THE EXES IN MY IPOD: A Playlist of the Men Who Rocked Me to Wine Country

by Lisa M. Mattson

  I pushed Marco away and laughed. The little voice in my head began scolding my naughty nemesis for deserting my morals—then my blood alcohol level drowned out the voice. I sauntered over to the new JVC stereo on my dresser and tapped the “play” button. My fingers tingled. My heart pounded. I’d already preloaded disc one. Premeditated sex. Another Miami first. The electric pulse of the drumbeat filled my bedroom. I turned and slinked back to Marco. His chest thumped to the bass line of Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer.” My lips crept slowly onto his, then I pushed him onto my double bed. I stared at his eyes watching me in the darkness, then concentrated on unbuckling my sandals and not taking a header into my bookcase. I pulled his sneakers off and threw them over my shoulder, then slipped my spaghetti-strap dress over my head. My tanned body stood over him at the foot of my bed. I ran my fingers through my hair, keeping my eyes locked on Marco. It seemed like the kind of thing a Latina would do before sex. Marco’s eyes bounced from my teal satin bra to my matching lace panties. Worries over my scars and tiny boobs were miles away. The devilishly handsome Robert had helped me feel more confident about my body; I could at least thank the cokehead for that. Marco leaned up and started to pull his T-shirt over his head.

  I wagged my head and index finger. “Uh-uh.” I pounced, straddling him like a tiger about to devour her prey. The room began to spin. He began squirming and grabbing at my legs. My body wobbled over him. I must have looked like a drunken spring breaker trying to ride an electric bull.

  “Oh, my God!” Marco’s eyes bulged in the darkness. I pushed my knees against his sides to steady myself. I pinned both of his hands behind his head with one arm like a prisoner in shackles, then slipped his black leather belt off his jeans. The music blasted through the apartment: raw, pulsing words about violating, desecrating, penetrating, complicating. It urged me to get away from myself, become somebody else—that song embodied the new me.

  He looked at the belt in my hands, then back to my eyes. “What’s your safeword?”

  I cocked my head. “A safety word?” I tossed his belt to the floor while my other hand kept his arms pinned above his head. Like dial 911?

  “You’re in charge, you tell me,” he whispered, raising his head to kiss me. “Am I your Sub tonight?” He cackled and bit my shoulder, making me squeal again.

  Is this what having sex with a schoolteacher is like? All code words? My head felt cloudy and confused. I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but I wanted him to think I was sexy and cool. The music pulsed in my ears.

  I giggled, hovering over him. “You’ve always been my favorite sub.” I licked his earlobe between words. “I want to be the teacher’s pet.” Foreplay with a substitute teacher. Another first for me.

  “Help me!” Marco cried out with Trent Reznor in the chorus.

  I released his wrists from my playful grip. “So, you wanna be helped?”

  His thick curls bounced as he shook his head. I pulled off his T-shirt, revealing the kind of carved six-pack you’d find on an Olympic athlete.

  “Oh. My. Lord.” My hands shot to my mouth. Too eager, Harley. Too Kansas. Be cool.

  Marco smiled and patted his washboard stomach. “Not too bad, eh?” He looked down at himself.

  I nodded, mouth hanging open. My acrylic nails glided from his bare chest down his abdomen. What a bod. And he wants me. His body heat warmed my legs, and the lower half of my body began throbbing to the music. My tongue flew from his chest down his stomach to his button fly. I frantically lapped away at the creases in his tight stomach muscles. A little sliver of self inside me whispered, “This isn’t you. It’s the alcohol. Don’t spread your legs.” I shooed it back into the deepest corner of my cloudy head. When my lips rested on his bellybutton, his abdominals quivered. I loved the sense of power my touch had over him. I unbuttoned his fly and watched him slip off his pants faster than a horny teenager. He leaned back on my bed, wearing only boxers. My fingers gripped his legs … his hairless legs. My entire body froze in the darkness.

  My fingers tingled, resting lifelessly on his silky-smooth thighs. I felt like an old woman groping a thirteen-year-old boy. The music pulsed from my head to my stomach. Visions of Mark humping Robert flashed through my head. Gaydar. Red alert! Marco wasn’t a boy, but maybe he liked to touch boys! My mouth got dry, my throat tight. I collapsed beside him on my bed.

