I’m 37 when I meet Bobbi. 2 b’s. 1 i. She’s what the Beach Boys were singing about. Perfect sunny blond bangs. Perfect perky nose. Perfect California body covered with a perfect California tan. In her perfect apartment perfect couples kiss perfect kisses hung from all the walls.

At this time in my life I have given lots of careful thought to what I want in a mate, so I won’t again choose the person capable of doling out the most misery possible to me and mine. So I boil it all down to a simple check list I can refer to at any moment, so I won’t waste any more time chasing and wooing and having sex with the wrong woman. This, I believe, demonstrates the depths of desperation I’m plumbing at this point in my life. Here’s what I come up with:

Smart
Sweet
Successful
Sexy
Sense of humor

The 5 S’

Bobbi has them all.

So how did things go so terribly wrong in the Bobbi Era?

I’ll tell you.

It starts, as all things must, at the beginning. After a chance meeting in a vegan bakery near the La Brea tar pits, in which banter and sparks fly over a wheat-free fructose-sweetened no-fat muffin, I ask her if she’d like to have dinner. Her exact words are:

Dinner is not possible.

Not-

I’d like to but let’s do lunch instead…

Or-

Maybe on the weekend, but it’s hard for me because of my work…

Or-

Let’s forget about dinner and go right to champagne and oral sex?

All possible answers to a request for a dinner date from someone you’re interested in.

Why don’t I have the good sense to just say thank you and walk away? A lot therapy under the bridge since then. Frankly, I’m blinded by all that blond. And I like the idea of trying to have sex with someone who doesn’t want me. If I can convince her, then maybe I can convince myself. So I set out with every fiber of my being to make her love me, make her love me, make her love me. Like the chump I am.

Undaunted I charge into the abyss like the Light Brigade. Ours is not to question why.

First I razzle her. That doesn’t work.

Then I dazzle her. That doesn’t work.

Then I sweet her. That doesn’t work.

So I start grinding on her. Excavating further and further down until I get to the real Bobbi. Dig dig dig. Underneath the perfect nail polish and the perfect earrings and the perfect matched outfits and all the perfect couples kissing from all the walls of her perfect apartment.

Finally I get all the way down to the real Bobbi.

The first thing you notice when you get under the skin of Bobbi is the giant bottle of booze looming, casting a vast black shadow drunkenly over everything. She hasn’t had a drink in over 10 years. Doesn’t that mean you’re not an alcoholic anymore? I ask. Oh no. Once you’re an alcoholic you’re always an alcoholic. That’s how it is with Alcoholic Anonymous. Bobbi’s climbed all 12 steps. Several times if I’m not mistaken. Surrendered to a higher power. Admitted she has no control. Living 1 day at a time. Apologizing, atoning, sponsors, sponsorees, the whole AA shmegegee.

God knows I’m a twisted broken soul, so who am I to judge? I go with her to meetings. I watch her speak. Bobbi’s a dazzler in the public speaking department. Brutally honest, laugh-out-loud funny, glowing, in control, spiritual, earthy, sexy, and alive. So I become a friend of John. Or Bob. Or Fred. I can’t remember, but that’s the code you say when you’re in public and you don’t want anyone else to know. I’m a friend of Bob/Fred/John, you say, nudge nudge, wink, wink. This is a group with a great hook. You can never leave. Once you’re in, you’re in for life. You’re never recover-ed. You are always recover-ing.

When I walk into my first meeting the first thing I notice is that there is a lot of misery in this room. A lot of surly people looking like they need a drink real bad, juxtaposed with the beaming glowing ones, the ones who shine like candles around the hung-over strung-out moths. The Bobbis.

It’s a family to people to have none, or worse, who have families that punish and abuse them. There’s succor and comfort here for people who’d be dead, on the streets ranting about bugs crawling into their eyes, or worse. And I love their sayings. My favorite is this: “Don’t quit 5 minutes before the miracle.” I love that. If I was a needle-pointer, I’d needle-point that.

So determined was I to make Bobbi love me that I went to meetings for partners of Alcoholics. And I did find it helpful and educational. But to be honest, most of the time I was sitting there thinking, “These losers need to dump their boozehound partners, and just move on.” I’m sure that says more about me than them, but there it is. I also came to the realizoion that a partners of Alcoholice meeting is a really great place to meet beautiful, desperate, vulnerable women who are involved with really fucked-up guys. Just a fun fact to store away for a rainy day.

But I show up. Every day. Apparently that’s 90% of the battle when you’re an alky. Just showing up. I’m ready to be the partner of an Alcoholic, and I’m going to make this thing work even if it kills me.

But I never once stopped to consider whether this was making me happy.

