My Worst Birthday Ever
I have had sad birthdays. Lonely birthdays. Boring ones. But my most recent birthday is probably the one that is going to stand out forever.
I spent the first half of the day angry. Impatient. Waiting for my new boyfriend to leave town. My two little dogs and I had been staying upstate for the summer with him. Now I needed to start packing us up so we could escape.
As soon as he pulled out of the driveway my body collapsed. It felt like every muscle in my body was rapidly contracting. My hands were shaking. I hopped in the van and drove. Two or three miles. Parked the van and walked. I was paranoid that he had bugged the house. The vehicle.
I called my ex-husband and cried. (He’s still my best friend.) And I started making arrangements for my secret move back to the city. It was also my five-month-anniversary with my new boyfriend. But it was the last day he’d ever see me.
The attack had happened one week earlier. So fast I couldn’t escape. We had been arguing about some minor nonsense. I had been slowly realizing that M was an alcoholic. With anger issues. A misogynist. And after The Accident, he had been abusing the Percocet’s. Popping ’em like candy.
So, we’d had this little bullshit fight. I’d been cutting him slack for weeks because I knew he was in pain. Five broken ribs. But I was getting tired of being yelled at. Tired of being treated like shit. And tired of every ‘morning after’ that he couldn’t even remember what he’d said.
I retreated to the bedroom. I lay down on the bed with my phone. Ten minutes later he bursts into the room. He was livid. During this second round of the fight I said something like, “(sigh) Leave me alone, fuckface.” And it enraged him. Yickity yak. On and on. He finally went to leave the bedroom from the other door.
I got off the bed to shut the door behind him and he snapped.
In an instant I went from being angry to incredibly scared. He was four inches taller than me and a hundred pounds heavier. One second we were at the door. And then, in a fraction of a moment I saw him lunging. I held up my hands to try and stop him. He grabbed me, dragged me across the floor, and threw me down on the bed, pinning me down with a knee across my legs. His hands were wrapped around my right forearm and my left upper arm. He was squeezing as hard as he could, his fingernails digging into my skin. I yelled at him to stop. Begged him. “You’re hurting me!” And then I looked up at his face. He didn’t even notice me looking at him.
He looked like he was “in the zone.”
It was a look I’d seen many times on my father’s face. My dad was an unmedicated manic depressive. He took sadistic pleasure in scaring his grandchildren. In pulling his children’s pants down to their ankles, so he could hit our naked bottoms. With a belt. With his hand.
This I knew.
I knew that look of sadistic pleasure in his eyes. And that smile on his face. Yes. He was smiling.
And that look made me fight like hell. I literally tried to bite his forearm.
That’s how sure I was that he was just going to “get carried away” and kill me.
It was enough for him to loosen his grip, as he evaded my attempt to bite him. He was just re-positioning his hands though. It wasn’t over. I scratched the entire length of both forearms. He recoiled in pain. I rolled off the bed and ran out the front door, down the steps and into the front yard. He followed.
There was no way I was going to let him kill me or my dogs. I threatened to call the police. We lived at the end of the road with six little houses. I made sure those people heard me and knew what was going on.
He began to rewrite the fight almost immediately…
And then it began. I knew I had to proceed carefully. I had no money in the bank. This guy had sadly manipulated me into using my own cash and credit cards to pay for all expenses for the last several months.
For seven days after the attack I had to live with him.
I was afraid to go to bed at night, to fall asleep.
I suffer from PTSD and hypervigilance due to childhood sexual abuse. When he attacked me my condition intensified. It’s all about survival.
The way he attacked me was also the exact same way my rape began, back when I was an 18-year-old virgin. I was grabbed at the doorway of a bedroom, thrown down on a bed, pinned down in the same way, as my clothes were ripped off…
The similarity of the attack brought back that level of fear. I thought I’d never be in that state of mind again.
Every night for a week he made a point of luring one of my dogs, Dollar, downstairs to sleep with him. I slowly convinced him I needed time to think. I asked him to give me a week or two alone to think about things. We both immediately after the fight discussed continuing as business partners. We had several projects we were working on. One was renting his country place. I had spent the summer working my ass off, cleaning and painting and dehoarding his home. He agreed to go back to NYC while I finished the house.
During that week that he remained I furtively began pulling my things together so I could begin packing as soon as he left.
It took me ten days and two van loads to get back home safely. I parked his van near his apartment uptown. Once I was safely in my apartment I texted that I had moved out and the location where his van was parked. My phone went crazy with rapidfire texts from him. 15 or 20 texts. “What happened?” “I’m terribly sorry.” “You’re a psycho.” My phone literally froze and I had to restart in the middle of the onslaught.
