

DEDICATION

For Julie, who always encouraged me to write a book.

Unfortunately, this isn't the book I wanted to write.

The Deathbed

I had never called 911 before in my life. I didn't want to do it. My wife didn't want me to dial the number either. She didn't want to go to the hospital, but knew that she had better. She didn't look good, and she was in a lot of pain.

"Did you take some morphine?" I asked her.

"Yeah, but it's not helping."

I guess it was lucky that I had even checked on her. Since Julie got home from the hospital five months earlier, we found it easier to sleep in separate bedrooms. The medical staff had arranged to have an oxygen machine waiting for us when we got to the house. It made a lot of noise. The thing always sounded like it was gasping for air. There was fifty feet of green tubing so she would be able to go almost anywhere in the house without having to remove the nose piece.

It was hard enough for Julie to sleep without getting tangled up in the hose, and if I was in the bed too, it only made things worse. She was also on all kinds of medicine. I couldn't keep track of it all. Between the pain killers and the anti-anxiety pills, she slept most of the time. It was only practical to turn my man cave upstairs into my bedroom as well. There was a futon in there anyway.

The day before I called 911, I had decided to get hospice care involved. My wife was at the stage where she needed care that I couldn't give her. In the previous two weeks she could barely get out of bed. I would try to check on her at least once an hour. I would help her to the bathroom if she needed to go. I would bring her food or bottles of water when she wanted it, but by that time she wasn't eating too much. There were days that all she could manage to eat was half a candy bar. If she needed anything between my hourly checks, she would call or text me.

It was about three a.m. on a chilly October morning when I woke up to go to the bathroom. I noticed that the message light on my phone was blinking. There was a missed call from Julie at eleven p.m. that I had slept through. She texted me and asked if I would bring her down two bottles of water. Since the text had been sent four hours earlier, I thought she would be asleep.

As I walked down the stairs to check on her, I could hear that her TV was on. When I went into the room, she was sitting up in bed.

"Are you okay?"

"I think something is really wrong."

"What?"

"I don't know, but I can feel it."

"Do you want me to call the doctor?"

"Don't call anybody yet. Let me just rest here. Come and check on me in an hour. If I still feel this way, you're going to have to call 911 because I can't make it to the car."

I went back upstairs and just laid in bed. I watched the minutes tick away on the clock until an hour had passed. When I went back down, she looked even worse. I didn't bother to even ask her if she wanted me to call for help, I just did it anyway.

The paramedics asked the standard questions. I let them know that Julie was a cancer patient. She had been diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in May. I told them that only a month earlier she had been doing so well, she had even went back to her job as a bartender. I explained how in the past two weeks she had just deteriorated rapidly.

They asked me what kind of medication she had taken. I told them that I knew about some morphine, but they would have to ask her about anything else. Julie was somewhat confused so the paramedics just wrote down the inventory of all the little brown bottles that were on the night stand.

Julie was placed on a gurney and loaded into the back of an ambulance. I told the paramedics that she needed to be taken to University Hospital where her doctors were and where she had been undergoing her chemotherapy treatments. They couldn't drive her that far so they would be taking her to St. Anthony's. I kissed my wife and told her that I was going to take a shower and I would see her in the emergency room.

When I got to the hospital at about 5:30, Julie still didn't look good but at least she comfortable. They had given her a big dose of Dilaudid, so she was only somewhat coherent. She wondered out loud if they were going to admit her to the hospital or just send her home. The nurse looked up at me, and asked if we could go talk in the hall.

The nurse had tears in her eyes when she started speaking. They had run tests on her before I got there.

"I'm so sorry", the nurse started. "She is too sick to be on the main floor, we are trying to get her a room in intensive care. Your wife has sepsis, and more than likely pneumonia but we need to get a sample before we know for sure."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Your wife's organs are shutting down."

"How serious is it?"

"She's dying."

"You mean like today?"

"Maybe not today, but soon. You're going to have some tough decisions to make."

I thanked the nurse, and stood there numb for a moment. For five months I knew that this day would eventually come. I couldn't believe that it was actually here. This was it. Julie and I had had only vague conversations about this day coming.

As the nurse was walking away she turned around and asked me, "How old is your wife?"

"Forty." I answered.

We spent the rest of that Wednesday, and the next day in a typical hospital fashion. We were always waiting to hear something from the doctors, hoping for any shred of good news. When they did tell us something, it was all in medical jargon so they didn't have to tell us anything definitive. Julie was in and out those two days. She was heavily sedated and they were pumping her full of antibiotics to fight all of the infections that were going through her petite body.

I got to the hospital on Friday morning and I couldn't believe my eyes. Julie was sitting up in the bed. She was alert and laughing with the nurses. Her color looked good and she seemed happy to see me. She even ate a big breakfast of French toast covered in blueberries. Since Julie got sick, I had become well versed in reading the vital sign monitor. All of her numbers looked good.

My sister Carol and our friend Jason dropped by to check on Julie. The four of us talked and laughed for about an hour. After they left, Julie and I kept talking. We both agreed that we had been through some crazy shit since we had met six years earlier. We reminded each other of some of the horrible times we had, but there was no denying that we had had some of the best times of our lives together.

The hospital was close to our house, so in the early afternoon Julie would take a nap and I went home to walk the dog. Before I left, she asked me to bring her back her laptop and an electronic cigarette. I didn't really want to buy her the cigarette, but fuck it, not much harm could be done now.

My daughter Alexis was waiting for me when I got back to the hospital. She wanted to spend the afternoon with us. In the room there was a small commotion going on. Julie looked much paler than she had in the morning. I looked up at the monitor and saw that her blood oxygen level was getting dangerously low. The nurse told me that the nose piece at the end of the hose was not supplying enough oxygen. They were going to have to put a mask on Julie, and she hated those things.

For the rest of the afternoon, whenever she got annoyed with the mask, Julie would just take it off. This would send her b/o level spiraling, which in turn set off an alarm at the nurse's station. The scene kept repeating itself. The nurse came in and scolded her a couple of times. I was getting irritated that she kept taking the mask off.

Julie wanted to listen to some music, so she asked Alexis to bring her the laptop and the headphones. She had to take the mask off to get situated, and once again the oxygen dropped.

"Julie, will you keep the fucking mask on" I said out of frustration. "Your level gets too low when you don't have it on.

She just gave me that evil eye of hers, put on the headphones and turned up the music and flipped me off. Alexis smiled as Julie closed her eyes and did a little dance in the bed. All I could do was shake my head. I needed a cigarette.

By the time I finished smoking, the dancing had worn Julie out. I went over to hold her hand. She told Alexis and me that she was getting tired and wanted to go to sleep. She said she would see us in the morning. Alexis and I walked out to our cars, hugged each other and went our separate ways.

I was about to pull out of the parking lot when my phone rang. It was Julie's doctor asking if I could come back and talk to him. He was waiting at the elevator when I got back up.

"We can't keep your wife's oxygen level where it needs to be with the methods we have been using. If we don't put a breathing tube down her throat, she won't make it through the night."

I didn't know what to say.

"There is an alternative" he continued. "We could just make her as comfortable as possible.

I told him that if it were solely my choice, I would choose to make her as comfortable as possible and let her go, but her parents were on the way out to Colorado from Iowa, and I thought they deserved to see each other one last time. Once her parents got there, we would decide how long the tube was going to stay in.

When the doctor told Julie what they needed to do to keep her alive, she was understandably upset.

"Does this mean I am never going to talk again?" she asked with just a ting of panic in her voice.

The nurse lied and said, "It's only until we can get your blood oxygen level stabilized".

I would have to leave the room as they inserted the breathing tube. They gave us a couple of minutes alone. We squeezed each other's hands and I stroked her close cropped hair and kissed her forehead. "I love you more than anything" I told her.

"I love you too."

When I got back into the room, Julie was unconscious with a long tube taped into her mouth. I couldn't help but wonder if I had made the right decision.

Love is like Oxygen

It's amazing that Julie and I ever got together in the first place. It was the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend in 2007. My friend A.J. called me that afternoon and asked me if I wanted to go to the bar with him and his girlfriend and have a few drinks. I had already been at my regular bar, The Draft, most of the day and already had a buzz so I told him that I didn't feel like going. I tried to get out of going by saying that I probably shouldn't be driving. Since it was a holiday, the cops would be out in full force. The last thing I needed was a DUI.

A.J. was persistent. His girlfriend Christie wasn't a big drinker so she would be able to pick me up, and get me home as well. I ran out of excuses not to go, so soon I was having a beer with the two of them. I didn't even like the place we were at, G.I. Jodie's. We usually went to more of a sports bar. A.J. and I would avoid the place, but Christie lived right down the street. I couldn't believe they had talked me into going out.

Not too long after we got there, the sun gave way to some really dark clouds. I was having a cigarette on the patio when the first drops of rain started to fall. I quickly put out the smoke and headed back inside. Walking back in I noticed a girl sitting under an umbrella. We smiled at each other, but didn't say anything.

Later, when I went out for another smoke, A.J. and Christie went with me. We huddled under a big table umbrella as the rain drops had since turned torrential. The same girl was still sitting out there. Again we exchanged smiles as I went to get another beer. I still wasn't happy that I was even at the bar. I would have much preferred to have been at home on my couch.

Christie came over to me and told me she wanted to introduce me to somebody. It was the girl from the patio.

"This is Julie," Christie said.

"Hi, I'm Cory" I said extending my hand.

"Nice to meet you," Julie said. She was attractive in a nondescript kind of way. She was a small girl, maybe 5'2" and couldn't have weighed more than 110 pounds. She was wearing sweatpants and a ratty old hoodie. Her hair was pulled up into a bun. After a little bit of small talk with her, I went back to my seat and finished my beer.

I looked around the bar to see where A.J. and Christie were. I was ready to go home. The two of them were nowhere to be found. I ordered another beer and hoped they would be back after they were done fucking.

Julie came over and sat down next me. We continued our small talk. She told me that she worked at bar called Q's that was only a couple of miles from G.I. Jodie's. She had the night off and wanted a drink. I told her that I worked in the mortgage business. I didn't usually go out on Sunday nights, but I had the next day off.

She asked me if I wanted a shot. I usually just stuck to beer, but if she was going to do one so would I. We ordered a couple of Jaeger bombs, and knocked them back. We started to talk about other kinds of liquor we liked to drink.

"I have a friend that just ordered a kit online to make some homemade Absinthe" she told me. "I can't wait to try it".

"I have a bottle of the real stuff at home" I said.

"Where did you get it?"

"I have a good friend that married a girl from Hungary. He grabbed me a bottle the last time that he was over there. I haven't even opened it. It's just sitting in my cupboard."

Before Julie came over and sat next to me, she had been at the jukebox for quite a while. She must have put forty dollars into it just so she wouldn't have to listen to other people's music. The song "Love is like Oxygen" by The Sweet came on. I asked her if she had played it. She had. I complimented her on her taste in music and told her that had been one of my favorite songs since I was kid.

I was starting to enjoy myself, talking to Julie helped loosen me up. She had an edge to her. She was intelligent and well read. She had moved here from Iowa a decade earlier. It turned out that we both had daughters who were about to turn sixteen. Alexis was only eight days older than her daughter Maiya.

I was getting absolutely shit faced, and it was apparent that A.J. and Christie weren't coming back.

"I'll make you a deal" I said to Julie. "If you give me a ride home, we'll do some shots of real Absinthe."

She agreed, and we got into her trashed filled minivan and headed to my place. My walls were covered with original art. Julie seemed impressed. She told me that she had previously studied art, and examined each of my paintings thoroughly. The really good pieces that hung on my wall had been done by a friend of mine, and the rest were ones that I had painted. I tried to explain to her what my paintings meant.

After a few shots of Absinthe, any hesitations we might have had about each other were gone. She took the bun out of her hair revealing a shock of long curly light brown hair. Her ass was simply incredible.

The second we kissed, it was just on. She insisted that I rip off her bra, and we were both soon naked in my kitchen. I think we both assumed that what was happening was going to be a one night stand so we held nothing back. We had crazy, nasty sex for the next two hours. That was roughly half of the time we had known each other.

The next morning we had breakfast at the clubhouse of Foothills golf course. She had never been there before. There were several Weeping Willow Trees around the course. Julie said that those trees were her favorite kind. They reminded her of home. She missed the simplicity of Iowa,

Driving home we exchanged phone numbers, and last names, but I wasn't sure if we would ever see each other again.

The Five Year Plan

When I met Julie, the rest of my life was going very well. I had a good job with Aurora Loan Services. It was a mortgage servicing company owned by the Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers.

The offices at Lehman were slick, like no other place I had worked before. There were espresso machines in the break room. We had bagels and croissants almost every morning which were supplied by vendors who wanted to do business with us. Why wouldn't they? Lehman was just throwing money around. The parking lot was filled with BMW's, Mercedes, Lexus' and a few Porsches. There was no way I was going to show up in my old Dodge Neon, so I went out and bought a Land Rover Discovery.

I was by no means an employee of significance at Lehman, or "The Firm" as we were instructed to call it. I was not in management, nor was I a low level grunt. My job grade was that if I were to be promoted, the next step up would be low level management. One of the requirements in applying for the job was that I had previous management experience. My official job title was Loan Resolution Counselor. It was my job to get nonperforming loans back on track.

Upon starting at Lehman, I began to formulate my "five year plan". Alexis was thirteen at the time, and in five years she would be an adult. I had been offered a very generous buyout from my previous employer, so I had a nice little stash in the bank. Now I was working for one of the biggest investment banks in the world. I was told that I would be very well compensated, not only with a nice salary but with those infamous Wall Street bonuses as well. In five years I would be more or less financially set. I would sell my house and take all of the equity that I had built up and just disappear.

I wanted to be near the Pacific Ocean. With the political climate that was going on, I figured that I would be pretty tired of America by then. I started doing some research and decided that Costa Rica was where I wanted to be. I would try to make a trip down there in the next year or two so I could find out where I would want to live, and then spend the next three years preparing for the move.

In Costa Rica, I would be able to do what I had always wanted. I was going to be an artist. I would be able to write all of the books that had been rattling around in my head since I was teen. I would be able to put on paper all of the poems that had been swimming through my veins. There would be no end to the photographs my camera could capture. I would be able to set up an easel with a blank canvas right on the beach and paint the life ahead of me.

It was so close I could taste it.

Diving

Julie and I weren't sure what to make of each other. It was evident that there was a deep sexual chemistry between us, but was that all there was? I'm not sure if either of us wanted more. Still, we liked to be around each other. She was usually off on Wednesdays and Thursdays and one of those nights we would like to hit the funky little dive bars on South Broadway.

One night as we hopped from bar to bar, we passed a place called The Castle. The marquee advertised "nightly karaoke". I loved the relationship that Julie had with the music she was listening to; she flowed so easily to it. Whether she was singing or dancing, she just felt it. We were going to go sing karaoke.

It was a Wednesday night and there were only a handful of drunks sitting around the sunken bar of The Castle. The guy who ran the song machine was nursing a Jack and coke at the bar. Julie didn't even need to look at the books; she knew what she wanted to sing. The guy put on Pat Benetar's "Love is a Battlefield" for her. Julie could really sing that song.

She told me that we weren't going to leave until I sang. I had never done karaoke before. I was hesitant until I looked around the place and realized nobody would even remember me singing in an hour. I gave Sinatra's "My Way" a shot. I thought I did okay, but I'm sure ole blue eyes would be rolling over in his grave.

We were going to have one more drink, then find a place closer to home. While chatting with the bartender he mentioned that the police had been to The Castle so many times that if they had to come one more time the place would be closed down.

I joked "so, I can just start kicking everybody's ass and there's nothing anybody can do about it."

The bartender didn't take it as a joke. He had a look of horror on his face. He started to tremble. I tried to tell him I was joking, but he wasn't having it. "If I buy this round," he said. "Will you please just finish your beer and leave?"

The situation was so bizarre, we just laughed all the way to the next bar.

Awkward Moments

There were a multitude of reasons that Julie and I were taking it slow between us. We were honest with each other. Neither of us was attached to anybody else, but we weren't exactly single either. I had a drinking buddy that had introduced me to his niece. I can't remember her name, but she had just moved to Denver from somewhere in the Midwest. She was attractive enough, and I helped her get a serving job at The Draft. A few days after she started there I was drinking at the bar and she came over and asked me if I had any weed. I told her that I did, but it was at home. When she got off that night, she came over to my house to get high.

We did a couple of bong hits and just talked for a while. She wasn't the naïve little farm girl I had her pegged to be. She liked to talk about sex. A fiancé was back home waiting for her, but while she was here she was looking for a no strings attached partner. That's the way life went for a few weeks. The girl from South Dakota (I think) would come and get high. We'd have kinky sex for a while and she would leave.

Julie's situation was similar, but a little more serious. She had been dating a guy named Sean for a little bit. Julie said he was friend who she did coke with and they would occasionally fuck. Even though they had only been dating a month, Sean had started to talk to Julie about having kids together. She had been trying to break it off, but the dude was persistent.

Sean had seen me around Julie a couple of times. She told him that she and I were just friends and that I was helping her train at the gym. One Saturday night I was up at Q's while Julie was working. Sean came in and sat down at the table that I was smoking at. We were cool with each other, but Julie was nervous about what we would say to each other.

Not too long after Sean sat down, Julie came over and told me that there was a brunette looking for me and pointed to the woman. It was my ex-wife, Gretchen, and she was there with her fiancée. They sat down at the table too.

It was easily one of the most awkward moments of my life. There I was, trying to make conversation with Julie's boyfriend, my ex, and the guy who might become my daughter's step-father. I had to go to the bar to get my beers because Julie wanted nothing to do with our table. I wished I had the option.

Eventually, Sean and the girl from the Midwest just fell by the wayside. She got fired from The Draft for smoking dope on the job. Nobody knows whatever happened to Sean.

My First Letter to Julie

Hey,

It's been a long time since I've written a letter like this. I didn't know if I'd get a chance to say it tonight in case you got busy at work. So, I was bored on a Friday afternoon and figured I would put it down paper.

I just wanted to let you know that you don't have to worry about hurting me. You kept saying that you hurt me the other night. You haven't done any such thing. I remember the first morning that we woke up together you told me that you were seeing someone and it didn't bother me. I told you that I wasn't really the boyfriend type because I suck at it. I didn't think it mattered to you. I guess what I am trying to say to you is that I have no preconceived ideas of what this thing between us is. Only time will tell.

Even though we haven't known each other all that long, I already consider you to be a good friend. I really like the time that we do spend together, you're always a lot of fun and easy to talk to. I like the fact that you are not a phony person; you've always struck me as a straightforward person, Of course, I enjoy the wild side of you that I have seen a few times. And it certainly doesn't hurt that you are easy on the eyes.

Fuck, let's just have fun on this little ride we're on. If the most that comes out of it is a good friendship, that's fine with me. What's been lost? I neither want nor need to be involved in everything else that goes on in your life. Maybe you should think of me as a kind of sanctuary where you go to get away from everything else.

By the way, I hope I never hurt you either.

Cabo First

Getting the job at Lehman Brothers had been a long time coming. It felt like I had arrived. I got into the credit business old school. I started with a collection agency in 1991. I think the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act was in effect at the time, but nobody gave a fuck about it. We used to threaten people with jail if they didn't pay an old phone bill. We called relatives to locate debtors. We would tell the family that we were from the lottery commission and wanted to give them money. If a kid answered the phone we would tell them to write our number on the bathroom mirror using their mother's lipstick. The mothers would call us irate, and we would jam them to pay the $200 they owed for a cable bill.

The job at Lehman meant the end of the sweat shop days. It took quite a while to get the job. I had sent my resume to them in the fall of 2004. I didn't get a call from human recourses until January of 2005. They wanted to talk to me about a position they had open.

The interview process was fairly routine. A guy named Marc came and got me from the lobby and told me that he would be my manager. I hit it off with him right away, and knew within five minutes that I was more than likely to be offered a job. From Marc, I went to interview with a lady named Deborah who was one of Marc's bosses. She struck me as a corporately institutionalized person. I noticed the picture of her family on the shelf, but she came across as a woman whose career came before anything else in her life. I felt like I struggled through the interview with her, only because her and I seemed to be opposite personality types. I had always had the attitude that I worked to live, and her attitude was that she lived to work. Somehow she was impressed enough with me to pass me onto the big guy, his name was Chris.

I wasn't sure what I thought about Chris. He seemed to be part cheerleader, part used car salesman. He made you feel that you had just hit the lottery. The world would be mine. The salary that I was going to get would be more than I had ever made before and I could expect five figure bonus checks every year. It sounded good to me. I couldn't turn that down.

As a formality, Marc introduced me to Kristy. She would be my direct supervisor, and we would be working on the SBA loan portfolio. "SBA" stood for Small Business Administration, but they weren't small business loans. The loans were granted by the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Lehman had purchased these loans from the government for pennies on the dollar.

The FEMA loans were interesting to work. Most of the loans had been originated by the government in the aftermath of any given natural disaster during the 1990's. The majority had been made because of hurricanes. There were also loans that were made after Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. There were several loans associated with earthquake that hit Northridge, California in 1994.

Although most of the loans were unsecured, a good many were collateralized. There were a few traditional real estate loans, but there were all sorts of other types of collateral. I was purposely hired and chosen for the SBA portfolio because I had experience with loans that were secured by manufactured homes.

Some of the collateral was unique. The loans in Alaska might have been secured by a fishing vessel that was damaged by oil. I came across loans on house boats, power boats, cotton gins, machinery, inventory in stores, and basically anything of value owned by victims of a disaster.

Our entire department was called Special Servicing. The area was a newly created department by Lehman. Of the roughly twenty or so employees, only a couple of us were natives of Colorado. The rest had been recruited from across the country. The mission was to create a department of experts in the field of default and loss mitigation. All of the original employees were well seasoned professionals who specialized in getting a bad loan performing again, or finding an alternative resolution that would minimalize any losses to the firm. The volume of loans kept us busy, but it was by no means overwhelming.

