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By the end of the second week in March I was having trouble going two whole days in a row without cocaine. Mirror nights I was still writing in my notebook; days-after I was rarely reading what I'd written. I bought new books for my collection, continued to work out on my established schedule, read when I could concentrate, enjoyed the Tucson spring, and watched a lot of television, often six or seven hours a day; unless I used coke, I lacked energy to do much else. I asked myself whether, since I felt so much more than usual while using, the trade-off was acceptable? Likely not, I answered; but however foolish and problematical my mirror nights sometimes seemed when I was undrugged, I knew, as I lay holding my stiffened fool's wand, that to abandon this abandoning of myself to feeling would be to accept a lesser world than that, the nights allowed, in which I lived. Was I yielding to a pattern which, if it didn't kill me, would irreparably damage me and leave me unable to feel or love at all? I hoped not and cautioned I beware. How long could these extraordinary nights remain so fresh? I didn't know, but so far they mostly had, and I was still convinced my story of a man who ingested an illegal poison to feel was a good one.
Today, March 13th, was Lee's thirtieth birthday celebration (her actual birthday was day-after-tomorrow, the 15th) and I was driving my chair the four miles to her house. She was now the age I had been when I had met her. After she and I had become lovers I’d thought of her now and wondered what she would have come to think of the older man she'd loved.
"How are you?" Lee asked searchingly soon after I arrived.
"Bad, actually very bad. I'm okay but I'm not succeeding at anything I'm trying to do."
"Are you still trying?"
"Oh yes. Yes yes yes, but. . .--our time together three weeks ago I was so dull! There's not nothing to say between us! I'm not only writer's-blocked, I'm tongue-tied!"
"You're a very unusual man. So emotional! I sometimes forget how attractive you are."
Later we were dancing. (Dancing in a wheelchair, like most free-form dancing, requires only confidence, and the beers I had had gave me all I needed. I kept time of a sort with the chair and un-self-consciously bobbed my moving parts, no nasty touching necessary in these enlightened times.) I laughed, remembering something from the summer.
"What?" Lee said.
"I was thinking of Joyner this past summer, saying to her while we were making love, 'This is real.' And she said, 'This isn't real.'"
"Joyner? Oh, I remember. From the farm. How did that make you feel?"
"Like she thought she wasn't there. Like part of her, the part I was making love to, wasn't there. It was spooky and sad." (This is the first I've mentioned Joyner, you haven't forgotten her; she will appear--but only briefly--in Part Two.)
I rolled toward home at sundown. I hadn't spoken of my book but hadn't meant to. I’d spoken to Lee and was glad I had, felt clear with her again.
_____
The night of my dinner date with Julia I got to the restaurant and was seated at a table a few minutes before 7 P.M. At 7:10 she found me. As I’d sat at my table she'd arrived and waited at the bar, which would have been a tactically superior place for me to be.
"Waiting there brought back memories," she said. "I've drunk a lot of wine sitting at bars."
"You quit?"
"I had to even though I didn't want to. My arthritis was just too bad. I quit everything. I'm careful what I eat and drink now. I had a lot of habits, and most of them were bad."
"You look great," I said.
She did, her hair in an elfin peak, her make-up carefully understated. For me, I thought, then edited the thought to the humbler, to please herself by being pleasing. I'd once implied to Faith that she wore make-up because it was expected of her; she'd taught me it was fun, that she was a painter and her face her canvas.
"Thank you," Julia said.
Having learned she drank no wine I ordered none. I knew that after my second glass whatever gleam there was in my eye would be accompanied by a foolish hanging of my nether lip I didn't want to impose on (or reveal to) her. In the past few years Julia’s mental health had improved as dramatically as her physical, she said. She wasn't lonely, was busy, was writing, and the drawing class she taught was a source of satisfaction to her, as was her income from it. She had a grant too, she said, and, with both, was poor. I felt I could fall in love with her easily, liked her and wanted her to like me. But how would we court? I'd have liked mutually to break through our super egos by using substances together, but that was not an acceptable option. She walked with a limp I guessed was painful and to get around she drove her car. Not only could we not do substances together, we couldn't go places together. She couldn't walk or bike beside my chair; I, even with her helping me, couldn't get into her car.
I didn't talk about my writing's subject matter but did about its being blocked. "I seem like I'm procrastinating. Then I manage to write but, when I read it, if I read it, it discourages me. I can't definitively begin. At least I don't, I haven't."
I'd not known what role I'd project tonight and didn't like that it was The Blocked Writer; I got little sense as the evening progressed what, given my current obsession, I might do for Julia. I'd hoped to talk in a way that might breach my isolation. I hadn't. We were together nearly two hours; I liked her and was interested in her, but I was relieved as we parted to be freed from the role I'd assumed.
I didn't know where she was going when she drove from the parking lot. I went to Delectables, my favorite hang-out and less than a block away, for coffee and a glass of wine. (The next time I saw Julia was in the Tucson Public Library in 1994. I'd done no coke in more than three years, smoked no pot in almost two. I didn't speak to her. Next time, I thought, I would, but there was no next time.)
