Love and Marriage & Stairs That Go Nowhere
A depressing meditation on loss balanced with a mildly amusing description of the Russian version of Married...With Children, or Сча́стливы вме́сте
I did something really fuckin stupid a few days ago.
I entered Incognito Mode on my browser and looked at my ex wife’s Twitter.
Why?
I don’t know.
Why not?
I can think of a few good reasons why not.
Trying to adjust to life without her for about a year & four months now has been a decidedly mixed bag for me, psychologically speaking.
I know now I’ll never see her again, unless it’s by accident, which would suck because I’d probably be poorly dressed & overly stressed, as is my usual state, & she will be sparklingly beautiful & presentable & impeccably dressed, as is her usual state. Also she has excellent posture. In my memory at least.
Or else I’ll run into her at some point when she’s with some new guy and this new guy will want very badly to prove his manhood to her by beating me up in front of her.
Sigh. That would be embarrassing. It’d be a bad call, on his part, though. You’ve already got the girl buddy. Never, ever fight someone who has nothing to lose. You just might lose something you’d always intended to keep. Like an eye or an incisor.
(I’m only speaking of how I would defend myself. If I ever run into my ex and she is with a guy, I’m not going to try to fight him. This isn’t Archie Comics, where Veronica takes off with Reggie Mantle after he manhandles our redheaded Archie Andrews and kicks both rearview mirrors off his stupid jalopy for good-measure.)
Hey, wanna do something fun that will occupy you for 3.4 seconds? Read the words “Archie’s Jalopy” to the melody and syllabic rhythm of “Apple Auto Glass.”
Here’s an Apple Auto Glass commercial to help get you started:
Ready? “Ar-chie’s Ja-lo-py.”
Well, that burned ten seconds off both our lives, didn’t it? Only difference is I’m trying to distract myself to survive. You’re reading this waiting for punchlines. They’re coming, don’t worry. You just gotta wait.
I doubt I’ll run into my ex when she’s with some guy, but it’s possible. And it’s also possible that he, having heard all about my horrendous treatment of her, would endeavour to teach me a thing or two about manners.
I’ve been there I suppose. When someone you love tells you about someone from their past, someone who treated them especially badly, one’s typical reaction is to say and think: What an asshole. Sometimes you go farther and say something like “well, I hope we run into him one day so I can physically assault him in order to prove my undying love or whatever,” at which point she says something like “Uh no. Don’t do that. It’ll just make it seem like I still give a shit about him, which I don’t. He’s nothing to me.”
The opposite of love is not hate.
The opposite of love is indifference.
So here I am, standing naked and vulnerable on a terminal beach of indifference. Grey skies above. The forecast is gloomy. Nothing indicating improvement is forthcoming. A harsh wind whips sand into my skin and it hurts but fucking where else is there to go? I bought the ticket that brought me here with my selfish & disgusting behavior. I am marooned on this island. Maybe forever. And my Top Five Desert Island Discs don’t fucking matter cuz I don’t have a CD player. Maybe I can use them as frisbees or something.
I do have a companion animal, my cat Cookie, on this stormy, off-season, shithole beach. But he’s been licking his fur off the past two days. Maybe he’s anxious? Like New Hampshire in November, more north Atlantic gusts bring garbage and gulls and corpses ashore.
Corpses, you ask? Well sure.
Yesterday a guy about my age, married, with his mother living in this city, overdosed in the bathroom of my Methadone clinic. (They revived him. He’s not dead anymore. But for 4 minutes, he was dead on the floor of the men’s room @ Metro Health Clinic). And he was smoking it, not injecting! I myself had switched to smoking the stuff my last few months using fentanyl. And, while out of my mind one night, I sent a message to ____ that was absolute nonsense, like…just totally incoherent and that’s what ended what hd already become just the scraps of what once was, a text-based relationship where there was once flesh & blood & kissing & laughter. We were now running Version 0.1 of what had once been a fully fleshed out experience.
So now I have nothing.
Not that I am nothing, I just feel like I have nothing. I’m not nothing, I’m a nobody. I suppose there is a difference. I have to keep making that mental adjustment. Every morning until the notion that I am nothing gets farther and farther away from me.
Since moving to Parliament Street in May, the adjustment sped up considerably, though if I had to guess whether that was due to the fact that I had new surroundings or the fact that ____ decided to cut off all contact, I’d grudgingly admit that it is the latter. I haven’t spoken to her or kept up with her doings, which has probably helped, more than hindered, the healing process, though I am loathe to admit as much because I always thought myself terrifically mature because I often stay friends with exes. I never put much thought into whether they wished to remain friends, I just assumed as much. Which is…pretty self-centered, actually. As almost all of my behavior was during my relationship with my ex-wife.
I came up short constantly, wore ragged clothes, was often in opiate withdrawal, and was just a shitty fucking partner to her, from start to finish, from A to Z. I never knew what she saw in me, or what she got out of the relationship, to be honest. I have never thought much of myself.