Q's

I still spent most of my time at The Draft, but I was becoming a regular at Q's whenever Julie worked. It was a step or two above being a dive bar, just a neighborhood place. There would be live bands on Fridays and Saturdays that played mostly cover tunes from the eighties and nineties. Julie would cocktail when the bands were on and then bartend from Sunday through Tuesday.

When she cocktailed, I would get to Q's around midnight and hang out on the smoking patio until Julie got off. If she was bartending, I would go in around happy hour and have a few beers. I never liked sitting at the bar because most of the regulars were a bit on the odd side. The bar during happy hour was like being in a high school clique where everybody knew everybody else's business. Even the guys had a penchant for gossiping. Julie and I kept our affair on the down low, not only because Sean was in the pictures, but because we didn't want the regulars telling stories about us.

How it all Started

Bobbing for Apples

If I could pinpoint the moment that I knew that I was in love with Julie, it would have to be on Halloween night. There was a bar in Lakewood called Eck's. Julie had heard that KBPI radio was doing something there and she wanted to go. There was some local heavy metal band playing that she wanted to see. Eck's was one of those places where you could count on a fight breaking out even on the slowest of nights. It seemed to attract that twenty-something UFC wannabe crowd. On weekends there were so many fights it could qualify as a small riot.

Julie was amped to go out dancing. We prepared our self for the night by doing a couple shots of Absinthe and snorted some Ecstasy. By the time we got to the bar, were buzzing hard and ready to do some head banging.

The first order of business was to do some shots of Jaegermeister and Tuaca. We went out and danced together for a while, but Julie had too much energy for me. I had to go catch a breather at the table and drink some beer. Julie stayed out and danced as long as the band would play. She would dance with anybody that approached her, girl or guy. Usually she was just dancing by herself, off in her own little world.

The band took a break, and the guys from the radio station prepared the dance floor for an apple bobbing contest. It was late, and both of us were just hammered out of our gourds. Julie was getting anxious that the band wasn't playing. She was ready to dance. Julie made up her mind that she was going to help speed up the contest. She did a shot then walked onto the dance floor where six people had their hands tied behind their backs and their faces were in the water trying to get an apple in their teeth. She walked up to the tub of water, grabbed an apple with her hand and took a bite. For good measure, she used her hand to splash the people in the contest.

The bouncers seemed not to have noticed, but there was table of four girls that weren't to amused with Julie's antics. I thought it was hilarious. Three of the girls came over to start shit with her, she just told them to fuck off. If they wanted a fight she was going to give it to them. When Julie was drunk, there was no way she was ever going to back down from anybody. The girls walked back to their table doing nothing except a little name calling.

The band started again, and Julie was on the floor tearing it up. The fourth girl from the table walked out on the floor to try and intimidate Julie. The chick was huge; she was waving her fat little finger in Julie's face and screaming something. From afar, I could tell by Julie's eyes she was getting ready to swing on the bitch. I put my beer down and raced over to restrain her. I was holding Julie against a wall, but the fatty was over my shoulder calling her a bitch, slut, whore, etc. Julie got strangely calm with a little smirk on her face. The fat bitch just kept talking shit. I finally looked her straight in the eye and said, "If you don't get the fuck out of my face, I am going to turn her loose on you and she will fuck you up."

That stopped the girl dead in her tracks. We were serious, and she knew she was way in over her head. She quietly walked back to her table and that was the last we dealt with those girls.

What man wouldn't fall in love with that?

Sense of Relief

If I remember right, it was the first snow of the season. I drove up to Q's to drop off the Land Rover for Julie. The tires on her van were bald, and it sucked in the snow anyway. I went in for a drink just as the band was starting to play. I told Julie that beer didn't sound good. I wanted a Mai Tai; I had a taste for something sweet. She just smiled and said "whatever".

The first Mai Tai went down easy, the second went down even easier. I was able to nurse the third one somewhat, but they were beginning to hit me hard. Julie had a wary eye on me. I always tried to be on my best behavior when Julie was working. I was not going to be to blame for her getting in trouble. I told her to call me a cab, and get me one more Mai Tai while I waited for the taxi.

I don't know how much alcohol goes into a Mai Tai, but it was a lot. I was barely able to stand up when I saw the cab pull up. Julie also noticed the cab and saw that a couple was walking out to it. She wasn't about to let that happen. She literally sprinted across the bar to keep that taxi from leaving without me. The way she dodged through the crowd looked like something out of "The Matrix".

The couple and I decided just to split the cab; it had taken forty minutes just for that one to get there. As I lay there in bed that night, I kept picturing Julie running across the bar. It was a small gesture, but at that moment I realized that she really cared about me.

Dub's

A week or two after I first met Julie, while we were hitting the bars on South Broadway, she introduced me to friend of hers. Charissa was in her early twenties and was very attractive. She had the long, lanky body of a model, but her teeth looked like they hadn't been brushed in a month. Julie later told me that Charissa was more than a friend and they had had sex a couple of times.

It was a late Sunday afternoon. I had been at The Draft all day drinking beer and watching football. Julie got off work early that day and met me there. We were just sitting there drinking when Charissa texted Julie.

"Charissa wants us to pick her up from work and go to Dub's with her", she said. Dub's was a total dive just down the street from The Castle. I had to work the next morning, but I still agreed to go for some reason.

"I can't drive," I told her. "If I go, you have to be the designated driver."

"We might be staying at Charissa's. She wants to have a threesome."

I started to think that I was going to have to burn a sick day from work on Monday.

Dub's was a slow as you would expect a bar to be on a Sunday night, maybe a dozen or so people. The three of us were playing pool, singing karaoke and slamming shots. I did a hit of Ecstasy, but the girls didn't want any. The two of them would go to the bathroom and stay in there for fifteen minutes at a time. When they came out, Julie came over and kissed me. She was breathless and told me how wet she was getting and wanted to go have a threesome. Julie wanted to watch me fuck her friend silly. She told me Charissa was dying to see my dick and give me head. We were going to do two more shots each then go to Charissa's apartment across the street and all get naked.

Julie didn't know that Charissa had a boyfriend until he came up and introduced himself while we were playing pool. He was a skinny little cowboy who had the idea that he was a tough guy. In an attempt to make him jealous, Charissa had been texting him all night telling him what she was going to do with us. She succeeded. The guy was jealous, and he was pissed. I know that he would have tried to sucker punch me if I hadn't outweighed him by 75 pounds.

I have no patience for ridiculous drama, so I told Julie I was leaving. She came with me, and tried to keep up her promise of being the designated driver. She might have been a little bit more sober than me but she almost hit two parked cars before I told her to pull over. I can't remember if I drove any better that night than she had, but we managed to make it home without getting pulled over or killing anybody.

Absinthe and Ecstasy

In case you're not noticing a pattern, alcohol, and to some extent drugs, played a big part in the early days of mine and Julie's relationship. Literally from the first night we met, when were together we were drunk, or in the process of getting there. Since Julie didn't get off until two or three in the morning we usually partied until the sun was starting to come up. We would sleep til probably noon, then get up and go to a bar that served breakfast all day. We would start doing shots while we were eating our eggs.

Julie was completely infatuated with Absinthe. When the bottle that I had was gone, we found a liquor store that carried it. It was expensive, but she just had to have it. I wasn't real impressed with Absinthe. The taste wasn't all that good, and I didn't notice anything special about the buzz. I always thought Julie just liked the myth and romance of it.

I liked Ecstasy from the first time I did it back in the early nineties. I liked it so much, that I did it every night for two weeks straight. The first time that I smoked pot was in third grade while we were riding out motorcycles in the hills outside of Pueblo. I've more or less smoked it ever since. I lived through the late eighties when life revolved around heavy metal, cocaine and strippers. It was an age of excess. I was working at a record store in Southwest Plaza where heavy metal music blasted all day. There was a burger place in the food court that was selling more blow than they were French fries. We used to call the owner Frosty the snowman. We were getting takeout from that place on a nightly basis. When the mall closed, we would head over to a strip club and see where the night might take us.

Julie had led a pretty wild life herself. She had been smoking weed since middle school. By the time she was sixteen, she was dealing cocaine. Since she worked in bars and clubs, she had a ton of customers and was making a lot of money. She was dealing when she met the father of her daughter. He was one of her customers. After Maiya was born, things went bad between them. There was going to be a custody battle. For reasons I was never fully clear on, Julie decided that it would be best if Maiya be raised by her father.

Giving up custody of her daughter sent Julie into a downward spiral. She started smoking the coke that she was selling. She was surrounding herself with wrong people. Most of the guys she was dating at the time were rotating in and out of jail. Things came to a head when she was raped at knife point. She stuck around Iowa long enough to see the guy get sent to prison, and then moved to Denver.

After she had been here for a while she started to hang out with a guy named Bob, he was a tweaker. Julie and Bob started smoking so much meth, and getting so paranoid, that they spent almost two years living in a storage unit because it had no windows for people to see in. Julie was never clear about how the situation resolved itself, but she ended up getting away from Bob and moved into some guy's basement. That's where she had been living for a couple of years when we met.

Julie could take or leave the Ecstasy. She said she could never feel it when we took some, but all she wanted to do was fuck whenever we did.

Absolute and Ecstasy Letter

Hey,

It's 11:20 on Saturday morning. You just left my house a few minutes ago. As you were leaving I told you that you were the "total package". You responded by telling me that there was a lot about you that I didn't know. Of course that's true, there's probably many things about the two of us that we don't want each other to know. That's cool.

I can tell you though, that I think I know what I need to know. I know that you are like nobody that I have ever met before. I know that you have a good soul. I know that you are a straight forward, no bullshit person. I know that you don't play games. I know that you are not a drama queen. I know that you are a whole lot of fun. I know that you bring out a side of me that I allow very few people to see.

I know how good it feels to have your body lying next to me. I know that you are capable of carrying on an intelligent conversation. I know that we can make each other laugh. I know that my life is better with you in it. I know that we are the sane ones, and it's everybody else that's fucked in the head. I know that I always look forward to seeing you. I know that the Exacta knife isn't too far away.

I know that we've both been through some shit in our lives, but that doesn't really matter right now. I know how we both feel about our daughters. I know that if I give you Absinthe and Ecstasy I better be wearing full body armor. I know to never to make you the designated driver. I know you are the best bodyguard I will ever have. I know how sexy you are when you sing karaoke. I know what a beautiful, awesome lover you are.

Most importantly, I know that you care about me. Know that I care very deeply for you. I know we will be friends forever.

Cory

Charlie Brown

While Julie and I were still trying to figure out the nature of our relationship, she got a phone call from Iowa letting her know that her grandfather had died. She planned on driving through the night to get to Iowa. I had driven across Nebraska before, and knew there wasn't much to keep you awake. I told Julie that if she started to get groggy, she could call me at any time. As she was driving, she called me three or four times that night. We probably talked for three hours total. Julie's nature was to be guarded, she only told you what she wanted you to know, but we really opened up to each other that night.

We learned more about each other's past. We talked about our past relationships and our childhoods. We talked about what we wanted for the future. She talked a lot about how excited she was to see her daughter Maiya. It had been a while since they had been together.

We started to talk about the traumas we had been subject to in our lives. I told her how my dad dying when I was ten had screwed me up for a while. That was when she first told me that she had been raped. She also told me that she had been molested as a little girl.

The person that had molested her was the grandfather whose funeral she was driving out to. I was speechless. Julie said that he had started messing with her when she was three and it continued until she was about six. It would happen on Sunday mornings before the family went to church. Grandpa would get her to sit on his lap so he could read her the comics out of the paper. He fondle her as he did the voice of Charlie Brown.

Say it

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, Julie and I were spending virtually all of our free time together. The night before the holiday, she came over to my house to use the kitchen to make deviled eggs for a get together she was going to. I had invited her to come over to my family's for turkey, but neither of us were sure if that was something that we wanted to do. After all, we weren't officially a couple at that point.

After the eggs were done, and Alexis and I had made our traditional pumpkin pies, Julie and I were ready for a drink. She wanted to do some dancing too, so we went to Eck's again. While she was driving us there, she got strangely quiet.

She parked her van, and just sat there staring straight ahead. She finally looked at me with a weird look on her face.

"Say it," she said to me.

"Say what?" I knew what she was talking about, but I feigned ignorance.

"Say it," she repeated.

I sat there for a moment and just looked at her. Was I ready to take this step? "I love you," I finally said.

"I love you too." She kissed me and we went inside to drink and dance.

Another Letter

J-

I just felt like writing you a note. I was thinking about the first night that we met at G.I. Jodie's. I kind of assumed that we would probably be a one or two night stand. I don't mean that as a disrespect to you, it's just that is how it usually works out for me.

I'm happy that it didn't end up being just that. I like that I actually got to know you a little bit. Simply put, you are just a very cool person.

I always have fun hanging out with you. You're easy to talk to and nothing seems fake about you.

After the other night, I know that we are friends and so much more. Friends are hard to come by in life. Of course, a lot of that might be my fault because I can be such an asshole.

Thank you for having my back, and know that I have yours.

Love,

Cory

P.S. I love your sharp teeth too.

Just a Little Badass

I'll make a confession right here, I can be a dick sometimes. Alexis has told me that my best quality is also my worst; I am extremely blunt. I can't help but call things as I see them. I would rather tell you the truth and hurt your feelings than lie to you. I've turned sarcasm into an art form, and when it comes to making someone laugh, there is nothing so sacred that I won't make a joke about it. I have never fared well with hyper sensitive lovers. I can and have quickly overpowered a relationship. I don't do it consciously, it just happens.

I never had to worry about that with Julie. There was no way in hell she was going to be overpowered, and she certainly wasn't going to take shit from anybody. She had more or less grown up in strip clubs and biker bars. She had heard it all, seen it all and probably done it all. She wasn't afraid to tell you exactly what she thought of you whether you wanted to hear it or not.

Julie had never been married. She had been in a few long term relationships, but had mostly lived alone. She went out by herself all the time, and couldn't give a fuck what anybody thought. When she was out on the dance floor, she'd rather dance alone than with somebody else. Julie took pride in her independence.

Nine out of ten times, Julie was a blast to be around, and she would go out of her way to help somebody that really need it. But on that tenth time, she could be more than surly. The last thing you wanted to do was cross Julie or make her feel that she had been disrespected. It was bad enough to piss her off when she was sober, but god help you if you made her angry after she had downed a couple of shots. She was coming after you. It didn't matter if you were a fat 350 pound biker dude, all 113 pounds of Julie would be headed straight for your face.

That's what I needed in a woman.

A Conniving Bastard

In early December, Julie moved out of the guy's basement and was renting a room in a townhome. It was a much nicer place for less money, but her roommate had two big black Labradors. She had a cat named Mary that wasn't happy about the new living arrangements. Mary hadn't come out from behind the refrigerator for the two weeks they had been living there.

I offered to let Mary come live at my house, but only because I am a conniving bastard. I didn't have a dog, but I did have a cat named Milo that I had bought for Alexis on her birthday several years earlier. My devious plan was that if Mary was at my house, Julie would be coming around more.

Every time I went up to Q's for happy hour, I would ask Julie if she was going to come stay at my house that night. Sometimes she did, and others she didn't feel like it. If the cat were there, Julie might stay there more often. It worked. Julie was barely staying at her own place. She had her own pile of dirty laundry in the corner of the bedroom.

The flaw in my plan was that Mary was much bigger and meaner than Milo. My daughter's cat was getting constantly bullied. Milo was always an outdoors cat and was coming home for food with less frequency. She eventually just disappeared altogether.

Our house bordered a green belt. Just before dawn, you could hear coyotes prowling the area. I hoped Milo was wily enough to avoid them. I like to think that she did.

You and Me Learning to be Us

A friend wrote this on a napkin, when Julie and I were having breakfast at a bar. I have no idea if it was an original thought.

Christmas

By Christmas, it was public knowledge that Julie and I were a couple. We were no longer trying to conceal it from anybody. It seemed like the perfect time for her to meet my family, which consisted of my mom and her husband, as well as my sister and her family. Alexis had been slowly getting used to Julie being around.

Julie was understandably nervous. She couldn't even remember the last time she met one of her lovers families. I'm sure my family was tense too, the last time I had bought a girl home to meet them was my ex-wife twenty years earlier. Everybody was nervous for nothing, the day went nicely. Julie seemed to like my family, and they said they liked her too.

After leaving my sister's, we went home and opened our presents to each other. I got her a little diamond friendship ring, and she got me all kinds of art supplies. After that, it was all we could do to just lay on the couch. When we were watching a movie, I saw a tear rolling down her cheek.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"Why are you crying?"

"Just happy."

"Good. I love you."

"I love you too. Thank you for giving the first normal Christmas I've had in forever."

"Do you like the ring?"

"I love it."

"There's something else."

"What? What else do I get?" She was almost like a little kid.

"I bought two tickets to Las Vegas. You'll be off on Valentine's Day, so I figured we would spend it out there."

The Clock Strikes Down

As the clock ticked down until 2008 was here, Julie had to work New Year's Eve at Q's. I got up there at about eleven, and Julie told me that she didn't want to party too hard that night because she wanted to go to a strip club downtown that was going to be open at seven and she wanted to go have Bloody Mary's and look at some naked girls. Sounded good to me.

We partied pretty hard anyway, but were still able to get to La Boheme by eight. I was double fisting it, a Bloody Mary in one hand and a Bud Light in the other. Julie was doing shots and nursing a Bailey's and vanilla vodka. Julie was in a good mood, she was flirting with all of the dancers and tipping them well. We had the place almost to ourselves and the strippers were giving us all of their attention. We were both drunk and extremely horny.

As soon as we got inside the door of our house, it was like two rabid dogs being unleashed. We were tearing each other's clothes off and literally biting each other. I am not exaggerating when I say that it went on for five hours, in every room of the house. I ate her out as she sat on top of the refrigerator.

When it was over we were out of breath, sore and dripping with sweat. I got down on my knees and asked her to be my wife. She couldn't wait to say yes. We were already going to Vegas in a month and a half, so we might as well get married while we're there.

We hadn't even known each other four months and we were engaged. Yes, we were that crazy together. We were each other's personal rollercoaster on so many levels.

Brain Drain

The "brain drain" from Lehman started slowly at first. We came in one morning to find that Chris' office had been cleaned out. Nobody seemed to know what happened; everybody assumed that it had something to do with the hiring of Terry. Terry had been brought in to oversee all of The Firm's operations in Denver and Scottsbluff, Nebraska. The story was the he had been coaxed out of retirement because of his "brilliance" in handling default loans. It was soon evident that he had been coaxed out of retirement by his love of fat paychecks. I never saw an ounce of leadership out of the guy. Most of the time he had his feet up on the desk reading the Wall Street Journal.

Lehman Brothers was still going strong then; the stock was trading at around $125 a share. They went all out on the Christmas Party. The Firm had rented out the club level of Invesco Field where the Broncos played. It was a very swank affair. You had the choice of Filet Mignon, salmon or chicken. Best of all, there was an open bar.

Terry hired Steve to replace Chris. Steve had run a very successful loss mitigation department for a major bank in Dallas. Steve seemed like a knowledgeable guy, and probably would have a positive effect on the department, but he wasn't there long enough. His wife hated Colorado so much that after three short months they moved back to Texas.

Terry, in his infinite wisdom, overlooked many talented internal candidates to bring in a trio from a servicing shop in Utah. Their names were Faulk, Janet and Amber. Over the course of nearly a quarter century in corporate America, I've had managers that I didn't like but I respected the job that they did, and I had bosses that I really liked but they weren't that great at their jobs. Those three were neither likeable or knowledgeable. To be frank, they were the most idiotic, arrogant pieces of shit that I have ever had the misfortune of working with. The mortgage crisis was just about to hit the country with full force. Lehman could not have made a worse hire at a worse time.

Now the "brain drain" was growing exponentially. The writing on the wall was there for everybody to read. Within three months, all the key leaders in the department were lost. Deborah gone. Marc gone. Most significantly, Kristi was gone.

To make a bad situation worse, they were replaced by people who had absolutely zero experience in default or loss mitigation. The new people had been originators, underwriters, and the closers who had been previously laid off. That's right, the people who had made these idiotic loans in the first place were now in charge of handling the same loans now that they were going south. I guess there is some poetic justice and irony in that fact, but it was no way to run a business.

Moaning my Name

On a bitterly cold winter night, Julie and I were at Eck's Saloon once again. As usual, Julie was out on the dance floor and I was sitting at the bar knocking beers back. I noticed her start to dance with this chubby little brunette. With each passing song, the two of them danced closer and closer. When the band took a break, the two of them went to the bathroom together. They were in there for quite some time. Julie came over and told me that her and the girl were making out in the bathroom stall and had made each other cum. Julie wanted to be with the girl some more so she invited the girl and her boyfriend over to the house.

"This should be interesting babe." It was the only thing that I could think of to say.

Julie was driving us home, and she wasn't doing a very good job of it. She was weaving all over the place and not maintaining a steady speed. A cop started following us. The chubby brunette and her boyfriend were right behind the cop. Just when it looked like the cop was about to pull us over, he turned off on a side street.

The four of us went into the basement and started doing shots and smoking bowls. The girls started again where they had left off in the bathroom at Eck's. Her boyfriend just sat back and watched as the girls got naked and started going down on each other. He pulled out his cell phone to video the action, but I told him to put it away.

He wasn't happy, but he got over it. He went over to the end of the bed and unzipped his pants. His girlfriend started giving him head, and Julie was soon helping her. He pulled Julie to the edge of the bed and slid himself into her. I stripped my clothes off and crawled on top of the girl and started fucking her. It was kind of funny, there we were fucking other people and Julie was moaning out my name.

When we were all fucked out, Julie went up to the bedroom to pass out. I went up to check on her and she asked me if the couple was till there. When I told her that they were, she told me to get rid of them.

I did. We never saw them again.

