Howling for a Mate

Should You Love Before You Marry?
Recently a good friend stopped me in the midstream of a river of whirlpooling rant about my "first" wife and said, "Whoaaa, Wolfie, what the hell's the score with all these wives you're always parablizing on; I mean, I can't keep track of them--who really was number one Ms. Wolf? and who wasn't really a real Ms. Wolf?" The questions stopped me in my tracks. I drifted back to high school days and this girl who every high school goof-ass horny boy had the holy hots for. This girl happened to be a playmate (good word) of mine--like, we grew up together---we were almost exactly the same age--a few days apart, but both deep summer West Texas-born babies, same year, same hot month, like I say, just a few days from me--same hospital, same floor--she was there right after me--her mother and my mother old pals from way back, her family a squirrel-cage of a brilliant scientist father (water was his subject), a bushy tailed God-fearing mother (I once heard her confide in my mother that she douched with Budweiser beer and that ever now and then she popped one and drank it--she said it was for her stomach), and two bright-ass big boy brothers, one who went on to become a famous surgeon in the Chicago area and the other one going on to become a zooman, starting with an internship at the famous Saint Louis Zoo under Marlon Perkins or one of those latter-day-Bring-'Em-Back-Alive white guys who was out to prove how his white civilization ("evolution of culture") could conquer the wildest beast whether human or savage--like Jim Fowler and today's Jungle Jim (remember Jungle Gyms?), Busch Gardens's Jack Hanna--who's a Jim Fowler graduate, I think--anyway, this girl's brother became a zooman like those guys--his love was snakes and he claimed he had tamed a rattlesnake as a kid though no one every saw him cuddling up to it and simply took his word for it. He was a big dude--he and his brother were both way over six feet three and weighed way over 200 lbs a piece. I once watched a "touch" football game--this girl's family home had a football-size lawn to one side of the house--and one of the participants in that game was Sammy Baugh who had been a college All-American quarterback at TCU and then had gone on to become a pro great with the Washington Redskins in that rough-tough pre-WWII pro-football, where unless you pinned a runner to the turf to where he couldn't move, the runner could get up and start running again--it made for some mean tackling. At the time Baugh was playing with this girl's brothers and several other wild-ass ranchhand types in that big football lawn he was retired from pro ball and hanging around my hometown waiting to eventually be made head football coach and athletic director at one of my hometown colleges (there were 3). I watched that game while putting my hand up under the dress of this girl--this when we were 12 and I had just discovered what was come to be called "coming" and she had discovered how she liked being seduced by such naive boys as me and loved letting them let their hands go wherever the curiosity in their fingers led them. That's how close I became to this girl.

And then one day, we were separated by school districts and I went off to my schooling in one district and she was off in a way-off district from me, a country district, and then suddenly her family moved from the football-field-lawned country place into another part of the city, the girl staying in the country--with her husband!!

God, I was totally shocked when I heard that. I was in high school. I was approaching 17; remember, so was she. I mean I was suspicious of her but I still trusted her. Then this dude who I hated, little weasel-like pretty-boy bastard, was surprised one day when he heard me say that this girl had once been my girlfriend and he heard me say that and he came over and said, "She's your girlfriend, then how many times have you fucked her?" He was from her school district transferring into mine and I knew that and I ask him, you know, like, hey, motherf-er, do you know her? and he replied, "Know her, heck yes, I fucked her every day for a year--and then I found out every other stud in that hick school was fucking her, too, and then that bastard overaged-dumbass knocked her up...." Whoaaaa. This girl was pure to me. Sure she'd let me put my hand up her dress and let me touch it and put my finger in it and yes I knew the way she got crazy when I did it and moved her body against my finger...more than once, more than twice, one time all afternoon and with kissing, too...but that was for me only, right? She loved me like I loved her, right? That was me showing her I loved her.

And then my mother let slip one night that the girl's mother had called to say she had run off with this no good overaged-dumbass and gotten married. She was 16 going on 17. They lied to a Justice of the Peace in a nearby county who went ahead and married them in spite of her being 16 and he being 17.

