Sugar

Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley with Samara Golden, still from Sugar

The OSC calls me kid even though I am technically older than him and even though we dated, what, about two decades ago. It seems like I have known The OSC for just about ever. He is the only man who has ever asked me to marry him–though he was drunk at the time and we had already long stopped dating. He is the first person to pour me a beer after heartbreak, the first shoulder I cry on when it gets hard to drag my ass out of bed, and–plug your ears, mom–the first lay when there has been a particularly long draught. Though his once lithe skate boarder's body has now grown soft, his hair has considerably thinned, and we don't even have to go into what years of smoking, dry walling and lack of health care has done to his capacity to breathe, looking at him is much akin to looking into a mirror, a painfully accurate mirror. Our dreams a bit more battered, our cross-word puzzling skills a bit improved, we look at each other and we read our own histories. I may not be balding and, at least I can climb up a set of stairs without coughing up half a lung, but he does know exactly what to say to make me feel better, precisely how to piss me off, and absolutely how to, um, push my buttons.

We moved in together to save money, not a good enough reason at any age, let alone when you are twenty-two. We lived in a one-bedroom, third floor walk-up where I was the apartment manager. Together we paid about two-hundred dollars a month in rent and sometimes we couldn't even scrap that together. For most of the time we lived together, I remained indignant. He never picked up a finger to help with the maintenance of the building, though, he benefited with the cheap rent. He wasn't particularly neat. And his idea of apartment decorating included hanging up his baseball cards willy nilly on the mantel so that they fell anytime the door slammed shut.

Still, we had fun. It was new, this living together thing, and we made the best of it. In our hearts we knew this was just a practice run for later, when we had the capacity to take these things more serious. We played house. And in the process, we learned one or two things. One Thanksgiving someone had given us a twenty pound bird, no doubt a freebie with the one they had purchased for themselves. We invited over a few friends and stuck it in the oven. Four hours later, it was no where near being cooked. It seemed our tiny oven couldn't handle a turkey of that size, and so, minus any kind of meat thermometer, we started sawing off the drumsticks hoping we could at least eat those. And we did. And lived to tell about it.

The OSC once tried on one of my dresses. It was a slinky, low-cut number and it startled us both to see how good he looked in it. He pranced about the house, dancing back to the full-length mirror to wag his ass and giggling the entire time like a schoolgirl in her first bra. I can't remember if it turned us on, or if the absurdity of his hairy chest and his high, round buttocks kept us in hysterics the rest of the night. He could make me laugh, that man, he could also make me forget, and for those alone, I will always keep his company. He might have been the boyfriend that behaved the worst–we were kids, after all, it could be argued that we hadn't known any better–but he was the one whom I have actually known long enough to completely forgive.

We've been to hell and back, both as a couple and each on our own. We've seen each other act the worst and we haven't always been there to witness the best. One marriage, one divorce and one abortion between us. We share a million stories. And one hopes there will be a million more. Lovers, jobs, apartments, they may change. But he is the well-worn map I turn to when lost. Separating at the seams, edges thinned from touching, the map may not always tell me where I am headed, but if I traces it's contours, it can begin to tell me where I've been.