It’s hard to remember how the fuck I found myself trapped in New Orleans. Which collection of impulsive choices led me here. How did I start talking to this asshole anyway?
Seeing as it’s easily the worst time in my life I’m going to tell it candidly and with whatever dark humor I can find. Hoping that putting it on paper will help it leave my body and mind forever.
There was fucking nothing I liked about Jeremy to begin with. The person I had considered my best friend that I went to high school with, whom by the end of this ordeal I would come to learn was not my friend and did not care for my presence, was deeply infatuated with this guy. She would talk about him nonstop. The way he was into her and she kept him at arms distance. She painted this rosy story of how he adored her and she kept telling him no. She kept saying he was obsessed with her, as she rattled on about how amazing he was, a tortured soul and refugee of Katrina.
Finally after weeks of hearing about this person we were all going to a party at his apartment. It was an upstairs cliff side apartment on Del Playa, Prime real estate. Like many college apartments in Isla Vista it was small, minimally furnished and smelt of stale spilled beer mixed with salty ocean air. I remember the way she immediately abandoned the friends she arrived with on the balcony. The way she fawned on him and vied for his attention. She wasn’t the only girl. There were others, identical to her, hanging on every word he said.
And I remember looking at him, seeing a pretty boy, short, tan, trying too hard to look effortlessly charming and cool. I could see and feel the vanity and ego from across the room. The entire situation repulsed me. And I was shocked, my friend who had educated me in the finer points of feminism, who denounced patriarchal structures, here she was, fawning over a man, alongside other women doing the same.
I could barely stand our friend Micah strumming his guitar to the attention of fawning girls and he was my friend that I loved. This vain stranger I was completely disgusted with. I left shortly after that.
It was still many weeks of hearing how he loved her and she refused him. Except now I had seen and knew that was untrue. If anything it was the other way around. Her accusations were reflections of her feelings towards him. But I ignored it and before long all of our time was up in Santa Barbara. I went on to transfer to SFSU. She went on to New York to boost her resume. I only saw her once after that. She came to the city at some point. By then all of Santa Barbara had moved to SF as well. I knew she wanted to see Micah and his house was the frequent of our friend group. That single night of drunk debauchery was the last time we spoke before she stopped taking my calls entirely. It seemed she was no longer interested in keeping our friendship.
I didn’t understand why, despite my love and admiration for her I couldn’t deny some part of me felt like she didn’t want me around and resented my presence. I knew I was never a priority to her. But that was a common theme in my life. I was never and still have never been anyone’s priority. So I let it go. People move far away and on to new chapters. But it was that gut feeling that kept me from feeling any guilt about starting a relationship with Jeremy.
I can’t remember how we started chatting and Skyping online. It must have been Facebook. People you may know. How suddenly this asshole’s face was on my computer screen all the time. Staring at me with those adoring eyes that couldn’t look away and selling me some story of a film that I would star in. How I naively believed him, how easy it is to believe someone that says they want to put you in their movie. My heart hurts for all the broken girls in Hollywood. It’s such a common and easy trap. How charming a man is, how genuine he seems. How much you want it to be true. Even then I remember that gaze and how vulnerable it made me feel even then, like he was staring at my soul, and how good it felt to be seen and how that deceptively felt like acceptance.
Now given the time line of events there is some overlap here. Just before leaving for NOLA, I was in the throws of emotional turmoil over the boy that drove me mad. I don’t remember this overlapping at the time. I must have been obsessing about him and Skyping with the other at night. But my young state of mind was always in two places at once and my heart was ever in many places at once.
Somehow on all these Skype chats I was still naively believing that he just wanted me to be in his movie, that the affection didn’t reach beyond that. I thought post theater degree that this would be a smart move for my career that I could come home after and resume life.
And of all the impulsive choices I’ve made in my life, this one would be the worst.
I decided to go. My family knew me better than to advise me not too. I was always going to do whatever I wanted regardless of any harsh lessons that would come of it. I was to leave in the New Year.
That holiday I stayed at my mother’s and decided to take a google map walk through the city. As I virtually went through block by block of shotgun houses next to bayous and weepy trees I was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. I suddenly didn’t want to go. Somehow seeing the city I didn’t like it and I couldn’t shake this feeling, that it was a mistake. The plane ticket was bought and he swore he’d buy me a ticket home when filming was done. I couldn’t change my mind now. How was I to know my intuition was begging me to stay.
