You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood

Author:Ira Wood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2012-07-23T21:00:00+00:00

My wife is a writer of prodigious literary output but some day it will be discovered by an astute grad student connecting the dots in her archive that her production increased significantly on the day that I rented an office outside the house. Working with someone like me under the same roof is a challenge even for those with unshakable concentration, impossible if you are at all sensitive to the sounds of a creature in pain. When one is told that he snores, it is difficult to believe. It is tempting to say, Prove it, tape me. But no one ever does. Once, at the end of a short call, I accidentally left my phone off the hook with the answering machine running and discovered that listening to myself writing is like being in bed next to someone with obstructive sleep apnea. Even people in my office building will occasionally ask after me, having heard me through the walls groaning or talking to myself or come upon me wandering the parking lot in a cold sweat. In the years that I was doing cocaine, however, I was working at home. I was quietly engaged in my study for hours, as my wife was in hers. She had no idea what was going on. I had always been prone to peaks of euphoria that alternated with troughs of intense envy and pessimism. I had always had a frantic drive for sex. Moreover, I tended not to show the effects of coke wearing off until the cocktail hour. For someone who had no idea that her husband had developed a secret drug habit I must have seemed an awful lot like a frustrated writer who drank. Except for the money. The money kept disappearing.

In the beginning I was spending about a hundred dollars a week on coke, not much more than a weekly restaurant tab or chain-smoking habit; an amount I could reasonably extract from my checking account. But coke made writing feel so good, so effortless, that I began to snort a bit for other unpleasant activities, like cleaning the bathroom, like figuring the taxes, like doing anything that was a pain in the ass to do. One hundred a week was suddenly three hundred a week and my personal savings were suddenly gone.

I found a freelance job writing software content for a toy company that had made its mark selling leather hobby kits and plastic backyard pools, and some decades later a doll so wildly popular that at Christmas there were shortages causing parents to fight it out in the toy store aisles to get one. The heirs of the company then went hi-tech and developed what might have been the world’s slowest personal computer. I was called upon to write amusing content for educational word games and was paid to come up with funny word searches, quizzes and acrostics. I wasn’t writing literature but who cared? I was on coke! I was harnessed to a project, making good money.

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