I have no idea how many people visit my website, but I’m sure it’s much less than I’d like. That’s my own fault. I don’t do social media, I don’t post new material often, and I never respond to email offers that I get practically every day to increase traffic to my site – for a fee, of course. As to the last consideration, I believe that only a fool would deal with an unknown individual or company with no phone number and no street address – and such companies proliferate on the ‘net.
Nevertheless, from time to time people use the contact form to send me an email. Nearly all have been positive, telling me how they enjoyed, and in some cases learned a few things from, reading one of my compositions. Shortly after the piece titled “Alcohol’n’Me” was posted, an American reader, ten years younger than me, wrote to tell me that he was in full agreement with my take on race, politics, and the Jewish problem. However, he took me to task over my lighthearted attitude in regard to drinking. Alcoholism had destroyed his family, he told me. I forget all the details, but as I recall his mother drank heavily when she was pregnant with him, which resulted in a minor but permanent impairment. He himself had been an alcoholic, as had his late brother. We actually spoke on the phone a few times. He was very serious on the subject of alcohol, and told me that I was kidding myself if I thought I didn’t have a drinking problem. Our conversations and email exchanges were always respectful, however, but we’ve lost touch over the past year. I hope he’s doing well.
For my part, I think he’s wrong. I guess it depends on how you define the word problem. I wrote about getting drunk a few times in “Alcohol’n’Me,” which was posted in January 2022. Since then I’ve gotten drunk maybe twice and I can’t remember the last time I bought a bottle of wine or liquor, but I do crave a small hit of alcohol most days. I’m in a routine now where I jump in the car, maybe five days out of the week, and drive a mile to the convenience store and buy one 19-ounce can of beer, usually in the late morning or early afternoon. My current favorite is Voodoo Ranger Imperial IPA, which at 9% alcohol content is pretty potent, but it has no effect on me. One can and I’m good for the day.
Words are interesting critters. Alcohol is a drug, of course, but saying I crave that daily can of beer sounds a lot better than saying I’m a drug addict. I wish that craving, as minor as it is, would end. It takes me back more than thirty years ago when I smoked, though never heavily, maybe seven or eight cigarettes a day. Just as with alcohol, I didn’t trust myself with having a full pack around, so I’d ask one of my co-workers for a smoke, then after a few days buy him a pack to make up for what I had bummed. It got on his nerves, but in a fun kind of way. I just craved drawing that smoke into my lungs. Your body demands it. I quit many times but then I’d start again, usually over a drink. But during one of my abstentions, I reached a point where I simply didn’t crave it anymore. I haven’t lit a cigarette since, and I certainly don’t miss it. I’d like that craving for alcohol to disappear the same way, but if it doesn’t, I don’t imagine that one can of beer on most days will subtract a single day from my life. If it does, it does. Then again, the nutrients in dark beer may add a few days. Who knows?
In “Alcohol’n’Me” I mentioned, in a humorous vein, how I had to have a drink before dealing with my ex-wife on the phone, and how I could tell when she was deep into a bottle of wine, her adult beverage of choice, maybe even a second bottle, by the drowsy way she spoke, though without slurring her words. I much preferred this to her usual edginess. Last year I spoke with her on the phone five or six times, on routine matters regarding our children, and she sounded drowsy each time. Once I came right out and asked her, “Are you drunk?” No, she said. I had my doubts, but I thought it was possibly a side effect of some medication she was taking. I never knew her to drink heavily so often, especially in the middle of the day.
My disabled 30-year-old son lives semi-independently in an apartment two miles from the house in Connecticut where he grew up, and where I lived for three years before going through a bitter divorce which turned my life upside-down, though that’s all in the rear-view mirror. I live 160 miles away and usually see him every third weekend. For years I’ve been calling him on Monday and Thursday nights. Earlier this year I called on Thursday to ask what he had planned for Mommy’s birthday, and he said he’d be going to the house on Saturday, where he often stayed on the weekend anyway, as did her male companion of many years. I called him Monday and asked him how the little party went, and he told me she had been rushed to the hospital in Middletown on Saturday because she was vomiting blood, and the doctors had mentioned liver failure. I don’t know much about the symptoms of end-stage alcoholism, but I do recall reading that the same thing, vomiting blood, happened to Jack Kerouac, of On the Road fame, who for years was never far from an open whiskey bottle. He died the next day.
