Chapter 2

Ava had decisions of her own to make and challenges to deal with quite apart from supporting me emotionally, and I did need her support, oh my I did.

She had also turned eighteen in the past couple of months, and living with foster parents, she was about to be out amongst them as they say. The Gordons, the family she’d been living with since being abandoned as a six year-year-old child were not exactly shooing her out, but they were about to lose state support and so the handwriting was on the wall. Ava needed to get a job and find her own way as an adult and that as soon as possible. That said, she was about to get lucky.

A month and a half had passed since the funerals. Ava and I were sitting on ‘my’ patio drinking tea; she’d brewed it. She was looking down and clearly wanted to tell me something.

“Ava?” I said.

“I have to move out by the end of the month,” she said.

“From the Gordon’s?” I said. She snickered, but it was a case of sardonic snickering.

“Of course,” she said. “I have gotten a job though, just yesterday in fact. I’m going to be a grocery checker. Pays okay, but it’s going to be tough until I can get enough together to get my own place. The Gordons said that they’d loan me the money to get into a place, but I know that they don’t have much to get on with, and they’ve been good to me and all, but...”

“Look, Ava, you can stay here if you want. I promise to keep my hands to myself. Well, I mean I am a gentleman,” I said. She gave me a questioning look.

“Julian, that would be wonderful. But I mean would Blake be okay with something like that?” she said.

“I’ll worry about Blake. You can move in right away. You’ll actually have his old room,” I said.

Blake did turn out to be good with the deal. Well, there had been no doubt in my mind that he would be. He wanted me to be happy I guess would be the way to say it.

At any rate, Ava moving in with me made life wonderful, well, for me. We had no rent to pay; Blake had paid the house off a few years before for the folks. But Ava and I would still have everything else to take care of: utilities, phones, food, medical stuff, the car’s gas and insurance; Blake would be covering me until I was employed, so I didn’t have to worry overmuch about things for the moment. And I was certain that I’d be working soon enough.

I did have my dad’s Fairlane which was free and clear; so, otherwise things were okay. Still, to be clear; Ava’s moving in with me was not wonderful because of the sex; there was no sex, and there wouldn’t be for a long time, a very long time; it was the deal we had made with each other at the beginning. We were smart enough to know we were too young to play that game.

Over the next months, she cooked and went to work during the daytime; and I continued working around the house and looking for a job for myself, well, most days. And yes, we had become boyfriend and girlfriend, sort of. And no, again, we didn’t do the deed; we were kind of afraid to, being as young and totally inexperienced as was in fact the case.

By summer’s end, August ‘68, I got lucky and got myself hired on at Westside Rock and Sand; I would be a driver; well a trainee to be a driver initially, but a full-fledged teamster soon enough.

With us both working and Blake keeping an eye on the two of us: he did have dinner at the house with us most Sunday evenings, and was at pains to compliment Ava’s cooking every time. And then things started to change. The biggest change? Ava began losing weight.

I’d discovered, after she’d moved in, that my girlfriend actually weighed in right at 185 pounds. At her five-seven stature, she was indeed arguably overweight. She had made me a promise that she was going to lose the extra pounds anyway she could. I’d laughed and told her she was fine as far as I was concerned. But she’d pooh-poohed me brushing me off.

Still, by January of 1970, a year and a half after moving in with me, she was down to maybe 120; I’d had to admit she’d succeeded beyond my expectations, or hers either I was sure. She’d lost sixty-five pounds. And she was gorgeous! Her backside was traffic endangering. Her B-cups likewise. Her long dark hair was beautiful. And her eyes were big and dark and flashing. Blake opined that she was looking like her namesake, the beautiful Ava Gardner of movie fame; I agreed with him. He laughed when I told him he could eat his heart out.

“What I didn’t know at the time was that Ava had had help losing the weight. Ava had an acquaintance she’d met at the grocery store, name of Dante Rodriguez. Dante, I would later learn, was an illegal druggist, a pimp, and a wannabe human trafficker of girls. Dante was helping my Ava lose weight by means of seriously bad stuff, cocaine. She’d been paying for the stuff with her body, which was something else I would eventually learn.

Having Blake to back us up made life less stressful than might have been, but nevertheless, we did have a bevy of responsibilities as noted and we dealt with them and that successfully. One thing that both Ava and I wondered at was why, with his looks and money, Blake didn’t date, and he didn’t. And, any time I brought up the subject he brushed me off. He just said the time wasn’t right and let it go at that.

At any rate Ava’s job at Ninth Street Grocers and mine at Westside Rock and Sand had us in a good place. I would never be the kind of money man my brother was, but I didn’t need to be. He had, as a matter of fact, offered to take me under his wing and make me rich; but I saw how pressed he always was for time and how he always seemed to be trying, almost desperately, to make his next dollar. I wanted something more, well different, for me. But then there was the other thing.