Mallory's Camera

Clarion West posted this photo of Lucius & the 1993 Clarion class.

I think the 1993 class was quite the disappointment to the Clarion higher-ups: Louise is the only one of us who got famous, and she is only modestly famous.

I was there on a full scholarship that covered room & board as well as six weeks of workshops.

That’s Lucius smirking in the doorway & Ben lolling insolently at my feet. You can really see the changeling thing full bore in Ben’s face in this shot.

Clarion really taught me how to write, and for that, I will always be grateful. I mean, I definitely had an aptitude for words before I did Clarion, and often I was able to sling words together in an engaging manner, but that was hit-or-miss, I knew nothing of technique.

It was Clarion that taught me technique.

Yesterday, I was queen of the Wild Kingdom!

I was right about that wild turkey. She was brooding in the underbrush on the path toward the garden. I came upon her yesterday with six wee little chicks.



This photo was taken at the respectful 20-foot distance I tried to maintain (Poor little vigilant Mama Turkey! Don’t wanna cause you undue distress.). My iPhone doesn’t take pix in high-enough resolution to show the chicks as anything other than blurry clumps.

Then, later in the day as I was tromping, a deer came up so close to me, I thought it was gonna try and hit me up for a cigarette and a light:



Later in the day, I was blasting tunes in my car when Steely Dan’s What a Shame About Me came up on the playlist.



I’m not exactly sure why this song reminds me so strongly of Ben.

For one thing, he hated Steely Dan—as do most people I know who are heavily into music. I’m not exactly sure why this is. Maybe because Steely Dan preferred studio production to live performances? Dunno. Except for Grateful Dead gigs, I gave up going to live concerts after my disastrous acid trip at Altamont (look it up, grasshopper!), and Steely Dan has always been one of my favorite bands. Something about the familiar, nasal, New Yawk resonance of Donald Fagin’s whiny vocals, I suppose. But I also like their instrumentation.

For another thing, had you stumbled across Ben stacking cutouts at the Strand, he would have lied and told you that he owned the place; and he was such a convincing liar that by the end of the conversation, you would have believed him. Even if you’d just come from the Office of the City Register where it said different.

But like all phenomenally talented liars, he had an Achilles heel when it came to people who somehow managed to penetrated his skein of untruths, half-truths and faerie glamour.

July 3, 1993! We spent the night walking the streets of rainswept Seattle. Nary a romantic gesture had passed between us up to this point though increasingly, we were spending every conceivable waking moment in each other’s company.

This was at Clarion, which is a very famous writing workshop in science fiction circles. Six weeks where you do absolutely nothing but write and workshop under the tutelage of famous science fiction writers! BLISS! I recommend Clarion highly for anyone who wants to write but doesn’t actually know how to write.

Clarion is expensive; we were the two scholarship kids.

I suppose movie stars on the set of a film that’s generating buzz feel a bit like we did.

Everybody knew us.

Everybody wanted to be us.

Here we are!



I am the woman in the white shirt in the front row, holding a hat.

Ben is the guy in the dark glasses, peeking out of the right side of the giant O on top. Even in this blurry photograph, his changeling ancestry is unmistakable.

And that’s Lucius in the middle row on the right. He was that week’s Famous Science Fiction Writer.

“You two should seriously consider going on a tri-state crime spree together or something,” Lucius told us one day. I think the Ben & Patrizia show was seriously beginning to irritate him.

Lucius ended up becoming my literary mentor for the next 14 years. I keep expecting moviemakers to start mining his work: It’s at least as edgy and voluminous as P.K. Dick’s and considerably better written.

When he ran into Big Trouble with the IRS, I let Lucius live in my house for a year and a half. Rent-free. A story for another day.

###

Sometimes, I still get visual flashes of that wet night in Seattle.

The omniscient narrator is riding a drone; we are walking on the overpass that runs alongside the great intergalactic Highway 5, hands thrust deep into our pockets, legs matching each other’s stride, heads cocked slightly. Rain drops glisten on our hair. We both had a backstory that involved hard drugs, but his was considerably more lurid than mine.

He was telling me how fresh out of rehab, he was offered a job at his rehab center counseling addicts—

“But you were still using, weren’t you,” I said more than asked.

His head whipped around. “How did you—”

I shrugged. “I just knew.”

