Bigger Fish

Baby…

Like I was saying on the phone, I am a goddamn genius, you know. Little story… have you even read this far?…Little story, Date: 1973, Martin’s Landing, Roswell Georgia.  My parents had sold their home on Mt.Vernon Road in Sandy Springs, and moved from the Golden Ghetto to the “New South,” Martin’s Landing, an attached town home community overlooking the Chattahoochee River. I, an eager young respiratory therapist, having just lost, for the third or fourth time, the love of my life, took the advice of a favorite patient who befriended the dashing and handsome Lothario. The man’s name was Joe David Brown, a southern writer of some repute, Google him, best known as author of  the novel “Addie Pray,”  later a film starring an old acquaintance of mine, Ryan O’Neal, and his daughter, Tatum, who of course was the youngest actress to win a “grown up” best supporting actress academy award for he role in the movie adaptation, titled “Paper Moon.”

But back to this story, Joe David and I became friends during his three or four extended stays in CCU at Atlanta’s Crawford Long Hospital (he later died there, or on the way there) and he came to admire my way with the nurses, my courtly southern manners, I was a southerion gentleman as was he, and I, in an effort to impress him, brought, with no little misgivings, a folio of typed pages of my poetry for him to read. Well, I don’t mind saying, he was impressed, and offered his assistance should I care to publish, but I had bigger fish to fry, for I knew that poetry as I understood it to be, was a dying art, even then being replaced by scrawny drug addicts with Gibson guitars, and rhyming lyrics which reeked of the bourgeois self indulgence of a drug laced generation of utter losers, like Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues, or that jew boy Bob Dylan or the monastic Arlo Guthrie…never mind, the point was I wanted to be a novelist, like Faulkner or Hemingway or even Steinbeck, and I knew I could write, I just knew it, I’d been doing it all my life, I was even editor of my school’s literary magazine, so I’ve been told.

You still with me?  Well, I went to see my daddy, living in Martins Landing with brother Bart, and I asked him if I could take up residence for a month or so to write a great American novel, and as my momma lived in Palm Beach at the time, and things around the house were fairly quiet, he said, “alright.”  Now I needed a leave of absence from the hospital, and to get it,  I scratched myself with a syringe that looked like a pen and had been used to test for a TB reaction on a TB patient, and with positive test results in hand, actually, false positive, in no time at all I got a paid leave of absence.  See, TB is a respiratory disease, and I was a Respiratory Therapist, it just made made good sense for the hospital to err on the side of caution.

Well, with a brand new silver Parker Ink Pen, you know, the one with the cross hatching on the barrel, a bottle of royal blue ink with the well, and a sheaf of lined paper, I pretty much wrote that damn novel in a month.  I still have the pen. The novel wasn’t war and peace, it ran a little over a 100,000 words. Now when Joe David read the hand written draft, he was ecstatic; it seemed to him he had discovered a protege, a new  southern literary voice,  and well, I was on my way to fame and fortune… and then it happened.

See, the woman on whom I based the heroine of the novel, the reason for my heart even beating, and it beating hard at that, the woman whose character I featured as nearly as important as the protagonist, a male character named Garth, well, that woman got angry with me and stopped speaking to me and to this day she still has never again spoken a single word to me, not that I even know where she lives now. Jesus, all because, well some say it was because I married Sam,  nee Linda Shoor Raiford, a crippled nurse, impulsively, after work one day. BJ and Mark (you don’t need to know them) drove us up to the marriage mill in Ringgold Ga and we tied one on and tied the knot; but in my defense, I did divorce her pretty quickly.  No, that wasn’t it, and it wasn’t cause she didn’t love me, ‘cause no one could hold a grudge that long if they didn’t really love you. No, I always said it was because we were always fighting over my ostensible lack of ambition.

Truth is,  she was a terrific nurse who would have liked the opportunity to go to med school, and I had that opportunity but thought little of it.  She had a daughter, Trisha, dear little child, who wasn’t nearly as bright or beautiful as my daughter, but I mostly kept that to myself.  No, the reason she never saw me or spoke to me again was that I tried to sleep with her best friend, a piece of work named Dirle Kirk, of the Kirks down in Columbus and across the river, in Phoenix City, Alabama. Tough people those Kirks, into lots of mischief, and well, Dirle became a nurse to help out her family; you know, sometimes its best not to go to the hospital with gunshot wounds.

Now that last night we spoke, not Dirle, but Carol, the love of my life, we had just finished a 3-11 shift. Carol was charge nurse in CCU and like me, was good friends with Joe David Brown. She even liked his pretty daughter, of course  she had no thought of my intentions toward his pretty daughter. Well Dirle came out of the nursery with her son, he was four or five months old, and she was looking a little ragged,  Now, down south here we have a saying about the foolish, impulsive acts of men, we say they “have a wild hair up their ass.”  Its a saying that supposed to make up for a lot, supposed to protect you from the consequences of acting like a fool. I looked at Dirle, turned and told Carol I’d ride home with Dirle. Nothing else was said, just that I’d ride home with Dirle.  Now usually I’d ride home with Carol, because I normally stayed at her apartment. We didn’t have any “agreement” and I suspect now, forty years later, that she had me on probation, after that snap marriage thing,

As I later thought about it, she did have a peculiar look on her face, kind of tight lipped and drawn-up, and she turned away and got in that damn little Toyota, the little yellow one we’d had such good times in, and off she drove. Now I got in the pilots seat of Dirle’s Impala, and drove her home down to Main Street, East Point, Georgia;  down past  southeast Atlanta.  When we got to Dirle’s apartment, I walked with her to the door, and she asked, and I remember this clear as day, she asked, ‘How are you getting home?”

“Why Dirle I want to stay,” I said.  “Your man’s in Reidsville, you’re alone and I think you are beautiful.” She hesitated. “Flattery will get you a drink before you call a taxi.”  As Sherlock Holmes would say,  I knew then “the game’s afoot.”   I entered the apartment with her, and she put down that baby it its crib, and she said, “I’m gonna change,” and slid off into her room. She was gone a while, then she called out “the liquor’s over the fridge” My heart was pumpin, my…, well it was hard pumping, and I got down the bottle of Evan Williams, the one with the red wax seal and set it and two jelly glasses smack down on the table, as if to call her to me. Here she came, wearing a just a little something, and tattooed on her left upper arm, “Jimmy,” and a floral heart above her right bosom, and and another real low ’round her back, and she sat cross from me at that little breakfast table, and we drank a pretty good amount.

Now then, it got time for bed, and we’d had some pretty racy, could have even called it raunchy, talk most about how I wanted to kiss and  squeeze and nurse those bosoms. Ok I didn’t say I wasn’t a little bent, and then, well you know what I wanted. She pushed away from the table, and we embraced, not kissed, and as she gathered up her little boy, she said “wait here, big man.”  I assume she was referring to the unmentioned member of my anatomy I spoke of as hard and thick and long,  and I puffed up in anticipation, and was tearing off my uniform when I heard her say “Big boy meet bigger boy”, and I wheeled about to see her standing bare breasted, naked in her bedroom door, and in my haze, such as a drinking bottle of liquor will do, I vaguely saw the outline of what she held tight in her hands.

“You aren’t nothing but a snot nosed preppy boy; my man Jimmy would cut you in two. This here’s a 44 magnum. You come through this door and I’ll  blow a hole in you.” I stood there somewhat stunned,  open gapping mouth, staring at her nakedness and the weapon. “Now look at what you’ve been wantin to see.”   Dirle began to turn this way and that, like a circus side show contortionist, revealing all, and boy, she had some pretty graphic tats on her pretty graphic parts, and she showed everyone to me. I stood there and looked dumb, nor dumbfounded, I was past finding dumb, I was in dumb. “Why, why,why?” I stammered. “Why not me?”  At that moment, glistening and slick with sweat, she spoke profound words to me that taught me more about how women love, about the nature of  love and friendship than anyone ever since, when she said: “Carol is my best friend” and turned and shut her door.

I stood there, before her closed door and considered my options. Of course, it didn’t help that I was drunk, but I did consider that she was a Kirk, and probably would kill me dead.

It was about three in the morning when I walked out her front door, I in my wrinkled white clinic coat, and bulging blue slacks. Well I was young then…and I walked through niggertown up the black belly of Atlanta, 7 or 8 miles and while many denizens looked on, no one touched. I reckon it was the way I walked; men know when a man walks like that he’s had a disappointing night and shouldn’t be troubled for his wallet.

Now I’ve done it twice, as you well know, gone after a true love’s best friend, and still no nookie. Not that its even near the same this time. I didn’t even want to fuck your friend. Hell, I’m a mess. If I knew why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing, I’d trade on the stock market. Its like I’ve been buying lottery tickets, thinkin’ I’d find a winner. You know, those scratch off ones, where you scratch the surface, and underneath, might find treasure. And here you are, solid gold!  I am so sorry, no, I am a sorry SOB, and that’s the truth.

