Thirty Valentines with Jennifer
We met in December, started dating in February, got engaged in March, and married in September. Nobody thought it would work.
My best friends were always girls. Once, in ninth grade, standing in Eric Palmer’s garage with a few other guys — all of whom had already had amazing success in the pursuit of the other sex — Eric singled me out.
“You watch,” he said. “Greg’s the one who’ll end up with a hot wife because he’s the only one of us who knows how to really talk to girls.”
At the time, I suppose, it was true.
In gym class, while the other pimply faced boys ran into each other on the basketball court, I sat in the bleachers hanging out with Susan, Carrie, and Beth, three of the cutest girls in the class. Walking out of the boy’s locker room after class one day, a muscular and brick-like kid named Charles slapped a toothpick out of my mouth for no apparent reason. He hit me so hard the sting brought tears to my eyes. I later saw Charles dribbling towards the goal, glaring at me as Susan, Carrie, and Beth laughed about some stupid thing I just said.
There were probably ten other girls I could name from that time who all enjoyed my company, who I talked to on the phone at all hours, who sat with me at lunch. But then on Friday nights after football games they’d end up making out with muscular guys like Charles in the school cafeteria’s makeshift dance hall or in the cramped backseats of cars before curfew.
It was years later before I had my first long-term girlfriend. I’d just turned nineteen, and that didn’t even last a year. It was another three years before my next ongoing relationship, and that one should have ended before it began. Instead, I endured nearly seventeen months of having my poetry mocked, of being ridiculed for life decisions, of her trying to dress me in clothes she wished I could afford on my own, and of interrogations about my intentions, even when they were as benign as simply wanting to buy an occasional comic book.
It was in the midst of that particular relationship, not so much disintegrating as naturally imploding upon itself after my girlfriend cheated on me with a married co-worker, that I met Jennifer Alvarez.
Undoubtably, it was the worst time to meet someone. I’d seen enough movies to know that you should never count on rebound relationships to work. Fortunately, though — and I say this with complete and total honesty — I wasn’t looking for a rebound. In fact, the first time I saw her, I had zero interest whatsoever in Jennifer Alvarez.
Besides, I was completely broke at the time, having recently and regrettably moved back to Georgia and into my parents’ house after more than four years on my own. I had lived solo in my own apartment for a couple of years in Ohio, sojourned to Northern California via Greyhound Bus where I struggled to get by for five months, moved back to the Cincinnati area where I worked as a live-in health care provider for a quadriplegic college professor for the next two years while I attended classes, and finally decided to return south to my home state of Georgia after my girlfriend got transferred to Atlanta for her job. It was shortly after arriving that her eye began to wander. By the time I first laid eyes on Jennifer, the ongoing break-up with my girlfriend was now in its fifth week, though neither of us had the courage yet to just put the relationship out of its misery.
Making matters worse, earlier on the same day I first saw Jennifer, I could be found walking barefoot through cold December mud, wearing a Civil War uniform two sizes too small, trying to earn a measly fifty bucks for a twelve hour shift as an unknown background extra on a television mini-series called Andersonville. Freezing and depressed, I left the set before they even called lunch. Arriving home, I immediately passed out in the dark of my parents’ guest room. Waking a few hours later, my first hazy thought was of a flyer I’d seen above an ATM at Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta advertising open auditions for an upcoming play: Prelude to a Kiss.
Despite my failed attempt at being a background extra earlier that day, and other than a bit part in a seventh grade production years before, I had no acting experience at all. Yet without thinking, I sat up, pulled on my pants and laced up my shoes and was suddenly driving towards downtown Atlanta without really understanding why.
Inside the theater, the hallway was crowded with actors who, from the black and white headshots they all seemed to carry, were vastly more qualified to be there than me. As I’d done earlier in the day at the movie shoot, I considered a potential escape. Meanwhile, I busily worked at blending invisibly into the beige walls until the line suddenly moved and I was greeted by two smiling stage managers, Reggie and Anne, who handed me an application and a pen.
“What role are you auditioning for?” Anne asked me.
“I have no idea.”
“Well, here are the lines for the male roles,” I was told. “Read through them and we’ll call you shortly.”
