Happy Birthday

My birthday is New Year's Day -- the perfect opportunity for my awful then-husband to pull out all the stops and make New Year's Eve a royal nightmare.

Christopher Smith

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He managed to get drunk before we got to the club at 9 p.m. He was already acting feisty, and by 9:30 he'd gotten kicked out of the club -- but not before he'd attempted to take them all on, like in The Matrix.

Outside the bar, he yelled at me to go with him. I refused. He wouldn't let me drive, and he was too drunk. As we fought in the parking lot, he screamed wildly, alcohol-swollen veins popping out on his forehead. He substituted many other names for my given one -- every name in the book and a few that weren't in the book.

Lucky for me, the pity factor at the bar was huge. The bar and party-goers made it their mission to make it all up to me. The booze ran like fountains: free bottles of champagne, and at midnight everyone had the bartender give me theirfavorite drinks for my birthday. I somehow felt obliged to express my appreciation by drinking all of them. Two in the morning came along in no time. The people who had promised me a ride home to Brighton, where we were living at the time, had vanished. I was less than pretty and far less than coherent. At one point I found myself outside the bar with a man showing me his penis. ThatI turned down. The security guy offered me a ride home. He had just hooked up with a cutie who went along for the drive. I thanked them by puking all the way home. I wish I could say that it was outside the car.

The next day, when mad-dog-evil-husband finally showed, I was crawling on the kitchen floor making my birthday dinner for the twenty family members and friends who had been invited. No one ended up helping, not even with the dishes. Soon after, I divorced all of them.