How To Channel Your Inner Henry Miller
Sep. 5th, 2010 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraMaybe I need a cardboard stand-up: Henry Miller in a penguin suit, taking on New York
Okay. So, first of all I’m sick of being pathetic.
I want to get to the Henry Miller’s eye view of the turbulence: it’s there, it’s raw, it’s jagged, but in no way is the protagonist – that would be io truly – a victim.
Problem is I’m feeling very victimized.
“Would you like to live with your father?” I asked the almost 16 year old.
“No!” he replied indignantly.
“But why not?” I asked.
“Would you just stop,” he said angrily. He was playing some complicated, online role playing game called Beyond that he’s been playing since he was seven years old and the scourge of the Cannery Row video arcade, taking on adults three times his age, whipping their asses at various Dungeons and Dragons games. There are no more video arcades anymore; improvements in the gaming industry have ruined the casual, social aspects of video gaming. One more obsolescence… Kids his age have seen a lot of them.
“No. I won’t stop,” I said. I really couldn’t tell whether I was being psycho or not. It seemed to me I was bargaining for my own survival. “I mean – you like it here, right?”
“Yes.”
“And he likes it here. But see – I don’t.”
“So start,” the kid said. “Figure out a way to like it. I don’t want to live with Dad.”
The car would have to pick Labor Day weekend to break down. Retail outlets are open, but auto mechanics are home barbecuing with family & friends like normal people. It’s probably something very simple – the ignition coil or maybe the starter – but it’s something I cannot possibly deal with myself so I am forced to call up Ben. After all, the main thing that car is used for is taxiing Robin, and Robin is Ben’s son.
Ben comes cruising up to the house in a nondescript anono-car, Toyota Celica, very clean. He’s obviously very at home in this car.
“Who did you borrow this from?” I ask.
He pauses a moment before he replies. “My friend Jayne.”
“Oh, right. The girlfriend.”
“It’s not a topic for conversation,” he says stiffly.
Fair enough.
Of course one of the things that depresses me the most about this whole situation is how fast Ben bounced back from it. Make no mistake – I wanted out for years but I kept taking him back because – well. Once upon a time we had a telepathic relationship, we lived inside each others’ minds. That was better than sex, that was better than anything. In retrospect, I suppose it’s a variant on what hookers feel for their pimps – it’s what defines a successful hustler, this ability to climb inside your mark’s mind and clothe yourself in their archetypes.
I knew this along, but still – intimacy is a heady drug.
So armed with the girlfriend’s name I went Facebook stalking – and there she was! She’s in a relationship! (Interestingly, he’s not.) And that relationship started… April 8th!!!
Why, that fucking asshole pig…
Because on April 8 he was still on the Culpepper Merriweather Circus, and he was being incredibly nasty on the phone to us. And then, of course, he disappeared from there without telling Robin or me, and reemerged in Ithaca a week later filled with sanctimonious priggery, filing custody suits for Robin.
He just crawled inside her life like the psychic hermit crab he is.
Shee-it.
I read a little farther on her Wall… They first met at the 4H Club in 1974 when they were both 18. Here come the two of them strolling down Memory Lane some time in March, which happens to have relocated to Watkins Glen for the afternoon, and guess what? They fall in love!
And I can just imagine the heated texts and emails that went back and forth while he was on the circus – Darling, I can’t live without you! If only we had realized this back in high school, we could have had three more decades together!
I’m thinking: he could have told me before he left. I mean, I really don’t love him or want him.
But if he’d told me, of course, he couldn’t have borrowed my car – Look, my friend Billy is going through some major anxiety here: he’s afraid he’s going to lose his job, he needs someone to talk to – to go see her in Watkins Glen.
What’s one more betrayal in a 17 year history of betrayals? Only this: he’d manufactured all these bogus reasons to be furiously angry with me, when of course the truth is he had turned me into a victim once again. And I have no resources here. Absolutely none. No friends, no money.
And it’s just fucking unfair – I am a good person and he’s a duplicitous turd, and yet I’m suffering and he’s not.
