I Love You and I’m Leaving You Anyway
Tracy McMillan
For my dad, who never let me go. And my fourth husband—
wherever you are.
Everything works out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out yet, then it’s not the end.
—UNKNOWN
Contents
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Introduction
One If You Love Me, Please Press “5”
Two I Love You, This Is Just How I Am
Three I Love You, but I’m Stuck in Here
Four I Love You, and I Can’t Live Without You
Five I Love You, Now Meet Your New Mom
Six I Love You, but I’ve Got Work to Do
Seven I Love You, but I’m Sick of Coming Here
Eight I Love You, Even If You Already Have a Girlfriend
Nine I Love You, but I Think I Can Do Better
Ten I Love You, and I’m Leaving You Anyway
Eleven I Love You, Even Though I Just Told You to Go
Twelve I Love You, Which Is Why I’m Lying to You
Thirteen I Love You, but I’m Ready to Start Dating
Fourteen I Love You, So Obviously You Must Have Serious Problems
Fifteen I Love You, but I Love Myself More
Sixteen I Love You, So I Forgive You
Seventeen I Love You, Totally and Completely
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I thank my dad, who has fearlessly supported me in the writing of this book. I love you.
This book would not exist without Andy Mcnicol, Alan Rautbort, Nancy Miller, and Hope Innelli—each of whom has gifted me with their encouragement, professionalism, guidance, and expertise. Special thanks to Jill Soloway, who blessed me with the best three words of advice a writer could ever hear (“be more you”) and has mentored me in the funniest and most generous way. Thanks also to Kevin Falls, Diablo Cody, Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, Scott Rosenberg, Nancy Josephson, Tom Wellington, Margaret Mendelson, Jennifer Grisanti, Ava Greenfield, Jaclyn Lafer, Dana Calvo, Amy Turner, Mishna Wolff, and the writing staffs of Journeyman, Life on Mars, and The United States of Tara, for proving that Hollywood is filled with good people.
Deep gratitude goes to the friends and loved ones who have given my life shape and meaning: my foster family for teaching me love and trust; my great friends Katie, Mary, David, Tracy Renee, Jane R., JoAnna, Karin, Joe, Stacey, Bevin, Chala, and Susie; all the beautiful souls at Saturday Night Atwater for their unfailing love and support; my son’s stepmother for her cooperation and caring; and most especially my son’s dad and grandparents, who truly have been family to me.
To Jon, Anil, Carla, Wynne, and Norma at the Casbah for the coffee and camaraderie, not to mention the necessary distractions. You guys are truly in this book.
And most of all, to my son, whom I love beyond words just for being himself.
Introduction
I LIKE TO THINK I’M NORMAL. I’m from the Midwest, I’m a mom, and I drive a Toyota.
But I’m not. Aside from my big hair and my ADD, there are two major facts that separate me from the average chick. 1) My dad was a pimp and a drug dealer and is doing twenty-three years in a federal prison as we speak. And, 2) I’ve been married three times.
This book is about the connection between those events.
If it were a math equation, it might look like this:
* * *
Pimp ≤ Womanizer + [Sex3] + Incarceration
x
Daughter ÷ Daddy – Security + Foster Homes12
=
MAN ISSUES
* * *
So how, more precisely, does one define Man Issues? Well, the story of my three marriages is a pretty compelling place to start. In my defense, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. There were thirteen years between my first marriage and my second one. And five years between my second marriage and my third. Sometimes I think I married the boyfriends whom other, better-parented girls would have had the good sense just to cohabit with.
In any case, it’s obvious I didn’t learn everything I needed to know in kindergarten. I think I must have been absent the day they covered “Topics in Serial Monogamy: From Mayhem to Matrimony,” because my man-ventory also includes:
Four live-in lovers
Five guys I was “in love with” but who wouldn’t have sex with me
More depressives than you can hook up with at a poets’ convention
1.5 agoraphobics (one of whom was considered half-functional because he at least had a job)
A host of other assorted addicts, whose dependencies included but were not limited to work, food, sex, heroin, and, um, motorcycles
Then, of course, there were those long stretches with no man at all, though not in a good way.
But the thing that truly convinces me that I have Man Issues and not just man problems (a difference similar to that between weather and climate—one is a cold spell, the other is Greenland) is this little paradox: at heart I’m totally conservative!
I know what you’re thinking right now. How can she possibly think she’s conservative when she’s a three-time divorcée? It’s a question I’ve had to ask myself. And here is the answer: because at my core, all I’ve ever wanted is to be in a committed relationship with one man. Who else do you know, without a burka, who has “settled down” at age seventeen? While my peers were out sowing their wild oats, racking up conquests, and sampling one, two, even three flavors of man each month, I was packing lunch for my husband. And loving it!
