Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (14 page)

If I wanted to drive to the Poconos the next
day, to take a look at the progress at the construction site, I
knew she would have a tantrum and find 10 reasons why I shouldn't
go tomorrow. It was like that every single time.

Everything was some sort of weird mind game
with her. She always had to have the feeling that she was the boss
and that I only did what she told me to do. If something was my
idea, and I wanted to do something without her explicit orders to
do it, she was against it. Every damn time. And not only did she
not approve of whatever I did on my own accord, she turned it into
something horribly bad that I supposedly had only done to spite
her, and now it was her turn to take revenge by doing something
spiteful to me.

In the animal kingdom, when lions or apes
live together in groups, they establish a pecking order. They fight
to see who's the strongest, and once everyone knows their place,
they get along just fine. Humans do the same thing. When you start
to work in a new office, you quickly learn who makes coffee for
whom.

The idea that I was going to take orders
from Donna went totally against my grain. Not because I'm some sort
of male chauvinist pig who feels it's my God-given right as man to
boss women around. I believe in equality. I looked at Donna as my
partner, with equal value and equal say. But she constantly tried
to be the alpha, the one who got to boss me around. Since I was
never a follower, that just didn't work for me. And I stubbornly
refused to do what she told me to, even if it was in my own best
interest.

If it was snowing outside, and she told me
to put on a jacket before I go outside, I would leave the house
without a jacket, just so that she wouldn't get the idea that she
got to tell me what to do. And then I stood out in the snow,
freezing like an idiot. If she hadn't opened her damn mouth, of
course I would have put on a jacket. I'm not a child!

So, yeah, that caused a lot of conflicts,
too. I explained to her many times that we can be equals, but I
would never allow her to boss me around. If anyone was going to
boss anyone around, I was going to be the one bossing her around. I
really didn't want to keep fighting with her about who gets to
dominate whom. But no matter how many times we went through this
conflict, it was like it never even happened, and she tried to
fight for the top spot on the pecking order all over again the next
day. And the next day. And the next day. It was like the movie
Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. I fought the same battle with her
over and over again. It was a giant waste of time and energy. So
after a while, I learned to choose my battles wisely. Instead of
daily conflict, I chose the path of least resistance to get through
the day.

I knew that if I wanted to go to the Poconos
the next day, and I didn't want to have yet another major fight
over nothing on my hands, I had to tell her that I was going to
have to go at some point during the next week, but that I really
didn't feel like driving all the way out there.

Inevitably, she would tell me to go the next
day, to get it over with. And I would reply, "Hmm, yeah, I guess
you're right. I might as well go tomorrow, even though I really
don't feel like it. It's such a pain in the ass."

Those kinds of crazy, manipulative mind
games were really the only way to get anything done, without
constantly fighting with her about it.

If we decided to rent 2 movies from
Blockbuster, of course I had to go alone, because she wouldn't
leave the house. If I picked out any movies on my own, she would
make my life miserable afterwards, because somehow whatever movie I
picked was the wrong kind of movie. If I picked a comedy, a comedy
was the wrong kind of movie that day. If I picked a horror movie,
that was wrong, too. You get the idea.

If a movie I picked contained brief nudity,
she accused me of being a pervert, who specifically picked this
movie for its nudity: "What are you looking at? You like her? Why
don't you go fuck her?!"

But if she picked a movie, and it contained
some nudity, it was no problem at all.

So whenever I was at Blockbuster, we were on
the phone, and she told me to read off the new movies they had. If
I made any kind of comment that I wasn't in the mood to watch a
particular new movie, that would be the movie she wanted me to
bring home. Every time.

So when I went to Blockbuster, while being
on the phone with her, I simply didn't read the names of the movies
I didn't want to see. So she could only choose from the movies that
I knew I was going to like.

When I brought home her two movie choices,
and it was now a matter of deciding whether we were going to watch
movie A or movie B first, she would always, always pick the
opposite of what I picked, and then start an hour long tantrum or
walk out of the room, if I didn't cave in and we didn't watch the
movie she wanted to watch.

So eventually I learned to always say the
opposite of what I really wanted to do. If I wanted to watch movie
A first, I pretended to want to watch movie B first. Then of course
she picked movie A first and I politely gave in to her wishes like
a gentleman.

I did the same thing with the divorce. I
told her I really wanted her to move to that new house in Florida
with me. But of course I knew she wouldn't, and that she would use
her kill-all argument divorce again, like she always did. I was
prepared. I had hired a lawyer in Guam, and he sent me the divorce
papers. All I needed now was for her to sign them.

When she said we'd have to get a divorce, I
said, "You don't really mean that. You wouldn't want to get a
divorce just because I want to move to Florida with you."

"Yes I would," she replied.

So I pulled out the divorce papers, and told
her, "I know you're bluffing. Here are some divorce papers. There's
no way you're gonna sign them, just because you don't want to
move."

"Oh yes I will," she said, and signed the
papers.

Checkmate.

Four years earlier, when I had first learned
the fact that Guam is the divorce paradise, it wasn't necessary to
go there in person, and you could just mail the divorce papers.

But by now the government of Guam had
decided that they should make more money of all these people who
wanted to get a divorce there. So they changed the law and suddenly
there was a seven-day residency requirement, before you could get a
divorce. In other words, they wanted tourists to spend a one week
vacation in Guam, and spend some money there, before getting a
divorce.