Manic

My first wife, Gretchen, wasn't crazy when I divorced her. The split was amicable for the most part. Alexis wasn't even a year old when we separated. The marriage was doomed from the beginning. We were just too young, Gretchen was only 18, and I was just 24. After Alexis was born, Gretchen found a guy that made more money than I did. I wasn't all that upset. My attitude was along the lines of, "don't go away mad, just go away".

The first few years of divorce, Gretchen and I were able to remain friendly but somewhere along the line the wires in her brain somehow got short circuited. She married the guy with the money and divorced him in less than a year. After that she got married a third time, but that didn't make it a year either. She started to get into painkillers and other drugs around the turn of the century. There were multiple stays at rehab centers that had no affect except to find her a new boyfriend. Every time she would break up with one of these guys, she got it into her head that we would get back together. I was constantly reminding her that that wasn't an option.

She had been diagnosed as being bi-polar by a couple of doctors. They tried all different kinds of medication on Gretchen, but nothing seemed to help. After a few years, she claimed that she was finally "clean and sober" and became an over the top born again Christian. She wasn't sober, and she was a "Christian" in words only. She quit taking all of her medication because, "God was cradling her in his arms, and he would take care of her". She used Christianity as an excuse to behave badly because, "Jesus would forgive her".

We had joint custody of Alexis, so there was no way I could totally get Gretchen out of my life. Truth be told, Gretchen was so much easier to get along with when she was a drug addict than when she found religion. Her hypocrisy knew no bounds.

When Gretchen found out I was going to get married again, she had one of her epic manic episodes. Less than a month before our wedding, Julie and I had met some friends at a bar in old town Littleton. Alexis called me in tears, because Gretchen had broken into our house and was looking for Julie because she wanted to fight her. I told Julie to call 911 and we're be on our way home.

While we were driving home, another bartender from Q's called Julie to say that there had been a woman at the bar that was making threats toward Julie. When we got to the house, Gretchen was gone but there were three Jeffco sheriff deputies there. Alexis told them what had happened, and Julie repeated what Gretchen had done at the bar.

The deputies went to Gretchen's apartment and arrested her for breaking and entering as well as harassment. The next day the district attorney called me and asked if I wanted to press charges. I talked it over with Julie. If it had been up to me, I would have prosecuted her. Julie talked me out of it. She and Alexis were slowly forming a relationship; she didn't want the situation to hinder that. Julie thought that Alexis had enough on her plate with me getting married without having to worry what might happen to her mom in the court system.

Vegas Valentines

It was the day before Valentine's Day, and Julie and I were both pretty nervous when we got to Denver International Airport. We had only known each other for a little over five months and the next day we would become husband and wife. Still, it felt right what we were doing. I knew that Julie was who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Julie wanted to spend the rest of her life with me, but we still had butterflies in our stomachs. We needed a drink.

The bar at the airport was the only place you could smoke before catching a flight. There was a one drink minimum before you could light up. I ordered my typical Bud Light, and Julie ordered a shot of Jack Daniel's. I didn't think much of it, but I was surprised because I had never seen Julie drink whiskey. She had two more shots at the bar, and a couple on the plane.

Julie was already wobbly when we got to the MGM Grand. We found a bar in the casino and had a couple of drinks before we went up to room to unpack. By seven that night, Julie was absolutely hammered and becoming increasingly belligerent. She wanted to go out, but I told her that we were both to fucked up already and we had a big day tomorrow. She was of course pissed off, and told me that if we were going to stay in that I needed to go the store to get some liquor.

When I got back, she had changed and put on some makeup and told me that we were going to go out. I let her know that I wasn't going to go. I wasn't going to be around when she made a drunken spectacle of herself. She said fine, and left without me.

In about an hour, I decided that I had better go look for her. The MGM is a huge place, and it's easy to get lost in there. I walked around and checked every bar that I came across, but Julie was nowhere to be found. I went back up to the room to see if she made it back. She hadn't.

I turned on the TV and waited for her to turn up. A little while later there was a knock at the door. It was two of the hotel's security guards. They were holding Julie between them. She had obviously found a bar somewhere because she could barely stand up. The guards didn't say much, but they let me know they thought it might be best if we stayed in our room for the rest of the night. It's not a good sign when you're too drunk to even be in Las Vegas.

Julie was not happy to be confined to the room. On the eve of our wedding, we were in an all-out screaming match. She was slamming cabinet doors, breaking ashtrays and knocking furniture over. The room look liked a hurricane hit it and I wondered if we were going to get billed for damages. I grabbed a pillow and blanket off the bed and slept on the couch.

The morning of our wedding, the anger from the night before had carried over and we giving each other the silent treatment as we drank our coffee. I finally looked at her, and there was a tear welling in her eye. "Do you still want to get married?" she asked.

"Of course I do," I laughed. "Who else is going to put up with either one of us?"

The rest of the day was beautiful, if not a little bizarre. The first thing we had to do was take a taxi downtown to get a marriage license. The line at the courthouse was huge. Call me naïve, but I had no idea that getting married in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day was such a big deal. We were interviewed by two local news stations and couple of people that I don't remember who they were.

A limo picked us up from the hotel and took us to a little chapel at the other end of the strip. A guy with Elvis sideburns greeted us and told us how things were going to go down. Julie had handled all of the arrangements, and most of it was a mystery to me. Thankfully, a lady justice of the peace was going to officiate the ceremony. Getting married by Elvis would have too cliché. He was only going to be the wedding planner.

Julie looked stunning in a cream colored dress. The lighting in the chapel made her look like a lady in an old Victorian photo. Before we started, Julie had one last surprise for me. She had agreed to let a television network film the whole thing. One of their wedding shows was doing an episode about the whole Vegas/Valentines angle. Knowing that I am a fairly private person, Julie thought that I would be upset that she had let them do this. They were going to set it up so that her mom could watch the wedding over the internet. I thought the whole spectacle was humorous. Everything went off without a hitch. Julie's hand was shaking so hard when I slid the ring onto her finger.

We spent the rest of the night walking around the strip. We stopped at place for an Ahi Tuna appetizer and some drinks, before going to a steakhouse at Mandalay Bay for dinner. The steak was excellent, but to this day I can't believe I paid $15 for French fries that were served in a shot glass. It had been a long day. We had a hot tub in our suite, so we just went back there and relaxed.

Wedding Letter

Julie, My Beautiful Wife,

I just wanted to write you this letter because my words don't always come out right. Maybe when I speak, I just fumble for words I am looking for and my thoughts come out in a different way than I meant.

Sometimes when I tell you that I love you the words don't seem adequate to me. My feelings for you seem deeper than those three words can convey. I think there is a reason why we like the song "Love is like Oxygen". You are my oxygen. You are the sustaining element that I need. I never thought that I would need a person the way that I need you.

This week I took you to be my wife. And though our courtship was not a long one, I don't think that I rushed into anything. When I looked into your eyes as you stood there in that beautiful wedding dress, I was completely sure that I had made the right decision. I remember on Saturday at the end of the movie, you were in the kitchen and I was sitting on the couch and I went into this little trance for just a few seconds. When I came to, I realized that the trance was a feeling of total contentment. There is nothing in the world that I would rather have done that night than be on the couch with you.

Julie, baby, I know in my heart that not only is this marriage going to work, it's going to be an awesome union. The reason I know this is because you are the only person for me. It was simply meant to be. I believe that were together in a past life, and I believe we will be together in the next life.

So whenever I say to you, "I love you", know that it means so much more than those three little words.

Billy Joel

Julie was always looking for a concert. She would scan the back pages of Westword to see what bands were coming to town. There were times when she would just drive around and look at the venues to see who was playing. If something looked good to her, she would just go in and dance the night away. Julie liked to dance hard, and she would usually be dripping with sweat by the time the band was finished playing.

She knew that I was a big Billy Joel fan, so when he came to town, she bought us tickets as a late wedding gift. She looked so sexy that night. She had on thigh high black boots with stiletto heels. You could see a little skin between the top of her boots and the hem of her skirt. A sparkling blue halter top brought it all together.

If her outfit sounds a little bit wild, that's because it was. The crowd that went to see Billy Joel was pretty conservative to say the least. They were happy to just sit in their chair and sing along with the Piano Man as they sipped their chardonnays. That just wasn't who Julie was.

She was dancing to every song, the slow ones, the up tempo ones and everything in between. I'll bet in the couple of sections around us, there were as many eyes on Julie as there were on the stage. The women were pretty much stone faced as they watched Julie dance. If the men didn't have smiles on their faces, it was because they were trying to hide it from their wives.

During "It's still Rock and Roll to Me", Julie was dancing so freely in the aisle that her halter top shifted, and she was revealing quite a bit of side boob. I couldn't help but smile as I surveyed the crowd. Some of the ladies had a look of horror on their faces, and most of the men had looks of open lust. Julie noticed it too and really played it up, getting more and more seductive with her moves until the end of the song.

Before the concert was even over, both of us were highly aroused. We left the concert early and went out to the parking lot. I opened the back door of the Land Rover and pushed her in. She took off all of clothes except for the boots. I put her heels into the hand straps near the roof, and we proceeded to make love in full on animal mode.

Julie and Alexis

After divorcing my first wife, when Alexis was about two, I made the conscious decision to stay out of serious relationships with women so that I could concentrate on being the best dad that I could be. Once my daughter was an adult I would think about whether I wanted to try marriage again. Truth be told, I didn't really like being married. It wasn't so much that woman as it was the whole concept. Once the rings went on it was like we quit being friends, and became society's definition of what a husband and wife should be. The role felt so confining to me.

While she was growing up, I didn't let Alexis meet anybody that I was dating. I didn't want her to get attached to somebody that in all likelihood wasn't going to be around too long. Similarly, I wasn't interested in dating somebody that had younger kids. After the way I had treated my own stepdad when I was a teenager, I assumed that Karma would be a mother fucking bitch.

Meeting Julie changed all of that. All of a sudden, I knew that I could be married again. There was a person who I wanted to be with until the end of time. I came within two years of keeping my goal of concentrating on fatherhood until Alexis was an adult. She was sixteen when I married Julie.

I will admit that that I might have been unfair to Alexis, and maybe Julie too for that matter. In less than six months I had forced a stepmother/stepdaughter relationship on the two of them. There were never any major problems, just a few hiccups along the way. It was going to take some time to figure out what the other was all about.

The two of them respected each other's boundaries. Julie might give motherly advice to Alexis, but she never tried to be her mom. Alexis never tried to take the place of Maiya. Neither one of them wanted to be overly close, but they did form a friendship.

Trailer Trash

Before I went to work for Lehman Brothers, I had spent the previous five years working for another east coast bank called Green Point. I was part of part of their manufactured housing division. It was nice because I worked out of my home and had Colorado and Wyoming as my territory. "Manufactured Housing" was classy term for trailers, it didn't matter if it was a single or a double wide. My basic job description was that I would drive to the location of the trailer and complete one of three options.

The first, and most preferable option, was that I would knock on the door and inform the occupants that the payments on trailer were past due and they would give me a check and that would be the end of the story. The second option was that the unit would already be vacant and I would inspect the place for any repairs that needed to be done. The remarketing manager would take it over to determine the best plan for selling the trailer to somebody else. End of story. The third option was that I knocked on the door and whoever was living there told me that they would not be able to make a payment. This wasn't a viable option. I would let the person know that they would need to move the fuck out. I would be back in one month and they better not be there unless they had some money. That should have been the end of the story, but it rarely was.

The last option could get a little tense at times. Like any other real estate, location meant everything with trailers. If the unit were in a mobile home park, chances are they weren't paying their lot rent either. If that was the case, the park was putting more pressure on them to get of the place than I ever would.

As cliché as it may sound, the use of methamphetamine is prevalent in trailer parks. There were times that the customer living in the trailer was tweaking so bad that they had no idea what I was saying to them. This was never acceptable to my boss. He would call me and immediately start screaming, "you drove all the way out there and didn't collect any money or resolve the loan?"

I always remained calm when I talked to him. "Dave," I said. "Do you understand that these people don't give a fuck about the payment they need to make on the trailer? The only thing the care about is meth. And you know what else Dave, we don't want that fucking trailer back, it's so fucking filthy we couldn't even give it away."

A couple of times, I was lying in bed watching the late local news. They would have a story about the cops busting a meth lab at a trailer park in one of the north suburbs. I knew right away that my cell phone would be ringing in the morning.

Sure enough, at around nine Dave called and told me where I needed to go to check the unit out. He got panicked in these situations. Having our unit as a crime scene was never good for business. He would have to explain these to his superiors. I would have barely even got there and he would be calling again. "What does the place look like?"

"Uh, Dave," I would try to explain to him. "I can't get into the trailer because there is crime scene tape around the whole unit and fifty signs saying 'do not enter. Hazardous environment', we don't want to spend seventeen grand to have a bio team clean a place that is only that is only worth five. Just release the lien and be done with it." Dave was just like anybody else working in corporate America. All he wanted to do was cover his ass. It's the secret of longevity and success in the banking world. That's all you needed to do to keep getting those paychecks coming every two weeks.

The most dreaded location to have to go to were those homes that were out in the middle of nowhere. We you used to call those places "wife beaters". It seemed logical to all of the field reps, that the only reason somebody would want to live in such a remote location was that some guy didn't want any neighbors to hear the screams as he beat his wife and kids. I don't know if our presumptions were justified, but there were more than a few of us that had guns in our waistbands when we had to knock on the door. You didn't only have to worry about what was behind that door; you knew that there was a mean ass dog lurking around somewhere. Dave didn't care as long as we had a check when we left.

I always liked Dave, he was a great guy whenever we had to be face to face, which was usually at a bar having drinks. He just always seemed so stressed out by the job. I've wondered more than once if it was the pressure of corporate America that led Dave to use his toe to pull the trigger of a shotgun aimed at his chest.

Divorce is not an Option

"I hope you took your wedding vows seriously." I had no idea where Julie's statement came from. We were just sitting there eating dinner.

"I did," I said kind of confused. "What is this all about?"

"I don't believe in divorce."

"Okay."

"You're stuck with me until you die."

"I know." I still wasn't sure where she was going with all this.

"You can be the cheatingest mother fucker to ever walk," she continued. "You can fuck a different bitch every day and I won't leave. Our bed will be pretty frigid but you're stuck with me."

"Okay baby. That's good to know."

Oysters and Salvia

We waited three months after our wedding to go on our honeymoon. We flew into San Antonio, rented a car and drove the rest of the way to South Padre Island, Texas. We got there the week before the tourist season was supposed start on Memorial Day, so it was pretty quiet.

We spent the first day just walking on the beach, holding hands and taking pictures. That first night we went out for dinner at place that had tables overlooking the bay. We had a couple of drinks and watched the sunset before our dinner came. When the waiter brought out our plates there was fish on mine and a steak on Julie's. I gave her some shit for not eating seafood while we were at the ocean.

We went shopping at all the little tourist shops the next morning and bought some gifts for family and friends. We decided to grab lunch at a pub across from the hotel. Julie told the bartender how I had teased her the night before about not eating fish so she ordered the oysters.

After lunch, Julie wanted to take a nap before we going out that night. I told her I was going to go for a walk on the beach. I found a little bar where I could have some beers and watch the waves roll in. After an hour or so of that, I headed back to the hotel.

When I opened the door to the room, Julie was sitting on the edge of the bed. She was white as snow. There was a pile of vomit at her feet. There was a jet tub across from the bed with even more puke in the bottom of it. I asked her if she was alright, she just said, "I don't think those oysters were good."

For the next three days, she was all but bedridden. I went out to grab a burger and decided to hit up a couple of the shops that we hadn't stopped at. One of the shops sold smoking accessories. As I was looking at the pipes, I noticed a plastic bag labeled "Salvia". I had never heard of it, so I asked the clerk what it was. He was Middle Eastern and his English wasn't that good so it was difficult to have a conversation. He told me that salvia was something that you smoked.

"Is it like pot?" I asked. He didn't seem to understand the slang.

"Is it like marijuana?" I asked.

"Yes. Like marijuana," he said.

It was obviously legal so I bought a little to see what it was like. I would have preferred real pot, but I was wary to search for it in Texas. There were probably people still in prison there that got busted with a seed twenty years ago.

Julie was still sleeping off the oysters when I got back. I used a thumbtack and an empty beer can to make a pipe for the salvia. I sprinkled a little of it into the bowl, found something on TV and prepared myself for a mellow evening.

Seconds after hitting the bowl, I knew that something was wrong. Salvia is nothing like pot. In fact, the two are polar opposites. There is nothing mellow about Salvia. It's like being on an intensely bad LSD trip that lasts only about five minutes. The hotel room started spinning and crumbling as though it was made of old red bricks. The people on the TV screen were coming to tear my skin off. It ended just as quickly as it had begun. Coming down off of that crap was one the best feelings I have ever had.

In the morning I told Julie about my experience and she couldn't quit laughing. I think it helped her to feel a little bit better. She was able to get out that day and we went into the city to do a little photography. She opted for a cheese burger at lunch. On the last day of our honeymoon she was finally feeling well enough to take the surfing lessons we wanted to do when we were first got there. A couple of dolphins were playing about fifteen feet from us as we surfed.

After we got home, it was Julie's turn to try salvia. She spent the next five minutes trying to stomp on the millions of fluorescent green frogs that had swarmed our basement floor. When she came down from it, she grabbed the vial of the stuff and poured it down the garbage disposal.

The Library

Once Julie got fully moved in and decorated the place, our house looked like a library. All of my books were on shelves in basement, and Julie had put hers on cases in the living room. She had stacks of unread books next to the nightstand in the bedroom.

Julie was a voracious reader, often having two, three or even four books going at a time. She would read anything. You name any genre of book, and I guarantee that it was represented somewhere in her collection. She was equally happy reading a book on metaphysics or a Harlequin romance novel.

She once told me that books were the ultimate escape for her. She could completely lose herself in a book's pages. Sometimes I would give her crap about the mindless pap that she occasionally read, she didn't care. The last thing she wanted to do when she was reading was to learn something.

Early on, I used to buy Julie books as gifts. A new bestseller would cost ten dollars, and she would finish it in less than a day. I started buying her potted plants instead. It was better, and cheaper, for her to go to the thrift store and buy ten used books at a time.

Camping

Julie had only been camping a few times in her life, and that had been when she was still living in Iowa. She had never been camping in the mountains while she lived in Colorado. She told me that she had only caught one fish when she was a kid. Alexis and I had a tradition of going camping every year. We always went to Eleven Mile Reservoir which is about forty miles west of Colorado Springs. My dad took me there when I was five. I caught my first fish there, a 22 inch rainbow trout. My best friend's family had a ranch nearby the lake, so if I wasn't at Eleven Mile with my family, I was there with his.

I would never have expected that Julie would want to go with Alexis and I, she just didn't strike me as the camping type. It was something we had never talked about until it came up. I thought she would want just enjoy the peace and quiet, or maybe check out a show with some friends while we were gone. I didn't mind that she went, I was just nervous about it. I couldn't picture her sleeping in a tent.

I was dead wrong. Julie loved every second of camping. She wasn't crazy about baiting her own hook, but I let her know that Alexis had to clean every fish she had ever caught since the age of eight. Julie didn't catch a fish on her first trip, so we were going to try again. We went up to Twin Lakes outside of Leadville. When you get to that kind of elevation in the mountains, the weather can be more than a little unpredictable. The day started out nice. The sun was out as we put up the tent and threw our lines in the water. Just as the fire started roaring, the clouds blew in. Once the rain started, it didn't stop. We spent the night huddled in our sleeping bags to stay warm. We even played twenty questions to pass time. Julie didn't even have a chance to catch a fish that trip.

It wasn't until the next year that we were able to go camping again. Just by accident we found a place called Williams Fork Reservoir. It was smaller lake, but very scenic. There was only one other campsite being used in the whole area. Within two hours of setting up camp, Julie had caught a fish. We put the fish on a stringer that was anchored to the shore while we went for a hike and to take some pictures. Julie was stoked to cook her fish over the camp fire that night.

It wasn't meant to be. When we got back, the only part of the fish that was still attached to the string was its head. It was probably an otter that got to it, but Julie wasn't looking forward to canned chili for dinner. At dusk the fish started hitting again so I caught three which spared Julie from looking for the can opener.

Living and Dying with the Minnesota Vikings

Years ago, while I was still working at Green Point, I became friends with an artist named Damon. He did amazing cubist paintings. Damon is one of those people who are living the dream. He makes a living doing what he loves to do. He was put on earth to be an artist. I was in awe of his natural talent. He encouraged me to take up painting.

Damon gave me a bunch of tubes of his old oil paint and some linseed oil. I went and bought a decent size canvas. It sat blank in the corner of my condo for a few weeks. I would stare at it without a clue what I was going to do.

On an afternoon in January I was driving over to Grand Junction to repossess a mobile home. I was hung over and depressed. I had spent the day before watching my beloved Minnesota Vikings get annihilated 41-0 in the NFC Championship against the New York Giants. I was swearing that I was never going to root for the guys in purple and gold again.

That night at the Holiday Inn, I started doodling on a piece of paper. I sketched the Vikings logo with a grave stone in front of it. I drew in some other stuff around it like a partial brick wall, a naked woman and a shark coming up for a bite. When I got back in town, I sketched that the same thing onto the canvas and pulled out all the painting supplies. I was going call my masterpiece "Living and Dying with the Minnesota Vikings".

I immediately fell in love with painting. I loved mixing the colors and looking at the brush strokes on the canvas. It was so relaxing, almost therapeutic. I worked on that painting for weeks. It now hangs in my office. Nobody is going to consider it fine art, but I'm still proud of it.

I always thought that I had the soul of an artist. I wanted so badly to be a musician when I was younger, but after a few years of playing in garage bands I had to admit to myself that I simply did not have an ear for music. However, trying to write lyrics for songs got me interested in poetry. My dad also had a darkroom set up in the basement when I was kid, so I was doing photography before I can even remember.

