Ass-Kicked by Ashley: Abusive Relationship No. 2
Several years ago it dawned on me: I am a thirty-year-old, snow-white, mostly-healthy able-bodied Christian male, and I’ve been in no less than three physically abusive relationships. I’ve done a fairly good job of avoiding physical confrontation in my life, but when I have found myself at the wrong end of violence, it’s been at the hands of a woman I’ve been inside.
Ashley was abusive relationship number two. I can talk about this one because it’s rather neatly compartmentalized and, in the grand scheme of things, rather trivial. It caused no lasting damage, she doesn’t haunt my nightmares, and she’s left no permanent stains on my psyche. Most of the bad shit that has come my way has fucked me down to slime and shed its skin before leaving, and I have a hell of a time telling precisely when shit begins or ends, but not in this case. I tell this story because it’s fairly easy to do so.
Ashley was a friend first and an ass kicker later. I met her during my first semester at college, which lasted all of six weeks before I sailed back to pittsburgh on a sea of box wine and got a job at a parking lot working for a schwag-dealing fifty-something van-driving dollar-store mafioso named Bob who still owes me money.
Yes, that is a true statement. If you find yourself offended at what might come across as hyperbole, tell it to the fates.
That nightmare dragged on a few months, followed by my first stint in rehab. It was great; I loved rehab so much that I’ve been back six times since. I returned to Oberlin College the following spring.
Initially, my plan was to switch to beer and fuck this girl named Olivia, but she was in a wheelchair by this point and I couldn’t figure out the logistics. Plus, she was conventionally beautiful, able-bodied or otherwise, and even if the stars had aligned and we had actually dated, I would’ve spent the whole time wrecking her happy with my self-loathing and jealousy. None of this matters, however, because Ashley was all over me within hours of my return. Which I found rather perplexing; to the best of my recollection, we had only been friends before my life had gone to shit.
My first night back at college, my fourth night out of rehab, Beck and I were at a bar. She was sitting very close to me and my spidey sense was tingling. Something big and bad was on its way and even though it was gonna get me laid, I knew my body wasn’t the only thing that was about to get fucked.
Ashley turned to me. “Brendan, I want to apologize for how I acted before you left. You caught me off guard…I didn’t know what to say.”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
“You said you loved me and I left…It was just so unexpected, you know? But I’m here now. And Brendan…I love you, too”.
I had lied. I didn’t love her. I’d like to say she probably made it up, but a funny thing happens when someone reminds you of something you did mid-blackout. You know if they’re telling the truth. The ghosts of the dead brain cells softly wail in confirmation, or they’re silent. You just know. When she spoke these words, my teeth clenched, my neck hair stood on end, and somewhere in the murky brain-damaged depths I felt something softly click. It was true. I had said these things.
We were sitting in a packed bar in the middle of happy hour, but this was of no concern. Just as soon as the words left her lips, we started tongue kissing with flagrant disregard for our surroundings. My spidey sense had stopped tingling. The danger was here. My dick was filled to the brim with nihilistic fuck blood. My cherno-balls were already hard at work producing liquid futility for the long night ahead. She was wetter than the tears we would soon be crying. The nightmare had begun.
For the next week she gave me a guided tour of the Oberlin Young Alcoholics circuit. We followed the specials: dollar well drinks on Monday nights at the Feve, quarter beers at the Sco on Tuesdays, 3 dollar Long Islands at the Inn on Wednesdays…that brings us to Thursday, by which point my brain was already too damaged to remember the rest of them. Point is: it was systematic, orchestrated alcoholism. I missed all my morning classes, and pissing myself was as close as I got to ever taking a shower.
After a week I told Ashley I had to take a night off. This is a singular event in my life: it’s the only time I have ever told someone I didn’t feel like drinking. I want to reiterate an earlier point: I’ve been to rehab seven times. Every single friend and girlfriend I’ve ever had has asked me to stop drinking, despite many of them being alcoholics themselves. Telling Ashley I needed a sober night is what’s known as a black swan event: an occurrence without precedence that cannot be anticipated, or really even explained.
