soon it will be over. 36 years of agony. no, no, i'm not about to off myself on New Year's Eve. the thought never even occurs to me even during my darkest moments. and besides, who would take care of the cats, the bunnies, the fish? and god...how i would hate the thought of someone going through my STUFF. so no, not gonna happen. what IS gonna happen is surgery and the removal of what i call that useless bag of flesh (though i actually think it might be muscle) - my uterus! since america is all about renaming things (i.e. the vagina has become the va-jay-jay, the kasloppis, the hot pocket) i will rename the uterus. since Useless Bag of Flesh is too long i'll rename it the Ute. my apologies to the indian tribe of the same name.
others get alot of use out of the ute, for instance that horrible Jon & Kate Plus 8 on TV and their counterparts 17 Kids and Counting. how i would like to neuter those folks. but alas, i am not queen of the world. i never had any use for mine. from Day One it's been nothing but a source of misery. when i was an innocent 12 my family was on a camping trip and at some lake in Wisconsin where we'd spent the day frolicking in the water. that night i had the top bunk in the camper and the next morning i awoke in a pool of blood. i stared at the murder-sized pool, horrified that perhaps a fish had bitten me in the lake and i'd suffered a delayed bloodletting. i called plaintively to my mother. the mother who had never told me the Facts of Life, mind you, and as the oldest i had no big sister to clue me in. hence my blame on the fish. she herded the rest of the family out of the camper then said to me, smiling, "you're a woman now". my inner response was 'what the fuck?' the next bit is blurry, but i assume we stuffed my underpants with toilet paper and changed the sheets, perhaps even flipped the now-stained mattress. then it was off to the store to buy me my very first Kotex and naturally i was completely mortified. the box looked gigantic on the check-out counter. the rest of my family was confused and curious and i just wanted to die. why hadn't i been warned about this horror???
we had places to go, things to see, so the six of us jammed into the station wagon and before long i found myself sicker than i'd ever been in my life. my gut suddenly cramped with pain and all i could do was vomit, so they gave me a bucket. no one had much tolerance for my condition and the other children grumbled about having to give the middle seat up to me so i could lay down. i begged to be allowed to just lay in my misery in the camper we dragged behind us, but that was Against the Law. fuck the law, i needed to get away from these people and puke and writhe in peace! finally i got my way and thus went the first day of my newfound womanhood. well, whoopee.
those cramps never relented. OK, sometimes i'd be spared for one month, but mostly i spent a day or more laying in bed in the fetal position or cycling my legs to distract me from the pain. i recall my youngest brother david coming up one day to console me when he was around 6. he brought a saucepan of hot water and a washcloth to put on my forehead, which was very sweet, and said "i hope i don't catch it". oh david, what i would have given to be a boy right then and rid myself of menstrual cramps. and penis envy had nothing to do with that wish!
my father had little pity for my condition. he seemed to think i was faking it and should get outside and help him cut wood. men have no idea and just once i would like to inflict a painful period on all of them for just one month so they'd learn a little compassion. instead, they seem for the most part to be revolted or at least uncomfortable by the very idea of a period. yeah, like we like it? to me it's nothing beautiful, no celebration of womanhood. 'aunt flo', 'my friend', all those stupid names . . . it's just a pain in the ass. or the ute, as it were.
i'll never forget the red flood that ruined my beautiful white jeans on a boat trip through some caverns in upstate New York. i'll never forget being unable to get up for (ironically) change of periods at school because my pants had soaked through to my wooden chair. i'll never forget my friend debbie's disbelief that i didn't know what a tampon was. hell, mom hadn't even told me about a period, much less a tampon. so debbie helped me buy some and described how to put it in. i was very wary. stick that thing up there? OK, so yeah there's a string . . . . but what if it came loose? how would i ever get that tampon out? so i didn't want to stick it up too far and spent the day leaping out of my chair every time i sat down. apparently, you can't stick a tampon in just a little ways. it will constantly remind you that it's there. then came the day (again, camping) that the string DID give way. any woman out there can imagine my horror. i tugged and there was no resistance, and all i held in my hand was a limp little string. how the fuck was i going to get out of this??! i spent what seemed like hours in the campground ladies room stall doubled over fishing around in there. i had no idea how deep this hole was! i didn't know where it could travel if i didn't get it out! and god, no way could i tell my parents "er...i need to go to the hospital to have this tampon fished out". i was 16 for god's sake. that was out of the question. finally, sweating profusely from the effort, i hooked the damn thing and pulled it out. no one has ever known such relief.
of course i swore off tampons at that moment, but a modern woman can't stick to that resolution. i was just never going to use that brand again.
i thought every girl experienced the same kind of cramps i did. i was too shy to compare notes on the subject. so i just withstood the monthly pain even though it reduced me to cold sweats and near or outright faints on many occasions. the nurse practicioner i went to for my first OBGYN appointment told me my cramps were "just normal". take some aspirin. aspirin didn't cut it, sister. and neither did percosets or anything else she prescribed, always with a tsk-tsk look as if she thought i was exaggerating. finally during one Thanksgiving dinner my entire family witnessed the distress i was in when i left the table to lay in the living room and cry in pain. if i left a table filled with food, after all, it had to be bad. my olive skin was white and clammy. the otherwise robust valerie was reduced to whimpering and writhing. the only thing that ever made any dent in the pain was a heating pad, and probably only because my burning flesh was preferable to what was going on inside my ute. my mother finally said "get rid of that nurse practicioner, go see a real doctor!"
and so i did. and so i was diagnosed with probable endometriosis. and, since they cannot really know for sure without going in, i underwent a laparoscopy which proved the diagnosis right. two little holes in my belly and the sensation that a truck had run over my abdomen, and i was cured! for a couple years anyway. endometriosis has this nasty little cancer-like habit of just going right on about its business even when you remove it if you are unlucky. and i was unlucky. endometriosis, if you don't know, is when endometrial tissue from inside the ute decides to go on a roadtrip through your gut and attach itself to various organs. in truly horrific cases it forms webs from the ute to other organs like your intestines or bladder. i read one horror story where it took a full 8 hours to remove such a web of tissue from one woman. the laparoscopy is really a piece of cake, especially when compared to years of monthly agony. they pump your belly full of gas through one little hole and stick a laser through another little hole to cauterize the adhesions. the gyno showed me polaroids afterwards of what had been going on in there all those many years and, while it wasn't pretty, it was rather fascinating. and so a couple years later when the endo returned i had no qualms about subjecting myself to yet another surgery. beats all the motrin and painkillers in the world.
