The Joke Was On Me (Part Fourteen)

Any number of irrational, illogical, and sociopathic things had been said during this "meeting". I'd been once again called a coward, a brainwasher, et cetera - and now a "loser" and other assorted patriarchal pleasantries. For everytime my ex would attempt to state her belief in our independence, they'd counter it with "Look at what Lewis is doing to you!!! He's brainwashing you!!! You've changed!!! You've been brainwashed!!!", and round and round it all went, with her being rebellious and sinful and me being Lucifer incarnate, brainwasher of the brainwashed.


It took me a couple of hours to soothe her and counter, or at least dilute, the poison they'd introduced into her mind. She felt sooooo guilty, and she'd done nothing wrong. Really, all I could do that night was assure her of that fact - that she, we, had done nothing wrong, had nothing to be ashamed of, and had no reason to second guess anything or be defensive about anything. She needed to shed this notion of the family unit practically being a deity, but on this night, she first needed to shed her unnecessary guilt. I stayed on the phone with her until almost 5AM, and after our I love yous and goodbyes, I practically collapsed in my bunk and knew nothing until early the next afternoon.


We were still a couple of hours out from the office when I woke up, and almost immediately I called her. She'd slept little, and more lunacy had transpired. When I called, they'd just finished their morning family devotional/indoctrination session/group business meeting, and afterward they set into her again with the accusations, guilt-trips, et cetera. When she mentioned something about her grandpa to them, her dad blurted out, "Your grandpa is a coward!" (Keep that in mind for a few paragraphs below) This was his own father he was talking about. In essence, anything that happened in her life needed to go through HIM first, and anyone who didn't see things that way and circumvented him was a "coward". Had I lived near them, I'd have HAD to circumvent the dude just to survive, cause otherwise I'd have ended up putting pop-knots on his noggin, and I've never physically harmed a soul in my life. Cowardice had nothing to do with most people maneuvering around him. He was just a jackass, and as I came to eventually find out, few people, outside of their cultic circle, could stand the man. He really wasn't particularly likeable, even when you could interact with him outside of a religious scenario (which his addiction made difficult). Just a weird man.


She asked me how to handle things if they kept confronting her. I was honest with her that I wanted her out of that house, but if she refused to leave, then she needed to have her father clarify, once and for all, exactly why he believed he had authority over her. No one could ever make that clear to me, so I wanted to see if it could be made clear to her. The closest thing I got to an answer to that when I asked him (during one of the blowups of the previous fall) was, "There are traces of it throughout scripture." When he'd told me this, I said, "Ok then - point to one. Just to one. I'd like to see it." His response to that was, "I'm not gonna argue scripture with you, Lewis." The sad thing is, she and her sisters had been utterly dominated by the belief of patriarchal authority for their entire lives, and not a single one of them could even begin to point out so much as a shred of scripture it was based on. So, if anyone wants to argue with me that her family wasn't in and of itself a cult, save your breath for something feasible.


Later that day, she confronted them and asked her father, "What is your belief about having authority over me based on?" He gave her the old "traces of it throughout scripture" spiel (which I'd warned her to not accept), and she told him that wasn't good enough, that he needed to make a definitive case to her. He hemmed and hawed around, said something about obeying your parents, stuttered around a bit more, said something about the "curse of Eve". She showed some backbone and told him that there was nothing definitive about anything he was saying, and that he'd need a lot more. He finally stated, "It's all very vague...Derwood needs to explain it to you." "Derwood" is the husband of "Ethel". He's also a patriarchal jackass of herculean proportions. One of the few people on this earth equally as shull of patriarchal fit as my former future father-in-law. This was all just a big "jokers on my left, jokers on my right" situation for me. She was used to being around such dysfunctional thinkers and religious addicts. I wasn't.