So anyway it’s night, and Robin is in town with a pal: I’m alone in the house with the two dogs and I can’ sleep, and I am so horribly, horribly ashamed of myself – why didn’t I see this coming? I really should have seen this coming. I lost my business, I’m losing my looks; once I thought I was special but it turns out I’m not. What good am I anyway? Why do I have to be here? Who would care if I wasn’t? And all of a sudden here becomes something bigger than Ithaca, here becomes life, and I’ve got the pill bottle in my hand and I’m counting the little white goodies –
You know how that goes, right? The Buddhists have a term for it – but having the concentration span of a gnat these days, naturally I can’t remember it. You’re wallowing in stress, pig in mud, preferred medium – because, of course, when a sociopath raises you, uncertainty is what’s familiar. In fact, it’s often occurred to me that the reason I fell in love with Ben in the first place is because his sociopathology is so very similar to my mother’s, incipient Love Object of my formative years, from whose lips the falsehoods fell like the petals of a daisy: she’s telling the truth, she’s telling a lie, she’s telling the truth, she’s telling a lie…
At some point the stress overwhelms you.
Well, this is very ridiculous, the grounded portion of my mind chides. So I start thinking of people I can call who I won’t lose face in front of once things recalibrate.
The only person I can think of is my half sister, Jeanna.
I glance at the clock: 3AM. What is it my comrade in arms Mister Fitzgerald used to say? In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.
What time is it in Las Vegas, New Mexico?
My old friend Bibbitt – who also tried to commit suicide once, now that I think about it, and who would also be a great person to talk to if only I hadn’t lost touch with her (and what good is Facebook anyway if it can’t reconnect me with Bibbitt, if all it does is narrate the syrupy saga of Redemption Through True Love of my unspeakably traitorous asshole of an X-Husband?) – used to say, Everyone gets two phone pick-ups at three o’clock in the morning. But the third time – and every time thereafter – it goes straight to voicemail.
Well, this was only Call Number One.
Jeanna didn’t pick up. Oh, of course – she’s still at the drive-in. Jeanna manages the drive-in in Las Vegas, New Mexico which in recent years has become a major tourist attraction garnering mucho press and turning Jeanna into a minor celebrity throughout northern New Mexico.
Jeanna may be the most pragmatic person I know, but back in the day when she was shooting heroin, she once overdosed herself intentionally. She told me the whole story while we hiked the ghost town, La Liendre, In New Mexico if it ever had a post office, it’s always on the map. There she was floating up the tunnel of light, the arms of loved ones reaching out to embrace her – and she thought, Nah, this isn’t right. Managed to come out of the fatal nod long enough to dial 911. Ended up in a mental hospital for six months – but today she’s sassy and successful. And happy – yes.
Just hearing her voice on the answering machine calmed me right down.
Next day I had email from Lucius: I have complete faith in you that you'll pull it together. Call me anytime.
Huh. Had I been beaming so hard that I actually got on to his frequency too?
Jeanna called back a few hours later. “Well, you can’t do… that thing. You’re a mother. It would devastate your children, might even ruin their lives. Think of the bad karma. You’d come back as a hen in the Tyson Chicken factory.”
“Well, I know I can’t, Jeanna. That’s why I called you.”
“It’s a very tough situation, honey. I mean, you see him all the time –“
“But I don’t –“ I swallowed furiously. My eyes had begun tearing up again. “I shouldn’t give a fuck. I’ve wanted to get him out of my life for ages. I mean, he did unspeakable things to me and to Robin. But why should he get to be the phoenix and not me?”
“Nobody says you can’t be a phoenix too,” Jeanna said mildly. “You were married to the guy for 17 years. Of course you’re bound to have feelings. Do me a favor though. Avoid the psycho revenge scenarios. The best revenge you can have is to be happy. Are you going to confront him?”
“What would the point be to that?”
“See? Already you’re thinking like a sane person! Honey, you can always come here. But if you’re going to stay there, you’ve got to work on getting a life. Otherwise you have to get out of there. You skirted awfully close to the fire this time.”
“I want to leave,” I said. “Unfortunately Robin really doesn’t want to live with his father.”
“Have you told him about… ?”
“No,” I said. “The despicable shithead is his father. I don’t want to confuse his loyalties.”
“See what a good mother you are!”
