We spent the beginning of this session discussing Donovan’s Halloween with Donna, his current girlfriend or “fuck buddy” as he usually referred to her. He’d had plans to celebrate without her, just doing something fun for himself for a change, but had felt bad about leaving her alone and stayed through what turned out to be a rather tumultuous evening. His four years with Gloria, his ex-girlfriend, seemed to have taught him little about relationships. He still caved in under pressure, sacrificing his desires to satisfy someone else’s even when he knew it would end up in disaster. “At least I got a good night’s sleep out of
it,” he told me. “But all this morning at work I kept thinking I’d need to go apply for low-income housing.”
“Maybe you should be alone for a little while,” I suggested. “It’s what you want.”
“Yeah, but not as a tenant in some slum area with domestic violence in stereo through the walls around me, sleeping on a pile of T-shirts on the floor again, doing nothing but sleeping and working like I went through back when I was in my twenties. I want my next move to be my last one. Ever. After that, my final move will be to a nicely manicured
plot with a lovely view of my headstone.”
“You have interesting views on death.”
He nodded, his focus going inward.
“What do you think happens when you die, Donovan?”
“I dunno.”
“What do you think will happen to you when you die?”
“I’ll rot.”
I tried, “What would you like to believe will happen to you when you
die?”
“Ah,” he said, giving in to a quirky smile that let me know I’d finally
asked the question correctly. “There’s a waiting period of three days. It’s sort of like an amnesia as you leave the physical world and get adjusted to the non-corporeal existence. Then I think I’ll come to in my personal hell, which I’ll deserve, but which will play out like a nightmare I’ve just become aware of. I’ll start at the beginning and go through each and every error in judgment I’ve ever made, going through
all the agony and pain and indecision and horror associated with each mistake, knowing what’s to come, but doing it all over again anyway. The
things I thought were for the best at the time but which hurt others will suddenly be very clear to me. I’ll be confronted with my selfishness, unable to escape or alter anything. And then I’ll be awakened, or come to somewhere nice...like I happened to fall asleep in
a cool, sunny meadow surrounded by mountain peaks, with a small brook down toward the valley. Or someone will wake me, and I’ll know them, or at least I won’t be afraid, and I’ll know then that it’s over, I’ve finished everything that had to do with that terrible lifetime, and the time has come to restore some goodness, to heal, to regain peace and knowledge and understanding and forgiveness.”
“You don’t forgive Gloria for what she did to you? Or your mother?”
He reached behind his neck to scratch at it for a moment. “I...am grateful for the lessons I was able to learn by enduring my experiences with them. I genuinely appreciate how things ultimately developed, but each of them has their own lessons in life to learn, and I feel bad that neither of them seems to be learning them.”
“What ultimately happened?”
“Gloria and I sort of got back together again after she slept with that stupid little kid. She asked me if I’d marry her, anyway. I wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as I had been, and I stupidly thought it meant we had somehow become stronger as a couple from the experience. The first time we fucked after that, I wound up at the Health Department getting tested for STDs. I’d awakened with an itchy, sore penis that smelled kinda funny, so went straight there to be seen. They ran tests on me and gave me some Cipro, but when the tests came back they were all negative.
They said there had definitely been something starting, but the Cipro had caught it in time. I was furious and called Gloria at work. At first she denied even sleeping with the kid, but then she kept trying to get me to tell her what they’d given me at the Health Department. She had a friend slip her some Cipro on the sly. I became distant and more mistrustful of her then.”
“Then?” I repeated. “It took all that to make you finally distrust her?”
“I already distrusted her, but I was scared of being completely single again. My credit was falling because our roommate, Andrew, couldn’t keep
up with his share of the household bills and I was the one taking up the
slack, so I was pretty sure I couldn’t get a place of my own, and I was loathe to try and live with anybody else. I’d waited twenty-four years to find happiness, I’d gloated about it once I finally had it, and it was embarrassing to have to admit that everything was crumbling away now, that I’d bet all my money on a lame-ass horse. I was sure I’d have nowhere to go, I’d be completely alone and terribly depressed
again...the total loser I didn’t want to admit to myself I really was.”
“You’re not a loser, Donovan.”
“Bullshit,” he grunted. “I’m sure not a winner by any means.
