Oh! how my parents hated him!!
They hated him for racist reasons — in their minds, Romanian wasn’t quite “white.” But…truth to tell, they were right, only in ways they didn’t understand.
P. had no compunctions about theft. Or about cheating on one’s wife.
First time this came to my attention, he and I had gone to the campus bookstore to buy a semester’s worth of textbooks. He’s wearing a student-looking fake letter jacket…right? You know whereof I speak: leather sleeves, university logo on the jacket’s body.
We’re standing in line with a couple piles of books, when quietly he slides two of them under his jacket and pulls up the zipper.
Uhm…what?
Shortly — after we’ve escaped with $40 worth of textbooks (in those days that was a lot of money: the equivalent of $70 or $80 today), he tells me he does that all the time. It’s one of his ways of funding his education!
Eep! Maybe my parents were right!
Well, I was far from the point where I was ready to admit that possibility.
Time passed. We were in love. La-dee-dah!
Then one night we’re in the sack, chatting post-coitally. And this is when he remarks, admiringly, that his best buddy is f*cking a barmaid that he picked up while the boys were out drinking. He thinks this is a good thing — yea, verily: a brilliant thing on the buddy’s part: because the guy’s wife is some eight months advanced in pregnancy and can’t accommodate him.
No kidding.
His wife. He gets her pregnant. She’s about to deliver his baby. And he can’t wait until she presents him with his son, but feels he must go out and pick up a chippy in a bar NOW by way of getting it off!
And P. thinks that’s just great. Brilliant, if anything!
This — finally! — was enough to get my attention!
Man, when they say “love goes blind at the garden gate,” they ain’t kidding!
It took a night and a day for this to soak in. Once it fully registered with me — that he was demonstrating just what kind of a guy he really was — I tossed him out of my life.
Never regretted it.
He ended up as a university administrator — apparently did fairly well for himself, on the mid-level career level. Would have had lots of access to cute college girls, too, eh?
His career took him to a UC campus in central California. No doubt a nice place to live…and UC would have presented me with any number of appealing job opportunities. As it no doubt presented him with any number of chickadees.
Ahhh, the good ole’ days!