Escalating Bad Craziness would best define my 8 year marriage to the woman I’d met in an AA meeting… The chances of any alcoholic or drug addict remaining clean and sober for a protracted period of time are abysmal… Let’s say the odds are 50-50… Well… I stayed sober.
Why is the Refrigerator in the Front Lawn?
Things just hadn’t been going well for quite a while. I’d just bought this house because my growing family needed the room and I wanted my kids to be in a better part of town with better schools… You know…” The American Dream” However shortly after moving up in the world the crazy lady I was married to decided to flush it all down the $h1tter… Drugs. It was all beginning to wear me down and I had been contemplating divorce for quite a while however, I have a very hard head and was willing to put up with an awful lot for the sake of the children… This was all rolling through my head as I drove home from work that evening.
Xanax is an amazing drug when taken in extremely high doses.
I passed my refrigerator sitting in the front lawn as I pulled into my driveway and as soon as I shut the car off I could hear screaming coming from inside the house… Quite honestly this was nothing new… Well… There hadn’t been any major appliances left out front before but screaming was becoming very common. As I stepped from the car crazy lady came storming out through the garage shouting something in a language I could not decipher… I walked right past her and in through the back door… I was met with quite a scene.
The kitchen cabinet doors were all stacked on a table and the vapor was so heavy it was almost visible… Paint stripper… There were drops, splashes, Foot and hand prints on everything… As I pressed on into the house I saw tools.. Cans.. Buckets… And our two screaming toddlers… All covered in paint stripper.
As I ran the two little ones into the bathroom and started to rinse them down I could hear crazy lady running what sounded like rocks down the garbage disposal… I think this was the first time I considered killing crazy lady… Oh, I’d thought about before this incident but this day homicide was definitely on the table as a solution to the 300 ring circus our life had become.
Hmm… You know I think this story is as much about Alcoholics Anonymous and the people that populate AA meetings as much as anything else, however, I think I’ll leave that rant for another day… Okay… Where was I? … Oh yeah… I was considering murdering crazy lady.
So after getting the little ones inspected for any damage that might require skin grafts, and finding none, I began to wonder “How did this all get so whacked?”
The noise from the kitchen had stopped… Oh-oh… I looked up from what I was doing and Crazy Lady was standing in the hall just staring at me and calmly as can be said: “You had better leave now, I called the Police and they are on their way”… Just like that… And she seemed almost lucid.
I stood up, walked over to her, and from about 2 inches from her face told her she’d better hope they got here soon, because I was going to paint the walls with her blood.
The Unwinding
Crazy Lady locked herself in the bedroom… I locked the 2 toddlers in their bedroom along with my 14 year old step daughter… She had been hiding in a closet all that time (smart kid)… I stepped out side to wait and I was sitting in the garage with the door open when the Police arrived.
Two patrol cars nosed in the driveway behind my car, both officers looked at the refrigerator sitting on the lawn as they stepped from their cars… One walked over to the fridge and opened the door… What looked to be milk came spilling from the bottom…
Huh, she didn’t bother to empty it out before she moved it… Remarkable.
After it was determined Crazy Lady was behind the mayhem and had passed out from the drugs rather than a beating, the police removed the had cuffs the put on me “For my own protection” and asked me what I wanted to do and I replied honestly that I would like to cut her into little pieces… I was given a stern look… But I could see they understood. So I said “Just take her cray a$$ to jail”.
There were now 4 police people there and I had given them the go ahead to search the house… They had found what looked like a lifetime supply of prescription drugs hidden all over the place and it was decided that Crazy Lady should go to the nuthouse for detox rather than jail.
Crazy Lady is Committed… Again.
So Crazy Lady went to the Nut House for her second stay in a year, and this gave me some time to think. I’d like to tell you this was the end of it but I’m just not that smart. She would go to the hospital for special people two more times before there were any divorce papers filed but the day the refrigerator wound up in the lawn will always be the day that marriage ended for me.
I spent a good part of that time she was gone cleaning up the physical mess but I also spent some time pondering what was wrong with me that I had let it go so far… I mean, I had to ask myself at this point… “Are you insane?” … I guess the answer was yes… And…
Nobody Knows What I’ve Done.
Sounds ominous doesn’t it?
In the course of crazy ladies going crazy, she had garnered a lot of sympathy and support from many people and I can’t even tell you everything I’d been accused of because there was just so much… Everything from prank calls to molesting the children none of it true… But it certainly set the stage for what was coming.
Aside from the material losses due to the cost of the horrid divorce and custody battle there was a lot of “humanity” lost… Many people I once trusted and considered spiritual giants turned out to be nothing more than vampires and zombies…
And worse than the living dead blood suckers, there were a few pit vipers. I was at one point witness to an elder statesmen of AA committing willful perjury and wound up in a knock down drag out fistfight with another. Like I said in here someplace this is a story as much about AA as it is about the refrigerator… AA worked for me as in I’m still clean and sober but it didn’t work for her and in the course of all this insanity I found out why that is… Perhaps I will expand on that subject in a later post.
In the end of it all a year or two later it was determined by the courts that she was so crazy they gave me custody of her kid as well but not until after everything was destroyed.
Phone Tapping and Safe Cracking
I sat across the table from my divorce lawyer who had this quizzical look on his face and he said “Just how do you know it’s your wife behind the phone calls you are being accused of?”.
“Well, it’s because I’ve tapped the phones”
And his reply was ” And this is how you know she is calling in her own prescriptions for drugs as well as running up all that credit debt in your name?”
“Um… No… I got that from cracking her safe and reading her 4th Step”
“4th Step?”
“Yes… It’s like a confession.”
His eyebrows went up… “She confessed to you?”
“Um… No she confessed to God and someone else… Probably her “sponsor”.. I just stole a look at the rough draft by cracking her safe”. I handed him a stack of photocopies of crazy ladies most personal secrets and he spent the next 20 minutes reading before he looked up…
“Remarkable… You really need a divorce don’t you?”
… Dude you haven’t even gotten to the good parts yet.
My notes: November, 1, 2003
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