Somehow, her parents had gotten wind of the ceremony potentially being moved up to August. I've no idea where they heard this, as the ONLY discussion she and I had about it (after her grandfather introduced the August idea into the equation) was me telling her that, given the situation, we needed to consider the date somewhat fluid, and we'd deal with it as we needed to, leaving it alone for the time being. After they'd sufficiently beaten her to a pulp emotionally in one of their confrontations on this day, covering her with guilt, she called me as I was driving the 90 minutes from the office to my house and hit me with, "Lew, I really think we need to honor my parents request to leave our date at October 25th." Oh my goodness. We hadn't changed the freakin' date! So I asked her, "When did we change the date? When did that happen?" She couldn't answer that question, obviously, because we'd changed nothing. I told her, "They've made you feel guilty about something that hasn't even happened - and you're asking me to reward their behavior?! Not a chance. No. No. No! We may very well keep the original date, but I can promise you that it WON'T be because of any request they make. I'm not gonna reward this crap from them. They both need to grow up and act like decent people..." - and I cut it off there. I was boiling angry, boiling, was pretty animated, and I didn't want to end up making things worse for her when she was already in the flames of their insanity.


About 7PM that evening, I received a call from the Bandaid. Like I've said before, he was a good guy - maybe a little young and naive to not see the emotional lack of health in the lightning speed at which my ex's sister "recovered" from loving another man and jumped into (was nudged, by her father, into) a relationship with him, but, I figured he was sharp enough that eventually he'd see where things were askew without me saying a word about it. I didn't want to see either him or her get hurt, but it was their business. We spent a minute or two making small talk (we hadn't communicated since the cruise a couple of months back), and then he got to the reason for his call.  He said he had some decisions he needed to make concerning his and the sister's relationship, and wanted to know what made me so confident that I was right about not needing to be in "submission" to the patriarse. I told him that for me, it wasn't about being right, but rather about doing right - and as far as needing to be in submission to the patriarse, I told him that until someone could prove to me, biblically or otherwise, that I was supposed to be in submission to him, asking me to defend my position was asking me to disprove something unproven and unprovable in the first place. I'm no scholar or theologian, but I do know the scriptures, and I know, and knew, that the patriarse was twisting them to the extreme to control his family and craft it in HIS image. We talked about this stuff for a few minutes, maybe half an hour, and I ended it by telling him that we have to follow our own convictions on non-essentials (particularly those which the bible is completely silent about), and I'd respect whatever path he and the sister chose. It was their choice to make. Not mine.


Yet again, someone proved to have loose and irresponsible lips *cough SALLY cough*, and the patriarse got word that the Bandaid had called me. Shortly after getting off the phone with me, the Bandaid made a call to the sister, and when his name popped up on the caller ID, the patriarse grabbed the phone before she could and unloaded on him, BIG TIME, accusing him of trying to tear apart his family, leading his daughter into rebellion, et cetera. Of course, I was patriarchal public enemy #1 in this scenario. The Bandaid unloaded right back, and good for him. It got pretty ugly. This was all taking place on the house phone line. After he and I had talked, I'd called my ex on their office phone line (she'd asked me to call her there that night). All of this between the patriarse and the Bandaid was going down with both of us unaware until the sister picked up the office extension and interrupted our conversation with, "Hey, guys, dad and ***** just had it out in a MAJOR way on the phone, so I just wanted to tell you that we now know a little more what you guys have put up with, and I guess you're gonna have company as the black sheep." I just told her I was sorry. I didn't know what else to say. She said they were probably gonna leave the patriarse out of their deal from now on. I told her that they were probably making a wise decision, and I'd respect whatever course of action they chose. At this point, I was so angry at their father that I was just beyond words about all of it. Any of you who've ever been so frustrated and angry about a situation that you couldn't put it into words, not because of fear of losing control, but because there just are no words, may be able to relate.


I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, worried about her, worried about "us", and just about ready to take John Belushi's advice from "Animal House" and start drinking heavy. Everything written above had taken place in the course of about an 18 hour window...and things would only get worse, MUCH worse, in the days that followed.


