The Goings on of Apartment C

In August of 1997 as we prepared to spend another semester in different dorms.  When we received the good news that we had gotten into married student housing and that apartment C would soon be ours. Mike’s manipulation and control also began in earnest about this time.  I was told what I could watch on TV.  Anything that was empowering or liberal he told me I was not allowed to watch.  He really hated Oprah.   He began to turn me against my parents so that I felt I was backed into a corner, and had no one but him.  The porn got worse.  My attempts to stop it became more frequent.  When I tried to confront him about it he flew off the handle and blamed me that I was no open enough. 

I began to try to remove the temptation from him.  I remember one time filling up half of a large black garbage bag with magazines, video tapes, and cd’s that I had cooked in the microwave.  They sparkle and pop when you cook them.  I went through his disks and his browser history.  I remember one time going thru a stack of floppy disks to see how many had porn on them.  My stack was about a foot tall when I stopped.  I destroyed them all.  It got to the point that I could not even keep a clothing catalogue or magazine with a picture of a woman in it, because he would steal them, hide them and use them.  What’s worse is I had to pick up his crunchy socks in the morning, because he would never put them in the hamper. 

I still have no idea how much money he spent on porn.  He hid so much of it from me.  I made the money and was in charge of the bills when we first got married.  Until I bounced a few checks and he took the check book away from me.  I turned the bills over to him, like a good little Christian.  He was the man.  He was supposed to run the house.  I remember one day getting a $500 phone bill.  Turns out he had been calling 800 numbers, that would then route him to a 900 number, where he could have phone sex.  He was furious when I found out.  I had to put a 900 number block on our phone.

We were piss ass poor.  I was working as a lab monitor and it paid very little.  Mike, when he did work, was delivering pizzas.  I remember even scrubbing his shirts on a washboard at night so that he would have clean clothes.  I did all of the house work.  If I did ask him to help, he would just ignore me.

I tried to throw him out one night.  I packed his bag, his teddy bear included, and threw it out on the lawn along with all his porn. I locked the doors and would not let him back in the house.  He banged and screamed on the door and windows.  I made it 30 min. before I finally gave in.

I would often begged him to stop, to get help, but in the late ‘90s there was no help for sex addicts in our area.  And that’s what he had become, by the definition.  He would just become more enraged, and fly into a tantrum, hit the wall and terrify me.  Always blaming it on someone else, USL, Liberals, me.  It didn’t matter.  He never took responsibility for what he was doing. I always expected his next punch would be my face, but he never hit me.  He just verbally, emotional, mentally and financially abused me. 

As for me, he would not touch me.  It took weeks, often of begging on my hands and knees for him to touch me or have sex with me.  This man I loved, no longer wanted me and I became a prisoner in my own home.  I would go to bed, and he would masturbate by the computer in the other room until the wee hours of the morning.  I would try to go to the bathroom to pee and he would scream at me to get back to bed.  I developed bladder problems for holding it for so long.  I still think this is part of why I developed IC.

I was depressed and under so much stress I developed Shingles.  I reached 300lb. I was suicidal, and wrote several suicide notes.  I reached out for help several times, but to no avail.  How could I ever tell them what was going on?  How could I tell them I was not enough for my husband?  Joe and one other friend were the only ones who knew what I was going through.  I had to have someone to talk too, and it took years for me to get to that point with them.  But neither them nor the councilors had any real answers for me, or could help me understand what was going on.  I was too embarrassed to tell them what was really going on. I did not understand I had been abused until after I left him.  I remember one night even calling a local rehab center and telling them what was going on.  They told me they had no programs for porn addicts at the time.  All they wanted to know was whether he hit me or not.  Mike was furious when he found out I called them.

Oh and this was also one of his things.  I have told you I would often get Bronchitis.  When I would get sick he would tell me, “You just think you’re sick.  You’re not really sick.”  Mike played head games with me.  Every time I caught him in a lie he would say, “It’s not a lie.  It’s omission.”  Or my personal favorite, “I told you.  You just forgot.”  Now I have a memory like an elephant, I didn’t forget, his lying ass just didn’t tell me. 

