![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tburg was… tough. Tough in ways that I didn’t even begin to understand till I was driving away from it. Tough in ways I probably don’t fully understand now.
Thank goodness I had a really nice Airbnb to retreat to with people who were friendly, kind and normal. And who seemed to like me.
I tried to make myself useful. I cleaned. I probably did 100 pounds of laundry. I drove people to places where they needed to go. That was about the best I could do.
###
It had only been six weeks since I last set eyes on B.
I wasn’t prepared for the changes.
Why, he’ll be dead in six months! I thought when I saw him. Three if he’s lucky.
His skin was melted candlewax. He’s lost 20 pounds or so, and he wasn’t heavy to begin with. He’s shorter than me, has a slight, elfin frame. When he gains weight, it goes to his gut. His gut is still pronounced leading me to believe he’s got liver involvement that they haven’t diagnosed.
They have him on morphine. Given the acute paranoia around opiates in New York State, I have to think the alacrity with which they started peddling the heavy drugs does not bode well as a prognosticator.
The diagnosis has gone back to being multiple myeloma. He starts radiation today, and chemo on the 15th after the last radiation appointment. I don’t understand that timeline at all: The radiation is palliative; the chemo is the treatment that’s supposed to zap the mutant plasma cells. Seems to me the treatment that might actually cure him should come first.
###
I’d actually thought there was a reasonable chance I wouldn’t see B at all while I was up there. I’d mentioned I was coming up to see Robin when B called me to confirm the diagnosis, and B had said he would see me “if he was up to it.”
I’m long past the stage of any deep emotional attachment that would incline me to read more into B’s words than might actually be there.
Robin was eager for me to see B; Robin practically pulled me into the flat. Dark and charmless to begin with—the bottom floor of an old mill—the flat’s really aberrant floor plan never benefited from B’s utilitarian ideas of home décor.
But now, the place was so filthy, it impinged on squalor.
Don’t get me wrong: You can’t eat off my floors, and if you did the white glove test on any surface in my home, likely the glove fingers would turn brown. I’m pretty slovenly. For me to call someone’s house filthy, it has to be pretty bad.
The girlfriend was in the process of moving in when B got sick. Her suitcases, boxes and knickknacks are everywhere. Two expensive blenders lying on the floor of the living room next to the snakes’ cages. Duh! I thought meanly. The kitchen is only five feet away!
I might actually feel sorry for the girlfriend if I liked her better. She thought she was getting Prince Charming. But instead she’s getting… what exactly?
I do feel extremely sorry for the girlfriend’s little dog, one of those tiny, exophthalmic toy breeds with long silky hair who now spends most of its time in a kennel and doesn’t understand why. I took the dog for many walks while the girlfriend was at work.
###
“I’m sorry I’m such bad company,” B said.
He is spending most of his time in the former guest room because the bed there is more comfortable for his back.
I didn’t say anything about how the back pain might indicate that the lesions are spreading to his spine. Just nodded and smiled. Nodded and smiled.
“This is the low point,” I said. “Once the treatments start, and you’re on your way to recovery, you’ll feel so much better.”
“I don’t remember morphine being such a drag.”
“Yeah, well. It’s different when you’re taking it for pain. You don’t get high off it. Or so they say.”
He grimaced and shifted his weight. Took out the little box in which he kept all his pain meds. Opened it and stared at its contents. My precious-s-s-s-s-s.
“Very soon you’ll be back to taking those things for fun! The way God intended!” I said.
“Very soon, I’ll be back to selling them on the street at $30 a pop. The way God intended,” he said.
“Ben, this is temporary,” I said. “You are going to get better. The next six months are going to be a complete and utter drag, but you will get through them. It’s a conveyor belt.”
Who knows? Maybe I even believed that.
“It’s only temporary after it ends,” he said.
He’s given up all pretense of not smoking in the house. “Don’t tell Sarolta,” he said as he lit up a cigarette, and I thought, What? Sarolta doesn’t have a sense of smell? But I smiled and lit up, too.
The guest room was just hideous. It had always been used as a storage space but now, in addition to many more boxes and suitcases of Sarolta’s stuff, there were the cans he was using as ashtrays and the plastic pots with dead stumps that used to be marijuana plants. And weird botanica paraphanalia. Sarolta dabbles in astrology. She fancies herself a white witch.
I glanced at two candles. “What’s up with all this St. Ciprian shit?”
“St. Ciprian is a sorcerer!” said B. “The most interesting by far of all the Catholic saints. He was a priest of Apollo before he converted to Christianity. He’s the only saint that can actually travel between heaven and hell.”
“Oh, well. That must come in useful. When they’re negotiating tariffs and hostage releases,” I said.
