Poverty to Live: Histories

My first two posts have disgorged a lot of fairly recent events. I suppose I should back up a little and explain the history of how I met my husband, as well as some of our personal history that has shaped who we are.  Perhaps this can help me figure out why we do what we do.

I was sixteen and going out with a guy six years older than myself. Young and ignorant, desperately wanting to be loved by someone, never interested in boys my own age who only wanted a piece of ass first. At least in an older man I found a degree of intellectual foreplay, not realizing how much I was manipulated at the time.

I met Guitar Man outside my boyfriends apartment. My best friend, Crazy V and I were sitting on the curb striking lit matches and extinguishing them by putting them between our teeth and closing our lips over the paper sticks. This was one of those pathetically defiant tough girl stunts I used to pull. I always had to act the Amazon Warrior. That act was the only armor I felt I had to conceal a surprisingly sensitive and easily hurt nature. That and outrageous humor.

He was wearing a booney hat and midcalf army trench coat. Naturally wavy shoulder length dark hair. His features were catlike and what stood out most about him were his almond shaped brown eyes. He looked quite serious, but when he smiled his face transformed. For someone who would later exhibit explosive temper, you could see his natural kindness in that smile. This is the duality of the man that is my husband. I did not know it then, of course. I had only just met him. A friend of my then-boyfriends best friend, he started to come around quite often and I got to know him.

Physically I always found him attractive, even though he was slight of frame. Five children later has done nothing to assist my own stocky frame, but I liked him and we got along well because we played well together. He would flip me shit and I would flip him shit and we would laugh.

Back then there were times that, though I never witnessed his more destructive smash-everything temper explosions, there would be times when he would not be his usual playful self, and if someone said something that he perceived to be directed at him, even if it was not, he would get angry and leave. This always confused me and made me sad. I didn’t want to see him go. I actually enjoyed spending time with him more than with my boyfriend. One time, Guitar Man, the boyfriend and Guitar Man’s best friend Elmo had come to visit me. I ran around a lot with Guitar and Elmo. We’d bomb all around town in that beat to shit Dodge Dart of Elmo’s. The whole time I had this huge secret crush on Guitar Man but never let on. I haven’t ever been the cheating type so I just held on to it all as an unattainable longing and left it at that.

Years passed and we lost touch. There were times I would think about him, sometimes often. Wonder how he was. If and when I saw Elmo I would always inquire about him. Yes, he was still playing jam night at the Bullet. Yes he was still around. He had spent some month in Oregon working on a friends cattle ranch.

Ten years and two kids later, single I began thinking about trying to contact him again. But I had no idea how. At least a year passed. It happened I was working for my landlords in their construction business. We had a meeting with all employees one day.  At this meeting was a young man named Isaac.  Isaac said he had grown up in my home town but I had never seen him in school.  He had been home schooled.  Lived up the line where I knew Guitar Man had grown up.  Not only that, but his family lived on the same mountain road Guitar Man and his father currently lived on.  He told me Guitar Man spent a lot of time at his sister’s place babysitting her kids while she worked.  He told me where it was and I even drove by.  I was reluctant to go to the door, though.  Would Guitar Man want to see me after all these years? I had always enjoyed our friendship, did he?

Six months again passed. I thought about Guitar Man off and on, wondering, praying. T hen I ran into Isaac again at Wal-Mart and figured it was a definite sign that I should contact him.  I arranged for Isaac to drive out and show me where on this mountain Guitar Man and his Dad lived. The day I followed him was a warm June day.  He drove me to the very end of a winding, rutted goat track of a mountain road.  There, at the bottom of the driveway parked in his blue Subaru was Guitar Man’s Dad, dozing in the summer sun.  I thought this was a bit odd.  He wasn’t drunk and hadn’t been drinking, but he was fast asleep.  I later came to find that things like this were what was considered ‘normal’ for this man to do.  In time I came to find out there were a lot of things what were considered ‘normal’ behavior for this man that really was not.

I was told where to locate Guitar Man’s sister’s house as that was where he was.  I was nervous driving back to town, but had wanted to see him for so long…

When I knocked on the door and his sister, who had been in my grade answered I asked if he was there, and there he was.  Ever the smartass, when I came in he was making the sign of the cross to ward me off, smiling ear to ear as I came in.  When I went over to hug him, his hug was so all encompassing and sincere I could tell he was really happy to see me too. He smelled clean and wonderful.

Over the next two weeks we got to re-familiarize ourselves with one another. He was more reserved, not as quick to laugh. Darker, maybe somehow. I chose to overlook this and focused on finding my old playmate.  He was still there, but felt different.  More calloused.

I have a girlfriend who has told me that I need to quit picking up strays. Maybe that’s what it was. I seem to have a knack for picking men who at the very least are emotionally stunted in some way.  With my husband, and seeing the relationship he had with his parents and family, it went deeper than that.  It seemed to be a family trait.