“So I was mistrustful of her, and I sure didn’t trust her judgment any longer, and I started trying to assert myself finally, but I had very low tolerance of her stupidity. I was growing intolerant of her. I wanted her to shut up, sit still, and hang on while I saved what was left of our relationship, but she’d always had a need to be bossy and in control even when all she was doing was creating more chaos. I think one of the reasons she ever liked me was because at first, I gave her total control. I’d never been in a relationship before, and she’d been in more than enough to make me think she might know what she was doing. She knew what she was doing, all right. She was keeping her little former virgin true and clean so she could always get a little wholesome sex on the side should she strike out while seeking the man of her dreams."
“What do you think she was looking for?”
“I don’t think she knew. She just seemed to both want a home with a
trustworthy man she could boss around, and a wild night-life with strangers and alcohol, and I wasn’t supposed to be the wiser. I wasn’t up to catching some incurable disease because she wanted to experiment with hayseeds in local dives. She couldn’t fathom my resistance to her continued cheating. Couldn’t figure out why I was starting to see she really wasn’t that desirable any more."
“Did you try cheating on her?”
“Hell, no! Didn’t I just say I wasn’t interested in any disease? That I didn’t want a new roommate? I never wanted to be with anyone else ever
again! I had no idea love could turn so painfully putrid and corrupt. I never knew the depths my self-esteem could sink to! Gloria kept hanging out at the bar, and she started talking about this new guy she felt really sorry for, ‘cause he had three kids from a former marriage, lived alone in a trailer with them, and his roommate had recently died of AIDS. It was the guy who owned the pitbull she’d been playing with that day I said she smelled funny. He had a history of picking up women in that bar, sleeping around with them for a while, then trying to get them locked up in jail on alleged false charges of things like theft and battery. Right before Gloria started hanging around with him, he’d been dating a girl who’d worked at the bar, then showed up at the hospital
with bruises on his arms and face, claiming she’d turned wacko and tried
to run him over with her car. The girl quit working at the bar after that. I couldn’t believe she’d do such a thing ‘cause she was very pretty, intelligent, and quiet, but I do know one thing I’ve learned in life is that you don’t really know anybody, even if you’re known them since birth. The charges never stuck. I think there was a lack of evidence. So Gloria hooked up with him. His name was John.
“Because he’d had the roommate who’d died of AIDS, I became concerned when Gloria started giving him rides home from the bar. She alleged he’d never slept with the girl, but I found that rather hard to believe. We didn’t fuck after my incident at the Health Department mainly because I didn’t trust her and I’m very aware that condoms don’t prevent all sexually transmitted diseases. The AIDS virus is small enough to slip through the pores in most rubbers, and you can get herpes from contact with thighs and around the genital area, not just on it. Gloria was
being nicer to me when she was actually home, which was seldom, and she asked me again, a month before Thanksgiving, if I’d marry her. I think I shrugged that time. I know I didn’t give her much of a response...no, I think I said, ‘I guess so.’ I shrugged and told her that. She didn’t want to marry me anyway, she was just testing to see if I was still stupid enough to stick by her no matter what.
“There was a blow-up between the three of us over Andrew’s erratic behavior, his alcoholism, the fact he couldn’t hold a job or pay back money we’d loaned him or his share of any bills. My name wasn’t on the lease, so they decided I should go. Does that make sense to you? One of three people leaves the door wide open, invited strangers into the apartment, and doesn’t pay his share of anything...so let’s make the only responsible person leave! Brilliant. I’d just paid the next month’s rent in its entirety because Gloria was short and Andrew was just a mega-loser. Certainly I would not think of letting them stay there for a whole month free while I scrounged for a place to stay! I went to the landlord and told him the whole story of the three of us. He said he’d
just retired from running the place, but he’d let the new landlord know
because he thought I deserved my money back. Oh, I was so pleased! I called Gloria at work that night because Andrew would hang up on me and sometimes a strange guy answered who I guess might’ve been John. I told her she was about to be evicted for failing to pay the rent on time and the dumbass was actually stunned! She honestly thought I’d let them stay there another month on me! That’s when I realized just how fucking stupid she really thought I was.