but now it's gotten ridiculous. i'm 48 and i've been through this bullshit since the age of 12. enough already! i knew from a young age (12, to be exact, the year my brother david was born and i decided i wanted no part of babies) that i was never going to be a mother. i have no maternal instinct. i sucked at babysitting and i can't stand the caterwauling of an infant. i don't even consider babies human until they're old enough to be amusing (around at least 3) and even then i have about a 2 hour tolerance limit. that doesn't mean i am not able to be nurturing (though i dislike that touchie-feelie word) and compassionate. i have a passion for animals, for instance, and will defend them with my life, rescue and care for them. and don't call that a maternal instinct. it has nothing to do with mothering. Mother Theresa was one of the world's most compassionate, caring and doing people in the world - and yet, not a mother at all. go figure.
ironically, children like me. they think i am great fun, probably because i just treat them like little adults, i enjoy scaring the shit out if them with items like my genuine human skeleton, and they like it. even babies like me and i'll never know why. babies will stare at me in the most abnormal fashion and smile away, toddle up to me trying to look all cute, but in my head i'm saying 'you don't tempt me, kid. i want no part of your kind.' i don't coo over babies, i think they all pretty much look and act alike, and while i have no trouble working with incontinent cats, a baby diaper would make me lose it for sure. i am not impressed with reproduction. after all, the whole world is doing that in excess and ruining the planet with over-population. why is it a 'miracle' when a human does it .... and not when a rodent or roach does it?
too many people have children to have 'something to love' even though they are completely unprepared in so many ways to raise a child. adopt a pet, for chrissakes. others want to fill some hole within themselves. fill your hole in a psychiatrist's office first! (well, not literally, that would be wrong). and more people want little carbon copies of themselves. gotta make sure those genes live on! and yet, in a lot of cases, those genes really should be put to a screaming halt. but, like i said, i'm not queen of the world and i can't put a stop to this. sure, some people truly do have good reasons for having children, will be fit parents and have the means to raise them and know enough not to go overboard. i'm OK with that. moderation, people, moderation. on the flip side, there are so many unwanted children in this world already there's a good argument for adopting and giving them homes. i was with Angelina Jolie when she first started down that path, but now i just want to neuter her and Brad Pitt too.
some people, women that is, think i must be jealous of their status as mothers. nothing could be further from the truth. i've been accused of that by both one sister-in-law and one step-daughter. to that i say have you met me??? obviously they don't know me at all. they translate my failure to cootchie coo over the cute baby ad nauseum as envy. such an accusation is actually highly amusing to me. do they think they hold some exalted status for having reproduced? i don't get it. honey, i too can do it, i just don't wanna. i chose this childless status and i've been nothing but happy with that choice. so those out there who think we the childless must be unfulfilled, must not know some higher love, know this: different strokes for different folks. we actually can be whole without replicating. we're not lacking in anything.
what i want to be lacking, ladies, is a uterus! and soon, oh happy day, i'll have my wish. i would have done it a long time ago but i was never into the long 6 week recovery. i'm too active to opt for that. and now, more than ever, i can't afford to be down for the count for any length of time. since bob's death (another one who wasn't big on kids though he had 2 and 4 grandchildren) i seriously don't have time to be bedridden. no one is going to do all the work around here for me. but now, through the grace of medicine, i can have that ute removed through a mere 4 little holes in my belly. isn't science great? they've figured out some way to peel that thing like an apple and extract it through an itty bitty hole and reduce the recovery time to a week or two! several months back, when i was bleeding excessively, doubled over by bursting ovarian cysts and endometriosis, my gyno did exhaustive exams. i have fibroid tumors up the wazoo, some disease called adenomyosis (not life-threatening or painful so i don't care about the details), 2 cysts on one ovary and endometriosis. she gave me a list of 4 options, which started with 'wait for menopause and hope it comes soon.' uhhh.....fuck that! i've been waiting for 36 years! painkillers (yeah yeah, none have impressed me), some pill to fake menopause (no thanks, on enough meds as it is), OR the most radical - this surgery. radical? i'm in. take that useless bag of flesh!
so, on january 9 i am checking into the hospital to rid myself of the accursed ute. i had a biopsy the other day (why, i am not sure) and that hurt, but not as bad as the complete agony i was in just 2 weeks ago when i lay on the couch sobbing "make it stop, make it stop" and almost dragged myself to the ER. all i can say is thank god for 800 mgs of motrin and a vicodin. wouldn't you know my last period had to go out with a bang. that is one vindictive ute.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
i feel sorry for inanimate objects
under cover of twilight at 4:45 P.M. i drove bob's big old green ford F250 to the parking lot of the Bluebonnet Diner (or Blue Vomit as bob liked to call it). my mission was a christmas tree and i had to wait til dark because the inspection sticker on the truck expired back in august (i hope there are no cops reading this). my christmas tree guy has a set schedule and i knew he'd only be there until 5:00. bob and i discovered him years ago and love his variety of many-sized christmas trees for only thirty dollars max. i even brought my stand hoping that maybe he'd help me get the trunk in. this is my 3rd year getting a christmas tree on my own (bob was too sick in '06) so i still have a hard time getting the trunk in the stand. then again, both bob and pop had years of christmas trees under their belts and i seem to recall a lot of swearing by both parties associated with this once a year holiday effort.
i pulled in to the Bluebonnet lot to see jim (that's his name) putting his sign in the back of his pick-up. one lone christmas tree leaned against his wood stand. the only one left. this is one of the saddest christmas sights there is. i can't bear to look at un-bought wreaths and trees on christmas eve, looking so lonely and forlorn. their lives wasted because no one bought them for christmas. so you can imagine what the sight of this little lone tree did to me. you see, i have a problem. i feel sorry for inanimate objects and it would be all i could do not to buy this tree even if it was far too small. apartment size. i thought i'd go something like a six footer this year.
"is this the only tree you have left?" i asked and of course yes was his answer. i stared at the little tree, tormented. oh god, how could i leave it there all alone? if i didn't take it, who would?
as if reading my mind, jim said, "don't worry, if you don't take it, it won't go into the chipper. it was fresh cut yesterday and it will sell when i set up again on friday. i can't have too many small trees. people want them."
thank god. people want them. i didn't have to buy the tree based on fear that no one else would want it. because if that was the case i'd have to get it, even if it was too small to hold more than one string of lights and only a quarter of my ornaments. despite jim's reassurance, however, i felt bad that the poor little tree had spent 6 hours sitting out in the cold, rejected by every person who'd stopped there that day. it would be riding back to ashfield alone in the cold bed of his truck. could i actually let that happen?
i fought my urge to shell out $23 for a too-small tree just so it would have a christmas home tonight. i have to trust in jim that it won't be fodder for his chipper, that someone in northampton will need an apartment-sized tree on friday. if you live here and you need a little tree, please go buy that one. it took all i had to abandon the tiny tree and climb back in my truck, watching jim grab it by its little bark throat and toss it into the bed of his truck.
