“She was quite a doll and I didn’t want anybody else.”

My wife, Helen, and I have been married sixty-five years. I met her in junior high school. And I think we figured it up. It’s seventy-one years that she and I have been together. Practically. We weren’t actually dating in junior high school until a little later, but I knew her and we were friends and so on.

We’ve lived in the Kansas City area all our lives. Back then it was like any other medium-sized city, everything was pretty smooth, there weren’t a lot of the troubles that there is today. It was just a good place to be. My father run a bakery there and we just had a great time. Her father worked for Procter & Gamble. I think he was a soap blender or something.

We lived about eight blocks difference. I could just walk on over anytime. We’d talk, you know, and play together in school. I met her brothers and we got very well acquainted. They liked to fish like I do, so everything was hunky-dory. I did a lot of hunting and fishing with them and we got so we were, you know, kind of like family already, as far as that goes in some respects.

So, you know, the feeling—it kind of grows on you.

Girls back then, well, it was all different. It’s very hard to even remember. Girls and boys. As far as dressing goes, there weren’t any of this show this and show that. (laughs) There weren’t any tattoos then, neither. None of that stuff. They just wore normal dresses and, you know, whatever the kids wore to school. The hairstyle was very conservative too. Nothing real fancy. Helen, she was really blonde and she dressed and looked like a blonde—very neat and very particular. Not one to show off. A regular good listener and just a nice person to be around.

It just seemed to be the normal thing, and we both understood it. She was quite a doll and I didn’t want anybody else. That’s the way it was. I’ve got good taste!

We were sweethearts for quite a while. I had a high school graduation and then I had a little bit of college that I didn’t get to complete because of the war. I went and volunteered in Leavenworth, Kansas. Helen, well, she took it like she always does. Whatever has to be, has to be. Then I was at air force training in Sherman, Texas. She came down there. We got married. I wanted to make sure that when I came home that she was still mine. (laughs) She was my sweetheart and I wasn’t fooling around.

We never did have any doubts about each other at all. Absolutely not. I knew I loved her and she knew she loved me and we still feel the same way. She’s my one and only. I’ve never had another. I remember, it was hard when I left. The last time I saw her, just before we took off overseas, we was surrounded by a lot of people. Everybody was doing the same thing, really. They had their wives there with them. I remember, I was trying to keep her as long as I could before I went.

I was a pilot stationed on Guam. I saw action in Japan mostly. It was about thirteen hours in the air, you know, back and forth. We’d bomb and then fly the six, seven hours back to Guam. Thousands of miles. Nothing but ocean and sky until you get to Japan.

I don’t know how many missions I flew. I just remember I would sit there for thirteen hours in that airplane, you know, and you think about a lot of things. We had to worry about the weather along with everything else. That long time over ocean water, there’s always some storms or typhoons. You had to be alert because there were no warnings what was ahead. It was a lot of worry. Just nerves. They did their darnedest to shoot us down!

But I’d think about her. She was in my thoughts every time. I’d be wondering how she was getting by, and how she was living with her folks, and just what the heck was good for her, really. It helped.

I worried about her a bit. That she might be meeting somebody else or something like that. The thought would cross my mind once in a while. But I trusted her and she trusted me and that’s the way it was.

I stayed in contact with her by writing letters. You’d write a letter, and hell, it’d be a month before you heard anything one way or the other. But if I got a letter from her, I’d read it two or three, four times, just to think about her. And I’d look at her picture every day. I had her picture right by my bunk. It was a good one—nothing fancy or nothing, you know, suggestive or anything like that, just from the waist up and such. I still got it. It stayed on my bed. I didn’t take it on the planes. You were not supposed to take anything personal, you know, if you get shot down or whatever.

There were some rough trips. This one particular one, they shot up both my wings and part of the rudder control. We had one left in-board engine out, and I knew we weren’t going to make it back to Guam. So I told my navigator to plot a course to the nearest island under our control. And it was one of those little islands that had runways on them but there was a cliff on each end of the runway. And it was five hundred or something feet to the water off the both ends. We got on the final approach and everything was going pretty good and I had the wheels down, and my right in-board engine quit. I just got the nose over the cliff and the landing gear hit. We made a big kind of a fishhook turn and we went on fire. I lost my belly gunner and waist gunner.
I didn’t even know my head was bleeding. All I’m thinking about is how do we get out of this thing? Some of the guys got their outfit on fire. I was trying to beat them out and I got both my hands burned. There was twelve of us and we all got out except those two guys. The waist gunner, I saw his body, but the belly gunner he got ground up pretty bad, you know, because he couldn’t get out.

This was in 1944. I was twenty-one. I know I was more of a man than I was when I went over there. When I came back home and saw Helen for the first time, I thought she was the finest thing that God ever created. (laughs) I couldn’t wait to get my arms around her.

We lived in an apartment, then we found this little house, and my first job out of the service was with General Motors. I gave them forty-one years. I started out on the line as an assembler before they had the conveyors in and we built them on dollies and pushed them to the next station. Then they asked me if I’d be a foreman. And then I was general foreman, then shift superintendent, then superintendent, then director of quality control. I was that for twenty-one years and then, when they shut the old plant down, they wanted me to come over to the new plant, and I said, “No, I’m going to go home to my wife.” And I retired.

Helen never worked. She raised our boy, kept our home. And she was very supportive of me. She agreed with whatever I decided that it was my job to do and she did her job and we didn’t have any problems there. She has been a good, faithful, enduring person and I wouldn’t trade for nothing. I’d do this whole thing over again in a New York second. I think it has worked real good. I didn’t ever have to worry about any of the marriage problems. We understand each other, we know each other well, and it just works.

We argue. Sure. We get in our little discussions, arguments, what you will. Sometimes I get the better end of it. Sometimes she does. I quit counting a long time ago. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You know how that is. There are times when, you know, we get mad and walk away or something, but hell, an hour later, it’s forgotten and by the wayside. You make it work.

