Signs of Healing

Editor’s note:  I have been trying for THREE DAYS to get these pictures on here.  True to my style of organization, they are on here bass-ackwards, so you get to see the pictures ‘after’ and ‘before’ instead of the other way around.  To those of you who actually keep a clean house, it may not seem like the miracle it is.  When you see the ‘before’ pictures, you may have a better understanding.

 

I wanted to see if I could get the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of F’s cabin on here.  I am sort of a techno-idiot for simple things like uploading pictures.  But I feel like it is an important part of the story for people to be able to see what happens when you can stand up for doing the right thing by letting go of anger and animosity and holding peace in your heart.  Even when dealing with someone who is mentally ill.

F is a hoarder.  I really saw the reality of this, not only with the cabin, but when S got his metal filing box out of storage.  He had canceled checks in with his military papers.  Which wouldn’t be odd except the canceled checks were from 1968 on up. Why he felt the need to keep them shall remain a mystery to me.

The ‘cabin’ is a slope roofed one room shack my father-in-law and husband built over fifteen years ago.  It is slowly falling apart and F never tried to keep it up.  S was the one who put new tarpaper on the roof last year to keep it from leaking.

Beds made to military precision, give or take. Floor shoveled clean of the dog shit coated clothes. He threw those down on our burn pile. That’s will smell nice. Guess we won’t be roasting marshmallows this year….

Now, this is what the place looked like the day he left, after we had that two hour palaver the night before. Holy shit, is that floor I see?

Yes, the cans really ARE all gone! Double take! I can’t believe my camera.

Do I detect the tang of Pine-sol in the air? Amazing what a shovel and a little scrubbing can do for that can collection. They hauled them to the dump, too!

This is a view in the front door. You can see my father-in-laws wood cook stove that F used as counter space. There are cans and garbage all in front of it. The floor is coated in dirt, probably dog shit and who knows what else.

The ‘kitchen’ area to the right. Years of food cans and garbage. The linoleum under this all is white, honest.

His heat source and overflowing ash pan for the woodstove. Honestly, I don’t know how he didn’t burn the place down. That’s Cindy Lou sitting in the chair where she had given birth to her pups. S has taken her to live in town now.

Inside to the left. He always made his bed. That’s my dog, Copper, coming in to check out the one that is hiding under the bed. I usually don’t let my dog’s anywhere near this place but he is current on his shots. There is clothes, dirt and most likely dogshit on the floor here too. The bed across has F’s clothes and other crap.

Yet it is real.  I don’t know if you can understand how miraculous this was.  This man, who has never batted and eye at letting not only dogs, but livestock, and I am talking sheep and goats, geese and pigs, in the house to live, eat and shit without ever cleaning it up.  He did this.  He cleaned his house!

This is the same man who would sit in the living room of S’s house over east in a living room that’s rug was soaked so thoroughly with dog urine it squelched with every step, and watch television as the dogs shit on the rug in front of him.

To me, this is evidence that Divinity is at work.  There is a spirit at work here that is stronger than the shit.  This is the miracle that turns shit into black gold.  This is the proof.

S and my father-in-law B seemed a little stunned at F’s  abrupt departure.  I don’t think my mother-in-law quite knew how to deal with the reality. F has been a fixture in her life for over twenty years now.  She never wanted to deal with him, but never made a move to cut him loose either.  This shall forever be a puzzle to me. 

The night GM called to tell her F had gone with his brother, I could hear her voice on the other end of the line.  When she said “Oh.” it sounded higher than her usual speaking voice.  Tremulous.  I wondered.  Did this mean there was a part of her that was actually sorry to see him gone?  Even though this was the man who had told her the mountain wasn’t big enough for the both of them and she should go live with her daughter.  Yet, what was I supposed to do?  I will gladly take on burdens for my family when the cause is just, when the need is real, but I will not  enable someone to use and abuse my family.  I will not allow someone to latch on to us as a drowning victim dragging their savior to the depths.

When I told S he had cleaned to the cabin up,  that he had even used a cleaner (probably even on that one white floor patch!) her mouth actually dropped open.  She was honest to goodness stunned when I told her that.  Said he had never lifted a finger EVER in the twenty-some-odd years they had been together to help her clean.  Not even the animal pens.

I couldn’t explain to her the how or why.  We don’t see things the same way.  I couldn’t explain to her that you can kick someone in the ass and do it with love.  I just don’t think that is the language that they have ever known.  I don’t know if S will ever understand that showing someone you love them doesn’t mean doing everything for them until they are crippled with the inability to do for themselves.  That is not love.  That is something else entirely and it has dark origins, no matter the intent behind it.

After F had left, and in the middle of the night when the large drink of water before bed finally ran its course and woke me, I went outside.  I heard something that I didn’t know I would ever here.  A bull elk bugling.  Our mountain, years and years ago used to have a lot of elk.  GM said he hadn’t seen any for over fifteen years.  I heard it another night, then again last night, just about dusk.  His bugling set the dogs off up at F’s old place where they still stay.  Excited, I went in to tell GM.  He told me he had been watching one of the home movies he recently made with he and our big white dog Fen on it.  He said Fen was howling on the movie.  This annoyed me.  I can tell the difference between and elk bugle and a dog howl for shit’s sake!  I snapped at him a bit.  He got a little mad back and told me angrily that he hadn’t seen elk up here in twenty years.

As we are learning to do now, we went our own ways for a few minutes.  We are trying (slowly) to pick our battles.  When we passed each other again on the trail down to our outhouse I stopped and looked at him.  I knew what I needed to say.

“When you pray for healing to come to a place, when you pray for good things to come back, they do.”

I continued down the path, and he watched me in silence.

A Hard Look Within, Part Eleven

 

I have asked myself how long I will write these, The Looks, as I think of them. As long as it takes is what the answer is, yet I want it to be beneficial.

 

There is mostly a negative connotation with someone who chooses to use marijuana. I believe it is very easy to get sucked into the negative aspect of what I consider to be a very powerful and potentially beneficial medicinal herb. I also believe consistent, daily use, unless the user is in a chronic pain condition, is counterproductive an not helpful in the long run.

 

While my choice to use this plant was beneficial in that it helped me learn to bond with my baby, I was using it to try and numb the emotional pain and desolate feeling of being abandoned by my partner. I was angry. Cain had always, emotionally, been like Spock off Star Trek. Detached and unemotional. He wrote me letters that said he missed me, even held vivid detail of his love for me, yet he had never really used the words, face to face to tell me these things often enough to make me believe them. Most of the time, there seemed to be room in his mind and heart for only one person; him. It seemed to me he wanted to be adored and worshiped without ever returning any. The months of his out of state work turned into a year. I felt like I was dying inside. I wanted attention and affection. I wanted to be held and loved. I was still too young and naïve then to know, even at 22 how empty physical affection can be.

