Trixie and Bubba

I once knew a couple whom I shall refer to as Bubba and Trixie. You may have known couples like them. They couldn’t live together and they couldn’t live apart, either. For years, they fought, separated, fought and got back together, again. Each time they separated, they swore it was final, over, kaput. Trixie would see a divorce lawyer, who would listen to her, take notes, and then put them in his burgeoning file and forget about it. At times, they actually went through with the divorce and then remarried.

They couldn’t use youth as their excuse. They were in their late forties, or early fifties, I think, and had both been married at least once before. So, you might say they were old pros where marital combat was concerned.

The fighting eventually escalated, as Trixie had a hair-trigger temper and a real mouth on her. On the other hand, Bubba just reared back and laughed at her, and that made her even madder. The nights they went to the local country club and got a snoot-full were the nights they had their most spectacular brawls.

Inevitably, things got physical. The opening salvo was the time Trixie told Bubba to move out of the house. She told him this by throwing all his underwear out into their driveway and setting it on fire. He left, gladly, and moved into an apartment that he kept rented for just this purpose. Early the next morning, Trixie took a baseball bat and totaled Bubba’s car with it. You could hear the bat hitting the car for at least two blocks away. You could also hear Bubba laughing his ass off from the vantage point of his balcony.

After couple of weeks , he bought a new car and moved home. A few days later, after a night of drinking, they got into a fight just before they left the club. This time, she was so mad, she pulled a gun out of her purse and blasted away at his car as he sped out of the parking lot. She hit the driver’s side door, but the bullet didn’t go all the way through. Then, she got in her car and followed him home, crashing into the rear end of his car every few feet. He pulled into their driveway and made a run for the house. She was too quick for him, because she didn’t get out of her car. So, he started running across the front yard, with her in hot pursuit, around and around the yard light.

Another time, when someone mentioned to Trixie that Bubba didn’t look like he felt too good, she confided that she had put rat poison in his bottle of Scotch. When that someone pointed out to her that it might actually kill him, she threw the bottle away, and Bubba lived to laugh another day.

Bubba and Trixie must have blamed the town for their problems, because they moved away. Eventually, something must have happened that Bubba couldn’t laugh about, because they divorced, again, and this time it took. Some time later, Bubba died of natural causes, which astonished everyone. Nobody seems to know what happened to Trixie.

It was kind of quiet here for a long time after they left. We still reminisce about Bubba and Trixie, and have a good laugh.