A lot of couples don’t do that today. They miss out on the benefits. We’ve got one boy and he’s sixty-two now. Fred Jr. Now, Fred has been through a couple of relationships. So maybe he didn’t pick up enough from the old man! But, well, we don’t know a whole lot of people right now that has been long together. There are some, but not many. I think it’s personal to us. I’m just once and never again and that kind of thing. I still love her and she still loves me.

I don’t have a lot of advice. Give and take. You know? You have to share. We both think the same way and we try to live by the rules. Death do we part. Oh, yes. And one more: True love exists. If you make it. It’s a true thing if you make it true.

***

Excerpted from US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe, published in February by Faber & Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by John Bowe. All rights reserved. Click here to purchase.

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #1.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #2.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #3.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #4.”

Related Posts:

• An Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
• An Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• The Rumpus Oral History Project— Nick, Coffee Shop Employee

Dominic Sclafani, Age 30
Tucson, Arizona

“He’s like, ‘She’s going to eat you alive.’ And I go, ‘Yes, I know.’”

I like people who play. People who are fun and who punch me at random moments and who do weird shit. The first time I met Chyna, we were at a rave. She bit me. I was totally into it. I’m like, “Fucking bite me harder!” And she got all excited and I got all excited, because I like being bitten and scratched up. That was orgasmic. When we left, people were actually frightened of the way I looked. She had torn me apart from my forehead to my waist. I mean, forget just blood—I was bruised and bleeding. And I was singing out, I was so happy about it.

I was living on the border of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, California. I was in college, studying philosophy, which I found out later was a mistake. I’m much more into psychology. I was working at a sushi bar in Huntington Beach where it was expected that you drink on the job. Korn and Orgy and all those bands used to come in. It was a party restaurant. I was having a lot of fun—nineteen and doing coke probably three times a week, just getting into Ecstasy. I got a whole new group of friends. Chyna was a part of that scene.

Chyna ended up getting together with my best friend, Randy. I’ve known Randy since we were eight. Anyway, it was cool the way it worked out, because this way, I still got to see Chyna without having to deal with her bullshit. Honestly, she was a kind of a pain in the ass sometimes.

Chyna’s mom was a drug addict and Chyna was abused by her mom’s boyfriend. She never had a clean slate to begin with. But Chyna was really smart and a good survivor. She was a beautiful, beautiful girl—about five one, a great mix of Chinese and Native American. And she was—well, by this time we were doing speed, so she was about 102 pounds. But she was strong as shit. She’d punch Randy. He’d be like, “Ow,” and I’d always think, “Fuck, I wouldn’t be saying ‘Ow!’ I’d be saying ‘Again!’ ” (laughs)

When Randy and I moved to Huntington Beach, Chyna just kind of tagged along. Thing is, she wasn’t working, wasn’t cleaning the house, she wasn’t giving anything, just living off of me and Randy. And it started to feel like we were both her boyfriend. She had Randy, the guy she went to bed with, and she had me, who provided most of the money and drugs and fun stuff. But Randy never understood how to keep her under control. I was like, “Dude, you gotta man up if you’re gonna deal with her.” But he was such a puppy. And slowly over the months, she started seducing me. I mean slow.

Chyna smoked a lot of meth. One night I tried some. It was fucking fantastic. All of a sudden I had a ten-day week. I could get all my schoolwork done. I could do my shift at the restaurant every night and have plenty of energy for my band. My grade point average immediately jumped up. Randy started doing it too. But eventually he was like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” He’d come out at seven in the morning and there I am, fucking having been up all night. And instead of he and Chyna having sex, she starts staying up with me, doing meth. So Randy starts getting pissy.

Now this is where she’s gifted. She tells Randy things, then she comes to me and tells me things slightly differently. She starts fighting with Randy more, and she makes it look like it’s his fault. So now their whole relationship starts going to shit.

To clear his head, Randy went out of state for two weeks. And that was it. Chyna made her move. Walked into my room at two in the morning. And I’m like, “Okay, what? Are you cold?” Because I didn’t… I was totally not suspecting it. And she’s basically naked in my bed kind of thing, and I’m like, “Oh, oh, oh, okay. Shit. Yes.”

At first I thought, “Well, maybe this isn’t such a big deal.” But it was. It was like finishing something off that should’ve been taken care of a long time ago, when she clawed me up at the rave—just kind of a completion of that experience. Very soon into it, I realized I wasn’t just having sex with her. I was starting our relationship. And I knew it. It wasn’t like we just had this little fling and I was going to let her go back to my best friend. No, we’ve really crossed this boundary. She’s mine now.

So Randy comes back. I’m a Southern man. I can’t lie to my best friend. I had to tell him. By this time I’m totally into Chyna. I loved her, and I believed in the relationship. So I looked at Randy and said, “I like your girlfriend.” Well, he totally flipped out. He threw a fit. He was like, “You got to stop! You got to stop this shit right now!”

I got down on my knees, took off my glasses and put them in my pocket. Hands behind my back. Like I said, I’m from the South. It’s etiquette for someone to punch you if you sleep with their girlfriend. I said no, it’s not going to stop. I told him to hit me. But he didn’t hit me. He destroyed the house instead, which I ended up having to pay for. I would rather he broke my nose. I mean, I was kind of insulted. And I still had insurance at that time.

But you know, all I could do is say, “I’m fucking sorry, it crept up on me.”

He’s like, “She’s going to eat you alive.”

And I go, “Yes, I know.”

And he goes, “Yes. You’re fucked.”

Chyna and I both moved out right away. She had another place to stay. I started sleeping in my car because I didn’t want to go back into the house. Randy was my best friend and I was just experiencing so much sorrow and guilt. For the record, Randy and I are still friends. But after all this shit went down, our friendship was done for around two years. At the time, though, there was really no other choice. This shit was really happening.

