listen to the audible version of this chapter here: sadness breaking through
Loneliness seems to be the human condition.
A lot of life is spent fighting against depression if you’re touched. If your not, it is boredom and isolation that will get you. On the sensitivity scale, according to my psychiatrist, “You are really sensitive.” I learned to cut my psychopharma meds in half with a pill cutter. I know that sounds like something a senior citizen would need. Also creative blues avoiders.
It’s not like I understood the mechanics of the mind like we do today. All the chemicals and neurons zipping around mixing it up. Sometimes, according to science, some people’s bioluminescence dulls or brightens too much. On either end of the spectrum, modern society still does not know exactly what to do for us. It’s been a human condition at least back to the early, pre-Jesus time, in Turkey.
On the honeymoon of my first disastrous marriage we took a cruise, mostly Greece and Italy, but at the farthest point out we visited the ancient city of Ephesus in Turkey, where the apostle Paul once preached. The most fascinating moment occurred as I was realizing my new wife was mentally unstable but in a different way from me, and we happened to be touring the ruins of the first mental health clinic on the side of some hot and barren hill outside of the main city.
There were stone beds, two to a room, with a small river of water running between them through the length of the room. The sound of running water was thought to take away the bad spirits and give comfort to the peaceful thoughts. There was no water, no priest, no bedding on the hard and hot platforms of stone. I could feel my people. I wanted to crawl up on one of the stones and declare I had made an enormous mistake marrying this woman. We took a few pictures and moved on to the first recorded livestock and zoo areas.
It was a beautiful day. Cloudless sky. Light breeze. And hot. I was not yet aware that my fear of my new wife was well-founded, more like a premonition to how bad it was going to get, banging doors, screaming, locking doors, screaming, and then contrition. I got us into couples therapy upon our return from the honeymoon, but it merely stirred up the angry skeletons in her darkened closet.
Here’s what happened.
She got even more angry. She uncovered some abuses I won’t go into, but suffice it to say it fucked everything up in the bedroom. Everything. What was well disguised began emerging into our conversations and chores she began to set for herself and me. “Projects,” she called them. And, “I need your help tomorrow.” Great fury would ensue when I claimed to have a tennis match or a visit with my mom, who was curating her dead daughter’s final art exhibit.
Oh, I think I’d better back up a minute.
My sister, the older one, did not like my choice of partners when she met Layla. Either she saw right through her bullshit, or she namastéd into some awareness of how crazy they both were. But, before she had a chance to avert my starter marriage she jumped off a bridge into the empty caliche of a creekbed below the highway overpass, leaving her Boston Terrier, Ruby, in the Toyota Landcruiser, pulled into the emergency lane, Christmas day. But this was not my first brush with darkness. My own breakouts have been well documented elsewhere, I’ll just say, the leaping death of my favorite sister blew away the plans of everyone near her. It changed the trajectory of not only her life, but my kid’s lives to come, and I wouldn’t be out of the first marriage for six years, not for trying, though.
My sister would always arrive late, but the mood had become quite anxious in our celebration of Jesus. The phone rang. It was the Austin Police Department, they needed a body identified. My mom howled. My brother had a crying jag for months that nearly sobered him up, but that would take another ten years or so. My alive sister was quiet. I was a stranger to myself. My soon-to-be in spite of it all wife became heroic in her efforts to get dessert served and the dishes rinsed. I think she wanted out of there. Out of the black ocean of death. My star had exited our orbit.
And then there was our wedding, shrouded somewhat, okay, a lot, by the sad events. We won the lawsuit against the independent executor of my father’s estate for negligence and gross mismanagement and he was ordered to pay back $475,000 worth of administration fees, but he declared bankruptcy and died a few years later from shame and alcoholism.
Back to the marriage and aftermath of my new “holy fuck” moment spread across Greece and Turkey.
The therapy actually stirred up the real dragon torturing her from within. A divorce attorney dad with a massive chip on his shoulder. A mom who fell into the Alcoholics Anonymous program without a drinking problem, but a serious need to belong. “One day at a time,” she would say as a rejoinder, all the damn time. She even shortened it to, “Oh-dat.” (ODAT) Our therapist was a good couples therapist, I assume, but she didn’t understand trauma and sexual abuse at all. Hilarity ensued. I joined a Partner of Survivors group and learned the mantra that would ultimately get me out of this union that was rapidly turning demonic.
“I will be your trigger, but I will not be your target.”
For a year and a half, I struggled to get myself out of the victim role. I was experimenting with a coaching/counseling community called RC. Reevaluative counseling. It was mostly hippies who couldn’t afford psychoanalysis. And I connected with a handsome man, Michael, who held me a lot as I cried trying to release my victimhood. Her trauma was not my trauma. I was not causing her trauma. I was not the reason she was batshit crazy and break the door down mad.
“It is okay for you to not be attacked,” he said. I wailed. “Her pain is not for you to fix.” I shivered and laughed. “You can leave.”
“Ouuuuuuch! Nooooo!”
There was closeness, trust, and maybe Michael confessed a crush on me at some point, but I didn’t need to follow through on that offer. It was part of RC called “The Blue Pages.” It meant, that for RC to work, the counseling relationship needed to be clean and not romantically charged. I felt his love and caring. He felt aroused. I helped him work through that sadness as well. Seemed like it was a common thread for all of us. I would learn that part later, though. I was pulling myself out of the river of sadness and yelling about what my life had become. Michael gave me the permission to divorce my first wife. I looked him up ten years later when my second marriage began suffering, or I began suffering, under similarly disappointing circumstances. He was a ghost. I could not recall his last name. I checked within the RC community. He was a landscaper. A fellow recovery junkie knew Michael. “He was a remarkable man. Don’t know where he ended up.”
