Friday, January 28, 2011

Big Boobs v. Blow Jobs: Commodities or Community Chest?

I have a friend.  She is a good friend, a good person - too good in her own fucked up way. When I first arrived in Wisconsin seeking the advice of anyone who would talk to me about the job market I was presuming to conquer, her name consistently came up as "someone I should talk to". When I had finally secured not one, but two job offers, I called her for advice.  It was a cold call; a blind, cold call.  No, it was a blindsiding phone call to someone who refused to divulge any market secrets to some hick chick from Oklahoma.  But I didn't judge, for we all know how to answer those calls; professional decorum and litigation friendly employment laws limit honesty and gag reality like a blow job gone bad. 

I accepted a job offer and one year later told the Norwegian tyrant with the red face/veins bulging from his neck to fuck off when he asked me to compromise my business ethics. Three days later I was hired to work side by side with the aforementioned friend, where I have stayed happily employed for the past ten years.

I have bonded with this woman, with her children, with her family and friends.  I have met her boyfriend, discovered he was cheating, hinted to her that he may be cheating, took pictures and developed photographs of him cheating, outright told her he was cheating,  called the woman he cheats with to see if she was out of town at the same time he was and sadly, most pathetically, stood toe to toe with this disgusting man threatening to expose him while he laughed hysterically, hugged me and gave me an extra special kiss on my cheek for being the innocent, naive schmuck I was.

Now this post is getting harder to write. I am chewing my fingernails, which is not a habit but they are fucking lame nails, not really worth saving; nonetheless, they are vanishing with my angst.  I just spotted a sliver of a nail between the H & J on my keyboard.  And I am much too exhausted to give this next bit of info any kind of  fluffy, literary treatment so I am surrendering to the bullet points.  May they rest in peace along with my fingernails.

  • This gorgeous woman that I love dearly has a sugar daddy.
  • He buys her lots of jewelry, pays her bills and enjoys her blow jobs until....
  • Younger woman comes along with big boobs
  • He promises my girl a life with BMW's, bank accounts and boob jobs of her own, he tells me she saved his life, she is literally the force that kept him alive through his divorce (see a pattern here?)
  • She has no car, no money and boobies that belong rightfully to a woman of her age. They are beautiful and sexy as hell but shit sags after 50. However, he did pay for her lipo and tummy tuck a few years back.
  • He still enjoys the blow jobs - and he speaks of them with his friends who are in our industry. 
  • But who am I to fucking judge?
  • I hate this mother fucker.
  • He bailed her out of debt within the last two years by securing a loan for her. It was big debt, but she is paying it back. The stipulation was - no more spending, no more debt.
  • She has now fallen behind and charged the credit cards back up at a rate exponential to her grief.
  • She is hiding the new debt from him, still giving great blow jobs and still, I am quite certain, one of his greatest commodities while also simultaneously hanging on to the community chest.
Back to life, back to the new year, my friend who manages to always maintain a sunny disposition, comes to me and proposes we start a blog together.  My blog has been somewhat (in her terms) successful. We need to start our own blog, tell OUR stories and gain sympathies so people will just GIVE us money. 

But why would people give us money?

Well, you know how you always hear of rags to riches stories, someone gets tipped $10,000 - why not us?  You are struggling to make ends meet, raising your kids, daddy is gone - people will want to help us.

And it was then I realized I am not a commodity or a community chest.  I have big (yet saggy) boobs and I can give a helluva blow job but I earned my self respect through years of fucking up.  The thought of money is not enough at the age of 47 to rock me off my Gibraltar. 

So I said in the most loving, girlfriend kind of way - sweetie, I am not comfortable with that.  But if you would like me to sit down and look at your financial situation, you know I am always available.

Today, we had lunch and I gave her a good Suze Orman smack down. "Sell all of that expensive jewelry and clothing, stop paying $200 per month for your smokes, write down everything you spend and take a good hard look at what you can cut".

She said she is currently in the hole and must charge groceries, gas and utilities each month just to get by. She wants her current sugar daddy or someone else to come along and bale her out but I told her a woman with a nice home, great car, expensive jewelry and wardrobe would probably not qualify as a charity.  Are you still getting your hair done every three weeks for over $150.00?  Are you still supporting your children who are of working age, able to take care of themselves? And are you fucking kidding me that you will spend $200.00 per month on cheap cigars that will end up costing you ten times that amount with credit card interest?

