Pretty Hate Machine
It appears to have become, by default, 90’s week here at A Free Man. The thing is, that I don’t really like getting too deep into really personal things on this site. As Jamie correctly noted the other day, I present a persona on this site - one that I’m comfortable with people seeing, one that’s often a smudgy reflection of reality at best (as Dr. O’C is occasionally kind enough to point out). I don’t really like to throw things out on the internets that are too personal or too sensitive. But, I like to keep the customer satisfied and as this story seems to fit in this week of self-indulgent retrospection, without further prelude here is the story of my brief ‘marriage’.
Her name was Beth, not Elizabeth, Beth. I don’t remember where I met her, I’ve blocked most of it out over time. It was most likely one of the Capitol Hill coffee shops that I lurked around smoking and reading. We would have talked frantically and excitedly, the way that you do when you meet a common spirit in a world full of strangers. We would have talked about music, the common denominator for most of the people that had emigrated west to Seattle in the early nineties. She had fled the stifling Western suburbs of Chicago (Wayne and Garth country) to find out what was happening in Seatown. She was tall, with auburn hair a tone so deep that it could only have come from a bottle. She was pale and carried the fierce features of her Germanic ancestors. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but carried herself with a straight backed arrogance that I found irresistibly attractive. She was a cat person and like her feline friends was fickle, cold and ultimately disloyal.
The dates sort of run together, but I’m pretty sure we first met in the late summer of 1993, a time that Seattle still held the promise of the life I was looking for. Our courtship was intense and fast paced, once we determined our compatibility we went for it and it slipped out of control. We moved in together early in 1994, to a woody top floor apartment on the west side of Capitol Hill. The place had an absolutely stunning view of the city skyline and Elliot Bay to the west and on clear days, Mount Rainier to the south. We painted the place in dark, funky colors and papered the walls with show posters and photos. To all appearances it was a happy hipster home.
We both liked music and we both liked to get wild, beyond that there wasn’t much there. We were more partners in crime than lovers. We fed off of each others self-destructive impulses and haunted the clubs of Seattle all through that year. I only have a couple of fond memories, again likely through intentional amnesia, but I remember the fights. Beth fought like a cat as well, screeching and nasty and claws extended. She liked to throw things. I had been taught that you never hit a woman so I took a lot of blunt objects to the head. Thank god for narcotics - they numb the pain of a marble bookend to the temple.
I don’t know why we decided to get married. In hindsight, I think that it was because - despite my rebellious, bohemian lifestyle - I wanted the Blue Sky dream that my parents generation had. I wanted a house and a pretty wife and a couple of pretty kids. I had never had much success with women and I figured that I better take the opportunity that presented itself. So one day in the summer of ‘94 I asked and she - and you’d have to ask her why - accepted.
The only time that I remember being happy with Beth was in the wedding preparations. She took to wedding planning like a cat to a bucket full of mice. She was going to design a wedding appropriate to our ‘alternative’ lifestyle. We didn’t have a ton of money and her parents were unwilling or incapable of paying for the wedding, so my parents offered to help us out. Beth spent my parents money with a kind of frightening verve, nothing but the finest for her wedding.
Despite offering to pony up for the bill, my parents, particularly my Mom, were not exactly thrilled about the impending nuptials. My Mom told me that, at 22, I was too young to get married. I reminded her that she was married at 21. She tried, and failed, to convince me that she at 21 was far more prepared for marriage than I was at 22. In hindsight she was absolutely right, but at the time I didn’t hear her.
The day came, a rare cool and bright day in October. The wedding itself went off without a hitch and to Beth’s credit it was a beautiful day. We headed to Mexico for the honeymoon - Guadalajara and the Pacific coast. And for that week, I really thought it was going to work. For that week, lazing in the tropics, it seemed as if we had made the right decision. As we flew back into to Sea-Tac, into the gloomy Pacific Northwest autumn, I had high hopes for a life together.
And then a few months later it was over. She came in from work one day and told me she didn’t want to be married, had made a mistake. I was stunned. Surely it was far too soon to make that choice. Surely this was something that we could work out. Surely. But her mind was made up and she had already made arrangements to leave and after a couple of hours of angry tears she was gone.