In college, I was a Journalism major and a creative writing minor. In hindsight, I think that would explain how I ended up in mortgage banking.

Stan's Caravan

Julie didn't want to work nights anymore, so she left Q's right after we got back from our honeymoon. She tried to get out of the bar business altogether and tried a few menial jobs but didn't like it. After having the cash flow of tips her entire life, she hated having to wait two weeks for a paycheck. She finally found a place in Wheat Ridge that needed a day bartender.

Stan's Caravan was an interesting place to say the least. It was a complete dive bar, just a stone's throw from being an alcoholic's bar. Julie would get there at ten in the morning and there would be drunken people already waiting to get in. The owner, Stan, would just sit there drinking along with them. He would start drinking when the place opened and was usually still there when Julie left at six. She said Stan had money but wasn't sure where he got it. The rumor was that Stan bought the place so that he could drink in peace away from a domineering wife.

After the morning drunks left, the happy hour would get packed with blue collar types. There were a bunch of industrial businesses near the bar. Stan's got a few truckers too. It wasn't too far off the interstate and there was a truck stop just down the street. At night, Stan's morphed into a country and western bar.

I didn't go up to Stan's to see Julie the way I did when she was working at Q's. Since we both worked days and the Lehman offices were thirty miles from Stan's I might stop there every other Friday or so. It was easier for me just to stop in at The Draft. Another reason I didn't go to Stan's was because a few of the patrons could be very disrespectful of Julie. Don't get wrong, I knew what I was getting into when I married a good looking bartender. She got hit on constantly when she was working. It happened in front of me frequently, but it never bothered me. Most of it was good natured and I knew that at the end of the day she would be coming home to me.

Some of the idiots at Stan's took it way further. They would wait for Julie at her car after she got off. On a couple of occasions somebody followed her home. There were a couple of guys would say graphically sexual things to her. My patience for the kind of thing only goes so far. It didn't bother her, she had grown accustomed to it over her career. I wasn't too worried, she could take care of herself.

Julie liked working at Stan's. There wasn't all that childish drama that went on at Q's. Stan was very good to her, and she more or less ran the operations of the place for him. She also liked most of the regulars and became good friends with many of them.

I think Julie would have worked there forever had Stan's wife not sold it out from under him. The whole sale took about three days. There had probably been more going on behind the scenes, but that was all that Julie knew. She tried to stay on with the new owners, but they wanted to turn it into Mexican night club immediately. This of course alienated all of Stan's regulars who started to boycott the place. With no customers there are no drinks to serve so there was wasn't a need for a bartender.

Photographing Her

Julie and I were always doing art together, she is the subject of several of my paintings, but I really loved to take her picture. She was so photogenic, sexy and had such a nice body. She had a flow about her that the camera could capture. She moved so easily that it seemed like all you had to do was hit the shutter button and you could get a great picture.

I used to like to edit the pictures that I took of her. I wanted the one below to look like a photo that had been taken fifty years ago. I thought it would work with the tattoo.

Taking pictures of Julie while she was dancing was always fun. She got so into the music that she was oblivious to me having my camera. When she noticed the lens, she would play up to it as if it were a dance partner.

The picture below is an example of what I said about just pushing the button and let the camera do all of the work.

Sometimes she just liked to flirt with camera and tease it.

One Father's Day

On Father's Day one year, Julie arranged for Alexis to take me to brunch. While we were gone, she constructed what she called "the nook" on the patio of our walkout basement. She had purchased everything from second hand stores. She put up a bamboo shade to shield us from the sun. She found these two old metal patio chairs that must have been from the fifties or sixties, they were very cool.

She set up four plastic columns to serve as a border. There were strings of lights hung all over so that we could sit out there at night. In the middle was an old chest that we used as a table. There were always candles lit when we were out there.

We spent almost every evening of that summer sitting in the nook just reading and talking. We were both engrossed in our books one night when she asked me, "Do you think we will be one of those old couples that just sit next to each other even when we're not doing anything?"

"I can't think of any reason why not," I said. "It would be nice if we could be doing it on a beach."

Slow Ride/Traction Control

Since Julie and I were naked together within two and a half hours of knowing each other, it's safe to say that sexuality was a huge part of our relationship. It was a strange experience of have that kind of intimacy instantaneously. I don't know how else to say it, except that she was a perfect fit, physically, visually and emotionally.

Neither Julie nor I had any inhibitions about our sexual sides. We told each other about our deviances and experimentation in our pasts. By the time we got together, we had tried almost everything we had ever wanted to do. Now we wanted to try it all again, together. We swapped with other couples, had threesomes, and got incredibly turned on by having sex in public. We would just see the perfect little place and have a spontaneous quickie, sometimes there was an audience. I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

There were literally times that we fucked like beasts. I remember mornings of painful showers because the hot water was on my back that had been mangled by Julie's fingernails. There were often bite marks around my nipples. I loved it, but it hurt like hell. One time I seriously thought that she had bitten my thumb off. She would get so wet when I overpowered her in the kitchen as she cooked dinner.

As much fun as all of that was, the best times were when we just truly made love. Whenever that's what Julie wanted, she would ask for a "slow ride with traction control". This was code for me to brace my feet against the wrought iron of our bed frame so there would be no sheet sliding when I was inside of her, hence the "traction control". The slow ride was deep, slightly forceful thrusts that I would deliberately make last up to a minute. She would almost have seizures during her orgasms when I did this.

The Clouds are Darkening

About the time Julie and I got married, you could just sense that there was a storm brewing inside the offices of Lehman Brothers on Wall Street. The number of mortgage loans in a default status kept growing each month, and The Firm's stock price kept dropping. It was going for around $85 a share.

For my specific job, the true firestorm of the national mortgage crisis hit around November of 2007. Prior to that, charging off a loan as a bad debt was a very controlled process. Each loan submitted to me was carefully analyzed to determine if it would be a true loss to our investor or if we had some recourse for proceeds from the property. Most of the loans were second liens where if the first lien had foreclosed, the second lien would be wiped out. We would attempt to contact the borrower to see what their intentions were about keeping the property. We would typically hire a vendor to drive by the property and submit a report to determine how much we would likely get in the event the property was sold at an auction.

Once we determined what the approximate value of the property was, we would take that and compare it to the combined unpaid principle balance of the first and second liens. If the value was higher than the combined amount due of the two liens that would mean there was enough equity to take the property through the foreclosure process. If the value came in lower than the amount due, we would let the investor know that there wasn't enough equity to proceed. We would write the loan off our system and refer it to a third party recovery vendor for further action.

Part of my job description was oversight and evaluation of the recovery vendors. We had two primary vendors at the time. For potential legal reasons, I'm going to call them vendor one and vender two. The way recovery works is that if the vendor collects money on a loan we referred to them, they keep one third and forward the rest on to us. Even if the borrower sent money directly to The Firm, we would have to forward it to the vendor who would take their cut and then send the rest back to us.

We used vendor one mainly for the collection of SBA loans. They understood the complexity of the loans and generally did a decent job of recovering money for us. They had about ten million dollars' worth of our assets and would send us a wire representing five to ten percent of those receivables. Vendor two was a whole different story. We used them primarily for the collection of second liens. We had referred them over thirty million dollars in assets and they would send us a check each month in the $500-$1000 range. This was unacceptable. You could probably get a team of monkeys to randomly dial phone numbers and they could collect more money than that.

I routinely voiced my concerns to management about vendor two's poor results. Although they feigned concern, they made it clear to me that this was a vendor personally selected by Lehman and I was to continue to refer new business to them. I once documented an instance where a borrower had sent a check for $25,000 directly to us, and I Fed Ex'd it to vendor two. The problem was that the vendor never sent our share back to us. Management became more alarmed about vendor two because of that transaction and they instructed me to send only minimal new business the next month. I kept sending them very few new loans each month until somebody inside the New York Lehman office made a phone call. They were upset that vendor two wasn't getting more business. From that month on, vendor two received all of the loans that were charged off in a given month. I continued to process the ridiculous checks that vendor two sent us monthly and wondered, often out loud, how big the checks were that was going to somebody high up at Lehman.

Skulls and Dry Ice

I'm convinced that Julie loved Halloween more than any other day of the year. She would start talking about it and planning for it at the end of September. As soon as one of those Halloween stores opened in the neighborhood, she would be one of the first ones there. When she got home with the bags, I was always happy that we maintained separate finances from day one of our marriage because I would have had a cerebral hemorrhage if I would have seen how much she spent on plastic skulls, dry ice machines and Styrofoam gravestones. But hey, it was her money so I didn't give a damn.

It was just something about that holiday that really brought out the child in Julie, the way most people are about Christmas. She was usually in a better mood throughout the month of October. There were a couple of years that she felt insecure that the decorations weren't good enough. When the big night came, she was as giddy as a teenager. Her face lit up at every little kid in a costume, and I mean every single one.

This was all from a woman who I never recall starting her Christmas shopping before December 22nd.

Evil Santa

Three days before Christmas in 2008, a Saturday morning, Julie woke up in a strange mood. She told me that she wasn't going to go to work and started doing shots of vodka. A shouting match ended up ensuing between us. She locked herself in the bathroom and was threatening to kill herself. I told her that was bullshit and I knew she was only bluffing. I grabbed my car keys, turned off my cell phone and went for a drive in the mountains.

When I got back into phone range, I checked my messages. She left one saying that she got help for herself and that she wanted a divorce. I got home and she was gone. I had no idea where she was. The bathtub was full of water and there was an Exacto knife on the ledge. I waited all day for a phone call telling me where she was. It never came.

Julie finally called me the next morning and told me that she was in a mental ward not too far from where we lived. If I wanted to see her I had to come between two and four p.m. Those were the visiting hours.

I got there right at two. We hugged each other, and both said "I love you". I asked her what happened. The way she explained it, the whole episode came out of nowhere. She said didn't really know. She got totally overwhelmed and just totally lost it. She might have had some kind of attack. Her doctors had her on a bunch of medication that made her dopey and docile.

She was still in there on Christmas morning. My family gathered at my mom's house and they asked where Julie was. I lied to them and said that she had to go back to Iowa to take care of her grandma because her uncle had knee surgery and she would have to take care of both of them. They seemed to buy it, so we had brunch and opened presents.

That afternoon at two, I showed up at the psych ward for visitation. She was in a good mood. She told me that earlier in the morning all of the patients made Christmas cookie tree ornaments. She made one for me that looked like a demented elf. She said that it was an "evil Santa". I laughed so hard, it was so Julie.

The visitation area was a huge room, so there were many other patients hanging out with their loved ones. As Julie and I talked, I noticed a guy with a huge ugly scar on the side of his neck. I asked her what the deal with him was. She told me that he had tried to commit suicide by cutting his head off with a circular saw. She thought he was a nice guy though.

We apologized to each other for the whole episode. I felt bad for not realizing what was happening to her that morning. She felt guilty that we wouldn't be spending Christmas together. I told her that I loved her and we would do our celebrating when she got out in a few days.

She told me a couple of years later that she was never serious about committing suicide. She said all of the pressure over our crazy and brief courtship and marriage just got to her. She just needed a break.

Carbohydrate Heaven

We both liked to cook, and shared the chore equally depending on our schedules. Sometimes there was reasonable efforts put into the meals that we cooked, and there were other times we just tossed frozen lasagna into the oven. Every now and then, one of us could be in the kitchen all day. We both had our signature dishes. Mine was green chile. Julie's was chicken and noodles.

I don't know exactly how she did them. She used a whole chicken that was simmered all day. In other pot there were various vegetable's cooking. Just before dinner she combined it all and added some egg noodles. All of it was served over a bed of fresh mashed potatoes. It was fucking delicious, like a little slice of carbohydrate heaven.

Babysitting in Las Vegas

Of all the idiotic mistakes we made together, deciding to celebrate our first anniversary in Las Vegas less than six weeks after Julie got out of the mental hospital was far and away the stupidest. The doctors at that place would have written her a prescription if the wind blew the wrong direction. The hospital sent her home with a suitcase of little brown bottles. There were antidepressants, different kinds of anxiety pills, anti-this, anti-that, I couldn't keep track. All I know is that she was walking around like zombie. The light that was usually in her eyes was gone.

We stayed down on Freemont Street. Needless to say, the first thing we did after checking in to our room was to go get a drink. I had no idea how many pills Julie had taken that day. After two drinks, she was almost falling asleep at the bar. I helped her back to our room where she promptly passed out on the bathroom floor and would end up sleeping there for the night. She wouldn't budge, so I brought her a pillow and blanket and hoped she would be comfortable.

The next morning was the first time I truly realized how much medication the hospital had put Julie on. When I looked at the bottle of Xanax, I couldn't believe that a doctor would prescribe that much to anyone all at one time. All of that stuff was stripping away her personality. She was almost catatonic.

In a case of history repeating itself, just like the eve of our wedding at the MGM, hotel security had to escort Julie back to our room. For the final night of the trip, we booked a room at the Hard Rock Hotel. We were planning on seeing Motley Crue at the hotel's theater. As concert time got closer, Julie kept taking more medication. She was so fucked up that she could barely walk. I didn't even bother to go buy tickets for the show. I lied and told her that it was sold out. She said she would go check for herself. Despite my protests, she stumbled out the door and slurred something as she left. It wasn't even fifteen minutes before there was a knock at the door. I don't know what happened down in the casino, but security was not very happy with Julie. They told me that I needed to keep her in the room, because if they saw her downstairs again they would call the police.

In the morning, I felt a wave of relief when we got to the airport I was sick and tired of being her babysitter and I wanted to go home. I sat Julie on a bench near the departure gate and went to the bathroom. When I got back, Julie was gone. I spotted her inside a bar playing video poker. When I went over to her, she had already had two shots of Jaegermeister. She was hammered, and the bartender gave her third shot even as I was trying to signal him not to. I was worried that they weren't going to let her on to the plane.

We made it home, but when she was little bit more sober she could tell that I was fucking livid. I let her know that I would never go to Las Vegas with her again. That place was just too much for her. I also told her that she had better get a doctor's appointment and have a discussion about the amount of medication they had her on. Two weeks later, she quit taking the medication altogether. In a month she was back to being the girl I fell in love with before any of the hospital nonsense happened.

One Billion and Counting

My cubicle at work was starting to seem like the visiting room at the mental hospital. The controlled process we had for charging off a loan went away. The process now was that I was given a list. There was no analysis; there were only orders to get rid of the loans. The volume on the lists kept growing until it was unmanageable. Management briefly gave me some assistants, but there were fires burning all over the department so they were allocated to other disasters. I became the sole employee at Lehman Brothers charging off loans. I was not suspicious of what was happening at the time. I just did my job. I could handle charging off a hundred or more loans totaling around ten million dollars by myself.

In November, Janet walked me over a list with four hundred loans to charge off. I told her that would be impossible for me to get rid of that many loans. How could we more than double the amount of loans we charged off from one month to the next? She claimed not to know the reason for the increase, and she told me that I no longer needed to worry about documentation for the loans. The only thing I needed to worry about was making the loans "disappear".

I could feel my five year plan slipping away. The stock price was hovering around $50 a share and falling. After I met Julie, I told her about my five year plan, but I'm pretty sure it went in one ear and out the other. She didn't seem to high on Costa Rica.

And so it began. With each subsequent month, the number of loans would double from the previous. The total number of dollars to be charged off grew exponentially. Before long, I was routinely getting rid of 1500-2000 loans totaling $100-$125 million per month. I calculated that during the first half of 2008 I made over a billion dollars in loans "disappear". April was my biggest month with $128 million in second liens being charged off. I just did what management instructed me to do, and they gave me a paycheck every two weeks.

Tuaca's on the List

Eventually Julie and I would have a mental list of the types of liquor that we could not drink together. Tuaca made the list after spending the day at the pool with it. We were catching rays for most of the afternoon, and doing shots. It was a nice day, and we were just bullshitting with a neighbor who was down there with her four kids. Something seemed to be bothering Julie.

Back home, we did a couple of more shots of Tuaca. Julie gave me a mean look. "Do you want to fuck the neighbor?"

I wasn't sure where the question came from. "No."

"She wants to fuck you."

"Where are you going with this Julie?' She could have her jealous side at times. She kept going on and on about it. I kept telling her that I didn't want to do the neighbor. She wouldn't accept that as in answer. I chalked it all up to the Tuaca, because the neighbor wasn't even attractive.

What started as an interrogation turned into a fight. Instead of just going to our opposite ends of the house to cool off, we kept on taunting each other. Even worse, we kept on doing shots.

Tuaca is some nasty shit. Julie just went ballistic and started smashing anything she could get her hands on: dishes, cups, bottles, pasta canisters, potted plants etc. When there was nothing left to smash, and the Tuaca was gone, Julie had the bright idea that she was going to get more. I told her she was an idiot to drive, but she left anyway. I knew the liquor store was closed by that point, I figured that it would be a quick trip. I was certainly in no condition to go after her.

When she wasn't home in an hour, I started wondering when the phone would ring, and who would be on the other end. As I cleaned up the mess that she made, I didn't know if she had gotten a DUI or worse yet, been in an accident. She had turned off her cell phone so I just went to bed.

The phone finally rang in the morning. Luckily, it was Julie on the other end of the line. She had miraculously made it to a strip club on the other side of town. She told me that she had gone home with one of the dancers and stayed at her house. She would be home soon.

Road Trip

Every year we would make the trip back to Iowa to see Julie's family. It was more about seeing Maiya than anything else. Usually we drove straight through to Des Moines. Since her family purported themselves to be religious, we didn't get much of chance to party while we were out there. A couple of times on the way out we stayed at a casino in Council Bluffs to get it out of our systems for the week.

Julie's parents were never married and she was their only biological child together. Her dad, Gerald, would end up getting married and giving Julie two younger half-sisters. Her mother, Glenda, married a guy named Jack who had children of his own. I not sure how many step-brothers and sisters Julie had. Jack and Glenda ended up getting divorced due to her numerous affairs according to Julie. Jack would have a heart attack and die some time later. Julie always felt close to him.

Glenda would go on to marry a guy named Dan. It was clear after our first introduction that they didn't like me and I didn't like them. They claimed to be devout Southern Baptists, but that was just a ruse to justify their ridiculously judgmental way of looking at the world. They sure the fuck weren't going to like some beer guzzling, cigarette smoking long hair like me. They felt the only people that belonged in their inner circle were the people from their church.

Denise was Gerald's wife. I always liked her, she was the only one in the family that had a sense of humor, perfectly dry and sarcastic. I like Gerald too, but I can't say I was always comfortable around him. He had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1989 and by the time I met him he was confined to a wheel chair that he controlled with his neck. He was also religious, but in a different way. We were about to leave his house after a visit and as we were saying goodbye, he told us that we needed to start reading the Bible because the Rapture would be happening on July 17th. Julie started laughing because she thought he was kidding. He truly believed it. After we left I reminded her that it was early June and there was a lot of sex that needed to be had before mid-July.

I was never sure where I stood with Maiya. We never had any problems, but we weren't on the same wavelength. She was pretty and intelligent. Me, being the armchair psychoanalyst that I am, my diagnosis is that she lived a far too sheltered life. She was more or less raised by her grandparents who were always in mortal fear that somebody was going to kidnap her. I think that kind of upbringing stunted Maiya's interpersonal communication skills. She couldn't take her eyes off of her phone long enough to have actual human interaction.

Redfield Locker

Before we left Iowa each year, we had to make a stop in the little town of Redfield. There was a butcher shop there called The Redfield Locker. Almost anybody from Iowa, I have family there as well, will tell you that beef from Iowa is better than from anywhere else. Julie would tell me that the reason for that is that the cows were corn fed, whereas in most places they are fed on grass. I took her word for it because that was some damn good meat.

For less than a hundred dollars, we could fill all of the coolers that would fit in our car. We got roast beef, pork chops, sausage, you name it. Julie confessed that having a freezer filled Iowa meat gave her feeling of security and a sense of home. When we got down to the very last rib eye roast she wouldn't let us eat it.

The Edge of the Pool

Julie had started cocktailing in strip clubs when she was sixteen, When she was 18, she told me that she danced on stage for a couple of weeks before deciding that wasn't something she wanted to do. If the lap dances she used to do for me in private were any indication, I'm sure she would have been very successful at it. She had more stints as a server or bartender at gentlemen's clubs over the career up until just a couple of years before we met.

After she left Q's, Julie never had to work on Saturdays. The typical day for us was clean the house and do other household stuff. In early afternoon, we would go to a place that served breakfast all day and have some drinks and pick a strip club to go to after we were done. I think we came close to hitting all of them in the metro area.

One of the bars had several stages. The place would have men dancing on one stage and women on the rest. Julie might occasionally go sit at the guy's stage if he was an especially good dancer, but mostly she liked to watch the women do their thing. If there was a dancer I liked, Julie would arrange a private dance for me. If there was a girl that Julie liked, I would do the same for her. Invariably, those afternoons led to crazy, passionate lovemaking at night.

Some of the clubs were better than others, some were downright bad. The worst was a place down on Santa Fe. It was small, with only one stage, and the crowd was a little sketchy. The girls that worked there could never in a million years work at one of the nicer clubs. The only reason we ever went there was because there was no cover and he drinks were reasonably priced.

One day the women were especially unattractive. Fuck it, they were ugly. Our server was hotter than any of the dancers. I kept telling Julie that she needed to get up on stage. She of course said no, but I could tell the idea intrigued her. I kept egging her on and played the sympathy card, "Come on babe, you know I can't watch a girl dance that weighs more than I do." She laughed and downed a shot, she was onboard.

Julie finally asked the server to ask the manager if she could do a routine. We watched as the server did this. The manager looked over at Julie and started nodding his head yes. As he talked to the server he must have had second thoughts because he started shaking his head no. The girl came back saying the manager wanted Julie to dance there, but she couldn't do just one set, she would have to work the entire shift. That was a deal breaker for us, so we finished our drinks and left.