no, no, no, go home, valerie. wait for the tree you want.
this isn't my first struggle over inanimate objects. in fact, it happens all the time. i feel sorry for pathetic things, for lonely things, for leftover things. one day in a department store with my sister joanne we came upon an easter display. heaps of pastel-colored fuzzy stuffed animals just tossed into a pile, half of thems with their asses in the air, heads buried in the pile. i couldn't stand it. the ones with the faces would get all the attention if i didn't do something about it. they all had to have an equal chance at an easter home. so i stood there and righted every single stuffed duck, chick and bunny. sat them in a happy, smiling pile and left them, hoping my efforts would earn each one a home.
you might wonder how i ever worked at an animal shelter, right? believe me, it was hard. the only way i could do it was to take charge of photographing and writing up every cat for the web. to do so, i spent time with every cat trying to discover something unique about it. some hook by which i could draw someone in. one cross-eyed flame point siamese i compared to barbra streisand. i was not afraid to pull on heart strings and if a cat stayed too long at the shelter and became part of its Lonely Hearts Club i made it a poster and bombarded northampton with pathos. won't you give patches a chance? for months she's watched other cats come and go and wonders why no one ever chooses her... people started to come in to Dakin shelter actually asking for a cat by its description! barbra streisand was popular (again)! that's how i could spend hours there on sundays and manage to leave cat-less. well..... for the most part. we did end up with Mosby because after 6 months he was deemed unadoptable because of his unrelenting fear of people. and we did end up with Big because he was tagged as "vicious" ( of all things) depressed and anorexic. at 20 lbs, 8 yrs old, he romps and stomps happily around the house when he isn't licking me to death. and okay...i did end up with Baby from Best Friends out in Utah because she too was depressed and only (and literally) came out of the closet she hid in when i entered the Kitty Motel to squawk at me in her rusty gate old lady voice.
aside from the unwanted cats i've succumbed to, i have a special favorite and i sleep with it every night. it travels in my backpack with me on vacations and housekeepers set it on my pillows after making my motel room beds. it is my pink stuffed bunny rabbit. it doesn't have a name. that's all it's known by. bob and i happened upon the bunny rabbit in the grocery store shortly after one easter several years ago. a big cardboard box stood by the entrance filled with leftover easter candy and a 50% off sign. splayed alone in this pile of marshmallow chicks and hollow chocolate eggs was the pink bunny rabbit, a sad multi-colored pastel ribbon around its neck. god, it was so pathetic. every other stuffed animal had apparently been sold except him.
i have a lot of guilt associated with easter bunnies. as a child i had a big fawn colored bunny named Bun-Bun that my mother bought me when i was in the hospital. he was so tall and proud and cheery in his day. i destroyed him by sleeping with him for years. eventually he sagged and his metal frame feet stuck me in the ribs. his ears fell off and his head holes had to be sewn closed. he lost one black button eye and all the turgor went out of his neck so that it flopped over. fake fur rubbed off from years spent in the crook of my arm as i slept (yes, even into my teens), Bun-Bun looked like a mangy dog. sometime in my heartless 20's i threw him out. and to this day i wonder, how could i have done that?
so when i saw that pink bunny rabbit i stopped dead in my tracks and bob, knowing what was happening, groaned and picked the rabbit up by one leg and tossed it into the grocery basket. when i protested at such cavelier treatment he leaned over and put the bunny instead into the child seat of the metal basket and so we wheeled our way through the store. people smiling at us, somewhat charmed by our 'baby'. even the check-out lady was delighted and bob had to tell her " she felt sorry for it".
i sleep with it now the same way i slept with Bun-Bun of old. the pink bunny rabbit is a comfort there in the crook of my arm. a gift from bob i can hold close.
i pulled in to the Bluebonnet lot to see jim (that's his name) putting his sign in the back of his pick-up. one lone christmas tree leaned against his wood stand. the only one left. this is one of the saddest christmas sights there is. i can't bear to look at un-bought wreaths and trees on christmas eve, looking so lonely and forlorn. their lives wasted because no one bought them for christmas. so you can imagine what the sight of this little lone tree did to me. you see, i have a problem. i feel sorry for inanimate objects and it would be all i could do not to buy this tree even if it was far too small. apartment size. i thought i'd go something like a six footer this year.
"is this the only tree you have left?" i asked and of course yes was his answer. i stared at the little tree, tormented. oh god, how could i leave it there all alone? if i didn't take it, who would?
as if reading my mind, jim said, "don't worry, if you don't take it, it won't go into the chipper. it was fresh cut yesterday and it will sell when i set up again on friday. i can't have too many small trees. people want them."
thank god. people want them. i didn't have to buy the tree based on fear that no one else would want it. because if that was the case i'd have to get it, even if it was too small to hold more than one string of lights and only a quarter of my ornaments. despite jim's reassurance, however, i felt bad that the poor little tree had spent 6 hours sitting out in the cold, rejected by every person who'd stopped there that day. it would be riding back to ashfield alone in the cold bed of his truck. could i actually let that happen?
i fought my urge to shell out $23 for a too-small tree just so it would have a christmas home tonight. i have to trust in jim that it won't be fodder for his chipper, that someone in northampton will need an apartment-sized tree on friday. if you live here and you need a little tree, please go buy that one. it took all i had to abandon the tiny tree and climb back in my truck, watching jim grab it by its little bark throat and toss it into the bed of his truck.
no, no, no, go home, valerie. wait for the tree you want.
this isn't my first struggle over inanimate objects. in fact, it happens all the time. i feel sorry for pathetic things, for lonely things, for leftover things. one day in a department store with my sister joanne we came upon an easter display. heaps of pastel-colored fuzzy stuffed animals just tossed into a pile, half of thems with their asses in the air, heads buried in the pile. i couldn't stand it. the ones with the faces would get all the attention if i didn't do something about it. they all had to have an equal chance at an easter home. so i stood there and righted every single stuffed duck, chick and bunny. sat them in a happy, smiling pile and left them, hoping my efforts would earn each one a home.
