On Infidelity: Michelle

Back when ya boy Boxer was just a young cad, he met a dark haired chickie at a Los Angeles night club, who happened to be considerably older than he was. Boxer was then twenty-three, and Michelle (of course it’s not her real name) was, on that very occasion, celebrating her thirty-first birthday. She was surrounded by her friends (mostly other women), at the other end of the club, and I was surrounded by my friends, and somehow we ended up dancing together.

No, scratch that. It wasn’t “somehow we ended up”. She moved in. The brilliance of the married ho’ is that she sees a young brother as prey, and treats him accordingly. With catlike stealth and womanly cunning, she arranges her entrance as a mystery.

Michelle was incredibly attractive, despite being a full decade older than the women I usually hunted. In fact, I don’t think I had ever gone out with any woman who was even a day older than I was, before I met her. She also seemed out of my league, with a diamond tennis bracelet and a designer outfit. In any event, nothing happened that evening except an exchange of phone numbers. I had a new phone, with a (coveted) 213 area code. Her phone number seemed to come from the San Jose area, hundreds of miles north.

Michelle left me a voice-mail message the very next day, telling me that meeting me had been the highlight of her birthday, and telling me that while she would love to see me again, she would “leave it up to me” as to whether that happened.

Young brothers ought to pay attention to this little tidbit, because I find it disturbingly common with married hoez. They are like vampires. You have to invite them in. I suppose this is an effort at ego-defense, so that when caught, she can excuse her crap behavior to her husband with the idea that you took the initiative. The married ho’ will always, always, always paint herself as the poor victim of her own moral mistakes.

Naturally, I didn’t waste too much time. I got back with her the day after her voice mail, and she invited me over.

I arrived at her house, knocked on the door, not having no idea of what the night had in store… like a dog in heat…

Her apartment was both cute and immaculate. It consisted of a house in a “trendy” part of town, that was split up into a number of different units. It was perfectly furnished, smelled good, and had a number of interesting upgrades. I had been working construction jobs to put myself through my undergraduate studies, so I was complimentary. We started on the couch, moved to the floor of the hallway, and finally ended up in the back bedroom. I fucked her in every conceivable position, without a condom, and we finally fell asleep together. All of this was incredibly unusual for me. I usually hit it and ran. As we were getting ready to head out the next day, we made plans to see each other again, a few days hence.

I had an African-American friend (call him Harvey) at the time, who was at the nightclub with me, on the night I met Michelle. The very day after my first tryst, he saw me again, and while I never breathed a word, he seemed to have an almost supernatural ability to smell her on me. He tried to give me some good advice.

I bet that you even ate the pussy, huh? Why you gots to be so damned dumb? She gots you under her control, nigga! You gots to get away from that bitch.

Naturally, all of this sound counsel went unheeded; and the rest of our peers simultaneously congratulated and mocked my aged conquest, and we went out and got drunk.

I was, at the time, fucking a couple of other women, in the 21-22 range. Their post-teenage antics and petty drama suddenly seemed trite and ridiculous. I gradually saw them less and less, as Michelle and I saw each other increasingly more often. I was blissfully unaware of the real nature of our relationship, and everything seemed perfect, as Michelle was on her very best behavior at all times during our meetings.

After a few rendezvous, a few things began to dawn on me.

• Michelle’s apartment seemed curiously untouched between my visits. If I left one of my CDs in the tray of her old player, it’d still be there, days later, when I came by for the next romp
• Michelle’s bathroom was conspicuously empty of even the most basic supplies. How many bitches you know don’t have tampons or aspirin in the bathroom?
• Michelle never really mentioned any of her family members. She was “from Montana” … which was one of the reasons we first started talking. I was “from Alberta,” which is the equivalent to people in California talking about their childhoods in Louisiana and Mississippi. But, where? Montana is an awfully big place. Billings? Helena? Missoula? Bozeman? Butte? No info. She didn’t tell me, and didn’t want to.
• Michelle told me two different stories about what she did. In the beginning, she was the live-in manager for the apartment house. This was true. Later, she told me she telecommuted for Apple Computer. When I asked what she did for Steve Jobs, she was incredibly vague. What I did know was that in the spare bedroom/office, there was an expensive Apple workstation set up, so it seemed plausible. Even so, she had tons of very expensive jewelry, and she drove a new model sports car. It just didn’t make sense that she’d be living where she was living.
• Michelle had two different phone landlines installed in her apartment. Ostensibly, one was for the modem that went to the computer/fax. I was only ever allowed to have one number. The second line was not for human use. Even so, there was a nondescript phone that would theoretically ring when the second line got an incoming call.
• Michelle politely declined all offers to spend any time at my apartment. To this day, I don’t believe she ever even knew where I lived.
• Michelle never wanted to spend more than two consecutive nights together. She was busy, and so was I, but I found it strange that she never wanted to go on a weekend trip, or to venture out very far. Our relationship mainly consisted of meeting for sex, and leaving, with plans for another meeting.

I’m unclear on exactly when it happened, but I remember the situation well enough. It happened two or three months into our fling. I’m lounging around in bed, when Michelle gets a call on her second line. At the first ring, she jumped up from the bed and ran, naked, into the office.