For the past ten years my now-husband and his father had lived on the five acres his father had purchased after his Mom had finally left them. They had no electricity, no running water. The place looked like a damned junkyard/garbage dump. Standing on the steps of Guitar Man’s trailer I once counted twenty-three junk cars. Those were only the ones I could see. There were many more I couldn’t.  Some date as far back as the 40s. Others are more modern. What struck me in this bacheloristic hellhole was the total disregard for the ground they were living on. Where they could have had vegetable gardens to feed themselves were scrap iron piles. Instead of working to have even a hand pump well put in, they drove to the nearest town twelve miles away to haul water.

I can’t lie that there weren’t warning signs of Bad Shit To Come. My own stubborn egotism at being able to ‘help’ him to improve his life and my arrogance at assuming he would want help or change of any kind. What I did was bring more forced change to this man’s life than he would ever want. We have spoken about it since and he claims no regrets but I often wonder.

The relationship I saw between Guitar Man and his father was very psychologically abusive. I would later learn the history of it from Guitar Man’s mom, but at this time all I could see was that any idea Guitar Man came up with for anything, no matter how small, his father had to jump in and tell him how it wouldn’t work, it was wrong, how dumb that was. There was no let up and this man never told his son he did a good job, at anything!

Guitar Man’s father grew up in Idaho and had left school in the eighth grade and possibly even earlier. I want to say third grade but that may not be correct. Regardless, he is illiterate and never went beyond manual labor. But there is also something mentally wrong with Guitar Man’s father. He is paranoid and suffers at times from anxiety attacks so severe he has in the past collapsed. Guitar Man’s grandmother went into the hospital when his father was twelve and died from something gynecological. His father refuses to go to a hospital or doctor. His health began to deteriorate severely two years ago and we would have driven him to the hospital. He adamantly refused to go until his daughter came to take him. He is obsessive about one of his daughters to a point which makes me uncomfortable. He is the same about Guitar Man’s mother who divorced him years ago but is still tied to him in a way that seems deeply psychological and co-dependant. She has told me herself that she doesn’t like him touching or hugging her and doesn’t like being around him, yet she is, constantly.

For a deeper understanding of the way Guitar Man’s family dynamics work…and honestly, I really don’t understand it, it is sick, twisted and just all ’round fucked up, even coming from a dysfunctional family such as my own, this is the history of Guitar Man’s parents as told to me by his mother.

His mother, S grew up in the same Idaho town as his father, B. S told me that she grew up in a family with a very chauvinistic father who didn’t’ believe women should go to college or do anything other than get married. S was molested for years by her own brother who was a born criminal that ruined the family name. In the era this happened of course, the ’40s and ’50s, you ‘kept it in the family’ and didn’t let anyone know about incestual sexual abuse. Besides, if it was happening, it was probably the girls fault for asking for it, because that’s the way the backwards bastards thought back then.

S told me she had gone out with B a few times, but he made her uncomfortable. As we talked she told me, “Every time I would go somewhere he was he would just sit there and stare at me the whole time. He would show up wherever I was if he knew I was going to be there. I think they have a name for it now…”

“You mean ’stalking’?” I asked her incredulously.

“Yeah! That’s it.”

Lovely. So, after awhile of this, I am not sure of what approach was taken, S wanted to go to school, her parents told her she needed to marry, S’s father told her she would be marrying B. S told me her parents made all the arrangements, including setting the wedding date. I don’t know if B went to her father to ask for her hand or not, but I would assume so. Frankly I was so blown away by someone’s parents telling them who they would marry and then making the arrangements that I didn’t think to ask.

Perhaps it was to marry off their ’soiled’ daughter to the first taker, thereby releasing themselves of the reminder her own brother had perpetrated on her, if they even were aware of it.

So S and B were married. They had one daughter, then Guitar Man seven years later. B was furious S had a boy. He only wanted daughters, he told her and B even went so far as to talk to the other woman that had just given birth in that ward to a baby girl. B tried to get this woman to trade her daughter for his son. He was serious about it. He pestered this woman to trade her daughter for his son. She told him she had five boys at home, there was no way she would trade because she had worked too hard for her daughter. Guitar Man’s family seems to treat this story as something quaint and humorous. They don’t seem to know or care how this would make Guitar Man feel.

S told me that B began pestering her about wanting to watch her have sex with other men. That’s his thing. He’s a voyeur. She told me he couldn’t get off unless he was seeing her having sex with another man. She resisted for a long time but then told me she gave in so he would just leave her alone. So the predator preys on the one who had been a victim. I firmly believe she gave in because she had already suffered at the hands of her brother and her conditioning permitted it.

Of course, he didn’t’ leave her alone. Why should he? His pestering had gotten him his sick and twisted reward. She told me he would get mad if any one guy came around too much and take it out on her.

