I left my wife for the last time in the summer resort community of Fire Island, New York. Instead of saving the marriage, our charming little beach house had been its killing floor. I still loved her, but I couldn’t stand the fighting any more, or see a way through it.  As the ferry crossed the water to return me to Long Island, I sensed a huge, dark territory ahead. Getting through it would require all my strength and patience, and most of my money, although there wasn’t much of that. I was a struggling freelance journalist. She was a bartender who published the occasional short story. We owned almost nothing, and thankfully had no children. Even so, I worried the end of my marriage would be the end of me. But it wasn’t.  My truck was parked near the ferry terminal. It felt good to get behind the wheel. The farther away I could drive, the safer I would be, because I craved her like an addict. I thanked America for its size. I could keep driving away from her for days on end.  But I also needed a place to hole up and lick my wounds. My friend Bruce from Fat Possum Records offered me a trailer in the small town of Water Valley, Mississippi. In his studio next door, he was recording the last of the real-deal Mississippi bluesmen, who had lived the rough, violent lives they sang about.  “You can stay there for free, but you’re going to have these guys staying with you from time to time,” said Bruce. “It might get rowdy.”  James “T-Model” Ford, who was in his early 80s, and his drummer Spam, were the most frequent guests. They would pull up outside in T-Model’s 1979 powder-blue Lincoln Continental, and unload guitar equipment, bottles of whiskey, boxes of fried chicken.  T-Model had worked most of his life in logging and sawmill operations, but one day a record executive had heard him playing a rough exuberant blues in a bar in Mississippi, and signed him up. Now T-Model was an international recording artist, flying off to perform in Japan, Canada, England, Germany.  The bluesmen hated to see a man brought down so low by a woman.  T-Model had been through more heartache and horror than I could possibly imagine. His father beat him so brutally as a child that he lost a testicle. Later on, his father stole T-Model’s first wife, and what really hurt was how willingly she went. T-Model watched another wife die on the kitchen floor after drinking poison to induce a miscarriage. He had been shot, stabbed, pinned under a fallen tree, beaten senseless with a chair by one of his sons, poisoned by the woman he had loved the most.  I was a sorry, heartbroken wreck that summer, and the bluesmen hated to see a man brought down so low by a woman. They would open the whiskey bottle, and give me their best advice. I liked the idea of this – getting divorce counseling from heartbreak specialists – but I found their recommendations hard to use.  Paul “Wine” Jones advised going to a whorehouse in Memphis where the women could do tricks with ping-pong balls and shoot them through miniature basketball hoops. “If you got money, that place will fix any man’s blues,” he said.  Spam, who was setting out on a tour of Europe with one pair of boxer shorts and a can of Vienna sausages, warned me to be careful of sporting women. He held up his hand and I saw the fingertips were missing. A prostitute named Francine had sliced them off with a box-cutter. “And you still ain’t broke up with her!” yelled an incensed T-Model Ford. Spam and Francine, it turned out, were in the worst co-dependent relationship I had ever heard of.  “I don’t let nothing get me down,” he said, and it was amazingly true. T-Model had strange, violent tendencies, but most of the time, he was full of charm and good humor, flashing his gold-toothed grin, and achieving extraordinary success with the ladies for a man in his 80s.  “You need to be like the tree,” he told me. “A tree just keep on growing and growing. He don’t give a shit about them other trees. But when he die, he gone fall and knock those motherfuckers down.”  'You need to be like the tree,' he told me. 'A tree just keep on growing and growing'  It all helped to put my own blues into perspective. I lived in a kinder, gentler world, with an invisible safety net of money and privilege – I had left my wife in a beach house at a fashionable resort. Nonetheless, the pain in my heart was real, and the legal paperwork was making it worse.  In the midst of the filing, and counter-filing, I went to Oregon to climb a mountain and write about it. Afterwards, in Portland, I looked up a friend called Sabrina, and we went out for drinks. She listened to my tale of woe, and then took me into her bed.  I was awkward and unsure of myself. My marriage had also been a 10-year sexual obsession, and it felt so strange to be with someone else. With kindness, grace and tenderness, Sabrina gave me what I can best describe as sexual healing. We carried on seeing each other on a long-distance basis for a year afterwards, and I still feel incredibly grateful.  Since then, I’ve seen other male friends go through divorce. Some have rebounded into torrid affairs, or sunk into long stretches of debauchery. Others have sat depressed in the house for months, or turned to meditation, yoga, reckless adventures in distant lands. My female friends, on the whole, have done far better at calling it quits and getting on with their lives.  For me, it took about three years to get over it. I wonder now if my cautious, sensible approach made any difference, because three years seems to be fairly standard, no matter how you approach it. Maybe I should have run wild.  Predictably enough, falling in love again, at a time when I was healed enough not to screw things up, made the biggest difference of all. But I still remained very touchy and hostile on the question of getting married. I had bitterly resented having the state and its legal apparatus tangled up in my affairs of the heart, and vowed never again. But the years rolled on, and the bitterness slowly faded. I’m married again now, and raising a daughter in Mississippi. The ring on my finger is a symbol of hope.
After splitting with my wife I spent the summer with real-life blues musicians. Getting advice from heartache experts seemed ideal but I found it hard to use