When I next spoke to my son, he told me that her kidneys were shutting down and that she had been transferred to Yale New Haven Hospital because they had better dialysis equipment, though he doesn’t understand any of that. On Friday afternoon, he called to tell me she had died that morning. It came as no surprise at this point, and I was glad that he seemed to be taking it okay. I was a bit sad and numb but felt no grief. It seemed like the inevitable end for a woman who was so neurotic and destructive, who I could best describe simply as a lost soul. It also was a lesson that, as my acquaintance tried to impress upon me, alcohol abuse is no laughing matter. I now feel a bit regretful about treating the matter with such levity.
I knew Nancy Samler for 38 years of my life. I can’t say I knew one day of genuine happiness with her. At the lowest point, the five-year period from when our daughter was diagnosed as autistic to the day we reached a final divorce settlement, I lived in a state of despair with the constant feeling that my life was over, that I had wasted my life by marrying this woman. Then again, I had only myself to blame because after the first year with her I knew she had serious psychological problems, that there was no real love between us, and that we weren’t meant for each other. I could have and should have ended the relationship at that point, before she made some major changes in her own life that made me feel committed. It would have been relatively painless for both of us but I was too weak to do it. Life does not forgive weakness.
Ours was a marriage made in Hell. How do you stand there, taking vows in a brief, civil ceremony, and think to yourself, “Why the hell am I doing this?” Well, I did it, because I felt trapped and torn about a lot of things. No one ever said life is easy. We were married in Saratoga Springs, New York on October 5, 1991, but at the time we had been living together for three years and trying to make a baby, first in Arlington, a suburb of Boston, then in Amityville on Long Island. If I was at fault for anything, it was my fertility impairment, which I’m certain was caused by the many vaccinations I’d gotten in the 1980s, when I traveled extensively around the Third World. I discuss this in the opening pages of my book Will Vaccines Be the End of Us? I went along with her wishes and did in vitro, the first big decision I was uncomfortable with; my gut feeling was that injecting hormones into her as a preparatory procedure carried unknown risks, though I never looked into it. Nor did I feel confident with the fertility doctors. In 1997, three years after our children were born three months premature because of the poor advice these doctors gave us, we moved to Clinton, Connecticut, fifty miles north of the affluent town of Weston where she grew up.
Clinton is a nice little town on the shoreline – I still miss it – but moving there was the second bad decision I made against my better judgment, only because there was no other way of continuing to live under the same roof with this impossible woman. It’s a long, complicated story, and as they say, there are two sides to every story, but for what it’s worth you’re only going to hear a tiny bit of my side of it. By the end of the year things began to unravel only because I had to go along with her wishes to keep from going insane. Living with this woman was Chinese water torture.
On February 22, 1999, my wife served divorce papers on me. The word divorce had never been mentioned, and coming totally out of the blue, it shocked me. My first thought was, “What new chapter of horrors is she opening for me this time,” but there was also a feeling of “something had to give” and here it is. And so began well over three years of litigation. I was so naive at the time. I was willing to move out of the house and I thought we could work out an equitable agreement, but I had no inkling that all she was interested in was total war, nor did I know what total war entailed. From time to time, I’d read newspaper stories of men driven to suicide or murder by the stress and strain of divorce, but I could never relate to it. How could it be that bad, I wondered. Now I know.
