It must have been the beginning of February when the ladies decided to get together for their annual dinner at Ruby Tuesday. This year, as it turned out, none of them had Valentine’s Day plans. For once, this group of single women was without boyfriends, lovers or whatever.
But you know what happens when you put a bunch of single women together close to St. Valentine’s Day? The stories start pouring out. It’s like a bad episode of Sex and The City — but the tales of awesome sex are replaced by stories explaining why men should take heed of the hearts they break.
A tall waiter walks over to the table, smiling at the women and assuring them that he’s going to take care of them.
“That’s what they all say,” Erica says after he’s out of earshot.
The other ladies laugh.
“Sometimes,” I say, “you have to take care of them. Teach them a lesson, if you will.”
All eyes are on me, and my mouth just starts running.
There was this guy that I was dating a few years ago; at first things were good. We watched old movies at his place and went to lunch in the park during the spring and summer. But once he got comfortable, things started to change. You know how men talk about a woman changing in a relationship after a period of time? It was the total opposite with this dude. Let’s call him Charles.
Charles started making promises, but never followed through on them. There was the New Edition concert at Carowinds that we never made it to. There was the time he swore he was going to wash my car because it was so dirty.
It got so bad that when he talked, it was just like listening to the teacher from The Peanuts.
Finally, I got tired of it. And the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was when the stereo in my car stopped working and he said, “If you purchase a radio for your car, I’ll install it for you.”
“OK,” I replied. I’d already called around to some of the stereo installation stores in Charlotte and their prices were just outrageous. Besides, Charles installed stereos for a living, and as his girlfriend, he should install mine for free anyway. Hell, it was the least the asshole could do after all of the broken promises and bullshit I’d been putting up with.
I went to Wal-Mart and purchased the car stereo. I really needed the CD player because Charlotte radio sucks, but I digress.
That Monday, I called Charles and said, “Hey, when can you install the stereo?”
“Uh, well, I’m going to have to call you back,” was his reply.
All right, I thought as I headed for work. Mind you, my job at the time was only about a block and a half from his place of business. So, imagine my utter surprise when I’m driving in to work and I see this fool all up in some girl’s face, smiling and shooting the shit as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Had I been early for work, I might have driven my car right into them. But I was running late, so I headed to the South End office building while I dialed his cell phone. Don’t you know, this fucker sent my call to voice mail!
Now I was mad.
The women lean in as if they can feel the climax to this story coming.
“Did you kick her ass?” Wendy asks.
“No,” I reply. “She wasn’t the one giving me the run around, nor was she the one who was supposed to be committed to me. That’s the mistake that women make, we blame the other woman.”
“Shut up, Oprah!” Erica says. “Get on with the story.”
That day, I called Charles a few more times that I care to admit. Each time, I got his voice mail. And yeah, there were a few profanity-laced messages left on his phone.
Then the wheels started spinning. It was obvious to me that two things needed to happen. This so-called relationship needed to end, and I needed to do something to make him feel like crap.
Sure, it wasn’t the most mature thing to do, but at the time who gave a damn about maturity?
After I went to this shady stereo store on Independence Boulevard and paid $35 for two seconds of work, I was really pissed. Not because of the money — but because this guy had promised to do something for me and instead, I see him laughing it up with some random girl.
Random … I wonder how he would feel if he got a random phone call from the Mecklenburg County Health Department?
“No you didn’t,” the collective at the table says.
“No, I didn’t,” I reply and nod toward my friend visiting from Atlanta. “She did.”
One Friday afternoon, I was heading down Sugar Creek Road, driving to an event, and I called up my best friend who has a great phone voice. Amber was my partner-in-crime.
After getting the small talk out of the way, I got to the meat of my reason for calling. “Girl,” I said. “I’m so mad. Let me tell you what Charles did now.”
I told her the story about the car stereo and how it was just the latest in a long list of broken promises and then there was the anonymous broad who he was so interested in talking to and not picking up the damned phone.
“I wanted to throw a brick at him or at least run him over, but I am far too cute for jail.”
“I know that’s right,” she said. “Still, that’s messed up that he was in some bitch’s face and couldn’t or wouldn’t answer that phone.”
“Amber, I need you to do me a favor,” I said. “I need you to call him, tell him you’re from the health department and someone he’s been intimate with tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease and he needs to get checked.”
