Nineteen

For years I would call him and ask where he was when he didn't come home. Most of the time I didn't get any answer. I'm not sure why I called. I guess part of it was because I was so lonely that I wanted someone - anyone - there with me and part of it was because I wanted him there to take some of the responsibility that he'd left me with. No, most of the time he didn't answer, but he'd come home at three or four in the morning. In the beginning I'd start in on him as soon as he came through the door about where he was or what he was doing. I learned later on that you can't argue with a drunk.

After that, my feelings toward his excursions changed. Instead of wishing he'd come home, I started wishing he'd come home in a body bag. I hoped and sometimes even prayed that the miserable son of a bitch would crash his truck in a drunken rage and kill himself. Sometimes I even fantasized about it. About how I would wait by the phone for The Call and then tell them to bury the motherfucker wherever they found him because I wanted no part of it. Nobody would miss his sorry ass anyway. Just throw some dirt over him. Who would give a shit? Good riddance.

But in my heart, I knew that wasn't me. As bad as he'd treated me over the years and as much as he'd done to me, I wanted nothing bad for him. I'm a firm believer in Karma, see. For 'good people'. I don't think Karma ever comes back on 'bad people', but I damn sure believe it comes back on the 'good ones' and I didn't want his blood on mine by wishing such thoughts. So I just started removing myself from him. I just started seeing him as a roommate. Us being just two people living in the same house, not a married couple. That wasn't a stretch. That's all we really were. It was another one of those subconscious self defense mechanisms. If he was 'just a guy', what he did or didn't do couldn't hurt me. Since I wasn't seeing him as a husband, his blatant disregard for me could be overlooked more easily.

You know what - I was wrong.

Eighteen

After that, things happened in a whirlwind fashion and I can't say I remember many of the specifics. I remember that he went to jail, but not for breaking the window or almost decapitating his daughter - but for Public Intoxication. I remember he bonded out of jail in four hours. I remember that we were separated for a few months.

I don't remember how I paid the bills, where he lived during the time, why I didn't get the hell out of Dodge while I had the chance, or what the circumstances were that brought us back together. All I do know, looking back now, is that was a mistake of epic proportions on my behalf. I guess I had a reason, though. Perhaps it was out of wanting to make sure my kids had a financially stable life and some resemblance to a family life. Just appearance-wise of course because we in no way resembled a family within the four walls of that sardine can of a two bedroom trailer.

We didn't in the years that followed, either. He never really was a part of normal family activities, holidays, or the mundane tasks of maintaining a home. He didn't see the importance of birthday parties or Christmas presents or The Easter Bunny or anything else related to childhood. Had it not been for me, my kids would have lived an even more grim existence than they already had. I was the one that made sure they had Christmas and holidays and birthday parties. I went to all the school functions and played Mom and Dad when the situation arose. I did all of the child rearing. The only time he had anything to offer was to come down on them for something. If it wasn't negative, you can bet he didn't say it.

For holidays, he'd try to find a way to fucking up the day for the rest of us. He'd get pissed off over something ...anything...and set the somber tone for the day. Christmas Eve, he'd go out drinking and be still passed out on the couch come Christmas morning. Birthdays, he'd have to work late, thinking the celebrations were going to wait on him or what he would be missed. That he was somehow going to control our happiness and dictate how our days were going to pan out. That nothing could occur without his input, his blessing, or his ridicule. That he was not only Lord and Master - but also running the show.

It took us both a long time to realize that the only thing he was running was his mouth.

Seventeen

So our daughter was born and he was thrust into fatherhood for the first time. Parenthood has a way of making people grow up, but not him. Nah, he couldn't be bothered with midnight feedings, burping, bathing, doctor visits, or diaper changes. He still had too many wild oats to sow. I guess since, by this time, I had already been a mother for six years, it was expected of me, if not just my duty, to take up his slack.

So I did - just like he knew that I would. He still didn't think anything of staying out on his all night benders, drinking and running the roads - while I, like the good wife (idiot?), stayed home and minded the babies. I didn't have a choice, see. It wasn't like he came home from work and then left again. No, sir. He went right on from work to his benders, never coming home at all until the wee hours of the morning when he was done. So what if I needed something from the store or one of the kids got sick. That was too bad because, even though he had a cell phone, he wouldn't answer it no matter how many times I called. I'm not sure where he went and at that point, I no longer cared. Actually, I never cared. My whole issue with the situation was that he was trying to make an ass out of me and I had no way to retaliate.

