In 1988, Fleetwood Mac and a Shotgun Wedding Changed My Life
Life never turns out the way you expect it to
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In 1988, I was 20 years old and more of a boy than a man. Married for a year already, I felt I was trapped in a marriage I didn’t want and didn’t ask for. I say I was a boy because a man wouldn’t have gotten himself in this situation, and if he had, he would have made it right somehow. In the end, I handled the next few years and decades badly, and in the process, ruined several lives that may have had a chance otherwise.
“Loving you
Isn’t the right thing to do
How can I ever change things
That I feel”Go Your Own Way — Fleetwood Mac
I met my first wife in the normal way boys and girls meet. I was the manager of a movie theater, quite an accomplishment for an 18-year-old high school dropout, but there I was with my blue suit, tearing tickets for the show-goers on a Friday night.
I would often walk by the concession stand to speak with the box office and on my way always stopped and flirted with giggling girls behind the counter. All of us did, by all I mean the projectionists, ushers, ticket-takers, and managers who ran the three theaters in town.
In fact, I flirted with everyone that came near me, because I was at that age where I still thought that all women found me irresistible.
That night, there was a new girl behind the counter, and whether it was first-day jitters or a well-developed bullshit meter, I couldn’t get her to even smile at me. She was Native American with long black hair that I always found sexy in an earthy way, with bold features and an air about her that said she wouldn’t be flirting with someone like me anytime soon.
How I did love a challenge.
“All your life you’ve never seen
Woman taken by the wind
Would you stay if she promised you heaven?
Will you ever win?”Rhiannon — Fleetwood Mac
No amount of charm seemed to melt the ice queen, but I must have made some impact because one day I was asking around the theater if anyone wanted to go with me to see Van Halen in Albuquerque. Strangely enough, she snuck up behind me and said she would go.
My friend Paul and I were mystified because she had shown little or no interest in anything to do with me up until this point.
After a concert and several months of the drama that always seems to surround me, we ended up together, sharing a drafty one-bedroom in Gallup, New Mexico in the frigid winter of 1986.
We had been through a lot, enough to know that I had misgivings about our relationship and its future. One of the main things that came between us was her proclivity for telling untruths and sticking by them no matter what.
Shortly after, I left my job and couldn’t find another, so I called my parents and asked them to bail me out. I was going to move back to Tucson and leave all the drama I had created in New Mexico.
But, she said she had no place to go, and I could tell she wasn’t just going to let me go. Then the bombshell when I was about to walk out forever: she was pregnant, but hadn’t told me until now.
Now, I grew up in a strict religious household, and one of the things I was taught was that you don’t abandon your blood, so at the last minute, we loaded up her stuff in the back of my 1971 Plymouth Valiant and headed for the desert.
“Oh, thunder only happens when it’s raining
Players only love you when they’re playing
Say, women, they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know
You’ll know.”Dreams — Fleetwood Mac
The thing you have to understand about my parents is that their religion is everything to them. Our family lived in a bubble where the outside world was only an intrusion, and the only thing that mattered was that the world was coming to an end, and if we wanted to be in paradise, we had to do whatever the church said we had to do.
My parents were willing to help me, even though I sinned and had premarital sex and got someone pregnant, but there was no way they would let me live with her, in a house they would provide if we lived unwed in sin.
Even though I was nowhere near ready for marriage, I became a married man the day I arrived in Tucson, standing in the office of the judge with my mom and dad smiling in the corner.
To them, it seemed simple. The Bible was cut and dried, and there would be no deviation from it as long as they were in charge. I was still unsure there even was a baby, and I was in no way shape, or form ready for something like marriage.
But, I became a husband, and did my best, even when a few months later I asked why her stomach wasn’t growing and she nonchalantly told me she had lost the baby a few weeks ago, but forgot to tell me.
I knew I had been duped, and the boy in me want to flee. But the man stuck with the commitment and made the best of everything. I worked until my fingers bled and tried to be the person she wanted me to be, but I was always looking for something different.
I was always looking for what I would never have.
“I’ll be around if you think you might love me baby,
And hold me tight.
Your mood is like a circus wheel,
You’re changing all the time,
Sometimes I can’t help but feel,
That I’m wasting all of my time.”Over My Head — Fleetwood Mac
Time went on while Fleetwood played on repeat. Time went on and so did life. There were good times and bad, children and heartbreak, infidelity, more lies, and untruth that a couple should not have between them.
Eventually, my mental illness scraped raw the flash that had somehow stuck to our relationship, and after decades together, three kids, and a whole lot of memories, we went our separate ways, she to the arms of someone who would be her soulmate, and me, to the deep and dark recesses of a rabbit hole I built for myself.
I don’t look back on these days with anger and sorrow, because those days made me the man I am today, but when I think of all that I have loved and lost, Stevie is singing in the background — the soundtrack to my young life.
