Single life: not what it’s cracked up to be. Several married guys
expressed envy at the supposed carefree life that I was living during the four
years between marriages, but it certainly was a bit less exciting and a bit
more stressful than they thought it was. [1]
The first few months that I lived in The Hovel I didn’t have much time
for a social life. In addition to my main job at Super Saver I had a second job
as a rural paper carrier, getting started around 2:00 every morning and
finishing up at about 6:00. It wasn’t a very difficult job, it fact it was
refreshingly easy, no one looking over my shoulder; just delivering the papers.
I’d drive about 130 miles every morning and after paying for gas and setting
aside money for tires and taxes I was netting about $900 each month, which
helped me start to get my huge debt paid off, as well as enable me to put aside
some money for a vacation to the East Coast. Having to start work two hours
after the bars closed didn’t allow for much late night carousing, although I
did try it once or twice. One morning, after closing the bar and picking up my
papers early, I got extremely sleepy and pulled off to the side of the road to "close my eyes for a few minutes". Six hours later, much more than the few
minutes that I’d envisioned, I woke up and finished my route. Many customers
were angry that morning. Even though
I didn’t have any opportunity for late nights, I still managed to convince one
woman to date me during my paper route days.
The Hovel had a washer and dryer on the ground level,
but they both seemed to be on the indistinct border between appliance and
habitat, so I did my laundry at “LaunDry
Land” (that’s right, with the capital “D” right in the middle of the word
“laundry”) a few blocks away. Marija, the clerk who ran the place in the
evenings, and I hit it off (it seemed to me) after I correctly (i.e. luckily)
guessed from her accent that she was from Ukraine, and not Russia or one of
the other Slavic countries. Being 20 years removed from active dating[2], I
mistook her friendliness for flirting until her husband started hanging around
while she was working. I don’t know if she felt sorry for me or thought she was
doing me a favor, but Marija set me up with Laura, another LaunDry Land customer.
At this point in my dating career, I hadn’t quite developed anything resembling
standards, and any primitive proto-standards that I may have had floating about
my subconscious apparently didn’t include sanity. Continual ranting about the
ex-husband who had thrown her out, the string of jobs that she had been fired
from and her complete inability to stay focused on a subject for more than ten
seconds should have been a clue that I was hooked up with someone with whom
things could go horribly wrong. But I was so thrilled that someone was paying attention to me that I overlooked
red flags that would have enraged a herd of bulls. After a couple of
dinner-and-a-movie dates I quietly moved on when Laura suggested that she
accompany me to New York, where I was going to visit family, in order to scout
out ideas for her “business”, the details about which it never became clear.
She also asked for me to “invest” in her business. Marija apologized to me
profusely.
One of the problems with those paper route jobs is that
its seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, no days off unless you find your own
substitute. Since I had planned a trip to the East Coast in June of that summer
I began looking for a sub for the route in early March, but without any
success. Since I was using the paper route to make payments on my credit card
debt I figured out, based on how much I was making each month, how much that I
would have to save up so I could forgo a second job and figured that I could
quit my route at the end of May and take off until August without missing any
payments. So I started the month of June with only my main job, with my
evenings pretty much free. I had Saturdays off and had been working 2:00 –
10:00PM on Sundays[3], so
Friday and Saturday nights were now open, but first, a trip to the East Coast.
It had been eleven years since I had been to New York;
I had nieces, nephews and in-laws that I had never met. I hadn’t been too nice to my family while I
had been in The Way; a few months before my trip I started putting together an
itinerary that would allow me to visit not only my parents, but also my
siblings who lived in other cities and reestablish relationships with them. At
the time I was involved with an anti-Way website called Grease Spot Café, which got its name from a remark The Way’s leader
made about people who left the organization, predicting that they’d be “grease
spots by midnight” and I began working visits to some of my online buddies from
Grease Spot into my trip. I left on a
Monday afternoon and drove until about midnight, staying overnight in a hotel
in Illinois. The Cavalier station wagon was gone, sold to my mechanic after
getting in an accident some months earlier. With the insurance money I
purchased another rust-bucket, a white 1986 Pontiac 6000. Just as rusty as the
Cavalier, the Pontiac had a seemingly unsolvable problem: after driving at high
speeds for a while, it would begin to buck and stall when coming to a stop,
especially when stopping or slowing suddenly, like when exiting the interstate.
Starting up immediately after it stalled was difficult, involving working the
brake and gas pedals simultaneously until enough speed could be worked up. This
made for constant anxiety regarding the prospects for the car starting each
time it was shut off. Parallel parking was out of the question.
