Leaving Salt Lake City

by Matthew Timion

  I had always wondered if Mormons married so young because of the silence after mission. Perhaps they were feeling lost and afraid after coming back from their missions. Perhaps they didn’t want to adjust to being alone. Maybe this is why I jumped into a marriage so quickly with my Mormon wife and then so hastily with Jessica. It would explain why I needed female attention so much all of the time. Those two years helped shape me into the lonely person I had become.

  I was coming to peace with being alone though. I wasn’t really alone. I had my son with me, after all, and Jessica was not much of a factor in our lives any more. The string of female groupies I had years before, thanks to my job in radio, were all non-existent in my life. Besides, I didn’t have time for dating. Considering how long I had been out of the “dating” game I doubt I would have been very successful at dating anyway. The solitary life was growing on me. I was still broke, but I had learned how to adapt to my financial situation. I didn’t have a girlfriend or a wife, but I had my son. At least I had him.

  Being the lone single father had its advantages. Long gone were the days when young single women were attracted to me. The younger girls liked that I owned a house or a motorcycle. They liked that I worked in radio or that I had tattoos. Introduce the kid, however, and they were usually gone. The good ones stayed, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to really be with them. Since my projected persona had changed due to my insistence of keeping Manny with me, the only women who ever showed any interest in me were married women.

  “You’re like chocolate to me,” a mother said to me at martial arts one day. Her two daughters were in our class. The mother watched her daughters, and me, kick, punch, jump, and sweat. “You’re like chocolate to me,” she said again.

  “What do you mean?" I was trying to understand her metaphor. After all, English was her second language and as far as I knew chocolate was something bad where she came from.

  “I know I shouldn’t, but I just want to sometimes." Since Manny and I had gone to a birthday party with her daughters a few months back, this woman had had a fixation on me. She was very bold and upfront. As enticing as her offer was, I couldn’t be that person. As attractive as she was I knew what it felt like to have your wife sleep with another guy. Nope. Couldn’t happen. She kept flirting with me for a while before changing her daughters to a different class schedule. “It’s just hard for me to see you sometimes." Her changing schedules was a relief.

  She wasn’t the only one. A number of married women propositioned me. I started to wonder if they felt there was something safe about me that said, “I sleep with married women." What was I projecting? Why did women from high school find me on Facebook and start talking dirty? Their husbands were in the next room. Why was this somehow okay for them?

  It all became clear. They were dissatisfied with their husbands. They wanted their husbands to be a father to their children not the guy who helped pay the bills. They saw me and somehow put me on a pedestal. I was a father, and a damn good one at that according to them anyway. I was not bad on the eyes. I followed my heart and these women loved that. I was new and exciting.

  And they were all married women.

  It started becoming rather annoying to have to tell married women over and over again that we would never work out. Where were the single women? I guess it didn’t matter though. Not really anyway. I had learned to accept I would be alone for the rest of my life, and I was okay with the idea.

  Of all the women in my life the only person who I could have ever seen myself with, Courtney, was long gone. I had not heard from her in months. I had not been romantic with her in over a year. I knew that my actions had made any chances of a relationship with her again impossible. I had earned my solitude. I deserved it. I opened myself up and let the cool nothingness sweep over me. “Being alone is okay,” I told myself. And it was.

  | FIFTY ONE |

  Assimilation

  Autumn 2011

  I looked into the mirror on my wall. The mirror was surrounded by pictures from my life, my grandparents’ lives, and my parents’ lives. There was a photograph of my family when I was in third grade next to a photograph of my father’s Vietnam era basketball team from the Navy. My father was the only white player on the team. To the left I saw a photograph of my grandparents from the late 1940s, and next to it was a picture of Courtney and Manny from the Oktoberfest in 2009.

  The mirror revealed something amazing. I was now covered in tattoos. I had seven of them. I had two on my upper right arm of the Philippines and the Aztec sun on my left wrist. I had a car and microphone on my right forearm. On my back was a giant scene from Don Quixote, which I had always loved because it symbolized a man living his life they way it should be not the way it was. On my left ribcage was Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. My latest tattoo was Korean words spelling out the version of martial arts that Manny and I had come to love.

  I had assimilated. I had become exactly what I had first criticized when I came to Utah. I was covered in tattoos. I had joined the hippy liberals, and I had a giant garden with thirty tomato plants that year. Like all of the other adult teenagers in Utah, I had had multiple sexual partners, both consecutively and simultaneously. I had experimented with over consumption of alcohol. It was official. I was no longer an outsider. Utah had become my home. My formerly emotionally shattered self had become open to the influences of the world around me. I had assimilated into this weird culture that I used to observe and mock. I had become the epitome of an ex-Mormon minus the need to talk about Mormonism all of the time.

  When I had lived in the Philippines during my two year stint as a Mormon missionary I did my best to assimilate into their culture. My appearance was a giveaway that I didn’t belong, but that didn’t stop me. I wanted to learn the language, the culture, and the food. I wanted to understand the rituals, the clothing, and the customs. In some way I did this because I knew it would make me a more effective teacher. I wanted to belong. When I came home from the Philippines my mother had introduced me to the woman who managed my new apartment building. My mother had acquired the apartment for me when my step-father proclaimed he would in no way ever want to see me or “my kind” again. Living apart was better for all of us.