What’s more, I have never ever had any interest in casual sex. (Not even in France! Or on ecstasy!) It’s not a moral thing—on the contrary, more than once over the years I have wished I had the capacity for no-strings, uncommitted fun. Then I could have explored the whole subset of super-hot guys who’ve never met a string without a “G” attached to it. Alas. It’s just not my temperament. Maybe it’s nature—I’m one of those people who go to the same restaurant twice a week and order the exact same thing every time. Or maybe it’s nurture, and I’m just an emotional wreck from too much childhood. Either way, I’m in total agreement with my gay friend Mark-David, who says, “No ring, no ding, honey.”
It’s all about the relationship for me.
Which is why I’ve spent months, nay, years on the phone with cauliflower-eared girlfriends—fleshing out scenarios, detailing facial expressions, recounting exact bits of dialogue—trying to figure out if he likes me, what he’s thinking, when he’s going to call, or if not, why not. And that’s before the relationship starts. Once it’s going, it’s all about getting him to 1) stop doing what he’s doing, and 2) start doing what I want him to do, or if that’s not an issue, wondering 3) if he’s going to leave or 4) whether I should stay.
And my dad Freddie’s in all of it. Way up in it.
Not like that’s a new thought. Any chick old enough to have acquired a Diet Coke habit has heard that your relationships with men will be based—one way or another—on the one you had with your father. But I arrogantly dismissed this as the kind of folk “wisdom” you get at the nail salon between the polish and the top coat. So trite, so clichéd, so lowest-common-denominator. Helloooo, what about free will? Women have choices. We’re not just programmed to seek out Daddy 2.0. At least that’s what I thought. But three wedding dresses later (a tea-length, a two-piece, and a big traditional white, in that order), I’m here to say that I’m not that special. It did, indeed, all come down to Daddy.
So this is my story. It’s about how a girl fro
m Minneapolis whose dad was obsessed with women became a woman obsessed with men. How having a pimp for a dad taught me to love men, leave them, fear them, fuck them, and yes, marry them. Over and over. Until I met “the one.” The one who went wrong in exactly the right way, making it possible for me to finally see who I had been emotionally wrangling with all along: my dad. It’s a story about a father and a daughter who managed to love each other despite one of them spending thirty years behind bars. And about how raising a son taught me everything I really needed to know about loving men.
Maybe you’ll relate.
One
If You Love Me, Please Press “5”
MY THIRD EX-HUSBAND CALLED me today.
He wants to see me. “Why?” I say, genuinely curious. It’s been just over two years since I last had sex with saw Paul. That’s when we gamely tried to paste our marriage back together in time to celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary. In bed.
We failed at the reconciliation. The bed part, as always, worked out great.
Since then, we’ve spoken on the phone from time to time, and lately he’s been calling more often. But he’s never asked to see me. Until right this second.
“I’ve been thinking…” He pauses, unsure if he’s really going to say what he’s about to say. “I was wondering—” He stops short. “It would be kind of like a before-and-after thing. You could see me before. And after. For comparison purposes.”
I should mention that Paul’s getting electroconvulsive therapy next week.
“If it works”—he means the electroconvulsive therapy—“would you maybe…” He stops once more. There’s something really vulnerable in his voice. Something I haven’t heard in a long time. Like, since we were married and manic depression took over his life, driving him all kinds of lying, cheating crazy.
“I was wondering if maybe you would…like me again?” He says “like” in the fifth-grader sense of the word, as in boy-girl like. “I know I blew it.”
It’s not as though I’ve been waiting to hear a mea culpa all this time, but this, I must admit, feels like a very nice start to one. Still, this man—this adorable, brilliant, sexy man—has got mental problems. Don’t, as they say, get it twisted.
“Oh, Paul,” I sigh doubtfully. “I don’t know.”
“Please, I really want to see you.” He’s almost begging, and what woman doesn’t find that kind of irresistible?
I take a long, deep breath. What do you say when your ex-husband asks you on a date to coffee?
SOMETHING’S DEFINITELY GOING ON. Because that’s the second plot-twisting phone call I’ve gotten recently from a key man in my life. The first was a week ago.
I am walking out the door to work, when the phone starts to ring. I know better than to answer it (when I get distracted leaving the house I usually end up forgetting something important, like my kid), but I pick it up anyway, because for me a ringing phone has always had a Wonka-bar quality to it, like, You never know, it might be something really, really cool, like a great job offer or a new man or a million dollars or…So I press the “on” button.
“Hello?”
Pause. Beat. Beat. Institutional recorded voice: “This call is from a federal prison.”
Oh, shit. It’s not a million dollars.
It’s my dad, who’s serving twenty-three years for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. He calls me every two weeks, like clockwork, and we talk mostly about what I’m doing in my life. We already know what he’s doing in his. Sitting there.
“This call is from—”
“FREDDIE.” He says his name so perfectly, like he’s just arrived at, say, Hyde or Villa or Beatrice Inn (or whichever “It” club you prefer) with two totally hot chicks and he knows he’s on the list.