“I had no place to go, so I started trying to live out of my car for awhile. I had no place to bathe, though, so I finally called up a former
co-worker who’d once offered to help me out if I was ever in any real emergency, and I knew it was implied he’d meant ‘briefly’, and I asked
if I could shower at his place. He agreed, and shortly thereafter he
decided it was okay if I stayed on his couch. He had a small place he had bought at auction, and he was always very likable, very popular, so he was seldom home, and he showed me where the spare key was kept and let me share some of his food with me. I started looking for a place to live, and first I tried becoming the fourth roommate of these three guys, but it became clear to me immediately that the guy in charge was looking for something a little more intimate than just roommates, and I don’t swing that way, so I got the hell outta that one fast. Next I found an upstairs apartment being rented by the sister-in-law of a guard I was working with. It was above the apartments of an elderly chain-smoking couple on oxygen and an elderly alcoholic guy. The place was so loaded with cockroaches that I set off seven roach bombs in the place, left it sealed for five days, then returned and found just as many live cockroaches scurrying around. There were mouse holes in the floor and wall. I couldn’t afford to have the electricity or water or anything turned on, but there was still some water in the hot-water tank
I was able to flush and take a few cold showers with, and I borrowed candles from my friend. I had no furniture, so I tried sleeping on a sheet spread out on this nasty old rug. The whole place smelled like cigarette smoke and piss. It was so hot, sweat would pour off me while I tried to sleep naked with the windows open for air. When I found out the cockroaches would swarm on me while I tried to sleep, I started sleeping
inside a ring of lit candles to try and keep them at bay. Unfortunately, I’d startle every time I felt something running on my skin whether it was sweat or a roach, so I asked my friend if I could stay on his couch again.
“I was way behind on my bills, and collection agencies were bugging me at work. There was no possible way I could ever buy any furniture or get my utilities turned on if my credit was fucked and I couldn’t save money. I checked into bankruptcy and found a seemingly nice lawyer who agreed to help me for eight hundred dollars. The only way I could come up with that much money fast was if I didn’t pay my next month’s rent at the roach motel, so called my landlords and told them I needed to back out. They only gave me back half of my deposit because they said I hadn’t given them enough notice that I was leaving. I’d only slept there
twice, showered maybe four times, but I couldn’t have my full deposit back. Whatever. As soon as I got my next paycheck, I scrounged up enough for the deposit on my bankruptcy and started going through the paperwork with the lawyer. They want everything you own listed at ‘yard sale prices’, so the sum of my life thus far came to right around two thousand dollars. If you have over five thousand dollars worth of stuff, they start selling it off to help pay your bills. I had to list everyone I owed money to, and give up my credit cards. They were shocked when all the furniture I said I owned was eleven bookcases, and the lawyer
decided the rest of my belongings could best be summed up as ‘eclectic’. In the meantime, Gloria stayed in contact with me like she was worried about my welfare, and she decided the idea of having your debt wiped out sounded pretty good, so she decided to file for bankruptcy, too. She told me she was going to hide her motorcycle and all its paraphernalia, her stereo and furniture to make sure no one knew just how much stuff she had.”
“That’s illegal,” I blurted.
“It wasn’t the only illegal thing she ever did, I assure you. I drove into a ditch on my way to the horse farm one day when it was snowing and the roads were full of slush. She did five hundred dollars worth of damage to her car trying to pull me out before it occurred to her there was a tractor at the farm. Her insurance wouldn’t cover the repairs because of the mileage on her odometer, so she ripped out her dashboard trying to get it out and once she had it, she rolled it back about three hundred miles.”
“Insurance fraud. That’s also a federal offense.”
Donovan said, “I hadn’t realized how fucking crooked she was as well as
just a lying, trampy cheat. Her behavior took a turn for the worse after
she started drinking, though. God knows what else she got into that I don’t even know about. She was acting so peculiar that her friends and co-workers started asking me if she was doing drugs. Even her best friend, Nola, asked me that. Gloria did a complete 360 when she started drinking again. She was nothing like the girl I’d met and wanted to marry. Watching her devolve like that...was just damn scary.
“But the bankruptcy,” he continued, sighing. “I told you she was
competitive--no? Yeah. If I had a headache, she had a migraine. If I
stubbed my toe, she thought her ankle was broken. If was hungry, she was
ready to pass out from starvation. Everything was a God-damned competition with her. It got on my fucking nerves. So she found a guy who’d represent her in bankruptcy court for only six hundred dollars and she had to call me and rub that in my face...like I cared.