And although ____ is not arrogant, she does not sell herself short. She knows her worth. (I hope, at least.) She knows what she likes. She knows, for the most part, what she wants to do in life. She knows exactly who she is - or at least, it seemed that way to me. She tried every-fucking-thing possible to keep us together, and only when it became apparent exactly who & what I was, that I was not going to be able to cease my drug taking (and the selfish activities that came with it), that she asked me to leave her.
Those were her exact words: “I am asking you to leave me.”
And so I did.
Of course, I came home that same fucking night, crying, not wanting to believe it was over but…it was over. She let me crash on the couch that one night but after that…I was gone. I shouldn’t have even returned that once but I never did do what she wanted, why start at the end?
I should have listened to my own instincts from early on, which were telling me two things:
You are going to hurt her if you get involved.
You are going to get hurt if you get involved.
To what degree the hurt would reach, I wasn’t sure, but there was such an ease to being with her, a sense of homecoming almost, of knowing exactly where I was, like how you know where everything is in the drawers of your own kitchen…a sense of having found what I’d been looking for, that made me understand, quite early on, that if things did not work out between us, I was going to be very broken up about it.
Because love isn’t this nice, pleasant, neutral, pastoral thing. No. It gets its fuckin meathooks into you. It hurts to love.
Anyway, I take comfort in the fact that there were a few times here and there where I surprised her.
I remember getting her a lot of presents for our second Xmas together, and because I’d basically bought her nothing the year before (and had nothing for her the year after, cuz I was in rehab), & she looked pretty surprised. And I enjoyed that look of surprise. Like “Woah. You did it, Danny. You participated in Christmas this year!”
No, I am not patting myself on the back for having, that one time, surprised her by not coming up short as usual. No. I wish I could have done stuff like that for her all the time, but I didn’t because I was feeding something far more ravenous most of the time.
I can say I’m sorry a billion times and it won’t fix anything.
You have to do sorry, not say it. You have to live sorry. Which is actually a relief because being sorry all the time is fucking exhausting. Doing sorry…well, you’ve got something to do now, don’t you? Job #1. And then maybe the healing can slowly start.
This is not to say I’m anywhere near ready to forgive myself for how I mistreated her. I am not going to forgive myself for that. I don’t give a fuck what my counselors say, I am not forgiving myself for that.
Because to forgive myself for mistreating ____ would trivialize the pain and inconvenience I caused her. You reap what you sow. And the fact that I feel like I’ve been walking through hell since July 15 2020 is entirely appropriate. I deserve this punishment. I deserve to not have her in my life. I deserve to feel the way I feel.
And since there is no way for me to live sorry or make ____’s life better by being in it, I had & have to honour her request to leave her alone. For good.
ANYWAY all this is a way of saying, I shouldn’t have peaked back into her life last week by looking at her Twitter. First I saw our old cat Moon spinning on an office chair. Pang #1. And then I saw her tweet something like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “why do so many men mistake stalking for romance?” and I automatically assumed it was about me, even though I haven’t been stalking her. So then I thought “I’ll fucking KILL whoever is stalking her, to prove my love to her or whatever…”
Let it go, dude. Danny. You’re making a fool of yourself with these fantasies in which you do good in front of or for ____. You didn’t do good when you had the chance. And you had several second chances. And many third chances. Innumerable chances.
But who the fuck is stalking her?
I did, this past August or July, when we were still on speaking terms, leave a cheap, shitty bouquet of flowers tucked into the front door handle of her apartment. I didn’t knock and try to “drop in.” I just left the flowers there at the door of the apartment the two of us were supposed to move into on Sept 1 2020. I think I even put together the drawers in her bedroom.
But then, the last time I was in there, I failed to fix the cutlery drawer, which was a huge drag for me, cuz I’d been up the whole previous night thinking that, if I could fix ____’s cutlery drawer, which had fallen off its tracking, it would signal the completion of Job #1 of the thousands of other things I broke between us. And maybe then I could start on Job #2?
These things are not possible.
What, am I gonna unsteal the money I stole from her to buy heroin? Am I gonna unbreak the trust I broke? Am I gonna unsully her name, the name I sullied, by borrowing money under her name to buy more heroin? Am I gonna unfuck everything I fucked up?
Could Renton save Tommy?
Nah. Nope. Never.
In dreams I still see the angry glare of her friends and family; accusatory, furious, disbelieving even, that I could have somehow fooled my way into her life despite being who and what I am. What deception, what devilish tools did you use, ask their angry eyes? What did you fucking say, you piece of shit, to get her to even look at you, much less like you?
Okay, that’s enough.
Here’s how I get by: I read what washes up on my beach. I read funny things. I read horrible things. Last week I read the entire transcript of the flight recorder from Air France Flight 447. I also read an absolutely fascinating blow-by-blow account of what happened on that flight in Vanity Fair. I’m serious. I absolutely can’t recommend this article enough: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash
You know the last thing the pilot said before crashing into the Atlantic and killing 227 people? “But, what happened?”