  Marco rolled onto his side. “You think it’s weird, huh?” He played with my hair. “That’s a surprise, considering the side you’ve shown me tonight.” I stared up at the spinning ceiling. My throbbing head kept saying, Please, God. Don’t let me puke. He rubbed his smooth chest. I pictured him standing in front of a classroom in his oxford and tie, and my heart fluttered again.

  “Uh, I dunno.” I scooted my back against him into the spoon position. We lay in the darkness, not saying a word. The alcohol was going to make me say something I’d regret. It always did. I kissed his biceps to fill the uncomfortable silence. I’d never seen any guy shave his body before moving to Miami. But major manscaping was pretty common in sweltering Skin City—whether guys hung out at 10th and Ocean on South Beach or Gold’s Gym in Coral Gables. It still freaked me out a little bit. Only four weeks had passed since Robert had taken it in the butt. And he didn’t shave his legs!

  Marco tugged me around to face him again. “It’s better for surfing.” He pulled my hand to his smooth chest. “My body sticks to the board. The hair gets in the way.” He paused. “I’m Cuban-Italian. I have no choice.” I looked at his sexy silhouette lying on my bed and pictured him turning into Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf.

  My chin rested on his chest. “I’ll get used to it.” I pushed my cheek against his right pec. My bedroom began to spin like a Ferris wheel. I forced my eyes to lock on a bookshelf. I’d puked on a college boy—in his bed—my senior year of high school. It was a Hallmark moment I didn’t want to relive. “You’re dating a gringa from Kansas, and you’ve adjusted just fine,” I slurred, feeling cool for using a Spanish word. My vocabulary had risen from zero to twenty words in three months. I wanted to be chatting up the busboys in Spanish before summer. I also wanted to throw up.

  “Ummm, yeah,” he replied, staring at the ceiling. “I’m always up to try something different.” My chin bobbed up and down with his every breath. I let his words sink in, then rushed to the kitchen and chugged a glass of water.

  I sauntered back to my bed. “Different is good, right?” I stood over him, looking down at his dark eyes.

  “I like different.” He tugged at my hand, smiling. The music stopped. I scurried over to my stereo and hit “rewind.”

  Marco leaned on his elbows. “Are you going to let me do any work tonight?” The electronic pulse of the music bounced around us. Taking the lead, being in control. At the time, it seemed like a clever way to land a new boyfriend.

  I slipped off his boxers. “Do I ever?”

  Marco shook his head. “Could you at least hand me my jeans?” I tossed his Levi’s from the foot of the bed and watched him fish a condom from his wallet. My mind rejoiced. Robert had scared me straight about unprotected sex.

  I slithered up and down Marco’s tanned body to the beat. He pinned down my shoulders and did the same. His lips moved to my inner thigh. I moaned, then grabbed his bare ass and smacked it. I’d never watched porn, but had overheard a lot of rough sex talk during pre-shift at work. It always involved spanking, biting and riding. My inner dominatrix had been unleashed—without the help of Wikipedia. I sunk my teeth into Marco’s side. He growled and barked at me. What’s up with the barking? Is there another type of doggie style I don’t know about? It was the closest thing to S&M I’ve ever experienced—even though I didn’t know what any of that BDSM stuff even was—and I felt like the biggest fraud since Milli Vanilli. But hey, I was taking risks. Trying new things. Closing doors and opening others. Marco seemed safe for experimentation. I lost myself in the moment, in the song. And now whenever I hear “Closer” I feel like a moron for being suc
h a fake the first time we had sex. I felt so right at the time.

  “I’m speechless,” he said afterward, fanned across my bed like snow angel. “I like your wild side.” He pulled my naked body closer and kissed my forehead. My sheets were damp from all the sweat. I felt like I’d just run a 5K.

  I curled up alongside his sculpted, wet body. “There’s more to me than meets the eye.” To win over this guy’s heart, I’d start with his body. It seemed so logical back then. Sex was still my gateway to a man’s attention and his love.

  And that was the beginning of Marco and me.

  “Shula’s had a great run, but it’s time to pass the torch,” Marco said to one of the bus boys in the main bus stand. I pictured his hot body under his wrinkled apron as he threw his hands in the air. Two days had passed since our sexcapade. Like most straight guys at work, Marco loved to talk football. I liked to play along.

