The Psycho Ex Game

Wednesday night I filtered through the new releases on paperback at Borders and came across a novel entitled “The Psycho Ex Game.” Immediately, I thought of Love Is A Cunt.

The book is told from two different perspectives, one of Lisa Roberty and the other from Grant Repka. A successful Hollywood A-Lister with extreme dislike for anything social, Lisa bargains with herself to see a new musical as a means to escape her pathetic life of solitude for a few hours. The musical, a creative work based on the romance between Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, is the big come back for Grant, a has-been that never-really-was punk rock star. The two are introduced after the show and trade e-mail addresses. Taking a suggestion from his jealous girlfriend, Grant battles Lisa in a story exchange called “The Psycho Ex Game,” in which they relate the strangest, most fucked-up situations they can recall involving their exes. The therapeutic quality of the stories push the two closer, but life in Hollywood gets in the way, as it sometimes does (or so I’ve heard).

The novel is funny but not so much so I would recommend it to anyone. In fact, I read the first 20 chapters and then decided to do what I always do with a book, regardless of whether it bores me or not: flip toward the back and pick up reading there, just to see what happens. Typically, there is no real reason to read the middle section, as it tends to be boring and an absolute unnecessary waste of my time. Everything that happens in the middle can be explained by simply reading the beginning and the end. This is how “The Psycho Ex Game” is, though I am sure I missed quite a few ‘stories’ of Psycho Exes that I will want to go back and read. The book is slightly more interesting than your 'average Joe' story of an ex because both characters are in the entertainment business—as were their Exes, to some degree—and therefore they were allowed the luxury of being 'eccentric' in their relationships, rather than being crazy fucked-up types that fuck over other crazy fucked-up types.

As the title insinuates, the novel’s substance is focused on the Psycho Ex game; the e-mails between Grant and Lisa are more intriguing than the rest of the story. No gives a fuck about Grant’s resentful white-trash girlfriend, Winnie, and the considerably fantastic relationship she enviably wrecks, and I certainly was not interested in Lisa’s plight to find Mr. Right, who she believed was Grant. No, all I cared about were the twisted yet realistic recounts of Psycho Exes, both whom needed years of intense mental therapy.

Jane Gray, Grant’s P.E. and ten years older than himself, was once in a rock band, and had a heroin addiction she never wanted to kick. In her spare time, she made dope runs for the elderly couple next door, exploiting their pathetic social security income to support her own habit, passed her son off on her sister to bring up, and fucked anything with a dick. Grant, being born without balls and common sense, always believed Jane would straighten her act up and join the rest of society on the Straight and Narrow Path of Life. Instead, she bargained out the last twenty-five dollars left in Grant’s wallet by saying, “You think I need your money? I’ll go out right now and suck some dick!” When he threw the money her way, Jane bolted to the nearest dealer, as Grant recognized he wouldn’t even have enough cash to hitch a ride on the public bus.

Lisa, on the other hand, was an eight-year witness to the madness behind Hollywood’s most desirable director-actor, Nick Blake, and therefore armed herself with multiple stories of mental abuse from a narcissist and borderline personality. When Nick became exceedingly angry, he berated Lisa’s crazy mother, her incapacity to think of anyone besides herself, and the undeniable plot she had against him to destroy his life. One of my favorite P.E. stories from Lisa is entitled, “The Consequences of the Vanishing Cat.” In it, she describes the rental home she and Nick were staying in during down time from the illustrious movie-making business. One particular night, Nick began looking for his cat, Kenny, and when he couldn’t find Kenny, Nick started disparaging Lisa for obviously leaving the front door open and allowing the cat to escape. They went outside to look for Kenny but had no luck, thus enraging the Psycho Ex and leading him to kick up the notch on her verbal abuse tirade. Because Kenny was missing, Lisa was just like her crazy mother. Because Kenny was missing, Lisa was obviously the reason why the world was out to fuck Nick over. Because Kenny was missing, Lisa was obviously fucking someone else.

By the time Nick reached a decidedly incoherent way of thinking, Lisa determined it was time for her to get out of the house, but every time she headed for the door, Nick would jump in front of it and block her way. After an hour of playing that game, Lisa saw her opening and dashed out the door, hopped into her car, and began backing out of the garage. As she approached the end of the driveway, Nick took a running leap onto the hood of her car, yelling at Lisa to get the fuck back into the house. Obviously having never heard anything about Women’s Liberation, Lisa did as directed and spent the night sleeping on the couch. The next morning, upon waking up, Lisa saw Kenny jump from a shelf in the coat closet and saunter over to her dish bowl for breakfast.

Upon further reflection (and much flipping through the middle section), I find the book more enjoyable than I originally deemed it, though “The Psycho Ex Game” is absolutely no Instant Classic. The character relationships are the driving force of the book, especially because of the realistic quality they possess in regards to the romantic entanglements gone astray. Grant’s illusory way of believing Jane would change for the better, that she would finally see how drugs ruined her life but that he was there to help put her back together, is completely convincing. My mother was the same way, always pushing my dad to try a little harder in his efforts to beat alcoholism and drug addiction; she tried to make him better, to get the professional help he desperately needed, but eventually saw that only daddy could make himself end his lifelong love affair with booze and drugs. She tried at first because she loved him, then because he made her life miserable, and finally she tried to fix daddy because it was her last resort, but when all of those efforts exerted themselves, mama proclaimed she wanted a divorce and never looked back. In situations where one party refuses to get help and honestly try to better themselves, the best thing one can do is leave, turn one’s back on that loved one because there is nothing else one can do. It is the loved one’s responsibility to make the life change because no one else can do it for him, as my mother, after twenty years, finally accepted.

The Psycho Ex Game is one that many of us at LIAC play without really realizing it, as we all post stories of past relationships and the general fuckage that occurred while in them. Sometimes I think we try to out-do one another with our stories—or at least reach JiB’s level of relationship incompetence with that same hint of humor—and sometimes we just post rants because we have no other way to release the anger and hurt feelings that comes with being love-fucked. Love Is A Cunt is simply a blog version of Merrill Markoe and Andy Prieboy’s novel, only we are not paid or reviewed for our wittedly honest reviews of being in love with a fucking psychotic.

Reading:


The Psycho Ex Game - Merrill Markoe and Andy Prieboy