Help
The tapes were still mostly unnumbered but I’d given each a title I hoped would spark my memory and today, August 20, 1988, I had listed the titles in my notebook. I liked my notebook work: notes, poems, lists, and drawings, most of the drawings of an ovoid with a pair of antennae, four arms, and two legs.
(Only Elvis, the Wurtser I had moved out in 1986 so Brian and Ellen would move in, had denied to my face that what I did, not just in my notebooks but at the typewriter, was work. "You're not a writer," he said accusingly. "That's not how you make your money. You're a businessman." What money I made was then from selling cannabis. It was 1982 and I was living at Wurts Farm with him and Marjorie, each of whom resented the time I spent at my typewriter. I'd asked them not to speak to me while I was writing, not to interrupt my work. "You're not serious. You're a fake. What you're doing isn't work," Elvis insisted.
("You may be right," I said, hoping to limit the disruption, "but I don't know it yet, and the only way I have to find out is by keeping at it. When I'm at it and you shift my focus to you, I'm likely to be rude except for the simplest matters, or the most urgent--'I've eaten the rat poison.'"
("You're rude anyway, and I won't eat rat poison, no matter what."
(Very wise.)
I wrote a letter to Lee yesterday and this afternoon added a postscript: "Faith's taken to crossing the daze off her calendar that separate her from Throck. She really is worried about him, afraid he won't take care of himself. She was I think serious this morning when she asked about going home early. Throck'll make it without her, but if she is in a really deep funk and I notice, am sensitive to its seriousness, I may leave early or try to find someone to fill in a few weeks so I can stay and let her go. She seems to like it he's so dependent on her and be confident—determined--he'll remain so. He is a helpless dude! The door to the garden house won't open or close anymore; instead of fixing it or getting it fixed, he's going in and out the window!" (I would fly Faith home before the end of August, stay another month myself.)
Tonight I had a fresh tape, Tape 7, in the machine. I recorded a few minutes of Faith’s and my chat and then, when she had left, spoke about my accumulating tapes, my unwritten book, and, eventually, my world, finishing: The fear, burgeoning, ubiquitous, is dangerous to
the stranger. All of us are strangers. My left leg was over my right and propped on pillows, my erection strong.
Soon after she had left I heard Faith hurrying down the stairs. She came in, hurried to the bureau without looking toward me, found a cigarette she'd left burning, put it out, told me what she'd done, said she'd gotten to it just before it would have scorched wood, and left.
The orgasm, the orgasm that began just now when P. was here, perhaps just before her entrance, went on after; it had risen as the oceans rise with the incoming tide; has risen since and rises still, changes still, intensifies. I feel. I can feel. I can feel!
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8/22, Faith 19. For her birthday today I gave Faith a crystal ball. She cares mightily for birthdays, and I like pleasing her as much as she does pleasing me.
She'd set me up and left and I, alone, unheard, was speaking to her. You are in the kitchen getting yourself Lucky Charms. I spoke at length, said what I imagined I would say were she with me. I hoped that if she did come in (she didn't) I'd play the tape that I was making. Had I been in love with Marjorie as I had been with Lee and Jane, I said, I'd have lacked the dissatisfaction that had led to the conversation in which she told me that she wanted me to feel not what I thought I ought but all I might; had we not had that talk, I said, I thought it probable that I never would have entered the physical wonderland to which she and our poison of choice had that night brought me. I reached a period and took a breath, my hard-on resting in the palm of my left hand; I then resumed haltingly, clumsily, thoughtfully, stupidly, trying my hardest to say exactly what I meant, say words that I would feel.
In my
imagination
it unfolds very neatly,
this history of which I wish to speak and write, and
I know what to say and what to write--
except I don't and . . .
--I paused and smiled, spoke matter-of-factly--
, well, regardless, trying--working!--keeps me busy and happy.
