Back many years ago, when Richard Nixon was President, my life was interrupted by a marriage of convenience. Convenient for my wife's family, who through no fault of their own, had unintentionally interbred through a series of unrecognized first cousin marriages. The great grandfather was a lover of women, and ran the local bank and sperm deposits with the female customers was his real passion.
Anyway when this rich and powerful family finally had the genetic testing/counseling to find the cause of the more than average number of simpletons being sired from my wife's family, the family paid to have all the eligible males tested and I was the only potential suitor not genetically related to these folks in our county, and I was chosen to marry her. My wife had dodged the bullet and seemed normal for a woman, and after a short courtship, I was lead down the isle to the slaughter.
It took six years to conceive, and after my son, Jackson Delano Maybolt, Jr was born and tested, and found to be healthy, strong and normal, my wife's family arranged for the divorce. I was devastated. I loved little Jackie, and my father sent the following letter as advice:
1867
1.
Dear Kids:
This page was to have begin Chapter 1 of Book TWO of "REDACTED", the novel I am writing under contract for REDACTED, but after hearing from you last night I decided it was more important to write to you instead of on the novel, and hence this missive:
First, for openers, just let me say that I love both of you and J2 more than words could ever express. Next, that my heart goes out to all three of you in this time of unhappiness; and finally, that I am the last person in the world to try to tell anybody how to make a marriage work, as the saying is;
I don't know why marriages have to work, why they just can't be idle, or loaf some of the time. Do they always have to be working? I don't know who first conjoined the words marriage and work, probably some girl editor at COSMOPOLITAN; but when you think about it the world around us seems geared to make us think that certain things have to be certain ways or hell, they are not working.
So I don't know how to make a marriage work. One way to induce it to work might be to raise its wages. Given enough money usually almost anything will work--or is that really right thinking? I don't know.
Anyhow, what I've discovered, if I have discovered anything about marriages, is that there are as many kinds of marriages as there are different kinds of people and none works quite the same way as others. Each marriage is unique, and according to your expectations and what others sometime leads you to expect, a marriage is good or it is bad.
Now to me, just me, a bad marriage is no marriage. I don't think anybody ought to be connected with a bad marriage. It is a nothing, negative, unworthy situation. So if I were asked to look over a failing marriage and try to see what's wrong with it I'd probably have the feeling at the outset that the thing probably wasn't worth fooling with and trying to fix. But in this case, since I am involved as close to both of you let me offer this.
Look at the friendship. Forget about the love for a minute. Forget about the sex. Just focus on the friendship and see where it stands, because the foundation of any lasting relationship is based on friendship, or to break it down, basically it boils down to whether or not you like the other person.
Now, unfortunately, this little basic piece of commonsense is something nearly all God-fearing parents fail to tell their children and impress upon them growing up. That plain fact is left out of the curriculum of child-rearing in favor of the old hocus-pocus about the old black magic called love, love being confused with God, gonads, St. Valentine, forever, moonlight, music and chewing gum.
Then comes marriage, which is once again confused. It is supposed to be happiness, not just good old down home contentment. Nobody in a marriage is supposed to get on anybody else's nerves. We marry somebody we love in order to be happy, just like everybody else that's so happy.
We can hear those others screaming and breaking the dishes they are so happy. We see her not talking to him, him drinking too much, and both treasuring up little grudges until they have a sack full and then they can have a fight and after the fight they pick up the same old grudges and put them in the same old sacks and pretty soon when they have some new ones collected, another fight.
Pretty soon the supply of grudges gets so plentiful that a war is declared, and they have a divorce, which takes a lot of time and energy and treasure and which makes lawyers and gossips blissful.
Now if you have friendship, as opposed to just love, sex, and marriage, you can sometimes throw the bags away along with the grudges, shake hands, admit that nobody but yourself is perfect, and keep the arrangement going. But you have to have friendship to cut this caper, in MY opinion.
What hurts people many times, is making an unrealistic arrangement when you are too young to handle it. That's probably the basic problem with any arrangement--too much youth. Because while you are young you are going to want to move around and have fun and experiment, or you, just aren't normal. If you are young and don't have these yearnings, then in my book you are just a plain weirdo.
But friendship is something that can be formed, and that can happen and that can endure between people of any age. That is the wonder of friendship.