She and I didn't talk so much about the heavy things the rest of that night, but instead, said a lot of "I love yous" and focused on her trip here in less than a week, what we would do for our engagement party, and such. I don't think I could've handled much more dysfunction and stupidity (and it was all so freakin' STOOPID) that night, and I can take a lot, so I knew she needed to breathe.


The next day just went to a whole other level of CRAZY.


{CLA}He showed up to their morning devotional/indoctrination session/group business meeting with back-up - he'd asked Derwood to write up an email to his family giving his take on the situation, since he'd known all the girls since birth and they knew him to be such a "godly" man, hoping Derwood could produce the appropriate level of manipulation, guilt, and damnation to bring them all back in line. He read it aloud to the whole family. Derwood was obviously pretty drunk on the bible when he wrote it. She recited to me later from what she could remember of it. It said stuff about "the bible says to have your house in order - and that means rebellious children have to come into submission to their parents and live under their father's authority for God to bless them" and some other patriarchal bullshit. THESE WERE ALL GROWN WOMEN. ADULTS. Then, the patriarse declared that "If either of you go ahead with your plans as they are now, I refuse to have anything to do with it, I won't support your plans in any way, especially financially, and you'll be totally on your own." If I'd have been there, I'd have said, "Please tell me that's a promise!" I mean, materially, financially, they had nothing. They'd never had anything, and according to my ex, her parents weren't very good with what little money they did have at any given time. I'd loooooong been prepared to foot the majority - even the entirety - of the bill for our wedding. I wasn't gonna give her father the excuse of finances to hold us back (and I'd been clear about this with her back when we'd chosen the original date), so we were gonna have the ceremony when we chose regardless of who paid for it. He could pay me back over time if he wanted to. As flippantly as I speak about this, though, it did hurt me, tremendously, for her. No girl wants to hear something like that from her father, even if he isn't much of a father, as was the case with hers.


But, it would get even worse...Seeing the girls unmoved, he started telling various family members, "It would be easier to just end it all." This scared her terribly, and even though I knew he was basically shull of fit, I advised her to make sure the handgun was out of the house somewhere that he couldn't find it, and I was adamant that she stay somewhere else that night (she chose to spend the night at her sister's small apartment). Even though I knew this was largely a manipulative tactic, I can't begin to express the fear that, from here on, was ALWAYS in the back of my mind that I'd get a phone call telling me that he'd killed the rest of the family and then himself. I tossed and turned over that fear many nights. 


Ultimately, he locked himself away in his bedroom later that morning, where he remained for three days, before emerging on Friday morning with a three page manifesto of all the ways his daughters had failed him as a father and failed their family ministry. Nothing about him. They were the ones with the problems. It was disgusting and sickening. And even better, later that day, her father gave her a loooong letter about me. It said things like...


Your mother and I have had doubts about Lewis all along.


Is that right? What about that video I have? You know the one - "You're perfect Lewis! God couldn't have answered our prayers any more perfectly in a man for ****!" Yeah, that one. It was what, maybe 3 weeks old by now? Lying snake.


It's evident to us why Lewis is 38 and has never been married.


Yeah, cause something like that never happens to patriarchal types, being that patriarchal types are so normal and all. and what we should measure normal by (SA). Personally, I know plenty of guys like that - and they all chose the same career path I did. Maybe that has something to do with  it. Just maybe.


We were appalled at the lack of respect he shows to his own parents, even calling them by their first names.


OMG. Remember, this is the dude who, earlier that week, called his OWN father a coward. And what he's referring to is a freakin' little game my ENTIRE family plays that goes back to something my brother said in 1969. Idiot.


As she read it to me, I'm telling you, I was coming unglued. Each line was more and more poisonous, with the BS getting deeper with each syllable. ALL of it pulled directly out of his anal cavity. One lie after another, all of which attacked my character, many of which were much more hurtful, both to me and those who love me, than the few lines I've represented here. 