The little incident got us turned on. We decided to go to a swingers club. The place was called Mon Chalet over in Aurora. It's a motel that features such amenities as a clothing optional pool area and suites equipped with love swings, hot tubs and mirrored ceilings. The only thing that you could get on the TV was porn.

We checked in and went and got naked in the pool area. To say that we were disappointed would be an understatement. Most of the people that were there should never be seen nude, let alone in public. We walked into a separate hot tub area and Julie's eyes fixated on a black dude sitting on the edge. He was muscular and hung like a fucking Mandingo. Julie never admitted it, but it was obvious that had a fantasy about being with a black guy. At the strip club that featured guys, when Julie was sitting at that stage there was usually a brother dancing.

As we were sitting there, another couple got into the tub. The guy would fall into that category about not being nude in public, but the girl was cute and in many ways reminded me of Julie. Julie's eyes soon shifted from the black guy to the girl. Without saying a word, Julie went over to the girl and started making out with her. She put the girl on the edge of the pool and started going down on her. Julie had that girl moaning.

The black dude and I were sitting there enjoying the show. The girl's boyfriend didn't like it as much as we did. In fact, he was pissed. He started telling the girl rather harshly that they needed to go to the car to "talk". The two of them argued in the car for two hours because the girl wanted to come into our room and play around. It never happened. The guy was such a dick. Julie was so disappointed that she just went back to the room and fell asleep. I didn't even get laid that night.

Domesticated

Had Julie desired to be more a domestic June Cleaver type, she would have been able to pull it off. She had a knack for decorating and was a pretty damn good cook. When she wanted something clean, she was on her hands and knees scrubbing it.

We didn't do a whole lot of entertaining, but when we did, Julie wanted everything to be perfect. For a couple of years before I met her, I hosted our fantasy football league's draft. I never made a big deal out of it except to buy a keg. If somebody wanted to bring their own pizza, chips, liquor, weed or whatever, I would have beer for them.

After we got married, I told Julie I would be hosting the draft again that year. I said that it would probably be boring to her since the draft would take about three hours. After that was done, we'd be playing poker until early in the morning. She might want to go hang out with friends or something.

Instead, she wanted to stay for the draft and wanted to organize the whole thing. It was fine with me, I would still get the keg. Julie went all out. She bought every flavor of potato chip there was, and several different kinds of dip. There were a couple of appetizers, and she bought new dishes to serve it all on. With all the booze and mixers she got, we could have opened a bar.

As the ten of us drafted our players, Julie sat on the couch reading her book making sure none of us were without booze and food. Come poker time, Julie bought in and played Texas Hold'em with us. She held her own too, for a while she had the biggest pile of chips on the table. Some of the guys starting giving her shit, but she gave it back and then some. There wasn't a guy there that could drink her under the table. She was the perfect hostess.

"Don't give this Girl Jaegermeister"

It took Julie and me a long time to realize that we should never drink Jaegermeister together. The night was not going to end well. We were usually happy drunks, but when we were drinking Jaeger the most minor incident could turn into an all-out brawl between.

The day after one of our bad "Jaeger Nights" I was at The Draft sucking down Bloody Mary's trying to get rid of the hangover. There were two girls going around the bar pimping Jaegermeister. They were giving out free shots of their product, and various little gifts. The girls ended up giving me a small sized t-shirt emblazoned with the Jaegermeister logo on it.

I took the shirt home, pulled out a Sharpie pen and wrote "Don't Give this Girl" above the logo. I meant it as a dig at Julie, but she thought I was giving her a gift. She loved it. The joke was on me. She even wore it to work the next night.

It wasn't until a year or two later that I told her I had altered the shirt. She thought it came that way.

Dead Mice

As I wrote earlier, Julie and I both had cats from previous relationships, but we always knew that we wanted cats together. One day Alexis told us that one of her friend's cat had kittens and she still had two left that they were trying to get rid of. That's all Julie needed to hear. There were certain things that I knew that I would never be able to talk Julie out of, so we got two new kittens. One was totally black with long hair; the other one was all grey with short fur.

Alexis and Julie were trying to figure out names for kittens.

"We should call the grey one "Misty." Alexis said.

"Why 'Misty?" I asked.

"Because it's all grey," She answered.

"Then why not just name it 'Greyee."

My logic worked with Julie. That was the name. The other was named "Blacky".

Each kitten picked its favorite new owner. Greyee took to Julie right away. They were always playing together with all of the toys that Julie bought for them. That kitten acted more like a dog. Greyee was always bringing Julie gifts. I don't know how many times I came downstairs in the morning to find a dead field mouse on the living room floor.

Blacky and I on the other hand had more of a normal cat/human relationship. We were both very laid back. I would pet him a couple of times a day and he would come sit on my lap while I surfed the net.

Blacky and Greyee wouldn't even make it a year with us. They were both outdoor cats. That greenbelt behind our house that I had worried about Milo going into probably got to those kittens too. The coyotes still howled there. Within a period of six weeks, both of them just disappeared.

I just found a Million Dollars that Someone Forgot

Although I was no longer required to do so, every now and then a certain loan would catch my eye at work and I would give it a full analysis. I'm not sure what amazed me more, the fact that the loan ever got made in the first place or that nobody in management even seemed to care that the loan was in default. I don't know if I would go so far as to call what I saw "criminal" when I worked for Lehman, but some of my colleagues would argue that point, and they might be right. I would argue that it was the culmination of years upon years of sheer greed coupled with a complete lack of competence on nearly every level of management.

The best example I can give of how greed contributed to the horrible decision making at The Firm was a loan that was made in an affluent area of California. It was what they call a "no doc" loan in the amount of one million dollars. What that means in simplified terms is that the property appraised for a million dollars, and the borrower had good credit. That's all it took to get the keys. It was getting to the stage of the game where I wasn't slightly surprised that a single payment had ever been paid on the loan. Whoever it was that got lucky enough lived in the home for free close to two years while the loan went through the foreclosure process.
Not a single person was ever held accountable for granting such an idiotic loan. By the time anybody realized it was a bad loan, all of the checks had been cashed. Everybody that was involved in making that loan happen was very well compensated for their efforts. The originator, the underwriter, the closer, the appraiser, the real estate agents, the title company and virtually anybody else who touched the loan got paid. Before getting too sympathetic for the investor who ended up eating those losses, don't bother. They were just as greedy. They embraced the "no risk, no reward" philosophy. They knew exactly what they were getting into.

That loan wasn't an anomaly; it was closer to the norm. I mentioned that loan only because the size of the principle. Horrible loans of all amounts were being made. The credit guidelines that Lehman used were so lax, that virtually any loan could get pushed through. Why not? Nobody was going to make a dime if the loan didn't close.

Once a loan was booked onto our system, the incompetence of management to properly service it became readily apparent. I was charging off loans that nobody had even bothered to contact the borrower to find out why they weren't making their payments. There had been zero attempts at collecting the debt. For some reason, I had to pull a credit report on a borrower. They were paying every other creditor they had, but they weren't paying The Firm. In a meeting I asked management if they thought it was odd that borrowers were paying their Best Buy credit cards, but they weren't paying their mortgage. Everybody just shrugged their shoulders. I let them know that the reason the Best Buy card was current is that they had collectors calling delinquent accounts at 15 days past due. We hadn't picked up a phone in four months. There were only blank stares in the conference room.

The tension around the office in the summer of 2008 was something that you could almost physically feel. The stock started the Memorial Day weekend around $30 a share. It might have a good week occasionally based on some unsupported rumor, but all in all the price kept dropping.

In hindsight, I often wonder if the reason the company never spent the money service the loan in a competent manner was because they knew all along how crappy the loans were.

Victory is Mine

Every January, Julie and I would take some time off from drinking. Since we both hated to be outdone by the other, we would make a contest out of it. There was nothing on the line except bragging rights. The last thing Julie wanted was for me to have those rights.

Sometimes it was me who lost the bet. Other times it was a mutual agreement to go get a drink. There was one occasion where Julie lost. You can tell by the agreement below that I wasn't going to let her off easily. She had to get in that little addendum in the bottom. It was not in her DNA to admit total defeat.

Gunpowder Adrenaline

In case you have noticed a pattern yet, the following story takes place after the two of us went on an all-day drinking binge. It was a Saturday and we got to the bar early for breakfast. We bar hopped all over town and stopped at the liquor store on the way home. I don't recall everything that we drank that day, but I do remember that we were drinking vanilla vodka and Bailey's Irish cream shots.

The reason we were drinking so heavily that day is because we were celebrating. It was our second wedding anniversary. Neither of us remembered how the fight began Something stupid, but we were going at until early in the morning.

Of all the things that were said that night, the only words I remember Julie saying is that she wanted to "kill me". If I wasn't crazed enough already, those words really set me off. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife and handed it to her. I pointed to my heart and told her to kill me. She threw the knife on the floor and went upstairs to bed.

Another pattern you may have figured out is that I am a total and complete fucking idiot when I have been drinking that hard for that long. I went downstairs grabbed by 9mm pistol and loaded it. I took it upstairs and put the gun in Julie's hand. I told her that this was her chance to kill me. She didn't say anything but stared right at me. She aimed he gun and fired. The bullet went over my head and lodged in the door jamb of the bathroom.

We were both in a state of shock. She couldn't believe that I loaded the gun. I couldn't believe she actually pulled the trigger. In a panic, I picked up the gun that she had dropped and the fucking thing went off again by accident. Luckily the bullet went through the wall to outside instead going into the neighbor's house. I got even more panicked now thinking that the cops would be pulling up any minute. As I was rushing downstairs to hide the gun, it went off accidently for a third time. FUCK!!!

The cops still weren't there went I got back up to the bedroom. We started rehearsing what we would say to the police. Julie, still in disbelief, thought the best thing we could do could do was turn out the lights, get into bed and pretend that nothing happened. When the cops got there, we would play dumb and say we didn't hear anything. I didn't have a better idea, so that's what we did.

We just laid in bed silently, but the sounds of our hearts pounding was deafening. We waited for the sounds of sirens or the doorbell to ring. Hell, we were waiting for the SWAT team to kick in the door. We waited. The adrenaline pumping through our veins had sobered us up. The only sounds were the ringing in our ears.

Come five a.m., one of us started giggling. I don't know who started it, but pretty soon we were laughing together. The cops, or anybody else, weren't coming. All the laughing made us horny. We made love until we passed out. Happy Anniversary baby!

Even as I write this years later I'm still amazed that we never faced any consequences for our reckless behavior that night.

Jac My World

Julie and I were always brainstorming ways to make more money. We were doing pretty well, but both of us wanted to find a way to be self-employed somehow in the art world. We needed to find our little niche in the business. I had always wanted to open a gallery, but I couldn't see how it would be a winning proposition.

Julie had the idea that we should do an online gallery. We would make it a forum where artists of all fields could sell their work. There were hundreds of similar sites out there, but we would find a way to make ours unique. It seemed like the way to make it successful would be to create brand awareness.

We called the business "Jac My World" and had it registered with the state of Colorado. We wanted to create a kind of "punk" feel to the venture, and had a logo created with that in mind. This was going to be a family affair. The "Jac" stood for Julie, Alexis and Cory, the "My" was for Maiya, and "World" was Julie and I's term of endearment for each other.

We worked on the idea feverishly for a couple of months. Julie built the site and it was up and running. I was busy trying to figure out ways to market it. Julie's work schedule got screwed around, and soon life just got into one of those periods where things got hectic. The business fell by the way side. We made a couple of halfhearted attempts to revive it, but by that time we had lost the passion for the idea. I think we got discouraged by looking at the competition. They were doing it better than we could have, and it sure didn't look like they were selling a whole lot of art.

Ugly is Ugly

AJ worked in corporate America too. His employer was one of the biggest insurance companies out there and you know the name. They took a bailout from the government and run commercials telling the nation how caring they are.

We used to argue about which was the more bizarre industry, mortgage or insurance. I had my stories from the halls of Lehman Brothers, but he had one that trumped me. AJ was a claims adjustor in the automobile division. One file that he worked involved a lady who had been in an accident where the rearview mirror went through her face. He figured that it was an open and shut case and he authorized the woman to receive the maximum claim amount. His boss objected to the settlement and demanded to see the file. AJ's recommendation that the woman receive the limit of the claim was overruled; in fact his boss reduced the amount of the claim paid to the woman to zero. His rationale for the decision was based on a copy of the driver's license photo in the file; the woman was already ugly before the mirror ripped through her face.

The insurance company had a confidential "whistle blower" hotline for employees. AJ called it and reported what he thought was the unethical behavior of his boss. The confidentiality didn't last long, because almost immediately he started being subjected to varying degrees of abuse. They never told him it was because he dropped a dime on his boss, but it didn't take a detective to figure out what was going on. They made his work life a living hell. Eventually they found some miniscule reason to justify the termination of his employment.

AJ found an attorney who thought that he had a good case for wrongful termination. In the beginning, the lawyer was very aggressive in her pursuit of compensation from the company. It was a battle that I knew that he would never win. The two sides jockeyed back and forth for almost two years before AJ just gave up and moved on with his life.

Egg Sandwiches and Chinese Food

There was only one occasion that the four of us, Julie, Maiya, Alexis and me, spent any length of time together. Over the Thanksgiving weekend we all flew out to San Diego and rented a bungalow down the block from the beach. Since the weather was kind of chilly, we had a pretty low key weekend. The girls spent most of the time shopping.

The area of San Diego we stayed in is Ocean Beach. There is a very bohemian feel to the community of OB. There is also a decent sized homeless population that flocks there. It can be difficult to walk down the street without getting hit up for extra change or a spare cigarette. Julie bought a painting from a guy who was selling them down by the pier. It was actually a mixed media piece that she gave him ten dollars for. I thought it was pretty cool.

The bungalow came with a kitchen, and Julie wanted to cook dinner for all of us. We went to the market and got everything we needed for a Chinese beef and broccoli feast. We went ahead and got stuff for breakfast in the morning. The dinner was delicious, but there was a lot of food left over. There was no point putting it in the refrigerator since we would be flying out the next day.

We could see the beach from the front of where we were staying. Julie saw a bunch of homeless people gathered around a fire ring in the sand. Julie wanted to take the rest of the dinner over there and give it to them. It's not that I didn't want to do it; I was just surprised that that was something she wanted to do. Alexis couldn't care less either way. Maiya was adamant that it was not something she wanted to do. When Julie asked her why not, Maiya said that it would be too embarrassing.

I saw the look on Julie's face and I knew that she was pissed. I suggested to Alexis that the two of us go outside and have a cigarette. We could hear Julie and Maiya having a loud conversation, but we couldn't hear what they were saying. In the end, the four of us walked over to the beach and Julie gave the rest of the food to a couple who had everything they owned in some bags right there next to them. They were very grateful.

In the morning, Julie and I were drinking our coffee as she cooked breakfast. As we talked, I started to notice how much food she was making. There was no way the four of us would be able to eat that much. She took the bacon and scrambled eggs from the pans and started put in all on toast. After each sandwich was made she wrapped it up on a paper plate.

We left a few minutes early for the airport so we would have time to pass out the plates to the homeless who had gathered by the pier. It was obvious that it had been awhile since some of them had eaten. I don't know for sure if Julie did that to spite Maiya, or if she was just in the Thanksgiving spirit. Either way, I thought it was pretty fucking awesome.

Problems Letter

Julie,

I don't even know how to start this letter. I guess I should just be blunt about it. I'm tired of you treating me like shit. I'm tired of you not only whining and bitching about everything, not just to me, but to everybody you come in contact with. You're rude to me. You're rude to Alexis. You are rude to nearly everybody you come in contact with. Why the fuck are you so bitter and mean? I absolutely REFUSE to walk on eggshells around you anymore. I'm going to make myself happy whether you want to be or not. After all this time of being with you, I'm convinced that you would rather wallow in misery than to try and enjoy life. If that's your decision, that's cool. You will NOT drag me into your negativity.

I've done all I can. I've tried so hard to make you happy. I wanted so badly for this past weekend to bring a family together. I guess I failed. I had a good time. Alexis had a good time. I would like to think Maiya had a pretty good time. I think your mom and Dan had a good time. Somehow your heart never defrosted. You treated the homeless people better than you treated me. You treat your cat better than you treat anybody else in your life.

The bottom line is that you and I need to have it out. There's no time like the present. Tonight. 5 p.m. No alcohol between us. Just you and I looking each other straight in the eyes. Let's figure out the wants, needs, and expectations of this relationship.

I hope you quit living your life in fear.

Cory

P.S. Would it be too much if I asked you to articulate a little better than to say "whatever"?

Maiya and Julie

I was always puzzled by the relationship between Maiya and Julie. I guess that was because Alexis and I had always been so close. I wanted the same for the two of them, but I didn't know how to go about it. I knew there was a lifetime of history between them that I wish I could have waved a magic wand to make go away.

For our annual trip to Iowa, we scheduled it to coincide with Maiya's high school graduation. Julie saved up for months so she would be able to get all of the gifts that her daughter asked for. Maiya was taking a trip to Spain after graduation and wanted a digital camera. She also wanted the two of them to get matching mother/daughter tattoos. And of course, Maiya wanted her mom to take her on a big shopping trip.

Julie bought her everything she wanted, and the whole family did whatever it was that Maiya wanted to do. The night before we drove back to Colorado, Julie's mom planned a goodbye dinner for us. We waited for Maiya to get there before we sat down to eat. Maiya never showed. It was more important for her to hang out with friends. Maiya told Julie goodbye over the phone, and never bothered to say thank you for the gifts.

At Home in Cloth Walls

The state of Lehman Brothers had morale so low at work, that it could be depressing. A cubicle does weird things to people. For some, it's a sense of security. The cloth walls where pictures of children and spouses hanging by cheap clips represent a sanctuary. They have fulfilled the desires of everybody who has ever told them how they should live their lives. These people have obtained that sanctum that allows them to have a determined amount of money deposited right into their bank accounts every other week. Oh, and more importantly, they have health insurance. That way they are covered by any imagined malady that might happen. Good for them, at the end of the day they got everything they wanted.

For others, especially younger people, the cubicle represents a stepping stone. They think that once they get their foot in the door the cloth walls will lead them to the middle office where they will at least have a window. If they have the intelligence, ambition, determination and kiss enough asses they will get the corner office that has two windows. The amount that is deposited into their accounts will be larger than when they started. From all that I have seen, most of these types will never even end up in the middle office, let alone the one in the corner.

These go getters will have carrots dangled in front of their faces that will create the illusion that the corner offices are attainable. They will come in early, stay late and get promoted just high enough that they can get into salaried positions so management can make them work overtime and not have to pay time and a half. Eventually they will be so indoctrinated by "corporate think" that they justify their existence with the phrase, "at least I have a steady paycheck and health benefits". Good for them too.

Two Hours Gone

As much as Julie loved to go out dancing, her true favorite thing to do was sit on the couch and watch a movie. Our cable bill was ridiculously expensive because we had to have all of the movie channels.

If Julie and I were in front of the TV, it was very unlikely that we were watching network programming. We were always watching movies. If she had the day off, it wasn't out of the ordinary for her to sit on the couch and watch movies from her first sip of coffee in the morning until she had her last shot of vodka at night. When the weatherman said that there was a big snowstorm headed our way, Julie would come home with a bag of DVDs from RedBox. Even the few TV series' that we did watch together were all on disc.

Just like Julie would read any book, she would watch any movie. Sometimes I'd sit down to see what she was watching. After 15 minutes, I'd say, "this movies sucks".

"I know."

"Then why are you watching it?"

"I want to see how it ends."

"Why would......" I decided not to even bother. That's just how Julie was; she would watch a terrible movie until it was over. I couldn't stand doing that. I felt like a bad movie cost me two hours of my life.

One movie I was always remember watching with her was "Sid and Nancy". It was the story of Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols and his girlfriend Nancy Spungeon. They had a crazy but passionate affair complicated by the use of heroin. Sid would OD on heroin shortly after he stabbed Nancy to the death.

When it was over, I asked Julie, "Other than the heroin and the ending did that remind you of anybody?"

"Yes."

Settling into Marriage

One of the few downfalls of getting married after a five months of dating, it that it probably took us a little longer to settle into marriage than most couples. It didn't help that we were both a couple of hard heads. The old adage "opposites attract" didn't apply to us, we were both alpha personalities. It seems that most of the successful marriages I've been around consist of one dominate partner and the other is more passive. That wasn't the case with Julie and me. We were both dominant, but learned how to pick our battles.

It was around the third year of our marriage that we started to settle down and we found a flow to life. We moved from Littleton to Lakewood. When we first met, Julie moved into a house that I owned. I told her to decorate it anyway that she wanted, but I don't think that she ever thought of that place as "ours". She never quite got comfortable with the stories about some of the things that I had done in that house. The place in Lakewood would be hers as much as mine. She went all out decorating it, but since it was rental there was only so much she could do. I handled putting my man cave together, and she took care of the rest of the house. She bought new furniture, and scoured second hand stores for interesting items to decorate with.

I was working weekdays, and she was working weekends so we didn't have many days where we could get into trouble together. There were no more strip club Saturday afternoons or drinking until all hours of the night. If we went out, it was to dinner and a movie, or hitting the art galleries down on Santa Fe. We might hit a concert every now and then. Most nights, it was evenings on the couch with the dog at our feet and we were in bed by ten or eleven.

Six Shooter

One of the things that made our marriage easier is that we both smoothed out our alcohol consumption. We no longer had the "anything goes" attitude. I stuck to beer only, and set a limit. Julie learned the only thing she could drink without going stark raving crazy was vodka. She stayed away from Jaeger, Tuaca, whiskey, tequila or any of the other shit. She stayed with vodka only.

Julie even perfected her limit. That was six little shooters of Smirnoff pear vodka. It would have been cheaper to buy a bigger bottle, but if she did she'd only drink it and be back where we started. That became the normalcy of our marriage. The fighting stopped with the exception of the minor flare up here and there.

