27-Mated Over Married

My biggest life-obstacle is getting through the days, emphasis on the plural. I bore easily. Even worse, I morose easily. If I don’t self-stimulate, I lean toward self-destructitude in many manners. Hence my love affair with driving.

No airport transport shift was just like the last. Each passenger was different, each traffic snafu pled for its own solution, each pick-up and delivery routed me to a new place. Ideal after two-and-a-half decades of constant surveillance and acquiescence. Maybe it wasn’t the wide, open road, but it was microcosmic adventure, freedom, and easy breathing, totally sans Mother.

But my bliss was naught more than a stopgap for my husband. Tom always had to find another place to play, as the song goes, so he dropped dollars of coins in public phones and ran down dozens of ads to find the next group, piano bar, or dark restaurant corner. He had a calling to perform, to make the people happy with his hands and voice and charisma. He was good at all that — the calls, the small talk, the showing off.

My calling, apparently, was to earn as many tips as possible to cover the expense of his hobby—oops, sorry, I meant career.

It cost us more for him to take gigs than he earned playing them. Not unique. Talk to any casual/club musician’s wife and you’ll hear the same. It cost his driving pay, an admittedly small but dependable amount; his music tips never equaled his passenger gratuities; and most of his performance fees ended up in the gas tank.

Music is extremely non-cost efficient. It must needs be constantly fed with new sheet music, new music books, new recorded music to learn. It demands new equipment, old equipment repairs, new cords, new cord bags, the latest device, gadget, and thingamabob. It sucks up time and money to find equipment-repair techs, hang out while waiting for said repairs (and buying said tech coffee, pastries, lunch, or weed), driving all over Southern California to attend equipment shows and check out newly discovered equipment/music/record stores. It bleeds cash for drinks in potential-gig bars, to sit in on other gigs, to hang out with contacts, to play the game behind the life.

And beneath all that, it requires yearly membership dues payable to the United Federation of Musicians (an offshoot of the Teamsters Union) for the privilege to pay weekly work dues. Such an honor.

Tom was good at all that, too, but those were hard days for me with all the accompanying, listening, tongue biting. Less than a partner, I was a pretty add-on, my only purpose being—what? Prove he had a wife? Show off my pretty turtle shell?

Keep him from feeling alone? Bingo over here at table six!

So I tagged along on my days off and checked in after my shift at whatever gig he was playing. Always everyone’s biggest fan, he forever wanted to get to be as good as whoever else was on stage now, had been on stage earlier, or was trying to take the stage away from him after he landed the gig.

Yeah, that’s right—we were a matched set. We jointly registered ten degrees less than zero on the self-esteem scale.

I’ve already recounted my confidence’s deliberate destruction. Tom, who grew up with loving, supportive parents, got depressed tying his shoes every morning, wreaked havoc on whomever he encountered in and out of the house, and was medicated with traditional 1950’s beatings, beratements, and belittlings to remedy his neurotransmitter fluctuations. They didn’t work. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

I learned a lot that first marital year about Tom’s brain-chemistry imbalance(s), then called manic-depression, later referred to as bi-polar disorder, currently euphemized under neurodivergence. Medical/psychiatric types love to pathologize behavior; families eagerly grab for said labels, hoping-against-hope that diagnosis begets medicinal or behavioral solution.

Maybe it does today. Back then, nay, nay.

Knowing Tom was manic-depressive/bi-polar/neurodivergent simply meant he had an authorized justification for why he—and his father, his uncle, his aunt, his grandmother, and who knows who else in his family—behaved how they did. The drugs-of-the-day would only tranquilize the shit out of him until he couldn’t put a finger on his thoughts. Neither of us wanted that.

But while the diagnosis itself didn’t solve a damn thing, it was a handy excuse when he slammed his fist through a cabinet door in our non-air-conditioned, western-exposure Yorba Linda apartment. Fortunately, my father knew how to fix it and helped him do the job. Note those words: helped him. Didn’t take it out of his hands and do it for him, which was what Tom really wanted. Didn’t show me how to do it, which would have made sense, since I loved tools and fixing things. No, I was persona non grata at the crime scene so Tom could learn to not make the same mistake again.

Had his action been impelled by simple anger, he woulda learned, but it wasn’t so he didn’t. We had to handle similar breakage in our Tustin apartment on our own because he was too embarrassed to call on Dad again.

He got his dealer to help with the Orange townhouse closet hole, and a contractor friend to talk him through the Orange duplex repairs.

I non-recall who helped at our second Tustin apartment. In fact, memory of that damage eludes me altogether, although my daughter assures me it occurred. I have no reason not to believe her; he had a pattern.

And anger issues. And forearms of iron.

By the time we’d moved into our single-family home in Santa Ana, he’d upgraded his excuse arsenal to include tequila and weed, but he’d also scaled his wreckage to far more expensive (and public) wreckage and threw in some pretty bloody self-injuries just to keep things interesting.

The exploding barbeque-sauce jug was epic. I scrubbed it off the ceiling for months.

But back at the beginning of our marriage, it was just the one cabinet in the low-rent area of a college town, and as soon as he’d smashed the thin veneer into submission, his rage instantly dissipated.

Dumbasfuck, I thought that meant he was over whatever had pissed him off, and everything was okay. What it actually meant was he could flip modes: “What a mess! Now I have to fix it!”

Tom’s methodology for fixing anything was to call friends and/or family to help him, loan him money, or talk him through whatever-he-had-to-do. His first call was always to his mother.

