Sad About Michael

sometimes I remember his smile, the easiness of conversation,

genuine interest—everything else

was explicitly allowed or not. Rules.

His voice.

His hands.

His hands.

His hands.

I thought he stood at the foot of my bed one night

three years or so ago, when I worked at the

haunted hotel.

I know you don’t want to know about him, the Other One, the one I met during grad school, the chef, but I need you to understand how badly it ended and that it can never be repaired. It destroyed other relationships as part of the fallout, and that was before the accident on Folly Road. Since he didn’t survive that, I owe him a true telling of what happened, and we’ll see how far I get, especially since most of it isn’t for public consumption.

I met him the night of the bachelor/bachelorette party. I was in his new car when his wife hit another car in her church parking lot, showing off. Not important. The two parties went out downtown, separartely, after sending strippers away with money-tight g-strings, and ran into each other at TBonz. Also not important, except that it became one big party downtown.

When we left from downtown, the guys wanted me to go with them. Specifically, the groom wanted me to go with the guys. He probably wanted a bachelor party blow job. His now-wife wasn’t taking any chances and tagged along with me and whoever I was riding with. The presence of the bride put a damper on the evening.

The guys wanted to do some blow, but not around her. So we’re all milling around this apartment complex parking lot, trying to figure out who’s going where to do what, and I noticed him. Really noticed him. Went right over to him. Told him I wanted to kiss him. He said he was married. I said that was fine; I was in love with someone else, going to school, and raising a three-year-old and just wanted someone to fuck me a few times a week with no strings. He said he was looking for something regular. Where did I live, and did I give head?

He took me home that night, to the apartment on James Island, the townhouse off Camp Road. He came in with me, and I entertained him in the living room. We were both pleased with how the entertaining turned out. He gave me his phone number before he left, but I didn’t call.

The wedding reception was at the aquarium, and he cornered me by the shark tank, wanted to know why I hadn’t called. I said I didn’t know if he changed his mind after he got home, and that I’d rather leave the ball in his court, didn’t feel like serving. I gave him my number. He called and came over the next evening, after I had my daughter down for the night.

While I lived on James Island, we fell into a pattern. He came over two or three nights a week, after he closed the restaurant. We would share a bottle of wine and smoke my weed before getting down to business, and the conversation was always good. Once, when I wouldn’t answer the phone for one reason or another, he broke into my apartment and showed up in my bedroom. I imagine it should have scared me, but I liked it, that he had to have me, wouldn’t even take no answer for an answer.

There was another night when my car broke down while I took my sitter home, and he came and got us from the side of the road, took my sitter home, and was a complete gentleman in front of my daughter.

Once or twice, when I went for drinks with classmates after class, he picked me up from the bar and drove me home. But we didn’t date. That was never part of the equation, and that unspoken rule was never broken. I’m not sure when it became more than what it was supposed to be, but we enjoyed each other’s company, even when we weren’t horizontal.

He wanted me to come work with him, offered to make me his sous chef for $30k/year. It would have involved working nights, and my classes were at night, so I turned him down, told him I wasn’t dropping out of school so he could get blow jobs at work.

After I moved out to Folly, it became a couple of times a week—less convenient to drive out to the beach than around the corner. We continued seeing each other even after I moved from East Cooper to East 10th. I was always an east beach girl.

A few weeks after I moved out to the beach, I got sunburned. I remember Michael putting lotion on my back beihe left. I had to tell him to go in my kitchen and wash his hands with dish soap. Coming home from work smelling like a day spa would be more than a little suspicious for the executive chef of a seafood restaurant.

He’d clean up a little bit when he got to my place; cooking all night in a hot kitchen creates a need to freshen up a little. There was a bit of restaurant smell that clung to him, but Gain laundry detergent was his primary scent. I had always used Tide or Arm & Hammer, so it was different. Appealing.

When I had been on East 10th for a while, I quit seeing Michael because I started seeing someone locally, and he ended up moving in with me. It didn’t last terribly long, just a few months, but I started seeing Michael again before I ended it.

The summer after I graduated with my MA, I moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, for work. That didn’t last long, and I was back in Augusta by the turn of the year. Part of the understood arrangement was that this would not become a long distance relationship, that when I moved away after graduation, that would be that. Move on.

It didn’t exactly work out the way we intended, and Michael called me in Georgia for phone sex. Got to where he needed to hear my voice to come. And he visited, fabricated reasons to go to Atlanta alone so he could take a detour to see me, coming and going.