We continued to play nice in public.  Few knew what was going on with us at home. In the darkness I reached out for anything.  I happened to find a book by his Holiness the Dali Lama, called The art of happiness.  I began to get very into Buddhism.  The first rule of Buddhism is that all life is suffering, and I was most definitely suffering.  The second rule is there is a cause for suffering.  The third is there is a way out of suffering.  I began to look for a way out of that suffering.   I started to study with a small Buddhist group in town, which kind of hid as a book club.  Buddhism helped give me a little light in an other wise dark life.

Then there was Joe.  He had stayed for a few semesters and then he left to join the Army.  He could not keep up with the break neck pace that his scholarships demanded.  He had also been in ROTC for a long time.  It was in Joe that I had hope that I had not lost all my sexiness, despite my weight and my current predicament so I tempted him.  I let him talk to me while I was in the tub.  I could see I was still attractive to someone.  Obviously the problem was not me.  Mike knew about this and was angry, but never tried to stop me.  He never tried to fight for me. 

Mike and I had changed his major, not long after we moved into apartment C.  As a Sociology major I had to chose a minor.  I started taking classes in Anthropology.  I fell even more in love with it then I had with Sociology.  In my senior year I changed my major to my minor.  By the time I graduated my GPA was 2.9, while still a C average, I had pulled it up a full point from the time I left USL.  Mike changed to journalism, just like his father before him.  In the Summer of 1999 Mike left me to do his internship at a news station in Shreveport.  We were elated he had got what we felt was a prestigious internship.  Mike received a D in the class.  Later I found out it was because he spent all his time downloading porn while he was at work. 

That summer I had to master 9 hours of French, or I would not graduate.  It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.  I was in class from 8 in the morning till 5 in the afternoon.  Then I went home to study until midnight or so.  Get up again about 5 a.m. to study and then do it all again, five days a week.  I passed by the skin of my teeth.  I don’t think I even remember how to say, “What is your name?” in French anymore.

It was during that summer that Joe and I became even closer.  I had not been away from Mike for many years.  Joe, Gods’ bless him, would drive up from Fort Polk every other Friday to take care of me.  We would go to put my check in the bank and buy groceries.  I didn’t see Mike for three months.  He could have cared less what happened to me.  While he was gone, Jim would sleep in the bed with me, while we both had our clothes on.  Hey it was better than him sleeping on the love seat.  I was scared to go to sleep on my own back then.  I remember the first few weeks that summer going to sleep with one of Mike’s lightsabers in my hands.  I didn’t have any other weapons.

I was still not sure what I was going to do with my life after I graduated college.  I began looking at attending graduate school.  I had thought about becoming a professor.  You really cannot work in the field of Anthology without a Doctorate.  We made a trip to the University of Alabama at Birmingham for me to look at the college.  I liked it and hoped to enroll.  My GRE, the test to get into a master’s program, was to be paid for by NSU.  Mike comes to me one night and says that we can’t go to graduate school just yet.  He says we need to take a year off and pay some of our bills.  I am devastated.  But he is my husband and he knows best.  We graduate in May of 2000, literally one behind the other.  The next day we pack up and move back to Shreveport. 

Ilsa

Marrying Mike

We made plans that fall to marry during the winter break of 1996.  I had no idea that we would marry on what would later become a sacred day to me, December 21^st, Winter Solstice, one of Holda’s most holy days.  It just happened to be on a Saturday.  My dress was a simple white dress my mother had bought from Catherine’s for me. We got the license and I had called around that week to Justice of the Peace’s in the area to see who had an opening.  We were married in the back yard gazebo of Tom Carlton.  Who was at the time the Chancellor for Bossier Parish Community College. 

