Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (13 page)

During the construction of that house,
everything went wrong. It almost felt like the property was an old
Indian burial ground and there was a curse on the house. The
builder went bankrupt. So I hired a second builder, and he went
bankrupt, too. I ended up suing the first one in court, and
threatened to do the same to the second one, if he didn't finish
the house. Altogether that whole ordeal took about 4 years, and I
had to drive to the Poconos many times to monitor the progress, or
lack thereof.

So Donna already knew that the phone signal
in the Poconos was very bad. But that didn't matter. It seemed like
she was making my life miserable on purpose, simply because she was
bored, and conflict was her only source of entertainment while she
sat home alone.

I was under constant stress while living
with her, because she went from being nice to being a totally
psycho hostile bitch from one minute to the next. I never knew what
would set off her next tantrum. Looking back at it later, I
realized how abusive her behavior was. But at the time, while I was
going through it, it just seemed like normal life to me.

Early on in our relationship, when I just
moved to New York, I was writing a letter to my parents. I was
answering one of their letters. They had written that the girl who
cleaned their house, an architecture student from Bulgaria, asked
them to tell me she said hello. Donna didn't like that, so she told
me to ask my parents not to ever mention that Bulgarian whore in
their letters to me ever again.

So in my reply to them, I asked them not to
mention the Bulgarian girl anymore, because Donna was kinda
sensitive about things like that. Donna decided to proof-read my
German letter, even though she couldn't read German. She asked me
to translate word for word what exactly I wrote about the Bulgarian
whore, while she stared at my letter.

When I got to the part where I had written
that Donna was a little sensitive when it came to other girls, she
asked me if that word she saw in my letter meant sensible. I said,
no, it means sensitive.

She completely lost it and went on a
rampage. She started screaming at me that I was making a fool out
of her and she smashed plates in the kitchen. She grabbed my 6 page
hand-written letter and ripped it up. I tried to stop her, and she
screamed for help, as if I was raping her. Her younger brother
still lived with his parents upstairs at that time. He heard
Donna's screams, ran down the stairs, broke down the front door,
and threatened me with a baseball bat, while I calmy tried to
explain to him that I hadn't even touched her, and she was the one
attacking me, not the other way around.

All that drama, because she felt that I
should have used the word sensible in my letter, and that calling
her a little sensitive when it comes to other girls was making a
fool out of her. So it rrreally didn't take much to set off one of
her over-the-top tantrums.

I read an article on domestic violence and
abusive relationships that said that people who grow up in an
abusive home, tend to end up in abusive relationships, because that
hostile dynamic seems normal to them. Without even realizing it,
they are attracted to people who will abuse them in some form or
another.

Back then I didn't even realize that the
tension I always felt around Donna was very similar to the anxiety
I had when my biological father was still alive and he would always
start arguments with my mother for no reason, just so that he would
have an excuse to storm out of the house and go on his next
drinking binge.

The constant anticipation of Donna's next
tantrum was not unlike the feeling my mother and I had while
sitting on the living room couch, watching a movie, but always
alert, and with our hearts pounding if we heard the front gate
creak in the wind, always anticipating that my father was about to
come and kill us.

One time Donna and I were arguing about some
trivial bullshit. The next day, neither one of us could remember
what we had even been arguing about the night before. It really was
a non-issue that nobody in their right mind would ever argue
about.

During the argument, she became completely
unhinged again, as usual. She always figured that if she got crazy
enough, I would give in at some point and do what she says. I had
learned to just walk away from her when she got totally mental like
that.

So I was trying to walk out of the house and
go see a movie. She blocked my way by standing in the bedroom
doorway. I shoved her aside and walked out. She started smashing
the bedroom door with her fist, and punched a large hole in it.
Almost like the hole my dad had put in the bedroom door when he
tried to kill my mother and me.

THE DIVORCE

"When people divorce, it's always such a tragedy. At
the same time, if people stay together it can be even worse."

Monica Bellucci

"A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but
there's less of you."

Margaret Atwood

"Divorce is just the most awful thing in the
world."

John Denver

"Divorce is probably as painful as death."

William Shatner

"I was so devastated by my second divorce that I had
a nervous breakdown."

Jane Fonda

"People that go through what I went through and
people going through divorce, it's really a difficulty process;
it's heartbreaking and it hurts really bad. It can really mess with
your head."

David Arquette

"Breakups are a horrible thing for almost everybody I
know. For someone who is a love addict, it's debilitating."

Alanis Morissette

"To get over my divorce, I got a prescription to live
at the Playboy Mansion for a while."

James Caan

Year after year, I told myself that I wasn't
going to put up with her crazy bullshit anymore. I told myself that
the next time she had one of her totally pointless, unreasonable,
uncalled-for tantrums, I would get a divorce.

But then the next time we had a huge fight,
because she didn't want to go to the movies, or she accused me of
purposely buying the wrong kind of peanut butter, or I supposedly
fucked a whore in the backseat during the few minutes my phone had
no signal, I always felt like I would be totally overreacting if I
got a divorce because she didn't want to go to the movies. That
just sounded so silly. Why did you get divorce? Because my wife
didn't want to go to the movies with me.

But I was really just making excuses,
because getting a divorce and totally changing my life was scary.
She had managed to drive away all my friends with her tantrums. If
she didn't want to go see a movie, I figured maybe I could go with
my friend Kenny. But she became insanely jealous even when I hung
out with other guys. She acted like any time I did not totally
focus all my attention on her, and I dared to speak to another
human being, I was doing something wrong, and it had to be met with
fierce vengeance.