 

There came a time in our relationship that I told Cain I wanted to be able to see other people while he was out of state. I wanted him to see other people as well. It was a completely selfish maneuver on my part in so many ways. But I didn’t know what else to do. There was a guy that I was interested in. I didn’t want to have a relationship, I WANTED Cain, but he wasn’t available. It wasn’t even really about the sex so much as it was about being physically close to someone. I was so lonely, and not strong enough in myself to go out and find healthy alternatives and this is the negative route I chose. I am ashamed of it because I believe I cheapened myself, no to mentioned hurt Cain. I wanted to be Cain’s wife, yet he would never propose. Because I did not have those vows, the long time apart, the fact that Cain seemed content to have and leave it this way, were all contributing factors. What blew me away though, in the end, wasn’t that Cain was jealous or upset about me being with anyone else, what he told me was that he felt jealous because I DID find someone else to be with and he DIDN’T.

 

It wasn’t that I found other men to be with. It was that he didn’t find other women. That put a spear in my heart that would fester.

 

I felt I wasn’t worth enough for him to worry about. He was only concerned for himself. By this time, I had learned a bit of that from him as well. My anger grew.

 

In September of ‘94 my landlord, Chuck informed me that Joan and her husband were going to buy my house for their daughter. The bitch finally got her revenge. Chuck had, at one point, told me he would sell me the house for the cost it took him to move it onto the property. I was stupid and naïve enough I didn’t take him completely seriously and because Cain and I weren’t married I didn’t want to risk losing it if I did go that route. Hindsight, being 20/20 and all…

 

I didn’t take him up on it and Joan did. They gave us thirty days notice to move out. Then Joan tried all her old bullshit with me, such as telling me I had to get rid of my dog because they didn’t allow pets! AFTER they gave us the thirty day notice. I told her too bad. After all, what were they going to do, kick us out?!! Fucking idiots. Then I was subject to even more indignities. They claimed they wanted to come through and ‘get some video’ of the house for their daughter. I let them, thinking they would just do the upstairs. Everything was a mess. Stacks of boxes, mounds of clothes needing to be washed. The basement was completely trashed from the combination of having too much crap and me not being able to give a damn about a completely clean house. I felt so violated and would never again allow a landlord to do that.

 

Cain took time off to come up the last few days, help me load everything into storage and pack both his car and mine to the ceiling. Take our two cats, puppy and pet rat and go. By this time the apprenticeship had moved him from Utah to Denver, Colorado. We locked the door on the house in Montana and were off.

 

I was excited and optimistic. Cain, Carter and I were together and could be a family again!

 

Our first home in Denver? The construction sight trailer the guys used as a meeting place and to have coffee in the mornings. There was a bedroom in back but that was occupied by another apprentice who spent a lot of times and most nights out on the town. We were relegated to sleeping in the living room which was where the guys would normally meet before work. This proved to be very awkward. I was invading their morning coffee spot and they were invading my temporary bedroom! After the first couple of mornings of me sitting there, hair tousled, blinking owlishly at these morning freaks who thought the world should begin before dawn, and them staring, silently back at me, I said ‘To hell with it!’ and just burrowed deeper into my sleeping bag when they came in. I may have even snored. I didn’t care.

 

The trailer had no running water but there was a bag ice machine out back. I melted bags of ice for bath water, dishwater and cooking. The bathing really sucked because we only had a small dishpan to use. Carter was small enough to sit in it but Cain and I took some pretty interesting baths!

 

To demonstrate my sad level of naïveté, one of the times that Cain and I drove downtown to look for a motel to move into that was fairly close to his job site I spotted a sign on one of the buildings. It was a bath house advertising men’s and ladies nights. What a wonderful idea! I thought, and excitedly pointed it out to Cain. The reaction I got was an odd one and I didn’t quite understand why he seemed to think I was making a joke that wasn’t very funny. The next time we drove by it I told him we should go in and check out the prices. I was getting tired of melting bags of ice and a bath sure sounded nice! He again acted like I was telling an un-funny joke and I told him I was serious. He looked at me as if I were the biggest idiot on the face of the planet and informed me it was a gay bathhouse and they weren’t selling ‘those kinds of baths’. I was stunned and felt like the world’s biggest idiot. I thought Denver was a big city with an innovative and safe way for their probably large transient population to clean up. Coming from a small town Montana community we just didn’t have those things where I grew up. I tell you though, after having to melt bags of ice to bathe in I seriously considered my odds for getting into and out of a shower quick enough not to be molested. Cain wouldn’t go for it.

 

It was only about a week and a half before we found a motel called the Niagara House Motel on East Colfax Avenue. We lived there for three months.

 

While Cain was there and we were together, it seemed my life was just on the same path with a different view. I didn’t feel comfortable driving in Denver very far on my own, so Carter and I stayed in the motel room all day, all night, day in and day out. Instead of out onto the porch to check the mail, once a week we would drive the seventeen miles to the post office. Occasionally we went out to eat a restaurant called Healthy Habits, and all-you-can-eat health food buffet. We went to visit a friend of his one time. We would go to the grocery store. The one time I did laundry at the laundry mat on my own with Carter, I got to have the company of a homeless man who kept talking about ’the Zodiac’ and ’the Zodiac says’ this and ’the Zodiac says’ that and all I could think of was the damned and nefarious Zodiac Killer until the poor guy mentioned ’Zodiac’, ’Safeway’ and ’for twenty-five cents’ all in one sentence and i figured out he was talking about the little horoscope scrolls. I bought him a cup of coffee.

 

I was with Cain and still felt empty. I am an emotional person who needs emotional support and looking to Cain for that was like trying to hug a brick wall. I initiated sex with him even if I didn’t want to just so I could feel like he was there with me for a time and not in his own little internal world.

 

I found a pamphlet for the local community college and though that perhaps I could take some classes. They had an excellent Criminology and Forensics program and I felt interest begin to stir. For my birthday Cain bought me a used cello from Celebrity Vintage and Clothing for $100.00. He arranged for me to begin taking lessons once a month. My instructors name was Mary. She told me, on my first lesson, that I would be a quick learner and would pick it up quickly. I was so excited! I loved the voice of the cello and I was really looking forward to learning the instrument.

 

A week after my first cello lesson Cain came home with bad news. He had been fired. Something to do with him taking the extra time off to come help us move down there or something. I don’t know for sure. I am not sure I got the whole story or whole reason. There was nothing he could do about it. He seemed relieved, though. He wasn’t comfortable working with high voltage electricity. He had a fear of it instead of a healthy respect. He shouldn’t have been in the field in the first place. If it hadn’t been for his father’s pressure as well as his need to escape fatherhood, so like his own father had done, he never would have gotten involved in the apprenticeship program.

 

So that was it. Three months and we were going back home to Montana. Until we got on our feet, we would have to live somewhere. I knew Cain’s dad hated me so we would be moving in with my parents for a time.

