Drunk and Disorderly
Tangled Up in Blue
It was 2015 and I was in yoga teacher training the first time around. On my way home, bored and hungry, I stop at a bar downtown for lunch. Sitting alone at the bar, I glance around at the few patrons there on that early weekday afternoon and I spot him — rather, her. By this point, Kyle had officially become Kyla. She’d come out as transgender in 2007, a year into our relationship, but didn’t transition — or change her pronouns — until after we broke up a year later. She was there with her wife, a woman who looked like she put up with absolutely no shit, which made me happy. Knowing Kyle had changed her name by that point and no longer being as angry as I used to be after so many years had passed, I decided to say hi. I cautiously walked up to the two of them at the pool table where they were playing nearby.
“KT?” I said, using what I knew to be her preferred nickname from some Facebook snooping. Her wife looks at me first, then KT glances over, not recognizing me right away. I was thinner, prettier, and noticeably healthier than I was when we were together.
“Oh my god,” she says, recognition finally dawning on her face. Her hair is longer now, longer than mine, and she's wearing light makeup, maybe mascara and some eyeliner, and nail polish. She's wearing fitted flare-leg jeans and a pink hoodie with tennis shoes, basically what she wore before her transition, only more feminized. She had always said she felt like a “tomboy.” Her voice is a little higher now, manipulated consciously to be softer and more feminine, and I think of how loud and masculine and angry it used to sound when it was directed at me and I can’t help but wonder which one her wife hears most often.
I don't remember what started it, but the sound of the birds in the morning and whether or not to open a window before bed were factors in the fight. Kyle and I yelled at each other about it in the living room and I decided to end the fight by storming into the bedroom of the tiny apartment we shared and slamming the door, my usual method of escape.
Kyle was fast! He wasn't huge, maybe 5'10" and slim, but he was athletic and strong. I had to really shove that cheap pine door to get it shut, but he overpowered me and got it back open, anyway. In doing so, he inadvertently sent me flying into the wall the door opened toward. He looked surprised for a moment, almost like he wanted to apologize, but then remembered where he was and snapped, now seeing the accident as an opportunity. He reached over, wrapped his hands around my neck, and threw me again into the wall. He held me there, my feet dangling, for a few seconds before letting me down.
Stunned and utterly enraged by what had just happened, I start hitting him, rather ineffectually punch-swatting him repeatedly in the face with the full force of my wimpy arms and telling him I was going to call the cops. Barely flinching, he laughed and told me, “do it. Call them.” His dad was a respected detective in the suburb where we lived. What did he care if I called them?
Of course, it wasn’t always like this. When I met Kyle, he was a hopeless romantic, an emotional poet with an English degree and an obsession with Bob Dylan. I met him at work, at a big box retail store [English degree and art school dropout joke], where he was a customer service supervisor and I sold cameras, although we didn’t know each other or socialize there much. I would learn later that he had been watching me around the store, crushing from afar, too shy to tell me how he felt, so he had a coworker do it for him. When the coworker told me the name of this guy, I was briefly excited, thinking it was a different employee with the same common name that I was actually madly and secretly crushing on. I was wrong; it was a guy I had seen in passing but never really talked to. I didn’t find him very attractive at first, but I was open-minded. I laughed, saying I was flattered, and confirmed that I was single but that Kyle should talk to me himself. He took that advice to heart and later, sheepishly admitted that he had taken my phone number from the employee record book.
He called me up out of the blue one January night and invited me to a bar. I was amused, not sure yet if I actually liked him or if I just enjoyed his awkwardness and flattering, doe-eyed attention. I agreed to meet him at a bar near his house, nearby where I was actually already driving to drop off a friend when he called my cell phone. He was pretty far gone by the time I met him at the diviest cash-only dive bar I’d ever been to (I loved those) and he hung on me affectionately, like a leech, the entire night. When it was time to leave, we went back to his house and played pool with his roommates in the basement.
We went up to his room after that, where he read me poetry he wrote in college that I should have read into much more deeply than I did at the time. There was an acoustic guitar in the corner. He leaned over, sitting on his bed next to me, and kissed me. Not a passionate kiss, not even a sloppy wet drunk kiss. It was, instead, a very perfunctory kiss, like a stamp. “I must do this now so that it is done,” the kiss said. That was all; he leaned back then and drunkenly just passed out. I was, somehow, smitten. At first, he seemed like such a stereotypical dude to me in so many ways: very athletic, was in a frat in college, got into stupid fights when he was drunk, paid attention to sports on purpose, that sort of thing. Seeing him turn into a sappy poet when he felt safe enough to be vulnerable set off some trigger, I guess, telling me that he was a good, safe person who was just surprising enough to keep my interest.