Stepping back into the packed hall, I noticed Jennifer almost immediately with her dark hunter green blazer with a thin blue checkered pinstripe, her long black skirt and heels, between which the slightest bit of ankle and calf peered out. Her makeup was thick and highlighted with shiny red lipstick. I assumed by her outfit that she, like my ex-in-progress, was several years older than me, already out of college and working full-time. The most significant difference between Jennifer and my ex-in-progress was the color of her hair. Jennifer’s was jet black, the polar opposite of the yellowish blonde hair of the woman who’d so recently broken my heart, but had not yet left my life.
Jennifer and I didn’t speak that first night, but to my surprise I got a call that same evening.
“Congratulations,” a voice said. It was Reggie, one of the stage managers from the audition. “You got a callback!”
“What’s a callback?” I asked.
That right there is a fairly good illustration of why I had no business auditioning for the play.
The next night I was paired with multiple actresses and, being such a theatrical neophyte, had no clue that I was being seriously considered for the lead role. As the night’s auditions continued and the lines became more comfortable, instead of thinking I was getting closer to casting, I assumed I was just being weeded out of the running. As a result, my line readings became overly casual and relaxed. Near the end of the evening, Jennifer and I were paired together several times and read through lines on stage in front of the director. At one point I laughed through my lines as I recited my sections for the umpteenth time, causing Jennifer to break character.
“Are you okay?” she asked, confused by my laughter.
“I’m just…” I said, then paused. “Acting?”
Apparently my acting, which perplexed Jennifer, was so convincing that it fooled the director and everyone else. We were both cast in the lead roles, along with a third lead played by another student named Chad who would play a different type of role in our lives for several years to come.
The cast got together once before Christmas for introductions and an initial read through, then on our own Jennifer and I met at her parents’ house a couple more times over the holidays to run through our lines. Once we returned for classes in January, our time together naturally accelerated.
Because of my particular role in the play, my attendance was required at every rehearsal. It wasn’t until a week or two in before Jennifer had a near-daily call time, as well. As a theater troupe, after rehearsals on Friday nights we’d fill the backroom of Manny’s Tavern, laughing uproariously and making too much noise. I was surprised to find myself suddenly surrounded by friends, and what felt like good friends at that. Despite being some random stranger who’d not only infiltrated their tight-knit theater company but managed to snag the lead role, there was little hesitation that I could ever perceive in accepting me as one of their own. It had been many years since I felt that level of companionship.
Jennifer arrived at the tavern one night and was surprised to see me sitting next to Chad as we both smoked cigarettes.
“You smoke?” she asked surprised. We’d already shared several stage kisses by this point, so I guess I assumed she knew. Still, I saw her disappointment and something registered inside.
During breaks between classes throughout the week, we’d meet for coffee or catch a movie at the Cinefest theater on campus. We’d run lines, go to rehearsals, and then one night when I arrived back to my parents’ house at almost eleven o’clock, the phone rang in the kitchen. I snagged the receiver as fast as I could before the ringing woke my parents.
It was Jennifer, and she wanted to talk, not about anything in particular, but just to continue whatever conversation we’d been having earlier in the evening. I laid flat on the kitchen floor, tethered by the cable that led to the phone mount on the wall, and listened to Jennifer tell me about a guy she was chasing after, and a student film she was working on, and about another guy she’d dated for awhile who ended up cheating on her. That led, naturally, to me sharing my own romantic woes, of knowing the relationship with my girlfriend was over, but it was easier to just see it through to the end than it was to imagine having to start dating again. It was easy conversation, like the ones I’d had with all those girls years before in high school.
My father came into the kitchen at that point and startled me. It was now well past midnight.
“Isn’t it late to be on the phone?” he barked, staring down at me on the floor.
“I better go,” I said into the receiver.
“Call me back if you can,” Jennifer answered.
On another outing to Manny’s I spotted a Ms. Pac-Man machine by the restrooms and dropped a quarter into the slot. One of my favorite games from childhood, it had been years since I last played a game, and I surprised myself by quickly racking up the high score. Suddenly, Jennifer was standing next to me at the game.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she said.
“You did?” I asked. “How so?”