The next morning I didn’t wake until almost eleven, when Faith came in and began chores. They were done by 1:15 and I then napped till 3:00, dozed till 3:30, and was up at 4:00, as usual hung over and beat. Busy and happy was hardly the whole truth. I thought I'd feel fine with a line, and that if I was going to do coke later, as I thought likely, I might as well do some now. There were reasons I abstained, among them my writing since the poker game. It wasn't going well.
I very soon decided to cruise, turned left at the road and went two miles toward town before turning back. The tip of my penis hurt and I wanted to be home, did the 4- mile roundtrip in only 40 minutes, about as fast as possible. Home, I scribbled a few terse notes in my notebook and then resumed reading Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way, the characters of which were my age, had my social concerns, and felt about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher much as I felt (not good) about President Ronald Reagan. I made it to bed and to sleep undrugged.
_____
Twenty-five years ago today, Saturday August 24, 1963, the sun bright, the sky blue, Anne and I drove across the bridge out of San Francisco. In my wallet I still had one of the three lubricated rubbers I'd bought for our South Jersey rendezvous a year and a few days ago. We had used one then and used the second night before last, making love which had settled neither's doubts and met neither's needs.
Anne had spent early Friday afternoon with Roy and had told him she and I were getting married. That night we'd gone to see Lawrence of Arabia, and through the long first half, Anne, sitting next to me, had cried. Regardless of her feelings for me she was in love with Roy. At intermission we stood in the aisle in front of our balcony seats and I put my arm around her shoulders.
"Do you want to talk?" I said. She nodded, crying. "Shall we go?" I said.
I held the door for her and followed her down the steps and out a door onto a grubby side street about a hundred feet from the corner diagonally across from the Greyhound Bus Station. We stood on the sidewalk by the theater in the cool summer night.
"I don't know what he's going to do," she said. "I can't do this. It's wrong."
"Do you want to see him now? Can we find him?" I asked.
"He may be gone. He said he thought he'd go to his parents' for a while. He said he didn't think he could stay here."
"His parents?"
"Where he grew up, in Minneapolis-St. Paul."
She turned from me and stepped away, trying to stop crying. My eyes were dry. To my left was a grated window, a marble resting on the dirty ledge behind the grate. I'd f*cked up just as badly as I'd feared I might, and here we were. I reached through the bars and touched the marble, which was clear glass with blue swirls the color of my eyes in its center. Anne's left eye was green, her right brown. The marble rolled toward the edge of the ledge and fell, hit the lip at the bottom of the theater wall, bounced, and rolled toward the street. Whether it rolled all the way to the curb and fell into the gutter seemed significant to me. It rolled to the edge and fell.
I went to Anne and turned her toward me.
"He was going to take the bus," she said.
"Can we stop him? Would he leave from over there?"
We crossed to the terminal and learned that since Anne had talked to Roy two buses had left for Minneapolis-St. Paul and a third was to leave in twenty minutes; Roy wasn't in the boarding line and Anne talked the driver into letting her board to look for him, but he wasn’t there either. We waited in the terminal until the bus left.
I drove through the unfamiliar San Francisco streets as Anne directed me and then waited in the car across the street from Roy's apartment while she went to see if he were there. She came back quickly.
"His suitcase is gone," she said when she got in front. "He's usually so neat. It looks like he left in a hurry." We started toward Anne's on Pine Street. "I have to talk to him," she said. "I have to tell him this was a mistake. It was, you know."
"I guess it was," I said. "I can't believe I've messed you up like this. I'm sorry. God, that's weak. What do you want to do? Do you want to go after him?"
"Go after him? What do you mean?"
"We could follow him. We can follow him right now if you want."
"You'd do that? Take your car and drive after him with me?" Anne had no car, had never even been licensed to drive.
"Sure, I'll do it."
"I love you, Arthur. I really do love you." She wanted to follow him, and we agreed we would. "But we shouldn’t leave tonight," she said after we'd talked some more. "It's after midnight. Let's sleep. Tomorrow we can make sure he's really left, then go."
Her bed was a mattress on the floor. I lay next to her and imagined trying to make love with her but to my relief made no overture. She'd shown me a picture of herself at thirteen before we'd left for the movie and laughed at her unflattering braces. I hadn't liked what I'd felt on seeing it. Eventually, I slept.
