GREG

Greg and Skitch at the Prom
1984

  When I was fifteen I despaired that I was an old maid. There were many reasons for this odd notion. Probably the main one was because I had been reading adult romance novels since I was a bored nine year old that had ran out of age appropriate reading material. I read both contemporary and the historical romances, and they instilled in me a longing for love before I clearly understood the meaning of romance, and not only for love, but for one that began as early as possible. My favorite romances by far were the historical romances in which the females were often as young as fourteen years old. I had been told repeatedly that I was very mature for my age. That notion coupled with books about child brides left me thinking that I was quite late in finding my true love. A few of the stories I liked best had lovers that met when they were even younger than fourteen. They grew up as childhood friends and later became more. Since I wanted, possibly more than anything, to have one love and one lover all my life, I made up my mind that a childhood love was the kind of love for me. I longed for a gentle friendship sort of love that grew into romance. This all made plenty of sense to me. After all, my sister Lila had married at fifteen and my mother at sixteen. (We later found out she was fifteen too. She had been misinformed about her own age.) My dear friend Jutannia had married at thirteen and several other acquaintances and friends were married before they were sixteen. The combination of my environment and my reading materials were a recipe for disaster.

    I had been praying for years, literally praying, on an intense and daily basis, for God to please send me my soul mate. I had named a tree in the grove near my home. I called him Tenison, and I spilled out my heart to him about how lonely I was and how much I wanted to find my soul mate. I often prayed beneath that tree. If someone had wandered by (I would have heard them tromping through the woods before they heard my whispering prayers) they might have thought I was praying to the tree, but I was not. The tree was only my confidante, my friend. I addressed my prayers, "Dear Father in Heaven" and ended them with, "In Jesus name I pray, Amen."

    I had dated this wild guy named Matthew off and on for just a bit. (He was too wild to endure long, in my opinion.) Matthew came by to see me one day and surprised me by asking my parents if I could ride to the gas station with him. They rather reluctantly allowed it. Once I walked to Matt's truck, I was surprised and annoyed to find another guy in it, and I almost went back home. I had made it a habit to never be outnumbered on any outings with a guy. Two guys and one girl spelled trouble in my book. But Matthew said it was a friend of his, Greg, and, "Come on! What are you, chicken shit to even ride to the gas station and back? This isn't going to take even fifteen minutes. How much trouble could any of us get into in fifteen minutes?"

    I made up my mind to kill both of them if they tried anything and I climbed into the truck.

    When I slid into the cab, I could smell beer very strongly and wasn't too surprised to see a beer bottle in Greg's hand. Again, I threatened to get out, but Matthew assured me that, though his friend was indeed pretty wasted, that he (the driver) had not been drinking a drop.

    I rode miserably to the gas station, promising myself that I would help my parents nix the idea if Matt ever showed up and asked them to let me go somewhere with him again.

    Every time Matthew went over a bump or hit a pothole, Greg would roll his beer bottle with the motions of the vehicle, and then congratulate himself by saying confidently, "Didn't spill a drop!" It was evident that he was truly very intoxicated, but I liked something about him that I could not quite put my finger on. He was soft spoken without being invisible. He was nice to me, and he had the most beautiful blue eyes I'd ever seen, and a great smile.

    During that short ride, I figured out that Matthew's friend Greg was my cousin DeanO's older brother, whom I had only heard of but did not remember ever meeting. Perhaps he had come once to our home when we lived up on the mountain, but I was not sure. So, that meant that Greg was my cousin too! DeanO and I were barely related. We called each other cousins due more to a great affection. By country standards we were third cousins and by legal standards we were second cousins once removed.

    Something about Greg's voice and his sense of humor drew me to him, and by the time we got back to my house, I knew that I was much more interested in seeing him again than I had ever been in seeing Matthew.

    The very next night, I ran into Matthew and Greg at the skating rink. It was not unusual for me to see Matthew there, but I had never noticed Greg before, though he swore that he went to the skating rink a lot and I was there almost every weekend. Maybe he was the invisible type, but I was certainly seeing him now.