So by this point, I’d busted up a friendship, I dropped out of college, I was addicted to speed, and I was going to get used and abandoned by the person I’d done it for. I mean, I knew it. And so with all this knowledge, I figured, ah fuck it, let’s do it any- way. Just, you know, like the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. What else are we going to do?

Eventually we decided to move out to Tucson, Arizona, where my mom lives. When we first got out there, we stayed at her house. My mom got sick of us pretty quick. So Chyna and I both got jobs at this local restaurant and moved out to our own place. Since we weren’t at my mom’s house, we started doing even more meth.

Chyna and I always had this instant physical intensity as a couple. I have a really strong stomach and chest, so she just punched me whenever she wanted to, as hard as she could. She bloodied me up pretty good all the time—not just during sex. She was just really affectionate and passionate and fun and smart.

We played music all day long and all night long. We loved the same music, and that’s a really big one for me: Tool, Radiohead, Zero 7, Tricky, stuff like that—experimental stuff, from Pink Floyd to The Mars Volta. I don’t think there was a single band that we had static on—ever. We’d get high together and experience the music physically. I’d play DJ, changing the music every few songs, and we’d just sit there and soak the music in, really like studying the notes, losing ourselves to it, then coming back, seeing the world, seeing ourselves and the music in a different way. Which is really kind of an intimate experience.

We used to do art when were on speed. We’d be drawing, just one piece for about thirty hours. We’d keep switching the CDs to make sure we got the mood right. We were always very in tune with everything, from the rhythm to, you know, the undertones of the vocal intonations, where it becomes visual, where you can see the person singing the lines, like they’re onstage, like they’re doing theater for themselves. Chyna could access the music at a holy, deep level, the same way I was able to.

We loved the same lines. We heard the same things in the songs. She was better at that than probably any girlfriend I’ve had, and it was really attractive to me, because music is… I don’t say, like, “It’s my life,” because that would assume that it’s still outside of me. And she would attach to it the same way.

Due to being on the same drug we could do a lot of the same things. There’s a reducing valve in the brain for sight, which is why you normally can’t see oxygen, nitrogen, things in the air. But after you’re sleep deprived for thirty-six hours, it goes away, so all of a sudden you think you’re hallucinating, but what you’re seeing is really there. So we’d get fucked up, and I’d start playing with energy, and by playing with energy I mean I’d intend certain hot spots of magnetism and basically create a ball out of it, and then not say anything and have her try to watch it and follow it around the room. It can be done. Magnetics are intense. And she was very open to that, which is nice because most of my girlfriends haven’t been into that. Even most of my friends aren’t. We did a lot of that. And also, like, using body energy to play around. We were very much in tune with each other’s bodies. There were no boundaries between the two of us.

But the speed was making me crazy. Chyna and I were both doing lots of it. I’m stealing from work, I’m supporting the habit for the both of us. I did it for almost two years and I could tell when I crossed a line with it. I noticed the second when it was like, okay, I can’t do this anymore.

When we stopped all that stuff it got different. The timing was off. We’d be tired, uninterested. Even three days without, you get really, really tired. It feels like taking tranquilizers all day long. And it’s not that the speed was the predication for our sexual relationship, but the lack of it definitely hurt it. We didn’t adjust very well, because I had to get drunk instead. Drunk boys, you know, we go to sleep. After a long day we go to sleep. We’re not as affectionate.

I’m one of the one hundred that quits cold turkey, just goes nope, I’m done. She couldn’t do that, apparently. She had a detox freak-out, and she kept on doing speed. We had a fight. She tore everything off the wall. So Chyna didn’t quit. And she was nuts.

I don’t fight. I’ve had seven girlfriends, and I’ve never fought with any of them. But Chyna could get me every time. Her favorite line was, “Why don’t you go fuck your mother since you love her so much more than me!” She was always baiting me to punch her in the nose. She’d get right up in my face, screaming at me over God knows what—usually something about how I left the kitchen cupboard open.

So she was staying up, doing speed with other people while I was, like, passed out on the couch. I was just drinking, drinking, drinking, drinking—pouring alcohol into my face. I’m kind of mourning the relationship at this point because I knew it was going to be bad, I just didn’t know when. I could see that she was starting to make ties with this new guy we were hanging out with. And I couldn’t seem to do anything about it. She was getting her next boyfriend lined up.

I was over my mom’s house, drunk as a skunk, and I told her, “You know, I don’t like my girlfriend, but I’m not going to break up with her.” My mom was like, “Well, that doesn’t sound very smart. What do you plan on doing?” And I said, “I think I’ll drink myself to death over the next six months.” And my mom just looked at me, like, “You rat fuck.” (laughs)

I was in a deep slump. I was doing over a bottle of vodka every day. I drank enough to black out on a daily basis. I’d lose entire weeks. I drove drunk, I drove blacked out. I’d developed liver failure and jaundice. I’d actually turned yellow. And every time I got sober, I’d start getting drunk again.

I know psychology. So I know that people have their own velocity when they go through trauma, pain, guilt, all of that stuff. And I know it’s retarded, but I wasn’t done with her. I wasn’t done with it yet. And I had nothing better to do.

One day, in between a double shift at the restaurant, I came home and drank a pint of rum and went to take a nap before going back. Chyna comes home while I’m passed out, turns off the alarm clock, and goes back to work. At the restaurant, she tells them I’m acting all fucked up and crazy, and I’m really drunk. When I finally come in, I get fired. And the next morning, when I’m passed out again, Chyna throws me outside, calls my mom and tells her she’s calling the cops unless she comes to get me.

Next thing I know I’m in Delaware. That’s where my dad lives. The minute I got there, I blacked out on his floor. When I woke up, I knew I needed help. I went to my first AA meeting. I ended up doing probably four hundred meetings in the next year.

They say that 3.5 percent of people who go to those meetings get helped. Well, I wasn’t one of those 3.5. I started working again and started drinking again.