We started to like the lack of volatility in our relationship as opposed to our early days when we thrived on the chaos.

Do as I say.....

Whenever I tell somebody that I worked for Lehman Brothers, they invariably ask if there was any criminal activity that led to the bankruptcy. My usual answer is, "Probably, but I never saw it. I had suspicions but didn't really care either way. They were paying me."

I'd let them know that there was quite a bit of incompetence, and a general helping of arrogance, and a wide swath of greed within The Firm.

Still, as an employee Lehman did things that made you question what was really going on in the offices on Wall Street. We were always going through some type of training course. One of those courses was on money laundering. The guy that was conducting it had an odd tone about him. He seemed to know a little too much about it. I remember thinking that you must have to know how to do it, before you can teach somebody how to prevent it. As you can tell by the certificate below, I passed.

Money Laundering Degree

Lehman Going Down

By August of 2008, it became obvious that one way or the other, Lehman was going down. The stock was in the $17 range. I was on both sides of the home loan mess.

I wasn't personally exempt from the national mortgage crisis. My house was foreclosed on. That's why moved to the new place. I didn't have the hardships that many mortgagers had; I did what was called a "strategic default". I bought my house at the height of the Denver housing market, May of 2003. The market was so hot that if a property hit the market at nine in the morning, there was a good chance that there would be an offer on it by five in the evening. There was no haggling about price. If you wanted that house, you had better offer the seller what they were asking or the next person would. Too make a long story short, I completely overpaid for the house.

In late 2007, legal notices started getting taped to front doors in the neighborhood. Every month there would be a new group of townhomes that went vacant, and they were staying empty for a long time. I had access to programs at work that allowed me to continually monitor the values of homes in my area. I'm not exaggerating when I say that they went down every time I checked. I was losing thousands and it was time to stop the bleeding.

I knew the industry well enough to know that my lender, Wells Fargo, was not going to offer any assistance until my loan was in default, so I quit making payments. Since I wasn't paying on the house, there was no need to pay the homeowners association dues either. It was nice having all that disposable income. After my loan was sufficiently delinquent, I called the lender to see if they wanted to cut a deal where I would start making my loan perform again or if they wanted to take the house into their REO inventory. I didn't care either way. I wasn't going to keep hemorrhaging money on the place so if they didn't want to work with me they could have their house back. I could go rent a similar place for a lot less than my mortgage payment was.

After the phone call, I came to the conclusion that Wells Fargo was just as fucked up as Lehman was. The process to get a modification was so ridiculous, it was borderline absurd. You had to jump through hoops to get absolutely nothing accomplished. It was a vicious circle. Once they turned me down for three mortgage modifications for reasons even they couldn't explain so I told them to fuck off. They could have their house back, and that was that.

I lived in that house for free almost a year and a half and I didn't feel the least bit guilty about it.

Paranormal House

There was something different about the place we moved to in Lakewood. Julie was the first one to hear strange noises as were moving in.

I had just got back from grabbing more boxes from the storage unit and she asked me, "Did you take a box of pots and pans up to the man cave?"

"Not intentionally. Can't you find them?"

"I haven't looked, but it sounds like the cat is up there playing with them."

I went up and checked. There were no pots and pans, or a cat.

The noises didn't stop. There were periods of weeks where we wouldn't hear a thing, but other times the noises were frequent. There would be banging noises, and the sounds of feet going up the stairs. There were a couple of nights where Alexis went to a friend's house because the noises in the room had frightened her.

I contacted paranormal researchers about what was happening. After a couple of weeks of emailing back and forth, they wanted to come out and do an investigation. When I told Julie about it, she wasn't real hip to the idea. Since neither of us felt threatened by the noises, we decided just to live with it.

I spent the most time in the room, in fact I'm writing this sentence in it. There are little things that happen. Paintings on the walls will move. Pictures on shelves will turn around. There is the feeling of being watched, but I never felt like something was trying to hurt me.

Two Truths

Our third anniversary went quite a bit smoother than our first two had. We weren't in Vegas, and there was no gun. It was dinner at a quaint sushi place. We laughed about the first two and all the other stupid shit we had done. We talked about the night we met.

"I have a confession," she said. "I was husband shopping when we met."

"Oh, really?"

"I was getting to that age........I had never been married."

"What made me a prospect?"

"I was tired of young, good looking guys."

She got me. Zing. I laughed, "What made you stop shopping at me?"

"Your Penis." She had a straight face.

I could live with that.

Broadsided

That first ride home with Julie was in an old Dodge Caravan. The paint was peeling, and it was just ugly to begin with. It was so filled with trash that I could barely get in. I asked her if she was in the process of moving, but she didn't know what I was talking about. I was able to stand it for a couple of miles, considering my only option was to walk home in a torrential downpour. I was also intrigued by her.

After we got back from our honeymoon, the transmission went out on the van. She wasn't too stressed about it; she had only paid $750 for it and drove it for three years. That meant we were going car shopping. Julie had never financed a car before, or had any kind of credit for that matter. She didn't believe in credit, but she changed her mind and decided to make payments on a Jeep Wrangler. She immediately regretted it. It wasn't the vehicle, it was the payments.

About a year after she bought it, she was turning into an intersection and was hit by an oncoming car. Although the damage was minimal, the insurance company totaled it. They gave her a generous settlement check.

She was done with car payments. A regular customer at the bar suggested that she go to an auto auction. She figured she could get a cheap car and have enough left over to take us on a weekend getaway. We went to the auction yard and scouted out a few cars that we might bid on that could be in her price range.

We missed out on the first couple of cars that we tried to buy. As the third car that she was interested in came to the block, the auctioneer started talking fast and Julie started raising her card every time the bid went up. Finally, the auctioneer said "sold to the little lady".

As Julie was high-fiving the people around her, I watched as the car drove around the corner and I saw that the passenger side was smashed in. I couldn't believe my eyes. I walked over to her and asked "What the fuck did you do?" I was hoping she had some plan that she neglected to tell me about.

"What?" She was annoyed at the question.

"The car you bought is wrecked."

"No it's not." She thought I might be kidding.

"Yes it fucking is."

We walked back to where the car was and I showed her the damage. It looked like it had been broadsided. When she was bidding, she could only see the driver's side. She stood there in silence as she looked at the wreck. She walked over to the car parked next to hers. "This is the one I thought I was buying."

It took every ounce of energy I had not to fall on the ground laughing, not at Julie, but at the situation. I wasn't sure if Julie was pissed or just in a state of shock. It wasn't until we were halfway home that she fully came out of her trance.

"I guess there won't be a weekend getaway," she said flatly. She found the humor in what had happened so we stopped at the bar and let everybody there laugh with us.

Cornfield Camping

Although Julie was pretty eclectic in her musical tastes, and would dance to almost every rhythm out there, there was nobody that she would rather dance to than Kid Rock. I'm fairly sure that most of our neighbors knew that too. She wasn't the type of person who was going to dance with the volume low. Our townhome backed up to a courtyard. The place had a southwestern exposure and we didn't have air conditioning. In the summer, all of the windows were open. When Julie felt like dancing, she wanted everybody else who lived on the courtyard to be dancing too.

She had seen Kid Rock every time he did a concert within a hundred miles of wherever she was living. There was a time we went to see him at the Paramount Theater in Denver and she wore this yellow shirt with Mighty Mouse on it. As soon as Kid Rock hit the stage, Julie would tell me where to meet her after the show and head for the dance pit. She must have been tearing it up, because Kid Rock, at mid song, said "Whoa, look at Mighty Mouse go."

Julie had turned me into a Kid Rock fan as well. The act that I always tried to see when she was in town was Joan Jett. I had been a fan of hers since the days of The Runaways. Joan was just cool, like Frank Sinatra cool. She seemed like she always stayed true to herself no matter what. At one point in my life, I think I owned damn near a copy of everything she had ever recorded.

One day I got an email with the subject "Colorado Concert Calendar". When I opened it, the first show on it was Joan Jett warming up Kid Rock at a music festival outside of Grand Junction. Even if I didn't feel like driving the three and a half hours each way, Julie wasn't going to let us not go to that show. We'd make a weekend out of it.

We pitched a tent at the "camp ground" right outside of the festival. The camp ground was an old cornfield, complete with irrigation rows and all. There was that awkward moment when I told Julie that I had forgot to pack the air mattresses. The first night of the festival was headlined by Poison. Neither of us had been big fans of theirs, and we stood there and mocked them throughout their set. It was like a 90 minute commercial for Bret Michael's TV show at the time, "Rock of Love".

The second day of the festival, the bands started playing at noon, but there wasn't anybody playing that we were interested in seeing. The best way we thought to spend the day was to drive over to Moab. We went swimming in the Colorado River and used our cameras to capture the beauty that surrounds you in that part of Utah. There was so much there to photograph, we could have stayed there for a week. Below is something we found just up the banks from the river. Julie took it, and we judged it the best photo of the excursion.

We got back to the campsite in time to for whatever band it was that came on before Joan Jett. After their set was over, Julie grabbed my hand and told me to follow her. When I asked where we going, she would only tell me that it was surprise. We ended up in the VIP line at the front of the concert area. Julie had bought us back stage passes for Joan's set. Whenever I started to think that Julie was a hopeless hard ass, she would go and do something that sweet.

When Kid Rock came on, she headed up to the dance pit like she always did. After the show, when she got back to the tent, she was sweaty and horny. You can get pretty creative sexually when trying to avoid the discomfort of sleeping in a corn field.

The night after we got back from Grand Junction, we want and saw Foo Fighters at Red Rocks. It wasn't a bad weekend.

Lehman Brothers Evacuation Kit

Ground Zero

On the morning of my 43rd birthday, Monday, September 15, 2008, I did what I always do. I got up early, grabbed up a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette and sat down at the computer. I clicked on the news, Lehman Brothers had filed bankruptcy. When I had left work on Friday, every employee knew that this was a possibility. It was either that, or another bank would buy us over the weekend.

Since I hadn't heard otherwise, I got dressed and went to work. The place was like a mortuary. There was very little conversation, and some people had tear-soaked cheeks. Most of us sat in our cubicles and monitored our email and the news. Even senior management wasn't really sure what was going on.

The place was a nonstop rumor mill for the next couple of months. The only accurate information we got was from the media. The only thing management would say is that "it's business as usual until we hear otherwise. Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, sent out a generic email about week after the bankruptcy and that was the last we ever heard of him.

Finally, after two months of being hung out in the wind it was announced that there would be a companywide conference call. They gave us two days' notice so all of the employees could speculate about what was going to be said until their heads exploded.

At the end of the call, nothing had been said that we didn't already know from the news.

The only thing of interest that voice on the other end said was, "On a positive note, you can take pride in knowing that you are at ground zero for the greatest financial crisis in American history."

Lucky me.

My Muse

As with photography, Julie was my muse for painting as well. I used to paint her body and have and have her lay down on a canvas. The painting below is an example of what I am talking about. She would get naked and stand on an old shower curtain. I would cover her body with latex paint. Slowly I would lower her onto a blank canvas, and gently lift her back up so as not to smear the paint. There would already be warm water running in the shower so she could rinse off before the paint dried.

I had done this type of painting before, and once I had the initial image on the canvas, I would fill in the blank space with different colors, techniques or anything else I felt like doing. While Julie was in the shower, I was considering what I should do next on our little project.

When she was all cleaned up, I told her what my ideas were. She stood there for a minute and looked at it propped up on the easel.

"I think you should leave it as it," she said. "Leave it right there on the easel. The color works with the rest of the room." She was right.

We left it as it, but could never decide on a title. We were both seeing different pictures in the paint.

It was easy to do an abstract painting of Julie. She was such a complex and unpredictable person. I call the one below "Angry Julie". I did it in about 30 minutes one night when I had done something stupid and she was pissed at me. This is what her face looked like that night.

Art is a lot more fun when you aren't worried about the end result or what anybody else might think, it was just about the process. My wife was a great subject.

I did a few pieces where I used photographs of Julie mounted on a canvas, and paint around them. Like I said, it was about where the process takes you.

Copper Pipes and Crack Houses

Lehman Brothers' stock was no longer trading. Since our division wasn't technically part of the bankruptcy, the company rebranded itself as Aurora Bank.

I continued to handle charge offs for Aurora, but the focus shifted from getting rid of second liens, to first liens. These were toxic assets to the company. First lien charge offs were homes that had been foreclosed on, but the company couldn't resell them for whatever reason. Typically these loans were in low income areas. The majority were in rustbelt areas like Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago. The entire state of Florida also had a steady stream of problem properties.

It was easy to make to make the unpaid balances go away, but the company didn't automatically release the lien in case there might be some kind of recovery. Most of the releases were due to code violations and public nuisance orders. There were a lot of properties that became crack houses and gang hangouts. Some houses had been vandalized so badly it cost less to release the lien than to attempt any type of repairs. For a while, the price of copper was so high that it became a near daily experience to get notification that somebody had broken into a foreclosure and ripped all of the plumbing out of it.

Like with manufactured housing, meth labs were popping up in the properties. Grow houses were a problem too. Growers would alter a houses electricity to accommodate the lights for growing marijuana. Once these guys got busted, the cost could be enormous to get the place back to code.

Aurora was already hemorrhaging cash due to inept management; we had to stop the bleeding where we could.

The Dog Rescuer

Julie came home from work one night with the story that one her friends, Chrissy, had found a puppy in the snow at the on ramp of I-70 and Federal Boulevard. She said that Chrissy was going out of town and she asked if Julie could watch dog for the weekend. It took some sweet talk and late night promises before I agreed to let the puppy stay. The second I said "yes", I knew how this story was going to end.

I have to admit that it was love at first sight for both of us. The puppy had the features of a German Shepard, but the coloring of a Doberman. Nobody knew what kind of dog it was, probably a mixed breed. Julie didn't think it would get to big based on the size of its paws.

The next morning when Julie saw me playing with the puppy, she came clean that the weekend was a test run. Chrissy already had two dogs and didn't want another one. If we didn't take it, she would have to take it to the pound.

I had many dogs as a kid. I grew up on the west side of Pueblo, which at the time was still pretty rural. Dogs just seemed to show up at our house. Some became pets after following me home. I'm not sure I even remember all of the dogs we had. Only two times do I recall actually physically going to get a dog.

The first one was a black lab mix named Joe that my dad was going to take care of because his owner was going to jail for a couple of years. Joe was a very smart dog. On those many occasions that I was grounded when I was a kid, I could still go play baseball with Joe. I would hit a tennis ball with a bat, and Joe would try to catch it in the air. Joe died when the son one of our neighbors shot five dogs from the neighborhood and threw them over a cliff. That same guy would later walk into a bar and shoot his girlfriend and then go back to his car and put the gun in his mouth.

The second dog we went and got was named Dobie. It was a Doberman puppy that I had saved up for with the money from my paper route. His tail had already been cut off, so all I had to do was to get his ears cropped. The veterinarian did the procedure and let me make payments. On the day that I made the final payment, Dobie got hit by a car.

Julie told me that I need to get over my childhood dog trauma, and just look at the puppy. It was adorable. Needless to say, we kept it. The only condition was that I wasn't going to feed, walk, or clean up after it.

Julie named the dog "Lucy" after her favorite actress, Lucille Ball. I believe that dog changed Julie's life in some ways. Her face just brightened up around Lucy. Julie spoiled that dog rotten. I have no idea how much Julie spent on dog treats and toys, but Lucy never went without.

Whenever Julie and I got into a little spat, I would let her know that if she treated people the way she treated the dog, there would be statues erected in her honor. She loved that dog, and that dog loved her.

A Microcosm of the Bigger Picture

It was fitting that Mike was my last boss in corporate America. He was the epitome of everything that was wrong with management in the business world today. He had absolutely no experience with charge off loans, and the only reason he was hired was because he was best friends forever with the guy that hired him. He was afraid to make the simplest decision. His interpersonal skills were nonexistent. Not a single one of his employees liked or respected him. He held meetings that served no other purpose than to create an adversarial environment. Mike was the type of person who went to a restaurant solely to abuse the server because that was the only way he could feel important and in charge of his life.

In March of 2012, it was announced that Nationstar Mortgage had purchased the servicing rights to Aurora's loan portfolio. That was the death sentence we had been waiting for since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Nationstar wasn't buying the company, just the loans. The rest of Aurora's holdings were being sold off as well. Without any loans, there wouldn't be a need for employees.

Nationstar announced that a few people within Aurora would be offered jobs with them. Mike used LinkedIn to start kissing the asses of people he wasn't even working for yet.

It's all in your Head

It's an interesting study in psychology to work for a company that is actively dying. Every employee reacts to the situation in differently. One way or the other it gets into their heads. Some of them thought the way I did, a sense of relief that the nightmare of working in such a toxic environment was nearly over, and excitement to get on with the next chapters of our lives.

Some people were ambivalent, they weren't making so much money that they couldn't go somewhere else and get essentially the same deal.

By far, the majority of my colleagues were in an unbelievable state of denial. I got past the sadness of that mentality only to find it amusing. You could show these people something black, nd they would argue that it was white. They had read the documents and details about the sale of the loans, but were convinced that they would still have a job in three months. They couldn't believe that after their years of service to the company that they would end up on the scrapheap outside corporate America's back door.

A handful of employees greeted their predicament with near paralyzing fear. They were so defined by their trivial job that they might die if they couldn't be in their little cubicles answering inane emails.

North Shore Bar and Grill

Julie had already been working weekends at the North Shore Bar and Grill when she got laid off from Stan's. I always liked the North Shore; it was at Wadsworth and Chatfield close to The Draft and regulars intermingled between the two establishments so there were a lot of people that I knew. She picked up Tuesdays too. She made enough money from those shifts, especially during football season that she didn't want to work the rest of the days of the week.

The Shore, during the day, was a laid back bar. I went in there for a couple of beers nearly every day she worked. On Tuesdays, it was right on my way home from work.

I used to like to go see her on Tuesdays. She would only have a few customers, so we could just shoot the breeze and talk about life for a couple of hours. We had some of our best conversations on Tuesdays at the Shore. When Julie had customers, I would scratch lottery tickets. The bar had a vending machine that would spit them out and treated me well. So well in fact, that I hit $4,000 ticket on a fall Tuesday afternoon.

A Simple Agreement

Throughout my career in banking, there were always jokes about how if the general public really knew what was happening behind the scenes in corporate America everybody would be hiding their money in the mattress. It's surreal working with in the walls of major financial corporation. The whole point of your existence is to meet some arbitrary goal number by the end of the month.

There was a time not too long ago where if you accepted an offer of employment from a Wall Street firm, the path of your life was set. You'd have a nice house in the suburbs with a two car garage. You will never be without benefits. All that was required of you was that you sit down, shut up and do your job. Put in thirty years and you'll have nice 401K and pension plan that will set you up for a nice comfortable retirement.

That might have been how it used be, but it hasn't been that way for a long time. With a quarter century of corporate America under my belt, those seven years at Lehman/Aurora were longest a job had lasted. In all that time, I had only left one job of my own accord. In every other instance, I had been laid off or got out right before the inevitable pink slip came. I need to clear up a myth right now; the end doesn't come with a pink slip. It comes in a blue folder.

The harsh reality is that when your paycheck is coming from corporate America, your livelihood is never guaranteed. Your sense of personal and financial security is directly tied to the price of your employer's stock. If that price is going up, then chances are life is pretty good for you. When the price is steadily going down, each day at work can be an adventure. The stockholders are going to demand action.

I've watched as people got to their cubicle in the morning and couldn't sign onto their computer only to find that they had been locked out. In a few minutes a voice comes over the intercom telling the people who can't get into their work stations to report to the conference room where you are promptly handed a box and told that human resources would be contacting you.

Or in the case of Lehman Brothers, there will be two meetings in the morning. If you are scheduled for 9:30 meeting, you should go look for a box yourself. If you are scheduled for the 11 o'clock meeting, you get the canned speech from the powers that be over a conference call that your job is safe and management regrets the "difficult decision" they had to make regarding your colleagues in the 9:30 meeting. I was always irritated by that "difficult decision" phrase. That is such fucking bullshit. It wasn't a difficult decision at all; they just looked at the stock price and that was the bottom line.

To this day, my 78 year old mom believes that there is a bond of loyalty between an employee and employer. She can't seem to grasp that that is not the case on either side of the fence. I never felt a sense of loyalty to any of my employers, or any emotion for that matter. I went in and did my job the best that I could, and they gave me a paycheck. It was a very simple agreement. My mom, God love her, conveniently forgets that my step father was forced out of his job at Santa Fe Railroad after 30 years. He was forced to work menial jobs for a few years until he reached retirement. He died mere months after reaching that milestone.

On June 29, 2012 I had my meeting with Human Resources and received my blue folder. It was the last day I ever sat in a cubicle.

Wherever the Road Takes Me

I told Julie that after I got laid off, I was going to take a two week long road trip. The plan was to drive south through Arizona and down into the Baja of Mexico. I would drive down the gulf side of the peninsula and drive back up the Pacific side. I was going to be camping most of the time and only getting a hotel room to get a shower and some Wi-Fi access. I bought a one way ticket to San Diego for Julie. I would meet her there and we would stay for a few days before driving back to the Colorado. I even promised, though I swore I would never again, that we would spend a couple of nights in Las Vegas on the way home.

The whole trip was going to be an artistic journey for me. I was going to take several canvases, my paints, all of my cameras and a couple of blank notebooks to chronicle the adventure. I had been researching and mapping an itinerary for a couple of months.

As my trip grew closer, Julie started to express apprehension. It wasn't that she didn't want me to go, after all the bullshit at work she knew that I needed to get away. It was Mexico that she was worried about. Some of the regulars at the bar had told her what dangerous place the country was and how they were finding headless, tortured bodies all over place down there. I tried to reassure her that the bodies they were finding were all linked to the drug cartels and I would be safe on the Baja since it wasn't a typical drug courier route. It shut her up for a while, but it didn't ease her worries at all.