Oh yes, Carol didn’t come to work the next day, nor Dirle, and the day after, I got fired; seems some nurses had complained about what they had seen going on in the linen closet.  Carol left Crawford Long soon thereafter, and I never saw her again. Tried to many times, so many different ways, but she never saw or spoke to me ever again. Later heard she married a Christian school football coach and had five more kids. As for Dirle Kirk, I never saw her again,  well,  except in my dreams. Didn’t know you could do that with a 44 magnum.

And to the point of this sadly true story, well really two points. First, I never finished that great novel, despite Joe David Brown introducing me to his New York agent, and his offering to stake me to a job in the Big Apple with Time Magazine, he’d been Editor in Chief there, while we waited to get “Richland Ridge” published and in print. If only he had offered me his pretty daughter!  I never finished it because I wrote…  because I loved Carol and wrote my novel because I wanted to give her a present. I wanted to give her a version of me that could do something good in the world, that could offer her and Trisha a safe secure corner in a chaotic world. I wrote it because she really was crazy about me, loved me so well, so much, put up with so much crap, so much horrible hurt and pain. I wrote it to write myself a new life;  but hell, I couldn’t leave the old one, it was too damn much fun, too damn much pain, speeding along, a life in the excess lane. So you see, Dirle was my “I ain’t playing with you no more” card, a chicken shit way of ending badly what began so well.

The second point is, I’m writing now for you. No expectations, nothing else to offer, I never will be enough for you. You deserve a wonderful life.  I’m just another man who abused you, but the difference is, this time, I really am sorry.  You remember that movie “Big Fish” how the son, played by Billy Crudup, thought everything his father, played by Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney, told him about his life was a lie, a fantasy?.  How when he died, all the characters who he befriended, all of them the stuff of myth, came to his funeral? You remember that?  How wonderful it was, what a good man he was?

Believe it, few men have survived the life I led, a life that really lasted but a decade, but what a decade, 1965 to 1975! For me, everything I believed about my life was a lie, I can’t find truth anywhere. For me, there will be an “After the Funeral” party, the one on the other side of life where all the women I’ve hurt, all the children those women aborted, all the people I’ve destroyed, all the children I fathered unknown, all the hippies I sent to jail and to hell, every one of them will be there. It will be one hell’va party, with much drinking jubilation as they lower me into the second grave, into that endless pit of fire. What did that old fella John Milton say? “I’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.”  That’s bullshit. What I want is both!

I can only say this, those who I have hurt have been the better for it.  Some learned painful lessons from the it; some saw themselves in me and changed; others were already to0 good, and stayed that way. You are the too good kind, so I guess I’ll say goodbye. Talk me out of it, please…

 

 

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The Other Road

“Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler… Two roads diverged in a wood,  and I- I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference”

Robert Frost, was perhaps 41, when he wrote this poem, “The Road Not Taken,” in 1915. He, as I am doing,  looked back into the past years of his life. With middle age approaching, with much accomplished and much yet to do, Frost considered the how his journey through life had presented different paths, and how slight was the difference between them.

When I  first read this poem, I, a budding young poet, took it to mean that our choices informed our lives, that the result was a consequence of what broad direction we took, that we were individually responsible for the outcome of our life, the destination at the end of our journey. Of course I was only nine, and as I read the Modern Library collection of Frost’s works, I had no idea of what I now believe he intended to say.

I have recently experienced an epiphany,  or as you might say or surely must believe, a hysterical conversion reaction, brought on solely by your love. Notice that I did not say by my love for you or your loss of love for me, but by your love. Memories have washed over, swept away my senses, and judgment. I am now, for the first time in my life, unsure of my outcome, of my future, and this uncertainty brought me to this page, through Robert Frost.

The poem tells me of two roads, the two paths we may choose from when we face any decision. Our choices begin with multiple possible outcomes, and if we consider those outcomes carefully  we parse them, we weigh them in pairs, , we narrow our choices and reach a reasonable decision. Frost is telling us that the last choice, is the “either/or” choice; that we attempt to reduce all arguments to the two most desirable outcomes, and that the difference, at the time we take one or the other road, is slight. What the poem is saying is that the path held both choices, that either would take us further down a road, that both were agreeable- after all they were already in our path- and that the divergence, the spread, the separation was slight at first … ” just as fair.” It is only much later when we notice the results of our choices that the consequences become clear.

I made choices long before you were born that brought me to this state of inchoate awareness. I saw a path and took it, I had a choice, I made it. What does one do when the evidence condemns the choice; the early slight divergence becomes a gulf between self and life, the swollen waters roil and drown you? One dies! And I have died.

My vision, years ago, was a life of happiness. I saw myself with a loving wife and happy children. I knew that true love was on the horizon, or just over it, and that I would find that one woman who I was meant to love eternally. I knew that I once I had that love, I would find all other dreams come true as well.

I did not see myself in a suburban wood, I did not see myself with wealth, or title, or of much importance to anyone but those I loved.

What happens, have you asked yourself, if you never find true love, or if found, it betrays you?  Where do your dreams go? Where do dreams go to die?

Let me share a dream, a simple thing to share, love and comfort and security without pretense, without the guise of intellect; a love that heals, cures, no need of pills to avoid pain, a love that causes no pain at all.  A life shared with another, mutual  partners, mutual mentors, each self sharing wisdom with each other. A dream in which there is trust that transcends all fear, where work is done and effort is spent to make the family safe and whole, and all to the purpose that each member find their road and never regret taking it.

I miss the family vacations I never took, the trips with my wife and the kids to Washington, New Orleans, Nashville, Chicago, New York, Boston, Seattle, Los Angles, Orlando. I offer you the battlefields I have seen alone, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Yorktown, Chickamauga, and fifty others.  I want to share the dams, every dam in the TVA and a few dozen others , I have seen alone. Come back with me to the Smithsonian Halls I have roamed alone, walk with me through the Rotunda of the Capitol. You and the children come  hike with me on the trails I have hiked alone. Betcha y’all can’t keep up! Lay in the warm sand with me, splash in the surf at Tybee Island, and Daytona Beach, and Gulf Shores  and why not Coney Island NY or Malibu CA?

I will always cook for you, and often something other than chicken nuggets, though I make them great and love ’em as well, and clean the house, and teach the children to be neat and organized, ( it’s too late for you, that’s why I am here) and I will go to work and make a living for us until you are famous, and you will be! I will lift you up and comfort you and protect you.

I will never be after anything but our happiness, and I will always hold you in the highest respect and deepest regard. I will love you, no matter what, until I die! In short I will take the path that I did not take before, and  I will be happy for it.

And if you do not chose to share this path with me, make certain that the man you love will give you all these things and more. Make certain he loves the woman you are, and will not change you, but see you grow in your own way wiser and more beautiful. And be certain that you love the man he is, or you will someday write a essay on life inspired by a poem of Robert Frost, and you will wish you had known, as he came to know, how such a  choice can lead to such a different outcome.

This is a short post. It is not a plea, it does not have to be answered, nor even seriously considered, no decision, no choice need ever be made, at least of my proposal. But in the most casual and light-hearted way, I  must say how I feel. As Frost said of the road he took: “Oh, I kept the first for another day, yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

Is that even possible?

 

 

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AN ORDINARY DAY ON THE MOJAVE RIVER

There are periods in our lives, at least there have been in my life, when time ceases its measured march across the surfaces of the earth, flesh and shadow are equally stilled, and moments, certain moments, may be drawn out into minutes, hours, days, months, years, or even, in my case, forty years. Such a moment for me, a moment when time slowed to an eternal pause, happened in the first months of the year Nineteen Hundred Sixty-Seven.

 

You would have to see the Mojave River, as it was then, to know how much certain places along its course resemble the River Jordan as it flows between Manasseh, Ephraim and Gad. There are places on Earth that seem to exist as two places at once, here as an original and again there, as a copy. These places seem to exist apart from the rock, sand and soil of the Earth, places that might be portals between distance and time, as where a door was left unlatched and barely swung open, a sliver of a crack; places where when standing near we might feel a draft blowing along our neck, a faint breeze whispering across our ear.

We reflexively turn our head toward that murmur; we feel a cool faint draft, and hurriedly turn up our sweater’s collar, pulling it up our neck, flinching slightly, trying to shrug off the cold air’s shiverous touch, but to no effect. The sweater’s bulky wool weaving’s hang caught on bristling hair, and taunt goose knuckles rise out of our tensing flesh.

We glimpse a burst of light; catch a darkening shadow crossing the corner of our eye, seemingly skirting the edges of ours and perhaps another dimension. Suddenly turning, what we saw is gone; what is left is the after-light, the certainty of vision, of indelible memory, written in the air, etched in streaks upon our eye’s lenses’, knotted, bound in our rising, pimpled flesh . The flashed memory compares itself with a primordial scene twisted tightly to a primeval gene.

Where were we? Were we there? And where is there?

“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” GEN 3:24.

