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When CR and I broke up, I kept in touch with his brother James and James' girlfriend Anna. I didn't know Anna for very long but she seemed like a really cool person, as well as being one of the few females I'd actually be willing to ...:experiment: with, should the chance ever come up. (It hasn't. Simmer down, boys.)



I suppose, as always, a bit of history is in order.



CR and I met in rehab. I realized even then that this was DEFINITELY not the ideal circumstance in which to meet a potential partner, but there were mitigating factors. (I was the hardcore one; he was just there because he'd mentioned to his parole officer that he smoked a lot of weed. To parole officers, that counts as a drug problem.)



The ex-con status and the weed smoking I could handle. The fact that he was a compulsive liar and a sex addict (as long as the sex wasn't with his significant other and involved some element of degradation) didn't come up til much later. Nor did the fact that the "roommate" he claimed to have, who had a teenaged son and was twice CR's age, was actually his girlfriend. Nor that she was a psychotically jealous trailer park bitch.



This was the woman who broke into a hotel room where CR and I were hanging out and beat me as I cowered naked on the bed.



CR was the man who let her, and then blamed me for not defending myself.



This was the woman who snatched me out of my own car, grabbed me by the collar and yelled "Are you gonna kill THIS boyfriend TOO???"



CR was the man who had given her the ammunition to use--who had told this crazy bitch the story of my grief.



This was the woman who shredded my poems and let them fly all over the trailer-park snow; the woman who found an explicit letter I'd written to CR, back when I could still write about such things, and mailed it, without explanation, to my mother.



CR was the man who let her get her hands on those items.





But this was also the woman whose man I took, no matter how worthless he was.



And CR was the man who lied to me to get me to take him back, who told me he never loved her--while telling her I was "just a place to stick his dick"--that's a direct QUOTE, boys and girls, repeated to me verbatim on the longest Thanksgiving night of my life, when I walked down the stairs of the motel and said to him as he begged me to stay: "You can't get me back. You can't talk me back, and you can't fuck me back. You know how you said you were afraid of being a 'Lou' or a 'David' instead of a 'JP'? You know what? You're right. You're none of those. You're lower than any of them. And I'm done."



I should have listened to myself.



He came back, telling me how sorry he was, how he was done with her, how he slept on the couch (hmmm....foreshadowing? You betcha) and he just needed to stay there a little longer til I could get a place, and then we'd move in together and be happily-ever-after.



And then she'd show up again, or try to beat me, or do some other evil shit. And he'd go back with her. And then, a few weeks later, the whole cycle would start again.



I don't know why I believed him.



Except I do, a little bit. I was alone, and I was scared, and I felt like JP's death had been my fault. I felt like all the things I'd done had left me damaged, so that no "good" man would want me. I felt like I had to prove something--not to CR, of course, at least not at first--but to God, maybe, or the universe, or the world I couldn't even bear to look in the eyes any longer. I believed in second chances, but I'd already had mine. It was my turn to give someone else a second chance. Or a third. Or a nineteenth.



Finally I just called a halt. I'd gotten an apartment and a job and had gotten my shit together and kicked the heroin for the fourth or seventh time, and CR had moved in but still worked far away, out by where She lived, and then he started calling after work and telling me he was "gonna spend the night at his grandmother's".



Maybe that's what the kids are calling it these days. (Well, she WAS twice his age....)



He dumped me on Valentine's Day. Called me from wherever and said "I'm not coming back. I'm done." I said "You picked a great day for it, didn't you." And went out and got some more heroin--I'd gone back on shortly after he'd stopped coming home entirely.



I was bored, and I was lonely, and I wanted my old life with JP. Not this New, "Improved" version which was supposedly supposed to make me happy--apartment, check. Job, check. Bills paid, check.



Only man in the world I ever would have willingly died in place of?

Nope...not there.



That June he called me again. "Hey, listen, I'm driving out to get Tim from Arizona and we're gonna drive back and then...I wanna come back. I'm so sorry." And he cried. "Can we all...get a place together, or something? When me and Tim come back? We can be like a family again."