“—an inmate at a federal prison. To decline this call, hang up. To block all future calls from this inmate, press ‘7.’ To accept this call, press—”
Don’t think I haven’t got a recurring morbid fantasy about accidentally pressing “7” and never again getting another phone call from my dad. But that would leave letter writing as the only available means of communication, and if that happened, he might as well be doing time on the International Space Station. Because I am the worst letter writer in the history of jailed fathers. In the fourteen years my dad has been incarcerated this time around I have managed to send exactly three letters. (In my defense, each contained a picture of my son.) And I call myself a writer! I am somehow sure Nelson Mandela’s kids coughed up more than three letters in fourteen years. Of course, their dad was a hero. Mine was a pimp.
I press FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE. Good and long to make sure Automated Prison Recording Barbie hears me. Then I wait. There’s always a weird moment where I’m not sure which of us—Freddie or me—is going to speak first, which leads to some awkward “you-go-no-you-go” overlap. I’ve learned to just be silent and let him speak first.
“Hey, baby!”
Freddie always says hello like this. With a certain forced brightness that makes me feel obligated to sound happy in return. Sometimes I don’t feel like sounding happy. And I don’t bother to try to hide it. This is a relatively new development. For years I urged myself to sound cheerful. Then one day I overheard a friend on the phone with her mother and realized that normal adult children are annoyed when their parents call. And all I really, really want to be is normal.
But nothing about this is normal. Our phone calls are timed, fifteen minutes apiece, to the second. I think the inmates buy some kind of phone card, but exactly how it works is one of those federal-prison mysteries you just don’t bother to inquire about when you only have a quarter of an hour two times a month in which to conduct an entire father-daughter relationship. There’s a necessity to get straight to whatever talking points you’re in the mood to get to.
“I watched the show again last night,” Freddie offers.
This makes me feel all warm toward my dad. I was a journalist for a long time, but now I’m a television writer and he has been faithfully watching the show I write for, every week. I recognize this as a dad-in-prison act of love. There is a separate scale for what constitutes an act of love for a dad in prison, because dads in prison can’t do normal things like carve the Thanksgiving turkey or fix your leaky faucet or give you money for a down payment on a house. In this case, simply watching my show qualifies, because I know he must have had to pull some serious strings to commandeer one of the communal televisions every Monday night, especially since the show does not fall into a felon-friendly genre. I imagine he had to give away a lot of cigarettes. And he doesn’t even smoke.
“Well, what did you think?” I’m only asking for the sake of conversation.
But Freddie breaks it down, and he doesn’t spare my feelings. “The ending was good, but you lost half of us before you got there.”
Ouch. Really? I’m visualizing the inmates getting up in droves, preferring to go back to their cells (!) rather than find out what happens to Dan and Katie at the end of the episode. Obviously, this is not a good sign. Genre notwithstanding, you want them to be loving your shit at the federal penitentiary. Because if the captive audience isn’t interested, how are you going to hang on to the regular Americans? The ones with the Internet and Halo 3?
“This call is from a federal prison.”
There’s Barbie with the two-minute warning. Already?! This always happens. Just as I get over my mild dad-in-prison petulance and am really starting to enjoy his company, the call is almost over. “Now listen,” he says, “we’re running out of time. I got something to talk to you about. Guess what today is?”
My mind goes blank. What day could today possibly be? A holiday? No. His birthday? No. Our birthdays are exactly two weeks apart, and they had just passed. (We are Virgos together, which must explain something.) No one has died, that I know of, and besides, he would have led with that.
“I give up. What is today?”
“October twentieth,” he says.
I plug Oc
tober 20 into my mental search engine, but even after .091 seconds, nothing comes up. “I give. Tell me.”
“It’s my release date!” Freddie’s excited, exultant even. He slaps his hands together and chortles—a big, giant, James Brown–like shout of HAH! “I’m coming home, baby! October twentieth, 2012. Five years from today!”
Mind you, my dad has been “getting out” since he got in, back when I was three. Usually any minute now. I have learned over the years to just say “Yeah, yeah” and go on with my life. But this time is different, I can tell. For starters, he gave me a date. A specific one.
This has a surprising effect on me. Kind of like the time I got my nose pierced. My mind thought, Okay, cool, that was easy, but the moment I tried to stand up my body was like JEEBUS PRICE, SOMEONE JUST PUNCHED A HOLE IN ME WITH A NEEDLE THE SIZE OF THE ONES IN A SEWING MACHINE! My insides are spinning and racing and rolling in all kinds of directions like a bucket full of marbles thrown on a cement floor. It’s one thing to have your dad in federal prison. It sucks, yes, but at least you know where he is, and you know he can only drive you crazy long-distance, and if you really really must, you know you can always press “7” to refuse all future calls.
But he just said that in five years—no, in four years, 364 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes (and counting)—prison officials will give him a set of clothes, and $200, and a box packed with those three measly pictures I managed to send him, and they will lead him down a hall, and usher him through some doors, and then, finally, they will open the last door and he will walk through it. He will have served eighteen years. He will be seventy-six years old. And he will be a free man.
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