Three Men Nearly Ended Me

The first place I lived alone was a tiny old 1 bedroom apartment on the main floor of a dilapidated old former logger bunkhouse right on Tacoma Street, across from the strip club and right at the base of the failing Sellwood Bridge. It was the first rental application I used with my old name, from before the marriage. It was only in my name. I would like to say I paid for the $500.00 deposit to move in, but it was paid by my ex-boyfriend’s parents to secure new housing for me and my 7 year old son after he had thrown a solid glass candlestick at my head and scared me nearly to death with the hole it left in the plaster, and the closeness it came to cracking my skull. 

  This random bout of near lethal violence right after a brutal custody trial was an unbearable betrayal that I did not take on quietly. If I wasn’t safe with him, I was not going to live there. So I called his parents and asked for a safe place for my son and I to sleep until I could find another place to live. They were appalled and let me sleep at grandpa’s house while they dealt with their son’s shameful behavior by taking his prized Gretsch drum kit away and holding it until he could repay the cost they incurred to move me from our residence to this little place. 

That was the only time I ever saw a family do the right thing in the face of their son’s violence and that’s the reason why at this point I have been able to forgive.

Their check cleared and I moved in and explored what it was to be officially single and independent at the age of 30. Looking back, I really wish I had left it that way. It was a really cute apartment and my son and I had a full re-bonding after the mandatory custodial estrangement his father had inflicted on us seemingly was coming to an end. It’s closure was the result of me losing legal custody, but still physically having Oscar in my care 5 nights a week, and no child support going either way because his father didn’t really want custody of Oscar and he also did not want to pay for his own child’s upkeep; he merely wanted to destroy my custodial rights as punishment for the divorce, and once he had achieved that he turned the child over to me for the caretaking details such as school, doctors, clothing, food, etc. so he could continue his Burning Man lifestyle with his trust fund girlfriend while boasting that he’s a cool single dad with custody- he wants everyone to know that. I was supposed to just shut up and be happy that I was able to have that much time with him at all, so I was! 

I just took that time and paid for all the costs and was glad to be with my child- the only ray of light that came from a traumatic 10 year abusive marriage that I’d entered with the intent to escape the family abuse when I was only 18, but did not know then I was running towards the same kind of dysfunction. 

He was a manipulative, charming, love-bombing, fast-talking dreamer who was always on the verge of some great idea or project or success. The reality was very different from the story, but the story was louder, so that’s what was generally accepted as truth.  If you ever had to deal with him, he would prefer that you listen to what he says rather than watch what he does. It was this ability to spin an alternate reality to any given situation that made me realize years ago that if I ever tried to leave him, that skill would be in full effect to cover up any kind of perceived failure on his part. And when you’re raised to believe divorce is worse than murder like he was, a failed marriage when a child is involved is deeply shameful to the fear-based Jehovah Witness he still is on the inside. I didn’t even care to point fingers; I just wanted to be free.

And for a brief period of less than a year, I was. 

In 2005 internet dating was considered risky, corny, nerdy, and done out of desperation by maladjusted gamers and fat women, which is the worst you can be if you’re a woman in 2005.   It was assumed that the reason you resorted to the internet to meet people is because you suck socially and no one in real life wants to date you, but you might be able to fool them online briefly.  The Portland Mercury had a backpage ad space for rent usually for escort services, telemarketing jobs and other want-ads. But on the second to last backpage there was a dating want-ad published, along with a primitive online service that has the same want-ads published online for users for free. I had been single maybe only 6 months before I started perusing these pages- first out of curiosity as to what kind of weirdo would post online for a date, but then the pressures of being single and emotionally unprepared for being that had eventually piled up enough that I thought maybe I should give it a try.

I had convinced myself at this point that I just needed to keep sifting through men until the right one surfaced. It seemed like a matter of numbers, really.  Over the next year I went out for dates with various men from that site. Some were evaluated further for boyfriendness. Some were rejected at the first meeting. One of them slipped me a roofie at the Sandy Hut and tried to assault me in his house while I was tied to his wall. He was unsuccessful. And I didn’t go out with him again, obviously- though I should probably have called the police, as he had a tarp out over the bed when he tried to grope me while I pretended to be unconscious. 

One guy, I dated for 3 months- he was into the SCA, which is a heavy armor combat simulation done medieval style. For fun. Nerd stuff- he also had a weekly D&D game, which I tried to participate in but found it tedious. He broke up with me because to him I was a desperate single mom he’d met on the internet who was more to handle in person than the ad had implied. Pesky how women have needs and are not something you can just order up online at your pleasure.

