Everyone has a stupid break up story.
Here’s mine.

Remembering Reni

[ part one ]

*****

September 2008
This is the time of year I met her.
And this is the time of year I lost her.
I guess it’s only appropriate
that she’s in my thoughts now more than ever.

*****

In the summer of 2006, I was entering the sixth year of monogamous relations with my then girlfriend, Reni. That summer we were invited to four weddings. No funerals. We were 26.

At the time people said, “Wow, six years a crazy long time to be in a relationship, especially at this time of your life.” But it did not feel crazy at all, despite the fact that 6 years is almost 25% of a 26 year old’s life. We met each other on moving in day our freshman year of college. We were in the elevator, Reni with her dad, me with my mom. She lived four doors down. We became friends. We cultivated the same enemies and mocked them behind their backs. We studied across the table from one another. I ordered her a vanilla iced coffee and a muffin when her head fell into her Endocrinology textbook. She ordered me a mocha with whipped cream and a chocolate croissant when I started drooling on Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day speech. I tripped her and she fell flat on her face in front of a group of touring high schoolers. We watched football and ate day-old ice cream cake for breakfast. We had dinner. My credit card bounced. She paid. We got drunk. We wrestled. We made out. We made love.  We met each other’s families. She did not give me a reason to not want her around all the time and, for many years, I returned the favor.

We were in love. What else could we have done?

Our junior year, a few weeks after 9-11, I broke up with Reni. Not because I wanted to do something as heroic or selfless as join the army but just because I was, as they say, “young, dumb, and full of come.” I figured, as all men do at some point, “Why have sex with one beautiful woman, when I could be having sex with one hundred beautiful women?” Sound reasoning. But the weeks of single life that ensued didn’t appeal to me at all; they were filled with cheap beer and long hours with likes of the very people Reni and I loathed. Each night I took to bed a festering, bottomless loneliness. I just wanted to hang out with Reni again. Which I did as often as possible. Which confused the both of us. Drastic measures had to be taken.

So one night late December back in 2001, six weeks single, I was set up by my roommate Tony with Trisha Stankowitz, a fake blonde theater student who had a real bad habit of dating “complete douche-satchels.” Enter Mike Lavoie. As a member of the campus improvisational comedy troupe, I was only peripherally associated with “theater people” like Trisha who only had sex with each other off stage but made equally obscene sounds and faces on stage for everyone else. Now it was my turn to step into the spotlight.

Trisha and I spent the evening together at Rhinos, if you can call shouting incomprehensibly over techno remixes of the Ace of Base discography “spending the evening together.” Rhinos was a popular dive where students of all ages could turn themselves into alcoholic shitshows for fifteen bucks. After a few hours of shots of some nameless, tasteless, intensely effective clear liquid and a few Bud Ices, Trish invited me to her place. We fulfilled the tacit contract we signed when we walked into Rhinos by stopping to make out every few blocks on our way and then all the way up her stairway; falling down, making out some more and then standing up and groping each other in that wild, iconic, young and drunk collegiate way. If I tried any of those late night stairway shenanigans now, I would throw out my back.

Upstairs, the door to her room was closed. Trisha stopped dead and held her hands in front of her, palms out, fingers up, like she was trying to stop the walls from caving in. It was a dramatic moment she had incorporated into her life from movies and TV shows. “What the FUCK?” She stormed into her room and slammed the door. She repeated this question to her now-awake roommate. They did not speak quietly. Apparently her roommate’s boyfriend had broken up with her so she had stayed home with expensive ice cream and a cheap Malbec. I bobbed in the hallway like a buoy, wishing the floor would stop undulating and wondered if Reni was eating Ben and Jerry’s too.

“FINE. Well I’m playing BRITNEY. And it’s going to be FUCKING LOUD.”  Trisha exited her room, slammed the door and walked past me.

I followed her into the living room. Instead of a couch there were three yellow beanbag chairs clumped in front of a TV and stereo. I sat awkwardly in one as she went to the bathroom. I was worried I’d have to make cogent conversation or field questions about improv theory when she returned but her reemergence eliminated any lingering concerns that more information needed to be exchanged before we got to business again. She pushed me to the floor, straddled me and took off her tank top. Since iPods did not exist then, she took a few moments to reach over me to insert the latest Britney Spears CD and press play. As promised, it was fucking loud. The first piano chords hit and she squealed like a pig getting slop.

Trisha’s favorite track was “Oops, I Did it Again.” It was either her favorite track or she was a masochist because it was the only track she played during the entire hour that we were on the floor. Too drunk to either find the repeat button or remember its existence, she had to lean over me for the stereo every time the song came to an end. This ensured I would see her cleavage in wonderful 3-D at least every three minutes and thirty three seconds. She attempted to keep up with the lyrics whenever her tongue was not flopping around my mouth like a trout on the dock and now and then she would sit upright on me and sing the chorus while she ground her crotch into mine and touched her chest, face and stomach. She was a flurry of activity. I was mesmerized. I just lay there, wondering if this how the other 99 members of my impending sex posse would treat me. If so, dumping Reni was the best idea ever. I was a genius.

Trisha asked me to sleepover but I had to work in the morning. I told her next time I’d stay the night. She told me she couldn’t wait. We kissed goodnight; it was long and slow and full of promises. I woke up invigorated that I had had my first post-Reni engagement but by the end of breakfast I felt strangely hollow. It was fun regaling Tony with my exploits and he and my other roomies encouraged me to rendezvous with Trisha again and impose on her the gamut of sex acts that she was probably accustomed to, courtesy her stable of douche-satchels. I told them I would call her after work. Then I said I’d call her after class. Then I said I’d call after Christmas break.

I did not call Trisha after work, class or Christmas break. And she did not call me. And to this day not one word has passed between us since that night late December back in 2001. Our last words were “Get home safe, Mikey” and “Thanks, I’ll try.” I only saw Trisha twice again, once my senior year at a Business Frat party, grinding her beautiful ass into the crotch of a lacrosse player named J.J. Trust and then a few weeks ago on a rerun of the television show House. She didn’t think her little brother needed surgery and did not appreciate House checking out her beautiful ass. She wasn’t half bad.

*****