"Again," he said. "Family", he said, and that's what HE was calling it, maybe, when he'd sat me in some little diner booth one night a few months after we'd met, and broached The Subject, the Subject that was never to go away completely: a threesome. In this case, with Tim.



"It will make us a family," he said. "My woman and my best friend. It's like a bond between us."



So we all got really drunk and really high, and Tim was so fucked-up as to be useless in that regard, pretty much. Which was fortunate. And it's a testament to Tim that neither of us ever mentions it--that we can still be friends, or what passes for friends, even after being in that situation together.



But I had been alone for too long when the call came that June, and so I said "Yeah--we'll talk when you guys get here."



He called me again, on my birthday, and asked me to wire them some money. Which I borrowed from my mother, claiming some emergency.



I didn't hear from either of them til a week after they were supposed to have come back. And then, it was only Tim, landing on my doorstep with his surviving cat--the other had perished after being left in a hot car on the trip.



"I just wanna tell you," Tim said, "I had nothing to do with it. I mean, I need a place to stay and everything, but I had nothing to do with his decision."



And I was just that obtuse that I didn't know what he meant, til he told me: "CR went back to Her."



So much for family.



Tim was going to crash on my couch for the remaining month of my lease. Then I was going to get a studio apartment, and it was gonna be sink or swim to the lot of you.



Then he was just gonna crash on the couch at the studio for one night. And how could I say no? He'd helped me move.



One night became two, became four, became thirty. Finally the landlord put it very plainly: either he goes on the lease, or out you both go.



And by then everything was good again--I'd gotten a new job, quit heroin for what's still the last time, and started getting my shit back together again. Tim's presence didn't seem to hurt, if it wasn't really helping. So I put Tim on the lease, and told him if CR ever, EVER, so help me God EVER, got a hold of our phone number, I was holding him PERSONALLY liable.



No worries, Tim told me.



A few months later he "just mentioned" that CR was about to be homeless--that She was moving and didn't want to take him with. "He wants to talk to you," Tim told me. "He said he used to call the old number just to hear your voice on the machine."



And I was alone, and I was lonely, and I was tired of hearing Tim on the phone with his girlfriend, calling her "Babygirl", which had been one of JP's names for me so long before. The loneliness was like a long sharp fork to the gut, and I wanted someone to love me again. I told Tim to give CR the number.



Before long, there were three of us living in the one room. And I had bought CR a set of turntables, because he wanted to be a DJ. There was barely room to walk. We got a three-bedroom apartment shortly after, on the third floor of a building across the street. And CR and I were happy, for a couple of months.



Later I found out: he was still sneaking off to see Her after work.



Later I found out: once he quit that job, once he was sitting at home while I worked, he was talking to women on the Internet. He frequented the chat rooms for "BBW's"--Big Beautiful Women. Fat chicks, in other words. Women who were perfectly happy being fat and wanted to date men who were attracted to fat chicks.



Even if they were involved. Even if they were living with someone else. And whatever scruples they had, could be broken down:



My girlfriend doesn't mind.

My girlfriend doesn't give me sex.

My girlfriend is too closed-minded to do the things I want to do.

Don't worry--my girlfriend will join in.



One day, not long after he got a new job, he sat me down and told me he'd met this fabulous woman "at work". "And her thing is, she comes into relationships where things have kinda gone 'pfft'. And she spices it up a little."



I hadn't known til then that things had gone 'pfft'.



It was all arranged, he said. She was going to come and spend a week or two with us.



Of COURSE he cared how I felt, he said. If I didn't want it, then he'd just call Bertha. And disappoint her. And he'd never get this freaky-sex-thing out of his system. But that was okay. If my narrow-mindedness was more important to me than his happiness...



The first night, over Chinese food, she said something about "the chat room". I fixed CR with my Glare Of Impending Nuclear Death and dragged him, bodily, out to the kitchen.



Of COURSE he'd send her home, he said. If I was that upset about a little white lie, which he'd told only to protect me, that it would actually move me to be RUDE, and to kick a guest out of my home....



She stayed a week and a half. By the last day, the two of them had made plans for her to move all her things from her mother's home in Iowa into the middle bedroom of our apartment.



She was to arrive on my birthday.



Later I found out: he'd told her I didn't mind. In fact, that I was thrilled.



