Valencia: My First Time/1988-1989

Mr. Valencia was one of my first history professors. He instructed my sister Moe and me in Mexican History. It’s not that he was tyrannical, he never was. He had this Cheshire attitude towards life, but more than that he was deliberately appealing. That plump face tainted with the slightest snowy beard. Assuming always too much, speaking rapidly, fervently, passionately about the past as well as the present. Standing above reproach, he wanted everyone including himself to believe. His confidence was in his bellowed laugh, his dress embroiled in his temperament. He wore tight clinging slacks that embraced his very round backside, every so often he brushed against the chalk board, revealing chalky marks sometimes thin, sometimes powdery, thick and layered. This sloppiness amused me to the point of seeing him as he really was; a sloppy creature. His dark eyes, spoke articulately, more so than his gestures. As he walked into class he never failed to take off his burgundy blazer. If he did he never failed to rub chalk on the tail of his coat. Black and gray hair formed a beachhead on the top most part of his shiny olive head. His tanned skin glowed brilliantly enough to overlook the fact that he was balding.

Flirtation was his specialty, smiling seductively as if to reduce all women to playthings for his mere enjoyment. When I asked him if I could turn in the first essay test on Friday instead of Wednesday he answered me in a condescendingly arrogant way.

“For you, I’ll let you turn it in on Friday.” He answered smiling erotically.

His seductive charms oozed across the room, hoping to pin every unsuspecting female, old and young alike. Like King Farouche, his young female students were his harem. I had never been so overwhelmed by blatant sexuality in all my life. Or was it me? I found myself constantly complaining about him, calling him arrogant, pompous balding pig scribbling all over my papers that he was a “jerk among jerks”, that he could never be reformed. Thinking what woman in her right mind would want him?

Yet, I admired his intelligence. I thoroughly enjoyed his lectures. It was a class I did not tire from boredom or want. Like an Oxford dictionary he spurted words that for the common man needed to be looked up. I must admit he sent me more than once to the dictionary. He was never at a loss for enthusiasm, like the main spark in a fire he had hypnotized me into his little world. Though I fought his appeal, I found myself deeply involved with his presence. When he rubbed his backside on the chalk board, I laughed condescendingly but secretly I found it appealing, chalky like a little boy who delighted in the privilege of writing on the chalkboard.

The other day he choked coughing and wheezing. Like most people who choke, he had a most difficult time re-gaining his breath. When his breath returned to normal one of his students asked him if he wanted a cough drop. He charmingly answered,

“No, but do you have a little bit of brandy?”

It was then that I had a hard time regaining my breath.

On Tuesday, I wondered if we could still turn in the test on Friday. And if it wasn’t something he had forgotten or would deny tomorrow once the tests were due. When we arrived at his office another student sat outside. His door was closed and I asked the student if he was even there. She said he was with someone, and said she was also waiting to see Valencia. During that time I asked her if he always said “In a very real way.” She answered yes. Unlike myself she was in his Sociology class. During the course of the hour he never failed to use the colorful phrase, “In a very real way.” No less than five or six times. Practically every sentence he uttered out of his mouth began, “In a very real way.” Yet, if he mentioned it only three times I missed the amusing little phrase. As we sat outside Mr. Valencia’s office we joked about his chauvinistic attitude his patronizing attitude towards women. Mr. Valencia’s blatant over friendliness. She happened to mention that he was unmarried, divorced or something. And I felt my heart race a little, as if there was the slightest bit of hope. Or at least that I could dream about him without coveting someone else’s husband. The office hour began to dwindle. So I jokingly remarked to knock and ask, with our eyes covered, “Is everybody decent?” A little while later, an attractive blonde student left his office and the next student walked in and shut the door. I knew I felt jealous. But what reason could I possibly have for being jealous? Yet, I was.

So, I made it a point to be rude to him, or at least unfriendly. The day I asked him in class about the tests, my sister Moe said I was hostile. It was deliberate. Why should I succumb to my fantasies of Mr. Valencia? It would be unproductive of me, and in the end hurt me because I could never have him, as I had been wounded by other crushes in the past. Because of this fact I tried with everything in me to fight my daydreams of him. I tried to dream of something or someone else at night. But how I wished he would press his body against mine and never leave. Especially since I believed all men were irrational donkeys. Yet, like a stupid child I dreamed of this conquistador. I was almost 23, and Valencia was 42.

The door opened and it was my turn to ask my very obvious question. She had left the door open since I had earlier complained of liking the door to be left open when I spoke with any male teacher. Standing halfway outside of the door I asked my repetitive question. I thought I would have to recapitulate it.