I guess that’s true for all of us, even me typing here. “Never know where you’ll end up.”
The first time I tried to get a divorce I was in Las Vegas for Comdex. Two things I have never developed a taste for, Vegas and tech conferences. I was there as part of Dell’s team, announcing great new products and hosting a dinner for their biggest customers. An appreciation dinner. A road show of what’s new. Oddly, twenty years later I’d be building websites for exactly the same Dell program as it toured out across Europe in 2008. It was called Future Ready. A buzzword from the tech world.
That’s not where I ended up, though. Let’s continue.
The little red light was blinking on my hotel room phone when I first unloaded my bags. The front desk said the message was, “Call your wife.” I didn’t call her. I had to meet everyone in the hotel restaurant in 30 minutes. I needed a shower and a 15-minute nap. The phone rang. (Again, historically, no cell phones at this point.) She was livid about something. “I don’t think I’m coming back to the house,” I said. And that was almost all I recall of Vegas. Dinner. Prep talk for tomorrow’s presentation at the high-roller dinner. I had prepared an “interactive” presentation that Michael could lead from his Dell laptop.
She called and left messages throughout the three-day trip. Never any info, just “Call your wife.”
I called her back. I arrived back home to a changed woman. She was on the program. “I’ll do the work, go to meetings, whatever you want.” But she didn’t. She lasted a week in this revivalist mode. Then I was standing at the locked bedroom door she was pounding trying to break through. The door jam separated from the wall a bit, but the door held. And I “escaped” up to the roof deck. I could still hear the yelling and pounding below, but I focused my attention on the Austin skyline.
“It’s okay not to be yelled at. You don’t have to stand it,” Michael would say, holding my shaking and releasing heterosexual body. According to RC, when you “release” a strong emotion (trauma) your body will discharge the energy in a number of ways.
Crying
Laughing
Sweating
Yawning
Yelling
Shivering
All of this, while I was trying to stay IN the marriage and continuously repeating my mantra, “But I won’t be your target.” That’s the one that pulled me “up and out” as we say in RC. I still check in with some of the local RC folks. Before the pandemic, I was in a weekly group of artists and dancers who celebrated each other. The virus killed a lot of people, but it also destroyed our social networks. We all went inside and stayed inside. I should reach out to Bev again, and see if they’re back on in the backyard high-ceilinged studio full of bean bag chairs and abstract art.
Now, you’re not going to believe this, but this is the honest-to-God truth.
That same woman, my first wife, filed for divorce a few years later while I was away on another Dell trip, this time to New York City for the release of Windows 95. Still no cell phones, but I had called her from New York and told her I would be returning to my mom’s house, the one above the big lake house until we sorted out our options. Obviously, her dad the divorce attorney gave her renewed optimism for her escape. The thing is, we agreed BEFORE I LEFT FOR NEW YORK, that no matter what, we would not sue each other. She was inside all those years of terror and loss as the attorneys were stripping my father’s carcass. “No lawyers,” I said. “If we’re going to part, we can do it without lawyers. We can agree.”
During my first hour back in the office from New York, I was served divorce papers and a restraining order in the reception area.
So much was going right in my life professionally up until that moment.
The restraining order demanded I stay 200 yards away from my condo. (A gift from her father, I suppose. Well, actually, all of it was, but let’s keep that between us, okay?) I got in my car and drove to my place to grab my two cats and my acoustic guitar.
I don’t know that there’s much fruit left to squeeze from my first wife’s story. She stayed in the condo for seven months. We fought for a month. I paid both attorneys. I cried “I give” and we met at The Holiday House and ironed out our agreement. She always said we could do that. It took the loss of $15,000 cash to convince her to take a different path. Both law firms complained. “You can do a lot better,” my attorney said. I would sleep with her years later, as she was friends with one of my neighbors. Early enhanced breasts. They were awful. They are much improved these days, fake boobs. I don’t have a ton of experience, but I did meet a fascinating pair on a short tryst with a lady off Ok Cupid. “Ten thousand each,” she said. She adored her boobs. They were much better than my memory of the lawyer’s boobs, but they were still oddly balanced. In certain circumstances, they looked amazing. They also seemed alien in other moments. Maybe they were PerfectBoob ™ sized, but it was not an experience I would do much more to celebrate than put it in a novel twelve years later.
In the end, my ex-wife took $80,000 cash, her parrot, and the aluminum art fireplace screen that had been a wedding gift from a wealthy friend. I think in the interim, between Vegas and NYC she convinced me to buy a lot of jewelry. She was also in charge of the money account, so things were to her advantage when she closed my access. I’ve spoken to her about 5 times since. Oddly, it was her that kept getting in touch.
“I have your baby brush and some books I want to give back to you,” she said about 8 years later in a text. She claimed to be a psychic I learned later, oddly, from a friend of the alcoholic I tried to marry. This woman worked for my ex-wife for several years. In that time, she convinced this woman that she was a powerful psychic and not to be messed with. This woman, when I met her, was like, “She was an actual witch, I think.”
“No, I told her. She was just a crazy child of Basque gypsies who thought she could manipulate people with her mind. She was not psychic.”
“I’m still a little afraid of her right now, even telling you,” she said.
“Me too.”
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