“I just had a feeling,” she said.
I tried to focus on the game, but something about the fact Jennifer just knew I’d be playing Ms. Pac-Man made me feel seen in a way I’m not sure I’d ever felt before. It was a stupid thing, but I’ve always remembered how it felt. My ex-in-progress often acted embarrassed at the things I was drawn to, like video games. Instead, Jennifer was drawn to me while I was playing a video game. We’d only known each other a few weeks, but somehow she knew that’s where I’d be, and she sought me out and found me.
A few days later I was on the phone again, but this time it was the payphone in the hallway of the university’s theater building. I leaned against the silver box with the receiver pressed against my ear and a hand covering my face when I heard voices coming down the hall. Looking up, it was Jennifer and several of the other actresses from the play. I waved as they passed.
“Who’s Greg talking to?” one of them asked.
“From the look on his face,” Jennifer answered, “it’s either his dad or his girlfriend.”
It was, indeed, my girlfriend. And that was the call where now — after more than two months of trying to resuscitate a long dead relationship — I instead finally ended it for good.
But still, any romantic interest in Jennifer was nonexistent.
In fact, one afternoon, a few hours before rehearsal, I was hanging out in the theater office with Reggie and another actor named Tom who played my best friend in the play. For no reason other than boredom, I set about cleaning the office, spraying Windex on the mirrored walls, and straightening stacks of paper. Jennifer wanted to speed-run lines, not acting, but just testing our memorization of the script. I half-heartedly agreed and began reciting lines while still scurrying around the office with a spray bottle in hand. She found my cleaning distracting. In fact, she got so angry she left the office in a huff. A few minutes later the office phone rang. It was Jennifer, calling from a payphone on the other side of the campus, and she wanted to talk to me.
“I didn’t appreciate how you weren’t taking our speed-run seriously,” she said. I immediately went defensive.
“We weren’t having a rehearsal,” I pushed back. “We’ll go over lines tonight.”
“Well, this is serious,” she insisted.
“I’m not saying it’s not. But like I said, it wasn’t a rehearsal. So I don’t know what to say.”
We both hung up annoyed and flustered. Tom and Reggie sat in their chairs, broad smiles across their faces.
“What?”
”Y’all are like a married couple,” Reggie said.
“Never in a million years,” I emphatically swore, “would I ever date Jennifer Alvarez. Never.”
And I meant it.
As opening night rapidly approached, that incident in the office was mostly forgotten. There were more late nights at Manny’s after Friday rehearsals, more games on the Ms. Pac-Man machine, more hangouts with the group, more late night phone calls and listening to her stories after she’d listened to mine. On stage, there were three moments our characters kissed during the play. But kissing on stage was always behind a mask of makeup. It was like kissing cardboard.
But still, it was kissing.
A few weeks before the auditions, I happened to have my guitar with me when I discovered Java Jakes, a little hole-in-the-wall coffee joint to the west of the university, across the street from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The place was managed by a short and kind little Filipino woman named Tammy who had a smile that took up her whole face. Tammy took notice of my guitar case.
“Play a few songs and I’ll give you your latte free,” she said.
“Seriously?”
“You can sit in the corner over there.” She took an empty plastic cup, wrote ‘TIPS’ on it with a thick black marker, and handed it to me.
I’ve never been the greatest singer, but I’m a decent faker. I set up in the corner by the front window and my eyebrows raised when people started dropping dollar bills into the cup. Just about every day after that, I brought my guitar with me and often left it at Java Jakes as I headed to class.
Once rehearsals began, a stream of aspiring actors began joining me at Java Jakes, often taking up several tables in the cramped space.
Now we were just days from opening night and Jennifer joined me for coffee, along with another girl named Karin who I could never tell whether she was flirting with me or just overly friendly with everyone. Tammy handed me my guitar case from behind the counter and I propped myself up on a high-top chair in the front corner by the window looking out on Marietta Street as Jennifer and Karin occupied a nearby table.
I learned later — from Jennifer — that Karin confirmed my suspicions.
“I just want to get Greg in a corner and maul him,” was allegedly what Karin said.
