THE FIRST TRUE LOVE OF EDDIE CALLAHAN | Fiction by Jen Conley

It was 1993, and Eddie Callahan, twenty-four years old, had three problems: He was in love with a married woman, he was going bald, and he drank too much.

The guys in the kitchen of the Sunset Diner, where Eddie worked, thought these things were a hoot. Old Joe, who wasn’t that old, was forty-seven, but he did fifteen years in Rahway State Prison and knew the ways of the world. He warned Eddie that he would regret his romance. Kenny, nineteen, not brilliant but blessed with a beautiful head of hair, claimed that Eddie’s karma was off, and that’s why he was going bald. And their boss, Marco, a Grade-A asshole, threatened to fire Eddie if he came in drunk or hungover one more time.

Renee, the married woman, Eddie’s big love, the best love, the woman who taught him how to do many things, who showed him what a woman needed, who made him feel like a man is supposed to feel, didn’t care about his hair loss. Maybe because her husband was a redhead, she was familiar with uncommon situations. She also didn’t know Eddie drank as much as he did, but he hid it well from her at the time. Hid it so well that he didn’t even think he had a Problem with Alcohol anymore. Her love was that powerful.

It was his father and stepmother (more his stepmother) who had complained about Eddie and his drinking problem, a problem he’d had since he was fifteen. No, thirteen. He wasn’t permitted to come around the house because Eddie’s father had kicked him out three years earlier, not out of cruelty, but out of tough love. “Son, we can’t have you in this shape every weekend, every other weekday night,” Mr. Callahan said, his voice shaking, so unsure. Despite his wife’s counsel, Mr. Callahan often checked on his son, showing up unannounced at Eddie’s decrepit Seaside Heights apartment near the cold Atlantic Ocean. Eddie, sober or not, would always let his dad in. Mr. Callahan, completely bald since he was twenty-six but had a good sense of humor about it, would walk through the door, handing Eddie an envelope with cash to help pay the rent, bills, and food. He’d then plop on the old blue couch and mock the landlord’s bad paintings of the Atlantic Ocean that hung on the baby blue walls. “It’s like walking into a doctor’s office here,” Mr. Callahan would say, and Eddie would laugh. Eddie loved his dad so much that his heart would ache whenever he drove away.

So, there was Renee, with her wild, long, curly blonde hair, dark eyes, and perfect teeth. They’d met at the Bamboo on St. Patrick’s Day, she with her girlfriends because her husband was working a night shift. Eddie, with a few friends from his local bar. Inside the Bamboo, the mood was top-shelf jovial Jersey Shore festivity: hundreds of shamrocks hung from the low ceilings, the speakers blasted Irish and grunge and Top 40 music, and everyone was dressed in green, drinking big cups of beer. At one point, Eddie, worming his way through the thick crowd to the bar, heard a scream in his ear. “Stop! Stop!” A pretty woman’s blonde curly hair had gotten snagged in the zipper of his LL Bean jacket. (A jacket Mr. Callahan had given Eddie so he didn’t get sick from living near the cold Atlantic with its relentless winter winds.) Eddie untangled her blonde curls from his coat, and she smiled, and he bought her a beer. They were inseparable for the next few hours, Eddie nursing his beer so he could focus on Renee. (See, he didn’t really have an ALCOHOL PROBLEM!) By night’s end, they stood on Lincoln Avenue under the starry sky, breathing the salt from the sea in the cold March air. Renee laughed, and Eddie grinned at his good luck: her friends had left her, his decrepit apartment was two blocks away, and as long as Eddie got her home before five in the morning, before her husband came home from his shift, she’d stay the night.

And so it began, and trickery ensued for the next ten months to let love blossom. Sometimes, she’d come to his apartment, and sometimes, he’d sneak into her house through the back so the neighbors wouldn’t see. Sometimes, they met during the day and sometimes at night, depending on her husband’s work schedule. Eddie was so filled with joy and pride to have his first real serious girlfriend! (Even if she was married). Old Joe in the kitchen warned Eddie that this relationship was risky and doomed. “How big is the husband? Because you may be tall, you may look pathetically cute to women in your age bracket, but you’re skinny and lacking basic vitamins.”