I hopped on the next plane and spent a week
in paradise. Guam is on the other side of the world, near Japan.
It's a lot like Hawaii, but because it's so close to Japan, most of
the tourists there are actually Japanese, not American.

A week later the judge stamped my papers and
I was divorced. On the way back to the States, I stopped over in
Tokyo for a few days. It was the first time I had ever been in
Japan. It was pretty cool. Tokyo is like New York on steroids.

When I got back, Donna said that I could
have my divorce if I wanted to, but she would fight me every step
of the way, and make my life miserable. She said she would take me
for everything I have.

I told her: "Sorry, you're too late. The
divorce is already done and over with. Remember those papers you
signed last week? That was the divorce."

She couldn't wrap her head around that and
called a few lawyers in New York, to see if the divorce could be
reversed or contested.

Nope.

"I can sympathize with people's pains but not with
their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody
else's happiness."

Aldous Huxley

After my divorce, I moved into the mansion
in the Poconos.

It was still not completed, but I explained
to the building inspector that if he didn't issue a certificate of
occupancy, I would lose a fortune in bank penalties, because the
deadline for the construction loan had long expired. Thankfully he
agreed to let me live in the house even though it wasn't finished
yet.

The house was way too big for just one
person. When I walked around, I could hear the echo of my steps.
The loneliness was soul-crushing. I really missed Donna. I was so
depressed, I spent hours just lying on the bed, staring at the
ceiling, lost in thought. I was so used to having her around me at
all times, that now there was a big gaping hole in my life.

But at the same time, I felt at peace for
the first time in... ever? Finally I didn't have someone constantly
telling me that no matter what I did, it was wrong. I didn't feel
like I was constantly walking on egg shells, because if I said or
did the wrong thing, someone would punish me with some psychotic
tantrum.

That feeling of inner peace and serenity was
nice. If only I had someone in my life to share it with.

The nearest town, Milford, was about 15
minutes away. My house was literally in the middle of nowhere, in a
beautiful albeit desolate gated lakefront community in the
woods.

As a teenager in Germany, I had gone to an
all boys catholic school. So I never had any girls around me in
school. And because my dad was the town drunk, I was embarrassed to
try to meet girls in my neighborhood. I didn't want them laughing
about me behind my back, because they saw my dad passed out drunk
lying in a ditch somewhere.

The fact that my mother always wanted to
move once my dad had humiliated her in front of the neighbors
again, didn't make it any easier for me to meet someone as a
teenager.

Then I met Donna over the Internet. She was
my first girlfriend, and I ended up marrying her and spent the next
15 years with her.

I never cheated on her. Not just because she
would have made my life a living hell if she had caught me, but
because I really had no desire to cheat on her. I just wasn't
interested in other girls. I was perfectly content with her.

I guess some guys enjoy the chase and love
to bang a new girl every few days. To me those guys are total
douchebags. Like animals in heat who will fuck anything that
moves.

My mom and my stepdad have a really great
relationship. They are each other's best friends. They do
everything together, and they miss each other terribly when they
are apart for even just a day. That's the kind of relationship I
want to have. Like one soul in two bodies.

And despite its flaws, that was the kind of
relationship I had with Donna. So for 15 years I had never even
looked at another girl or flirted with another girl. I really had
no dating skills whatsoever at this point. I had never experienced
the things normal teenagers go through, when they begin to date: a
first kiss at the prom from your high school sweetheart, casual sex
with female friends, make out parties, or learning how to deal with
a break up.

I felt a little bit like an alien from
another planet, who had beamed down to Earth and was now posing as
a human, but was unfamiliar with even the most basic human customs.
And now I had to start meeting girls, if I didn't want to sit in
this huge house all by myself every night. Terrific. What could
possibly go wrong?

Patty was the first girl who answered my
online personal ad. I think I was 38 at the time. She was 39 and
lived in Scranton, about half an hour away. We decided to meet at a
Chinese food restaurant in Lords Valley. Somehow we ended up at two
different restaurants, waiting for each other for about 20 minutes,
until we figured out the miscommunication.

When I met her, her voice instantly turned
me off. She wasn't bad looking. She had natural blonde hair, a nice
smile and big boobs. But she had a deep man's voice. I almost felt
like I was sitting across the table from a drag queen.

But the small talk with her went
surprisingly well, considering that this was the first time I had
to do that kind of stuff. We had a lot of fun and laughed a lot.
Then she went to the bathroom, and tripped along the way. When she
came back, her whole lap was wet. Somehow she had managed to spill
a bunch of water on her lap in the bathroom. When she sat back
down, she almost knocked her plate over. She was even worse at this
than I was.

After we had dinner at the Chinese
restaurant, we went back to my place. We sat on the couch in the
living room. She kept gushing that this was the most beautiful
house she had ever been in.

The building inspector, a no nonsense
bureaucrat, had said the same thing when he had issued the
certificate of occupancy a few weeks earlier. He walked into the
kitchen and quietly looked around. Then he matter-of-factly told
me: "I usually don't say this, and I don't bullshit people, but you
got the nicest house in the whole county." That made me feel pretty
good.

While Patty and I were sitting on the living
room couch, I told her that building this house had been my dream,
and that I had designed every little detail, from the type of crown
moulding that was used, down to the color of the tiles and the type
of door handles throughout the house.

Then I told her that I was thinking about
selling the house and moving somewhere else. Maybe Florida. She
couldn't understand that: "Why would you want to leave your dream
house?"