During the time I was struggling to get clean, I found out from my mom that Chyna had become a manager at the restaurant she’d gotten me fired from. And that she already had another boyfriend. Five months after moving to Delaware, I finally wrote her a breakup note—which is hilarious, because she had already dated two other guys by then. I was basically left with nothing.

I was stuck with my dad in Delaware, because Chyna was living in the same town as my mom. I just never wanted to see her again.

You know, I’m an intimate guy. That’s just the way I am. I’m always kind. I’m very dedicated. When I’m with somebody, there’s nobody else in the world. And that’s how I was with Chyna. I was broken up bad for about a week, and then I was like okay, this is how this was supposed to end.

But my body knows that it will always care for her and get a little bit excited when I see her on Facebook. My body will always wonder how she’s doing. But that’s just the body. It does what it does. I don’t get hung up on it. I mean, I’ve probably shared more time and intimacy and knowledge with Chyna than anybody else. If you count the nights we stayed up, we basically spent the equivalent of seven years together. I’ve known her since she was eighteen years old. And she’s thirty now. But the truth is, we broke up seven years ago.

I haven’t had a real girlfriend since we were together. I haven’t lived with anybody except my parents. I’m on disability now because of too much trauma and who the hell knows what else. I still drink, but I switched to whiskey because it tastes bad and so I only drink a pint or less. What I’m drinking right now won’t kill me—not until I’m fifty-five or something. Which is fine. I thought I was going to be dead years ago, so everyone’s kind of happy about that.

I’m in Tucson now. I moved back as soon as I found out she had gone. I think she’s in Vegas. I haven’t seen her. I know she’s alive and healthy. The last time I talked to her was around a year ago. I was about to go to a Pixies concert. I called her to tell her, because she loves the Pixies. But she took offense and hung up on me. We talked for five minutes. I was drunk, and I could tell she was fucked up. I was trying to be friendly and she took it the wrong way. I never heard from her again until recently. I think she accidentally sent me a group e-mail.

***

Rumpus original art by Christina Gualy.

***

Excerpted from US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe, published in February by Faber & Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by John Bowe. All rights reserved. Click here to purchase.

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #1.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #2.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #3.”

Related Posts:

• An Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
• An Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• The Rumpus Oral History Project— Nick, Coffee Shop Employee

“That man could turn me on by touching my little fingernail.”

When I married my first husband, I married to be married forever. And because he was a womanizer and a weekend alcoholic, that changed that whole theory.

Clyde.

The son of a bitch.

I remember the day—this was years after we divorced—my daughter called me and says, “I know you don’t care, but Clyde had a heart attack and died when he was out jogging.” And honest to God, I thought, “Son of a bitch, I’ll never be able to run him over.”

He was so bad. Bad about his own kids. He’s not even worth talking about.

***

I met Bill at Domino’s, a nightclub. The owner took me over to introduce him. What can I say? I knew I loved him the minute we talked.

We left the bar, and I said, you know, “I’m separated, and I have four kids, and I won’t go to bed with you tonight.”

And he said, “Who asked you?”

And I said, “You will.”

And he did.

And I didn’t.

But we sat in the car and necked until I thought our skin was going to fall off.

I came home that night. And the next day, I told Ruth, my neighbor lady friend. I said, “I found him.” I said, “He’s a combination of”—I don’t know if you know who these are— “Alexander King”—he’s a writer—“Jack Parr”—the host on a talk show—“and Captain Kangaroo.” And that’s what I got. That was Bill.

I don’t know if you have this, for your freezer, the food sales-man—there were guys that went into homes and sold people food plans. You order, reorder to fill it. Well, he was in that. And the first time he showed me the pitch that he gave to people, I was enchanted. I just thought, “I’ll buy one now!” He could sell snow to Eskimos.

My oldest girl couldn’t stand it, because I was bringing him into the house. She was thirteen at the time and she says, “I don’t want you to marry him. I want it to stay the way it is. You, me, and the kids.”

And I said, “Okay. If I can’t have any friends, then you can’t have any boyfriends.” So that closed up. I said, “First of all, I don’t care whether any of you like him or not. You will respect him. I’m marrying him for me. Not for you.”

***

I was about thirty-three or thirty-four. We didn’t get married until ’62. We saw each other every day from our second date until the day we got married. And he was my husband of twenty-four years. I was so blessed. He adored me and I adored him. It was just a mutual admiration society.

He was built like a gorilla. I mean, he was really built like a silverback gorilla. He wore a size 52 coat. Let me tell you, he was a big man. He wasn’t tall. He’s just six feet, but he was big. And he was just so cute. He was just so cute.

Love to me was being a responsible person. To someone and for someone. Bill was a rock. He was like a father, a brother, a lover, a friend, a pal, a buddy, and would do anything for me. It was always very safe and very secure. And I needed the emotional security that Bill could give me. I didn’t care about finances.

I used to tell him, I said, “Look, I don’t need your goddamn money. I didn’t marry you for your money. I married you to love me. That’s it. I don’t care about all this other stuff.” Because he was always wanting to buy… if there was an appliance out in the market, I had it. He was so good.
Bill was steady. But he was never boring. No, no. He was too intelligent to be boring. He was Italian-Irish. I’m Italian-Russian. And we could argue about how to boil an egg. Our house was always in an uproar. We fought about everything—except important stuff. Never fought about money or anything like that.

He died of cancer.

***

Four months after he died, I was sitting in a bar. I used to always sit by myself at the table. Because even when I was fifty-something, I was pretty hot. I wanted to select who sat down next to me. And that’s how I found Edward. He came over and asked me to dance. And then I invited him to my table. That was the beginning of it. I said, “I like your face. I’m going to take you home with me.”

