I was married to the “Bad Boy”
I was married to the punk snot nosed kid on the block.
Growing up, there is always some boy in your neighborhood, kinda cute in a skinny upturned nose sort of way, but this kid has a bad attitude, he’s the bad boy. The parents don’t pay him too much attention, he’s always running the streets, he probably plays guitar, he lives dangerously. Rides his bike too fast, or drives a dirt bike when he’s too young.
He always has a scrape on his knee, a mean look in his eye and its only there because he’s got this insecurity that makes him compensate by being a punk, a jerk, generally an asshole that’s funny but you don’t want to encourage him by laughing at his tasteless jokes, usually at the expense of someone nicer than him. He always looks underfed, like a mangy stray cat. He probably wears cut off t-shirts and is tanned because he never goes inside.
He’s the guy that starts smoking at 13 because it makes him look tough, he’s that kid with two older brothers who seem to look the other way when he’s drinking beer at 15 cause mom and dad don’t seem to care too much about any of them, certainly not the baby of the family who always seems to pull nice when the adults are looking, but when they are not, he’s talking shit about them behind their back to anyone who will listen, which will be the bevy of neighborhood girls who think they can change him because he must have a heart of gold because he’s always taking home those stray dogs…But what they never know is that the dogs always seem to “run away” again, or die. He talks it off as bad luck.
What he doesn’t care to think about, and never admits, is that these animals were neglected by him, fed sporadically, ignored once “adopted” but found to be imperfect in some way, left to fend for themselves, no better off than before, but his open door policy encourages a return to the wild, or exposure to the busy street to get hit by a car when he throws the dog a ball to play catch but aims in the direction of the road. It’s the stupid dogs fault he got hit by a car.
So he doesn’t have a heart of gold. That heart was tarnished at 10. Probably exposed to porn too young, or something else that robbed him of his innocence. His youth left him jaded and hard on the inside. There is no cracking his need to compensate when he thinks he’s in the presence of someone who he thinks is superior, whether it be mentally, morally or physically. If that person is physically superior, he’ll befriend that person, be their lickspittle, but secretly hate them, and when that person has moved on, grown up and gone to college on a sports scholarship, he will talk crap about them, ape their movements and belittle their race/culture/nationality if it might be an acceptable excuse for their prowess in an area where he lacks, because they can’t have succeeded on merit or talent or ability–because he hasn’t and inside he doesn’t want to admit he is jealous.
This boy always has some friends, not many and never any real close, these guys think they know him, but they only know what he cares to show them. He is fun to be around because he’s irresponsible, he is the one wanting to take risks, thinks of stupid things to do to show off, never stops drinking because he doesn’t know when to say when, but the guys just think it’s because he’s the life of the party–not that he’s developing into an alcoholic.
It’s all very deceptive. This boy is the kid in the neighborhood that despite being a complete jerk, he can still make you feel like it’s somehow your fault that he scraped his knee, or broke someone’s window with the baseball he aimed at your head, but tells you he was only trying to include your inept self to play baseball with him and his punk friends–and you feel lucky to have been included, then remorseful because you messed up your chance by not catching the ball and now guilty because this boy who is finally paying you attention is in trouble because of you he broke that window.
Yes. That is the man I married. When that boy grows up, he finds someone to latch on to, whom he knows he can manipulate in this way and have this person take care of him, elevate him from the corner where he grew up and move him into the suburbs, and sacrifice and steer him to have ambition he was never secure enough to pursue, but at the same time make you feel like it’s your fault he strays, it’s your fault he refuses to settle down months into your new marriage, belittles you and says bad things about you to all his friends at work who listen but aren’t in a position to advance his career… Cause that’s the game he plays. And when he does something wrong, because he was aiming at your head with the baseball, not “including you” in his game, it’s always your fault.
That bad boy doesn’t have a heart of gold.
That bad boy has a glint in his eye, sure, they always do. But it’s as genuine as the cheap gold hanging from his neck, and it’s out to get you.
That bad boy grows up to be a very selfish and emotionally/physically abusive man. He grows up to be a pathological liar, a man who can’t appreciate that someone might actually be smarter than him, especially if that someone is a woman, and if that woman figures out too late what he was up to all along, he works harder to con her into thinking she’s got it all wrong, just so he can keep her-caged like an animal for over a decade. Until you finally scratch enough numbers on your arm until you wake up and realize you’ve been in the presence of something bad all along, you just kept forgetting. So you work up your resolve to remember, and then you leave…
You’ll never convince the bad boy any of it was his fault. Don’t buy into the Hollywood lies. Bad boys are a pipe dream.
Bad boys grow up into bad men.
