Failures Of Compassion-A Rock Star Verbal Abuser

OK, I said it out loud and to a few people, now what do I do? Will the truth set me free? I’m a cliche, a statistic and why don’t I hear people talking about this more often. Is this socially acceptable behavior since its not out in the open as much as physical abuses?

I’ll start with the highlights of my background. I’m not your typical woman that you would look at and suspect that anyone would be capable of abusing me in the slightest way. I’m lively (almost bubbly), driven, confident, slightly adorable with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. When I met my husband to be I was 24 and an Executive Producer of my own radio show in Los Angeles which shortly thereafter I started a print modeling agency with my then partner Dr. Donald Plance, my hero who discovered 5 years earlier that I had two rotting tubular pregnancies in my fallopian tubes and held my hand in and out of hospitals for over two years to save my life. I should have know when he refused to be any part of the wedding and never welcomed (lets call him) Richard in his practice...ever. I was the girl that got promoted every 6 months no matter where I worked. I would work 24 hours a day if I needed to get ahead. Second to that, the other embarrassing truth that I’m sure most of you could understand the concealment, is that technically...I have an eight grade education. Which, I later went back to community college where I was told that I had dyslexia and I tried but I couldn’t pass my math requirements so I gave up trying. Thus, the need for someone to edit when and where my comma’s are supposed to go but I am a very good speller on my own...thank you very much. I left school in the first semester of ninth grade. Primarily because my parents had long forgotten looking after me for years and there wasn’t anyone there to encourage me to stay in school and also because my only brother Johnny had his skull cracked open in a motorcycle accident and laid in a convalescent hospital trying to kill himself every day. I would sit with him trying to feed him baby food and play ball with him while he would call me a filthy slut and tell me to go fuck off. Ten years later he decided it was all to hard for him and he drank himself to death. My father was a used car sales man who wore slick suits and my mother was a dancer in those swanky sort of clubs. Both of my parents are alcoholics but my father was a particularly bad one, he was a binge drinker and would stay drunk for literally an entire month and during his binges it was very bad times in the Cavalier household. He was very violent when he drank and even though my mother was little she never let him beat her without him getting hurt as well. I never hid my bruises from anyone, they were like battle wounds and I suspect I thought people might let me get away with stuff since they would feel sorry for me, but everyone in the neighborhood was just used to it and nobody paid much attention. Until, one day he almost beat my dog Sachmo (who was a cross between a Poodle and a Schnauzer) to death one day for taking a shit on the living room floor after waiting patiently by the back door for a day. I decided the best way to get back at my dad was to ruin everything he loved...his home, his TV, his Johnny Mathis vinyl collection. I waited until I knew he wasn’t going to be home and I went through the entire house and tossed every last item into the swimming pool. I mean every last item, toaster, chairs, lamps...everything. I got the worst beating that night but my mom saved me just before I went unconscious and I didn’t see him again until I was 18. For me, I won. I fought back against a very stronger man and I made him MAD. That was pretty much the last man that ever struck me and after that I was hella feisty and nobody ever messed with me, I was now a defiant angry teen. I was also a heart breaker and a cheater. I pretty much cheated on every boyfriend that I ever had and simply stated that I wasn’t married yet and how would I know that I had THE ONE if I didn’t take chances when I met someone that I had chemistry with.

When I met Richard at the radio station for his interview my boyfriend at the time was the host of the show who was a used up 80’s drummer with a big mouth who was perfect for the gig. Richard had a girlfriend in the studio. When I walked down the hall Richard turned to the host and asked him, “Who the hell is that girl?and he confidently assured him that I was his. Richard sent his apologies but when I walked in the room Richard and I had instantaneous love lock. I continued to go and watch Richard’s band play at the local pub on Fairfax in LA. Richard had to meet a series of my new boyfriends of mine as Richard got engaged to his gal. We never once did anything more than hug one another. Not him, he was all or nothing in my eyes. Richard called me up for lunch one day during my hectic modeling agency days, but I moved everything to make the lunch. There he poured his heart to me about breaking up with his girl and that he was renting a part of a living room from his best friends girlfriend which he just happened to be shagging as well. I remember on the walk back from lunch, he grabbed my arm and said “LINK ME? which brought me closer to him than ever before and while the both of us were actually single. By this time, I had already purchased my first house at 25 and was feeling pretty secure about my future. Days later I invited him out for a drink and he declined. I responded by telling him that there would be no need for us to be friends then, if we couldn’t have a few drinks together to loose my number. He quickly agreed to have that drink but his hesitation proved to be right on the mark. Our whirlwind romance started just then and didn't slow for a very long time.