We crossed the bridge from San Francisco at 3 P.M. Saturday. Anne sat in the front seat with me until, about 2 A.M., she crawled into the back to sleep in the double sleeping bag she and I had made love on in New Jersey. An hour or so later I took the last condom from my wallet and threw it out the window. I felt good no longer having it. I was giving to Anne, loving her, acting in a way which fit with my preferred self-image--flawed, honest, passionate, kind. I was with her as I craved to be, but I knew that I had to let her go as she deserved to be let go, let her go as proof I really did care for her, and I did not deny that my regret included an element of relief. By throwing out the condom, I was putting a block between myself and the self I knew I was who would not necessarily have the sense never in the next two days to want to make love and let her know I wanted to. Even when, after I'd first told her I was not in love, I'd shamefully refused to respect her "No" one time in Godwin (I entered her but then withdrew immediately), I'd worn a condom. I knew I'd be able to resist my desire if we had no protection. I felt this trip after Roy was opportunity, in little, to redeem myself. After we got to Minneapolis would I return to the West Coast or go home to New York City and Godwin and begin my life-after-Anne? Go west, I thought. Either way I'd soon be working on a newspaper; that, I [U[knew[/u].
At 4 A.M. I stopped for gas. As the tank was filling I told Anne, who had waked when I stopped, that I had to sleep. I said I'd be okay to drive again in an hour or two.
"What time is it?" she asked.
"It's four," I said.
"I slept two hours. I don't want us to stop. I want to drive now, okay?"
"It would be better if we slept."
"Please, Arthur."
"Are you sure?"
"I really want to keep going."
I didn’t argue. I only wished to please her. The stars were bright, and I noticed as I walked around the camper to enter the side doors into the back that the moon had set.
"Wake me at Wendover," I said. “We'll be there in an hour.”
Anne had driven a stick shift a few times but it had had three gears, not, like the Volks, four. The car bucked as she shifted gears but didn’t stall and she was soon eastbound on Route 40.
I lifted my head as we were going through the next little Nevada town and, by the lights that lined the brief business stretch of the highway, saw she was crying; I didn't like how crying made her look and was ashamed. I looked away, closed my eyes, slept.
The accident happened ten miles west of Wendover while the sun was still but just below the horizon. No one saw it. We were on a miles-long gradual descent and the Volks was at its top down-hill speed of 70 miles an hour when it left the highway and jumped a narrow ditch into the desert. Anne was probably knocked unconscious then. Blood and hair were found on the roof above the driver's seat. Afterwards I could never decide if I'd waked and could remember being tossed about in the back of the van or if, from trying to remember, I imagined it. Four hundred feet after leaving the road the car hit an 18-inch wide irrigation ditch and then tumbled end-over-end until, a hundred feet later, its momentum exhausted, it fell on its left side. Anne's lower body and legs were pinned but she was already dead. Within minutes I, still in the double sleeping bag, regained consciousness on my back outside the car. I tried to move and couldn't and guessed my back was broken. I called Anne, not expecting her to answer. "She's dead," I thought. Aloud, unaware how faint my voice was, I said, "Soap opera."
I was never deluged by guilt at my part in Anne's death. I hypothesized its absence might be the complement to what I found a surprising absence of both bitterness and depression. I reasoned that if I was guilty--and I'd never, after my first fall from grace, first falling out of love, been inclined to deny I was--, I'd been punished. I didn't believe I was being punished, but I knew I'd been culpable. I lived. I would, though paralyzed, recover. Many nights in the next month the private nurse who sat by my bed thought I would die before morning. I thought not. The nights seemed interminable and I knew the days would bring no relief, but my will to live was strong. I loved my being, had all my life liked being who I was.
_____
To access LOVE NOTE Chapter 16 part ii click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. Has your genital feeling been affected by SCI? If so, how? I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.
This post has been edited by Coach: 27 August 2006 - 07:57 PM