My family didn't know how we lived or what all I had endured at the hands of the man who promised to 'love and cherish' me. I just kept it all to myself because my sisters had been in similar situations and it was common knowledge. I swore I would never, ever be in a situation like that and always said they were crazy for allowing that kind of abusive behavior to go on. That was when I was single and still green in the ways of the world. Before I was ear deep in dirty diapers without a friend in the world. Before my self esteem had been shattered and before my head realized how quickly the odds can stack up against you.

His family knew how he was. He had been this way all of his life, but I didn't know it until it was too late. When somebody's trying to woo you, see, they put on their best face. They don't show you the dark side until you're too far away from the light to find your way back. That's what happened to me. I'd call and tell his sisters all of the things he had done and they would just sigh and make comments to the effect of they 'guessed he wasn't ever going to change'. I don't know why I called them. I guess to try and shame him in some way, not because I wanted their help. His mama was no different. They had always turned a blind eye to the things he did because they were scared to confront him.

My family did get to witness some of his alcoholic antics. It was Thanksgiving 1998 - two months after our daughter was born. I'm not quite sure how he ended up at my sisters house because he's never been to my sisters house before or since - not even with me. But he did and he was drunk and he got drunker. I, of course, was at home with the babies like the good wife (idiot?). I remember that night my sister called to tell me he had just left her house and that he was 'crazy'. He was drunk and violent and tried to beat up her husband. She told me to lock the doors and to not let him in because, frankly, she was scared for me. So I laid out daughter on the couch to sleep. My daughter was asleep in her bedroom and I went to lock the doors. He came flying home and went into a fit of rage when he wasn't able to open the doors. Yes, he tried to bust through them. He tried to kick them open. All the while, he was cussing me and threatening me. In the meantime, I had called the police and they were listening to every thing he was saying because it was that loud. Still holding the phone to my ear, I walked over to the couch to pick up my daughter. Just as I got her nestled safely to my chest, the window shattered and shards of glass pierced the couch where she laid not three seconds before.

Sixteen

Midsummer of my pregnancy, we were living in the third sardine can of a two bedroom trailer. It was in the same park as the second so we didn't have far to go, but it was still hard on me being big, hot, and pregnant - and having to move.

That was the middle of July. The baby was due the second week of September. You'd think that an expectant father would want to be at his wife's side helping her tend to things and anxiously awaiting the arrival of his firstborn. And I guess in a 'normal' or 'typical' family, he would be. However, my family was never normal or typical. Sometimes things become such a pattern in your life that your mind tries to make you believe that the things you're enduring are normal and typical and that you just need to find a way to cope. That everybody has the same troubles and you should just suck it up. It's a self defense mechanism that kicks in, in an effort to spare yourself some amount of grief - a subconscious survival tactic.

It works for a little while until you realize that your life pales miserably in comparison to interactions you see between couples around you. You realize that people really are kind to each other and that not everybody screams obscenities to each other. That not every husband calls his wife names and sometimes daddies really do take their families on outings together. You learn that people are loving toward one another, they tell each other how much they love them, and that couples still hold hands and give kisses goodbye before leaving their homes. That their house doesn't feel like a pressure cooker from all the stress and that they really are enjoying life.

When you come to those realizations, you go through the gamut of emotions. First you feel jealous of them so you immediately have to hate the loving couples, so the jealousy turns to anger because people you hate make you angry. Those are more self defense mechanisms, courtesy of your subconscious. If you hate them, they won't matter. Then you remember that everything you hate in someone else is a reflection of yourself - of something you don't have or wish you did. That's when the sadness and longing set in - when you realize what you don't have and everything you're missing out on. Then you get angry again because of how your life turned out and how dare you be suffering when everybody else seems to have it all. Finally, when you're done of feeling all these things because you've spent so much energy and have nothing left to feel - the final self defense mechanism kicks in and that's numbness. You shut down completely. You grow cold. Numb. Desensitized. Not because you want to be, but because the only thing left to feel is nothing. Your mind is out of survival tactics so your senses shut down and you go back on Auto Pilot, pretending you don't need the basic human needs of love, kindness, compassion, sympathy, company, and closeness. Defiance. Your final stand. You don't need it. Fuck 'em. You're tough. That shit's for lame people anyway. Who does that stuff? Who needs it?

You do.

But the defiance survival tactic won't let you show it because it knows that showing it would make you vulernable to feeling again and that's what hurt you to begin with.

