The Jerk

My second marriage had crashed and burned and so had the computer industry. At the same time I was getting back out onto the job market, I felt I was ready to start dating again. I really did not prefer the nightclub scene though I enjoyed a good evening of dancing and fun. It’s just that when it comes to targeting one’s next victim, the disco or two-steppin’ joint is not the place to do it.

There was little hope of finding a good man at work considering all the rules most companies have concerning dating other employees. Whatever was a woman to do?

Then I saw it – “Ladies, place your free personal ad for a week. Hundreds of men on-line 24 hours a day!” How much cheesier could it have gotten, and how funny would it be to try? I had to go for it!

I had never done anything like it before (I know you’ve never heard that before) but it really was my first time. I figured I’d better do some research, so I read through ads of hundreds of desperate, lonely women, and what I saw amazed me. Hundreds of practically identical ads, one after the next, page after page… SWF seeks caring individual who enjoys walks on the beach and candle-lit dinners. Jeez! What a dull existence these poor on-line daters must lead. I had a mission. It was up to me to single-handedly spice up the on-line dating world. It was my job to paint this world in a Technicolor rainbow of unspoken promises. It was my job to create the best darn ad these withered wisps of humanity would read all night!

I approached it from a marketing standpoint. Audience? Male. Purpose? Get a date. Yeah, that pretty much sums it all up. And I started:
1969 Classic. Original Blond color. Incredible performance on all types of terrain after appropriate warm-up period. Shifts on-the-fly from elegant city style to rugged off-road model. One 5-year-old after market addition. Room for your kids, but not for excess baggage. Bad drivers will encounter flawless anti-lock braking system. I added my email address and then I hit “send.”

Though this was a great experiment in marketing, my actions bore vastly unpredictable ramifications. Within a few hours my mailbox was full to capacity. There was no way I was ever going to be able to read all of the responses. I skimmed briefly over numerous letters, finally coming to one that I found interesting. A man who loved road-trips and world travel, water sports and any number of other things I enjoyed. We started emailing back and forth, and before too long, spoke on the phone.

And that’s how I started dating Trent… henceforth known as The Jerk. He seemed like a perfectly normal man. He was outgoing, intelligent and friendly while not being too over-bearing. He was nice looking but not overly vain. We shared many similar interests and both enjoyed deep discussions about the universe, religion and other Zen-type things.

Little did I know that lurking beneath that normal-looking exterior was an engine that ran on alternative fuel sources.

After dating a few weeks, The Jerk wanted to meet my son. We wanted the introduction to be non-threatening and fun, so we chose a hockey game as out first “group date.” A few nights later The Jerk wanted to take us out to dinner. It was fun until near the end when The Jerk wanted to go smoke a cigarette. He went to the bar, and evidently slung back a drink or five.

Later on that evening The Jerk’s alter ego showed up at my apartment after quite a few more drinks. He was not one of those slurring, falling-down drunken people. He was bright-eyed and even claimed to have sharpened senses. So sharp, in fact, that he explained to me that he could tell that an airplane flying over-head was going to Phoenix. (Hmmm... now that's normal!) I wanted to ask him to leave, but I worried about the lives he’d be endangering if I did so. Shortly thereafter, he left anyway.

Why did I see him again? He apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again. Perhaps my faith and trust in others was just a tad out of proportion. I don’t honestly know, but looking back, I was looking real intelligent, no?

Of course it did happen again, about three weeks later while on an out-of-state trip for Thanksgiving. And again at a Christmas party and at a Super Bowl party and one evening after work. So I moved in with him.

I know, I know. After making one less-than-bright move with Number Two, I do this? The thing is that The Jerk was a great guy as long as he was not drinking. He was wonderful with my son and he and I shared many interests. He was always nice to me, as long as he wasn’t drinking, or I wasn’t trying to talk to him about drinking.

Somewhere during this time I got laid off yet again and went for a number of months without a job. Thankfully The Jerk was still working and paying the bills. I found out later that he was paying the bills with a number of credit cards he had gotten in my name by stealing and using my personal information. Though I was debt-free when I started dating The Jerk, he successfully ran up close to twenty-Thousand dollars of credit card bills in my name. Nice.

