Dahmer Part 1
I know after Relapse, you all must think that has to be the worst relationship of my life. I mean surely if it wasn’t, I would have learned my lesson the first time. No way a dog goes back to his own vomit. You would be mistaken.
I dated a girl in my 20’s on and off for about 5 years. We will call her Dahmer. Queen B asked, a while back, if I would ever write about the relationship. I told her no, that if I did, I may catch a conspiracy to murder charge. At first, I didn’t think there was any part of that story that I could use. I was doing drugs the whole time, and she was doing drugs the whole time. It was miserable. I wanna write stories that promote hope. That are light and fun. I know many of you have asked me and others close to me if these things I write about actually happen. Are they true? Yes, they do happen. Yes, they are all true.
As I thought, this is what I came to decide. I did not see the beauty of the story. I was too close to it; this is why when Queen B asked, I said that there was nothing I could say to bring hope out of that story. Luckily, I serve a God who sees beauty in the broken. He looks past the trivial and sees the big picture, but the coolest part is he’s sovereign over the trivial as well. Even though, sometimes it takes me a while to see the story; I shouldn’t forget He already wrote it long ago.
I was 25 when I met Dahmer. She was a nurse, a great nurse. She worked on the med-surge floor; for those of you that do not know, almost everyone on this floor was fresh out of surgery and had dilaudid or some other strong opiate plugged into their main-vein, by doctor’s orders. She loved being the nurse to administer and waste this kind of medicine. I loved her for it; every time she got enough waste collected for us to use, she would call me to come by the hospital. I would have my windows down in the parking garage, so I could cut my car off while I waited for her to arrive with our analgesic treats. The acoustics in a parking garage create great echos. I will never forget the sound of all the glass vials jingling like bells as she walked to my car. Everyday was like Christmas, and just like Santa, she wasn’t real.
Dahmer had the most charismatic personality of anyone I have ever known. Part of the reason I used humor to deflect writing about this was because I knew that not only would I have to reopen myself to the sick things about the relationship but more terrifyingly the good.
We fell in love or something like it so quickly. Looking back I was an easy mark; no one has ever honed in on the best ways to capture my heart like she did. When our relationship started everything was so fun. She was so sweet to me. It was like everything she said was was written specifically to match the puzzle pieces of my heart. Any questions I ever had about strange behavior were met with beautiful, complex answers, and when answers she gave didn’t suffice, she had other more physical ways of making me forget that things just weren’t adding up.
She didn’t just use words to keep me from pulling at threads of her lies; she would compliment me and build me up all the time for no reason. It was like she knew my most vulnerable places and built a house of cards to make those vulnerabilities my strength. The problem was as the builder of this house, she knew exactly which card to pull to make every good feeling I had about myself fall apart.
There were huge signs early that things were going to get very very bad. About 3 weeks after we started dating, we were supposed to go to Hangout Music Festival. The Tuesday before the festival she called me 2 hours into her shift to tell me she got fired from her nursing job. It was a shock, but I had a pretty good job. She said she would have no problem getting another job. What she didn’t say was that her nursing license was about to be suspended for the rest of our relationship. I wasn’t sure what to do, but she said it would be fine for us to go to the festival; she had some money in her account. She wrote me a $1000.00 check. Hangout here we come. After fun weekend filled with music and her making out with strangers, I woke Monday morning to a bounced 1000.00 dollar check on my bank account. She said it was an accident, so I believed her.
Moving forward, Dahmer became more and more erratic. Her lies became more unbelievable. Instead of me leaving, I stayed thinking I was getting what I deserved. You have to understand everything I liked about myself at this point were things that she like about me. Self-confidence? Who me, the junkie who is slapped in the face daily that his girlfriend is cheating on him sometimes for money or drugs? No there was no confidence to be had for me. I deserved the love I was receiving. My own personal hell. Where the door was unlocked, but my key didn’t fit.
Dahmer had been a self-harmer since her teenage years. When I would ask questions about things that were making me sad, if I did not accept her clever answers or physical advances as an answer, then she would either send me pictures of her cutting herself or would do it in front of me. This would kill me; I couldn’t understand what I was doing to make her hurt herself. It was obviously my fault; she told me it was. I was destroying her life and her body with each doubt I had in her. She would tell me that she loved me more than any woman had ever loved a man. Every time she cheated on me or had sex with another man for drugs was the last time. She would beg me not to leave. After the begging, if I was not ready to forgive her then she knew I would take pity and hold her once I had tears running down my cheeks from watching blood run down her arm. It was a vicious cycle.
Everything was so confusing for me. She was constantly pulling me in and building me up only to tear me down and push me away. After multiple attempts at something like suicide in front of me (when cutting wouldn’t work to sway me, on more than one occasion she took up to 30 kolonpin at a time), my family became more and more worried when they started noticing bite marks and bruises. They knew about some of the problems, but I had not shared with them the extent or escalation of things. I had nothing to say about this.
Deny, deny, deny.
