Romancing the Con, Part 2

by Gwen Cooper — May 30, 2007

In addition to his various prison sentences and five-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, Jason came saddled with one additional piece of baggage--an ex-girlfriend named Svetlana. Well, not quite "ex," as Jason explained on that first date of ours. Svetlana lived back in Pennsylvania, where Jason visited every weekend from NYC in order to see his daughter. Jason had been "trying" to break up with her for some time, but getting her to let go was proving difficult--and, as if to illustrate exactly how difficult it was, Svetlana called Jason's cell twice during our dinner.

It's astonishing to me, looking back on it all now, that I chose at this point to get even further involved. We had long-since passed from the "red flag" stage to the "screaming red ambulance sirens of impending doom" stage. All I can say in my own defense (again) is that I had some half-baked, romantic notion that Jason was a guy trying to change his life who needed someone to give him a break. He was doing his best to put a somewhat ugly past behind him, and it struck me that there was a certain nobility of spirit implied in this attempt.

Did I also mention that he was very, very good looking? Yeah. Anyway...

We quickly progressed from the dating phase of our relationship to full-fledged coupledom. As noted, Jason was gone most weekends, which was tough because--of course--the weekends are when you especially want your boyfriend around. But how could I complain about his spending time with his daughter?

It was about a month or so into things that my phone rang at 4:00am one Saturday night. Back in my South Beach days, I'd grown somewhat accustomed to late-night phone calls--friends calling with updates about hot after-hours parties, stumbling home drunk and wanting to talk about whatever adventures they'd had that night, and even the occasional "The cops raided the club; can you come pick me up?" request. But about two years had passed since then, and I was more than a little befuddled as I lurched across the room toward the phone, wondering who on earth it could possibly be.

It was Svetlana.

It didn't occur to me until later that the fact of her knowing my name--because, I presumed, she must have called Information to get my number--was in and of itself a fairly damning indictment of Jason. It meant that, despite his assurances to the contrary, the two of them were still talking, and they were talking about me. At the time, I was sleep-dazed enough that I could barely focus on the litany of profanities and vague threats spewing forth from the other end of the phone line. But I did have the presence of mind to do what any sane person would do in a situation like that, which is hang up the phone without comment.

When I woke up the following morning, my initial reaction was (aside from general annoyance) disappointment in Jason. I didn't think of it as something that would become an ongoing thing, where I'd constantly be plagued by these phone calls. At the time, my sole thought was that there's a certain kind of person who makes late-night phone calls to a complete stranger for the sake of issuing obscenity-laced threats over a guy. The kind of person who might, perhaps, feel most at home sitting on Jerry Springer's couch. And this was Jason's ex-girlfriend, a woman he'd been with for over two years, and who he'd allowed to spend significant time with his daughter.

It wasn't a thought I would have allowed myself to express clearly at the time, but I began to have an inkling that some people, perhaps, are fundamentally decent people who might be led into making the sort of youthful error that could, as a one-off, land them in jail. And then there are other people who are, by their nature, only suited to associate with...well, let's say the "Jerry Springer" crowd.

My friend Peter, a blessedly bitchy queen, expressed it more succinctly. "There are two kinds of people in life," he said. "Upstairs people and downstairs people. It sounds to me like this Jason may be downstairs people."

But Jason returned later that afternoon and was charming, sympathetic, and to all appearances appropriately outraged when I told him what had occurred. And, as the next couple of weeks passed without incident, I pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind.

Little did I know that, as the weeks went on, I would eventually look back on that particular weekend as one of the "salad days"...

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.