Happily Ever After…an archive favorite

Submitted by Lisa Steadman on August 9, 2010 - 7:12 am

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This happens to be one of my all-time fave stories ever shared with The Breakup Chronicles. Enjoy!

By Lani Voivod

I would start with the image of a semi-crushed can of Keystone Light flying across a seedy motel parking lot in Cody, Wyoming at four in the morning, followed by an impassioned SLAP in the face, but it all sounds like one big freakin’ cliche. So I’ll pick some arbitrary spot on the timeline, label it “The Beginning,” and start there instead.

Mr. Ex arrived at the resort toting nothing but a duffle bag and a crooked smile. I had been working on the outskirts of Nowhere for about two months – two months that felt like a few hard, lonely years at Sing Sing. I had fled my life in our nation’s capital to claim a personal sabbatical in the Wyoming wilderness at the ripe old age of 24. Ironically, heartbreak was the catalyst for that decision, too.

On the national spectrum of good-looking men, Mr. Ex would probably fall in at about a five. On this remote resort’s spectrum of good-looking menMr. Ex leaped to a whopping nine. He had all his teeth, a full head of hair, some rippling muscles, and the flirty confidence of Tom Cruise.

He also had a teardrop tattoo (gang slang for, “Look at me! I’ve murdered a rival gang member!”) and an Indian-inked “ODESTO” tattoo that sprawled across his abdomen. It was supposed to say “MODESTO,” as in Mr. Ex’s hometown, but unfortunately for Mr. Ex, the artist/fellow inmate ran out of ink before he could finish. I guess they were too busy with cockroach races to bother finishing it up over the rest of the six-month sentence Mr. Ex earned for robbing a mini-mart of $40 and a case of beer.

Here are my excuses: I was lonely, drunk, heartbroken, desperate, deluded, stoned, and lacking in self-esteem, self-worth and self-knowledge – not necessarily in that order. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life, thought I had lost my youth, and had gained 40 lbs. in two months. At such times in a woman’s life she sees only one “cure,” however temporary. That cure is SEX.

Mercifully, Mr. Ex was too drunk to notice the sprawling lard that was my ass and my bad perm. He spoiled me with booze and sweet, city-licked poetics, plowing through his meager paycheck in one sitting. We went on hallucinogenic hikes through grizzly-infested woods. We lit bonfires anywhere we pleased and insisted we were “one with nature.” Short, unexpected bursts of intelligence and insight were punctuated with the word “dude” and his air-headed laughter.

Among other things, he begged me to buy him a wallet with a chain attached to it. Lord knows what he intended to put in it, but I acquiesced. I had become some sort of white trash sugar-mama. I was even contemplating a life in a pick-up and cab-trailer with this moral-less, penniless, vision-less moocher, and yet somehow I thought my father was the crazy one when, after a long talk in a phone booth, he suggested I was out of my damn mind.
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Which brings me to a certain motel parking lot. After a long day attending to some weird crisis involving evictions, suspended licenses and general mullet-filled drama, I found myself shelling out yet more money for a room in town in which about ten misfits – myself included – would party and crash for the night. Several cases of cheap beer later and I’m standing in a parking lot at four in the morning, REALLY angry, looking Mr. Ex straight in the eyes. My eyes are red and puffy from crying, and we’re fighting over something -definitely something ridiculously stupid.

It is at this degrading point that I throw the semi-crushed can of Keystone Light across the parking lot. I would have said this is the absolute lowest point in my life, but, ever the perfectionist, I had to up the ante by actually slipping further down the hole of humiliation and slapping this guy hard across the face.

I don’t know why he didn’t hit me back. He wanted to – I could see it in his eyes  – but he didn’t. The sound of the slap in the pre-dawn Wyoming air woke me up to the absurdity of the scenario. It also summoned three inner truths that had been in hibernation for some time:

I want better than this.

I deserve better than this.

I AM better than this.

I went back inside, crashed on the floor next to a bunch of other lost souls, and woke up again a few hours later to a brand new day.

Thank God.

Mr. Ex left the following week with one of the other female lost souls sitting faithfully by his side. They had found a 1978 pick-up in town for $300 and decided to seek their fortune in Jackson Hole. I stayed on at the resort through winter, left around the first day of spring, and headed south on Rt. 25, eventually bound for Southern California.

Less than six months later I met my husband. My darling, beautiful, intelligent, handsome, law-abiding husband, whose only tattoo is a tattoo of a playing card: the seven of hearts. He surprised me with it about six months after we moved in together. He says it’s his good luck card, and I’ll happily ever after take his word for it.

Funny how life works out. You just can’t make this stuff up. I guess, in the end, it all sounds like one big freakin’ cliche, huh?

What’s YOUR Breakup Chronicles story?