Daffy Doormat

Wow. Merry Christmas from a dirtbag.

In the spirit of all things Christmas-y, here's a story that will freeze your heart. From a Greenpoint blogger comes a tale of betrayal, that makes this the season to be furious. Read it and weep. Then go drink some alcohol.

Merry Christmas!!!

I hate Christmas. Even more so this year.

 

The doormat lives of others.

I know it's usually a no-no to write about your friends in any specific way. What about a friend, though, whom nobody else here knows, who lives in another country and who never reads this blog? And what if what I write is generally sympathetic? Alright, all names have been changed by the editors...

I have this childhood friend named Gisela. She lives in a big, hip, happening city in Germany. She's very pretty, she's accomplished, she carved out a nice life for herself. Back in 2004, a few months after I met my husband with the help of an internet connection, she started online dating as well and met Joerg. He was a lawyer, recently separated from another girlfriend but seriously in the market for a new one, and reasonably charming. He had a son from this previous involvement, only two years old at the time. A red flag? Maybe. A deal breaker? Probably not.

Over the years I heard stories of their fights, big and small. In the beginning I thought those were just the regular birthing pains of getting on the same page in a relationship. My husband and I had those fights, too. You know, the ones where you find out something about the other person you didn't know and don't know if you can deal with but then you just do. Usually things like being a jerk during fights or always starting to cry at the slightest provocation.. But I digress.

When Gisela told me that Joerg had changed the locks of his home several times on her, so she couldn't use her key anymore, and that he generally disliked if she brought company over to his place when he wasn't there, the words "control" and "freak" popped into my head. She wasn't living with him then, but spent most of her time at his house and had brought in a significant amount of her things, clothes, dishes, her bike, and so on. She felt that she had a place in his life, yet whenever problems arose, usually centered on the issues involving his son, Joerg was quick to kick her to the curb, or at the very least he threatened to.

One day she told me that she had chased him in her car on the autobahn. She was beside herself after a huge blowup and he took off. So she decided to follow. She sped after him, crying, agitated, doing 150 km/h at least, all the way to his sister's house. He got out, called her crazy. Said he never wanted to see her again and that he's changing the locks. Ah, yes, the lock thing became a theme.

Fast forward to 2009. Last October, Gisela had a son with Joerg. I remember the tingly numbness of shock when she told me they were trying for a child. I had just met Joerg for the first time ever. I was in her city, visiting with my husband, and we were introduced to the lock-changer. I felt immediate nausea. I didn't like him. He was a withholding, humorless little man. His eyes were piercing and devoid of warmth. And I literally feared for my friend.

Their baby is now almost a year old. He's a sweet little boy and the light of Gisela's life. My slightly envious vision of her happy Euro-family was crushed when last weekend she called me, sobbing. She's at the end of her rope. They fight all the time. He doesn't support her at all, leaves all the household work to her, doesn't touch her, sleeps on the couch and spends more time with his oldest son now than ever. He lies. He calls her names. He tells her she's fat. (She's not.) And most importantly: when they fight he threatens to kick her out and change the locks. He started last weekend by taking her car keys away. Oh, and he bruised her arm by twisting it in a fit of rage.

I'll never say "I told you so", because I never did. I kept my mouth shut over the years, hoping she would see the light. I never said "don't get pregnant by this guy" when she was trying to. Now I hear her sobbing on the other end of the phone line and I feel a twinge of guilt. Maybe I should have told her what my instinct told me about Joerg? That he's a controlling, raging dipshit? 

What are the options now? She is a mother and her whole life has changed. From this point forward, she is living her own personal hell. No matter what happens to their unhealthy union, Gisela won't be able to leave Joerg behind. She is connected to this vindictive man forever through her boy, whom she loves more than anything. It's a fate I would never wish on anyone, least of all a friend.

PS: After a friend just commented how Gisela could just raise the child all by herself, which is indeed a great idea, I realize I left a small (but huge) detail out. Gisela and Joerg signed legal documents immediately after the birth of their son, sharing custody. Joerg insisted on this because they didn't plan to marry and he had to fight to see his first child. The mother of that kid was not very cooperative. I wonder why? So he made sure that Gisela couldn't just take the kid and run...

Could not have said it better...

...yet never took this advice myself.

My friend Judy McGuire's column on rebounding after getting hurt:

After The Rebound - Seattle Weekly

When exes read your blog.

The other day I received an email from someone I once dated, commenting on my musings here. The email was actually kind of sweet; he wanted me to know that he never thought of me as a doormat. That's nice. Thanks! Truth of the matter, though: I knew that. He was one of the men in my life who treated me nicely. Once in a while someone did come along who unabashedly adored me and still managed to get my attention. For good reasons I had to pass on this man, but now I can't tell you what those are because... Hello!... he reads this blog. The big issue at hand: when you write a blog, do you edit yourself, consciously or not, because people whom you know (and perhaps slept with) might stop by for a read? When I began this site, no one knew about it and no one read it. Since then, I have come out to my friends and now it's all not so anonymous anymore. So I feel self-conscious writing about, you know, the size of a guy's pecker. Unless, of course, it was enormous and they'll take it as a HUGE compliment. Get it? Huge. Haha. What? No, I don't mean YOU! I'm being hypothetical here. Seriously though, I was reminded by my ex how easy it is to overshare and sometimes results can be a bit embarrassing. Or hurtful.

