Sharing My Rejections

The time an terrorist incident saved my marriage and changed the way I think about life.

(lights cigarette, takes drag) I was born in New Jersey, but I’ve always considered myself a New Yorker. I was living there with my wife and kids when she got a big promotion and had to move to L.A.. My counterproposal was simple. She’d stay with me in New York and forgo her high-flying career. I’m a caveman, I know, but in my defense, I honestly thought our kids would be better off growing up in a real city where they had roots, not some fake plastic fantasyland where haircuts cost a hundred and fifty dollars.

Well, my wife, having self-respect, rejected the shit out of my proposal. She moved to L.A., and we separated. I was bitter. Bitter as hell. I mean, she took the kids! And what about my career? I was a cop, goddamnit. I’d absorbed a lifetime of local knowledge and professional contacts that would’ve been worthless out west. Moving to L.A. would’ve meant starting from scratch. What was I gonna do for a living, clean swimming pools for millionaires? Fuck that. I’m a New Yorker.  

I started drinking. I mean, I’d always drank a little. I’m Irish-Catholic. And a cop. But I never drank like this. I don’t even want to think about the corners I cut as an officer of the law, the perps I got rough with, the evidence I planted — hell, sometimes just for fun, just to feel some control over the chaos — reeling as I was from the dissolution of my nuclear family. (ashes cigarette) But that was the 80s for you. Reagan’s paradise where mediocre white guys like me took a pass and everybody else paid the price. 

Some of this even dawned on me then — how good I’d had it, how pathetic it was to feel threatened by my wife’s independence, and how maybe, just maybe, a real man would’ve made a real sacrifice, would’ve risked falling on his ass among the palm trees in the California sunshine in order to show her the support she deserved.