It's Kind of a Long Story... about MY SISTER EXES (Part IV)

Things are becoming Crystal clear.

I’ve been struggling with calling myself “a writer.” Yes, I write. Yes, people read it. And yes, I’ve been paid for my writing.

But my books and other paid projects were works-for-hire. Someone else’s idea. I’ve never been paid to publish something I’ve come up with on my own. That’s who writers are.

And, because I work in publishing, I am very wary and weary of self-published weirdos passing themselves off as “writers.” I have an acquaintance who sort of semi-self-published (I think her “publisher” is scammy) and claimed her book was an “international bestseller.” I looked it up on Amazon, and the book’s BSR (bestseller rank) and number of reviews did not back up that claim. Nor did Bookscan.

When I asked her how her publisher had validated or explained her bestseller status to her, she basically said she had earned an Amazon orange flag in some obscure category (most books do - all of mine have) and had sold a copy in Brazil.

I gently explained that being in the business, I’m concerned she is going to call herself an “international bestselling author” to the wrong person, someone who knows better and is going to look foolish and dishonest.

She seemed to take it in, but I recently saw her post on LinkedIn or something and she’s still at it. She however isn’t still at life coaching for widows, which she was when we met. She went from that to business consulting to now she’s some sort of matchmaker. Or dating coach. Or both. (honestly, likely not much of either)

So when I’m asked if I’m a writer, I think of that Coach-turned-Yenta and do not want to appear that deluded.

However, when working on these last two posts, I stayed up until 3:00am without even noticing. I was so in my groove/zone/flow that I didn’t stop.

Maybe, regardless of whether any money changes hands, if you stay up until the middle of the middle of the night writing, you are a writer.

I’m so glad you’re here.

-Lara

What Happened in Vegas

Short story: 

Learning that my relationship with my exBF was based on lies sent me reeling and questioning everything. Mostly myself. It also sent me on a quest for truth to counteract the lies and led me to connect with another Sister Ex.

Long story:

It’s hard to fully explain how the information and evidence I got from Susan about Cris’s lies impacted me. At our dinner, I was laughing and present and having a good time while I was taking it all in. After I got home, it started to hit me.

I felt like Alice spiraling down the rabbit hole grasping for anything solid and familiar. I literally steadied myself whenever I got out of or into a chair. I clutched my steering wheel. I remember going to work the next day and looking around and questioning everything. “Is this a chair?” “Is this a pen?”

We are through the looking glass here, people

It felt like the rug was pulled out from under me. Like I was walking on quicksand.

I can get very attached to narrative. Often to my detriment. When Cris and I were dating and things were going so well and I thought I might have a life with him, my story was, “We met and hit it off right off the bat and I can’t believe how lucky I got.”

After our relationship ended, my story was that we were two people very compatible in so many ways, who loved and liked each other and wanted to be together, but it was alcohol that had come between us.

It was a story I believed. It was foundational. It was the story of my post-married life.

Have you ever had a story shattered? Something you knew was true as much as you know your own name turned out to be wrong? Lemme tell ya, it’s a mind fuck.

Do you remember the scene at the end of The Usual Suspects? If you don’t, I’m about to spoil a 25-year-old movie. Kevin Spacey is Verbal, an ironically nicknamed soft-spoken small-time criminal telling detective Chaz Palminteri a long, complicated story about a murderous mafioso named Kayser Soze. At the end of the movie, the detective lets the mild-mannered criminal go.

After Spacey has left the office, Palminteri turns around and sees that the whole thing was made up. Verbal had taken names, phrases, and snippets from the bulletin board on the wall - newspaper clippings, a menu, even the name of the manufacturer from the bottom of the cop’s coffee mug- and woven them into a wild, entertaining, and entirely believable story.

And Verbal is revealed to be Kayser Soze.

In the best of times, everything Susan had shared with me would be a lot to process, and it was not the best of times for me. I had been displaced from my house for two years. I had moved 13 times. I had the good fortune to stay in several amazing places: a multi-million dollar house in Tiburon overlooking the Bay, a beautifully restored Eichler, and a cozy apartment on a street where I had always wanted to live. But, at the time that I connected with Susan, I was living in a basement in Oakland. A very nice basement my friend had remodeled into a lovely and comfortable guest suite that was like a well-appointed hotel room, but it was a room. I was literally and figuratively at a low point.

There are definitely worse places to be homeless, but even this spectacular spot had its issues. It’s (another) long story, but there was no bed in the primary bedroom, so I slept on the little girl’s pink twin bed next to the doll house. My therapist and I had a lot to work with.

On top of all of that, I had *just* found out that I had a date to move back into my house. Which of course, was a very good thing and also a big thing. It brought with it a lot of emotions, planning, and logistics.

