Everyone who gains a more intimate knowledge of my marriage can see immediately that it was a nightmare. It was abusive. Living with Dave was a horrible experience. Those closest to us knew. When we ran the store, we had employees angrily quit over the “dysfunctional dynamic” of working for us, witnessing the fighting, the drinking, all of it.
My closest friends knew the worst parts, witnessed many of Dave’s most puzzling and shocking behavior. A handful of friends had dawn a boundary: I was the friend. He was my husband. They wanted me to know they loved me, but he was not someone they considered a friend and he wasn’t welcome when we hung out.
After Dave died, one friend messaged and apologized for not reaching out sooner. It took him 6 months to finally message me a paltry “I’m sorry for your loss,” on Instagram. When I questioned why it took him so long to say those words, he was honest. “I didn’t know what to say. Dave was never very nice to me and I was often afraid of him.”
Same.
Employees we had during the record store years knew he was always the wildest card in the deck. Dave was not afraid of a physical fight and he seemed inclined to choose that option. He was always the one escalating. He didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. One of my long-term boyfriends once told me that he loved being on the sidelines of our annual record store day event because whatever crazy shit was going to happen, he always knew Dave would notch it up to the next level. He said he was afraid of him because he had “that look in his eye.” Like if you pissed him off, if he ever really snapped, “It was gonna be like that guy in the movie, ‘Fear.’”
Especially when alcohol was involved, Dave could be volatile. We went to visit one of his old bosses at the diner where he used to work, and after our visit he pulled me aside to tell me privately that Dave really used to have an anger problem, but I seem to have cured him of it. He winked as he said it. I didn’t laugh.
He still had an anger problem, but he took it out at the person at Home Depot whose cart got too close to his or the person in the grocery store parking lot who parked too near his truck. At his mother, at the cat when he didn’t move out of the way quickly enough. At the neighbor that once suggested it was awfully early in the morning for Dave to be holding a beer, so he went from 8 years of saying hi and sharing garden tools to never speaking to him again. He was a dick.
Every year at the annual block party, the tension would get so high. We were juggling thousands of customers attending and trying to shop from our singular register, while also staging 14 bands without tearing each other’s heads off. Once he would start drinking midday, I was left to juggle (with the friends we could cajole into helping us for the day) both the register and the stage management. My friends were always there to pitch in, but by the end of the event Dave would be drunk and either angry or happy, maybe sometimes both, about how the day had gone. Inevitably, a tired sound guy or a someone in a band that we didn’t know that well would get in his face about some meaningless thing, and Dave would snap. He would chase the guy down the street swinging. Those who were close to us knew to stay on his good side.
I see now how much they gathered around me, protected me, sometimes made a human shield between us. My true love, Kelly, and I would leave the event and take a walk around the block where I would scream and yell and vent about everything I wanted to shout in his face, then she would embrace me in a crushing hug, offer me her handkerchief, and we’d go back in to smile and say thank you behind the register.
It’s hard to describe him to people who will never know him. From my perspective, he sounds like a monster. A terrifying one. But he wasn’t, he had friends, coworkers loved him, he kept his best friends from high school and was close with them. People cared about and loved him. He stayed in touch with people, sent them mix CDs in the mail. He was funny and witty and knew so many things about carpentry and gardening and music. His brain was incredible, and he was fun to go down a rabbit hole with on a variety of topics.
He was fun to raise children with. He loved when the kids were toddlers, loved taking them everywhere and teaching them everything. Those were the best years of my life. We weren’t spectacularly good at running a record store, but he was a hard worker, someone who showed up and got shit done. We moved countless record collections together over the years, and he was really fantastic at figuring out how to do difficult things through cramped spaces. We wedged ourselves and a massive shelving unit into more than one stairway, and his geometric mathematic brain always got us out of it.
Even after his death, moving out of the house, I couldn’t get his favorite easy chair up the basement stairs and out of his office because no matter what we did, no matter how we maneuvered, we couldn’t make it around the corner. Nothing, not taking the legs off, not turning it upside down, would get it up the stairs. He had an uncanny knack for geometrical and logical puzzles. He was fantastic at the crossword.