She was not happy about it; she actually spent about an hour begging me to go drinking with her. I tried to explain that I really wanted to finish a semester without needing to go to rehab. And there was this “homework” thing I kept hearing about. She didn’t consider this to be a valid excuse. But finally, she relented. Or rather, I got up and left.
Classes had started over a week ago, and this was my first night sleeping by myself in my dorm. I was very excited to do so; tidying up my room to reflect my new-found (and very short-lived) sobriety had been my first order of business upon returning to campus, and I’d done a bang-up job of it. Quick disposal of the plastic red Dixie cups full of piss, a proud vacuuming of the eight-by-five rug, the hanging of various alt rock posters and the meticulous folding of my small wardrobe felt good, like I was finally on the right path. And for a few brief hours, I was.
I lived in a split double, which means an inches-thin wall and door that bisected a regular dorm room double. My roommate was a pothead whose room looked like it was being raided by security on a daily basis. By the time I saw Ashley that fateful night, my room was neat and Dahmer-esque tidy.
Sleeping solo that evening, I had a dream. I was lying in bed and a beautiful woman was above me. She was warm and smelled of safe sex and cleaning products. She was naked…and she was kissing my feet. But this was a dream. Weird shit happens all the time in dreams.
All at once the beautiful woman stopped kissing my feet, ascended my prostrate body, and began to assault my face holes. The sudden stench of cheap, hard liquor penetrated my nostrils. A thin, wet, hundred-proof tongue slid into my sleeping mouth and forced its way between my teeth. Suddenly the dream wasn’t so good anymore. I was getting skull fucked by the trans-gendered ghost of Jack Daniels. It stirred me from my slumbers.
“Ashley, what the fuck are you doing?”
It wasn’t a dream, as it turned out. It was a fucking nightmare, and it was my life.
“Kish me Brennan I wanna fuk”. She was on all fours above me. I could see her ass crack hanging out of the top of her pants.
“Ashley…I’m gonna ask you a question and I want you to be honest with me. Were you just kissing my feet?”
“Shut up fuck you move over I’m getting in”. My bed was a double. There was no room. If she was getting in, I would be “getting in” as well. And I was in no mood for love.
“Ashley, get the fuck out of here. I have class in five hours. Remember when I said I was staying by myself tonight?”
She started crying. She didn’t want to leave. Ashley was a need machine, and she needed fucked for fake validation.
“You’re gonna wake up my roommate. Please leave. This isn’t cool.”
I don’t know how I got her out of there, but I did. I locked the door to the hallway, and apologized to my half-awake and rightfully pissed-off roommate. Who, I later learned, had been disturbed from his slumbers by my girlfriend banging her fist against the door until he let her in. Sorry about that, Zachary.
I’d like to take a break from the story for a second so as to provide some exegesis. This story took place eleven years ago. Does it sound like a nightmare? I haven’t even gotten to the sad part yet. And all the same, for as much as this mundane horror show tragicomedy is absolutely indicative of the life from whence it came, I am overwhelmed by melancholic nostalgia as I write it down. Because things have gotten so much worse. I’ve been clean and sober for fifteen months as of this writing, and I would give anything to go back and relive these events. Even if I couldn’t change anything. Because I now know these were my good old days. And they weren’t that good at all, and I was fucking miserable then, but I’m more miserable now. If I had known what my future had in store, maybe I could’ve enjoyed what hindsight has now revealed to be my highly subjective “good times” a bit more than I did. This was before I’d ever stuck my dick in Katie, before I impaled myself upon Elizabeth, before the hepatitis C, before the let-downs and disappointments and failures that are far too numerous to recount. I’m going to get back to the story now, but as you read it, try to keep these honest words in the back of your mind: this was one of the happiest times of my life.
