Mid-Life Crisis in London

As usual, I've been procrastinating about starting this. I worry that I'll hurt someone's feelings, seem foolish, or reveal too much about myself. But today, I read the blog my ex-boyfriend Pat is writing (The Potato Peeler) and was really inspired. So I'll start by digressing into what led me to move to London, although my relationship with Pat started long before that.

I first met Pat when I was 14 and he was 15, and I was dating his best friend, Joe. Pat was at my house almost every night with Joe. Since my parents were never home, all the neighborhood kids congregated there. But I was Joe's girlfriend, and Pat had a crush on my little sister, so there was never anything going on between us back then. In fact, I can't remember ever having a conversation with him. He was very quiet and shy in those days.

If you read Pat's blog, you'll see what kind of world we grew up in. And we grew up fast. Like Pat, by the time we met, I had already seen violence, alcoholism, death, and poverty. Like Pat, I had held a gun in my hand with the intent of killing someone, except in my case, it was my father I was going to kill. That's another long story. But in short, I was 13 years old, and was tired of hearing the sounds through the bedroom door of my father beating my mother yet again, and listening to my little brother and little sister crying in fear. I went next door while our neighbor was at work, and got her gun from her nightstand. To those of you who grew up in a more middle-class existence, I must explain that poor people roam rather freely through their friends' homes. None of us had much to lose, so there wasn't much point in locking the doors.

Meanwhile, my father had apparently passed out and my mother had come out of the bedroom, and my sister told her where I had gone, and why. Mom met me in the front yard, and told me to take the gun back, and said I would never forgive myself if I killed my father. I'm not sure about that. But in any case, I put the gun back. It didn't make much difference. That's how he ended up dying anyway, although not by my hand. Seven years later, after my mother finally divorced him and he had remarried for the third time, his then-wife managed to pull a pistol out of her purse and shoot him six times while he was beating her. She turned herself in at the police station, but instead of arresting her, the police took her to the hospital because she was so badly beaten. She was 4'10" and my dad was 6'1".

Betty got out of the hospital in time to attend the funeral, and she cried and threw herself on the coffin, screaming about how much she loved him and how sorry she was for what she had done. I never shed a tear, then or since. I was just relieved that he couldn't cause any more pain in our lives. He was 42 years old.

Pat escaped from our world when he went into the Army when he was 17. I was 15, and didn't see him again until 31 years later, when I ran into him at the grocery store. At first, we were just friends again, but that changed pretty quickly. He was in a bad way in those days -- alcohol, drugs, medical problems, poverty. I was a lawyer by then, divorced for the second time, with a teenage daughter who had just flown the nest. I thought I could "fix" Pat, just like I'd fixed everything else in my life, and my memories of him were of such a nice, sweet guy. Surely he wouldn't do anything to hurt me, would he?

But I was wrong about that. After five years of trying, I finally admitted defeat, bought him a ticket to Mendoza, Argentina, and bid him adios. Among his many flights of fancy had been the idea that Argentina would be a good place to drink himself to death. I got sick of hearing about it, and I was also tired of spending hundreds of dollars a month keeping him supplied with Budweiser and Kools. He was drinking a case of beer a day, which made him a less-than-amusing companion most of the time. His $950 per month disability income was enough to support himself on, other than the beer and cigarettes, which had somehow become my responsibility. And he was convinced that he could live on $950 per month in Argentina, where beer, cigarettes, pot, and women were cheap, and have plenty left over, so spending $1,500 on a plane ticket for him was a wise fiscal decision on my part.

On the way to the airport, Pat told me that he knew I would breathe a big sigh of relief once I dropped him off and drove home. And he was right. I really didn't ever want to hear from him or about him again. For awhile, we stayed in touch by email, then he met another woman in Mendoza and seemed fairly happy, and I felt free to go on with my life.

Business was great in 2005, and I got busy and made a lot of money, without the distraction of an alcoholic, unpredictible nutcase to deal with. In November 2005, I went to London, my favorite place in the world. I took my mother with me, and we had a marvelous time. We had tea at Claridge's, lunch at one of Gordon Ramsey's restaurants, shopped, saw the sights, and met some local people. Then my mom went to visit a nephew in the Cotswolds, and my daughter came over for a few days. We spent some time with the people my mom and I had met, two guys who ran a restaurant near the hotel. I fell completely in love with London once I got to know some of the real people there, and stopped being a tourist.

In April 2006, I went back for a week on my own, as a birthday present to myself. And then the fateful thing happened. I met a guy in a pub, and spent hours talking to him. Mick walked me back to my hotel, we bid each other good night, and promised to stay in touch. I had plans the next night (my last night in London) to go to a play with a friend, and didn't expect to see him again. But my friend called the next day and said she was too sick to go to the play, so I went back to the pub, and there he was again. Once more, we talked for hours, and this time he stayed when he walked me home. I'll leave out the gory details, but he rode the train to the airport with me the next morning, and we had a very romantic leave-taking, with promises of phone calls and emails to come.

