Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [60]
ME: Last n—
CHIVAS’ DAD: What’re you hollerin’ about, doodlebug?
CHIVAS: He says I told him you fucked me!
CHIVAS’ DAD: That was a nightmare you had! We agreed! [To me] Who the fuck are you?
CHIVAS: Who’s this bitch?
CHIVAS’ DAD’S GIRLFRIEND: Cowgirl with a bomb-ass pussy, that’s who.
Chivas throws pepper mill at no one.
What it’s All About, in the End
My wife at her worst:
Has taught me the past is dead, the future is uncertain, and all we can truly know, or come close to knowing, is the present.
My stripper ex-girlfriend at her best:
If you go down on a girl, or leave her a note saying you miss her, or don’t pay her rent, you’re a faggot.
It only took two months of me dating a stripper to appreciate what a miracle my wife is. And I didn’t meet my wife until three years after my stripper girlfriend’s final, typo-heavy text message saying she was flying to “arJenteena” with a “music band.” “Watch out for all the Nazi Hitlers!” I furiously texted back. Alas, she was gone.
I’d like to think she’s still out there, perhaps not in arJenteena, but somewhere else, Bolivia for example, giving some other poor fool a lesson he will never forget, and mentioning casually, in her own off-handed way, that her dad may or may not have molested her.
Lesson#42
Sometimes You Find a Lost Love, Sometimes You Don’t
by Bob Kerrey
In January 1961 at the beginning of my final semester of high school I put a photograph of a woman I loved in my wallet for the first and last time in my life. She had just won a skating competition. Head back, hair cut short, and smiling. She was beautiful but something about her captured me beyond her raw beauty. Nothing quite matched the spark, which arose between me and my girl, skating across the ice. The only problem was I had cut the photograph from The Lincoln Journal sports page. I had fallen in love with a total stranger. A very pretty one at that.
There wasn’t much detail in the story accompanying the photo other than she was sixteen, a year younger than me. A month later she was featured on the front page of Sports Illustrated as the most promising U.S. female skater. Inside I learned that her older sister and both her parents were skaters and that her father had died when she was seven. I learned she was planning on attending college in the fall. Later, I learned—as I prepared to write about this lost love—that she and her mother had purchased several copies of Sports Illustrated right before boarding a plane bound for Brussels where she was to compete in the World Championships.
As it turns out, a wallet is the least safe place to put valuables. I didn’t hold on to the photograph long. That summer my wallet fell into the warm water of a sandpit lake along the Platte River. The physical image was gone but the memory of her face has stayed with me to this day.
I thought of her when Darrel, one of my best friends, recently called to tell me about finding his lost love. Impressive, since Darrel is eighty-seven years old. His first wife died shortly after they celebrated their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. His second divorced him after three years because he didn’t act his age; he likes to swim in Puget Sound with the otters early every morning. (What is the proper age for early-morning swims with otters anway?)
The divorce depressed him and he began seeing a shrink “for the second time,” he told me. Before long he was feeling better except that he was dating women who were in their thirties. I should say “because” he was dating women in their thirties. The shrink asked him about his past love life and Darrel told him about falling in love with his nurse when he was in the hospital for gallbladder surgery during the summer of 1963.
“That was when I went to a shrink for the first time. I asked him how much it would cost to talk me out of this [affair]. I did not want to destroy my family. I never saw her again.”
For a man in love there are no more terrible words than those. I’ve uttered them too. In 1963 I called my girlfriend at the beginning of my third year in college.