Oh I know what you're thinking. It's a WAFD post, and it's not even about my husband! While this is technically true, this story may be used at a later time to facilitate a Steve WAFD story. So I guess you could say, even though it's not about him, it is. Actually I think he'd like it that way ("it's all about meeee...") ;-)
Victor E. was an aquaintance of my ex-boyfriend and still good friend Hideki. I met him sometime in January or so 1996. I was out at ManRay with Hideki, his girlfriend at that time Jen, and probably some other peeps Hideki knew, and I think some people I had invited from my work, like this kid Mark, Cybele Dupuis (who I also knew from H.S.) and possibly Fernando Melo. He seemed pretty good natured when we met, a tad immature maybe but he was younger than me and a guy, so that didn't really phase me. I thought he was quite good looking (he was Peruvian, so he has Spanish and Inca blood) as well so I kind of coaxed Hideki into maybe setting us up. That was my first mistake, Victor from the start always had a bit of a superiority complex about the fact that I had chosen to persue him, rather than the other way around, allthough it took me a little while to realize this.
Anyways we went out and the first couple of times went really well. Eventually I felt close enough about him to start talking about my past. It was something I never had tried before, I wanted to get all my emotional baggage out on the table from the start, so there were no surprises. So we talked about our various exes, thier good qualities thier bad qualities, what we learned from those experiences. It seemed, at the time, like one of the best conversations I had ever had with someone I had dated, because he seemed like he understood where I was coming from, and wasn't threatened by the fact that I had dated people before him. Those of you who have read some of my self-reflective posts, know my dream guy is someone who I can talk about pretty much anything with, and they won't judge me, but instead interact in constructive dialogue. I thought, "wow, finally someone who get's it", I couldn't have been more wrong.
Soon after that day, Victor started behavign oddly. He had a lot of credit card debt at the time, due to having gone swipe crazy his first year of college. He had also dropped out of school, while his sister was still going, and I believe also gettting pretty good grades. So he kind of felt like a disappointment to his family. Because of the credit card debt, we couldn't really continue having traditional dates, unless I paid all the time, and his male pride didn't really want to allow that. So often we would just hang out at his apartment (which was upstairs from his mother's in a three-decker between Harvard and Central square Cambridge). Didn't really bother me any, since as I've said before I don't really need to constantly be out and about, I appreciate good company and good conversation.
Sometimes I would come right over from work. We'd be hungry for some dinner, but again we couldn't order takeout due to the money issue, and Victor didn't seem to keep food in his house. One time I swung by the supermarket on the way there and brought some pasta or something. He got so angry, because he was the man and he was the one that should be taking care of me! I should have realized at this first sign, to run like hell, but as someone who always tries to give people the benefit of the doubt, and especially because he apologized because it was his frustration with himself, and he shouldn't have taken it out on me, I forgave him. I didn't dare ever bring or even mention bringing/ordering food at my expense ever again after that point, so often times despite being hungry we would skip dinner altogether. Also some of our conversations would go on until the wee hours of the night (midnight or later) and I woudl still have to drive home to North Andover (appx. 30-45 min) and work at 4:30AM (this is twhen I was the opening Manager for my dads' Dunkin' Donuts). At first this was my choosing, but eventually as I started getting less and less sleep I would try to break away early (like 10PM) and then he'd get upset with me, accuse me of not caring about talking to him, and then it would take me another couple of hours to calm him down and would inevitably be 12AM or 1AM still no matter what I tried (this behavior rings a bell doesn't it.. yes I am referrring to Steve). It didn't initially occur to me, that this pattern would become unhealthy, or as I later surmised, might have been planned.
