Dave. It means ‘beloved one’.
I feel compelled to call him “My Dave,” but he’s not. He is one of my life’s beloved ones.
I worked with his sister in a quaint coffee shop on Main Street in one of America’s best small towns. Oh god, it is too. I grew up here, and downtown is magic. Everything is charming. It smells like small-town wonder and twinkles a little bit year-round.
When Dave started working with us, it was impossible not to notice him. He’s long, lean, and gorgeous. He’s done some modeling, and you can tell.
His mouth naturally parts between his full lips like he’s always about to smile, and you can hear his East Coast accent ever so slightly. He’s clever and funny, entirely more intellectual than I can dream of being, and won’t eat meat because pigs are smarter than dogs. He’s lovely.
We first talked about ghosts. The coffee shop we worked in used to be the town morgue. Most of the businesses are old converted houses. Now and then, something weird would happen, like the doorbell ringing over and over with no one there, and everyone would freak out.
“What do you think happens when you die, Dave?” He gave me a quiet grin and, after a moment of calm, said with peaceful assuredness,
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” I was in my thirties, and this was the first time I was confronted with this idea. “Nothing,” nothing was a possibility after death?
“We go back to dust…nothing.” He tossed his hand casually in the air and glided back to his work. He suggested I might be schizophrenic when I attempted to offer potential alternatives to his answer. I liked him instantly.
He was new in town, and I had an event to go to. I invited him to come, and he happily agreed. At the time, I was a much older, newly divorced Mom with 3 small kids and relieved to have someone to go with.
I wasn’t looking forward to whoever I would, inevitably, run into from high school, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a hot man with me. My hotness began and ended in my early 30’s, I was on the other side of the hotness burnout. I needed hotness balance.
I was also teetering. I suffered a complete identity crisis post-divorce and started drinking to cope with my marriage PTSD. A new binge drinker, I was fresh off a bad bout of heavy drinking. I was forcing myself to go to this thing. My body was swollen. I looked like I tried make-up for the first time and should be pushing a shopping cart down the street. I was craving alcohol like a mother fucker, sweaty, and terrified of drinking again.
There was Dave, model posture with one hand in a pocket and his back slightly arched while he waited for me under a big tent lit with fairy lights. He moved with grace when he offered me a drink. I painfully refused. I saw him notice my cringe.
“Not drinking?”
“Mmmm,” I awkwardly hummed, “I can’t.” He smirked knowingly and never mentioned it again. He smelled of the perfect combination of booze and cigarettes, sweat and sweet soap. Sexy as fuck, strolling by his dark, tall frame through a delicate summer night.
I don’t remember who we saw that night or what we did. I just remember him. His thoughts were considerate and intelligent. He had strong convictions. He laughed at the mess we humans have made as these weird evolved beings who grew to be self-aware but are without meaning. I liked to hear how he thought.
It didn’t occur to me that he would find me sexually interesting. But our magnetism was always there even when we ignored it. Despite his few flirty comments as we parted ways that night, nothing happened.
Except, I confided in him that I was a drunk, and he laughed and shrugged. “So am I,” he grinned. I talked to Dave for years after that and never filtered a word I said. He always understood me in a way that was like understanding myself — through him.
We both started relationships with other people. They hated our friendship. I can’t blame them. We knew everything going on with the other down to what sexual positions were working and where our partners sucked in bed. We were kindred spirits.
Dave always hated anyone I was with. He’d tell me I matter, deserve to be fucked right, and to leave my shitty boyfriend.
Especially as drunks who were being called out by the people we loved, we found solace in each other and had no boundaries. I’m sure it was annoying for the people we were with. For me, it was comforting and priceless company in dark shadows.
Both of our lives were going to complete shit, and I was forced to go to a transitional treatment center and get sober. Dave’s girlfriend thought it was a grand idea and gave him an ultimatum, so he came too.
Dave showed up hammered. They wouldn’t let him in drunk, so he left under threat of police to sober up at home and come back. It was a weird place. It was attached to a drunk tank I had been a frequent visitor to.
Our part had beds in rooms that opened into a circular common area. That is where our group would meet and learn not to be alcoholics. It’s also where I idiotically taught one of the more sideways girls the cup song from “Pitch Perfect.”
I didn’t know she had a terrible voice or compulsion problems that would drive her to repeat it night and day. It was torture, and the only thing that got me through was Dave making me laugh and him fantasizing about me and my roommate fucking at lights out.
He’d tell me I’m beautiful and to leave my dirt-bag boyfriend.
Things got way worse for both of us after we left treatment. I got a DUI. Dave’s girlfriend used the time he was gone to pack up all his shit and break up with him. It was a real heart wrencher since he had just gone to fucking rehab to make her happy. She had all his things bagged up on the sidewalk for Good Will to pick up. He was still in rehab when she gave him the news.
He called me to go rescue everything, but I was too late. I endured a long but probably truthful lecture about our behavior and weird relationship but left empty-handed. He got out the next day.
I knew why she left, but my heart broke when Dave’s did. I felt it. He deserved to be loved at that moment, as he was. I loved him, but it wasn’t the same.
He got faded when he got out. But not just fucked up from drinking. He threw in some acid for the enormous hole in his chest. After his last plea with her failed, he asked me to come to be with him while his girlfriend finished packing up her stuff.
He was still on the lease, so he was stuck awkwardly sleeping in an empty bed, in an empty room, in a nearly empty apartment, after she threw all his shit out, while his heart packed up in the other room to leave him. Misery.
I didn’t have a car and was miles away but caught a ride part way and found him wandering the street while walking the rest.