But not really gone. Seattle at the time was more a collection of small towns than a city proper. We were forever running into each other at clubs and coffee shops and parties. We ran with the same crowd. I asked her to pay back my parents for the wedding - she wouldn’t. I asked her to return the wedding gifts that we received from friends and family - she wouldn’t. I found out that she had been sleeping with a ‘friend’ for quite some time and that affair may have been what helped her make up her mind to leave. Every time that I saw her for the next few months I got angrier and angrier and began to feel something that up until that point I had never experienced - hatred.
I hated her in a way that I had never hated a person before or since. I hated her for humiliating me, for tearing apart my fantasy life. I hated her for cuckolding me. I hated her for making me incapable of trusting women. I hated her for driving me to pursue notches on my bedpost for a decade to prove that I was a real man. I hated her for years and years. There are things still that I do not like because of her - the name Beth, marriage, The Posies, Chicago, Germans, cats.
But somewhere along the way, I started to get over it. I started to move on. I forgave her (in absentia) and forgave myself. I learned how to trust women again and I began to put the whole episode behind me. These days I treat it as a dinner party anecdote (don’t you wish you could come to one of my dinner parties) or a cautionary tale to young lovebirds (I’m talking to you SSG). In a lot of ways now, I’m grateful to Beth. Life’s a tangled, fragile web and the decisions that you make - or those that are made for you - can change the path of your life in ways that you can’t predict at the time. If she hadn’t left so soon, our disastrous marriage may have made both of us miserable even longer. I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. I almost certainly wouldn’t have these two people in my life. Beth did me a favor and for that, I owe her one.
One more thing, I love irony. Every now and again I Google past acquaintances that I’ve lost touch with to see what they’re up to these days. About a year ago, I Googled Beth and I’m almost certain that she’s a - wait for it - divorce attorney in her old home town of Chicago. I couldn’t make it up better than that. I’m fairly certain she’d be pretty good at it.
This has been surprisingly difficult to write and thus, this is the last of these kind of posts for a while, folks. Back to Boy Z photos and minutiae for a while.
———————-
Two albums got me through this period: Nine Inch Nails’ “Pretty Hate Machine” for the hate and Sugar’s “Copper Blue” for the redemption. I rarely listen to the former any more, but the latter still comes up on my iPod now and again. Here is a track from each that sort of gives an idea of where I was at the time. Both are excellent albums and available from 
.
Image credits:
Lazlo Moholy Nagy - “The Broken Marriage” (1925)
Nine Inch Nails - "That's What I Get": Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Sugar - "The Slim": Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadPopularity: 59% [?]
I’m sorry you went through that, Chris, and I appreciate your restraint in not sharing the story with our 22-and-newly-married selves when we first met you. And I’m so grateful that you found Dr O’C. You’re a good guy, and you deserve kindness.
20 Nov 2008 at 11:10 am
Well, please don’t hate Chicago—i’s a lovely city, and it’s mine:)
20 Nov 2008 at 11:11 am
She hit you with a marble bookend? Jesus.
20 Nov 2008 at 11:42 am
Yours wasn’t the only blog I’ve visited this week that was strolling his or her past, and I caught the bug, too. Just like you, I’m in the middle of writing about a failed marriage and coming back from it. I’m just really glad we seem to have made it.
20 Nov 2008 at 11:46 am
sorry to hear about that, too, but glad you can talk about the gained perspective positively at least.
hope to read some more about UGA football, etc. soon! right?
20 Nov 2008 at 12:30 pm
Well, that was brutal. I had never heard about the divorce-lawyer part - it does make a nice ending to the whole ordeal.
20 Nov 2008 at 1:45 pm
Jesus. That is quite a story. I love that you can give a piece of it here and that Dr. O’C is cool with it. You are who you are because of the sum of your experiences. I’ll bet if nothing else you appreciate your Doc way more than if you hadn’t had that experience. I know that is the case here in NATUI-land.
20 Nov 2008 at 2:03 pm
It’s kind of hard to regret the past when you recognize it brought you to where you are now. I don’t know that I would have recognized what an amazing person my husband is if not for the fact that I dated some giant assholes in my time.
I liked this post Chris though it might feel a bit confessional for you. Your correct in saying there’s the person and the persona when it comes to blogging,these posts, while I wouldn’t want to read(or write) one everyday show a little bit about the person.
While I turn my nose up at your anti-cat stance, I love all the feline comparisons to the woman. I abhor Beths too but for a different reason. When I was in 5th grade, a girl named Beth threw up on the bus and it got all over my shoes. Stupid Beths.