While I try to navigate my way between the pitfalls of blogging, I want to assure you exes-of-mine, you need not fret. Readers of these pages know it's not penile measurements I typically write about (though I'd gain a bigger audience, I'm sure). I just try to answer the age-old question "What were you thinking?" with a few sweet 'n' salty anecdotes from my life. If you're in any of them — and I've known you in the biblical sense — just take it lightly and remember that a certain tongue-in-cheekiness applies to everything that's written here. And take it as a compliment. A HUGE one.

This one even I haven't done.

Traveling for work today, so I must keep it short. I came across this short from Slate's funny "What Was I Thinking?" series. Dating a porn star... sounds like something I could've done. But I didn't.

Why dating a famous guy can suck.

Some years back, I went on a date with a well-known politico/TV personality. I met him on the job. I was working in TV then and we both attended the same political function. Exchanging phone numbers led to phone calls and witty email exchanges, swooned over by my office colleagues, who wet their panties with every "ping" coming from my mailbox. "Is it from him?" they'd call out. I tend to overshare, I know. It gets worse.

After days of furious emailing, email-checking and general obsessing, I went on a date with this man. He was, according to the tabloids, shopping around for a wife in those days, gallivanting through New York's nightlife, basking in the glow of his own, fabulous eligibility. His usual diet consisted of semi-famous starlets with careers in decline, so I was not a natural pick. A news producer who gets maybe one hit if you google her? Not exactly his type.

On the night of the date he took the subway to Brooklyn. He actually came to my neighborhood, which I though was nice. It seemed unpretentious. Then again, I live in one of the most pretentious neighborhoods in Brooklyn, so my assumption may have been too kind. I took him to a local place for dinner and we had a reasonably nice time. The waitress nearly fainted when she saw him and tripped all over herself to be extra-charming. I was beginning to second-guess my choice of venue. I got through my food without choking, was all smiles and seemed to reasonably charm him. After dinner, we went to yet another local hangout, where everyone was stealing glances. His celebrity status distracted me. I kept checking my own behavior, wondering if what I was doing (sitting there) is what I should be doing (stand, suck it in, look cool, pose, pout, whatever). My anxiety-level rising, I suggested we leave. Then, I walked hand in hand with him down the main street of my hood. Big mistake.

We ended up listening to music, making out and then some at my place, and he left in the wee hours of the morning, because, you know, he was a busy man. I would be lying if I said that I didn't hope for him to call. I'd be lying even more if I said that I actually thought he would. Something about his demeanor, his nonchalance gave me that hint. I think he was used to dating and sleeping with a slew of attractive New York girls and was just going through the motions of someone who has too many chicks available to him. His hype, by the way, way outshone his actual personality or performance. That just as an aside.

But the real kicker in this story is that I had shat where I ate, as they say. The next day I ran into several acquaintances, who greeted me with some version of "Hey, I heard you were walking hand in hand with XYZ down Bedford Avenue last night? So-and-so said so!" Crap. It was only Saturday. I still had to deal with the expectant faces of my colleagues on Monday and was not looking forward to it. It would be hard to hide the absence of a constantly pinging mailbox. That Sunday I curled up in bed, watched TV and felt bad. I had put myself in this position of weakness. It was pretty clear what he had wanted and my expectations should never have been anything beyond that. I knew, despite the assurances of my salivating girlfriends, that he wasn't going to call. And now I'd have to walk the walk of shame. Just as my misery was peaking, I switched TV channels and... there he was. Coiffed, suave and grinning, and surely thinking not a moment of me. I turned off the TV, dreaded Monday morning and cried myself to sleep.

The man with no name.

After only writing down daily laments for a while now, I should really get back to disclosing some of the finer moments of my love life's checkered past. As luck would have it, I just remembered an episode the other day, which even I couldn't believe actually happened. It seems so random and crazy now, when viewed with the accumulated wisdom of 20 years of hindsight.

In 1988, my best friend and I took a road trip to Southern Hungary, where my great-grandmother lived. When I say road trip, I mean road trip. No, we didn't drive up through Canada and the North Pole to come down on the other side (I don't think that's even possible, is it?). We started off in Germany, where we were both living then. The plan was to hang out with my great-grandma in her dust speck of a town for a few days and then drive north to Budapest, the (even then) exciting capital of communist Hungary. Remember, this was 1988. The Hungarians had not opened the floodgates of their borders yet. The wall in Berlin was still a wall. Nutella and bananas had not made it past the Iron Curtain at that time. Hungary was still the deprived, yet strangely jolly country of goulash communism. So we hung out in the Southern plains of this pretty and very rural land, and drank ourselves silly every day with the neighbors' homemade wine. The liters of rocket fuel schnapps, the unpaved roads, the geese running around, the petroleum lamps, the outhouses.... it was all very romantic then. Which would explain my general disposition to get romantically involved with a real Magyar.

