Damn My Ex 

john and i had been engaged for a year and a half.  work was slow, so i came home a couple of hours early.  i walk into the living room, sit on the recliner, and see a clear VHS tape case on the end table.  i figured he rented us a movie.  how sweet, right?  turns out, not so much.

that’s when i look up at the TV.  the one i bought him for his birthday.  there’s a video in, and it’s on pause.  if you remember the old video cassettes, you know the pause wasn’t really that clear like it is today.  squinting and tilting my head a little, i realize there’s a woman giving a guy a blow job on the screen!

i’m not against porn.  i don’t really get into it, but i’m not against it.  just be upfront about it, right?  i only think that’s fair.

i sat there, looking at the fuzzy picture for a while before i go looking for john.  boy, will he be glad to see me!  i finally found him, in the basement, switching a load of laundry over.  he froze when he saw me, and turned white, which is quite a feat considering his african coloring.  he finally closed his open jaw, asked me if i could finish the laundry while he went to the bathroom, and bolted up the stairs past me.

it took a while, but the whole sordid details finally came out.  he had quite a collection going by now.  my question was where he got them all.  he had rented a p.o. box behind my back and had had them delivered there.

to this day, i am confused as to how bad that video had to have been in order for him to stop watching it and go switch his laundry over.  must’ve been some laundry.

i was dating an army special forces guy. we had been together for about 6 months when i got pregnant. he said he was happy and we were gonna be a family, yada yada yada.

i was 5 months pregnant when i met his wife!!!! he was on temporary assignment to washington, so his wife and two kids stayed in texas. i never had a clue. she flew in to surprise him for their anniversary. i stopped by his house to visit. she answered the door….there we stood…both pregnant! she invited me in, he saw me and took off running down the street in nothing but his boxers in 25 degree weather.

she asked me, “would you like some grape juice?”

“yes, i would!”

i’d like to tell you marie was lazy, but that’s such an understatement. see for yourself:

i worked outside in the sun and heat.  i walked a lot but made good money for it.  i figured that if i’m working outside of the home so marie doesn’t have to, the least she could do was put down the game controller (mario 64 if you care) and wash a dish or two.  in my dreams.  what actually happened was we ended up with a path through the living room to get from the bedrooms to the kitchen.

i got fed up with it.  in five minutes, i had cleaned up a huge area of the floor, filling up three 55-gallon trash bags.  i made marie an offer.  i offered her a dollar a minute she cleaned the apartment.  i suggested fifteen minutes a day would be enough to clean the place in a week or two.

her response?  me wanting her to do anything was controlling.  in the following argument, i learned that it wasn’t that it was degrading asking her to clean.  it was controlling asking her to do anything she wasn’t inclined to do on her own.  despite the fact that she would get paid more than i did to do it, i was trying to control her.  i wish.

if i controlled her, the place would be clean, and the princess would still be stuck up in that damn tower.

john, my then fiancé of three years, got suckered into buying one of those pay-in-advance cruises from a telemarketer. he gets off the phone, all excited, and tells me about this great honeymoon he just bought for us. romantic, right? newly married couple out in the caribbean, listening to the steel drums and all that. i just couldn’t help picturing the sunset over the blue water.

fast forward to the next day when i hear him talking to his mother on the phone. he’s telling her how she’s going to love the cruise he just bought for the four of us. FOUR?!?!?! did i just hear that right? surely he meant two.

nope. four. me, him, his mom, and his mom’s wife. yeah. and to top it all off, we were sharing a cabin. thanks, john, i think i’d rather go camping.

so christmas came, and we actually had some money. i gave marie some money, and dropped her off at a strip mall she said she wanted to shop in. looking at the stores in the mall, i could see some decent gifts coming my way. when i pick her up, her bags are packed with stuff. cool, finally some decent gifts from her, right?

not really. come christmas morning, when it comes my turn to open presents, i find two gifts for me under the tree. one was cologne that sounded like straight rubbing alcohol, and the other was one of those big-button calculators made for little old ladies who can’t see shit.

me: “what about all those bags?”

marie: “oh, those were for me, wanna see what i got?”

tons and tons of pretty nice stuff. all for her. she bought my stuff at dollar general. guess i was worth about $6 of my money to her.

so my then girlfriend, marie, had a son.  great kid.  well, she decided to go after her baby’s daddy for support.  according to her, he was her “one and only”.  okay, whatever, good luck!

test comes back: not him.  a little more digging and i get the story.  he was in the military back in texas (she had just moved here).  he’d have her over with a bunch of buddies, and she’d get wasted drunk.  she didn’t really remember anything that happened at the parties after a couple of drinks.  according to her, she only had sex with him a couple of times that she can recall.

my thought? maybe his buddies showed up at the parties for his great party favors.

so marie, my then wife, and i went to a fast food seafood place.  you know short bob gold’s, and she tells me to get her extra hushpuppies.  so i come back with our order and extra hushpuppies (3).  she flips out, flips out!

apparently,extra means at least a dozen.  what did i end up getting her to get her to shut up?? two dozen, that’s 24 hushpuppies “on the side”.

and you thought this post was about boobs.

so marie and i are sitting in the bed of her truck after class let out, just talking like normal.  we’d been seeing each other for a couple of weeks.  nothing had happened yet, but, ya know- i was hoping.

she drops this bomb on me: “my baby’s daddy called from my old hometown.”

“uh-huh, did you tell him to go to hell?”

“i was gonna, but he asked me what my ring size is.  so now we’re engaged, but nothing’s changed between us.”

so after marie and i broke up, she says, “i’m so glad we didn’t do a whole lot.”

“why?”

“well, if i want to get intimate with a guy, i have to go to the doctor first.”

“again, WHY?”

“since i have general warts and all”

one, that’s something you should’ve shared with me during our relationship.  two, yes, i, too, am glad we didn’t get too far.  third, don’t you mean genital?

UPDATE:  i ran into marie’s dad this weekend.  she got knocked up right after we broke up.  yes, he got her “general warts”, too.   nothing like community property, huh?

i was working as a server when a stack of pans in the back of house fell on my head. obviously, i was in pain.  worse than that, though, i was getting disoriented and confused.  probably a concussion, right?  so i call my then fiance, john, who was of all things, a nurse.

i explain to john what happened and asked him to take me to the hospital so i wouldn’t have to pay for an ambulance. (i know, i know, my employer should’ve done that.  what can i say? i was 21 and stupid.)

his response? basically, what the hell was i thinking, why did it go and do something so stupid, did i know he just got home from work and was really tired, did i have to go right now, and could he get something to eat first.

he finally picks me up and drops me off at the hospital, after he stopped at a drive-thru. yeah, he dropped me off.  he tells me later that i was probably faking and i wasted his time.  i was stupid to go to the ER, and i was going to have to pay for it.

i’m fine, thanks for asking, honey.