I think that was the moment he fell in love with me.

###

Anyway, today is his birthday. He would have been 65.

Our son is doing the mourning-by-Instagram schtick, posting lots of photos of himself as an unbelievably beautiful child with his father—who, except for the baseball cap (he was balding), was going through kind of a preppy dress phase throughout RTT’s childhood.

There are lots of photos of RTT as an unbelievably beautiful child with his father. Because I was the one who took them.

There are practically no photos of me and RTT as an unbelievably beautiful child. Because Ben never took any.

I left RTT a voice message and a text: I wanted to check in with you. I know you miss him.

Honestly? I was relieved when RTT didn’t pick up the phone.

Nasty, cold, raw day. I stayed in the house. Honestly? I was looking for an excuse to blow off the Blessing of the Garden and attendant socializing, being in a sardonic mood.

It seems the whole world is darkening and slowing in preparation for Yom Kippur.

Instead, I worked: Clients are coming out of the woodwork right now, and I would be ill-advised not to net them up, particularly since there won’t be any clients in January and February. I also watched a documentary about Orson Welles called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

Special to Orson Welles on whatever Bardo barstool he’s packed his ample ass: Not necessarily.

In the evening, Max texted me: He’d just gotten back from the Future Mother of my Unborn Grandchildren’s wedding.

I’d already known she’d gotten hitched. Like a true modern bride, she’d posted all about it on Instagram just moments after the ceremony!

FMomUG was by far my favorite of all Max’s girlfriends. I’d always hoped that they would figure out a way to resolve their differences, so she could fulfill the destiny that God intended for her, which was to be a vessel for my DNA!

I don’t suppose she ever will now.

###

Here’s some heresy for you: I don’t think Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made.

Flashbacks are narratively weak.

Voiceovers in movies are vestigial techniques left over from the first person point of view in novels.

I’m not sure anything Welles directed is great, as a matter of fact, though it’s all interesting from a strictly cinematic point of view. But if I had to pick his best picture, I’d say Chimes at Midnight. Falstaff is obviously a main character, and Welles’ genius was to see the considerable disservice Shakespeare did Falstaff in breaking him up over a series of plays.

What seems to have done in Welles in the larger sense was his absolute inability to comprehend that film is essentially a collaborative medium despite those French New Wave guys and their wacky auteur theories. (What the hell do the French know about movies anyway? They think Jerry Lewis is a genius!)

Welles’ ego was too big to permit him to work and play well with others.

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is a documentary about the making of one of the many movies that were left unfinished on Welles’ death. The movie, The Other Side of the Wind, appears to have been some Fellini-esque, Fitzcarraldo-like monstrosity that Peter Bogdanovich—another American director with delusions of grandeur—recently scraped together the production budget to finish.

Watching Welles hustle is entertaining up to point. He is so extemporaneously and brilliantly verbal that one really does wonder why it never occurred to him to back into the production process by writing a novel and adapting it; that would have reassured the film people in charge of giving away money that there was some kind of action plan in place.

But I guess Welles thought novels were beneath him.

One thing about Welles: His laugh was exactly like Lucius’s laugh.

Gave me a start, that did.

There were other similarities between the two men, too: Both had been handsome when young but chose to imprison themselves in vast pods of unhealthy flesh as they aged.

Lucius did have appalling eating habits. Left to his own devices—which, mostly, he was—he would have subsisted entirely on a diet of strawberry soda and Three Musketeer bars. To me, it was so obvious he was shoveling what he thought was LUV into his mouth. This is how he nurtured himself throughout his appalling childhood, I thought. With insipidly sugary and tasteless treats.

Of course, there is no way you can actually point this out to someone.

So, I didn’t.

Two (count ‘em!) shots of the Clarion West Class of 1993.

That class was a Very Important Event in my life, for it was there that I met Ben and there that I met Lucius. The former became my second husband; the latter, my literary mentor.

I’m in the front row clutching my favorite slouchy hat in that first photo. That’s Lucius on the far right in the second row while Ben, in baseball hat and dark glasses, effects a cheeky peek-a-boo out of the right side of the oval sculpture. (In retrospect, I’m thinking Ben may have seen one too many Beatles album covers.)

In the second shot, Ben and I are standing side-by-side, second-and-third to the left in the last row.

