You Can Smile Now; You're Rid of This A**hole

By Bobbi Botaz

“You can smile now; you’re rid of this a**hole.” That’s the last thing he said when I dumped him off in a motel parking lot, fittingly and not without much difficulty on April Fools’ Day 2000. It may be the only thing he ever said to me that was true.

“You Can Smile Now” is a first-person account of an abusive relationship that happened to begin online, in a Yahoo! chat room, but could have developed as easily in person. It’s a memoir of my silly online romance, my crazy 2-year trip to the brink of destruction with a nice widower who turned out to be something else, and another few years of reality-facing and recovery. It’s a portrait of the kind of person many people don’t recognize or even realize exist—much less think they might meet—and a naïve, love-starved former Mormon girl who never thought of herself as the kind of person who’d get conned and stuck in an abusive relationship. It’s honest and humorous, more witty than whiny. I take a long, hard look at myself as well as the psychopathic con man I once called my soul mate.

I’d like to be able to call him a con artist, but he really wasn’t very good.

I used to think he and my story were very unusual, but I’ve learned they’re all too common—and not just online. I wanted to share what I learned and how I began to recover, and give hope or insight to those who have been in abusive situations or know someone who’s in one now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bobbi Botaz
• Release date: Dec 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301289783

Book preview

You Can Smile Now;

You’re Rid of This A**hole

A Memoir of Abuse and Discovery

By Bobbi Botaz

Copyright 2012 Bobbi Botaz

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For all the women who are too embarrassed to talk about it.

Thanks to my mother, for reminding me of my infinite worth; to Lisa, Laura, and Carol, for listening; to Wendy, Phyllis, Darnell, Kathy, and Andrea for reading, editing, and encouragement; and to my son, for making me laugh.

Table of Contents

1. BUTT PRINTS

2. ON THE CUTTING EDGE

Keepin’ My Spirits Up

Throwing Bones

The Last Bone Thrown

No More Mrs. Nice Guy

Prelude to a Cyber Kiss

3. FLIRTING WITH DISASTER

Nothing Bad Ever Happens to Me

From Here to Interneternity

4. THE GREAT LOVE AFFAIR

The Hidden Danger of Too Much Fake Self-Esteem

Love in the Wires

Two Voices

Photographic Evidence

Skeletons in the Closet

5. TUFF TITTIES

6. STAND BY YOUR MAN

Too Much Information

Chemical Imbalance

A New Life

7. NEWS FLASH FOR TOM PETTY

Minding My Manners

Pie Oaty

Get Up and Go

Soup Beans and Corn Bread

The Hidey Hole

Death March of the Mad Cows

Nymphokarmic Disorder

Illusion vs. Reality

Rude People and Their Crazy Pets

Handyman from Hell

8. THE MARVMOBILE

9. ASSHOLE & ASSHOLE

10. ME AND MY SWEATER

The Envelope, Please

Dead Women Don’t Send Men to Prison

Off the Hook

Illusion vs. Reality: The Battle Continues

Who Do You Love?

Dead Women Don’t Send Men to Prison, Part II

Rebound Girl vs. the Meal Ticket

11. CAN YOU SAY ABUSE?

Verbal and Emotional Abuse

Financial Abuse

Child Abuse

Substance Abuse

12. CLARK GABLE IN THE MIRROR

13. DON’T BLAME THE INTERNET

Where’s the Fish?

I Understand About Indecision

14. SATAN AND THE SOCIETY LADY

15. THANKING GOD AND GREYHOUND

A Corner in Winslow

16. MY CHICKENS

17. ANIMAL SHAPES

W.O.W.

Stroke of Luck

What I Did On My Vacation

Hey, You! Get Off of Our Cloud

Rick Gets a Job

18. APRIL FOOLS

Countdown

Go Your Own Way

19. THE SWEATER UNRAVELS

Holding Up the Ceiling

Lifestyles of the Injured and Inhibited

20. THE REAL RICK

You Met Him Where?

Hello Karma

21. POISON PENOLOGY

The First Letter (May 2000)

The Second Letter (June 2000)

The Third Letter (July 2000)

The Fourth Letter (September 2000)

The Letter I Never Sent

22. REALLY REAL RICK

23. SQUEEZING LEMONS

Unbearing My Cross

Look, I’m a Saint

Gullible and Gullibler

24. UNSCREWING MYSELF

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Testing My Skills

Who Wants to Go to Fire Lake

I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.