After Karin’s bold proclamation, Jennifer apparently saw me in a new light. But still, neither of us quite realized any of what was happening right before our eyes.
A couple of nights before the premiere, Jennifer and I both felt more pressure than ever before. Tech weekend — several days of intense rehearsals, lighting fails, last minute set changes, non-stop camaraderie, and countless realizations that the show was nowhere ready for public consumption — had finally come to a close. We were exhausted before the show even began.
“I don’t want to go out with the group tonight,” Jennifer whispered backstage two nights before opening. “Let’s just get coffee somewhere.”
Even now, I don’t think she realized she was asking me out on a date, and I didn’t think she was doing so, either. By then, cups of coffee with Jennifer had already become a comfortable routine.
Java Jakes being closed at night, I instead followed Jennifer’s baby blue Honda Civic down the side streets of downtown Atlanta known only to locals. We made our way to Cafe Diem, a quaint bistro in Virginia Highlands, with its plain white-painted cinderblock façade outlined with white garden lights. Inside, tables were pushed close together in the narrow room as friendly waitresses with their hair pulled into messy ponytails bounced between tables like in a pinball machine. Jennifer ordered hummus and we both got lattes delivered in massive mugs balanced upon mismatched saucers.
Conversation flowed as smooth as the coffee, natural and endless. Pauses were breaths, and nothing more. Silences melded with the music pumped out from speakers hidden behind draping tapestries on the walls.
The previous year — moving back to Georgia, the confusion of the breakup that now seemed years, and not just weeks, in the past, living in my parents’ home once again, my borderline poverty for living on little more than Java Jakes tips — was relegated to absentia.
“Have you ever been to the Jimmy Carter Center?” Jennifer asked. The night had grown long but neither of us was ready to go home.
I stopped in the restroom before we left. Washing my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror.
“Here we go,” I said to my reflection.
Outside, the February night air was damp and chilled, yet not exactly cold. I had the sense of moving through water, gently and slow.
Again, I followed Jennifer’s car as we drove through Little Five Points and turned onto a road leading to a small parking lot in front of a darkened building. There, as we walked along a fountain illuminated by garden lights, our conversation turned into a dance.
“Truth or dare,” Jennifer posited.
I always chose dare.
“Kiss me,” she said, and I did.
I recently read a quote from the author Oliver Burkeman who wrote, “…actually doing one meaningful thing today…requires surrendering a sense of control.”
There was no stage makeup between us that night, no lights blazing down hot and blinding, no audience to critique our blocking or delivery, and certainly no control. Neither of us planned this moment, but it was the most meaningful moment of our lives up to that point. This was the moment that framed every moment that would follow for the rest of our lives.
I awoke the next morning in my parents’ guest room and immediately thought of the night before.
Was it real? Had it actually happened?
Lying in bed, I thought of past first kisses from other girls over the previous years, kisses at parties and after awkward first dates, first kisses that often ended up being not just first, but singular kisses. Was kissing Jennifer the night before just another meaningless moment among many? It was hard to believe that could be the case.
There was a meeting at the theater scheduled for that morning at ten, and I took the long way to the university. I stopped first at a grocery store where I picked out a Valentine’s Day card and purchased a single red rose, not because of some grand significance but because that’s honestly all I could afford. I emptied out my wallet.
In my car I looked at the card again and doubted my choice.
“Valentine, I’ve had it with you,” the outside read. A cartoon dog held a red heart in his paws. Opening the card was the punchline: “Can I have it again?”
I shook my head — I hope I don’t regret this — and scribbled my first “To Jennifer” inside. I then signed my name, tucked both the card and the rose safely inside my guitar case, and continued downtown.
During the meeting Jennifer and I sat next to each other, neither mentioning the night before. I wanted to hold her hand, but thought that surely she’d made an unintentional mistake in the darkness of the Jimmy Carter Center. The play was opening in two nights. This was not the time for romantic complications.
Nevertheless, in the hallway afterward, I revealed the card and rose and was delighted when Jennifer’s face lit up.
That night, after running through the show once more, we again evaded the rest of the troupe as they headed to Manny’s. Instead, we found our way back to the parking lot of the Jimmy Carter Center. This time, we kissed without any games, eagerly, until a security guard suddenly tapped on the driver’s side window.