Arising early on Tuesday morning I proceeded to Dayton
Ohio to spend the evening with some ex-Way folks who used to live in Omaha.
Dave and Dana were the first ex-Way people that I had knew who, appeared to be
living a normal, even a prosperous life. I had begun feeling like I was
destined to live in “a hovel” and have no friends for the rest of my life, so
ingrained had the condemnation from The Way and my ex-wife become. So meeting
some people who had moved beyond Way-world was an important step in my
evolution. I did drink too much
coffee and had a hard time falling asleep in the little kid’s bunk bed that
they had put me in.
On Wednesday morning, after a hearty breakfast, I drove
across Ohio, a slice of West Virginia and most of Pennsylvania to arrive at the
home of Gail, one of the WOW’s from my year in Sidney and Kearney over twenty
years earlier. About 2/3 of the way through Ohio the
scenery begins to change from “flat” to “rolling” in preparation for
“mountainous”, which describes most of the drive through Pennsylvania. This was
a long drive. Accompanying me on this
trek across the Quaker State was my trusty collection of cassette tapes. Yes,
you read that correctly. Although this wasn’t all that many years ago, CD
players in cars, while standard equipment in the newer vehicles, were not
universally found in the vintage[4]
vehicles that I drove. My habit,
technologically speaking, is to stay a jump or two behind the curve, hence (that’s right, I said “hence”) a cassette
deck when everybody else is laughing at how old fashioned CD’s are. Fortunately
for me, the public library lends out CD’s, which I was able to record on to
tape for my listening pleasure. So the long miles across Penn’s Woods were made
more pleasurable by Mott the Hoople’s Greatest
Hits, Dick Dale’s Tribal Thunder,
The Who’s Quadrophenia, Oasis’ What’s the Story Morning Glory?, and Birds of Fire by The Mahavishnu
Orchestra.
I had not seen Gail in over twenty years and we had
only recently been corresponding through email. Gail greeted me at the door
with a snarky remark about my car, informed me that she had to go to class and
left me in the care of her husband and three daughters, none of whom had I ever
met, and gave me permission to use her computer, which one of her daughters
kicked me off five minutes later. After sitting around in uncomfortable silence
for a while, Chuck (Gail’s husband) decided that what we needed to break the
ice was grilled bratwurst, beer and cigars. So when Gail returned from class,
there was Chuck and me, sitting out back with a couple of brews, a pair of
cigars and with mustard stains on our teeth, deep into some serious male
bonding.
After a diner breakfast and a brisk walk to work it off
it was back in the car to meet Cindy[5]
and her kids in Trenton New Jersey, dinner at Burger King and then off to
Jersey City. I spent the night in a cheap motel so that I could be up before
dawn on Friday morning to visit lower Manhattan and the location of the World
Trade Center. The 9-11 attacks had taken place about nine months previously and
the WTC site was still a mess. The enormity of what had happened hit me the
night before as I was heading east across New Jersey. At one time the New York
skyline, dominated on the south end by the Twin Towers, was visible for many
miles to the west. But now, as the lighted skyscrapers hove into view, a
prominent gap stood where the steel and glass once soared into the sky. I had
to pull off to side of the road; the tears in my eyes made it difficult to
drive.
It was still dark the next morning as I made my way
across the bridge into Manhattan to visit Ground Zero. It’s fascinating to see
New York City in the early morning hours before all the office workers show up.
Delivery guys unloading trucks, restaurants firing up the grills, newspaper stands
opening up; it’s a different world. It was without a doubt a really different world with the open
wound of Ground Zero so prominent a part of Lower Manhattan. With the attacks
less than a year in the past, the improvised memorials were still up, photos
and notes and flags stuck to light poles and churchyard fences. The atmosphere
was at once a great miasma of sadness and a fierce pugnacity and pride that
“The City” was still standing, still reveling in its in-your-faceness.
After a few hours I jumped in the car and headed out to
Port Jefferson Station, my parents’ home, arriving on Friday afternoon. I had
never been to their post retirement home, several hours west of the
neighborhood where I spent by childhood, Rosedale, in the borough of Queens. Previous
visits, the most recent which had been eleven years before, found me sleeping
in the bedroom that I occupied from the age of six to when I moved out at
twenty, eating at the little table in the yellow-walled kitchen with the poorly
repaired hole where I had once thrown a chair at my brother Mike [6] [7]and
grilling burgers on the concrete patio behind the slate blue house on 255th
Street. About a year after my last visit my parents sold the two-family house
that I grew up in and moved out to Long Island. Virtually everything else had
changed as well. My brother Jim, whose wedding had been the occasion of my last
visit, now lived in Rochester and was the father of two rambunctious boys; my
baby sister Maryann was married, had a daughter and was pregnant with a second;
Mike had gotten a divorce from his first wife and was the proud dad of two
girls with his second wife Jean. Patty had also divorced her first husband and
remarried as well. Most of my cousins were married and had children also. The
family had gotten huge while I was out in Nebraska.
