Diary of a Sex-Starved Pseudo-Mennonite, Part 24

Satan helped me pay off the credit card debt from This Dude with money from the job my mom and stepdad gifted him when he offered to marry me. Because apparently even in 2002, you should pay a man to take your spinster daughter off the market. This job settled Satan's credit card debts in full as well. Which were substantial from his unemployment stint.

Of course I took on debts for This Dude. Of course he already had ruined credit at 19. He still owes my friend in Portland $10,000. You think our relationship was only codependent, drug-addled, then ultimately unfaithful? Please. Go big or go home. What's worse is until probably 6 months before Satan left, I thought I still loved This Dude. Probably because I married Satan. And I love dudes who are genetically designed to let me down. And despite his obvious shortcomings, This Dude was nice. I asked This Dude to marry me. Twice. In each instance, he gently changed the subject. My stepdad was the same. Nice guy. Total money pit. Also an alcoholic. I would like to write that my stepdad stole my mom's squirrelled away money, but she just handed it to him. Like I did to Satan and This Dude (but with This Dude, I think I put up more of a fight. I fought Satan, too. For years. But because Satan is eternal, he outlasted me). My stepdad's potentially life-changing parental inheritance; my mom's potentially life-changing parental inheritance; money with the promise to improve lives for generations; buh-bye. My stepdad was the only child of a successful hotelier. My mom's mom went to finishing school. She wasn't 1 to mention it, but Grandma played a jaunty Joplin and read Flaubert and set holidays with imported linen and crystal on something approaching mahogany and was owed half of a prosperous Iowa farm, which her only brother's children now own and operate. Despite these impressive combined inheritances (we're talking just south of Lotto money), my mom and stepdad were still working for minimum wage at 75 and 80 when COVID hit. My mom lives with her sister now because she could not afford to keep her house after my stepdad died. Mom and I have not applied the prescribed amount of reverence to money in regards to men. And for much of our lives, we paid for this. My stepdad did not like my high school sweetheart John or This Dude for me. He liked Satan.

To his credit, This Dude paid back a portion of the debt. I guess out of guilt or hoping I would take him back (his side piece, now the presumed main dish, perhaps waiting unknowing at the ever metaphorical Tall Corn Motel). He said he would not repay all of it because suddenly I was a liar. That debt couldn't all be his. Guess what? If you are a person who accumulates debt on the back of those who love you and are so cavalier and accustomed to this that you do not even track the debt because you have no intention of repaying it, IT'S ALL FUCKING YOUR DEBT. Eventually I stopped taking This Dude's calls. Then changed my number in hopes of pleasing Satan. I declined to see This Dude as he wished, when he would visit our mutual friend in Portland, whom he would soon begin to owe money.

Funny story. You know why I stopped entertaining This Dude's calls? Because out of the blue, John, my boyfriend of 6 years who preceded This Dude, called me drunk in the middle of the night the same week I had the stalker who was moving to Seattle (see Part 7). Those theoretically single midnights, my cordless phone rang like a dinner bell. I had not heard from John in maybe 2 years. Slurring, emphatic, sweet--John told me to stop keeping This Dude as a backup ho. Because I was entertaining Satan. So I did what my drunk-dialing ex-boyfriend told me to do. John was a great guy and from what he called himself and showed me, an alcoholic. But he was young. These things might be mislabeled at 17. John's mother, who I'm still friends with, refutes my understanding that John had already been through some form of rehab his junior year of high school and that's why he was sober when we started dating the second half of his senior year. But John's her favorite. Like her workaholic alcoholic father was her favorite before John. John's status as his mom's #1 was an open secret in sibling discussions. The daughter was their dad's favorite. The youngest boy got the shaft, and for that reason and more, he became my favorite. He was my roommate for about 6 months in college, after John moved away. I never lived with John. We were young and Catholic and unmarried. But I did live with his brother. His brother's idea. Brothers like me. It's a thing.

I believe John's mom silently believes John and I should still be together. John's married to a doctor. For which I have accused him of being a trophy wife. Shrinks make bank. My lack of ambition and weak hustle-muscle exasperated John. We both got essentially straight A's in college. But mine were straighter and I worked hard, but not as hard as John. I was such an oblivious, storytelling dawdler that John once dragged me across the Pentacrest by my toddler wrist so he would not be late for class. Yes. This was my good boyfriend. John's mom loves me the way my dad's dad loved my mom. John asked me out because his mother spoke so highly of me. She went to college with my mom and was my teacher and biggest fan in junior high.

