I know a woman who married a tall, charming, athletic man a few decades back.  He was a salesman, and something of a bullshit artist.   He exuded self-confidence and threw money around to impress his guests, but occasionally he would stutter.  His stutter did not stop him from being very opinionated, very assertive, arguing forcefully for opinions gleaned from his wide reading.  His stutter did nothing to curb his road rage.

 I once saw him strike out in a softball game and throw his bat down in frustration.  He was a giant and almost shattered the bat on the hard dirt near home plate.  Next time up he popped up, put his head down and groaned in frustration.  His groan could be heard on the other side of the park.   The third time up he hit a monstrous drive that kept rising as it went, and it went further than any ball I’ve ever seen hit in a softball game.  He went into his homerun trot smiling.

The woman fought with him, and dominated him in many ways, but they clearly loved each other.  He loved her so much he kept buying her cowboy boots, at one time she had a dozen pairs.  Their daughter would later have two dozen Barbie dolls.  He was a high roller.  He left 40% tips if he liked the service.  Then things started going badly for him.  Over time his stories of bad luck stopped making sense.

For example, he had a very lucrative sales job, working on a small crew of salesmen who sold a product that flew off the shelves.  He was friends with the many store owners on his route, they often gave him hardcover books, current best sellers.  There was no reason to think this friendly salesman was putting the books in his case when the store owner was distracted writing him a check for the goods he delivered.  He was loved at work, one of their top earners and a bright guy with a great sense of humor who could make fun of himself.  Everyone believed him when he reported that his sample case had been stolen from his car.  Why would anyone sell his samples for a few hundred bucks when he was taking home so much money?

Once he came home with his clothes cut to ribbons by razors, his wallet and house keys stolen.  He’d pulled off the FDR to avoid a massive traffic jam and two crackheads had tried to carjack him on an East Harlem side street.  He reported they were each as big as him and had eyes like sharks.  He’d managed to fight them off, being hit by a 2 X 4 in the process and amazingly not going down, they got his wallet and house keys, but he managed to hold on to the car keys and drive home.  He was black and blue, his clothes sliced to ribbons, but otherwise OK.  Nobody will ever know what actually happened to him that day, though one suspects a gambling debt was involved.

He eventually was fired from the lucrative sales job when his second sample case was stolen from his trunk, and samples began showing up on the shelves of stores on his route.  He managed to talk his way back into the job, but was reassigned to a very slow territory and his sales, and income, plummeted.  The woman found out they had zero left in the bank, and very little coming in, and with a new baby in the picture she was very stressed out.

He eventually lost that job, had others, progressively less lucrative, lost them too, usually following the discovery of some petty embezzlement scheme he cooked up.   Each scheme had two characteristics in common: they netted a few hundred dollars at a time and they were designed in a way that guaranteed he would get caught.   My personal favorite is one I will relate in a moment.

The woman eventually realized that he was a person who was handy with an untruth if it suited the situation better than candor.  It took years, but eventually she came to see him as a liar.  The final proof came as they were house hunting, a couple of years after the birth of their second child, a son.  When she was pregnant with the boy she reported that her husband wanted another child “as much as he wants testicular cancer”.   Once the boy was born it was love all around for everyone.  They were going to put a down payment down on a house the woman loved, they were done negotiating and were ready to buy it.  He borrowed ten thousand dollars from his wife’s parents on a Monday, part of the money they were going to put down to buy the house.  Later that week he informed everyone that he’d declared bankruptcy on Wednesday.

The woman went into a rage, and a panic, and stopped sleeping and lost a lot of weight, she could not keep food down.  For a variety of reasons she didn’t leave him, though she slept with her young son for several years and actively hated her husband.

Fast forward several years and we are at my personal favorite story about this guy.  He was coaching his son’s basketball team with another guy, and they got to talking about the shit work the guy was obliged to take these days to pay his bills.  The other coach had a commercial extermination business and offered his new friend a sales job.  The pay was better than what he was making, he would be working for a friend, and the friend’s company was flourishing.

