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