It was me, Mike, my parents, his parents, Nicholas and Mr. Carlton.  My mother walks me down the aisle and whispers in my ear, “You can still get out of this if you want to.  It’s harder to get into a marriage then it is to get out of one.”  It just strengthened my determination that I was going to fix Mike and prove her wrong.  The service begins and we are not passed the “Dearly Beloved,” when my mom begins to speak up behind me.  I am terrified of what she has to say.  God she’s going to ruin my wedding!   Is she going to protest our union?  Nope.  She says to Mr. Carlton. “I know you!  I’ve seen you on the cover of the National Inquirer.” 

“Well yes Mam, you have,” he says.  Now I’m thinking oh god what have I gotten myself into and are there aliens involved in all this.  No mom, ever the lover of animals has seen an article on Mr. Carlton who was forced to give up his pet alligator.  See he had raised him since he was a baby, but once his insurance company found out about said alligator they make him give it away.  All this while I am trying to get married.  After all that explanation we take our vows and the ceremony is complete.  No reception we just went back to Mike’s dad’s office.

Mike’s father ran what he called a Media Marketing company.  He made junk mail. We often spent time stuffing envelopes for him.  His office was in an old house in Broadmoor.  The houses along this one street had been originally been residential and then eventually zoned as commercial.  Two rooms were used to make mail, but there was still a shared living room where we stuffed mail, a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom and other room that had junk in it.  So our first night as a married couple was spent in that house.  We had come there right after school ended and we had been living together about two weeks before we got married, I think.  Mike’s father was such a pack rat, and so nasty it took me almost a week to carve out enough space to live in.  We won’t even talk about the horrors of the shower that was black and piled high with boxes.  It took me more than a week of steady cleaning, but I made it as comfy as I could.  I even put up a Christmas tree in the big bay window up front.  We passed our first Christmas in that house as man and wife.

In the Spring of 1997 we returned to school.  We put our name on the list for married student housing, but we were told there was a year wait.  So the first six months of our marriage we spent living in different dorms.  From my dorm room window I could see the lights of Mike’s room, and at night it would give me comfort.  I wasn’t alone and I loved him so much.  Some nights I would just stare at his light.  He no longer had the money to live in an apartment as he had done before he left for USL.  In fact I don’t know how he had paid for that apartment unless his parents had paid for it.  And I don’t remember if the idea of us getting a place together ever came up.  I don’t know that Mike was working at that time or not.

The Summer of 1997 found us living in an upstairs apartment that Mike’s father owned, next to his office building.  Downstairs was my kitchen and dining room; upstairs were our living room, bedroom, bath, and a small room that served as my closet. 

In going back and rereading my stuff I had written from the days of the “Prodigal Daughter.”  I found a painful memory I had forgotten.  It is of one of the first times he had emotionally abused me. We were living in the upstairs apartment.  It was rather late and I had tried to convince Mike to come to bed, to no avail.  I lay in the dark room wondering what my new husband was doing.  One minute I would hear the TV and the next I would not.  After a few minutes, I got up to see what was going on.  There in the blue light of the television sat Mike masturbating to a porno.  His pants unzipped with penis openly exposed and a sock to catch whatever evidence remained.  I was shocked.  I did not understand.  My calculations and analysis could not come up with the right answer.  I had believed once we were married and living together that this behavior would stop.

“Michael, what’s going on here?”  I asked in a timid voice.

      
He turned to me, his eyes filled with rage, “What are you doing up! Go back to bed! Why are you not in bed?!  Go away and leave me alone!”

“Michael if you want sex why don’t you just come to bed?!  I don’t understand?  What are you doing?  Why are you doing this?”

He became enraged, screaming at me, “It is all your fault!  If it wasn’t for your backwoods Victorian morals, you would not have a problem with this!  It is all your fault!  Get back in there and go to bed!” 

I do not remember the rest, only that this was the beginning.  I felt as if he had ripped my heart out, and deep down I knew that it was true. I had caused this.  I was fat. I was ugly, I was naïve and out of work.  I became suicidal the next day.  I hid in a closet until I was found, I ran into the park, close to our apartment, with our BB gun to kill myself.  Whatever insecurities I had about myself were confirmed on a daily basis with him.  The next day I became terrified of him.  I was so afraid.  I did not understand what I had done wrong.  I had had no other lovers but Michael.  I must be doing something wrong.  He was right I knew nothing of sex other then with him, so I began to verse myself in the sexual arts.

