Part One: BOY LOSES BITCH
What do I think of when I think of my wife? Hmmmm, that’s a tough one. Because I try not to think about her at all. Why? Because she’s a total bitch! “Yeah, right,” you say, “every husband thinks his wife is a total bitch.” Perhaps. But my wife is a bigger bitch than any of them, the biggest bitch in the history of bitchiness. Don’t believe me? Once you hear my story, you will.
My story begins on a hot July morning in 2012. I woke up at 6 as usual, walked downstairs, and took the canoe to fetch the morning paper.
Okay, I guess I should explain that.
When my wife Amy and I moved to Missouri, we were in kind of a rush, so I did my house search entirely on Craigslist without actually visiting. I figured I’d stick to places where the ad had a lot of photos and a virtual tour, because how different could the place really be when we got there? So I found a listing for a “charming 3BR on the Mississippi River,” and it had like a hundred fifty photos of the inside of the place, and everything was just upgraded and the appliances were new, and I mean, it was on the river, how cool is that? So I took it. What I didn’t realize, however, is that while the house was originally built “on the river” as in overlooking the river, during the last century the river has shifted, so that the house is now “on the river” as in in the river. The only access to it is via canoe ride from the shore.
So that’s why I had to take a canoe to fetch the morning paper.
I bet you think you know what my wife did when we first saw the house in person. You think Amy went nuts and yelled at me and told me what an idiot I was. But actually, that’s completely wrong. Amy was overjoyed when she saw the place, because she knew that every single day we lived here, she’d have something to criticize me about. Think of all the time I just freed up in her life! As a hot girl, she was going to have to find something to complain about every day anyway. Now all the work of figuring out what to complain about was pre-done. It was like someone coming up to you on the first day of college and offering to do all your homework and take all your tests the entire time you’re in school. Party on!
Looking back on it, I think Amy knew in advance there’d be a ton to complain about in Missouri, and that’s the only reason she agreed to move there in the first place. We’d been living in Manhattan in the unfathomably expensive West Village condo Amy “owned” (i.e. had been bought for her by her parents), supporting ourselves on “Amy’s money” (i.e. the money given to her by her parents). Originally we’d also been living off of some of my income, when I was a working writer. I wrote greeting cards — real greeting cards, not e-cards. Cards with real writing on them with real sentiments and real jokes, not just singing animated cows or singing animated tulips or singing animated whatever.
I specialized in cards for dads. Really funny ones. You know that awesome card you bought your dad for Father’s Day ten years ago? The one that said on the front: “Dad, for Father’s Day I got you something for your favorite chair,” and then inside the card was a drawing of a dad sitting on a toilet with a beer dispenser next to the toilet and a caption that said: “Just remember, no drinking while wiping!” I wrote that. You’re welcome. And I probably wrote every other card you bought for Father’s Day or your dad’s birthday from 1999 to 2010. If that card was really funny.
But then a little thing called the Internet started blowing up, and a little thing called e-cards started blowing up along with it, because people didn’t want to buy a two-dollar card and a 45-cent stamp when they could send an e-card for free. Because $2.45 was way too much to spend on the person who’d been responsible for putting you on the Earth. So I got laid off.
Three weeks after I lost my job, Amy lost her job. At least that’s what she would tell you. I’d tell you that she lost her “job,” because her “job” (annual salary = $0) was being an Elite reviewer for Yelp. For those of you who aren’t “Yelpers,” Yelp is a website where regular people like you and me can review whatever we want. If you post enough reviews you get the coveted “Elite” status and get to be a “Yelp Elite reviewer.” As far as I can tell, the tangible benefits of this position consist of being invited to two parties a year, neither of which Amy attended. But being a Yelp Elite reviewer gave Amy something that to her was the greatest gift of all: a way to say she was better than other hot girls, which was every hot girl’s main goal in life.
Amy blamed me for making her lose her Yelp Elite status, and for once her blaming me for something was actually somewhat justified. The average Elite Yelper reviews 23 restaurants per day. This is why Elite Yelpers tend to be trust fund kids, or wives and girlfriends of trust fund kids. When I lost my job, there was no way for us to support both our elite West Village lifestyle and her Elite-mandated 23 restaurant meals per day, so the Elite status had to go.
To show her displeasure with my role in her losing Elite status, Amy started posting Yelp reviews of me.
BUSINESS NAME: Nick’s Penis
PROS: Is a penis, fits inside my vagina.
CONS: Is small, doesn’t give me an orgasm.
RATING: 1 star (out of 5)
Like I said, she’s a bitch.
I could keep going and tell you how Amy and I got from New York to Missouri, but that would be a digression, because I began with a story about me waking up already in Missouri. And I’m a really good writer, so I will avoid such a digression. But don’t worry, I’ll catch you up on everything later.
After reading the paper over coffee and taking a shower, I headed off to work. When I’d moved back to Missouri (where I’m originally from), my sister and I did the thing we’d always talked about doing: we opened a cat cafe. We’d borrowed $80,000 from Amy to do this, which was once nothing to her but was now almost everything. I promised I would pay her back with interest, and with her choice of any two cats.
It was a practical decision. My previous job had showed me the danger of going all-in on something for which people’s tastes could change. But I knew there would always be a demand for an eight-dollar latte that you could drink while being annoyed by cats.
We named the cafe Doggie McDoggerton’s to be ironic. My sister and I especially liked the idea that nobody in Missouri would get our irony. That assumption lasted all the way up to when our first customer walked in. “I dig the name,” she said. “It’s like that pizza place next door that’s called Not A Pizza Place.” Oops.
As I parked my car and walked toward the cafe that morning, I immediately became much happier than I had been at home. This phenomenon happened every day. I think it might’ve been because I was getting no love at home from Amy, whereas here, I was getting love from 63 cats, albeit in a 1 to 10 ratio of love to aloofness and sometimes outright hostility. It was great to have such a fulfilling job, but it was depressing as hell to know that at the end of the day I had to go back home.
My gut twisted, and I rushed to get the key in the door and go inside. I needed a shot of espresso and an American Shorthair.
