I had a Blue Heeler when I was in High School. Her name was Index. Index was the reason I met Ty. Ty isn’t his real name. Ty isn’t the brightest Crayon in the box. In fact, he would probably consider being mentioned here a compliment. Ty has spent his life bouncing from one home to the other of who ever will take him in at the time. He has no ambition and he will never grow up. But he likes Blue Heelers.
One day I had just washed the Oklahoma clay off of my car at the gas station/grocery/auto parts/car wash in our sweet little ‘burb. Index was with me hanging her head out the window while I vacuumed the floor mats. Ty came over from the gas pumps and said, ‘That’s a Blue Heeler.’ (How is that for a pick up line?) Ty had just bought a six pack, so my 18 year old brain started churning. You see, months before I turned 18, Oklahoma liquor laws changed from a minimum purchase age of 18 to 21. And most establishments for consuming illicit beverages while dancing and general meat marketing weren’t with the program yet. If you were with someone who had the proper documentation you could get your 18 year old butt past the bouncer.
So that is the why I ended up dating Ty. He got me into bars.
This time period was one of the few that I know of in Ty’s life when he was actually paying rent. He had a roommate that I knew, but never once saw during the time they split the rent. I left to spend Christmas break in STL and when I came home Ty was living with his mother. Actually, Ty was in the hospital, with a broken arm, broken leg and no front teeth. He had gone all UFC in his truck with a telephone pole. And lost. His story was that a Blue Heeler ran out in front of him.
Much later, I found out the real story. I actually had to piece some of it together because it came through different sources. One of those sources was on the Tulsa fire department. While I was gone, Ty picked up a woman in a bar and took her home. Only she didn’t want him to spend the night and sent him packing. He was parked in a neighborhood with his truck running and was passed out. The why of the next part is fuzzy, but according to Ty the TPD came by and made him leave. He had been passed out drunk but somehow convinced them to not haul him in and they let him drive away. That is the fuzzy part, I find that hard to believe now, but I was quite gullible in those days. And things were different back then. Not better, not worse, just different. So Ty drove off and hit a telephone pole before he got home; totaled his truck and wrecked his body.
Did you miss the part where technically he was cheating on me? I did for a while. But I wasn’t that emotionally attached to him and he got me into bars. Oh and technically, I cheated on him too. My aunt introduced me to a guy in STL and I went bowling with him while I was out of town. He played in bowling tournaments. He had 300, 299 & 298 rings, was an ace pitcher on his school’s baseball team, and he was funny. Oh come on, cut me some slack. I was 18. And my supposed boyfriend was picking up women in bars and taking them home.
While Ty was recuperating from the wreck, we didn’t go to bars. Not going out probably would have doomed our relationship, but I didn’t have anything else going on at the time other than my part time job. So I continued to hang out and keep Ty company when I could. Then Valentine’s day rolled around. An 18 year old girl would die (in those days, at least in my world) if she didn’t have a date on Valentine’s day. So Ty was handy. Except that he bought me a ring. An engagement ring. A tiny little dime store diamond chip. You had to have a magnifying glass to see the stone. And I didn’t get the enormity of it at first. I just thought it was cool being engaged to a guy who was out of school and could get me into bars. Then he got really possessive, and pushy, and bossy, and was getting on my nerves at times. But he could get me into bars and I was going off to college soon.
One day he was at my house while I was getting ready to go out. When I came in from the bathroom, he had a strange look on his face. He was sitting on my bed with my text books spread around him and a letter in his hand. He had gone through all my books and notes. The letter had been tucked in my French book. It was from the guy I met in STL. Luckily, the letter wasn’t dated, so I just told him it was old and he believed me. But he became more controlling. He wanted to know what I was doing every minute of every day. At first, I didn’t recognize the pattern. But explaining myself all the time quickly got old. I knew where he was because he wasn’t very mobile with a broken arm, broken leg and no wheels. To justify his tyranny, I just figured it was because he couldn’t get out much and was bored.