I did not meet Daniel online. I met him at Kay’s Bar, which was Portland’s speakeasy during Prohibition. Complete with prostitutes upstairs- their boudoirs are now converted to storage upstairs. Jeffrey, the Best Bartender in the World says there is a ghost up there that likes to knock things over at night. It had become the mainstay of the neighborhood with a full roster of regulars who lived mostly within staggering distance of the place, as did I. By this time I had enrolled in school full-time, was working at a taxi cab company on weekends and spent those weekend evenings exploring singlehood at the geriatric age of 30- who would have ever imagined?

Growing up was all about training me to be a wife and mother first. Girls age 17 or 18 would be looking for husbands already. If a girl wanted to go to college, that was fine, and a likely way to land a man, but it was by no means supposed to be a pathway to independence or a career. It was like frosting on a wifely cake- an education was superfluous to my existence. I did not have any models for what a single mom is like. The reason I stayed in the marriage so long was mainly because I had no idea how to be financially secure in myself- I always thought I needed to have supplementary income to be truly safe and stable. 

Anything other than a dual income is teetering on the edge of doom, and a precarious place for a young mother to be. Do the math and it’s easy to see how having twice the income can buy a bigger place for my son, more food he can eat and better care in general. A dual income means security. Even more stable is a single income from the man of the house, who lets you stay at home and take care of the child full-time. Not having to worry about my bank account or whether or not I can afford shoes for my son because there’s a man who has a good job and can pay for all of it. That, to me, was stability. Not because it actually is. I see now how that’s actually the opposite of stable- to rely on a man for your daily bread. But Mormon programming goes deep within me, just as my ex-husband’s unconscious Jehovah Witness beliefs were the opposite of stability. 

Without a man in my life, I felt like I was only half a person- there was a person out there who would fit me, if only I looked hard enough, tried all types and followed my heart, surely the right man would come out of the ether and save me from a lonely life alone and vulnerable. It was Daniel’s turn.

And he was a slouchy, glowering reptile of a man. His eyes were large and framed with very long lashes and capable of real charm, but they also darted around the room constantly, his twitchy hands and full sleeve tattoos. He should have been a one night stand, but he kept showing up at my apartment and I guess I was flattered and glad I didn’t have to go out to have a boyfriend. He was a cigarette smoker; I used to make him smoke in front of the apartment, but the cars driving past on their way off the Sellwood Bridge always pushed the smell back towards my windows. 

I somehow spent 9 months with him before we regretfully decided to cohabitate. It was better for me, as by 2006 I had begun full-time coursework in Civil Engineering at the community college and could use cheaper rents for me and my son. By this time, Oscar was staying with me Monday through Friday, and his father would come pick him up for the weekend. It had been that way for a year, and it was not what the custody order had laid out. We never followed the ordered custody plan. As soon as his father was declared the Legal Custodian and Primary Parent, he allowed me to have Oscar all week, in exchange for not seeking any child support, as this amount of custodial time would have triggered a change in custody, if the courts knew. 

Oscar was with me during the school week, and this was most important to me because I could help him by providing stability during the school week- under his father’s care his attendance was poor, his assignments were missing or late and he was unkempt looking and wearing clothes he’d outgrown. I didn’t care that I was going to have to fund all his school expenses and a cellphone, his clothes, his medical and dental care. 

All I cared about was that I could be there for him most of the time, since I was typically the punctual more responsible parent before the marriage exploded apart. I even sent groceries back to his father’s house on the weekend on a few occasions because I knew his father was not ever reliably employed- he was leaching off that trust fund girlfriend, poor Michelle. 

Apparently I had not learned my lesson about living with unstable men because I moved into a large 3 bedroom apartment closer to Oscar’s school and on the main drag in Sellwood for Daniel’s convenient commute to his job at the art glass furnace. It took less than a month of cohabitating for Daniel to take off his charm mask. He stopped showering and started spending all his free time in his computer den with his gamer community. He was eating my food out of the fridge, which was irritating because by then I knew I was a Celiac and had a special gluten free diet, which was expensive and hard to find back in 2006. He didn’t seem to care about the relationship anymore- like I had become a mother figure to him in his unresolved mother-issues he began treating me with disdain. 