And then the most disturbing one:
“Im coming down to at least say
good by to
Dollar you too I don’t deserve
this”
Remember how I said he was obsessed with Dollar that week? I had the feeling he’d have been happy to kill me and my other dog and claim Dollar as his. It was creepy. Dollar is super cool, though.
The only safe way to escape him had been to assure him that his interests were being served. I was safe, and I didn’t want to ever see him again.
I called and told him that if he ever came near me, I would call the police and file charges against him.
Now, he was not poor. I knew for a fact he had $70,000 sitting in his bank account. In the past month he’d bought a Saab convertible and a retro 1970s van. He’d dropped $390.00 on a BluePrint juice cleanse. He spent hundreds every month on Human Growth Hormone in a desperate attempt to flee his advancing age. He had lied about his age when I first met him. Shaving off 5 years. He dyed his hair and gobbled Viagra like Tic Tacs. Everything about him was a lie.
He even lied about being gay so he could get cheap rent in a NYC apartment with 3 gay men.
I’d been with him long enough to know he was lying about a lot of things. Being a ground zero hero. Yeah, he worked there shortly after 9/11. But he told me that a job he was with a few years ago was getting ready to fire him. In order to preempt that move, he filed for disability.
I’m not sure how sick he was or is. That’s between him and God, if she exists.
He did say that Aetna would pay big money to have photographs of him digging fence posts. Hey Aetna — I have those photos.
Why am I writing this now? Maybe it’s to vent. To get it out of my head. I haven’t felt like dating since my ordeal with him. I have never been so happy to be single.
Maybe it’s because I finished my taxes two days ago. And I’m still reeling from seeing in black and white how much money I lost by being with him for those few months. We’re talking thousands of dollars, not hundreds. I’ll be paying that debt off for a long time.
Thanks, fuckface.
I originally intended to write my story so people could understand the sadness in the aftermath of domestic violence. Why so many women stay. Hell, I wanted to stay, even after. I wanted to forgive him. And I might have, if I hadn’t seen that smile on his face. That pleasure in his eyes.
But tonight, M gave me a reason to sit down and write my story. The texts started pouring in. A looong video of a bee on a moldy peanut. A photo of the sky at night with the moon shining through tree branches. A video of two chickens in the backyard. Four photos of his new girlfriend’s dog.
And the final video: sitting in the living room we once shared, zooming in on a bird outside the window. You can hear his girlfriend start to enter the room, singsongingly speaking to her puppy. And then I hear his voice. “Don’t come in here!” he warns her in a firm tone. Then he tries to cover by explaining he doesn’t want her to startle the “pileated woodpecker” he’s filming.
The creepy thing? (Besides the creepy combo of messages.)
Her voice sounds like mine.
And then he texts two words: “Later grifter.”
Wow.
I learned long ago, and have carefully studied it in the years since I first heard it, that when someone flings an accusation at you, it is usually the truth about themselves.
He is still obsessed with me. He is angry that I convinced him to give me a partial payment on the money he scammed me out of. He’s pissed that when I moved out, I took some of the things I’d bought. I didn’t leave him enough free shit. He is furious that I won’t respond to him.
Tonight wasn’t the first time he’s texted me photos. Or cryptic angry snippets. But I don’t respond.
That’s another thing I’ve learned. The best response when someone is angry, especially when they are crazy, is silence. It drives them insane.
So this will be my only response to him. A very public response. And if you know whose dog this is, warn her.
And to all the future women who might see this loser’s profile on match.com — gates_of_fire — and believe that he is really “athletic and toned” as he states in his profile,
this is what he really looks like. High, drunk and passed out.
Oh, and if after all this, you are still considering dating him, know this. He has saved every scrap of correspondence from every woman he’s met online. He has notes on different women to keep track of them. He has a certain technique to seducing a woman. He was proud to tell me.
New girlfriend: Did he put his hand on your knee during the date, and slide it up your leg? If you didn’t stop him he knew it “was a go.” Did he say something cute like “One day we can tell our grandchildren about the way we met.” That’s how he proceeds on every date. He has a tally of women he’s had sex with. I was number 152.
He wants to write his sexual experiences in a book.
As for me, I’m going to get to work on paying off my debt. His advice to me, after I finally got that partial payment out of him, was to stop paying my credit cards. Declare bankruptcy.
Sorry. That’s not how I roll. I’ll pay my debts and go on and have a happy life. Oh, sorry. I meant your debts.
I choose to remember the joy of my dogs running in the fields. That’s what I’ll try and salvage from my summer of dating a con man.