After a month of hyperbolic conversations of never-ending love, soul mates, “meant to be” and the like, he asked me to marry him. I nearly screamed “yes,” half drunk on cheap wine and high as a kite in love with this near-stranger on what ended up actually being Valentine's Day. We announced our plans to marry to everyone we knew within the week. He bought me a ring a few days later, 3 sizes too large because we didn't fucking know each other. We had it quickly resized.
As our month grew into a year and we moved in together and remained engaged, not anywhere close to being married as we had originally planned to do as soon as possible, our relationship quickly grew strained.
“You never do a fucking thing,” he’d say to me, sneering and glaring hatefully at me. “You never get off your fucking lazy ass. Do you just not notice that there have been bags of recycling stacking up in the kitchen for almost a week?”
I’d ask Kyle why he didn’t do something about it if he minded it so much. “I was waiting to see if you’d ever do it,” he’d say, “and I just couldn’t fucking take it anymore.”
Kyle had developed a problem with damn near everything I did. I talked too much, I was getting fat, I needed to work out, I said something stupid, I ate too much, I looked pathetic, I was lazy and incompetent. But talking too much was his primary complaint.
“Fourteen minutes and 34 seconds,” he announced. We were out on the balcony of our second-floor apartment smoking cigarettes that night, drunk as usual.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“That's how long you were fucking talking. I timed you.” He pointed through the screen door to the microwave clock inside.
Kyle drank a lot, and by extension, so did I. I was a party girl before I met Kyle; his excess was just what I needed to turn myself into a full-blown drunk. And he was right, I was gaining weight; consuming at least 12 beers a night after work and tons of junk food all day while having a sedentary job and lifestyle will make that happen rather quickly. We drank every work night and all day on weekends, partying with friends or our fellow degenerate neighbors, or just by ourselves with rented movies and pizza.
During the first part of each night, Kyle would get buzzed enough to become nice to me again. For that stage of his intoxication, he put on a nice show: oh, he loved me so much. I was the perfect woman. I was so passionate and kind. I was an amazing writer. He didn't deserve me. He'd start crying, maybe about his purported love for me, sometimes about his dad who he admired deeply, sometimes about some ex-girlfriend he still thought of as a goddess. I was used to it and not jealous anymore. Molly, the sporty redhead who lived in Tahoe. Julianne, the gorgeous old-money blonde with the plastic surgeon husband a few miles away. Sometimes he'd cry about how he just wanted to live a beautiful life. I remembered during those moments of vulnerability how much I loved him and I convinced myself that we could work everything out. I loved his passion, and I loved how he could see all this beauty in the world even while he seemed to hate it all at the same time. No wonder he drank so much; this must hurt.
Of course, it never lasted. Each time, it didn't take long for that nice phase of intoxication to transform into the next one, the angry one, where he'd remember how much he hated me when he walked through the door after work earlier in the evening and saw the recycling piled up or a dish in the sink or a sock on the floor. We'd argue, scream, slam doors, the usual.
My usual mode of ending an exhausting all-night fight with him was to escape, to go to the bedroom and lay down, taking a shortcut to morning when we'd pretend everything was normal as we nursed our hangovers. Sometimes he'd let me go, other times he'd follow me. One of his favorite things to do would be to let me get settled in the bedroom for a few minutes before barging in to find a way to disturb me. Usually this was by ripping the blankets off of me and taking them with him back to the living room, laughing like a psychopath, leaving me cold on the mattress. I'd curl up on the mattress, freezing, waiting for him to fall asleep in the living room before I quietly made my way to his passed-out form, taking back a blanket for myself and finally going to bed.
The police did show up that night. Several squads, because the news that Respected Detective Kyle's Dad's son and his girlfriend were having a domestic was too juicy for half the department not to come out and see for themselves. A male and a female officer showed up, as was customary for domestics. They asked me what happened, and I told them. The female officer led me from the apartment in handcuffs while a male officer took photos of Kyle's completely unblemished face where I'd tried so hard to hurt him as badly as he'd hurt me, pent up rage having accumulated over the year and a half of being the subject of his loathing, contempt, humiliation and now, finally, physical violence.
While Kyle got to stay home acting like a victim to his dad's uniformed acolytes, I spent the next 15 hours in jail, starting in a holding cell with a full wedding party, all drunk. Everyone in there was drunk, even the young woman waiting in the squad as I was pushed into it, just picked up for a DUI, crying on the gray, pee-proof, plastic backseat.
One young woman asked me what I was “in for,” which surprised me because I didn't think anyone actually asked that question. I considered how I should respond for a moment and decided to just be honest: I told her I was there for domestic assault. Her eyes widened with surprise. “He must have deserved it,” she concluded. I wondered what the bridal party had done to find themselves all together in that Ramsey County jail. I wonder if the bride and groom are still married.
I got off okay enough: despite the “politics” involved with assaulting the son of a detective, my attorney, purchased with $1500 borrowed from a reluctant aunt, fairly easily convinced the judge that I was not a risk, that I did not deserve further jail time or a record with “domestic assault” permanently on it, even though what I did was less self-defense and more blind rage. I went home on probation, where I'd remain for a year, with only “disorderly conduct" on my record for the next decade.