20 Nov 2008 at 3:09 pm
And this is why I’d admire you Chris - yes there is a persona when it comes to blogging, but you’re not afraid to get more personal every now and then. There is no way that I would have the courage to write about things that have caused me pain in the way that you have here.
Having said that though, posts like these always make for fascinating reading, and the honesty expressed here is quite extraordinary. Many people would be more than happy to bury an episode like this and never speak of it again. Certainly not publish it in a public arena for (relative) strangers to read! Once again, a beautifully written post.
20 Nov 2008 at 3:41 pm
Sir, that was a wonderfully-written description of a most heinous gut-punch - beautifully done. Why dance with regret when there are so many other experiences to invite for an electric-slide?
Also, the blog-persona thing? Spot on, brother.
Spot on.
20 Nov 2008 at 4:43 pm
Oh my God what a DOG. I can’t believe she never even gave the wedding presents back! Her Karma, however …. is to have a job helping people in the throes of pain and divorce. Sucked in.
Now Chris, you have me thinking. About the differences of “personal” and a “persona” in blogging. I think I have blogged way too much about myself, and am tempted to go back and edit. (A LOT).
Or, f*ck it. It’s me - real and out there.
Thank you for the reminder to keep things simple. Eight years clean and I forgot. DUH!
20 Nov 2008 at 5:43 pm
Ah, the joys of a youuthful marriage to someone that is so not in love with you… ah the memories. Been there, done that. I am getting over the hatred, I just feel sorry for my ex cos he is a dick and will never really be an OK guy. I didn’t find solace in music, I just had good friends who cam and sat with me while I got drunk. And then I met a nice guy, which i wasn’t expecting. These things do make you who you are, maybe things would have been different if I’d heard this story earlier? I doubt it. I would still have wanted to make a point, to show I could tick all the boxes in life. I think I was similar to you, wanting what is deemed successful, the family, the house. Wanting them for the sake of it, rather than because they would make me happy. Impatient to have this “dream” and just going along with it. My wedding wasn’t a great day, i try to forget it. The thing i feel bad most about in relation to my marriage is my husband’s family. They were so good to me, probably happy someone was finally marrying their son, and I know the divorce would have been harder on them than it would have been on me. My ex, though, he doesn’t care about other people enough, even his own parents, to let anything like that bother him. I just want to laugh at him, poor him, he’ll always be a total freak. errr… what do I sound like?
Way to go with sharing though. Sometimes I would like to have a different blogging persona, one that wasn’t “i’m an insane, manic depressive, self-pitying mentalist”, but we can’t have everything. For me, I gotta get it all out, that’s why I keep my blog anonymous and dont tell my friends and family about it.
20 Nov 2008 at 6:54 pm
um…you were married???
might have been nice to know before now…..
20 Nov 2008 at 7:00 pm
hehee Dr O’c you crack me up.
hehehe I remember telling MrC that I was actually married. This was after I slept with him. He said he already knew cos our friends told him, but he was alright with it. He asked why I didn’t tell him before. I said cos i wanted a shag. he seemed impressed.
Here endeth the first lesson.
20 Nov 2008 at 8:58 pm
Nichole - Maybe good judgement was why I never told y’all that story. Though, good judgement isn’t something I’m normally burdened with.
Suzer - Yeah, Chicago’s not bad. It’s no Paris, but not bad.
Courtney - A horse shaped marble bookend no less. Kind of felt like getting kicked by a horse. She had dead good aim.
Angel - Must be that time of year.
Muskrat - Unfortunately it’s an off week.
Jamie - I just found out about it a year or so ago. Good ending. I owe you an apology for making you dress in that gay vest.
NATUI - Apparently Dr. O’C doesn’t know
Chris - There won’t be many of these for a while. And cats suck.
Agnes - Yeah, my cloak of semi-anonymity gives me a bit of freedom to write these kind of things.
Ryan - My life is the electric-slide. Baby.
Topcat - I’m pretty sure that she’s karmically fucked. One of the reasons I’m OK about the whole thing now. I try and keep my side of the street clean.
SSG - One of the reasons I like you is that we’ve shared similar experiences and are the better off for them. I know about your blog and so does Waters and so does your man, so who are you keeping it anonymous from?
Dr. O’C - Must have slipped my mind in the last 7 1/2 years. Huh…
SSG - Slapper.
20 Nov 2008 at 9:05 pm
I love this post.
