44 Chapters About 4 Men: A Memoir
Copyright © 2015 by BB Easton
Published by Art by Easton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 978-0-9967906-0-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9967906-1-1
Artwork, Photography, and Cover Design by BB Easton
Cover Formatting and Consultation Provided by Indie Solutions by Murphy Rae, www.murphyrae.net
Editing and Interior Design by Jovana Shirley, Unforeseen Editing, www.unforeseenediting.com
Lyrics to “You Never Even Call Me By My Name” used with permission from Al Bunetta d/b/a Jurisdad Music o/b/o itself and Turnpike Tom Music
44 Chapters About 4 Men is a work of creative nonfiction based on true events that have been embellished, approximated, and exaggerated for the sake of humor and/or due to the author’s tendency to write while drunk and deprived of sleep. All names, places, and identifying characteristics have been altered to protect the identities of everyone involved. Should you decipher the true identity of Ms. Easton or any other character in this book, the author asks that you kindly allow her to fulfill a short list demands in exchange for your silence.
Due to excessive profanity, vulgarity, and graphic sexual content, this book is not intended for—and should probably be completely hidden from—anyone under the age of eighteen.
I was going to dedicate this book to my husband, but seeing as how he doesn’t know and must never, ever find out that it exists, I decided to dedicate it to you, my sweet reader, instead.
After all, you're the only reason I'm publishing this embarrassingly personal pile of journal entries, emails, and smut in the first place.
I’m a school psychologist, so behavior modification is kind of my thing. Want to get your kid to stop acting like an asshole? I’m your girl. Want to figure out if little Johnny has an autism spectrum disorder or is just really, really into Minecraft? Let me at him. But want to know how to get your cold, distant, communication-averse partner to show you more affection? Um…
Fuck if I knew. My marriage felt more like ottoman and owner than man and wife, and it was only getting worse. Until the day that changed everything—the day Kenneth Easton started reading my journal.
From there I stumbled upon a psychological breakthrough so simple, so stupid, so perfect, that it transformed my introverted, number-crunching husband into a smoldering sex-panther over the course of a few months. I was so excited I wanted to shout my secret from a mountain top. I wanted to gather up all my notes, lash them together under the cover of night, and rain copies of this Frankenbook down on every poor sap slogging it out in a monotonous, long-term relationship from sea to shining sea. “There is hope!” I would cackle into the darkness as I flew overhead in my stolen crop duster. “You don’t have to settle for boring bullshit!”
So, rather than learn to pilot a single engine aircraft, I’m going to do the next best thing. I’m going to click PUBLISH.
And I’m freaking the fuck out.
There’s some pretty graphic, at times humiliating, and overwhelmingly unethical shit in here. If anyone in my real life finds out that I published this thing, not only will my hunky, human Ken doll of a husband probably have me served with divorce papers, but I won’t even have my career to fall back on, what with that nasty little “gross moral turpitude” clause in my contract. And as far as my kids are concerned, I can’t say for sure that the state will take them away, but I’m pretty confident I’ll at least be assigned a case manager and some mandatory classes, which will be awfully hard to attend once my car gets repossessed.
Now, I know that you would never intentionally rat me out, but if you tell two people and they tell two people, the next thing you know, I’ll be a penniless divorcée living out of a 2006 Ford Mustang, turning tricks and selling organs just to keep gas in the tank. So just to make sure that you’re extra prepared to take my secret to your grave, I’ve developed a quick little role-play exercise.
Me (pretending to be your bestie): “Hey, girl! You have got to read 44 Chapters About 4 Men. It’s a memoir by this psychologist who figured out that her husband was reading her journal, so she wrote a bunch of raunchy stories about her ex-boyfriends and planted them in there for him to find. After a year of manipulating him and modifying his behavior she published the whole story under a pen name and didn’t even tell him! Can you believe that shit? He sounds really hot, too. I can’t wait until he finds out and divorces her!”