“It doesn’t work like that,” B said. “See, what happens is that St. Ciprian can help you enslave demons.”
“And this is useful because… ?”
“The demons grant wishes!”
“I see!”
“Because they’re so grateful when you finally let them out of bondage.”
“I see. Yes. Well. One only has to listen to the lyrics of Straight Out of Compton or All EyeZ on Me to understand how grateful people get when you let them out of bondage.”
That made him laugh. So score for me!
###
In the middle of all this squalor and depression, my beautiful, genius, sensitive 24-year-old son is living.
I wish more than anything right now that I could get him the hell out!
He won’t go.
Part of it is that he’s desperately trying to be helpful. Viewing himself as helpful. Contributing to the finances of the struggling household.
The finances of the household is a continuing refrain. They’re running scared.
“Why don’t you apply for social security early?” I asked B. “You can go back to work once the myeloma is in remission. They’ll just lop a certain amount off your social security.
“No!” B said.
It’s true he’d get maybe a third more if he can hold out another four years.
But, honestly. He may not be around in another four years. And he needs the money now.
I suppose he’s got to be in complete denial about that in order to keep pushing.
And, too, I suspect work keeps B occupied. Going to work. Bitching about going to work. Joking and talking cinema with the people he works with who don’t have the whole 360° and who therefore are able to see him as more than an invalid.
Invalid! Someone who’s been invalidated.
B’s the assistant manager at Ithaca’s indie movie theater, Cinemapolis.
There’s some weirdness about the household finances. Two sets of books. Robin gave me one answer when I asked him how much he was contributing to the rent; Ben gave me another.
“Isn’t Sarolta contributing anything at all?” I asked Robin.
“No,” said Robin.
“Of course,” Ben said, deeply offended that I’d asked.
I probably shouldn’t have asked. It’s none of my business. But you know me!
Of the two answers, I’m inclined to go with Robin’s. It’s entirely plausible to me that Ben lured Sarolta to move in by promising she could keep all her money to spend on studio time. For in addition to being an occultist, Sarolta’s also a guitarist! A self-styled “soundpoet”! (No space between the words!) For one brief shining moment 30 years ago, her band was number-three-billed in various lineups at Chicago’s punk club scene.
Bribing Sarolta at Robin’s expense is just the kind of hustle Ben excels in.
###
The other part of the reason why Robin does not move out is that when B is aiming the intense focus of his attention on you, it’s a very heady feeling. Now that I’m out of the loop, I can see the dynamic more clearly: B creates emotional dependency; he feeds on it like a vampire. He did that with me for many years: I was the rock star; he was the manager. After we broke up, he did it to Robin. And then he met Sarolta—conventionally very pretty, obviously very damaged—and began to spin the web for her.
I pointed this out to Ben as I was driving him to work on my way out of town. I’d driven him to a couple of hospital appointments, too. I was trying to make myself as useful as I could.
“Robin should have moved out a year ago,” Ben fumed. “In three months, I’ll be on my feet again. He can move out then.”
“Yes, he should have moved out a year ago,” I agreed. “But the reason he didn’t is because the two of you have—or maybe had—this strange codependent emotional relationship. And he didn’t realize you were tired of it.”
B startled and looked down nervously.
“I don’t say that to reproach you or to make you feel bad,” I added. “I say it because that’s what I think is going on. The challenge now is how to get Robin to understand where his overly strong sense of obligation is coming from. So he can free himself from it.”
Ben was quiet for a while. Then he asked, “Are you going to watch the Democratic candidate debates tonight?”
###
I helped Robin clean his room. I don’t think he had cleaned it since he broke up with Marissa, which is coming on two years now. The room was disgustingly filthy, but looked okay when I left. Which is not to say that it wouldn’t have benefited from another day of intensive cleaning.
He hadn’t washed most of his clothes for several months.
Oh, he’d washed a few every now and then. At his friend Daryl’s house. Daryl lives right up the street. Move in with Darrrrr-y-llll, I kept telepathically projecting at Robin the whole time I was there.
I took probably 100 pounds of clothes over to the Colonial Laundromat and washed them.
It must have been 100° in the Colonial Laundromat. A pair of girl twins were taking turns pushing each other around in the laundry carts. They looked just like the twins in The Shining.
One of the twins pushed the other twin toward me.
“Give me a dollar,” said the twin in the laundry cart.
“No,” I said.
They stared at me for a full minute with their dead twin eyes.
I took Robin to Walmart—a place that I hate but, you know, cheap—and bought him a bunch of practical things. I took him out to eat a couple of times. I wished I could do more for him.
