TIME TO GET SERIOUS
When I turned thirty, I decided it was time to ‘get serious’ and get
married. I saw this tall man in a double breasted suit carrying a briefcase in
front of a gallery opening I was going to and I said to myself, “he looks like a
husband, I’m going to marry HIM.” So a year from that day, we got married. My
wedding night, I realized I’d made a mistake. He accidentally got us locked out
on the porch of the Marriott Hotel in Poughkeepsie and still, in my wedding
dress, it took them over an hour to discover us and get us out; the problem was,
I was bored. That was pretty much the beginning of the end. He told me a year
later, that he wanted me to stay at home and have two children and stop making
my art work because he felt that the ‘environment’ in my studio was ‘dangerous’.
He was just jealous that I loved my work and for some reason, he didn’t love
hooking up peoples computers on network systems all day long, which in fact, is
something he still does a decade later, though he blamed me for it, and went on
Prozac. Anyway…one morning I get up, it’s around 10 a.m., I turned the TV on to
“I Love Lucy”, made myself a gin and tonic and as I was walking toward the couch
I stopped dead and looked at my hand. WHAT THE HELL WAS I DOING!!!! I phoned and
went to a therapist for the first time in my life. Two weeks later, I moved out.
The last time I saw him was in court and he was wearing that same double
breasted suit with his briefcase. My friend Stella came with me. She spent the
entire time telling me how this 300 pound diabetic lesbian women who lives above
her, was feeding the squirrels and they were eating her flower bulbs and she was
really pissed about this. When it was over, we stood on line to the bathroom at
the Jersey City Court House. There was a woman in front of us a bit bloody
around the mouth, and missing a lot of teeth. She recounted to us, the story of
her alcoholic husband who had beat her up for the third time and she was in
court to get an order of protection or something and then someone on a toilet
started screaming there wasn’t any toilet paper….we finally got out of there and
went to the dock in Jersey City and watched the ferry move people from Manhattan
to New Jersey, and back again. It was very soothing doing this. Stella died five
years later from lung cancer though she didn’t smoke.