But the final straw for me was when we went grocery shopping and he stood me up at the register with a full cart to pay for- suddenly confessing to me in front of the harried cashier that he had no money for his part of what we had loaded in the cart.  I paid over $200.0 for the items and when I tried to get some hint of responsibility or maturity out of him, he slunk down lower, got menacingly quiet, only one syllable gruff replies and slammed doors. I’d seen this before. I wasn’t going to wait around for the slamming of doors to turn into a slamming of objects into walls or heads. 

While Daniel hid in his den, I went back to the leasing agent that had signed us up for 1 year in that apartment only 1 month ago. Tearfully, I told her I was afraid for myself and my son, that the man I moved in with had begun to scare me, and I wanted to get out of the lease. Amazingly, she acquiesced and let me free to move out of the apartment. Before doing that, I had already found another 2 bedroom apartment just a few blocks away at “Crystal Springs Apartments” and was prepared to make the deposit and move in. 

I’d made a number of hasty exits before, by this time I was good at pulling up stakes and rehoming because I’d found myself living with yet another unreliable, unstable person. By this time I also knew that the most dangerous time is when they realize you are leaving them. I had made my rehousing arrangements without his knowledge, and had already signed the new lease in a cute place with a swimming pool and a small river running through it. 

I’m not ashamed to admit that I lied to Daniel about moving out. I told him that co-housing was ruining our relationship and that I needed to have my own place in order for it to continue. 

In truth, I had no intention of continuing any relationship with Daniel- my heart was already hardened- I wasn’t going to let another man scare me like before. 

But to keep him from springing unpredictably into violence in front of Oscar or in the home we still shared at the moment, I led him to believe I wasn’t breaking up with him, just moving out. I was backing away from him nervously, like I’d lit a firework in the street and was keeping an eye out for explosions while moving slowly to safety. I’d break up with him as soon as I was safe in my own place again. 

I had to spend my latest financial aid disbursement to pay the deposits and expenses necessary to move. Done by myself, as usual. I hauled all my shit upstairs to our new place in Crystal Springs, adjacent to a really nice park- my son had lots of range for outdoor adventures. This was a real bastion for the both of us. 

Shortly after the move, the day before Christmas in 2006 I met Daniel at Kays where I had planned to break up with him. He didn’t have a key to the new apartment, and had only been there once or twice since I had left our brief shared residence. He rented out my rooms to other internet gremlins he’d known online and interacted with regularly in his den. I had 2 gin and tonics before pulling the cord, and predictably, Daniel did not take it well. 

We argued. He followed me home; Oscar was with his father this holiday so I was alone with Daniel in front of my new apartment and he was being loud and dramatic, which was embarrassing to be since I’d just moved in, I didn’t want to be associated with home-brawls. I let him in the apartment hoping to quiet him, but he began to threaten to harm himself because he was so sure I was going to have a child (no I wasn’t!) so my leaving him was too much of a loss for him to bear. His despondency was angry and punishing- childish in nature. I could see that he was talking to his mother when he was talking to me. I didn’t have patience for Daniel anymore. 

I told him repeatedly to leave, but in his increasing display of theater he grabbed a paring knife from my kitchen and began threatening to cut his wrists, whipping it around his neck and arms. I wasn’t going to break. I wasn’t going to be soft and crumble into a bath of sympathy for Daniel. I sat there and stared at the wall. I was so fucking sick of these child-men, how did I end up getting tangled with yet another one?! I moved to open the door for him to leave, and he stopped me, pinning me to the door with the knife hoovering at both our throats. I refused to meet his eyes in this stupid drunken moment. I just silently froze and looked down. 

Sensing he still wasn’t getting the reaction he wanted, he pushed me out of the way and whipped open the door, stomped down the walkway and fled in his rattling tan 1978 BMW into the darkness of the night, and I hoped, forever in my past. 

But no. He wasn’t done yet. 

Daniel called me from the Sellwood Bridge, telling me between pseudo-sobs that he was going to jump off the bridge, and to leave his comic book collection to Oscar, as if he ever cared. Again, I refused to give in to the drama. I was done with Daniel and was not going to be emotionally blackmailed. “Go ahead and jump.” I said flatly and hung up. I knew he didn’t have the courage to jump- it was all a tantrum. Still hoping it was over, I tried to hope for peace. But no. Daniel was still putting on a show. 