I started applying to colleges. My friend and I decided to be roomies at a college 50 miles away. We scheduled a visit to tour the school and dorms. Ty insisted on going with us. He waited in the car since he couldn’t keep up with us on crutches. While my friend and I were talking to the advisor, we mentioned that my boyfriend was waiting. She said, ‘You mean you brought your own meat?’. She was incredulous. And bells started ringing in my head. To make matters worse, later that weekend, Ty mentioned that he wanted to get married before I left for college. I began to wonder if I wanted to get married at all. But for now, I would just keep on making my daily report of all my activities because a big concert was coming up at my favorite bar.
About that time, Ty had the cast removed from his leg and went to buy a new truck. He came home from truck shopping and said he couldn’t get approved for a loan because he had an outstanding debt on his credit report. The debt was from a rent to own store where he had bought a very nice, very expensive component stereo. He had the speakers in his room at his mother’s house, but there was no stereo. We went to talk to the people at the store. They told us that they would take the stereo back, but he would still owe for the interest. He almost had the unit paid off when he quit making payments. But the interest had continued to compound.
Against my better judgment and absolutely without telling my parents, I took money out of my savings account and wrote a check to pay off the stereo and the interest. But the condition was that the stereo stayed in my possession. Only we had to actually gain possession of the stereo first. There were pieces of that stereo all over our little ‘burb. Basically, everywhere that he had lived in the last two years he had left part of the unit behind. The speakers were at his mom’s. A couple he had lived with had the cabinet. They had it stored in their garage so they were glad to have it and all of his other possessions out of their hair. His former roommate had the amplifier. He was using it so he wasn’t too happy about giving it up. We went several places gathering various pieces and delivered them to my room at my parent’s house.
And Ty still couldn’t get a loan. But a guy Ty knew took pity on him and sold him an old truck with the understanding that Ty would pay for the truck with his first few paychecks when he returned to work. And what did Ty do with his first paycheck after returning to work? Why I’m glad you asked. He bought a freaking new set of wheels (which required new tires). Hopefully, he didn’t think I would pony up the money for the truck because I was about as vested in that relationship as I was going to get. And besides, I had plans to fly to STL for a long weekend.
I left for STL, giving Ty some hair-brained excuse. I had family there so going for a visit wasn’t too off the wall. Really, I don’t remember the exact details of the tall tale I wove. My mom knew where I was going and why. For several months I had been corresponding with the guy I met in STL. He asked me to go to his Sr. Prom with him and sent me a plane ticket. I took a formal I borrowed from my cousin and Mom dropped me off at the airport. But then, after the prom I didn’t get on the plane to come home. I changed my tickets and called my Mom to inform her that I was staying another night. And she informed me that Ty was at the Tulsa airport checking every flight from STL wondering when I was going to get back. I told her when I would get into Tulsa and begged her to come pick me up herself. She didn’t. She was mad. First of all, she didn’t much like Ty. Second of all, she didn’t approve of me flying off to go to the prom with another guy when I was supposedly engaged. We had some real knock down drag out fights over my relationship with Ty. And in the final loud exchange I yelled, ‘You are just trying to break us up.’ After that she never really harassed me much about Ty. I thought that she had realized the error of trying to run my 18 year old life. Or maybe I was just relieved to not have her harassing me anymore. Or maybe that would have required introspection and I didn’t give it any thought at all. Years later, Mom told me she realized in that exchange that I was not really into the relationship and if she backed off it would burn itself out.
But that didn’t stop good old Mom from getting in her punches when she had a golden opportunity. For example, when it came time to pick me up at the airport. Ty called her wanting to know when my plane was due. She told him and he volunteered to pick me up. My dearly beloved mother, knowing where I had been and that I would be carrying a huge formal, complete with a cancan slip, let him pick me up. Little did she know, it was worse than she imagined. When my aunt, uncle and the STL guy dropped me at the gate I was very choked up. I didn’t want to go back home and be controlled and harassed and have to face my future. So I got on the plane with tears streaming down my face and sobbed all the way back to the land of the red man. I stepped off the plane all puffy eyed and red nosed expecting a big hug from my mom, to see Ty standing there leaned against the wall. I still wonder now and then what the people on that plane thought. If they saw me get on the plane hugging and kissing one young man, noticed that I sobbed through the whole flight, then noticed that I stepped off the plane to meet another man, what did they think? It wasn’t too hard to figure out.