Next evening, I’d had more than enough of sober reality; it was time to get back to the business of being an alcoholic. Ashley had stubbed out half a pack of cigarettes on the back of her left hand during our brief time apart-”This is why I didn’t want to be by myself last night”-and explained that she’d kissed my feet because she had been “pretty loaded” and mistaken them for my face. Whatever. This evening, I was the one making plans for both of us. One of my now long-gone guy friends was having people over, which meant free booze, and that guaranteed Ashley’s willing attendance, even though she didn’t really know them. Not her ideal situation, as it turned out; Ashley had to be the nucleus at all times. I was about to find out what happened when she wasn’t.
We came and we socialized. I had some normal people laughs with my normal people friends. I felt rather like a human being. It felt new and healthy and good. After a short period of time, Ashley wanted to leave because somewhere it was half-off something or other, and at my friend’s get-together Ashley couldn’t drink like she wanted to without making everyone uncomfortable before she was too drunk to care. She started nagging me to leave. I was actually having a good time being social with a minimum of intoxication-another rare occurrence, let me tell you-and I told her she could leave and I’d catch up with her shortly. This was not an option. She began to act like a spoiled six year old who wasn’t getting what it wanted and couldn’t tolerate ticking clocks and planetary rotation until this deplorable situation was remedied.
“Brendan! Let’s go! My girls are waiting for me.”
Annoyance and passive-aggression got the best of me and I decided to have some fun at her expense. It was a decision I was soon to regret
“…Who is saying that?”, I asked, turning my head from side to side, looking around as if I couldn’t see her. Ashley was much shorter than I; she was five three standing on her tip-toes and I’m about six feet tall. “I hear a voice, but-”
Ashley reached up, reached back, and smacked me across the face just as hard as she could manage. I’m not talking fingers on my cheek. I’m talking the whole hand, held rigid, crashing into the side of my head. Five foot three, three foot five, or six foot nine, she connected with a surprising degree of force. I was too shocked to feel pain, but whether it hurt or not was beside the point. It was meant to hurt.
The sounds of tastefully inebriated casual revelry all at once came to a halt. We had their attention. This was a Kodak moment, except a photograph would’ve only been redundant. We were making memories. I have since lost touch with everyone who was in that room all those years ago, indeed I can barely remember their names or faces, but they remember hers and they remember mine. They were witness to the moment a mundane romance made a ninety-degree turn towards darkness. They were witness to the birth of an abusive relationship. What’s more, we were cutting edge, Ashley and I. We were defying gender norms, the very paradigm of ultra-liberal arts students. I had not hit her. She had hit me. Their mouths hung open, utterly aghast at what had just transpired in their polite company.
What happened next makes for one of my few proud moments in life. I am not known for timely quips. Clever retorts don’t occur to me until years later. Fortunately, I am incapable of ever getting over anything, so the retorts always come, but only after I’ve been haunted by their antecedents for years. But this occasion was an exception. Just as soon as my neurons resumed firing, I turned towards three of my guy friends who were sitting on a couch to my immediate right.
“Guys, please lift up your feet, it seems my balls have just dropped off and rolled under the couch”.
There was much-needed laughter as I made my goodbyes and acquiesced to my diminutive, yet oh-so-pejorative girlfriend’s demands. I shudder to think at what might’ve happened if I hadn’t been so uncharacteristically quick and clever. I might’ve turned and leapt out the nearest window.
Actually, I take it back, fuck my one-and-done quick wit. I wish I had leapt out the nearest window. I would’ve avoided eleven years of ever-worsening soul-squishing horseshit. All these years later, I’m not mad at Ashley because she hit me. I’m mad at Ashley because she didn’t kill me.
I am uncertain of the sequence of some of the events that follow. Maybe it was the ever-increasing quantities of booze, maybe it’s my mind’s futile attempt at self-preservational memory suppression, maybe it’s just the way any mind adapts to a living nightmare. Can anyone remember the exact order in which the punches were thrown? Does it even matter? And still I wish I could go back and do it again.
A series of memory fragments, written as they come to mind:
-Arguing in the grassy bowl out front of North, one of the larger dorms on the Oberlin College campus. Ashley in hysterics, screaming and crying. A plot-lost feminist walks up to us and turns to Ashley.
The not-so-hidden meaning: What is this horrible man doing to you??