You: “Um…actually, I forgot how to read so—hey, look! Is that Channing Tatum?”
Me (being me again): Nailed it!
Glossary
1. The Husbot
2. There Once Was a Man from Nantucket
3. Frenemies
4. Props
5. Condiments Are for Hot Dogs, Not Wieners
6. Enter My Best Friend, the Evil Professor
7. The Notorious K.E.N.
8. Call Me Crazy
9. Lady and the Tramp
10. Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read Ever—Entry #1
11. Inception-Style, Muthafucka!
12. More Like, Billy I-Don’t
13. Knock, Knock. Who’s There? Ding-Dong.
14. My Tail Fell Off Again
15. Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read Ever—Entry #2
16. Oh No, I Incest
17. Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read Ever—Entry #3
18. And That’s How Deepak Chopra Scored Me Some Much-Needed Oral Sex
19. The Worst
20. Somebody Call Oprah
21. Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read Ever—Entry #4
22. I Was in a Basement, Surrounded by Phantom Limbs
23. Hansel and Metal
24. Bonerversary
25. Guard Your Thighs
26. Skynet Has Become Self-Aware! Skynet Has Become Self-Aware!
27. When the SUV’s A-Rockin’
28. Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read Ever—Entry #5
29. Mission(ary) Accomplished!
30. Stupid Safe Word
31. Super Private Journal That Ken Is Never, Never Allowed to Read Ever—Entry #6
32. I Put the Ass in Passive-Aggressive
33. We Both Have Gmail Accounts. It’s Like We Want to Get Fired.
34. 867-5309
35. Hasta La Vista, Knight
36. Actual Poem I Wrote for Ken on Our Eighth Wedding Anniversary
37. What a Difference a Year Makes
38. Sex on the Beach
39. Adieu
40. Haiku of Shame
41. What’s Your Beef with Breakfast, Ken?
42. Take a Picture. It’ll Last Longer.
43. You Can’t Always Get What You Want
44. Blue Balls
Epilogue: Actual Text Conversation with Dr. Sara Snow
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Here is a list of made-up words you will encounter while reading this book. (Webster’s, give me a call if you see anything you like.)
Abraised (adjective)—a word that should exist but doesn’t; the raw, painful quality of skin after an abrasion.
Badassery (noun)—the behavior of one who is a badass—intimidating, rebellious, defiant.
Bonerversary (noun)—the yearly recurrence of the date that one’s male partner, who usually lies motionless for
the duration of all sexual activities like a disinterested invertebrate, made love to him or her. Commemoration might or might not involve a moment of silence.
Cush (adj.)—abbreviated form of cushy; easy and profitable.
Dungeony (adj.)—being, resembling, or suggestive of a dungeon but not in a sexy BDSM way.
Emorection (noun)—a penis that has become erect due to an emotional rather than a physical or visual stimulus.
Fanfuckingtastic (adj.)—the way the words fucking fantastic sound when uttered by someone who’s had an over-poured glass of pinot grigio.
Favoritest (adj.)—a dumb way to say most favorite.
Floaty (adj.)—1. buoyant, elevated, airy. 2. carefree, content, relaxed.
Frankenbook (noun)—a random pile of journal entries, emails, photos, dirty poems, and pornographic short stories that some asshole threw together and tried to pass off as a book.
Frenemies (noun)—Friends? Enemies? Depends on the day and the amount of liquor involved.
Gargamelian (adj.)—of or pertaining to Gargamel, villain and nemesis of the Smurfs.
Husboner (noun)—a married man who should be sick and tired of his wife’s stretched out, floppy old vagina but instead behaves like an insatiable sex machine who just snorted an eight ball of coke.
Husbot (noun)—a married man who behaves more like a robot than a human being. This cyborg is typically obedient, task-oriented, introverted, rigid in his adherence to rules and routines, sexually inhibited, and averse to fun.
Judgy (adj.)—1. tending to make moral judgments based on one’s own personal beliefs and experiences. 2. most females native to the southeastern United States.