After I was back in Augusta, the phone sex continued, as did the more intimate conversations. I would drive to Charleston to see him about every other week. Masters Weeek, he came to the Par 3 and spent the night with me. That’s when the last of the rules got shattered.

He was drunk after being on the golf course drinking beer in the sun all day. And when we got back to my apartment, he said he was in love with me. He went on and on about how much he loved me before he passed out. We went out for coffee in the morning, before he got on the road, and things were already different. He wore his deerskin shoes, the ones he got for his wedding.

There was a new urgency in the relationship. We talked more often, deeper and deeper conversations. We started acting like two people in love with each other, even after I chewed him out when he was safely back in Charleston. I asked him who he thought he was speaking to me like that. He knew what I was talking about and apologized, but the damage was done. Love entered the equation.

The last time I saw him was in Charleston, on Folly Beach the day after he visited me in the hotel near his restaurant over in Mount P. It hadn’t ended well that night. I allowed liberties previously denied, and instead of being appreciative, he thought it would be cute to be an asshole. It wasn’t.

The next afternoon, I drove over to the peninsula and went to Saks. When I end a relationship, I change my perfume. I decided I was done when I woke up in the hotel bed and recounted the events of the previous night.

Silver Rain from La Prairie is what I bought. I loved it, wore it for several years, until Lara stole it out of my bathroom, but that’s another story. I got some lunch then headed out to the beach. The house I lived in on East 10th was gone, razed to be replaced with a mini mansion. This is what’s there now:

It wasn’t there yet, just the vacant lot. I drove over to the East 10th public parking, dropped my keys on my towel, and took off down the beach, toward washout. I didn’t go all the way down to the lighthouse; the mosquitoes get really bad on that end of the island. But I walked and walked and walked, occasionally getting in the water to ride a wave.

I spent the entire afternoon on the beach, and when I got back to my towel, I headed back into the water, swimming out past the breakers to float on my back and drift for a moment. Then I got down to some serious bodysurfing, catching wave after wave and swimming back out, fighting past the breakers after slogging through the whitewater that’s too shallow to swim through.

Every now and then, a wave would be too strong and knock me down before I got out far enough to dive under. The sun was setting when I dragged myself out of the water, and a group of people had assembled in camp chairs with a cooler. A woman approached me as I got close to my towel. Michael’s wife.

She was happy to see me, hugged my neck and got her pretty outfit wet with seawater from my dripping bathing suit. And sure enough, there was Michael, sitting next to the cooler. She offered me a beer. I accepted it and sat down in the sand.

Michael got up and walked away while I made conversation with his wife and their friends and learned that they came out to this spot every Sunday evening, had for a couple of years. Before that, they went to East 5th. I lived between 4th and 5th when I lived on East Cooper. This asshole had been playing with fire the whole time, coming to my beach with his wife, daring fate. I made short work of my beer and got back in the ocean.

The sun was setting in earnest when I got back out. I gathered my towel, threw my beach dress on over my bathing suit and headed to my car. Michael and his wife were arguing beside it. It seemed he had just narrowly avoided being arrested for indecent exposure for urinating in public, in this lot. Did he pee on my car? What the actual fuck?

It was beginning to get dark, and Michael was talking to his wife like she was a piece of shit, somehow it was her fault that he whipped his dick out in public. I got in my car, didn’t even bother putting the top up, and pulled out of the parking lot, took a left on Ashley, and headed for Folly Road and the mainland.

I drove all the way back to Augusta in my wet bathing suit, absolutely fuming. I talked to a friend for part of the drive, and I listened to music. Stevie Nicks’s “Gold Dust Woman” stands out as the soundtrack of that drive.

The next night, while he was at the restaurant, I called Michael’s wife and confessed. I won’t say she took it well, but she handled herself like a lady and was incredibly dignified. I truly admired her for that.

Michael called two days later and said she changed the locks and threw him out. I remember how my heart hammered in my chest when his number came up on the caller ID. He also said I was a bitch and he hated me. I replied with, “I think we’re done here,” and hung up. Then I called the phone company and changed my number, gave up the one I was able to get back when I moved back to Augusta. I loved that phone number, 706-733-1319. But I gave it up.

Michael and I never spoke again. A mutual friend who’s not allowed to talk to me anymore, the groom from the wedding, called me on Christmas Eve that year and told me that Michael was dead. He was run over by a car on Folly Road, walking from Brinson’s steakhouse to the American Legion, where I tended bar before I moved away.