Ed had been married for twenty-five years and he had stayed with his wife—I forget… Daisy? Daisy—until all the kids were grown up. They had a house out in Palm Springs. He said he was sitting in the Jacuzzi and some guy on the radio said, “Is this the way you want to live the rest of your life?” And he got up out of the Jacuzzi and took his clothes and left! (laughs) Which I thought was great!

Oh, he was crappy dressed. I had to redo him. My husband had some beautiful clothes, which I gave to him. My daughter-in-law said, “Doesn’t that feel strange seeing Bill’s clothes on Ed?” I said, “No, you’re wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts. That doesn’t feel strange to me.” It’s a piece of material! It’s just a fabric. That’s all it is. It’s not the man.

I know my kids were just horrified. Four months after Bill died, I’m out honking around in bars. And I wasn’t… I guess I was. When I told them that Ed had this ’67 Ford truck, they were convinced that I was either going to get killed or robbed.

And then after we’d been going together about three weeks, he says, “Would you like to go on a fishing trip?”

Yes! (laughs)

When we left, I’m going down the freeway and I’m thinking, “What the hell am I doing? I’ve only known this man for three weeks and I’m going off to Idaho and Utah in this horrible truck I wouldn’t let anybody catch me dead in.” But he was so different and he was so… he was more poetic than Bill. When he was fourteen years old, he was a wrangler. He’d say things like, “You never heard anything until you’ve heard a cougar scream at night.” Or he’d say, “Watch a snowflake kiss the ground.” What am I going to do but fall in love?

Bill was my knight. But Edward was the man. He was a cowboy. I would say that he was the most exciting. When we made our trip to Utah, I found a postcard and it said, “When I grow up, I want to be…” and I checked off cowboy. Mailed one to each of my four kids.

They were horrified that I was doing this. I had been an executive’s wife, with the cocktails, and all that shit-ery that goes on with that, and now I’m with this guy that only owns a truck and the clothes on his back. And they just know that he’s going to do me in. I said, “Look, I’m fifty-seven years old. I’m not some eighteen-year-old kid. I know what the hell I’m doing!” Really, how can you be upset about a man that’s making me so happy? They eventually fell in love with him just like I did.

I had to make some adjustments in my thinking because first of all, he was a mechanic. He was a handyman. So his hands were always grubby-looking and I used to say, “You can’t touch me until you go scrub your hands.” I would make him go scrub his hands with a brush. And I’m an organizer, so I had to get him organized. His truck—the dash looked like… he was a redneck! He was born in Idaho and it was just crap everywhere.

Bill was such a fuss-ass. The biggest fuss-ass in the world. The mailman would come by and drop off the bills and Bill would meet him across the street and give him the bills all paid up! (laughs) That’s the way he was. Oh, yes, I never had to pick up anything after Bill. Never—except cardigan sweaters. He had an aversion to putting his cardigan sweaters away. But his closet—we had this huge walk-in closet. His side was always… shoes were here, this was there. He was just so. He’d wiped the tub down. Wiped the bowl off in the sink. Wiped the shower walls. He was absolutely meticulous about everything.

And Ed just was an absolute slob. Which is why I needed to make sure that I could live with it. Like, what if I couldn’t change it? So then I thought, “Well, okay, if I’m going to do this, let’s face it: It’s going to be your money that does everything. Are you going to resent it after a while? You’re going to have to handle it in such a way that he doesn’t feel like he’s being kept, like a gigolo.”

I said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ve got the money, and you’ve got the time. We’re going to fix up the old Ford truck. And I’m going to sell the house and the Continental. And we’re going to hit the road. And become gypsies.”

Which is exactly what we did.

We did that for nine years. We became prospectors, panning for gold. We did swap meets, we sold solar panels, we went to school. We got drunk and danced every weekend. It was just an incredible life.

I was just hot for his body. He was glorious. (laughs) I mean he really was glorious. He had a big head of hair. Salt and pep- per. He looked like the Marlboro man. And he was about six foot two. And he kept me laughing all the time. What was he? My boy toy? (laughs) No. No, no, he was a love.

***

When I got the face-lift, I’ll never forget… I’ll never know how I ever did that.

I go to see the doctor and he says, “Well, first of all, I want to know why you want one.” I said, “Look at my face. Now, look at my body. My body is forty years younger than my face,” because I had a real tight body. And I said, “I want this to go with this.” And I had a face-lift! And put my boobs in perspective—put them up where they belong. And man, I was in seventh heaven.

But that was one miserable week. And he just lived with me on that. He just stayed by my side and cuddled me and coddled me and, you know, nursed, nurtured me. He was a rock.

When we started selling solar, we went to the school at ARCO, Atlantic Richfield. They have a school for teaching about selling solar panels and stuff. We had to go to school for a week from nine to five. And he was just so bright. Very smart, very, very, very, very smart. Not smart—intelligent. He absorbed everything. I could remember nothing. He was the serious one.

We would travel and it was just marvelous. We spent a summer in Idaho, north of Boise, swap-meeting on the weekends, playing golf during the week. Oh, it was the greatest deal in the world. We just had a great time.

I’ve got some albums of what we did. This is just a smackeroo of what… Okay, here’s the old truck. We sanded and painted it. I hand-painted this with sponge brushes.

We were on that road in Juneau.

There’s a picture of him. He’s such a sweetie. Eddie played the banjo.

This is panning for gold. We never found enough to pay for the books that told us where to find it. This was in ’87? ’86?

Here we are congratulating ourselves at happy hour. Ed had to have happy hour. I don’t care what we were doing at fifteen minutes to five o’clock, it all had to halt.

This place I call Popcorn Ridge, up in Idaho. The only people we saw in three months were two forest ranger ladies and one old man and his grandson coming to get wood. I ran around in a baby doll nightgown and Ed ran around naked! It was just a wonderful life.

***

Being three months on the side of a mountain with somebody twenty-four/seven, you better get along. When you live in a truck… I mean, we’d go to bed and one turn over, the other turn over. That’s the way it was. Because the bed was only so wide.

