Wednesday, November 20, 2013

The One

The time has come for me to tell you about "the one". The one who inspired the blog. The one who led so many people to say to me, "You need to tell that story to the world". The one who compels me to use language that Andrew Dice Clay would be appalled to hear.

There are a few reasons that I've held off telling this story until now:

1.) "The one" is a complete narcissist. He has read the blog in the past and if he read this, he would be wearing this post like a badge of honor. And frankly, I didn't want to give him the satisfaction. So, I had to wait until his interest in me had subsided, which it seems to have done.

2.) I wanted to build up my readership. I try to make this blog funny and amusing to my readers and not to sound like a bitter, jaded, ex-girlfriend. But, it's hard to find that voice when telling this story because this guy is just so damn shitty.

3.) It was hard to narrow down which parts of the story to tell. He's done so many crappy things to me that if I wrote about all of it, the tome would rival War and Peace and blogger would kick me off for taking up all the storage space on their server.

But, all things considered, I think that I am finally ready to tell the story...the Story of Douche.

When I first met Douche, he introduced himself to me as "John". A few months into the relationship, he admitted that his name was actually "Mark". And then a few months after that, I found out that his name was actually "Mike". For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to him as to how he's listed in my contacts to warn me not to answer when he calls: "Douche".

We clicked right away. We went out to dinner and had amazing conversation and a great time. He was a perfect gentleman. He paid for dinner. We had a lovely good night kiss and he ended the night with "When can I see you again?" He was smart. He was fun. And he gave me a lot of attention. Everything that I had been looking for. However, after a few months, when I still hadn't been to his place, or met any of his friends, I started to get a little suspicious that maybe he hadn't been telling me the truth about his life.

I kept telling myself that he spent way too much time with me to be involved with someone else. He would stay over at my house. We always went out to dinner in public. He would stop by my office. But, something was not right. My intuition was telling me that he wasn't being straight. I brought it up a few times. His answer would always be accusatory. "Why don't you trust me?" "Are you going to always have these walls up?" "Will you just let me in?" "You googled me? What are you? Some kind of stalker?" It was my lack of trust that led me to wait a few months before being intimate with him. And not sleeping with him just added to my confusion, as I continued to tell myself, if he were cheating on someone with me, he would be insisting that we have sex. It's "secret lovers" not "secret dinner companions". So, I continued to ignore my intuition.

After about three months, he took me out to lunch one day and told me that he really wanted me to trust him. He said that I was right and he hadn't been completely truthful with me. His name was really Mark. He was married to a woman named Heather. They had a two-year old daughter. I was devastated. I didn't want to be right about this. I almost walked right out of the restaurant, but it was Bertucci's pizza and really, who can walk out on the Bertucci Menucci? He said that he had filed for divorce, but he didn't want to leave the house because he didn't want to give up custody of his daughter. He also said that if his wife found out that he was dating she would do her best to make sure that he didn't get custody. This all sounded a little fishy to me.

But, he was a born salesman. And he sold me.

Knowing that I was exceptionally proficient at facebook stalking, he covered all his bases with his story. I found his divorce complaint in the court records. I found his wife's facebook page where there was a daughter, but no trace of any husband in any of the photos. That would be consistent with his story. The story seemed true. I continued to date him.

While all of this was happening, I had picked up a couple of SAT tutoring clients. One of them lived out in Western MA, and I would go to his house on Saturday mornings to give him lessons. One Saturday morning, I was leaving the lesson and driving down the street. And I saw Mark, walking a black lab, seeing my very recognizable car, and looking extremely freaked out. Now, this was already odd as Mark lived in Ashland, MA. At the time, we were in Hopkinton. I pulled over to the curb and he opened the door and sat in the passenger seat. Both of us said, "What are you doing here?" at the same time. I responded first, "I had a tutoring session down the street. Now, you go. You don't live here. Why are you walking your dog through this neighborhood?"

That's when he told me everything. Heather and Mark were getting a divorce. They did have a two year old daughter. What he neglected to tell me before was that he wasn't Mark. He had stolen Mark's whole story. His name was Mike. At my insistence, he showed me his driver's license. He had two sons. He was married. He had no intention of getting divorced. But, he "still wanted to see me." I entertained a vision of him being blasted out of my passenger side door, hitting a tree, and sliding down the trunk like a cartoon character. Alas, my car, though awesome, did not come with a passenger side ejection seat. I settled for yelling at him to "Get the fuck out of my car" and left him in a cloud of adulterous dust after he did so. I've been ignoring his calls ever since. For about six months after I ended the relationship, he called me and sent me texts and tried to get me to speak with him. I never did understand why he wanted the relationship to continue.

The way he got caught is too much of a coincidence. And now I hold a strong belief that nature has a way of balancing everything out. I do try to help it out a little bit by telling this story to every single person that I have a longer-than-ten-minute conversation with in the hopes that some day it will get back to his wife.

The good news is that I learned two important lessons from all of this. Guilty men always get mad at you for not trusting them. They will accuse you of being "crazy" or "trying to sabotage the relationship." The non-guilty men will laugh it off. They will say you're being silly and you'll believe them. That ties into the second lesson: Always trust your instincts.

So, that's the story. The story of the shittiest shitheads of all shitheads. I apologize that this entry was a lot darker than my other ones. And I promise that next time I'll be funnier. But, I think that this story is a good insight into why I am the way I am (freaking amazing) and the choices that I make today (better ones). Thanks for reading, all.