Interestingly, we are standing next to a chap named Ian whom I ran into at the Terribly Progressive Science Fiction Convention last spring and whom I did not recognize. I don’t think he recognized me either. But I did get the opportunity to hear him rail against Clarion West! For trying to “silence his voice” by convincing him he was a baaaaad writer!

“Well,” said Ben to whom I described this encounter and who remembered Ian perfectly, “he was a bad writer.”

###

Since I didn’t remember Ian, I don’t remember anything he wrote; so I’m unqualified to have an opinion about his prose.

I will say Clarion used – and still uses – a critique process that disavows the use of words like “good” or “bad.”

You sit in a circle. The person being critiqued is not allowed to speak until the critiquing process is through.

Critiques begin with the person to the left of the writer and travel round the circle.

The critiquer begins by pointing out all the things that worked for him or her in the piece being discussed and then moves on to the things that did not work, that left him or her puzzled. The critiquer is also free to provide Helpful Hints – on plot mechanics, on writing techniques – that in the critiquer’s opinion might be able to improve the piece.

When all the critiques have been delivered, the writer is allowed to address them.

The process is extremely rigorous, but it’s also respectful.

I, for one, found this process so amazingly helpful that I’m now trying to set up a writers group founded on similar principles. (Reading this? Live in NYC? Wanna play? PM me!)

Here’s the deal that most wannabe writers don’t get: There’s a real difference between writing as self-expression and writing as communication.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing for self-expression.

And there actually are a few writers whose vision or singular understanding of the zeigeist make the struggle to understand their unclear self expressions worth deciphering.

Most of us writers – certainly moi! – don’t fall into that category. And therefore, if we want to be read, it behooves us to learn effective communication techniques.

###

I don’t remember whether these photos were taken before or after Ben and I became an item.

Certainly, from the moment we lay eyes upon each other, Ben and I had this uncanny facility for finishing each other’s sentences, expressing each other’s innermost thoughts in first-rate prose.

“You two should really consider going on a Tri-State crime spree together once the workshop is over,” Lucius advised us.

The attraction was not physical. At least, not at the start.

Ben liked punk girls with multiple tattoos and piercings. I liked guys who were either (a) black or (b) looked like Michael Caine or Sean Connery in the opening scenes of The Man Who Would Be King.

But once the attraction became physical, it was very physical. We had an amazing sex life.

###

I still sometimes see Lucius. At a distance, of course. Twinkling at me from the other side of shelved political histories when I show up at the library to tutor Samir. Waving at me from outside the Dollar Store on Poughkeepsie’s Main Street on those (mercifully) few occasions when I’m called upon to navigate that boulevard of broken dreams in my car.

Lucius was a very brilliant writer. Although you certainly wouldn’t know it if you met him casually. He was kind of like what might happen if Joseph Conrad took demonic possession of the soul of the Duck Dynasty patriarch.

In the mid-1990s, Lucius had Big Problems with the IRS, lost all his money. So Ben and I – at this point domestically ensconced and new parents to Robin – decided to help him out. We bought an old RV for him to crash in until he could write a new novel that would clear up his financial problems. Stashed the RV in our backyard: Lucius was a notorious pig, so I certainly didn’t want him in my house.

Alas, the RV for all sorts of reasons turned out not to be a viable option.

Lucius ended up becoming our house guest – for a year and a half!

During that year and a half, he wrote Trujillo and A Handbook of American Prayer as well as a book, Two Trains Running, that purports to be a nonfiction book about riding the rails. It’s complete fiction: Lucius hardly ever left the bedroom we assigned him and certainly never spent time with anyone called Missoula Mike. The freight train riders were pals of Ben’s cousin Bruce Shoe who used to visit us from time to time and would tell us stories about his own adventures. Lucius overheard him and decided this would be a good way to scam money out of Rolling Stone.

Lucius dedicated Two Trains Running to me and Ben.

###

After Lucius finally moved out, he and I kept in touch through marathon phone calls that generally took place while we watched episodes of Survivor on our respective TV sets in our respective abodes, him in the Seattle metro area and me in Monterey.

I was vaguely aware that, ummm, yes-s-s-s, Lucius had a crush on me.

This was not as disingenuous on my part as you may be quick to conclude.