There is a gate to Eden, G-d tells us of it in the Book of Genesis. A gate guarding the Tree of Life, that second tree so easily ignored in the infamy of Eve’s consuming of the other tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’s fruit. Can there exist somewhere another version of the Creation Myth, told to eternally innocent faces as fact? Can there be a second family of man, a second he and she who, unlike Adam and Eve, refused to eat the fruit; a man and woman so perfect that the Father to this day dwells with them? Is this paradise just beyond the limits of our dimension, just outside our range of perception; is it just a stolen glance, just a shimmering glimmer of after-light away?  It is a fair question to pose, but one that begs an answer.

We know for a fact that man fell from G-d’s Grace, to beg the question, for the Bible tells us so. The Bible is the Word of G-d. G-d exists; otherwise the Bible would not exist.   What others call a “fallacy,” and “myth,” we call Faith. Is our Faith false? Did you see that light? Did you feel that draft? Do you see the River before you? Is it not the River Jordan?

There once was, and remains still, for G-d tells us of it, such a place as the Garden of Eden, and the gate thereof, and there are tales told by others about that Gate as well as by this once and ever Postulant. Man and woman may come upon it suddenly by accident or after years of quest. Seeking it is the penultimate Biblical quest, as true in fact as the quest for the Sacred Ark of the Covenant, as real as the search of Mount Ararat for the timbers of Noah’s Ark. And yet, the Arks are the work of man, the garden of Eden is the work of G-d.  It must exist, or why would G-d have had Moses, in The Book of Genesis, write about it? Consider this, why would G-d record in the First Book of His Revelation to mankind His need to leave Cherubims and a Flaming Sword to guard a gate that did not exist?

The Gate to the Garden of Eden, Fearsome Angels and a Flaming Sword turning every way, the passage that leads deep into the Garden, to the Tree, the fruit thereof, which when eaten, conveys fleshly immortality. I have seen that Gate, and what lies before it; and I live in fear and awe of Angels. Above all, I live in fear of He who made us all. I know that beyond the blinding light and searing heat of the Sword, beyond the fierce visage of the winged Cherubim, beyond the wrought gold pickets and rails of that Great Gate, there, deep in the Garden of Eden, is the Tree of Life; the Tree of Immortality of the Flesh, the fruit of which was eaten freely by Adam and Eve, before their fall from grace.

Is it possible that God was twice betrayed? How is it so? The Almighty twice created beings, angels and humans that chose rebellion against their Creator, each time in disobedience to His will, and each time in peril to their very existence. Pride and vanity, the spirit and the flesh, the image and likeness of the Father; one fighting to be an equal, the other hiding in shame, each cast out of the immanent presence of God.

 

I know that the place of which I speak, the Forks of the Mojave, was sacred, hallowed and a womb of life, revered by holy men for thousands of years. Two rippling flows became one rivery stream astride banks of verdant Cottonwoods, which shaded the waxing sand bars and stippled soil lush with thousands of broad-leafed mullein plants and with verdant ragged leaves of stinging nettle. Men have made medicine here since man first walked this beside the river bed, and holy Datura Stamonium’s trumpets hailed the start of many dream trances and vision quests. And on the soft loamy banks of the river’s forks life spawned from the loins of wizened hoary headed men and into the wombs of the nubile, fertile virgins who danced entranced among the Cottonwood thickets.

I came to this River as a spurned lover, a Postulant come to cleanse my tormented heart, now denied my chance at Roman Holy Orders, denied my unholy union with Torquemada’s seed. My purity had earlier been taken, as a child, by a reverend torturer’s phallus; in my innocence, I sought forgiveness from my seminary’s confessor for my complicit submission to the collar debauchery. Betrayed once again by a sacred broken vow, the words of my confession reached a mighty Cardinal’s ear. He told my confessor he deemed I could not be trusted to remain a submissive victim, and he feared worse that I was a weak and languorous temptation, too easily held and too easily had. When I was called back to the confessional, seeking my penance, seeking a return to the hope of grace, my confessor, a Monsignor, told me of the looming impediments that would surely bar me from sacramental Priesthood quoting verbatim the Cardinal’s thoughts. I begged his forbearance, his mercy, his absolution. I want only to serve God, I cried, as he turned to me and blessed me. My penance, he suggested, was that I should seek ordination as a deacon, remaining in seminary, perhaps to become a brother in a teaching order. It seemed to me as if he was saying I was complicit, as if had I brought abuse upon myself. The stresses of the priesthood, the weakness of flesh, the desire for affection, a pathology which yielded these encounters, in which both man and boy were willing, were equally sinful. He blessed himself, he removed and kissed his alb, and he beckoned me to sit in a high-backed parlor chair, and sat down across from me…

Why would a child have such visions of the Beatific Beauty, and later been so easily taken? Laying still, fighting off my heart’s infection, seven towering angels astride my bed, my soul lifted from my body to look down upon my death, then spared by warmth and love, by a light that suffused an absolute knowledge of G-d, a sureness of His person and His place. White, golden, blinding, binding in the light, I became a child whose eyes were opened to everything flesh and spirit, the stories of a thousand souls became my story. The light unlocked my mind, and nothing, good or evil, was denied me, or permitted me, or allowed to confound or confuse me, for I understood that everything, every object, very action, every outcome is an expression of the Will of G-d.

There is no good and evil to G-d, there is only our choice of either within his Will. For man, there is only our obedience to his Will, or denial of it, but all of it, all life, all creation, expresses His Will. A child seeking love, seeking comfort and affection, seeking that enveloping beatific warmth, that child would know when another’s actions violated G-d’s Law, but would also know the acts of perversion themselves had no moral value. That child would know that what we call “sins of the flesh” do not offend G-d, but that when those who willingly perpetrate them deny the Laws of G-d; their body, their very disobedient being, becomes sin itself. Sin works only on the willing; when it acts against the innocent, its effect is natural, within the given order of nature; it is merely destructive of the flesh of victims. Sin does not obtain to its victim’s souls. Perversion obtains to the sinner, their very being becomes the sin; the damage sin does to the innocent is worldly; it is flesh torn even to death, but there is never caused a transferal of sin from perpetrator to victim. What this meant for me is that I was physically defiled by unnatural acts, a loss of virginity, but spiritually untouched and innocent.

What was in my trusting sweet smile that beckoned Hell for cassocked men, and polluted virgin wounds? The Monsignor asked, “Why did you give the priests what they demanded, why did you allow your abuse? Why do you now tell us these things: you can not be called by G-d to serve: to be forgiven you must admit you are sent from Lucifer, fallen and corrupt, your gentle voice and kind heart a trap for weaker men. You did not forgive, you forgot and walked away, you did not confront or condemn, you admitted flesh, traded it for His Blood. Now you want our Collar?”

How weak had I been?  Why had I trusted so? Why did a child deserve such attention, was it I that sought it? What type of sinful creature was I, that I could be used in that depredation, what was my purpose, why did I not hate those who tortured me with pleasure?

I was sobbing as the Chancellery door slammed closed behind me. I was owed Holy Orders, was I not? I heard His Voice calling, I was commanded to worship G-d and find His way in the World. Why did what they had done to me as a child hurt so little compared to the closing of that door?

The sidewalk was crowded with other Romans, Catholics living constrained by Pope Paul VI, after the Holy Madness of Pope John XXIII. Devout Catholics marching in holy contempt of a papal red-robin, the Archbishop of Los Angles, James Cardinal McIntyre. Catholic Christians chaffing under the repressive yoke of the Old Latin Church…The European Episcopacy of Apostolic Succession… centered in the Imperial Capital, in the Vatican, in Rome itself!

The few who knew me gathered around me, and they prayed, and consoled me. I spoke, I do not recall all or most of my words, but I did speak of re-birth, of a new Baptism, of being born again in Christ. These words were a novelty if not heresy for many there, but several echoed my sentiment. “We must be immersed in water to drown the old man and give birth to the new man, just as John baptized in the River Jordan. We must find a river…” There are few rivers in Los Angeles, and those that do flow, course through concrete channels leading to the sea. Someone mentioned the Mojave River, and another, an “out of habit” nun, said it looks like the Holy Land up there. Another said, there is a sacred place up there, the Forks of the Mojave.

There was our River, our Jordan. We made plans to meet in a revival at the Forks of the Mojave.

 

“Then shall the righteous man stand in great boldness before the face of such as have afflicted him, and made no account of his labours. When they see it, they shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at the strangeness of his salvation, so far beyond all that they looked for. And they repenting and groaning for anguish of spirit shall say within themselves, This was he, whom we had sometimes in derision, and a proverb of reproach: We fools accounted his life madness, and his end to be without honour: How is he numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!” WIS 5:1-5

It was circulated, in the rebellious camps of Roman Catholics, and curious klatches of reformed protestants, a good number were Lutherans, and such a conclave as we planned appeared seemly among Episcopalians, that a gathering would occur on such and such a day in the life of our nearly apoptotic movement and that rebirth would spring forth from death, we would Baptize in the River, in the Mojave, in the New Jordan, by full immersion.