—Elizabeth Taylor,

on her marriage to Nicky Hilton

1. BUTT PRINTS

I wished I’d had the guts to push him out of the car while it was still moving. He probably expected me to take him back to my place, but the motel drop-off seemed generous after being called an Indian giver and a cunt and a whore—not to mention having spent the last two weeks locked in my room, eating non-perishables out of my closet.

He had missed the bus on purpose. He could catch one the next day. He could stick out his thumb or flap his arms and fly, for all I cared, as long as he left town. He had enough money for a bus ticket back to where he came from or anywhere else he might have wanted to go. He had more money than I did, in fact, and now he wanted my Fleetwood Mac CD.

It didn’t especially bother me that it was ending with a fight; it seemed fitting. We’d fought almost every day for two years. He’d always said I hated him and didn’t care if he lived or died. This time, he was right.

The last thing he said was, You can smile now; you’re rid of this asshole.

Indeed! I wasn’t smiling, but I wasn’t crying, either.

You’re rid of me, too, I sputtered, lamely, through the sunroof, as I peeled out of the motel parking lot and sped away with Mick and Stevie riding shotgun. Shaking and not quite believing the ease of what I had done, I drove back to my house—yes, my house—mine again, at last. It was exquisitely quiet. I slept well that night.

The next morning, the stiff neck and the feeling of impending doom that had been my true companions had left me. Otherwise, I was not unlike my newly vacated couch: dirty, saggy, and threadbare, but still functional. The butt prints might be permanent, but the butt was not. It was simply, wonderfully gone.

So much for the most undesirable person I’ve ever known, the one I’d once called my soul mate. The one who promised me unconditional love. The one who wrote me poems, who inspired me to write poetry, who sent me flowers and played me a song about holding hands on a porch swing under the moon. The guy who moved in with me didn’t even vaguely resemble the one I had known on the computer and the phone.

Who was that guy? I asked.

A fantasy, he said. Somebody I made up. Somebody I wanted to be.

I made him up, too, and oh, how I wanted him to be. But the guy who moved in didn’t want it very badly or for very long. Instead, he reverted to ... no, revealed his real self and dragged me, not exactly kicking and screaming but more like flailing and yelling, through some previously unimagined hell.

He said I ruined everything. He came here to start a new life, not relive his old one, and it was none of my business. If we’d had anything resembling a normal life after he moved in, I might have left it alone. But we didn’t and I couldn’t. I dug into his past, looking for an explanation. It took me most of the first year to find one that even began to make sense.

I now know there’s a very simple explanation for his behavior. My own behavior is not as easy to explain, much less defend or justify. It makes little sense, even to me. I put myself and my son at risk, subjected us both to horrific verbal and emotional abuse, and unwittingly endangered our lives. I wasted two years and thousands of dollars on a dream man who was just that: a dream—and not even a very good one.

It’s been over 12 years since that day in the motel parking lot. I started this book in March 2000, while holed up in my bedroom, hoping he’d leave as promised on the first of April, without police assistance. I had no reason to believe it would happen and was surprised when it did.

It was a very different book then—all indignant and melodramatic and, like its author, completely deluded about what had actually happened. I posted a draft introduction to an internet writer’s group for some feedback. Among the kinder things said were my sarcasm didn’t serve me well and I wasn’t a sympathetic character. The consensus was I should fictionalize.

I don’t see any point in fictionalizing. I’ve done enough of that in my head, and getting past it has been a real challenge. I started out thinking I had an extraordinary story, but at some point I realized it’s really quite ordinary. It’s about every naive, love-starved woman and every bad boyfriend or abusive husband on the planet. What happened to me was neither unusual nor uniquely horrible. It happens to millions of women, children, and men, too—many of whom are brutalized in far worse ways than I was. I got off easy, with a low reading on the tragedometer.

Writing this book has been an exercise in facing the truth, not to mention remembering a terrible time and owning some things I’d rather not claim. I’ve continually struggled with whether to finish and attempt to publish it. I may not be a sympathetic character, but it isn’t my intention to be one.

