Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

953 Wrong

Wrong

I saw a T-shirt the other day that said something like this: there are two kinds of crazy, the kind where you're sure there's something terribly wrong with you, and the other kind. I think the shirt was pithier, since that sounds like a lot of words to put on a shirt? What had caught my attention was that it was plastered across the rather nice chest of a bouncer, so I was a little distracted at the time I was reading it. But now that I think about it with a broad canvas of that size there was plenty of room for words.

Anyway. Later I was thinking, what does that mean, exactly? It was kind of clever, like it says hey, there are people who are paranoid that they're crazy and think about imaginary problems all the time and then there are the other kind of people... and if you're the paranoid type you probably imagine all kinds of insanity that the other kind could suffer from. And if you're not the paranoid type you just think well, of course...?

But then I thought maybe I read the words wrong and it didn't say "other," maybe it said "opposite," which would mean that there are people who are insane because they worry they're nuts, and then there are people who think they're fine when actually they're insane.

Or maybe who insist they're fine, when they're really not.

Whatever kind of nuts you can imagine, of course, my family had all of them.

Courtney told us that Lilibeth had waltzed out on her first husband after proving to her local priest that he had been unfit, "a drunken gambler who did drugs with whores" as Lili had supposedly put it, and he was unkind to their pets to boot.

"Was he?" I asked.

"Unkind to their pets?"

"A drunken gambler."

"I don't think so," Court said. "I mean, I know they say girls end up marrying their fathers, but in this case I think he was actually a completely strait-laced, utterly boring stiff."

Ziggy giggled. "Which made it completely believable that he was actually a degenerate?"

We were hunkered together in the downstairs rec room conspiring like teenagers at a sleepover, looking over our shoulders every so often to make sure some adult hadn't snuck down to supervise. "I think she set him up."

I kept my voice down. "What do you mean, 'set him up?'"

"Like she basically went to the priest and her church elders–"

"Which kind of church was this?" I asked.

"She didn't get sucked into the whole thing with mom's former guy, I think because the guy she married was already religious. Presbyterian, maybe? I forget. Anyway. She asked him for a divorce first and he refused."

Ziggy leaned in. "Because he was a drunk?"

"Because she was ready to trade up to a better husband. Janine said she's a trophy wife now? It's the other way around. Or it's mutual or something." She checked the door again, craning her neck. All clear. "Hubby didn't want to let her go, though, so she set about gathering proof that he was no good. Receipts from strip clubs, casinos, and lingerie shops, blurry photos of him with his arm around a woman, a blonde bombshell sitting in his car, all that kind of stuff."

"Fake?"

"Pretty much."

"And how do you know all this?"

Court put a hand on my arm. "D. She bragged about it to me. You can't pull off a stunt like that and keep it a complete secret. Not if you're Lili, anyway."

Ziggy made a noise of appreciation. "And she basically trashed his whole life on her way out."

"Yep. She said he had a choice. He could have just let her go. She told him she'd make his life a living hell if he forced her to stay. I think he thought that meant she'd just try to make him miserable while staying married to him. He wasn't prepared for what she was prepared to do."