This is going to fall well within the TLDR category. Feel free to scroll along to the next thread.
I don’t want to burden my friends and family with a bunch of words they can’t escape from, and apparently talking it through to myself (and my baffled dog) isn’t getting the job done. I don’t feel too bad about unloading on you, dear invisible friends, because you have an easy out. This hopefully therapeutic (for me) endeavor might devolve into a depressing narrative in upcoming installments.
There, you’re forewarned, so I take no further responsibility for you.
Chapter 1, In Which Inappropriate Meets a Man
I haven’t posted here literally in years, and even if you were around when I was it’s a really good bet you wouldn’t remember.
I divorced in…let’s say 2006ish. Hadn’t had sex with my husband, or anyone else, since 2001. We were roomies those last years. We were married for 19 years, officially. I had 2 children, primary custody and no love life. I didn’t date at all until a year ago last May.
Memorial Day weekend 2012 I went out bar hopping with an old high school friend or three and we picked up a large carload of people for the adventure. I didn’t have a lot a bar acclimation before that weekend’s adventure. A couple of times I and one friend or another had gone out and had a couple of drinks and participated in the “girl dances”, e.g. Cupid Shuffle and the like, where various guys would hit on us. I’m not saying I’m all that, but I do sport a vagina.
On this occasion there was a guy one of my friends had dated in high school who seemed interested, but I blew him off because of the friend history thing. Let’s call him…Ignavus, which is latin for lazy. Iggy, for short. Tall, attractive and reasonably fit, for our age. He ended up in the car that night, squashed in the backseat next to me. He had a tall glass of Jose Cuervo that he offered to me (after I’d had an ill-advised shot assortment) and I guzzled quite a bit of it. This part comes up later. (This is forshadowing.)
In any case, I was hammered. like I hadn’t been hammered since probably 1985. I’m going to edit a bunch of bar scenes here. I am aided in this by the fact that I don’t remember but a couple of blurry clips anyway. There was some advanced snogging between Iggy and me. In public. :smack:
Disclaimer: I got a lot of the following second-hand but the evidence backs it up.
We closed down a couple (4) bars and eventually had one of my friend’s daughter’s come and collect our sloppy asses. When we got to my house Iggy simply got out of the car with me and came on in. I reportedly stripped naked in the bathroom to wash my face, then fell into the shower, pulling the shower curtain down on top of me. When Iggy came to see what the commotion was about I was sitting wrapped in the shower curtain with my legs hanging over the side of the tub, giggling. Then it was off to bed, where based on empirical evidence, I pushed all my pillows off onto the floor and vomited on them. Including the girly decorative pillows.
Iggy further reported that just when I seemed to be sorted out (and he thought that at last he was getting laid) I started making alarming gurgling noises then spouted vomit straight up in the air, like a volcano. I hear it covered his left arm and he had to make a manly dash to the bathroom to wash most of his body in my wrecked shower. The next thing I remember I woke up naked wrapped around a warm man. WTF!
At first it was very nice, but soon I began to notice things were not as they should be:
- Naked man in my bed.
- Heavy smell of alcohol and vomit.
- Massive hangover.
- Where the fuck are my pillows?
- Vomit in my hair.
I list these in the order that they occurred to me, not necessarily of importance.
I will say this for Iggy, he persevered in conditions that would have made another man gather his shit and run screaming down the street. Or maybe he was just an opportunist with decidedly low standards for arousal. In any case the deed was done in the light of murky day. The rest of the morning was spent by me in the shower. After that I got to the task of vomit eradication, starting with the pillows and floor and ending with Iggy’s socks. No, I don’t know how I vomited on his socks.
During the clean up process Iggy was passed out on the bed. When he woke we talked for a while (mostly incoherently as we were both still quite impaired). He invited me to his family’s fish-fry that day, making my stomach flip over and necessitating another trip to the porcelain altar.
Once we’d collected ourselves I drove him to Perkins since he wanted to buy me breakfast (I tried to eat toast. Unsuccessfully.), then dropped him off at his car. He gave me his phone # and a kiss.
When I got home I caught up with what the rest of my family’s night had been like. Thankfully my youngest daughter, who was then 12, was staying with her dad that night. My oldest daughter, who was 19 at the time, was home with her girlfriend. A man’s voice was certainly novel in our house and I gather the girls were quite startled by it. So much so that at first they thought we were being burgled and locked themselves in the bedroom. Soon that thought was replaced with the thought that heterosexual sex was very noisy, based on my fall in the shower. At least they didn’t call the cops. That would have been awkward.
I got to explain what happened, omitting a few details, and that the man wasn’t a complete stranger. Yay me.
I didn’t eat for several days, as I was a bit delicate, nor did I call Iggy, as I felt a bit slutty. Eventually I got word that he was bummed that I hadn’t called him, because he liked me so much. My first thought was along the lines of “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, that was a disaster!” followed by me calling him, I would guess because I was afraid of having a one night stand. Especially one with the embarrassment potential of that one.
We dated for almost a year. The first six months he was gainfully employed and only wished occasionally that he could smoke a little pot. The pot thing didn’t bother me, since I smoked a whole lot of pot in high school. Then he quit his job and smoked pot all day every day, at least when he wasn’t with me. That’s when I found out that I have quite a different attitude toward the occasional joint and being high all damn day.
That’s also when I found out I have PTSD (don’t worry, any nitpickers who have read this far, I’m not entirely serious about it being as severe as PTSD) brought on by unemployed men based on my ex-husband. It is not cool to not have a job if you able to do so. In Iggy’s case, his mother has quite a lot of money and a willingness to pay for her son’s lifestyle.
I’m going to cut to the chase here (yeah I know, too late) and say during the next six months I thought every day about breaking it off, but to be quite frank the sex was spectacular. I didn’t live with him and I didn’t support him. He was quite a pleasant man and would help me shovel my walk, just as I would help him. I thought we loved each other but now I can see and admit that was probably an exaggeration of fondness.
In any case, he broke it off with me just before the one year mark. I didn’t cry or have a fit because I was really getting what I wanted. I wasn’t looking forward to spending time with him anymore and would sometimes avoid it. I found that the rejection stings none the less. He had found out that one of his friends has a hot sister who also is opposed to employment and smokes pot. Iggy told me that since he had been thinking about her he would do the honorable thing and tell me, even though he didn’t think she’d ever notice him, blah blah blah. The next week he added his new relationship to his timeline on Facebook, showing a 5-day overlap between his old relationship and his new one. Facebook sent me an e-mail. Iggy was confused when I unfriended him, since we’d parted on good terms. Bite me, Iggy.
Here ends Chapter 1.
I hope the lump turns out to be nothing, but know that even if it doesn’t, it likely means just one more thing to get through.