And work was very stressful, and I had challenges communicating with my mom. I had some weirdness with my best friend that I didn’t understand, and some travel planned that would be fun but also a juggle.

I also had an unpleasant gynecological procedure coming up. Oh yeah, on our last night together - a night I’m 99% sure he was cheating on the girlfriend I had no idea about - Cris gave me HPV.

Therapy wasn’t an option either. I was already feeling iffy about Dr. Home Goods (so named because she was very basic) and I fired her during our first session after Susan and I had dinner. There was no way she was capable of helping me unpack all of this.

The people who were helpful were my Sister Exes.

For weeks after we met, Susan was available to answer my questions and confirm my hunches. She was incredibly generous with her time and wisdom. No one else could *really* understand what I was feeling and how I was reeling.

I’m fortunate to have a lot of good friends who have been very kind and patient and there for me through a lot of Cris-generated tsuris, and… I know many of them were sick of it. Sick of me talking about it. Sick of the details and wanting me to move on. For my own good and theirs. I get it. I wanted that too.

But I couldn’t just flip it like a switch. Alice has to go all the way down the rabbit hole.

Susan was there for the details and, as I combed through and interrogated five years of memories and saw them in a new light, the What Abouts.

“What about the gun?”

Early in our relationship, Cris told me he had an unloaded gun at his house. He said he bought it in Alaska because everyone had guns there and he didn’t even know why he still had it. It was unloaded in his closet, and he wanted me to know in case it was an issue for me.

It made sense at the time. Bears or whatever in Alaska. I said it was OK and thanked him for telling me.

A while later, he said he had gotten rid of the gun, “out of respect for you.” I said thank you, even though I hadn’t asked him to get rid of it. It seemed to me like a thoughtful thing.

Now that I thought about it, that gun would have had to be in Susan’s house. He would have had to have brought it with him from Alaska to Vallejo when he moved in with her.

I asked her, “Would you have allowed that?”

She laughed and said, “I got some version of that story too. No, there was never a gun in my house.”

“What about the maps?”

At one point, Cris showed me a portfolio of fantasy maps he had drawn. They were beautiful. Very detailed and creative. I knew he was into Tolkien and D&D and that kind of thing, so it didn’t seem weird that he would have made them. What was weird was that he showed them to me after we had been dating for quite a while.

I remember telling him at the time that they were amazing, and that I was so impressed. I said something like, “I had no idea you had that kind of talent! You are full of surprises."

Now, I thought, “Wait a minute. Cris had the worst handwriting. Barely legible even when he tried. Even with the deterioration in penmanship that everyone our age has, there is no way he drew those maps or did that tiny, precise lettering.

When I asked Susan about it she said, “Oh yeah. I saw those. Who knows who drew them? I know I never saw him draw, paint, or even doodle anything the whole time we were together.”

She was pretty sure he told her he did them in high school. I’m pretty sure he told me he did them as a young adult when he was recovering from a surgery.

“What about Cal?”

He had told me he had done a semester at UC Berkeley (which Californians call “Cal”) but had dropped out to move in with a girlfriend back in Southern California. He said he had gotten in because he was Mexican (he’s only 1/4 Mexican and doesn’t have a Latinx surname) He often said that not finishing school was a huge regret in his life.

He never told any stories about Cal. Did he live in the dorms? An apartment? I didn’t ask because he seemed to be ashamed about dropping out.

When I asked Susan about it, she said, “Did he mean Cal State Long Beach? I don’t think he went there, but it’s possible. He absolutely never went to Cal.”

When he and I were driving to Portland to visit his parents, he said with a smile and a laugh, “Now, three things to not talk about with my parents...” Which seemed normal. Everyone has topics that are better not brought up with family. I don’t remember what the first two were, but the last one was college. He said it was because his mother has always been disappointed that he didn’t finish.

I now know it’s likely because in the unlikely event I did bring up college - maybe in the context of my own time at school or my son who was at college at the time - his lie could be revealed.

There were a lot of other examples. I could write all day about how many things popped into my head that I was now considering in a new way. Things I dismissed that now seem revealing or even sinister. I was swimming in a swamp of memories and revelations and it was exhausting.

And I can’t deny it was also kind of exhilarating. This was some Big Main Character Energy. I remember saying to someone, “You can only scream “This is not my life! I’m a normal person!” before you have to admit that it is your life and you’re not normal.”

They say you’re not drawn to what you want, you are drawn to what you know. Drama and plot twists were what I knew.

***

During these first few weeks of connecting with Susan, she let me know she was also connected to Crystal, my next Sister Ex.

Crystal had met Cris when she was dating his good friend T. She and T didn’t last very long (he cheated and lied too, birds of a feather… ) but she and Cris stayed Facebook friends. They mildly flirted, and when he was visiting Portland in January 2017 (a few weeks before he and I met) they made plans to meet for dinner.