“Everything went well with the bankruptcy until I got this notice in the mail from the mattress store near the apartment. I owed four hundred
dollars for her fucking California King! I called her in outrage, asking
her what the hell was going on, and she asks all innocent, ‘Oh, weren’t you making payments on it?’ And I said no, I remembered there were no payments due for the first year, and it was her fucking mattress anyway and why were they contacting me? She asked if I’d forgotten to put them down when I listed the people I was in debt to. I told her I had no reason to list them and she reminded me that I’d signed the fucking paperwork...and I had. I’d thought I was signing something so that if I was the one who signed for it when it was delivered, they’d have an
authorized signature to compare it to...but she’d lied to me when she’d
asked me to sign it. I’d signed a contract saying I’d be liable for the
cost of the mattress if she defaulted! So I told her I was not going to pay for her mattress because I wasn’t the only guy who’d been sleeping on it. If she wanted someone else to buy it for her, she could ask one of the bozos she’d cheated on me with. She said she would pay for it. I don’t know if she ever did or not.
“Anyway, I needed a place to live. I’d been with my friend, Jeff, for over a month then. I was working in security at that point, and I was doing triple shifts and I was already sick from taking Melatonin and caffeine to try and keep myself alert or sleepy. Jeff liked making food and waving it in front of my face while I was sleeping to see if I’d react to the smell while I was unconscious. I was having trouble keeping food down then, and all I ever ate was chocolate milk and granola bars.
It was at his house that my hair turned into a sheet of rubber, too. It was a very strange phenomenon because his hair was okay, and we were using the same products and everything. My hair looked wet and stayed flat to my head, but it lifted like a sheet of rubber and the strands stayed in place even in a high wind. I tried washing my hair in
different shampoos and conditioners, I tried washing it in vinegar. I tried boiling the water first. I was getting ready to have it all shaved off when I finally bought a gallon of water and washed it in that, and suddenly I had real hair again and not Max Headroom head. There was something funky in his water that reacted with my hair, but not his. I’m still not sure how that all came about, but it’s just one more bit of weirdness in the journey that is me.
“So I needed a place to live, and the new landlord at the apartment where I’d been never refunded my last rent check, but he hadn’t cashed it, either. Gloria decided she wanted her waterbed mattress back again, so when the lease expired, she’d asked about moving into one of the vacant apartments downstairs. The new landlord went over my credit report and decided I was worth the risk anyway and gave me back the apartment I’d lived in, using the old rent check as my deposit. I was
thrilled I’d have a place of my own finally, but not that Gloria would
now be my neighbor.
“The day I was supposed to move back in, I unlocked the door and found that neither she nor Andrew had packed up a damn thing. I called the sheriff’s department to see if it was okay for me to be there, and they said yes, as of midnight on the date of the contract I’d signed, I was legal resident of that place and could throw the other two out. I left them a note telling them they needed to vacate immediately, then returned to Jeff’s place. Andrew had been passed out in his bedroom
while I was there, but woke to find the note and called Gloria at work to see what was happening. She called me, furious, telling me they needed a few more days to prepare for the move. I told her she had twenty-four hours or she’d have to start paying me rent money. The landlord called next and asked me what my problem was. Gloria had told him they’d need a week to move out and that I’d said that was okay, I
told him that was a total lie, and I expected to move in within twenty-four hours or he would be in breach of contract because my name was the only one on the lease and he had no right to allow anyone else to stay there. He then told me that Gloria had told him she and I were engaged to be married, so how could I act that way, and I told him that was a lie, too. He said he’d call back. I called my mom’s lawyer to ask him about what was going on, and after I read my copy of the lease to
him, he said it was full of loopholes designed to let the landlord get away with a lot of bullcrap, and that I really oughtta look for a better place to live, but that yes, I was correct in accusing him of being in breach of contract by allowing Gloria and Andrew to stay there.”
“Playing hardball, eh?”
“The relationship was over. Why should I have to keep putting up with her shit? I stopped by the next day and kept haunting the area while they scrambled to move all their shit out. Unfortunately, most of my belongings had remained there while I’d been staying with Jeff, and I returned to find they’d done damage to the place and some of my stuff, as well as stolen a few things. I took photos of the damage for the new landlord, then called the cops about the theft, but while they said they’d do something about my missing stuff, they never did. That really pissed me off. I stayed the night at Jeff’s, but before I left for good the next day, Gloria called me to tell me her mother had finally been
kicked out of her boyfriend’s trailer and she needed a place to live. I’d gotten along well enough with her, she’d cut the expenses in half, and she actually owned quite a bit of furniture.”