She said she can't give up the cigars because she is working on the shopping and alcohol addictions first.  Plus, the asshole bought all of her jewelry so she can't sell it as long as she is with him.  (Just go ahead and infer what I was thinking here.)

I have always been after her to stop smoking but in an ironic twist, I became more concerned with her financial health than her physical health when I weighed out which would kill her first. Yes, I want you to live to see your grandchildren grow up but for the sake of all that is holy, set a fucking goal and put down those nasty ass cigars. Then I remembered I cannot change her, help her, or even inspire the tiniest flicker of hope in her mind unless she is ready.  And clearly she is not.

Now here's the rub. She is happy; carrying a perpetual smile. Always thinking on the sunny side of life, hugging me from behind unexpectedly and loving me with a gleam in her eye that is the real deal. She sees me as a negative Nelly who tells her the ugly truth but she loves me in a way that few are loved.

On the other hand, I struggle.  I want my kids to have everything they were used to before their dad went away.  I would love to take vacations, and pay for swim lessons and camping trips and the latest fashions but we have to be conservative in order to survive. (For those that are catching up, it's not because I'm missing a child support payment, it's because he owes me for his half of joint expenses to the tune of $16,000 then denied any responsibility for his share of their expenses while he serves his prison term, leaving me to cover all costs for the next two and a half years.)

Who wins, who loses and who looks down and realizes they have no fingernails left at all?

That would be me.

14 comments:

  1. I'll take a peaceful nights sleep over jewelry and stuff any day. Just reading about her financial situation made my stomach hurt. And if I give a bj for christsake, it's going to be because I want to make my husband's eyes roll into his head, not because I need to pay my gas bill. I'm sure she never wanted to be at this point and I know that sometimes a girls got to do what a girls got to do, but this to me is a cautionary tale and just crystallizes my desire to make sure I raise my girls independent and financially responsible.

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  2. I would like to just and paste the above comment here. Shit you guys can write.

    Okay, so your girl is a great gal, but happy? No, Happy people do not have that kind of debt. Its just a different sort of addiction and she is numb. Don't get sucked into her chaos.

    And you are living in reality that is why you have no fingernails but the hope of an authentic life.

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  3. I have girlfriends who are given the world and still blow it.

    Every penny I've made was hard-worked for.

    I see their method and I see mine. Easy hand outs or blood, sweat, and tears? I'll take the B,S,T. No one will ever say to me, "But you owe me."

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  4. A woman I work with had to check her bank balance and make a phone call to find out just how late her car payment could be before she could decide whether or not she could afford to go out lunch one day last week. It was a $12 lunch. I feel like I'm an enabler now. As for your friend, ZM, I think Robin is right when she says that she's really not as happy as she seems. Either that, or she's got some really awesome happy pills.

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  5. All I know is that every time I've sold my soul for cold, hard cash I've ended up wanting to open a fuckin' vein. Period.

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  6. You all are spot on with your comments. The hardest to read was MG as I often think I would have opened a vein long ago in my friend's incredibly sexy, six inch heels. But denial and subterfuge is the vessel that can carry a woman who self medicates for anxiety a long way down that river before she will ever reach the rapids.

    The most troubling aspect for me is the begging for money. Whether it is from the two-timing, botox-injected-ass she sucks (botox in his face, not his actual ass) or the idea that someone will simply choose to give her money. The woman is put together. She is all that AND a bag cashews but she has passed the baton of helplessness to her two daughters and son.

    I am such a stark contrast to her. I am the stark and snarky to her light and sparky. I wonder how she can put up with me but she continues to sneak up behind me in the office just to hug me and tell me how much she loves me. Even after I have harangued her for an hour over the smoking and spending.

    Of course she is not as happy as she seems. But that's what the anti-anxiety meds (as the Elder predicted) are there for. She has panic attacks at work, she falls asleep at her desk and oh, by the way, she is battling with alcoholism, having had her second DUI and continuing to regularly get smashed and drive.