I ignored it. I went.
Sheets and sheets and sheets of frigid ice cold rain hammered Lakeside those first couple weeks I arrived. All he had acquired for this apartment was a mattress for his room and an air mattress for mine. The air mattress held no heat from underneath and I froze every night. I had attempted to decorate the room to make it feel like home but even my trinkets and posters did nothing to warm the space.
And more confusingly than anything, he ignored me upon my arrival. He was cold and distant. I asked about filming and was met with short vague answers on his way in and out from work. He was a server at a fine dining restaurant and I was left alone at home in the frigid apartment so confused as to how his behavior had gone from so charming and persuasive to distant and cold. I was so depressed I reached out to the friend in New York and some hope that she would have some kind of explanation for his behavior and despite crying into her voicemail she never answered.
To say I had culture shock would be an understatement. I worked at a restaurant where servers threw around hateful slurs about every minority that walked in. I felt so naive as a Californian. Knowing racism and bigotry exists and being in the presence of it are two entirely different things. I realized I was the liberal minority. I was the odd man out. I kept my mouth shut. When the rain stopped and I could wander I wandered around lakeside. Not every house was occupied like much of the city. Many were still vacant shells of what was left after the flooding. There was this stagnant feeling of death and souls hanging around the neighborhood. I would describe this feeling to a local later and learned that little pocket of neighborhood was where many bodies had collected and floated. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of death and felt so incredibly alone.
One day he came home and he wasn’t so dismissive and distant, instead he was longing and needing of something I couldn’t figure out. He asked me to get drinks with him. I obliged in the hopes I could get him to talk about whatever was bothering him. We went to his local watering hole and there we sat at the bar and he was so antsy as he chain smoked and drank high life after high life like water. He couldn’t sit still. He still wasn’t speaking though something was clearly bothering him. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and I demanded an answer. What is bothering you? Why are you suddenly not talking to me? What happened to the movie he spoke of? Was it all a lie?
In some dramatic fashion we were outside and suddenly there he was professing some kind of undying love for me. That he had always loved me since we started Skyping, how could I not know? And didn’t I love him back?
Blindsided. How naive I was. I really didn’t see this coming. I really didn’t love him. We didn’t have the term for love bombing yet. But I knew that I had lovebombed people before and somehow that rationalized accepting his lovebombing. Maybe he could convince me to love him, I could grow to love him. I also, however, couldn’t escape the thought, you don’t have a means to get home, what other option do you have?
So I accepted it. I said sure, I’ll be your girlfriend. Then began the brief honeymoon of our relationship. It was bars and drinking and the most joyous man I had seen just absolutely elated that he could call me his. I went along, drank to the best of my ability though I was never a heavy drinker. He introduced me to his parents, his friends, he was over the moon. I had never been so exalted in all my life. And it seemed like it was meant to be joyous. The city was the riding high on the win of the Saints for the first time ever. Everyone everywhere was feeling great. I told everyone at home I was in a relationship with this man now. For that brief couple weeks of spring everything felt great. I felt his love for me and felt that joy with him.
But that wasn’t enough. After a few weeks of early relationship bliss he asked me to marry him. Marry me he said. Let’s get married. There was this urgency to his voice, this longing. I didn’t want to say yes. I had envisioned the moment someone proposed to me as being someone I had deeply loved and that was not what I felt for this man. But again, I didn’t want to say no. No would kill the joy in him, no would be a rejection he would not take well. I felt cornered again and doing my best to hide my reluctance I agreed. He was like a kid at Christmas. We have to get you a ring he said. I didn’t want a diamond. I think even then I knew the permanence of a diamond and I insisted on some shitty kladdah ring which I believed to be an Irish promise ring and said I wanted to be different in order to placate his wish for a diamond. God forbid that the mother who didn’t trust me because I didn’t drink, be forced to part with some family heirloom to put on my unwilling finger. Everything was happening so fast I couldn’t keep up. I felt swept up in something I no longer felt I had control of and I would just have to ride this out wherever it took me. Like a riptide taking me out to sea, there was no point fighting it.
