Against His Religion
I've never told this entire story to anyone until now. I can't figure out how to tell the one part of the story about college without telling the whole story, because they seem inextricably intertwined. It's going to run a little bit long; bear with me.
There are periods of time when a person's heart can go dark. All of this happened years ago, but even with the distance I have from it, I can still feel how empty and tragic the world seemed to me at the time. In a previous episode I mentioned my uncle Kenyon trying to sell an open snapple to his nephews on a street corner to get money for crack. What I remember most vividly about that incident was the bleakness in his eyes. During the period of time this story covers, the entire world seemed bathed in that sort of bleakness.
Back then I moved with my girl to a city in the Midwest for a job. A year before that I ended a long-term relationship with a woman I loved more than I'll ever love any woman again in my life - I'm certain of that - and started another relationship shortly after with a new woman who loved me a lot more than I loved her, which is never a healthy dynamic for a relationship.
It was summer. As we drove into town we could see the modest skyline from the highway, and my girl was like "this city looks so cute. It's like a big city with training wheels." I remember the lake was shimmering like sequins under the sunlight when we drove into town, and I thought okay, okay, this shyt is kind of nice, it might just work out. I didn't know at the time that decades ago one of my favorite singers had died in that very lake. Talk about a fukking omen.
The city was really a glorified college town, and it seemed like a patchwork quilt; many of the "locals" I met were like fabric left over from other projects, other lives that didn't quite turn out as they had hoped. Some had been lured by employment, others by spouses' careers, still others by graduate programs that converted them to permanent residency. We quickly became attuned to the volumes of the place: there was the resigned and even pleasant quiet of family life, which existed in an unholy marriage with the awful caterwaul of the undergraduate culture in a football town. There didn't seem to be room for much other noise between the two.
We rented a house with enough space for us not to drive each other crazy. Like a lot of medium-sized Midwest cities, the one we were in wanted to be one thing, but also another, and as a result it ended up being a mush of confused nothingness. It sort of had a restaurant scene, but not really; it pretended to have an arts scene, but it didn't; the nightlife was just sad. Neither one of us thought we could settle down there. It was hard to get a foothold in the place.
I could be projecting. When I got with my new girl, I was at the end of a 5 year relationship in which I was running up against the sort of obstacles often bred by intense familiarity. Maybe I was seeing in the city what I felt but couldn't articulate in my own life. But I dont think it was that. I'll say this - my previous lady lost a child, and our relationship never recovered from that. I was trying to trick myself into moving on from it all by finding a new person to rock with.
I really fukked with Andre's verse on T.I.'s "Sorry" when he said "I'd probably do it differently if second the chance/only if some cool ass older man woulda let me know in advance..." When you're growing up, no one tells you the truth about relationships. No one tells you that sex can get stale and complicated, even with someone you care about; that, as Killa Cam so succinctly put it when the Dips were in that SUV out in London, "past a certain age, bills is in effect;" that when you narrow your universe down to a two-person population, it puts a lot of pressure on the inhabitants to keep things fresh and fluid; that the human heart has a tendency to yearn for more no matter how much it has, that when we get used to something - no matter how good it is - we start wanting something else to justify our existence; that love isn't always enough to keep two people together. Love isn't always enough. My aunt had once said that to me when I asked her why, if she loved her son, she wasn't visiting him in jail. That's a whole 'nother story though.
I guess what I'm saying is relationships are uniquely complex entities. At best you open yourself up, make yourself vulnerable, say "what may come, will come." At worst you are deeply private while ostensibly sharing yourself; paranoid, protective to the point of diminishing the presence and significance of the person you're with; and ultimately manipulative. I still don't know what to make of relationships from one day to the next, and I've been in my fair share.
This new relationship got rocky faster than I could've anticipated. Shorty stopped fukking me for like two months, at the end of summer and the start of fall. I was going out to bars a few times a week, reminding myself that if I wanted, I could fukk a different woman on any night I wanted to, and wondering what was going on at home. Tensions were high. After a particularly awful argument in September, my lady and I decided to do something that would bring us together, be fun, serve to heal whatever fukked up rift had opened between us. We decided to do a tour of Midwest landmarks. We drove through different parts of Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin. We saw The House on the Rock; The Mustard Museum; a couple of Sculpture Gardens; a haunted corn maze; a famous haunted house; and a few other depressingly boring places. These were not legitimate tourist attractions. I mean, the Mustard Museum was basically a fukking gift shop. I ain't even gonna waste your time with details of that corn maze, man. shyt. Just like the city we lived in, a lot of the Midwest is pretending one thing is another thing. For instance, we kept getting invited to the beach by some friends when they meant the lake. A lake ain't a fukkin' beach; a gift shop ain't a fukkin' museum. When words become meaningless in any culture, you know you're in trouble.
We took our very last trip in early October to an old school soda fountain my girl had seen profiled on one of those travel/food television shows. The trips had become more frustrating to me than my relationship, so I ain't want to go. Shorty tried to convince me by reading the online reviews out loud to me across the dining room. I remember one of them said, simply: They serve happiness there.
