I’ll be amazed if this blog has any readers left pretty soon…it’s been about two months since I last posted. Part of that has had to do with the debilitating migraines that returned in full force with November’s violently schizoid weather and continued well into December. I’m certain I experienced a dramatic drop in my seratonin levels, too, as the daylight hours dwindled down to eight and once-active possibilities seemed to settle underground with all the other dormant living things. My unstoppable winning streak ended. And I found myself wondering, again, whether one can really control things like desire and chemistry — or whether, to quote author Jeanette Winterson again, “passion commands us, and rarely in the way we would choose.”
On the more positive side, the space created by the sudden excommunication by my infuriated “best friend” allowed me to have more time and energy for an old college friend in New York who needed a lot of long-distance support in ending a dangerously abusive live-in relationship. There’s no way I would have had the emotional wherewithal to spend half as much time on the phone with Laura if my other friend were still calling me all the time. I need serious down time to myself. So that was a trade-off that worked out for the best.
**
In the last month or so it’s felt as if my life were loosely following the script of some highly unoriginal romantic comedy or sitcom. Nearly every one of these contrived narratives uses a combination of familiar plot devices. In the sitcom that has been my daily life, the plot devices involved have been:
1. Two main characters who have great chemistry and palpable sexual tension (which the audience is well aware of), but only one wants to take it to the next level
2. The other party has turned him or her down, usually in favor of a third party
3. An alternate love interest for the rebuffed party, who.knows this person would be a better choice but can’t get excited about it
4. A twist in the plot involving a crisis, mistaken identity, and/or separation, which causes the rejecting character to examine his or her feelings for the other
5. A moment of truth with the alternate love interest, who exits the picture
Sounds like Moonlighting, or Friends, or The Office, right? But I’m talking about stuff that has really happened to me lately. Without the neatly tied-up ending.
**
Things began to sour with Jamal when I tried to pay him a compliment. Haltingly I tried to tell him (after we had a lovely Thanksgiving with my friends) that I was getting over a painful incident involving a male friend that had only reinforced some old emotional wounds, that I was trying to make better choices for myself, and that the sweet things he’d said to me had helped me through a difficult time and made me want to spend more time with him.
Maybe he would have accepted that if I hadn’t only hugged him good night that night, I don’t know. I just didn’t feel like doing more than that — not yet. I figured there was plenty of time and that we could take things slow.
Later in the week, during a long phone conversation, he angered and upset me by telling me it didn’t sound to him like I’d let the other thing go. Stung and defensive, I told him I was doing my best — that sometimes our emotions don’t always catch up with our conscious decisions — but that I’d come a long way in breaking out of many of my self-defeating old behaviors, and that I thought I was doing well.
He still didn’t buy it. Getting hot in the face, I felt frustrated and patronized — suddenly not so sure I wanted to hang out with Jamal after all. I stayed angry for days, and didn’t call. He didn’t call either. Not surprisingly, I soon got ill with more migraines and stomach trouble, and was out of the office for five days in a row.
**
While I was gone, the sad and shocking news got around the office that the teenage son of a middle-aged coworker, a woman whose first name is very similar to mine, had died suddenly. Our disappearance from the office at the same time only created further confusion for a caller named George who was already constantly confusing our names. George became one hundred percent convinced that it was my son who had died, and he managed, through sheer dogged insistence, to convince several other people — including Ted — that this was the case. As I heard later from George, the two of them had a very heated argument about whether or not I had a son, and Ted got very upset. So upset that several people felt the need to tell me about it when I got back to work.
(As he told me later) Ted walked around with a “hurt heart” for the next two days, showing up nicely dressed on the day of the memorial service to go there from work. Then he talked to Jamal in the kitchen. I don’t know the details of what was said, but it started to dawn upon Ted that George had been sorely mistaken. Ted promptly gave George hell (which I also heard about from George later). Not being close to our coworker, Ted did not attend the memorial service.
When I finally came back to work on a Wednesday, unaware of the whole preceding drama, neither Ted nor Jamal were around. George and a couple of other guys filled me in on the case of mistaken identity and on Ted’s violent reaction. Ted wasn’t there on Thursday during the day shift, either, although I glimpsed him coming in as I was leaving. I wondered about Jamal, debating whether or not to give him a call.
On Friday, Ted arrived late and nabbed the empty station next to me. When we experienced a lull in calling, he cried “I’m so glad you don’t have a son!” and hugged me, telling me how brokenhearted he’d been for my sake and filling me in on the missing part of the story. I must admit I wasn’t displeased to be the recipient of his attentions for the rest of the afternoon.
For the first time in weeks, in fact, my pledge rate climbed out of the toilet. (The previous week I had gotten a quota warning for poor performance.) Ruefully I had to admit to myself that being close to Ted again felt better than anything else had in a while — even the attentions of a suave, handsome, younger admirer. I also felt overwhelmingly horny for the first time in God knows how long. Shit. I’d done my damnedest not to, but I had to admit I still wanted to jump this old fool, who probably wouldn’t know a good thing if it bit him in the ass. And I would, too.