Within a half hour he showed up on my doorstep knocking and calling for me to let him in. I’d locked the door and was definitely not going to let him back in. His pounding got louder and louder. I told him to go away, and it only made him more driven to talk to me. He was humiliating me in my new neighborhood carrying on like a toddler. He upped the stakes, “I crashed my car at the bridge, I’m hurt, let me in!” he cried. Nope. I was not letting this person into my new safe place. He’d already violated it with a knife- I’d only been here a few weeks before he’d sullied it with violence. 

This time, I hadn’t done anything wrong- I tried to end it peacefully, no brawling, no screaming, and here i was again- afraid for my safety, embarrassed at the scene being created by yet another volatile man-child. Daniel started kicking at the door and within a few blows had managed to break the doorframe and the door flung open. I slammed it shut, fortunately the chain still worked, and was able to get him out of my face, holding the door shut with my body curled up against the door. 

“I’m calling you an ambulance.” I said. I dialed 9-1-1 and told them a man was outside my door claiming to be hurt. I lied to them because I didn’t want them to know I was involved in another domestic violence incident. I didn’t want to be a part of what was happening, and I didn’t want any of it in my new apartment or in my new life at Crystal Springs. Daniel wasn’t going to be known as my boyfriend- I didn’t want to admit I had a relationship with him. I was terrified what he might do before the police could arrive. 

He heard me talking to the dispatcher- he knew I’d invited law enforcement in on the breakup. He was bawling and cursing and stomping away through the parking lot so loudly- it was probably midnight or so before the squad car pulled up. By then, Daniel had fled the scene and headed back to his vehicle he’d allegedly crashed- it wasn’t crashed- that was all his theatricals. 

It didn’t take police long to assess the situation: a drunken breakup the day before Christmas. A second squad car had found Daniel walking on Tacoma St back to his car and apprehended him, much to my relief.

 It wasn’t going to be me in handcuffs this time. 

There wasn’t going to be another betrayal of justice at the scene of the crime. I don’t actually remember what happened from that point on- it’s funny how traumatic memories can be seared into memory like they happened yesterday, yet details and entire days and months afterward end up disappearing entirely in the shadow of the fear experienced in the moment of threat. 

I do remember that Daniel spent Christmas in jail before his mother was able to bail him out, and I went to Utah and got tonsillitis and had nightmares and constant bouts of dissociation and flashbacks the whole visit. I remember being unwell and generally out of sorts for weeks, and then again when charges were heard in court. He was charged with harassment, attempted kidnapping, 2nd degree burglary for kicking in my door and Menacing with a Knife for holding me against the only exit while waving my kitchen knife around. 

I remember vaguely testifying against him, too. His mother’s lawyer tore me to pieces on the stand, painting me as the aggressor and making the whole case swing on the fact that I didn’t admit to the dispatchers that he was my boyfriend and I was breaking up with him. That I’d lied to law enforcement when I downplayed who he was to me by claiming that he was just a guy at my door claiming to be hurt in an accident.

 Obviously, not a single person in that jury knew why I would lie. 

They didn’t know that the last time I was honest to the police when I’d called them to help me during a breakup from another emotionally imbalanced man, I ended up being the one arrested. 

I was scared of Daniel and I was also scared of the police. I didn’t retaliate against Daniel physically like I did last time, but I did deny that I knew him at first. Of course I eventually told the police who he was to me, but only after it became clear through their questioning that there was more to it than what I had initially reported to the dispatcher. Once you’ve seen how easy it is for a volatile situation to spiral out of control when the police show up, you always fear it because it happens so fast and so easy. 

They have the power to ruin your whole life in that moment, and I wasn’t going to let that happen to me again. 

It was painful that the defense attorney had some success in making me seem like a drunken single mom with a previous record for assault and poor taste in men. I listened to the jurors through a crack in the door when I was standing in the courtroom hallway, waiting for deliberations to conclude. They were talking about what an idiot he was, and how silly the whole drama played out but they did not think Daniel was a burglar or a kidnapper or a harasser, so those charges were “Not Guilty” but they did convict him for Menacing with a Knife, and he spent at least 9 months incarcerated for what he did. 

I had to endure another reputational slaughter in the courtroom to get my safety, freedom and justice, but Multnomah County was willing to hold Daniel at least a little responsible for being a very bad breaker-upper. 

That was the last time I would ever allow domestic violence into my home. 

My homes have been violence-free for over 20 years now, and it took three tries to get there.