Was that a red flag? Uh, yeah. Did I realize that? Um… no. Dumbasfuck, remember? Also—and good golly, let’s don’t forget—we lived in those good ‘ol, great ‘ol, ignorance-is-bliss days, when no one ever talked about anything of import, nothing was ever askew, and no one was supposed to know anything about anyone or anything because, geez, Mr. Cleaver, we just didn’t need to know, now, did we?

We, the collective baby-boomer generation, were too young, too innocent, too immature, too… what’s that word? Oh, yeah, liberal… to be trusted with honest information. Best to keep the realities of sex, death, and life secret to protect the kids. Sound familiar? Except we weren’t kids, we were supposedly functional members of society, and we had theoretically ended the Vietnam conflict and initiated the feminist/black/gay revolutions in a single decade.

We’d eventually turn ultra conservative ourselves, doing everything we could to protect our kids from learning everything we’d fought to bring into the open so that now, our children’s children don’t want their children to know it’s okay to fart sideways.

My husband’s violent outbursts morphed into life as usual. To his credit, he never expected me to handle any of the repairs. In fact, he found/borrowed the money on his own to replace the giant terra cotta planter he smashed and the wooden gate he drove through. He also covered the loading-dock damage, the exact nature of which blissfully non-resides in my memory banks. I knew about them all, just as I knew about the affair he had, because he couldn’t not talk to me. What the universe hath joined, let no devastation put asunder.

I was never worried that he’d physically attack me—he destroyed property, not people, the better to punish himself. For all his loquacious, bombastic personality, Tom was, at heart, an especially gentle soul. He’d grown up trying to be as boy as he could because, despite all his closest friends being gay, that life path was virulently non-acceptable in his house, just as mine as nonbinary/trans was 100 percent non-optional. So he’d (theoretically) bedded a series of girls he didn’t care about as evidence of his straightness and non-proposed to the one he knew had expectations he couldn’t possibly meet.

He finally copped to being bisexual, according to our openly bisexual daughter, but he never came out to me. Probably because he knew I knew he’d never been guy before this incarnation, just as I’d never been girl. Neither of us fit our AGAB (assigned-gender-at-birth).

Spiritualists claim we come to Earth with a mission to learn certain things to take back to our master soul. A pretty idea. But I think about the kids gunned down in elementary schools… the politicians promoting mythology-based hatred… the meth babies… the children with bone cancer… the innocents taken out by indiscriminate bombs or cross-fire… the genocide victims throughout history—

… and I call bullshit.

In contrast to Tom’s gentleness warped by brain chemistry and self-medications, the Jeffosity in me was still furious All. The. Time. And still thinking about sex All. The. Time. I jonesed for more physicality. Okay, okay, fine, I’d stand with him, I’d fulfill all the boy responsibilities while accepting all the girl penalties. But for all that, damnit, I wanted some recompense, at least between the sheets.

Nay, nay, ‘twas not to be, for Tom’s wants and needs not only came first, they came only.

Bondage wasn’t on his play list (crossed off on mine), and he didn’t like having to touch me. For that matter, he didn’t really like me touching anything other than his penis. What he wanted was for me to erotically asphyxiate him. Breath play they call it now. Back then, it was just clamping my hand over his mouth and nose.

The only thing I ever said no to, pretty much the only thing I managed to stand firm against. Even early in our sexual position jockeying, I tired of him pushing for it, of him trying to hold down my hand over his face. So one night I grabbed his neck with both hands one night and squeezed.

He extricated himself immediately, of course—male upper-body strength and iron-rod forearms against disabled-female punisity—but I felt… horrible. Terrified. Abusive. Piece-of-shit flummoxed, craven, who-the-hell-did-I-think-I-was shell-bound.

Had I frightened him? Oh, hell no. Unlike me, he never lost control. A man who qualmlessly threw past mistakes in my face all the time, any time, this one, thank-Mithra, he never weaponized.

But the mood was gone, obviously. He rolled over and fell asleep while I lay furiously awake and alert, dissecting the differences between his anger and mine over and over for the next endless hours.

Tom’s rage was chemically induced, very much a non-element of his innermost nature. I knew that, even though in the moment, I didn’t/couldn’t always accept it. Once expended, his anger embarrassed him. Since we talked about everything without necessarily talking about everything, we’d tacitly shunted his mania under cover of his familial, consequently unavoidable, mental illness. No autopsy, no foul. Nothing to see here, folks. Clean-up crew’s on the way. Move along, move along.

My lividity, on the other hand, was tightly woven, hard-wired, welded into my essence, the solder that kept my shell intact. Unlike Tom’s out-of-conscious-control rage, my wrath was entirely my responsibility. I had no excuse, no justification for my non-command. Worse, it felt almost self-compensatory, as it were, for all the compulsory meekness and deference and self-abasement I rigidly, albeit grudgingly, owned. I hated me for it—both the timidity and the aggression—even as I non-admittedly understood why I had it, why I gave in to it, and why it flared out of my mouth.

But I didn’t put my metaphysical foot down to stop myself until I let myself abuse him again. I raked my nails down his back.

In my pathetic non-defense, a) it was covered by a t-shirt, and b) I didn’t realize my nails were so hard nor my fury so high nor my ability to cause injury so effective.

He was at a piano in someone’s house. If memory serves, I had a malevolent urge to get him to notice that I was there, too, god-motherfucking-damnit.

Except it wasn’t just “someone’s house.” It was my sister’s place. Her piano.

And my malevolent urge wasn’t just to get noticed. It was to furiously inform Tom I wouldn’t just stand by as he replaced me with a skinny, beautiful vocalist the way my mother had replaced me with someone else’s so-much-more-perfect daughter.

Aftermath notwithstanding, it was my last violent act against him or anyone else. I did have capacity to learn from my mistake—

… wait—did I mention I have a sister?