The next thing you find out about in Bobbiville is the Elimination issue. Bobbi has to go through an elaborate ritual involving metamusil, laxative, fresh strong coffee, a newspaper, and pictures of the Virgin Mary and Doris Day in order to coax her poor cemented bowels into movement. I was more fascinated than taken aback by the whole thing. Crippling constipation? Bowel emptying rituals? I can deal. I can hang. I will make you love me.

So I throw myself headlong into evacuation research. I attack the challenge with a true idiot’s zeal. Find an herbal colon cleansing program which involves taking 10 horse pills for 7 days in a row, in combination with morning and evening enemas. I get the pills and read the books, and I make a bold decision based on either blind love and staggering desperation. SI show up one day and I say Hey Bobbi, let’s cleanse our bowels together!

Boy do my bowels get clean. The first day I take the 10 horse pills they tell you to take. An hour later I explode like a pig with a belly full of raw bread dough laying in the hot sun. Urping and puking and spewing from mouth, nose, and ears. An hour after that I take the hugest dump of my entire life. One thin curling circular loop wound round and round the bowel four times, a bona fide triple flusher, I shit you not.

Bobbi claims the pills had no effect on her. Hard to believe her. Unless you know Bobbi. A jackhammer or a keg of dynamite maybe, but certainly not 10 horse pills. I offer to give Bobbi her enemas, maybe have some crazykinkysex, but she says she’s not comfortable with that. I ask her if she wants to give me one, to at least get some kind of action going, but she says she’s not comfortable with that either.

We fast and we juice and we cleanse for 7 days. By the time that week is over I am revitalized, renewed, rejuvenated, and cleaned to within an inch of my life. You can eat off the floor of my intestinal track. Bobbi doesn’t feel much of anything, but she does manage to wean herself off the laxatives, which I take as a personal triumph.

There was, looking back, always a terror lurking just below the surface of Bobbi. An alcoholic constipated manic terror. I chose to ignore this because it seemed prudent to do so at the time. One of the keys to getting into really dysfunctional relationships is to disregard everything except your own unquenchable thirst for love.

1 day she came back from a run all hot and flushed and sweaty. I was sitting in her living room, surrounded by all those perfect people kissing on her walls. She walked in and shot me such stone cold black adder anger it practically knocked me out of my chair.

1 time she was getting dressed in the bathroom and I was watching her thinking, Damn, look at how beautiful this woman is. No offence to Lou Gehrig or his disease, but today I am the luckiest man alive. Just then she feels me watching her and wheels around glaring seething fangs bared hissing, “Why are you staring at me? Stop staring at me! What is wrong with you?” That’ll whip you out of your romantic reverie pretty quick. What did I do wrong? What’ve I not done right? How can I make you love me?

1 time we were in Paris, having a magnifique day, strolling on the West Bank, wandering through the Picasso Museum, taking in Notre Dame. I kiss her sweet deep and Paris romantic. “You’re so gorgeous, I can’t wait to be inside you,” I say. Bobbi pulls back fast. Away away away. She looks at me like she’s got a 5 alarm fire inside her. “I have be alone”, she says. I panic. “Where are you going? Why are you going? Just open your heart and let the love in baby.” She flees weeping. I go have paiea, then watch a lot of French porno, which as you can imagine, is very risque´. While I was in the porn emporium I start a conversation with an interracial couple from the Netherlands and when I mentioned I have ganga, they invite me back to their hotel room. I refuse. I’m being faithful to Bobbi, who’s made it clear she doesn’t really want my love over and over, and who, at this point, I haven’t spoken to in five years.

People say all the time, “I have no regrets”. Je ne regrette rien. I have about a billion things I regret on a daily basis, but this is right at the very top of that list. Why didn’t I go back with that gorgalicious interracial couple from the Netherlands to their hotel room and partay? Eh bien, I sigh as I kick myself again.

Then when you get deep in Bobbi country, you inevitably encounter the parents. What a couple of specimens these two are. The mom has had some kind of a stroke/grand mal/aneurysm, so one side of her face is a little paralyzed, and she slurrs everything like a bad drunk. And she always drinks milk though a straw. Only it isn’t just milk. It’s laced heavy with vodka or gin or some damn thing. I’m not a drinker, so I don’t know one booze from another, but the booze she drinks apparently has no smell at all. So Mom, who had been a ravishing beauty who gave up her promising career as a singer and her one shot at stardom and fame to be mother to Bobbi and the rest of her ungrateful brood, is basically giving herself an IV drip of dolce de leche all the time.

Dad is one of those over-energetic guys who’s always slapping you on the back a little too hard and calling you Chief, or Champ, or Young Fella. 1 time when he was off in the shadows in the corner and Mom was deep in her Cups, I caught him staring at Bobbi like she was Miss November and he was a GI who hadn’t had any R&R in 6 months. Creep-Ee!