The people that knew me when I was with Bill, they would say, “I can’t even imagine you out there on the ground in a tent. I can’t even believe that you would do this,” because I was with wigs and false fingernails, five-inch heels—I had the whole shebang. And the people that I met when I was with Ed said, “I can’t imagine you being at a cocktail party, doing the executive life.” But you can’t call it a different lifestyle. It was two different meetings of soul and body and mind.

I suppose it’s like, it’s like having a good bowl of chili and then having another bowl of chili with jalapeños in it! (laughs) Yes. One is sturdy and filling and you feel good when you get to eat it and blah blah blah blah blah. But then you take the one with jalapeños. It sort of sets you up on your heels a little bit. Yeah, oh, yeah. There would never be anybody who could live up to those two men. Never. Never ever, ever, ever. I just know how to pick them.

I was so lucky. You cannot believe how lucky I was. Yes, yes. With Ed, it was always exciting. Because Ed was just… that man could turn me on by touching my little fingernail.

We didn’t have to be married. He did one time admit that it kind of got to him. I really worked hard so he wouldn’t feel like a gigolo. I never gave him a credit card. I never put his name on my checking account. But when we bought the trailer park, I put his name on it.

The kids were having a fit. I said, “Hey, I’ve been with him for ten years. I’ve taken him off the job market. He has got to have something for his time.” I mean, fair is fair.

And we were together twelve years. When he died, it was because he had a heart attack. I went down and emptied the trash and came back. I looked in the kitchen and called, and when I went to the bathroom, I couldn’t get the door open. He’d been sitting on the toilet. He fell over and hit the tub. And then his feet went out and that was keeping the door shut.

It was a crying, shrieking time. I tried never to sleep in our bed again. I couldn’t sleep in it. I had to sleep on the couch for the next two years. The thought of him not being there with me—I couldn’t handle it. It was just too, too wrong.

Two months after Ed died, I was going to go crazy. I needed something to tend to, because all I had was that stupid trailer park. I went into the animal shelter and got me a cat! She’s the only one who put her front paws through the cage. We were meant for each other.

I’ve been living in this motor home since 1999, traveling throughout the United States. My solar panels that I have on the roof give me independence. I don’t have to go into an RV park. From January to September, I stayed in eighty-four different Wal-Marts. Prior to that, I was staying at truck stops.

I only have a cell phone, I don’t have a computer. I don’t want any e-mails, jokes and stuff, junk mail, junk calls. I don’t want any of that. I don’t need it anymore.

People are always trying to set me up. Well, I see the husbands around here. (snores)

The kids will say, “Don’t you get lonesome?”

I say no. Personally, I find my own company more entertaining than most people I meet.

I’ve had a varied life and a good life. Another piece of ass isn’t worth the problems! No way, no way! No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I love my privacy.

I get into bed at night and I got my electric blanket on, and I’m snuggled down here, and I got my book right in front of me, and I’m reading and I’m at peace. I’m at peace with the world. I don’t want to accommodate or do anything for anybody. I only want to take care of me, my cat, and my motor home. I like it.

***

Rumpus original art by Lucas Adams.

***

Excerpted from US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe, published in February by Faber & Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by John Bowe. All rights reserved. Click here to purchase.

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #1.”

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #2.”

Related Posts:

• An Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
• An Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• The Rumpus Oral History Project— Nick, Coffee Shop Employee

“He had a lot of cool toys, and I really liked the toys.”

Well, I was born, and Mommy took me over to his house to make some friends, and me and Lukey wanted to play with each other every day, and we gotted to do it. And that’s how we got along.

I’m just in kindergarten. I knew him since preschool. Actually, I met him before preschool. I woke up and I got dressed for preschool and then I went to preschool and he’s like, umm—he said this funny thing, I can’t remember. He’s like, “A- busha!” He was really funny.

He had a lot of cool toys, and I really liked the toys when I was little and he had all of the little working things. He really had great hair and he really had a fish on his clothes ’cause he liked to go fishing with his grandfather. And I had a princess on mine, because I liked princesses.

I felt happy that I made a friend, and me and him kept, like “UHH NNNN MMM NNN! I want that toy!” And we kept pulling the toy!

He was very nice to me and when I was born he let me drive in his little thing and that made me get along and like him. And he said nice things, like “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

We played pirates, and we went on a treasure hunt. We went past some houses, we found this little statue of a lion, and we were pretending that the owner had a bunch of animals that were mean to people except the owners. We were both doing it. We went really far, we went to the street, we tried to walk to the mailbox to see if there was any gold inside.

He took the map. I was the captain. And he said the captain doesn’t always hold the map. But the captain always holds the map!

He knew the way back to the house and he left me, and I’m like, “Luke, where did you go? I gotta find him!” And I was like, “Luke! Luke!” I kept on screaming “Luke!”

He used to have good table manners. He ate with his fork and spoon. Now he has bad table manners. ’Cause when I was four I came over for a playdate to have dinner and we had macaroni and cheese and I ate with my spoon and he ate with his hands. And his hands got all cheesy. And then like, “Okay, you’re not having good table manners in front of girls.” And—
his dad—and he got in trouble. He had to go sit in the bathroom.

He’s a little bit mean and a little bit nice. When I went to his playdate, he didn’t let me drive his little red golf cart, and it really used to have a lot of High School Musical songs on it.

He lied to me. He said he could hold his breath for three days and three nights. And he really didn’t do it. That’s impossible.

And he said he could—he said he could go like this (crosses eyes) for two nights and two days. But if you do that for two nights and two days, your eyes will stay like that.

He lied about um . . . I was being mean every day, but I really wasn’t. I mean bossy every day. But I wasn’t. I used to, but now I’m not. And he said that on Monday. But I wasn’t on Monday. When the school year started is when I stopped.

I felt sad that he lied to me—he was the first friend I knew.