One thing about family that I’ve heard said is that
they’re the people who have to take you in, no matter what. I don’t know how
literally true that is, but I found my family incredibly open and forgiving,
even though I hadn’t treated them very nicely over the past few decades. It
inspired me to be more forgiving towards those who I perceived had wronged me.
I stayed until Monday morning on Long Island and headed
to New England via the Port Jefferson ferry on that morning. I met another Grease Spot participant for lunch and
then continued to Hingham to meet Uncle Tim for dinner and stayed in his guest
house, leaving for Rochester on Tuesday morning. Tuesday night I stayed with
another Cindy, an old friend from Long Island, and her husband Richard.
Wednesday morning I drove up to Niagara Falls an hour away, stopped to see
another GS buddy and then to my brother Jim’s. I stayed two nights there and
then headed across southern Ontario[8] to
Lansing Michigan Friday morning to spend two nights with my friends Leah and
John. On Sunday morning I was on the road home, stopping in Illinois or Sunday
night before arriving back in Lincoln on Monday, two weeks after I set out.
The crossing back into the United States from Canada
was interesting. After waiting in an endless line I was interviewed by a Border
patrol officer who asked what my point of origin was, as well as my
destination. After telling him that I had started the day in Rochester New York
and was headed for Lansing Michigan, he squinted at my Nebraska plates and
asked me if I realized that I was exiting Canada. Suppressing my natural
tendency to make a smart-assed remark, I explained that yes, I was aware that I
was exiting Canada. He once again squinted at me and asked why, if I was
leaving one U.S. city for another, I was now leaving Canada. All I could tell
him was that AAA had recommended it. I avoided the rectal exam and strip search
and went about my business.
It was at this point that I started to develop a social
life of sorts. I still had my full-time position at the grocery store, but
wouldn’t pick up a second job until late August, and even then it was a one day
a week job delivering the free Tuesday afternoon paper; at the store I had
Saturdays off and due to my previous gig delivering papers I worked on Sunday
starting at 2:00 in the afternoon, so I was free to “socialize” on both Friday and Saturday nights, and made frequent,
if not all-night appearances at the local bars during the week. O’Rourke’s, my
favorite tavern, attracted a diverse demographic, all ages, multiple income
levels, ethnic groups, you name it, and it became like a second home to me.
Newly freed from the need to go to bed early in order to deliver newspapers, I
often headed down to O’Rourke’s right after work at 4:00PM for a beer or two,
going home or to a local eatery for dinner, and then back at 9:00PM for a few
more beers and in the sack by midnight. Some of O’Rourke’s regular “old guys”
became my buddies and drinking companions. There was Doug, a retired postal
worker who sported his long white “cool old guy” hair in a ponytail, and who
fancied himself a ladies’ man; Kevin, who became one of my closest friends
during this time period; Rob, a fellow New Yorker who spent most of his time
whining about how his mother wouldn’t send him money; the two Scotts: “Smart
Scott”, one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met, and “Lyin’ Scott”, who
always had a tall tale to tell; Clarence, then known as Butch, a local
newspaper reporter, as well as many other characters.
Now that I was out and about more, I started meeting
more people, including women. Something that I found out relatively quickly was
that when you’re in your forties, the dating pool is relatively shallow. So there I
was on a weekday afternoon seated at the bar in O’Rourke’s, with a reasonably
attractive woman who seemed to know everyone seated beside me complaining about
not being able to find anyone to go out with her. Since at this point my dating
experience was about on par with your average 16 year old boy with a bad case
of acne I innocently snapped at the bait; I struck up a conversation and we
made a date for dinner for later that week. I say “innocently” because while
looking back I’m sure she was throwing that line about no one going out with
her in my direction, I was totally unaware of her intentions and ignorant of
the come on. I arrived at Sheila’s (not her real name) home to pick her up at the appointed time,
but she wasn’t there. After an extended period knocking on the door, ringing
the bell and peaking in the windows I decided to head on down to O’Rourke’s and
found her there. No explanation, no apology. When I asked her if we had
crossed wires in our communication, she simply said that she’d had a big lunch
and was feeling kind of full! I should have run away right then and there, but
hadn’t yet developed the bad relationship radar and continued to pursue her.
