WARNING: There are bad words below. More than a few...
I've had this friend for a while now. Let's call him Mark, because I don't want to get sued. Mark is a refugee from one of those countries close to America and found my Americanness to be highly, well, fascinating. Whatever, I just want a friend, not a nationality. Over time, Mark became my BFF, my confidant; rather, I became his. I thought we were inseparable, but something was just...off. He liked to talk a little bit too much about his friends with money and how they bought him things. Women draped themselves over him and he would whisper in their ears as they told me he was their...soulmate. Gay, but their soulmate, their BFF, the one man that did no wrong. Hmmm...
He also liked to talk about how people let him get away with other things because of his refugee status. He never really cared about what I had to say, but hey, I'm not a refugee, I've not lived his life. Carry on my friend, live the dream.
His other female friends would get jealous when he was with me, but I have a life. I have no room for jealousy, I have no time for spending my every waking moment with someone that is not my partner. Go out, have fun, live that dream I previously mentioned. I was never jealous, just observing and starting to piece it all together. There was a pattern there, behaviors that were screaming a warning out to me, but I ignored them. My brain didn't want to let that picture form, oh no, it fought me, but I was starting to see. I didn't like the picture that was forming, at all.
Last week he invited me to go with him and another friend I barely knew to Seville, over in Spain. A two hour drive but I've yet to leave Portugal since arriving so...ROAD TRIP!!
Seville was great. I knew this by 3:45 am, walking around the same block for the fourth time looking for the shoddy little apartment we'd been conned into renting. No hot water, no way to cook, no bed linen, ONE towel for three people, the reek of "somebody died here and we just left it as it is since then". And the dust. But, that wasn't the best part of the trip.
The best part was the part where the woman, another friend of Mark's and I figured out WHY I'd been invited. To keep her company as he went about the day treating us like the servants he'd brought along with him and couldn't leave at home. It was nice how he kept reminding his Spanish friends he'd actually come to see (not to show me Seville as he'd said) that I'm American therefore, I didn't have the ability to drink like Europeans. And that I wasn't as good as Europeans. It was hot and I was on the verge of barfing, but whatever, let's pour some alcohol in me. No, thank you. I think now he just wanted me drunk for what was coming later. Unfortunately, he picked the wrong little American to mess with.
This part would come hours after his other friend and I had enough for the day. We were whined at until we agreed to go out with him and his friends to ONE MORE BAR. Just one more, on top of the 15 or so we'd already been to. Just this last one, then we'll get a taxi back to that nasty little apartment and go home. He promised. Then he "lost" his wallet.
We had to pay for his drinks. We had to pay for the taxi. It was this "losing of the wallet" point that it all finally crystallized into cold, logical, clarity. I was being used. We both were, his other friend and I. I'd been asked along to keep her company so he could spend the day with these other people in peace, and she was invited because she had money. Right. We see now.
This the part where the inevitable happened...and he told us to "fuck off, yes fuck off, of course I want you to fuck off, now fuck off" because he'd got a signal from a man that wanted to have sex with him and he didn't need us anymore that night. Words were exchanged because we didn't even know the address for the apartment HE and his Spanish friends arranged and I'd had about enough of his crap for a lifetime, so I walked off to be away from him on a bench not far away, and the words "let's go to this other bar, leave her here, she's a big girl, let her find her own way home" were spoken.
I sat there, with 20 euros in my pocket, no idea of how to get back to the apartment to get the rest of my money and belongings, trying to figure out how to get back to Portugal. As the scent of marijuana clogged my nostrils from the group standing about ten feet from me, a calm came over me. Maybe it was the second-hand weed infiltrating my respiratory system, but I was awesomely calm for somebody that had just been dumped in an even stranger land. This weird mental shift happened and I knew I was going to be alright, no matter what happened. I was still angry, of course, but weirdly calm.
We'd been walking all day and I was tired. Maybe that was it? I don't know but, the lady that was kind enough to bring us to Seville with her was too and said something along the lines of "fuck you, man, are you serious, we can't leave her, she's exhausted and your friend. You can't be serious!"
"Fuck her, I don't need her anymore."
And then he rattled off an address we gave to the taxi we were made to call. We weren't given a choice of what we wanted to do, he decided we were leaving and that was it. He was going to stay and we could find our way back without him. That taxi took us to that address and said the apartment was behind us as he drove away.
Guess what happened next? That's right, we walked. We walked for almost two hours, before we saw another taxi. The first taxi had dropped us about five miles from our apartment we soon found out by looking at google maps. We tried to walk that five miles but every single time we got the point where the restaurant we'd eaten at earlier was supposed to be (not far from where the nasty apartment was) the line would jump. We went in circles for hours. The new taxi drove us all over until I finally found the address online for the restaurant. He dropped us off there and then we walked some more. At 4 am in Seville.
He'd given us the wrong address. He'd been trying to get me drunk all day, though I refused and sucked down water like it was the last water available on earth, so I wouldn't protest too much when he needed our money. He "lost" his wallet, which he didn't really lose by the way, it was in his bag at the apartment, so that he didn't have to spend HIS money. He wanted to leave me alone, in a country I'd only just arrived in, with no way home because my usefulness for him was done that day. He left us both to walk alone for two hours in a city we did not know. I no longer have a friend named Mark. But I do have a new one in the other woman he used, a 67 year old woman that had both of her knees replaced by the way, and an appreciation for the beauty of Seville in the middle of the night.
My instincts have been telling me for months that something was off and I ignored them. I wanted to believe in him, believe he was a good person, and that I was too suspicious. I told myself I'd grown hard and cynical, that he was a man wronged by life that needed a true friend. That I was looking at him with the same intense distrust that I saved for others. I didn't want to put the bad together into a picture that was going to be oh so ugly. I'm used to the trickery of others, to the "get money any way you can" philosophy shared by so many. I didn't want to admit to myself that he was just another of the followers of the mighty coin. I didn't want to see that he gave women this idea of being the only one that understood him, the only ones that mattered, each of us, so that he could further manipulate our money out of us. Even when he knew we had little to give. I was wrong. I've learned my lesson. I won't make the same mistake ever again.