Ladyfriend (noun)—a female friend whom you do not wish to refer to as your girlfriend because you are culturally sensitive enough to know that African American women hate it when Caucasian women call them girlfriend.
Lickable/Flickable (adj.)—self-explanatory.
Manfriend (noun)—a male lover who is both of adult age and considerably older than his beau, causing the term boyfriend to seem silly and inappropriate, much like the relationship itself.
Menius (noun)—1. a monster-genius hybrid. 2. a mean genius. 3. Insert picture of Dr. Sara Snow here.
Sausagefest (noun)—a social gathering consisting primarily of people with penises.
Shivved (verb)—to stab or be stabbed with a makeshift blade, referred to in prison as a shiv.
Skeezy (adj.)—a sleazy person with less than honorable intentions.
Snarf (verb and proper noun)—1. to swallow or gobble up ravenously and with zero respect for table manners. 2. the name of Lion-O’s slightly annoying catlike pet on ThunderCats.
Stabby (adj.)—1. full of sharp points or stabbing sensations. 2. a word coined by and stolen from comedic goddess Jenny Lawson.
Stalkery (adj.)—of or pertaining to someone who regularly harasses, follows, monitors, and attempts to contact another person—especially a former lover or celebrity—in an aggressive, threatening manner.
Tuberculosed (adj.)—the state of being afflicted with tuberculosis. Duh.
Underworldly (adj.)—of or pertaining to hell.
Unshitty (adj.)—not shitty; not necessarily nice but not shitty either.
Vagrantism (noun)—1. the state or condition of being a vagrant. 2. one who wanders about idly without a permanent home or employment yet manages to afford leather pants and partially completed tattoos.
Vandalous (adj.)—of or pertaining to vandalism; basically, just a way better, sexier version of the word vandalic.
Vulneraboner (noun)—see Emorection.
The Husbot
August 16
Dear Journal,
This motherfucker is killing me.
Fresh out of the shower. He’s so close I can smell the Irish Spring on his skin. His hair’s all damp and sexy, and his beard scruff is at that perfect length—just long enough to be soft to the touch, but not so long that it hides his perfect chiseled features. And the way his undershirt clings to biceps and stretches across the hard planes of his chest…I could stare at him all night. Actually, I have been—through the corner of my eye. But that’s not enough.
I want to touch him.
In the half hour since he plopped down next to me and flipped on the Braves game I’ve thought of at least a thousand and one ways to reach over and caress this man. I could lace my fingers through his, or run my knuckles along his rough, square jaw. Maybe I could be playful and walk my mint-green nails up his sculpted ab muscles, then, once I have his attention, I could thrust those same fingertips into his wet hair and straddle his damp, clean, hard body.
But I don’t do shit, because I know all it will get me is a sideways glance and a shift in the opposite direction.
My husband is a rock. Not as in, He’s so strong and supportive. I don’t know what I’d do without him. But more like, He’s so fucking cold I wonder if he still has a pulse. Ken has never even held my hand, Journal. Not on purpose, anyway. He has had his hand held by me, while unconscious, but whenever I try that move during waking hours, Ken will politely endure the discomfort of human contact for…oh, say, five and a half seconds before smoothly removing his soft, limp flesh from my grasp.
Sex is pretty much the same story. Ever the gentleman, Ken will lie on his back and allow me to have my way with him while he quietly engages in minimal and obligatory petting. (Even when I try to be fun and reenact the ice cream scene from Fifty Shades Darker. In his defense, I do have to play the part of Christian because Ken obviously doesn’t know his lines. And I admit, the white noise of a baby monitor isn’t exactly Al Green. And for some reason we never seem to have vanilla ice cream, like in the book. We only have Cherry Garcia, which is pretty awkward to lick off, what with all the chewing required. But still. A little participation would be appreciated.)