And then one day several months later, I came in from working at my summer job of delivering wholesale groceries all around all over West Texas in a GMC six-wheeler, dirty, hot, but extremely good looking, I had silver blond hair in those days and I worked out, I was on the track team, and really thought I was a hotty and I came in the house and there was this girl, standing in our den and she was big-as-a-house pregnant and she was wearing a sheer maternity top that showed her breasts voluptuous through the thin black material and her face was so soft and mellow with beauty, so F-ing Ingres-like ivory complexion, deep blue eyes, gold-standard-perfect nose, bee-stung red lips--my God I was suddenly kicking myself in the ass for being so naive; this beautiful creature now so obviously bearing this overaged-dumbass's little bastard could have been mine; I had sole possession of her love at 12 and just because we got sent to different school districts.

She actually apologized to me when I finally got her alone. "For what?" I asked. "Because I was your girl one time and I want you to know that." Dammit, I was kicking myself in the ass again. I kissed her once before she left that day--a sweet kiss, a good kiss, a hot kiss--and I felt me urging myself against her extruding belly and her returning the urge--and then she was gone and I never saw her again; I did hear later that she eventually divorced the overaged dumbass and had married a career officer in the Air Force and lived in New Jersey.

After that day I began tooting to my friends and anybody who'd listen to me how I was never going to marry. Marriage was bullshit; just the way for the state to collect another form of tax from us. Why do you need a license to get married? How does that legitimize a union? How does it even legitimize children? Marriage; bullshit, I said; all it is is mating, the instinctual urge in us to mate and copulate and procreate--there is salvation in sex.

And then one day in a sweltering winter in Big D Little A Double L A Ass, in the living room of a young woman's brother, with her father officiating, I took the walk--yep, I married, a beautiful young California girl, with dark raven hair, with a wonderful youthful figure, so full and fresh and clean-lined and symmetrical to the touch and so willing to open unto me and to love me.

I did get married, yes, I did, but it didn't last. Yes, it lasted 10 years, but it wasn't ten years of peace, love, and tie-dye--it wasn't a marriage to write sonnets about, but it lasted and I was resigned to stick it out, though kind'a right off the bat I knew I didn't love this woman--but I didn't hate her either--we never fought--we had sex--but I didn't feel any love for her.

My contemplation leads to: is hate the opposite of love? Is hate love withdrawn? Once you love someone and they totally reject your love does you taking your love back turn it into a hate thing? I mean "hate" in a marriage sense; that which leads to divorce, which my loveless cohabitation led to--I never told her I loved and her and, yes, vice versa, she never told me she loved me either. Two plus two almost equals mutual hate.

You know something, both of us came from the same environments. There was no love in our environments--her parents had so many kids they couldn't love them all all the time and who the hell knows if they loved them at all? The first time I kissed my wife-to-be and unbuttoned her shirt and began fondling her breasts I almost told her I loved her. I remember the night. We were at a drive-in movie--I have no idea what the movie was, but I knew my objective that night and I pulled it off, deep-deep passionate tongue kissing and then the opening of clothes and the feeling up and the heat rising from the kissing and feverish touching and when she collapsed against me with a moan when I touched her clitoris--I almost said it, I wanted to, I really wanted to say, "God, baby, I love you--let's get married."

You know something weird? I think I married trying to make up for missing the boat on that first true girlfriend of mine--I mean I had her, too, and I couldn't say I loved her.... And that wasn't my first marriage either--and that's the irony that I love so well. I wrote earlier about my first marriage. If sex is love, then I was really in love during that short-stint marriage that really wasn't a marriage--and, hell, here I go, off on another adventure in the whirling dervish world of my romance. Is romance love? I hate the opposite of love?

Some more irony: one could say, theoretically, that I was never divorced from any of my wives. Ponder that, dear friends.

OK, Tina, you're right, love is a second-hand emotion.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler