I told Becca I think Joaquin is on my mind because the other day my sister asked if I could watch Lucia and I asked her what the date for that was and when she told me I realized it was his birthday. He’ll be 41 this year but I betcha a nickel he hasn’t changed a bit. He’s one of those guys who doesn’t age.

I don’t know how all 14-year olds fall in love but this one did because:

1. She was hormonally primed to do so.

2. She was lonely and bored and disillusioned by school.

3. She was flattered.

I met Joaquin in ninth grade, which was a time when I didn’t really have a handle on the whole adolesence thing (see link in #1 above). I was trying on being my sister, which didn’t work really well since we are totally different people and I was in the throes of several mad crushes. Who I really was was a day-dreamy heavy thinker with astigmatism but I was pretending to be a light-hearted girl who wore pink. It was awkward.

Ninth grade English was with Mr. Glick. I sat in front of my best friend Melissa and it was the last class of the day and it was even sometimes interesting so it was my favorite class. One day this guy walks in wearing an ugly leather coat (like something Starsky and Hutch would wear) and rainbow converse before anyone was wearing converse. This guy glided in with an exaggerated laid back walk that curved him like a question mark. And he was humming to himself. I did not think he was handsome; he was too much. His features were strong — big lips, big nose — and even then my type was more Brett-like. He slid into the seat next to me and the teacher introduced him as Joaquin.

Joaquin was from the same town I was (different elementary and middle schools) but he’d disappeared for a year when his mom decided that they would go camp on the beaches of Mexico so he was bumped back to my grade. Missing a year of school to bum around on beaches seemed irresponsible and dangerous to me but also lent (to my eyes) an air of sophistication to him. Then the first time he opened his mouth in class it was to correct the teacher about his interpretation of Shakespeare so clearly we shared an antipathy to authority, which I found appealing.

We spent that year talking and teasing each other but neither of us thought of each other that way. (Later he confided to me that he thought I was woefully underdeveloped, which I was but then I was 13 when he first met me.) I used to tell him that Duran Duran was better than The Doors and he suffered this comparison with little grace, which makes sense since I’d never listened to The Doors and had no idea what I was talking about plus I was obviously wrong.

Here’s the thing about Joaquin that really fascinated me in ninth grade when I was trying to figure out social stratification: He was effortlessly cool. He breezed into our high school and immediately rose above the fray. The guys thought he was tough and the girls — at least the ones who could get past his essential weirdness — thought he was dreamy. He didn’t care if he was strange. Now with the hindsight of a quarter of a century I can see he relished it but back then I couldn’t see how much he cared. All I knew is that here was someone who was embracing his outsider role and since I was clumsily trying to shed mine, I was fascinated. Plus he liked talking to me and he demanded that I didn’t dumb myself down. Even though just talking to a boy (even to a boy I wasn’t interested in) made me giggle with nerves, I loved rising to the challenge of our conversations. Finally! Someone who wanted me to be smart!!

I remember standing in choir, which took place in the gym in the center of the school building so that we could look up at the windows to the second floor hallways and see everyone rushing off between classes. I’d see Joaquin stroll by and all the guys in choir would chant, “Wa-KEEN!” And I’d wonder at it. Joaquin seemed totally unaware of the small stir he was causing in choir and I’d marvel at his calm.

I still didn’t like him though. I had other crushes. Although I remember coming home from a school dance where no one asked me to dance (I never did slow dance with a boy until I slow danced with Joaquin) and crying to my mother and I said, “At this point I’d even date Joaquin!” And my mom, who’d never met him but had heard me talk about him, said, “Oh Dawn! No you wouldn’t!”

Then on the last day of school he asked me for my phone number and I gave it to him but he didn’t call until, I think, the 4th of July when he tried to get a ride to my house without luck. I was 14 by then (he was 16 but without a car) and after that first phone call we spent the whole summer talking til all hours. I wrote this before but the first time I heard him on the phone I was horrified because his voice was so deep. It scared me. Joaquin was — and I’m sure still is — very sexy, very sensual. He had all that in his voice and it scared the hell out of me. I was still fantasizing about a chaste relationship with someone a lot like, say, Ponyboy. You know, someone shy and sensitive and tough only by association. But Joaquin was not at all shy and more wry than sensitive and very, well, male.

Still we talked like teenagers do and again I loved the freedom of being myself and having conversations with someone who liked that about me and didn’t think I was weird or else thought I was weird but liked it. Then all of a sudden it was the first day of school and I was terrified to see him because by then I liked him (like LIKED him) and I was afraid of seeing him and I was afraid of him seeing me. Which I should have been because I’d got a perm over the summer (see the pic) and sure enough the first thing Joaquin said to me was, “Hey Poodlehead!” Affectionately, maybe, but I was rightfully insulted and decided not to bother with him. Sure, we’d had this incredibly intimate relationship over the summer but maybe I was too geeky for him to like me (like LIKE me) and certainly there was no way Joaquin would date below his social status even though I couldn’t figure out his social status because he seemed neo-popular and apparently could hang around any group he pleased therefore I assumed (perhaps wrongly) he could date anyone he pleased and so certainly wouldn’t date ME.

He felt bad about the poodle remark, I’m sure.

Then one night when we were at my dad’s, Erica took me over to Joaquin’s instead of taking me to the football game, which is where she told my dad we were going. I have no idea where she was — probably smoking cigarettes with her girlfriends. Anyway, she dropped me off at his house. His grandfather owned a golf course (Joaquin’s mom was apparently broke and they got government cheese but they lived in a biggish house right near the golf course so again, he was this weird mix of not there but not quite here either) and we spent the chill September night wandering the golf course and flirting nervously. At least I was nervous. I was trying to get him to say whether or not he liked me and he was teasing me about it and I remember shivering in my sister’s parka (seen in the pic at the top) both from the cold and from the nearness of him. He was singing, likely, because he always sang wherever he went (a lot like Pennie and Madison do, come to think of it — an unconscious soundtrack to his life) and I was drunk with the clear sky and the wide golf course and by the warmth of him brushing up near me and then the cold when he’d swing away in that long loping way he had.

Now this is where my life turned and shifted and clicked onto a new track. This point is where it all got written down in ink — the first kiss, the first sex with him less than a year later, the obsessive and often emotionally abusive relationship we created, my rage and grief and exile to Portland by my mom and then the getting better and learning and getting stronger and even meeting Brett. (Because I wouldn’t have met Brett if I hadn’t learned from the disasters that came before and I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him if I hadn’t been imprinted with that first relationship, which demanded a little bit of drama and some intensity. So loving Joaquin gave me the capacity to love someone as bruised as Brett was but also the strength to accept love from someone as good as Brett is.)

So there I was standing on the street next to the golf course and there was Joaquin standing maybe three feet away from me. And I’m hassling him to tell me what his feelings are for me and he’s scuffing the street with his shoes, looking down at his feet with his hands in his pockets and he says, “How can I tell you that all I ever want and all I ever need” (he looks up) “is you.”

Swoon, right? We didn’t kiss that night but we sat on the road right there and held hands a million different ways and my fate was sealed. But I’ll tell you — I needed him more than he ever needed me and that, my friends, was what doomed me. I don’t regret that first year of mad passion but I do wish I’d had the sense to unhook myself from him before it all fell apart. I might write more about that later but I don’t know. Writing this may have exorcised it all for a bit.

Note: Pics removed since I didn’t ask Joaquin’s permission to post and I got all weirded out about it.