you might wonder how i ever worked at an animal shelter, right? believe me, it was hard. the only way i could do it was to take charge of photographing and writing up every cat for the web. to do so, i spent time with every cat trying to discover something unique about it. some hook by which i could draw someone in. one cross-eyed flame point siamese i compared to barbra streisand. i was not afraid to pull on heart strings and if a cat stayed too long at the shelter and became part of its Lonely Hearts Club i made it a poster and bombarded northampton with pathos. won't you give patches a chance? for months she's watched other cats come and go and wonders why no one ever chooses her... people started to come in to Dakin shelter actually asking for a cat by its description! barbra streisand was popular (again)! that's how i could spend hours there on sundays and manage to leave cat-less. well..... for the most part. we did end up with Mosby because after 6 months he was deemed unadoptable because of his unrelenting fear of people. and we did end up with Big because he was tagged as "vicious" ( of all things) depressed and anorexic. at 20 lbs, 8 yrs old, he romps and stomps happily around the house when he isn't licking me to death. and okay...i did end up with Baby from Best Friends out in Utah because she too was depressed and only (and literally) came out of the closet she hid in when i entered the Kitty Motel to squawk at me in her rusty gate old lady voice.
aside from the unwanted cats i've succumbed to, i have a special favorite and i sleep with it every night. it travels in my backpack with me on vacations and housekeepers set it on my pillows after making my motel room beds. it is my pink stuffed bunny rabbit. it doesn't have a name. that's all it's known by. bob and i happened upon the bunny rabbit in the grocery store shortly after one easter several years ago. a big cardboard box stood by the entrance filled with leftover easter candy and a 50% off sign. splayed alone in this pile of marshmallow chicks and hollow chocolate eggs was the pink bunny rabbit, a sad multi-colored pastel ribbon around its neck. god, it was so pathetic. every other stuffed animal had apparently been sold except him.
i have a lot of guilt associated with easter bunnies. as a child i had a big fawn colored bunny named Bun-Bun that my mother bought me when i was in the hospital. he was so tall and proud and cheery in his day. i destroyed him by sleeping with him for years. eventually he sagged and his metal frame feet stuck me in the ribs. his ears fell off and his head holes had to be sewn closed. he lost one black button eye and all the turgor went out of his neck so that it flopped over. fake fur rubbed off from years spent in the crook of my arm as i slept (yes, even into my teens), Bun-Bun looked like a mangy dog. sometime in my heartless 20's i threw him out. and to this day i wonder, how could i have done that?
so when i saw that pink bunny rabbit i stopped dead in my tracks and bob, knowing what was happening, groaned and picked the rabbit up by one leg and tossed it into the grocery basket. when i protested at such cavelier treatment he leaned over and put the bunny instead into the child seat of the metal basket and so we wheeled our way through the store. people smiling at us, somewhat charmed by our 'baby'. even the check-out lady was delighted and bob had to tell her " she felt sorry for it".
i sleep with it now the same way i slept with Bun-Bun of old. the pink bunny rabbit is a comfort there in the crook of my arm. a gift from bob i can hold close.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
the reign of pain stems mainly from the plane
i'm home now, chock full of drugs right now and put myself on ice for good measure. 800 milligrams of motrin and 2 vicodin have yet to dull the pain in my lower back, which makes me walk like Quasimoto. i blame the plane. six hours from vegas to philly crammed in coach. OK, agreed - i spent the previous five days bent over mopping and sweeping and cleaning cat boxes as i volunteered at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, so the storm was brewing. all it needed was a bolt of lightning to set it off. that bolt struck me as i ran through the philly airport after unfolding myself from a seat that seemed to shrink with every hour in the sky. had my plane been on time i wouldn't have been running. in Dingo boots no less. no one runs in Dingo boots. but i had to, the pilot said so. he announced over the loudspeaker "we're in a holding pattern over philly because of weather right now but we are in communication via computer and your connecting flights will wait for you, but once we land i suggest you make haste to your gate."
you know airplane crowds, they're up and in the aisle long before the hatch door ever opens. like a herd of cows waiting to be milked. they don't care if you need to cut through the line and get out first. in Coach there's a mentality of "i suffered like a sardine for 3000 miles and i am not about to let anyone get off this plane before me". you know the type. they stand there slowly hauling their oversized carry-on out of the overhead bin, oblivious to the impatient line of desperate flyers aching to flee the fuselage. unfortunately, even if these boneheads had moved more quickly, even if they had stepped aside for those of us with connecting flights, we never would have made our flights anyway. you see, the pilot lied. our connections were long gone. but i didn't know that yet as i clomped gracelessly through the airport, leather backpack repeatedly bouncing and ramming me in the spine until suddenly the lightning bolt struck and i froze. did i dare move? if i do will i end up on a stretcher? the muscle spasm radiated, burned, and never relented. my plane..... i have to make my plane. face twisted in pain, tears catching in my waterproof lashes, i gingerly staggered on to B 8, backpack clutched to my belly.
i arrived 3 minutes before scheduled take-off at the hartford connection gate to find emptiness. i looked out the plate glass windows and saw nothing. no plane. the dour airline lady at the desk had no pity for us - an angry man, an irate woman and her baby, and a disbelieving me.
"we don't hold planes," she said.
"that's not what the pilot said!" the three of us exploded.
she didn't give a damn and didn't hesitate to show it in her face. US AIR employees clearly need a seminar in customer service. "we never hold planes," she insisted. i begged to differ. "oddly enough," i said, "my flight out of charlotte, north carolina to vegas on friday sat on the runway a full twenty minutes specifically to wait for passengers from connecting flights. the pilot even told us that's why our take-off was late." she was unmoved. "the pilot promised us our connections would wait!" the red-faced man insisted. we were met with pursed lips, a shake of the head. besides, we could argue till we were blue in the face and it wouldn't bring the plane back. "when is the next flight?" we three asked in unison. our answer? that was it, no more flights tonight. we'd be catching the 7:55 AM to hartford tomorrow. tired of us, she directed us to US AIR's customer service booth where slightly less jaded employees handed us pathetic overnight goodie bags of toothpaste and combs and an alleged "discount" voucher for Howard Johnson's. DISCOUNT? i have to pay for US AIR's incompetence? $77, no less? wearily, she handed me a form i could fill out to contest the hotel cost and beg for reimbursement. but don't get your hopes up.
lurched sideways from the unrelenting electric shock of pain that had almost brought me to my knees on the run to Gate B 8, i shuffled outside to await the hotel's courtesy van. and waited. and waited. it was drizzling in philly, fitting the mood of all of us disgruntled US AIR victims leaning against chilled cement barriers as every courtesy van for every other hotel came and went. an 80 year old cowboy from arizona went to complain and was told the van was on its way. where was he coming from? jersey? mr. courtesy van driver gave a little laugh when he saw us and packed us in. "more happy US AIR customers, i see." we weren't laughing.