Then there’s the sex. Bobbi likes to use a silver vibrating egg. The thing I remember most about the silver vibrating egg is the sound. A relentless inhuman infernal buzz. It made me rather like I was having intercourse with my dentist. Why the silver vibrating egg? you’re probably wondering. A fair question. Actually the exact question I asked. It’s the only way I can get off. Okay. I can work with this. Silver vibrating egg. I become Master of the Egg. The Egg King. The Grand Vizer of Egg.

1 time I taught her a game I learned when I was a sex worker. I always felt like having sex with her, and often she didn’t want to, so I said well just lay there, you don’t have to move a muscle, I’ll just stick it in. I call the game Coma Girl. Bobbi loved playing Coma Game. Loved it, loved it, loved it.

The next thing Bobbi reveals is that she’s slept with 100 men. I am number 101. She has them all written down in a book she’s been keeping since she first did the deed in her teens. It is, I dare say, more disturbing that she kept the list than that there are 100 men on it. Of course, as I ponder my own sexual past, which is like a travelling Freak Show full of bearded ladies, sword swallowers, fire eaters and not quite human creatures, I realize that for me, being number 101 is neither here nor there. Bobbi explains that 80% of the list was accumulated during her Lost Weekend, which lasted about 10 years, and included waking up from an alcoholic blackout to find herself the star attraction at a tits-to-the-wind, balls-to-the-wall gangbang. Four guys were being the bang-ers, while she was the bang-ee. Well, actually this is good, I’m thinking to myself. I’ve been with lots of women who were doing the whole virgin thing, and that didn’t work out, none of them liked having sex as much as me, so now I’ll be with someone who’s in touch with her silver vibrating egg loving inner freak.

Next Bobbi tells me she’s been with a number of celebrities. I won’t tell you which ones if you don’t want to know, she says. Of course I want to know. Who wouldn’t want to know. Only a goober, insecure in his own manhood, would not want to know. I’m the kind of guy who wants to know. I want to look under the bandage and see the scab. So, who was the most famous? I ask real cool, real casual, like I don’t really care one way or another.

Warren Beatty, she cools me right back. I immediately imagined the celebrity penis of Warren Beatty, star of Shampoo, Reds, and Dick Tracy, inside Bobbi. Damn, I’m thinking, this Bobbi babe can really Walk the Walk. Apparently she had a ten year affair with the guy. During the Lost Weekend Years. He used to come over by himself, or with a girlfriend, late at night, and have sex with her, or have her hold his hand and watch while he had sex with some other woman. He wanted her to have a 3 way with Julie Christie, but Bobbi didn’t want to. Apparently Warren Beatty is a quite the loverstudguy. Hypnotic. Can charm the wimple off a nun. He still calls her late at night with that whispery velvety voice, never identifying himself, like an obscene phone caller on parole. She drew the line at Jack though. Wouldn’t have intercourse or fellatio with Jack Nicholson even though he begged her to. She recalls watching Jack in Warren’s kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator, stuffing their faces with the finest food in the world, talking about all the girls they were going to boff.

Now I have the whole picture. Alcoholic, constipated, suspicious, angry, wary, Coma Girl, silver vibrating egg, pedophile looking father, alky train wreck of a mother, dinner not possible. But Bobbi is smart, sweet, successful, sexy, and has a sense of humor. All five S’s.

So naturally I propose marriage. Bobbi has been married once before. To a guy she knew for 10 days. Named Hook. Hook didn’t have a car, or an apartment, or any money, and was an ex-heroin addict. Ironically he had lived with Faye Dunaway, who of course starred with Warren Beatty in the groundbreaking film Bonny & Clyde. So they had that in common.

Hook moved right in with his stuff and his friends. He was trying to get a record deal at the time. Apparently he was a very talented harmonica player who couldn’t get a break coz the Man was keeping him down. He lived with her for about a year, and didn’t pay any rent and didn’t buy any food, and had her Dad buy him a car which he absconded with when she finally pried him out of that apartment with a crowbar. The final blow was when he wouldn’t have sex with her, then ordered pay-per-view porn after she was asleep, charging it to her cable bill. I’d say that straw would pretty much break any camel’s hump

I am the next guy to ask Bobbi to marry him after Hook. Naturally she says yes. So we are engaged, with a ring and everything. Bobbi and I then head up to the Oregon coast for a big reunion with my family. Cousins, nieces and nephews, aunt and uncle, brother and sisters, the whole repulsive crew. It’s in a lodge with 4 bedrooms downstairs, and one big room upstairs filled with 12 cot/beds. Bobbi and I don’t have out own rooms. We’re assigned bunks in the big room.