Day by day, she tried harder and harder to talk me out of Mexico. She even enlisted the help of AJ to dissuade me from going. I was furious at her that she would involve him in such a way, and I was almost as pissed at him that he would interfere. I told her that it was a nice try, but I wouldn't be taking travel advice from him because he was afraid to leave Jefferson County. She gave up trying for a couple of days.

On the night before I was leaving, she came to me in complete hysterics. She was crying nearly uncontrollably and begging me not to go. In the five years I had known Julie, I had never seen her like that. I held her and promised that I wouldn't go across the border.

In the morning she was on the receiving end of my silent treatment as I was packing up the truck. I was pissed at myself for making that promise to her. I guess in my own childish way, I was trying to get her to let me out of it. That didn't happen. I kissed her and told her I would call her.

"I know you're going to break your promise."

"No I'm not."

"Yes, you are."

I went out to the truck grabbed my passport and took it back into her. "I keep my promises."

So there I was pulling out my parking lot with not a clue where I was going. I just started driving west. I perused the map and thought about my options. After doing a few mental calculations, I figured I could get to Lake Powell before nightfall.

I found a desolate campground right by the water. There first thing to do was make a fire and find the lantern, it was getting dark. I didn't make a big camp, because I was going to find a new site in the morning. The only other sign of life was a travel trailer about two hundred yards away with a dim light on. The solitude felt great. I love sitting by a campfire with a beer and just looking up at the stars.

When it was light I took a ferry over to a camp ground at Bullfrog Marina. I did some photography and started a painting. I had to spend a lot of time in the water because it was so fucking hot. The thermometer in my truck said it was 108 degrees, the sun was blazing. I was drinking full beers in two or three gulps. They were going down easy.

The next day I set a goal of finding a hotel room. I was sunburned, hung over, and my stomach killing me. The only thing I ate the day before was chili cheese nachos that I paid ten dollars for at the boat marina. The chili was more like brown gravy with red pepper in it. To make matters worse, the only beer you could get in Utah was 3.2%. After checking out the map, I was heading for Laughlin, Nevada. I was counting on a cheap room at a casino, a decent meal and maybe do a little gambling.

I still wasn't sure what I was going to do for the trip, but I knew I needed to get to the ocean. I hadn't traveled Highway One for twenty years so I was going to pick it up south of the bay area and inch my way down the California coast until I had to meet Julie the next week. The next day I got as far as Bakersfield, where I had a few beers by the pool at a Motel 6 off the interstate. I bought a detailed California recreational map and spotted a campground on San Simeon State Beach. I started a second painting that night.

The only problem with my plan for camping at San Simeon was that I didn't know what day of the week it was. It wasn't until I got to the campground that it dawned on me that it was Saturday. I hate using the word "impossible", but trying to find a spot at a beach on the weekend during the summer was about as closest as you come. There was a row of hotels nearby, but the clerk at the closet one told me that it would be almost as hard to find a room as it would be a campsite.

The next day I was able to get into a campsite at Gaviota State Beach. That day was the way I had envisioned my entire trip to be. Most of it was spent just watching the waves roll in. There were intermittent periods of painting and photography mixed in with a little body surfing. I took a little cooler of beer up on the pier and watched the sunset.

Over the next week, I just drove south each day until I found a place that looked interesting, in the mornings I would go for a walk on the beach and maybe take a few pictures. Around midafternoon I would find a hotel, and head for the nearest bar. If I didn't feel like painting at night, I would go sit on the beach and have some beers.

It was good to see Julie again. I think we had only spent a few nights apart since we got married. We spent a couple of low key days in Ocean Beach doing nothing except enjoying each other's company. We needed it. With our work schedules, the two of us hadn't got away by ourselves in way too long.

There is a part of OB called Dog Beach. It's a place for dogs to run around leash free and play in the ocean. Julie could have stayed there all day and played with the dogs.

I told Julie how much fun I had in Laughlin and she wanted to stay there one night, and Vegas the next night on the way home. Those few days were great, just talking and relaxing. She was even on her best behavior in Las Vegas.

Gaviota

I have had people tell me that they are "content" in life. It may only be a matter of semantics, but I believe moments of true contentment are fleeting and rare. They are those instances in life when all of the worries and other useless feelings that invade your life are gone. You realize that the universe has positioned you exactly where it wants you to be. It has supplied you with everything you could possibly need and want for a brief period before everything shifts and you get out of alignment with the stars again.

I had one of those moments on my road trip when I was camping at Gaviota. I could hear the gentle breakers hitting the sand just a hundred or so yards away. I could feel the warmth of the fire just inches from my knees. The smell of the salt air blended perfectly with the smoke. I took a sip of beer and watched as a packet of pages held together by three medium binder clips turned to ash in the flames.

I thought about the last seven years sitting in a cubicle. It had become my prison cell. I felt like I was in the middle of the movie "The Shawshank Redemption" and Morgan Freeman was narrating my life. Corporate America institutionalizes a person the same way a prison does. There was a decent amount of money going into my checking account every other Friday, and of course I had those all-important health benefits. I also was self-aware enough to know that I had become one of those two types of people that I had described earlier. I was never going to get to the corner office, hell, I wasn't going to get to the middle office with only one window. I was on death row in cloth walls. The only mystery was whether it would be cancer or a heart attack that got to me first. Okay, may it might be cirrhosis of the liver.

That's why watching those pages burn in the fire were such a source of optimism for me. I had been collecting those pages one at a time for 88 months. They were hard copies of my Outlook calendar from work. They had been hanging in the cubicle since I started with Lehman. Knowing that I would one day watch them burn gave me a sense hope. It may sound funny that wanting to burn those pages had given me such a sense of inspiration. I had come to the conclusion that I had wasted the past seven and a half years of my life and believed that by burning those calendar pages the ash would go into the universe and somehow those lost years would in some way come back to me. I do the same thing with the Christmas tree each year believing that the ashes from trees carry the memories of the year out into the world so that they will someday return. I use the same philosophy with poems that I don't finish.

I would hold onto those pages and burn them when the time felt right. I had considered burning them on one of those nights in Lake Powell. There was a satisfied solitude that I felt there, but nothing else felt right. I wanted it to happen near the Pacific Ocean. Although those nights on the shore of the lake gave me a new appreciation of the desert that I had never known before. I'd be lying if it was the same sense of power I felt from the Pacific, or being on top of a fourteen thousand foot mountain in Colorado, but it was appreciation none the less.

The pages burned perfectly. It was like they were burning in order, month by month, year by year. Each page made me think of something else. All of the absurdity was going away.

It was all going to come back to me.

Julie Finds Her Art

Julie was meant to be an artist, we all are, and she knew it. Just like the rest of us, life got in the way of her realizing her potential. Some of her drawings were incredible especially considering that her medium was ball point pen on paper. Some people might dismiss it as doodles, but it was art to me.

While I was on my trip, Julie got caught up in her own little art adventure. She started making these cool necklaces with small odd bottles filled with some type of glow in the dark powder. People started to offer to buy them from her. She was also making Chrystal necklaces. She went out and bought everything she needed to start a little business.

She did the two painting below while I was gone.

Café Luna

During a lazy day on my road trip I stopped at a little place called Café Luna not too far from Santa Barbara. While savoring probably the greatest eggs benedict I have ever had in my life, I flipped through a small weekly newspaper called the Santa Barbara Independent. I'm not a big horoscope guy, but my astrological sign is Virgo. I came across the following horoscope, it was in a column by Rob Brezny:

The painter Philip Guston loved to express himself creatively. He said it helped rid himself of his certainty, to divest himself of what he knew. By washing the backload of old ideas and familiar perspective, he freed himself to see the world as brand new. In light of your current astrological omens, Virgo, Guston's approach sounds like a good strategy to borrow. The next couple of weeks will be an excellent time to explore the pleasures of unlearning and deprogramming. You will thrive by discarding stale preconceptions, loosening the pasts hold on you and clearing out room in your brain for fresh imaginings.

Art Contest

Art Walk

With some extended time off and a severance package to hold me over for a little bit, I thought it was time try the whole artist gig. I knew it would be a jump from the drab cloth confines of a cubicle to the vibrant walls of a gallery. There are numerous obstacles for an unknown artist, and getting your work shown is at the top of the list. I entered mixed media art contest and had a piece that was accepted for the show. It was an old television that I painted a quasi-evil face on with acrylic paint. I called it "Into Your House", and was on display for almost a month. It didn't sell, but I was encouraged to have some art that I created in a fairly reputable gallery.

I followed that up by renting a space at an open air market on Broadway in Denver. I was displaying photographs that I took on my road trip that had been mounted on canvas. I thought they were pretty cool, but only a handful of people paid any attention to them. I didn't sell anything, but I didn't get discouraged. That market didn't really cater to art; it was more of an antique fair.

Denver has a few art districts spread around town, but the biggest is on Santa Fe Drive. I joined a co-op down there called Denver Art Society. There was a very eclectic group of artists there. I hung the photos there and also put out some old vinyl lp's that I had melted into bowls and painted them. There was art of all mediums hanging on the walls at the gallery. Some of it was very good, but there was a lot of it that I didn't understand. That's okay; it's kind of the purpose of a co-op.

I started volunteering at the gallery a few shifts per week. The place wasn't in very good condition. It was in a rundown building, and nobody seemed to be putting any money into it. We spent the first couple of shifts cleaning the hell of it. We got rid of so much trash that we doubled the display area.

What I liked about being a member at DAS was that it gave me the feeling that I was part of something. There was a sense of accomplishment. I hadn't felt that on professional level in over eight years, probably longer. The best that you could hope for is that you got your email inbox cleaned out.

The first thing you realize making the leap from corporate America to the art world, is that being an artist is a tough gig. On the first Friday of each month, there is the "Art Walk" that draws thousands of people, that's when the galleries down there debut their new shows. It's nice to have people come through the gallery and compliment you on your work. You're not going to get rich doing it, but that isn't the point.

The Pink Tree

We decorated the house for Christmas, and put up lights outside, we weren't going to do a tree. We always bought a real tree, and none of us felt like dealing with the mess that comes with it. Alexis would probably spending most of her time at her boyfriends. I was unemployed and things were slow for Julie at work, so we didn't have the money to put a lot of presents under a tree. I was able to scrape up the money for some diamond earrings that Julie had been asking for since our first Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, Julie told me that I needed to go up to the man cave. I assumed she was going to be wrapping presents for me. A half hour later I asked, "Can I come down?"

"Not yet."

Another half hour passed, I looked over the railing, "Now?"

"Nope."

"How long can it take to wrap a couple of presents," I muttered under my breath.

I was finally allowed to come down; she had put up and decorated an artificial tree. There were some logs burning in the fireplace. A snack tray was on the coffee table. She had made herself a drink, and had a beer waiting for me. She asked me to come sit on the couch and hold her.

The whole scene was beautiful. The tree was trimmed with pink lights, and the shadows of the flames in the fireplace danced behind it. The snow was steadily falling outside, it was the first white Christmas we had had in years. We smoked a bowl and fed each other cheese and crackers. It was like something out of a Hallmark card.

There was a tear rolling down Julie's cheek. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"What if this is the last Christmas tree I ever see?"

"What are you talking about?"

She repeated what she said.

"Baby, we have a lifetime of Christmas trees ahead of us."

She just smiled at me.

To this day, I don't know why she said that.

Her Last Christmas Card

Final Anniversary Letter

February 14, 2013

Hey Baby,

It's hard to believe that it was five years ago today that we became husband and wife. I can still remember the day vividly. I remember how beautiful you looked in your dress. I remember how nervous we both were, and whether it was wise of us to be getting married after we had only been dating for less than six months. I remember wondering if you were actually going to go through with it. I remember the way your hands shook as we exchanged vows. I remember eating $15 French fries that night.

We've been through a lot since that day five years ago, and we both know it hasn't always been great. There are times that I'm sure either or both of us didn't think that we would make it to this day. At the end of the day though, I firmly believe that the good times have far outweighed the bad ones. I don't really think about the bad episodes we've had, but I always think about the good ones. Of course I think about the obvious ones like the day we spent taking pictures in Moab or holding hands walking down the beach in South Padre Island. I also think about the little things like going to breakfast at Chatfield's and taking mini road trips in search of scratch tickets.

I firmly believe that it is a culmination of all of the good times, as well as the bed times that have put us where we are today. I don't know about you, but I feel this marriage is stronger than it has ever been. I can't imagine my life without you in it. If you aren't my soul mate, I'm not sure that I know what the meaning of the term is. You really are my best friend.

I know that things aren't as either of us imagined right now with me being out of work, and money being tight. As stupid as it sounds, I think this might be a necessary struggle for us to go through to make this marriage even stronger. We will get through this.

Thank you for five years of loving me. Happy Anniversary! Happy Valentine's Day! I love you!

Your husband,

Cory

Paint Mixer

I liked being a member of DAS and showing my work, but that branch of the art world wasn't going to pay the rent for me. I hadn't had much luck finding a new job that didn't involve sitting in a cubicle. When I got laid off, I told by coworkers that they would see me sleeping under a bridge before they saw me sitting in a cubicle again. There was a business that had opened up that a lot of people, mostly women, were talking about. It was a place where you could go create a painting and have a couple of drinks while you were doing it. I thought it was a good idea except for the fact that everybody went home with essentially the same painting at the end of the night.

I was going to take the same idea and make it mobile. I would contact bars and see if they would host an event. I would supply the paints, canvases, and everything else. All the bar had to do offer up some space and serve drinks. I figured that if I could book ten events per month that would get the bills paid.

I formulated a business plan, and worked diligently on it. The hard work paid off and I found a couple of bars that wanted to do business. All that needed to be done was set a date.

The Last Symptom

A couple of months after we got back from California, Julie started mentioning a pain in her side just below her armpit. In December, she caught a cold and was laid up in bed for a couple of days with head and chest congestion. She also developed a nasty cough with her cold. After a week of being sick, we took her to urgent care, even though we didn't have health insurance.

The doctors and nurses asked Julie the usual questions, and performed the normal battery of tests. After about three hours, the doctor's came back and diagnosed her with, "just something that was going around". She got a script for an antibiotic. It played out exactly as we thought it would. That's the way doctor's appointments always go. As we were walking out the door, he casually said to Julie that she might want to get with her regular doctor and have her lungs checked out. There was no tone of urgency in his voice.

Eventually, all of the other symptoms of her cold went away except the cough. The pain in Julie's side was getting more acute though. Her health stayed the same through the end of January. On Valentine's Day, our fifth wedding anniversary, she had to work at the bar during the day. I was going to meet her there, and then we were going out to eat.

I got to the bar early so I could have a few beers before we went out. She told me that her side had really been bothering her all day. One of her regulars said that it sounded like her gall bladder was acting up. I told her to go have it checked out. I also thanked her for wearing my favorite jeans. She just smiled and went to check on her customers. When she walked away I noticed that her jeans weren't fitting her the way they usually did. Normally when she wore them, they were tight and really showed off her beautiful ass. That night they just hung off of her.

We had to get our dinner put in boxes and leave the restaurant because Julie's side was in so much pain. On the way home she was on the verge of tears, and she headed straight for bed once we walked in the door. That was the first night that I fully realized that there was something seriously wrong with my wife.

My worry for her grew with each passing week. I don't know how many times I told her that she needed to go to the doctor, but she only replied that she would be fine. I started researching her symptoms, and there were any number of ailments that it could have been. I told her what I found, and she assured me that she would get to the doctor soon.

"There's something I haven't told you," she said one night in bed after we had turned out the light.

"What's that?"

"I've coughed up blood a couple of times."

"That's not good. We need to get to the doctor right away.

When you throw that symptom into the equation, Google brings up a whole lot of other diseases. Bad diseases. One of the first ones that pops up is Lung Cancer.

I started really riding Julie hard about going to get checked out. This shit that was happening was nothing to be fucked around with. Predictably Julie, the harder I busted her balls about going to the doctor, the more adamant she became about not going. She went to a Walgreen's clinic. They told her that it was a simple case of bronchitis and gave her a ten day prescription of something. I was hoping for a more thorough examination, but it bought her a ten day reprieve from me bitching at her.

I promised that I wouldn't bring up the doctor again until her prescription for the "bronchitis" was gone. I had to bite my tongue one night. I had been upstairs watching a game, and she was in the living room watching a movie. I went downstairs to get a beer and she was going to bed. She got up to kiss me goodnight, and I was startled by her nude body. She looked like a concentration camp prisoner. She had lost so much weight. When she was healthy she was always right around the 115 pound mark.

By mid-April, the ten days had well passed and her health was only getting worse. Our arguments about her getting to a doctor were starting to affect our relationship. I was so worried about her. It was constant tension because I couldn't stand to see her waste away. I'm sure she resented the way I was badgering her about it.

One night I couldn't stand it anymore. I told her that if I had to put a gun to her head, we were going to the hospital on Friday.

"If you're going to forcibly take me to the hospital," she said. "It's going to have to be on Monday. I'm going to work this weekend."

We had a deal, Monday it was. No excuses.

One Normal Night

That Saturday I went up to The Shore to have a few beers. I was so relieved that she was finally letting me take her to the hospital. I didn't know what the next week was going to bring so I wanted that night to be special. I told her that I would cook whatever she wanted for dinner and we would watch a movie in bed. She wasn't going to turn that down.

I served her Shepherd's Pie on a tray by the bed, and we watched "D'Jango Unchained". As we fell asleep in each other's arms I couldn't help but wonder if that would be the last normal night we would ever have together.

The Dry Erase Board

On the way to the hospital, Julie laid down the rules for how the day was going to go.

"I don't want you to say anything today," she said.

"Okay. I won't talk to you."

"You can talk to me. I just don't want you to talk about me."

"Why? I'm worried about you."

"We're going in here to talk about my gall bladder. Don't say anything about Lung Cancer."

"Whatever." I was assuming that the doctors wouldn't need my internet diagnosis.

Once we were in the emergency room, the staff started the normal battery of tests. They asked Julie the same questions a hundred times, and she answered it the same every time. She was getting frustrated. They did an X-ray, and we waited for it to be read. The staff was friendly and spoke in a positive tone.

Once the X-ray of her chest came back the faces of the medical staff changed, you could see the look of concern. They didn't tell us anything except that they wanted to do an MRI. After another lengthy wait, the nurse came in and apologized. The ER doctor wanted a specialist review the results, and then he would come in and talk to us.

The doctor finally came in. He didn't sugar coat anything. He told us that there was a very large mass in her right lung. He said that he thought it was cancer and he wanted to admit her right away so they could determine what type of cancer it was, and what the course of treatment would be.

Julie wanted to have a cigarette, before she made a decision. The look on the faces of the staff was priceless. They looked shell shocked that she wanted to do that after what the doctor had just said. We walked out to the car to get the smokes and each lit one. We were numb.

"Well, that sucks," she said.

"Be positive. We don't know anything for sure yet."

"I'll try."

"You've never backed down from anything, don't start now."

She nodded, her eyes far away.

The room that they put her in was small and had no windows. The rest of the hospital seemed so modern, but this room seemed like place from the fifties. The doctors that were assigned to her at that stage were much more optimistic than the ones in the ER had been, in fact they were kind of miffed that the ER doctors had called the mass "cancer". The only way that could be determined was with a biopsy. Before they did that, the doctors needed to rule out all of the other possibilities first. After a few tests, they narrowed it down to cancer or tuberculosis. For two days they quarantined her and I had to wear a mask the entire time I was with her. She called me at night after I got home from the hospital and told me that I wouldn't have to wear a mask the next day, and that if she wasn't in her room they might have transferred to the Oncology ward. She hung up without saying goodbye. I didn't sleep a wink that night.

To do the biopsy, they had to make an incision at the base of her throat. The surgery took a lot out of her, she was out of it for a couple of days. All I could do was sit on the chair next to her bed and watch TV. The room on the Oncology ward was much nicer, and least some sunshine could get in.

Three days after the biopsy, the doctor came in and gave us the diagnosis by writing "small cell lung cancer" on a dry erase board and nonchalantly asked us if we had any questions. He was such an asshole. I wanted to punch him in the fucking mouth. He seemed surprised that we were upset, not only at the diagnosis, but the way the douchebag delivered it. We told him what we thought of him. That only made the prick more smug and defiant.

He told Julie that she would be discharged in the morning. The outpatient Oncology department would call us the following week about a treatment plan. It would involve chemotherapy and possibly some radiation.

When I got home that night, I started researching small cell lung cancer. I kept searching for something good to hold onto. There is nothing positive when you research the disease. The current treatments they have can buy a patient some time, but it won't cure the cancer.

After Diagnosis Letter

Dear Julie,

Please don't ever say that I don't care about you again. There is nothing that could be further from the truth. I remember when we got together, we used to say "world" to each other. We may not say it to each other that much anymore, but the sentiment is still the same.

The truth is that I am so worried about you that I can't stand it. I think about your health from the time I wake up until I go to sleep.

The bottom line is that if you will just communicate with me, I will have a better idea how to handle the situation.

I love you.

Your husband, Cory

P.S. Just talk to me. I know you think I'm a mind reader, but I'm not.

We called it R2D2

Before we could leave the hospital, the nurse had to arrange for Julie to have enough oxygen to get her home. Once we got there, a truck would be waiting for us with a home oxygen machine.

When the delivery guy smelled our house, he gave me a "Flammable. No Smoking" sign to tape in the front window. There were two parts to the machine. The bigger, lower part that filtered the air in the house into oxygen, and the smaller top part was for refilling the tanks she would take when we went somewhere.

We put it on the main floor of the townhome. It made a loud, steady, ominous sound. The noise was a constant reminder that somebody in the home was sick. There was green tubing all over the floor so Julie could take it anywhere in the house. It took us both a while to get used.

Julie was sleeping on my lap while I was watching TV one night. She was having one of her bad days, and took a big dose of Morphine. She popped up suddenly and just stared at the machine.

"Are you alright?" I asked.

"Is that R2D2?" She sounded like a little girl when she asked that.