With the 20/20 vision that hindsight bestows, I believe
that I was (again) simply besotted by being paid attention to, by being viewed
as a desirable companion after years of being the source of all evil in the
world. After a very brief time, things just blew up. Early on in our
relationship, I got a glimpse of Sheila’s jealous streak when she got very
publicly angry over a conversation that I was having with a woman at the bar.
[9] A
second, more dramatic display of jealousy, this time in a series of answering
machine messages, put an end to our relationship. She attempted to apologize
and get back together, but I knew that I had to have some standards and that I no longer had to “just settle”.
Oddly enough, the younger man with whom Sheila flirted,
a musician/poet named Drew, became a good friend during this time. It was
primarily through Drew that I met Pam. (We met Drew and Pam in an earlier
chapter involving buying pot) Drew was dating Pam at the time, despite a twenty
year gap in their ages. Drew was about 25 years old, tall and thin and
rock-star good looking, Pam was in her early forties and was kind of a latter
day hippie, working only as much as she had to and living in a commune south of
town. For a while I spent much of my after-work time with them, discussing
books, music, poetry and Celtic spirituality. Feeling burned by my experience
with Sheila, and valuing my freedom more than desiring any kind of relationship,
I spent the rest of my social time hanging out with “the boys” or enjoying live
music at some of the local venues, avoiding any attachments with women.
“Surprised” is a huge understatement to describe my
feelings when Pam grabbed me in a parking garage one night and kissed me. The
three of us were supposed to attend a show at the Zoo Bar, but Drew did not
show up, so Pam and I attended without him. I suppose that I should have seen
it coming; in the weeks leading up to this the two of them fought frequently,
each coming to me to complain about the other, especially Pam, who seemed to be
looking for excuses to spend more and more time with me. We both pretended that
it hadn’t happened, but shortly thereafter Drew and Pam broke up and we
confronted the feelings we had (or thought we had) for each other.
There is a short list of people who I consider to have
helped me stay sane during the years when I was living alone, and Pam is close
to the top of that list. She is one of the key links in my ever-changing
spiritual quest and was instrumental in helping me define what I believed and
what kind of person that I wanted to be. The first time that I ever saw a set
of tarot cards was a hand painted set that Pam had made, and when I started
reading cards myself several years later, I still remember that short one-card
reading that she did for me in O’Rourke’s one night that came true several
hours later. Pam was one of the few people who did and said exactly what she
thought and felt. She made of fun of what she called my “molester moustache”,
laughed at the image of the baby on the diaper pail turned dirty sock bucket in
my bathroom, and was not shy about telling me that Quadrophenia by The Who, one of my favorite albums, just wasn’t
that good. We wrote erotic haikus together, made fun of people and eventually
moved apart.
Despite all that we had in common and the affection that we had for each
other, it just wasn’t “meant to be”. I was still insistent that I didn’t want
to be part of a relationship and wanted to put myself first, still in my
“selfish” phase. For me, the biggest obstacle to a relationship was her
inability to understand how and why I had gotten involved and stayed involved in a religious cult.
This lack of understanding would become the biggest contribution to keeping us
apart; I could not give my heart to someone who lacked a basic understanding of
who I was and why I was the person that I had become. Eventually we drifted
apart and I saw her seldom until she developed a cancer that slowly killed her
in the spring of 2008. Another friend let me know that she was dying in a
hospice; I managed to see her a few hours before she passed on, one of the last
things she said to me was that she was glad that I had shaved off “that
molester moustache”.
With a short hiatus to date a woman my own age in the
early part of 2003, I moved into a phase where I alternated between “safe old
guy” and “creepy old guy”. The hiatus involved a woman who had worked at Super
Saver when I first moved to the Cornhusker Highway location. Denise attended
the company’s annual holiday party in January 2003 as a guest, having left the
company the summer before. During a break in the festivities, as I stood in the
hallway smoking a cigar she approached me in order to verify that I was not
there with a date, which I wasn’t. We ended up dancing and talking, and left
the party to go to O’Rourke’s. I drove her home, both of us aware that there
was an attraction and set up a time to meet the next night. While part of me
was still in the “selfish” mode and not interested in a relationship, I quickly
became caught up with Denise, being told after just a few days that I was “her
man”[10],
meeting her parents and married daughter, socializing with her friends and
without realizing that it was happening, involved in the relationship that I
hadn’t wanted, which had become serious on all levels. In a few short months
Denise, frustrated by my aversion to commitment and concerned that I would get
back with my ex-wife, dumped me in the middle of the night, never to be heard
from again.
