Once upon a time...

The Hub and I celebrated our 9^th anniversary yesterday. Actually, I met K about 4 years before we got our stamped piece of paper declaring us “legal”. I worked at Borders, and he worked at a white collar employment agency. He gave the Myers Briggs test to countless laid off VP's while I dealt with my caffeine addiction and became a guru of the children's section, the arts and crafts section, the psych section, and finally the history section, all the while up to my eyeballs in the first and probably last union drive I will ever be a part of.

Borders. If anyone has ever worked there, you know the drama. The incestuous relationships, the hierarchy of workers, the crossover of the private life into the business life. But as this is the story of the night K and I met, I'll focus on the most important aspects of this existence.

First off, everyone in Philadelphia is somehow connected to everyone else. Like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Within our group, K had grown up with one of the managers “Brad” and had briefly dated another manager“Chris”, who had known Brad for some time. Brad was a man with major issues with women, which is a nice way of saying he couldn't keep his dick in his pants. Chris was pleasant enough on the surface, but once you got under that gloss, she was rather, well, CRAZY. In a nice way, though. Kind of.

For my part, I generally hung out with fellow booksellers: “Becca”, an artist who painted fantastic images on abandoned doors and windows she would find around town; “Samantha” a women's history/poli-sci student who was openly bi; and “Laura” an insecure, brave girl who was saving to get into school and loved her cat, “Patches”. There were many more, but these are the characters important to this narrative.

Here's the setting: Brad was going “steady” with another bookseller who shall remain nameless. Becca was going out with Samantha. Chris had gone out months ago with K, who saw that once as enough, and they parted on friendly terms. I was recently liberated from my schizophrenic boyfriend. Laura had just moved into a women's boarding house that didn't allow pets, and Patches was staying with Brad for the time being. Got that? Good.

Like all students/booksellers we had our after hours crowd that rotated around various bars...Doobies, Oscars, Fergies, Tangiers. Rolling Rock was our beer of necessity, closely followed by Black & Tan. For the uninitiated, this is generally half Guiness stout, half pale ale (though we generally swilled Yuengling) and was the cheapest way of getting dark beer down our gullets.

It was Chris's birthday, and Brad decided to throw her a party. Which basically involved telling everyone to meet at 9:30 at Oscars. Oscars is one of those bars perpetually suspended in time...brick walls, vinyl topped bar stools, the smell of 40 years of Marlboros and Camels mixed with grease, beer and Jack Daniels. Blue collar and unapologetic, our crowd felt right at home.

I settled in with my friends at a table with a couple pitchers of Black & Tan. I was in a tired, relaxed mood. I'd just finished my senior work a few days prior, and now regaled my friends with the news of the fist fight that erupted over a girl while we hung our installations. Blood and art, forever entwined.

While we laughed and talked, a man with delightful blue eyes and an engaging, interested face sat down in the chair across from me and joined our group, and in that marvelous, organic arc of talking, we eventually found ourselves speaking more with each other. We talked of art, and myth, fairy tales, folklore and illustration. It was one of those conversations that invites more and more exploration, and questions. We talked late into the night, and K said he would lend me a book he had mentioned. Eventually he said goodnight and left. I took off with my friends a bit later, excited and energized.

The next morning, I met Sam and Becca in the back room of Borders to unpack and sort. We were all in various stages of hangover, but Sam's eyes were puffy, like she hadn't really slept, and she was still a bit drunk. We realized this when she lifted up her skirt to show us a nasty scrape about six inches long across her upper thigh. How had it happened? The answer was evasive, and we both knew she was lying.

The story emerged over the next few days. K added missing pieces later.

Sam and Brad had gone back to Brad's place in the small hours of the morning, where they sat on the floor, getting more and more friendly and naked. And right in the middle of all the hot, steamy, drunken foreplay, Patches went berserk.

Have you ever heard a cat scream? Seen one on the attack like they've been possessed by Jack the Ripper in kitty form? This was Patches. She flew at Sam first, claws bared, and for a while, it was all flailing limbs, paws and blood, until Brad got lucky and punched the cat in the face. Then it sat down, licked it's paw and began to wash it's face. It looked at them every so often as if to say, “what' the fuck's up with YOU? I'm not doing anything.”

The mood, was, of course, broken. Sam left as soon as she could fumble into her jeans and Brad collapsed into bed in a drunken stupor after throwing the cat in the bathroom.

So while Sam showed us her scar the next morning, Brad realized upon waking that he was mighty uncomfortable. He lifted his sheets, and then left for the hospital.

The nurse who saw him brought up his chart, took one look and started to laugh.

You know that kind of laugh that says “I'm with you...we're all in this together”?

It wasn't that kind of laugh.

Then he lifted up the sheet to look at Brad, paled, said:
“Sweet Jesus I need to get a doctor” and ran from the room.

Patches had ripped a hole about the size of a quarter in Brad's testes, and the flap of torn skin hung down like a little bloody flag.

Turns out the only one who got some that night was the cat.

I'll leave the immediate aftermath of the various relationships to your powers of deduction. Patches went to live out in the country with people who didn't mind psychotic cats.

K and I wouldn't see each other again for almost 6 months, but true to his word, he did leave off the book a couple of weeks later with his phone number on a Calvin & Hobbes strip tucked in the leaves. I went to Japan, K went to the Netherlands, and when we met later that year for coffee, that was it. The start of a long, and wonderful adventure. To be continued...

*names changed to protect the not-so-innocent