The season was late winter, or early spring, in Southern California the equinoxes are hardly distinct. Chilled winds still blew down the back of the transverse ranges of the San Bernardino Mountains, but the sun shone bright and warm. I walked from the highway bridge east along the river’s south bank, among cottonwood stubs and scattered clumps of green weeds, until a garden blossomed before me, and thick stands of cottonwoods budded and opened into choruses of rustling leaves billowing before me, pools of cold clear water sprang forth from the river bed, and green budded and silken leafed plants laced around the ponds’ edges. And I knew I was at Eden’s Gate, and the River was the Jordan, the Water was Life.

I dropped to my knees, and drew from my britches, my pocket Bible, with its tiny text and a few colored map plates; it was the King James Version, the version of my maternal ancestors. I had chosen it not only because of my familiarity with “my” families Protestant King James Bible, but because the Roman Catholic Church offered no complete Doury Rheims version of the Bible available in a pocket-size. Missals, New Testaments, prayer books, devotionals and catechisms yes, the sixty-six Books of the Holy Scriptures, no.

I began to read, and though I read a book, it seemed a little time had passed before another pilgrim came, and then came another and more following them; though the forecast of cold winds and the remote location no doubt deterred others. As those who arrived congregated on the river bank hesitant to brave the cold waters of the deep pond, I waded in, and asked, “Who will baptize me, so that I might be born again?” A young man called “I will,” and joined me in the river’s rippling font, and immersing my whole body, baptized me in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. I then baptized him. It was a very natural thing to do, to join him to Christ, as he had joined me. Flushed first with the excitement of the moment, we suddenly became aware of our pale shivering selves, and waded to the shallow water and rose up the river bank. We joined the joyous congregants, clamoring about us to warm us, grasping, hugging us in prayers of thanksgiving and praise. Still, in this moment of conversion and communion, no one else of the orthodox faithful was moved by The Holy Spirit to join us in our sacramental immersion.

The blazing bonfire, started earlier, was fed fallen logs and limbs. I, heated by the fire and the passion of the prayers, soon felt dry and warm. As I sat beside the fire, we all sang hymns and said aloud the rosary, and a benediction was given, and the saints began to leave the fireside and walk toward the highway and their cars. We two Baptists embraced, blessed each other, and he, well wrapped and warmed, turned up the river side and left. I and others, after finishing a thermos of coffee, remained; we, several young men, a woman and an older man shared our praise and thanks, and talked about the Christian Church instant, the struggle for spirituality and sanctification in such a modern world as was California in the 1960’s. The tone was confessional, and our sadness was palpable. As the fire died, others determined to leave, but I and the older man remained, speaking of the spiritual world, my torments and his recent tragedy, the loss of a son. We spoke mainly of Eden, and the Fall, and in a curious way, we both felt that such a place as we were, was in fact a new Jordan, and that now, in this very moment, we were at the very gate of Eden, and both of us could hear the voices of the Cherubim calling out to us in tongues. The late afternoon somehow became brighter as the sun receded behind the ridges to the southwest, and sword light flicked among the tree branches. Our lips confessed sins, our mouths admitted guilt and shame, our hearts grieved in sadness, our souls bared our losses and we were both filled with grace. The older man asked me what it was I most wanted: why had I come there, to be baptized in the pool of this river.

Do you believe in visions, I asked? I am a sinner now, yet when I was a child, God spoke to me. When I was six, I laid very ill in bed, sick to death with Rheumatic Fever, my small body racked with fever and sweat. I felt myself drifting away from my bed, away from my body, but suddenly, I was lying healed on my bed, and beside it stood seven tall men, angels all, eight hundred feet high each, praying beside my bed. And I was lifted up toward their head, toward a warm comforting glow, borne on their hands until I was equal to the crowns of their heads, seven hundred ninety feet high, and my body and spirit were suffused with the most wonderful light, and my eyes filled with a golden glow, and I knew then that God was with me, that God is as real as His creation and that I was to serve Him forever. You see, I know God for a fact. I know each of us is his perfect work, and each of us is the perfect reflection of Him, perfect in creation. No other creature is like unto us, for we are created in His image and likeness from Clay, from the very dirt he made, and yet above all, we have a soul, which is the mirror of His eye, for we have free will, and unlike anything else, any other creature on this His creation, the world, we can choose to disobey God Almighty, we can choose to sin. This is God’s greatest gift to man, that we may obey or not obey, and thus we are able to bend the Will of God, nature, to our will. I knew all of this when I awoke, healed. My senses were then, and are now, pens that write man’s truths on God’s parchment. Our truth is Good or Evil, we are sinners or saints, and most often, we are both. I wish only to guard and guide His Children; I want to be His Priest.

He rose, stood before me, and was for a while in prayer. Then his eyes fixed on mine, and suddenly then the most remarkable and glorious words poured from his mouth, and he said, I am Christ’s Priest, and His Bishop in Apostolic Succession and I will ordain you, I believe you ready to be called to His service. Lay face down here, before me, and pray silently as I pray aloud. When I ask you, answer the questions I ask as each answer is an oath, and what we do is a sacred covenant. And he asked questions and I answered, and he prayed aloud a litany, and then he laid his hands upon me and raised me up a Priest. He said: You are Christ’s Priest. And I said “Who are you? What Church have I, what Church am I to worship in…? He answered “I am an Episcopal Bishop, my name is James Pike, and you are very irregularly ordained.” It was now dark, the embers of the bonfire were fading red-gray, and for a good while he spoke to me and questioned me, and finally he advised me. “You must finish your degree, and then I will welcome you in my Church, wherever that may be, and we will preach the Gospel, the good news, together. Let us pray.” And there we knelt, and prayed together for some time. We rose together and he said, “Gregory, God has used me to ordain you into the priesthood, you are his Priest. Pray to do good, to do His will. I am your Bishop, I instruct you to learn and grow in His Grace, and when the time is right, we will tell the world of this…this moment on the Mojave.” We spoke a few personal words and walked to the cars, and gave me his Blessing and drove away.

I took a blanket and bag from the car, and walked back to Christ’s Church on the bank of the Forks of The Mojave. I spent the night there, in a peace that passeth all understanding, sleeping for the first time in memory without dreams or nightmares, at peace. I never saw my Bishop, my Ordinate again. We spoke several times by phone, but his circumstances prevented our meeting, we awaited the moment.  Then given the opportunity, he sought God in the Negev, and gave up the ghost in September 1969. He would have appreciated that phrase, “Giving up the Ghost.”

In the End, God’s Will is always done.

 

 

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I don’t always fly, but when I do, it’s always First Class!

I don’t always fly, but when I do, it’s always First Class!

And I always wear a suit and tie, and more often than not my seat is next to young man likely worth a hundred times my wealth, wearing basketball shoes and some sort of open neck, collarless T-shirt printed with an advertising logo or meaningless or rude pithy saying and always, Help me Lord, always smelling like a metro-sexual male who lunched at a fragrance counter at Macy’s.

And I am certain he’s thinking, Oh “Shxx!” Some old dude, dressed for his own funeral. How “fuxxing” long is this flight!

As I settled into my reclining leather upholstered First Class seat, on my last flight from Sea-Tac Seattle to Reagan Washington, (I always called the trip “Washington Squared,” as in “Book me tomorrow Washington Squared,) there he was in the seat next to mine, Grunge Boy! He may have been thirty, even older, but he was dressed like a teenager from the foundling home, do they still have those? Why me on a five hour flight?

I dress for dinner, and for Church, and when ever I leave the house because I love the knotted feel of a Harris Tweed, and silky smooth Sharkskin, and the lay, the weave, of fine wool fabrics, the crispness of a starched white button down. Even causally, what can compare to the coolness of combed cotton kakki, and the bright yet faded  patterns of madras cloth.

It’s not a class thing, or a cultural thing, I want to look like my father; I want to dress like a “grown up,”  I want to be comfortable, assured and competent, and I want to pay homage to the tailors and haberdashers and seamstresses and to the cobblers who made my Churchill’s on their lasts, because any of them, any of those who have served me are worth more than I, and far more than the pencil necked prick sitting next to me, whose lack of taste and decorum assures the extinction of what I value most, a culture built on interdependency, mutual respect, and a society that has a place for all, from gentle soul to acerbic genius.

Do you notice that in the imagined future, of film and fiction and video clips, aside from conversations almost exclusively expletive driven, everybody dresses the same? Everyone wears a a zippered version of a 1970’s leisure suit? Androgyny is the style, personality is communal? Even worse, everyone is young?