I thought John was going to marry me. We were each other's first and both Irish Catholic and eventually went to the same college. Then John moved to Kentucky. He did not break up with me. Just moved. From Midwest to South. So I studied abroad to prove I wasn't moping about my latest abandonment experience. We agreed to an academic year of exploration since we had been together approaching 5 years and would now be separated by extra long distance. Ancestors watching, I viewed study abroad as my Rumspringa. OMG I had so much fun.

There was a southern preacher's son and a Dutch boy and a Marine sergeant on shore leave and a French turned American car importer/exporter (illegal, I think) and an Italian peasant poet followed by an Italian American future litigator and then it was time to cum home. These 9 months abroad were by far the longest period of time I went without a job since before I was babysitting for the cop (see Part 18). So since I was 5 or 6 or 7. I could not work because I was a foreigner. About this I was ecstatic. Prior to my year abroad, I worked 3 jobs and earned 4 scholarships so I could have a single 9 month period where all I had to do was go to school full-time and fuck around. The other Pisces I was friends with abroad, from New Mexico--she didn't make it. Flunked the whole year partying with me and a handful of Italians. Her parents had money and the whole family graduated therapy, so they loved her anyway. I got 3 A's and 1 A- studying abroad. The minus was for Women in America. Even the professor thought I could know myself a little better.

I didn't sleep with all of the men abroad. I merely kissed the southern gentleman and made out on several levels of a North Sea ferry with the Dutch boy. These fellows were too earnest and responsible to sleep with. 

John came to visit and travel with me for weeks in the spring. He was about to confess his sanctioned affairs. We were in the honeymoon suite of a bed and breakfast outside Dublin. I might have once again slept with the Italian American future litigator the night before John arrived. It was fun to be so bad. This was St. Patrick's Day week in Dublin and the suburban honeymoon suite was all we could get for lodging and we had to pretend to be married to stay there. Before he got the chance to name names, I told John who he slept with. He could not believe I guessed correctly. No one told me. I just knew. Cuz I so psychic. Then I told him about my adventures. From which his ego never recovered, nor did our relationship. Because I slept with 2 more people than John did and those 2 were 1 night stands and I was not sorry about it. Until John made me sorry. He got so paranoid he asked his BFF who also came to visit and travel with me that year if he slept with me. I'm pretty sure we both thought about it. I'm very attractive. His BFF said so. As was he. But we didn't touch each other, sharing the same small floorspace to sleep as poor backpackers do, me in my irresistible OshKosh overalls slash pajamas. I mean, we were not animals. We exercised restraint in service to love of a mutual other.

I had made out with 3 different guys (1 time each) before Rumspringa while in the teenage portion of my long distance relationship with John. The relationship was not open then. Perhaps I was my father's daughter. I was the cheater. Because we were so young and it was not sensible, I was never part of the equation when John decided where to live and work and study. While wooing me with bottomless drinks in Barcelona, the Marine sergeant said of John, "If he loves you, why isn't he here?" I still have no answer to that. For college, John moved out of state. Then moved back. So I went out of state for college, then returned to John and Iowa. Leave. Then come back. Leave. Then come back. John did not love my transfer to Iowa because I might interfere with his studies. For the most part, I was only allowed to hang out with him at some meals or to study or on weekends. Which was smart. Because neither This Dude nor Satan had such rules and they both left school after entertaining me. My love can be distracting. Even my uncle mentioned that my boyfriends seemed to drop out of college once I arrived on scene. He said it giggling and squeezing my shoulder, a nightclub compliment. After graduating, John moved to Kentucky. Then Texas. Then Colorado. 

In those first several years, John was not around and I was a kid. So I dallied.

When looking at my lack of commitment through the full scope of our relationship, John's reaction to my Rumspringa abroad was understandable. It reinforced the idea that I wanted to fuck around always, whatever the context. Guilt over my lack of complete faithfulness to John is why I never touched another man during my relationships with This Dude and Satan, once committed. I was faithful for almost 25 years to these 2 because I felt guilty for making out with 3 dudes (1 time each) in my teens. I confessed the sin to John each time. That's what good Catholic girls do.