After the engagement a mutual friend felt obligated to tell New York. She had been in love with this man though they had never dated. He and I were sitting at a coffee shop. His phone rang. I saw him look at it. A dark shadow and scowl flashed across his face that I would soon come to know so well. I knew it was her. He picked up the phone. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. But he sat there and listened, he didn’t interject, I could hear her tone heatedly spewing words feverishly. I watched as he absorbed her words and kept throwing dark looks my way. I saw the love seep out his face and saw deep hate take its place. Right before my eyes as she poured every word into his ear I saw whatever illusion he had about me being erased by her words, and a cold dark hatred taking its place. I finally insisted he get off the phone. I demanded to know what she said. He wouldn’t say though he couldn’t stop looking at me with malice. I demanded an answer and he confirmed what I suspected which was some sort of narrative about my slutty past and how stupid I was. I didn’t deny that I had slept with people before him and was incredulous when I discovered he thought that there was any amount of purity to me. I wasn’t going to feel bad for living my life and he was foolish to have made up some idea of me. And thus began the fuel for all of the violence that followed. She had lit the kindling, the honeymoon was over.
I knew what the early fucking stages of abuse were. My father was an abuser. They’re fucking charming valiant men in the community, they are wizards with their bullshit words. I know how they ridicule the clothes you wear, comparing you to whores and telling you how you should be conservative. I knew abusers expect you stay home and not have friends, how they want you stand around and wait for them, how they leave you alone and then berate you upon return, how they stalk you if you dare leave the house without them. How they hope to get you pregnant so that they can trap you. How they try and belittle you into subservience. I was not having any of that. There is not a bone in my body that was going to accept that I was less because of my promiscuity, that I was not allowed to have my own life without him, that I was bound to his whim, that I was going to cover up in the now god awful humidity of the summer to placate some bullshit notion of what a lady was. I was from fucking California and he was high as a kite if he thought he could bend me to his will.
And in the thick hot soup of the swamp we fell into this pattern. Hot heated fights where I would never bend and call him the piece of shit I knew him to be as he started throwing shit in the apartment, the deeply apologetic reconciliations that somehow never issued an apology just another restatement of his undying love for me. I never fucking believed it. I knew what it was. It was conditioning. It’s how they try to trick you into thinking that this behavior was love. But I would agree and take the temporary peace. We would have makeup sex and have a pause in the violence. He would be appeased enough to where we go out and get drinks with his friends and inevitably after enough alcohol the rage fighting would start again at the bars. I had never known anyone that knew how to trigger such anger in me as this man. He somehow knew how to provoke me.
One night on Bourbon he said something and I started to walk away down the stairs to leave. He said something on the stairwell. I can’t remember what it was, but it inspired such fucking rage in me I couldn’t contain it any longer. I turned around and with the full strength of my rage I slapped him across the face. Except I didn’t realize till later that I hadn’t fully opened my hand in time, that I had hit him with my closed fist. He would later confess I had a strong arm on me and that if he didn’t know how to take a punch that it might have knocked him out. I logged that away for any men that tried me in the future.
I stormed out of the bar onto the busy street making my way to our home on Ursulines where we had decided to move in our brief happy honeymoon period. He was screaming at me as he followed me down the street and I must have been yelling back. Suddenly his tack and vocal tone changed completely and he was grabbing my arm and pleading. ‘I’m so sorry baby, I can’t go to jail with you mad at me.’ I thought was is this psychotic change?
He would do this at home when his fucking cat would hop on the couch in front him in the middle of us screaming at each other. He would go from screaming at me to baby voice and cuddle his fucking cat, Little Jerry Seinfeld ‘you’re so cute, I love you so much.’ And that cat would make eye contact with me mocking me, telling me he hates you but he loves me. I’ve never wanted to drown a cat so vehemently before that animal. But he killed the roaches so I tolerated his presence. Then when the cat he would re enter rage mode like a fucking psychopath.
But here he was doing this on the street and talking about going to jail. And before I could get words out there was a flashlight in my eye and I was being ordered to sit down on the sidewalk by policemen. Apparently it is illegal to have domestic disputes in public. I laughed at this knowledge, the absurdity of the south. Their general disposition of that’s your man, that’s your problem, keep it at home.