Mr. Valencia, sat with his feet up, leaning back on the office chair as if he wanted to conquer some unsuspecting virgin student. Who did he think he was, Fernando Cortes? He smirked casually that Cheshire cat smile, carefree and irresponsible. Before he could say anything I quickly assaulted him with my question.

“You had said last week, on Monday we could turn our tests in on Friday, is that still the case?” I asked with urgency.

“I haven’t forgotten.” He answered sounding almost human. “Do you feel better now?” He answered arrogantly.

I became indignant at his answer and left. Not that I had planned on staying for champagne. But I thought what nerve.

Underneath, I was in turmoil. My daddy was incarcerated for bad checks, I had been writing to him for months. Mr. Valencia reminded me so much of my daddy’s whimsical character. The fact that he Mr. Valencia also was a Hispanic man made him so familiar.

As the months passed I did my best in his class, to get the best grades that I could. I continued to see him in his office, we talked about my exams, I did exceptionally well. I was the top student in class. I continued to see him to discuss anything about Mexican History. It became my passion, and I read books outside of class to discuss with him. It was Mr. Valencia that introduced me to the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. He even gave me his very own copy of “The Labyrinth of Solitude.” He was my favorite poet, and I was introduced into the world of Latin writers.

By the end of the semester, I was already 23. Even though we loved discussing Mexican History, I could tell he wasn’t attracted to me. I knew I had to get over him, Mr. Valencia. His interest in me was purely academic. There was the knife of unrequited love stabbing my young heart once again. As I looked at him in class it wasn’t the same anymore.

The very last day of class, I turned in my essay, and merely shook his hand, good-bye Mr. Valencia. _________________________________________________________

I transferred to Fresno State in the fall of 1988. Still I continued my friendship with Mr. Valencia. I should have left well enough alone. He was always flirting with beautiful blondes. I was a slim dark petite Hispanic with a very cute face, not at all beautiful like my mother. I was not his type. His first wife was an English woman he met while in the Air Force in the 60’s. He told me she used to channel spirits through her. I cringed, knowing that spirits were demons.

Still I wanted this chubby bald Hispanic man who was 43 by this time. It was the confidence that he exuded that I didn’t have. He reminded me a lot of my daddy who was serving time for writing bad checks. My daddy wrote to me from prison quite often a couple of times a week. I was still young, I never had a boyfriend. I was out of my depths with this man Valencia. Still I continued to take the city bus to stop by and see him in his office.

We continued talking about Mexican History, I told him about all of my professors. But I had sensed that something changed. I told him my father was serving time. He remarked that I must have missed him a lot. I began to divulge things to him that I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t his place to hear my problems. But it seemed to me that teachers, especially professors begin to become enmeshed with their students, especially if they were female.

In the afternoons, when I didn’t have any classes I would stop by and visit him. Valencia became my private therapist. I was between therapists that year.

He was very sweet in the beginning. He let me read my poetry. I didn’t know that I was stepping into a well prepared spider’s web. I trusted him. I should have trusted God. But I hadn’t prayed in awhile. I don’t know what came between Jesus and me, living?

I would sit in the chair next to him. He began to touch my tennis shoes. The conversation would become more intense as I told him how lonely I was in college.

“You’re my only friend.” I said.

He would pull me into his lap, and hold me. I don’t remember where all the students were during his office hour. It was peculiar we had all this time together. But I still would visit him. I began to wear make-up. It was in my heart, and in his to begin something between us, only I didn’t know how it would begin.

The day before Valentine’s Day, our two chairs faced each other as they usually did, I used to talk to him about the crushing loneliness, it was really the borderline personality disorder that I suffered from and would be diagnosed with later.

He looked at me differently that day, with desire. Like I was something he could eat. Finally, he lunged into me, and took my mouth into his and kissed me. This was the first time I had ever been kissed. It was a connection I had never experienced before. He pulled me into a world I was not ready for, at least not with a man so much more experienced than I was.

Even though I loved him, I would still play paper dolls with my younger sister. They were not the traditional paper dolls we drew faces, and gave them stories. We would play for hours with the radio in the background, but that is where I was, going to school, taking care of my baby sister Mia and coming to see Mr. Valencia. My younger sister Monica was still attending City College with me, and I ran to the tutorial center where she worked elated to tell her that Mr. Valencia had kissed me. I misconstrued the kiss for love. My experience of love was watching The Sound of Music, Gigi and playing paper dolls.

“When are you going to see him again?” My sister Monica, whose nickname had changed from Mo-Mo to Mo by this time asked with excitement as if we were still in high school.

“I don’t know, but he loves me or he wouldn’t have kissed me.” My naïve brown eyes were beaming. My heart was dancing. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It was just a move on his part in his sexual chessboard. I didn’t know that I was walking further into a sexual spider’s web. How could I have known?

