Dounohuiam

This blog is for my local friends who know my friend who had a breakup this week. The story was just too whack for me to repeat. So as they sang it on Hee Haw, "No, you'll never hear one of us repeating gossip, so you'd better be sure to listen close the first time."

This blog is not quite a week past due, as it happened on Monday, to a friend of mine. My Fella, I told him, “This is crazy” and I can’t even repeat it without sounding like I’m gossiping. He said, “Well, I know you’re gonna blog it anyway, so just let me read it when you do.”

I have this friend, and for the sake of this blog, we’re going to call her Dounohuiam. That’s short for “Do you know who I am?” We call her that because, although she claims to never tell anyone, everybody knows she has a fairly famous relative. If I told you the relatives name, you would (most likely) recognize it. It’s someone in the entertainment industry, though I’ve never been a fan of, or for that matter ever looked at, their work. But anyway, somehow, for her never to tell people, people always know. Of course, they were relatives before fame, so it’s logical that people in her hometown would know.

Anyway, she’s been dating this guy, and for the sake of this post we’ll call him Lieing Cheating Dennis. Or Dennis for short. She and Dennis met a few months ago at Friday’s (are you old enough to remember it being called T.G.I.F.’s?). Dou loves her some bar type atmosphere – foose ball, karaoke, Corona, the one screen trivia games. It all makes her happy. So she’s belly up to the bar with a Corona, probably beating somebody at trivia and (always wondering why the boys don’t like a loud mouth) somehow she hits it off with out-of-town and staying-at-a-hotel Dennis. He’s in town on business, comes to town regularly for some client, or plant, or production something or another. He’s in town for two weeks, and they hit it off great.

A few nights after she meets him, I have to Surprise! Show up at Friday’s and be like, “Oh! I didn’t know you were here!” to meet him. I liked him. Nice guy. Bought me two beers. Seemed real fun, just the kind of guy with whom Dou would have a lot of fun.

By the time his two weeks in town is over, they’re “in love” and she’s telling us all. Then all the plans start – when he’s coming back, he’s saving for a ticket for her to fly to meet him, they’re gonna blah, blah, blah blah blah. What do I say to all this? I tell her go ahead and have a heady whirlwind romance. Who am I to say otherwise, and she’s not going to listen to me anyway.

Then he tells her he’s going to marry her, and on the next trip he’s taking her to buy a wedding ring, and (get this) he even goes to her parents house and tells them he wants to marry her. He sits her daughter down and says he loves her mom and is going to marry her. (aaawwww – until the crazy part comes).

So Monday of this week, a friend of ours stops in my office and says, “Dennis broke up with her today. Called it off, said he couldn’t deal with the stress.” I’m thinking, “Oh great. She’s gonna be a basket case. AND she allowed him near her daughter, so her daughters going to be hurt again too.”

So on the way home from work, I call my friend SO, and I says to her, I says, “Do I have to take the exit, or can I just go on home?” SO says, she says to me, “Take that exit. I can feel the bad vibes from here” and I’m like, “OK, beotch, but I’m taking the bulk of this breakdown. You better make a call.”

So I sashay in Dou’s house, she’s all up in the kitchen smoking and drinking Bud Light. (I know it’s bad if she’s not even drinking Corona) and I try to make small talk a minute before she says, “Dennis broke up with me.” I said, “I know, so go ahead and tell me.”

So she says he’s married, and I said, “Well, I know he’s got two kids that will soon be in college and the granddad’s paying for college, right?” and then I realize what she means is, “He’s married.” I said, “When did you find out?” July 13. I said, “Ok, well, today is July 14 so . . . . . . wait, no, today is AUGUST 14! And you’re just now telling me, but back to you.” (I’m pissed already, because with those two words what she’s really saying is, “I made this happen by being too stupid to leave a month ago but I’m not going to admit it.” So here’s how the rest of it goes.

July 14, he’s in town on business and they just had sex in his hotel room. She checks the voice mail on her phone while he’s walked to his car or something, and there’s a voice mail from HIS WIFE, who has gone through his cell phone bill. So he walks back in, having been on the phone with his wife and he knows she knows.

So he starts telling her all that crap married men tell women (and sometimes other men) about how she’s a beotch, how she has his children, how he’s going to leave her, blah blah blah blah blah. Then (get this, it’s a good one) he calls someone that he says is his grandmother. HE CALLS HIS GRANDMOTHER, hands the phone to Dou, and this grandmother tells Dou things like, “No one in the family likes his wife. He’s really going to leave her. I’m giving him the money to divorce her.”

OK, so I’m sitting in the kitchen, trying to keep a straight face while I’m listening to this, thinking “Not only did this crap really happen to her, she believes it. She BELIEVES it. She STILL thinks he called his grandmother to try and save his relationship with her.” Now, granted, I don’t know who he called. It might have been his grandmother. But this story is sounding more and more whack. Just whack. So she has this phone call with grandmamaw (I’m mocking it, so read that word the way Endora pronounced it on Bewitched). And she decides (because she’s not co-dependent, nooooooo) to “stay with him.” So the next month passes (I still don’t know what the voice mail from the wife said, I was so in shock I forgot to ask) and she’s “dating” Dennis or whatever. He makes his regularly timed phone calls to her, usually bitching to her about how his wife is a beotch, blah blah blah. So then Dou tells me that Dennis took money out of his 401K to move his wife to New York, where she had a job waiting for her and he would then divorce her. Only she never started the job so he has to pay her bills because “she has my children and they’ll be homeless.” And then. . . . surprise – he gets a job transfer to New York and he’s soooo mad about it because he just moved his wife there to get away from her. (Dou actually BELIEVES this because, “Oh no, he got the call about the transfer while he was here with me, and he was so mad.) So I’m still trying hard to look her in the face and not fall out.

So after all this, he quits calling so much “because my kids are with me and they’re spying for their mom.” But he manages to call her 10 year old daughter on her birthday last week and tell the girl that he loves her and will see her soon. But this Monday, he’s 2 hours late for his regular call and when he does he goes straight to, “I can’t do this anymore. It’s too stressful. It’s unfair to you.” She says she says to him, “Are you telling me you’re reconciling with your wife? Are you telling me to leave you alone?” and she says Dennis gets mad at her and says things like, “You don’t understand how hard this is. You don’t understand what a beotch she is. You don’t understand blah blah blah and then says to her “I don’t have to prove to anyone that I’m getting a divorce except my grandmother because she’s giving me the money.” Then tells her “Didn’t I make you happy for two months?”

Falling in love with a married man is a lot like swimming in the ocean. It may feel great, but that undertow is just going to kill you.

So anyway, while I am telling this crazy story to SO, she quite literally hangs up on me and refuses to call back. It’s all just too crazy.