Thou Shalt Not Pass Go

Father forgive me, for I have sinned.

I slipped money into my pocket when my wife went to get more pretzels.

You have to understand. She always wins. She wins at everything. There is no game she cannot defeat me in. No sport. No gamble. No competition.

On our first date, we went bowling, and she decimated me. Made a mockery of me. Laughed at the way I was holding the ball. Criticized my every toss. If I managed to knock down a pin or two, she would step up and achieve a strike as though each individual five-pin had insulted a member of her immediate family.

After she had beat me in three consecutive games, I swore to never speak to her again. I do not mind losing to a woman, Heavenly Father, but a woman filled with so much pride at being better than a man? It struck me as vulgar.

While finishing the somewhat cold hot dog I purchased from the concessions stand, she approached me with a downcast look upon her face. She apologized for not being a more gracious winner, and asked if I would accompany her back to her vehicle so that she could return home before curfew, as we were both only in our early twenties at the time, and she was expected back at a reasonable hour.

Though I had been smarting from my multiple defeats, I acquiesced based on her seemingly sincere regret and the way the fluorescent light of the bowling alley hit the left side of her neck. When I was younger, my darkest fantasies involved vampires, and I would find myself staring at the veins that run all over a woman if you know where to look. After praying on the fantasy for over a decade, I have managed to subdue it, but at the time, it was still quite potent.

Upon walking her back to her father’s borrowed Volkswagen, I noticed the air was chilly, and I offered to lend her my burgundy sweater for the ride home, but before I could get it off, she had yanked me forcefully into her backseat, and taken my innocence from me in a matter of mere seconds. While it was not done without consent, and while I may have yelled “Yes, most definitely!” several times, I was nonetheless shocked when she requested that I leave her car post haste so that she would be able to stop at the local A&P before it closed to grab “a box of ciggies” before returning home.

As you can imagine, Heavenly Father, and as you know, for you know all, I had no choice then but to marry her. It would have been unthinkable to tender a woman so and then refuse to legitimize her in your eyes. When I spoke with my priest about this, he suggested, having known her for some time, that it was possible I was not the first boy brought into the back of that Volkswagen, but I would hear no such about about the woman who had been given the gift of my attention, and shortly thereafter, we were wed.

The first year of our marriage featured no games at all, as we were much too busy building a home for ourselves and laying the groundwork for a marriage that would be pleasurable to you and your benevolent attention.

It wasn’t until our first anniversary that my then wife suggested a trip to the local batting cage, and O, but the memories of the bowling alley came rushing back, and I suddenly felt a great yearning to defeat her in a game of ball-hitting. Though I had long forgiven her for humiliating me on our first date the way she had, I believed that it was proper to right the scales of dominance in our marriage.

I was to be the winner and she was to be the dutiful wife of a winner, and so off to the batting cages we went, where I proceeded to hit less than half of all the balls she hit. At one point, a crowd of younglings formed around the cage and began to jeer at me, saying that my wife (how they knew she was my wife, I’ll never know, since she refused to wear her wedding ring, saying it made her hands break out in a terrible rash that I have yet to observe) was showing me up, and why was I holding the bat as though it were a latent sausage?

After a thorough shellacking from my spouse, I was convinced that as soon as we got home, I would begin the process of divorce. Not legally, of course, as I know that goes against your will, but emotional divorce, similar to what my parents had, wherein I would habitat in my room and study, while my wife tended to the kitchen and garden. We would exchange pleasantries over meals and go on a short vacation once a year somewhere terribly boring and that is how we would spend the final fifty or sixty years of our lives.

Instead, the moment we stepped through the front door, she had thrown me down on the raspberry couch my grandmother gifted us as a wedding present and proceeded to regale me with sexual theatrics fit for a sultan’s dancer.

The shame I felt afterwards was potent, but it was also alleviated by the fact that everything we had just done was conducted under the umbrella of matrimony. Could you really be angry at us, Father and Savior, if we took a little extra joy in procreating after coming so close to dissolving our emotional union?

Ever since that day, my wife has made it a habit of beating me at some game or other at least bi-weekly, always followed by a show of affection so extravagant, the police have been called to our home multiple times only to find me red-faced and covered in perspiration, begging forgiveness for all the commotion, most of it made by me, if I’m being honest. No man should ever have to find out his nipples are as sensitive as mine are, let alone find out the way I was made to, while tied to a ceiling beam wearing only a tattered pair of my wife’s culottes.

Is it any wonder that now, here I am, covertly tucking fake money in my pockets so that I may have some chance of defeating my adversary and spouse in America’s favorite game about capitalism and fiscally humiliating your opponent?

No, I am not proud, but I shall chase pride, in whatever way I can.

She will still beat me. I know this. But perhaps the loss will not be as great if I can erect at least one hotel before I am struck down.

I know you love losers as much as winners, Father, but a loser who is kept a loser by the tantric nature of his oppressor?

What could your feelings be of someone as sad as that?

I pray you’ll tell me one day when I ascend from this earthly plane to your graceful hold in Heaven.

Until then, I shall try to convince my wife that this Get Out of Jail Free card was always tucked under my side of the board.

She won’t believe me, and you and I both know, I shall pay for my deception later.

I would love to tell you I’m not looking forward to it.

But the lie would be the greater sin.