There was no internet where we lived.  Most information was still in books.  So every time we went to the book store I would hide myself in the sex section.  I read as much as I possibly could on the subject.  I was determined to please my husband.

 

Despite what I learned, it was not enough.  My nightmare had begun and there was no escape for me.  I was too ashamed to tell my parents what was going on.   That my husband preferred to gratify himself rather than touch me.  My parents did not know until right before I left him that Mike had a sex problem and what he had put me through in that department.  I was so embarrassed.  Only Joe and another friend ever knew what was really going on in my home. 

Ilsa

NSU

I spent the Summer of 1996 working at Wal-Mart and being with Mike.  That fall I started at NSU as Sociology major.  The classes were much easier at NSU then at USL or at least I thought so.  I was also taking classes in something that I loved.  I still had no idea what I was going to do after college.  But I was assured by everyone around me, get a good college education and you will have a better life. Yeh right.

Mike was still a music major and I don’t remember if he was delivering pizzas at that time or not.  We were college students.  We were living on student loans at the time. 

I had started getting into computers at USL.  Three of the four fellers I road back from St. Louis with were computer majors and hung out at the Wesley with me.  They introduced me to the internet.  The computer lab at USL was freezing cold, as computers were known to overheat.  The floor was raised and made of metal to hold all the cables connecting all the computers to the printer and the main frame that was in another room.  The internet was in black and white, and Yahoo was just one page.  And it was not a search engine yet, it was a directory.  You had to click a link and then another link to get what you wanted, unless you had the URL.  I have been messing with computers ever since.

I remember trying out email for the first time.  On a black screen with white letters that looked a lot like DOS.  Later learning to go into what were early chat rooms.  These were a lot more sophisticated then the computers that were in the dorms that had either lime green or hunter orange text on a black screen for you to type your papers on.  I even remember Windows 1 and what a wonderful improvement it was over the damn orange and green text.  Now you could chose your writing program, and you typed on what looked like a white piece of paper and you could chose the color of your text, you know if you had a color printer and those were only for rich people. 

When I got to NSU the Sociology department was just setting up its own computer lab for students to use and I was made one of the monitors.  Now a monitor was someone who helped you with the ins and outs of software, the internet, and made sure that people did not down load porn, which was starting even in those early days.  Mike started downloading porn just as soon as he figured out how.  I turned a blind eye for many years.  If my bosses had known I was letting him do it, I could have been fired and him expelled.

Mike’s attention and lust for me seemed to be fading with each passing day.  I wanted to so much to get back to that summer, the Summer of ’95, when he had wanted me so much.  I don’t know when I started having to beg for him to have sex with me.  I know that other then the first few times I always initiated sex.  I also know that once Mike had sex that first semester it was downhill from there.  I feel he saw me as concurred, like Mt. Everest.   Once he planted his flag that was it.  I was saddled and put up on a shelf like a trophy, not to be touched or played with again.  Into my life walked Joe. 

The first time I ever saw Joe he was leaning up against the door frame of the Sociology lab.  Oh he was so beautiful with his blue eyes, sandy colored hair, trim little body, and allergic little sniffles.  The first thing that caught my attention was his Boy Scout belt.  I asked him about it and we soon became fast friends as he told me about him being an Eagle Scout and that he was also from the Shreveport area.  I invited him to the Wesley and Joe started hanging around with me and Mike.  We all became very close fast friends.

It was later, in my darker days, that we would begin what my therapist termed an emotional affair.  But Joe is another story all together.  I still believe if it was not for him, I would not have survived, and for that I am ever grateful. Oh the flirting between us began almost immediately, but nothing came about until much later.  We are both horrible flirts. But Joe began to give me what I desperately wanted in those days, attention.  Most of the time I think Mike could have cared less.

