Half My Life Ago

This is something that I need to put to bed and keep there. It’s become clear to me that the pieces to the puzzle of my life that I seek will probably never be found this side of eternity.

I wasn’t going to share this publicly but maybe if someone reads this and it helps them, even if it’s one person, then I did my job. But it’s time to move forward. It’s always been time but I keep getting in the way. So. Here goes nothing.

I’m not sure what made me think of this, but half my life ago, the year was 1997.  I am currently 54, and so thinking back to when I was 27, is a little unsettling.  After turning 27, life underwent a lot of changes.  I was still living in Salisbury, MD and working at the job that my Dad had taken on in 1986.  Dad decided to retire at the end of 1996 and that was devastating to me as I didn’t know work life without him.  But I soldiered on, but it was incredibly challenging.  

That Christmas, my parents bought us a computer through my brother who worked with IBM/New York Life at the time. It had Windows 95; not like I knew anything about that back then.  I ended up getting AOL 3.0 for the computer and that introduced me to the internet and the online world.  

Within the first month of 1997, I developed Pilonidal Cysts.  If you know anything about those, it’s not in the best place as it’s around the tailbone area.  In other words, a real pain in the butt.  I ended up having surgery to remove them in February and was told to stay in a laying down position.  Sitting down was quite uncomfortable. 

 As I was at home recovering, my wife and I ended up rigging up the computer room to where I could lay in bed and still be on the computer as I was sucked into the world of the online chat room.  I was addicted.  Hook.  Line.  And Sinker.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but wedges were starting to be built between my wife and myself.  I was paying more attention to people in these online chat rooms.  I thought I was balancing everything well, but time would tell a different story.  We still frequented a comic book shop in the Wilmington Delaware area.  I was still listening to my music.  We still attended wrestling events if they came around to us.  But I was making a lot of friends online.  One lived a couple of hours away in the Baltimore area.  

June 1997 would bring us to the Philly/Camden NJ area for what was supposed to be a weekend of concerts.  Saturday night, W.A.S.P. and Motorhead at the Electric Factory in Philly.  Well, we showed up at the venue and found out that the show was cancelled.  The story was that Chris Holmes was rehabbing a knee injury.  Had we known how close we were to the ECW Arena, we could have tried to go that as they had a show that night.  And it was where Jerry Lawler would invade the ECW Arena.  A rather historical night for ECW.  But we weren’t aware of how close we were and how we could have gotten tickets.  

Sunday was the Ozzfest ’97 show.  There was a side stage that had a few bands, one of them being Drain STH.  I had just started getting into them a little earlier that Spring and so seeing them was a blast.  This show would be the last time I would see Ozzy live in concert and he sounded better than the previous time but not by much.  During the day in between bands, we got to chat with this couple and the girl talked about piercings and where they were.  I tried to entice her to show me 2 in particular and I really thought she was going to do it, but she didn’t.  

I think it was the following weekend, we agreed to meet this online friend from Baltimore I mentioned.  Her and her boyfriend at the time were coming to Ocean City for a day or two and since it’s only 30 minutes away from where we lived, it was easy to meet up.  We all connected pretty easily.  I guess I wasn’t thinking anything more was going to happen out of it other than it was nice having new friends as it seemed like our community of friends was breaking up and heading off to various parts of the country.  

July 4th weekend would be where things started really going off the deep end.  We decided to go to Baltimore and visit our newfound friends and stay with them for a couple of days. As the weekend went along, it seemed apparent to everyone that we all wanted to be more than just friends.  And, without getting too graphic, that’s about what went down.  

Later in July, was when it became an orgy.  The friends visited us at our place.  Again, without getting too graphic, the partner swapping went even further than before.  

Then the rails of my marriage started falling off.  And rapidly.  And with it, my own mental health and reality.  There was a time when we were driving back from Baltimore, and I had W.A.S.P.’s K.F.D. playing.  I always liked singing in the car but this time, I went too far and tried to become Blackie Lawless himself with the songs on K.F.D.  I thought my wife was going to jump out of the car in fear.  She had every right to jump out.  I was losing my mind.

By September, I don’t even know who I was anymore.  My wife and I stopped having any kind of married couple type things together and we did those things with the other partners.  I came home one night amped up on Slayer, Pantera or whatever it was that was making me turn into a monster.  I had scared my wife so much that she left the house and didn’t come back for a couple of days.  No matter how much I apologized, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.  We were done.  As far as she was concerned.  And then, I gave up on us and didn’t think about how to try and fix us.  Early October, my wife moved out.

By November, I started getting rid of anything I could to have some money to pay bills as I had amounted massive credit card debt from all the collecting that I was doing previously to all this swapping stuff.  Then, I made the mistake of breaking things off with the girl in Baltimore thinking me and my wife could restore our marriage.  That wasn’t meant to be as it was going to take a long time to regain the trust on her end.  By this time, I had endured some hateful conversations from the other guy in the swapping.  It was at this point; I honestly didn’t know if I was going to make it to my 28th birthday in December or not.  Either I was going to get myself killed or I was going to do it myself.  

I did make it to my 28th birthday, still unsure of life, but Christmas Eve was around the corner.  But that’s a story for another time.