Ricky, B, and Me, by Paul Shirley

Not long ago, I was in my basement with my friend “Neil”, eating pizza and drinking beer as the two of us watched college football and tried to forget that we were a pair of men sitting on the same couch on a Saturday night. As the action on the screen dulled, our conversation picked up and, eventually, Neil told me about a situation that had arisen with his girlfriend, who has lived several states away from Neil for the last year.

By his telling, a male graduate student had recently befriended his girlfriend. Not a problem, until he’d tried to kiss her. She’d stopped the kissing proceedings cold and had explained what had happened to Neil.

I told Neil that the set of circumstances he described was significantly better than the alternative, which would have been a makeout with the grad student, followed by nondisclosure. (Then again, making out with the grad student, followed by disclosure wouldn’t have been great either. Really, in monogamous relationship, any extraneous kissing is a problem. Assuming that an explanation will help is like hoping to find the black box after a plane crash – it doesn’t bring back the incinerated bodies.)

At any rate, it seemed that she had handled the situation well, until he told me that the grad student was less than apologetic and that he’d been offering the girlfriend rides to parties. And that she’d accepted, on several occasions.

I looked into my friend’s eyes, took a bite of my slice of the delicious Papa Minsky pizza I was working on, and searched my brain for reassuring words. The only problem: I didn’t have any.

What I did have was a very long but – I think – very pertinent story from my own life. And so I told him.

The story involves three characters. There’s me. There’s my then-girlfriend, who I will deem B for the purposes of anonymity. And there’s a man called Ricky, who I will call “Ricky”, because fuck that guy.

The story of mine and B’s early dating days is one that is ripe to be mined for anecdotes, but I will skip ahead and set the scene by giving this tale a start date: August 24, 2008. I can remember the date because it’s my father’s birthday and because, after dropping B at the airport for her return to Barcelona, I went with my brother to watch Bruce Springsteen. It was the last night of her absence that I felt good about life.

When I left her at the airport, we were planning to be apart for two months. It was our first try at such a break. We’d just finished spending every night of the previous three and a half months together. Prior to that, we’d seen each other almost every weekend in the formative months of our relationship, with her in Barcelona and me in Menorca, Spain, and with the two of us making frequent trips back and forth.

Soon after her return to Spain on Springsteen Day, B had a sort of emotional attack, likely aided by her Spanish father, who was not thrilled that his daughter was dating an American. Normally, I wouldn’t blame him – I’ve come to learn that most Spanish people distrust Americans. Except, in this case, the American was me.

Quickly, our relationship devolved into B not wanting to speak to me because she “needed some time to think” and me running in mental and emotional circles because I didn’t know what had gone wrong. Admittedly, our relationship was fraught with challenges. A year earlier, B had only just ended a relationship with a German pilot when I’d burst into her life. In addition, she wasn’t sure what to do with her future; she was a full-time model but, at 27, the sun was – if not setting on her career – at least moving toward the time of day when the UV rays are at their worst. Throw in her unease about the United States, her scattered family, most of which was suspicious of an American, and its no surprise that our relationship was holding on like an action hero anytime there’s a cliff, scaffolding, or elevated walkway in the shot.

Of course, knowing that our relationship had its challenges did nothing to deter me from assuming I could fix it. After several weeks of speaking every few days, I agreed that we could ratchet it down to once a week. When that got to be too much for B, I started a ritual of one email plus one video that I would cornily make on my front porch and share through a private YouTube-like site.

In related news, I was completely unbearable to be around, and probably hastened my brother Matt’s departure from my house by acting like a heartbroken asshat 92% of the time.

Then, one day, as Matt and I got ready for the radio show we were doing at the time, a call out of the blue from B. She told me she was finishing a meal with a friend named Ricky and that he’d convinced her to call me. She’d recently been offered a permanent job with a magazine in Barcelona and had been discussing the pros and cons over dinner with Ricky. She didn’t know what taking the job would do to our relationship, and told Ricky of her concern. He said, “Why don’t you call Paul?”

So she did. When I heard her voice, I thought, Finally, a breakthrough. I didn’t know quite what to say as A) we hadn’t spoken in weeks (remember, emails and hokey videos only) and B) Matt was waiting downstairs for the beginning of our live show. I made one last plea on a topic I’d been hammering for a month: Let me come see you.

She asked me if I would really fly to Barcelona for her. I told her that, yes, of course I would; I’d been saying I’d do that for 40 days. She sighed and said she’d love it if I came. I celebrated inwardly and told her to thank Ricky (who I’d never met) for suggesting that she call me. She assured me that she would, we hung up, I went downstairs and I did a radio show with my brother.

During the show, with Matt glaring at me – in part because he was disappointed in my complete lack of fortitude and in part because I can’t multitask online – I bought a plane ticket to Barcelona that would have me leave the next day.

