Ex-Husband: “I’m going to fly you to Atlanta so you can see my house.”
Tiffany: “I don’t need to see your house. I’m not going to care about your house.”
Ex-Husband: “No, I’m going to fly you Sunday. It’s my birthday.”
He flew me to Atlanta, and that was the first time a man flew me somewhere, so I was feeling super-special, even if he was gay.
At this point, I’d been talking to him seriously for a few weeks, and he’d been buying me stuff and being so nice and flying me places and he even found my daddy. Yeah, he wasn’t all that hot, but damn—no man had ever been this good to me.
After he picked me up from the airport, we pulled up to his house. In my little pea-brain, I thought this was the most beautiful house in the whole wide fucking world. I was telling myself, I don’t care if he is gay, I am fucking the shit out of him. He’s going to get the business. I don’t care if he’s gay and ugly and fat, I’m going to fuck him.
So I did fuck him, and he wasn’t gay. It was like my soul had left my body. It was like, This is your husband, girl. You need to lock this in. He knows what he’s doing. He was all cool.
Then when we were done, I was like:
Tiffany: “So where my ring at? Ain’t you supposed to be giving me a ring or something?”
Ex-Husband: “What? You really want to get married? We can do that. We can do that shit today.”
Tiffany: “Yeah, I want to get married. I want my ring. It better be pretty and stuff, too.”
That day, he drove me up to Virginia to meet my dad. I met my dad in person, and he filmed all that. After I met my dad, we drove back down to Atlanta.
Don’t get me wrong—there were signs of craziness during all of this, but I didn’t think much of it. I know what you’re thinking, MORE signs of craziness? As in, more than what you’ve told me?
Yeah, there were. This is when I confirmed that he wasn’t really filming his vacation on that cruise ship. He was just filming me. I only got to see the cruise video one time, but yeah, it was real stalkerish. It’s creepy. He was hiding the camera under a jacket, following me around. The camera was pointed at my booty a lot. It was crazy.
But you gotta understand my mind at the time. I’m thinking this is God’s work. Like this is exactly what I asked God for, even if he is not all that physically attractive, I can live without that. What’s important is his soul, and to me, his soul seemed like it cared about and cherished me a lot.
After that, I flew back to California. He told me:
Ex-Husband: “I’m going to come to California, and we’re going to have the best—you’re gonna have the best life, the best everything.”
The next week, he came out to LA, and he brought me a Dodge Charger.
Ex-Husband: “You can’t be driving in no Geo Metro, you drive this.”
Tiffany: “Great, cool. I can live with this sort of life.”
He drove a Dodge Charger from Atlanta to LA. For me.
Honestly, part of the reason I was looking past the craziness was my own arrogance, in a way. I had started thinking I had the best cootchie in the world. I was thinking, My pussy is the best pussy ever. There must be midgets in my pussy doing magic tricks on his dick or some shit. Like, no man had ever brought me cars from other states, so it MUST be something about me.
Turns out, he had a tracking device on that car. He was tracking everywhere I went. He was just watching me, that’s why he brought it. He also had one of his former police partners, one of his buddies who lived in LA, watching me. So that dude was following me around when he wasn’t in town.
I didn’t know any of this, I found all this out later on. Just checking to see what I was doing is what he said. He said he was doing it to keep me safe, but really he was a stalker.
I could have seen the signs then, if I wanted to. For example, one day I didn’t answer the phone at all, I just didn’t feel like talking, and he just popped up in my house. I thought that was . . . unusual.
I kept telling myself that he did this because he cared about me. But really, he was controlling me. That’s what it was about. Not love, not caring, it was about control.
But I either didn’t know any better, or I wasn’t willing to see it. I looked past his issues, so I could have a man in my life who did things for me.
Even though we were “engaged,” he formally proposed to me at a comedy club. I was onstage, and he was going to come up to the stage and give me the ring, but then he got scared for some reason. When the show was over, when nobody was around, he was like:
Ex-Husband: “Will you marry me?”
Tiffany: “Yeah, but why did you wait till nobody was around?”
All my friends was like, “He’s ugly, Tiffany, you can do better. Like, he fat. He’s ugly. Yeah, he really love you and stuff, but he’s wack. Like, you could do better.”
I thought they were all haters. I just thought they were jealous or whatever. Because he drove a car out for me, he gave me a ring, and he was giving me an allowance, too. I thought that was super-dope. That’s how you know I was stupid. He was giving me like $100 a week, and I thought that was so fucking awesome. I thought that was the shit.
Not that I needed it, but it meant a lot to me. Because to me, if a man cares about you, he gives you money. He works hard for his money, so if he gives it to you, he cares.
So even though all my friends hated him, I just thought they were jealous. And none of them knew all the crazy stuff. At least not yet. But crazy can’t hide forever.
He moved out to LA soon after that. And he had a son with him. He told me he had three kids, and he brought his son with him, the eight-year-old.
So now we are living in my one-bedroom apartment. Me, him, and his eight-year-old. I did not like that at all. We only lived there for a month, and then he got this house, and the house was great, but it was far. It was like seventy miles outside LA, in Wildomar.
I thought he was doing it for me. He wasn’t. It was to keep me away from everybody and make me feel like I didn’t want to do comedy anymore.
But I still kept doing comedy, I just did it in Wildomar. I just found places out there, did the casinos and stuff like that, did shows in San Diego. That shit used to piss him off.
Ex-Husband: “You don’t need to do this comedy stuff. I’m making money, you don’t need it.”
Then as soon as he was saying that, he would lose his job (he was doing private detective work), or get laid off, and so then I had to be supplementing everything. So I started booking movies and all these other really good-paying gigs.
Then as soon as we got married, he had all kinds of demands on me around taking care of his son.
Ex-Husband: “You need to go to the PTA meetings. You need to pick up the kid and take him to soccer.”