“We got it under control,” Eddie said, sipping his Pepsi secretly spiked with cheap vodka.

Joe flipped a cheeseburger. “No, dumbass, you don’t have it under control.” 

“No, you don’t, no, you don’t,” Kenny echoed, his beautiful dark hair gleaming under the fluorescent, greasy light. “Nope, nope, nope.”

#            

Ten months after they’d met, the affair was still going strong. On a bright January day, a rare sixty degrees, a respite from the grim, south Jersey winter, while the birds chirped and sang like sirens from a Greek myth, Eddie parked his old car at a dead end in Renee’s quiet blue-collar neighborhood. He got out, walked through a trail that went through a patch of woods, climbed over the chain-link fence, and strutted through her backyard like a king. He made his way around the covered inground pool, up the wooden steps of the deck that Renee’s husband had built the summer before. The sliding back door was unlocked, and when he stepped into the house, it smelled like flowers and shampoo—Renee always smelled like flowers and shampoo. He strolled through the white and lavender living room, passing the 24 x 30 wedding photo of Renee and her redheaded husband that hung over the couch. He walked down the hall, passing an engagement photo of Renee and her husband. Then, another of Renee and her husband in Jamaica. “One day we’re gonna replace those pictures with you and me,” she’d told Eddie a few weeks earlier. “You and me, forever.” Renee was usually all business with Eddie, getting right to the physical part, and then she liked to talk about how she needed to escape the Biggest Mistake of her Life. She also talked about her dreams of owning her own business—she usually flipped back and forth about what type of business to run—a high-end bakery, a high-end coffee shop, or a high-end Italian Bistro. The trouble was, she said, that nobody had any class in this county. “It’s all fast food and strip malls.” And that truth would shift her into the negative. She’d accuse Eddie of liking the waitresses at his job. “I’ve been to that diner. I’m sure you’re tempted.” And Eddie would smile. “I am.” And she’d kick him, and he’d kiss her.

That afternoon, he found her in the guest room, because they never had sex in her marital bed—not because it was wrong but because she was afraid her husband would smell her lover. “You sometimes still stink of diner food, baby.”  

So there they were, in the post afterglow, Eddie sitting on the edge of the bed, tying his shoelaces, buttoning his jeans, his back bare to her when a school bus lumbered along the street outside, followed by the distant echo of a truck door slam.

Renee gasped. “He’s home. Shit.”

Eddie snapped around. “I thought he was working.”

“He must know,” she whispered, immediately finding her shirt underneath the sheets. Eddie heard footsteps from outside. Renee found her bra and told Eddie to get out. “He’ll kill you.”

For a moment, Eddie had a brief fantasy that Renee’s husband wouldn’t kill him, but he’d finally find out, and ask for a divorce, and Eddie could move in.

Renee hissed at him again. “Get out, now!”

“Why?” he said.

Renee hooked her bra. “Are you stupid?”

Eddie’s stomach coiled. She didn’t want a divorce, did she?

The front door rattled, keys chiming like little bells. They heard the door swing open, and then the heavy footsteps inside.

“Get out,” she hissed again, tugging her shirt over her head.

“You home?” her husband called.

“Go, Eddie, now!”

Eddie grabbed his shirt and raced out of the bedroom and down the hall, catching a glimpse of a very thick man whose face was pink.

“Who the fuck?” the man shouted.

Eddie, who had always been quick and with his long, skinny legs, swerved left into the living room, leaped over the coffee table, yanked open the sliding glass door, raced across the deck, down the steps, around the pool, heading for the chain link fence. But Renee’s husband, although big, was also quick—must’ve been a linebacker in high school. He caught Eddie and ripped him down from the fence, and they both fell back against the ground. Eddie hopped up, let go of his shirt, wheeled around the man, and dashed around the pool, heading for the front chain-link fence gate. No time to open it. He jumped forward, got one foot high into a diamond-shaped space of the fence, gripped the top bar, swung his bony body over to the other side. He landed hard on his ankle, tripped, and rolled onto the ground. He heard the gate open, glanced back, seeing the furious pink face and bright orange hair. Eddie bolted up and ran to the front, but the man was behind him. Renee’s husband definitely was once a linebacker because his speed was remarkable, and his power was stunning—the tackle took Eddie down, knocked the wind out of his chest, and planted his face onto the hard, cold ground of dead winter grass. Then the man jerked Eddie over, crouched down, and punched him in the face. The shock was hot, the pain fierce, and Eddie’s nose began to run. Eddie tried to fight back, but he was too weak, too weak because since he was thirteen, when he preferred alcohol to food. Old Joe was right—Eddie was lacking basic vitamins.