I had never known an alcoholic, but I began to wonder. (And you're thinking, "You began to wonder?") I started to see that The Jerk became very defensive if alcohol was brought into the conversation at all. I had always thought alcoholics drank every day. The Jerk did not. Then again I thought most adults out-grew getting sloppy-drunk just for fun by about 23 years of age.

Then one day in late May The Jerk called me up where I had finally found work selling office furniture, to see if I could get off early. He wanted me to pick up Jake so we could all go on a boat-ride in the boat he bought with my credit. That’s right. He sweet-talked me into buying him a nice used ski boat even though I told him I thought we should wait for our financial situation to improve.

Anyway, Jake and I went home early and changed into our bathing suits. We even invited the neighbor to come along. The Jerk had left to put the boat in the water before we got home and was to meet us in the back yard of our little house on the lake any minute… any minute…

After an hour and a half, I started to worry. After three hours I was sick with worry. After a tremendous thunderstorm started with high winds, hail and a chance of tornados, I got Jake out of bed and we got in the car. We went to the park where the boat launch was, and found his car and empty boat-trailer there. I went to the park security guard on duty and explained my situation. An alert was put out to the coast guard to find the poor man who must be stranded on the lake in the storm. Then I went about trying to locate one of The Jerk’s friends who was camping in the park to see if he’d seen him.

I was told which campsite the friend had and drove down there in the pouring rain and screaming winds. As I arrived, I could see to figures sitting in the cab of the friend’s truck. I ran out in the whipping rain, sure The Jerk must have just gotten off the lake, soaking and cold. I was sure his cell phone must have gotten too wet to work, and they were probably just on their way to our house.

He lowered the passenger-side window and looked at me as if I were a heinous bug.
“What do you want?” He sneered.
All my pent-up anxiety exploded with the energy of a small nuclear warhead. “Nothing! I don’t want anything!” Suddenly the picture was all too clear (finally, right?), and here I was at 10:30 at night in a thunderstorm with my child asleep in the back of my car, chasing after The Jerk.

I could not sleep the rest of that night, and the next day I took Jake to a movie. The Jerk did not bother to come home until about 1:00PM. I was done. I was ending it right then and there. I had my mind made up!

Of course I didn’t end it just yet. To his credit, the Jerk gave up alcohol that July and things went fine for a little while longer until the alcohol addiction was replaced with sleeping pills. I often wondered about The Jerk’s habit of taking a sleeping pill or four at ten-o-clock at night, and then going out to watch TV. He rarely came to bed before three.

Then one night I found out. The Jerk came into the room at two in the morning and turned on all the lights. He then started to dance around in his underwear and sing incoherently. Surprisingly, this was almost exactly how he acted while drunk! Though I repeatedly asked him if he’d been drinking, he didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. He finally danced himself out into the other room and I turned out the lights, thankful my son was not home.

The next day I asked him about the incident, but he didn’t remember a thing. He simply said, “Huh, I guess I took too many of my sleeping pills.”
To which I responded, “Huh, I guess you better never do that again!”

Of course he did do it again. The third time he did it, he emptied out my medicine cabinet and emptied a number of bottles of pills of all varieties, including an entire bottle of Darvocet. When I found him, he was in his underwear again, upright but incoherent. He had been finger-painting in the contents of an entire can of shaving foam and had interred the left-over pills within the small foamy mountains. Hollywood art, perhaps? There were quite a few unaccounted for prescription pills, and a large number of empty bottles.

Unable to carry him to my car, I called 911 and cordially invited an ambulance to come pick him up. Upon the ambulance crew’s arrival, the Jerk brightened up and asked “Got any fish food?”
One of the paramedics made a quick search of the ambulance shelves and replied, “Gee, hmmm… we must be completely out tonight.”

The Jerk was taken to the hospital. Due to the nature of the incident, the local law enforcement was sent to question me. When they asked for the Jerk’s address, I simply told them “As of tomorrow, he no longer has one!”

And that was the end of the Jerk. Of course at that time I swore off men, I swore off most of humanity and made up my mind to just stay single for the rest of my life. I celebrated the Jerk’s leaving with a large, cold glass of milk and danced around my house fully clothed. It was going to be hard, but it was going to be better!