  I stuffed two plates in a bus tub. “If it wasn’t for Zach Thomas and Jason Taylor, Shula would have been canned two years ago.” My older brother and I had shared a Dallas Cowboys-themed bedroom until fourth grade, and it didn’t take me long to trade in my Barbies for a pigskin. I loved watching a guy’s eyes widen when I talked football. It was my secret weapon. I continued spouting off statistics about Thomas’s sacks like an Al Michaels’s protégé.

  “This girl is unreal,” Marco said to the busboy, then winked at me. I blushed and grabbed four water mugs from a rack. Touch down, Harley Aberle.

  “Did you see the rack on that lady at thirty-one?” I asked, pushing the glass rack back under the counter. “She could smuggle a whole cheesecake between those things.”

  “Bullshit!” Marco darted over to survey her cleavage. When Marco wasn’t touting Dan Marino’s latest comeback, he was talking about tits with his co-workers. I always thought talking sports and boobs and drinking beer were keys to making guys fall for me. I was like a guy with a vagina. Marco was eating it up. Having a boyfriend was as essential to my being as sunscreen on South Beach. After nearly two years with Chris, I’d gotten dumped by James and Robert—and hooked up with another co-worker, Armando (the techno dancer with moves like Justin Timberlake), while drowning in self-pity on New Year’s Eve—all in less than sixty days. Living without a boyfriend for four weeks felt like someone had cut off my left arm. And I’m left-handed.

  Super Bowl XXIX came to Miami in late January. I couldn’t afford tickets, of course, so I bought us two passes to the NFL Experience at Joe Robbie Stadium. Marco and I scurried around the stadium playing games like two grade schoolers at the county fair. The relationship was sweet, playful and a little dangerous—like cotton candy-flavored vodka. We’d spend afternoons hanging out at his apartment or mine on the rare occasion we weren’t both scheduled to work. He invited me to spend the night at his place—then made me scrambled eggs, sausage and toast for breakfast. Cheesy scrambled eggs, made with Kraft singles and Jimmy Dean sausage—the fast lane to a Midwest girl’s heart. Marco was definitely falling in love with me, even if he didn’t say the word. I bought him a Miami Dolphin-colored Nerf football so we could play catch in the street. Our game was progressing smoothly.

  Then I went out of bounds.

  I took a vacation.

  My co-workers—Alicia, Christina and Brent—had been planning a road trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for almost two months and invited me to join them. The biggest block party on American soil? I didn’t blink. The legal drinking age in Louisiana was still eighteen at the time, so I could relax and not worry about getting carded. If our society would just treat alcohol like a civilized beverage and not an illegal weapon regulated by the same governmental office as guns and tobacco, maybe young adults wouldn’t be so motivated to get drunk.

  “You’ve gotta come with us,” I said to Marco, tugging his apron at work. I wanted to share my first Mardi Gras experience with my playmate boyfriend.

  He stroked my arms softly with both hands. “There’s no way I can get that much time off, Sweetheart.” Marco didn’t hide his affection at work like James did. We never held hands at the restaurant, but he always touched my arms or lower back at the right moment, discreetly. We also shared smoothies (same straw) and salads (same bowl, same fork) before our shifts—the telltale sign we were serious.

  I looked into his brown eyes, lips drooping on my pouty face. “But it won’t be as fun without you there.” Once involved with a guy, I wanted to spend every free minute with him. I didn’t know how to have my own life. “Don’t you even want to try?” I asked, straightening his Jerry Garcia tie. The idea of leaving Marco for five days made my stomach squirm. I never worried about the longevity of my relationships before moving to Miami. Since age fourteen, every first date had led to a relationship that lasted as long as an apartment lease. The goal of a date was to get the boy to only want to date me—not to analyze him and determine if he was worthy of my love. (I always liked achieving goals, even if they were the wrong ones.) Marco hadn’t called me his girlfriend yet, and I feared spending time apart might make him believe he didn’t need me in his life.

  He nodded. “I’ve worked here four weeks. I don’t have any strings to pull, Hon.” We stood in silence, looking at each other. His big eyes pierced mine, warming my heart. “Don’t worry. You’ll have a blast.” Marco always had this soft, sincere tone to his voice that reminded me of my father back when Dad had the strength to overpower his inner demons.

  “I thought you were going to tell me to be good,” I replied, rubbing his thick biceps through his work shirt.