I like talking! (laughs)

One time he tried to read a book, and he went like, “A- busha- shesha- yeah- a- sheeshay- sheeshay- shyah!” He was reading this book that Ms. Bennett read! (laughs) And I’m like, “What in the heck did you just say?” Ow! I just bit my tongue!! Um, yeah. You should have seen Lukey when he was reading! “A- busha- shesha- yeah- a- sheeshay- sheeshay- shyah!” (laughs)

I’m turning six on April 3! Can you believe that?

Love means that you’re in love with somebody and you think he’s cute or she’s cute. That feeling of love is um . . . that you really love them. It’s in your heart. God puts it there. God is actually inside of our heart so he put the love inside when he was inside. You can create it by . . . umm . . . thinking someone is cute.

No more questions!

***

Excerpted from US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe, published in February by Faber & Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by John Bowe. All rights reserved. Click here to purchase.

Read “An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America: Selections from Us #1.”

***

Rumpus original art by Ilyse Magy.

Related Posts:

• An Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
• An Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• The Rumpus Oral History Project— Nick, Coffee Shop Employee

Brigitte Aiton, Age 44
New York, New York

“How do you deal with the fact that the person you’re with might hate you?”

It was the first summer we were together. We were twenty-three years old. I felt like I met the most amazing person and the path of my life was completely changing, going in some completely uncharted direction. Everything was this amazing adventure. Everything became creative and fun. We could go off and do things in a way that would defy convention and defy the things that make life tedious and difficult.

Once we started dating, we were inseparable. We probably spent every night together. It felt really comfortable to be with each other—incredibly comfortable. We were like two peas in a pod. From the beginning. Very calm, very comfortable. It was
really nice. You know that sense of being invincible and insular? I remember walking through the East Village, holding hands, and we’d stop at every corner where we hit a light and kiss. The rest of the world didn’t matter; there was this new life that I was stepping into.

We had the same childish sense of fun. We really enjoyed the same kind of silly things. Like, “Oh, let’s go drop acid and go to Coney Island and go on the roller coaster over and over and over.” (laughs) It was just that kind of really silly feeling—totally lost in the moment, totally protected by your own bubble of happiness.

I don’t think I was ever that happy with anybody else.

He was so talented. It was a given that he would be successful. I really admired that he seemed so willing to be different from other people, to take the contrary point of view, to be very confrontational with the world, and yet be incredibly sweet and kind to me. He was able to talk baby talk in this sort of shamelessly unadulterated way.

And really, what sort of happened was that at a certain point (laughs) I didn’t want to keep dropping acid and going on roller coasters. The good times and the things that were interesting in the beginning… I grew up a little. And he continued using drugs continuously and constantly. The bong was the first thing to hit his lips in the morning and the last thing at night. Quite a few times during the day, he would duck outside to get stoned. He was high continuously.

Sex was a problem from the beginning. Because he was a pothead, his interest was much lower than mine. If I didn’t push the issue, he could easily have gone a month without sex. When we did it, it was great, but in general, he wasn’t that interested. Also, looking back, he definitely had a porn addiction that got worse over time. Me being naked wasn’t necessarily a turn- on for him. There was a lot of aesthetics that had to accompany it.

I think that he had this kind of adolescent vision of himself in the world. I’ve never met anyone who wanted to be famous as much as him. He had this idea of himself, sort of, “I am somehow this person of enormous insight that will inform the world of something.” If you have no desire to become famous, it’s a weird thing to be around.

He had this band that he rehearsed with four nights a week and Fridays and Saturdays. And it meant that we didn’t have that much time together. When we did, it was really fun. But he just wasn’t around.

Rehearsing so much would have been fine if the band had improved. But they were a shitty band. Basically they centered on smoking pot and thinking they were sort of brilliant. You know, when you smoke a lot of pot, you’re like, “Oh, this ninety- minute jam is really interesting!” (laughs) It’s just not!

It was excruciating at times to watch him do things that were completely misguided, to watch somebody just slowly messing up. And there’s nothing you can say to them—because they know better.

I was always very encouraging when I thought things were good and had promise. But when things weren’t, I would be honest, which he couldn’t take. He felt that as his partner, my support should be unconditional. I mean, children get unconditional
love and unconditional support. I don’t think adults in their thirties still get that.

In large part, I didn’t agree with his aesthetic. He was very aggressive toward the audience in ways that just weren’t productive. It’s hard being with someone who’s performing and what they’re doing is so antagonistic and confrontational and unpleasant. His band would start out with a room of thirty people, then end up with three. “Didn’t you notice that people were, like, leaving?” I said this as tactfully as I could, and his interpretation was that I was mocking his entire artistic career.

It goes back to being a heavy drug user from his teens and having parents who just adored him and let him do anything he wanted and were always like, “You’re brilliant and wonderful.” I found it very annoying because he had such a childhood of privilege. His grandparents were self- made millionaires.

The worst thing that ever happened to him was when his father had a job transfer and they moved to another city. And meanwhile, I was like, you know, my father was killed violently when I was a kid, and our whole family was disrupted. My mother struggled raising four kids by herself and I had all these orthopedic devices. So I wasn’t that sympathetic to him on some levels. He had all the resources to do so much more in the world, for other people, for himself.

The world got really small, like in terms of things that we could do. He wasn’t one of those people who would make small talk—he would have absolutely no interest and was completely unapologetic about never asking anybody how they were. And I can’t tell you the number of plays we went to that we left during the intermission because he didn’t like them. He had such contempt at a certain point for so much stuff. And he was so unhappy about how unrealized he was in his life.

I was trying to be loving and accepting. When I met him, I thought he was an exceptional person, and even in the later stages, I felt the essence of somebody who had exceptional promise and capability, that I knew was really kind and really fragile and really insecure. And so, you know, there was part of me that was very protective because… I loved him.