Like me after my marriage exploded. “Huh?” Wondering why externally, when deep down I knew why.
It was me. Me. My fault. Mine.
And now I’m stuck with me. Stuck with myself.
So I distract myself. To get by.
So here’s a funny thing I read:
So a good long while after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 2006, some Russian TV producers decided to adapt the American sitcom Married…With Children. Big deal, right? TV shows get adapted into different languages all the time. But here’s one detail that leapt out at me: In the Soviet Union, people of the Bundy’s social class, and other classes both below and above, did not have two-storey apartments or houses. Everybody lived in one storey dwellings. So when the show debuted, every journalist wanted to know one thing: “Why does this family have stairs in their apartment?”
Honestly. It was like, a national mystery.
So the biggest problem the producers of the Russian version of Married…With Children had was explaining to the Russian audience why those stairs were there. Why they didn’t just build a new set, I have no idea. If you watch the show, which is called Happy Together because Married…With Children doesn’t translate well into Russian, you can see that the set looks identical to the American one. It might even be the same set, shipped over on the Maersk Line or some shit.
This is actually because the actual original Married…With Children aired in the Soviet Union before 2006 with the English turned down low (but not off) and a Russian man explaining all the dialogue. Which is hilarious. They didn’t dub Christina Applegate or Katey Sagal. One man just explained what everybody was saying to each other. That was TV in the nascent Russian Federation in the 90s, apparently. But once the Russians ran out of Married…With Children episodes they wanted to continue the show but now using a Russian speaking family. But despite needing to find an entirely new cast that sorta resembled their American counterparts, the biggest challenge for the producers remained explaining to the public why this family, this Russian (formerly Soviet) family, had stairs in their apartment.
You can see how prominent those fucking stairs are, right? Right in the middle of the fucking room! You can’t just put a grand piano in front of stairs as prominent as those. And if they had, viewers would have then just wanted to know why such a family owned a piano.
Eventually it was written into the Russian show that the family you see above, these Russian Bundys1, had once upon a time purchased a very small attic, hence the stairs.
The stairs led to a modest attic. A very small attic, just in case you’re thinking how fucking bourgeois these jerks are. After this explanation was reached, after hours of agonizing writers room arguing, it was built into the introduction of the show via voiceover!
I’m not sure how, exactly, but in lieu of hearing Frank Sinatra sing “Love and marriage, love and marriage…” Russian viewers were instead treated to some man explaining something like “The Bukins once purchased the very small attic above their apartment, which is why they have stairs.”
Of course no attic was actually built. The stairs led nowhere. But they now had a reason for being there!
It is details like this, hilarious details like this, that keep me alive. Waving at passing planes from the deathly pale grey of my terminal beach. My post-____ life isn’t what I make of it. It’s more about how I choose to deal with the loss. I, like those Russian stairs, am searching for my reason for being here.
I’m surviving, but I don’t wanna just exist. I want to live.
So, one step at a time. Job #1 right now, is self-care. Just take care.
Hopefully I’ll get off this isolated island I’m on someday. But for now I’ll just chill and read whatever newspapers wash ashore. Reading is a great distraction. Words are windows to the world.
Sometimes I try to think to myself, what if Job #1 was explaining, to a Russian audience, why a middle-class sitcom family had stairs?
Where would I start? How would I begin?
The Wikipedia page for Happy Together has a whole paragraph explaining the stairs:
Instead of living in a house, the Bukins live in a box on the top floor of a small building, and the Stepanovs/Polenos live in the box in front of theirs. Prior to the series' beginning, the Bukins could buy off a part of the building's attic for extra rooms, so apart from the lack of a cellar, the lack of a backdoor, a garage in a separate building instead of being adjacent to the house, and a balcony used instead of the yard, the layout of Bukins' flat looks like the Bundys' house. The apartment is in a mess from some fixes in the house which were never finished, and in the show's early episodes an unfortunately placed construction site outside allowed people (and Baron, the family dog) to go in and out the Bukins' apartment by the balcony.
I think back to my marriage and remember something odd about our one-storey apartment.
Our one-storey apartment.
It had stairs.
Stairs that led nowhere.2
That’s them below on the left.
The Bundys are called the Bukins in the Russian version.
But seriously, if some guy is stalking her, I’ve got the time, and I’ve certainly got the motivation, to stalk him.
____, if it’s serious, if that Tweet was specific to someone or something, plz get ahold of me. Hit me up indirectly. Through channels. A mutual friend (if we’ve got any left). I can stay away from you, as requested, but I can’t let you be afraid. If someone is stalking you, I’ll make him wish he was born in Russia. If it was me you meant, I can stay away. As I have been. And I can promise no more shitty flowers await you.