Stepdog

by Mireya Navarro

  Unlike some of the nerds back in the office—Seersucker Day, anyone? (not to be confused with Tie Tuesday!)—this James was almost Bondian. He was the kind of man I’d immediately notice at a party. He looked me straight in the eye with a couple once-overs. I couldn’t help going into self-conscious dating mode as I shook his hand and made introductions. I held my vodka with a teeny splash of cranberry that barely tinted the clear liquid and worried he’d think I was a heavy-drinking barfly. No one offered him their seat—way to go, New Yorkers!—but Jim was completely at ease. He politely offered to buy us drinks and went to the bar for his beer.

  “So what’s the story in Phoenix?” I said when he returned, trying to sound casual.

  “Strange story,” he said. “They had a bunch of arsons . . .”

  What a deep, guttural radio voice. How old can he be with that sexy salt-and-pepper chest hair? I looked into his eyes and nodded.

  “. . . The guy left messages behind claiming that his fires were symbolic acts to protest the degradation of the desert by avaricious developers and he became a local folk hero. Except that after he was arrested, he turned out to be just a nut without a cause. Oops!”

  He laughed. His teeth were perfect.

  My gorgeous colleague was not only smart, he was self-deprecating and funny. I wasn’t about to waste any more time talking shop. I quickly learned that he was divorced, had two kids, and loved opera and Santa Fe. That last bit came up because I told him I had enrolled in a summer course on opera at St. John’s College in Santa Fe and would be seeing Lucia di Lammermoor. I had never been to Santa Fe.

  “You’ll enjoy it,” Jim said of the city’s famous opera house. “I’ve been there. It’s a beautiful outdoor venue, with a tentlike roof, in a gorgeous area, and has fantastic food. I’m jealous. I wish I could join you.”

  Hands down, best prospect I had ever met in a bar. Just as I was letting my guard down, Jim excused himself, saying he had an early flight back to L.A. Oh, no! So soon? Then I remembered.

  “I may see you soon,” I said. “The national desk is sending me to L.A. for a month to fill in for Todd after he moves to D.C.”

  Todd, the chief of the L.A. bureau, was relocating to Washington. As fate would have it, I had gotten his gig while they searched for his replacement.

  Jim looked happily surprised. “Really? If you love the outdoors, you’ll love L.A. There’s great hiking and camping, and the weather is always fantastic.”

  Camping? I’d rather have every pore of my body waxed and then tattooed.

  “I love camping!” I said.

  This was just too much good fortune. My arsonist-hunter was already hinting at dates in the wilderness.

  Later that night, as I dozed off playing back the reel of our encounter, I was mindful that if I dated Jim I would be violating one of my rules. I adhered to a never-date-coworkers policy and it had served me well. Who needs to see their walking mistakes at the office? But Jim and I worked on different coasts, so who needs a policy? And I wasn’t after a relationship, particularly, just some spice in my otherwise uneventful love life at the moment.

  My previous relationships had been phenomenally ill-suited to my ambition for everlasting love. I dated a charming alcoholic for more than two years. I dated a line cook who was too young, too bald, too overweight, but, oh, could he salsa dance. I stupidly agreed to go out with my mortgage broker—and stopped seeing him upon realizing he was a handsome misanthrope—before securing the loan. (At least he was ethical and I still got the loan.) Then I wasted another year of my youth on an intriguing Eastern European I met at a club. This guy was really hard to resist. He regaled me with stories about his hometown and urged me to read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, his favorite book. He took me to shows and dinners at social clubs in unfamiliar corners of New York with flavored vodkas and spectacularly beautiful women. He lavished money and romance on me. Then one day I discovered that he packed a gun for protection. I wondered, “Protection from whom?”

  The suspicions were reinforced one evening when he met me sporting a busted lip.

  “What happened?”

  He knew these people up in the Bronx, you see. He was so underpaid at his job, you know. He needed to make extra money, and these people, well, they knew how to get maximum insurance benefits. So, anyhoo, why not pack the car with relatives and purposely crash it into a tree?

  “Taxi!”