they don't feed you for free anymore on planes and my sandwich of 7 hours ago was long ago digested, stomach grumbling for more, but at that hour HoJo's was closed and i'd have to make do with the trail mix i secrety praised myself for buying the day before. as i paid my $77 in the hotel i pleaded, "do you have any painkillers? i hurt myself running for the plane." the concierge said sure, in the vending machines. and there it was, a little pack of Aleve that could perhaps put a dent in my agony, only $2 away. but i did not have $2 and the machine wouldn't take a ten. i gave up. US AIR had won, i was beaten. in my stale cigarette scented room i set the alarm clock for 5:00 AM and gingerly removed my clothes and laid myself on the bed. for 7 hours i tossed, if you could call it tossing since it was slow motion accompanied by whimpers and cries. i am not sure i ever slept, but i must have slept just long enough to miss the fact that the 5 AM alarm never did go off. at 6:19 i sat bolt upright with a yelp. the hourly courtesy shuttle had left at 6. i dressed, brushed my teeth, and called for a taxi. "how much to the airport?" i asked, "$25" the ex-harley biker turned taxi driver said. "good, $30 is all i have left in the world." it was a good thing the vending machine wouldn't accept my ten the night before.
he was a heavy smoker, this driver. i could tell by his cough. i told him i was valiantly trying to quit with the patch and acupuncture and told him the story of bob's death by cancer on the 15 or so minute drive to the airport. he seemed very alarmed as he listened, eyebrows knit in the rearview mirror. "how could he tell something was wrong in his throat?" he asked, and i told him bob couldn't swallow anymore. i had the distinct sense the taxi driver was worried about something. maybe he too was having a problem he preferred to ignore, as bob did. maybe he too was afraid of finding out what was wrong with him. maybe i missed a plane, but maybe, just maybe, i saved a taxi driver's life.
but don't get your hopes up.
you know airplane crowds, they're up and in the aisle long before the hatch door ever opens. like a herd of cows waiting to be milked. they don't care if you need to cut through the line and get out first. in Coach there's a mentality of "i suffered like a sardine for 3000 miles and i am not about to let anyone get off this plane before me". you know the type. they stand there slowly hauling their oversized carry-on out of the overhead bin, oblivious to the impatient line of desperate flyers aching to flee the fuselage. unfortunately, even if these boneheads had moved more quickly, even if they had stepped aside for those of us with connecting flights, we never would have made our flights anyway. you see, the pilot lied. our connections were long gone. but i didn't know that yet as i clomped gracelessly through the airport, leather backpack repeatedly bouncing and ramming me in the spine until suddenly the lightning bolt struck and i froze. did i dare move? if i do will i end up on a stretcher? the muscle spasm radiated, burned, and never relented. my plane..... i have to make my plane. face twisted in pain, tears catching in my waterproof lashes, i gingerly staggered on to B 8, backpack clutched to my belly.
i arrived 3 minutes before scheduled take-off at the hartford connection gate to find emptiness. i looked out the plate glass windows and saw nothing. no plane. the dour airline lady at the desk had no pity for us - an angry man, an irate woman and her baby, and a disbelieving me.
"we don't hold planes," she said.
"that's not what the pilot said!" the three of us exploded.
she didn't give a damn and didn't hesitate to show it in her face. US AIR employees clearly need a seminar in customer service. "we never hold planes," she insisted. i begged to differ. "oddly enough," i said, "my flight out of charlotte, north carolina to vegas on friday sat on the runway a full twenty minutes specifically to wait for passengers from connecting flights. the pilot even told us that's why our take-off was late." she was unmoved. "the pilot promised us our connections would wait!" the red-faced man insisted. we were met with pursed lips, a shake of the head. besides, we could argue till we were blue in the face and it wouldn't bring the plane back. "when is the next flight?" we three asked in unison. our answer? that was it, no more flights tonight. we'd be catching the 7:55 AM to hartford tomorrow. tired of us, she directed us to US AIR's customer service booth where slightly less jaded employees handed us pathetic overnight goodie bags of toothpaste and combs and an alleged "discount" voucher for Howard Johnson's. DISCOUNT? i have to pay for US AIR's incompetence? $77, no less? wearily, she handed me a form i could fill out to contest the hotel cost and beg for reimbursement. but don't get your hopes up.
lurched sideways from the unrelenting electric shock of pain that had almost brought me to my knees on the run to Gate B 8, i shuffled outside to await the hotel's courtesy van. and waited. and waited. it was drizzling in philly, fitting the mood of all of us disgruntled US AIR victims leaning against chilled cement barriers as every courtesy van for every other hotel came and went. an 80 year old cowboy from arizona went to complain and was told the van was on its way. where was he coming from? jersey? mr. courtesy van driver gave a little laugh when he saw us and packed us in. "more happy US AIR customers, i see." we weren't laughing.
they don't feed you for free anymore on planes and my sandwich of 7 hours ago was long ago digested, stomach grumbling for more, but at that hour HoJo's was closed and i'd have to make do with the trail mix i secrety praised myself for buying the day before. as i paid my $77 in the hotel i pleaded, "do you have any painkillers? i hurt myself running for the plane." the concierge said sure, in the vending machines. and there it was, a little pack of Aleve that could perhaps put a dent in my agony, only $2 away. but i did not have $2 and the machine wouldn't take a ten. i gave up. US AIR had won, i was beaten. in my stale cigarette scented room i set the alarm clock for 5:00 AM and gingerly removed my clothes and laid myself on the bed. for 7 hours i tossed, if you could call it tossing since it was slow motion accompanied by whimpers and cries. i am not sure i ever slept, but i must have slept just long enough to miss the fact that the 5 AM alarm never did go off. at 6:19 i sat bolt upright with a yelp. the hourly courtesy shuttle had left at 6. i dressed, brushed my teeth, and called for a taxi. "how much to the airport?" i asked, "$25" the ex-harley biker turned taxi driver said. "good, $30 is all i have left in the world." it was a good thing the vending machine wouldn't accept my ten the night before.
he was a heavy smoker, this driver. i could tell by his cough. i told him i was valiantly trying to quit with the patch and acupuncture and told him the story of bob's death by cancer on the 15 or so minute drive to the airport. he seemed very alarmed as he listened, eyebrows knit in the rearview mirror. "how could he tell something was wrong in his throat?" he asked, and i told him bob couldn't swallow anymore. i had the distinct sense the taxi driver was worried about something. maybe he too was having a problem he preferred to ignore, as bob did. maybe he too was afraid of finding out what was wrong with him. maybe i missed a plane, but maybe, just maybe, i saved a taxi driver's life.
but don't get your hopes up.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
i got the power!
