Antonio’s attempts to win over my girlfriend have been thwarted- for now.
The latest news is that Jackie has a Latin admirer. Not, not me. Another Latin admirer. Name’s Antonio. He lives down the street, and we heard through the grapevine that Jackie makes his heart skip a beat. With a name like Antonio, it is only natural that he be something of a lothario.
It’s the way he acts that bothers us- he flings himself to the ground in a fit of emotion whenever Jackie and I come to visit and will not speak to her for the first half-hour or so, after which he will sit and stare perversely at her until Jackie starts to become embarrassed, and everyone in the room is suppressing laughter. It’s pretty apparent.
In fact- I shit you not- he has been vocal in his praise of my girlfriend’s breasts. Some months back he yelled out (he’d been hitting the bottle pretty hard that night), “JACKIE’S BOOBIES!” in a crowded room. His companions laughed uproariously. He has also sculpted her breasts out of woodchips; a relative of his can attest. “What is that?” was asked of the haphazardly-assembled mounds. “Jackie’s boobies”, Antonio replied simply. He is shameless.
The guy is cute, and he knows it, and uses it to his advantage. He is on the short side and dark, skinny, arms and legs as spidery as pipe cleaners, but with a bit of a potbelly despite his maintaining a constant flurry of movement until the moment he finally runs out of steam and passes out on the living room floor.
I began to suspect his antagonism toward me one day while, during one of his visits (in hopes to see Jackie, of course), I watched him scrawl an unidentifiable image on a piece of paper (much of his art, I’ve noticed, is abstract). I asked him whether it was a pregnant water buffalo or a dying penguin, and he replied in an exaggerated high-pitched voice, “Your mom”. I tried to chalk it up to his ineffectual grasp of the English language, but I caught what had to have been a flash of resentfulness in his eyes.
Lest you think I am nitpicking, I tolerated his brazen behavior with the grace of an understanding woman…. in the beginning, anyway. People can’t always control who it is they fall in love with. I couldn’t fault him for wanting to sexually harass my girlfriend. How could he not? My girlfriend is spectacular. The guy has taste.
It all came to a head one night at his house, a birthday party. Attendees crowded the living room and kitchen. Music played. Children ran underfoot, and all of the adults tried their best to act more sober than they really were. I myself was working diligently through my second glass (well, plastic cup) of sangria.
Antonio looked debonair in his casual ensemble of a t-shirt and baggy jeans. From across the room I saw him approach my girlfriend. Jackie saw him and smiled. “Heeey, Antonio!” she said (he flatters her- I suppose she likes the attention). She swept him easily (despite her small stature, she towers over him) into an enormous hug. As he squeezed her tightly in return, his eyes met mine…. I swear, they narrowed. Then he lifted his smallish hand and revealed his middle finger. My own eyes narrowed in response.
“So that’s how it is”, I murmured to myself. Well, two could play that game.
Jackie put him down, upon which he burst into a series of feverish dance moves, all the while gawking openly at her chest. Calmly, I made my way across the room to her. I wrapped an arm around her waist, and she responded in kind. I kissed her. I looked over her shoulder and saw that he’d stopped dancing and was now watching us. He looked murderous. I went to him and bent down; I embraced him with the pleasant familiarity of a caring babysitter.
He yelled, “Mine”.
Smiling benignly, I whispered in his ear: “If you don’t back off, I’m going to make your life a living hell” .
Antonio scoffed.
I continued, “Wait till I babysit you next. Ants in your Pull-Ups. Sriracha in your sippy cup. And that is only the beginning. By the time I am through with you, you will wish for the good old days when, not so long ago, you were back inside your mother’s womb. Anyway, what have you got to offer her, Oreos? Dried-up play dough? Those pages of sorry scribbles that you try to pass off as love letters? I know you haven’t learned to read. Give up, child. You’re dealing with adults here.”
He spluttered a few times in his attempt to respond, but his vocabulary, advanced as it was becoming, was still that of a toddler- after all, he was two going on three- so he managed only a few stammering excrement-related insults. Poo head, and the like. He couldn’t say anything more because his mother scooped him up. “Time to sing happy birthday to daddy!” she said. “Having fun?”
“Oh, yes”, I replied. “Antonio and I were talking about what a great time we’ll have when he comes over next. Won’t we have fun, Antonio?”
Antonio glared. Said his mother, “Oh, he gets so tongue-tied around women sometimes.”
I said, “I know the feeling”.
