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Vol. 2, Issue #2 Feb. 16th - March 1st, 2007
No More Happy Endings Episode 2 - The Perfect Husband
And I’m left alone, knowing only that she was overwhelmed. With bills, work, school, keeping the house up. But there were solutions. I would become the perfect husband. The perfect husband. We might have bickered now and again. I might have gotten too busy with work and school and writing the goddamn novel. I might have bitched about spending all of our Sundays with her family. But I’d become the perfect husband. If I need to pick up shifts at my shitty day job, well then, I’ll pick up shifts. If I need to go half time to school I’ll go half time to school. Whatever I need to do for her. But nothing worked. Nothing. Frustration grew. I thought that there might be someone else. I knew the antidepressants she had started taking a few weeks ago made her seem strange sometimes. I wasn’t exactly sure why she was taking them. Was it the pills that had made her slip away? I knew it had to be, those pills were bad news. But what could it really be? What could I do to save my wife from slipping away? She was vanishing and nothing worked. It had been five years since I had last drank. Five long years. The last drink I had was after 5 jugs of Bison Wison from the Bricktown Brewery. I left in a hurry. I was always running behind the result of squeezing one more round out of the impatient clock. I got on I 40 eastbound, hauled ass in my mean 57 ford f100 4x4, came up over a hill and plowed into rush hour traffic. The rest of the day was pathetic and low caliber, but I spent the night in Oklahoma County for a DUI and leaving the scene of an accident. So needless to say there were good reasons (that go way back) for why I shouldn’t drink. I should say something here about alcoholism. About recovery, but I’m not real sure what I should say. Am I an alcoholic? It’s a complicated question. I had spent a lifetime in 12 step meeting halls, making the admission, the words rolling off of my tongue with pride that I had beat it. A daily reprieve contingent on buying into something that was another type of addiction. I beat around the question now. Just forget I mentioned it. So what does the perfect husband do when he’s just celebrated his five years sobriety? When the one that was inspiration, his muse had not celebrated it with him? What does he do when his lovely new young wife doesn’t return his phone calls? What does he do when none of her family that over the years has become his family can’t tell him what’s going on with her? What does he do when he has become a part of those rumored couples that had been together for five years and their marriage didn’t make it six months? I wish I knew what the perfect husband was supposed to do. As for me, well, I fall short, I drank it down. I drank it down like calling that ex-girlfriend that would always give it up even if I had to deal with a load of drama and bullshit. I drank it down with a quickness. I drank it down because that’s what no one and every one expected at the same time. I started early afternoon, after just having left her parents house. Took them her stupid cat. Pulled in to the gas station and made the decision. Fuck it. I’ll drink at her. I’ll get some release after a suck down the first few suds. A binge was what the doctor ordered. I’ll go into it scathed and it wouldn’t matter about coming out of it unscathed because I was already broken. I needed to quiet my damn head. I needed to wash it away. I went in to the gas station and bought six pack of Rolling Rock, made it home, cracked the top, drank some release, and let me tell you how Dionysis had me at that moment, that old meddling sonovabitch, but I wasn’t afraid, I wasn’t afraid, and like Dylan says, “when you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.” No More Happy Endings Homepage ©2007 G. Smith |
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She wonders about her loneliness, how he has gotten so busy. She is alone, in her new marriage. What happened to us? The bills, college, a pregnancy that she was trying to figure out how to tell him about, growing excited and nervous and hoping upon hope that he’d feel the same, that he wouldn’t mention abortion, or the timing, or his own self-interest, and then the miscarriage introduced her to the like of a loneliness that she wasn’t capable of dealing with. She leaves him after a fight, waiting for the moment where she could seek comfort, seeking something lost inside of her, yet ashamed of her failure to confide in him. Comfort often is the mask worn by death.©2006-2007 NONCO Media, L.L.C.