  My dating record was not stellar. I knew women who planned to get married by thirty and have kids by thirty-five. They were as strategic about love as they were about their careers. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t that well organized. I was just open to new adventures, to whatever life would bring in between newspaper deadlines.

  And it wasn’t like I was the Bachelorette. The pickings were always slim, even in college. At five-nine, I was too tall for a third of the men. Another third fell off because I had the better job. Finding the last third entailed online dating, which I tried without posting a picture, which any online dater knows will yield worse results than a two-dollar scratch-off lotto ticket. But I was too self-conscious for a picture. My pitch didn’t help either. Determined to tell the truth, I wrote something along the lines of “Tall, slim Latina with zest for life and brains to match. Funny. Outspoken. Spanish accent. Loves jazz, good wine, assertive men.”

  I scared the deer.

  I was aware I might have come across as a handful to some men, but I listened to Oprah. She once told Serena Williams on her show that women erred when they tried to dim their light to let their men shine. Blind the hell out of them, Oprah said, or something to that effect. The right man would be able to take all your brightness. Amen.

  When I was young and still in Puerto Rico, before leaving for college in the States in my sophomore year, I wondered if I would be happy marrying and having kids in my twenties, like a good Puerto Rican girl. I grew up the oldest of two sisters in a suburb of San Juan, went to the same Catholic parish school from kindergarten to my senior year of high school, and should have had a couple toddlers by my big 3-0. That’s what my sister, Mari, did, and today she and I are grateful for her three kids, my three adorable nephews, even if her marriage foundered.

  Family is a big part of how we view ourselves. I religiously spent every New Year’s Eve in Puerto Rico with my parents, sister, nephews, and assorted cousins and aunts and uncles. On the island and in the States, some of my closest friends were classmates from kindergarten and grade school—Diana, Celia, Lourdes, Clemson, Jesús—another extended family. Because of my upbringing in an extremely family-centric culture, I have never been afraid of commitment, just of bad husbands—specifically, hard-drinking, horse-betting, womanizing macho men that are not uncommon in Puerto Rican culture. Many men regarded their financial support of their family as a job well done. They did minimum housework or child-rearing and dropped everything come “Social Friday”—a Puerto Rican tradition that involves binge drinking until early Saturday. My father, a claims analyst with a health insurer, was among those partaking of our cultural traditions. His drinking drove a wedge between us as I grew up. I couldn’t accept the loud personality that came with it, or the time and money wasted on it (and on gambling at the racetrack). I couldn’t accept that it took my father—a good-natured, affectionate, and decent man when sober—away from me. And I couldn’t accept it on behalf of my mother, who was more tolerant of it than I but was unhappy, still. I fought back with disrespect and the silent treatment.

  My mother always worked, first as a secretary for a bread company and later as an administrative assistant in a doctor’s office, and she called the shots in the house. But she didn’t earn a lot and regretted not being financially independent enough to have options of her own. She worked full-time, she raised me and my sister, and she was the one who insisted we attend a Catholic parish school with Franciscan nuns from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so we could learn English,
even if she and my father had to scrape to pay for it. She hosted family gatherings, planned our beach vacations around the island, painted the house and made repairs, but she still needed my father’s paycheck. I grew up with her mantra etched in my brain: “Get an education so you never have to depend on a man.”

  I looked up to my mom for her work ethic, common sense, and devotion to her family. I also learned from Mami to value my girlfriends. Even as an adult, I sometimes tagged along with her and the moms of my grade school buddies who met in restaurants or at one another’s homes to drink rum and Cokes, gossip, and trash their husbands. They called themselves Las Muchachas—the girls—forever ageless. Their daughters, my contemporaries, all eventually got married in their twenties and had their own kids. We formed our own circle of friendship. Las Muchachitas. I always assumed I’d have children. I got crushes on babies. But I also wanted a partner to have children with, and that was the glitch. Adopting a baby by myself, like some of my friends have done, was not for me. I didn’t feel that wanting or count myself that brave. And my job was a huge distraction from any long-term planning.

