Marriage
In 1981, I was still living in this Pollyanna fantasyland. At this point in time, I was quite literally color blind. I was partying with everyone and living in a kind of bubble. That would change after I moved to California. There was a lot going on that I didn’t know about. My biggest concern at the time was having fun.
I’m a slightly spaced out, latter day hippie. I meet a guitar playing, blond, blue-eyed, German, Catholic girl. She’s a little like me, (thank God for her, not completely), and she’s nice. We connected and moved in together. Three months later, we were married. Six years later, we were divorced. That marriage produced a child.
Of course, there’s a little backstory here. She was a friend of mine long before I started dating her. I had a girlfriend. She had a boyfriend. I break up with my girlfriend. Her relationship is not going well. We’re at a party…
While it’s perfectly fine for me to air my own dirty laundry in public, I’m certainly not going to discuss extremely intimate things about my ex-wife and ex-girlfriends. That just isn’t polite. My comments on my marriage will be brief. I will have to convey a few anecdotes just to give the general vibe of the marriage.
We took LSD on our honeymoon. I would only do it a couple more times after high school, this being one of them. I am in no way advocating the use of this drug, but, to be quite frank, we had a lot of fun.
With a start like that, you can probably guess what followed. We partied. I was nineteen. She was eighteen. Our child was not born until our third year of marriage. Between her friends and mine, there was this pool of couples and singles that would trade off having parties and dinners. (Nothing weird here guys-no partner swapping.) All these events included alcohol. Many had marijuana. A few had drugs.
This union was doomed to failure from the start. People have been trying to fix me up with black chicks for a very long time. As early as sixth grade, I remember one of my fellow students expounding about the wonders of certain parts of a black girl’s anatomy. Black girls have been hitting on me for almost as long. At the same time, there’s always been this heavy push for me to convert to Protestantism. I did the exact opposite of what “the powers that be” wanted me to do.
Her father didn’t particularly like me and, in retrospect, had reasons not to. Though he did his share of drinking, he was a fairly conservative Catholic. I, by all outward appearances at the time, was “white trash”. There were also other dynamics involved.
The “honeymoon” part of our marriage lasted about two years. Then, the company I was working for shut down. That was the beginning of a downward spiral.
I was working at a mail-order catalog house. I started as a union forklift driver. After I got married, I was promoted into a department called “the sample room”. This is where the merchandise buyers would hang out a lot. As a consequence of that position I got to known some of them, as well as some of the advertising people. The people on our end that interfaced with our contracted photographic studio were cool.
Everything in a catalog has to have a picture, of course. In those days, rather than send artwork, sources sent actual products. (Photoshop was not invented yet.) Once those pictures were taken, most of the items were not returned to the vendors. This was everything from furniture to clothes. They would sell those items at ridiculously cheap prices. I, of course, bought some of those items. I can remember buying an expensive fur coat for my wife. I paid only a fraction of its worth.
So, life is not bad at this point. My wife and I are both working. We have an active social life and a fair amount of disposable income. We have been at parties with some of the advertising people and it looks like I’m on the fastrack to becoming a buyer. Then, my company was bought out by The Wickes Corporation.
I will forever have a grudge against that company. They bought us specifically to use as a sacrificial lamb. Wickes was having financial problems, bought our company, filled our warehouse, and then filed bankruptcy. I was there. I saw it. They put thousands of people out of work, many who had been there for decades. That corporation still exists.
Once the announcement of our imminent closure was made, Titanic mentality took over. It brought out some strange behaviors, even in some of our top executives. Since I’m not a rat, I won’t be going into any specifics.
I knew how to drive a forklift, so I was one of last to go. During our liquidation period, I was carpooling with an older gentleman that had been a forklift driver for decades. He was, for lack of a better description on my part, one of those “salt of the earth” types. Like many in the blue-collar south suburbs of Chicago, his “American Dream” was crumbling right before his eyes. Though I semi-recovered from this corporate bankruptcy, he did not. My serious crash and burn would occur a few years in the future.
When I load one of the final pallets of merchandise into a truck leased by one of the “job-lotters”, I knew what it felt like to be a turncoat Jew in a concentration camp. This was a company that had employed many friends of mine and I, as one of the remaining survivors, was feeding the last bits of its corpse to vultures.
And the hits just keep coming. After the business failure, one thing after another went wrong in our lives. My next job did not pay as well and we all know what that lead to. We were also no longer getting many items at substantially reduced prices.
There was sabotage in this relationship from several different fronts. Those doing it will of course say it was self-inflicted. While self-sabotage was often a reaction to this subversion, (thus, giving them fuel to justify their innocence), there was a lot of dirty shit going on.
Our child was born a year later and our partying slowed down. Even that did not save our slowly disintegrating marriage. Before my child even started school, we separated and I moved out to California. That…Oh shit!
© John Bielecki 2024