The next couple of weeks we met in his office for the assignation. We still spoke, but now it involved a lot of deep kissing and touching. He began to touch parts of my body that I didn’t know were alive inside me. I shouldn’t have let him treat me so cheaply only I didn’t know that he didn’t love me. I didn’t know that I was only his plaything. Finally he told me he was already seeing someone, and that he didn’t want to have to lie to her about me.

“Oh, well, what is all this, if you have a girlfriend already?” I asked with a hurt voice.

“I don’t know, fun.” He thoughtlessly remarked.

“So, it’s just fun.” I was injured.

“Of course I care about you.”

“You don’t want to see me anymore.” The words escaped through the brokenness of my naïve heart.

“No, I just want to be honest with you.” “I love your passion.”

But loving a person’s passion was not the same thing as loving a person, even though that passion was a part of the person. I had a lot of thinking to do. I should have walked away and never have come back. But I just didn’t want to listen. I had already loved Mr. Valencia for a year. It seemed like my dreams were coming true. He finally noticed me as a woman, and not as only a student.

I came back to him the next week.

“I’m glad you came back.” He said. He pulled me onto his lap, and began to have his way with me, until I stopped him from touching parts of my body.

“What’s the matter?” He said disappointed.

“I can’t.” It was my heart that knew I shouldn’t cross any more lines with a man I wasn’t married to. I knew what God told me, what His word said. I thought, that the only way he would want me was if he had experienced me as a woman. Such a lie was from the devil, I should have known this wasn’t going to mean anything to a man like him.

I started to realize he was nothing like the man I had built up in my heart last year. But I loved to feel his graying beard against my face he was already becoming too familiar to me. I felt as if I belonged to him already.

As the weeks continued he began to talk to me in a way I was not accustomed to. He used deplorable language. “Did I want to feel his (expletive) going in and out of me.” He wasn’t like Captain von Trapp played by Christopher Plummer, nor was he like Gaston LaChailles played by Louis Jourdan. They would never talk to the woman they loved in that way. This should have told me something. He talked to me as if I were a prostitute. Valencia wasn’t a knight in shining armor, he wasn’t even a conquistador. There was nothing romantic about his crude language, about his demeanor; he wasn’t the irresistible professor with chalk on his pants. Still I stayed with him. Still I let myself be pulled deeper into his spider’s web. Then he told me he may want to have sex with me only once.

“I’m a virgin.” I admitted.

“You’ve never been with anyone before?” He seemed surprised.

“You are the first person I kissed.” I must have sounded like a child.

I struggled with seeing him. I struggled with my classes I was still taking classes at Fresno State.

He was the first man who had ever touched me. My feelings for him didn’t go away. I would see dandelions on the lawn, pick them up and blow them making wishes on them that this relationship would lead to a marriage for me.

Whenever he had classes to teach, he left, and let me stay in the office to do my homework.

“Don’t go anywhere”, He’d say kissing me.

Students would come by and I would answer the door and tell them he wasn’t here. They must have thought I was his assistant. Even pretty blondes would stop by, and I would tell them the same. They would always tell me tell him I stopped by. Of course I wouldn’t. He returned hungry for me. I continued to get swept up in my carnality. I still hadn’t decided if I wanted to be with him, but I needed the closeness. As time wore on, I felt as if I were “Home” with him. I deceived myself into believing he really cared about me, even loved me, even though he never told me that he did.

I remember the day I gave myself to him and lost my virginity. I had planned to leave him. But when I saw his big brown eyes that day, I let myself be seduced, and stepped deeply into his spider web embracing my death. This was the closest I had ever been to anyone. Like an animal, Mr. Valencia had me on the office floor. The very first time I was intimate with a man, I was on the floor. I didn't think it would hurt, but it did. It was surreal. Part of me felt like it wasn’t me.

I told Mr. Valencia “I love you.”

After he got dressed he said, “I didn’t know you were a virgin?”

“I told you I was.”

“I feel like I stole something from you.” He sounded guilty.

“You didn’t, I wanted to be with you.” But he had stolen something from me, and I let him.

Then he said it, something so terrible to me. He couldn’t wait until another day.

“Matty, I don’t love you.”

His words sliced like a cold blade across my throat. I was bleeding emotionally, dumbfounded. I was drowning from the tears inside my soul. I felt dirty. I walked out of his office. I wondered if everyone who saw me could tell that I was no longer a virgin.

The affair continued. He took me to his apartment a couple of times a week. Then we would go out to eat afterwards. He lived with his teenage daughter Natalie.