I don’t know if the voyeuristic crap was going on before or after this major tragic incident, but I think perhaps it came after.

S and B had to take a day trip down to one of our larger Montana cities for something to do with the line of work they were in. Getting a chainsaw or something. S’s mother was going to watch Guitar Man and his older sister for them when they went. She was also caring for S’s sister’s two girls as well.

Guitar Man, however, at two years old, was being his typical rambunctious little shit self. S’s mother told her she didn’t want to take him that day, only his sister. It was in June of 1971. While crossing the tracks at train crossing with no lights or arms, the car was struck by a diesel train that was going 60-70 miles per hour. The engineer had been drinking. S’s mom, her 9 year old daughter and two nieces were killed instantly. They heard about the wreck on the radio coming back. S told me she told B, “That was Mother.”

Guitar Man remembers coming home and driving down the road seeing his favorite Aunt, mother to the two girls, walking down the road crying. He remembers, later, trying to talk to her, at two not understanding, and her screaming at him, “Get away from me you little shit!”

Guitar Man knew, at two years old that people were angry with him because he should have been in that car too. His father in particular.

S told me B refused to let her go see her daughter to identify her in the morgue because he was afraid she wouldn’t come back. She learned from her sister, who identified them that her daughter was not as mangled as the nieces. S told me it seemed very unreal and she never cried, not until twelve years later when it hit her and she cried for two days straight.

Guitar Man’s family seems to have been ruled by his father’s paranoia and phobias. Couple that with his mother’s own untreated issues and you have the perfect set up for abuse and neglect. There was domestic violence between B and S, S drank to get to sleep before B came home, B drank for his own reasons. Two more daughters followed Guitar Man in the family line. S did put her foot down with B about naming the next baby girl the same name as the big sister as he wanted to do.

All through his formative years, growing up in a home sewn with conflict and domestic strife, my husband was constantly told by his father how he couldn’t take care of himself. This seems to be B’s projection of his own life situation ever since his own mother had died when he was twelve.

By the time Guitar Man was 10 he had acquired his father’s porn mag collection. By the time he was 12 he had moved out of the house, tired of sharing a room with sisters four and eight years younger and moved into a camp trailer in the back of his mother’s house. His idea of home decor was wallpapering with nudie pics out of those magazines. Though that may have come later. That’s what it was like when I saw it when I was 16 and he was 19, anyway.

By the time I met him, Guitar Man’s mom had left B for a man, F. There is no real love lost between them, what S has alluded to was F was more for keeping B at bay than anything. F is an ex-Vietnam Green Beret who did two tours of duty on thing like night missions where the orders were to go into villages and slit throats. He has a steel plate in his head from a car accident and he is a fucking free-loading asshole because my mother-in-law enables him to be. He is also my next door neighbor on our mountain but I will get to that story later.

I grew up with a father that had no use for his daughters. I was a ‘nuisance’. I was not as valuable as a boy. This lent me a definite attitude of defiance. My father was a weaker personality than my mom yet belittled her whenever he could. My mother was a degreed college graduate, my father couldn’t pass high school. He always treated my mom like a second class citizen. He never beat her, he saved that for us girls, though the occasions weren’t often, they still stick out in my mind. Mostly it was severe emotional and verbal abuse. I grew up with a very ‘Fuck You!’ attitude toward men and authority. I have not been very successful in my life and struggle with not being my father or mother.

I cannot imagine what my husband has felt growing up. He is much more intelligent than his father, yet he cannot allow himself to feel that way. There is a bazaar and unhealthy clannishness about my husband’s mother, father and one of his sisters. The other sister married and moved to town and refuses to be part of the whole co-dependant weird bullshit my husband and his other sister get sucked into. Though his other sister recently left the state with her boyfriend, also another story I will get into later.

There is a truly fucked up habit in this family of either his mother or sister making decisions leading to a major crisis then calling my husband in to bail them out or fix it.

I know my husband doesn’t want to be part of this, yet the conditioning he grew up with is keeping him chained to it. This in turn is bringing out a nasty and volatile chemistry in our marriage. Not something I want my children to grow up with. But I also don’t want them growing up without their father.

I am looking with horror at the word count on this blog. So much to tell and no editor but myself! I needed to get this background and believe it or not I have only touched on the subject. There is a psychological dichotomy in any relationship and how we were raised has a huge impact on how we will not only raise our children, but react to our spouses.

Stresses are on the rise. My husband was laid off his job this week. Even when we had income we had ‘no money’ in his eyes. Now it’s ‘no money and no more comin’ even though he is eligible for unemployment and job retraining. I guess I should be grateful he isn’t a drinker and doesn’t do drugs. I may start to be though, with him home all the time!

Some days, more days than I would like, I think, “Is this worth it? Am I just fucking nuts? Will anything I have planned turn out? Will he support it?”

Sometimes I am afraid I know the answer.