If I could pay half of Ben’s rent for him, I would. If only to get Robin out of that awful, awful situation.
Thank goodness I had a really nice Airbnb to retreat to with people who were friendly, kind and normal. And who seemed to like me.
I tried to make myself useful. I cleaned. I probably did 100 pounds of laundry. I drove people to places where they needed to go. That was about the best I could do.
###
It had only been six weeks since I last set eyes on B.
I wasn’t prepared for the changes.
Why, he’ll be dead in six months! I thought when I saw him. Three if he’s lucky.
His skin was melted candlewax. He’s lost 20 pounds or so, and he wasn’t heavy to begin with. He’s shorter than me, has a slight, elfin frame. When he gains weight, it goes to his gut. His gut is still pronounced leading me to believe he’s got liver involvement that they haven’t diagnosed.
They have him on morphine. Given the acute paranoia around opiates in New York State, I have to think the alacrity with which they started peddling the heavy drugs does not bode well as a prognosticator.
The diagnosis has gone back to being multiple myeloma. He starts radiation today, and chemo on the 15th after the last radiation appointment. I don’t understand that timeline at all: The radiation is palliative; the chemo is the treatment that’s supposed to zap the mutant plasma cells. Seems to me the treatment that might actually cure him should come first.
###
I’d actually thought there was a reasonable chance I wouldn’t see B at all while I was up there. I’d mentioned I was coming up to see Robin when B called me to confirm the diagnosis, and B had said he would see me “if he was up to it.”
I’m long past the stage of any deep emotional attachment that would incline me to read more into B’s words than might actually be there.
Robin was eager for me to see B; Robin practically pulled me into the flat. Dark and charmless to begin with—the bottom floor of an old mill—the flat’s really aberrant floor plan never benefited from B’s utilitarian ideas of home décor.
But now, the place was so filthy, it impinged on squalor.
Don’t get me wrong: You can’t eat off my floors, and if you did the white glove test on any surface in my home, likely the glove fingers would turn brown. I’m pretty slovenly. For me to call someone’s house filthy, it has to be pretty bad.
The girlfriend was in the process of moving in when B got sick. Her suitcases, boxes and knickknacks are everywhere. Two expensive blenders lying on the floor of the living room next to the snakes’ cages. Duh! I thought meanly. The kitchen is only five feet away!
I might actually feel sorry for the girlfriend if I liked her better. She thought she was getting Prince Charming. But instead she’s getting… what exactly?
I do feel extremely sorry for the girlfriend’s little dog, one of those tiny, exophthalmic toy breeds with long silky hair who now spends most of its time in a kennel and doesn’t understand why. I took the dog for many walks while the girlfriend was at work.
###
“I’m sorry I’m such bad company,” B said.
He is spending most of his time in the former guest room because the bed there is more comfortable for his back.
I didn’t say anything about how the back pain might indicate that the lesions are spreading to his spine. Just nodded and smiled. Nodded and smiled.
“This is the low point,” I said. “Once the treatments start, and you’re on your way to recovery, you’ll feel so much better.”
“I don’t remember morphine being such a drag.”
“Yeah, well. It’s different when you’re taking it for pain. You don’t get high off it. Or so they say.”
He grimaced and shifted his weight. Took out the little box in which he kept all his pain meds. Opened it and stared at its contents. My precious-s-s-s-s-s.
“Very soon you’ll be back to taking those things for fun! The way God intended!” I said.
“Very soon, I’ll be back to selling them on the street at $30 a pop. The way God intended,” he said.
“Ben, this is temporary,” I said. “You are going to get better. The next six months are going to be a complete and utter drag, but you will get through them. It’s a conveyor belt.”
Who knows? Maybe I even believed that.
“It’s only temporary after it ends,” he said.
He’s given up all pretense of not smoking in the house. “Don’t tell Sarolta,” he said as he lit up a cigarette, and I thought, What? Sarolta doesn’t have a sense of smell? But I smiled and lit up, too.
The guest room was just hideous. It had always been used as a storage space but now, in addition to many more boxes and suitcases of Sarolta’s stuff, there were the cans he was using as ashtrays and the plastic pots with dead stumps that used to be marijuana plants. And weird botanica paraphanalia. Sarolta dabbles in astrology. She fancies herself a white witch.
I glanced at two candles. “What’s up with all this St. Ciprian shit?”
“St. Ciprian is a sorcerer!” said B. “The most interesting by far of all the Catholic saints. He was a priest of Apollo before he converted to Christianity. He’s the only saint that can actually travel between heaven and hell.”
“Oh, well. That must come in useful. When they’re negotiating tariffs and hostage releases,” I said.
