Mallory's Camera

Between Remuneration, dropping more Stuff off at Casa Iggy, & various maintenance-&-upkeep errands, yesterday was a Productive Day, but, of course, nothing feels productive when you are living in chaos.

I long for a house party filled with BFF playing board games in between tromps on the moor and long conversations about the nature of the Universe.

###

Yesterday’s maintenance-&-upkeep errands took me to Neighbor & Mrs. Ed’s house for an hour and a half. We drank coffee and chatted animatedly about shoes and ships and sealing wax.

Once when we were driving somewhere in his car, Neighbor Ed remarked to me, “I know my marriage to Pat has given me a life that’s far more comfortable than anything I might have managed on my own.”

I thought of that as I sat in their pretty, cozy, neat, & ordered living room: It was just so… nice.

And for the rest of the day, I ruminated on what it means to have a good marriage—or a good partnership if signatory approval from church or state is unimportant to you.

I am incapable of having a good marriage myself.

For one thing, good marriages were never modeled for me during my formative years. My family was made up of shattered pieces.

For another, I have always patrolled my own boundaries rather fiercely. The consequence of growing up under the tyranny of a borderline personality mother, doncha know. The pronoun “we” is actually a bit frightening to me since it could signal absorption into craziness & chaos.

###

“Talking in supermarkets” became a kind of metric for me early on.

For most of my life, I thought nothing could be more boring than a conversation that runs something like, “Do we need more milk?”

“Well, we still have a quart in the refrigerator—”

“Yeah, but I’m going to be making mashed potatoes for dinner tomorrow—”

Meal planning! Resource allocation! How deathly!

Now I think such conversations are rather sweet.

But now it is too late.

###

Iggy seemed utterly depressed when I rolled into the house.

It was a gorgeous day—and he was sitting on the couch in the living room, restlessly paging through Netflix tiles on his gargantuan TV screen.

He’d begun preparing food. Some vegetable sat half-chopped on a cutting board in the kitchen. (Can’t remember the vegetable, but I did think the chopping technique was good.)

Also, the dog he’d been babysitting the week before had taken an enormous dump in my room.

The dog had been the sweetest thing in the world, a little licorice-tipped shih tzu named Liza, but obviously frightened and sad. I can’t imagine why Iggy agreed to babysit her—scoring points with some fellow Burner?

“She keeps wanting to sleep with me,” he’d complained. “On my pillow!”

The oldest son, Dante, was upstairs in his room playing video games while talking on the phone, a pair of enormous headphones muffling his ears.

Well, I’m going to be living here mostly alone, thought I to myself.

Because Iggy bought the house to spend time with his kids.

But it’s clear his kids don’t like him very much.

Of course, the Last Honest Cobbler in Dutchess County did not have my boot ready for pickup even though when I went in for pick up the day before—a full five days after the date he’d scribbled on my receipt—he’d absolutely assured me the boot would be ready at 2:30 pm yesterday.

But what are you gonna do?

Not only is he the Last Honest Cobbler in Dutchess County, he is the Only Cobbler in Dutchess County.

“If you wait half an hour, I finish,” he told me.

“Can I watch while you work on it?” I asked.

Hey! Watching someone work is better than a YouTube video, right? I could probably figure out how to repair shoes on my own if I watched him, and then I would have a useful skill to pander after the coming bioweapon attack wipes out 99% of the world’s population and civilization collapses.

###

Preparing for contingencies has always been a hobby of mine.

When I was 10 years old (for example), I taught myself to write with my feet in case my hands ever got amputated.

But I can’t do that one anymore.

###

“No, no, no,” said the Last Honest Cobbler. He was appalled by my suggestion. “You wait in Dunkin Doughnuts."

Dunkin Doughnuts on Main Street in Poughkeepsie is where the local junkies like to go to nod out whenever they’re lucky enough to score.

There is no way I was gonna hang out in Dunkin Doughnuts.

“I will come back tomorrow,” I told him.

He made apologetic noises.

“No, no, no,” I said. “Listen! I want to support you!”

And this was true, even though I couldn’t figure out why.

###

Anyway, yesterday was quite busy with myriad errands and strange little adventures.

In the evening, I went to the movies and out to dinner with Loraine whom I’ve been trying to cultivate because I have a real dearth of female pals here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.

I have guy pals!

But no girl pals.

And I miss girl pals.

Loraine is a very no-bullshit Philadelphia girl who was brought up by her tough Italian grandmother after her mother committed suicide when she was nine.

I enjoy her company.

I can’t say we have a tremendous amount in common since I am probably what her tough Italian Grandma would have called “artsy,” and Loraine was brought up to suppress her inner artsy, that being the trait that in Grandma’s eyes put the Seconal bottle into Loraine’s dead Mama’s hands.

