The "Beard" post dredged up so many bad memories, I've been having trouble making myself continue with the story. I want the things that happen in this life to make sense to me, but lots of them just don't.
That child, my first son, AP, is in his early 30's now, and has just gotten married. It was a secret wedding.
Immature charming narcissist funny X-junkie. I love the little boy he was; and the shitty parents he was dealt, his shrew of a step-mother included, can't explain all the choices he has made for himself, but it's still significant. I got custody of him when I divorced his father, JP. I also got: $20.00 a week child support, a mattress set, a rocking chair, a little cash and my freedom. JP got to hit-up his parents for $20.00 a week and take AP to Tennessee for the summers. Actually JP"s father gave him a mimimum wage "job" at the oil company. The elder JAP (junior) had inherited several lucrative companies from his father, JAP the First. The job required some real work from time-to-time, but JAP III usually spent the day playing guitar.
After years of moving around the country on a less than shoestring budget (money begged from his parents) and my frequent escape attempts, JP, our son AP, and I were back in Tennessee, living in a little, old, country house that his parents owned. (If you put your ear to an outside wall, you could hear bees buzzing. I like to imagine that this house is insulated with one huge honeycomb. I'd like to be there, to see, if they ever knock it down.) It was at the end of a lane and backed up to a river. They had usually used it when his father wanted to go hunting. One of his employees lived in a house on the lane that the P. family owned and across the road from them was a small building that housed his collection of beautiful German Shorthair Pointer hunting dogs (the brown speckely kind). I think the employee was supposed to feed and water the dogs, but JP's father made sure they were under-fed, because he said that made them hunt better. I didn't know how bad the situation was. I didn't visit the kennel, because they kept it locked, and I assumed that the man across the street and JP's father took care of them.
I called the ASPCA after the winter most of them froze to death, but no one ever did anything to stop his mistreatment of the dogs. I walked down to their kennel, in the snow, to see them because they were transporting the survivors to the vet's to try to save them. I was shocked and furious at what I saw. Each of these beautiful dogs was in a separate pen divided by chain link fencing, so there was no way they could have huddled together for warmth. They were on a cold concrete floor and they had no bedding to keep them warm. They were skin and bones. I was told that this was not the first winter that this had happened. He would just replace the dead dogs. I had never liked the elder JAP, but now I hated him. To me those dogs symbolized the mind set of that family. I feared for any slaves their forefathers might have owned.
We took in an old friend of JP's (that I had never met). We were giving him temporary lodging, because the house had four bedrooms and he, A.T., would soon be renting a house of his own. JP's Grandmother owned a few old houses on the lane to the house we were in, and she knew A.T.'s family, so she agreed to rent one of her houses to him.
A.T.'s father had been the Mayor at one time, but they had moved to Montana before I moved to town. A.T.'s Grandmother still lived there, though, so he had been staying with her until he reconnected with my husband and his old friends. Sorry, Grand Ma, old friends are just more fun for long term hanging out.
For years, I had tried to figure out a way to finally leave JP, and live on my own with my son and make my own money to live on. One morning, just as I woke up, the solution hit me! I would divorce him, go back to school and get a job to support my son and me. I would be able to get loans and grants for school, because of my below-poverty-level income for the past years, which would help enormously. I was thrilled by the plan. I sat up in bed, ecstatic, and said, "I finally figured out how to leave you!" He looked shocked, probably more by my happiness than the news that I wanted a divorce. He already knew I wanted out, but I was usually stranded and had no way to get away. I had pretended to be happy so many times, just to survive and end the private hostage situations he put me in; but I had promised myself that the first chance I saw a way to leave and be able to take care of my son, I was out of there. When the baby was little, and we were in Eugene, Oregon, he would grab him and run out the door saying I would never see either of them again. They would live off of berries in the woods. I'd be running down the street after them, screaming and begging him to give me the baby (he was still nursing). JP was high on peyote buttons most of the time we were in Oregon. He made sure not to waste any of his peyote money on food. Why would anyone want out of that marriage?