“It doesn’t work like that,” B said. “See, what happens is that St. Ciprian can help you enslave demons.”
“And this is useful because… ?”
“The demons grant wishes!”
“I see!”
“Because they’re so grateful when you finally let them out of bondage.”
“I see. Yes. Well. One only has to listen to the lyrics of Straight Out of Compton or All EyeZ on Me to understand how grateful people get when you let them out of bondage.”
That made him laugh. So score for me!
###
In the middle of all this squalor and depression, my beautiful, genius, sensitive 24-year-old son is living.
I wish more than anything right now that I could get him the hell out!
He won’t go.
Part of it is that he’s desperately trying to be helpful. Viewing himself as helpful. Contributing to the finances of the struggling household.
The finances of the household is a continuing refrain. They’re running scared.
“Why don’t you apply for social security early?” I asked B. “You can go back to work once the myeloma is in remission. They’ll just lop a certain amount off your social security.
“No!” B said.
It’s true he’d get maybe a third more if he can hold out another four years.
But, honestly. He may not be around in another four years. And he needs the money now.
I suppose he’s got to be in complete denial about that in order to keep pushing.
And, too, I suspect work keeps B occupied. Going to work. Bitching about going to work. Joking and talking cinema with the people he works with who don’t have the whole 360° and who therefore are able to see him as more than an invalid.
Invalid! Someone who’s been invalidated.
B’s the assistant manager at Ithaca’s indie movie theater, Cinemapolis.
There’s some weirdness about the household finances. Two sets of books. Robin gave me one answer when I asked him how much he was contributing to the rent; Ben gave me another.
“Isn’t Sarolta contributing anything at all?” I asked Robin.
“No,” said Robin.
“Of course,” Ben said, deeply offended that I’d asked.
I probably shouldn’t have asked. It’s none of my business. But you know me!
Of the two answers, I’m inclined to go with Robin’s. It’s entirely plausible to me that Ben lured Sarolta to move in by promising she could keep all her money to spend on studio time. For in addition to being an occultist, Sarolta’s also a guitarist! A self-styled “soundpoet”! (No space between the words!) For one brief shining moment 30 years ago, her band was number-three-billed in various lineups at Chicago’s punk club scene.
Bribing Sarolta at Robin’s expense is just the kind of hustle Ben excels in.
###
The other part of the reason why Robin does not move out is that when B is aiming the intense focus of his attention on you, it’s a very heady feeling. Now that I’m out of the loop, I can see the dynamic more clearly: B creates emotional dependency; he feeds on it like a vampire. He did that with me for many years: I was the rock star; he was the manager. After we broke up, he did it to Robin. And then he met Sarolta—conventionally very pretty, obviously very damaged—and began to spin the web for her.
I pointed this out to Ben as I was driving him to work on my way out of town. I’d driven him to a couple of hospital appointments, too. I was trying to make myself as useful as I could.
“Robin should have moved out a year ago,” Ben fumed. “In three months, I’ll be on my feet again. He can move out then.”
“Yes, he should have moved out a year ago,” I agreed. “But the reason he didn’t is because the two of you have—or maybe had—this strange codependent emotional relationship. And he didn’t realize you were tired of it.”
B startled and looked down nervously.
“I don’t say that to reproach you or to make you feel bad,” I added. “I say it because that’s what I think is going on. The challenge now is how to get Robin to understand where his overly strong sense of obligation is coming from. So he can free himself from it.”
Ben was quiet for a while. Then he asked, “Are you going to watch the Democratic candidate debates tonight?”
###
I helped Robin clean his room. I don’t think he had cleaned it since he broke up with Marissa, which is coming on two years now. The room was disgustingly filthy, but looked okay when I left. Which is not to say that it wouldn’t have benefited from another day of intensive cleaning.
He hadn’t washed most of his clothes for several months.
Oh, he’d washed a few every now and then. At his friend Daryl’s house. Daryl lives right up the street. Move in with Darrrrr-y-llll, I kept telepathically projecting at Robin the whole time I was there.
I took probably 100 pounds of clothes over to the Colonial Laundromat and washed them.
It must have been 100° in the Colonial Laundromat. A pair of girl twins were taking turns pushing each other around in the laundry carts. They looked just like the twins in The Shining.
One of the twins pushed the other twin toward me.
“Give me a dollar,” said the twin in the laundry cart.
“No,” I said.
They stared at me for a full minute with their dead twin eyes.
I took Robin to Walmart—a place that I hate but, you know, cheap—and bought him a bunch of practical things. I took him out to eat a couple of times. I wished I could do more for him.
If I could pay half of Ben’s rent for him, I would. If only to get Robin out of that awful, awful situation.