I blame it all on the pencil necked pricks like the kid in the seat next to mine, ear buds crammed in his auricles,  dressed like a male skank, no doubt hating every minute seated next to me, Why, I think, I could snap that little pencil neck… and then he speaks…

Hi, I’m Mark, my Dad used to dress up to fly, you remind me of him. He passed away last year. He always said that a well dressed man could always be…

I don’t hear the rest, my thoughts are suddenly yanked back to my father’s advice, “Never judge a book by its cover, or a man by his color… and always wait until words are spoken to begin to form an opinion”

I heard the young man speak earnestly of his work, of the need for a corporate social conscience, of the value of stewardship of resources and the need of leaving a legacy for future generations, and at the flight’s end, friends, we exchanged business cards, but on the back of mine, I wrote my tailor’s name and number…

 

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Stealing Candy from the A&P

Ah, my favorite candy…I nearly did time for M&M’s…As a child I was often sent to pick up an item or two at the A&P (The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company) on Peachtree at Brighton, next to the Rexall (later Crain Daly VW and Cloudt’s). On one of these shopping excursions I was sent to buy several items, pasta, we called that spaghetti noodles, and salad fixins’ and given funds nearly equal to the cost of items: we were taught the value of money back then, with scant change remaining after purchase. For some unknown reason (likely I hadn’t done my chores and been paid my allowance), I didn’t have any money besides the grocery funds in my wallet. Waiting in line to check out, I stood next to the candy displayed in neat rows to my right, and I caught the smell of chocolate, the wafting scent of amorous delight, the anticipated pleasure of soft dark chocolate melting on my trembling lips, the pungent overwhelming bitter sweetness of sensuous mouth candy…and…I grabbed a big bag of M&M’s off that Circe’s shelf knowing full well I had not the dime to pay for it. I furtively stuffed the treasured condiment in my right pocket, knowing it would melt in my mouth, not in my pants. I checked out, paid for the pasta and fixins’, and clutching the grocery bag, headed right toward the door. Just a few feet to ecstasy, I was looking out, craving heaven on Peachtree’s sidewalk. Oh God! “You are one of the Sullivan boys, aren’t you?  “Yes sir” “I believe you haven’t paid for all your groceries, have you…? “Uh, uh, what do you…” “I mean the candy in your pocket, didn’t you mean to pay for that, let’s see it” I was shaking so hard, tears welling up, my face flushed red, my skin white, drained of blood. He took the dark brown bag of M&M’s from my hand. “Come with me.” The manager of the store had caught me, and he led me, sobbing, to his office. As I recall the event now, I had no fear of his punishment; I feared the belt, I feared being laid upon my bed and I feared the sting of the lash. But most of all, I feared seeing my mother’s face, the disappointment, the grief, the sadness I would cause her. “Young Mister Sullivan, do you know you have done wrong?” I thought how to get out of this mess, I thought to tell him I intended to come back and pay for the candy, I thought to lie to save my butt, to make a deal. For a moment, my lips started to move to calumny, I would save myself. “Sir,” I looked up at him through tears, “Sir”, his face pained with the expectation of my words, as if he knew what lies would follow, “Sir” “Sir, I…I.” I caught my breath. “I stole them, I am so sorry, I took them, I didn’t have enough money and I wanted them so bad, I’m sorry,” I sobbed. I felt his hand on my shoulder, first the left one  and then the right. Was he going to shake me, slap me, when would he call my parents? “Young man, look at me. Look at me, look at me now.” I turned my head toward his face, I opened my eyes wide to see him smiling. “What you did was very wrong, do you know that?” “Yes sir”  “But young Mister Sullivan, you admitted it, you know what you have done is wrong, and I know you are sorry.”  “Yes sir”  “Here’s what we are going to do.” He handed the bag of candy back to me. “You come back tomorrow and pay for these. Go to the cashier, and tell her you forgot to pay yesterday.”  I held the crumpled bag in my hand. “Young man, never steal. You will grow to be less a man if you lie and steal. You know its against God’s law, and it is He who will finally punish you if you go through life lying and stealing” “Yes sir” “Do you understand”  “Yes sir, thank you sir”  “You had better get those groceries home.”  “Yes sir”   There are two morals to this story, one, never get caught stealing, and two, M&M’s may not melt in your hand, but they sure as hell will melt in your pants, especially if you do get caught stealing. I can truthfully say I never knowingly stole anything again, that is, if you don’t count my time as a US Military Defense Contractor…www.bullsullivan.com.

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So it is written, so it must be…

So she wrote me this, a complete eternity ago, on the back of a “To Get List” Notes page:

Dear Bull,

I love you. You are my sun, moon and stars.You are the air that I breathe. When I’m with you I feel higher than any drug could ever make me feel. I will love you for all eternity. No man will ever take your place in my heart. which means I will never love another because you fill every inch of my heart.

Love,

Your Babee

So I now belatedly but necessarily write her back:

Dear Babee,

I love you too.  But let’s face it. When you wrote me this billet-doux, you were far less worldly than now, and I seemed to you far more magnificent than I now am. I gave you a very large piece of my very small heart, and it must have been enough to shake that wonderful woman-child you were then loose of the cultural tethers that constrained you.

I am an alpha male, and I was your alpha, the beginning of your life as a free, sentient being; as a remarkable and talented woman unafraid of the world, willing to venture where the gods are  unknown, and where will itself  is the most powerful agent of intellect.  You have eclipsed me in so many ways, and yet somehow you feel trapped in some vestige of your earlier state, bound by some undeserved loyalty to me, some anachronistic affection that constrains your movement.

I set you loose to be the best Babee you can be. I treasure your love, but I am no longer the center of your solar system, I am no longer the sun, no longer the moon, certainly not a star. I was, at best, a comet that disrupted a boring life, that illuminated your dark night sky. You are brilliant now, you glow from the light of many who are led by your wit and intellect to shine upon your heart and  your soul.

Oh how I want it to be as it was, but it never was as I wished it to be. I failed you in so many ways, until you stop counting on me. I drove you out into the light and look at you now! The eternity of love you promised has passed, you are free. Never feel pressure, never say that I cause you to feel pressured, say instead, “Your time has passed, old fool. I owe you nothing but the memories of the past you cherish, they will warm a comet until it melts, and I will think only of you as a vapor that passed my way, for a brief freeing fling, when I was becoming what you knew I would be.”

Babee, you kill me. Go, be free!

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Darkness

I’m feeling very dark right now, well, dark for me. I’m not depressed, it’s just that everything has slowed down. I’m taking longer to do usual things, delaying what used to be snap decisions, dithering over simple choices. That’s dark for me. Oh, I’m not putting cigarettes out on my forearms, or ritualistically cutting myself, other than when shaving. I can’t consider self harm, or even self annihilation, I’d miss me too much; besides, I might miss her even more, were I to wind up on the other side of some eternal impenetrable membrane, forever separated from her.

Who am I fooling?  She won’t be seeking me out in the afterlife ether; she didn’t want me in the flesh, why do I imagine she would want me in the spirit?  That’s the problem with unrequited affection, it’s based purely on a vague notion that if someone really knew who I am, they’d understand, they’d yell eureka, they’d come running. What folly, what ego-dementia drives such a false notion?  In point of fact she knows all she needs to know, she knows what she needs to know, and no, it’s not me she wants or needs.

Need and want, interchangeable? Two separate pains of one huge headache, not the same, but not separable. I don’t think you can want something you don’t need, but you must desperately need something to want it so badly that you ruin any chance of ever having it. That’s what love, real love is all about for me. Eros, physical sexual sensual, that’s easy. Touching the flesh of another human can’t help but stir desire, especially if an offer to be touched is on the table.  But love, unconditional love, no holds barred, total union, that’s impossible for a single unsecured self. An unsecured self is a very well-defined self,  rooted somewhere out side the body, rooted in the mind, not the brain. What do I mean by that?

Consider this, so much of “real” life is rooted in repetition, in ritual, in response. You say this, I always say that, you do this, I always do that, kind of like married lovers. Therapeutically, we say “You’re in a rut,” when what we should say is you are repeating the same act in response to the same stimuli each and every time.  My shirts must hang a certain way, (on wooden hangers, facing left, top button secured) my socks rolled just so, my toothbrush and paste arranged just as I found them, What? 50 years ago,?  and I always sleep on the right side of the bed, and rotate through all four positions before laying next to…next to…that’s right, my bed is empty. As I was saying, repetition and ritual. And, of course response. You scratch my back, I scratch yours; quid pro quo; please, thank you, you’re welcome, don’t I always just hate people who say or write “your welcome.”  What about my welcome? Isn’t it good enough? Aren’t I good enough? Why aren’t I welcome? Why don’t you love me?  I digress.

Ritual, repetition and response are brain functions, pure rote developed over a period of time to allow a sense of security as it relates to everyday existence. So it goes with math, algebra, calculus, engineering, physics; all science is derivative of repetition, I still can recite the multiplication tables up to 20, and do long division, and solve the first derivative, and parse a sentence, and normally know the definition of a hundred thousand words and usually spell them correctly.