 

Even though we had been reunited and were moving back to Montana as an intact family, old problems were still there. Old issues were still present. The time and distance we had lived apart had served to place a distant between our hearts. Like watching an old dear friend die a slow and painful death, our life as a family together lived on numbered days.

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Eight

Seems like my whole life I have been looking critically into my soul demanding “What the hell is wrong with me?”  My dreams of what I wanted out of life have always been vague and uncertain, with no deep driving direction to fuel them.

When they were younger and dating, my mom introduced her sister to my father’s brother.  They fell in love and were married.  Uncle J and Auntie K had six kids together.  Even better than a big family, in my young eyes, was the fact that they really loved each other.  They held hands!  My parents never held hands!

It made me want a big family of my own some day.  My sisters were ten and thirteen years older than me and so by the time I was five, they had moved out.  My middle sister, G had moved back home once when she was seventeen and going to college, but other than that I was raised almost as an only child because of the age gap.

Yet, at twenty-one, when I found myself pregnant I was terrified.  Cain and I weren’t married, in fact he told me he didn’t WANT to be married.  This conflicted with every moral that was drilled into my skull by my very traditional and old fashioned mother growing up.

The day I found out I was pregnant was such a paralyzing moment. I can walk in to that frozen heart-stop every time the door of memory opens on it.  It was one of those moments that, once it has touched your life, no matter what you choose in the outcome, you will never be the same.  For the rest of your life you will carry with you the knowledge that the house of your spirit carried within it another life, not your own, but one which you are completely responsible for weather you choose to let that life into the world or not.  As well, you will live with the responsibility both physical and spiritual of what you choose to do with that new life.

I could tell by the look on the Family Planning nurse’s face what the test results were before she spoke.  Cain was sitting in the chair behind me.  After she told me I turned around to look at him and burst into tears at the look on his face.  He looked condemned.  Like, walking-up-to-the-gallows-to-be-hanged condemned.

I am pregnant and he doesn’t want a kid and now he will leave me.  I thought as I began to sob.

We left the office.  On our way out I had gained a bit of composure, not wanting to bawl in public.  Outside I asked him, “What should we do?” hoping, as my mother’s voice railed in my mind about marriage before sex, that he would ask me to marry him.  Even though, I didn’t really believe in getting married just because you got pregnant, I was hoping maybe that his mind about marriage would change now that this had happened.

“What about abortion?” was what came out of his mouth.

I felt like a second crushing kick to the stomach had come right then that day.  I couldn’t believe that was the first thing out of his mouth.  I felt hurt and angry beyond belief.  I have always been of a pro-choice standpoint.  But I don’t believe you just have an abortion and it’s like nothing ever happened.  There are some serious spiritual consequences for ending a life, no matter how small.  While I didn’t believe in stopping others from making that choice, I didn’t feel I could live with that idea.  Besides, I loved this man.  I was carrying a part of him too now.

On the car ride home I sat with an angry lump in my stomach.  Cain didn’t speak to me.  I was to angry to speak to him.  I was terrified.  In a way, I too, felt condemned.  My life as I knew it would end and what the future held and the hardships and uncertainty involved left me reeling.

I couldn’t get used to the idea of being a mom.  I didn’t know the first thing about it!  I was, as always, afraid of failing.  I felt certain of it in fact.

Yet, I decided to keep the baby.  Cain wasn’t too happy about it, but he wasn’t going to leave me over it.  Cain’s father didn’t like me, and I never felt like his step-mom was entirely forth coming with me though she was always nice to me.  Cain’s father never bothered to get to know me, but felt certain in his arrogant assumptions that he had me pegged as a gold digger.  He had, in fact, told Cain at one point when we first got together that I was only going out with him for the money.  Cain worked part time at a pizza joint.  I worked full time at the title company. It was me Cain borrowed $190 from to buy his school books because his own father refused to help him pay for any schooling though the man was a lineman and worked on power lines for a utility company.  Cain decided to move in with me in part because paying half rent at my house was less money for him than what his Dad was charging him for rent to live at home!

About four months along and we found we were to have a son.  Cain’s father was more friendly to me then.  The brood mare would put forth the first Grandson, so she was tolerable.  Cain’s paternal Grandmother came down, a wonderful woman who was the one person in his family that truly made me feel welcome.  Together she and Cain’s step mom purchased a set of nicer China for us, bought us a large second hand sectional couch in fantastic condition and bought a lot of baby items.  I was at once overwhelmed, gratified and a lot freaked out by the generosity.  I did not want anyone thinking I was using people to get this stuff.  I felt a little bit okay with getting things from his Grandma simply because she seemed to genuinely want me to enjoy them.  It was hard though.  I don’t have that a lot in my family.  I didn’t know what was expected of me for it.  To me, some of it didn’t seem like it came without some agenda, though that could have been my own internal paranoia.

I know what it is liked to not be liked by people.  As a child people had looked at me sometimes and weather it was my face, my expression or the fact that I had always been overweight I had children and sometimes grownups say things or just treat me in ways that made it perfectly clear they didn’t like me.  This hurt my heart very much.  I have quite a sensitivity to things like that and feel things very deeply.  While I can hold a grudge, my most common reaction was to just build an internal wall.  You hurt me once, I won’t every give you a chance again…so the litany in my head went.  I had never done well with people who say cruel and nasty things behind my back then treat me as if I were a welcomed family member to my face.  That duplicity leaves me in a constant state of indecisive insecurity.  I always felt as if I were walking on eggshells.  And it hurt.  A lot.  It is in my nature to want to be open and trusting with people.  It is in my learned survival skills to hold back and come off as stand-offish or cool with people.  When it is family, it is too much to bear.  I dealt with it the only way I knew how.  I just kept my mouth shut and tried to be invisible.  When I was seven months pregnant my landlord told me he found a different house they were going to move onto the property.  They would tear the old one, the chicken-wire shack, I liked to call it on account of the chicken-wire and plaster walls, and move this other one in it.  He would have sold it to us for $10,000 dollars and I didn’t take him up on it because I was for one, a complete fucking idiot, and two, so naïve I didn’t think he was serious.  I was also worried we wouldn’t be able to afford it.  Or something.  All I know is I had my head way up my ass and let that deal slip away.

When I first met Cain, I had been coming off my party-life, unemployment diet, which pretty much consisted of beer, coffee and very little else.  I had lost over forty pounds in less than a month. I began to have dizzy spells and actually fell down a few times, though I didn’t lose consciousness. Not eating made me feel sick to my stomach which made me not want to eat.  My thoughts were sluggish.  I was horrified one day when I reached up under my hair and felt not one, but two bald spots.  One was almost as big as a baseball.  My hair had begun to fall out because I had no protein in my diet.  But everyone told me how great I looked.