Back to Tennessee: I was so naive that I drove to JP's parents' house and told them my plan and asked if they would help me financially to go back to school, etc.. The answer was, of course, no. JP then inflamed his relatives against me by telling them that the reason I wanted a divorce was that I was having an affair with A.T.. It was a lie of course, but they loved the story and came at me with the hate a cheating slut would deserve. I moved into a house in town that was occupied by people from "The Farm". We had become friends. They were pre-med and nursing students, and they had a spare room that my son and I could rent until the divorce was over. My parents helped me with the rent. I was going to move to Austin, Texas afterward to be near my family. They were no longer in Indiana and no longer married.
I didn't even know JP had told people the lie that I was screwing A.T., until JP's grandmother came over to the Farm People's house and stood out on the front lawn yelling at me to tell A.T. that she wouldn't rent her house to him now. I told her he wasn't there, and maybe he was living with his grandmother, but I didn't really know where she could find him. I thought it was really weird that she had come there looking for him. She was gone by the time I figured it out.
Yes, A.T. and JP, were both handsome, but I have never fooled around on either of my husbands. And, A.T. and I were just friends. JP used to try to get me to seduce a male friend of ours, so we could all have sex together. I told him he was out of his mind and it was out of the question, but every time JN would come over my husband would urge me to do it when he was out of JN's earshot or he would do those little eyebrow-jerking nods behind his back. I would just glare. The three of us were very good friends and that was how I wanted it to stay.
(My father was a cheatin' pole cat and I grew up with a very dim view of liars. If you want to fuck around, get divorced first, shithead. Unless you have a mutually agreed upon gay-dike set-up like the one described in the comment on the previous entry.)
A light bulb did go off for me when A.T. moved in, but it wasn't the one between my legs. He could reason like a normal person, he didn't make up an alternate reality with bizarre rules that he lived in. I had lived in Idiotland so long that every time I managed to get away from JP for any length of time, I felt like I was coming out of a very foreign land, back to the land and language of my birth. One where no one gave a shit what I ate, etc..
JP was, and has been supported by his parents' money his whole life. After we were divorced, he made pocket change with occasional part time jobs, most of which involved playing guitar at restaurants. He is a gifted musician, I'll give him that. It is his life's main obsession, and he has many; that and food phobias. He wanted me to be his anorexia buddy from the start; boy was I skinny back then, and hungry and did I say HUNGRY?! He never seemed hungry; I think it's the real deal when starving yourself is fun.
JP's parents had given me a brand new car for Christmas, but it wasn't until the divorce that I was let in on a little game the men in the family play. They all have the same name: JAP, JAP Jr., JAP III...., so if the suffix is absent on a document, JAP is whomever they want it to be. They always paid cash for everything, no loans like almost everyone else. So my lavish Christmas present was not legally registered in my name, but to JAP.
I have to confess to being infuriatingly fair minded. My attorney was an old friend from high school; he is now a member of the United States Congress, The House of Representatives in Washington D.C., Bart Gordon (D-TN). I thought that I should only ask for half of the value of the car, because JP's parent's were denying they gave me the car! What was all that fuss on Christmas morning then?
No one from JP"s family was present at the court for the divorce, not even JP, just their attorney. Back then they didn't have No Fault divorces in Tennessee. I plead mental cruelty. After the Judge listened to me on the witness stand, I could tell he was shocked at the life I had been subjected to by a member of one of their town's "fine families". He told me he would give me the car if my attorney had asked for it. I waited for Bart to speak up and ask him to let me keep my car, I really needed it, but he didn't say a word. I was too shy to speak up, and too fucking modest to say "I want it, and enough alimony and child support to live on." I think the Judge would have helped me if I had spoken up, but I was such a kicked puppy by then, that I couldn't stand up for myself. So I ended up with a couple of thousand dollars for letting them take the car away from me, and no alimony, because JP was a broke moocher. The fact that he had no living expenses, other than guitar strings and health food, was not brought to the judge's attention. JP's parents paid for all utilities, free car, free gas, free house, free clothes, free insurance...
I'm no where near finished with this story, but I'll work on this later.
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