    Greg and I spent a lot of time talking. I discovered that sober Greg was much more delightful than drunk Greg, and I hadn't really minded drunk Greg all that much. We couple skated when the lights went off and the disco ball went on. We spent most of the evening talking about music, and movies, and other things from pop culture. I felt that we had a lot in common.

    When I got home, I asked my mother if there was any reason third cousins should not date. She told me that after first or second cousins she figured we were all about as related as we were going to get. After all, we all came from the same couple, Adam and Eve, so everyone was cousins in the grand scheme of things. She even pointed out that she and my dad were distant cousin, fifth cousins they believed. I took that as a much better sign than I should have.

    Greg and I spent a lot of time on the phone after that and I grew to really love the sound of his laugh and his sweet husky voice. I wanted to be in love so much that I exaggerated every accomplishment that he had ever had. Every act of kindness or compassion that I saw or that he mentioned was blown out of proportion. I placed him so high on a pedestal that he could have won out against Mother Teresa and Gandhi and walked away with the Nobel Peace Prize if I had been the judge. I loved the idea of love so much that I ignored any red flag that flew up, red flags that had stopped me with other guys. I did not worry about the fact that we were distantly related, though this had kept me from ever considering DeanO as date material, or my favorite cousin Ramona's brothers, who were related to me on the same level. When he talked about how much he disliked his mom's boyfriend, Truman, and Truman's kids, I shrugged it off, though Greg's reasoning seemed petty. The same kind of disdain had thrown me off with other guys, even my most sought after boyfriend, Buddy. But not this guy and not now. I ignored the fact that he had been known to drink a lot and to smoke a lot of pot. I told myself Greg wasn't doing it now, and that was what really mattered. I had never knowingly dated a guy that used drugs or drank more than infrequently. My mother had teased me so many times when I was washing dishes. Ever time I got my shirt wet she would tell me, "You got your belly wet! That means you're going to marry a drunk!" I was sure she was off her rocker, and I never would marry a drunk! I was not fond of people that used pot, or booze, or any drug. I ignored the fact that Greg was very broken over his father's death. His dad Jimmy had died of a massive heart attack when Greg was only twelve and it left Greg very angry and scared. I felt only sympathy. I could imagine losing my dad would do the same to me. I ignored the fact that he resented his mother, Nina and was not very kind to her. I ignored the fact that he swore he would die before he reached the age of thirty-two, since his dad had died at forty-two and his dad's dad had died at fifty-two, both from heart attacks so massive their hearts exploded. I told myself Greg would grow out of his morose prophecy, he was still so young! And besides, thirty-two?! That was a lifetime away! Maybe he was even correct, but we would be completely different people by the time we were in our thirties. We would be old people by then! I ignored the fact that Greg had severe acne and that I hated the way he walked. To me, there was something feminine about the way his hips swayed, and yet, he did not have a girlish butt. In fact, he had no butt to speak of. He had the sunken butt that many men seemed to suffer from, the one that had dissuaded me often enough before. I told myself that I had been being too picky, too uppity, that now that I was older (and in my book more desperate) I should learn to look at people's insides not their outsides, that I would never get married if I just kept pointing out every guy's flaws. Everyone had flaws, right? I just needed to focus on the good parts of this guy and not the bad. I resolved not to look at his rear when he walked away from me and to stare into his bright blue eyes as much as possible.

    One thing that I really loved about him was the way he was with my niece Tanya. Not being good to Tanya would have been a real deal breaker, no matter how much I wanted to be in love. Tanya was seven years younger than me and she was my heart. She was my niece/sister/daughter/best friend, and I was convinced that no one would ever hurt her or be mean to her as long as I had breath in my body. Greg seemed to love Tanya, and she took to him like she had no other. He became her second best friend, right after me. My nephew and my younger nieces seemed to love Greg as well. Tanya teased us that I was Miss Piggy and he was Kermit the Frog and that one day we were going to get married and have little frogglets. I found her word combination of frogs and pigglets to be delightful. I thought about the fact that Tanya had never liked any of my other boyfriends enough to laugh and play with them, let alone to predict my upcoming marriage with them. Though I should have realized that lots of little kids make strange little predictions of the future, I did not. Her words became almost prophetic in my mind.