  I had initially wanted to be a doctor. When revulsion at dissecting frogs in biology class made me reconsider, I spent months searching for a new major. Pharmacy? Accounting? Political Science? Then I saw All the President’s Men as an impressionable nineteen-year-old premed student at the University of Puerto Rico and that was that. Until then, I had no idea there was such a profession as “Woodward and Bernstein.” After watching the movie, all I wanted was to be a Washington Post reporter and knock on doors to dig for information, meet sources in parking lots, use code words and potted-plant signals to maintain secrecy, and publish stories that would dislodge the corrupt and make our world better. It didn’t cross my mind I could suck at it. I was what you’d call an upbeat teenager, even if sometimes I wondered, “Is this all there is?” In those moments, I felt the smallness of the island and yearned for everything I didn’t know. I also yearned for boys taller than me. I had been five-six by age twelve, five-nine by fifteen—taller than even my teachers. In other words, a skinny, flat-chested freak in a culture where men prefer to tower over their curvy women. I kept growing and slouching like Olive Oyl, and at some point my always enterprising mom got me what, to the naked eye, resembled a straightjacket to pull my shoulders back. She also enrolled me in modeling classes at Sears. “For your posture,” she said. “Siempre estas joroba.” Studying journalism in Washington, D.C., where I already had friends at Georgetown University, was my chance to step out of my flat shoes and sheltered life, if only for a few years of college.

  I was oblivious to the fact that I could barely speak English. I couldn’t even figure out the lyrics in disco songs. I could read and write it, though, thanks to the American nuns who enunciated at Colegio San Antonio, my parish school. I was going for Woodstein, not Barbara Walters, so I picked my new major and told my parents I had to move to the States for a little while because the UPR had no undergraduate journalism program. Amazingly, they said yes. These were the same parents who, on my first date with an eighteen-year-old, who picked me up honking from a yellow convertible Corvette, insisted on chaperoning me, which is how I came to be French-kissed at fifteen for the first time in a dark movie theater with Mom and baby sister sitting just a few rows away. But somehow, the idea of sending me off alone to the States still in my teens didn’t scare them. As long as it involved education, my mom, and therefore my dad, was fine with it. Neither of them had gone to college, and they both wanted it for their daughters.

  And there was my mom’s “Get your education so you never have to depend on a man.”

  I guess it’s no mystery why I stayed single for so long.

  Above all, I was trusted. It was as if Mami and Papi could foretell that their oldest would go through college without smoking pot and with her virginity intact. As I prepared to leave the island, I knew I’d be homesick. But I was ready for the non-Caribbean world. I applied to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and enrolled with a patchwork of financial aid—scholarships, loans, work-study programs—and whatever my parents could give me. Once in D.C., finances were the least of my problems. That first year at GW was T-O-U-G-H. I lived in a huge, noisy, awful dorm. Every weekend, drunk students would pull the fire alarm a few times a night, so we all spent a good part of the year freezing in our bathrobes out on the street while firefighters checked the building for smoke. I had several roommates, one of them a nymphomaniac. At least that was my humble opinion as the only virgin in the zoo. We’ll call her Betsy. She slept around as if it were a required course. It’s as if she had been held hostage for years by her parents and was finally tasting freedom. I didn’t care until she brought a guy to our room and had sex right below me on the bunk bed.

  “Sheet, Betsy!” I said the next morning in my heavy accent. “You can’t do theeese!”

  Betsy found me immensely funny, which made me angrier and less fluent. All I could do was move my half of the bunk bed to the study alcove in our room and the next year get out of campus housing altogether. I found a studio apartment with mice above a Roy Rogers chicken restaurant and roomed with a Puerto Rican high school classmate who was as celibate as I was.

  That first year I could barely keep up with classes, and my journalism school grades were in the gutter. I had the hardest time with accents that didn’t sound like mine. I went to cover Jimmy Carter during a presidential campaign appearance for an assignment and didn’t understand a word he said. (I taped him and a friend later interpreted his drawl for me.)

  But I was lucky to find a mentor in a beloved professor who everyone knew as Puff, short for Puffenbarger.

  Charles Puffenbarger was a business editor at The Washington Post who also mentored one of my Watergate heroes, Carl Bernstein, and brought him to class as a speaker. I was so impressed I went out with Puff for a whole year after the course ended. Our relationship was flirtatious, not sexual, but Puff convinced me I could be a good journalist and our friendship endured for twenty years, until he died of brain cancer at seventy. Puff encouraged me to aim high. My grades steadily improved as my English got better. I interned at the Cox Newspapers bureau in Washington and got a few pieces published in The Washington Post.