To those who would criticize and pass judgment, what can I say but get in line. Say what you will and then hope you never meet the person who, under just the right circumstances, is capable of fooling you. Time was I’d have been among the first to ask, Why’d you let that happen? and the last to agree it could happen to me. I didn’t think I knew anyone in an abusive relationship. I’d certainly never thought of myself as the kind of person who’d get conned and stuck in one. But I did. I want to share what I learned and how I began to recover, and give hope or insight to those who have been there, or are there now, or know someone who is.

I’ve changed names and locations not because I’m embarrassed or I fear the consequences of telling my story, but because others may be embarrassed and I can’t predict the consequences for them. My mother disagrees with some positions I’ve taken, on my father and my Mormon upbringing in particular, and would have preferred I not write a book. My son, now grown up and on his own, says he’s okay with it. His father will never speak to me again, with or without a pseudonym.

Then we have the criminal I once called my soul mate. Much as I’d like to name him and send some negative attention in the direction of the famous judge who allowed this human wrecking ball to roll my way, I wouldn’t expect it to sail through a legal review with real names.

Last but not least are the members of two families in a certain city in the eastern United States. I’m quite sure both of these families have suffered enough. Because of the judge, naming the city might make them identifiable.

So, with apologies to the people of Pittsburgh, I’ll say he came from there.

Where is he now? I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s hard to say which is deeper—the imprint he left on my couch or the one he left on my psyche. He was right about one thing: I can smile now. It may be the only thing he ever said to me that was true. Why I didn’t send him packing when I discovered his lies is a question that took me a few years to answer.

For a long time I thought it was an internet thing, that it all happened because I fell for him online. It’s true I probably wouldn’t have been interested if I’d first met him in person, but I could just as easily have met someone who could pull it off without the help of a computer.

The computer only made it easier.

[back to TOC]

TWO

between my sheets a space within

waits to fall upon your skin

through all the night i feel that space

let it fall not ‘til i see your face

with trembling hands touch what has filled it

breathe its fullness, for my soul has willed it

no fire burns such as this that heats

the space for you

between my sheets

—Bobbi Botaz, from the poem Two Voices

2. ON THE CUTTING EDGE

Perhaps I passed on the love of my life at 15, when I broke up with Daniel M. He was cute, smart, funny, and had great parents. He was also Mormon. We made out on the bus to the Manti Temple—in the dark, under his navy blue down coat, until someone tattled and the Bishop separated us. At the next stop, he made Dan run around the block.

That was my only visit to a Mormon temple. There weren’t as many as there are now, and we had to go to the one in Manti, Utah, from the Denver area where we lived. The kids did baptisms for the dead while the adults did their sacred, not secret (read: hokey, embarrassing, funny-outfit-wearing, death-oath-taking, what-the-hell-were-they-thinking) thing.

You’d think I’d remember getting dunked for the dead, but no. I remember a certain girl, whose entire family had joined the Church around the time my parents decided to reactivate and whose parents (like mine) were there for the eternal marriage ceremony, saying the adults all looked dazed when they came out of the temple. I didn’t see them until later, but now that I know what they did in there, I don’t doubt it. That comment and making out with Dan are my only memories from the temple trip.

Making out with Dan is my only fond memory in five years of forced churchgoing. Dan would call me up and say, Do you know that I love you? and I would get all flustered and refuse to say I loved him back. I still have a hard time saying I love you unless someone else says it first, and then I feel funny.

Dan was much more tolerant of my handicap than I was of his, which was being a freshman when I was a sophomore. One day he rode two miles to my house and chauffeured me to school on the back of his little banana bike. His house was much closer to the school, which he’d passed on the way to my house. True love, right? But no, I was embarrassed and started formulating whatever excuse I gave for breaking up.

I kicked myself about a year later, when Dan got a GTO convertible and a cute new girlfriend named Jessica. By then I had dumped another nice Mormon boy for this narcissistic idiot who, after one date, said it was time our relationship changed—meaning I should put out—and I should call him when I was ready.

Don’t hold your breath, I said, and kicked myself again for breaking up with Dan.

It was a shining moment of clarity, the likes of which would not be seen for another quarter century. After that, I was only attracted to jerks. The less the guy seemed to like me, the more I wanted him.

