The Ex Files – The Jersey Devil

I was minding my own business when the ex sent me this text message:

To which I replied:

Why did he text me randomly out of nowhere with a song he wanted me to listen to? And what does he hope to gain from this behavior?

When he sent the text, for a brief moment, I thought he had butt dialed me again and sent me a text that was intended for his other woman or something. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened. So his response that no, he wasn’t having a stroke, it was just a song, and he wanted me to listen to it, left me uneasy.

I have a troubled history with him and music. Specifically, how he has tainted my enjoyment of music by attempting to manipulate me and/or my emotions through lyrics.

When he did it while he was cheating on me, before the divorce was final, I was livid. I was also slow to catch on to what he was passive-aggressively not saying out loud by playing this one song over and over in my presence. It still is, to this day, a song that will trigger me.

However, my curiosity won over my hesitation, and I decided to press play on this song recommendation. Lo and behold, to no surprise to anyone, this song was laden with “meaning” vis-à-vis the lyrics and how I’m sure he was choosing to interpret them.

Let’s break this down to find the hidden meaning behind the music.

As I listened to the song, I immediately released a long, frustrated sigh, because here we go again. Without provocation, and for seemingly no reason, here he goes disturbing my peace. Why else, if not to fuck with me and try to worm his way into my frontal lobe, would he ask me to listen to this song?

The song is basically the frontman’s lament about some woman, who I can only surmise from the context of the lyrics was Latina, possibly from Mexico. Or the singer just thought it was clever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  But I’m leaning on the Latina angle, hear me out – this gets a little convoluted…

When I was packing up all the things I had to take with me after the divorce, I came across a stash of burned DVDs the ex had shoved in some notebooks I had on a shelf. Ironically, these DVDs had scrawled on titles such as ‘Latina Mamas’ and ‘Brazilian Babes’ 😑

At the time, I was too pissed off to process the context of what I was seeing and what it meant overall. Especially in the wake of the years of anti-Hispanic arguments that he had as he sank deeper into his Glenn Beck era. I was confused because he would spout things like “immigrants needed to go back to their own country” and voice opinions about how people should speak English and not other languages if they’re in the United States.

He would say these things to me, phrased in statements like he expected to gain agreement from me, while I stood there, as an immigrant, confused as fuck as to why he not only was saying this conservative bigoted shit to me, but had married me, as I represented everything and everyone he purported to hate in that moment.

Years after the divorce, my eldest son said something profound to me, which sickened me as it also checked a bunch of boxes for me in my head: that he had long suspected that his father (mr horrible) had fetishized my Hispanic-ness. 🤢 Gross, but it made sense.

It brought to mind that early in our marriage, he had asked me why I didn’t call him “Papi”. OMG. Just writing that is embarrassing. At the moment, I was like, what about me would lead him to believe that I’d call him Papi? And that is not something I was raised to say naturally, despite hearing it said by my mother and other aunts and relatives. So what the fuck? I think I may have said some other shit, and I’m pretty sure we had a fight about it. But in those days, we fought about a lot of things, so another argument wasn’t unusual.

First of all, he knew my history. He knew I had been forced to shed my primary language, that though I understood and could still write in Spanish, I struggled to speak it naturally and, as a result, did not have an accent when I spoke English. The best example of what I think he wanted me to sound like is Sophia Vergara. And that is so not me.

Maybe in another lifetime, another version of me would have sounded like that. And maybe that is what he actually wanted. I knew, because he told me when we were dating, that I was the first non-white person he had been with. What I did not know, but would eventually find out, even if later, as the math finally mathed for me, was that he didn’t actually want me. He wanted a version of what he had hoped to get. Like a collector’s item.

The fetishization of Latinas and then stumbling upon his bootleg porn stash was par for the course of this backward asshat that I had inadvertently married. Which is why I am convinced that when he heard this song, he thought of me.

In my opinion, the whole song is some guy whining that his Latina ex thought she was better than him. And this part of the song encapsulates the sentiments exhibited by the ex in the early marriage years. He drank a lot at the start of our marriage. I was pregnant, so being the sober person around a constant drunk was an emotional rollercoaster. We were living in a small apartment in Virginia Beach. Many times, I would come home to find he was on another bender. All the lights would be on, and he’d have an open bottle of liquor somewhere near him as he plucked on his electric guitar.

Whenever I would find him like this, I knew a fight was brewing. Thinking back, I don’t know if I purposely said shit I knew would set him off, or if I hadn’t yet learned how to read and manage his emotions, so I’d be honest expecting an adult response from him.

He would ask me if his playing sounded good, or if I liked a song he was working on, or his popular trigger, he’d ask me to read something he had typed on the computer (which had also been on, standing idle as he did something else). What pissed me off the most about all of this is that I’d be exhausted and would come home to this mental minefield when all I wanted to do was relax. My first pregnancy was no joke. I had all day morning sickness. I was not a happy camper. Nor was I a patient one, and I didn’t have it in me to humor him.

Inevitably, anything I said would set him off, and the argument would ensue. The lyrics are a direct reflection of many of his arguments – that I thought I was better than him, that I emasculated him, that I didn’t treat him like a man… But his favorite was that he wasn’t good enough for me, I was too smart for him, and so on.

Whether it was the alcohol or his actual stubborn beliefs, nothing I said would dissuade him.

Looking back, I know now that it was emotional abuse. His intent was to manipulate me into making me smaller. Into diminishing myself. And unfortunately, it was effective.

My deepest regret is the damage I did when I sacrificed myself on the altar of his personality. Because that was something I did. He may have capitalized on my terrible upbringing, the fact that he found a weakness in me because I wasn’t given a strong role model of womanhood, nor a supportive sense of worth. It wasn’t on him that I had become a people pleaser. No, all that was thanks to my wonderful childhood.

But the fact that, as it was happening, I could feel my self-doubt growing, and I overrode my instinct, which was telling me not to trust this. To resist. All that was on me.

But this right here? The fishing in this pond for attention that he’s doing now by sending me this message? That’s all on him.

I woke up when I filed for divorce. I gave myself the grace that I had disabused myself of for years when I chose me, instead of choosing to stay. Though by that point, I knew he wasn’t going to stay. And I certainly wasn’t going to become another cautionary tale. I’d seen this play out before through my aunt and her toxic marriage, which broke her and drove her insane.

I escaped and have cycled through all the circles of hell (aka grief) to finally end up here, after 13 years, bouncing between acceptance and depression. Yay. 🙄 But times like these, in the past, would have shot me straight back to anger. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

It’s frustrating to live this way, where something as simple as words sung to a melody can be wielded as a weapon.

Since his intent is laden with innuendo and hidden motives, at least I know it’s better to bitch about it here than engage in a pointless battle of wits with him. So, is it growth that now it’s just an annoyance? Probably.