I am 6’2”, 200 lbs. I grew up hunting, playing basketball, tennis, and feeding my dad’s cattle 3 times a week in high school. In college, my best friends grew up on the levee. I have been beat up by dudes, and I have beat up a lot of dudes. My definition of fun has always been pretty extreme. I know I joke about being manly, because I think our society has completely screwed up the masculine notion. I tell you this to tell you I have never been scared. I am a man that was raised by multiple men, God fearing, frog-gigging, horse-riding, calf-cutting men. I am not weak. I am, however, easily tricked by the guiles of a sociopathic woman with bad intentions when my eyes are not on my Hero.
There were times during this period that I did not believe in God anymore. The only god I knew melted into water when I held fire to it or told me all the bad things about myself that I didn’t like. She would build me up and say things that fixed my scars only to slice them open again and again. When none of these other things worked, she would go into a blind rage. Most times I was able able to contain her and hold her down until things cooled. She only weighed about 106 lbs, but when she did whatever it was she did, I could not control her.
The worst time happened one morning. I was chained to heroin, but I did not want to be this day. It was a back and forth dance. I wanted to be clean when I went to bed but knew I needed a fix when I woke up. Every once in a while I would have a moment of clarity that would last for several days. When this would happen, Dahmer would tell me she wanted to be clean too. This would be great. Now we could get clean and maybe she wouldn’t feel the need to do these things behind my back that hurt so badly. I thought if I could get clean, then maybe I would worthy of her love like I was in the beginning and could fix her to only love me. I just wanted her to love me like she said she did so many times.
The night before I went to bed thinking that finally my hopes could actually happen. I never remember bad things; I am an optimistic person when I feel a connection with someone. It was so much easier to remember all the kind things she had said to me, not the emotional abuse that had been ongoing or the small physical spats that were escalating in intensity and frequency. Spats that I had to take and could barely defend myself in for fear of being arrested.
When I went to bed that night, I remembered that she told me she loved me, and we were quitting, together. This should fix the problems that made her feel like she had to step out on me. This is really what I thought. I could not see past the picture she had painted of the world. Through all of this, she had slowly isolated me from all my friends and family. I was completely trapped and called it love.
I had a black eye, a lip 3 times too big, bite marks all over my face and torso, and bruises on my back from the lamp. I swear even when she was beating me up, when she picked that lamp up and hit me with it, my mind flashed to MachoMan Randy Savage. The scene was that crazy. At the time, I was living in a little townhouse that I rent out now in Clinton. Years ago, when this happened, I had to pay someone 1400 dollars to fix all the holes in the wall to make it rentable.
I was also bleeding pretty badly. During the fight, Dahmer had gotten my blood all over her. I guess she thought it was her blood, because she called the cops on me for beating her up. If you know anything about cops and domestic violence, then you know when a fight goes down then the guy is getting arrested automatically, most facts do not matter. As we waited outside on the cops, I looked like I had been on the wrong end of a murder conspiracy gone bad. I had blood all over my face and my shirt was soaking. I threw it away before they took me to jail. Once again, it was ruined, and so was I.
People walked by in my neighborhood, and Dahmer would call out to them, pointing at my blood on her telling them, “You live in a neighborhood with a woman beater. Look at me he tried to kill me. Don’t worry though, I called the cops.” I just sat there looking at the grass and sobbing. There was no way she would ever love me now. Everything was broken.
The cops arrived. I knew I was going to jail, no matter what the truth was. She told them that I had stepped on her foot and broke her ankle. When I was on the way to jail, she was calling in an ambulance calling my mom. She told my mom I had tried to kill her, was out of control, and that she expected for me to pay for her trip to the ER. What she didn’t know, was when the doctor got done with her ankle, she was being dropped off at the cell across from mine. They may have thought I had physically assaulted her based on my blood and her loud words, but they knew I was in bad shape.
I was waiting in the cell when she arrived back from the hospital. You’re gonna think I’m lying, but within 30 seconds of her going into her cell, I heard, “Bae? Bae, I love you. I’m sorry. I can’t live without you. I don’t know how this happened. It wasn’t me. It’ll never happen again. Bae, If I lose you, I have nothing to live for. Please tell me I’m still yours.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just wanted to go home. I was hurting. I could barely walk, and my spirit was withering in the desert. No relief was in sight. I finally got bonded out by my sister.
She was not expecting what she got when I walked out of the jail. Dahmer had called my mom and told her that I was a villain and woman beater. She told her that I was in jail, and she wasn’t. What my sister saw when she rescued me was nothing like what had been described to my mom. I explained to my family the real story. We took pictures and spoke with an attorney. When court came, I didn’t even have to see the judge. My lawyer showed the judge my pics and read him my statement. My charges were immediately dropped. Dahmer was pretty ticked when she was convicted after I left court. She did text me to let me know how felt about it.
I was done with Dahmer. I never wanted to see her again. She made me hate myself. She manipulated me and isolated me from ones that cared about me. She pretended to fix me just to control me. I was over her, but then I thought about how she said she was sorry and loved me when she got to the jail that day. She and her parents came later and got her stuff from amid the rubble that was my house. When they were, her eyes softened as she mouthed where no one could see, “I love you, I miss you.” Maybe she meant it this time.
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