B didn’t start off calling me names and breaking my things. He drank…a lot. But so did I. He was a bartender and I worked in kitchens so that was more or less par for the course.
It was the Summer of 2019 and I had just been promoted to Pastry Chef, a job I didn’t feel particularly qualified for, but I needed the money. I almost didn’t go out that night. I was so tired. My body ached, begging for rest, but staying home meant being alone and alone was the last thing I wanted to be.
I noticed him right away, his unruly bleached blonde hair tucked under a black beanie. His gray eyes, snaggle tooth and tattoos. He seemed confident, the way he moved around the bar, shaking and stirring drinks. I saw the way girls looked at him. I wanted him to notice me.
“Is this your music playing” I half shouted over the sound of the crowd and the rhythm of a song with lyrics I could make out, this loves sweet like tooth decay.
“Yeah, Cosmo Pyke,” he told me, his eyes lingering.
I was invited back to his place with a couple friends after the bar closed. Someone pulled out a little bag of white powder, poured it out and lined it up, passing it to B who passed it to me. I took it, wanting to seem like I belonged and knew what I was doing. We spent the rest of the night on his balcony smoking cigarettes and talking until the sun came up over the silhouette of downtown Oakland. He made me a bed on his futon so I could sleep off the drinks.
When I woke up with the sun blaring in, he laughed with a big smile at my state of disrepair.
“Come on,” he said, “there’s only one thing that will fix this.”
We spent all day drinking beers and sharing French fries, telling each other stories about our lives and wandering around town buzzed on electric scooters, like kids on Summer vacation. When it was time for him to go back to work at the bar that night, he looked me in the eyes and said, “I don’t want to leave.”
I knew it wasn’t normal when he called ten times in the middle of the night or showed up at my work or promised so much so soon, but it felt good to be desired almost desperately.
Being with him was intoxicating, in part because when we were together, we were usually drinking. We went to bars, drank at the beach and the cemetery, at my apartment and at his job. We skinny dipped, spray painted walls under the freeway, got tattoos and went to parties. With him, I could succumb to my own addiction. Our nihilistic lifestyle provided an illusion of freedom that had a chokehold on me.
A few weeks into our relationship, he brought me on his balcony and shaking, told me about a fight he had with an ex.
He got locked out and had to break down a door to get in, the cops got called and he was arrested. A big misunderstanding, he assured me. He wanted to tell me the truth because what we had was special. He cared about me so much, he was giving me the option to walk away.
I had a pit in my stomach, but at that moment, he seemed so incapable of hurting anyone. He seemed genuinely remorseful. So, I stayed.
When the outbursts began, I excused them as temporary regressions.
He was jealous.
The silent treatment turned into accusations. Accusations turned into yelling. Yelling turned into punching windows and throwing furniture. He was disgusted by anyone I’d ever been with and disgusted by me. I knew it wasn’t right but he was hitting a nerve, criticizing me for people I had been with in the past. Part of me thought maybe I had been easy or a slut and that I should feel ashamed.
The morning after the worst fights, he would clean up his mess, buy me flowers and tell me all the ways he was going to change. He’d even give up drinking. But, it never lasted more than a few days.
No one had ever spoken to me the way he did. No one had ever spit at me or called me a “cunt” or broken the drawers off my dresser, but I couldn’t get myself to walk away. I felt tethered to him. His hooks were in so deep that I believed him when he told me that he really loved me and he was going to change.
Eventually, I learned how to yell like him, how to throw every twisted word back as loud as my vocal cords would permit. I learned how to smash bottles, slam doors and break things.
“You’ve changed,” he snarled.
“YOU CHANGED ME,” I screamed even though I knew it wasn’t true.
The anger was always there. I had just never given it a home. But even in my own fury, I couldn’t overpower him. Pinned to the wall, he stood over me and punched a fist shaped hole in the drywall, inches from my head. I could never be as angry as him. And the more I tried, the more he tried to convince me that I was the real monster.
Then one night, he came home from the bar fuming. He threw his keys, hitting me in the leg and demanded I give him my phone. I locked myself in the bathroom while he looked for evidence. There was silence and then I heard the sound of glass and plastic being smashed. He started pounding on the door.
“I’ll take the dog if you don’t come out,” he threatened. When I came out, I saw my phone in pieces sitting in a glass of water. I grabbed my dog and ran into our room locking the door behind me. He pounded on the door at first with his fist and then the whole brute force of his body, relentlessly while I begged him to stop. With no phone to call for help, all I could do was yell over the sound of wood splintering.
I could feel my dog shaking as he emerged through the destroyed doorway, tears streamed down my face. I could smell whiskey on his breath as he sneered, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I knew then that I had no choice but to leave.
When I found out he was dating someone new a few months later, I messaged her a warning. I wish I could say it was out of genuine concern for her wellbeing, but the truth is, I couldn’t stand the thought of him loving someone else.
She responded “he’s been honest with me, it would be wrong of me to turn my back on him now.”
I would’ve said the exact same thing.
B grew up in St. Louis Missouri. There he saw his aunts and uncles beat his cousins. His brother went to jail for beating him.
He was sexually abused by a man that would come around during the holidays.
The night he broke down the door to get to his ex and the night he broke down the door to get to me both happened the night before Thanksgiving, a year apart from each other.
His mom called his life a “cosmic joke”.
When he was a teenager, he dropped out of high school and went on tour with a band until he made it to California where he eventually got a job bartending.
I’m not sure when he started shooting up. He told me he was done with heroin when we got together. If that’s true, alcohol, cocaine, meth and our relationship took its place.
When I left, there was no immediate sense of relief. Part of me still believed that at his core, he loved me. Part of me believed that I was abandoning him and that if I had just stayed, things would have gotten better. He wanted me to believe that we lived in a gray area where his actions held less weight than his apologies but if I’m honest, the whole relationship was a lie built on codependency. It was years before I understood that abuse and love cannot coexist.
He wept when I told him I was leaving.
I’m lucky that I had a safe home to return to. The friends I abandoned were there waiting for me when I got out. Despite my fears, my life is better now than I ever could have imagined. What felt like a curse, now feels like a blessing. I am only responsible for my own happy ending, but that doesn’t stop me from hoping he finds a way to rewrite his story.
This was a harrowing read. I hope you found this therapeutic to write, and thank you for sharing. <3