Before or after the big sanctioned affair reveal in Dublin, John told me something and there was trauma bonding and passionate sex in the honeymoon suite. John and I were happy in Ireland. We felt at home. We had some trouble with authorities in a Baltic country practicing ethnic cleansing and Easter in Florence was the pits cuz everything was closed and we didn't have any food and I was on the rag and we fought about my attitude. Passed out on a train from Brindisi to Rome, an Italian dude slipped silently into our train car and molested me. John was sleeping directly across from my body on the opposite bench. Our eyes were level. If I felt I could move, I could have touched John. My eyes screamed at him to help me. But he was too drunk and unconscious to notice. I reunited with study abroad friends in Verona and John took his leave. 

When I was with This Dude once John and I officially broke, I voluntarily got tested for all STDs in consideration of my hijinks abroad after This Dude told me he'd only been with 2 virgins, so he was clean. The nurse told me a gory blood draw story as I watched my blood fill the vials and I woke up on the exam room floor with every clinical person working that day at Emma Goldman Clinic encircling and staring at me. Cuz I passed out hard and for a long time and was convulsing. I do that sometimes. The other side likes me and wants to keep me. I'm the 5th Dimension's boo. When I got back to my room and tried to wake This Dude because I wanted to be heard and comforted after my ordeal, he would not wake up. I told my daylight nightmare to a sleeping boy.

I want to be loved by someone who when I need him, intuitively springs awake from a dead sleep. 

 

When mutual friends and I visited John in Kentucky after my year abroad, we entered his home to find 1 of his sanctioned affairs from the prior year (but not THIS year) staging something like a love-in on John's bedroom carpet. She would not leave. Tears and despondency reigned. I'm not sure how forcefully John asked her to go. If at all. I fear both she and I stayed at John's house that night, her resolve like Super Glue. I think she finally left in the morning. Did I sleep on the couch cuz she wouldn't leave John's room? I sure hope not. Gross. Needless to say, the visit was not super fun for anyone. And we still did not break up. This situation was all the more hurtful and humiliating because our now wrecked relationship had an audience of visiting friends from college and the high school friends who were John's roommates. Mutual friends drove all day to see this mess. Super Glue was an unstable bisexual who is probably the reason I still struggle to trust bisexuals. I wonder if like me, my mother wondered why our men cheated with women who seemed overall less appealing than we 2 magnetic water signs. Help me understand the allure of tenacious women no one else wants long term, even the men keeping them.

When I shared a home with This Dude in Iowa, John came to visit. This Dude knew and made no objections. John drove us downtown and parked quickly at my suggestion when he started bawling. He missed me, I think. He was crying so hard he couldn't really explain, so I did my best to interpret. As when I helped Satan by asking for the divorce he wanted when his  sobbing held up the production. Super Glue--the plain, thickly built, acned bisexual who hijacked our Kentucky rendezvous--proved difficult for John to live with. Shocker. John agreed when I said it was too bad we hadn't learned what we knew now before we dated each other. But we were babies then. Babies have to learn.

In retrospect, my high school sweetheart, who only dated me cuz his mom made him, is the best relationship I've had. We were mostly long distance and not together but when we were, we had so much fun. I have mostly memories of us laughing, especially him. He supported my independent endeavors. When free from academic pressure, John was down to clown; a bundle of love and activity and exuberance and adventure. He was frequently and spontaneously affectionate. He is the only boyfriend I've had who consistently wanted to hold me. 

John had a bad temper. As did I, on my period. After I confessed my first teen dalliance, John wordlessly moved outdoors to shatter bricks in the alley with a sledgehammer. I watched him do this from a window on the main floor of my junior high drama teacher's house for what felt like hours, but might have been just 1. Or less. Heartbreak time is tough to measure. The interval felt heavier than the bricks John was shattering. John was strong and athletic. A jock with a heart. As was This Dude. Satan was not a jock and secretly heartless. 

I slapped John once because he said I ate like a barbarian. Which was true. Because I was raised by wolves. There was no time to think. I was on my period and my hand defended my honor and my unearned difficult childhood with 1 quick smack. John's mother was right next to us near the kitchen table and laughed. John and his siblings wryly joked that I was their parents' favorite kid. I just visited their mother before COVID. There was almost not enough air to support our energetic gabbing. When Satan left, she was the person who immediately identified his mental health problem and said I should not blame myself. She spent a weekend with him. She was a teacher. She knows stuff. She might be reading this blog because she always encouraged my writing. 

John and the boyfriend before him (who was my boyfriend--twice--before John) are Virgos. I thought I didn't do well with Virgos. Because Virgos are never satisfied. But Piscean This Dude and my Cancer Satan were not ultimately satisfied, either. At least Virgos pay their own way.

Until Next Time, Sweeties!

Ness Sweet Ness