The relationship was going nowhere I was just a body to him. I began to cut myself again.

“Don’t cut yourself.” He’d make that horrified face. But it did not deter me. I used to sit in the doorway of his office despondent. The rejection of being used was seeping through every part of me, and it was bleeding out of my wounds.

“What’s wrong?” He sounded surprised.

“I’m not happy.” I muttered.

“I thought this would be a good experience for you.”

I could never bring myself to call him Richard. I was miserable in this relationship. There was nothing in it for me. He bought me a gold necklace and thought it would make me happy. He said that I reminded him of the girl in the song by Looking Glass “Brandy”. I threw the gold necklace away at some point.

He’d drive me around town in his black sports car, at first I thought I had found someone. But I knew I was deceiving myself. I couldn’t tell anyone about Mr. Valencia. I lived this double life that made me feel worthless. At night when I would take baths, I had a razor with me, and would cut myself to numb the deeper pain of having sex with a man that ate me like a meal then discarded me.

I began to have trouble going to the bathroom. I made an appointment with the campus gynecologist. The doctor asked me if I had been raped. I was surprised by his question and replied “no.”

He was surprised. “The man who was with you obviously doesn’t care about you, you’re all ripped up inside, that’s why you are having a lot of pain urinating.”

I was cleaved to him, only he didn’t know it. Mr. Valencia thought I was having a good time, but I wasn’t. I spent my nights like a doll that was broken. I wasn’t the same person I was last year, he wasn’t the same person he was last year. I flirted often with thoughts of suicide. I knew he wasn’t going to marry me, hell, he didn’t even love me.

One night I called his house, and his daughter Natalie told me Mr. Valencia was at his girlfriend’s house. “I’ll give you the number”, she said, “You can call him there.”

But I didn’t want to call him when he clearly did not want me. My body was strewn with fresh cuts. Mr. Valencia suddenly had no time for me. Whenever I would show up at his office, he would say, “You should have called, I have things to do.” I could feel him distancing himself from me, the open flesh had gotten the message before I did, they had been trying to tell me he had no interest in me, and was done with me.

Six months after Mr. Valencia kissed me it was over. I spent a lot of time on campus just watching him walk to his office. He didn’t know I was watching him, everything in me wanted to call out to him. I was broken, more broken than when I sat in his office a year ago.

I couldn’t play this big girl game of being able to adjust to being dumped. The poetry I had been writing was strewn with such dark imagery. I dropped out of school, as I spent most of my time cutting in the bathroom, instead of actually sitting in class.

Finally my momma found a deep gash on my wrist and took me to the emergency. With my bandaged wrist I found myself sitting with two other patients who were waiting to be transferred to the hospital.

“What are you in for?” One of them asked.

I related my situation to them. “My professor f—d me, then dumped me. I was with him about 6 months.”

“Bummer.” “Do you want to get back at him? “What hurts what really hurts….Shoot the guy in the knee caps.” The guy who said this was also waiting to be transferred to a Pact Unit.

A slight smile took over my face. “Yeah.”

I was hospitalized. My psychiatrist was an Indian doctor named Awar. He told my momma and my daddy who had gotten out of prison a few months ago that I suffered from borderline personality disorder. He also told my parents that it was quite common for young women my age to have this diagnosis. Dr. Awar also told my parents that they should hospitalize me for a year. He said this would benefit me in the long run. _________________________________________________________ Mr. Valencia was the only person I can truthfully admit I ever wanted to kill. I never thought I could hate another human being so profoundly, so completely. I had ripped up the dirt all around me and found myself in this deep black pit I had created. I should have cried out to my God. I descended into a dark creative period. The poetry was so black it was like reading blood splattered all over the pages. I had been running with the demons. I had sinned so profoundly and I paid for it.

It's been years since I have felt that intense towards Mr. Valencia. I stopped having those grievous thoughts the following year, 1990. But he did eviscerate me, but I can say that Jesus has freed me to forgive him and I only want the very best for him, namely Heaven. I have prayed for years that Mr. Valencia would be saved by God's grace.

_____________________________________________________

“My Son/Daughter, pay attention to my wisdom;

Lend your ear to my understanding,

That you may preserve discretion,

And your lips may keep knowledge,

For the lips of an immoral woman/man drip

Honey,

And her/his mouth is smoother than oil;

But in the end she/he is bitter as wormwood,

Sharp as a two-edged sword.

Her/his feet go down to death,

Her/his steps lay hold of hell.

Lest you ponder her/his path of life

Her/his ways are unstable;

You do not know them.

Therefore hear me now, my children,

And do not go near the door of her/his house,

Lest you give your honor to others

And your years to the cruel one;

(Proverbs 5:1-9)