“Y’all need to move along,” he said, and in a way, we did.
As I write this, that was thirty years ago this morning, just after midnight. We started at Cafe Diem and ended on Valentine’s Day.
By the time the show opened two nights later, I realized I’d fallen helplessly in love with Jennifer Alvarez, the young woman I swore I’d never date.
In the weeks after the show closed we’d meet halfway between our homes at a Waffle House later in the evenings after she got off work. As usual, despite the late hours, we’d order coffee and I’d stuff napkins in my pockets that I’d later use to write love notes to her.
Two weeks after our first kiss — at least our first kiss when no one was watching — we were at a theater conference in Virginia Beach, out dancing in a club with our group of friends. In the middle of a song so loud that we could barely hear ourselves, I leaned into Jennifer and spontaneously yelled a proposal.
“So are you going to marry me or what?”
When people react to the brevity of our courtship and engagement, I’m reminded of how most of our theater friends shared that same disbelief.
“They’re just living out the play,” I heard more than once.
“It won’t last.”
“It’s a mistake.”
One of my favorite lines from the movie Say Anything occurs at the very end. John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobbler character holds hands with Ione Skye’s Diane Court. They, too, have had a whirlwind romance. They’re on a plane preparing for takeoff and Diane is terrified. Lloyd comforts her by stating the obvious happening around them:
“Wing adjustments,” he says, and Diane takes a breath and closes her eyes.
“It could be a roller coaster,” he tells her. “Everybody likes roller coasters, right?”
She nods.
As they take off, Lloyd continues talking to distract her from her fear, and then kisses her.
Diane turns and leans into Lloyd.
“Nobody thought we’d do this,” she says. “Nobody really thinks it will work, do they?”
“No,” Lloyd answers. “You just described every great success story.”
The camera then focuses on a lit sign above them.
“No Smoking,” it says. “Fasten Seat Belts.”
On the way home from that theater conference, the day after I hastily suggested marriage in the middle of a dance floor, we stopped at the welcome center on the border of North Carolina and Georgia. I stood outside the restrooms smoking cigarettes with Chad and Lawrence, another theater friend. I looked at my watch at 5:05 PM and tossed my cigarette butt to the ground, stamping it out with my foot. I thought about Jennifer’s face from just a few weeks before, and the look she made when she saw me smoking that night she arrived at Manny’s. Now it was March 5, 1995, and that was the last cigarette (or any tobacco for that matter) I’ve ever had.
I often tell people Jennifer and I met in December, started dating in February, got engaged in March, and married in September.
I’d quit smoking, and our seatbelts were fastened. Nobody thought it would work, yet here we are thirty years later.
A little over two years into our marriage, we welcomed our first son, then three more boys every two years. We then went through several miscarriages before our daughter was born, and then suffered two more miscarriages after that. We now say we have ten children: five on earth and five in heaven. Together, we’ve walked through my endless career changes, moved our family across the country multiple times and have found ourselves back in Georgia for the last six years. Together, we’ve hosted thousands of hours of radio and podcasts, and yet our conversations are often still like a dance, fluctuating between endless streams of words and comfortable silences. And we still drink lots of coffee.
Two of our sons are married now, so we have two daughters-in-law, as well. In June of this year, our first granddaughter is due. What started with a spontaneous audition has led to a family of fifteen. Our children in heaven, our children here on earth. Our lovely daughters-in-law, and a baby whose face we can’t wait to see.
Another one of my favorite lines from Say Anything happens when Lloyd explains his career plans to Diane’s father.
“I can’t figure it all out tonight, sir,” he says. “So I’m just going to hang with your daughter.”
For thirty years now, our lives together have been regularly unpredictable. I can’t often figure out what I’m doing from one day to the next. I rarely feel in control of what occurs in our lives. But one thing I can say for certain that I’m good at is hanging with Jennifer Alvarez, who for more than half of her life has now been called Jennifer Willits.
Thirty years. And nobody thought we’d do it.
And nothing could be more meaningful.
Can't wait for the full memoir!
You made me cry. ‘Nough said.