    On my birthday in 1983, not long after we met, Greg asked me to go steady. He joked, telling me that he had waited until it was quite late on my birthday to ask me to go steady so that he did not have to buy me a birthday present. I thought it was supposed to be funny, so I laughed it off. I wasn't very materialistic enough to care about a ring anyway.


    Greg and I spent the next two years vacillating between euphoria and fury. I shrugged this off as something that all couples went through. Greg once confessed telling me, "When I am with you no one else in the world seems to matter, but when I am at school I think about being with other girls." I did not take this as a red flag or a bad sign. I did not see it as a normal part of being a sixteen year old boy. I saw it as a cry for help, a call to arms, a demand for action. It inspired me to go back to school, to try even harder to be in his face twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. I told everyone that I was going back to school for me, but really I was doing it because I was afraid I would lose this soul mate that I had worked so hard for if I did not stay in his face.

    Despite all my best efforts there was a lot of time apart in those dating years. I took a summer job with the Manpower program the first year we were dating. I spent a lot of time hauling rocks in a wheelbarrow, cleaning out a field for the little league, and building two outdoor toilets for the crowds that would come watch their games. One day, Greg and my dad came to pick me up and I was nearly covered in green paint. I had been told to paint a group of standing aluminum bleachers but, being unfamiliar with the process, I did not paint things in the correct order. I painted myself into a corner, so to speak, and paint dripped all over me and got on my legs when I tried to extradite myself from the green mess I had just made. Dad drove home with the windows down and stopped at a gas station and bought two gallons of gas. I had to nearly bathe in it, and my sensitive skin turned bright red. Daddy was annoyed with them for not instructing me about the process, but he and Greg were also slightly amused. Greg told me I was the cutest green lady he'd ever seen. Despite my lack of common sense, they liked me on the ball field. I mixed concrete and hauled rock with the best of them. Still, I was transferred out of that job when I fell prey to a gang of bullies. They did not beat me up but, after cracking heads with them over some frogs they were torturing to death, I went to the "boss" and told him not to be surprised if I beat those three boys up. The Manpower program then sent me to work with the adult custodians at the high school. They probably marked my file, "Does not work well with others," and I spent the rest of the summer scrubbing chewing tobacco out of the corners in the high school walls. I resolved to keep my mouth shut next time and just beat people up.

    That same year, Greg was hit by a truck as he was biking to town to see me. We lived about six miles apart and when his mother refused to let him use her truck he sometimes biked to my house. A truck was speeding and it came barreling around a corner and knocked Greg and his bike for a loop. He had cuts all over his forehead and upper lip. He lost three teeth in the long term, one and a half immediately, and he broke his arm. I was acutely aware that it could have been much worse. I was in the tub when my daddy told me through the bathroom door, "Baby, he's okay, but Greg's been in an accident and Nina is on her way to pick you up and take you to the hospital to see him, so hurry up in there." Before I left my dad warned me, "Now, don't get up there and upset that boy. If he looks bad you keep your strength, you hear? No tears." I promised I would, and I probably needed that warning. Greg did look pretty scary. To try to lighten the mood, I showed him a necklace around my neck. It was an arrowhead necklace he had given me and I wore it always. I cherished it though it had been lying around in a drawer at his house, something he never wore anymore. It was like wearing his jacket or a prelude to his class ring.

    This was a game we had played before. He glanced at the necklace, smiled a bit and said, "Where'd you get that?"

    I teased him saying,"My wonderful boyfriend gave it to me."

    "Oh, he did, did he?" Greg said. "I'll have to kick his ass."
  
    I giggled and held tightly to his good hand.