After I met Cain and got regular employment all my weight and then some came back.  Cain’s father made comments to him about that too, I later learned.  The pregnancy didn’t help.  Always an emotional eater, it got worse and worse.  By the time our son Carter was born, I was well over 200 pounds.

I had been very depressed when I got pregnant.  I had been, for a year, taking belly dance lessons from a woman in her 50s named Molly.  She was friends with both Cain and I.  Yet, when I became pregnant, she started to treat me differently.  Molly never had kids.  At one point she and Cain and I were going to try and bike ride together to stay in shape.  Being my first pregnancy though, I was always so tired I could barely function.  I was still a night person.  Molly started wanting to go bike riding at five o’clock in the fucking morning!  Cain had no problem with it.  Soon, she and Cain were going on daily bike rides and I was left at home.  I wasn’t worried about an affair, she was married and faithful to her husband, but I grew to deeply resent the fact that the friendship I thought I had with her was obviously influenced by my soon-to-be-motherhood.  Molly was the one person who threw me my one and only baby shower and I will always be grateful to her for that, but our friendship pretty much died by the time my son was six months old.

Being left.  Ever since I was a small child, the idea of being left has held a fear paramount to nightmare proportions to me.  I know in part it is connected to a few childhood incident.  Shrinks call it “abandonment issues”.  Perhaps I wouldn’t have been as jealous as I was of the friendship Cain and Molly maintained if it hadn’t been so obviously exclusive.  It was hurtful.  Yet Cain was never the type to nurture emotionally.  Not even a little.  He was respectful, courteous an attentive lover, yet there was no emotional feedback.  He was and is a very self-centered person.  He knows his own mind and desires and everything else must orbit around his world.  He leans toward arrogance, being a very intelligent person.  That is his preservation skill.  He constantly spoke then, as now, about ‘stupid people everywhere’. Anyone that he considers of inferior intelligence is classified one of the ‘stupid people’.  This bothered me a great deal.

Cain, after leaving school, and under constant pressure from his father, gave in to that pressure, paid the union dues and signed the books to become a lineman’s apprentice.  He worked with his father’s company for awhile.  While learning to run the backhoe he accidentally misjudged and tipped it over backwards. He was not injured, but it cracked the window of the backhoe.  It also, no doubt, gave the other lineman something to laugh about.  It did not sit well with Cain’s father, whose own arrogance was fucking mind-boggling.  It was only a couple of months later that Cain fell asleep at the wheel driving a line truck home and drove off the road.  He awakened enough to keep it from flipping, but it hit the ditch with both front wheels hard enough to drive them firmly up into the engine compartment, doing extensive damage.  He was fired.

I knew Cain had no interest or desire for this field of work.  But his fathers kept after him.  Cain’s father and mother, both born in Canada had met at a drunken party one night.  After that one night, Cain was conceived and his parents ’did the right thing’ and got married.  After Cain was born his father worked for a few years there in Canada, but at the age of four decided that, to better support his family, he would become a lineman.  Then he went to America to work.  Needless to say, divorce eventually followed.  Cain lived with is mother in Canada until he was fifteen.  He never even went and stayed with his father.  But he was not at all close to his mother and needed to get away from her.  He wanted his father to be proud of him.  His father was only proud of himself it seemed to me, and unless Cain lived his life according to his father, well, suffice it to say I never heard a ’Well done!’ come out of that man’s mouth.

Cain went to work for a printer.  Carter was born in the fall.  Three weeks after he was born Cain came home to tell me the printer’s business had fallen off and his job was cut.  That was on a Tuesday.  The next day, Cain got a call from the lineman apprenticeship program.  They had a position for him. Be in Park City, Utah by Friday.  That quick.  Our son wasn’t even a whole month old and now his father was being called out of state to work.  I felt my world shift again.  I had no support structure outside of his dad and step-mom.  My mother made it clear she was old enough to not want to deal very much with babies.  My father hadn’t even come to see him until he was a week old.  I had not friends but Jessica and we actually hadn’t spoken with each other in about two years.  Cain was my world, weather he liked it or not.  Now I had a new baby and a husband getting ready to leave.

I hadn’t listened to Depeche Mode since that one awful night, but I could taste its echoes in my head as a reminder: You’re going to be left alone.

Again.

A Hard Look Within, Part Seven

Bryan was an intelligent, personable well read and well spoken individual.  He never spoke down to me or would have ever raised a hand against me or any woman.  Unfortunately, he had no problem with holding no job, allowing other people to support him and he was a thief.

I tend to be more naïve than I like, and I am an idiot when it comes to relationships.  Bryan was captivating in his intellectual capacity.  I was blinded by his bullshit.  Bryan ended up moving in with me.  Sort of.  Some of his cookware ended up at my place, in fact, I still have the pizza pan his sister gave him for his birthday all those years ago.

Bryan had an old military backpack with his clothes packed inside.  Instead of a move in, it was like an extended crash-over.  We never really agreed to stay exclusive to one another, though, while he was staying there I didn’t see anyone else.

We bonded over coffee and getting stoned.  Smoking pot that I purchased all the time turned me into a moody bitch.  I didn’t like it.  I did it anyway.

I knew Bryan occasionally swiped a pack of cigarettes.  I didn’t really want to know what or if he took other things.  I considered myself immune until the day I got off my courier job and Bryan, who was supposed to pick me up since I was letting him use my car to ‘look for work’, didn’t show up.  Chuck had his son give me a ride home in the courier car.  No Bryan.  I thought perhaps he was in an interview.  Since I had no phone he didn’t really have a way of calling, but I was pissed.  He could have left a message at my office.

The hours rolled by and I finally went to bed at midnight deciding I would walk across town to the police station in the morning and report my car stolen.

Around three in the morning Bryan came in.  With some guy I had never met before named Jesse.  I was up and snarling.

What the fuck?  Where the hell were you? Give me my fucking car keys right now!  Do you know I was going to call the cops in the morning?

Sorry, sorry, had a job interview in Missoula.

Missoula?!? That’s 175 miles away!  And who the fuck is THAT!?

I actually was pretty reserved for how I was feeling, confronted with a complete stranger in my own home and not wanting to make a scene.

Jesse needed a place to crash for a couple days….

Jesse actually was a very like-able person, but cut from the same cloth as Bryan.  I don’t know if he was a thief, he never took anything from me.

I began hiding my pot stash the day after I came home and Bryan and Jesse had been helping themselves to it.  Bryan had decided to get my little .22 Jennings pistol out, trying to show off to Jesse his vast knowledge of firearms, handguns in particular.  While trying to fast eject the bullets from the pistol by pulling the slide back repeatedly and as fast as he could, one of the shells didn’t eject and the gun went off, missing Jesse’s kneecap by less than a foot, and destroying my favorite Alice Cooper tape.  I never did find out where that slug went.  I hid the gun.