I will note here that while I am usually good at picking up other people’s emotional subtexts – that’s what learning hyper-vigilance at your mother’s knee will do for you – it’s very difficult for me to pick up subtext when I am one of its precipitating factors because my default assumption is that every single person I know secretly loathes me.

Even now that I’m tottering on the brink of senescence, every now and then someone will remark to me, Surely you knew back in [your interminable number of years goes here] that I was in love with you.

So yes, Lucius was in love with me.

And no, I was not in love with him.

You may think it was because of his gargantuan size and homeless-person-looking appearance, but no, that wasn’t it. His appearance did not deter romance with many other women far much more accomplished than me! The elegant Alice Turner ran after Lucius for quite a while, and in addition to being a famous editor, Alice was a minor David Foster Wallace girlfriend!

No, I crossed Lucius off the potential romance list because once when I was about to make a road trip with him, I noticed his refrigerator was filled with food.

“Lucius, you’re gonna be gone,” I told him. “All this stuff is gonna rot. Why don’t we clean it out?”

No, no, no! Lucius refused to clean out his refrigerator!

“Hey!” I told him. “You don’t have to lift a finger. I’ll clean it.”

No, no, no! Not only did he refuse to clean out his refrigerator but he got deeply pissed off at me for being so petit bourgeois as to care about such things!

After that, every time I tried to imagine having sex with Lucius, all I could envision was being buried in an avalanche of rotting food.

###

Now that Lucius is dead, I keep expecting him to be discovered the way Phil K. Dick was discovered. His Dragon Griaule books would certainly make a great parry to Game of Thrones if Showtime really wanted to take on HBO.

And, of course, there’s a lot more I could write about Lucius, but June and the Hassid are tapping their feet impatiently. (Lucius would like June and the Hassid!)

The Lucius KGB event was very healing. So glad I went to it. So grateful to the wonderful Ellen Datlow for putting it together.

BB came with, which was good because otherwise I would have spent the entire three hours bawling.

Photo is of Katherine Dunn, whom I had never met before and whose novel, Geek Love, I admire. Lucius lived downstairs from her those last years in Portland. She had a Glenda-Jackson-in-Women-In-Love-ish quality, which you can sort of see in this photo.

I spoke to Lucius for the very last time in Ithaca during a very dark time in my life when I thought that every hope, every dream, every vision I’d ever had was wafting away and that I’d become just another round steel ball skittering along down its square groove. Why even be alive? I wondered. And somehow Lucius heard this, called me, our complicated history notwithstanding.

“I believe in you totally,” he said to me that day.

I’m not sure that any act of friendship has ever meant more to me.

First crocuses appeared three days ago. Crocuses have a short growing season; in another three days, they'll be gone. By then presumably the green arrows shooting up beside them will have metamorphosed into daffodils.

Harbingers of spring, yes?

Though, of course, the odd black-crusted snow pile can still be seen in vacant lots. Poughkeepsie has a lot of vacant lots. These snow piles are kind of like the remains of some mythical antediluvian creature named Winter. When sunlight hits them, they vaporize. Poof! Magic!

###

A lot's been happening.

Nothing's been happening.

Albany approved my feasibility study, so I went back to Pollyanna last week.

Nothing's changed there, but of course, there's no reason why it should. Pollyanna hasn't gone broke quite yet, but I'm guessing the lights will go off permanently around the first of September. I have this mental image of Reverend Cal in an ankle-length great coat and natty fedora cackling madly to himself as he makes his final tour of the light switches. A demonic mythological presence himself, that Reverend Cal. Much like Winter.

The Pollyanna family -- yes, this is how Reverend Cal encourages them to address each other in emails, Dear Pollyanna Family -- continue to respond to this uncertainty by oscillating between a kind of frantic inappropriate merriment and sullenness. It's exactly the kind of reaction you'd expect in a real family if Dad was an alcoholic or molesting the family dog. Sure, it's not good. But you don't wanna rock that boat too much.

Over the course of my lifetime, I've held some extraordinarily prestigious, high-paying jobs. But I've also done my time in the low-hourly-wage salt mines. The dysfunctionality of the American workplace never fails to amaze me. Is it like this everywhere in the world? Are research scientists -- a term I define broadly -- really the only people who enjoy what they do for money?


###

I see Lucius everywhere. It's disconcerting because, of course, he's dead. So I'm not really seeing him. Except I am.