Upon the recommendation of my boss at work, I hired a bull-dyke who had a reputation as the meanest divorce lawyer in the county. We had several conferences at her office and never got along. After nearly a year of my wife filing motions for this and that, and a failed attempt by a lawyer-mediator to resolve the whole thing, we were supposed to go to trial in January 2000, but it got postponed over some personal bullshit on the bull-dyke’s part that involved a medical crisis with her lesbian partner. So it got pushed up six months. One week before trial, out of pure vindictiveness, she dumped me and handed the case to a young male lawyer who rented part of her office and knew nothing about it. He had to do a lot of cramming. The trial took place in the Middlesex County courthouse in Middletown on July 18, 2000. I had known my wife for nearly fifteen years at this point, but I had never known her to lie the way she did when she was on the stand. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – I wanted to jump out of my seat and shout “That’s a lie!” – but knowing nothing of judicial protocol I just sat there steaming and her lies about me went unanswered. And she was an extremely persuasive liar who could convince you that 2 + 2 = 37. My lawyer was not prepared to cross-examine her, and not knowing me well, was probably having his own doubts about me. My dear father, who had gotten sucked into this mess, was in the courtroom and testified. He had loaned us $100,000 to buy the house which cost 124K, as a step to saving our marriage, with the understanding that we had to make monthly payments to him. I felt uneasy when we went to closing, that the house should have been in his name instead of ours – actually, that we shouldn’t have moved to Clinton and bought a house at all – even though we both understood that it was a mortgage, informally speaking. But at our trial she testified that it was a gift.
The judge, James Higgins, was a grumpy old man who died of cancer six months later. I’m not sure if he was sick at the time. His conduct was horrible. I later learned that he had set a state record for appeals filed against his decisions. What kind of system is it when such an incompetent judge can stay on the bench for decades and be allowed to ruin the lives of decent people over and over? He handed down his ruling nine days after the trial. It was filled with half-truths and outright lies about me, making me out to be an underemployed bum who didn’t take my children’s problems seriously and sat around doing nothing while my wife worked her tail off doing everything possible on their behalf. The fact is that I had led an exemplary life other than being verbally abusive towards her, which worked both ways, and I make no apologies for that. I was already broke at this point (my father was paying my lawyer bills) thanks to a disastrous work situation which my wife had caused, and which I never got to testify about, but Higgins ordered weekly child support payments of $300, which was double the state guideline, and saddled me with other debts I had no way of paying. He ruled that the house was a gift and awarded it to her, along with all household contents. At 46, I had no choice but to move back to Long Island and live with my parents. My lawyer was shocked, telling me it was the most brutal divorce ruling he had ever come across. He advised me to appeal, which I did just before the deadline. Although this man had done a good job under the circumstances, I could tell that he was intimidated by my wife’s lawyer and was no longer going to fight for me, so I dropped him and went pro se. I bought two books which I studied diligently, Civil Litigation in Connecticut and Connecticut Practice Book and became my own lawyer. God, it’s such a racket. Anyone with half a brain can become his own lawyer. It’s true, as you may have heard, that most judges are blatantly biased against pro se defendants, but it proved to be the best thing I ever did.
During the trial, my lawyer held up a sheet of paper on which my wife, in applying for Social Security benefits for our children, stated that we had taken out a mortgage, though legally speaking there was none. Higgins was so swayed by my wife’s supposedly sole concern about our kids that he brushed this aside in his ruling. In advance of our trial, seeing the writing on the wall, my father filed a lawsuit against both of us (I was totally on his side but technically he had to include me as a defendant) to recover his $100,000. Higgins acknowledged this lawsuit in his decision, which threw a monkey wrench into the works, and he spelled out conditions pending its outcome. Also, there was an issue of stocks that my father had put in our names years earlier, so that we could profit from the dividends, which we did, though we were obligated to pay income tax on them. Obviously, we came out ahead. Even a financial knucklehead like me who to this day has never been involved in the stock market can understand that. Neither of us had any idea how all this worked, and in applying for Social Security benefits my wife innocently failed to mention that we owned stocks. When the matter came up on some federal tax return printout, we were contacted by a bureaucrat and told that we had been ineligible for benefits, and had to pay all of it back, around $15,000. (In his decision, Higgins ordered me to pay this entire amount.) In a subsequent motion, my wife’s slimeball lawyer, who was now representing her in both cases, explicitly accused my father of tax evasion, and God knows where that would lead. This putrid lie caused him much distress. Had he not been generous in any way, had he just kept his distance and done nothing for either of us, he would’ve been spared all this grief, which took a heavy toll on him. “No good deed goes unpunished,” as the saying goes. At some point he broke out in shingles, which is well-known to be triggered by stress; the pain tormented him for months.