The first one I probably loved was a handsome blond boy I met in college. Think Simon LeBon, 1981-84. I did a double-take and got super deluxe achy-breaky heartthrobs when I first saw Simon riding the bow of the boat in the Rio video.

We never had sex. It was, after all, a Mormon school with a strict code of conduct. He broke up with me because, he said, it freaked him out that another couple got engaged. He’d just joined the Church, and I, having been summoned to the Dean’s office and placed on probation for being seen drinking beer at Pizza Hut ... or was it for smoking in the park? Either way, it wasn’t the least of my sins and I didn’t fit his ideal of Mormon womanhood and whatever else he said.

I cried myself to sleep every night for weeks and then spent the rest of the school year flaunting the big-haired rebound boyfriend with the cool car, in hopes my true love would come to his senses. The day he went home, he embraced and kissed me in a way that puts any movie kiss in history to shame, or so I remember it. I walked away sobbing and proceeded to mourn our beautiful blonde unborn children and the life I thought we’d have together.

Seven years later, sitting in the bar at the Hyatt Marina Pacifica, he finally gave it up. I had always known, in the back of my mind. At 2 a.m., after so many hours of anonymous, non-gender-specific references to the person he was living with, I didn’t need to be told.

Sad thing, when a torch goes out. In fairness, though, he wasn’t a jerk. He just wanted to do my hair and makeup more than anything else.

Keepin’ My Spirits Up

In the Mormon Church, they teach that you probably have a predestined mate, and you’ll have a better chance of finding that person if you only date other Mormons. At least that’s what they taught me. It’s kind of like marrying someone you met in a bar, because you met them in a bar. They don’t really teach any skills for picking a partner, other than to make sure you’re both Mormon.

It’s also common in Mormon culture to get married in your early twenties. By then I was no longer involved with the Church, so I wasn’t interested in dating Mormons. But I lived in Salt Lake City, surrounded by Mormon culture. I felt like an old maid at 24.

I married Bill at 25 because, well, he didn’t seem to like me that much. At the time I thought it was because he was nice. He wasn’t a mean bouncer or a bad musician or a ski bum or any other sort of bum. He took me out on real dates to nice places, and he always showed up. He was 33.

In his late forties, he resembled Clint Eastwood—and I heard he was offended by my saying so, strange and unknowable being that he is. I remember thinking he was a bit nerdy when I first met him—in a club, where I often went with two girlfriends who’d had normal teen years and were vastly more experienced. Try as I might, I could never hope to catch up. Perhaps I was tired of trying. I danced with Bill and then went out for coffee with him and his friend, Mark. They seemed mature and sophisticated. A few days later, I got a card from Bill with a cartoon of a drowning drunk holding his jug above the water. The caption read, Keep your spirits up!

Okay, so he was nice. He also had a house and four cars and a good job managing a travel agency. He was respectable. A businessman. I thought it was time to get married, and he let me talk him into it. Beyond that, why he married me is anyone’s guess. He proposed in a booth at Denny’s, if the way he did it can be called proposing.

Well, I guess we’d better go get a ring, he said, not quite begrudgingly. I ended up with a ring I didn’t particularly like, out of fear I wouldn’t get one at all if I made him take me to another store.

Then he suggested Las Vegas. We had this bizarre wedding at The Little Church of the West, where Elvis and Ann-Margret recited their vows in Viva Las Vegas. It took all of five minutes. Choose flowers, choose music, stand here, say this, say that, pose for pictures, pay money. Then we went to a show with my dad—who had invited himself and my mom along, making it that much more bizarre—frowning at all the tits. Then my mature, respectable new husband and I went back to our room and each sat on one of the two beds, staring at each other. We didn’t even attempt to have sex.

I now know there are lots of couples who don’t have sex on their wedding night, usually because they’re too tired from the wedding. But in our case it wasn’t because we were tired, and I was mightily disappointed.

There’s really no excuse for having married Bill because I knew what else was available, sexually speaking. I’d had more than a few partners in three years of trying to catch up with my girlfriends. Never mind that none of the sex I’d had was very good; at least the other guys were trying. With Bill it had started out as a matter of not being able to get an erection, and I thought it was getting better. The attempts had become more frequent and were occasionally successful, if only for Bill. So I faked it and went ahead and married him, even though I was unhappy with our sex life. I thought that could be fixed, and I was much more in love with the idea of being married to this respectable guy than I was with the guy.

