Bunk beds and romance.

I was so excited to be home with our son. I just knew that everything would be ok now. We were a family and life would be as I had pictured it, perfect.

I wanted the story-book life and I was foolish enough to believe that you can have that.

Anyway, this is also where we met Pam and her fiancé Bob. I thought they were so cool, the perfect couple. They lived in the apartment next to ours, and we became fast friends. These cool friends would play an interesting roll in our lives years later.

I didn’t realize until much later that the person that I thought was “just so nice” was a very manipulative woman who always got what she wanted; at any cost.

It was interesting living there, to say the least.

The woman who lived above us was old and very cranky. She spoke broken English, and she kept calling the superintendent on us saying we had a cement mixer in the living room that we were running all night long. I kid you not. I have no idea what this woman was hearing; we never heard anything. Not even my husband was that nuts.

One evening the superintendent came to our door and asked if she could bring the woman through our apartment to show her that we did not have any equipment that would make a noise like she stated she heard every night.

This did not satisfy her. We had shelves that divided the living room and the dining room. These shelves consisted of boards set on cinder blocks. It fit into our style, didn’t cost much and it was functional.

When they left, the superintendent called to let us know that she was satisfied that we weren’t building anything in our living room, but the woman was now convinced that we were throwing the cinder blocks around at night. She was a nut too. I should have moved up stairs to her apartment and let her live with my Gary.

Several weeks later it was our turn. We called the super on her. She was sneaking out of the apartment in the middle of the night, making a great deal of noise, while trying to skip out on her rent. Gottcha!!!!

Our relationship with our new-found friends was moving along just fine. They were fun to be around and tended to have parties on the weekends. I am embarrassed to say that I would go next door to their apartment for the party, while Shayne was in our apartment sleeping. I would check on him often, but the fact that I left him alone at all still haunts me.

It’s funny, whenever there was a party and I would leave to check on Shayne, not one person expressed concern or shock that I would leave a baby in the next apartment alone. This is the group of people that I wanted so much to fit in with.

Life for us had it's ups and downs. Gary as working steadily and that was a good thing. His temper had it's ebbs and tides that came with no rhyme nor reason. You just never knew.

It was in our apartment that he broke my beautiful gift from Maggie and also my glass owl cookie jar from my aunt. I loved that jar, which is why he smashed it I guess.

Whenever he got like that, I always ran for my chime clock that my dad had given me when he retired. I just couldn't have let him smash that too. Not that.

Between the mixed bag of friends that we had and Gary’s personality is it any wonder that any of us are alive today. The things that this rag-tag group did boggles my mind to this day.

I was just as bad, I went along for the ride.

Cheating seemed to be the norm for my new-found female friends. It seemed that Gary was the only male that was stepping out. Figures, while all my girl friends were out screwing around and having the time of their lives, I was home playing Suzie homemaker with a dirt bag husband who thought fidelity was a dirty word.

I do have to hand it to one of my friends for the way she handled her infidelity, and situations where any normal person would have gotten caught.

This particular friend was our cool neighbor. To my knowledge, she didn’t cheat when they lived in the apartments while she was. I believe it all started after the wedding, when they moved into their new home. Beautiful, wait until you swear your solemn vows and then screw around.

Gary and I were in their wedding. We wore lovely; brown fake fur muffs and little pill-box fake fur hats. As far as the dresses went, we were supposed to make our own. I don’t know how to sew, and if memory serves me correctly, I waited until the week of the wedding to ask my mom and I believe my sister Susan for help in making it.

The dress got made, along with the hat and muff. I looked like a large, molting bear Grizzly.

Our group of friends knew how to party, and that is what we did, all the time on the weekends. Drugs were the name of the game. We were at a party at their home one evening and low and behold there was no cocaine to be found… God, how can we enjoy ourselves now? This party was going to suck for sure. It didn’t matter that there was enough booze and beer flowing to cater to a party of 50 people, let alone the fifteen that were actually there.

Well, if you have a package of diet pill capsules and you are my husband, you will find a way. He opened the capsules and snorted it like cocaine. It did absolutely nothing but it made him feel like he was experiencing something. (DO NOT TRY THIS, IT IS NOT SAFE).

