The end of the world started where most good things do: in a brewery. Cascade. A quiet, respectable place for a quiet, respectable execution. It had been a long, quiet separation up to that point. No real connection, no real war. Just the quiet, steady, and completely ominous beat of the drums in the distance, getting louder.
I’d made a few pathetic, beautiful, and completely honest attempts to get back in. To rekindle something. I missed my family. I’m a family man, or I was trying to be. But a few months on the outside, a few quiet nights with a few different women, it starts to change a man’s opinion of his own net worth. You start to realize the market is a little different than you remembered.
But I was still trying. For the kids. For the house. For the whole goddamn, beautiful, phony American dream.
And then she walked in.
And she wasn’t alone. She was carrying a goddamn binder. A fucking binder. Not a purse, not a flower, but a thick, black, three-ring binder, the kind an auditor brings to a hanging. The same kind of weapon she’d used to try and destroy our middle child. And now, she had one for me.
She sat down, and she opened it. And there it was. The terms of my surrender. A list of demands for my own castration. No more Xbox. No more drinking. I had to get a job, a real one, not my own beautiful, chaotic, and completely unpredictable business. I had to go back to church, to be a good little Mormon boy again. No more humor. No more daydreaming.
And in return? What was her end of the bargain?
No wife. No sex. No courtship. No going out. No nothing. Just “be happy” to be back in the cage, a quiet, respectable, and completely passionless ghost in my own house.
She sat there, a smug, self-satisfied little smile on her face, like a cat who’d just cornered a particularly stupid mouse. She had her binder, her evidence, her collection of half-truths and beautifully crafted lies, ready to counter any argument I might make. She had the documents, and in her sad, pathetic little world, the person with the documents controls the truth.
And I just looked at her. This cold, strange woman on the other side of the table. A woman I’d known for twenty years. My best friend. An honest person, or so I had thought. And now? Now I was looking at a stranger. A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest monster. The polite, phony “girl next door” from Santee, the one she’d been playing for two decades, she was gone. And in her place was a quiet, cold, and completely ruthless echo of her mother, her sister, her grandmother. It was like watching a zipper come down on a human suit, and seeing the real, ugly, and completely alien thing underneath.
And there was no going back. I knew it. In the quiet, dead hatred in her eyes, I saw the end of the whole damn show. My house, my kids, my life… it was never going to be the same. This wasn’t a negotiation; it was a threat. “Come back under these conditions, or I will burn everything you love to the goddamn ground. And I will make you watch.”
She finished her little speech, laid out the terms of my future imprisonment, and then she leaned back, a quiet, triumphant little pause, like she’d just said “checkmate” in a game of checkers.
And in the most calm, quiet, and completely honest voice I could find, I looked her right in the eye, and I said it.
”I want a divorce.”
And then the dam broke. Tears. Real, ugly, and completely baffling tears. Like she was the one who had just been handed a death sentence. And I’m sitting there, thinking, Does she not understand the goddamn math? I’m the engine. I’m the whole goddamn show. People don’t come to our house because of you; they come because of me. You’re not leaving me; I’m leaving you. You don’t take the engine out of the car and then cry when the whole thing won’t start.
But she was crying. So I did the stupid, gentlemanly thing. “Look,” I said, “maybe we need to see a counselor. To talk this through.”
She agreed. I suggested the marriage counselor we’d seen before. “No,” she said, “the last session didn’t go so well.” Of course it didn’t. The poor bastard had the audacity to suggest that maybe, just maybe, she was part of the goddamn problem.
”Fine,” I said. “You pick one.”
A month went by. A beautiful, ugly, and completely liberating month. I was single. I was drinking. I was fucking a thirty-year-old redhead who was a beautiful, stupid, and completely honest animal. I was alive again.
And then the call came. She’d picked a counselor. And she’d picked the date. Valentine’s Day. Of course. A perfect, beautiful, and completely ironic setting for the final nail in the coffin.
I walk into the office, and the first thing that hits me is the smell. A quiet, sad perfume of old books and quiet desperation. I look at the shelves. Books on alcoholism, on AA, on drug abuse. And I knew. I knew this wasn’t a counseling session; it was a goddamn ambush.
She was already there, sitting on a couch, looking like a beautiful, tragic victim. And on the table in front of her? Three binders. Three of them. The case file had gotten thicker.
The counselor, a woman with the sad, knowing eyes of a retired drunk and a heavy smoker, she starts to talk, and I just cut her off.
”Why are we here?” I asked.
And then I stood up. And I gave the performance of a lifetime. With a quiet, Mormon aura of authority and a voice that was shaking just enough to be believed, I looked that counselor right in the eye, and I gave them everything.
”I’m here to get my family back,” I said. “I will give up the Xbox. I will stop drinking. I will get a job. I will go back to church and be a good Mormon again. I will stop the humor. I will stop the daydreaming. I will do all of it. Because I love my family, and I am a family man, and that is what a family man does.”
I said it with a tear in my eye. A real one. A beautiful, ugly, and completely honest piece of theater.
The counselor, she just stared at me, her jaw on the goddamn floor. Tears formed in her own sad, old eyes. She looked at my wife. “Did you hear that?” she said, her voice full of a beautiful, stupid hope. “This is a strong man. For him to say what he just said… that’s why we’re here. He just agreed to everything you wanted. What do you have to say to that?”
And my wife, my beautiful, cold, and completely honest wife, she just looked at her, and then at me, and she delivered the kill shot.
”He can say that,” she said, her voice a quiet, flat, and completely devastating little whisper. “But I can’t be the wife he wants me to be.”
And that was it. That was the whole goddamn show.
I leaned forward, and I looked at her, and I smiled. A real, ugly, gut-shot smile. “Then fuck you,” I said, and the words just sucked the air right out of the room. “I want a divorce.”
I stood up, all six-foot-four of my big, stupid, and finally free body, and I walked out of that room. I had a beautiful redhead waiting for me at my bar, a bottle of good whiskey, and the rest of my goddamn life. I never looked back.
That was my apocalypse. My shedding of skin. It was scary, sure. Like looking at the needle for a tetanus shot. You know it’s going to hurt, you know it’s going to be a sharp, ugly little violation. But once it’s in, once the work is done… it’s not so bad. It was all in your head. And that’s what this was. A long, slow, and completely necessary injection of the truth into a loveless, joyless relationship that was already dead on the vine. I was just the one with the guts to cut it down.
Little did I know, she’d spend the next five years trying to destroy me, trying to take every material thing I’d ever built, trying to poison my own children against me. A beautiful, ugly, and completely predictable act of war from a woman who had just lost her whole goddamn world.
And the kids? They forgive her, of course. They still celebrate Mother’s Day with the woman who tried to destroy their father. And that’s their own sad, beautiful, and completely fucked-up story to live with.
But that day, that Valentine’s Day in a sad little office with a sad little woman and a stack of binders full of lies?
That was my apocalypse. The end of an era. The beautiful, ugly, and completely honest destruction of the American Dream. And it was the best goddamn thing that ever happened to me.