Now, as a reader, you’re probably thinking one of two things: 1. That’s amazingly romantic and dedicated of you, Paul. Or 2. That’s amazingly pathetic and inexcusable of you, Paul. You’d be correct either way. The problem was my confusion. I was in love with the person I thought at the time to be the girl of my dreams: a beautiful, 5’10”, half-Spanish, half-Dutch girl who spoke four languages and was capable of being silly, charming, smart, and funny. Who, incidentally, had loved me back. We’d lived together all summer and, while there had been hiccups, we had talked often of things working out forever.

So forgive me if I was willing to part with $1500 for a ticket ¼ of the way around the world. Sometimes, you have to do shit like that.

And then, a year and a half later, you can recognize how stupid you were and then write about it.

But the stupidity has to come first.

I got on the plane, B and I were reunited, and we had a great time for the five days I was in Spain. On my last night in Barcelona, I even got to meet Ricky, the savior. I was pleased to make his acquaintance, as he had helped save my relationship. We had a lovely meal, during which I realized that I genuinely liked the guy.

After dinner, B and I went back to our hotel. (She’d given up her apartment when we’d left the city in July and was staying with a friend.) I was curious about how she knew Ricky and why he was being so nice to B, so I asked. She told me that he’d been the boyfriend of a friend of hers and that after that relationship had broken up, they’d stayed pals. She also told me that Ricky had made a pass at her a few years earlier but that she’d had a boyfriend at the time. And anyway, she said, he wasn’t her type. Plus, she added, her friend had told her that he had a tiny penis.

While she may have thrown in the last part for my benefit, I was generally reassured. (Because of the nature of their friendship. I’m not one to win over women with my genitals.)

When B and I said farewell at the airport the next day, we did so safe in the knowledge that the next hiatus would be a short one. B would come to the US to be with me for a wedding just prior to Thanksgiving, and would stay until Christmas or until I got a job playing basketball in Europe. With our relationship healed, the next few weeks passed without incident. She arrived in Kansas City, I was happy, and we had fun at the wedding in question, even becoming the subject of a bathroom getaway liaison that wasn’t actually true.

A few days later, I was offered a one-month contract in Malaga, Spain. B and I flew out the day after Thanksgiving and spent a remarkably domestic and carefree December in the south of Spain. A few days before Christmas, she left for Holland to be with her family. Around New Year’s, I went home, safe – I hoped – in the knowledge that we wouldn’t repeat the fall’s relationship chaos.

For the most part, I was right. There were a few more hiccups before we were back together; her family remained unthrilled about me, which was beginning to irk me, especially because they hadn’t actually met me and – let’s be honest – on paper, I’m not so bad.

We were reunited in Barcelona shortly after Valentine’s Day. I spent a month living with her in that city once again. Our apartment was terrible and small, but we did our best to survive, even under her deteriorating mental state. One bright spot: my burgeoning friendship with – oddly enough – Ricky.

Soon after my arrival in Barcelona, B and I went with Ricky and a girl to a village called Sitges for Carnavale. It was only my second time with Ricky, but as can be the case during a hard-drinking night between two males, we quickly bonded. To this day, there may be pictures of us lifting one another off the ground in costumed and inebriated jubilation on my facebook profile.

After Carnavale, our friendship endured. Sometimes, we’d see each other with girlfriends in tow – his Polish girlfriend was in town off and on. And sometimes we wouldn’t – we’d meet for lunch in the Born district of the city, talking often about the girls in our lives.

I knew a few people in Barcelona, but most of them spoke limited English. Ricky – half-German/half-Spanish though he was – spoke English well and was enthusiastic about almost everything. He was about my age, had lived in several countries, and shared many of my views on the world. By the time I left Barcelona, I was disappointed that I wouldn’t see him in the next months, but glad to call him my friend.

B and I flew to Kansas, where we spent the next month turning my house into a place that looked like it was inhabited by an adult and having many, many conversations about “the future”.

When she left in late April, the plan was for her to go first to Germany, where she’d had modeling leads before, followed by trips to Holland and the Canary Islands (where her father lived). I would join her sometime in June in Germany, most likely for a month. Afterward, she’d come back to Kansas for August. It was a loose agenda and, obviously, an intercontinental one. But those were the breaks. And, we thought, we were fortunate. We didn’t have normal jobs, which meant that we could handle the bizarre scheduling that came along with this weird relationship we’d now been in for a year and a half.

We thought we could make it. We’d handled separation, albeit barely, before. We could do it again. But then, as is often the case in relationships, there came an obstacle. Ours seemed innocent enough: It was a wedding. Not our wedding, mind you. A wedding involving one of her friends.

Of course, the wedding wasn’t the problem. The wedding only helped expose the problem.

For the conclusion of “Ricky, B, and Me”, click here.