Even when I talked on the phone with my
mother in Germany, Donna acted like my mother was "the other
woman." She always accused me of conspiring against her with my
mother somehow. And she often asked me, if I had to choose between
Donna and my mother, who would I pick?

I did ask Kenny to come over once or twice,
so we could play video games. Donna acted normal for the first few
minutes, and then started some kind of argument over nothing that
quickly escalated to the point where Kenny was really uncomfortable
being in the middle of all that screaming.

Of course he didn't really feel like coming
over anymore after that. And I didn't really want him to come over
anymore either, because it was embarrassing to have one of my
co-workers witness what a psycho Donna was.

Little by little I lost all my friends, and
Donna was now the only person I hung out with. Especially after I
quit my newspaper job and I didn't have to work anymore.

To be honest, I didn't even mind hanging out
only with her. I'm not exactly a social butterfly. I'm perfectly
content spending my nights cuddling on the couch with my special
someone, watching a good movie or playing video games. I'm not a
big fan of parties or large social gatherings.

I would have loved being married to Donna,
if she didn't always go out of her way to make me miserable. She
wasn't just my wife, but also my best friend. She really was the
only person I wanted to hang out with. If only she could have
stopped throwing these pointless tantrums and if she could have
gotten over her damn agoraphobia and come on little road trips with
me, or go to the mall or a county fair with me or something. I
would have been sooo happy and content.

One day, while I was at the Six Flags
Hurricane Harbor waterpark in New Jersey, alone as usual, I finally
had to admit to myself that no matter how much I wished for things
to get better with Donna, they were never going to change. I was
floating down the lazy river on a rubber tube, alone, while
watching all these happy couples around me, floating down the river
in double tubes, kissing, laughing, splashing, and holding hands.
It hit me like a brick wall that day that I was never ever going to
have that kind of experience with Donna.

That was the day I decided to get a divorce,
because I realized that she wasn't just ruining her own life with
her behavior, but my life as well. I didn't want to wake up one
day, and be old and gray, and my whole life passed me by.

I knew that if I told Donna I wanted to get
a divorce, she would fight me tooth and nail, to make my life as
miserable as possible. Whenever she got something in her head, she
couldn't let it go, like she was OCD or something. And she was
relentlessly vindictive.

So if I was going to go through a long,
drawn out divorce with her, she would sit there day and night,
trying to find new ways to make my life miserable. If I was going
to get a divorce, it had to be over as quickly as possible.

I started googling divorces. I knew that Las
Vegas was the capital of instant marriages. I was hoping that
getting a divorce there was equally easy. But, turns out, it's
not.

Then I read that you can get a quickie
divorce in the Caribbean. That sounded promising. But then I read
in the small print that US courts don't necessarily honor a foreign
divorce, and Donna would still have been able to contest it in a
New York court and make my life miserable for months.

After some more research, I discovered Guam.
Lovely, lovely Guam. You didn't even have to go there. All you had
to do was mail the divorce papers there, a judge stamped the
papers, and you were divorced. Boom! Just like that. And since Guam
is part of the United States (Surprised? Google it.) every court in
every State honored the divorce. I had found the Yin to Las Vegas'
Yang!

So if I filed for divorce in Guam, it would
be over instantly, and then Donna would not be able to contest it
in a New York court. The only catch was that she had to sign the
paperwork before I sent it to Guam. I knew there was no way she was
going to do that, unless she thought the divorce was her own
idea.

I tried to figure out a way how to approach
her, so that she would think the divorce was her idea. It took me
four more years, until I finally had the courage to actually go
through with it.

She had been the only person in my life for
the past 15 years or so. I had no support network, no friends, and
no family in the States. I knew that the divorce would be very very
hard on me, and that was a scary thought. I knew I was miserable
with the way things were now. But what if I was going to be even
more miserable after the divorce?

Week after week, month after month, I made
excuses why I wasn't going to file for divorce this week: well,
it's almost Christmas. I can't divorce her right before Christmas.
That would be terrible.

It's almost Valentine's Day. What kind of a
cruel scumbag files for divorce right before Valentine's Day?

It's her birthday next week. I can't divorce
her on her birthday.

The truth was, I was really just scared of
the great unknown after the divorce.

By now I had heavily invested in real
estate, and I owned 2 houses in Canada, a few condos in New York, 4
or 5 houses in Florida, a rental house in the Poconos, and the big
mansion that was still being built in the Poconos.

After I had bought another house in Florida,
I told Donna that since the mansion in the Poconos was probably
never going to be finished, we should move into the new house in
Florida. It was 3000 square feet and in a beautiful gated community
called Olympia Pointe, on Lee Boulevard in Fort Myers.

Of course she didn't want to. I knew she
wouldn't. But I wouldn't let it go. I kept asking her, showed her
pictures of the house, and tried to convince her how awesome living
in that house would be.

It didn't take long until she pulled out her
nuclear option: "Well, if you really want to move into that house,
I guess we are going to have to get a divorce, because I'm not
going."

I had anticipated that response while I had
learned to navigate around her tantrums. I didn't like to be
manipulative, but it was really the only way to survive the
relationship with her without constantly arguing about every God
damn thing. I had learned that with a little bit of reverse
psychology, I could make her think that whatever I wanted to do was
really what she wanted to do.