A big source of income was commissions for landing new accounts.  The first few months he opened a few accounts a week and he was taking home good money.  Then it became harder and harder to find new businesses that needed exterminator services.  He could not let his wife and children down, so he hit on another brilliant scheme.  

Trusted by his friend, he would often lock up the office at the end of the day, he had his own key.   Ignorant about the workings of computers, he managed to pull up accounts and change the details, making up new clients he’d pretend he’d signed up.  He would print out the new client information sheet, turn it in the next day, and his friend would slap him on the back and pay him a commission.

The only problem was, in order to create a new fake account to get a commission for, he was inadvertently deleting actual accounts.  He’d overwrite company A’s file on the computer, renaming it company X.  He didn’t know how to copy a file and retain the original, so an actual client was deleted each time he overwrote the file to create a new commission.   The scheme worked perfectly, for several weeks, until the deleted companies started calling in to complain.

“Hey, Dave, what the hell’s going on?  I’ve got waterbugs marching out into the waiting room, carrying away small dogs,” reported a disgruntled veterinarian, “I haven’t seen you guys in a month.  What the fuck, Dave?”

Dave was sincerely perplexed, checked his computer, did not find the vet’s account.  Once this happened a few times Dave figured out what happened and angrily fired his unethical buddy.

The man went home to his wife that Friday and sadly reported that Dave’s business was having a slump, and that Dave had to let three sales people go, and since he was the last one hired, he was the first one on the chopping block.  His wife was all sympathy, took him to dinner, then a movie, reassured him that everything would turn out OK.  She took him to the beach the next day, the family had a wonderful weekend.  She had finally completely recovered from her rage against him.

Until Monday when Dave had calmed himself down enough to call the wife.  He reported the crime, and how much he was hurt by the betrayal, and told her he was going to press criminal charges unless the $3,600 was paid back immediately.   They made a payment plan and the woman began paying her husband’s debt weekly out of her meager salary.

I urged her to finally tell her children the truth about their father’s treachery, otherwise she would appear once more irrationally angry at him and the kids would be rightly confused.  Honesty was the only light to be shined on this hideous situation, and she agreed.  Declining my help (I’d known them all for years and have had training as a mediator) she assured me that he himself had promised to tell the kids what he’d done.  I was skeptical.

When the big day came he put on a sad face and sincerely told the children: “you know, sometimes people make mistakes.  And, as you know, your mother has a hard time forgiving people, particularly me….”  At this the woman screamed, ran out of the house and began driving 90 mph on the highway.  To this day, I’m pretty sure, her children have no idea why she is often enraged at their father.  The father, after all, is an affectionate, playful, easy-going guy who takes things in stride.  Their mother, by contrast, is a demanding and stressed out nervous wreck who is often cranky and who treats their loving father very badly much of the time.

Now, we fast forward to the present.  The kids are both young adults, the daughter just graduated from college, the son on his way to college.  Lovely kids, and both quite brilliant, good looking and well-liked.

The man is now crippled with multiple disc and joint problems.  He can no longer stand or walk without pain.  He had to give up his off-the-books job delivering pizza, he can no longer drive or carry the bags and boxes to and from his van.  Pain killers do not seem to help, and he moans in pain as, after a long day at work, the woman waits on him, does the laundry, empties the dishwasher, brings him water, the TV remote, his book, his reading glasses.  He groans throughout the night.  This once muscular 240 pound athlete is now a shattered 300 pound albatross who has not left the house in a month.  He hangs heavily from his wife’s neck, and it is up to their son to tell the man not to groan all night, that he must not keep his wife awake and endanger the hardworking breadwinner’s livelihood.

I tell the story because, having heard it, and felt the weight of it on the woman, and the almost mythic proportions of it, it becomes impossible not to tell it to somebody.