The drive out was phenomenal. There are parts of the Midwest that have the bluest, most endless skies Ive ever seen. It's like being in one of those old arcade driving games where the scenery is still and picturesque. The soda fountain itself was like a piece of memorabilia brought to life. It was hard to believe it wasnt a propaganda piece of some sort, meant to remind us of an America that never existed anywhere but in whitewashed lore about "real America" and the "good ol' days." We walked around in the midst of heavy winds and bright sunshine. The leaves on the trees were a strikingly rich autumn red, and when my girl walked under one small and frail tree the wind blew through it and rained the leaves down on her. When she smiled that wide ass, pretty smile of hers and stepped out from under the tree, it looked like she was emerging from a beautiful fire. I like to remember her that way: vibrant, colorful, lovely, happy.
I like to remember her that way especially because it was my last good memory of her, and the last time either one of us was happy in the other's presence. When we sat down to split an old school ice cream soda, she let me know why we hadn't had sex for two months. I went numb. Word? Nah. Word? Nah. Should I hug this bytch or smack the shyt out of her? She said it was a freak accident, she must've missed a day with the pill. She was worried it would've fukked things up. She said she was scared and nervous. She said she thought the timing wasn't right and that she didn't want to burden me. Well why the fukk are you telling me now, then? You out your motherfukking mind? The ride home was a few hours, but it felt like it took at least 12. I knew in my heart then that we were done, it was just a matter of getting through the lease. The next two months were mad uncomfortable. We were both mad as shyt with each other and with ourselves. We were barely communicating. I started going out more to drink, she would lose herself in netflix after work. It got so bad I couldn't deal with being around her at all - a nikka set up permanent shop in the guest room.
shyt got completely unbearable for me around Christmas. Her mom was coming to visit, and she wanted me to spend Christmas with them. I told her I had already booked a ticket back to NYC to see my fam. On December 23 I packed a bag, hopped in the car, and drove to the airport. Except, I didn't. Because I hadn't booked a ticket. I hadn't planned to head back to NYC. I just didn't want to be around my girl and her mom. So I got in that car and randomly drove to Milwaukee. Took me a couple hours to get there. I had no idea what the fukk I was doing, just knew I had to go somewhere.
I parked in a garage downtown and walked around. It was freezing, snow had started falling kind of heavy. The muscles in my face were pulled tight from the blood slowing in the cold, and I could see in a store window that my face was bloated from two straight months of drinking. I was angry as fukk that I still didn't have the slightest clue as to how to communicate with my girl about what she had done, nor any real inclination to do so at that point. All I had inclination for was whiskey and the comfort of a bar.
After popping in and out of a few spots, I ended up at this bar that was way up on like the 30th floor of a hotel. Some local who was kickin' it with me about sports at this one spot recommended it. "Can't beat the view." Aight, cool. He was right about that shyt, it turned out. The place was all windows, and you could sit there and watch planes coming right at you, then banking sharply to land at the airport. You could see the empty freeways crisscrossing, and the people-less streets of downtown, and it felt like Milwaukee was a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
A woman sitting at the bar told me Milwaukee was always like this; everyone worked downtown, then fled to the suburbs at 5. It was her birthday, she had just turned 30. She was from a little town of 6,500, grew up on a dairy farm, and had lived in Milwaukee for 5 years. Within a few minutes of conversation I could see she had made the decision that she could do worse with her 30th birthday than fukk me. She was, despite the sweatpants she was sporting and her tired eyes, attractive. We had dirty vodka martinis and toasted to her birthday, then went to her room. I don't think I was excited to bang her out as much as I was happy I wasn't going to have to try to find my own hotel, or sleep in my car.
She had this little cute terrier in her room, the same kind as the one in the movie The Thin Man. The dog was named Josephine, she was a sweetheart, never barked once, mad affectionate. The shorty's name was Bree. I banged her out up against the desk by the television, and then again doggy style over the edge of her bed. shyt was mad hard and passionate but without meaningful emotion, like pounding a stake into a vampire's heart.
Woke up the next morning and Bree gave me her story over some wack room service breakfast: she got married young to please her family, was in her 7th year of a loveless marriage, her husband had recently found out about an affair she'd had by hacking into her email, and they agreed to take some time apart to reflect on shyt and try to repair the marriage. She decided to take a road trip alone, and I caught her in the middle of it. She unfolded a big ass map on her bed and asked me to help her choose where to go next. I remember she seemed like a little kid, tracing different routes on the map with her finger, grinning and saying "You look at a map and it's like the whole world opens up - there's so many roads you can take."
I'd love to tell you about the next 5 days I spent with her, but a lot of the details are lost in a dense fog of alcohol, marijuana, and sex. I was suddenly and improbably on yet another journey throughout the Midwest. I remember shorty rolled mean ass joints, and we would smoke in her car. I remember one night shorty passed out on the floor in a motel, and I slept cuddled up with Josephine the terrier - it was the closest thing I felt to love in months. I remember fukking Bree in the bathroom of a Minneapolis bar called The CC Club. I remember watching shorty do blow at a table inside a strip club in Fargo, North Dakota. I remember thinking I lost my license, rifling through my wallet, and finding a handwritten note my grandmother gave me from when I got a scholarship to go off to private school. She passed a short time later, and I had gotten it laminated, and always carried it with me. It said, simply, keep us proud. I remember not sleeping that night
We drove back to Milwaukee on December 29th. I got my homegirl who worked for this airline to hook me up a last minute ticket to NYC, got my car out of the garage, and drove it to long term parking at the Milwaukee airport. Bree drove back home to her husband.
and on the FTL podcast you could tell that @Walt was a damn good writer when he did choose to do stories. Some nikkaz got a gift.
to the writing and story telling. You waste more hours of my work than any other writer