Losing a friend is a horrible experience. I have lost enough of them to know, some through death. God, it hurts; I can't tell you how much it hurts to lose your best friend. Mine was killed when he was 21 in an air force plane crash on the night he was flying his last training mission before graduation the next day. I've really never recovered from that. They guy was my true friend. Not replaceable. Like the Chump.
Right now my best friend is Lulu. How did I get so lucky? Well, I was not looking for someone to marry. In fact I had decided marriage was not for me. I had suffered more in marriage that I could tell about if I had a thousand years in which to try.
I had really had it with marriage, twenty-three years of insufferable shit. I shudder when I think about it. I wake up sweating sometimes under the impression that I am still in that awful prison, married to somebody I didn't like, somebody who didn't like me.
We were out to get each other from the first and we both succeeded in tearing large chunks out of our lives, much of it in front of other people who variously helped us or applauded us or suffered with us because they were tied in too and could not get away. Please, God, deliver me from any more such arrangements.
From the first my in-laws moved heaven and earth to keep my wife and me together. They figured plenty of children would do the trick and make us friends. So they insisted on children, children, children--and again, one more--and sure enough I stayed in there to raise the children. It was like fighting a 23 year war, and if you add to that the years it took to finally get a settlement, it would be 29 years.
Now this is the confession of a wasted life, a life spent trying to snatch brief moments of contentment and surcrease from an endless and on-going battle to the death. In a word, two enemies were in the church when I got married--the bride and the groom.
The instant we discovered it we should have gotten as far from each other as distance, earth, wind, and water would allow, and located friends to be with; we didn't; we stuck in there, and oh boy, what a mess it was!
So, aside from looking at your arrangement, which is all a marriage is when you get out of your tuxedo and lay aside the bouquet and the veil--just an arrangement, that's all; I say, aside from looking at your arrangement, open the hood and check the oil and see if any friendship is left in the crankcase. If it has all run out and you've been driving it hard, then I don't have to tell you that you have blown it and it would be easier and cheaper to get another one than to try to fix this one. But if the friendship is just low, well, add some, the best quality; and if it is dirty, well, drain the son-of-a-bitch and put in new friendship oil, of the best quality.
Back to Lulu and our arrangement. She's had two failed marriages before this one. First time she and the guy were not friends. Second time she felt trapped because the guy was too old and Lulu had a lot of living she felt like she was not going to get to do if she stayed in that situation. Both times she altered the situation, both times, I think, wisely. It was tough, but in spite of everything she managed to bite the bullet and survive.
She got her running around done. She was the bell of the ski circuit and the Hollywood circuit, the whole bit. She went the whole route. Then we became friends, and we still are friends and are working in a partnership to try to bring about mutual benefit in such a way as to weather us as comfortably as possible over the years (or hours, who knows?) between now and the moment of our deaths.
Our arrangement has largely to do with preparation for the immutable sentence of life, which is illness and death, and we are clinging to each other in this mutual support arrangement which is at bottom really very pragmatic. Most arrangements at this age(middle age and beyond) have this element or they are not much.
We have other things, affection, love, and interdependence, which you probably already have seen. And we don't have any children, which grieves Lulu and makes her dote on J2(we are planning to come out and rent an apartment and spend some time skiing Utah and baby sitting next winter). We really want to be a part of J2's growing up if there is any way to manage it.
He is really the center of our universe, so to speak, and the poor little guy in not even aware of our existence yet.
But this is where we are coming from, from what for us is a stable arrangement.
Will it last? Hell, I don't know. But right now things look really good. I have half this novel ready for the publisher and expect and hope by fall to have the other half done and to have another contract somewhere, for something next, and to keep on happily plugging away at this machine, to get back in the chips again and go on some more trips before I cash it all in...
Kids, what can I say? I woke up this morning hurting for all of you. I woke up hurting and had to write to say I love you.
ALWAYS, The Old Man
12/4/2011
Dear Dad,
Wife and I checked the crankcase in 1982, per your advice. Not a drop of friendship oil and the engine had seized. She left for some other guy who had a bright future.
Thank you for the advice. As I look back on those days, painful then, joyous now.
See you in heaven?
I love you, too.
Jackson Delano Maybolt, President Urban Poverty Law Center
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