I don’t know what Ashley said in response. Now it was I who was shocked. I think we were fighting because I was unhappy to be less than a month out of rehab and already embroiled in full-blown alcoholism and an abusive relationship. Imagine that. The Feminist gave Ashley a hug, wrote down her phone and room number on a slip of paper, and left. She didn’t give me a mean look. She never gave me any kind of look at all. I told Ashley that she needed to let this woman know what she had really walked into. Ashley’s screams and cries were not, in fact, an X-marks-the-victim. Ashley agreed with me. I’ll say this about her: she was many horrible things, but she did not gas light me. God how I miss her.
-Arguing in the Oberlin hotel lobby en route to The Inn, one of three bars in the town of Oberlin. The Inn had complimentary popcorn, but none of the hip atmosphere of The Feve, nor did it smell of PBR and date rape like The Sco. They had cheap Long Island Iced Teas, however, and when I drank there I felt like less of the college student I half-pretended to be and more like the Rust Belt alcoholic in my heart.
On this occasion, I tried a different tact as a means of escaping conflict with Ashley. Rather than use my words, I turned and walked quickly away. Ashley was having none of it. As the bouncer looked on, a manly man working a manly job, Ashley leaned forward and slightly downward, right shoulder aimed for the small of my back, and charged. She caught me mid-step; I lost my footing, and she sent me flying into a banquet table and chairs lined up against the adjacent wall of the lobby. No clever retort this time. I just stood up in a daze I had zero interest in coming out of. I don’t remember if I went home or followed her into the bar. Probably the latter. Nothing hastens alcoholism’s progression like a shitty life.
Our slime slide down the ladder of degradation and degeneracy progressed at a steady clip. I began to feel a bit trapped. Ashley had a very big personality; in the early days of college, while most of us were struggling to construct some vague approximation of an independent young adult identity, Ashley seemed to have it all figured out. Consequentially, she attracted a sizable following of insecure and impressionable females like flies to piles of horseshit. And she attracted me, an insecure and impressionable mostly-male coasting on the death fumes of illusory testosterone. I identified with these women; I considered these women to be my friends. Unfortunately, this complicated the issue of just breaking up with her: to lose Ashley meant to lose our mutual friends as well. But even if this hadn’t been an issue, I wouldn’t have found it much easier to leave her. I am weak-willed, lily-livered, spineless, gutless, easily-led and prone to victimization. Folks like me aren’t much good at ending relationships that are detrimental to our health. It’s something of a foreign concept. And besides, even the very cleanest of breakups would have only left me at the mercy of an even more destructive relationship: mine with myself.
I was much more naïve back then, and at some point I confronted Ashley about the fact that she was being physically abusive. I don’t know, I guess I thought she might stop getting drunk and roughing me up if I said “please”. I don’t recall the exact conversation, but I do recall her excuse/explanation. Evidently, her father had abused her as well.
“My father…he hit me….” She spoke with theatrical affectation, her voice low and slow, her timbre like plastic buckets, filled to the brim with brine, being carried gingerly across cobblestone floors, water slopping down the sides.
That was it. That was her excuse. Her father had hit her; sucks to be me. And so it continued for a while longer, until there came a time when I acted very out of character and put a stop to it.
I had once again decided not to follow her to the nightly bar crawl circle jerk. I knew I had to slow my roll at least a little bit; at the rate I was going, rehab was only one extra-bad blackout away. Once again: highly unusual for a guy like me. My death wish can be seen from outer space. Getting shit faced on a nightly basis while my girlfriend beat the fuck out of me at the slightest hint of independent thinking should’ve suited me like a pig in shit, and yet Ashley’s behavior was so egregious, so insanely aggro, that it actually caused me to behave kind-of like a normal human being who made good choices in the interest of his own well-being. Fuck me, I should’ve married her. She beat the dysfunction out of me.