Richard was raised in Ireland and had been moderately successful in a 80’s English rock band with some rotation on MTV and had since run through all of his money. He was an only child to two aging people and his sweet father passed when he was just ten years old leaving him with a cold, depressed and bitter drunk mother whom he said never told him that she loved him. He took over the male role in the house by cooking and trying to keep it together but she never seemed to notice. He would come home with black eyes and never question to what happened. Right when his 80’s band started to take off he found out that a girl that he was trying to break it off with was pregnant. They married but he admittedly to me told me that he had several affairs but that was only because he was never in lover with her. Soon after, he quitted his band, first wife and son and moved to America. He always drank, every night but to me he was a poet. I believe that was my initial justification to his heavy drinking. He was definitely a depressive and was on Prozac when I first met him which he told me made it hard to write songs and make love so depression seemed the better way to go. I was in love and nothing in my soul could push him away. We would fax love letters back-n-forth every day to each other. We were rarely apart. The people in the band immediately became jealous and felt like I was taking him away from their intentions. Even though he never missed a rehearsal or a gig my presence was very threatening to them and they weren’t very nice to me in the beginning. He even wrote a song that went on his second album asking how could everyone be against something so beautiful. Soon, they found out that the nights that I wasn’t there he would be a mean bastard. His manager would tell me that he knew it was going to be a good show because I was there.

Then about 6 months into our relationship we were home drinking pretty heavily and he just turned to me and started to tell me that I was stupid and retarded and that he couldn’t have any worldly discussions with me. I’d ask him to teach me, that I was a quick learner and he would say that it was worthless to even try that I was so dumb it would be a waste of time. He said I would never be book smart. I was completely devastated and speechless by what he was saying. I mean, I was truly in shock and it felt like my world just stopped. My body trembled, my hands clammy and my face was soaked with tears and in the heat of it I ran to the kitchen and pulled out what I thought was a butter knife and grabbed my wrist and sliced it but it wasn’t a butter knife, it was a serrated knife and I cut myself pretty good. I went to Dr. Plance to sew it up (17 stitches) and I begged him not to turn me in. Richard didn't talk to me for a few days even though by that time we were living together. I thought I had lost him forever so I stayed quiet as a church mouse until his eyes turned back to their normal color. Every time I saw him I would just bow my head with guilt for making him that mad at me. I would wait until he would be all hugs and kisses and love me again and I would sincerely love those times. As days would pass and a gig would come up we would go out with the gang and he would get on stage and do a beautiful dedication to me and tell everyone how much I meant to him. I would feel redeemed again. Richard’s world was pretty messy when I met him, he was illegal in the country, had no drivers license, owed thousands on back taxes, and had a 20K bill on his credit from his ex-girlfriend. These were all messes that I needed to help him clean-up. He worked during the day at a tow yard filing paperwork for 10$ an hour. He would come home from his long drive, pop open the bubbly and make us dinner. I would try not to share in the drinking, but he would get insulted since he spent time cooking, and it would ruin the meal. There really wasn’t an option for me...we were drinking that night. He didn’t like me to talk to him when he was cooking and he refused to show me what he was doing-saying it was his time, his therapy. Yes, I’m a pretty bad cook but I wished that someone would teach me. At dinner, it was one or the other “I love you? “You are my angel?or the other which would start out by saying I was “boring? “ridiculous? “useless? and a “loser.?When the bad times would happen I would feel it coming, he would start posturing towards the dark guy and I would try everything to change his mood. Going to a pub always helped but that meant we weren’t leaving until at least 4:00 in the morning and that wasn’t good for me or my career. When he got into these moods he seemed to be in a slight trance, his eyes would go dark and when he would look at you it felt like something else was looking at you. Sometimes I would just come home from work and in a great mood and as soon as I would walk in I would feel the energy and a tightening in my throat like I swallowed a potato and I would clench my fists with my thumbs inside really tight until they turned white. My vocal cords would tighten up and it felt as though there was a rope from my throat to my heart and it was constricting. I would think to myself “Not tonight, please not tonight? The “God you bore me?would start and the only thing that I could do was let the tears fall out of my eyes. I might be able to get out a “Why are you doing this to me??Where had the fighter gone?