And they did. We began spending hours on the phone every day, and soon I was planning another trip in July 2006. I rented a flat next door to the pub, and we spent a week living there together, playing house, cooking, eating our meals out on the terrace. We walked all over London, went to museums, drank in the pub -- just lived. And fell madly in love. It was terribly painful to get on the plane and fly back to Texas, and our phone calls and emails flew back and forth until September, when I was able to get to London again.

I spent a week with Mick in his flat in Pimlico, and he asked me to marry him. I know. I was crazy to say yes, but it seemed so right at the time. Business was starting to go downhill badly. I am a bankruptcy attorney, and after the laws changed in late 2005, the phone stopped ringing and money stopped coming in. I had a young lawyer working for me, and I offered her the opportunity to take over the practice. She accepted, and I made my plans to move to London to marry Mick.

All along, my daughter had been very amused by my behavior, but when I made the decision to move to London, she reverted to the horrid 16-year-old monster I thought had disappeared forever. Veronica is extremely independent, and it really hadn't occurred to me that she would feel so strongly about my leaving. One day, she blurted out, "What am I going to tell my children? That you just left them because you didn't love them?" Now, bearing in mind that Veronica has no children, it was obvious who she was really talking about. I was shocked, and suddenly felt very selfish. It led us to have some major heart-to-hearts, and we ended up being closer than ever. When I went to London for three weeks in November, she and one of her girlfriends came over and stayed in a hostel for a week, met Mick and my other London friends, and we had a wonderful time. She finally forgave me for my decision, and gave me her blessing.

The three-week trip gave me a few clues that I should have heeded. For instance, two of my girlfriends came over for the first week, and we stayed in another flat near the one where Mick and I had stayed before. He wasn't interested in meeting my friends, and I ended up spending my nights with him and my days with my friends. On the last night, he did come out with me and one of my friends (the other friend had gone home the day before), and he had a little too much to drink and became rather loud and obnoxious. My wise and wonderful friend Debbie tried to gently warn me about what I was doing, but of course, I didn't listen.

The next week, my teenage nephew and niece came over and we stayed in a hotel down the street from Mick's place. He was on fairly good behavior, but again, had a little too much to drink one night when we were out with the kids, and I saw them exchanging some looks that were hard to ignore. But in my typical optimism, I was sure that once I moved to London, Mick would stop drinking so much and we would be blissfully happy together.

When Veronica and her friend Jeana came for the next week, everything went fine. Veronica liked Mick, he liked her, and all my earlier misgivings disappeared. When I flew back to Texas with Veronica and Jeana, I already felt as though I lived in London, and was just coming back to get my things. I spent the next few weeks madly selling, giving away, and throwing away most of my possessions, just keeping my most treasured things to begin my new life.

And in January 2007, I moved to London. After the 10-hour overnight flight, I got onto the Gatwick Express with my three heavy suitcases, and arrived at Victoria Station right on time at 10:00 a.m. But Mick wasn't there. I called him, and he told me to just grab a taxi, so I did. When I arrived at "our" flat, he came out and helped me with the bags, while I paid the driver, and we went inside. He made me a cup of tea, and we sat and talked, as though I had just driven across town instead of flying in from another continent. I was beginning to feel a wave of panic wash over me, but decided I was just tired and being paranoid.

But I wasn't. We had some good times, but within a couple of weeks, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. After being with Pat for five years, I was accustomed to being around an alcoholic. But not a mean one. Pat drank a lot, occasionally disappeared for days at a time, and caused absolute chaos in my life. But he was more like an unruly child than a monster like my dad had been, and he was never unkind to me. He never said one derrogatory thing to me, never criticized me, and did whatever he could to make my life easier, when he was around. He was just unpredictible, self-centered, and unreliable. And that began to look good once Mick started in on me. Suddenly, my hair was wrong, I wore too much makeup, I washed the dishes incorrectly -- one thing after another. My clothes, my taste in music, my desire to go to museums, walk around London, do all the things I had dreamed of -- all of it was wrong.

The funny thing was, after Pat had been so supportive of me personally, I found Mick's behavior laughable. It didn't affect my self-esteem. I knew by then who and what I was, and I liked myself quite a lot. I had met a few of Mick's friends on my earlier visits, and they all loved me, and when they saw how he was treating me now, they were shocked. I started sleeping on the couch, and going out sightseeing all day, just to get away. I dreaded coming home in the evenings, and having to pretend everything was okay. I grew to despise Mick, and felt trapped and alone. I was too embarrassed to admit my mistake to the people back in Texas, and had lost touch with the friends I had made in London before I met Mick. And I was rapidly running out of money. I had a return ticket, for mid-May, but I didn't know if I could stand living with Mick for another five months. I couldn't work without a work permit, which I couldn't get unless Mick and I got married. And I knew by then that I couldn't go through with that.

One day, I took a walking tour through Chelsea, and the tour guide pointed out a little pub on a side street in Belgravia, called the Fox & Hounds. She said it was one of the best pubs in London, and recommended a visit. The next day, I took her advice and went back to the pub at lunchtime and as soon as I walked in, I felt as though I had been there before. I went back every day, began to meet the regulars, and they welcomed me like a long-lost friend. I felt safe and comfortable there, and I quickly became part of the pub community. I had no idea how my life would be changed by that tour guide who pointed out the pub to me.