i like going in Green Mountain Power Equipment. it's reminds me of bob's old Exxon except in mini. repairs on cars shrunken down to repairs on mowers. like the old Exxon there are machines strewn about the place and though it lacks the great big bays and the super-sized air compressor it's still got the feel. a big old fan blowing air around on a hot day. the same cinderblock walls filmed in grease, filmed in grime, filmed in dust. the hand-printed receipts, the dirty cash register, dented file cabinets. all reminiscent of the old Exxon. where bob had Snap-On tool calendars featuring sexy girls hung behind his office door where the public couldn't see them, this guy's got equal opportunity calendar titillation hung by the register. beefy guys in cut-offs and well-rounded chicks in barely-there bikinis, side by side. i like his sense of fairness and his sense of humor. even the guy behind the counter is bob minus 15 years. he's tall and rangy with impressive forearms i like to stare at and the same kind of once-broken nose and sun-bleached blond hair. instead of green garage pants he wears hiking shorts and a tee with the sleeves torn off. not something bob, with his striped Exxon shirts with the script Bob embroidered over the left pocket, would have worn. but to each mechanic his own. i like the smell of the place. it smells like motors and gas. like bob used to smell.
the first time i went in David, the Green Mountain guy, paid me little attention. i was just one of the stream of summer customers with broken mowers. i wore rumpled shorts and a stained tank top, no makeup and my hair disguised in a red bandanna. nothing to look at. i didn't even notice him that much in my lawnmower aggravation. he just grew on me over time. each time i went in i prayed his idiot driver wouldn't wait on me. that guy had stopped over once to re-string my weed wacker. "So," he'd grinned toothlessly through his hairlip, "how long's your husband been dead?" nice. great come-on. "18 months," i said, silently willing the wacker strung already. "Sooooo," he says, all 5'3" and 200+ pounds of him, "time to get back in the dating scene." oh christ. could he possibly think he had a chance? he had the IQ of one of Hugh Hefner's bimbos. am i that bad now that this guy thinks i'm fair game? "no, no," i protested, "not interested in any of that shit." my smile a half sneer, i'm sure of it. i've never been able to control my face.
david, on the other hand, took on greek god proportions over the summer of mechanical breakdowns. he paid me a lot more attention the day i arrived and descended out of bob's giant green Ford F-250 in a summer flowered breezy dress and high heels, curls loose in the wind, workday makeup on my summer tanned face. suddenly the abrupt businessman became a hopeless flirt and i was just as bad, joking that i mowed my lawn in heels to aerate the soil. he rolled his eyes and grinned. lame, i know. but flirting people say stupid things that are only cute to the other flirtee. i found a nice dress and prettier face earned me $20 off the standard cost of the repair for 'water in the gas tank' (a problem i was to have 2 times this past summer). i wondered how much more cleavage might gain me. hell, why not? women get ripped off all the time for the sake of being women. i am not above lowering my bill with cleavage. their weakness should be my power, after all.
so david has now repaired my weed wacker and showed me how to raise the handle and tighten the strap so it's gone from tall bob-size to val-size. i almost thought i'd seriously have to weed wack in heels it was so tall for me. i've got 10 foot tall weeds under the apple tree, a thicket of bamboo. he thinks i exaggerate but i could always send him a bikini-clad photo, "Me With Tall Weed" as proof. and maybe free repairs for the life of the wacker...
the first time i went in David, the Green Mountain guy, paid me little attention. i was just one of the stream of summer customers with broken mowers. i wore rumpled shorts and a stained tank top, no makeup and my hair disguised in a red bandanna. nothing to look at. i didn't even notice him that much in my lawnmower aggravation. he just grew on me over time. each time i went in i prayed his idiot driver wouldn't wait on me. that guy had stopped over once to re-string my weed wacker. "So," he'd grinned toothlessly through his hairlip, "how long's your husband been dead?" nice. great come-on. "18 months," i said, silently willing the wacker strung already. "Sooooo," he says, all 5'3" and 200+ pounds of him, "time to get back in the dating scene." oh christ. could he possibly think he had a chance? he had the IQ of one of Hugh Hefner's bimbos. am i that bad now that this guy thinks i'm fair game? "no, no," i protested, "not interested in any of that shit." my smile a half sneer, i'm sure of it. i've never been able to control my face.
david, on the other hand, took on greek god proportions over the summer of mechanical breakdowns. he paid me a lot more attention the day i arrived and descended out of bob's giant green Ford F-250 in a summer flowered breezy dress and high heels, curls loose in the wind, workday makeup on my summer tanned face. suddenly the abrupt businessman became a hopeless flirt and i was just as bad, joking that i mowed my lawn in heels to aerate the soil. he rolled his eyes and grinned. lame, i know. but flirting people say stupid things that are only cute to the other flirtee. i found a nice dress and prettier face earned me $20 off the standard cost of the repair for 'water in the gas tank' (a problem i was to have 2 times this past summer). i wondered how much more cleavage might gain me. hell, why not? women get ripped off all the time for the sake of being women. i am not above lowering my bill with cleavage. their weakness should be my power, after all.
so david has now repaired my weed wacker and showed me how to raise the handle and tighten the strap so it's gone from tall bob-size to val-size. i almost thought i'd seriously have to weed wack in heels it was so tall for me. i've got 10 foot tall weeds under the apple tree, a thicket of bamboo. he thinks i exaggerate but i could always send him a bikini-clad photo, "Me With Tall Weed" as proof. and maybe free repairs for the life of the wacker...
the toilet god
when i told a good friend that i'd cried over the open pool of a toilet tank, he wisely said, "valerie, you weren't crying over the toilet." well, literally i was. tears really were dripping into the tank. and it really had made me cry. but he was right. i was crying over far more than a wayward toilet. crying because i had to fix it and it should have been so easy and it wasn't and because i never would have had to if bob were alive. for him it would have been a two-second job and me? i didn't even know enough to turn off the cold water supply before plunging my hand in to the elbow. he would have known that the toilet fix-it kit in the basement was not for our toilet, but for those at my parents' house. but me, i'm trying to make a little flapper cover a big drainhole. so for a week or more i took the lid off every time i flushed to make sure the crumbling old flapper i'd reaffixed covered the hole right because of course it no longer fit right when i reinstalled it. i simply couldn't face the toilet all that time. a little job was just too big a job for me.
sometimes everything's too big for me. i feel so useless and incapable. lost and floundering. and i'm really no slouch. i mean, i know how to run a chop saw, a skill saw, a table saw. i have my own drill. i've been stripping the aluminum siding off the house, sometimes up on a steep roof, sometimes on a scaffold. i've been scraping and painting and replacing window glass. i've lost all fear of menacing carpenter bees and instead stand there like a warrior princess, brandishing my weapon paintbrush, daring them to bring it on. i can move huge ladders. i can patch a roof with tar. i can run a bead of silicone, of caulk. i can do alot of things. pop raised me as if i was his oldest son instead of oldest daughter and though he pretty much floundered as a carpenter because he was really a professor and the two don't readily seem to mix, we still made do. we built fences and horse stalls and a hay loft. later still, with bob's help, we built a shed out of the old barn's wood once it fell down. i had my own tool belt, like a holster. i was tough and i could work side by side with the men. now the men are dead and sometimes my holster seems empty against all the enemy things wrong.
