The Inexplicable Allure of the Bad Boy

I've always had a weakness for bad boys. A cursory look at my dating history will show this. A long, long time ago, I dated a long-haired photographer who was into shabu (though he said he was over it at the time we were going out), got into bar brawls, and got into a major car accident which resulted in him staying at the ICU for over a month. I remember that he got into another bar brawl complete with chair-flinging AFTER his accident while he was still recovering from his wounds. He's fine now, though he bears a lot of scars from this accident.

I dated another heavy drug user after him, and this one would describe to me the effects of different kinds of drugs, from mushrooms to coke to acid and some other substances I'd never even heard of. If I remember correctly, he eventually checked into rehab. I find bad boys very intriguing, and like a lot of women, I feel myself irresistibly drawn to them.

I recently met a guy who seems, so far, to be the baddest of them all. He has big scars running down the back of his head, because he was shot there. In fact, the bullet is still actually lodged inside his head, since the doctors said it was too tricky to remove it. He was heavily into meth (aka shabu) in high school. Missouri is the meth capital of the US, and apparently, living in a small town (he's from the middle of Nowhere, Missouri) makes you so bored that you're almost obliged to contribute to the state's number one product.

Anyway, I've kept in touch with this guy since I met him at a party. Recently however, he's been harder to get a hold of, because he got arrested for a DWI (driving while intoxicated) and has to serve jail time for five weekends. He also has to render community service on top of this. He chose to do time because in that way he can get his license back more quickly. If he had not agreed to, he would have had his license suspended for a whole year. In a place like Missouri where public transport is practically non-existent, that would have meant his virtual immobility.

It's been very interesting to know someone like him. His world seems to be far removed from mine, and asking him about his life is like experiencing his bad boy existence vicariously. He has become a friend of sorts (he seems to not have any real friends), and strangely enough, I will actually miss him and his rather uncouth ways when I leave the US.

Getting to know him has revealed much to me about a slice of American life that I otherwise would not have been exposed to. I've learned a lot about middle America and how young people navigate their way through it. It also doesn't hurt that he carries with him at all times the programmed-in-the-DNA air of the bad boy. And this is something he doesn't relinquish at all, not even for a minute. Which makes him all the more attractive, of course.