“Oh, no,” I groaned.
“The plot sickens. So I became roommates with my ex-fiancee’s mother and neighbors with my ex-fiancee. Gloria kept dropping by to see me. It was annoying and terrible, but I couldn’t keep her out if she was pretending she needed to talk to her mom, who she’d always claimed she hated. We did have sex one last time,” he admitted, and he didn’t look pleased
about it at all. “I didn’t know she’d already started sleeping with that
John guy. As a matter of fact, she was married to him.”
“What?!”
“Jennifer told me. She came by to talk about the boyfriend who’d just broken up with her and she drops this total bomb on me. Here we’d split up, but she was still around every fucking day, and Jenny tells me she’d been over at John’s house with them when Gloria had admitted they’d gotten married. Never told anyone else about it...not their friends or family members. No one. Dated just over a month and got married. A month after asking me one last time if I’d marry her, the piece of trash. Married, and already cheating on her husband with her ex. So the first
thing I did was go back to the Health Department for AIDS testing. Then I called Mom’s lawyer again. He said if I tested positive, then Gloria would be charged with attempted murder. If I died, she’d get manslaughter. I called her and told her and she tried to say she hadn’t known he’d had a roommate with AIDS when she slept with me that last time. I reminded her she’d mentioned it to me all the way back in
October, and this was late November. I was scared to death. Here I’d only had one girlfriend ever in my whole life, I’d been faithful to her to the very end, and I could be dying of AIDS. I came up negative. They told me to come back every other month for six months just to make sure. I was already sick inside. This bitch had risked my life in the name of stuffing her pussy with fresh meat.
“Life became intolerable to me. I wanted to die. I had a bayonet I slept
with under my pillow, and I started holding it and thinking about it while I sat on the edge of my bed, and every now and then I’d think of cutting my wrists with it, but I’d plunge it into the mattress instead. If I was going to die, it had to be certain. No mistakes. Nobody could find me and try to save me. I became morose. I did nothing but work and sleep again. I choked down sleeping pills every time I found myself
awake and didn’t have to be anywhere. I’d dream that it was all some huge joke and Gloria really wanted me, she was so sorry for all that had happened, she wanted to start over again and everything would be okay... Her mother thought the marriage was a lie, but she finally found the record of it. Gloria lived downstairs in her apartment, and her husband and his three kids, one of whom was sixteen and very pregnant, still lived in their filthy trailer. The only smart thing that dumbass girl
did was get Andrew’s name bumped off the lease so she could finally throw him out for not paying his share of anything. She took him to court later for all the money he owed, but I never found out what became of that. Don’t really care.
“Gloria’s sister kept coming by the house with her rotten little heathen
shaved monkey kids...at least they should have been shaved. They kept
catching lice at school. The kids would eat all my food. I’d find fist marks on my cheese, so I stopped buying cheese. I stopped buying hot-dogs. I stopped caring if I ate anything or not. They would tear up my books and my art supplies. They’d draw pictures with my paints and crayons and push them under the bedroom door for me. I would cover my head with my pillow and...I’d cry.” He faltered for a moment, not liking
admitting that to me. “Gloria’s mom worked nights at the bar, but after
closing at three in the morning, she’d be home with the TV up loud, running the dishwasher and the blender, vacuuming. She moved in and the damn electric bill went quadruple what I’d budgeted for because she had so many damn things plugged in and running all the time. She was allergic to trees, so we couldn’t open windows, and she smoked like a damn chimney, which made my COPD worse. She’d run air purifiers and this little tabletop fountain that would get so hot the motor would evaporate all the water in it and make me wonder when the place would burn down. All the lights stayed on in that place all the time. She didn’t have a
car, so I became her chauffeur, and sometimes she would borrow the car,
which scared the hell outta me. She kept trying to get me interested in
social things like parties at the bar, which I disdained, or visiting her daughter and the grandkids, which made me tense. I know she meant well, but she didn’t realize I just needed to be alone, to think about things and decide what to do next. She got me the part-time job as a grill cook when the cook at the bar went in for heart surgery. She even got me to help her on weekends when she and a friend of hers cleaned
condos for extra money and they even cut me in on the deal. I never knew
why Gloria hated her so much. I asked her about some of the stories of abuse she had told me about and heard her side and believed her instead. Gloria had always been a mean-spirited troublemaker, trying to grow up too fast, no plan of how to shape her life. She was amazingly immature, stupid beyond belief, lazy, and a liar. Then she tried to come back into my life.