    That's the one part of her I will forever fight for. We worked our way up through this penis required ascent together, drinking our way to the top. And now, she and I share one paddle, trying to get out of shit creek. As part of my rehab, I am inviting her to participate in my recovery. She is there, begging me to take her with me; yet, she leaves the office with the usual gang and I know she will drive home as I am not there to stop her.

    Just please be careful as you read "These Women's Words" and know that you can never give your power away as so many of you have already commented.

    Own it, see it, dig it, free it. Then clean up the shit and just be it.

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  7. I hear you, ZM. It's strange being the one in a friendship who isn't destroying herself. It's a relief to be able to invite others to participate in recovery or anything else that might be helpful. It can also be a curse when the one I'm inviting is so easy to love, but never takes me up on the invitation. In cases like that I have to check my balance often - making sure I'm not being drawn away from what keeps me free when the one I love clearly is not. Making sure I'm having just as much contact with those who have accepted the invitation.
    When it's especially hard - when someone I love is seriously in their "stuff" - I always remind myself that it was the people who refused to place themselves between me and my bottom that saved my life. For me, it was a gift to have my life turn into a gravel spitting, tire squealing, spark flying, metal bending crash. It saved my life. Thank goodness for those people who had it in them to watch with love rather than try to insert themselves into the situation.

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  8. I knew people like you when I was still using drugs, Rass. One in particular loved to hang around and take note of every bizarre, stupid, degrading, depraved thing I did while using or in an effort to get drugs. Almost every day she would recount to me all the things I'd done. She called herself my conscience, but I know I was actually a convenient person to have around so she had a place to put her generalized disdain, arrogance and self-hatred. She was one of the first people I gladly "left" when I got clean. In many ways, she was worse that people who wanted me to keep getting high with them. I've seen her one time since I got clean. I think I had been off of drugs for around 10 years and was living a completely different life. Her face lit up when she saw me and she began to immediately recount one of her observations of my using days. I cannot tell you the pleasure I had in saying, loudly, "You're right! OH MY GOD, you're right. I did exactly THAT!"
    The room went silent and I said, "What else ya got? Anything? Or haven't YOU been doing anything with your life for the past decade or so?"
    Can I imagine saying that to you? No. But I would.

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  9. The difference I think is that Rassles knows it and doesn't take advantage of the human punching bags.

    And MG, I think it is really shitty that rather than tell you that you looked great and that she was ecstatic to find you got your shit together that she immediately brought up past crap. I'm continually amazed at what people don't get, frequently myself included.

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  10. But, Rass, what you describe is NOT being cruel. It is being honest that someone is being harmful and others should be careful around them.
    I think you're confused about the difference between speaking the truth and setting out with the goal of using others to make yourself feel better.

    Rubes: Yeah. She (the woman I ran into a decade later) is a dumb fuck. She is clearly not up to my standards.

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  11. Everyone needs a Rassles in their life. What you describe is not an intent to usher in the demise of your friends, it is a love greater and stronger than most of us are willing to give.

    I wish I could be strong enough to take some type of drastic action to turn my friend around but like MG said, better to watch her fall then try to rescue her. I'm going to stop giving advice and dancing around her issues. I'm going to take three giant steps back, just like playing "Red Light, Green Light", and I'm going to stay there until she breaks.

    You on the other hand, helped speed up the fall so they could get on with the shit that needed to get done, like leaving a whore or not attempting to kill people with their drunk ass driving.

    Wish I would have had you in my life like twenty years ago. I needed to be fucking cut, like a fucking fileted fish.

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  12. ZM, I wish I could give you some advice on this situation.

    Is she somehow entangled up in her goals as well, so you don't really know how to deal with it because you'll be crushing her dreams? That's the worst, when someone is barreling towards their dreams like a plow of self destruction.

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  13. Rassles - the opposite is true of her. She has no real dreams or goals because she doesn't live in reality. Sure she wants to lose a little weight, stop drinking and get out of debt but there is a stuckness to that. I'm stuck in my own ways as well but I only tend to stay stuck for a little while until I get all riled up and start some serious shit to get out of it. She just floats along. Though she did stop by today and announce her need to get control of the drinking after a week where she showed up to work with a black eye and no idea how she got it.

    Thanks for trying though!

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  14. I say do whatever Mongo says to do, because she is wise.

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