Ten Twenty Ten. Stephen Polando
pong with the customer, better tip. Not to mention, you meet a lot of chicks. I was actually faithful to Tiffany, despite having a job that threw temptation at me almost daily. So you can imagine my resentment when it later came out that she was not being faithful to me.
Tiffany was about 5-foot-5 with dark brown hair. “A loud, crazy, bitch” was her most common self-description. She was a waitress and/or bartender during all of the four years we dated. After it ended, Guy summed it all up best by saying, “She was a one-night stand that you turned into a four-year relationship.” This could not be more true.
I caught Tiffany cheating once, but I would probably bet it happened more than that. We fought a lot, we drank a lot, we were young, dumb, and broke. I know deep down I did a lot to help her. I would argue that I was a pretty good boyfriend, despite it all. However, I am not perfect, and certainly bear some responsibility for it being a bad relationship.
When we met, I was 19 and she was about to be. She was about to move back into her parents’ house. They lived in North Phoenix, about 40 minutes from Chandler. Her car broke down for good in the first month we dated. That left me going back and forth a lot to make it work. My car actually broke down the night of our first date. What a sign that was. I brushed it aside and borrowed my friend Luis’s car. We saw “Dodgeball,” then she had people over and we made out a lot. I was actually a virgin until I was 19. Tiffany would receive my virginity on her 19th birthday. How thoughtful I was.
Tiffany epitomized the word irresponsible. The night before she was to move back to Tempe after six months at her parents’ house, she broke down and claimed she lost $50, and then proceeded to borrow $200 from me. I actually woke up my mom to go to the ATM and borrow it from her. I solved the problem, without hesitation. After a couple months Tiffany punched her best friend and they moved out of the new place. She also got arrested twice in a month for warrants on shoplifting charges and something else I can’t remember. I bailed her out for one of the two.
After breaking the lease with her friend, she stayed with her other best friend, Megan, in the same complex for a few months before getting a new apartment. This apartment is the one I would eventually move into. I was wildly blinded by love. It stresses me out to roll through these memories and look at how naive I was. I honestly don’t have any resentment or ill will toward Tiffany so I’m not really trying to rip her in this book.
The honest reality is that we were in a situation caused by shitty decisions she made, and I tried to help us escape from it. When I claim to have been a good boyfriend, it’s because I did things like this. At one point, she got evicted from another apartment, so I lived with her in a shitty motel for a month. Motels and hotels are two very different places. This was the kind of motel where meth is prevalent, and a lot of people stay night to night. We couldn’t afford the next night so we would often move out at checkout and then move back in after we had both made some cash at work. I was actually living at my mom’s at that time. I didn’t need to be going through that shit. But I did. I stuck by her side and loved her unconditionally.
In truth, the longer it went on, the worse it got. She eventually got hired at Hooters. She had A cups but her personality was a great fit. Loud, obnoxious, and flirty plays well at an almost strip club. A perfect match. We had finally seemed to put an end to the constant crises of our living situation. After a year in a condo with our gay friend David, we moved to a house with two guys that I met through Tiffany. They had become two of my best friends at the time, Blaze and Eddie. They were stoners, sports fans, and poker players. Three things that I enjoyed.
Right after moving in, Tiffany and I had gone for a couple drinks when she got off work one night. While having a good time, one of her former co-workers, Katelyn, approached our table to stop by and stir up a quite a ruckus.
“Stephen, you’re a good guy and you deserve to know that Tiffany slept with Eamon,” she claimed.
Eamon was a mutual friend of ours who had worked with both Tiffany and Katelyn at a bar called The Vine in Tempe. Anybody that went to ASU has probably been there on a Wednesday night for dollar “you-call-its.” But at the moment of this revelation, I had Tiffany’s back. Of course, she had an excuse as to why Katelyn would try to start some shit like that. Obviously, in the coming days I did some digging. Sure enough, a couple days later, Eddie would pass on some knowledge he heard that would confirm what Katelyn had said.
My first action was to go get a pint-sized bottle of Southern Comfort and get fucked up. Tiffany came home from work that night and found me passed out. When she woke me up, I just said, “I know.” She knew what I meant. She started crying and left.
I was heartbroken. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been. I should have rejoiced over the freedom. I should have bought Eamon a beer for helping get me out of this toxic relationship. Unfortunately, that’s not how love works. I invested a lot into this. She was the only girl I had ever been with. I guess in my hopeless-romantic mind I liked that story. We had been through a lot of shit. We had been on and off a couple times. One of those times she had slept with another guy and called me crying at like 5 am to tell me. My brilliant idea in that moment was to take her back.
She had supported me emotionally after my house burned down. I overvalued that. In reality, that’s what any good person would do. I later came to find out that the night Tiffany had cheated, I was actually passed out in the other room. Furthermore, I gave Eamon a ride home the next morning. Pretty ballsy.
So naturally, I took Tiffany back after this, too. Despite all the reasons I shouldn’t have. I ruined what could have been an amazing bachelor pad and managed to take the next six months and turn everyone against me, instead of against her. The cheating was really the straw that broke the camel’s back for my drinking. I was young and having fun. I drank too much, and too often, but there was no dependency before this incident.
That would not be the case after, however. I drank in the morning, before work, at work, after work. I was just drinking all the time now. I resented Tiffany constantly. I have no idea why I tried to make it work. There was no trust. The whole thing wrecked me and definitely wore down my friends. We had a 23rd birthday party for me at the house and I was done and passed out by midnight. I was just spiraling out of control and every day seemed worse than before.
But in reality, this wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg of my relationship with alcohol. My car ended up getting repossessed the day before, which is obviously not ideal for a pizza delivery guy. Luckily a friend at work sold me his beat-up old car for $500 to help me get by. Unfortunately, when you buy a $500 car, you know it’s a time bomb. It gave me only a couple months. After that, I showed up drunk to work, because I was also a time bomb at that point.
I was fired, or I quit; I’m honestly not even sure how it went down. I just never went back and I don’t recall anybody being surprised I didn’t show up again. I had made a lot of friends and a lot of money at this job. I should have handled the exit better.
I want to make something clear. I didn’t become an alcoholic because my house burned down or because my girlfriend cheated on me. I became an alcoholic because I chose alcohol to be the best way to handle these types of adversities. Did I start drinking more because I dated Tiffany? Undoubtedly, that is true. However, nobody ever poured alcohol down my throat. I was a willing participant and it escalated from there.
The major life heartbreaks were a fork in the road – and I chose the path of self-pity and overindulgence. That is very clearly my own fault and only my fault.
That spring there was an incident that turned everyone against me. Or it seemed to, in that moment. We planned a day trip on the Salt River, where you basically float down a river in an innertube in 105-degree weather and get drunk. Sign me up. On that day – you guessed it – I drank too much. We all did. I don’t remember a lot of things. I do remember us all taking a pretty rough spill on the rapids and hitting some rocks, though. Everybody got kind of beaten up. I don’t remember the ride home that day. It just seemed like a regular amount of debauchery, and I knew Tiffany and I were pissed at each other.
A couple days later a house meeting was called. Much to my surprise, this was pretty much an intervention directed at me, but not about drinking. On the ride home after