This tax evasion crap enraged me, and now that I was on my own pro se, and having learned the ropes of the judicial system, I started faxing the shyster’s office with messages that I would file a complaint with the state bar grievance committee, that I would file a federal lawsuit against him and send a copy to the local newspapers, and that I would picket his office with provocative signs. It’s a safe bet that his staff picked up these messages from the fax machine and read them, and that my threats rattled him. That was my intent; I wanted to wear him down to bring this whole thing to a close. Throughout all of it my now ex-wife and I filed more motions, and I had to show up in court five or six times in Middletown, a 240-mile round trip for me for a ridiculous ten-minute hearing that solved nothing. I also was legally obligated to file all this garbage, which contained much derogatory language directly aimed at her lawyer, with the appellate court in Hartford, and they reached the point where they had enough and warned me that if I sent them one more malicious letter they would deny my appeal and throw the case out. That made me back off. In my pleadings to the appellate court, a copy of which I was required to send to her lawyer, I laid out the whole story of our marriage that I never got to testify about during our trial. There was much emotion in what I wrote, but I never got a response from them, other than the stern warning I mentioned, and my guess is that all of it fell on deaf ears. By now I was pretty sure that my ex-wife’s lawyer realized that she had misled him about me, that I was a nice, responsible guy, not a dirtbag, and she was a mental case, and that he wanted nothing more to do with her.
Things reached the point where this was taking a toll on everyone. I learned, from my father’s lawyer – with whom I was working as a team, even though she had to name me as a defendant, which should tell you how crazy all of this was – that this case had gotten a great deal of discussion among the legal community in Middlesex County as a hopelessly complicated judicial nightmare, with my handicapped children at the center of it, that had no solution, that no lawyer would want to get involved with and no judge would want to touch. Yet it dragged on, and the date of my father’s trial against us was fast approaching. One week ahead of it we drove up to her office in Madison to prepare for it. She had typed a long question and answer rehearsal of how she intended to examine him on the stand. When I read it I almost fell asleep. She really was a nice lady who felt for my father as if he were her own father, but she was timid, by-the-book, and I could picture a judge snoring after listening to two minutes of this. Meanwhile, the wheels were turning in my own head. I really wanted to head off this trial, which I instinctively knew would solve nothing, no matter how it ended. After discussing it with my father and getting his approval, I hammered out a settlement proposal which he gave to his lawyer, and which she would have to run by my ex-wife’s lawyer, whom she was friendly with, who in turn would have to run it by my ex-wife’s father, who from the beginning had been coaching her and paying her lawyer bills. My scumbag father-in-law, who hated my guts for reasons I’ll never understand, was in the courtroom during our trial and was happy to see me get buried by Higgins’s ruling, which he knew was a pack of lies. But he hadn’t bargained for my counterattack, and at 78 I’m sure this was wearing him down and he didn’t want it to go on indefinitely.
The legal community in Middlesex County, as I said, dreaded this case, which seemingly had no solution. But it did have a solution, based on the truth, that is, the plain facts of the whole matter which not one lawyer or superior court or appellate court judge or the useless mediator ever showed any interest in fleshing out. That solution was a settlement that I, and I alone came up with, a settlement that everyone could live with, and forget about any airy notion of “justice”: my child support would be reduced to $150 a week, which was the state guideline for two children (I had been paying her $100 a week after getting a new job on Long Island) and the accrued two-year debt of $20,000 (Connecticut’s child support enforcement agency had been mailing me monthly computer printouts of my ever-increasing delinquency) wiped off the slate, along with the $15,000 owed to Social Security, which her father agreed to pay; she would own the house free and clear; and my father would drop his lawsuit and get screwed out of $100,000, though he had the satisfaction of seeing a huge burden lifted off my shoulders; and even though he got a royal shafting from his former daughter-in-law, he sympathized with her plight, particularly in caring for our autistic daughter (whom she put in a group home two years later) – and of course he wanted to see his grandchildren, with all their problems, safe and secure in their own house. The settlement was affirmed in court on July 9, 2002, the very morning we were scheduled to go to trial. I’m sure everyone was content, including the judge. Judges love settlements, I had learned from studying the system, because it reduces their workload – and this was one case every judge wanted to run away from. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and was able to start a new life.