  He patted my shoulders like a football coach. “You’re a big girl. You won’t let those girls get you into trouble.” I got the hint on his emphasis of the word “those.” Alicia and Marco were like oil and water. She hissed at him every chance she got. He was half Cuban by blood and half slacker by choice. Neither half seemed good enough for her naïve friend from Kansas.

  We drove Brent’s mom’s minivan fourteen hours straight to New Orleans, switching drivers along the way. Before college, my idea of a vacation involved a twelve-pack of hot dogs, a can of bug spray and a twenty-minute car ride to Spring River. My family didn’t have the money to fly to Disney World or even rent a cabin in the Ozarks. My co-workers were my new family, and they were showing me the real world.

  “That’ll put hair on your chest, eh?” Alicia asked, watching me sip my first Hand Grenade at Tropical Isle’s weathered-wood bar. I sucked the sweet melon cocktail through a straw until brain freeze set in. It was Alicia’s third trip to Mardi Gras, and she knew the best bars for drinks, the best clubs for jazz, the best diners for Cajun food and the best street vantage points for each float parade.

  I slammed the plastic, hand grenade-shaped cup onto the counter. “Thank you, sir, can I have another?” Purple and green beads bounced around my neck, tangled in my hair. I could handle my liquor, just like they could. Drinking daily felt natural. It was in my blood. My grandpa was born in Germany and my grandma in Ireland, so the line of alcoholics in my family probably went back four to five generations. Since leaving Chris, I’d spent one-third of my tips on booze each week. I’d dived head first into the restaurant lifestyle and hadn’t come close to hitting bottom.

  “Dorothy’s gotta learn how to pace herself!” Alicia pulled a $20 bill from her jeans pocket. “We’ve got four days of partying ahead of us.” Pace myself? I rolled my eyes and kept sucking the potent, fruity concoction through my straw. New Orleans was a one-stop shop for my three favorite things—delicious food, stiff drinks and live music. I felt like a crack addict who’d just been dropped off in Skid Row with a $100 bill. We devoured spicy shrimp po’ boys at Mother’s on Poydras Street. We downed fruity Hurricanes on the brick patio at Pat O’Brien’s, then danced in the street alongside a roaming, five-piece band. We ate king cake for breakfast, paired with frozen Strawberry Daiquiris. I experienced the euphoria of a late morning buzz for the first time. My taste buds rode the heavenly high straight through to the gigantic parade floats and fly
ing strings of beads. I never got the courage to show my breasts for beads, but Alicia flashed her huge boobs to get huge beads, and slipped every other string around my neck. I was definitely not in Kansas anymore.

  Alicia called The Cheesecake Factory to check the upcoming two-week schedule. It was Sunday afternoon, and Mardi Gras revelers were dancing in the street below our hotel room window. Our server manager posted a new fourteen-day schedule every other Sunday, and even though we’d requested time off for our entire trip, we wanted to be certain there were no issues. We sat on the floral-print sleeper sofa in our cheap hotel living room, watching Alicia’s eyes bulge with the in-room phone receiver pressed to her ear.

  “We’re all scheduled on Monday?” Her face contorted as she wrapped the phone cord between her acrylic nails.

  My jaw dropped. Monday was twenty-four hours away.

  “You gotta make me understand what happened here, Richard.” Alicia launched into her “Jenny from the Block” routine with bobbing head and nasty tone. She’d grown up in New York, and made sure everyone knew it. When her tanned face turned red, Brent grabbed the receiver and tried smooth talking our boss like a used car salesman. Alicia rolled her eyes. We huddled around the phone in Brent’s hand, listening to our boss explain how he didn’t have enough bodies to cover all the shifts we’d requested, so he’d scheduled us all on Monday, because that would be the easiest shift to cover.

  My body was paralyzed by fear and helplessness. My eyes darted from my duffle bag on the bedroom floor to the dead bolt on the front door. Fourteen hours of interstate highways and turnpikes stood between the Dade County line and us. Brent kindly asked to be placed on hold for a moment.

  Alicia fumbled for a cigarette lighter in her jeans pocket. “Screw him!” The words spit from her full lips. “How the fuck can he be so disrespectful to some of his best servers? We’ve been there since day one.” Her wavy, black hair whipped around the shoulders of her New York Knicks jersey.