“You have to leave, now!” she told me, with a panicked expression on her face; as she ran back in and began to move around the bedroom.

“Why? What’s up?” I asked.

“There’s no time! You have to go!” she insisted, as she was throwing my pants and socks at me. “Get up! Get dressed! Hurry up!”

And now, dear readers, you are getting a glimpse into the simple, dull mind of a youthful Boxer. That’s right. I never figured it out until three months in. Michelle was married. Her husband, who lived in Cupertino, was the Apple Computer bigshot. He had phoned from the Burbank airport, and was moments away from “surprising” her for dinner and a night out.

I did leave, just in the nick of time. I probably passed husband’s cab, on the way down the street. I went across town, to visit Rachel (not her real name). Naturally I didn’t tell her that I had just fucked Michelle, raw and without a condom. Rachel got a condom. Rachel was 22, sorta dumb, and cute but not pretty. She was, as I remember, currently working her way through an associates degree at community college. I fucked the hell out of her, at the same time Michelle was likely getting fucked by her husband, and only an hour after Michelle and I had been fucking and sucking each other with abandon.

Rachel is still my friend. As of today, Rachel has been faithfully married to a very nice guy (and a good earner), for many, many years; and she has several kids by him. She was no virgin when she married (and I wasn’t the guy that originally turned her out) but she seems very happy living an honorable and monogamous lifestyle. She is the type of example of what can happen when one decides to take life seriously and embrace discipline.

Michelle is now divorced.

But here I’m getting ahead of myself.

Fast forward, two or three weeks after my great escape, and subsequent radio silence from Michelle, I get a voicemail from her. She wanted to see me again, and told me that she’d explain everything if I’d meet her at her apartment.

Her first story was that her husband was her high-school boyfriend, and that she was married to him before he “discovered” that he was a flaming homosexual. She told me that her marriage was a sham, that she was actually in love with me, because I “made her feel alive for the first time” or some such nonsense.

I told her, flatly, that I didn’t believe that. If he was a fag, why would he have objected to me being in her apartment? I left, unimpressed, with her looking all weepy in the doorway as I walked to my car and pulled away. I hit up Stephanie (not her real name) five minutes later. Stephanie lived in Boyle Heights, with her father, who drove the city buses around L.A.. We went out to dinner that evening, and I contemplated the consequences of having had condomless sex with what someone who claimed to be married to a San Francisco faggot for the past four months. I didn’t tell Stephanie about my current predicament, but I also didn’t have sex with her that night, either. I was just glad to be in the company, for a while, of a decent girl who seemed to like me, and who had never lied to me about shit that was so outrageous it defied description.

The next day, ya boy Boxer went down to the Los Angeles AIDS Foundation clinic and had himself tested. The results took a week to return. It was one of the longest weeks of my life. When the results came back neg, I felt like I had won life’s lottery.

I won’t lie. I saw Michelle a few times after that. Always in public places, and never at her apartment. She tried to get me to buy her dinner at some cheeseball lowbrow place (The Olive Garden?), and I declined. She had some shirts of mine and some music CDs. I tried and failed to get them back. In the interim, here are a couple of other things she revealed.

• She had been, off and on, under the care of a psychiatrist. She was suicidal, and had previously received electroshock therapy.
• On at least two occasions, when I had wanted aspirin/tylenol/ibuprofen, she had given me Valium instead. She explained that she loved the fact that she could fuck me, while I was half-conscious, and insisted that my erections were better. (I didn’t bother to ask after the details of this odd claim.)
• While she was with me, she had found out about Stephanie, and had made a frivolous complaint to the Los Angeles Metro Transit Authority about Stephanie’s father, in an attempt to get him fired. I suppose she thought that if he lost his job, Stephanie would be less attractive to me, or something. To the best of my knowledge, all that meddling came to nothing.
• She insisted that her husband was indeed a homosexual, but admitted that he had sex with her also. She boasted that I had “tasted him” on multiple occasions. (That makes me want to vomit, all these years later.)
• Her absences were due to her going back to her primary home, in Northern California. She made weekly excuses to “check on the rental property” in Los Angeles to justify her trips to see me. (I’m sure her husband was only too happy to be rid of this headcase, and was glad to see her go, every time).
• At one point, early on, she had me practice signing different names in different handwriting. I didn’t know what she was getting at, and thought it was ridiculous, but I did it anyhow. Months after it was all over, she insisted that, during this early game, I had actually forged her husband’s signature on an application for credit. She claimed the credit card arrived at the Los Angeles house a few weeks later. She attempted to blackmail me with this idea, threatening to report me for credit fraud if I didn’t come back to her house for sex, there and then. I assumed she was bluffing and laughed at her, but, who knows? That was the last conversation I ended up having with this nutjob. I never heard anything about this after-the-fact, so I assume it was just another lie.

One of the people who I ended up telling all this nonsense to was Harvey. He had the predictable response.

Nigga I told you that bitch was crazy! Didn’t I tell you? Next time use your brain!

Yeah.

I left Los Angeles less than a year after seeing Michelle for the final time. I was, and am, glad to have escaped that maelstrom unscathed. It could have been much, much worse.