Chapter Eighteen Honeymooners
Eighteen
Honeymooners
Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity / To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment / Would you capture it or just let it slip?
In the soundtrack of my life, no song better fits the start of my new life with Robbie than Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” which was released just days after we married.
At the beginning of our relationship, still so new to one another but already completely attached, we must have listened to that song a thousand times.
“You better lose yourself in the music / The moment, you own it, you better never let it go,” Eminem warned us, and we listened.
“You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow / This opportunity comes once in a lifetime,” Eminem rapped, and I believed him.
Robbie was my one shot, my true love, a gift I had never imagined I’d receive.
The day after our wedding, we’d moved out of the Royal Princess and found cheaper accommodations.
I also let the massage school know I was withdrawing.
I’d loved my brief interlude with ITM, and I had completed two of its five levels of instruction, but I didn’t have enough of my own money to continue.
Besides, Robbie wanted to take me on a honeymoon.
I think we spent three more days in Chiang Mai.
Then, after a quick luggage edit (Robbie said I could only take three of my six suitcases), we set off by train.
We were headed to Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, four hundred miles or so to the east, to get my passport stamped.
Robbie was hoping that if we pinched our pennies, we could travel around Thailand for a few months, but my student visa was set to run out in just a few weeks.
If I left the country, even briefly, and then entered again, Robbie had been told, the clock would restart, and I’d have more time to explore.
So while Vientiane was hardly a romantic destination, that’s where we needed to go.
When we arrived, tired and sweaty, it was late afternoon.
Robbie had warned me that the place was far from picturesque, but I was still appalled by the sight of children squatting and urinating in the streets.
Soldiers were everywhere, just waiting to enforce the 9:00 p.m. curfew.
We were so obviously tourists, with Robbie somehow carrying my three suitcases and his own big backpack, and I knew we stuck out like sore thumbs.
So once we got proof of my visit to Laos stamped in ink on my passport, I told Robbie I wanted to get out of there.
We took a boat back across the Mekong River, found a cheap hotel, and slept in Thailand that night.
In the morning, we got on another train.
Our next stop, about eight hundred miles south, was Surat Thani, a transport hub where we’d catch a bus (and later, a ferry) that would deliver us to our ultimate destination: Ko Pha-Ngan, an island that Robbie and Mat had visited when they first arrived in Thailand.
This magical place, one of three islands off the southeastern coast in the Gulf of Thailand, was renowned for its monthly Full Moon Party: an all-night celebration, tied to the lunar calendar, that attracted throngs of tourists.
But Robbie promised me the island was also the perfect place to spend one-on-one time—beautiful, peaceful, affordable.
Sitting on a bench in the crowded, rusty ferryboat that took us from the mainland to Ko Pha-Ngan’s Thong Sala Beach, I was transfixed by the view.
The ocean was an unbelievable shade of luminescent blue, and above it, like frosting on a cake, was the lighter blue strip of the sky.
A Thai man next to us was carrying a rooster that he had trained to “sit” on command.
Every time the rooster sat down, I burst out laughing.
Robbie held me tight with one powerful arm. I was happy.
Stepping onto the dock on Thong Sala Beach, we were immediately surrounded by locals, all of them tugging at our sleeves, each more determined than the next to lure us to stay in the hotel he or she was there to represent.
One young man handed Robbie a printed business card that said Two Suns Resort.
On the card, handwritten in English: “I can get you anything you want.” Robbie looked at me and grinned.
Two Suns would be our place. For less than six dollars a night, we rented a private bungalow a hundred feet from the ocean.
The resort was run by a family who cooked all our meals.
I was still shy about eating new foods. Epstein’s strict diet regimens had made me hyperfocused on remaining thin, and even the blandest Asian delicacies—pad Thai noodles, say—seemed off-putting.
But Robbie was encouraging, and for him, I tried to be brave.
Thai beer was cheap, and the sun was hot. Truly, we were in paradise.
As we lay around on the sand, Robbie and I began really getting to know one another.
He told me about his parents, Antonina and Frank.
His dad had once worked painting and refurbishing fishing boats, but now the family ran a catering business in Sydney.
Robbie told me about his older siblings—two brothers, Gaetano (who everyone calls Guy) and Frank Jr., and a sister, Angela.
Robbie had dropped out of high school because he was bored, he said, though he’d later finished another year through a correspondence course.
At seventeen, he’d moved out of his parents’ house and lived for a few years with a Korean woman who became his fiancée despite her parents’ objections.
“I stayed longer than I needed to,” he said of that relationship.
Indeed, while he’d never lacked for female companionship, Robbie tended to be a one-woman man, not a player.
He said he’d always prided himself on having close women friends, and he was often the “bloke” who gave these “sheilas” romantic advice.
My new husband had strong opinions, I was learning, but also understood that people moved at their own pace.
To be a bully basher, you must have a sixth sense for spotting vulnerability, but Robbie’s response—the polar opposite of Epstein’s—was to help, not to hurt.
Robbie asked more about my family and my upbringing, too, and bit by bit, I divulged the ugliest parts of my childhood.
As I described what my father and Forrest had done to me, and what my mother had failed to do in response, I saw anger in Robbie’s eyes.
All families have their difficulties, his face said, but this was beyond the pale.
“Where were your brothers?” he demanded, clearly imagining how he would have reacted if his sister had been so mistreated.
I explained that Danny was sent away to boarding school and that Skydy was a kid, too small to defend me.
And besides, neither of them knew, because I’d never told them.
Robbie just shook his head, then opened his arms wide to envelop me in a hug.
At one point, I asked Robbie if he believed in God.
“God is like the wind,” he said, explaining how reading about paganism had taught him to see God in nature.
“Can you see the wind? No. But you can feel it when it brushes your cheek.” Did I believe in God?
I couldn’t answer that. I’d always been comforted by the idea of reincarnation because it promised that my piss-poor excuse for a life was not the only one I was going to get.
But God? I wasn’t sure. Hadn’t Forrest, one of my earliest abusers, invoked God to manipulate me—just as the counselors at Growing Together had done?
In my experience, God had been wielded by others to get what they wanted.
Still, meeting Robbie at the very moment I needed him most seemed the best evidence I’d ever had of the existence of something divine.
Lying in the sand on that pristine island, exchanging stories about our lives and our beliefs, we covered a lot of ground in a short time.
For example, we talked about how Robbie’s spirituality dovetailed with his interest in fighting.
He’d grown up watching Monkey Magic, a wacky, cult Japanese TV show that played on Australian TV every Sunday night.
From the moment he discovered the show—whose title character is an ape, a skilled fighter and the king of his tribe, who achieves enlightenment through martial arts—Robbie was fascinated with the Buddhist concept of satori: the sudden comprehension of one’s true nature.
“The nature of Monkey was…irrepressible,” said a voice-over in the show’s opening montage, and Robbie could relate.
That his spiritual awakening owed such a debt to a badly dubbed 1980s TV series could be seen as funny, he knew.
But hey, he said, you take your illumination wherever you can find it.
“Martial arts is not just about fighting,” he told me. “It’s a way of thinking—a way of life.” Robbie was fascinated by the idea that through intense physical conditioning, you could prepare yourself for anything.
“One of my teachers was all about controlling your punches,” Robbie told me.
“You were not allowed to land a hit. You had to stop an inch away from your opponent’s face.
Instead of dominating them with force, you blocked their blows and let them wear themselves out.
We used to take broken bottles and scrape up our shins so that after a while, we couldn’t feel anything.
My body got conditioned to the point where if someone hit me, I’d just look at them and smile. ”