Early the next morning I met up with a girl named Katie, who would soon help me break things that can’t be fixed to an extent that makes my time with Ashley seem like pure Disney in comparison. But that’s another story. I don’t know how or why Katie and I were hanging out at such an early hour. It can’t have been class; we never woke up for those on any other day. Regardless, while we were hanging out, Katie gave me the best news I had heard in years: Ashley had ended her nightly circle ‘round the drain impaled on another man’s cock in her dorm room. And because it was 7 am and Ashley was both alcoholic and psychotic, they were probably still there, passed out at the scene of the crime. I don’t remember how Katie actually knew this, and I really don’t care. I have been cheated on by every single woman I’ve ever dated (and I frequently returned the favor, although in many cases they were in fact the ones “returning the favor”, but I digress), but I have never been so happy to have been infidelitized before or since. My prayers were answered. This was a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Ashley couldn’t trap me in her dorm room with her skipping-record threats of suicide. She couldn’t even call me a jerk. If you get cheated on and you want to end it, it is your unquestionable right to do so, is it not? This was going to be glorious. I was going to walk in on my soon-to-not-be girlfriend and catch her dick-handed, reeking of booze and fuck, no doubt probably spooning with some guy she was going to have to pretend to recognize whenever consciousness finally came calling. I was going to announce my intention to quit our romantic cluster-fuck, effective immediately. I was going to speak in a booming, masculine, authoritative tone that didn’t betray the slightest hint that its owner had been physically assaulted by the five-foot-and-change gremlin more than once in the very recent past. In short: I was about to actually like myself for a couple minutes.
Her dorm door quietly hissed back on its pneumatic arm. The hallway’s fluorescent lights cut a triangular arc into the chaotic darkness of her living space. My oh-so-manly, oh-so-imposing silhouette was cast across her floor and the myriad of cutesy “I’m from New York” outfits that almost entirely covered it, ending at the foot of her bed. And there she was, alone, but it didn’t matter. I knew, and she was about to know I knew. Everything was still playing out almost as theatrically as I’d hoped. My moment had arrived.
“Ashley,” my voice spoke, loudly, cop-like, “We’re done”. I saw her stir, I saw her eyes open wide. I saw them open too wide. I recognized that look. It was her “I’m about to fuck your shit up” look. Now my eyes were widening, too; it was my recently-acquired “I’m about to get wrecked” look. My elation at the thought of easy freedom had overpowered my cautious nature. I’d just kicked the beehive.
I tried to slam the door, one last paltry attempt at reclaiming my now-vanished self-assuredness, but its pneumatic arm was having none of it. Whatever, I needed to get the fuck out of there. I fled.
I ran outside and across the bowl like a frightened asthmatic gazelle. I had found myself in a truly fucked situation. I wasn’t just at Ashley’s mercy. In a grander sense, I was just as much at the mercy of the flipside to Oberlin’s left-wing social equality rhetoric. I was a white heterosexual male and my sick-minded sociopathic ex-girlfriend could inflict a ton of pain on me that I could only attempt to run from. I couldn’t lay a hand on her, even to save a life that would very quickly become not worth living were I to ever do so. All those young, enlightened minds still couldn’t conceive of how a woman nearly a foot shorter than me could ever hurt a man. The impetus for gender bias was not, in fact, vanquished. It was merely inverted, driven underground. Down to my level.
I had just about reached the concrete sidewalk in front of North Dormitory when I heard Ashley’s voice, croaking my name in the distance behind me. She was always rather close to late-period Marianne Faithfull even when well-rested and sober, and right now she was neither. Her exhortation echoed off the brick-and-mortar walls of the surrounding dorm buildings, portending a near future more gloomy and grey than the late-January depressive Ohio skies. She was in pursuit.
I met back up with Katie in the third floor lounge. The smart thing to do would have been to hide in my dorm room, but what can I say, Katie and I are attracted to chaos, and a whole bunch of it was on its way. This habit of standing in the middle of highways, waiting for cars to hit us and talking shit on their drivers, was going to get both of us in a world of trouble in the years to come. This was the start of it.