so why the hell should a toilet flapper beat me? once i regrouped (so what if it took a week or two?) i revisited that toilet like a woman to be reckoned with. i could hear bob saying honey, you can do this. so i flushed the enemy toilet and turned the water supply off and removed the offending flapper. marched my Jeep right over to the hardware store with the crumbly rubber wrapped in paper towel because i didn't like touching it. Universal Toilet Flapper one package said. universal should mean what it says, but i double-checked with a man in a name tag. yes, it should fit. should? i didn't like that word. i needed a definite yes or no with all i'd been through with this toilet. so he obliged, yes it will fit. as an extra treat i bought myself a pound of my favorite philips head screws. i love screws. you can never have too many screws. there's a certain satisfaction you can't beat when you powerdrill a screw into wood. but my toilet awaited.
i detached the little hose that helps refill the toilet so i could slip the new rubber ring on the little pipe and attach the robust new flapper to it. i am sure they have official names, but i don't know them, and frankly i hope not to see the inside of that tank for a long time to come. my flapper fit perfectly first time in. i even got the chain length right on the first try. just one flush and i would know for sure if i'd mastered the flapper. so i leaned over to that place we all hate, the place in back of the bowl where the plunger and the toilet brush hide, and turned the metal knob to refill the tank with water. then i stood up with proud satisfaction only to be sprayed full in the face by a wildly flopping nozzle. i'd forgotten to reattach the filler nozzle to the tube. face full of toilet tank water. i had to capture it as one would a hissing snake and clip it back where it belonged, but this time i could laugh instead of cry. sure, the toilet had the last laugh with its porcelain chilled Fuck You but i laughed along. and i think bob, surely watching as always, had a good laugh too. after all, this was a show he would have loved.
sometimes everything's too big for me. i feel so useless and incapable. lost and floundering. and i'm really no slouch. i mean, i know how to run a chop saw, a skill saw, a table saw. i have my own drill. i've been stripping the aluminum siding off the house, sometimes up on a steep roof, sometimes on a scaffold. i've been scraping and painting and replacing window glass. i've lost all fear of menacing carpenter bees and instead stand there like a warrior princess, brandishing my weapon paintbrush, daring them to bring it on. i can move huge ladders. i can patch a roof with tar. i can run a bead of silicone, of caulk. i can do alot of things. pop raised me as if i was his oldest son instead of oldest daughter and though he pretty much floundered as a carpenter because he was really a professor and the two don't readily seem to mix, we still made do. we built fences and horse stalls and a hay loft. later still, with bob's help, we built a shed out of the old barn's wood once it fell down. i had my own tool belt, like a holster. i was tough and i could work side by side with the men. now the men are dead and sometimes my holster seems empty against all the enemy things wrong.
so why the hell should a toilet flapper beat me? once i regrouped (so what if it took a week or two?) i revisited that toilet like a woman to be reckoned with. i could hear bob saying honey, you can do this. so i flushed the enemy toilet and turned the water supply off and removed the offending flapper. marched my Jeep right over to the hardware store with the crumbly rubber wrapped in paper towel because i didn't like touching it. Universal Toilet Flapper one package said. universal should mean what it says, but i double-checked with a man in a name tag. yes, it should fit. should? i didn't like that word. i needed a definite yes or no with all i'd been through with this toilet. so he obliged, yes it will fit. as an extra treat i bought myself a pound of my favorite philips head screws. i love screws. you can never have too many screws. there's a certain satisfaction you can't beat when you powerdrill a screw into wood. but my toilet awaited.
i detached the little hose that helps refill the toilet so i could slip the new rubber ring on the little pipe and attach the robust new flapper to it. i am sure they have official names, but i don't know them, and frankly i hope not to see the inside of that tank for a long time to come. my flapper fit perfectly first time in. i even got the chain length right on the first try. just one flush and i would know for sure if i'd mastered the flapper. so i leaned over to that place we all hate, the place in back of the bowl where the plunger and the toilet brush hide, and turned the metal knob to refill the tank with water. then i stood up with proud satisfaction only to be sprayed full in the face by a wildly flopping nozzle. i'd forgotten to reattach the filler nozzle to the tube. face full of toilet tank water. i had to capture it as one would a hissing snake and clip it back where it belonged, but this time i could laugh instead of cry. sure, the toilet had the last laugh with its porcelain chilled Fuck You but i laughed along. and i think bob, surely watching as always, had a good laugh too. after all, this was a show he would have loved.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
here comes my saturday nervous breakdown
this morning my hands were in both the toilet and the garbage. i may never bite my nails again. why should a toilet flapper leave me sobbing over the tank like Lucille Ball, wailing as if i'd lost my best friend? but i did lose my best friend. he would have known how to fix it. he knew how to do everything and, if he didn't, he figured it out or made it up as he went along. he'd never cry over a toilet flapper, or over cheap trashbags that breed holes and spill cat letter all over the bed of the truck on the way to the dump. he never would have filled the trashbags beyond their apparent "Hefty" capacity. "always trying to stuff ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag," he'd say to me. and it's true. the men at the DPW with their tanned legs and orange shirts look the other way when i don't have enough lime green dump stickers on my trashbags. they let me slide. they knew bob and they know he died. perks to being a widow.
so my hands smell and i find myself wondering what it is about all garbage that makes that singular smell? and why is the inside of a toilet tank black when the water is allegedly clean? i scrub my hands only to get dirtier, spending an hour or so on the back porch roof buttering it with tar patch. my red Vixen nails outlined in tar. i've added gasoline to the mix because that's all i have to remove the tar. if i lit a match would my hands explode into torches?
bob used to put cigarettes out in open coffee cans of gas. it's not the gas that ignites, he'd scoff dismissively, it's the fumes. and if it's in an open container in open air then you got nothing to worry about. still, i'd back way off when he did it, convinced every time that he'd explode into a human torch. but he never did. he always knew his stuff.
a long, achingly hot shower and i'm still vaguely perfumed with Regular Unleaded and my nail beds are still black. the trash is gone and the roof is almost entirely patched, but that goddamn toilet flapper still has me down. when i removed it from the tank i found that the reason the toilet runs is because the rubber stopper is crumbling at the edges, letting water seep. i can't wait to see this month's Water & Sewer bill. bob, always prepared, had a toilet repair kit on the basement workbench. so i brought it upstairs with complete confidence that it should be a snap. but of course it wasn't and now the old flapper is back in its place and i have to remove the tank lid and make sure the damn thing securely plugs the hole every time i flush. so i'm flushing a whole lot less.