Ted left at shift’s end to go to a yoga class (he has lately become a yoga addict to rival Sonny) but first he drew me in for a squeeze. “Mmm,” he exclaimed, “your hair smells yummy!” When I pulled away in a hot confusion and murmured something about my fruity hair product, I saw him flushing crimson, as if he were a shy nine-year-old instead of a diffident forty-nine-year-old. I wanted to follow him out of there then, to yoga, or bed, or the moon, it hardly seemed to matter.
Good-natured, hyperactive young Tim, bouncing in his chair and reeking of Axe and cigarettes, decided to tell me his life story that night between calls. As I listened to his painfully honest tales of substance abuse and rehab I wondered if there weren’t in fact something morally objectionable about using a recovering codependent to prop you up emotionally or otherwise when it wasn’t really him you were interested in.
**
On Saturday morning, I got a goodbye text message from Jamal, saying that he was moving to another city two hours north. That day.
What??!!! I called him almost immediately.
It was true. He had been presented with the opportunity to move upstate, and had jumped at it. His buddy Joel, whom I knew, was already living up there in a group home for recovering men, and could probably get him a job at his company.
As shocking as this was, I relaxed. This development seemed to me like the best possible thing that could have happened as far as Jamal and I were concerned. There would be no awkwardness at work now, no confusion, no frustrated expecations. Feeling free to speak frankly, I admitted to Jamal that he was at least partially right, even though the things he had said had gotten me so angry I hadn’t wanted to talk to him for days. I wasn’t over the other thing, and I had been trying to force things with him. “Wanting to want something isn’t the same thing as wanting something.” I didn’t say anything about Ted. Nor did he.
Jamal and I said a number of nice things to each other and parted on good terms. I think he understood it wasn’t anything personal.
**
The resemblance to a rom-com or sitcom script ends there, however. There are no grand moments of truth ending in mad kisses to relate, nor even any coffee-table-smashing resolutions of sexual tension to report. No, it’s still The Same Old Story I’ve gotten stuck in a thousand times already, not some feel-good chick flick from the producers of When Harry Met Sally.
On a day Ted had stood perilously within what Americans consider their personal space radius and provoked me to want to pounce on him like a cheetah (is it his pheromones, or his body heat, or both?) I overheard him talking to a buddy about the candle he had just given his girlfriend for Christmas, as well as the little end-of-year paper-burning ritual they had performed together. It sounded ever so precious. Yes, I’m being sarcastic. Hey, Teddy, here’s a New Year’s resolution idea for ya: quit yanking the chain of your part-time bitch if you have no intention of ever giving her a bone.
Because while I’ve fallen back into suffering agonies of lust that keep me awake at night like the pangs of hunger, this pot-bellied middle-aged dweeb is apparently getting off regularly with his darling li’l’ gal pal, content to just flirt with me for kicks. After I’ve completely blown it with probably the hottest guy who’s ever been completely and totally into me. Whom I just couldn’t get all that hot and bothered about, honestly. (I was really willing to try, though.)
What a fucking vagitator. That’s the urban slang term I discovered for the male version of a cock-tease. Vagitator. Getting a lady’s vag agitated for nothing.
**
Needless to say the negative self-talk returned with a vengeance, along with every alarmist and abysmal prediction about the rest of my life based on the precedents of the first half. At Christmastime, no less — when my family members like to parade their shiny happy victorious Christian lives and families under my nose, while I’m out here soldiering on alone, feeling like a loveless failure. You will never be whole and happy, warns a voice religious-recovery specialist Marlene Winell calls my “idea monster” — a voice I internalized via my indoctrination, but which the Bible-bangers would refer to as being “under conviction by the Holy Spirit.” Your life isn’t working, see, and theirs are, because they’re “surrended to Christ,” or whatever ultimately hollow relibberish they make sound like something deep and meaningful.
As I have to remind myself, I already tried, with Herculean effort, to drive the lemon they’re trying to sell me now. Part of my core damage has to do with feeling thoroughly rejected and abandoned by their apparently very selective Big Daddy Himself. The grace and joy and supposed “relationship” they crow about endlessly was never part of my generally wretched experience as a wannabe disciple.
Of course I must not appear even the least bit vulnerable in front of my family, because when they smell blood, that’s both their vindication (poor, misguided, Prodigal daughter, trying to live without God’s Wonderful Plan For Her Life! ) and their invitation to invade, like good Christian soldiers, and pour their Salt of the Earth on my open wounds.
An objective and empathetic friend pointed out how profoundly disrespectful their behavior is toward me. I had never thought about it quite that way, but it’s true: they have never trusted me and can never trust me as my own authority, nor even allow me my fricking privacy. Wielding their rigid dogma like a bludgeon, my family members continuously and with unmitigated audacity smash my personal beliefs and my choices as inadequate, mistaken, and wrong. Is it any wonder that even as an adult I’ve been paralyzed by a lack of self-confidence?