Spent the rest of the day which was stormy out and forbidding watching Season 4 of The Wire with Robin, and scribbling madly away at the Decennium rewrite: if I’m in virtual house arrest due to the car situation, I might as well get some use out of it. Ben wanders by around 3pm to calk some windows and poke around a bit more in the engine. I am civil, and otherwise ignore him to the best of my ability: I need him to do practical shit because I could no more calk a window than I could fly, and thanks but I don’t want to learn.
I cried when Randy’s house got fire-bombed, and the two times he got beaten up for snitching.
“That’s just so sad,” said Robin as the credits rolled over Episode 13.
“I know. I read an interview with David Simon—he’s the guy who came up with the idea for the show – and he said the writers always knew that only one of the four kids could be saved. And there was a standing argument: was it going to be Randy or was it going to be Namond? And in the end it had to be Namond.”
“Why?”
“Randy had more self awareness. And in the end, it's always the most self-aware characters that have to suffer -- for the good of the storyline.”
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-05 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 11:22 am (UTC)I agree that I need a change of venue -- but perhaps one more along the lines of the one you've embarked upon, a kind of Me 2.0. Think I need to find a therapist and hit the Baby Daddy up for child support -- I'm such a hippie at heart that I hate doing things like that, but part of the problem right now is that my financial state is so marginal.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-05 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 11:26 am (UTC)Shawn, we are sisters under the skin in some weird way, dealing with our separate burdens of immense (and doubtless unjustified) shame and no doubt you are tired of hearing me say this but... you write like an angel, a highly commercial angel which is a very good thing. No shit -- you out-Flagg Fannie. Maybe you need to write about me, and I need to write about you. But we both need to write.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 03:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 03:55 am (UTC)Also,
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Date: 2010-09-06 10:25 am (UTC)You're leaving for wherever. If he wants to stay in Ithaca, he can live with his dad. Otherwise he comes with you. Those are his choices.
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Date: 2010-09-06 11:58 am (UTC)Also, [info]mallorys_camera, you seem special to me.
Such a sweet thing to say. Thank you, sweetie.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-07 05:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 11:56 am (UTC)Since when does the child call the shots in a situation like that???????
Sixteen year olds are not children. They're not adults either, of course, but it's kind of a critical developmental stage. I plucked Robin out of his environment a year and a half ago and transported him here. Not sorry I did either -- he was on the verge of getting into all sorts of bad shit in California, and he still has major lapses in judgment from time to time here. But in general, he's doing well and he's happy. And when you sign on for parenting, you sign on for putting the kid's interests in front of your own -- that's just the way it goes.
I have been dehabilitated by sadness these past 8 months. If we'd been reading each other's journals longer you'd see that such passivity is not my normal state. I'm actually kind of a go-get-'em personality. There are actually quite a lot of things I like about Ithaca & I think if I can motivate myself to take advantage of all its resources -- and find myself a therapist :-) -- I could be quite happy here. I pondered all this yesterday and decided I'm going to take Loathsome X to court for child support. Then I'llhave a financial cushion for things like cars breaking down, and I won't ever have to see him.
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Date: 2010-09-06 01:30 pm (UTC)I hope you're able to get the help you need. Getting child support is a good step, too.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 03:43 am (UTC)the wire, season 4 ... terrific.
ben ... never liked him from what i had heard and despise him even more now.
my main thought: it would be winning for you to figure out how to have zero dependence on ben and no relations beyond those related to robin. i know your resources are few in your current locale.
(i can offer some remote help diagnosing car problems, but some knowledgable local soul would be better obviously.)
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Date: 2010-09-06 11:13 am (UTC)Yes, I pondered that very issue all day yesterday because in many ways Ithaca is a good place for me, the resources are here, I've just been so sad that I haven't been proactive about plugging into them.
I'm going to put in a court request for child support -- $400/month, which ought to be doable for him. As small as the amount is, that would give me a margin. Main problem for me right now is economic -- I'm maintaining a house for a home for Robin, a car for taxiing Robin around, and paying storage bills on all the furniture, still in CA (& living in an empty house because I can't save enough money to get the stuff here), & these are all expenses he doesn't have.
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Date: 2010-09-06 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-06 11:14 am (UTC)patriziadilucchio@gmail.com
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Date: 2010-09-06 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-10 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-10 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-11 10:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-07 01:31 am (UTC)I read the 'Tropic of...' books. I must re-read them, to see if they are as racy as I remember them.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-10 01:22 pm (UTC)