I’m still not sure if he even speaks English because I haven’t heard him utter a sound classifiable as anything other than a grunt. He’s not cowed by my idle threats, either. He knows I won’t kick the door in and, even if I did, I would not be able to inflict any appreciable damage on him. Mainly because he outweighs me by at least a hundred pounds, all of which is almost certainly steroid-inflated muscle.
He closes the door, fiddles with the chain, and opens it again. I step forward to go in, but his meaty fist blocks my way, a bucket filled with water dangling from his hairy knuckles.
“You wash up outside,” he garbles in a deep, thick Russian-ish accent. Definitely Soviet Bloc in origin. “You are nasty motherfucker.”
He smiles at his little joke and closes the door. The lock clicks back in place and I can hear him laughing on the other side — a deep, guttural sound like a growling animal. As I peel off my sopping shirt and lift the bucket above my head, I make a silent vow to get even with that shithead at some point. But that will come after.
First, I have to win this contest.
Interlude 1
The Divorce
You may ask yourself, how am I in this situation?
Why am I holed up in a shitty motel with drunk college chicks, asking to them to pee on me? Sharing a squalid room with a cameraman who is borderline gorilla? Standing on the second floor walkway of a shitty motel, washing bodily fluids off myself with a bucket of water?
Am I some sort of sick fuck who gets off on weirdo sex shit like that?
I want to say no to that, but it’s really complicated. Like life is complicated. Like marriage is complicated. Nothing is cut and dry, black and white, even if I wish it to be so. Everything is shades of brown like a shit the morning after a drinking binge. It all depends on what you consumed the night before that determines what color of shit you’ll be cleaning up the next day.
So this really starts much earlier, as all stories like this tend to. Mine really begins about seven years ago, when I got married.
It goes like this:
Dennis was your pretty regular, average kind of guy. Not real tall, but not real short either. Decent looking, but in a somewhat non-descript way. He would actually have made a pretty good criminal because he was the kind of guy that, if witnesses were asked to describe him to the police sketch artist, they’d furrow their brow and chew their lower lip and struggle to describe him with any specificity. Dennis was just there, in a very non-threatening sort of way, like discount store corn chips. They weren’t Fritos, but they were sort of like Fritos, just lacking in things like, you know, flavor and texture. That was Dennis, the human equivalent of dollar store snack foods.
Mr. Average.
Dennis was not particularly smart, but he was smart enough. He graduated high school. He attempted college. He tried for a little while. He probably could have been something more if he ever applied himself like his dad had tried to convince him to do, whatever the fuck applying oneself really means. Dennis guessed the definition depended on the person uttering such a vague phrase. It wasn’t that Dennis didn’t want to learn, he just never really cared to do more than was absolutely necessary. He lacked ambition. He had no goals, aside from trying not to embarrass himself or his parents by flunking out or getting in trouble or standing apart from the crowd in any way whatsoever.
Once he got to college, he didn’t really know what he was going to do next. No surprise he didn’t last very long.
Enter Carrie. Dennis liked Carrie right away and it turned out she liked the hell out of him, too. They went from first date to moving in together pretty quickly, within a few months. Dennis stopped going to class and got a job because now, all of a sudden, he had things like bills. That sucked. Dennis hated bills. He never really had many of them until he moved in with Carrie.
But Dennis didn’t look at it that way. He was happy. He fell in love with her. He even admitted he had fallen in love with her from the first night they were together. He was never much for fairytale romance shit but I guess you could look at it like that. Carrie always did. That’s probably why it went so bad so fast.
Because, as Dennis liked to try and explain to his naïve bride, “real fucking life” was most definitely not a fairytale. He did his best not to term it in such a way. At least, not at first. Once the shit began rolling downhill, though, it changed.
Dennis supposed he was as much to blame for it going bad as Carrie was. He tried to tell himself that. But no matter the amount of self-loathing, regardless of how hard he tried to convince the reflection in the mirror that holding onto hate was not healthy, he simply couldn’t get past the facts:
Carrie changed, not him.
Carrie wasn’t living in reality, he was.
Carrie fucked him over, and good.
They didn’t just fall out of love, they plunged headlong into hate, with a capital fucking H.
Dennis had dropped out of college to support them. Carrie never even bothered to get a job.
Dennis worked a second part-time job to keep up with the mounting debts. Carrie excelled at adding to that mountain.
Sex became a thing of the past, which only added to Dennis’s spiraling attitude toward his wife and their relationship. The only thing he could be thankful for was they had managed to avoid conception.
That’s the short and dirty version of things. Maybe I’ll get into it a little more in-depth later, but really, that’s all you need to know leading up to D-Day.
D-Day hit seven months ago, and it went something like this:
“Dennis, we need to talk.”
“Wow, what’s the special occasion?”
“Shut up and sit down.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“Why do you have to be such an asshole?”
“What do you want to talk about? I’m going to be late for work.”
“Screw work, we have more important things to discuss.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury to just say, ‘Screw work.’ Someone has to make sure the repo men don’t come for the car again like they did last month. At some point you might understand the concept of work leading to money, which you use to pay your bills, and the more you spend the money on things that aren’t bills, the more you have to work to make more money to cover what you pissed away on — ”
“I want a divorce.”
Silence.
Shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it still came as a slap in the face. I didn’t know why at first, but the more I thought about it later when I had nothing but the cold hand of loneliness to cuddle with on my brother’s couch, the more I figured it had to do with failure. I sure as hell didn’t want to be married anymore, but getting divorced made me feel like a failure. Quitting college didn’t because that was my choice. I controlled that decision. This, I had no control over. I should have brought it up first, but I didn’t. I was determined that at some point we would figure it out. We would get better at being adults and spouses. At being mature people. But we weren’t and we didn’t. We were just a couple of spoiled kids playing grown-ups. And now she was controlling what happened next and that just didn’t sit well with me.
“Fuck you, a divorce.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Fuck me? You better watch the words that come out of your mouth right now.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“You bet your ass I am.”
“You can shove your threats up your ass. And we’re not getting divorced.”
Yes, I realize now how stupid that sounds. What can I say? I don’t handle change and upheaval well.
“You tell me to fuck off and shove it up my ass and then insist that we’re not getting a divorce? Are you shitting me?”