Things went on and on like this for a while. Nights with no food and only about 3 hours sleep, for about three months, and then things really started to hit the fan. For whatever reason, Victor's mother didn't like me. I don't really know why, but she decided I was a bad influence on her son. She was a strict Mormon, and was deluded enough to believe Victor was as well (she thought he was following all the tenants, like no drinking or sex, but he wasn't even long before I met him, plus he was going to clubs much to her chagrin, which she blamed on me, even though if you are reading it's obvious he was already doing that also, well before I came along). She quite literally acted like I was the devil incarnate, and Victor being a bit of a momma's-boy was torn between us. It didn't help that she would always compare me to one of Victor's sister's friends, whom Victor once had a crush on, and say things like "why don't you go out with a nice girl like so-and-so?", right in front of my face. I tried going to services with them, to see if I could appease her. But I think she saw right through me, so it didn't really help.
One time, because she had a key to his apartment, she just barged in and started yelling at me to get out of her house. Victor yelled back, and they started going on a bit back and forth in Spanish. This is something I can never abide. I guess it's a little ethnocentric, but I hate when people who know you can't speak a certain language, blatantly start having a conversation in that language right in front of you. It doesn't bother me as much in say other countries, becuase hey it's thier native language, and really I have no right in that case to complain being the one visiting thier country without first familiarizing myself with that language. But in America, I kind of still think people should try to speak the language that is known by the majority of people in the room, in this case 2 out of 3 people knew Spanish and 3 out of 3 people knew English, therefore they should speak in English (and yes if the situation was reversed and 2 out of 3 people knew English and 3 out of 3 people knew Spanish, I would find it perfectly acceptable in that scenario that Spanish be spoken so all parties could understand the conversation). Any other way IMHO seems like you are intentionally excluding people, it's like the equivalent to whispering something in someone else's ear while another person is sitting right there. Anyways the point is he got so mad at whatever she had said to him, that he literally started ransacking his room. Throwing things, ripping apart his bed.... I just stood there in shock and awe, not knowing how to fix it and also being too petrified to get my ass out of there. When I finally got out of there, I should have never looked back... I should have cut off contact with him... shoulda, coulda, woulda: as they say.
I think after that point the survival instinct kicked in. After that blatant display of what Victor was capable of, I was afraid NOT to keep seeing him. So we would still hang out, but instead of his apartment now we were confined to walking around Cambridge or chilling out in my car. Things started to get back to normal, and I started feeling comfortable again. We got a couple of different rounds of concert tickets. Each time Victor would have a major drama moment, and we would either be late to the show or not end up getting there at all (If you've been reading my Steve blogs, some of this is starting to sound vaguely familiar I imagine). Terri herself can personally attest to an episode which occured before a Halloween party on Friday Oct. 18th that year, maybe she'll be nice enough to comment about it. Despite all this I still couldn't seem to break away.
Victor at one point did get a job at Pix Posters, which made him a bit more bareable, because he was now able to pay some of the bills that were bothering him. Plus he'd randomly surprise me with cool posters and such. Now I'm not a jealous person, I realize in any retail job, that he was going to have to wait on females, and that in fact said females might even flirt with him. I don't have a problem with that, I was up to that poitn comfortable enough with my standing in his life to asumme that other women were a passing threat at best. What I did have a problem with is he started coming home from work and tell me about his day and how he met this really cool girl who was smart and funny and really good looking (as if I were somehow some piece of dogshit he wanted to scrape off his shoe) and that he'd taken her phone number. This wasn't just one time, there was a whole slew of them, one he met pretty much every day he was scheduled, and then would come home and tell me about.... and then when I would get mad he would claim he couldn't understand why. He would play all innocent with the doe eyes like, "what they just want to hang out, like friends".
So now you may be noticing the timeline here, I have gone about 6 months at this point, not eating dinner and not getting more than three hours of sleep a night. Those of you who have ever read up on Nazi Concentration Camp techniques probably know that a similar method is used in order to break the wills of the prisoners there. Your body chemistry gets all off, etc. I still have no idea if the whole thing was coincidental or planned, but either way I had no willpower at all with which to even argue with him anymore. I just spent most of my days like the walking dead, my own father almost fired me from my job, because I couldn't function. I had one final fight with Victor on October 20th, in which he got so pissed at me he threw an excercise bicycle at me. I somehow, despite being in an almost dreamlike state, managed to avoid getting hit by it. However it did hit a glass table, the table shattered and a huge chunk of glass went flying into my right arm (I still have a scar).