At this point in my life I had decided that pot, cocaine and acid were not something that I wanted to be doing. I had sworn off all drugs and decided that beer was my drug of choice. I had seen too much the first year of marriage; I had had enough. It got to the point for my friends where if there weren’t drugs at the party, there was no reason to party. Uppers, downers, cocaine, Quaaludes; you name it, my friends did it. It scared the hell out of me.

It just wasn’t cool anymore. I missed the days when all our parties consisted of was beer and if we were lucky, a bottle of Jack Daniels. If you over did it, you threw up, end of story.

Have you ever been to a party and you were the only one not high or stoned? It is not a pretty sight.

It didn’t matter what drug it was, if it was available, he did it. It was difficult to know sometimes if he was going to be up or down. It all depended on the color of the little pill he took. It was a roller coaster life that most of my friends enjoyed.


It is at one of these parties that Gary asked me if he could sleep with Pam. He felt that her husband didn’t appreciate her, even though they were newlyweds, and he needed to teach him a lesson by sleeping with her; thus letting him know what he was missing.

Of course, I had to think about this one. I finally said no, which caused a huge argument between us. I was called every name in the book for being such a selfish bitch. Again I was reminded that it wasn’t cheating or about the sex if he was doing it to help someone.

I stuck to my guns on this one. I don’t know why he felt he needed my permission on this, he hadn’t asked me to sleep with the heart-broken girl on the beach, why ask now? I don’t know if he followed through on his idea. I don’t want to know, even now.

Well, during the next year or so, this lady had several one-night stands. Her business, I realize that, but it is how she got out of being caught one night that sticks in my mind.

She had gone out shopping and ended up coming home at around 2:00am. I think that might raise suspicions in your husband’s mind, don’t you think? She was good though, I have to give her that. When she arrived home, before he had a chance to confront her, she burst into tears and told him that she had been at the police station for the last several hours.

It seems that while driving down the road near our local K-Mart, the car in front of her threw a bag out of their car window into the wooded area on the side of the road. Being curious, she pulled over to see what they had discarded.

Low and behold, it was a baby in a bag; a little crying baby. Now, you simply cannot make up this shit. She told that to her husband and he believed her. Or so he said. She proceeded to tell him that she spent the following hours at the police station giving her statement.

I’m sorry, but if that were my spouse, I would, if nothing else, call the police station the next day to see if the child was ok.

Looking back at who I was at that point in my life, I hope to God that I wouldn’t have believed my husband if he spun that story at me.

Now, she also had a hickey from this tryst that she had that night. Problem you say? Not for her. She jumped into bed with her husband, proceeded to make love to him and gently persuaded his mouth to her neck, thus, the next morning she informed him that he had left the mark.

You have to search far and wide for friends of this caliber. Now, Gary, as you know, handled his infidelity differently. He would just tell me he had sex with someone else, or, bring them home for a tussle.

One of our other female friends kept an alphabetical list of her lovers. It was over 100 strong and still going. Every single couple that we hung out with are now divorced, which doesn’t shock me in the least. We were so reckless. We lived for the moment without regard for anything or anyone else. We expected life to be a constant party, which it was for a while.

I bailed out of the scene long before anyone else did. I just could not take it anymore. I had, at this point in my life a small child to take care of and sitting around snorting coke didn’t seem like the thing that I should be doing. That’s when most of my friends started to disappear out of my life.

I was hurt and confused at first, but thank God for small miracles’, don’t you think?
It wouldn’t be long before I was pregnant again. I had been using a form of birth control, but as luck would have it, it didn’t take. Of this I can only say that because of that “mishap” I was given a beautiful daughter, who I wouldn’t trade for anything or anyone, ever.

It was a difficult time for us, we didn’t have much money and Gary clearly had priorities other than his family, but our family and my friends thought our relationship was strong. But, I was thrilled as was my family. We always believed that things have a way of working our and they were always there for me.
Gary’s family on the other hand was not so happy. His sister didn’t speak to us for days, and only called a week later to apologize and explain that they just didn’t do things that way in her family. Every thing was planned.