The “safe/creepy old guy phase” started before and
continued after my time with Denise. One of my observations as a single guy in
his forties was that with few exceptions, young women view men several decades
older than them predominantly in three fashions. The first and by far the most
widespread is the invisible old guy.
Most of my single guy buddies realized that to college girls, men our age were
simply invisible. We would even play a game where we would attempt to make eye
contact with attractive young ladies, and when we failed, this confirmed our
invisibility. Another type was the safe old guy. This is the guy who women view as a nice guy, easy to
talk to, but who is non-threatening, like a father or uncle…or grandfather.
This is the guy who young women talk to about their boyfriends, who feel
comfortable revealing personal details, even about sex. Women walk up to safe
old guy in bars, hug them, kiss them on the cheek and otherwise flirt with
them. Sometimes the safe old guy recognizes this situation for what it is and
is at peace with it, other times the safe old guy believes that he is really
being seriously flirted with. In any case, the attention is flattering. A guy
becomes the creepy old guy when he
doesn’t understand that he is the safe
old guy and starts hitting on the young girls. The creepy old guys are
overwhelmed by their non-invisibility and often are confused by it. Often they
are in denial about the “old guy” part of the description! Sometimes they just start out as the creepy old guy,
flirting with women who hadn’t yet been born when they graduated from college,
usually with a distorted view of their own attractiveness. They look in the
mirror and see a version of themselves that hasn’t existed for quite a while,
if ever. This malady can afflict any guy, but most of us snap out of it, the
seriously deluded, however, do walk among us.
I was one of those who started out as seriously
invisible and eventually, after becoming visible, morphed into the safe old
guy, with brief stints as the creepy old guy. Mainly my transformation to
“visible” was due to dating Sheila, who a lot of the college aged girls knew, as
well as my transition to an O’Rourke’s regular, which meant that all the
bartenders knew me, signaling “safe” to the girls.
During this time I was undergoing some internal
transformations. I had learned some lessons from the women that I dated, to
have standards, to go slow and not rush into “the next level”, to not put
myself at the center, yet to be aware of what I needed as well. I learned that
running around with women my daughter’s age was not productive. That despite
having a brief fling with a much younger woman, to most of them, whatever my
own self-image, I was either the invisible old guy, the safe old guy, or the
creepy old guy, but what all these descriptions had in common was old.
At this point I had decided that I was ready for
something serious, that I was done with hitting on women in bars, that I was
done with settling, done with being selfish. It was at that point, when I had
gotten all manner of bad
relationships out of my system, I met Susie, who I would marry two years later.
[1] The
grass is always greener, isn’t it?
[2] Which
pretty much means I reverted to having the social skills of a teenager
[3]
Typically the assistant store director came in at 6:00am on Sundays, but since
I couldn’t get my paper route done in time I switched shifts with another
manager. After quitting the route I retained the Sunday late shift.
[4] Unlike
fine wine, cars usually don’t improve
with age.
[5] Cindy
was another ex-Way Grease Spot Café
regular who had fled an abusive husband from somewhere down south to be with a
guy she met on Grease Spot who in no
way wanted to have a relationship with her (or four kids). At the time of this
trip she was preparing to move to Chicago to marry another guy that she met on Grease Spot, who had left his wife…it all worked out; they got
married and are still happily together. (That was true when I first wrote this - they have both since passed away
[6] After
throwing the chair at him and seeing the hole, we dropped our disagreement and
worked together to repair and paint over the hole, which our parents never
found out about.
[7] Years
later two of my sons got in a fight and put a much larger hole in the laundry
room wall. They could not repair it, but did
pay for the dry wall guy to fix it.
[8] I
usually gauge the time of my trips by figuring an average speed of 60 miles per
hour; so if I have 120 miles to my destination, then I know it will probably
take 2 hours. I was thrown off by the signs in kilometers, until I figured that
60 mph is roughly 100 kilometers per hour.
[9] The
woman with whom I was conversing was much, much younger. Sheila’s response was
to very publicly flirt with a much younger man, who eventually became a good
friend of mine. (In the editing phase I realized that this footnote was redundant - but decided to keep it to not mess up the numbering)
[10] This
was a surprise to me, especially since on the night we met at that party Denise
was living with a guy and had me drop her off a block from her home so he
wouldn’t see her.
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