Eddie covered his face and begged the man to stop.

The man had no empathy, only rage. He punched Eddie again, and again, but then it stopped—someone yelled and pulled Renee’s husband away. Eddie rolled over, pressing his face into the cold earth again to stop the pain. He heard people shouting. Or cheering. But more hits came again, this time from a foot as the man kicked Eddie in his side, causing him to shout out, and then another kick in his right arm and his leg—until it stopped once again. When Eddie rolled over and peered up, he saw a mailman and a big teenage boy pulling Renee’s husband back. Eddie had no idea where they came from. Somewhere, Renee was screaming, and kids were cheering. Eddie tried to move, but he was in too much pain, so he lay there, trying to hear the birds he’d heard earlier.

#

In the end, Renee and her husband walked into the house as man and wife. The mailman helped Eddie into his mail truck to give him a ride back to his car, while the kids laughed and mocked poor Eddie, who could barely walk. Finally, after being dropped at his car, it took all of Eddie’s strength to get his keys out of his jeans and turn the ignition, but he did it and got out of there.

Eddie spent the next two days nursing his wounds, using ice and aspirin. The liquor store clerk got a kick out of his black eye and the way Eddie shuffled painfully up to the counter holding a twelve-pack of Keystone Light and a jug of cheap vodka.

On the third day, Eddie had to go to work, and as usual, dressed in his white and black checkered pants and white shirt, he headed for the front doors of the diner. But Marco had seen Eddie coming, had seen Eddie limping through the parking lot, had seen Eddie’s disfigured face, and had shouted at him to go through the back near the Dumpster. “I can’t have my customers seeing a cook looking like you do!”

Old Joe shook his head when he saw Eddie and Kenny, snickered, and began singing that OPP song.

Renee never called, wrote a letter, or sneaked into the diner to see how he was doing. Only Mr. Callahan came by, and Eddie knew his father would understand. He might even take him to the doctor and pay cash because Eddie had no health insurance. But Eddie didn’t answer the door when his dad came by for one of his random visits. He just opened another beer and looked out the window, where he could glimpse the cold blue Atlantic Ocean. The truth was, his arm hurt like hell, his side was in pain, his head still ached, and his face was half purple, but none of this hurt as severely as his heart. After all, if Renee showed up at his door, begging Eddie to take her back, he’d let her in. And if that redheaded beast came by to beat him again, he’d take it. He’d take all for her.

#

Every so often, after a meeting, when they’re at the diner for breakfast or a pizza parlor for a late dinner, while new guys sit nervously, some ashamed, some worried, Eddie Callahan tells the story of his first real girlfriend to make them laugh, to help them feel normal. He conveys the Story of Renee like all former alcoholics and addicts and old rock stars regale their Tales of Stupidity and Desperation Before I Got Sober: part cautionary tale, part self-effacing confession, part pathos, and always with a heavy pour of top-shelf distilled wit and humility.

Eddie, in his fifties now, is a different man: he is part-mentor, part-friend, and part-confidant with the people at the meetings. Although his dad died of cancer seven years ago, Eddie has a job, a good wife, a cool step-kid now in grad school, a cat, a house, and a community of souls in recovery that love him so much, he’s almost a local celebrity. Eddie isn’t shy or monosyllabic anymore, one of the surprises of being sober. It was as if he’d bloomed into a completely different human as he went through his Twelve Steps. But each time he tells the Story of Renee, deep down, under all his thick skin, under all his dry humor, under all his delight at being well and alive, he still feels every moment of that ridiculous, wasted time of his life.

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