Throw those crutches away!
This makes it tolerable, the lack, it lets you wallow in it, brings dreams of escape, of the trip across a continent for love, the feel of a stranger’s hand on your fishnet-clad thigh, the adoration from hundreds (ok, dozens) of readers, writing you about the way you captured it, you nailed it, you got ‘em right in the eye.
Then? Nibble. Rip off a bit of bread, shove it in, chew surreptitiously as you chop the garlic. Allow yourself a bit of cheese. Sample the vinaigrette, a drop here, a dram there. Listen to the sounds of your family laughing, playing, arguing while you are there in the sanctum, the kitchen, the locus of creativity and loneliness, your task to provide, to pretend that you still get 100% satisfaction out of caregiving.
At dinner you can eat, one helping is all because that’s all it takes to fill you up, the plate sparse with pasta, the asparagus piled next to the sandwich. You’re stuffed. If you've been drinking beer, now is the time to move on to wine. Wine burns a trail down into your stomach, it clears a path for tears if you’ve been holding back, for fantasy if that’s what you need.
It’s the only way you can take it, the tasks without interest, the empty life of dust removal and scrubbing and wondering what is next. You love them, love the people in your life, but they are not enough. There is something lying ahead of you, some quest or discovery and you will not let the alcohol get in your way. You can cap the bottles, let them remain in the refrigerator, on the shelf, these substitutes for feeling, these maudlin tear-producers. (Or, let's not kid yourself, you could just cut back.)
The wine days are over, a memory of the need to loosen after holding it together. The key to maintaining a self is to listen to your heartbeat, to what stirs the pain, to building a flexible framework for love and self-support. Where wine fails, conversation and action take over. You are on a path now, necessarily alone, naked, your feet moving forward while your mind, two steps behind, looks back at what you once were.
From the prompt "Too much."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I spent a little time editing this. Clearly my brain starts out in the old way (the melodrama, the desperate wish for escape) and then is surprised to find itself in a more hopeful paradigm.
Image by cabbit.
Comfort me
Instead, I live off of chocolate and alcohol, though I prefer my empty calories in liquid form. I don’t want the mind-dulling effects of carbs and butter. I want the emotion-tugging action of booze, the nightly IPA chased with red wine. And it has to be the good stuff. No cheap alcohol for me. I won’t drink it, will miss the sloshing effects, will go to bed clean and sober and bored as shit, that and worried, worried about what is next, worried about where I am, where I am going.
So I stock up. Soon I’ll be visiting different liquor stores on my way home from various appointments, cruising their wine selection, anticipating the velvety texture of red on my tongue. Because something is wrong. Something is dreadfully wrong and I’m not sure what it is and I’m not sure what to do about it.
But, oh, am I thin, thin as a reed quaking in the wind, thin as a sheet of paper being carried away by a wind gust. My problems are written somewhere, on my mind, hidden on my body, locked in the physicality of thin, of table manners, of the constant harangue of my mind, of them, of abandonment. I want to seduce abandonment, want to make him my lover, show him a thing or two before I abandon him myself.
I’ll leave him alone at the bar nursing his drink. There will be no announcement. I’ll excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room and won’t come back and I’ll never call. I will stop chasing beer with the wine. All my drinking will be social. After I abandon abandonment, I will eat the occasional square of chocolate. Otherwise, my diet will be balanced, a mix of green and beige and red and orange, the crispy nestled next to gooey, tart intermingling with sweet, placating comfort bustling with health.
Until then: Proost!
From today's prompt: Comfort food.
Image: Sticky bun with wine. OK, add sticky buns to the short list.
And please don't take me too seriously.
Men, liquor, punk and pregnancy
Longtime readers have heard it all before. First I shared it, then I shaped it. Now I continually reinterpret, run my fingers over the words, trace the abandonment, part of the story that led me to where I am now. I've gone from openness to control to anger twice removed.
My fabulous writing group met on Monday night. I finally passed Reconciliation on to them, the story of the end of Kevin's life, how we supposedly reconciled through his long last hospitalization. Kevin was my mother's boyfriend from 1984 until his death in 2002. He was a mixed bag, more rotten than good, and his presence in my life led to the troubles, continued and expanded my narrative of never-good enough, of self-blame, the dance of convincing and wheedling, of proving my worth to the unworthy and congenitally reluctant.
I passed the story on to the group, but I didn't want to go there. Life has been emotional enough lately without retracing the days of ventilators and morphine. But there I sat with these wonderful supportive women, who had kind words and useful feedback, including the desire to hear more of my story with Kevin, to have the payoff, to understand why reconciliation was required in the first place and what led to it in the end.
I'm thinking. I'm thinking. It's complicated, of course. Unfortunately, the upshot of what I am thinking is that there was no reconciliation. What went on for those six and half months of Kevin's final hospitalization, of all those hours I spent next to him in the hospital, was another one of my attempts at healing, at proving how good I was, at trying to remake the old story in a different way. The guy was a bastard who didn't deserve my goodness, but I was -- and remain -- too fucking kind to have treated him any other way. It's the same kind of empathy that keeps me from being able to direct too much anger at my mother (with her own troubles) or at a person who recently did me wrong, who hasn't manned up and never will (poor kid: it's hard to be strong when you're an emotional mess).
