Advice on Marriage

He cracked up and asked me a few questions about it. He started prying for information about my parents, my personal history, and my youth. All are areas I'm not particularly comfortable with talking about. When I go in to topics like that, I usually start talking like some wicked cross between a stoner and a D&D convention attendee. So when I began to sense my limbs flailing, my speech failing and coming out in slurred half-sentences, I cut him off at the pass.

"I just remembered another one. A favorite."

I related the tale of the girl who I had taken home with the sole intention of having intercourse with her and driving her home. The one where she starts biting and scratching and I keep pulling out to get her to stop until finally she latches on to my arm like a snapping turtle and doesn't let go. This is the story that ends when I punch her in the face in a final, desperate attempt to end the great pain and phsyical trauma that she is causing me. I finish the story in the customary way, imitating the aroused moan that she made when I socked her good on her jaw.

The camerman waited. "And then what? She let go?"

"Eventually," I said.

"Hunh. Must've been some awful teethmarks on there."

"Yup."

"Do you have a scar?"

"Nope."

"Hunh."

"Are you married?"

"Yes," he said. "A good one. A good marriage. I always tell her that she should've been my first."

"Why wasn't she?"

"Dunno."

"Hunh."

"My daughter attended our wedding."

"Like, your daughter? That you had with your current wife? She attended your wedding? How old was she."

"Two. She was the flower girl. We had her before we got married. The little girl even told some other kids at school that she had attended her wedding. They called a PTA meeting. Said that she had confused the other children."

"Good for her," I said, grinning. "May she confuse the other children for the rest of her days."

"Yeah, well, the wife and I told her not to tell other people that she attended her parents wedding anymore."

"That's awful. How sad. I mean, well, like, I dunno. Shouldn't it be an important lesson for your daughter to learn - and to teach - that there's more than one right way to do pretty much everything?"

"Yeah. I think the wife took her aside later and told her what you just said now. She was confused, too. She thought that's how everyone did it. She thought everyone got to be the flower girl at their parents wedding."

I pictured a little girl, the proudest girl in the town for one day, tossing rose petals into the air, watching them fall, and showing off her big new special wedding dress. What a smile she must've had on that day.

"We had told her, you know, initially, that her mother and I met at the little girl store when we both wanted the same one."

"That's incredibly sweet. And she believed you?"

"Yep."

"I guess when you're that young, it's hard to remember anything in the past. She must've thought, hey, that sounds plausible."

We both laughed and then it was time to shoot. He didn't want me to touch the lenses, the camera, the magazines, the tripod, nothing. I respected that and understood. Even when I work with The Big Guy as his assistant cameraman, I don't like him touching anything until it's time to choose and shoot the shot. I don't like him helping me to break it down, either. That way I know where everything is. I am in complete control. If anything goes missing or wrong, I want it to be my fault. Besides, if only one of us is setting up and breaking down, it's easier to keep track of all the gear. I keep things organized.

But, still desperate to be useful, I gave him footage counts as the Kodak 5218 sped through his old german camera at 24 frames a second.

Eventually we had finished what we had come to accomplish. We sat down in the hallway of the apartment building to load the film out in to cans, to prepare them for shipment to California.

"What's imporant to maintaining a good marriage," I asked. " I'm pretty new to this, and all I hear is unsolicited cracks from cynical tough guys, things that sound like something they read in an e-mail forward. 'Three special words is all yeh need, buddy, three special words: you're right deah.' And they crack themselves up and I think to myself fuck you and plus if you're so fuckin' tough how come you're still married to this bitch that you so clearly hate?"

The camera operator laughed but quickly got serious.

"You've got to be friends. Friendship is so important. You've got to want to be with her all the time. It's got to be, like, you'd still want to hang out with her, even if you weren't married, even if you weren't together. There's no big secret to a good marriage. If it's good, it's good. If you hate her, if you want to strangle her, if you wouldn't hang out with her if you weren't living together, well, it's going to be a bad, shitty marriage. That's what my first was like. My new wife? My second? We can sit on the couch and talk about bullshit, about nothing. She's great. It's like that with us. We're friends. That's the most important thing. Friendship. There's no big secret, no top ten tips to a successful marriage."

"And anyone who tells you there are top ten tips to anything is selling something, anyway," I added. I hate that shit.

"Exactly."

This was all good news. This is what I had been thinking all along, but cynical people I don't respect had been telling me otherwise ever since I had gotten engaged.

It was just nice to hear it out of someone else's mouth. Without prompting.

And, someday, eventually, maybe soon, I'll get my writing legs back. I think not reading Jon Katz's "Dogs of Bedlam Farm" will help. He writes flavorless navel-gazing paragraphs detailing the soft and cushy ways that he has healed and discovered himself, and others, through his relationship with dogs.

My mom sent it to me. I love her very, very much. But I don't much care for the book she sent me. Even writing about not liking the book she sent me makes me feel guilty because it means so much to me that she made that effort.

That's something that always used to tear me up when I was younger. It still does, a bit, but it doesn't sting as much as it used to. When people bought me gifts, no matter what it was, I imagined them taking time out of their days to go to the store, thinking about me, picking something out, something specific that they had in mind that they thought would make me happy. The time spent waiting in line at the post office, the money spent on postage, and their subsequent anticipation of my receipt of their package. The anticipation of my response.

All that effort, thought, and emotion, aimed at me. That gaping wound that sucked at my chest, that drove me to cutting and nearly killed me all those years, yawned wide enough to swallow me whole one special day a year.

I used to cry on birthdays because I hated myself so much. All those people going to all that trouble for useless, hopeless, pathetic me. I felt as though I had betrayed them, tricked them somehow into thinking I was worth it. It ripped me to pieces. I hated myself even more for tricking these nice people into thinking I was worth the effort of gifts, attention, celebration. I didn't even know how I had tricked them.

Has anyone else felt this way? About gifts? Surprise parties?

Anyway, I've never told anyone that before.

Thanks for listening.

But the point is that I'm writing, right now, anyway, like Jon Katz. Dry toast self-obsessed words. Soon I will move on from his book and with any luck leave his voice behind.

Thanks again for listening.