The shine was beginning to wear off Bryan, big-time.  In this time as well, he had introduced me to a friend of his I’ll call Cain.  Another intellectual, but this guy was working to put himself through college.  His hair was naturally curly, long and stood out from his head like  electro shock, when he took his huge felt cowboy hat off.  Couple that with the floor length black duster on a well proportioned six-foot frame and you had a very imposing figure.  I was twitter-pated.

Cain was a gamer, a role playing gamer.  People are most familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and all the good or ill associated with the idea of it.  There are, however, many, many different role playing games on the market ranging from those like Dungeons and Dragons to more science fiction styles to everything in between.  Instead of having a game board and pieces the person running the game, called the Game Master, spends time either setting up the scenarios from the book or making up his own.  Like puzzles there are situational challenges and obsticles to overcome.  Using dice and rolling numbers to create stats like strength, endurance, physical beauty, charisma and the like, the players create characters to run in the game.  Everything is determined by roll of the dice.  You roll to attack in a battle but also to parry or dodge.  If you come to a booby-trap your dice roll along with you character’s ability to disarm the booby-trap all play a part.

Cain was a very imaginative game master and ran an awesome campaign.  I enjoyed the challenges he set for us.

Contrary to popular belief and misconception, we didn’t do drugs, (Bryan and I were the only pot-heads or drinkers in the group) hallucinate, summon the devil, try to actually become our imaginary characters or sacrifice any innocents in the playing of the game.  It’s a game.  Role playing.  Like acting with words, for lazy people with no stage.  My eldest sister got wind of us playing, and being an extreme rabid fundamentalist I once endured (after I got phone service) a three hour lecture on how I was “playing on Satan’s playground” and “inviting all sorts of evil and demons into” my life by perusing an activity in a fantasy based setting where we could pretend to use magic and didn’t go to church on Sunday.

God and I had a good laugh over that later.

There was an odd occurrence that came about one time when my landlord, Chuck came over to check the pump under my house.  As I have said I always felt uneasy with him.  As we were under the house, looking at the water levels he started to ramble on about the office politics.  How some of the workers made crude jokes he didn’t appreciate.  Like one of the male office members talking about his ‘pud’.  This, being raised by depression era parents, was a rather old term slang for penis, one not often heard anymore.  I wondered why the hell he was telling me this and I couldn’t believe I had actually just heard the word ‘pud’ come out of the mouth of my landlord.  He then began to go on that ‘some of the office staff’ thought that maybe there was something going on between him and I on account of him letting me slide on the rent.  He further went on to say ‘someone’ at the office was insinuating that I was paying for rent with sex.

I didn’t have to think long who could have been spreading THAT particular rumor.  After all, Joan hating me was no secret.  Why stop at offfice bullying?  I had no proof, but you get a feel for these things.  To this day I don’t know what Chuck’s intention was in relaying that information to me.  I didn’t want to know! He did not make me feel at ease and in fact I got out from under that house as soon as I could.

Soon after I came home from work to find Bryan packing his knapsack.  He told me he was going to Seattle.  I was relieved.  I didn’t know how long he planned on being gone.  Didn’t care.  Cain had taken to flirting with me on occasion and I was really falling for him.  Bryan left for the highway to hitch a ride and I went to Cain’s parent’s house where he still lived.  It was like we had just been waiting for Bryan to leave.

Imagine Bryan’s surprise when he showed up a month later, after no contact at all with me, to our Friday night game session at another mutual friend’s house.  I was sitting on the couch with Cain.  I had my feet propped up in his lap.  Bryan made some gracious comment about how he was happy for me.  Asked me for a ride to my house after to get his knapsack, which he not only had left at my house but had left in my bedroom.  Arrogant, assuming son-of-a-bitch.

But I was with Cain now.  Cain and I would change each others lives forever.  I had finally found ’the one’ to spend the rest of my life with.  So I told myself.   I underestimated the internal damage I carried within, and how that would effect both our worlds.  In fact, it is only in recent years that I came to understand self-sabotage.

Cain and I were together for almost a year before he moved in with me.  Trying to hold a job and take physics classes proved too much for Cain.  Our relationship no doubt took its toll on him as well.  He opted for ‘taking a break’ from school and working.  He never has gone back.  We both worked and paid the bills.  We never really planned or talked about the future.  We had been together a year and a half before we got the news that would change our lives.

I had messed up on my birth control pill pack.  We were going to have a son.

A Hard Look Within, Part Four

I knew Rich was sick. Mentally. I had just been too young and naïve to know it. Dealing too with my own issues I couldn’t see it. I didn’t really know how severe his mental health issues were until about a month after I broke up with him.

 

By then I had gone on my own sort of rebellious path of self discovery/destruction. Mostly it involved men and booze. Then one of the boozing men introduced something I had only tried twice with ill results: marijuana.

 

I guess back then what happened was that I had felt so repressed growing up in high school, then in that relationship with Rich that I just took sowing wild oats to a whole new extreme. At least an extreme for a shy, introverted girl raise by Depression Era parents with a religious background. What I did would be nothing for most people, but for me this was extreme, over-the-top behavior.

 

I had been reputed to be a bad ass in school. I didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted to do, like sneak out of my parents house because my Mom for years had told me how much my sisters doing that had hurt her. I didn’t want my parents to be any more ashamed and angry with me than they were. Really, I only wanted them to love me and actually enjoy my presence in their lives. I didn’t want to hurt them. I, save for a handful of times, always went where I said I would be and always came home when I was supposed to. Looking back on it now I really wish I had snuck out more. Perhaps it would have saved me a headache later.

 

After Rich I turned for the first time in my life hardcore to the party life. My friends Jessica and Mona moved in to room with me and we started drinking a lot. I lost my job at the dairy because staying up all night screwing some guy I used to go to school with was more important to me. The truly sad part was that the guy told me not to tell anyone we slept together because he didn’t want to ruin his reputation. That made me laugh because everybody in school thought he was a fucking putz. It also hurt me a lot. I convinced myself that I was using these guys instead. And more guys there were. With no job I didn’t buy food but somehow we always had money for beer and coffee. I lost 40 pounds the first month after I broke up with Rich and for the first time in my life discovered the power of my own sex appeal. Which I used like a common slut, I might add. I found a smorgasbord of men for one night stands. Well, it was a smorgasbord for me anyhow. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty in a very short period of time.

 

I picked a hitch hiker up that ended up being my boyfriend for three months. He was the one that introduced me to the joys of marijuana. Jessica was my partner in crime. We soon ran Mona off, I think the wild life scared her.