You see, a self unsecured, not insecure, but unsecured, relies on such parlor tricks to advance a career, or stay married, or generally give a damn about most things in the world, and for most people, certainly not you reading this, but for most people, a brain is enough to get by; properly conditioned, you can accomplish anything…well any thing tangible. For the insecure, which is most of you, not me of course, there is always a question about why you do what you do, or how you do it, or the question of who does what to you, or other such drivel as to defy your sense of self. You may need these things explained, you may seek help, you may be given a label, such as depressed, or obsessive compulsive, or the king of current psycho-monikers, bi-polar.

That’s what she says she is, bi-polar. Which to an undisciplined and unenlightened “mind” is a marvelous excuse for never leaving the body; just like alternating current, she switches back and forth between up and down or happy and sad, or courageous and cowardly. Vacillating over all the common things of life, even love, as common as that is.  Her insecurity is just an excuse for laziness; it’s not the fear of commitment, but the work of dealing with it that the brain doesn’t want to do. Bi-polar is the slacker bon-mot of the new millennium.

Bi-polar?  It’s called emotion! It’s called creativity! It called complicated! It’s called profit by drug company’s that are enriching themselves on the plasma of your mind, on that wonderful “alternate” being that we should all acknowledge; that something of us that changes yet remains the same,  that something of self that shimmers even in the dark, faintly pulsing with self-approval, and then bursts like a mini-quasar out of the blackness and fills our life with light!

What is “unconditional love?” Of course, it means I’d die for you. That’s easy, simple to comprehend, but it so much more means I’d live for you; that’s right, live for you! Giving up nothing of myself; you in no way diminishing yourself, both of us together being in union with each other, in harmony.

That’s what an unsecured self can do: repetition, ritual, response, all necessary to the daily drudge, the perfection of which any mind will admit can be a delight; but beyond the ordinary, the expected, the necessary lies the realm of thought, the debate of purposefulness, the quest for knowledge, the kingdom of the philosophers, the rule of mind over matter. And unexpectedly, at least to most selves, here is found the passion of love unbounded by physical constraint, the dance of souls before the face of God, here is found “unconditional love”

The pity, at least for me, in my darkness, is it takes two self’s to achieve this perfection, although I’d be up for three!

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Unfriending Facebook

I “unfriended” my best friend on Facebook last week. Actually, she was really my best friend ever, but, well, I was never her best friend ever, and it just got too complicated.  Maybe its true that love and friendship shouldn’t be mixed; in any case, I was the one who mixed it up and messed it up. I had been her friend on FB for two years, and on My Space, for two years before that. Like so many pairs, we had great sex for while, but never made it to the “couple” status; just friendship and respect for each other and a sincere admiration on my part for the woman she was through all the changes in her life of the last four years. Those four years coincide with her university degree; no she’s no childish coed, but a married mom with children who became a single mom when she finally divorced the pathetic drug addled criminal she once so dearly loved, and now feels so guilty for leaving behind. Mutually assured abuse is a cultural phenomena of which I was unaware; but believe me, it exists. There is too much history to recount here and frankly, for the first time in my life, something I feel is too dreadful to dwell upon, even if I can’t resist the daily self-mutilation of the remainder of my dignity. I did beg on my knees, but it was just too damn little, too damn late.

Anyway to my point, social media gives a whole new dimension to the meaning of stalking, or that earlier psycho-babble term, voyeurism.  I know this for a fact! For nearly three years, after the party, but before the chasm, we remained friendly, even through several massive missteps on my part, not the least of which was being more than casually interested in her lifelong best girl friend. I had my reasons, my excuses, but really, they were justifications for dealing with what I assumed were her continued rejections of me as a lover and husband. I say assumed because I recently realized I had not even made her “Top Three”, hell, I probably didn’t make her “Top Ten”

I want to say that she loved me, but really she never did; she just appreciated the fact that I loved her and I expect she was at times confused by my behavior toward her; the love hate that comes from spying on someone through an electronic key-hole. You see everyday, from her first sharing her My Space address with me, friending me that first time, everyday without fail, I would look her up. She posted pictures of her family, even her ex-husbands, taken during holidays and vacations, and family gatherings, and she posted pictures of herself, taken with those cell-phone cameras, from odd and funny angles, pictures of herself at home, out clubbing, with the kids, with her girl friends.

It was so easy to see myself in those pictures, to be the one at the beach next to her; to be opening Christmas gifts by her side, to be dancing foolishly at a country night club. It became easy to think of laying with her through the night, of waking up to her next to me, of loving her children as my own. Those damn social media pages made my fantasies possible, and every day, I would touch her face with a kiss blown from my lips onto my fingertips, and know, just know, it would happen; it would become real!

Alas, such is the stuff of fairy tales and bedtime stories, and those years of tender first awakening to hopes of love, years I mistook for fun. No matter, the awesome LED screen gave her life, shared her wistful smiles, and I think she even used that screen to take advantage of me. There’s the joke! What comes around goes around, or Karma will get you, or it took forty year’s for all those women I hurt to get even with me, and when they read this essay, those who learned to read, they will know its true! He hurts, he suffers, he’s angry, but at himself.

I awoke one morning to realize that as much pleasure as her social media sites had given me, yes, even that pleasure, I was wrong to look again at her with passion and love, to peek into her life from which I had by her been excluded.  She calls a man shes seeing, a man I don’t think she loves, her “boyfriend.” She never called me that, never once. She calls him her mentor, as she once called me, but honestly, I am sure she calls the shots. And then as I gazed starstruck at the most memorable picture of her I’ve ever seen, taken incidentally, by a ten-year old neighbor who has a crush on her, as I peered into the screen’s ether to see, to feel, the softness of her face, the gracefulness of her smile, the sensuousness of her languid gait, she walking away from the camera, head turned back over her shoulders, I realized that my pleasure belonged to another, to the photographer, even if, as she later emailed me, he was her ten-year old neighbor.

I went back through the albums on-line, back through what seemed like a thousand snapshots, a thousand smiles, a hundred parties, gatherings, vacations, and not one picture of me in any of them! How is four years of fantasy possible? How was I so blind! I am not a well-kept secret, I am not her lover, her ex-husband, nor her spouse, nor her fiance, I am no longer her mentor, not ever her best friend or her confidant: I am not even and never have been her boyfriend.

In that moment, staring at my glaring absence, I had an Epiphany! No one can be what others will not allow them to be. No matter how true your love feels, no matter how deep your desire is, no matter what you need or want or even think you deserve; most of all, no matter if you know how good it would be to be together, how good you would be to her and for her; Realize this: you are just another unbalanced stalker, just another peeping tom, if she says its over.

Unfriend her on FB, My Space, Twitter or whatever. Throw away the mementos,  take her number out of your phone, try not to think of her. Unfriend her, it’s over. The other guy won, whoever the other guy is… Really, you didn’t deserve her. Unfriend her! Forget her! You never made her MySpace or FB pages; she never said, or she didn’t mean to say, she loved you. Unfriend her! Unfriend her! Please unfriend her now. Don’t wait until it’s too late, until now. Unfriend her!

 

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The Small Room

This essay is intended for adult audiences only! Contains sexual imagery and adult themes. It describes the sexual abuse of a child.

Commentary on the following essay:

The article which follows describes a particularly disturbing recollection from the author’s childhood. It has taken half a century for these words to be written, they are true and honest words, recalling the horrible abuse of an eleven year old boy, the author as a child. They are not offered as an excuse for why a life as been lived as it has, or why the author failed to accomplish in his life what he had hoped. Nor is it a condemnation of a religion or its ministers, nor a request for damages, or even a desire to set things right. The abuse of a child by a pedophile is a terrible thing. Our society condemns the crime and the criminal, yet there is little comfort in such actions as  may be brought by dedicated and often horrified public servants.

Each life is a mosaic of all the events experienced, but it is not linear, not sequential by hour, day, month or year. Connections are made when we are children which persist through out the span of our years, threads which, seen or unseen, tug us one way or another.  Some threads pull us up, tug us toward understanding and acknowledgement, they enlighten us. A coach, a teacher, our mother or father, a preacher or friend; we live better lives because we feel their influence lifting our spirits or strengthening our resolve.  We go forward through time seeking a better self, believing we are good and worthy of reward.

Other threads are anchors which hold us in a darker place, pull us toward the shoals, strip us of hope. Some of us are irreparably damaged, those children have hope dimmed and then extinguished. Others, like the author, cling to the warmth, the vague feeling of being loved, wanted, needed, understood by some powerful yet unknown force, repressed by fear and disgust, unseen yet always present.

Pedophiles seem to be clever people, they know the right bait with which to catch the child, be it a candy bar, a puppy dog or filling an emptiness that the child expresses in confidence to a counselor, a minister, a family friend.

Some act alone, driven by their demons, and snatch and grab and rape and take the life of the child, they make newspaper headlines, their victims are the subject of alerts and are the top story of the evening news. We are fascinated by the horror of the act, terrified by swiftness of the act, confounded by the meaninglessness, and saddened by the inevitable outcome.