Later I found out: she was leaving her four kids, all under the age of ten, in Iowa with her mother.



Later I found out: she never even called those kids ONCE.



She lived with us for a month and a half before he tired of her. Or of me. Or of the drama. Whatever he tired of, the lease had MY name on it--not hers.



At CR's request she left, saying she was going home. She went to some other Net person's house and slagged our names all over the chatrooms. Mine, too.



Her mother called us a half-a-dozen times, looking for her. We didn't know what to tell her.



CR said he was sorry. A hundred thousand times, he said, he was sorry. He'd learned his lesson. He was over it. He would be faithful from now on. We'd get our own apartment--our relationship with Tim had deteriorated drastically almost from the moment we moved into the three-bedroom, ending with CR putting Tim through the wall one night in a drunken brawl. The Bertha thing had been just the icing on the shit cake.



I let him stay. We got a nice little one-bedroom apartment, in the same building the studio had been in. And we were happy, for a couple of months.



Then he got back in touch with Bertha. He started sending her money for her bills.



She brought her two little daughters to our house the day after Christmas. He asked me to let the kids sleep in the room with me, to give him one last chance to get it out of his system for good, before we got married. He promised this was it. That he'd be done.



I refused. But the kids ended up sleeping on my floor anyway. They liked me, and besides, CR and Bertha wanted to listen to some music in the living room.



In the middle of the night, long after I estimated any festivities would be over, I got up to pee. The room was dark, lit only by the streetlight outside.



It was enough to see by.



I told Bertha the next morning not to believe everything he told her--particularly about me. "What do you mean?" she said.



"I mean, I did NOT tell him it was okay for him to fuck around. In fact, I told him exactly the opposite."



He came into the room and caught her packing her things and the girls' things, and tore into ME. "You realize this means we're through, right? I'm leaving. You're a bitch. You had no right."



And then chased her around the apartment, into the bathroom, to plead with her to stay. And then chased me around, to tell me that if I wanted to kick these poor little girls out, if I wanted them to see how rude adults could be...



She stayed a few more days.



"Sometimes," the three-year-old told me as I stood one morning making everyone breakfast, "we're hungry 'cuz we don't gots no food." On their way out, I gave them half our groceries.



He finally decided--after I'd had to tell him once too often that no, we couldn't go buy records this week, because we'd sent all the spare money to Bertha for her bills--that he was done with Bertha. He was always done with people who inconvenienced him.



And after ten million more promises, after telling me that I was the only one he really cared about, the only one who would ever be able to help him be the person he knew he could be--after all of it, we got married on Valentine's Day, in the basement of City Hall.



His brother James and James' girlfriend, Anna, were the only ones there. My family didn't even know about it--not even my mother. One of my co-workers had a husband who worked in the McCormick Place Hilton, and she got us a room for the night, cheap, even though the Auto Show was that weekend.



We went out to dinner and got snubbed by the waitstaff--two black males, two white females was apparently more than they could deal with--so we went to a Walgreens and bought a shitload of liquor and went back to the room to hang out.



James and Anna got too drunk to go home, so CR said they could stay. Then he pulled me out into the hallway and tried to arrange a foursome, videotaped with James' camera.



I put my foot down. I spent my wedding night in the bathroom, crying my eyes out, listening to CR try to talk me into it.



The next morning, CR and James got into an argument about Michael Jordan--some irrelevant little-boy shit--and later, when James tried to hug me goodbye, CR snapped at him "Get your hands off my wife!"



That was the last time we saw them. Anna still called me, though. And a couple of months later, CR left me for another woman he'd met on the Internet.



Later I found out: he'd told her our marriage was just a sham.



Later I found out: He'd told her he'd married me as a favor. That it was a sexless marriage, that I was actually a lesbian who was involved with a co-worker, but who didn't want my family to know. That he'd married me just to hide my shame, and that I was okay with him having other relationships. Because I wanted him to be happy.



He moved off to Indianapolis, to "find himself"--but he promised me he'd come back. And as long as we didn't have to be married--as long as he didn't have to feel owned--we could be together.



I got the divorce a month or two later. (I paid for it.)