I've had a number of friends and family members die over the years -- at the age of soon-to-be 62, that's unavoidable. Some of them I've felt after they died; most of them, I haven't.

I won't try to explain, justify or defend seeing ghosts, subconscious psychological projections or whatever the fuck you want to call them. In the ancient cathedral town of Ely -- a ghastly island floating in muck for most of its geological history until the East Anglia swamps were drained -- I once fell into a fugue state and watched a blind monk tap-tap-tap his way over some 14th century cobblestones.

When I got stuck in that Yosemite blizzard for three days, lost all sensation in the distal toes of both feet to frostbite (permanently, as it turned out), and had to be rescued by helicopter, there was a point when our little band of four was struggling up a mountain on our cross country skis in the blinding snow and I saw a downhill skier coming down in the opposite direction. He was wearing a bright yellow muffler and huge futuristic goggles so I couldn't see his face, but he waved at me. Neither Ann nor Joe nor Dan saw him, and I knew that he was dead.

Those were probably my two most extreme visions.

When my mother died in 2001, I felt absolutely nothing. On the other hand, after Tom died in 1995, I felt him hovering just out of reach for years afterwards, a beneficent presence who was very concerned about me, who was watching out for me. I felt it when his spectral attentions began to focus on other matters, as he slowly withdrew his attention. It felt like an abandonment.

So anyway -- Lucius. He uses the public computers at the Adriance Public Library. He shops for breadfruit at the weird Jamaican supermarket. He leers at me affectionately from the other end of a parking lot, standing near one of those ancient black-crusted mounds of dead snow. He's not mad at me at all. He gets the joke, the cosmic goof. He's riffing on it. He wants to create one of our old screamingly funny comic routines. He catches my eye from the corner where he's crossing the street, shrugs helplessly, shakes his head and beams. He mouths words that I can't hear but then, I don't have to because I've heard them before: Ya gotta be cruel, Patrizia. Cruel to be kind.

He draws out the word "cruel" in a fake English accent: cr-r-r-uel-l-l. He throws back his great leonine head, and he laughs and he laughs and he laughs. And then though I don't hear him laughing, and nobody hears him laughing, a guy driving a car comes to a screeching halt just in front of the pedestrian walkway even though the light is clearly in his favor and there's nobody on the street.

Maybe 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.”

So my quasi-famous writer friend Lucius calls yesterday and we spend an hour or so hashing out the subtlties of Project Runway.

"Santino's gonna win, isn't he?" says Lucius. "He's clearly the most talented."

"Well, he knows how to ruch," I say. "But he can't take direction."

Somewhere towards the end of our conversation, the subject of Lucius's book sales come up. "Nobody liked the Honduras stories," he says. "They fell flat."

"You've got to market yourself better," I say. "Do you have a website?"

"Yeah," he says. "I mean, it's a pretty lame website. But it's there."

"I know!" I say. "You need a blog!"

"Other people have told me that."

"It works great for docbrite," I said. "She grows the fanbase for her foodie books by doing cat slide shows and hitting fans up for donations of their expired pain meds. They feel like they're supporting great art; she gets high. A win win all around."

"Can you set me up a blog?" says Lucius.

"Sure," I say.

Although quite honestly I have to say I hate blogs. I hate all that shrill political/sociological posturing linked back to the same ten primary sources. Imagine the sound of a hundred thousand hampster wheels all firing up at exactly the same moment – that's the music of the blogosphere. Cheep, cheep!

I'm very clear – at least in my own head – that this isn't a blog. It's a diary. A common place book. A record of one (as it turns out) fairly unremarkable life. Putting it online complicates that. But I have been thinking recently that maybe I'll stop putting it online. There's no marketing pay-off for the psyche flashdance and the pal in NYC for whom I first started putting my journal online – dispatches from the interior – has fallen upon psychological hard times. I'm not even sure he bothers to get up in the morning anymore. I doubt he's reading my journal.

Blogging at Sundance got bigger headlines in the mass news outlets yesterday than the stock market tumble.

Which one was the bigger story?

(And I could go on and on about GE – how does a diversified company like General Electric's fourth-quarter net fall forty-six percent??? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. But that would be blogging.)

So Hunter Thompson finally pulled the trigger.