We saw She Said and then went out to the Most Fabulous Indian Restaurant in the World, which happens to be in Rhinebeck.



I had complicated reasons for wanting to see She Said.

Basically, I wanted to see if it could convince me that the #MeToo movement was as big a deal as it seems to be to every other woman in the U.S.

Because to me, #MeToo is not a big deal.

All it seems to have done is penalize workplace relationships—and the workplace is practically the only place where unattached adult women get to mingle casually with unattached adult men now that no one gives dinner parties anymore.

This means that the only consensually sanctified way to meet unattached adult men is through dating apps.

And, omyGAWD.

Dating apps suck.

###

Having been a model in my tender years, I naturally have my own share of casting couch stories.

I always figured casual sex was the vig you had to pay if you wanted to play the game.

I never felt particularly demeaned by it.

Why would I?

Of course, Harvey Weinstein was an absolute monster since apparently he got off on brutalizing women, forcing them in ways that are absolutely reprehensible and unacceptable—and quite weird if you think about it since physically and psychologically as repulsive as he was, there were any number of women who would have been absolutely delighted to have sex with Harvey Weinstein of their own free will.

After all, like Henry Kissinger once said (a remark that will live on long after his Metternich-ean pronouncements on foreign policy have been forgotten): Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

But most of the stuff I saw back in the day didn’t rise to the level of Weinsteinian bullying or brutalizing.

It was strictly transactional: I’ll give you a blowjob, and you’ll choose me for a catalog shoot.

Sure. Unequal distribution of power.

But I don’t particularly see that that unequal distribution has been righted by the #MeToo fallout.

All I see as the consequence of #MeToo is that you can no longer make jokes to lighten a tense atmosphere and that men in positions of power refuse to be alone with women. (We laughed when Mike Pence was the one doing it, remember?)

And in show biz and related industries?

Since you can no longer fuck your way to the top, now you have to be related to someone to score a gig.

Talent was never gonna be a currency in that particular economy.

Talent was wampum—a useless specie designed for defrauding the guileless and innocent.

###

Anyway, when I finally get hauled off to that Reeducation Camp, they should definitely not stream She Said on the walls six hours a day.

It is a very boring movie.

Choppily directed, with scenes appearing out of nowhere that are supposed to connect to scenes that pop up an hour later.

And Zoe Kazan—see mini-nepotism rant above—is probably the most boring actor on the planet.

Dinner was great, though.

Loraine talked a bit about her 23-year-long marriage.

“He got depressed, you know?” she told me. “Deeper and deeper depressed. And I tried everything—got him to go on antidepressants, dragged him to therapy. And he didn’t stop being depressed. And finally I thought, I do not want to be living my life this way! So. I left.”

She smiled and shrugged.

I was filled with deepest admiration for Loraine!

Although, of course, she didn’t have children.

Children make leaving exponentially more difficult.

These days, Loraine is consort to Buff Ken—who, I swear to God, looks like he’s 35 from the neck down even though he’s over 70.

“Ever think about marrying Ken?” I asked.

“God, no!” Loraine said. “Marriage is a trap.”

My first marriage lasted five years.

And the reason it lasted even that long was Jim Bishop. (Not His Real Name.😊)

Jim Bishop was Bill’s best friend, and a more intelligent, humorous, altogether sympathetic human being you could never hope to meet.

Many years afterwards, it occurred to me that Jim had been sitting on his own secret.

But we were long out of touch by that point, and although I have a general idea of Jim’s whereabouts and could probably get in touch with him again if I wanted to—

Dear Jim,

Remember me? I believe we met in a Moscow train station back in 1919—

—I decided against it. I mean, it’s possible he might be overjoyed to hear from me again after 30-some odd years!

But probably not.



Bill and Jim grew up in Delaware, Ohio—not together exactly, but on each others' peripheries. I loved listening to Bill’s stories about his boyhood: Give Huck Finn a bunch of explosives and teach him how to drive, and that would have been Bill. He was always blowing stuff up and having interesting interactions with the local wildlife.

Al Hare, Bill’s father, an engineer who worked in some capacity with molecular bonding, had discovered that for certain metal alloys, useful in industrial production, molecular bonding was best accomplished through massive explosions; so Bill had ample access to explosives.

Eventually, Al decided to strike out on his own, so the Hare family set out for the Olympic Peninsula where Al bought a bunch of land in and around Port Angeles and Sequim, and founded his own company for molecular bonding through massive explosions. It was very popular with Japanese industrialists.

Each of the seven children was allowed to bring a single item of personal significance on the cross-country move.

Al brought the entire contents of two cluttered garages.

This tells you everything you need to know about the dynamics of the Hare family.