That lasted maybe six months, and then I was miserable. Four long years with a man who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to have sex—not with me, anyway. At the time, I thought that was the only problem, but in retrospect I realize we had nothing in common. I thought I loved Bill, but we never even began to get close. To this day, I have no clue what’s in his mind.

Years ago, as he sat on my couch reminiscing about good times I didn’t remember, I realized he’d had a completely different experience. Mine was most unpleasant. Oh, sure—we went on nice trips and did things other married couples do, but we hardly ever had sex and I really hated that. It was never more than once every two weeks, even in the beginning. Later, we’d go one, two, three, four, five, six months without having sex.

Throwing Bones

What little sex Bill and I had was very bad, and never at my behest. I simply had to wait for him to throw me a bone. The bone-throwing ritual went like this: We’d get in bed, under the covers, in the dark. He’d roll over and kiss me goodnight. Most times it would be a condescending little peck; but if he started French-kissing me, that meant we were going to have sex. He was a pretty good kisser. He’d kiss me for a while, and then do his thing—always straight intercourse (except for one time he tried oral and was completely inept and clearly hated it), always in total silence and darkness—until I faked an orgasm. Then he’d roll over and fall asleep, and I’d lie there and be mad or cry or masturbate, depending on my mood.

Lingerie, books, begging—nothing worked. Any initiative on my part invariably resulted in a flat. Bill refused to see a doctor or a sex therapist. He wouldn’t even talk about it. Every few weeks we’d sit up half the night at the kitchen table with him staring and nodding while I ranted. He’d agree it was a problem and promise to work on it. Then I’d shut up and put it away in the back of my mind for another few weeks, until it rattled around to the front and came out my mouth. I thought about going to counseling on my own, but I wasn’t into learning how to cope with this particular problem.

I’ve come to believe withholding sex is a form of abuse, a way of controlling and wielding power in a relationship. It does things to the mind of the one from whom sex is being withheld. Sex becomes an event in the sense that you spend much of your time wondering when the next one is going to be. You become obsessed with sex. Everyone but you is having it. You look at friends and co-workers and people in the grocery store and think, they’re having sex. Everything reminds you that you’re not. It gets to where you can’t stand to watch people kissing or even holding hands on TV.

Marital sexlessness eats away at you, like acid in your brain. You become very angry and begin to retaliate in small, petty ways like refusing to prepare meals or do housework. You look for ways to deprive your partner of whatever is important to him. You fight with what you’ve got. You find yourself making snide remarks whenever the subject of sex comes up or some other subject reminds you of it—at your brother’s wedding, for example.

Bill doesn’t like sex, I announced, and then wondered whether he or my mom was more embarrassed.

It was the Eighties, before the internet went public, before the sexless marriage became a fashionable thing. There were no anonymous discussion forums or chat rooms to commiserate in, no cybersex to fill the void. I didn’t know I was on the cutting edge of marital sexlessness and wouldn’t have appreciated it if I had known. When a co-worker complained about her husband crawling all over her, I wasn’t very sympathetic. I felt so terribly alone, as if I were the only woman in the world who had this problem. I thought about having an affair and might have done it, had a suitable opportunity presented itself, but I didn’t like the idea of living a double life.

The Last Bone Thrown

The days and weeks and months went by, the intervals between events getting longer and the resentment deeper and the tension thicker. It didn’t help that Bill’s career had a setback while mine took off. I went to work for a communication training and consulting firm and started traveling, mainly on proposal-consulting assignments for defense contractors. I volunteered for long-term assignments up to eight weeks, with a flight home every other weekend. I managed to avoid my marriage in this fashion for two years.

My son came along at the end of my job with the consulting firm and, as it turned out, the end of my marriage. It was June 1988. I had just spent six weeks in Phoenix. While there, I accepted an offer of a job for which I had interviewed before leaving, with a computer company that wanted to build a proposal department.

I was pregnant when I started that job. I had gone off the pill several months earlier, thinking it was silly to be on it when the need for birth control was so infrequent. It had been six months since Bill and I