Living a life of solitude is hard, but living a life of solitude in the physical company of someone would be unbearable to a feeling person. I've spent more nights alone since getting married than I ever did as a single person. I don't know why he drank. I don't know why he didn't come home from work most nights or come home at all on most nights, for that matter. I don't know if he hated me that much or loved the alcohol more.I never asked. It wouldn't have done any good to ask. Our communication consisted of tirades of curses, insults, threats, and the occasional physical contact punishable by law. Living like this forces you into a life of solitude. You learn to keep the peace by keeping quiet. Not because you're scared, but because you're just so.....tired. You're mentally and emotionally drained all the time and you end up not having anything left in you to care or fight with. So you let it go. You let it build up. You let it slide. You forget it. It might seem that you're giving in, but you're trying to keep your sanity - what little of it you have left.

The day of my last prenatal visit, the doctor sent me to the hospital for some tests. They decided to keep me there and induce my labor. The induction wasn't going well so the doctor called for an emergency Cesarean section because the baby was in distress. I called The Expectant Father at work that afternoon about 5:oo PM when I got the news. He told me he was 'working' and that he 'wasn't sure he could get off'. Some how, I wasn't surprised. Par for the course, it was. He did show up, though. While they were wheeling me down the hallway to surgery. He says he was there for the whole procedure. He wasn't with me when I went to sleep. He wasn't with me when I woke up. So who really knows? Or cares, for that matter? I mean he had been drunk and/or gone my entire pregnancy. It's not like I depended on him for any kind of moral support. I learned a long time ago not to do that and I wouldn't be disappointed.

Fifteen

It wasn't too long after we moved into the second sardine can of a two bedroom trailer that I found out I was pregnant. I hadn't planned on having any more kids, but it didn't hit me nearly as hard as the second time I found out I was pregnant. Thankfully, I was still working during the six weeks he was laid up with his broken leg. That's the only way we were able to survive and just barely. We were without a car because of the wreck and I had to have my mama take me everywhere I needed to go. It wasn't until a couple of months later that we bought another vehicle. This time, it was a tiny Mitsubishi truck with barely enough room for my daughter's car seat and the gear shift. This truck also ended up totalled in a wreck, but alcohol was not a factor.

My daughter seemed happy and content. She was about four years old at the time. That's when she still liked The Evil Bastard. At least that part was going as planned because, after all, she was the reason I had married Satan. I never told her to call him 'Daddy', even though we moved in together shortly before she turned three. I wasn't sure it was going to work out and I didn't want her to be attached to him. So I let things take their own course and figured she'd call him whatever she felt like. I didn't realize until years later that the fact that she never did call him 'Daddy' spoke volumes about our home life.

This became another bone of contention between us. He said it's my fault she never called him 'Daddy' because I never told her to. 'Daddy' is a title you earn, it's not given. He still resents her for this, considering all he's done for her. She wouldn't spit on him if he were on fire. This has forced me to be in the middle and the tension is almost unbearable when they are in the same room.

Even though we were still in a 'happier, more bearable' time in our lives as a family, I was still apprehensive about having another baby with things the way they were. I felt like he was going to alienate my daughter and show favoritism toward 'ours'. I was very adamant that that was not going to happen. I absolutely was not going to stand for it. He might have only one child, but I had two. If they couldn't be treated the same, they wouldn't be treated at all. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about in that aspect. The Evil Bastard never did show favoritism. There was never any 'She's yours' or anything like that in the relationship, even after my second daughter was born. They were treated equally and I was pleased.

We moved into yet another sardine can of a two bedroom trailer in the middle of the Texas sweltering summer. I was 7 months pregnant at the time. This last sardine can was to be home for a lot longer than the others had been. It was very nice compared to the other ones, too. We were moving up in the world- sort of. They say you don't know what goes on behind closed doors. Well, 'they' were right.

Fourteen

Once settled into the second sardine can of a two bedroom trailer, I started working at a convenience store. I would work from two in the afternoon until ten at night. Sometimes I'd have the midnight shift and it would be from midnight until six in the morning, but those shifts were rare.

The Evil Bastard would go drinking when he got off work, while I was working. I can't count the times he came up there, belligerent and intoxicated out of his mind. He'd come and accuse me of things. Mostly of having affairs. Just talking all kinds of nonsense in front of the customers. So, not only was this what I had to look forward to when I got off of work, he was to be my ride home because we still only had the one vehicle. I can't count the times he never showed up after my shift to pick me up. So that would leave me having to either walk or call my mama to come and get me.

Two things stand out in my memory of my tenure on that job. The first is the time I called the police after one of his drunken tirades. He left and I watched the police pull him over in a parking lot across from where I was working. Through the window, I saw them do the sobriety field test. I also saw them walk to their cars. I watched and listened as he squealed his tires and sped off after the police gave him the all clear. I watched them do nothing about it.