Part of me wants to smack her for doing what she did to my friend and the other part wants to hug Dr O’C and you for being who you are together.
“I wanted the Blue Sky dream that my parents generation had. I wanted a house and a pretty wife and a couple of pretty kids.”
The really sad thing is I made an equally stupid mistake…at 32!!!!! Some people take a long time to learn.
Thanks for ‘letting us in’.
PS: I have been deliberately editing my divorce/pregnancy journal because my ex husband sometimes reads my blog. So maybe 32 years had taught me something……
20 Nov 2008 at 9:15 pm
anonymous from my ex, my colleagues, my friends i may or may not want to bitch about, my sister, my mum, my ex-s family, my teachers.
If I wanna let the crazy out, I don’t wanna feel constrained, ye know? dya ken?
20 Nov 2008 at 9:29 pm
this was a very touching post. posting these things helps. they get them out of our heads. this may be why I’m usually tmi, but hey, that’s the way I roll.
20 Nov 2008 at 10:45 pm
Sooooo…in other wooorrrrrds…she helped you end up happily married and you defined for her a brand new career goal? tee hee Couldn’t resist.
Nice work. On all levels…getting past it, moving on, and writing about it so well. Thanks!
The blogging persona? Ugh. If I thought about that long enough I would stop blogging completely.
21 Nov 2008 at 12:20 am
Dr.OC,
Upon reading your comment, I spat out the vegetarian sausage english muffin my husband was kind enough to make me for breakfast. Now the cat is eating it, you ma’am owe me a sandwich.
21 Nov 2008 at 1:20 am
Even if that was the last personal bit we hear in a while, it was worth it.
Seriously, I would love to attend your dinner parties!
21 Nov 2008 at 3:25 am
Man, that’s heavy stuff. Thank god for music.
21 Nov 2008 at 4:18 am
The incomparable Dwight Yoakam:
“I heard you swear your love this morning,
and it caught me almost wanting to believe.
Three little words should be my warning,
that say it’s just a promise you can’t keep.”
It’s good that you appreciate this woman now, Marcus Aurelius writes that the good and the bad are part of the same divinity, and work together like “the upper and lower rows of teeth.”
Hey, at least you gained by losing The Posies.
21 Nov 2008 at 4:20 am
That is quite a narrative, I almost feel like it was a story they edited out of Singles.
And you really should get over this cat thing you have, they can be pretty awesome. I’m insulted on my cat’s behalf
21 Nov 2008 at 5:25 am
Ariza - Woo hoo! That means I’m wiser than you!
SSG -
JChev - I’m rarely TMI. In fact, if you asked the lovely Dr. O’C she would probably say I’m NEI.
Mongola - Yep, that about sums it up. Except that Dr. O’C and I aren’t married.
Chris - Didn’t sound like that good of a sandwich anyway.
Vixen - Next time you’re in Adelaide, look us up.
Canuck - No doubt. Music has gotten me through most of the tough times in my life.
Jason - Dwight Yoakam and Marcus Aurelius in the same thought - well done, sir.
April - Singles, huh? As long as I can be Matt Dillon.
Cats still suck.
21 Nov 2008 at 6:54 am
This is the kind of writing I admire. There are too many nuggets of beautifully-rendered reality to pull out and highlight. You done good, my friend.
Don’t be afraid to go here on occasion. This works . . .
21 Nov 2008 at 10:43 pm
Thanks for sharing, man. Truly.
22 Nov 2008 at 12:42 pm
Oh, my free friend. This is a helluva tale. Thank you for sharing it.
(and your description of her? Is A-MA-ZING.)
23 Nov 2008 at 4:22 am
These are the posts that when I´ve been procrastinating and letting my reader pile up with posts I´m just so glad I opened it.
Takes guts to share this kind of stuff. I´m still not ready to post about the really deeply painful experiences of my life. I write them and then I feel like my words nowhere near reflect the crap I felt at the time and it just ends up sounding kind of stupid. Yours gave an honest glimpse into your past and especially how you´ve built on the past experience to find yourself where you are today. Some people can´t do that in a lifetime and spend forever lamenting the shit that happened to them.
Thanks for sharing such a personal post.
23 Nov 2008 at 4:53 am
Fascinating stuff. It’s interesting how the people who fuck us up the most can be thanked for, eventually, allowing us to be happy.
Thanks for the glimpse.
25 Nov 2008 at 1:07 am