As we get ever closer to our destination, Bobbi’s knuckles edge ever closer to white, and by the time we get there, she looks like she could use Mom’s alcohol IV drip. There were about a dozen blonder-than-blond, too-blue-eyed children under the age of 10, like we’re in some knock-off Village of the Damned movie. Oddly enough, Bobbi fits right in, like she’s a member of this tribe.

Bobbi immediately wants to go stay in a hotel. I don’t want to stay in a hotel. I never get to see these people, and half the fun of it is going to sleep and waking up with them. But okay, I try to get a hotel room. Nothing doing. It’s August on the Oregon coast. There’s not a room to be had. My family is now asking Bobbi if everything’s okay, if she’s alright, I suppose they mean well, but it’s bugging the hell out of her, and she’s breathing shallow little breaths and looking green around the gills.

Bobbi has a miserable night sleep. Wakes up cranky, plumbing completely clogged. There’s peace and quiet, no place to escape the screaming beasts and the incessant questions about whether everything is okay. No amount of coffee is going to loosen this stool. Panic sets in. So I go play golf. Perhaps not the best decision I’ve ever made. In retrospect perhaps I did not feel equipped to deal with the growing Bobbi crisis. When I get back, she’s gone. The family’s freaking out, but pretending not to freak out, which only makes them seem that much more freaky. They’ve already searched the house and ask me all jitttery if they should organize a posse and deputize them to go find Bobbi. No, for God’s sake, that’s the last thing we should do, everyone should just go about your business and leave her alone, I say. So everyone backs away whispering, looking like they’re half a second from freaking out all over again.

Finally Bobbi appears, a chipper, brave, plucky soldier, looking like she’d just gotten off a red-eye from Bangkok. I try to be real casual, like nothing weird is going on, but I can tell that’s just making me also look even freakier. My family are twitchy and bug-eyed, and the Blond Children of the Damned are screaming and Bobbi looks like she’s about to blow sky high. I whisk her upstairs where I excrutiate it out of her that she can’t execute her elimination. I take a deep breath. How can I help honey? Stand by the door and make sure no one tries to come in, she says. Okay. I can do that. I’ll be the Knight in Shining Armor slaying the dreaded Dragon of Constipation. So I stand guard. A brood of Blond Children appear out of no one and swarm, try to get in the bathroom door. Why don’t you kids play somewhere else, I whisper under breath. But acting as the collective Unconscious of the family, they ask, Is Bobbi in there? Shhhhh! I hiss - Go away! They start chanting-

Bob-bi’s in the bath-room!

Bob-bi’s in the bath-room!

Bob-bi’s in the bath-room!

Like we’re in a chilling Twilight Zone episode. So I herd them away, telling them if they come back I’ll send a bloody monster to come get them in the night and eat their eyeballs and guts and bottoms. They squeal and sprint blondly away.

I stand by the door for about half an hour, trying not to think about how disturbing this is. Bobbi finally emerges, looking much relieved, completely drained, and dangerously close to the edge. Confesses that she actually had to scoop out the elimination with her perfectly manicured red nails. Sure, why not?

The next morning everyone’s getting ready to leave, packing, cleaning up. Bobbi sinks into the bed weeping. Everyone tries not to notice, going about their business, 1 eye askew, glued to her. I sit down next to Bobbi on the bed. She stares at me with big wet California eyes. What’s wrong? I ask. I can’t do this – she sputters. What? I ask. This – she says – all this. My family? I ask. She shakes her head no. Another vacation? No. I already know exactly what she’s really saying. You mean the whole getting married thing? She shakes her blond head yes.

Picture time! Everyone come on, it’s time for the Family Picture! Someone calls from outside. As everyone trickles together for the Family Picture, I’m not sad, I’m not hurt, I’m not heartbroken, I’m pissed off. I babble some incoherent gibberish about how she’s making me look like an idiot, and how I‘m gonna sue her for breach of contract, and how a verbal agreement is binding. They’re calling us out for the Picture, everyone else is already assembled, and they’re waiting for us.

I get up and storm out of the lodge. Bobbi follows at a safe distance. I take my place in the back line of the Picture with all the Adults. Bobbi stands next to me. When the photographer snaps the family portrait, I smirk, rueful, weary, wary, jaded, staring into the camera. Bobbi has her arm around the wife of a cousin. They look like lesbian lovers, Bobbi and the wife. Bobbi stares far away, a lost look on her California face.

And that was all she wrote for Bobbi and me.

They have a saying in AA. A relationship is like a rowboat, and every once in a while you have to stop rowing to see if the boat is still going anywhere. I stopped rowing and the boat stopped moving. Then it started taking on water at an alarming rate. Then it sank.

I owe Bobbi a huge debt of gratitude. Thank you Bobbi, for dumping me. I hope all your dreams are coming true, and you’re having fun somewhere and your bowels are flowing freely.