But lucky me! She'd spent the morning talking to Ethel and grandpa about it before talking to me, and thanks to Ethel and grandpa's brilliant moral compasses, when I started in on and condemned what was genuinely EVIL - this letter wasn't a flesh/spirit thing, it was an evil jackass thing, put it in whichever camp you want, but just call it what it is - my ex told me, "But Lew, do you have any right to judge this after the email you sent dad on Thanksgiving?".....!!!!!!"What the....?!"!!!!!!... Dear Lord help me. Wasn't this the same woman who'd long ago told me that every single word I wrote to her father on Thanksgiving was true and needed to be said?!!! When I reminded her of this, she was taken aback, snapped out of whatever mojo Ethel and grandpa had put on her, and said, "You're right. There's no comparison and I apologize." Whatever ANYONE thought of the Thanksgiving email I'd sent her father, there's no comparison, on any level, to this tripe her dad had written about me. I don't deal in dishonesty. That alone ends any comparison.


While we were on the phone, another call came into their office line, and it was a call she needed to take, so I grudgingly hung up, and...


I'd barely had 5 minutes to catch my breath before grandpa called me and told me, "Lewis, my son delivered a letter about you to **** this morning. I think this is something you're gonna have to address with him." I told him, "I've no intention of addressing anything to do with it. I've already addressed it with ****. I've no business with you're son concerning it." He was stunned. He comes from a long line of letter writers, where two men in disagreement try to out-Apostle Paul each other by writing verbose "epistles" back and forth. I've seen some of it. It's a human tragedy and cheesefest. He responded, "Oh, but I don't think you have a choice but to address it." I told him, "Oh, but I do...Do you make it a habit of acknowledging and addressing every piece of dogcrap on the sidewalk when you take a walk, or do you just make sure you don't step in it? What your son wrote was a pile of crap, and you need to acknowledge it as such or we're wasting our time here. If the lies in his letter were even halfway believable, even halfway, then you might have a point, but use your head here." I'd literally never seen social, relational, emotional, and moral ignorance on this level - and that's saying something, having been in the music business for two decades now. The worst label I could get him to apply to what his son had done was "flesh". Dear Lord. This was intentional evil, intentional dishonesty, deception, and diversion, carried out with the intention of destruction, done with the intention of taking something good and innocent and pure, and making it intentionally ugly and painful. There's no gray area about it. None. Pure EVIL.


I finally got off the phone with grandpa, and called my family (first my folks, then my brother) to tell them about this, at this point just needing desperately to vent. They were all faaaar beyond irate about it, and even requested that I ask my ex to bring it with her when she came. They wanted to read it. They weren't upset with her, mind you, but with her father and mother. They had EVERY right to be. Toward her, they felt pity that she had such a jackhole for a father and a mother who just stood back and "dutifully" allowed him to be a jackhole - even joining him in the jackholing.


I just wanted to get her here SOOOO bad. So bad. We were less than 72 hours away from it at this point, and I was sweating bullets that one of these lunatics would screw it all up.


The call that had come in to their office phone was from a family acquaintance from their area who attended a church her family had once attended (before her father had issues with the leadership there and left). My ex did the right thing in opening up to this lady about what was going on - she later confessed that she almost had to, because the flow of tears overpowered her once she answered this lady's call. This was a healthy choice for my ex, as this lady wasn't a patriocentric and was totally unattached to the situation - but knew the family, and for once, my ex was completely honest with an outsider about the whole deal.


My ex gave her the outline of the whole situation, described the previous couple of weeks to her in good detail, and told her about the letter. She asked this lady if she could just read the letter to her, and the lady agreed. Upon completing it (and it was a novel), she asked the lady what she thought of it. The lady hit her with some hard truth - the letter was full of manipulation, guilt, coercion, all made even worse by the fact that her father was making up all the stuff in it, and that her father was WAY out of line. She also confessed to my ex that she and her husband had seen things about her family that they found troubling all along, and advised her, "If you feel that God wants you to go and marry this man, who is any man, even your father, to tell you otherwise? Go and marry him." While the observations about her family hurt her, she knew they were true, having mentioned all these things to me herself from almost the beginning, and overall, this call from this lady was just the salve my ex's immediate wounds needed.


