Richard

The first time I saw Richard made me want to dress in leather and get tattooed. He was a tall lean green-eyed Israeli, with dark brown chin length bobbed hair that he sometimes wore in a half-up and half-down ponytail before man buns were cool. If there were a Mr. Potato Head build your own boyfriend, I would have come pretty close to creating Richard.

Richard’s red flags, in increasing order of importance, were 1. Richard was a good friend and business associate of my boss, a short and stocky he-man who marveled over Kim Kardashian’s breast size and wanted to fuck me, and whom I hated; 2. Richard smoked so much pot every day that his dog seemed high; 3. Richard didn’t like me as much as I liked him.

Both Richard and my boss had emigrated to NYC after doing their compulsory military service in Israel. My boss liked to insinuate he was Mossad-adjacent whereas Richard never talked about being an ambulance driver near the Israel-Lebanon border during one of their many wars. Maybe that’s why Richard was afraid of blood, which made his desire to have sex with me when I had my period rather courageous.

I was at a career crossroads. My marketing and operations job was dumb and didn’t pay enough to live on, so I still waited tables in an unglamorous restaurant at my perimenopausal age. I had quit acting but hadn’t found writing. Without a creative outlet, health insurance, or purpose, I fell hard for Richard. There was a gentleness to him. I liked having sex with him because his dick was medium-long but slender, so he didn’t leave my girl parts feeling bruised and battered. We could have sex three or four times in a night and then again in the morning. Boned soft, I did not have to think about how spectacularly I had sideways my life.

We were easy breezy until I committed the cardinal sin of confusing sex for relationship. One night when Richard was making us dinner, I decided to abandon my inner druggie goody-two-shoes and smoke a joint with him to get closer. I had gotten high only twice in my life, the last time being twenty years prior. As he prepared our steaks, Richard watched me hold his joint like a cigarette before teasing me about gooing the filter.

Like all novice smokers, I was convinced the pot wasn’t affecting me because I hadn’t smoked enough and wound up smoking way too much. Peeling an avocado was a high-aptitude skills test, so I lay on Richard’s sofa and let him finish up. All my skills are oral, but being high made me feel like I was talking through peanut butter. My lips went numb, like they were no longer connected to my face. Words were forming in my brain, profound, world perspective changing words, but my lips and tongue couldn’t form the shapes needed to push them out. The top of my head sizzled as if someone were trying to pull all my hair out. I felt like I was falling, a tumbling tower of babble, even though I was already lying down.

Time folded up, and dinner was ready. Richard led me from the sofa to the kitchen island, where avocado slices neoned next to pan-seared steaks on two dressed plates. Sitting side by side, I wanted to koala-bear onto Richard’s chest and fit my head into the hollow beneath his chin. I headbutted his shoulder instead.

“Easy there,” Richard patted my back. He’d repeat this gesture weeks later when he broke up with me because I had given him some thoughtful Christmas presents. “How you feelin’?”

“Mmm.” Back in my early twenties, when I’d drink too much, a good old-fashioned make out session would restore me to my senses. I caressed Richard’s thigh. “Let’s go to bed.”

After our bodies made soft exchanges and I awoke from the glue of sleep, I stumbled into the bathroom for a dehydrated pee. Washing my hands at the sink, I stared at my reflection in the tarnished mirror. A hormone-induced pimple threatened my chin. Major luggage darkened my under-eyes. Shuddering, I threw on my clothes and softly closed Richard’s apartment front door, my feet rising and falling on the darkened stairs, bicycling slowly home.

Alex Poppe

Having worked in conflict zones such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine, Alex Poppe depicts fierce and funny women rebuilding their lives in the wake of violence. She is the award-winning author of four books of literary fiction and the USA Today bestselling Breakfast Wine, a memoir-in-essays about her wild ride through Iraq, recently named a first runner-up for the Eyelands Book Awards and a finalist for the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year and the American Writing Awards. Alex’s work has appeared in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Literary Hub, HuffPost, The Los Angeles Review, and Bust among others. Find her at www.alexpoppeauthor.com or follow her on Substack at @alexpoppe.