    That exchange was overheard by Greg's cousin Regina, who told her mom and Greg's mom that I was lording some ex boyfriend's gifts over Greg while the poor boy was on his deathbed. They were in an uproar! The shame! The nerve! Greg set them straight on that one pretty quickly. The one thing he was best at was taking my part against his family. I was on my own with my own family, and with our friends, and pretty much anyone else, but anytime any of his relatives set themselves against me I did not have to wonder. Greg had my back. It was as though he felt he was responsible for shielding me from his family and from other men, but no one else. At first, his mother, Nina, was very sweet to me, but when she decided that Greg and I were too serious, she began to give him grief about our relationship. He told me that she had started trying to get him to break up with me. He said that she told him my family was a bunch of lazy no goods that lived off of government money, and that I would probably be a lazy no good as well once I grew up. She took him to Angie's, his ex girlfriends house, to give Angie a chance to seduce him and hopefully end his relationship with me. Greg assured me that he pushed away from Angie, though she was wearing a see-through nighty and begging him to stay the night with her, which he said his mother would have allowed. He told me that he went and waited in the car and that his mom pretty quickly got the message that Angie wasn't going to win and so Nina joined him in the truck and took him home. (Greg said his mother and Angie's mother were having coffee in the kitchen while all this drama was going down.) Many years later in life, I would find out about multiple infidelities that started when Greg and I were dating, and I would doubt his version of this story very much, but Greg never confessed to anything different, though he confessed to many other deceptions. He never told me any other version of this story. By the time Greg and I married, I had won Nina over. She adored me and she still does to this day. I have not officially been her daughter in law for decades and yet she still introduces me as one. It's certainly fine with me. I love her very much and we will always be connected for the sake of my sons.

    Greg and I dated until one month after I turned eighteen and two months after he did. Then On June the 8th, 1985, just two months before he was supposed to ship off for basic training in Texas, we were married.

    I had begged him to not sign up for the military. He had been taking carpentry at the vocational school. He was good at it, and he enjoyed it. I had been taking food service and winning many awards. I enjoyed the creativity of the process, and eating. I really enjoyed eating. I was convinced that Greg and I could find jobs in our little town and happily settle down together and raise frogletts. He had never proposed formally, and I was never given an engagement ring, but he made statements all the time about "when we get married," so I knew it was  his plan as well as mine. I wanted to travel and vacation and see the entire world, but I had absolutely no desire to ever live anywhere other than my small Appalachian town. Before he left to talk to the various military recruiters, I told him all that. I told him I did not want to leave my town, that I did not want to be a military wife, but he came back telling me he was all signed up for four years in the Army. He said that he had to sign up then or miss out on a huge bonus that they agreed to give him. I was so hurt and so disappointed that I argued with him and went to bed angry, which was against my own personal policy. I truly and seriously considered, probably for the first and last time before my marriage, breaking up with Greg. What really stopped me from doing that was the fact that I had already had sex with him. That dream of always having one lover my entire life came to the front of my mind and made the decision for me. I was deeply a 'make your bed and lie in it' type of girl.

    For the first year that we dated, all Greg and I did sexually were first and second base things. When his junior prom rolled around, l decided that it was now or never. We had dated a year and I either needed to commit totally or move on to another guy. I did not want to move on to another guy when I  felt sure I loved this one. I told Greg that we would go all the way on prom night. I chose prom night because I wanted the event to be a memory that he and I could both cherish forever. It is a memory. I remember discomfort, blood, pain, and embarrassment. I remember shame. If you gave it up for the first time in the back seat of someone's dad's Escort, you're probably doing just as well as I did with the prom and a nice bed.

    We did not make it to his senior prom at all. I had a food service competition and Greg actually talked my overly protective parents into allowing me to go to Richmond to compete. I had won a blue ribbon, a blue rosette for best in class, and a trophy for best in show at the regional contest. Greg talked about how proud he was of my accomplishments and how he was willing to miss his senior prom in order to let me see what I could do at the state level. I told him later that I did not want him to miss his senior prom, that I did not want to miss his senior prom, that it was more important to me than the food service competition. But Greg said junior prom had been a joke anyway, and he had no desire to go to his senior prom. I thought about pain and embarrassment and looked away. So much for making a memory we would both cherish forever. I'm pretty sure Greg was drunk on the river bank with a group of teenagers and had his hands all over another girl while I took second place at state.