Trashley: Part Nineteen
DINK Life
We drove home to Los Angeles after spending a week in Big Sur and Bakersfield for my birthday. I felt like Ashley and her family were up to something shady after secretly listening in on them Facetiming Ashley’s kids. I already knew about Ashley’s ex-wife and kids, so I didn’t understand why her family was going out of their way to keep them secret. Or maybe they were keeping me a secret from them. Ashley had told me she wanted me to be their stepmom, a role I had zero interest in playing. When Ashley and I first started dating, she referred to us as DINKs, a term I hadn’t heard before. She said it meant Dual Income, No Kids. Which meant before Ashley, I was a SINK. But it turned out we weren’t DINKS because she had children all along.
On the drive home from Bakersfield, I told Ashley that my friend and neighbor Kirsten was taking me to Mozza, my favorite Italian restaurant, for my birthday dinner. Kirsten didn’t like Ashley because Ashley didn’t tell me she had a family when we started dating. And Ashley hated Kirsten for hating her. The car went silent, and for the next twenty minutes, I could see Devil horns growing out of Ashley’s forehead in my peripheral vision. I braced the steering wheel, preparing for impact. Ashley would detonate in three, two, one —
“I can’t BELIEVE you’re going to dinner with my ENEMY! Kirsten is a DOUCHE! And she’s IN LOVE WITH YOU! I can’t believe you’d put me in this position! I HATE HER!” Kirsten is a lot of things, but she’s not a douche. The least Ashley could do was use the words bitch or cunt, something more accurate. Any mention of my friendship with Kirsten sent Ashley into a rage-induced tantrum. And I wasn’t going to let Ashley stop me from going to Mozza, she’d have to kill me first.
There were so many times when I thought I should end things with Ashley. Like every time she screamed or spoke like an asshole or made a comment that put someone else down. But there was something inside of me that said not yet. I don’t know if it was the former journalist in me or the storyteller, but I was invested. I had no choice but to see how our relationship would play out.
Now I know I could win a Moth Grand-Slam with Trashley stories.
I also hadn’t dated anyone in nearly five years. Was this what it was like now? Post-Pandemic? Had everyone gone mental and turned into monsters? Dating was already confusing enough in Los Angeles because nobody here is normal. Here, people get paid to play roles on TV, and others play roles when they aren’t getting paid just for fun.
Instead of going to an office like the rest of the country, we take Hot-Girl Walks ™ with our friends at the reservoir and do Pilates at noon. We buy twenty-dollar smoothies from Erewhon and “work” from the West Hollywood Soho House. If you drive down Sunset Boulevard in the middle of the day, you’ll notice that no one, not one single person, has a regular nine-to-five.
If Ashley was pretending to be something she wasn’t, she fit right in.
I remained silent the rest of the drive home. I tried not to react when Ashley yelled at me because it only fueled her, and she was skilled at twisting my words and using them against me. I was starting to realize how toxic this was. Why couldn’t she be the person I first started talking to? Where did that Ashley go? She was the one I wanted to be with, not this volatile person I had to dance around so as to not upset her. I held out hope that Ashley would return, the one I’d be on the phone with till five in the morning, the one who taught me about Quantum Physics and the Meta-verse. She had to be in there, somewhere.
Ashley was leaving for Chicago the next morning, and the way she was behaving, good riddance. Once she left, I’d have my space back.
I felt like I had the memory of an abused dog, like she would scratch my ear before punching me in the snout and kicking me in the ribs. I’d cower under the table for a few minutes, but then I’d come back and lick her hand.
I’m sorry. Do you love me?
Ashley left a note for me the next morning. She did sweet things like that sometimes and it would partially make up for her temper. I could feel myself starting to detach from her. I hated it. We used to have so much fun.
That night, we talked on the phone as if everything was fine between us. She kept bringing up my birthday present, and I was excited to see what it was.
“I think I know what you got me,” I said.
“Oh yeah? And what would that be?”
“You got me a ring from Jamie Joseph.” Jamie Joseph was my second favorite jewelry designer, my first being Jared. Can you imagine?
“How did you know that? How’d you know what I got you?” Ashley switched tones and came off as paranoid.
“I don’t know, I just guessed?” I said.
The rest of the conversation was surface-level. I couldn’t connect with her, like her brain was on auto-pilot. We hung up, and I got ready for bed. She sent me a follow-up text. Clearly, I had struck a nerve by guessing what my birthday present was.