“Do you ever think about going to Hawaii, floating out in the ocean, and just disappearing?”
“Ya Dave, I do.”
We wandered back to his empty room, laid there in the dark, and just knew all the parts of why this hurt and sucked so bad. I wanted to help, but I couldn’t.
He reminded me that my boyfriend was an ass and I deserve better too.
Dave left the state and moved back in with his parents in New York. We both pulled things together for a while, but not for long. I got fired from the coffee shop for showing up wasted, falling over tables and guests on the patio.
My life took a bad turn, and I was panicked. I was under threat of losing custody of my kids and had legal charges to face.
At my worst, I was the drinker who drank until I lost absolutely everything. No more car, job, house, kids, friends, money… you name it. That kind of drinker ends up with charges.
It was one of those times, and Dave stayed on the phone with me for weeks on end, all day, every day, sometimes until my life was okay again. He was sex walking and deliciously screwed up.
I mean, who has time to stay on the phone for hours on end? Drunks.
We talked about everything. We sat in silence sometimes for hours. He told me again and again that I could stay sober one more minute. I cried and screamed, and he told me again. A close relative of his passed away from withdrawal, so Dave avoided it at all costs. It was better to stay drunk all the time.
He would run to the dollar store and buy mouthwash to drink when he couldn’t afford booze. Then he’d tell me to keep going.
“Stay sober!”
He would sit and listen to me with my head in the toilet, as I was throwing up my soul, and tell me that I was disgusting. But it was going to be okay.
I told him everything was impossible. He told me it wasn’t and to leave the asshole I’m dating because I deserve better.
I talked a lot about liquor and why I drank. I heard why he did. We understood. Hurt and damaged people had hurt and damaged us. It was a lot to deal with. We drank to try.
I told him every story of why I love my kids. He laughed and beamed with pride over everything I ever did right. He reminded me that I would have that again, and I believed him. He listened to them laugh and play in the background when he turned out to be right.
He told me to leave my douchebag boyfriend and remember that I’m a good person.
There were other years, other times, and other mistakes that Dave sat with me for hours on end for. I relapsed a lot, and since he was always drunk, I would call and drink with him or cry to him.
He’d tell me I deserve every good thing, get sober, be a writer, be there for my kids and leave my dick boyfriend.
Half the time, one of us wouldn’t remember the entire conversation we had. We were basically on replay telling each other brand new, old information every day. We were idiots, but every moment with him felt meaningful.
We were never single in the same state at the same time. But sometimes, if neither of us was dating anyone, we’d drink and have phone sex. Amazing phone sex. I didn’t believe it was possible either. Crazy hot.
We promised we would have sex if we were ever in the same state and single at the same time. Tragically, we never did and never were. We never kissed, we never romantically touched. But our sex would have been fireworks!
After a few years, I got a lot better, and my life changed. I was less caught up in chaos and more with carpool and kid events. Dave met women and had interesting jobs. I never stopped thinking about him, but we only connected here and there, usually when I needed him.
I’d still call him with relationship crises; he’d tell me I was worth so much more and to leave my prick boyfriend.
I found someone I was serious about and didn’t want to tell him when it sucked. I wasn’t going to leave this time and couldn’t bear him knowing what I was tolerating and why.
St Patrick’s Day is my birthday. This is an utter nightmare for an alcoholic, or maybe why I am one. Either way, I’ve had some rough ones. I told Dave after the St Patrick’s Day parade in Denver went to shit. I had never seen drugs before. I was already hammered when I drove 45 minutes North of Denver to pick up my idiot boyfriend at his request and drove us both back down to the parade.
He and his friends lined up fat lines of coke on the bathroom counter. I was spinning, and someone had given me Molly, that was starting to kick in. I grabbed the rolled-up dollar bill and, one after the other sucked up each and every line that had been cut out for the other 5 stunned people around me.
I was wrecked for days. My boyfriend was racing assault charges after he punched the guy I must have thought felt like luscious ground clouds and was for caressing.
Dave was there for me, said I was stupid, but it was okay; I needed to pull my shit together and tell my boyfriend to go fuck himself.
He’d call me after a crazy weekend he had doing drugs in the City or getting in fights with his brothers or friends. He’d tell me when he was in love, or kind of in love because it was never the same.
He was my first call walking down the Denver streets breaking with the dawn, last night’s heels in hand, searching for my car. He would cry from laughing while I recounted my nightmare, sure to be, one-night stands.
“At least you still have your heels this time.”
“I guess. I really miss those leopard print ones; I never found them.”
“Is he going to call you?”
“Ummmm, definitely not.”
“That’s a hard ‘no’ then?”
“He’s a high-end real estate broker. His house looked like a page out of GQ magazine, and everything was sleeked out in black marble.”
“Christ. And why isn’t he going to call?”
“I didn’t know I was going to start my period. His sheets probably cost more than my apartment. There were handprints on the pillowcases.”
It never mattered when I called. He always answered. But we talked less and less. I missed him terribly.
A year must have passed when we talked about how boring the shutdown was. Another year flew by, and we didn’t talk again.
I tried reaching out a few times but didn’t hear back. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I kept trying to reach him, but he didn’t answer.
Then, he did.
He told me that his liver had failed, and by some miracle, while he didn’t believe he deserved it, they had given him a new one.
I haven’t been able to get ahold of him since I heard. I want to sit for hours and tell him that he’s beautiful, he matters, and should have every good thing. I want to tell him that he’s worthy, deserves to be fucked right, and is a man I will always love.
