After two weeks of calling him everyday without a return call, I finally got a call from him. I was elated to say the least. He told me that he did indeed remember me, the girl with the beautiful smile, but he had a rule not to date women who were married or had boyfriends. Looking back that was so ironic because he was constantly cheating on his own wife before I met him. I guess the consequences took a toll on him, because she divorced him and aborted their unborn child. It would haunt him for life. Anyway the message was clear to me, if I wanted to ever see him again I would have to be free of the situation I was in. I called one of my friends up and asked her if I could move in with her. She said it was fine, so that same night I went home, told the man I was living with that I had met someone I was very interested in getting to know, but he would not see me unless I was free. I moved out in a couple of hours. The next night I went to the private club where I first met him hoping to see him again. He was a member and as fate would have it he was there. That was the beginning of my new life. From the moment I saw him again I went up to him and asked him if he remembered me, of course he did. We became inseparable. We spent all of our time together when we were not working. I was with him so much I barely went home to my friends apartment. He confided in me one night that he was an alcoholic, I came from Wisconsin, everyone I knew drank too much. It didn't occur to me that it would be a problem. After all he was only twenty nine years old and going thru a really hard emotional breakup with his wife, and his mother had passed away within the year. He was also torn up because he was losing his child in his mind. He loved her so much. He had gone through an unsuccessful series of rehabs already and was already in and out of AA. I should have seen the writing on the wall, but I was blinded by "Love". I felt sorry for him, he told me all about time spent in Vietnam and how awful it was. This was the saddest man in the world. Several years later, I would be telling his brother about his war stories and he told me he had never been in the war, he was never in the military, period. I was stunned. Why did he need to make up such a terrible story to get my sympathy? I already was sympathetic to his situation. I passed it off as drunken story telling and let it go.
I went thru the pains of his divorce with him. I would be there when he was on the phone with his ex trying to work out all the details of the divorce. In the end she got everything. The house, his car, his personal papers from school, his artwork that was given to him by his mother, everything. He got half of what was in the checking account. That was it.
One day I followed him to his wife's house and he dropped off the Brown Mercedes and that was the end of it. He got into my car and we drove off. I don't know how the courts didn't just divide it all up 50/50 but she got everything. It was the tie that bound us. When I left my former husband I gave him everything also, just to be free. I gave up a new house in Sausalito, a twelve unit apartment building and three townhouses. All because I made a promise that I would never take his property. I kept my word. My ex lost it all anyway.
My former husband had developed a terrible cocaine addiction and used up the equity in all the property for coke. So there we were, young and broke. Both having lost quite a lot of material stuff seemed to bring us closer together. He was gun shy of relationships to say the least. Although he felt a lot for me, he told me that he was not going to jump from the frying pan into the fire of another serious relationship. He needed to be free to date other people. I let him do whatever he needed to do. I would be the one he would call after his "dates" were over. He always called wanting to know if I would come over and be with him. I always went. I didn't play the games I could have. He loved my company and the attention and unconditional love I gave him.I just loved being with him and I was very patient with him.
In the beginning we had a lot of fun together. I would meet him every night after work and we would go to dinner and then out for drinks and dancing at the club. I was only 29 myself. I was having a good time. I didn't know that he wasn't doing it for fun, he had to go out drinking. His drinking was getting progressively worse. I was too blind to see what was really going on. His moods started to change little by little. The happy fun drunk, who only drank after five, was getting darker and darker. There would be little fights in the club that would start over little comments or whatever. Because he was a club member, they put up with his behavior because he was spending a lot of money there every night. The only time he wasn't there was on Saturday and Sunday nights because those were the days he got to have his daughter, and he never drank on the weekends. Those were the best times of the week. In fact when our relationship became more serious he told me that his daughter would always come first and if I had a problem with that we could not be together. It was one of the most admirable qualities he had. The kind of father he was made me adore him even more. He may have been a terrible husband, but there was never any question that he was a stellar father. That quality remained with him forever.
Our "Honeymoon" period in this relationship lasted about 4 months. Even though his temper seemed to be getting a bit out of control at the bars, we were still having fun when he had people over to his little house in the hills of Hollywood. I was cutting hair and he was still practicing law, but the hours we were keeping had me going into work later and later. He hardly made it to the office at all, or only if absolutely necessary. He shared an office with his partner at the family owned business. I guess they knew more about his condition that I had any idea about. I did get an opportunity to meet his father one day, very unexpectedly I might add. He paid us a visit at the house for some reason, I wasn't told why he just came over. I didn't ask any questions. His father seemed really nice and he was very kind to me. I could sense something was not quite right between the two of them. We never brought it up after his Dad left.
His Birthday was coming up and he wanted to go to Palm Springs, I totally agreed I thought it would be great to be alone and celebrate it together. I could not have been more wrong. That night we checked into a nice little hotel and it was so warm we decided to go for a swim. Of course he brought a bottle of Vodka with him to the pool. He proceeded to get very, very drunk. I asked him if we could just go inside after about 40 minutes because I was getting tired and cold. It was when the "other" guy showed his ugly presence for the first time.
We went inside and he started to beat me up. I never saw it coming, I had no idea that he had a violent temper like that, unprovoked. The nightmare had begun. It would never be the same from that day forward. I never quite felt comfortable watching him drink and I never drank with him again after that. I felt I needed to be totally sober and alert to his mood swings.
He sensed that I was no longer just having fun, I was gaging the drinking and the atmosphere around him when he did drink.