I started this post yesterday, kept on typing and erasing with the usual worries about pulling up the past on a thick narrative rope. I don't write this to keep the past alive, I write it to interpret it and my interpretation keeps changing. Conveying the depth of my abandonment -- my abandonment "issues," as cliched as they are, as typical, as shared with the masses -- without resorting to maudlin description is almost impossible and yet I am compelled to write about it, to share it, to neutralize it.
We could take my history with Kevin scene by scene, ugly fight by nasty canard, that first dinner where Kevin tore into 14-year-old me for being quiet and sullen followed by my mother having dinner at his house every night followed by her telling me that Kevin said I was evil and she agreed followed by my move to the Little House, the stillbirth, the continued life in bad circumstances. I could add in the confusing bits: his sit down with me and my boyfriend D after the pregnancy, lecturing D about our relationship "because her father isn't doing it;" his confidence in my intellectual abilities and advice to get a library degree; his funny stories that left the impression of uproarious laughter long after the plots were forgotten.
My child's mind fit the pieces together, they already were set in place, but the neglect of my teen years cemented the image: I was the catalyst for the bad things that happened to me. I caused it all. I was a bad person. I deserved what I got. I was a liar and a cheat, irresponsible and evil, too quiet or not quiet enough. Because of the evil within me, the evil I spread with my bad words and dark looks, I was left behind. I was to blame for my own neglect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the history. I know it's bullshit. And I know that writing it out in such bald language doesn't really help. It does get me angry, which isn't such a bad thing -- though the anger remains directionless and sometimes turns on me. Lately, with the help of my therapist, I've been feeling the feelings -- the sadness, the need that once had no end, the anger -- with the understanding that they won't destroy me. That they are totally appropriate. It's the only way I know to heal at this point, letting them out in fits and starts when they need it, giving them a voice, that and being brave, knowing I'm not a child anymore.
It's less about the history now, it's about the effect, the acceptance, the march forward. The feelings are with me in the room, they know why I've called them here, and we're going to hash it out together. We will gut and rebuild my psyche without looking back.
Enough about this. You were expecting stories about men (the gropings), liquor (siphoned gin leaking out of jars on the bus from Wilmington to Newark), punk (fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck her fucking brat), and pregnancy (pushing out silence). But I'm sure you have some of your own stories of love and the bottle and the music that saved you, that kept you from smashing something, that tapped into your anger before your head exploded.
I will leave you with a bit of punk, Riot by the Dead Kennedys, something I listened to on my headphones as I walked through the Wilmington night, lit cigarette resting between my fingers. I was a little unsteadily from the gin, from the vodka, from the amaretto, but I kept on going, turned the anger in on itself, gave myself another scene for future narrative.
Image: Legs, Little House, 1985ish, one of three in the "Legs" series, probably taken when I was up late and liquored, waiting for a man.
Title comes from a comment on my essay from the writers' group. I tacked on the last word.
Thin end of the wedge
Where does this couple come from? They show up sporadically, once a month or so, time travelers in their denim and leather, the woman wearing pointy-toed boots that demonstrate the thin end of the wedge, the toe jam, the man with quirkily British brothel creepers, thick-soled and wide. Both of them have artificially blonde hair, tousled, the roots a shade of anonymous brown. The quick intake/exhale, the sideways glance, the tabby or calico, all of it incongruous against a stucco house the color of French’s mustard.
This is one of my dream lives, beholden to substances, a life of no obligations, romantically influenced by the 70s punk scene, where I could reasonably write something like this:
I paid for it
A lifetime of clean living doesn’t show on the face. The late nights, the whiskies and tequilas, the hovering over a mirror with a tightly rolled dollar bill: eventually, those years catch up with you. It starts out as a slight dullness in the eyes, a yellowish tinge to the skin. One night you go to sleep almost young, the next morning, the fine lines start to appear, the fissures, the sags and bags.
At that point, it’s too late. No amount of detox can save you from the destruction you’ve brought upon yourself, the physical ruination.
At that point, then, why stop? Why not go out in a hazy glare of glory, the afternoons fuzzy, the mornings cotton-mouthed? We’re all dependent upon something. Some people need sweet-as-candy positive thoughts, the cheery aphorism, pep talks written on the bathroom mirror in styptic pencil. Others need human touch, have to feel skin against skin, insist upon hugging every acquaintance, on touching palms with strangers. You, lover of chemicals, of the products of ferment, find this need pathetic. It’s nothing that sour mash and cheap wine followed up by a pack of Pall Malls can’t solve.
So you examine your face, pinch the sagging skin on your forearms, remember the long ago days when you were young and naïve. That first drink was bitter, but the next one went down easy. It wasn’t just the taste, the feeling of looseness, like drifting on the ocean, it was the camaraderie, the friends around the bonfire, the people stacked against the bar.
From a prompt, I paid for it. The next Round Robin starts up this weekend, thank goodness. Feeling very dark today, despite my night of long-enough sleep, but there's good news: we're closing on the house on Monday.
Image by Diamond Farrah.