  “Nice to meet you!” The manager said to me.

  “Nice to meet you din!” I replied back. “Din” is a Tagalog (Filipino) word for “as well,” or “also." I had spent so much time speaking the language and living in the Filipino culture that assimilating back to American life was difficult. Because my experience coming back to America was difficult, I started to wonder if I ever could leave Salt Lake City. I had become a full fledged member of the tribe. Everything about me screamed “Former Mormon,” from the tattoos to the cigarette hanging out of my mouth.

  Everything I knew, from the culture to the customs of the area had become second nature to me. They were second nature to my son as well. I knew liquor stores were closed on Sundays and it no longer bothered me. I knew the best time to shop at a big box store was also on Sunday because half of the population was at church and not allowed to shop on Sundays. I knew twice a year you never go to downtown Salt Lake City because the Mormon Church was putting on their semi-annual General Conference and the traffic was horrible. I knew on Saturdays that the Farmer’s Market at Pioneer Park was the best place to get fresh produce and see yuppies selling beaded jewelry. Could I survive somewhere else? Would it be just as difficult as leaving a country and a culture that I had grown to love? Would I have to learn how to speak American again as I had to learn how to properly speak English again when I came back from the Philippines?

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I was staying. The thought of leaving, the overwhelming process required to sell a house worth less than I owed, or paying off credit cards I had neglected to pay for over a year was too much to handle. I would rather just sit there and let the status quo happen to me. I would rather just be. It was exactly what I had done for so long.

  It was Thanksgivi
ng of 2011 and the only place I could go was to a friend’s house. Nadia had invited us to spend Thanksgiving with her family first, but I declined. It would have been weird to be the third wheel anyway. My own mother had just moved from Las Vegas back to our home state of Illinois so going to Las Vegas was out of the question. A family from martial arts invited us over. The people in our small martial arts community were becoming my family. They took us in and helped us when we had nowhere else to go. I loved it. I loved that they had it in their hearts to reach out to us and take us in. If we had nowhere else to go I would have simply made a chicken while Manny and I watched one of his favorite movies for the 50th time.

  Manny called Jessica that night and she didn’t answer. As long as the effort was made, I was okay with it. She called back later than evening and they spoke for a few minutes. Manny was having too much fun playing with other kids and their conversation was short. She called back a few days later and wanted to talk to me after she talked with Manny. She wanted to know what Manny wanted for Christmas, she and couldn’t understand him when he told her. I was feeling very forgiving that day. After all, her court case had gone nowhere. I won although the cases were still technically open. I had nothing to fight with her about. Her behavior was so clearly wrong in so many ways that I did not see how talking about it even mattered. I got on the phone with her.

  “Maaatt." She had been drinking, but she wasn’t drunk. Well, she wasn’t as drunk as I was used to her being, so in my mind she was just buzzed not drunk. We talked about gifts for Manny, and just as I thought the conversation was over she continued. “Listen,” she said, “I pulled some shit with you, and you pulled a lot of shit with me. But I’m willing to let it go for Manny’s sake." Arguing about the specifics was irrelevant. I could let it go too. “Matt, I dropped the case against you months ago!”

  I don’t know why she thought the case was dropped, but she was wrong. “If you think the case is still open you have a horrible lawyer. I dropped it." I asked her why her family doesn’t contact Manny. “Maaaatt. My dad wants to talk to Manny but doesn’t because you have an open court case against me." She was referencing my counter-suit for legal fees. Somehow her father not wanting to talk to his grandson was all my fault. Suddenly the conversation changed directions again. “Things are great with us here. I’m an AA now. Both me and Vince are both AAs.”

  “AAs?" I had to ask.

  “Yeah, Alcoholics Anonymous." I knew what AA meant, but never once had I heard someone refer to themselves as an AA. I had even read the entire Alcoholics Anonymous handbook and had never once seen that. “Yeah, I just got my silver chip, and Vince is getting his soon too." I didn’t ask what a silver chip was. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous received chips for milestones of sobriety. The colors of the chips, however, are irrelevant. Every local meeting can have whatever colors they want. I had only spent one meeting in AA and I had only read the book one time, but I could tell that her terminology was off. Alcoholics talk about their chips in number of days not colors. Something didn’t bode well with what she was saying and how she was saying it. Her lingo was all wrong.

  “That’s good Jessica." I found that playing along with her instead of confronting her usually made her say more ridiculous things.

  “Yeah, I know how much that means to you because of your dad." I couldn’t believe she was bringing that up, but I had learned to let what she said roll off of me. I could pick it up later, dissect our conversations, and figure out the truth behind her words. “I’m there so often and am so good they want to hire me to be a full time counselor." I knew that what she said was a lie. One of the best things about Alcoholics Anonymous is they have no paid members. The entire program is volunteer-based. I put one more thing on the list to look into the next day, if it even really mattered, which it didn’t.