However, when she got to the restaurant, they sat at the bar, he ordered a drink for her without asking what she wanted and then left quickly to meet up with T. She thought it was weird. Weird that he ordered for her and weird that he left.

Much, later Susan would tell Crystal that she saw on the Housewives chat that he bragged to them that he and Crystal spent the night together, and he had given her 5 orgasms. That he was so good she took him out to breakfast the next day.

Susan had also told me about a time that he had ordered for her. After they had split up, they agreed to go to a concert they had bought tickets for when they were together. He insisted on ordering her food. When she refused and told the server what she actually wanted, he became angry and said "In Thailand, the man orders the food for his date.” She said, "We're not in Thailand, and we're not on a date. We're out as friends.” He turned beet red and yelled, "We're leaving!” She told him he could sit in her car and wait, but she was going to finish her dinner and go to the concert. He made such a big scene that the people sitting next to her asked if she was OK. They were also going to the show and insisted on walking with her to the venue.

An hour into, the concert, she checked on him in the car and told him if he could behave like an adult, he was still welcome to join her inside. He again insisted that they leave. She refused and he took a long, expensive cab ride miles back home.

In May 2017 (put a pin in that, a lot happened in May 2017) Cris invited Crystal, to Las Vegas. She thought, “Sure, I could use a fun weekend. Why not?”

She found out why not.

He was drunk and obnoxious the whole time. He bent her over a slot machine and pretended to hump her in the casino. He asked her to go to the garage to get his sunglasses, forgot he had done it, and then berated the valet for giving his glasses to “some lady.” He patted a housekeeper on the butt.

He brought the sex gear he’d used with Y. They hadn’t discussed it beforehand or flirted in a way that would make it seem like she would be into that. She wasn’t.

He told her he owned a home in Sonoma. He told her he wanted to take her and her kids to Hawaii that summer. He told her there was a woman in Belize who was his submissive and would do whatever he wanted. He told her her had had a vasectomy. He changed plans on the last day there and took her to the airport hours early, which she was fine with because by that time she was done with him. When he dropped her off he leered at her and told her, “I’m not done with you.”

He also sort of alluded to a girlfriend or somehow made her think that there was something going on he wasn’t telling her. She was unnerved. She had never had an experience like this.

So in May 2017, while I was on a business trip in New York, he was behaving like an obnoxious pig with Crystal in Las Vegas. He and I were texting the whole time, and he was behaving like a perfect gentleman when we were together.

Crystal took a chance and reached out to Susan. She knew they weren’t together anymore, but she wanted to connect with someone who might be able to help her understand what the hell had just happened and what was up with this guy.

She and Susan stayed in touch and mostly rolled their eyes in a “can you believe this guy?” kind of way about his lying, cheating, and delusions. Susan was blocked from his Facebook, but Crystal wasn’t.

Susan said Crystal would be happy to talk to me, and we had a long phone call and several text exchanges, she told me that in February 2023, after he had been living with B for seven months and was a month away from proposing, he tried to get Crystal and one of her girlfriends to meet him in Las Vegas while B was out of town.

At one point, I said, “I don’t feel comfortable reaching out to B, but I somehow want her to know I’m available to her if she wants to know my story, or if she has any questions or concerns about Cris.”

Crystal said, “I’ll take one for the team. I’ll do it.”

A few weeks later, she did.

To be continued…

Know someone who would get something out of that story? Please share.

Lara sez…

Listen!

80s deep cut of the week! This bouncy, melodic tune makes me want to skip down the street! And the band is absolutely adorable!

Read!

I won’t tell you who or what The Nix is. It doesn’t matter. The book is engrossing, delightful, poignant, funny, and went in entirely different directions than I thought it would.

Buy!

I recently joked that I wanted to hire a task rabbit to bring my groceries in from the car. Until that happens, the Wonday Utility Tote makes the job a little less heinous. It can carry 3-4 bags bags of groceries without them digging into your hand, and it’s also come in handy for things like bringing bags of mulch into the backyard or schlepping several bottles of wine out from the garage for a party.

Watch!

Dramedies are my jam, and this one stars the always-awesome Melanie Lynskey.

Eat!

Will it Waffle? Yes, it will! I don’t know why it took me so long to put Mac & Cheese on a waffle iron, but I did it recently and I never want to eat M&C any other way. I used leftovers from Thanksgiving and Da-YUM it is delicious. I looked around for anything else I had that I could waffle and I threw a corn muffin in there and that was fantastic too. I’m told leftover stuffing and risotto are also good candidates for wafflin’

Before I let you go…

A big thank you to everyone who commented or replied last week. I was happy to randomly choose Betsy Cooper as the winner of a donation to the organization of her choice, the DePelchin Children’s Center.