Feeling bad, I ended up calling her to see what she was being so weird about.
“I don’t understand why this is a big deal,” I said. “When you followed me on Instagram for two seconds, I saw you also followed Jamie’s page. And you didn’t even know who she was before we started dating.”
“You were going through my Instagram to see who I follow? Why would you do that? What were you looking for?”
“I wasn’t looking for anything. I just noticed she was our only mutual follow. So I figured you probably bought something from her.”
We got off the phone that night, and I sat with my thoughts. I never knew what would trigger her. I hoped her ring would make up for her attitude.
The package arrived the next morning and I put it to the side. It had lost its magic.
While Ashley was gone, I worked remotely on season five of Ex On the Beach. I loved my job. I wrote zingers for the snarky narrator and sent ideas to our editors on ways to cut the show together that would make it funnier. Making TV during a Global Pandemic made me just as important as any other essential worker.
On one of Ashley’s last nights in Chicago, she asked if I would be interested in re-writing her corporate employer’s website. I didn’t want to take on any additional work since I was busy with my MTV job, and in my free time, I only wanted to write for myself, not anyone else. But I knew her company was stupid with money, so I asked how much they had in the budget, and she said six thousand dollars. I scanned the three pages that needed to be re-written and knew this was a job someone would do for much, much less. A copywriter would’ve done it for thirty bucks an hour and finish by the end of the day.
Ashley’s company had no clue how little writing gigs paid, and I took full advantage of that. I told Ashley I wasn’t interested but would hook her up with my friend Rachel, who would be perfect for the job. I offered Rachel five thousand dollars to re-write the site, and I’d keep one thousand as a finder’s fee.
When I emailed my invoice to Ashley, she bumped up my pay. She changed my invoice from six thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars. I paid Rachel five grand and kept the rest. This was just the first stage of the website re-do, and I looked forward to doing much more business with Ashley’s company in the future.
While Ashley was gone, she brought up her kids again, wanting to know what I wanted to be in relation to them. The topic was more of an in-person discussion, not a text message. Lol, u want kids?
When Ashley returned from Chicago, she had a stolen robe from the Waldorf Astoria, where she had stayed. I had jokingly asked her to steal one for me, and she had committed. When I asked her to take one, I had no idea she would follow through because when we were still getting to know each other, she had said she only stole water because she refused to pay for a necessity. I guess stealing luxurious hotel robes was a necessity, too.
Ashley was excited for me to open my birthday present. And I was correct in guessing where it had came from. Previously, I had shown Ashley an Australian Opal and a Ruby ring I had my eye on, but what she got me was better than anything I could’ve imagined. It was an oval-faceted emerald from Zambia hugged by two gold nuggets we’d found in Alaska. Ashley had commissioned my second favorite jeweler to custom-make a ring.
All of the sudden, she was the best girlfriend in the world. When I put the ring on, my brain shook like an Etch-A-Sketch that completely erased all of my bad memories, and I forgot how awful she was seventy percent of the time.
This was my new power ring and I was sure it had cost her at least ten thousand dollars.
If Ashley was conning me, she was doing a horrible job.
And now I felt like a con artist. Since I started dating her, I’d made an extra thirty-five thousand dollars for doing nothing.
I looked around my apartment and saw a new Frame TV, an iPad, an Apple Watch, a Ukelele, camping gear, a vacuum, a SMEG coffee maker, and now an emerald and gold ring.
And all I had to do in return was put up with her bullshit.
“I was thinking,” she said. “We should start planning what we’re going to do for Christmas,”
I was shocked she was thinking that far ahead. I wasn’t sure we’d make it to Christmas.
“What if we fly into Rome? I have the entire city memorized, so I’ll take you on my normal walking route. Then we can take a day trip to Slovenia to see Lake Bled. From there we can take the train to Switzerland, and spend Christmas in Matterhorn and Lucern. Then we could fly down to Paris for New Year’s Eve.”
“I loved every single word you just said.”
“Great, I’ll start booking hotels,” she said, “The Four Seasons in Paris is nice.”
“I’m sure it is.”
Okay, maybe we would make it to Christmas after all.
I seriously hope you’re writing a screenplay for this shit. Your plants could play themselves, but a black lab might have to play Perci to make it Oscar eligible.
I know you’re alive because you’re writing this but I am very concerned for your safety!!!