Others, the vast and silent majority of pedophiles, seek not only sexual gratification, but most perversely, they seek a union with the child, the malevolent control of another’s life, the molding of the child’s character to the end’s, to the needs of their own corrupt psyche.

These men and women need adulation and respect for the very acts they commit, they need a sense of normalcy; they need to influence the child not only to give sexual gratification, but even more, to give their acquiescence and affection, to give them love.

This desire for acknowledgement, acceptance of perversity is no different than in those cretins who sexually and physically abuse their wives and girl friends, and in many ways the emotional needs of the victims are similar.

Pedophilia apparently is a common human condition, an anachronistic, vestigial trait that we now see occurring more often, or have finally begun to notice more often, as media and the internet make available source material: pictures, videos and stories of little boys and little girls subjected to this perversion. It can not be long before the psychologists will determine that some percent of the population is born with the condition, and that so called non-violent acts of perversion should be decriminalized.

After all we read of boy love in  ancient Sparta, of intercourse with little girls at Roman bacchanalia, of the marriages of prepubescent girls to elders in Asian and African cultures. We objectify our own children in child beauty pageants, our culture encourages immodesty, sexual precociousness, the near worship of fashion and film portraying innocence taken or worse, willingly surrendered.

The minds of children are blank tablets, but not of paper that can easily be erased, but of clay, and what is written into those minds remains for a lifetime. We must strive to keep our children safe, not just from the obvious dangers that maim and kill, but from the many silent assassins that destroy innocence and hope, that deeply mark the clay tablets that for our recollections and that even if forgotten, even if deeply repressed, shape our children’s destiny.

 

The Small Room


It seems an odd thing, to be haunted by dreams, to be tugged to and fro by shadows, to question the facts of life as they are known by yourself. A man in full, entering his seventh decade, should be sure of himself. His history should be recorded in full view of truth; no secrets of self should be hidden.  This is a story about a rediscovered memory, or series of now remembered events, that are the riptide beneath the surface currents of a lost life. Lost? Lost to demons hidden by waves of repression. “Life is a Beach” they say in Florida, a place of golden years and diluted memories. The waves that hide the sands of memory can as well, in a perfect storm, erode them.

For decades I have known little peace, which wasn’t disturbing because I learned to live atop the shifting sands. From a precocious boy, to pubescent “lad,” to adolescent lover, the shifting sands of memory masked my fearful need. Need of what? Need ignored, need forgotten,  youthful corruption,  repressed horror,  expressed affection; unanswered questions all leading to that illicit image of a mature mad man.

Am I in an asylum? Am I certifiably crazy? Neither. Am I the man I might have become? Have I done the things that I was meant to do, that by mind and temperament I was capable of doing? Have I any knowledge of inner peace. No, no, no, and no.

I am a southern man, a keeper of tradition; by our culture taught to be a gentleman.  Read of honor, duty, obligation, bred to be like the paragon, to emulate our pinnacle of true virtue, our beloved R E Lee. I grew up on the banks of Peachtree Creek, whose swirling waters still revealed the hidden minnie balls, whose receding banks yielded the brass of the fallen. I was born into a society within memory of a epochal conflict, where the children of Confederate veterans still spoke the living memories of valiant yet defeated men. Our unique culture spoke of a war lost to exhaustion, not of zeal or spirit, but of materials; and of a time and way life of life gone with the wind. My mother was southern by birth, but progressive by marriage to a man of the West, she was a convert to an ancient roman religion. I was raised on rite and ritual, which always seemed unnecessary to me. I was born in mind and heart a protestant: I would read my mother’s family Bible, it was the King James Version, it was the Word in prose and poetry.  It was written in the voice of my maternal ancestors and it was elegant. The roman Bible lacked any pretense of elegance, it was written as a reference source, a handbook for theologians, translated by French monks into English. It was seldom used, excerpted only for sermons, treated in parochial schools as neglected literature; it had not the weight of the Baltimore Catechism, nor roused any curiosity of the faithful, whose sins were so easily forgiven by a penance of praying three Hail Mary’s. I always imagined those devout Catholic mobsters of the Northeast had to say at least a decade of the rosary for each life they ended.

I began this story talking of dreams, of shadows, of repression and I will return to those hidden memories, but first, I must share a humiliation. I must tell of an often recalled shame, never forgotten, never repressed.  Picture a young boy eleven years old, kneeling on a black and white subway tiled floor before a white ceramic toilet bowl. He kneels before it naked. His pale white back faces you, his buttocks are streaked with narrow red whelps. If you could hear him, you would hear his sobbing, the catching breath, the heaving moans, the deep and sharply drawn spasms called hick-ups. Before him, the toilet lid is lifted, and  his arms lay over the bowl lip, his are hands plunged into the cold water; he is scrubbing a white garment, it is stained. Holding a bar of ivory soap, he scrubs to clean the stain, to clean the brown defecation’s streaks from the under wear’s crouch. The tile is cold, the water is cold, the room is cold. The bathroom is doubled-doored, it is  shared between two bedrooms, to his back faces his bedroom door, ahead to the right the second door opens into another bedroom, one which by happenstance, is occupied by guests, one of whom is his favorite cousin, dear Cousin. Little boys, pubescent little boys are often aroused by the cold, and by the actions of their hands. As the boy plunges the stained briefs into water, lathers them to clean the stain, the cold water splashes onto his hairless bare belly and trickles down from his belly button, and a recent distant memory seizes his hands and he rubs the soapy soiled ivory bar on his private flesh, erect from the cold room and cold water, tugging, stroking along as if he had been taught, and at the moment when his pupils were rolling up and his slim sinewy limbs were taunt and convulsing, when his breath was frozen in his lungs, at that moment, his nude cousin pushed open the guest room door, a green towel draped like a cape over her shoulders, coming to bathe before bed.  She froze mid-step, her arms flew out extended, flinging up the towel, her little girl’s body opened to his inspection, revealing what he had never seen, the female body in full.

He saw not only what was not there but in her face what her eyes were locked on, her almond brown eyes wide as saucers on her face, the white corneas pie pan size, the dark pupils fixed as in death at the convulsions she saw. Her face flushed pale, them turned crimson. He watched her breasts harden, the tiny penny sized dark buttons of flesh stiffen and pop out of her pink chest like arrow heads shot toward him. His little boy eyes recorded her image, his brain drew a topo map of her body,  a indelible record, and as his eyes fell he saw the crease between her thighs where their was nothing, nothing to hold and tug and stoke. Nothing with which to pee , just  a slightly widening crack that seemed to part as she stared at his erection, at his hand full of his little hard jutting stem, and at the soapy crinkled sack beneath it. The white lather and milky discharge coated his peppermint red stem and he suddenly let go of it; his eyes followed her eyes, and then their eyes met.  Suddenly,   just at that moment,  she pulled her towel down around and in front of her shoulders, and she pirouetted around yanking the door shut! He fell back into the bowl, and began to furiously scrub the stains until his briefs were spotless. He would latter remember how her exposed butt had a different shape than a man’s, how it looked full and round and so much softer. Neither he nor his cousin ever spoke of what occurred, but the mind is its own master, and he would relive the humiliation and arousal of the moment ever more.

To his parents, it seemed the young man would not control his bowels, that these frequent stains were a regression to his earlier years of potty training, a means of seeking attention or punishing them for some unknown perceived inequity or rule. Over the year they lasted, they even sought medical help for the child, concerned that the rectal fecal stains, the occasional blood stains were a sign of illness. A doctor of internal medicine found no disease, a proctologist found a few polyps that might have bleed but noted nothing now. Resigned to the embarrassment, the parents sent the child to a psychiatrist. The child sat in a an overstuffed leather chair, and spoke of Marcus Aurelius and Camus and Kierkegaard and of sputnik and the stars, and of his hatred of the roman way, but nothing came of it. The psychiatrist  said, “He’s just very bright and very sensitive.”

Sixth grade was a very bad year. Everywhere he looked, he saw the budding nipples of the girls beneath their starched uniform blouses. He smelled their earthy, warm wet sweat and the odor of their first periods. He was enraged by their diffidence, and their cruelty. Other boys began to grow muscles, and some even facial hair, but not him. School became work, and he looked elsewhere for pleasure. He served as an altar boy, and grew fond of drinking the Christian Brother’s wine, and the languor and bleariness it brought him. He was often sent to the mother principal’s office, and slapped hard for an outrageous comment he made about the church or God, or country. He read Mein Kampf, and read of National Socialism. He thought he had a vocation to be a priest and thought to ask the priest who had befriended him about it, but the subject never came up.