My parents felt that with another child on the way, we needed a home of our own. They loaned us the down payment for our adorable two bedroom cottage and once again, I thought that my life would turn itself around and we would be the perfect family.

I loved our house, and Gary proceeded to furnish it for us. God help me….

I wish I still had that house. But, that was not to happen.
It had a nice living room, two small bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen and one bathroom. It was the perfect starter home for a family of our size.

The one oddity was that the back door was in our bedroom. It was a very small room by anyone’s standards, and Gary and I were not small people. Being the furniture guru that my husband was, he had the grand idea that instead of sleeping in a double bed that would take up most of the room, he would build us bunk beds.

Yup, bunk beds. The romance just oozed out of our marriage.

So, the building began. These were not your ordinary bunk beds mind you. Gary was a big man. He needed a lot of room so he could sit on the bottom bunk with relative comfort. He couldn’t sit up straight and tall, but he didn’t want to have to slouch much either.


Wait a minute, I certainly wasn’t a small woman by any stretch, and I was pregnant to boot; why did I have to get the top bunk? Why, because I was told I was getting the top. I was such a twit.


The room’s size made it necessary for the ladder to be at the foot of the beds, not on the side. So, being the submissive one in this marriage, I got to climb up the ladder, and once at the top, turn around so I would be on my back and push my way to the head of the bed. It was an acrobatic accomplishment to get up the ladder, make it to the head of the bed and under the covers, all the while trying to maneuver my belly from side to side while making the journey up the ladder.

Now, try to imagine yourself eight months pregnant, lying on your back with only inches separating you and the ceiling; a leg cramp comes and your initial reaction is to sit bolt right up in bed. This action causes you to smash your head on the ceiling, pushing you back down, all the while trying to point your toes towards your head to relieve the leg cramp that is making your calf muscles contort in ways that could earn you a position with the circus. To make matters worse, you have to pee.

Life just doesn’t get any better than that does it?

And Jesus Christ, don’t startle the man lying in the bed beneath you when he was sleeping. You could end up dead. He had an arsenal of weapons under his mattress; a gun, knives, and a machete; sleep tight babe.

Another wonderful experience I had with being on the top bunk was when I was six months pregnant with Brittany and got sun poisoning on my legs.

I had spent the day with my mother at the beach watching an air show. It was an overcast day and I didn’t realize that I could get a severe burn. My pasty white legs were purple. I should have gone to the hospital for treatment, but it just didn’t occur to me.

I was in such pain. Just to stand up sent electric shocks through my legs that made it almost impossible to walk more than a few feet at a time without sitting down to catch my breath from the pain.

The only thing that took any of the pain and heat away was Noxzema. I would spread it on about a half inch thick and then lay damp wash rags over them. Now, try to do that and then climb up a ladder, turn around on the top step without falling, and shimmy on your back to the head of the bed.

The pain was unbearable, there was Noxzema everywhere, and all my man could do was tell me to suck it up and maybe next time I wouldn’t let myself get so burned.

It didn’t dawn on me until this writing that he never offered the bottom bunk to me so I wouldn’t have to climb that ladder, pregnant, and with my legs so burned you could have cooked a meal on them.

Can you imagine the 911 call if I had gotten stuck up there. My stomach got very large when I was pregnant with Brittany, and with my legs in such pain, I could very easily have gotten stuck. I am sure that the look on the EMT’s faces would have been priceless? I think that they would have needed the Jaws of Life to get me off that bed.

My eyes were finally starting to open to who he really was. Have you ever heard the expression “dumb as a stump?” That was me all the way.

Brittany was born on a December evening, Gary at my side. She was perfect, just as Shayne had been. I was more experienced this time around, so when I went to the bathroom on the bedpan, and afterbirth came out, I didn’t call the nurse hysterical thinking that my uterus had fallen out.

When it was time to bring our child home, it would be my mom who came to the hospital for us.

It was at this point in our lives that things went from crazy to insane.

If the events that were to follow didn’t force me to grow up and take responsibility for myself and my children, than I didn’t deserve them anymore than he did.