“I’d switched security companies so I wouldn’t have to commute so far. My main base of operations was a factory--the one I told you I’d ride bicycles in while singing at night. Donna worked there, but I had no idea she was interested in me. She was a fairly pretty girl with long, flowing blondish-brown hair-”
“Chestnut?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. That sounds so girly. Chestnut hair.” He grimaced. “She did odd jobs there and her co-workers would sometimes point her out and tell me she was filthy rich, that she could own the place if she wanted to, but that she was happy doing little things here and there like cleaning the toilets and mopping the floors. I didn’t care. Whatever. She would come to the guard shack every day and chat with whoever was inside. She wasn’t the only one who did that, so it
meant nothing to me. She liked to sit in a window above the shack and drop small rocks on it to annoy us, or throw rocks at me while I was patrolling the grounds, or spray the windows unexpectedly with a water hose. She liked to joke around a little. Big deal. I was aware of her, but she just one of dozens of characters who stood out in my mind on that jobsite for various reasons.
“A couple of the women there started flirting with me, and it made me very uncomfortable. I kept telling them it was unethical for me to date anyone while I was a security guard there. It didn’t dissuade them. One day, Donna stopped by the shack while I was inside talking to my captain, and he asked me, ‘Does she like you?’ I just shrugged. It hadn’t occurred to me before. But then the suggestion was in my head and I started noticing how she always said hi to me and smiled if she saw me on rounds. Finally, she passed me a note asking if I’d like to go out
with her sometime for drinks or something. I wasn’t ready for anything
like that, but I was definitely ready for something fun to do to help me get my mind off of Gloria. I sent her a note back telling her I didn’t drink, so she sent me another note suggesting pizza or a movie. I was still concerned, so I sent her a note warning her I was being tested for AIDS and why. She said that was okay, did I still want to go out sometime. She was persistent, and her co-workers always spoke well of her, so I finally relented, but warned her I could get in trouble for dating someone I was supposed to be guarding.
“We agreed to go out on my birthday. She said she had some business to take care of earlier that day, but to drop by afterward and we’d go do something fun. I got dressed in black jeans, a black T-shirt, black jacket and boots and drove to her house...and she wasn’t there. I went to Jeff’s, but he refused to go hang out with me because he was broke. I tried to pay him to grab some food with me at least, but he refused. He let me hang out at his place and use his phone to call Donna several times, but there was no answer. Hours passed and I got so discouraged, I decided I couldn’t even take myself someplace fun. I just wanted to crawl into bed and die. I detoured toward her house on the way home from Jeff’s place and there she was, pacing in her kitchen, talking on the phone. I knocked on the door and her dog started barking, but she just got mad at it and made it quit so she could hear what was going on in
the phone. I stood there and tried waving at her. I was standing on the
front step of her porch, looking at her through two glass doors and she just didn’t see me. I almost left. I went down to her driveway and threw rocks at her kitchen window and she finally thought she heard something and came to see what it was.
“We went to the movies. Saw a werewolf flick. Then we went to a restaurant in the mall for dinner. We headed back to her place and she invited me in and put on HBO and some movie came on about boys getting molested while attending a Catholic school. It was a three and a half hour movie and boring as hell, and I started falling sleep, but I didn’t
want to seem rude, so I kept yawning and watching this long-ass dull film, and she just sat there watching it too...and then this guy in the film is narrating it and says something like, ‘It was six o clock, Sunday morning...’ and I looked at my watch and joked, “My God, it is six o’ clock Sunday morning!’ and used that as my cue to excuse myself. She followed me outside, trying to convince me it was okay if I stayed overnight on her couch, but I was wearing my contacts and have trouble when I sleep in them, so I begged off. I was getting ready to get into my car when she grabbed me suddenly and kissed me full on the mouth. I tried kissing her back once I got over the shock of it, so it lingered a bit, and then she smiled and told me I was a good kisser. I was still
mainly in shock. We agreed to hook up the next night after work, and we’ve been together ever since.”
