggle switch, life can be so fucking worth it. A man
about a thousand miles away from perfect, especially for me, but in that time
and place….we belonged.
“Samantha, do you remember this?” I was just
settling my ever-chunky rump into one of the, “Oh for the love of cheesesteaks
don’t let me break this fucker” chairs in the artfully draped and fairly hip
salon at Marion-Bosser in Hautvillers, a rather fancy but still quite tiny and
charming village in Champagne. Elodie Marion, young, beautiful, fit, never
having to worry about busting an antique chair, and winemaker for Champagne
Marion-Bosser, was handing a hardcover book in my direction. The hardwood
floors, the smells of melting butter, seared whitefish and asparagus spinning
around my already dizzy head as I glanced from a richly red saturated painting
on the wall to the glossy pages in front of me. There I was, big dumb grin,
stoopid flat blonde hair, button up black shirt with The Wine Country emblazoned
across the top of the shirt pocket…a picture of me standing with Elodie back in
the shop when she had come to visit and thank us for stocking her wines. Right
there in high resolution color and hard cover, my ugly mug in a book that sat
upon a table in a salon in Champagne showing all that come to visit the Domaine
one of the people that work with and support the wines.
Invited to come to Champagne by an importer that
wanted, valued and asked for, my opinion in finding some new grower Champagne, sent
there willingly by the bosses that have allowed me to make our Champagne department mine, at
that dinner table with forkfuls of white asparagus that had been dashingly
slathered with some rich creamy sauce prepared by Elodie’s father, glasses
refilled as we discussed the region and the plight of the small grower. The first
night of several with Aline in Champagne that would prove to me that while never easy, this fight has
always been worth it. Not sure I ever had a groove to get back but that night,
as I sat in a quiet guest room in Hautvillers sipping the last puddle of
bone-dry and mouthwatering Rose Champagne, I sure as hell got my swagger back.
I belonged there.
To Be Continued....