In the meantime, I cried, and wrote long begging letters, and pleaded with him over the phone to come back. And he agreed that he was wrong. That he didn't mean to do this. That he needed some help. But he was staying with her. And if I did anything stupid--like an anonymous letter telling her the REAL truth--I'd never see him again.



I wouldn't have told her, anyway. I kept remembering the lack of dignity with which his LAST jilted girlfriend had comported HERself. I wasn't going to be like THAT. I was going to salvage my little scraps of pride.



He said he'd come back in September. By September I didn't want him any more. Even the realization that the two-night stand with the really hot guy had just been a pity-fuck wasn't enough to undo THAT resolve. (But my god, was that guy fine. On my deathbed I will be able to say with all honesty that in my life, I have been well-fucked by at least ONE classically-fine guy. That's all most women can ask for, no?)



By October I had another man--Bob, my Seattle man. Who, in the end, I treated very shabbily--it was a non-breakup breakup. After four months of round-trip weekends, I just stopped calling...Except it wasn't like that, not really, not at this end. It was more like, I just stopped not-fucking someone else. Who turned out to be LJ.



That was in February. By the end of summer I had my credit cleaned up and one eye on this house.



And that was when CR called.



So how've you been? he asked. Have you heard the new Audioslave? 50 Cent sucks. He's a joke. You sound like you're doin' good. Oh, you have a cell phone now? That's great. Buying a house, eh?... Listen...our lights are about to get cut off, and I was wondering....



I lied to everyone, even Stella, even Firefly, even LJ, about this story. I told them I'd laughed in his face and told him to go fuck himself, and then hung up.



Really, though, I sent him $80.



I lied to everyone because I knew what they would think, and why they'd think I did it. But they would have been wrong about my motive, about why I'd sent him the money.



Not because I felt anything for him. Not because I ever entertained the slightest wish to have him anywhere in my life, even on the fringes, or the fringes of the fringes. Not because we were "family" or because we'd been lovers once, or because he needed me--or for any other stupid altruistic deluded reason.



I sent him the money because I COULD, and he knew I could, and he hated that I could, and I KNEW that he hated that I could. I sent him the money to tell him I thought that when you left I wouldn't be able to support myself. Now that you're gone, I have enough. In fact, more than enough. I have enough to spare, which I didn't have when we were together. So--here. Enjoy your electricity.



I have never claimed NOT to be, in my heart of hearts, a vengeful, castrating bitch.



He e-mailed me a couple of times, trying an apology, but I wasn't receptive. Finally I told him he hadn't changed a bit, and if he wanted something he needed to spit it out and quit with the grovelling because it was making me a little sick. He sent me one last message, telling me how wrong I was about him, and that was that.



I hadn't talked to James and Anna in a while, though James sends me bulk-mails about his comedy shows and karaoke gigs. A couple of days ago he sent me an announcement about his new Internet radio show.



Relevant background: CR's hugest dream was to be on the radio. He wanted to be the next Jay Marvin or Roe Conn or Garry Meier--or M@nc0w. He really, REALLY wanted to be the next M@nc0w.



So I sent James a reply: "You know, don't you, that the mere EXISTENCE of this radio show would be enough to send your brother into screaming HISSYFITS, if he knew?"



Today, I got this back.



"My brother is pretty much dead to me. He molested my wife over the Christmas holiday. He's a degenerate scumbag whom I have no further use for."



My reply:



":::donning my best lace-curtain Irish, Little-Miss-Snippybritches voice::: I was not aware that that ....individual...was even back in town. (Pass me the bleach, please; I have an entire STATE to sanitize.) (/Snippybritches)...Jeez. Nice to know that good ol' CR is still bringing the clusterfuck wherever he goes."



Is it wrong of me to hope that CR ends up at my doorstep one day, all 5'5" of him? And runs straight into LJ's navel?



No--really--is that wrong???



Sometimes I look back at my life and cry for what I've lost.



Then there are days like today, when I look back at my life and count all the shell-casings from the bullets I've dodged.



That's a lot of expended ammo, boys and girls. A LOT of ammo. And I'm still standing tall.



Sometimes it kinda rocks to be me, you know?