He began having strange unusual thoughts. He found a nursing text book of his mother’s, a text book of Gynecological Nursing, 1934, and with interest began to read it. The first half of the book dealt with obstetrics, and he read with wonder of the act of birth and the care and attention that pregnant women required. At the beginning of the next section, a very accurate drawing of the female genitalia drew his eyes to its very center. Their, exposed, was what was hidden in the crease between his cousin’s thighs. Terms like labia, clitoris and vagina leapt from the page, and he flipped back and forth between the drawing and the pictures of mothers delivering their babies. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, he felt a distending erection, painful and bulging. Having just read of how babies are conceived, he realized that his penis was aroused by looking at the drawn shape of the female genitalia, the shape stimulates the response. This knowledge was more exciting than what he felt.  Sitting at the desk in parent’s library, he removed his clothing, and taking large white sheets of paper, he began to draw these shapes, and as he did he became more aroused, and soon he found is hands on his penis, and quickly all the tension of his life escaped from him, and he fell back in the chair, the semen sticky and sweet in his hands. He now felt a strong connection to earlier unknown acts of relief.  Laying his left leg over the arm of the chair, he wrapped his right arm around and under him, and his fingers tugged at taunt rim of his anus, and then one finger slipped in, rubbing the tight knot of muscles around the inside of the orifice, then another finger, and then another, rhythmically plunging, twisting in and out, in and out. His left hand slid over the small head of his penis, and rubbed and turned, flesh against flesh.  His state of consciousness altered, his eyes dreamily rolled around the reddening sockets.

He felt warmth, he smelled cigarette smoke and tasted wine. With him, in the room, dream shapes emerged, and he felt kisses on his neck and cheek and lips, he felt a tongue where his left hand was, then the alternating warmth and coolness of lips moving up and down his penis. His right hand pressed all his fingers into the willing opening anus and  buried itself, turning left and right, rotating around the stretching muscle wall. He felt the warmth of a body next to his, the tickle of hair on his face, his jaws and teeth being racked apart by hot hard bony meat.  Gagging, gagging, the inflamed inserted object rolled his head over and to the side, and he shook with surges of tidal waves that filled his throat with hot salty sea water. Then it was over. His left hand was filling his throat with his own fingers oozing with semen, his tongue was licking his own palm. His right hand, streaked with brown and blood, pulled sharply from his anus, and the twelve old lay exhausted on the brown leather armchair.

He hesitated, as if waiting for another kiss, for a sign of love and warmth. His head spun around looking for…for what, for whom? He saw, he knew he was alone.

Swaggering up, he smelled his hands, saw the drawings, felt warm and slimy between his butt cheeks. He grabbed the drawings, he gathered up his clothes, and crept to the library  door. He listened, heard nothing, cracked the door, saw no one, and bolted across the hall to his room. Locking himself in the bathroom, he washed his body even as it still shook with quaking rhythms. Were there such things, he queried himself, such things as demons?

That Sunday, as he pulled his red cassock over his head in preparation for mass, he noticed a door to the right of the sacristy, next to the chancel door. The oak door seemed familiar, but was locked.  Why hadn’t he noticed it before? After Sunday High Mass, he normally loaded his Raleigh 10 speed bicycle into the the trunk of his father’s sedan and rode home with his family. This Sunday he asked his dad if he could stay, help the janitors, enjoy the exercise. When all the Missals were put in place, and the track cards all straightened, after the janitors had said goodbye, he walked past the flickering light of the ceborium, and went through the Epistle door into the sacristy.

In a vestment drawer he found a chain of keys, tried several in the oak door, unlocked it, and followed the steps down with sure certainty. The cathedral basement had been a girl’s high school, it was divided into class rooms,  many of which were accessed from the narthex stairs but none of which were here under the sacristy. Here were storage rooms, and the physical plant, the boiler and and its piping, a maze of rooms and nooks. There was even a door to the tunnel built between the church basement and the rectory.  It was said that it, and a companion tunnel to the convent, were built to allow the Catholic clergy to escape the Klan.

Though frightened, he was not hesitant to follow his feet; they seemed to know a familiar way. Toward the back, around a bend, on the left was a small room, tight against the street side below grade concrete foundation wall. It was locked, but his fingers found the key to it on the chain, and he unlocked it and opened the door.

The small room smelled of cigarettes, but otherwise was spotless. A porcelain wash basin hung from a wall, two armchairs faced a couch, candles lined a shelf, a black shiny silk caftan  was draped over the couch’s end.  In a cupboard were several cases of sacramental wine, and several silver cups. He began to shake, to feel hot, to feel confused, to feel aroused, to feel…. He slammed the door shut, locked it, turned and felt nothing at all.

That afternoon, at home, he told his parents that he no longer wished to be an altar boy. Being one, he said, took up too much time.

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Self Examination No. 1

I awoke this morning with the same awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that I have grown used to feeling. It’s a tight constricted knot like a fist that has punched my gut and stayed. My head feels light and I feel woozy.  That’s a word I never thought I’d write. Woozy. I mentioned to my friend that I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown, an attempt at half-hearted humor, and she said, “I’ve had a nervous breakdown.”  “When.’ I asked.  “Last year, in January.” I knew that, but had repressed the knowledge of it out of  fear, out of a sense of overwhelming shame.

I’m trying to fall out of love, and every instinct I have fights my desire to do so. I’m trying to take myself down from a desperate desire to have one last shot at peace and happiness. I’m trying, and this sounds really odd, to set the object of my affection free from the ravages of a relationship with me.  Well, the current ravages, as I’ve already done the major damage in the past.  I can’t help thinking that I helped caused the pain and confusion that sent her to the mental ward for a week, and that my recent attentions threaten to send her back.

Question 1.  Does she still love me?

Answer. I believe that there are embers, but that several of cruel incredibly self centered behavior has all but destroyed that love. What remains is a sense of gratitude for my help and encouragement; what is lost is a delight or affection for being with me. She truely lights up my life. I’ve told her recently that seeing her brings a smile to my face, that my heart still leaps, that I now yearn more than ever to be with her. When we first met, some four years past, or very soon thereafter, I noticed her eyes widened and brightened when she first saw me every day. They sparkled with anticipation and affection. I no longer see that sparkle in her eye. Oh, it’s there briefly, at least I imagine I see a twinkle in her eyes when she first sees me now, but the glow dies and the dullness, the scaring of her soul comes over her,  and that light, that sparkle fades, and the mirrors to her soul fog over with pain. Seeing me must be a awful combination of small joy and great despair.  She did love me deeply, she would love me dearly, but she can’t love me now. Self preservation is too strong. She is a survivor.

Question 2. Who is she now?

Answer. That’s easy. she’s not the same woman I met four years ago.  She looks as she did, well, actually she’s much softer, much more the mature woman than the ingenue. Her face has softened, her shoulders are more rolled and rounded. She carries herself with more self assurance, at a slower pace. The tension that created her exuberance, her frantic calmness is gone. She is much more a mature personality and that is reflected in her conversation. She seems far more certain that her life will be good, that she will add value to the world. She’s not certain how she will, but that will come with time.Her days of living out fantasies have been replaced with a hope and determination to be real as a woman and a mother, as a student and scholar.  She’s still skating on her intelligence, still somewhat of a slacker, but as I say that I realize all the tasks and responsibilities she completes and fulfills everyday. To be totally fair, she’s incredible.

Question 3. Why not me?

Answer. That’s easy. I was an asshole. Selfish, frightened, foolish. For the last three years I’ve been in love…with myself.  I always thought we’d be together, she’d come around. Had she, it would have been a disaster. I am awake after decades of sleep, she roused me, but I awoke dreaming. For the last three years, as I have lost everything, house, cars, wealth, work, I have hidden from the world, from truth. I have driven myself to the edge of self-destruction, it wasn’t far to go. She loved me, but never trusted me: I talked a good talk, but I didn’t walk the walk. I didn’t know the steps. Her instincts told her that I was not capable of being a good man, a good husband, a good father. She was right.

Question 4. Why not finally let her go?

Answer. I am afraid. It hurts. I love her, and respect her. She is the only woman in my life of whom I have felt such affection, passion and thankfulness. I must stop thinking of my needs and think of hers. I must stop competing for her hand. It is so hard to think of life without her, yet I really believe she no longer wants me, and wants to go her own way. This is really hard to accept, but truth tells no lies.  She is sleeping with another man. Does that sound like she needs you?  She says she does not love him, yet she sleeps with him. Does that not tell you of her that she does not want you. It must be that only the smallest memories of our time together holding, no it must be the memory of how I helped her, how I mentored her, that keeps our friendship alive. I lack the courage to break off our friendship, I must find it to free her of me. I am not being honorable, I just don’t want to hurt her anymore.

Question 5. What about self respect?

It’s very hard to have any when begging does no good.  Of course, I do maintain my dignity. Not every story has a happy ending. I am becoming a better man because of her, but to what purpose? And then I think, given our relative ages, would it even be fair to marry me? I have at most 20 or so active years. I might be better for her to be with someone who would be with her all her life, to share the grandchildren and maybe the world.  I respect my self for having such thoughts. I wish I could spend every day of the rest of her life with her. I am a good man now, I wasn’t when we met. She deserves the best, and can surely do better than I.

 

 

 

 

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