I nodded. “Great, but you said Gloria came back-”
“Oh, right! She did. She tried to anyway. She’d been married like four
months when she came to me at the apartment, upset because she finally
realized she couldn’t handle trying to stay married to a redneck with three kids and a grand-kid on the way. She realized she’d made a terrible mistake, and would I take her back please and stop seeing that long-haired girl at the factory I was guarding? Oh, God, she went on and on about how sorry she was about everything and she really needed a place to stay and the whole thing was getting annulled and didn’t I
still love her after all? And I just sort of stood there, tight-lipped,
really freaking out inside, because she’d mentioned committing suicide
before, too, and I was afraid if I turned her away, she might do it.”
“What happened to her apartment?”
“Oh, right. She eventually moved in with John and let a younger cousin of hers and her friends move into the apartment, but they were all druggies and petty thieves and eventually got evicted. So she really had no place to go if I didn’t help her. She kept telling me about all the fun we were gonna have, all the places we would visit together, all the sights we would see, and after crying on me and going on and on about how wonderful life with me was gonna be this time, she asks me, ‘But if things don’t work out, y’know, like after awhile, would you be mad at me if I brought home a new guy every once in a while?’ And all I could
think was of how stupid she thought I must be, and I told her honestly,
‘Never stopped you before’. She looked at me all confused and said, ‘Yes, but would that bother you? If we just still stayed friends and maybe lived together, but I was seeing new guys? Only if all this doesn’t work out well, of course.’ And I repeated to her, ‘Never stopped you before.’ So she took that as a yes, that I’d give up Donna for her, and started talking about moving her stuff over as soon as she could as she was walking back out the door. And I left to go see Donna and didn’t say a thing about it. The next day I went before a judge and tried to get her committed to the psyche ward. Obviously, this girl had lost her marbles and was a possible danger to herself. The judge agreed and put the paperwork through. I called her at work hours after I thought they were supposed to get her and told her how sorry I was, that I’d done it for her own good...but they hadn’t arrived yet, they were running late, and I’d just tipped her off... I was stupid after all, huh? She warned her supervisor at the hospital that I was a raving lunatic bent on revenge for her cheating on me, and she averted getting committed for a psychiatric evaluation. But she’d apparently been getting into trouble at work off and on and I hadn’t even known about that, so telling her
supervisor this crazy story was the last straw and she was fired.”
“Wow. You tried to get help for her and you got her fired.”
“She got herself fired. One of my supervisors knew someone at the hospital who worked with her and told me all these stories about her fuckups that I had never been aware of. He told me stories dating back to when I’d first met her. How she’d let a prisoner brought in for evaluation go, how she’d run at the first sign of trouble from combative patients, her history of sleeping on the job, showing up late or not at all, getting caught in areas of the hospital she was not permitted to
be. They’d been compiling stuff over the years so they could kick her out and keep her from ever getting a job there again. If what I’d done hadn’t helped fire her, her next stupid stunt would have. No guilt on me,” he said with just a hint of smugness. “She got miffed when she found out I was still dating Donna after I’d ‘told’ her I was going to drop her. I didn’t give a damn. Her years of lies were just too much for me. I didn’t care what she did with herself anymore. If she took her own life, then the world would be better for it. She stayed with John longer than she anticipated because his son was in a serious car accident, and
I guess she thought that would mend all their differences. I had to get a tooth pulled some months later, and afterward I became terribly ill. I couldn’t work for three months. I’d been staying with Donna off and on anyway, so she took care of me, and asked if I’d like to just move in. We discussed the idea further, and I finally figured I was more than ready to bid Gloria and her messed up family goodbye. I let her mother know, and she was okay with it. She’d been thinking of renting my room
out anyway if it came to that. We moved my stuff to Donna’s place, I quit busting my ass working double and triple shifts and got that new suck-ass job selling clothing. But I was with a much better person in the eighth level of hell. I was moving up in the world slowly, but by God, I was finally moving up.”
Happy Halloween. A volume of Horrible Haunts & Twisted Tales taken from the horror books La Belle Rouge has written every October for a decade and a half. If you have read her works in the horror genre, you know the invitation is for you to enjoy thr
