For fifty years I got myself through the roughest times in life, believing in a hero that I met in my teens, believing I would find him again one day and he would save me as he had promised.
I was 16 and he was 18 when we first met on the streets of Old Town Chicago. I was looking for a job with 2 runaway buddies from Texas. We were wild and crazy and had no sense at all. My hero was working in Old Town, and he and his friends took us in for the night, gave us KFC when we were starving, convinced us to go back home and the hero continued to correspond with me, years after that, professing his desire to protect me.
I only saw him for 48 hours and we never touched except to hug goodbye at the airport. I was flooded with tears as I left him.
We kept in touch by snail mail for years. Computers and cell phones had not come into existence yet and most of us young, single, working class didn’t even have wall phones in those days. There was a pay phone in every fast food, gas station and grocery store.
So, snail mail was what we used to keep up with each other for several years. Both of us moved around the US, from state to state, and we eventually lost touch.
As life wore on and got harder, after each event that knocked me to my knees, I thought about my hero and wondered where he was. I knew he’d come and help me if he could. When would he save me?
I held on, knowing that one day he would come through. Believing that he would save me in the end is what gave me strength to hold on in my darkest hours.. That sounds so ridiculous now I’m embarrassed to put it down on paper, but I have to admit that believing in this man is what got me through a lot of tough and gruesome times.
Retirement comes and family events leave me feeling abandoned. I wake in the night clutched by the fear that I may never see my hero again. What ever became of him?
It’s been decades now since I’ve heard anything about him. Will I ever know what became of him? I feel a deep sense of loss that tortures me now, now that I have too much free time on my hands.
I search for him on social media. We have it all now, the cells, the laptops … fifty years later.
I hire a private detective from Chicago. Long story short, I find him.
We correspond on facebook and talk on the phone every evening for a full year. We seem to have so much in common. We both want to find property on a lake. We decide we can live together, despite having never seen each other for over forty years.
I drive to Chicago. He is not what I think. He is not what he said. He withheld things. I was not what he thought. I was too old and not Asian and not into the things he’d been watching for years.
I have worked more years than he has. I have more social security and I did inherit more than him, so he takes advantage of the imbalance. I pay for all our groceries. I pay all the restaurant tabs. We split the rent and utilities.
He is cruel and mean spirited in passive aggressive ways. Every time we headed out for any event, he complained we were running late, and he would drive the car in such a way that rocked my body violently, side to side, up and down and forward to back, pulling up fast to stops, slamming on the brakes. Making his turns jerky. Driving fast and hard over large bumps in the road. He did it once with a lifetime friend of his in the car and she freaked out. I told her he did that all the time and she couldn’t speak.
He begins to trick me into paying for more and more. $700 to an attorney who protected him when buying the property, but not me. $500 to a realtor friend of his who was angry at us that we had found a property outside of his district. He tricked me into paying for these things and more.
I paid for all the motel rooms as we traveled to sight see or search for property. When it came time for the closing on our house, the day before he informed he was 5k short of his half and I had to run to a bank across town to withdraw enough to cover his shortfall.
He then tricked me into paying for his auto insurance and grew angry when I told him it was not my job to pay for his insurance.
When the doctor almost killed me by accident, and I lay in my hospital bed for a month, I returned home to discover my hero had gone to the casino and gambled away his entire monthly social security check while i was having surgery, at risk of losing my leg and also on the day of another life threatening surgery. My son stayed by my side and never left.
As I recovered in the hospital, my imaginary hero sat beside me eating half of every meal I was served. He was hungry because he had run out of money. I had to pretend it didn’t bother me, but it did. I was starving and needed that nutrition to recover. I kept suggesting he order his own hospital meal and each time I did he would exclaim, “I’m not paying money for this garbage!” But he kept eating half of my garbage. It was actually very decent for hospital food.
He worked against my recovery the entire 30 days, showing deep resentment at the presence of my son, making him feel as unwelcome as he possibly could, showing me he was anything but the hero I had believed in all my life. I actually named my son after him. What a fool I was.
As soon as I got back to the house I asked him to leave and he couldn’t wait to move out.
He’d hated it here the entire time. He complained about the yard work before he’d even done any. He hated the parties we were invited to. He’d spent 36 years with his AA group in Chicago and he missed them, understandably.
He continued to screw me out of money here and there over the next two years, making me pay for his boat and his broken exercise bike, things I never wanted or could use. I was willing to do anything at that point, just to get rid of him. I finally blew my stack and told him to stop costing me money and thankfully never heard from him again.
I ended up finding my hero in cardio recovery class, of all things. The most wonderful man in all my life, who understood and respected me, for my life of labor, just as i respected him. He appreciated who I was, the life i lived, more than anyone had ever before and we had many shared values, from politics to the simple things in life, like gardening, cooking, children. We held each other in high esteem, supported each other through the pandemic, all of it via facebook and email.
If not for the misguided direction that I took, I would never have found that unexpected hero. So, is this the synchronicity that Jung is talking about?
My real hero, that I met in cardio class, has passed now, and I was never allowed to be with him physically, but he held my heart up for the past eight years, and I feel his strength and his presence to this very hour.
I guess I did find my hero after all.