By this time I had lost the modeling agency and was now just a personal assistant making more than 1/2 of what I was making. We were actually almost poor, I went from couture to thrift stores. I encouraged Richard to take time off work even though we needed the money so he could stay home and write songs for the band. Our plan was for him to make it and then I could concentrate on writing and other things I wanted to do. I had never been such a big drinker and now I realize how lucky I was when I was younger. I was very skinny my entire life and never weighed more than a healthy size 4 maybe 6 at the most. Since he was a vegetarian and he cooked I became a vegetarian and my body was all out of whack. I had no idea that I needed to replace protein and I didn't even know what a carbohydrate was. I remember the day that I was at the store and I had a size 10 in my hands and I had to ask the girl for one more size up. I looked to the girl and I said “Do you know if beer is fattening? Of course she just looked at me like I must have been kidding, but since I never had a weight problem I didn’t understand what was happening. Now, with that...I lost my confidence, my strength, my soul was now fat and thus couldn’t fight for me anymore. A girlfriend of mine told me that she thought he wanted me to gain weight so when he was on the road nobody would try and hit on me. At the time, I thought it was the craziest and meanest thing I had ever heard but now I’m not so sure that she wasn’t right. I was being controlled one move at a time.

He was very jealous but he never and I mean never showed this in public, but when we got home he would question me on who was looking at me and who he thought wanted to sleep with me and what a slut he bet I really was. I can say that the whole ten years we were together I never even simply kissed anyone else ever. I was always faithful to him. Then he had a certain girl in the band who I knew never wanted me around for reasons that now are very apparent. She is a very cold person and a big drinker as well, she was mean to everyone and many people didn’t like her. To give you an example of how she was, she never spoke to the bass players girlfriend until she got pregnat three years after they went out and the girlfriend would live on the bus with them sometimes. One night after a show she called me a “Bitch?and I went crazy and told Richard I wanted to leave immediately and he said no that he wanted to stay. He never stood up for me whenever there was any confrontation, it was always my fault. It was more important that everyone thought he was a great guy. There was little manipulations that he would do that I can see now such as “How can you think that I would ever do that to you? The strange thing is that he would tell everyone that he came in touch with that I was his everything. He would cry and say that he sees my face in every window, that I was his light, that I clipped his wings of insanity. I would have strangers from around the world of where they would have played that would tell me they would die to have someone love them as much as Richard loved me. I really wanted to believe all of that. But the truth was I was very sad and lonely. The band started to take off, making more money and he started to be gone weeks at a time, then months and then many months.

It was our second anniversary and I was going to fly to New York to meet him and I hadn’t seen him in awhile. I was so excited. I had never been to New York and I had found a precious original signed letter from one of his favorite writers George Bernard Shaw and had it specially framed. It cost a whopping $700 and was the most expensive present I had gotten anyone before. I wanted this to be special. I put the present right next to my bed and my flight was leaving at 6:00 a.m. in the morning. The phone rang at 3:00 a.m. and it was Richard. The conversation started out very nice and all of a sudden he just went off. Telling me that he didn’t want me to come out that I would just be a pain in the ass and he would have a better time without me and that there wasn’t room for me on the bus. I remember falling to the ground with my heart racing. My whole body was shaking, I was hyperventilating and I called a friend of mine whom is a very stable person and asked them what I should do and she said to get on that plane and go get my husband and that he couldn't treat me like that anymore. Richard didn't know if I was going to show up at the venue and truthfully I was terrified but I felt like if he wanted to end it he should have to look at me to do it. Of course, when I got there he was amazed and delighted with a long face and flowers for me. I hadn’t seen him in so long that I just wanted to enjoy the time and that he was feeling sorry for what he had done. I took the good times not knowing it was just another set back.

I started to have to watch what I said to everyone about everything. It just started out as simple looks like ‘Don’t You Dare? It made me almost paranoid and I thought intensely about everything that came out of my mouth. If I even indicated that he was less than a perfect person he would make his attack later when we were alone. Next, I became nervous to buy anything substantial in the house without his approval. I was now no longer Gina, I lost who I was, my own identity everything was about the rock star that I lived with. So, what did I do? I tried to make our world even better, I tried to be the best wife I could so that there wasn’t anything for us to fight about. I was always cheerful, supp

Thank you for your ears, your brain cells and your heart and soul for taking time to read my story. Regards, Gina