 

We had no phone service. One night my hitch hiker, Terry had stayed over. Early in the morning there was a pounding at the door and Jessica answered. It was Rich. She gave me an odd look when she told me he was there. I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. I came out to see what the hell he wanted. He walked into the house. I had to either walk backwards or be stepped on. He was talking non-stop the whole time. He wanted to know who was in my bedroom, what I was doing with someone in my bedroom. I told him it was none of his fucking business. He started to babble at me that he had walked the seventeen miles to Kalispell from Columbia Falls and he had counted every one of his steps. I asked him if he was fucking drunk. He then started to tell me all his friends had turned against him and it was all my fault, that I had turned them all against him.

 

I told him I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about and told him to get the fuck out of my house. He shoved past me to the kitchen and I asked him what the fuck he was doing and continued telling him to get out. When Jessica heard me yell, “What the fuck are you doing with that knife?!” she was out the door to try and call the cops from the neighbors house.

 

Rich grabbed one of my kitchen knives and proceeded to try stabbing himself in the chest through his shirt and coat. I freaked out and tried to grab him. Ironically, the only though in my head was, What the hell am I going to tell the cops about a dead body in my house?

 

He and I struggled by the counter, he jerked away from me and I heard a pop noise and felt warmth flood over my hands and legs. I froze in shock and he reeled away from me.

 

For a brief moment I felt myself truly teetering on the thin edge of sanity. My mouth was open, but I couldn’t breathe. I expected him to collapse thinking I was watching a man die. He’s stabbed himself in the heart! I thought. Then I realized he was not only not going down, he was still trying to stab himself. I felt a rush of confusion then dared to look down at my hands. It was then I noticed the paper biggie sized soda cup on the counter laying on it’s side. It had held ice the night before which had melted. Knocking it over in our struggles was what made the sound and it was water dousing me, not his blood.

 

In a snap my paralyzed fear was consumed in towering fury. I was consumed in some unholy rage right then. In two steps I was over to him and yanked the knife out of his hands, by the blade, not even caring at this point. I knew he was over the edge. Somehow we were back across the dining room and he had me shoved up against t he door, pinning me while simultaneously trying to open it. It was then I saw Terry standing casually in the doorway, one arm propped up, looking for all the world like he was watching us play a friendly game of darts.

 

“Terry! HELP ME!” I screamed as Rich began striking at me. Terry sauntered over and made a half assed attempt at putting Rich in a full Nelson. Rich, suddenly realizing there was another person there seemed to revive from his animal state and ran out the front door. Jessica came back, none of the neighbors had been home.

 

I have never been so pumped on adrenaline in my life. I knew we had to make a police report. I stood there in the dining room and we talked about going to the police station, when I rubbed my forehead.

 

“You’re bleeding!” Jessica said, alarmed, pointing at my head. Confused, I reached for my forehead, thinking I was bleeding from there and noticed the blood in my hand. I had forgotten I grabbed that knife by the blade and all for of my fingers were gashed open and oozing blood. I couldn’t even feel it right then. I stared at it for quite awhile, in complete disbelief, waiting for the pain that didn’t come until later, then went in the bathroom to wrap my hand.

 

We went to the police station and Terry took off. There were large, half-dollar sized drops of blood on the walkway in front of my house. The animal had wounded himself after all. We wrote out the police report. I told them how Rich tried to kill himself with the knife, about our ensuing struggle. Before we even left the station the dispatcher informed us the police had him in custody. They had arrested him as he was heading back to my house.

 

For the first time, I was truly scared. He was obviously off his fucking rocker. That he held me personally responsible for his friends turning against him pissed me off and worried me. He had been heading back to my house. Why? Not for anything good, that much I knew. Either the next day or the day after, I called the Violence Free Crisis line at my mother’s suggestion. The advocate suggested I try and find out when he would be released so I could get an order of protection.

 

I called the police station and got the female dispatcher. I asked if he was still incarcerated. The dispatcher asked me if I was a family member.

 

“No. I am his ex-girlfriend. The one in whose house he tried to kill himself.”

 

“We don’t release that information to anyone but family.” the dispatcher informed me.

 

“But he has hurt me before and may try to hurt me or himself again! He tried to stab himself in my house!”

 

What I heard next I still have a hard time believing, but this is what I was told by this dispatcher.

 

“Unless you are family I cannot release that information. Besides, you WERE caught in bed with another man!”

 

“WHAT?!! He’s my EX-boyfriend!” I shouted. I couldn’t believe what that bitch had just said. I hung up the phone in tears. What had that waste of skin told the police? He was my distraught boyfriend come home to find me in bed with another man? Seriously? He hadn’t lived with me in over a MONTH!

 

When I called the crisis line back and relayed the conversation I had with the woman dispatcher my advocate blew a gasket.

 

“SHE SAID WHAT??!!! I’ll take care of this. I’ll call you back.”

 

I don’t’ know what that wonderful woman told that bitch dispatcher but when she returned my call we found out he was going to the state rehab/mental health center in Great Falls for a month for evaluation.

 

I didn’t have a phone but he began calling my parents house. He was so sorry and he was getting help, etc. etc. He had a hang-up about my tattoo, the one I had gotten to cover his name. It is a collage. I told my tattoo artist I wanted a half-Elf woman and a sword or dagger in the collage. I told him to use some artistic license to put something else in it. So what I ended up with is a half-Elf woman’s face, partially obscured by hair. Over the hair on her face is a dagger. To the left of the dagger, coming out of the hair is the head of a snarling demon. The demon was my friends idea, I was 18, what the hell and whatever. Rich called my mother to ask if the demon in the tattoo was supposed to symbolize him.

 

Since the demon was my tattooist’s idea, and this tattooist was the guy that told me about Rich hiding from me at friends houses and he knew it was a freedom gift to myself, it could have been what he had in mind. I don’t know. But I still HAVE that tattoo.

 

Rich talked about getting back together. I made non-committal noises. I still didn’t want to hurt him. I knew he was sick and wanted him to get better. He informed me that before we got back together I had to go get an HIV test and be tested for STDs.

 

I ran into his father in the restaurant. Frank informed me that his son needed healing and I needed to stay away from him since I was the one who had driven him to suicide. Like having parents who raised him telling him he was so smart and could do no wrong or take no responsibility didn’t help get him there. Not to mention the genetic propensity for depression. I couldn’t believe it. Frank was telling me his fucked up son was all my fault too. It was like something Rich himself would have said.

 

Needless to say, I had no interest in getting back together with him. After getting out of Great Falls he came back for awhile and kept a low profile, eventually finding true love and a sugar mama in a cousin of a mutual friend. He and his brother Donny got drunk together, stole their other brother’s car and plowed it into a bunch of trees. Rich had his jaw wired shut. I saw him in the restaurant and to try and prove to him and myself everything was water under the bridge ( I still had nightmares then) I went over to chat with him. Soon his knew girlfriend, Pam, who was about ten years older came in. He began to tell me how wonderful she was. What a miracle what with all her health problems she had. How happy they were together. When I looked at her, it was the strangest thing. She seemed to have this darkness around her. That voice came back again.