No I was committed to Mike, no matter what my heart or my loins might have told me to do. My bible told me to not have sex outside of wedlock.  I had barely got it in under the fact we were engaged.  After all Mary and Joseph had been engaged when she had Jesus, right.  I had to marry him.  I remember before leaving USL having this conversation with a very Christian friend of mine.  I had my reservations about marrying Mike, even then.  She was the first to tell me I didn’t have to marry him just because I was sleeping with him.  I had never heard that before.  But I wanted to do what was right and proper and so that included marrying him, even if I was starting to see the signs the ship was sinking.  Hey I was 20, over 200lb., and still no car.  I felt I didn’t have a lot of options. 

Ilsa

 

 

 

Becoming His

In the fall of 1995 I returned to USL in Lafayette, more than 4 hours away from where Mike was at NSU.  He called me not long before I was to leave and go back to school to tell me Charlie had broke up with him.  He could not understand why. 

When I returned to USL I began to write him letters again, many of them erotic.  It was not long before we became a couple.  What he did not share with me, until our wedding day, was that he had slept with another girl, between Charlie and me.  Some girl he had met at his apartment complex pool.  I still don’t know how many times.

Mike called me one night after receiving one of my letters and asked me to marry him.  I gladly accepted.  We began to make plans soon for him to come down, so that we might have sex for the first time.  I even brought special purple lingerie and white thigh highs.  He arrives and we go to make love, he never says anything about how nice I look in my new lingerie.  I lay on the bed, him on top and he enters.  It is over in 30 seconds.  He shivers and collapses on top of me. 

I pat his shoulder and say, “what the hell was that?”

He says, “Oh you didn’t have an orgasm too?” 

“Um, No.  Was I supposed to?” I ask.

He does spend the next 2 hours making it up to me, but he knew it was my first time.  You never get to make that back up, you know.  This was not his first time.  He knew what he was doing. Most you remember your first time, and I hope it was a good experience and not what happened to me.  This man should come with a warning label I swear!  I wish there was somewhere I could register him as a sex addict, abuser and a bad lover so other women would know to stir clear of him.

We continue hot and heavy for that semester.  As I had no car, and I still think that is part of why I married him so I could have a car, he had to come down and visit me.  I could not drive to NSU to see him.  He did take me back with him one weekend and I got to meet his friends and go to the Wesley up there.  We spent most of that time shacked up in a hotel room though.

That semester Mike’s grandmother died and left him some money.  He bought a new car, a new computer, some inline skates, and an engagement ring for me.  He just showed up with it one day.  It was gold with a 1/8^th of a caret diamond in it.  Yeh, I hated it, but I accepted it. I was never asked what I wanted, and if he had ever bothered to listen to me, he would have known I don’t like gold and I don’t like diamonds.  I find them pretentions, everyone has them. 

Now my parents did not like Mike from the very beginning.  Hell my dog Sissy did not like him either.  Every time he tried to touch her she screamed and ran away.  She would not let him touch her.  She never did this with anyone else.  Remember what I said about animals always know, if we only listen.  I should have listened.  After a summer spent messing around in my parents’ house, behind closed doors, they were not thrilled with me either.  And why would they like him.  He was a music major, had basically had an affair with me while still dating Charlie, and had not worked meaningfully since the time they knew of him.  They saw no potential in him, and now their only daughter was having sex outside of wedlock.  This could only lead to no good. 

Mike decides in the Spring of 1996 to transfer and be at USL with me.  He says he needs a change.  For the rest of our marriage Mike would go into a screaming fits and often rage about how USL ruined everything in his life.  While we were happy to be together, stealing in each other’s dorms when we could.  Hell I practically lived I his dorm for days in a row until we almost got caught and we decided it was not worth getting kicked out of school over. 

While we were still hot and heavy for each other, the porn continued.  It just never went away.  I kept explaining to myself that it would get better, once we were married.  Mike worked very little other than being a monitor at the Wesley, which paid less than $100 a month, and stuffing envelopes occasionally for his dad, he had no steady employment or real skills. I am always lending him money, which he never paid back.