Why he thought he would go to jail was news to me. I realized I didn’t trust anything this man said anymore. There was never a film. Every grandiose story he told must have been lies to make himself to appear grand and strong and all the other attributes toxic masculinity idolizes. The film was the bait and trap. Here I was. Trapped.
I sat there as the adrenaline slowed and breathed. I had hit him. I had no idea there was anything in the world that could provoke me to such anger that I would strike a person. I hated him for pulling it out of me, I hated myself for giving in. I hated how he was making me like him. I hated that I knew that was how abuse worked. You either reject it or become like them. I knew that getting you to hit them first was part of their plan. It was how they would rationalize hitting you back eventually. That all of this was leading up to that day. He who was a boxer. He who was a local white boy that easily buy off the law. Here in the south where me hitting him first was more than enough to justify violence in return.
The despair, frustration and deep deep depression I found myself in, how I was trapped. Unable to make enough money to leave. How could I get home?
I refused to not seek out friendship, so I went out. He would ask where I was and stalk me there like a psycho. I managed to enjoy myself and even had a couple friends come visit. One was the mutual that had told New York of our engagement. I could tell she felt bad. I knew she was only doing it out of being a good friend. She couldn’t possibly have known that it would trigger this violent relationship.
The highs and lows of my bipolar were made so much worse by the relationship. I kept getting animals thinking they would help. I let the house sit in squalor. The violent fights where I resisted his control and he destroyed the house. Then the make up sex that was fueled by this insane desire to get pregnant. That was the only idea that turned me on with him. The idea of breeding. You cannot understand the insanity of the abused mind unless you’ve been there. The way your brain starts to believe the gaslighting the way it does on some insane level feel like obsession and clings to it. It’s a kind of obsessive love and even with all my knowledge of how abuse starts there was still that pull in my brain towards the madness. I wasn’t stupid enough to quit birth control. I had somehow acquired that. Somehow he wasn’t pushing me not to take it. If I had learned anything from my mother and sister it was that a baby is a trap. It’s a man trap. And this was a man I needed to escape.
Let’s revisit how my mind and heart can be in multiple places at once. I was alone and isolated. I was carrying on an email exchange with someone I had harbored feelings for. Feelings I shouldn’t have had because he was also someone, that someone I shouldn’t have betrayed loved once. His relationship was falling apart as well. In large part because of me. A cd I made him and became their summer anthems. Till she found out I made it. We started talking to each other romantically again. I needed so desperately to feel love that was genuine and authentic, even through an email.
And one day I left my email tab open.
He arrived at my job suddenly where I was hosting at a pizza joint. He demanded the ring back and I gave him the shitty little silver ring. He threw as hard as he could and took off and I went back in to finish my shift dreading the blowout that was to come.
More of the same. More him trying to convince me this was love. Me violently screaming back that it wasn’t. He picked up a decoritove gourd a friend had made him for his birthday and threw it across room and it shattered on the wall. That was something someone special made him and it lay in pieces on the floor. I looked at it. I knew the days were numbered before it was going to be me next.
I was alone, I was on the floor, sobbing hysterically as only a trapped animal can. Suicidal thoughts compounding me from every direction. I was trapped there was no way out, this was the only way. There had to be another way. How do I get home? I have no money. Where would I go? I’m trapped. Trapped. Trapped.
And then somewhere in the back of my brain. A small voice popped up. Nate has a tiny spare room in the back of his apartment. Call. Him.
I picked up the phone and dialed his number. And in all the incoherent hysterics of a severely unstable abused bipolar mind I somehow sobbed out that I had made a mistake, that i was trapped in an abusive relationship, and that I needed to get back to California before he hit me. I had enough money to buy a plane ticket and that was it. I asked if I could stay in the back room till I figured out what to do.
‘Of course Gina, come home.’
I told him I was leaving, going back to California. I brought up that he lied when he said he would buy my ticket home. That everything he said was a lie. He had always taunted me in our fights, if this isn’t love just leave. If you don’t love me then leave. If your’e unhappy then leave. I knew this tactic as well. He thought taunting me I would stay somehow. But I was leaving for good.