She laughed. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the number?” she asked. (Told you — partner-in-crime.)
I rattled off Charles’s number and told her to call me after the deed was done.
“This is wrong on so many levels,” Erica says as she laughs. “But what happened?”
After Amber made the call, she called me back with a funny story of her own.
“Oh my God. You really owe me,” she said. “He asked me all of these questions. Hell, I had to pull up WebMD.”
“What disease did you give him?” I asked.
“Herpes.”
“Wow. Well, at least it wasn’t Hepatitis C.”
“Girl, you’re crazy,” she said.
“I know. Wait … guess who is calling me right now?”
“Charles.”
“Umm-huh. I’ll call you back,” I said before clicking over. “What?”
“What’s up?” he asked.
“What do you want?” I snapped back.
“Do you have something you need to tell me?” he asked.
Oh, no this ass didn’t, I thought. So, he’s just going to assume he got herpes from me? What about the chick who caused him to put my call into voice mail?
“Yes, I do,” I said, voice still filled with attitude. “I’m sick of you and your shit. You make promises that you don’t keep and the fact that you gave me the run around all week while you can talk to other bitches like they’re your best fucking friend pissed me off. So, don’t call me anymore, asshole.” I hit the end button on the phone and laughed my ass off.
Maybe he’ll think twice in his next relationship about making and breaking promises.
“I have a story,” says Wendy.
We all look at her and say, “All right, what did you do?”
“Well,” she begins, “I was in college and had been dating this guy for about a year. The closer we got to graduation, I was expecting that we would take our relationship to the next level.”
Wendy said that she and her boyfriend had a good relationship, at least in her mind. They did everything together from dinners to shopping at Wal-Mart, and they even collected Beanie Babies.
But things started to change. He became distant, and she couldn’t understand why.
Then it became clear: there was another woman in the picture.
Wendy says she asked him one night, “What’s going on with us?”
Her man replied, “This just isn’t working for me anymore. I think we should break up, but at least still be friends.”
“Hell no,” she replied.
At first, she’d been content to just move on, ignore him and his new, younger girl. But one night after listening to Alanis Morissette, Wendy said she became angry and wanted a bit of revenge.
She built up her courage with rum, and then she took several rolls of toilet paper from her bathroom, leaving her roommate an IOU.
Wendy knew that other than himself, her ex loved his car. It was a sports car, she recalled, but couldn’t remember the exact make and model. As she drove over to his place, it started to rain. She said she remembers thinking that wet toilet paper would be hell to get off the car.
He had parked his car sideways, as usual, in the dorm parking lot. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and began working. It took four rolls of toilet paper to cover the entire car. When she was done, she kicked the passenger side door and ended up with a broken toe.
“My God!” Erica says. “It sounds like you ended up getting yourself.”
“So, what happened?” I ask.
“If you two will let me finish,” she snaps with a smile.
By the time Wendy returned to her dorm, it was pouring rain. All she could think about was her ex seeing his beloved car covered in wet toilet paper. Part of her wished the paper would’ve been soiled with something else, but she had to draw the line there because that would’ve been nasty.
The next morning, around 6:30 a.m., her phone rang and predictably it was her ex.
“You think that was funny?” he demanded.
“What are you talking about?”
“I know you did that shit to my car,” he said, his voice filled with anger.
“Did what to your car?”
“Don’t play with me. Do you know how long it’s going to take me to clean that paper off my car?”
“I really don’t care. You and your car can go to hell and you can take that little girl with you!”
Wendy said she slammed the phone down and laughed. Later that day when she walked by his dorm, she saw him outside peeling away the paper from the car with an angry scowl on his face.
She took solace in the fact that he wouldn’t be driving his new chick around for the next couple of hours.
“We actually looked back on that a few years later and laughed,” she says.
“You two are friends?” I ask.
“No. But I’ll admit that a few years after college we started to give it another try. But he was in Texas and I was in North Carolina. I figured if he couldn’t be faithful when we were in the same city, he wasn’t going to be faithful when we were thousands of miles apart,” she says.
“And they’re exes for a reason,” Erica interjects.
“So true. It reminds me of something that happened to me,” Amber says.
Amber had been in a long-term relationship with her ex. They shared everything, and when she came into some money, she bought him a 52-inch television, redesigned his bathroom and purchased him a DVD player.