I said something like, ‘What are you doing here?’ Wow. Fine how do you do. And it made him suspicious. He began scolding me for staying a day longer than I’d planned. Then HE NOTICED THE DRESS. And I was quick. Despite the tears and the looming future and the hours of trying to figure out how to gracefully get out of my current predicament and grieving my loss of access to the bars, I was able to quickly come up with another convincing tall tale. I told him my aunt loaned me the dress to wear to my prom; the prom which he would escort me to in a couple of weeks. AND HE BOUGHT IT. And I didn’t care at that moment if he believed me or not. I think that made it more convincing.
The whole incident made Ty even more controlling. But the straw that broke the camel’s back came from a student teacher in my business class. She showed up in class a couple of weeks later sporting an enormous chunk of compressed carbon on her left ring finger. The thing was so big and bright that it blinded you if it reflected light toward you. Maybe she had the ring for a while and I just noticed it. But on that day she was standing right in front of my desk lecturing and nearly put my eyes out. I kept looking at her ring, then down to the desk to my own left hand. And back at her ring, then down to mine again. It suddenly occurred to me that comparison would represent my entire life if I didn’t wake up and get off the train to disaster. I suddenly recalled the Monty Python movie I had seen a couple of years earlier. ‘The Meaning of Life’. The scene of the woman in the drab dress and apron standing at the sink scrubbing dishes, popping out one kid after the other made me throw up a little in my throat as I saw myself in her shoes. But the prom was that weekend and I wasn’t going to break up with Ty and be without a date.
As I was walking down the muddy clay road in my borrowed formal after the prom, I knew I would have been better off had I been dateless that night. You see Ty was a little drunk on the way home from prom. It was raining and he slid off the road and got the borrowed truck he was driving stuck. He called the owner of the truck who came and pulled the truck out of the ditch. I had already walked the rest of the way home. Furious. I avoided him for a few days then I gave him the pathetic little ring back. I told him something to the effect that I was going to college, leaving town and I didn’t see him in my future. There were bigger things on my horizon than him, and I was tired of having to tell him what I was doing every second of every day.
A few days later, all in the same week, the place I worked went out of business, I somehow ended up going out with Niner, an on again off again guy, and blew my car up. Had I known then what I know now about Niner, I would have stayed around to see where that took me. At any rate, Ty called me and said he wanted his stereo back. I told him he could have the stereo if he paid me back the money I spent to get the debt off his record and if he hauled the carcass of my car to the junk yard. That was the last I saw or heard of him for a very long time.
And some people are like the proverbial bad penny. They keep popping back into your life when you least expect it.
After I came back from being a party girl for three years in STL, Ty somehow found out I was back in town. When he called, I had been in bed for over a week with a devastating intestinal virus. It attacked me on the second day of a new job and landed me in not one, but two emergency rooms. For two weeks, my diet consisted of soda crackers and 7-UP. I told him as much when he called. But he wanted to take me out to a steak dinner. I tried letting him down nicely, but he persisted. So I ended up being very mean to get the point across that not only was I too ill to leave the house, but he was the last guy on earth I wanted to date. I’m still confused about why he would call me out of the blue when I had so acutely, definitely, absolutely, unequivocally, specifically, unmistakably told him to hit the highway and never come back. AND THEN I LEFT TOWN. I know it sounds cruel, but he really had a hard time getting the point.
And like the bad penny, Ty popped up recently. Not long ago my s-Dad told me Ty said hello. It seems that Ty is crashing at the home of my s-uncle. He allegedly got fired from his job for fighting with a co-worker that was playing music that annoyed Ty. Really? And sadly, Ty is really good at what he does for a living. So to get fired for doing something so stupid….
I didn’t even send greetings back his way. I just said, ‘Oh, good grief.’
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