I knew it was going to be fighting until I left. Fighting and pleading, fighting and pleading. I booked a flight home on my birthday. Nov. 2. On Halloween there was a huge blow out. It was his last attempt to get me to stay. I can’t remember what was said but in a rage I took a broom and hit him with it. I somehow was on the ground from fighting with him, though I don’t recall how I got down there. As he dealt with the pain of his arm, as the broom had bent when I hit him with it, the adrenaline in my body started to ebb and suddenly my ankle was throbbing. I must have violently kicked the marble table at some point. The broom was a metal pipe he informed me as if to illicit some sympathy from me. It felt like butter when I swung it at him I thought to myself. He could barely move his arm and he had to go to work. I watched him leave in horror of myself and who I had become.
I had a ticket to VooDoo Fest. I put on a fairy dress and made my way to the festival limping.
I saw Metric, who I loved. Emily Haines always a musical idol of mine. I jumped a little much for my foot. I saw Weezer my favorite band, and was in front and on the rail and actually got to touch his hand. I jumped way too much on that foot. When the excitement subsided I could barely walk. I made my way over to deadmaus. I couldn’t stand. Not be able to dance for a dance set was the worst. I made my way home.
The last day I was there was calm. He was avoiding me. The day before was his last effort. We were bruised and broken. I went to a bar to watch the World Series. The Giants won. And I cheered so psyched for San Francisco. I looked around. Nobody cared. No one else watching the World Series. Because New Orleans didn’t have a baseball team.
I was suddenly filled with hatred for this city. Fuck this town. Fuck this Disney novelty town, this drunk abusive keep your dysfunction at home shithole. Fuck this swamp hellhole.
I paid my bill and left.
The next morning he left early. I packed the one bag I had money for and looked around. My trinkets and art, yearbook albums and possessions, two cats and a dog. I was leaving it all. I was running away as fast as I could. I made it the airport and got my boarding pass. I walked up to the TSA line and handed the agent my ID.
’Look at that’ she said ‘It expires today’
My heart dropped right through my stomach, sheer terror immediately consumed me, I hadn’t thought to check my license, my California license it was my birthday it expired today. For the briefest of moments I thought I was going to be trapped in New Orleans again.
She handed me my ID back and let me go. I walked in and breathed out shaking violently and feeling like I was going to vomit. I tried to hold back my tears to the best of my ability to get through TSA. When I got through I gave in and sobbed freely not caring who saw me. I got on the plane and I passed out.
The next day I woke up in the back storage room Nate had cleared out for me. I could hear the fog horn in the distance. I felt incredibly unstable still but at least I was in CA. Far far away from Jeremy and New Orleans. I got up and made my way to the DMV. I called my mother earlier that week to tell her I was coming back to San Francisco and she put some money in my account so that I could get a new license.
I got to the DMV and it was relatively empty. I got my number and was seen within 20 minutes. When I walked up to the window and asked the woman. What’s going on where is everyone?
’It’s the Giants parade today.’ She said rather annoyed. Oh. Right. I forgot already. Watching them win in New Orleans already felt so long ago. I renewed my license and walked out with my paper license and made my way back to Nate’s. I don’t know when but slowly I started to feel like I could breathe again. And I slowly exhaled all of New Orleans out of me.
Every now and then I catch a glimpse of someone that looks like him or someone that walks like him. The way you memorize the gait and movement of your abuser, so that you can see them a mile away… It’s never him, but it doesn’t stop my heart from jumping into my chest before I realize it’s not him.
I’ll have to return to Nola soon. And I imagine I’ll me mildly terrified every second we spend in the French quarter knowing he’s there somewhere in his fine dining suit serving at some restaurant. But I’ll be with loved ones. People who know. People who will protect me if needed.
But this. Putting it on paper. Sharing. This needed to happen first. A way to process. A way to heal.
Never judge a woman in an abusive relationship. You don’t know. You don’t know till you’re there. Nothing is easy. Escaping is never easy. I’m grateful I had the strength to get out. Before I got hit. That’s a line that most women don’t get out before. I did somehow. But that’s because of my strength. And I sound be thankful for that.
This Modern Dystopia 