Don't quite know how to respond. The only one of his books I ever managed to get through cover to cover was Hell's Angels, an extraordinary piece of journalism, I still think. But everything else, including the much-vaunted Fear & Loathing series, I found unreadable – brilliant word spillage, yes, but I have 19th century prose sensibilities: word play has to be metered, set off in sturdy workman-like prose, otherwise its cumulative effect is the literary equivalent of one of Liberace's supper jackets.

No, the real reason I liked Hunter Thompson is because he took a lot of drugs, and did so unapologetically. Way to go! says I. He was one of the last great sideshow attractions of the Sixties, the era in which I came of age. I think we may learn that a doctor handed him a terminal diagnosis in the period just before his death. If we don't, then I'm kind of mad at him for killing himself: inevitably, his self-inflicted demise will be used as a further indictment of the various experiments in freedom that flourished when I was a young woman – free sex! free drugs! free Angela – and that means it will become propaganda for the myriad repressive influences peddled top-down today. A bullet through the head is an effective way of negating the authenticity of one's life experiences, and this is the reason I will never kill myself. Yep, life is tough, and very few of us asked to be born (although this may be changing if you believe in reincarnation now that in vitro fertilization is a 2 billion dollar a year industry.) But if you off yourself, you are in essence saying there was no truth whatsoever to your testimony. And testimony, ultimately, is the only thing we have to give.

Not that life as a counterculture icon is ever easy. In the early eighties I "dated" Huey Newton for a couple of months. I use quotes advisedly because after a couple of dinners at cheap Mexican restaurants, the relationship settled into a pattern of late night phone calls, cocaine and blow jobs. I suppose you could say I was being used, although the way I looked at it then was that I was being an adventuress: this was a man who was a bona fide footnote to important historical events and I got to see what his cock looked like. In my own way, I was channeling Hunter Thompson! At this point in his personality unraveling, Huey was kind of a sweet, confused guy in a lot of psychic pain. He talked about his mother a great deal: she was apparently a strong Southern lady of Christian sensibilities who had been terribly disappointed in him and that was the reason why he'd gone back to school after his trip to Cuba and subsequent legal misadventures and gotten his Ph.D.

There were a lot of late night car trips since I never slept over. Frequently we drove past the Rainbow Car Wash on the corner of Broadway and MacArthur. This is where he shot the hooker. Nothing alleged about that, he did it. The two hung juries deadlocked for reasons having nothing to do with the facts of the case.

Anyway, one night I was feeling particularly stoned and sassy: "Lots of rainbows in your life, huh Huey? Rainbow Coalitions, Rainbow Car Washes. You might say it's a motif!" I laughed and hiccoughed and began crooning, "Some- wherrrrre over the rainbow, waaaaaay up high!"

You might expect him to slap me across the face so hard he'd break my jaw.

He didn't.

Instead, he started to cry. A true Winston Smith moment.

In other news, the store did reasonably well this holiday weekend although probably not as well as it would have done if the weather had been sunny. Something strange happened to me though: both days I went in to man the cash register, I freaked. I had to call Ben: "I'm sorry, I can't sit here one more moment." I've always had trouble separating public from private personas, and I think my life right now – all output, no refractory – has exhausted me to the point where I simply cannot tell those states apart. Every person who walked into the store and left without buying something was a personal rejection.

As soon as I got home yesterday, Lucius called. Lucius is chronically depressed and I suspect he has a number of pals he keeps on speed-dial. "Can't talk to you now, Lucius," I told him. "Bravo is doing a Project Runway marathon."

"What the fuck is Project Runway?"

"You don't know? Project Runway is simple the best reality television show in the history of reality television. Villains! Heroes! Personality clashes! Four letter words bleeped over, not out; you can still here Jaye saying, 'She so wants to fuck me' behind the bleep. Talented people doing something they're passionate about!"

"What channel is Bravo on?" asked Lucius.

"In Seattle? Who knows? Sometimes you gotta do your own research, Lucius. Oooops – Austin's taking the rollers out of his hair. Gotta go, Lucius –"

Thereafter, at every commercial break between episodes. Lucius would call me for a quick dish. "You're sick," were always his first words. "So. What did you think of Austin's postal uniforms? I think that judge got it exactly right: it looked like something Doris Day would wear."

Project Runway saves another brilliant writer from despair!

Which raises an interesting question: if Hunter Thompson had known about Project Runway, would he still be alive today?