Mike claimed to be a music major, with his concentration in voice.  Mike never sang.  He never practiced.  He never studied.  I still don’t know how he passed his classes.  I have a memory of walking to his dorm on my birthday.  He didn’t get me a present, get me a card or even make me one. I innocently asked him to sing me “Happy Birthday.”  Just to have something from him on my birthday.  He refused.  He suddenly claimed to be getting a sore throat.  In fact, he never sang to me. The only time I ever heard him sing was during one of his finals at NSU.  I was waiting for him outside the door, and I leaned my ear to the door to hear what he sounded like.  He sounded good, accept he kept saying “wait”, as if to get what he was doing correct, every few seconds.  They flunked him.  That was the only time I ever heard him sing. 

Why Mike was at USL, my father insisted that I stop paying for things for him and he get a job.  What money his grandmother had left him, was long since gone. Mike walked around the corner from the Wesley and got a job delivering pizzas.  A profession he is still in to this day.  Delivering pizzas got us through most of our college years. 

At some point in the Spring of ’96 it was decided that I would transfer to NSU in the fall.  I missed my family terribly.  I was 6 hours away from them. I saw them maybe once or twice a semester if I was lucky.

When I began to apply to schools I was told by my father that they had to be within driving distance of home, so that limited me to Louisiana.  I had applied at several universities in Louisiana and got into all of them, even LSU.  I had wanted to go to LA Tech like my father.  When the letter came that I was accepted into LA Tech I was so excited.  My father then looked at me and said, “That’s great.  Now you can choose.  You can go to NSU where your mom can watch over you.  Or you can go to USL where you aunt can watch over you.”  I was crestfallen.  I was a daddy’s girl.  I wanted to do what daddy did.  As I had and still have a very difficult relationship with my mother, and I knew many of those who attended my high school were attending NSU, I chose USL.  It was only years later that I learned NSU had wanted to give me a full ride.  By the time I got there, those offers were long gone.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.  My father said, you’re going to college, so I went.  I did as I was told in those days.  I had thought for some years that I might want to be a chef and USL had a good culinary program.  So that’s what I had come for.  But as they laid out the realities of the cooking industry and what it took to run your own restaurant, I decided it was not for me. When I heard that even with a degree I would start as a dishwasher, I decided to switch majors. 

Hell I was failing anyways.  Two years into college and I had a 1.9 major and not for lack of trying.  I had taken remedial math twice and failed.  It would take me 3 more times at NSU before I passed. I often tell a joke where I say, “It took me 5 times to pass math in college,” and only holdup 4 fingers.  I still hate math and are amazed by those that can do it well.

Somewhere along the line I had to take a Sociology course, and I fell in love with it.  I had the most awesome teacher who has spent many years working with people who had AIDS and in the LGBT community.  Don’t ask me to spell her name I never could get it right.  So in the Fall of 1996 I would transfer to NSU as a Sociology major.

Ilsa

Summer of 1995

In the Spring of 1995 the first letter from Mike arrived.  I did not even read it.  I tore it up and threw it across the lawn of the USL Presidents house.  It happened to be on the way between the post office and the Wesley United Methodist Campus Ministry.  Sorry I littered!  I was even stronger in my resolve that what I had done with him and being involved with him was wrong.  But the letters kept coming.  I finally gave in and began to read them and then to write him back. 

By the summer of 1995 I was very much in love with Michael. So much so that I proposed to him twice, and both times he turned me down. I did not want to be in love with him, because he was still with Charlie, his girlfriend.  It was a very mixed emotional and difficult time for me.  I in no way wanted to hurt her.  I never believed I would ever fall in love, marry, or have children.  I had been told all my life I was too fat and too ugly for such a thing to happen to me.  So the idea that Michael wanted me was just overwhelming.  I soaked it up like a sponge.  Every moment of attention I hid in my heart.  What we were doing was wrong, but I could not bring myself to stop.  Mike’s hold on me, as threw out most of our relationship was hypnotic.