“She’ll be dead in three months.”

 

Two and a half months later I ran into her cousin. Pam had died of a sudden heart attack from complications to do with diabetes.

 

I had nightmares about him for about two years. He would be coming to kill me. I knew this was some process of unresolved emotion I needed to work on. At first, in the dreams, I was helpless and at his mercy. As time progressed, I was able to fight him. Then fight him to a draw. Each dream I made more progress. The last dream I ever had of him, The fight ended quickly, and he was naked, cringing. In the dream I told him to leave and never bother me again. I never dreamt of him after that.

 

Sometime after Pam’s death, unable to sponge of someone else, Rich moved to Livingston with his mother. I saw him once years later and it took me a minute to realize who that scruffy, fat guy was. He was bullshitting with some guy he and his mother were having coffee with, trying to tell him his expert opinion on the guys own field of work.

 

I saw him notice me and the look that came across his face was priceless. Like he just took a big bite out of a cat shit sandwich. I suddenly realized that he was way more disturbed by seeing me than I was at seeing him. It occurred to me that the bastard still wanted everything to be my fault! I looked at him, his appearance. The years hadn’t been kind. He was pathetic.

 

He got up at one point to pass by my table. He looked like he had a stick shoved sideways up his ass and the wave he gave me looked more like an epileptic twitch response. I gave him my best condescending smile, vindictive bitch that I am. With the pot-gut, striped shirt and unkempt hair he looked like a fat hair twelve year old.

I went back to reading my book. I never saw him again.

 

Two years ago, his sister-in-law told me they found him dead in the motel room he lived in in Choteau. Heart attack, they say. He was forty-one.

 

A Hard Look Within, Part Three

I dated a couple guys in early high school from a nearby town. I don‘t know if it was because of my antisocial ‘fuck you’ attitude or just the fact that I put off the hard ass vibe, but very few guys in my school asked me out. The ones that did either held absolutely no appeal to me or did so only after I was going out with my older boyfriend. And according to one of my best friends I scared the hell out of people.

 

My social life consisted of five hour coffee marathon’s at the local greasy spoon. Because my sisters had been hell raising partiers my parents over compensated by severely restricting my movements. I only rarely got to stay the night at girlfriends houses, and the few who braved staying at my house got to see first hand my father in sarcastic asshole mode. So it was the coffee shop. Coffee and cigarettes.

 

I met Rich through a mutual group of coffee drinking friends. Witty, older, smart. Black hair and blue eyes. Smoked the same brand. It was by chance I went into the restaurant alone and found him by himself at the counter. I took a seat to talk to him. We talked for three hours. Soon after started seeing each other. He had a job and soon got an apartment. His apartment turned into party central. They only let people in who brought their own beer. People came from other towns to party there. I would come in to wake him up and find strangers passed out on the living room floor. I met GM there and he and I got to be friends. I even had a secret crush on him while I was going out with Rich.

 

Rich had just turned twenty-one. My Mom knew his mother and had known him because she was a substitute teacher at the high school. While my parents didn’t necessarily approve of the relationship, they allowed it because he ‘seemed like a nice kid’. What they didn’t see too much was the complete imbalance of power in that relationship. My immaturity coupled with his ability to manipulate, an slowly awakening mental illness. I had never known about mind games. He soon lost both job and apartment and moved back in to his Mother’s house.

 

Time and again the scenario would unfold. In naïve ignorance and out of desperation for some kind of life, I threw myself mind body and soul into this relationship. Being denied healthy friendships with my own peer group I became completely obsessed with the idea of this relationship and with him. I didn’t understand that he probably didn’t really want me as much as I wanted him. After all, he told me he loved me, we talked about getting married someday and we had sex all the time. He wanted to go hang out with his buddies which I wouldn‘t have had a problem with if he would have kept his promises to me. His friends were my friends as well, but Rich didn’t have a car so I couldn’t go with them. GM and Elmo even came to visit me fairly often and there were times I would go places with them in Elmo‘s beat to shit Dodge Dart. My parents trusted them more than they trusted Rich, I think.

 

What got to me the most was being told by Rich that he would come see me then being constantly stood up. But I was in an emotionally desperate state at this time of my life and refused to cut ties and move on. Clingy doesn’t begin to describe it. I was more obsessed I think. If he told me he would come see me and stood me up I would go to every place I knew him to hang out until I found him. I was trying to force him to be accountable. This probably drove him as nuts as he drove me lying to me all the time! At the same time though, he never moved to break up with me. Never once told me we were through, not even at the end.

 

Another aspect began to emerge. If he told me he would come see me at 7 p.m. he wouldn’t show up until 9. That was how it first started. Then it would be midnight. Then 1 a.m. On school nights. When I confronted him with my anger the way he would twist and manipulate the argument, by the time it reached its end I would be the one apologizing! He made it clear time and again everything was all my fault. He would have me so upset I would be in crying hysterics, hyperventilating, literally pulling my hair out and thinking I was going out of my fucking mind. He never apologized.

 

One incident stands out. I wanted to have a romantic picnic and brought the idea up to him. He said it sounded cool. We made plans for a Saturday. I woke up early and started cooking all his favorite dishes plus desert. I cooked for half the day. I called him and he said he was going to run out to his friend Eric’s with them. Rich didn’t have his own car. Eric lived miles out of town. I asked him when he would be back and reminded him of the picnic. He told me he knew and he would only be gone a little while. Two hours later I called out there. Only a little while more. I called an hour later. And again. And Again. Soon they quit answering the phone. My sister and mother were furious on my behalf. My sister, G was calling him everything but dirty white trash. They had seen all the effort I put in. He finally showed up at 10:30 pm. Full of apologies. It wasn’t his fault. Eric’s Mom didn’t give him a ride. Like a naïve idiot I bought it, so desperate I was for affection and to just have him there.

 

This went on for three years. I was obsessed with making him be honest with me. In the winter time I could track him in the snow around town.

 

There is a morbid, pathetic piece of very dark humor here. I stalked him, yet he never tried to break off the relationship. That was what really confused me. If he would have told me he didn’t want a relationship I would have got it and moved on with life. But he always told me he wanted to be with me and loved me. Then he would avoid me and get angry when I tried to make him be accountable to me.

 

During this time, my one saving grace is a job I got working for a woman named Carellen. In exchange for cleaning horse corrals and stalls she would give me riding lessons. This was my one bright spot of saving grace through those dark times. I even took an after school job, babysitting two boys while their mom went to school. Over the course of the school year I saved every penny to buy my horse Steele for $350.00. A full blood Arabian gelding. Working with the horses was the one time I could just be myself. Be in my body. Working with the horses I was secure in what I was doing. I wasn’t some freaky little fuck up. I was strong and right in what I did there and I was good with horses. I helped break them to ride. I worked them in the arenas. I could go home carrying that horse smell on my clothes, and the part of me that knows how to survive took that into her and held onto it for all she was worth.