Ashley showed up. Words were exchanged. I hadn’t told her that Katie was the informant, but Ashley was more than capable of putting two and two together. Ashley denied having had a close encounter with strange dick, I used some combination of the words ‘fuck’ and ‘you’, and then it was time for Ashley Fists.
Ashley Fists went to work on Katie at first. I thought Katie was going to wreck her; Katie was from LA as opposed to high-rise penthouse NYC, Katie dressed punk, was half black and had a Mohawk. I thought Katie was going to chew this little rich white bitch up and spit her out. But no, Katie was convinced of her pacifistic nature at this point, and her own deep self-loathing and love of victimization found a good friend in Ashley Fists. And so Ashley thrust out her chin, narrowed her eyes, planted her feet squarely on the floor with a slight bend to the knees, and begin to throw right cross after right cross at Katie’s face while Katie just kind of stood there and took it. After a few punches, my incredulity had worn off; I was now ready for Ashley Fists.
“Ashley, why don’t you attack who you’re really mad at?”
Ashley Fists accepted the invitation. Within seconds she was standing in front of me, adjusted to the height differential, and was once again swinging away. Unfortunately for her, the sun was up, the birds were singing and I was completely sober. She was aiming for my face, and I was doing a bang-up job of effectively dodging her blows by leaning ever-so-slightly backwards.
Ashley Fists could not be denied, however, and at some point her evil little bloody brain aimed for parts of my body she could more easily reach. She kidney punched me so hard I gasped. My kidneys were no stranger to assault at this point, and they damn sure didn’t need any more of it. This was the only time she inflicted real physical pain on me, and right then we both knew it.
I forget just what Katie was doing during the assault. Probably taking notes, actually, because she would be roughing me up on a fairly regular basis as well before my Oberlin days were done.
Ashley’s rage dissipated shortly after the kidney punch. No doubt she was getting dangerously close to a state of relative sobriety herself, and would very soon be forced to face the reality that she regularly attempted to thwart with booze and manipulation. She ran out of North dormitory and out of my life forever, save for a week or so towards the end of the semester when she slept over a few times and we fucked once or twice more. The kidney punch pain lingered rather like a kick to the balls, and I used it as a convenient excuse to get in bed and sleep through the day’s classes. I was elated, despite the circumstances; I was single once again, and now free to follow my own personal downhill alcoholic trajectory straight through to the end of the semester. I wasn’t able to go to the bars much after Ashley because she had told all the bartenders that I was not yet old enough to drink. Neither was she, but she evidently fucked more than a few of them, which is as good as a driver’s license for a college town bartender. I spent the rest of the semester drinking with friends, occasionally having sex, and somehow completing class work. I had a summer vacation in Pittsburgh to look forward to. I would be addicted to heroin for the first time in my life before it was even half over.
When the fall semester began, I only managed to stay in Oberlin for about three weeks because of a recently acquired habit of voraciously injecting cocaine into my arm that took precedence over any remaining vestige of pride or dignity I might have had. Soon I was once again in rehab, where I would remain for eleven months. I never saw Ashley again. When I finally returned to Oberlin a year and a half later, I learned that she had left Oberlin after embezzling money she didn’t need from a student non-profit. The gig was up. Her friends had seen through her bullshit. She transferred to a new pool of suckers. I learned that she had managed to contract chlamydia at some point; a reconstruction of the timeline suggested that there was a decent chance I had caught it from her, but I had been tested for disease six ways from Sunday whilst in rehab and I was clean. Of course Ashley had never made even the slightest effort to tell me.
I reconnected with Ashley via facebook about five or six months ago. Turns out she had done well at her new college. When we spoke, she had very recently completed a Masters degree in English. She is now happily married and living in New York, surrounded by friends and respected by her colleagues. I myself am overweight, Hepatitis C-positive, unemployed, and friendless. I live with my parents and I never go outside unless I’m attending an AA or NA meeting. If I want sex these days, I have to use the allowance I get from my parents to pay for it and hope that they don’t ask too many questions about where the money goes. But they always do, and so the lies continue. I miss Ashley. She still looks great. I wish I’d hung around long enough for her to kill me.
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