Two months later my father, aged 76, had a heart attack and I will always believe that this affair caused it. It was very stressful for him, almost as stressful as it was for me; I endured a full year with a constant dull pain in my chest. He had open heart surgery, which went well, and lived to the ripe old age of 90. The whole case, from beginning to end, was about money, money, money, but eight months later my ex-wife filed a motion to change the site where we met to exchange the children on visitation weekends so that it was less driving for her, even though it was already hugely in her favor – 90 miles for me and 30 miles for her each way. I forget what prompted this, but it was such petty, childish, vindictive bullshit, so typical of her. This time we stood for a brief hearing in front of a new judge, unfamiliar with our case, and after she spoke first I convinced him that she was lying now and had been lying for years, and the following week he denied her motion in writing. That was the last time we went to court.
I was amazed to discover that Judge James Higgins’s decision of July 27, 2000 is there for anyone to read on the internet – as is the other stupid nonsense of March 2003 – simply by typing in our names. Is there any privacy left in this world? I can laugh about it now, of course. The thing is so absurd, so far from the truth, that anyone who knows me and reads it would shake his head in disbelief. When I run for president of the United States in 2028, and they dig up dirt on me and gloat about this, I guarantee you it’s going to blow up in their faces.
Anyone who’s on the unjust end of a lengthy, bitterly contested divorce knows what an ordeal it is, how it consumes one’s life and becomes the only issue that matters, and about which one needs to vent constantly, even though it’s a personal pain that those who haven’t been through it can never understand and don’t want to hear about. Of course, it’s long past for me now, and I never talk about it anymore, but back then, as a man who wears my heart on my sleeve, I talked about it way too much. What was done to me was a raging injustice, but afterwards I became philosophical about it, pondering the billions of people past and present who have endured raging injustices, and the fact that most people have experienced trauma or grief over something that could have been avoided if only we lived in a better world.
Several years ago, I read a gripping book, A Civil Action, by a Jonathan Harr, which was about children dying of leukemia in the 1970s in Woburn, Massachusetts, near Boston, because of two huge industrial corporations knowingly contaminating the water supply. The book became a #1 bestseller and won a prestigious literary award, and deservedly so. An excerpt from the blurb on the back cover reads:
This is the true story of an epic courtroom showdown. Two of the nation’s largest corporations stand accused of causing the deaths of children. Representing the bereaved parents, the unlikeliest of heroes emerges: a young, flamboyant Porsche-driving lawyer who hopes to win millions of dollars and ends up nearly losing everything – including his sanity. A Civil Action is the searing, compelling tale of a legal system gone awry – one in which greed and power fight an unending struggle against justice. Yet it is also the story of how one man can ultimately make a difference….
Well, I was never flamboyant, I never drove a sports car, and my case did not involve corporate greed and power, but I can easily relate to the rest. I have long toyed with the idea of writing a book about my own case, but I doubt that’ll ever happen. I still have all the paperwork from those years – correspondence from lawyers, mine and hers, motions, billings and whatnot, the trial transcript, and much else besides – stored in a cardboard box and shopping bag in my basement. There’s a ton of it (actually 28 pounds: I just weighed it). And I just opened a couple of envelopes and glanced at the contents to momentarily relive that period. I can’t say that it opened up old wounds, but rather that it depressed me when I think that, being a fair and reasonable guy, whatever my shortcomings – and I admit to not always being the easiest person to live with – all of this could’ve been avoided. We could’ve settled this whole thing from the start, on terms nearly identical to the final settlement, without all the anguish and money thrown down the lawyer rathole.
