By Emilio Martinez
LIFE WITH MY WIFE TWISTS AND TURNS and always throws me a surprise. "Carpe diem," she cries as she runs in where angels fear to tread. She once turned a Sunday drive into a trip to a chess tournament in Georgia simply because she read "Gone With the Wind."
Frustratingly capricious, at times. Dull, never. Like the time we landed up in the mental hospital together...But I'm getting ahead of myself.
When we were first getting to know each other, she told me "let's run away together...to a cabin in the woods." I had just met her. I didn't need this kind of reckless abandonment in my life. I needed stability. Self-control.
Well, I ran away instead. I'm still running, though I haven't seen that cabin yet. I think she tricked me. You see, when she walks out of the room, I feel lost. I wonder what to do, and then I wonder why to bother doing it. If she died, I might just sit down and not do anything else. She fires me alive.
And no one else ruffles me. Judge me, ignore me, insult me, misunderstand me, curse me--I won't really care when I lay down to sleep at night. I will detach from the illusion of your hostility. Yet if SHE does not seem to approve of something I do, I have to work myself down from a tempest of indignation and fear.
I admit it, in this world of suffering, I have willingly attached to her… and I am not letting go.
Remember with me the first time I saw her: "Hey, who's that?"
Don't fool yourself, though, I asked that about a lot of pretty women. The next thought came quickly: "Hold on. I'm not in this place to pick up girls."
I definitely did not need to go there.
But I did. I wanted to. It took me a day because if I was to go down that path, I was not going to run. But there I was, a day later. And the day after. And the next.
Two weeks later, we agreed to get married. I know, sounds crazy. But hey, our neighbors thought it was a good idea.
"You should have the wedding right here,” they said, “We'll all come."
Here I was, entering into a lifetime commitment with someone I had barely met. Perhaps I wasn't becoming committed to the right institution.
SEX AT FIRST SIGHT
I can exhibit a tendency to jump into the river before checking the depth. Like with that girlfriend before my wife. I'll cut to the chase--the first date ended up in her bedroom. I wasn't expecting it; I just went with the flow. And then I felt guilty. I imagined that we could get married, but she seemed confused when I mentioned it. A few late nights later she left me for her ex-boyfriend. Sadly, there wasn't much to leave. The sexual tension that had built up between us over two years of friendship left only ashes after that brief burst into flames. I only recently realized that I never learned how to spell her name.
But then I had a second chance at love, and we know how the story ended--my second chance has lasted for eight years. But I didn't know that when I started. I was no fortune teller. No, I had a habit more like a guy at the craps table who's down a grand. "C'mon. It's gotta pay off. I've been at the table all night!"
God, I needed self-control. This chance had to be different. No indiscriminate sex. No making out in public places. No holding hands, even. Not if I could help it. Yes, I was going to get married to a woman I had just met. But, no. I was not going to sleep with her.
Wow. I had never had that. Getting engaged before getting it on. Here we were, promised to each other, and I had never even kissed her. Now, the pages of Cosmopolitan and Maxim would decry this is as one of the great follies of life--not going for a test-drive on the road to love. After all, I could’ve be under-endowed; she could’ve been a cold fish. What kind of love life could we expect if we hadn't screwed each other's brains out before finding out what our middle names were?
Well, this time, I did not know the taste of her lips, but I knew her middle name was Jane. And I knew that I was just wasting time if I waited another day to get her into my life.
But here we were, practicing the safest sex of all--no sex. Of course, we had some help. We couldn't have done anything with each other than get engaged. You see, just like an old black-and-white movie, there were censors watching over the love scenes, keeping them to winks and nods and innuendo. And the sexual tension that built up between us could only play out in the imaginations of the audience.…
"SO, WHERE DID YOU MEET YOUR WIFE?"
Whenever I get that question, I come home and tell my wife. We chuckle, we blush, we reminisce.
"Oh, Emilio. I hope you didn't tell them, I'll be so embarrassed."
Of course no aphrodisiac works better, no marriage therapist brings us closer together than this phrase:
"Remember how we were in the hospital?"
The hospital? Yes, we met in the hospital. No, we weren't working there, we were patients. And we couldn't leave, because it was a mental hospital. Yes, you heard it right, I met my wife in a mental hospital:
The place: the dayroom of a state mental facility. The walls of the ward haven't been painted in years, and when they last were, the only color that was available was institutional yellow. The drab clock at the nurse's station reads 9:55--five minutes before bedtime.
A cute, young woman sits on the couch in the TV area. She seems a bit too lucid to be a patient, but her bare feet and dressed-down clothes discount her as anything but a patient. Her arms and legs shake and bounce in a eurythmic dance.
A man, dressed in a red t-shirt and black sweats, walks behind her headed for a drinking fountain.
SHE: Hey, what are you in here for?
HE (making a quick turn to jump on the couch beside her): Oh, they tell me I think I'm Abraham Lincoln.
(She giggles.)
HE: So, what are you in here for?
SHE (pointing to the dance she's caught in): This. I can't stop.
HE: Oh, yeah, I get that. It's like disco on crack.
(She giggles again. But even more so: she understands.)
NURSE: Okay, everybody. Lights out...
Those five minutes changed my life. The next day she had my semi-delusional roommate wake me up for breakfast, and we spent every waking moment together until we were released three weeks later.
In that time, I could do nothing more erotic than ask her to marry me.
You see, if I as much as pecked her on the lips, a large, burly psych tech would come up to me and escort me to the "quiet room." And if I resisted, I risked being strapped down next to a schizophrenic who was screaming about how he killed JFK. So, instead, I sat in the milieu of my "heat," my desire, my passion and I bore the stress, the strain, and the tension.
But then suddenly, I didn't feel so crazy anymore. I could imagine myself holding a job, building a family, and finishing things I had started. I could even wait a patient moment before jumping in the river. And we jumped into the river. We got out, got jobs, got a place, got married, and then got two kids.
If I hadn't have waited those few weeks in lockdown, I may have never seen her again. They would have separated us immediately, without allowing us to even say good-bye. I would have then just checked out alone, headed home to my mother's basement, and given up.
I never would have gotten the chance to be in love, and not just insane.
"A MEASURE OF SELF-CONTROL BRINGS A MEASURE OF SELF-RESPECT"
Now what if everyone who had an impulse, sexual or otherwise, didn't think they had to act on it. What if they could ignore that inner voice that said, "Do it! Or you'll explode!"
In chess, the master beats the amateur because the amateur breaks the tension on the board before the game ripens for the attack.
It took one mental hospital and one woman who I couldn't kiss for me to learn that. It also took me one gamble with a girl who had to wait just a little before I ran away with her forever.
You haven't lived until you've witnessed the cultural force that is Denver-based performance artist Emilio Martinez. He sings, he dances, he tells irreverent jokes about religion and Manifest editor Paul Salamone's current employer. The one thing he will NOT do is shut up. Stay tuned for more Emilio....