That Summer of 1995 Charlie was in Baton Rouge, Mike was in Shreveport and I was in Keatchie.  I was an hour away, compared to her 6 hours away.  Mike and I spent every moment we could together, locked in each other’s arms, and each other’s bedrooms.  The rule was no clothes off.  Everything else was fair game.  We kissed, groped, dry humped all to the point of orgasm.  But no we never had sex, just everything but.  I never realized until now maybe he just wanted me for the thrill of the affair.  Maybe he was using me ever then. Who knows?

Now I knew about the porn.  I found the tape in his player.  His magazines while putting up his socks and making his bed.  I knew about the ones under his bed and in his night stand.  I explained it way.  He misses Charlie.  He’s not getting sex on a regular basis.  I think that summer he only made one trip to Baton Rouge to see her.  Course then money was tight and neither one of us was working at the time.  I figured the porn would go away once we got together and he got sex regularly.  That he would grow out of it.  He never did and it only got worse.

In August of 1995 Mike went back to NSU and I went back to USL.  With heavy hearts we parted ways.  Mike reported for band camp, a few weeks before Charlie was to report for school.  A few days after he arrived she called to break up with him.  They remained friendly threw out our marriage.  Charlie would confide in me years later that she had broke up with him over the phone because she was terrified he would hit her. 

Mike had a violent streak, although he never hit me, he hit everything else.  The walls in our home had holes in them.  I learned early on not to keep glass in frames, because when he would beat the walls, our pictures would fly off and the glass would break.  I kept boxes of telephones on hand, usually three at a time, because he would break the phones so often. He had road rage and would beat the steering wheel so bad it had no cover left on it.  This was pre airbag days.  The cover came off and for years he beat the part where the metal part for the horn was, until it had a dent in it.  He would throw temper tantrums if he did not get his way.  He would bang his fists against his leg, gnash his teeth, and stomp his foot.  And he did this in public with me many times.  I always feared I would be next.  And he had no remorse for any of it. None of these things he showed until after we officially became a couple. 

Where there warning signs?  Yes there were warning signs.  Experts have come out in the last few years and told women not to date men with holes punched in their walls, because one day it will be your face.  The first time I walked into Mike’s family home I was shocked to see this nice suburban home so destroyed.  There were holes in the walls and holes in the doors.  Nicholas, Michael’s younger brother had no door.  It had been destroyed. 

Mike and Nicholas were violent towards each other.  Always yelling and screaming.  I’ve seen then try to kill each other with baseball bats.  Their mom was no better, constantly screaming at them.  Mike’s father, a former news editor, had long ago checked out.  Yet I believed I could be a positive influence on the situation and I could fix Mike and his family, with love and understanding. 

Ilsa

Meeting Mike

On December 21^st, 1996 I married Michael Carl Liberto, in a back yard in Bossier City.  My mother walked me down the aisle and whispered in my ear, “You can still get out of this.  It’s easier to get in a marriage then get out of it.”  All that did was harden my resolve to prove her wrong and to fix him. 

Michael and I had met on December 31^st, 1994, New Years Eve, in Saint Louis, Missouri.  We were both attending an Ecumenical Campus Ministry conference.  There were several thousand in attendance. 

Now a Campus Ministry, for those of you who don’t know, is kind of a throwback to years past.  Campus Ministries are organizations that are usually located just outside the fiscal boundary of a university.  Most of the time a block or two over, within easy walking distance of the campus.  They are outposts of most large church denominations, Baptist, United Methodist, Catholic, Pentecostal, etc.  Hell, I hear Harvard even has an Atheist one now. These ministries care for students spiritual needs.  They provide activities, like movie night, bible studies, church services, a quiet place to study and usually a free meal at least once during the week.  Although Campus Ministry is dying and underfunded I most places, Mike and I were heavily involved in them. 

We had not met until the last night of the conference at the big dinner and New Years Eve dance.  The feller I was supposed to go with bailed on me.  I was there with a group from the University of South Louisiana (USL) in Lafayette, He with a group from Northwestern State University (NSU) in Natchitoches.  There was no room for me at the USL table so I went to sit with the people from NSU.  I was looking good and smelling fine.  I had just bought some new vanilla oil perfume that day.  I took a seat between Mike and his roommate.  Now his roommate was cute and I was chatting him up.  Whatever I would say Mike would interject something.  I was trying to explain to the table that my mom was attending NSU and when I said she looked just like me.  Mike says, “Then by god she must be beautiful.”  Well that got my attention.  He kept saying, “Where are the cookies?   I smell cookies.”  We finally figured out it was my perfume.  It got such a rise out of him, that I continued to wear it most of our marriage. 

I don’t remember a lot of what happened after that.  I know that Mike and I stood outside the ballroom and danced for a while.  He had a hard on for me.  That was the first time I had ever felt that on a guy.  That was the first time, that I know of, I had caused one in a man. 

Now I was raised under a rock.  I was 18 and still a virgin.  I was 180lb and believe I would never marry, because I was too fat and ugly.  I’d never seen an erect penis much less been the cause of one.  Now let’s be clear, Mike at least kept it in his pants, that night.  I spent the 16 hour van ride home to Louisiana asking the 4 fellows I had come with what that hard thing was in Mike’s pants and what did it mean.  Conclusion, he liked me.  I’d never had a guy like me back. 

The next part is hard for me to tell.  After all these years I am still ashamed of it, but I’ve promised to write the truth of my life and this is part of that truth.  Mike and I went and hid for the rest of the night, in a little alcove not far from the ball room.  I don’t know how many hours we were there.  We talked, and we could not keep our hands off each other.  The worst part is that Mike had told me he had a girlfriend, Charlie, back home, and I did it anyway.  I wanted the attention so bad, it was hard to resist.  It was something I had never had.  He even told me he loved me, that night, as friends though.  Agape he called it.  I would get disgusted with myself and want to leave, then he would touch me and I would just melt.  He had my number early on. 

The hot and heavy continued for a while, with him even asking if I want to sneak away and make love.  I decided that was not what I wanted for my first time.  I asked him to walk me back to my hotel, which he did.  We said goodbye and I spent the rest of the night talking to my roommate about this horrible thing I had done.  I knew better then to mess with another woman’s man.  I knew better.  I was not raised like that.  My roommate and I made the decision to swear him off and never to see him again.  That was the most logical thing to do. 

The next morning I was full of resolve and self hatred for all that had happened the night before.  I am coming up the escalator and my pastor, and the pastor of the NSU group are desperately trying to get my attention. 

“What’s going on?” I said.

“It’s ML.  He’s been talking about you and asking for you all night.  He’s desperate to see you!  We’ve never seen him like this!  Ilsa you have to go to him.”

“Who the hell is ML?” I ask.

“Mike? You were with him last night.”

“I wasn’t with a Mike last night” I said.

“Michael”

“Oh Michael,” I said.  For some reason it didn’t register in my head that way.   “I don’t want to see him.” 

“Please Ilsa!  Please.”  You know what it’s like when you have two pastors begging you.  They know best, right?

“Okay.  Where is he?”  I finally gave in.  My resolve did not last that long.

Mike was checking out at the front desk.  He embraced me and tried to kiss me.  I turned my head and refused to hug him back.  I was like a limp noodle.  I asked what he wanted.  Mostly he wanted to give me his contact info and asked if he could write me.

Now this was in the early days of the internet, so most people did not email and few people had cell phones back then.  And they sure didn’t text.  Long distance calling on dorm phones required calling cards and were hugely expensive.  Later in our relationship, Mike and I ran up a $500.00 bill on my father’s AT&T calling card. And we didn’t talk that much and we were in the same state!  So in the beginning Mike and I wrote letters to each other.  What harm could a letter do?         

Ilsa