Harr’s brief bio mentions that he had written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. I’ve noticed over the years that authors like him who have an “in” easily get their books published and often get good or rave reviews, which is the lifeblood of the book trade. It’s one of those injustices of life that I and thousands of others of talented, obscure writers can’t get our works published by any of the big houses. Of course, self-publishing is always an option, but I’ve gone that route twice and I won’t do it again because I know from experience that I’d be lucky to sell 500 copies, even with an ambitious marketing effort. (If, by chance, some literary agent or editor at a major New York publisher is reading this, and is willing to offer me a hefty advance – ho ho ho – I may reconsider.) And that’s really too bad, because I know I could reach the depths of every reader’s heart, not only with all the emotions connected with well over three years of litigation, but so many of the other trials, predicaments, joys and struggles that nearly everyone faces in the passage through life: of the right kind and wrong kind of upbringing; of good families and dysfunctional families (hers, not mine); of the deep regret not marrying someone you loved and marrying someone you didn’t; of the importance of having good values; of the inner turmoil of facing hard decisions; of the heavy price to pay for being weak; of the lifelong heartache of having disabled children; and of a hundred other things, even the smallest things that stay in our minds.
Just now, for example, I’m thinking about how I risked and lost a good job trying to please this woman, and ended up driving a propane truck for a miserable company that I hated working for. Yet, I found inner peace for nine hours every workday escaping a pressure cooker situation at home and being alone all day doing productive work; how pleasant it was plying country roads in eastern Connecticut, especially in the fall when the leaves change color. In delivering propane to a dozen trailer parks I even learned a few new things about people and life. And – I know this is extremely subjective – I still remember some of the current hits that played on the truck radio in those few relaxing hours in the eye of that emotional hurricane, how I was able to squeeze out a few drops of joy listening to music and, well, you know how you forever associate certain songs with major life events. I still remember the little pleasure I got out of hearing tunes like You’re Still the One by Shania Twain, Torn by Natalie Imbruglia, and Truly, Madly, Deeply by Savage Garden.
Sometimes I ponder life’s mysteries, and wonder, had my wife been brought up differently, had she been instilled with discipline instead of delusions of aristocracy, and spoiled rotten, maybe we could’ve had a good life together. There was, from the beginning, a mutual physical attraction, and as I wrote in “Alcohol’n’Me” a wonderful intimacy. Down deep there was some kind of sublime connection. Through the roughest years we almost always slept in separate rooms, but there were times when both of us had to give in to those deep stirrings. What men and women do behind closed doors should forever remain their secret, so all I’ll say is that a gratifying sexual relationship is one of life’s treasures, and ours was as close to perfect as anyone could hope for. One other thing still perplexes me. My wife had an inclination for outdoor adventure; as a matter of fact, we first met through an ad in a defunct newsletter called Outdoor People. In 1987 we made a trip to the Pacific Northwest and I joined a class 3 white water rafting trip on the Rogue River in Oregon. She didn’t accompany me, as she had the done the same level rafting previously in Maine and said that one of those was enough, which was just how I felt at the end. I was impressed that she, of all people, an habitual nervous wreck, had done something like that. The following year we traveled to southern Africa for two months, and once in Zimbabwe and twice in Botswana we pitched a tent in big game reserves, where we didn’t sleep too well, with all those nerve-wracking animal sounds at night, and we had a few other daunting moments around hippos and elephants. I don’t think one in a hundred women are that adventurous. Yet years later she freaked out when there was a tiny leak in the gas tank of her car, and worried that it might blow up, she refused to drive it. I guess that’s more frightening than the outside chance of being dragged out of a tent and eaten by lions! Go figure. She had serious anxiety issues and took Xanax for years, though it didn’t do anything for her.
So there you are. What began as a sad and simple story about alcohol abuse expanded into a microcosm of my life since 1985, written in place of a riveting book that will go unwritten, and on some level a tribute to the woman I made the fatal mistake of marrying, as strange as that may sound. I guess I had to get it out of my system. There was a memorial service for her on July 20, and I wondered if I would be invited, since, compared to earlier times, things were fairly civil between us for twenty years. But I wasn’t invited and that was fine with me because I wouldn’t have attended. But when you have children with someone it creates a permanent bond of flesh and blood, and if there’s one good thing I can say about her it’s that she worked tirelessly to give our kids, especially our son, the best life possible, though she always shut me out of the decision-making process. She was cremated, leaving nothing to remember her by, so I’ll end this by saying rest in peace, Nancy, and adding a simple inscription:
NANCY OGDEN SAMLER
JANUARY 16, 1957 – JANUARY 26, 2024