Bill was determined to be a scientist because it was something his father had failed at. Al had wanted to go into pure research, but putting food on a table for seven children presents significant challenges, and the private sector pays much better than the pursuit of pure science in the Realms of Academe.

When I met Bill at the Café Roma oh so long ago, he was in the process of finishing up a Ph.D. in the neurobiology of vision at the University of California at Berkeley.



I forget how Jim ended up in California.

He was—probably still is—a fairly competent bass guitar and played in a couple of bands, so it seems likely that his reason for migrating had something to do with his music—although the San Francisco Bay Area was hardly the heart of the rock ‘n’ roll scene by the mid-1980s.

He shared a dark little cottage on the Oakland/Berkeley border with one of his bandmates, a guitarist called Bill Duke, and Bill Duke’s girlfriend, a Brit called Debbie Hyatt whose accent and hairstyle exercised a kind of morbid fascination on me. Debbie didn’t speak in the pearly tones of the BBC but rather like one of the characters out of one of those English kitchen sink movies, Look Back in Anger, maybe, or A Taste of Honey, all glottal stops and diphthongs. And her hair was cut like a Mohawk except instead of bald scalp, there was hair.

Bill Duke came from a rich family in Tiburon. In addition to being a remarkable guitar player, he was rumored to be smart. I never saw any evidence of either of those attributes, but of course, in those days, I didn’t look around as much as I do now.

Bill Duke also had a heroin addiction, so much of Jim’s life—when he wasn’t playing music, or selling security alarms, or reminiscing with Bill about the time Bill blew up the Van Zants’ abandoned hen house, or saving my marriage—was spent listening to Debbie complain about Bill Duke’s heroin addiction or chaperoning Bill Duke through various stages of relapse and recovery.

One day, Jim returned home—after eight hours of convincing moderately well-off people that an expensive security system was really the only thing that stood between them and underclass hoards aching to get their hands on the moderately well-off people’s worldly possessions—to find that everything of value in the dark little cottage was gone.

Jim being Jim, I’m sure the irony of that discovery did not escape him.

Bill Duke had apparently had a massive relapse and no money to feed it with.

So, Bill Duke did what any self-respecting junkie would do. Nabbed every object of value in the house—including Jim’s three bass guitars and Jim’s expensive stereo system—and sold them for dope money.

Shortly after that, Jim moved back to Delaware, Ohio.



Bill and I did love each other. Both my sons were conceived in an excess of ❤️LUV❤️; in that sense, I guess you could say it was good genes calling to good genes across enormous chasms of misunderstanding.

Because Bill didn’t get me at all.

And for that matter, I didn’t get him.

He teased me a lot, the kind of rough-edged, sarcastic jostling you’d expect from someone who grew up with six siblings all struggling to prove to a massively self-absorbed father that they were not invisible. I couldn’t stand what I saw then as constant belittling. In those days, I was incredibly thin-skinned.

Also, he did not get that I saw myself essentially as a narrator (that hasn't changed, by the way 😊), that it was therefore important for me to have certain kinds of adventures. I mostly stopped having sexual adventures after I married, but occasionally, I’d go off on a psychedelic adventure.

Funny. Bill was into dropping acid, too, but we never tripped together. I think because I really did not want to be seen in my entirety by Bill; I was pretty sure he would be horrified.

Jim was not horrified.

Jim was one of the least judgmental human beings I’ve ever known.

I would summon Jim when I was coming down off one of my clandestine psychedelic adventures, and we would plot out exactly what I’d have to do to “maintain,” and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

Jim was the only person I confided in about what happened when I went back east to hang out with Jon and Ann again after All Those Years.

At one of the innumerable parties Bill and I gave—or that others in our circle gave—Jim and I would invariably gravitate toward each other after two or three beers and launch into a marathon talk fest: philosophy, history, the meaning of life, shoes and ships, cabbbages and kings.

The friendship owed nothing to romantic attraction.

In fact, I’m not even sure the friendship owed much to affinity.

Jim by nature was what you might call an emotional fixer. That was what he was really, really good at.

And in those days, I had a lot of things that needed fixing.

###

Many, many, many years later, I had the Aha! moment.

Jim was gay.

Not closeted about it. I’m quite sure he knew his own inclinations and quite possibly acted upon them.

But he almost never talked about himself. And he had a kind of cool, temperate persona. Detached. The political baggage attached to “coming out” would have been something he simply had no interest in or use for.

Also, I’m quite sure he was in love with Bill Duke—as much as he could be in love with anyone. And that was a card impossible to play, so he'd want to keep it close to his vest.

When Bill Duke went full-on junkie, stole Jim’s bass guitars, his sound system and everything else, Bill Duke broke the closest thing Jim had to a heart.

Last time I was in Oakland, I went looking for the dark little cottage under the freeway.

It isn’t there anymore.