 

Rich’s best friend Eric got sick. He had a form of cancer so rare only four or five other people in the whole country had it. He fought it for five months. He died a month after his seventeenth birthday.

 

Eric was the second friend he had lost in the time we had been together. One of his other friends had committed suicide. Rich had been struggling some time with depression. Rich’s father, Frank, had it. In fact, we sat with his father for HOURS at the restaurant, day after day sometimes, listening to Frank go on and on and on about his depression. His medication. How his divorce from Rich’s mother had triggered it. What he had to do every single day to deal with His Depression. It was like a soul sucking litany this man relayed to us. Eventually, Rich’s mother, Nancy moved to Livingston and the house had been foreclosed on. Rich’s siblings either went with his other or moved out of the house. Rich lived in the house for two or three months with no running water and no electricity, not even trying to get a job.

 

For me, high school was going no where. I was still too short of math credits to graduate. I mulled it over and let my parent’s know I was thinking about quitting school. My parents told me if I dropped out I could no longer live in their house.

 

Praise God and hallelujah, I finally found my ticket to freedom! School let out for Christmas vacation my senior year, 1989. I never went back.

 

I found a small one bedroom house renting for $200, a month, utilities included plus $100 deposit. My father, since he had retired with dependants under 18 was receiving $200 a month for me being there. They decided to use that to pay my rent. I got a job working for $400 a month under the table at a local dairy. My parents cashed in some savings bonds of mine my maternal grandmother had purchased for me to buy me a better car.

 

I knew nothing of budgeting or saving money or establishing credit. I didn’t even know about paying bills! Rich moved in with me. After a time, I started badgering him about getting a job. He couldn’t he said, because all the jobs were in Kalispell. He had no ride to Kalispell. Couldn’t get a car because he had no drivers license. Then he got a job at a Kalispell fast food restaurant and went in to Kalispell to live with our friend Tom while he worked. I never saw any of the money.

 

I also didn’t take this as him maybe trying to dump me. He said he still wanted to be with me, still loved me. Still lead me on. That job lasted all of two weeks before he was back. Said he couldn’t handle all the beeping from the French fry machines. I figured he had gotten employment once he could get it again. I found a rental in Kalispell. A one bedroom house for $150.00 a month, I pay utilities. No more excuses for him of not being able to get rides to Kalispell for employment. After only a week or two, he was going back to Columbia Falls where we had just moved from, staying at his dads or whatever. Still telling me he loved me, still using me for sex.

 

I was done. About two weeks before my eighteenth birthday I gave my self two presents. A tattoo to cover up his name on my right forearm and I finally told him to stay away for good. I felt like such an idiot. Another mutual friend of ours, his name was Tom, told me Rich had cheated on me numerous times. Another had enlightened me to his hiding from me and/or sneaking out the back door when I came over. I felt like such a pathetic idiot. I had wanted a fantasy relationship with a manipulative lying cheat.

 

I still hung out with him and his brother on occasion, with friends. One night a couple girlfriends and I ran into him and his younger brother. They came with us as well drove down to the fishing access to do some drinking. On the way out, we spotted a skunk in the road. Rich started yelling at me to run it over. I refused. He got furious. He was screaming at me to run over this poor little animal who had done absolutely nothing! I got furious. I told him to fuck off. This infuriated him even more. His control over me was no more. He couldn’t stand it.

 

My parents were out of town and had told me to stay at their place. We all went back to their house. We hadn’t had that much alcohol, about two wine coolers apiece. One of the girls, Mona was trying to seduce Rich’s brother. The other girl, my best friend Jessica and I decided we wanted to walk to the store for some gum. Then we detoured to another couple of friends house. Jessica decided she needed to get home, it was 4 am. I wasn’t really worried about Rich and his brother being at the house I figured they would leave once Jessica went to get Mona. Wrong.

 

Jessica and Mona came back to tell me that Rich and Donny had gotten in a fistfight in my parents living room after downing a bottle of whiskey of my Dad’s and stealing a bottle of wine and that Donny had puked on the rug. I came back to my parents house then went to their Dad’s apartment to find them. When I got to the building, Rich was passed out up the first flight of stairs with the stolen bottle of wine on the landing in front of him. I roused him and made him get into the house. His brothers were sleeping on the couches. I was furious and was planning on talking to him later but the dumbass kept trying to follow me out the door. So finally, not wanting to wake his dad or brothers arguing with him there I told him to get into the car and we went back to my parents. I was furious. It’s one thing to treat me like shit but don’t fuck with my folks, even if they can be assholes.

 

We started to argue. I told him how dare he and his brother come into my parents house, trash shit and steal from them. I wouldn’t take any of his guilt bullshit. I refused to take responsibility for his actions anymore and I told him so. It was him, NOT me. He couldn’t handle that and he snapped.

 

The next thing I knew I was flying across the room. I leapt up screaming at him to get out as he swung at my face. I thought about my father’s .357 in the bedroom and a voice that could have only been my guardian angel told me, “If you go for the gun he will kill you with it.”

 

I tried to shove him out the door and he tackled me. He sat up, straddling my stomach and began to strangle me. I couldn’t breathe, my throat locked shut by his hands. I tried to scratch his eyes out but only was able to leave a pathetic shallow gash on his right cheek. I began to panic. I knew he was going to kill me. My vision started to spot and blur.

 

I heard the voice again in my head. “Go for his balls.”

 

I reached down around his hands but was only able to get a little. I twisted, pinched and squeezed for all I was worth. A little goes a long way in a case like this. Rich let go of my throat with his right hand, drew back his fist and punched me as hard as he could. The blow landed just above my left eye. It would take over seven months for that bump to disappear. He jumped up and headed out the door. I was in some out of my head state of mind because I saw him going for my car. I couldn’t even think ’get help’ or ’call police’. I was in some visceral state of freak-the-fuck-out. I thought he was going to steal my car. When I ran up to him he grabbed me and I was air born again, landing on all fours in the gravel of the driveway. He didn’t get in the drivers side, he opened the back door where he had been sitting earlier and got his notebooks out, then stomped off, no sign of drunkenness in his walk.

 

I jumped in my car and drove back down to my friend’s house. I left the front door wide open. My mother later showed up in a panic wanting to know what happened. I told her. We didn’t press charges which was just stupid on my part. I really don’t know where my head was then. I was still angry. He could have killed me but I wanted him to feel bad for what he did.

 

I went over to his Dad’s later, I can’t remember why now. Woke him up. He sat up and looked at me, tried to craft a confused look on his face and asked me, “Dearest, what happened last night?”

 

I could tell by the look on his face he remembered everything. He was all apologies. He was so sorry, called me dearest again. I hated him more then than I ever thought possible.