The next thing I remember is the night that I saw rescue vehicles and police with sirens blaring, speeding down the service road of the freeway just about the time my shift was ending. I waited. He never never showed up. This wasn't anything new so I wasn't surprised. I was just about to call my mama, again, to come and pick me up when she called me to tell me that The Evil Bastard had been in a terrible wreck. My first thoughts were not ones of worry or fear or anything like that. I wanted to know if he was dead. I wanted to hear that he was dead.

But no - he wasn't dead. I couldn't get that lucky because people have been trying to kill Satan since the beginning of time, but he just won't die. He just had a broken leg that laid him up for six weeks. How unfortunate. The ambulance took him to the hospital and the rescue vehicles I saw earlier were on their way to the scene of his accident. I did go to the hospital straight from work that night - just because I wanted to see the bastard writhing in pain. I remember walking into the room and being overcome by the smell of alcohol. He was that drunk. I didn't speak. I didn't console. I didn't ask the attending doctors for any information. I just turned around and left, hoping I'd get a call during the night that he had died from internal bleeding that they did not find until it was too late - but alas. He lived.

Thirteen

So I had to look for another place for us to live, as per the eviction. The search led us to a trailer park across town to another sardine can of a two bedroom trailer. It was a better one, but not by much. This is when we started to get a little better off financially. We even had a color TV and was paying $12 a week to a rent-to-own place for the privilege. We got a better car, but he took that to work, too, so it didn't do me any good. He also ended up totalling it one night on a drunken binge while I was at work at a drive-in store. I'm not sure if that's the same night I realized the cops were on his side and not mine, but at any rate - I remember him coming to my job one graveyard shift, knee walking drunk. He started talking his shit to me for no reason, but the sake of doing it and squealed his tires as he left. I called the cops to report a drunken driver and watched from the store window as the 'good 'ol boys' stopped him, did the requisite field test, and let him go. I also remember the sound that his tires made as he, once again, squealed off into the night. This time, in front of the 'good 'ol boys'. I felt sad, sick, furious, and disappointed all at the same time. The two people a girl would think she could trust aside from her daddy were betraying me right before my eyes. The man who promised to love and cherish me and the 'good 'ol boys' who promised to protect and to serve me.

We lived in the second sardine can for ten months, most of which are also a blur. I know things were just as bad, if not worse than, in the first sardine can. He still went out nights and left us stranded at home. The phone lines were severed again after a fight. I don't remember all the details of the situation or even where my daughter was that night, but I know that I fled to an empty trailer deeper in the park to spend the night on the floor because I dreaded him coming home.

The time spent here stands out the most because two life altering events unfolded within the tin walls of the second sardine can. I married the miserable SOB and I got knocked up courtesy of some faulty birth control. I think it was me that suggested that we get married. At the time, he was in the country illegally from Mexico and that made just living day to day difficult because of all the restrictions against him, and me - by default. I figured the only way he could ever really make a life for any of us was to get his immigration affairs in order and get on the right path. He couldn't do that without getting married so that's why I suggested it. I wasn't thinking about it in terms of love or any of that gushy, mushy, giddy bride bullshit. I was thinking of it more in terms as a career move.

So we wed. At 4:30pm in the local Justice of the Peace office at the county courthouse in an unceremonious ceremony - by the very same person who pronounces people dead after horrific accidents. I didn't see the irony in that until much later, but that's what it was - a horrific accident. We were both clad in dirty work clothes. The groom in paint and plaster splattered jeans and T-shirt and I in scrubs stained with hair dye from the local beauty college I was attending. Without even a ring to exchange, we made our promises to each other. I don't know if he knew he was lying when he agreed to love, honor, and cherish me. It's unfortunate that people can't be held in contempt of court and jailed for breaking such promises. At least I had the decency to cross my fingers behind my back before I agreed. Maybe he did, too.
I got my wedding ring two days later, financed at a jewelry store with his boss' signature. It was another two weeks before it came back from being re-sized to fit my fat finger. That ring was bounced around quite a bit over the years. Off his head. Off his back. Off the wall. Off the floor. I delighted in hurling it against whatever would stay still long enough because it seemed to hurt him. Eventually, it began to give me a rash wherever it touched me and that's when I realized I was allergic to him. I lost the ring. I took it off and laid it down somewhere when it started itching me one day. Too bad that SOB wasn't misplaced as easily as the ring was. I could have, at least, pawned the damned ring.