“Hello, Laura.”
I ignored her.
She got louder. “Hello, LAURA—”
Colleen popped up and said “Hi, I’m Colleen,” in what I’m sure she imagined to be a very menacing tone. To anyone else, she sounded friendly. Sugar smiled and shook her hand.
“Finally, someone with some class.”
Colleen looked at me and used her pants to wipe off the hand Sugar had touched.
Rudolf was walking over to us from his car. When he saw all three of us on the porch, he moved his legs much faster. Sugar broke the silence.
“Rudolf, why did you invite me over when this stupid bitch was here?”
That was IT. NO ONE calls me a stupid bitch except me to myself in the mirror.
“You need to get the fuck out of my apartment now!” I yelled.
Rudolf was sprinting over at this point. She looked at me with her crazy eyes. Classic Sugar. However, she took classic Sugar to another level by hissing:
“I’m gonna break your legs.”
What the fuck? I was terrified. I stepped back, and she quickly grabbed my head and yanked out a chunk of my hair. MY HAIR. She started to wave it back and forth, rhythmically chanting, “I’m gonna make sure you never walk again.”
At this point I was screaming, “You’re the devil! You’re the devil!”
Rudolf finally found his words. Unfortunately, they weren’t very good ones. “Sugar, NO. NO, Sugar. You give her back her hair. You cannot do that Sugar, give Laura back her hair.”
I swung open the door to the apartment and ran inside. I locked myself in the bathroom. Comet ran inside there with me at the last minute. I glared at him.
“Why did you do this, Comet? Make Sugar go away.” Comet just stared at me with his little eyes and then slumped over to the side and licked his asshole.
The messy and unsatisfying epilogue to this story is the following: Two weeks later, Sugar called Rudolf and told him she was going to kill herself, so he had better come over and pick up the dog. She was very unstable. Rudolf rushed over to find Sugar with a knife pressed to her own throat. He called the police, and she went to a mental institution for a while, until she got out and started breaking my car windows every so often.
I never spoke to her directly again because obviously conflict avoidance always helps with everything. Right? *nervous laughter*
I mostly tried not to think about her. But when I did, I wondered what Rudolf ever saw in someone so needy and unstable. Maybe he thought he could help her, kind of like . . . he was trying to help me.
Life eventually settled down again, and when it did, so did Rudolf and I. We got into this lovely, positive . . . stifling rhythm. We got up early. We exercised. Rudolf was close with Colleen and we had these lovely dinner parties that were healthy and fun. Colleen moved into a studio apartment down the street from us. I was getting my career on track because of him. He was so brilliant and sweet and encouraging and everything was right. But it didn’t feel right at all.
He wanted kids and a family. He wanted us to start a life together because I was the one for him. But in reality, I didn’t know who the fuck I was yet. I was nineteen, for God’s sake. He was thirty-seven. I was not having kids yet. The more he pushed for stability, the more I’d pull away. I knew I wanted to break up with him.
Unfortunately, my nineteen-year-old brain didn’t know what words to use to break up with someone, or how to say them. So instead I avoided the problem, hoping he would break up with me eventually. My drinking worsened. My drug use worsened. My escapism worsened. As much as we wanted it to, addiction doesn’t just go away by ignoring it. As much as he and I both wanted me to just be healthy, I was still an addict. And I was finding ways to hide it from him.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I knew that the part of me that Rudolf hated the most was the part of me stuck in my addiction. He tried every day to squash that, and he even got me to stop hard drugs. So if I were to amplify that deeply impulsive, unhealthy, toxic Laura . . . he would have no choice but to leave me. Deep down, that horrible part of my brain thought that this was what I deserved.
I would stay out all night, and in the morning Rudolf would be upset, but he would quickly forgive me. He knew something was wrong and he wanted to help, but I felt myself being pulled away by the hand of my addiction.
One night I came home at eight a.m. to him blasting “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” by Elvis. He wasn’t even home. He just had it on repeat, loud enough for all the neighbors to hear. I remember thinking this was way more embarrassing than the fact that I was coming home at eight a.m. multiple nights a week.
That was his worst. Rudolf was a sweet, sweet man.
I tried to zero in on a way to break up with him, but I couldn’t think of one thing he did wrong. And that’s the only way to break up, right? To be deeply betrayed by a horribly toxic person so there’s nothing left to salvage between you two?
Since Rudolf was not going to be that person, I would have to step up. What a cross to bear, what a sacrifice. You’re welcome, everyone.
I was out one night on Sunset Boulevard and I met an Irish guy. His name was Kevin. Or Devin. We were both very drunk.
“Wanna go to Mexico?” he asked after thirty minutes of talking to me.
“Ummmm. Yeah, I do. Let’s go.”
I picked him up the next afternoon. In the cold light of day, I tried really hard not to regret everything I’d ever done to lead me to this moment. He had an angry face, with eyebrows that looked perpetually mad. He sighed like everything took way too long for him. He had a weird scar next to his eyebrow that looked like he got a bad piercing, felt self-conscious about looking gay, and then took it out.
Maybe I was projecting a lot of bad things onto him, but also he sucked. He was so condescending. On the way down, he found a bag of ecstasy in my glove compartment and became infuriated.
“Do you KNOW how much trouble we could get in for having this when we cross the border? Do you KNOW we could go to Mexican jail? I’m throwing this out.”
Can we ignore for a second the fact that I forgot I had a bag of drugs in my glove box? Kevin was a prick. Of course I would pick the worst guy in the world to trek into another country with. I swerved my car, trying to grab the bag back from him.
“DON’T THROW AWAY DRUGS. DON’T! I’ll put them up my vagina if I have to.”
He threw them away. I wanted to punch him in the face.
We kept fighting about everything. Where to actually turn (MapQuest was not in business, you guys), what music to play on the radio (I wanted hip-hop like a sane adult and he wanted Nine Inch Nails), and whose soda got to be in the cup holder (my car, my drink). There were some red flags.
But I kept driving.
We stopped in San Diego for the night at some seedy motel near the beach. I’d had enough of him at this point. I wasn’t trying to get out of my near-marriage so that I could fight like a married couple with this random asshole. Ugh. He got some whiskey for us to drink in the room. It was becoming clear that we both had issues with alcoholism. But as much as I loved to drink, I hated being there with him more.
“I’m taking a walk,” I told him.
Kevin didn’t answer; he was either swigging some whiskey down or giving me the silent treatment. I slammed the door on my way out.
The beach was cold and dark, so I couldn’t even see how beautiful it was or reflect on my life or some shit. It was just pitch-black. I kept walking.