Alcohol! This was the trigger that started the cascade of my marriage destruction. Not excessive drinking by me—Kenneth J. (for Jerome) Hart, 6' 6" tall—or my 5' tall brunette wife, Miola. No, nothing alcoholic crossed my lips that night. It's just that I can't drink, and she knew it.
Somehow, I'm missing a gene or something, because one beer, or small glass of wine or a light mixed drink and I'm off, talking nonsense, wild, free and often inappropriate. I've lost friends and business contacts because of having a single drink and then talking off-guardedly. Two beers and my speech is slurred. Three beers and I start to stagger. Four or more and I'm quickly passed out, like a sodden old drunk on skid row, not to awaken until the next day.
Miola knew I couldn't take alcohol in any form, and yet she and her friends from work, there at our evening house party, whispering and laughing behind my back, and, giggling, kept pressing me to drink and down the vodka often.
Early in the party, with everyone else getting a little tipsy, I was handed glasses of expensive vodka-and-lemon-tonic and encouraged to drink it down. My manhood was challenged. Social pressure mounted to follow their lead. Keep up with the rest of the crowd, they said.
Even Miola was chugging down her vodka-and-lemon/lime mix, whispering and laughing with the crowd of her friends, as she encouraged me to take just one more sip.
Something was up. This was so unlike my 35-year old wife of 7 years, her jet-black hair flowing and bouncing off her bare shoulders, there in her off-the-shoulders peasant blouse, bare midriff and pleated skirt. Tonight, unusually, she wore 3" heels and fishnet stockings: what the hell, all that made her look sexy, a little slutty and desirable. Maybe I could get her to keep them on until tomorrow, so I could bang her in the morning?
But pushing me to drink? What the merry hell was going on? These were her friends from work. What were they all whispering about?
Due to being a self-employed maintenance/lubrication robotic engineer, I only had a few friends from my work and the people I did know were scattered around the country.
Lubrication? Maintenance? Robots? OK, think about one of those robotic assembly lines you see on YouTube. All those whirling, dancing machines, working in total darkness. What keeps all that whirling, 27/7/365 masses of electronics and metal moving? Bearings. Hinges. Sliding parts. All of which need a regular few drops of specialty-lube delivered to the one exact place, which just happens to be buried inside the mass of whirling metal. Move one centimeter in the wrong direction and whack, you've lost a chunk of skull or a fingertip.
There has to be a better way. That's what I do, design and find the better ways. I get paid well to do so.
I make a good living. Enough to support Miola well. She didn't have to work. But I'm away several time a month, and she got bored, so she got a corporate job involving audio-visual production of training films. Now she knows video production work backwards and forwards, and sometime acts in front of the lens as well as behind it. More power to her.
But, tonight, here I was at the party with Miola and her friends, trying to be social but not drink. I mixed up a pitcher of sparkling water with lemon, then added a couple drops of bitter and only drank that, but pretended to get bombed.
Suspicious? Hell, yes, I was suspicious.
Just like I'd gotten suspicious when I came home from a recent trip, to find the living room subtly re-arranged. Two previous trips, two times re-arranged. Nothing major, but little things done. My reading lamp on the right side of my chair instead of on the left. The clock moved from 'there' to 'here'. Chairs that didn't fit the mashed-down imprints of the legs on the floor. Plus a vague smell of disinfectant, masked by a stronger scent of lilac or lavender. That sort of thing.
So, while Miola was at work one day, I installed a motion-activated video cam, covering the living-room. I fixed it so that it would only record longer term motions and not just walk-throughs. The cam would record to memory but also make a DVD, from a tray of 5 blank disks. That was 2 trips ago, and I'd almost forgotten about it, thinking I'd check on the video memory later, since there didn't seem to be any hurry.
After all, I knew-for-sure that my Miola loved only me and only wanted me to have her, alone, for sex and loving.
Thus, there I was, still cold sober, but acting seriously drunk, and being helped to my easy chair by two of her friends, Ahmed Mingo and Warren HungLo. I let my last 'drink' fall from my fingers and slumped into my chair, where the two guys positioned my loose head so that everyone could see my face, bolstered by carefully-placed pillows. As they stepped back to the group, I watched any future action through slitted eyes.