Marriage 1: NYC Intros, When the Rich and Poor Mate, and “Babe, Don’t You Know? No One Fucks With the Persian Cats.”

I want to tell the story of the Four C’s. We’ll get there. If you saw my notebooks, my apartment, the state of my mind, you’d expect an HBO documentary with deleted scenes. Cocky? Maybe. Earned? Also yes. It isn’t my prose that’s outrageous; it’s the plot. I did mention there’s a murder, right?

But none of it lands unless you know me first. Staring at the first chapter last night, I realized I have to surrender to the reader. Dear reader, I am utterly in love with you—and I fear, I do not know how to love in halves. You need the preface: the few years leading to 2020, or the rest reads like hallucination.

So, we pick up where we left off: the highs of marrying… let’s call him Mr. Wulf.

In NYC, engaged, I was blissed out. He paraded me through his much older Persian circle. He taught me to dress. Before him I owned two outfits, Doc Martens, and Converse. He introduced fabrics, cuts, the sly tyranny of the red lip. If you think I was groomed, I understand. I also believe in past lives. If mine was the tenth, his was the first. A child in a man’s body. Stockholm syndrome could write that sentence; I’ll let the armchair jury deliberate later. The truth is simpler: I still love Wulf, like a feral little brother who learned tenderness from animals.

The nightlife came with a running whisper: “Playboy Wulf, of course.” I was flattered they assumed I was a model and not a homeless pickpocket with good cheekbones. I had done a few shoots for cash around West New York and Union City. One involved waving a pirate flag on a high-rise roof in heels. Terrifying in theory. Hilarious in practice. Wulf loved it all. Sometimes it felt like charity, but most times I was his muse.

He cultivated my femininity. The red lip was his fault. It is mortifying to admit and oddly liberating. Confession is a solvent.

Wulf is the gentlest soul you’ll meet, if he likes you. He trusts a handful of humans and a menagerie of four-leggeds. His temper flashed only when someone crossed a line. A friend got handsy and Wulf snapped: “Don’t forget I own everything in your house. Back off, peasant.” At first, the power trip was thrilling. Then the question arrived: if he is classist with friends, what exactly am I to him?

I brought him to my world anyway. Lindsey deserves a shout. She fronts Pynkie, and we are all convinced she is Kurt Cobain reincarnated. She used to shout me out at shows; consider this karmic symmetry. I took Wulf to the Meatlocker.

For the uninitiated, the Meatlocker is a North Jersey basement that occasionally remembered to become a venue. One toilet, a shower curtain pretending to be a door, needles on the floor, local bands, skateboarders, junkies, and the kind of young, reckless girls who get waved past the door because chaos is good for business. We called ourselves: the skaters, the rock n rollers, the pretty girls… “scumbags” with affection.

Wulf was appalled. “These are your friends? This is what you do? This isn’t safe.” Which only made him more interesting to the room. Even Lindsey leaned in: “How old is that guy? He looks like Waldo.” He did: round Moscots, dark curls, six-two, Japanese denim, an Italian chore jacket. He is now with a costume and set designer, which feels on brand. He traded up. We wish them rich textiles and good lighting.

(You could also marry an artist, we can immortalize you into a cartoon, too.)

Everyone from my town knew I was secretly smart. I edited their college essays with a line out the library door. Words kept me alive. Math did not. I abandoned it after a geometry teacher declared war on my problem-solving style. My Latin teacher joined the rebellion. The sciences and the humanities loved me back, but language married me first.

They also knew I was a short fuse with a record and an allergy to coloring inside lines. Exhibit A: I once crossed state lines with pounds of weed in a Saturn, got pulled over, and survived because I noticed the cop’s Rutgers keychain. We discovered I vaguely knew his daughter. I went home with a story instead of a charge.

Exhibit B: donuts in the Edgewater lot with friends on the hood, a concussion, and a favor from a man with local pull. I was already living with a plan B: if I failed, criminal would do. Three square meals and books sounded fine to me.

So when I told everyone I was marrying an aristocratic gentleman and moving to Los Angeles, the reaction was a cocktail of envy and relief. The redemption arc writes itself.

On the walk to his car after the Meatlocker I teased him. “Fun, right? Bet you’ve never seen anything like that.”

He smirked, turned, and delivered the line that still makes me laugh.

“Babe, don’t you know? No one fucks with the Persian Cats.”