As for me and Kyle, unbelievably but predictably, I went back to him. I hit him, too, so it’s only right, I told myself. But if he puts his hands on me again, I'm out. It only took 6 months for it to happen again: New Year's Eve, 2007, I'd worked a long serving shift at Red Lobster that night, a new job I was not very good at, and came home with hundreds of dollars in tips. I was thrilled, finally able to turn my phone back on, and Kyle and I rushed to a party nearby before the clock struck midnight to celebrate the beginning of 2008. Once we got back home, drunk from the festivities, Kyle snatched my purse from my hands, breaking the strap.
“You owe me this!” He yelled, looking for my wallet with my tips in it. “For rent! For bills! I've been supporting you! This should be mine!”
I argued with him. I cried. I needed to pay my phone bill, I need to, I cried. My phone was off, as usual, because I spent all my money on beer and fast food and other bullshit. I tried to get my purse back from him. I finally decided it wasn't worth the effort, that I'd wait until morning. I tried to escape to the bedroom again. This time he didn't just take my blankets, he lifted the entire mattress off the bed and tossed it into the wall a few feet from the bed, me still on it. I rolled onto the floor between the bed and the wall, just played dead. I wasn't hurt, and in a fucked up way I was almost grateful to have the mattress over me since he had also, of course, taken the blankets and sheets.
I lay there awhile, under the tilted mattress between the bed and the wall, until I hear him settle into the living room and I finally figure he's asleep. I put the bed back together and I'm about to lay down when an irrepressible urge strikes. I run from the bedroom, look at Kyle sleeping comfortably on the living room floor underneath all the blankets he took off of me before throwing the mattress on top of me. In one swift motion, I grab hold of the blankets near his feet and tear them off of him.
“HOW DOES THAT FEEL, MOTHERFUCKER!” I scream at him, proud of my petty behavior for a nanosecond before I realize I've made a terrible mistake. He wakes up immediately and needs no time at all to figure out what's happening. He charges me, an ugly growl twisting his blotchy face, shoving me to the ground in the hallway between the living room and the door. He held me to the ground by my wrists, screaming in my face. I didn't fight back this time, still on probation and not wanting to end up back in that horrid jail with those horrid people, and just hoped he'd hurry up and get off of me so I could go to bed. For once, I wasn’t even that drunk with him.
The next morning, I came out to the living room where Kyle was already awake, drinking coffee on the couch.
“Where's my money?” I demanded. I had found the purse in the linen closet, but my cash was missing.
“I honestly don't know,” he sheepishly admitted, apparently having hidden it so well in his drunken stupor the night before that he didn't remember where. I eventually find it under a couch cushion and I leave, going to pay my phone bill at the T-Mobile store before my lunch shift at work.
At work, I'm sent home almost immediately once I start rolling silverware and notice the bruises appearing on my wrists and start crying. A week later, I have a new, better job at a bank and my mom and uncle come over while Kyle is at work and help me hastily throw my belongings into the back of my uncle's minivan and take them, and me, to my mom's townhouse in a neighboring suburb where I'll stay for a few months and get back on my feet.
I'd see Kyle three times after that. The first time, a few days later, coming by to pick up some things I'd left behind. I literally ran from the apartment hallway to my car that night as he chased me out, unsurprisingly hammered.
The second time, maybe a few weeks later, he suspected I had a guy over at my mom's and came to investigate, drunk, looking to fight him. My mom wouldn't let him up and made him leave, and called the cops to report a drunk driver (no, he was not pulled over).
The third time was at that bar downtown, seven years later.
Awkward recognition issues out of the way, we walk over to where I was sitting at the bar and Kyla — KT — sits down next to me, asks how I've been doing. We make some polite small talk, her excited and jumpy, with that same just-drunk look of bewildered, crazed love she'd give me back when she was still Kyle, only a few beers in, before he'd flip the switch and start berating me. I’m cautious and also somewhat amused at how much, and simultaneously how little, Kyla has changed. I realize the extent of her increasing intoxication as she speaks and feel bad for her wife again, who just walked over to join us and is looking tired, like she's been through this before. I want to ask her how.
“Oh my god,” KT starts, laughing, “do you remember that time the cops got called?”
I stare at her. I glance at her wife, whose expression I cannot read. I am incredulous.
She looks perplexed for a minute and then laughs.
“Oh,” she chuckles like it’s all a hilarious memory shared between old sorority sisters, “not that time.”
Thanks to for editing advice!
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As a fellow sufferer of narcissistic abuse, I can relate so deeply to so much of this story that it brought tears to my eyes at times. I'm glad you were able to extricate yourself from that situation. I hope you're doing well now and have the healing and peace you deserve.
So proud of you and what you did with this.