The first time I saw my ex-wife, Song, she was walking down the middle of a road, looking beautiful and insane as she got dragged by Walt and Emily, her two mangy shelter mutts. She looked just like that Asian model in the 90s CK1 ads with tattoos up and down her arms and a wife beater with short hair and black boots. Yep. Song looks just like her, the only exception being her brick shit-house white girl booty.

I should have known better, but what could I do? I’d been completely alone in Chicago for two years before meeting her, and by completely alone I don’t just mean womanless, I mean 100% deprived of any meaningful human company. I can’t stand people and didn’t fully understand how to make them tolerable (snort coke and/or insert your penis, if you’ve got one, in one or many of their holes). Sure, I always managed to find some boring alky to get drunk with every once in a while, but being friends with people who go to sleep when they’ve run out of money and booze because they’ll melt if they’re conscious and sober is on the same level as being friends with an asexual blow-up doll that shits, pisses, and constantly needs to borrow money.

I was so bereft of contact that I put out the occasional classified ad looking for one-night stands. They typically read: “Slightly attractive early 20s male looking for somewhat stable and well-built women for impersonal sexual interludes. Let’s get off and forget about each other. Deaf mutes and/or women from the wrong side of the tracks are strongly preferred. ”

I averaged about 5 replies a day, mostly from bored college educated women who thought that being secret sluts somehow equaled being from the social periphery. I really didn’t care where they came from. What bothered me was that they thought the deaf mute line was a joke. Remember the Dianne Wiest character from Bullets Over Broadway? “Shhhhhh, don’t speak.”

So what did I do as soon as I re-emerged in the outside world? I got serious with Song, and in doing so made sure that I did everything I possibly could to end myself. Everyone is crazy and two crazy people should never marry. Think about that for a second. People who kill their lives by doing crack and/or heroin and/or meth are soft. If you really want to fuck yourself in a big way, spend many years of your life attached to someone who’s every bit as wacked as you are while being every bit as dishonest (and jealous) as O.J. Simpson. Fucked life guaranteed.

I’ll never forget the day when we went to see a Colorado Rockies game (on my fucking dime). Song, a standard hipster artsy type and sports hater with a college prof father and enviro-activist mother, suddenly decided that she had to see a baseball game. I couldn’t stand the thought of having Nickleback and Stevie Ray Vaughn pumped into my ears every two minutes, let alone sipping on $8 cups of half-flat beer while worrying that I’m about to get brained by a foul ball, my last breaths coming from some fan boy’s incompetent, nacho cheese flavored attempt at mouth to mouth, but she kept talking about it and even played the blame your family card. She complained that she felt deprived of all-American experiences by her minimalist commie parents. She wanted to experience it first-hand. Knowing her parents, I believed her and sort of sympathized, but I still told her not to bother, she’d already figured it out from a safe distance.

We decided that we’d go to a game on my birthday and that I’d get the tickets while she reserved the FUCKING HOTEL ROOM AND GOT THE FUCKING DIRECTIONS SO WE COULD FUcKING FIND THAT MOTHERFUCKER AND TRY TO HAVE SOME FUN THAT’s FREE OF MUNDANE, USELESS DRAMA. The day of the game showed up and we drove the hour into Denver. When we got there we pissed around for another hour plus (on my fucking dime) trying to find the Adam’s Mark Hotel. It was humid as fuck and she forgot to bring directions. It sucked hard in that snafu kind of way. As I started thinking about driving the car off a bridge, we finally stumbled across the hotel and pulled up to the front entrance.

A happy bellman opened my door and grabbed our bags. As we emerged from the car and I started thinking about cocktails, Song said to me, “I’ll go get us a room.” The way she phrased it made me shit myself.

“What do you mean you’ll go GET us a room?” I asked. “Don’t we already HAVE a room? Didn’t you mean to say that you’ll go check us in?”

“No, I didn’t get us a room yet, but I’m sure they have one. It’s a big hotel. Chill the fuck out, maynard.”

“We’re all booked up,” said the bellman, who suddenly came off like a total asshole as he left our bags in the street. “Every room in town is taken. There’s the baseball game and a poker tourney too.”

We got back in the car. I rolled down the window, lit a smoke and headed straight for the highway. She still wanted to see the game but there was no way I wanted to do that without getting to stay in the hotel (on my fucking dime). That’s all I had to look forward to as compensation for having to watch hillrods with mullets and DRs with jheri curls chase a white ball for 4 hours. She fucked it up and I wasn’t going to pay, or so I thought.

As soon as we got on the expressway she started tearing into me. I drove bumper to bumper at 80 mph in 10 lanes while she spat hatred in my face. She flailed about with her arms, underscoring her shrieks with stabs in the sky. I grabbed her hand and tried to settle her down. She pulled the hand away and back-handed me with her fist straight in the eye, not only hitting me but also poking the eye, turning it into a red mass of crushed veins. It stung like a motherfucker. I couldn’t see out of it and swerved on the road, but she still screamed at me, not stopping for breath until we pulled into our parking lot.