Regardless of the level of theatrics involved, afterward I always kiss and cuddle Ken’s lean, beautiful, unresponsive body, trying to squeeze a single degree of warmth from the man-shaped boulder that is my husband. All the while, I can almost hear him counting to himself—one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand—before he taps me on the ass. My cue to get the fuck off of him.
At least, that’s what it feels like. The problem with Ken isn’t so much his coldness—his lack of need, want, or capacity for intimacy—or his inability to feel, let alone discuss, emotions. Those attributes actually keep our marriage quite stable and drama-free. That, and the fact that the man never does anything wrong.
Kenneth Easton is a lawn-mowing, bill-paying, law-abiding, defensive-driving, trash-toting husbot—a cyborg built specifically to withstand seventy to eighty years of gale-force matrimony. I’ve never caught him looking at another woman. Hell, I’ve never even caught him in a lie.
No, the problem with Ken is that he’s married to me.
Before meeting Ken, I’d been contorted into at least seventy-three percent of the positions in the Kama Sutra, Journal. I’d shaved most of my head and had all my lady bits pierced before I was old enough to see an R-rated movie. I spent my free time being handcuffed to things by boys with more combined tattoos than a Guns N’ Roses reunion concert in the Florida Panhandle. Ken simply can’t compete.
So, why, you might be wondering, did a slutty little punk like me go and marry someone so straight-laced and frigid?
It was because of them. Because of the way my adrenaline spikes and my pupils dilate in a fight-or-flight-or-fuck response every time I smell the sickly sweet musk of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men. Because of the way a pierced bottom lip makes me want to take up smoking again. Because of the way a full sleeve of tattoos makes me want to hitch a ride on a tour bus and leave everything I worked so hard to achieve in a gutter at the side of the road. Because my nerves were fucking shot by the time I met Ken, my heart was riding in on fumes, and the stability and security and sanity he offered was a soothing balm to my spent scorched soul.
Those inked-up men-children
from my past might have been ferocious lovers, but they couldn’t keep their dicks in their pants, their asses out of jail, or a positive balance in their bank accounts to save their lives. Ken, on the other hand, was just so…safe, responsible, easy. He wore Nikes and GAP T-shirts. He owned his own home. He jogged. His criminal record was as ink-free as his freckled skin. And, to top it all off, he had a degree in…wait for it…accounting.
Needless to say, I might have overcorrected a bit.
Don’t get me wrong. Ken is my best friend, and we are actually ridiculously happy together—or, at least, I’m happy. I am. Really. You can be bored to tears and happy at the same time, right? They call those happy tears. Happy, bored, oh-so bored, sometimes-fantasize-about-hitting-your-spouse-out-of-frustration happy tears. Ken is pretty anhedonic and deadpan, so it’s hard to tell how he’s feeling. I choose to think of him as happy, too. But let’s be honest. Ken doesn’t really have feelings.
What he does have is a Captain America–style square jaw with a subtle cleft and a permanent five o’clock shadow. He also has enviously high cheekbones. His aqua-blue eyes are hooded by long espresso-colored lashes, and his sandy-brown hair is just long enough on top to allow for a good grip. His physique is lean yet muscular. His sense of humor is dry. He is brilliant and self-deprecating, and he has the ability to skip rocks across any body of water (a secret turn-on of mine).
The man is at least ninety percent perfect for me, but lately, all I can think about is the less-than-or-equal-to ten percent that’s missing—passion and body art. Two things I need to mourn and move on from in order to protect this lovely yet depressingly monotonous thing I have going with Ken.
But I can’t.
Tattooed bad boys are like a drug I can’t quit. I devour antihero romance novels like they’re an essential food group. My phone and iPod runneth over with the songs of a thousand breathy, angsty, tattooed alt-rockers, ready to fill my head at the press of a button whenever I need to escape. My DVR is brimming with mysterious vampires, renegade bikers, hedonistic rock stars, and zombie apocalypse survivors—alpha males into whose swollen, ink-covered arms I can run whenever things around here get a little too…domestic.