But he was also emotionally unstable. He was harmed in his own childhood by parents that loved him in traumatizing ways. He was too proud to go to therapy. He was scared. He was an alcoholic. He was hurting. He was complex. I feel compelled to explain, to try to make people understand, like I have to provide the backstory on how he seemed like a nice person but he was not a nice person to me. To argue in the face of people who have looked at me quizzically and told me, “but you seemed so happy.” Yes, thank you. I learned to grin and bear it from a very young age.
I didn’t know I was being abused. I still struggle with it now. Dave wasn’t abusing me, he was bothering me. It’s confusing to talk about him. I legitimately don’t think he was a bad person, even though he spent his life hurting me. I thought that’s just what husbands were like. I thought it was my job, my responsibility, to grind my teeth and barrel my way through it. Like Homer Simpson, husbands just kind of suck. They’re often drunk and angry. Sometimes they cause fires.
There was a customer at the record store who once, after Dave was rude to him, told him “Everyone feels so sorry for Laura.” Dave was so furious, he accused the customer of stalking me, and attempted to get a restraining order. From then on, he referred to him as “Sad Man” and needed to pick me up at the end of the day instead of letting me walk the half mile home because he was afraid for my safety. He made fun of “Sad Man” because he had come in with a woman once and Dave hadn’t been able to tell if it was his wife or his mother. Sad Man had never been anything other than nice to me. I didn’t know why people would feel sorry for me. I didn’t think I was being stalked.
Leaving him was like coming out of a trance. I worry I’m repeating myself. It was the most unreal experience in my life. I had a panic attack in the car after visiting his mother the week I decided I didn’t want to be married to him anymore. In one crushing moment, I realized that his sister had *not* fabricated her eating disorder and the accusations that their dad had abused her, and that Dave and his brother had abused her. She was, in fact, the victim she claimed she was and he had always dismissed it. She had every reason to be dubious of me, a woman who would tolerate and stay married to her brother for 20+ years, Her brother is a bad guy and he hurts people. She had every right to be afraid that he knew I was at their house, she knew better than any of us that we were all in danger. She spent her life afraid of him.
In that moment, and the days that followed, I felt unreal. Like I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know who I could trust, or where to go. I got lost a few times. I wandered on hikes for hours. I took pictures of moss and tearfully reminded myself aloud each night that I was going to be ok, that I was doing the right thing, that it wasn’t my job to keep him safe anymore. At night I would dream of him yelling at me. Of the record store. Of me drowning, while he clawed at me from the water. I laid awake at night, too scared to sleep.
I spoke to him every day of my life from the day I met him in 2003 to the day he died. There was never silence. We never went more than 24 hours without texting or talking on the phone or being together. Through the record store years, we worked together, every day, 7 days a week. We emailed back and forth during the day because he refused to let us have cell phones. We spoke on the phone daily. We never traveled. When I would take the kids and go to visit my mom and sister for the weekend, we would email or eventually text the entire weekend. When he took the kids camping, his one annual excursion away from home, he would text me constantly.
When I started traveling alone, with friends, he would always manage to go completely off the rails and need me to constantly put out fires remotely for him. Every trip I took, someone ended up in the hospital, usually him (most commonly for anxiety, dehydration, and three times, a broken toe). He was completely unable to manage without me, and he resented me for taking vacations. He called me selfish; he would “forget” to pick me up at the airport despite confirming he would be there the morning of. He was in constant need of attention, unless he was giving me the silent treatment.
So when we were divorcing, my brain felt filled with silence. Like cotton in my head. I felt foggy. It was quiet. I could hear my own thoughts and observe them. I worried about him constantly. I was terrified. After he died, the nightmares got scary. I asked my doctor for medication. She obliged, and along with the medical cannabis registration, now my sleep is mostly dreamless and black. I miss dreaming, but I’m scared to try sleeping without an aid.
I’m healing from the nightmare that was my life, my marriage, my husband. He was all encompassing; a personal tornado. I understand now why everyone would feel sorry for Laura. I’m so grateful for the silence in my head, in my life, in my heart. I feel lucky I get to be free of the nightmare and instead, work on making all of my dreams come true.
What a powerfully written post about your marriage, Laura. It's amazing how easy it sometimes is to dismiss the abuse in our lives as normal yet be able to see it so clearly after the fact. Fuck.