 A few days into our trip, inspired by the cultural whiplash and thinking "Who needs democracy anyway" we arrived in Budapest. Once there, it didn't take long until a young gent caught my eye. He, whose name now escapes me, was hanging out with a buddy in the restaurant we were eating in. I honestly can't fully remember the details (my memory has occasional pity on me), but somehow we began to talk. Not. Fact is, he spoke zero German or English. My Hungarian is beyond rudimentary, and was even worse at the time. I don't know what we "talked" about, but he and his friend ended up meeting us several times over the course of those few days. We went sightseeing, we had lunch, we took photos. The one I liked was a DJ and we went to some euro-trash disco he was working in. I may have spent the night at his apartment, but... I am honestly not even sure anymore. My best friend will remember. Nothing slips by her, and she reads this blog. Did I or didn't I? I think I did. So anyway, the day we had to drive back home I was still feeling the reverberations of my Eastern bloc romance. Before my friend and I took the turn off onto the highway, I told her to stop. I got out, walked to the car behind us, in which my Hungarian man was sitting to see us off, and gave him a piece of paper, onto which I had written "I want to see you again!" He smiled, I smiled, I got back in the car, my best friend smirked and said "Oh no, you didn't!" 

What followed where countless expensive phone calls from Germany to Hungary, that my parents grudgingly paid for. My father thought I was a lunatic, my mother — ever the believer in doomed love — encouraged me. The obvious problem: without a common language or the ability to see one's gestures, a phone conversation is pretty much impossible. My mom sometimes stepped in. As the resident Hungarian in our family she played interpreter to my cause. I'd call her over to the phone and ask her to tell him something borderline silly or intimate. He'd respond and she would translate it back to me. (Oh mom, the hell I put you through. I am sorry...) Knowing that our "thing" wasn't going to work like this, I told him (god...what was his name again? I am wracking my brain..) to drive up to Germany. NOT an easy undertaking when you are a Hungarian living in Eastern Europe in 1988. My family had to write official invitation letters so he could get a visa. It took a month or so. Finally, he got into his old Lada or whatever tin can he drove, and sputtered away, making the 10-hour trip to a foreign land. 

Once he got to our house, he was greeted by me and my mom, who was by now the official chaperone of our commie tryst. She had cooked dinner for us and sat at the table, chatting away with this young fellow countryman of hers, obviously trying to figure out whether he was worth the pain in the ass that he had caused her. Once in a while she'd repeat to me what he said. I got the feeling she was interviewing him. She raised her eyebrows when he spoke and once in a while gave him a long, drawn out "Jaaaa?" It sounded as if she didn't believe him. I think under my mother's withering stare he was trying to come off as more interesting than he may actually have been. But how would I know? I didn't understand a word he was saying! The whole thing began to unravel when he excused himself to go to the bathroom. My mom had a look of unimpressed irritation on her face. She turned to me and said "Dear heavens, that guy is an idiot!" 

Oh god. Here I was, with a man who drove 10 hours into hostile territory just to see me, and I was being told that he was a dimwit. She said all he talked about was himself and how fantastically great he was. She said he bragged and bragged, then bragged some more. She said he was one of those "typical Hungarian macho chauvinists", who think they know and own the world (and the women therein), but really have no clue. I guess she met the type before. She was, after all, the expert on all things Hungarian. At some point what's-his-name came back to the table. I managed an insincere smile. I knew this wasn't good. Frankly, I had doubted the decision to have him come to Germany before he even got there. I knew the language barrier and the fact that we lived worlds apart was working against me. I also knew that I was having major second thoughts about him in general. It had all been a gamble. I was hoping for some big, romantic whirlwind to sweep me away. 

The next day I took him to see some sights around town. By mid-day I was hardly able to stand his company. He must have noticed, because he tried very hard to be silly and make me laugh. I was deflated. I couldn't believe what a stupid choice I had made. Even if he was borderline obnoxious, he still had driven a long way to come and see me — and now I was overwhelmed by guilt. I couldn't ignore what my mother had said about him. Instinctively, I knew it was probably true, or maybe I wanted it to be. I had seen his behavior and watched his interactions, remembered how even I thought he came off as pompous here and there. With our complete lack of understandable verbal communication, I couldn't even give him the benefit of the doubt. Now I had to find a way to extract myself from this very awkward situation and I was embarrassed as hell.

That night he slept on the other end of the bed. The next morning he left back to Hungary. My mother made him sandwiches for the road. Hey, she's not completely heartless! After his car pulled away and our front door fell shut, she said "So much for the Hungarian experiment." Yeah, so much for that. I went upstairs to my room like a chastened 10-year-old, ashamed of what I had done. I felt I had hurt somebody, albeit a jerk. I had outed my own immaturity in the process. Most disturbingly, I had given my mother a huge opportunity to meddle — and I couldn't even prove her wrong. 

What had I been thinking? And WHAT THE DEUCE was his name??