There were many days and nights when they’d lay in his bed watching that TV and just being romantic.
It all changed one morning when he was in the shower and she found a condom wrapper on the floor.
Amber knew that it wasn’t one they had used because they hadn’t had sex that morning. Angry, she began rummaging through his things. Sure enough, the box of condoms that they’d purchased two days ago was empty.
This is some bullshit, she thought. Then she looked around the room, taking inventory of all the things she’d purchased for him. Without giving it a second thought, she stormed into the bathroom and began taking the toothbrush holder, the towels and the rug. Her ex hopped out of the shower.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Who was here last night?”
He deflected the question, ordering her to put the stuff down. “You’re acting crazy.”
“And you’re fucking some other bitch. I tell you what — she won’t be taking a shower using my stuff. She won’t be laying in your bed watching my TV.”
He knocked the things out of her hand. “You need to go home.”
She pushed him in the chest. He pushed her to the floor, grabbed her shoulder and said, “Calm down.”
Amber said she kneed him in the stomach and did go home.
“He put his hands on you?” Erica says. “That’s a no-no.”
“I wasn’t done,” Amber says.
Still having a key to his apartment, when Amber got home, she called up a couple of her girlfriends. Their mission was to go to his apartment and get Amber’s stuff.
Though she knew she couldn’t take the television, one of her friends had a plan. Cut the cord and pour water and rubbing alcohol in the back of it to ruin it.
It sounded good to Amber. So with her three girls, they devised a plan. One of her friends sat in the parking lot with her cell phone. If she saw Amber’s ex or his roommate, she’d call them and warn them to get out.
Amber and her two friends went inside the apartment and cleaned the place out, taking everything that Amber had purchased for her ex, down to the shower curtain.
“It wasn’t stealing because it was my property,” she recalls. “Besides, that’s what he deserved.”
“What happened when he arrived home and found his stuff missing?” Wendy asks.
When her ex arrived home that night, he knew who’d taken his stuff. Amber said her phone rang off the hook. But she didn’t answer.
Her friend who played the lookout even got a phone call that night. Amber’s ex’s roommate called her friend and issued a warning.
“Tell Amber she has 24 hours to get our stuff back.”
“Who the hell did they think they were? The Mafia?” I say with a laugh.
“It didn’t matter to me because I had already decided to take all of that stuff to the pawn shop and then take myself to the mall,” she says.
As we swapped stories, I had to wonder, what makes us feel so compelled to do these things to people we obviously loved at one point in time?
After dinner, I decide that all of us need therapy. So, I reach out to an expert to find out if we’re really crazy or if this is “normal.”
“When a lover leaves you, you feel hurt, rejected and angry,” says relationship expert Dr. Elaine Stevens. “Because of those feelings, you want to get back at the person because, in your mind, that person has done you wrong. It is normal to want to hurt the other person, but it is definitely not healthy or wise. Our emotions cause us to do things that we would never do under normal circumstances. [The woman who wore a diaper and drove hundreds of miles to confront her lover and his new love interest, for example.] These things are highly emotion-driven, and human nature often makes us want to do things in an unorthodox way when emotions are involved.”
Dr. Stevens is right about people seeking to do things in an unorthodox way. Curious to see if there were other stories of revenge out there, I do a Goggle search and find a bunch of Web sites that encourage you to take revenge and a few that will do it for you (for a fee, of course).
• Makehimpay.net was one of the meaner free sites, offering tips to get revenge on an ex like: Carefully use a razor blade to slice through most of the stitches holding the seams of his pants together. Leave some stitches intact so his pants don’t rip apart when he first puts them on. His big dirty ass will be exposed to the world in about half a day. Or, use a bottle of syrup to write his most embarrassing secrets on the hood and trunk of his car. Top off the syrup with your favorite color glitter!
• Getrevengeonyourex.com: This fee-based site allows you to send twisted gifts to your ex and also has a feature where someone will record a haunting message to a CD and then send it to your ex. Since this site is based in Europe, you more than likely won’t get caught and it only costs $26.95 — less than a dozen roses on Valentine’s Day.
• Thepayback.com: From this site, you can send that dirty ex a smelly dead fish for $19.99. And since it’s almost Valentine’s Day, send your ex the flowers you never got … only they’re dead. The site claims that everything is sent anonymously, so you shouldn’t get caught.
This article appears in Feb 6-12, 2008.