I laughed. "What?"

She pointed to the machine. "Is that R2D2 from Star Wars?"

"No baby, that's your oxygen machine."

She laughed about it for a minute, then went back to sleep.

From that day forward, we called it R2D2.

Equal Opportunity

We had both heard horror stories about chemotherapy. I had a friend that had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer a couple of years earlier. He was given nine months to live. He seemed to be at peace with what was happening to him, and had a good attitude. He got a second opinion, that doctor told him that if he did chemo, he might make it two years. His body reacted so badly to the first treatment that he was dead in a week. Julie had a friend with a similar story.

Before you start treatment, you have to go through what they call "chemo education". The first thing they tell you to ignore all of the stories that you have heard, because each patient's journey through chemo is a unique, individual experience. We could expect the typical side effects that go along with chemo, such a nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, etc. It was the hair loss that would be the big one for her. Julie's chemo would be intensive; she would do a four hour treatment the first day followed by one hour of treatment on the next two days. Then she would have three weeks off before she repeated the process. They expected her to go through four or five cycles of this.

In education they told us that one of the drugs they would be giving her was so toxic that it would burn her skin. I couldn't believe my ears, I was thinking to myself, "Fuck! It can burn her skin but they're going to pump it into her veins?"

The advisor warned us that we should not try to conceive a child while we going through chemo. In fact, if we were going to have sex I should wear a condom, "or two," because the chemo drugs could get into my blood through bodily fluid exchange. We both said that we would probably be celibate for a while.

The drive to the hospital from our house took almost an hour each way, so it gave us plenty of time to talk.

"Are you sure you want to go through with this?" I asked her as we were on our way to the first treatment.

"I've been thinking about it. I don't know."

"I worry what it might do to your quality of life."

"It's not like we can afford to just go spend the time left traveling."

"That true I guess," I agreed.

As I dropped her off at the front door, I asked her one more time, "Are you sure?"

"I have to try," she told me.

I respected that. I would never have expected anything less than Julie fighting cancer tooth and nail.

Julie responded well to the chemo, with only minimal side effects. It was the constipation that bothered her the most. I wish I could say the same for some of the other patients I saw on the chemo ward. That place will change a person to the very core. It can be depressing and uplifting at the same time. I know that after my many hours there, I will never look at life totally the same.

The first thing I noticed is that cancer does not discriminate. Cancer does not care if you are black, white, Asian, Hispanic or any other race or ethnicity. Cancer doesn't care if you are catholic, protestant, atheist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Wiccan or practice any other faith. Cancer doesn't care if you are male or female. Cancer does not care if you are young or old. There was a day on the ward where almost all of the patients were in their twenties and thirties. Call me selfish, but I was relieved that Children's Hospital was across the street so I didn't have to watch kids go through this.

I'll never forget the time Julie and I were sitting in the waiting room and there was a couple about our age sitting across from us. The lady was there to get treatment for late stage breast cancer. There was a moment when my eyes met the guy's; a bond was formed between us without saying a word. We knew what each other was going through. That happened frequently on the chemo ward, forming little bonds with people you don't even know.

Smoking and Drinking

The day Julie got out of the hospital we had to go to Walmart for fill her prescriptions for pain killers and sleeping pills. On the way home we stopped at the liquor store, I asked Julie if she wanted six shots of vodka. She said she only wanted three and she needed a pack of cigarettes. She was going to wean herself off of both. She was only going to have five smokes a day until she quit. The hospital had given her nicotine patches as well.

That night she only drank two of the vodkas. It had been almost two weeks since she last drank. She didn't really want to drink; she was only doing it because she could. The next day she said she wasn't going to drink anymore. The combination of the morphine and vodka wasn't good.

I wish I could say I quit drinking the same day, but I didn't. I wish Julie could have quit smoking as easily as she quit drinking. We both knew that the battle we would be fighting was against a form of very aggressive cancer. I guess we both needed a little escape from the fight. When I stopped into the bar, it felt like the only time that life was still normal.

The doctor told her that small cell lung cancer was 100% caused by smoking. Julie grew up in a house with heavy smokers, and had worked in bars and restaurants her entire life. This was before the indoor smoking bans that were eventually put in place in Colorado and Iowa. She was also a heavy smoker herself. On her days off she probably smoked two packs a day.

Ironically, Julie said that it was smoking that made her life feel like it was still a little bit normal.

Another Father's Day

Like I said, Julie's side effects to chemowere minimal. Like almost every other female cancer patient, the one thing that bothered her the most was losing her hair. It wasn't noticeable to me, but the clumps of hair coming out in her fingers really depressed her.

It was Father's Day, Julie and Alexis were going to take me to brunch. Before we went, Julie asked me to shave her head. I didn't know what to say. I was conflicted, I loved her hair. She told me that when she was in the shower, the drain almost clogged because so much of her hair had fallen out. I got the clippers and did what she asked. When the initial shock of her stubbly head wore off, I realized that she could pull it off nicely. She was just a beautiful as ever. I made her a doo rag out of a bandana and we went out to eat.

Hugs and Kisses

On the third of July, her family arrived for a three week visit. Glenda, Dan, and Maiya got into town at about five in the evening. Julie was just getting out the shower so it was up to me to entertain them as she got ready. I tried to make small talk, but they would only respond with one word answers. Thankfully, Julie came up when she did, because I was out of ideas on how to engage these people.

Maiya was texting on her phone when Julie came into the room, but didn't bother looking up. Maiya was hungry, but didn't want to go to a chain restaurant that they had in Iowa. She also wanted to go see some fireworks. Julie asked Maiya if she could have a hug, but Maiya who was still looking down at her phone told her maybe later. Fireworks don't do a whole lot for me, so I told Julie that since I had to go see them on the Fourth I wasn't going that night. They went on without me.

I promised Julie that I would spend the entire Fourth of July with her and her family. The whole day was about what Maiya wanted to do. It was as though she didn't care that Julie was sick and had to lug an oxygen tank everywhere she went. We had to go to the aquarium. We had sit around for three hours while Maiya shopped for clothes. Mind you, the parents were supposedly strict Southern Baptists who didn't drink so I couldn't even go have a beer while we waited. It took half an hour for Maiya to decide what she was hungry for, then we had find an eatery that fit her tastes. Driving to the fireworks show, Julie asked Maiya if she could have that hug. Maiya replied that she couldn't hug in a car. My blood was boiling but I said nothing.

The way Julie and her parents catered to Maiya's every whim was excruciating. It was no wonder the girl was such a self-centered, spoiled little bitch. When the firework show was over Maiya needed to go to the bathroom, Julie and Glenda had to escort her there because they were afraid somebody was going to snatch her. I guess they didn't see the police mobile command RV parked in front of the row of porta-potties.

Maiya flew back to Des Moines after a couple of days. Her parents stayed for a couple more weeks, but they stayed at a hotel so it wasn't too painful. I asked Julie if Maiya ever hugged her before she got on the plane. "Barely," she said.

Back to the Grind

Julie was responding to the chemo treatment well. After her family left, she was feeling well enough that she went back to work one day a week. It was her Tuesday shifts, so it wouldn't be too strenuous. Taking care of her customers was really good for her mental state. I was so happy for her on that first day back, because when we first found out the diagnosis, going back to work was something I thought Julie would never do.

Gene, the owner of the North Shore had organized a golf tournament for Julie's benefit. There were nearly a hundred golfers who played, and there were dozens of other people that showed up at the bar after golf for a buffet and art auction. It was a really great day. Julie was truly overwhelmed by the outpouring of support she was shown that day.

There won't be Blood

I have been a Great White Shark fanatic ever since I saw "Jaws" at a drive in theater in Pueblo. Julie always made sure that "Shark Week" was always recorded on the DVR for me. There was movie about sharks on the IMAX screen at the Museum of Natural History that Julie wanted to take me to for my birthday. She had finished her final cycle of chemo and it was hitting her harder than the previous ones. She was supposed to talk to her doctor about starting radiation. The tumor was as small as it was going to get with chemo alone.

We had to put off going to the movie for a week until she felt better. We were both a little disappointed in the movie since there was no gore in it. Not even a seal got eaten. Isn't that the whole point of going to see a movie about Great White Sharks?

We made the best of it by spending some time just walking around the museum until she got too tired. We stopped for a bite to eat on the way home. It would be the last time that Julie and I ever went out together.

We Never Talked About It

Although we both know that the type of cancer that Julie had was one of the deadliest forms out there and the long time survival rates were very low, we never talked directly about her mortality. We talked about death in general terms, but never talked about her specifically. I firmly believe that the reason for this is that Julie never believed she was going to die. I think she thought she could will the disease away. She would tell me that when she was lying in bed she would spend most of the time visualizing a healthy lung.

Julie was a fighter, that was one of the traits that made me fall in love with her in the first place. She never once asked "Why me?" There was very little self-pity. Defeat was never an option for Julie, not in life and not against cancer.

My Last Card to Her

The Middle of Nowhere

When I was on the first night of my road trip, driving to the camp ground at Lake Powell, I passed a hitchhiker. If you have never been to Lake Powell, it is literally in the middle of nowhere. The route I took was from Blanding, Utah. From there to the camp site was almost eighty miles. The road is beautiful, but desolate. Orange rock formations tower all around you. I think I passed maybe three cars the entire time. It would be a really shitty place for your car to break down. I'm not sure if Blanding is even big enough to have a towing company.

The hitchhiker was about halfway between the town and the lake. He must have been in his sixties, with long stringy black and grey hair. He was wearing an old business suit with tennis shoes and carried a tattered red backpack on him. He didn't even look my direction as I drove by. He just halfheartedly held out his thumb. He knew he wasn't going to get picked up by me, or probably anybody else.

I couldn't decide whether to pity the man or admire him. He was certainly living an unconventional life, which I admire, but the life he was leading must be hard one. It was one lonely road that he was walking. I wondered if he knew where he was going, or even cared.

He was courageous, but was the courage out of choice, or out of necessity? Maybe he was just lost. Why else would you be in the desert during the middle of July? The sun was brutal.

I thought about that old man a lot on my trip. I still do.

Go Dancing

The night that I had to put the breathing tube down Julie's throat, I didn't sleep at all. I just kept picturing her with that tube coming out of her mouth. I could hear the sound of that machine breathing for her.

As I said earlier, Julie never believed that she was dying so we never talked about what I should if she got to the position that she was in. She may have never said it, but I know in my heart that she would never have wanted a "fake" life. I felt guilty for putting that tube there in the first place. Dan and Glenda would be getting into town the next day, and I had no idea whether they would agree with me in wanting to remove the device and let Julie go.

When I got to the hospital and saw Julie, it felt like a thousand knives were being twisted in my stomach. I hated seeing her like that. I pulled the nurse aside and told her that I thought the whole thing was total madness. I let her know that Julie's parents would soon be there, and I wanted the doctor to explain to them just how grave Julie's condition was.

When Dan and Glenda got there, I gave them a recap of what had happened over the past few days. I told them that I was going to let them spend the day with her and that I wanted them to talk to the doctor. They said okay, and we agreed to meet the next morning and talk about what the next step would be.

It was a Sunday morning, and her parents hadn't arrived yet. The nurse asked to talk to me in the hall. She told me that Dan and Glenda agreed with me. The breathing tube was going to be removed that day. Hearing that come out her mouth knocked the wind out of me.

I did hate seeing Julie like that, and I was ready to let her go. I'd been mentally preparing myself for this day for five months. I just wasn't prepared that today was that day. I took a little walk. The world was spinning. I smoked three cigarettes in 15 minutes.

I got back to the room and Julie's mom and Dan were there. I called my mom and Alexis to let them know what we were going to do, and they were soon there too with my mom's husband, Earl. Maiya had just landed at the airport was on her way with her other grandma, Pat.

Julie had been unconscious since the tube went in. She would open her eyes occasionally and the nurse said she could still hear everything. The eight of us sat around and made small talk with each other and talked to Julie. You could sense that she wanted to be part of the conversation. When Maiya spoke to her, Julie's eyes opened wide and she made a little smile.

This nurse came in and told us we would need to leave; they didn't want the family in the room as the tube was being removed. It would take about 30 minutes. I went and smoked, then waited for the staff to come out.

When we were allowed back in, the first thing I noticed was how quiet the room was. Everything had been turned off except the vital signs monitor. The staff had to further sedate Julie to take out the tube and increased the amount of pain medication they were giving her.

Very few words were said over the next two hours. Our eyes alternated between looking at Julie and watching the vitals monitor. Just before five p.m. the pulse rate accelerated and blood oxygen level started sinking. I went over and stroked her head. I leaned down, kissed her, and whispered in her ear, "I love you. You go dancing now baby."

At 5:02 p.m. on October 20, 2013 my wife Julie Rene Cason passed away.

Lucy on Julie's Bathrobe

When I got home from the hospital, I was carrying all of Julie's possessions in a plastic grocery bag. Lucy didn't greet me the way she usually did, her tail wasn't wagging so hard that moved her entire butt. She just sat there looking at me. I honestly believe that she knew Julie was gone. I gave Lucy some food, but she didn't want to eat. She sniffed at the bag of Julie's stuff and slightly whimpered. I pulled out the lavender bathrobe that Julie had put on when the ambulance took her away. I spread the robe on the couch where Lucy normally slept anyway.

I took the picture below as Lucy lay down on the robe. All she could do was lie there and sigh for the rest of the night. She was still there in the morning. I left the robe there for a couple of weeks. It took some time for Lucy to come around.

Funeral Home

I met Julie's parents at the funeral home the day after she died. Although Julie and I didn't talk about the cancer or her impending death, we did both agree that we wanted to be cremated. I told Glenda that I thought Julie would have wanted to go back to Iowa, and all I wanted was three little vials of ashes that I could spread in a few of mine and Julie's favorite places. Her parents, my sister Carol and I decided that we would put Julie's ashes into one big urn, and three little ones. Glenda was going to keep the big urn and she was going to have it buried with when she died. The three little urns were going to Maiya, Julie's dad, and me.

We didn't have a funeral service. Her parents were going to do a religious memorial service back in Iowa. I was going to try to get together with the owners of the North Shore and have a small wake at the bar.

Julie's urn came in a black velvet case. The urn itself was flat black with shiny gold rings around the lid.

Trespassing

It took me some time before I could go into her room and start going through her stuff. Julie would have hated that. She never wanted people fucking with her stuff. I felt like I was trespassing. I don't know what I was looking for, but I found a notebook with the two entries below.

Postscript

This book started as a list. A few days after my wife passed, I thought about all the good times that we had together. I didn't want to forget any of them. I thumbtacked a blank piece of paper to my wall, and just started writing them down as they popped into my head. The words that I was writing down were ambiguous, in most cases they weren't even sentences. They were just brief ramblings, that if anybody else read them they would have no idea what they meant.

One day I got home from The Draft and was reading over the list and on a couple of items, I had to remember what some of the words I had written meant. I took the list off the wall and transferred into a Word document on my laptop. This time when I wrote my memories down, I used complete sentences so that I would know what the hell I was talking about.

For a couple of weeks, I was opening up the list daily and adding new entries. I also started adding details to what I had already written. They were starting to become paragraphs. I had a lot fun writing them. I laughed while I wrote about all of the good times that Julie and I had together.

It occurred to me that I wasn't being intellectually honest with myself in my writing. Julie and I had more than our fair share of bad times. Not all of memories were good. I repeated the process I had used for the good memories with the bad. The list wasn't nearly as long, but there were a couple that I had almost fully repressed until I started writing.

I had been working on a story about how bizarre it had been to work at Lehman Brothers on and off since right before I got laid off. I never had a plan for what I was going to do with it; I just wanted to document one of the most absurd chapters of my life.

As I combined my two lists of memories, I realized that the bad ones made the good ones all that much sweeter. Since it was Julie who was asking, "How was your day?" when I got home from work, I thought that the two documents that I was working on could be combined. I guess you could say that was when the conscious decision to write a book was made.

I had the best intensions; I felt that I owed it to Julie to tell our story. It helped me to make sense of everything that happened. It would be my little way of making her immortal. I didn't have anything else to do, I would write at night while I had the TV on in the background.

There is a quote that goes, "Having good intentions isn't enough when actions fail". That means, I was only telling myself that I writing a book. I might have had some pieces in place, but I wasn't really doing anything with them.

I was making excuses for not writing. It was the holiday season in the couple of months after Julie died. There was so much going on I told myself. I would keep writing, but I would get serious about it after the New Year.

The truth was that I was getting into a rut. I didn't know what to do myself. For the past six years, Julie had been my world. If we weren't working, we were always together. The previous six months, when Julie got sick, thoughts of her consumed me nearly every waking moment. I worried her about her so much. Now I was asking myself, "What am I going to do?"

Actually, the question was, "What am I going to do until two p.m.?" After two, my days were booked solid. In the mornings, I would go to work or the gym or both. I would take care of grocery shopping and little errands. But at two, I was at The Draft. For all the years I had been going there, I would have my three beers and go home. Since Julie was gone, there was no hurry to get home. I started having four or five there.

On the way home, I would hit the liquor store and grab a case of beer and two packs of Marlboro lights. I'd come home and open up the Word document. Some nights I would do a little writing but those were few and far between. The other nights were all about drinking those 24 beers and passing out.

Life was becoming like the movie "Groundhog's Day" with Bill Murray. I was doing the same thing every day. If I knew I had a big day at work, I would get up early so that I would still be able to get to the bar on time.

I knew this wasn't a sustainable model. Something had to change. I needed to get away.

I never held a that wake for Julie. Since she was cremated, I figured that was something I could do at any time. I sent the majority of the ashes back to Iowa with her mom, and kept just a little urn for myself. I wanted to spread a little of her ashes in a few of our favorite places. I would put some at Elevenmile Reservoir. I thought about making a road trip to South Padre Island.

The first place I wanted to go to was San Diego. There were two places in Ocean Beach where I was going to put her, off of the pier and at Dog Beach. Dog Beach is a dog park; I knew Julie would like it there. Alexis and I flew out in January. We'd make a weekend out of it. Get in on Friday, put Julie at peace and have a few drinks in her honor, then fly back on Sunday.

As I spread the ashes on Dog Beach, I said a few words. I didn't realize that Alexis was taking pictures on her phone behind me. That night we were sitting on the balcony of our hotel having a beer. Alexis handed me her phone. She asked me if I saw a face in the stream of ashes. I told her I didn't, so she zoomed in and showed me again. I tried to do the same for you in the photos below.

It looks like Julie to me. Free at last.

I think there are some people that have perceived me to be too casual about Julie's death. I guess they expect me to walk around crying all of the time. The first time I walked into the North Shore, the place seemed to get quiet and all of the regulars went out of their way to avoid eye contact with me, you would have thought it was me that died and I was a ghost walking into the place.

I guess I've had so much death in my life that I have come to understand it more than most people. My dad died when I was ten. Thirty eight years later, I can still see the whole event in my head. I woke up for some reason, and I could see blue and red lights dancing across my neighbor's house. I heard noises downstairs. I crept halfway down the staircase and looked around the wall by the railing. The ambulance drivers were just pulling the sheet over my dad's face. He had been overweight and a heavy smoker his entire life. He died of a heart attack at 42 years of age.

Not long after my dad died, my best friend's mom shot herself in the heart. Some of my friends died. They got hit by cars, or drowned. Some of them died of drug overdoses, and others caught a disease. I lost count of all of the funerals I had been too before I was out of my teens.

In college I was journalism major, and a creative writing minor. I spent my elective courses studying death. I took all of the sociology and philosophy courses the college offered. There was even a death in literature course. Although I was raised in a catholic household, religion hasn't played a big part of my adult life. I'm not sure about the whole concept of heaven, and whether we see deceased loved ones in the afterlife. For all I know, this time on Earth was time I got to see my dad and Julie from a previous life.

Death doesn't scare me. I don't fear for my life, and don't dwell on the possible deaths of others. I feel like I have some inner peace about the whole end of life. It is what is.

That said, I miss the love of my life more than anybody will ever know. Of course I miss the obvious things like companionship, conversation, intimacy, laughter, her beauty, and all of the things that made me fall in love with her in the first place. Those aren't the things that make me sad, usually they make me smile. I even miss having her mad at me. It sucks not to have somebody tell me I've been acting like an asshole when that's exactly what I've been being.

No, it's the little things that I never really thought about that makes me sad, like buying firewood on a cold day so that we could be warm at night. I miss cleaning off her car after a snowstorm so that she could lie in bed for little while longer. I'll see a girl wearing a necklace that looks like something that Julie might have made and I will get a little teary eyed. I always liked surprising her with a clean house when she got home from work.

I miss the love. Even during our darkest times, those few occasions when we thought about throwing in the towel, I knew that I would never find anybody who made me feel as loved as Julie did. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I could physically feel her love, even when she was on the other side of the room.

To get this book done, I knew that I had to give up drinking. I owed it to her. Within two days of being sober, the words started flow out of me. There were days when I would start writing with my first cup of coffee and get so wrapped up at the keyboard that the next thing I knew it was midnight.

For about six weeks, writing became an obsession for me. I barely left the house except to go to work or to the gym. Most of my human interaction, other than with Alexis, came in five minute phone calls or by email. The dogs, Lucy and my daughter's dog King were my companions and confidants.

Now that I'm on the second to the last paragraph of this book, I will soon start having to think about what comes next in my life. That "five year plan" I had when I started at Lehman has long since passed. The truth is that I don't have a clue where I will be in five months, let alone five years. Alexis has grown into a beautiful, confident woman and will soon be off to blaze her own trail in this world. Then it will be just Lucy and me. I've got a couple part time job that I like, but they're not very stimulating or satisfying.

It would be easy to fall into a depression if that's what I wanted to do. Instead, I'm treating the situation as if I'm getting a "do over" in life. It's almost as if I am a young man again going out into the world for the first time. I have no idea what is coming my way, but I'm looking forward to it. Now it's time for a beer.

My Favorite Picture of Julie