The noises of destruction
One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.
It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.
From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.
Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.
Foundation
The story was that he and Willard were drunk when they poured the foundation. It was a hot day, unusual for May, and the sky was cloud-veiled, the sun nothing but a glowing round cloaked in grey. The men mixed the cement by hand in a wheelbarrow, kept taking slugs from the whiskey bottle. Vi and the girls started out planting flowers, then prepared a lunch of liverwurst sandwiches, sugary potato salad, and coleslaw. Finally all there was left to do was to sit on the metal lawn chairs and watch.
Everything went down so easily. The cement had a nice resistance, just yielding enough, like Vi on a good night. It was a perfect mix, Willard agreed, as he passed the whiskey bottle back. Running a trowel over it was soothing, could almost put you to sleep. Dusk was enveloping the neighborhood as they wrapped up. One of the girls had fallen asleep on a blanket on the dirt, and the other one glowered as she kicked up clouds of dust in the rutted driveway. Al struggled with the wheelbarrow until he decided the hell with it, it was just a rusty piece of shit anyway.
Vi finally had to drive everyone back to Delaware, the men singing a song she didn’t recognize, the girls bleary-eyed and hungry. When they returned the next weekend, excited to start building the cottage, Al ran his hands across the foundation and groaned. It didn’t take a level or a plumb line to figure out that they had to start all over again.
Image: The house at Hollywood Beach, August 1957.
Shadowplay
The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.
Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends: we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.
Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.
He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.
The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.
By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.
Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko Zivkovic)
The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good sign.
You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape with its violence and violations and death threats and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's right.)
Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now there was something between us. Another lie. I already had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a series of flirtations and one night stands that I excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?
Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.
I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast enough.
Hello ... Columbus?
Capitol Plaza Apartments
The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved in August 1991.
To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a better paying part-time job working in a library at a high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.
Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to my fellow college students. We were both in love with DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.
Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and headed straight for the District. He would tell me stories of growing up the city, where his large family lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and insular.
Most of our conversations took place on my early evening library shifts where there was no one else in the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch), explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how the destructive energy fields from power lines were spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would stare out the window at the office building across the street, watch the after hours workers work or not work, watch them watching us. There was one man who was always talking on the phone, standing with his back to the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though the person on the other end would be persuaded by gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station on the corner.
A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont Circle.
I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings at Andy’s were blurred through multiple glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings generally ended in an argument over something petty. We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.
In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people to the surface.
In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing November winds, floating through the incredible sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the joy rise up in me).
The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every intention of returning to DC immediately after graduating from library school. But then I met a guy who got a job and we moved to a new town together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a moment.
“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood home.
Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another day). Photo from Old Towne East Neighborhood Association.
It was a strange coincidence. What were the odds?
Writing prompt: There is grace in that direction
Photo from apartment therapy.
“If only I was drunk,” she thought, remembering those tales of drivers fueled by alcohol miraculously surviving car-totaling accidents, their floppy limbs and carefree attitudes rescuing them from death. Extricated from smashed tin-can cars, they get up and walk away with a sprained wrist or broken toe while their sober counterparts are Medivaced and rushed to emergency surgery. Then she remembered: she was drunk.
This wasn’t normal. “Really, this is an outlying event,” she pictured telling the paramedics. “This is not my standard Tuesday afternoon.” Her stressful weekend had bled into the week and she couldn’t stand the muscle tension, her shoulders pulled tight, the way her tendons held her limbs at awkward angles. Victoria couldn’t even hug her husband properly. Unconvinced by his warmth, by his beating heart so close and welcoming, her body maintained its stiffness. She felt like an impassive observer as her hands thumped him on the back, a prelude to withdrawal.
When Laura suggested sharing a bottle of wine with lunch, Victoria thought: why not? It beats valium. The crisp Sauvignon blanc complemented her crab salad. They each had a tiny glass of Port at the end of the meal over a shared piece of chocolate cake. She felt marvelous.
No. Not drunk. Just a little tipsy, a little loose. Maybe she wasn’t hurt after all. Victoria slowly raised her right arm, then her left. She moved her head from side to side, bent a leg. Sore. Bruised but not broken. Her tailbone ached, and her left hip was probably turning purple, the broken blood vessels leaking into her muscle fibers. She turned around, pushed herself up. How would she explain this one to Barry? Oh, it was easy enough. Chris was in the habit of leaving his toys right by the stairs and both she and her husband had almost tripped multiple times. Maybe this would convince her son to be more careful. Even though he had nothing to do with it.
Once she was off the floor, Victoria inched her way up the stairs, favoring her left leg. To better assess the damage, she went into the bedroom, stripped down to her underwear and stared at her battered image in the mirror. Years before she had fantasized about taking up boxing as a way to get out built-up anger. Intrigued by the idea of sanctioned violence, she wanted the thrill of knocking her fist into another human being, but had never worked up the nerve to sign up for lessons. Victoria balled her freckled hands and took jabs at the mirror as she danced and swayed. Her hip was as dark and soft as a ripe plum. One of her cheeks was yellowing and there was a thin line of clotted blood coming from her nose. Her back ached. But the tension was totally gone.