_____
Lee's birthday I was at my typewriter sgurding and for the third time writing Maria. An hour after I'd begun I cruised out of the Arizona room, through my bedroom, small front hall, and the living room, and into the kitchen, but I soon returned to my typewriter, did another line, and began a fourth letter to Maria, this one about Julia. After finishing three pages, with which I was pleased, I wanted to feel, and though it was barely 5 P.M. I called Faith to help me to bed.
I'd felt better about my relationship with Lee since her party, and as I'd lain feeling in the hours just passed (it was now 8 P.M.), I'd imagined phoning her. I'd even made notes from which, if I did phone her, I intended to read. I knew reading from notes would be ridiculous but I wanted to trust Lee with my secret life and invite her into it, and that I had to write down and then read what I wished to say was part of the story. I reached for the phone and dialed her number.
"Hello," she said.
"Happy birthday!"
"Thanks Hon."
"Going out?"
"I'm just getting dressed. I'm going over to Carlo's." (Lee and Carlo had been a couple for almost two years.)
"I called to say happy birthday, and because I haven't had the words to say something and now I think I do. I even wrote them down because I knew that otherwise I'd stutter and lose them--and besides, I want to know for what I'm writing exactly what I actually said after I say it and I know I'd forget."
"Read it? You can't just say it?"
"Sounds crazy, eh?"
"Go ahead," she said, resigned.
I read my clumsy and inadequate message clumsily, not stuttering but pausing inappropriately, and ended by asking if she would "sit twenty minutes with me while I touch myself and say whatever comes into my head to say."
"Only twenty minutes?" she said.
I'd usually fantasized being accompanied for an hour that was broken into three 20-minute segments. Twenty minutes was neither too long nor too short, I thought, and it was my plan to do lines and smoke between segments because I was best able to enter the within-the-feeling space immediately after doing lines. I'd dropped the second and third segments under the illusion that asking for twenty minutes would seem more reasonable than asking for an hour.
"It could be an hour, it could be anything," I said.
"That's it?" she said.
"That's it."
"What would I do?" Lee asked. It was an intelligent question to which I had no ready answer. "You would ask for me to feel for you," eluded me.
After the call, during which I never had become articulate, I wrote in my notebook for forty-five minutes, unaware I was incoherent. I paused and did a line and felt. I wrote again. I wanted to do another line before lying back but first I wanted Afrin, a decongestant spray I'd taken to using to clear my nose so I could snort more effectively. (Even when not using coke I was more often than not a mouth-breather.) I called Faith but she wasn't home and I left a message on her machine asking that she call, did lines as best I could, smoked, and felt. I wrote:
9:42
Counsel no more,
To stop for the night.
No, I want.
There still is time for bliss.
If Faith calls after ten thirty I will not ask for Afrin--a pledge I make so that I may be allowed to ask for it if she calls earlier!
Faith called before ten thirty. I was erect when she came in and gave me Afrin.
The next day I felt at peace at having again exposed myself to Faith. My feelings about what I'd said to Lee, though, about which I'd felt easier, were confused and included more than a little embarrassment. As days passed I found myself hoping more and more that she would never mention it, and when eventually she did, I responded evasively and changed the subject. I had dared imagine that, clarity lacking, I'd use her questioning to help me toward it, but the tactic had failed.
____
I took March 16th and 17th off from cocaine but, the 17th, had Faith leave me with the mirror and propped on pillows, the first time I'd had her leave me so when I wasn't doing coke. I wanted to see whether the sexuality would be intense enough to keep me at it if I were drug free. The experience was inspirational. I read the entries I'd written in blue in my notebook March 9th; I edited in red and imagined editing in green another time, then black, and so on, till what I had was layered and articulate. I knew if I tried and tried and tried, worked, worked, and worked, I might write what I wanted to. I knew it. The possibility that pot alone, plus the mirror, might help me work gave me hope. Coke was obviously dangerous and debilitating, and if without it I could write as well as I seemed to be tonight then I must do it. I was pleased with this cokeless sex-and-mirror night, however uncompelling I had found it sexually. (I never again would use the mirror without coke.)
_____
March 20. After Faith left me tonight--with mirror and drugs--I lay back and touched myself and for the first time on a coke-and-feeling night felt nothing. A surprise; and not a pleasant one! Minutes passed. I usually wrote in my notebook because I was feeling so much and wanted to describe the thoughts that were generating and intensifying the feeling. Tonight (as on the 17th) I wrote because writing held my interest whereas touch had not.
I stopped writing, did two more lines, smoked two hits of pot, and lay back. In my failed phone call to Lee I had said I would like to tape record our time together. Without a recorder, I had doubted my ability to recreate accurately whatever would happen. My feeling tonight began as I realized I could record even without a collaborator; it soon intensified as I imagined I was doing a live radio show, Aural Sex, on which I took listeners' calls and made love as I replied. I described what I was doing and what I was feeling and then apologized to any discomfited station hoppers who'd tuned in innocently unaware of the show's sexual content. My apology interrupted my feeling, but not making it seemed discourteous and the need for it had begun to distract me. I then resumed the show and, before I finished, felt myself quiver and come, both hand and penis. Soon, in my hand—this orgasm of the hand a new sensation--and all along my stone-hard satin-surfaced staff, within, without, I came again.
_____
To go to the next part of LOVE NOTE click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.
Edited by Coach, 13 July 2006 - 09:29 PM.
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