Did you ever see the Family Guy episode (actually it was on TBS last night) where Stewie is pretending he's in the Olympics. Well that was pretty much me at that particular moment (only it's much funnier when it's a cartoon and not you personally). I opted for "take it out". It bled, a lot, but for some reason I never felt compelled to go to the hospital. What I did feel compelled to do instead was get the frig out of there. I tried, but Victor ran after me... I got about four blocks towars my car (parking in Cambridge sucks sometimes, especially at night) when he finally caught up with me. No word of a lie I thought for sure he was going to kill me or something. It was a dark area where the streetlights didn't work. But all he did (thankfully) was beg and plead with me to forgive him. I just wanted to get out of there.. so I did something I don't normally do (because I'm so bad at it, and because I don't like to) I lied my ass off and told him everything was fine, until he calmed down enough to finally believe me and let me go home.
At this point it was about 3AM. I had exactly an hour and a half to get home, change and go to work. Some of you Bostonians probably remember the weather on October 20th, 1996. That was the year we had torrential downpours overnight, so much so the Green Line of the MBTA flooded and some areas were put out of comission until late November. On top of this I was sleep deprived, food deprived, and in a hurry to get home. Also I was driving a 1984 Chevy Camaro (which was my moms). At some point I nodded off, I woke up in a panic to see myself quickly accelerating toward the minivan taillights in front of me, and tried to hit the breaks. Well you know how well slamming on the breaks of a 1984 Camaro in a torrential downpour works? Not fucking well at all, I went spinning towards the right hand guardrail from the left hand lane of I-93 North in perfect 360 degree circles, narrowly avoiding an oncoming 18-wheeler (at which point I really did see my life flash before my eyes, let me tell you it's not all it's cracked up to be). I was unscathed, mostly because I was wearing my seatbelt, and somewhat because weirdly all that spinning slowed me down a bit and only minor damage occured to the rear of the car (enough to bend the frame, but considering I was probably doing about 95 mph because I fell asleep and my foot weighed down the gas... not nearly as catastrophic as it could have been). I managed to get the car to function long enough to pull it off the highway and into the Stoneham Bickford's parking lot, where I proceeded to call my dad on thier payphone and hang out in a booth talking to some guy who played guitar for Peter Wolf (and no I wasn't hallucinting, this actually happened) until my dad could get there and pick me up.
The next day, I called Victor, told him what happened, and told him I never wanted to see him again. Hung up called the phone company, changed my phone number and had them make sure it was unlisted. I stopped going to ManRay for a couple of weeks, but Victor was persistant, he asked around until someone I knew who didn't know what had transpired gave him my new number. He called me, I coudln't get him to stop. When he wasn't calling there he was calling my work every five minutes and disrupting everyone and their work, and almost got me fired a second time! I didn't know how to get rid of him, until I remembered that way back he mentioned that the one thing I could do he would never forgive was cheat on him. So I asked my friend Douglas to construct a bit of a white lie with me (wow, what a low point, two lies in one month). He was more than happy to do it, I told Victor I had slept with Douglas while we were still dating. Knowing Victor would confront Douglas (this is why he had to be in on it with me) Douglas and I had already come up with the answers to the questions we knew Victor would ask. A lot of them were actually ture answers, like how we had met, just the details of the affair were false, because it hadn't actually happened. My plan worked, he never bothered me again after that, even the few times I ran into him face to face (which I try to avoid whenever possible as the mere sight of him makes me want to vomit about three times sideways) he just avoided me.
I swore I would never stay with anyone who abused me like that ever again. And I was doing a pretty good job too.. until Steve
To Be Continued (of course!) ;-)