I spent most of Christmas Eve in tears, watching the film “For the Bible Tells Me So” (about the ongoing Christian Right vs. gays drama) and grieving the fundamental rejection the fundamentalists necessarily — by virtue of their absolutist beliefs — perpetrate upon each and every defenseless child’s natural soul. My kinfolk claim to love me, but that love is conditional, predicated upon the nonnegotiable refusal to accept any deviation from the Truth. So it’s never really me they love, but some idealized, sanitized, Christianized concept they hold in their minds of me, some supposedly “real me” who loves (their patently horrifying) God deep down beneath it all, and who bears little relation to the complex and distinctly agnostic individual I’ve become. Things like unorthodox and theologically incorrect ways of thinking and an immodest sexual appetite are unfortunate and unseemly manifestations of “sin,” not part of who I truly am. Whereas, for me, these curiosities and passions define me. So I am in effect mostly invisible to them.
I cried a lot this holiday, lonely and feeling as if that loneliness were in itself some kind of judgment, damning my life path. Certainly my relatives would say it was so. Look at them on Christmas day: seemingly blessed, successful, prosperous, happy, secure in their “salvation” and enjoying a feast around the family table to celebrate their Lord and Savior’s birth. And here I am, two thousand miles away, dangerously poor, alone, aging (in this culture, depreciating in value) as we speak, living in decidedly precarious circumstances without any kind of safety net, not even remotely “successful,” once again aching for the touch of a man I can’t have.
As if in an act of mercy, my unconscious proffered up an attractive suitor in one of my dreams, a man I’d never met but who was both attractive to me and enthusiastic about being with me. This did help to remind me that just because I’ve had one more frustrating experience (after many such frustrations) doesn’t mean that all possibility is lost forever. It just seems that way right now, having driven off the most attractive prospect on my horizon, who in all honesty didn’t do it for me, and knew it. (Tim, sadly, doesn’t really do it for me either.)
**
What truly saved me from despair, however, was one of my favorite films and one of the few I own, 1998’s Pleasantville.
For a “fantasy” film involving two teenagers who get pulled inside a 1950s television show, it never ceases to impress me in its accurate representation of the conflict between the conservative love of tradition, safety, control, and order and the messier, riskier (more “liberal”) celebration of free thought, feeling, spontaneity, and uncertainty.
The film is understanding and sympathetic toward the former view: at the outset, we see a montage of modern-day high school classes and assemblies dealing with the daunting subjects of the AIDS epidemic, an impossibly competitive job market, climate change, and famine. Alarming stuff. No wonder so many people today long for a simpler, safer, more “innocent” time. What’s more, the patriarchs of idyllic black-and-white Pleasantville, notably Big Bob the mayor (played with bluster by the late, great J.T. Walsh), are essentially well-intentioned (if controlling) small-town types who try to maintain civility even when their way of life is seriously threatened. .
But it’s clear which side the film is on. Gradually it brings into living color the characters who, one by one, begin to access emotions, desires, and complexities within themselves that had lain dormant in Pleasantville’s predictable, antiseptic universe. Simplicity, order, and innocence are compromised as the protagonist David(Tobey Maguire)’s TV-land mother, Betty (Jane Allen) falls in love with the owner of the local soda shop (Jeff Daniels), who is awakening to his powerful artistic impulses and turning into a wonderful modernist painter. Goodbye, Father Knows Best!
The most important message the film holds for me is the reminder that the outer appearance of the “shiny happy” idyll, the perfect 1950s nuclear family — conservative and squeaky-clean and unambiguous — is always repressing or missing something vital, is actually antithetical to authentic human life. “You can’t stop something that’s in you,” cries David, during his trial in a courtroom clearly modeled on the one in To Kill A Mockingbird. In the end, he manages to show even a horrified Big Bob that the full range of human color is in him, too. Despite what conservative religious zealots like my folks believe, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
When David returns to his present-day home and his real-world, divorced mother (Jane Kazmarek), he finds her crying in the kitchen, having called off her weekend getaway with a younger boyfriend. His responses sum it up for me.
David’s Mom: When your father was here, I used to think, “This was it. This is the way it was always going to be. I had the right house. I had the right car. I had the right life.”
David: There IS no right house. There IS no right car.
David’s Mom: God, my face must be a mess.
David: It looks great.
David’s Mom: Honey, it’s really sweet of you, but I’m sure it does not look “great.”
David: Sure it does. Come here.
David’s Mom: I’m 40 years old. I mean, it’s not supposed to be like this.
David: It’s not “supposed to be” anything.
It’s not supposed to be anything. There is no “right life” — contrary to the popular myths I was fed from birth. What there is is my life.
And no, thanks, I have no desire to return to a black-and-white world.
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