what love is

philip charles weiand the fourth was a gay whore, semiretired. she met him when he was 27, and on trial for armed robbery/carjacking, a crime phil was startlingly unsuited for. . monica imagined that if phil ever attempted to pull such a crime, he would likely be laughed right out of the vehicle. not guilty by reason of laziness—he would need initiative, and when did he ever actually take it upon himself to go out and make money these days?? nope, his earning days were long gone. he had traded in his expensive relationship with cocaine and heroin for a more affordable one with liquor, and given up his guitar playing for full-time ranting and raving against life, love, happiness, and optimism. most of all, against his old girlfriends and the men whose pricks he serviced.

monica heard all about both groups, of course. most distinguished pervert: randy price, weatherman, who apparently enjoyed sharing golden showers with young boys. least distinguished: william, an old black dude who lived in an apartment that looked out over both blanchard’s liquor store and city hospital, who provided a living space for what he regarded as sweet little pieces of ass. which phil may have been, back when he was 18—monica had seen the pictures. william’s most famous contributions to phil’s rhetoric were chitluns and a certain horrid incident involving live lobster and a hot plate.

as for girlfriends, well, phil did alright with them, too. monica was friends with a couple of them, and much hated by the little 16-year-old socialite phil was fucking when monica met him. that little girl’s name was madeline freed, jewish kid from newton. monica didn’t have any problem with her. in fact, she would have done her any day of the week—such a cute little face, sexy body, too. small-framed. nice tits, round freckled little ass, big brown eyes and a jewish-princess nose.

too bad she was such a bitch to other females. monica was not one to threaten violence, but she did not appreciate others trying her patience with ultimatums which could not be carried out. just ask mike wilson.

madeline’s mama was the advertising director for telemundo, the spanish channel. madeline called herself starr and dressed in stylish rags. she was always running away, and her parents were always out, dragging her back. poor starr was living in an impossible dreamland: she was the princess, and phil was her knight in shining armor, saving her from a boring life of privelage in waban. hah! some knight! the freed family hated his guts; he really got their goat, did phil.

but that wasn’t monica’s thing.

her father practically sold her to the first bidder. mike wilson was quite fond of philip charles weiand the fourth. they drank together.
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the wilson family did not live in newton, but in central massachusetts, in a little town called lancaster. across the street from the state’s most comfortable prison and in front of bob’s turkey farm.
the fitchburg-worcester area was not exactly teeming with artistic types, or hippies, or anything much for that matter, other than white trash boys and their repressed womenfolk. those who wanted more from life in lancaster, generally left town. but monica did have a pot dealer there, at least. she got her ged after repeating ninth grade too many times, and she worked hard, busted her ass at mcdonald’s in clinton, walked there from her parents’ house every day. 45 minutes one way, if you take the shortcut along the tracks.
monica worked 36-hour weeks. she was the meat person. also, she did the fryolaters and made sandwiches and salted the fucking french fries too. everything but dealing with the customers up front. which suited everybody just fine—meat person paid fifty cents an hour above minimum wage, the salary the cashiers made, as an added bonus.
monica wasn’t the most sociable of people. not that she wasn’t nice—just not comfortable interacting with folks who wouldn’t understand. she had been tortured in school since day one, and she wasn’t in the mood for any repeats of that. not to mention home.
but monica was biding her time, just waiting for june eighth, her birthday, to roll around. that was the day she was off probation. that was the day she was finally free—free to go and live with her lover after a year of long-distance waiting initiated by the court system. fiona, her probation officer, did not approve of phil.
if fiona had her way, monica would not have been allowed to see him at all, but she didn’t. monica’s parents understood life differently than fiona did.
without phil, monica would have nothing to lose, and with nothing to lose, they had no leverage over her. michael and leslie wilson knew that monica was unstable, intense, and willing to give up almost anything to get her way. they knew monica didn’t give a fuck about the stuff that most kids do at her age. it was already gone, they had already taken it, to no avail.
they had played their hand way too early, they knew, in hindsight. they had done it long ago, and never stopped. that is how monica grew immune to punishment, to threats. they hit her too much, too hard, and at too young an age. she was so proud, she would take it without shedding a tear by grade school.
they had berated her for A-minuses, for B’s. now that she had flunked out of ninth grade twice due to lack of attendance and dropped out of school, they said nothing.
they had tortured her with her most treasured possession and talent, the trombone. they had gotten in her way at every opportunity, tried to bar her from playing in the groups she had auditioned for and gotten into, took her money, the $800 that was rightfully hers from winning a concerto competition against violinists and piano players. she was the only trombone player ever to do the competitions that she had done, and in both, she had placed fourth. how many eighth graders take an unwieldy instrument like that and play it at the caliber of little violin and piano prodigies?
and how many parents spend their time threatening to run their child’s instrument over with the family car?
small wonder that monica burned out at age fifteen to a resounding “I told you so” from mike, hooked up with phil immediately, and began a full-time career as a druggie.

and small wonder that she was now on probation for assault and battery on mike, having tired of years of low-grade physical abuse and degradation from him.

she never forgot that saturday when she was just a small child, when mike was alone with her and her younger sisters, the day he tossed her about by the hair just for playing barbie dolls with annie while he was hungover. he bellowed and slapped and grunted, while monica, surprised and outraged, told him that he was full of shit, that he was unfair and unjust, that he was a bully who told his children to do one thing while he did another. while annie, just a tyke, screamed that they were only playing barbie dolls, they weren’t bad, they weren’t fighting, don’t hurt monica, stop it daddy.
“someday, when you are big enough to beat me up back, I will stop this.”
that’s what he said. and monica promised silently to hold him to that, which perhaps he thought would never happen. little monica knew that he thought girls were weaker. little monica knew she would make him pay the piper someday. she would make him stop. he wouldn’t get away with this shit, because she wouldn’t let him, just as she never let him touch her younger sisters. and that’s what happened.
he crossed the line one day after monica had been hefting huge cartons of frozen meat for a few months, and she told him that he’d better stop, if he didn’t want his ass kicked. michael wilson laughed, told her to go for it, give it a try, go on, hit him.
last time she had tried to fend him off, she couldn’t. but this time was different.
this time, she pounded on him so that he couldn’t fend her off. he was winded, surprised, knocked off balance. monica figured she had made her point, so she laid off on him.
of course, once she stopped and turned around, he tackled her and held her to the floor by the neck, made poor little lillian call 911 at a neighbor’s house, because monica had torn the phone out of the wall when she figured out the chickenshit thing he planned to do. mike was a sore loser, she always had suspected as much. he hated being proven wrong, and he had just been forced to respect his own daughter.
which he did, after eye surgery.
other people did, too. whenever he came to the juvie lockup or the mental hospital to visit monica, after not paying her $25 bail, somebody always said, “that’s the worst black eye I’ve ever seen!” then later, to monica, “you did that? wow.”monica would just smile shyly, look at the ground. she never wanted to seem like she was bragging.