I resigned myself to the idea that if I left, he would be in terrible, terrible shape. I resigned myself to the fact that life was getting smaller and smaller, because everything was governed by his depression and complete disdain of things.

***

I think a couple of factors allowed me to remain in a situation that was progressively getting worse. The household where I grew up was pretty erratic and volatile, and you just get used to constantly figuring out how you can adapt and fix things. I think I spent a long time with Andrew just trying to fix things, not necessarily noticing how badly things were going.

I remember, a friend of ours, he was like, “Brigitte, the guy’s jealous of you.” I was like, “What are you talking about? That’s not possible.” I couldn’t accept it. And I started to run through these memories of me talking and him looking at me with, like, total contempt, and I could clearly see him thinking, “Shut the fuck up,” you know, and realized, “Oh, my God. It’s true.” I think he really did resent me on a lot of levels.

At one point, this guy I was designing an album cover with, he got a crush on me. He told me I was just wonderful, the sun, the moon, the earth. All these things that I hadn’t heard for a really long time. It made me realize how unhappy and how lonely I had been. I’d felt like a pair of old shoes. Your classic starving person who suddenly finds an oasis. I told him, “I can’t do this. I’m married. I’m trying to figure this out.” I didn’t even like him that much. But it was so amazing to have somebody be like, “You’re interesting and sexy and you’re beautiful.”

I moved out, to my sister’s apartment. I told Andrew that we had to get to couples counseling. And I made Andrew pick the counselor. We went for about two months. You know, it seemed wrong to have the relationship end without trying. But our therapist was really annoying. And I think that that sort of brought Andrew and I together against her.

We got back together.

I was still completely committed. But I think some of us are just loyal in a way that’s sick. You know? How do you deal with the fact that the person you’re with might hate you? (laughs) It’s really hard to look at. You start qualifying it in these ways, like, “Yes, I’m kind of annoying.”

I thought, “This is what I accepted. This is the situation, and I’m in this for the long haul.” I was very happy with my work and my friends and so I think it was more of this resignation: This is what it is and I will keep working to try and make things better. I think it’s really cliché, the whole living a life of quiet desperation thing, but I think that’s really true for a lot of people. But what are you going to do? You just keep moving forward.

I think it’s also an aspect beyond love: You’ve shared this history with them that they alone know. You don’t want to just get rid of it, if that makes sense. Also, I just didn’t want to be seen as the bad guy with his family.

***

The fall of 2000, that’s when things started to get really bad. We went on a trip to Las Vegas for my thirty- sixth birthday. I had arranged it. And within thirty minutes of our arrival, I got super sick and was, like, throwing up every thirty minutes for twenty-four hours. He got the same thing, twelve hours after me, so obviously we got something on the airplane. The weekend was terrible. We had tickets to see Penn & Teller and we didn’t go. It was basically three days of continuous vomiting and diarrhea.

Months later I was watching Bravo and they had one of these Cribs- like shows on about this house of Penn’s that he designed called the Slammer that’s built to look like a penitentiary. So I said to Andrew, “Why don’t you come watch it?” And he was
like, “I can’t. I’m really upset. I really needed that vacation.” It was all about what an incredible loss he suffered, you know, from not having this relaxing trip.

He wasn’t blaming it on me, but it was just like he had suffered this incredible loss—worse than I had. He just saw himself so deeply as the center of things.

And this is where life gets really complicated, because you can be like, “This person is completely self- involved—oh, but they make me a cup of coffee every morning even though they don’t drink it.” Probably up until, like, a week before we broke up, he did this. No one is just so completely bad all of the time. If they were, then you’d be an absolute idiot to stay with them, right?

He was coming home from work really late. I had a feeling he was having an affair with his assistant, Courtney. I asked him about it and he said no.

Once I found them sitting on a park bench near the house. She had just found her natural father and I remember thinking, “I’m sure the newness of her natural father is so much more interesting than twelve years of hearing about my dead father.” I just knew that something was happening between them.

It was October 11, a month after September 11. He confessed that he’d been going to therapy for the last several months and hadn’t told me about it.

And then he said he was unclear whether or not he should have ever been married to me.

I felt like I had just been hit by a bus. I was like, what just happened? (laughs)

The next day he was so hostile that I had to leave. I walked out to Ground Zero. I had to go somewhere that was worse than my own house. I had to go experience somewhere else’s badness. (laughs)

When I came home he had taken down all the pictures of us. The walls were full of empty picture hooks. I said, “Do you not love me anymore?” And he said, “I don’t think that I ever loved you enough to do any of this.”

He told me he decided in therapy that he should end the marriage.

And I was like, “Your therapist feels it’s okay to end a twelve- year relationship without having any kind of deeper conversation?

And he said, “Yes.”

I said, “Does your therapist know how much pot you smoke?”

And he said, “No, we haven’t gotten to that yet.”

So I realized he had been lying to his therapist completely. And he still insisted that there wasn’t anybody else, even though two years later, one of his assistant’s friends confirmed for me that he’d left me for her.

He refused to see me in person. He said he felt too badly to see me. He sent me some really, really mean e- mails about how he never should have married me, and how this was the reason why he wasn’t artistic, and he had sacrificed his dreams.

I never saw him again.

We got divorced entirely through e- mail.

***

There’s all this space in your brain that’s filled with information about this other person. You know, like what they like to eat, and just their little habits. And then all that information is totally useless.

I remember the first time I went to the drugstore and didn’t have to pick up his products. I’m in the Rite Aid, crying because I’m not picking up Tucks Medicated Pads for Andrew’s hemorrhoids. And I’m like, “I’m crying over this?” (laughs)

***

Excerpted from US: Americans Talk About Love edited by John Bowe, published in February by Faber & Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2010 by John Bowe. All rights reserved. Click here to purchase.

Related Posts:

• An Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
• An Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• The Rumpus Oral History Project— Nick, Coffee Shop Employee