  Then, as I was set on returning home, I happened to spot an ad for a summer journalism program for minority journalists at the University of California at Berkeley. A summer in sunny California? I applied, got in, and bought new sunglasses. I had no idea the Bay Area has miserably cold weather in the summer. Neither did I realize until it was too late that the benignly named “summer program” was really a boot camp. Basically, top journalists around the country—the likes of Bob Maynard, Nancy Hicks, Eileen Shanahan, Les Payne, Roy Aarons, Milton Coleman, and many others—came to Berkeley on two-week rotations to kick our butts. They edited a weekly called Deadline and we spent the week reporting and writing for it in between seminars about the ethics and standards of our chosen profession. I had never worked so hard in college or life. I also realized I had overlooked an important detail. The program wanted to increase racial diversity in newsrooms, so they wanted me to interview for jobs on the mainland. I told my parents I had to delay my return for a couple years. I told them the experience in the States would help me land an even better job back home. My parents were all for it.

  But I never returned home.

  My poor parents. They never thought they’d lose me forever by sending me to college. Neither did I. I don’t regret my choices, but it would forever gnaw at me that I chose to not have my family around for most of my adult life–or any of my old close friends, for that matter. Phone calls and twice-a-year visits could never make up for all the moments lost. I thought more about this only as I got older. When you live apart from the family you love, by choice, nostalgia only grows with time. But as a twenty-one-year-old suddenly in charge of her own life, I was just excited, even if I cried on the plane all the wa
y to San Francisco from San Juan when I officially moved out of the parental home for good to start my first real job. That would be as a reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, an afternoon paper in a city I came to love so much that it took me another ten years to think about moving again.

  I fell in love with San Francisco at first sight. It was hilly and surrounded by water just like home. The fog and perennial chill were definite downsides. But the city more than made up for those with its sheer physical beauty, its accepting politics, and its racial integration. I arrived in a shell-shocked city, though. Just a few months earlier, San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk had died at the hands of Dan White. And just days before those shootings, Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones orchestrated the mass murders and suicides in Guyana.

  On my first day at the Examiner, they assigned me a desk near Tim Reiterman, a reporter who was shot in that tragedy but survived the same hail of bullets that killed Congressman Leo Ryan on a remote jungle airstrip. He was friendly and kind to the new wide-eyed hire, just like the rest of the Ex’s staff.

  My colleagues were eccentrics, cynics, union rabble-rousers, musicians, chili cook-off experts, and brilliant writers, some even more so after a liquid lunch at the corner hangout bar, the M&M. The paper itself promoted fun. It gave the staff free tickets to Giants games at frigid Candlestick Park. It sponsored opera at Golden Gate Park. It threw lavish Christmas parties with exhilarating quantities of Dungeness crab. The newsroom was so loosey-goosey that I would blithely indulge in pot smoking—finally!—with another editor at the end of our midnight shift in the city editor’s office, right next to a bustling copy desk. If they smelled something, they said nothing. One night, in the high of very strong weed, I drove over the Bay Bridge to go home to the cozy basement with a fireplace I rented in the house of my friends Laura and Larry in Oakland. The ride was always smooth late at night, but this time I became so paranoid that I thought the car in the rearview mirror was following me—like really following me. I rolled down the window hoping that a blast of chilly air would sober me up, then remembered from some news story that the California Highway Patrol spots drunks by their rolled-down windows. I rolled the window back up and turned up the radio and sang gibberish to whatever was playing at the top of my lungs to make it over the five-mile bridge and up the Oakland hills. I cleared the bridge only to run into the cop car that was always stationed at the intersection of the commercial village of Montclair, which I had to pass to get home. They were there to keep an eye on the comings and goings of Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers, who lived in the vicinity. That night I became bridge-phobic. I soon quit pot and moved to San Francisco, to a nice one-bedroom near Golden Gate Park, only fifteen minutes away from the office over solid ground.