  I didn’t know what her agenda was with everything she was saying. I’m guessing she wanted me to know she was doing better and was sober. She wanted me to know that her issues with alcohol were gone as she attempted to convince me of this through slurred speech.

  I said to her, “Let me update you on all of our friends." I was grateful we were communicating again. We both agreed communication between us was long overdue. I told her about Nadia divorcing her husband and about Alan’s mom dying. I told her that Tyson, who lived with us for those two months, had become a professor at Princeton. I told her that my brother had divorced his wife and was living alone with my niece. We discussed people who were at one point her best friends, her closest confidants.

  “I think that’s really sweet and all, but I don’t know why you’re telling me this." I just listened. Interrupting Jessica only led to fights. “These people all abandoned me. They all threw me away and chose you over me. The memory of that hurts me. I don’t want to hear about it." So I stopped.

  “I’m proud of you Jessica for stepping up and facing your addiction. We need to talk like this more often.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  We didn’t talk like that again. Our talk was a one time deal. A few days later she wrote me an email.

  Hey, Vince and I will be in Utah over Christmas, so I'd like to figure out a time to pick up Manny. We will arrive on the 22nd and stay through the new year. Please let me know what works out best.

  Thanks.

  It was her year to take Manny for Christmas. I couldn’t do anything about it, but I really wanted to.

  I tried not to focus on her weird story about a silver chip and becoming a paid counselor for Alcoholics Anonymous. Focusing on her so much is part of what led to the demise of Matt and Courtney. Her behavior affected my life too much already. I needed to let it go.

  Jessica showed up on Christmas Eve to pick up Manny. She was staying with Vince at Vince’s ex-wife’s house for the holiday. Vince brought me a package of fireworks that he picked up in Alabama. “This is the good stuff. You can’t get it here." A giant box filled with explosives would usually make any man happy. I had to wonder if they were going to call the police and tell them that I had illegal fireworks. Just in case I left the fireworks untouched. At least his fingerprints would be on them, which would prove they were driven across state lines. That’s a federal offense.

  I hated that my mind worked that way. I hated that I had to always think of a backup plan just in case a nice gesture was ever secretly a ploy to take Manny away. My anxiety, although warranted, was unnecessary.

  Christmas day came in 2011. Jojo caused the only noise in the house. I had no one to talk to so I sat in silence. Manny’s childish voice was nowhere to be found. The one person I wanted to see the most that holiday was off with his mother for five days. I didn’t know the address where he was staying. I refused to impose myself on friends during this family holiday. If I had done that I would be the equivalent of the drunk uncle sitting in the corner drinking his fifth egg nog before 10 in the morning. I would be the guy invited over out of obligation. Spending the holiday by myself was better. Besides, being alone was something I had mastered. I was good at it.

  I sat at my dining room table and browsed the Internet on my laptop. A few weeks prior my friend asked me if I thought his sister-in-law was cute. I did. He said we would hit it off and had a lot in common like being divorced, having tattoos, being a single parent, etc.. Anything was worth a shot, but she lived in Southern California. Maybe she was the kindred spirit I was looking for. I saw that she logged into Facebook.

  “Hi Michelle,” I wrote.

  “Oh, hi!” She wrote back.

  | FIFTY TWO |

  Michelle

  Shortly after Christmas 2011

  For the first time in five years, I felt ready to be in a relationship. A real relationship. I was okay being alone. I had worked on myself during those years. I felt that I could offer someone a person worth loving. I was ready for a real deep connection. When Michelle and I started talking, I put myself out there no longer afraid of being hurt and no longer always thinking about protecting myself like Jessica had tau
ght me to. I felt healed.

  Michelle seemed to be the answer. She was smart, which I find attractive. She was tattooed, which made me feel normal being around her. She was a single mother of a hyper kid much like Manny so she understood the unique challenges of my life. She was recently divorced from a controlling guy who she should never have married. Actually, she was recently separated, not divorced. She had just moved back into her mother’s house. Her son’s father wasn’t a part of the picture much so she understood this part of my situation too. We seemed to have a lot in common from the initial conversation.

  Our relationship evolved fast, too fast. I did my best not to control the evolution of the relationship so that it happened organically. We talked every night and sent each other text messages every day. We video chatted often and she let me talk to her son Charlie. Charlie and Manny also video chatted.

  I think we were both trying to fill a missing piece in our lives. While I had long embraced being a single parent, romantic solitude wasn’t what I wanted. I don't know what she wanted, but she did not want to be a thirty-three year old single mother living her in mother’s house. She did not want to have to share a blow up mattress with her seven year old son. She was seeking that other person, the one that would solve her problems. I was seeking the other person who could accept me and would be okay with my ADHD child, my dog, my cats, and would be able to understand just exactly how difficult it is to do it all alone.

  The pieces seemed to fit. We got along. We planned for a meeting in February of 2012. Meeting up in Las Vegas made the most sense since it was between the two of us. Our children would meet each other in person and play.