…ain’t a singer in the park or a dancer in the dark. No, he’s eighty-six years old and bipolar, and he lives down the street from my workplace, in an apartment complex for seniors with disabilities and dementia.
I’ve been struggling so hard to stay positive, but this particular bind is defeating me. Maybe, in the spirit of my last post, I should stop struggling and just be defeated.
Clarence, as I’ll call him, wanders down to the yoga studio during my shifts to regale me with stories. But they’re not your grandfather’s stories, about Normandy or dancing to the Glenn Miller orchestra or what the cat did yesterday. No, he elaborates in great detail upon all the beautiful young women (typically between the ages of nineteen and thirty) who have recently been or are currently in love with him, pausing only to gaze at me expectantly with a suggestive smile. “I’ve known lots of girls.”
Sounds cute, doesn’t it? Well…it’s not, exactly. Unless you’re reading about it from the comfort of your armchair. Or you’re a guy.
I’ve listened to Clarence for what must be hours now, about girls, metaphysics, and what he calls the “dimensional people.” (I don’t even consider the latter to be necessarily a function of his illness; otherwise “sane” people I know claim to see inexplicable things, and there’s probably a lot more going on out there than we know.) I seem to exist mainly as a sounding board and a source of energy for him; he is scarcely more aware of what I’m thinking and feeling than he is of the spittle that drips distractingly from his chin. I don’t consciously detect any vampirism during our exchanges, but when he leaves I feel exhausted, as if someone had somehow managed to suck all the oxygen out of my cells.
His visits have lately become more frequent, more uncomfortable, and even more draining, to the point that I finally attempted to take a step back and let him know that I’ve got work to do. I did my best one afternoon to put up an invisible barrier, and to respond in a way that would discourage a lot of discussion. I felt guilty for it, but I desperately needed to create some kind of boundary.
The very next morning, I spotted him on the other side of the street, directly opposite our front door, just standing there oddly motionless on the sidewalk, staring through the studio windows. Usually he comes ambling down our side of the street, the same side of the street as his apartment building, and through the door. I could be wrong here, but it looked and felt as if he were waiting — watching, at a distance — for me, like some jilted love interest, like some geriatric Lloyd Dobler without the boom box. I could feel what he was doing. I got it. It completely unnerved me.
And at the same time made me unspeakably sad.
Clarence’s wife died two years ago. He’s got time on his hands, although probably not much more, and he’s lonely. He’s told me about his suicide attempts and his visits to the “mental ward,” and it scares me to think that the real reason behind his last attempt wasn’t, as he tells it, the mutual decision between himself and his very young lady friend to cease seeing each other, but rather the rapid backing-off of a freaked-out female acquaintance like me. (I don’t know this, but I can never discern how much or what part — if any — of his narratives really happened.)
Other women at the studio have had him latch onto them for brief periods of time — there’s been some discussion among staff of his “inappropriateness” — so maybe, hopefully, he’ll move on. Frankly, I don’t like the kind of power I feel like I’ve got at the moment in regard to another human being.
…
Years ago a modestly successful singer-songwriter coped with her mentally ill “stalker” by penning a completely sympathetic and even poetic song based on his fervid, obsessive, confessional letters. It turned into a massive hit (“Possession”) that rocketed her to the top of the pop charts and made Sarah McLachlan a household name. She universalized what most of us tend to want to separate ourselves from, the delusions and disorders of those crazy people over there, demonstrating that the lines between “them” and “us” are tenuous indeed. Millions of dollars in sales testified to the obsessor in all of us.
What adds to my sadness when I think about Clarence is that that could just as easily be me. I know how days of solitude march by when one lives alone, and how important it can be to have something to look forward to. I can identify with his stubborn attraction and attachment to youthful vitality and beauty, now that he possesses neither, and I know that one day the young clerks who flirt with me at the hardware store will see only their grandmother. As the Ian McKellen character unhappily discovered in “Gods and Monsters,” intergenerational affinity doesn’t necessarily translate to the sexual. (Nor do we always want it to, Harold and Maude notwithstanding.)
Most of all, I know what it is to want someone out of reach. I can carry a flame longer and farther than the hardiest Olympic torchbearer. I know what it’s like to have a head full of daydreams and fantasies that are about as likely to come true as a childhood prayer for the resuscitation of a goldfish. I know the awfulness of becoming aware of one’s desires as an unsolicited burden to another — this is perhaps the worst feeling of all. Not that Clarence, in what appears to be his utter self-absorption, necessarily gets that part, but the possibility is painful to contemplate. Asserting myself in this case might force him to get it, where he might be better off oblivious.
I think about the far-fetched stories Clarence is always telling me, and the similarly flattering stories I tell myself. Is he really that much crazier than I am? One of my best girlfriends asked me, “Why do weird people stalk you? You aren’t weird.”
Ha! Are you so sure? Maybe Clarence senses a kindred spirit, my friend.
Philosopher Norman O. Brown famously wrote “The horror of death is the horror of dying with unlived lives in our bodies.” I feel that horror sometimes, with my years of failed attempts and bankrupt investments, a kind of impotent helplessness; I wonder if Clarence does, being that much statistically closer. I wonder if his semi-delusional obsession with much younger women is a way of vicariously squeezing more unlived lives out of the life left to him.
I can’t disown these tendencies in myself. Clarence may imagine a new May-December romance around every corner, but I keep believing that the fun will surely start tomorrow. He’s probably just as likely to have an affair with a twenty-one-year-old college student as I am to wind up with a guy so man-licious that every vaguely heterosexual female within sniffing distance stars to salivate like Pavlov’s dog. Clarence and I are both as naive and vulnerable as toddlers, although his bubble of denial protects him somewhat.
As I said before, who’s the crazy one?
….
Going back to the subject of singer-songwriters, I quit listening to one of my favorites for a long time, because like some other masters of the craft (Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Springsteen, Mitchell, Cash) she creates these incredibly melancholy characters and scenarios that can really get under your skin and bum the hell out of you. I became determined to get on the Positive train to Happyville, and didn’t want to pollute my brain. But I’ll give her the last word now.
When I was eighteen I moved to Florida
Like everyone sick of the cold does,
I waited on old people waiting to die,
Yeah I waited on them until I was.
Something as simple as boys and girls
Gets tossed all around and then lost in the world;
Something as hard as a prayer on your back
Can wait a long time for an answer.
– Patty Griffin, “Mother of God”
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