Also that day, another sister overheard a phone call between the patriarse and Derwood, and the patriarse told Derwood, "I'm gonna destroy their relationship however I have to do it." Those were the exact words. What a loving, "godly" father!


We spent the rest of the day trying to focus on good things, although both of us were stressed out the wazoo. I'd been out on the road since Wednesday, and when I returned home on Monday morning, she'd be there. My brother and his family were coming in from Nashville on Saturday morning so they could finally meet her and be there for our party, and the two of us were finding whatever comfort we could - trying to look past the immediate madness - in the happiness we knew the very, very near future would bring us. I had made it a point to tell all of my family (as well as those invited to the engagement party) and all of my bandmates, "When she gets here, leave California in California. If she brings it up and wants to talk about it, that's fine, but otherwise, I want her to just be happy and see what normal actually looks like. Don't bring up any of this stuff with her family." 


On Saturday night, I made one request of her - for the sake of a larger point to be made. I asked her to bring along the letter her father had written about me as my family - mom, dad, brother, and sister-in-law - wanted to read it. I assured her they weren't angry with her, nor would they be. She asked, "They won't judge me for it?" I told her, "I promise you they won't judge you for it." They wouldn't have. She agreed to bring it and allow them to read it. I asked her this knowing fully well that my family would never get to read this letter. Like I say, this was about making a larger point which I'll get into in the next installment or the one thereafter. Unfortunately, I never got a hard copy of this letter, nor did the members of my family who ultimately requested it, nor my professional associates who ultimately requested it. All the snakes in her world saw to it that all known copies saw their demise, and that NO ONE in my world would get to scrutinize it. Remember, these people had ONE goal, and stated as much several times - to destroy our relationship by any means necessary. Such "godly" people, that crowd.


She would board the plane early Sunday afternoon Pacific time, fly to Atlanta, have a short layover there of about 90 minutes, then make the short hop to Charlotte, where my folks and sister-in-law would pick her up around midnight. We were playing in the Maryland panhandle that Sunday night and would have about a 6 to 6 1/2 hour run back to the office, and then I'd have a 90 minute drive home (although I'm sure I carved quite a bit off of my personal best commute time that morning). I anticipated getting home by 7AM. She called me from Atlanta, and we'd just finished playing, so I was able to talk to her for most of her layover there. She was happy. She sounded more like the woman I'd last seen than I'd heard in a while. And...this made me happy. I'd found that the more connected the two of us became, it was impossible for me to be happy unless I knew she was. 


Later, after my family had picked her up and as they made the slightly over an hour long trek home from the airport, she called me from the new phone I'd bought for her and asked them to give her. It was a VERY happy conversation. She was relieved to see my parents, and getting along famously with my sister-in-law. She was breathing.


We pulled into the office at just after 5AM that Monday morning, and you've never seen a musician get his crap together, pull it off a bus, and throw it in the back of an SUV like I did that morning. I hadn't slept all night, and by 3AM, with everyone else long settled in their bunkrooms, I'd already rounded up all my stuff, my bags, and my bedclothes into a big ball in the front lounge of the bus so I could make an extra-quick departure. One of my bandmates got up sometime after this to go to the bathroom, and had walked up front to see where we were, saw my pile of stuff, looked over at me and started laughing, then just turned around and headed back down the hall. They knew I was ready to get home.


As I was leaving the office, I called home and my dad answered. He told me she was sleeping, having been pretty well knackered the night before. I told him to let her sleep, and I'd wake her when I got there (she'd asked me to). I also cautioned him that anyone caught in the path between me and her might be prone to get injured, cause I may come flying through the door.


As I rounded the last curve and topped the ridge, my little yellow house came into view, and her Prague Spring was about to begin.