Once inside the house we physically and verbally brawled for the next 2 hours. We went OFF. By the time the cops showed up with three cars and a paddy wagon (on the taxpayers’ fucking dime), we had retired to the couch with beer and a frozen pizza covered with lit birthday candles (on my fucking dime). They said that someone had heard her threaten to shove a knife (my knife) up my ass. I had an ice-pack taped to my eye and the red strangulation marks around her neck had slightly gone down, but what could they do? We both claimed domestic bliss, which we had sort of morphed into anyways. They left semi-convinced that we were the happiest, most peaceful people in the world. I shut the door and returned to the pizza. It was nothing more than business as usual.

A week later we were married by the justice of the peace (on my fucking dime), confirming a totally idiotic 6 year engagement because we feared that we’d never find insanely good sex again. Six months after that we had finished traveling half the world (on my fucking dime), culminating in an incredibly acrimonious break up. A month or so after we split she sent me an e-mail telling me that she had secretly been pregnant with my child and had had an abortion (p.s. the bill is on the way), and finally, before she left town, she smeared my name everywhere, trying to ruin it all. She even called my boss and regaled her with fictional stories of my allegedly unprovoked, wife beating ways and my complete denial of our unborn child that I didn’t even fucking know about.

And what of the ill-fated bambino? It wasn’t mine. We spent a month apart from each other shortly after our marriage when she attended a “writer’s” workshop in Prague (on my fucking dime). She stayed there and I stayed in Amsterdam before returning to Colorado a week before her. When I picked her up at the airport, she introduced me to one of her fellow travelers; a nervous, fortysomething geek from Denver who just happened to be at the same workshop when his dick fell inside her and he started fucking her on a regular basis (on my fucking dime).

How did I find out about this? A couple months after the abortion letter I got a call from a strange woman named Carrie in Arcata, California. She said that she’d been at the Prague workshop with Song. She eventually got to the point and told me what she thought I needed to know, that the long dead baby was never mine but instead the spawn of the middle-aged airport putz. When I asked her why she felt the need to inform me of the truth, she said that she and the other Prague workshoppers had listened to Song bitch about me for a month straight (on my fucking dime) while openly cheating on me (on my fucking dime), leading all of them to conclude that I’m a reasonably okay dude who got roped by an incredibly toxic chick.

Carrie got the full lowdown when Song called her shortly after she left me. I guess Song was liquored and rattled on and on about how she left me and was staying with Bill (middle-aged geek guy) and how she got pregnant within a week of leaving me and wanted to fuck me over by getting me to pay for the abortion because Bill was and is a shit writer with no money and zero discernible talents beyond being pathetic. The night before Carrie called me, Song had called her again and said that she planned on harassing me for the abortion money with fake letters from fake lawyers, many of which I eventually did receive along with threats to sue me for the remainder of my money, unless of course a less ball-breaking deal could be worked out “through the mail, say $57,600.” I ignored it all.

Carrie had also seen my picture and read some of my bullshit on the internet. What can I say? She was bored and looking for a Colorado adventure, sex included. We hung up and she drove down to Frisco where she jumped on the first plane to Denver (on her dime). When I saw her long ass legs and red hair, I realized that she was the beautiful “dumb white bitch” that Song had jealously complained about for a week straight after returning from Prague. I remember how I got one of those secret boners that won’t quit when Song showed me Carrie’s picture accompanied by the completely illogical preface, “Look at this skank.” That “skank” looked like a higher end, built version of a young Julianne “Ol’ Fire Crotch” Moore. Blessed be the wonderful twists and turns of this shitrag of a life. For three days straight I fucked Carrie sleepy and silly, celebrating not only the truth, but also my uncanny ability to sniff out bullshit (yeah right, my instincts with women are shit) and therefore not pay for the abortion. It was, for lack of a better word, awesome.

Two other things I’ll always remember from Song and I splitting up are 1) feeling incredibly impatient to have sex with someone else and 2) the killing ultimatum she gave me right before she left. She told me that if I didn’t quit writing she’d leave me and that I’d regret it. She also knew that she had more than halved my trust fund and that more income would soon be required. I told her that there was no way I was going to be married and someday have kids while being miserable because I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. I had grown up around plenty of unfulfilled, dream-shattered people who suffered from a distinct lack of carpe diem. It blows, especially when those people are your parents.

When Song realized that I’d never take her rotten bait and pursue a position in “sales,” she took her shit and walked 8 miles to her “friend’s” house in a blizzard. Don’t blame me, she didn’t want a ride. I offered and she said “no.” According to the old script I should have let her walk about a mile before I got in the car and retrieved her melodrama for another try. Not this time.

About a year later I finally found myself sitting in city hall on the grayest, rainiest day of the year, waiting five hours with my fuck-up neighbor/witness (I paid him $20) to see the magistrate and finalize the divorce (on my fucking dime). Thankfully, Song didn’t show. There was nothing to contest. We mutually agreed that we were completely tired of each other.

Joey Odessa

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