i'l try it again tomorrow. surely if i can fix a roof i can fix a toilet. bob never would have imagined me fixing a roof or a toilet. i'll show him i can do both. i'll put on 1.75 strength reading glasses and maybe i can see through that water better. maybe this time i'll read the directions or consult my Tuff Chix Guide to Home Repair. my sister gave the book to me for my birthday five months after bob died. hard to misplace, being bright pre-teen pink. bob would have a good chuckle because he knew i never read directions, much less a guide. but i swear i did read the "how to" stop a faucet from dripping and i'm still intimidated by plumbing. so my answer was to shut the cold water supply off and brush my teeth real fast. the Hot, after all, turns hot real fast.
did so many things break when bob was alive? did he invisibly fix everything before i ever knew it was broken? could he fix me if he was here? if he came back alive, it would fix me, i'm sure.
but the reality is i am stymied by a jammed garbage disposal (hint: there is a Reset button). jammed it trying to stuff ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.
so my hands smell and i find myself wondering what it is about all garbage that makes that singular smell? and why is the inside of a toilet tank black when the water is allegedly clean? i scrub my hands only to get dirtier, spending an hour or so on the back porch roof buttering it with tar patch. my red Vixen nails outlined in tar. i've added gasoline to the mix because that's all i have to remove the tar. if i lit a match would my hands explode into torches?
bob used to put cigarettes out in open coffee cans of gas. it's not the gas that ignites, he'd scoff dismissively, it's the fumes. and if it's in an open container in open air then you got nothing to worry about. still, i'd back way off when he did it, convinced every time that he'd explode into a human torch. but he never did. he always knew his stuff.
a long, achingly hot shower and i'm still vaguely perfumed with Regular Unleaded and my nail beds are still black. the trash is gone and the roof is almost entirely patched, but that goddamn toilet flapper still has me down. when i removed it from the tank i found that the reason the toilet runs is because the rubber stopper is crumbling at the edges, letting water seep. i can't wait to see this month's Water & Sewer bill. bob, always prepared, had a toilet repair kit on the basement workbench. so i brought it upstairs with complete confidence that it should be a snap. but of course it wasn't and now the old flapper is back in its place and i have to remove the tank lid and make sure the damn thing securely plugs the hole every time i flush. so i'm flushing a whole lot less.
i'l try it again tomorrow. surely if i can fix a roof i can fix a toilet. bob never would have imagined me fixing a roof or a toilet. i'll show him i can do both. i'll put on 1.75 strength reading glasses and maybe i can see through that water better. maybe this time i'll read the directions or consult my Tuff Chix Guide to Home Repair. my sister gave the book to me for my birthday five months after bob died. hard to misplace, being bright pre-teen pink. bob would have a good chuckle because he knew i never read directions, much less a guide. but i swear i did read the "how to" stop a faucet from dripping and i'm still intimidated by plumbing. so my answer was to shut the cold water supply off and brush my teeth real fast. the Hot, after all, turns hot real fast.
did so many things break when bob was alive? did he invisibly fix everything before i ever knew it was broken? could he fix me if he was here? if he came back alive, it would fix me, i'm sure.
but the reality is i am stymied by a jammed garbage disposal (hint: there is a Reset button). jammed it trying to stuff ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
three dollar cat
(i wrote this one night in 1986 on an old-fashioned typewriter and haven't changed a thing just because. it's nothing more than my farewell to my devoted cat, from childhood to adulthood.)
i remember how i cut off his long white whiskers and kept them in an old cardboard jewelry store box so that if he ever died i would have something to remember him by. that was when he was barely more than a kitten, a three dollar cat my father bought for me to replace a cat that disappeared on Halloween night. now the three dollar cat and i are sixteen years older and we are looking at each other over expanse of of my white sheeted bed. i start to cry and Fearless looks at me, his yellow-green eyes rheumy with age. understanding.
he is dying and i no longer have the long white whiskers to keep to remember him by. i lost them years ago, perhaps believing that he would live forever. other cats have come and gone, but Fearless has alwaysbeen here. he's never been sick, never injured, never beat up. he's always been a fat lump of black fur sitting at the edge of the garage, waiting for somebody to let him in and feed him. he's led an ever-hopeful life, walking in his funny stiff-legged way to meet me half-way up the driveway. looking expectantly up at my face as if this was the night he was sure he'd be let in. that fat cat never knew when to stop eating, and when he'd demolished everything within his reach he'd settle his bulk at the end of my bed so that i would have to arrange my sleeping position to lay around him. "Put him on a diet," my family would say as Fearless benignly licked the last of a Friskies Buffet dinner from his lips, his stomach nearly hanging down to the floor. but how do you put a cat on a diet? i took for granted that Fearless would live forever and remain fat even if he were starving.
my opinion is changed now. my poor, ravaged cat sits before me with bones sticking out. his black fur is dull and lifeless. he is dusty looking and constantly shedding. he seems so very old. i lay with my head close to his, talking to him and petting him, telling him how glad i am to have had him for my cat and how i love him. his back ripples and his purr rumbles throughout his body. he loves me right back. he has been my friend for sixteen years, my buddy. a cat so full of personality you couldn't help but like him, even when he drives you crazy.
i remember leaving him at the vet's to be declawed because he was destroying the front of my parents' house. when i went to pick him up the veterinarian and his assistants gathered to say goodbye to Fearless, telling me they could hardly bear to see him go he was such a characer. i wanted to say "well if he was such a joy, how 'bout destroying his bill?"
Fearless would put up with anything as long as i was paying some semblance of attention to him. when we cut wood and brought it in to the house he would follow me back and forth out to the woods, over and over. "stay," i'd tell him, "i'll be right back." but he'd accompany me roundtrip over and over again. he would hobble out to the pool on the hottest days and sprawl his body under the lounge chair i was sunning myself on so he could shield his black fur from the sun. he was happy as long as i talked to him periodically and didn't splash him when i jumped in the water.
i have a picture of him on my bulletin board. he is buried up to his nek in a pile of fall leaves. he didn't mind it any more than he minded being dressed in a doll's dress and bonnet when i was a girl. he didn't mind it at all compared to the time i dropped him in the pool to see if cats could swim. or as much as he minds it every spring when i put the hose on him and lather him up with shampoo. he always submits with resignation, then looks at me in disgust as he stalks across the patio shaking off droplets of water and licking his fur dry.
he is never mad at me for long. he has always adored me even when i ignored him or refused to let him in. he has always been so definitely my cat and i am reminded of this whenever he does anything particularly offensive like use the bathtub as a litterbox. i am always urged to take him whenever i've moved away from home, though i am torn because he is so used to that place and its safety. Fearless doesn't fare well away from home. in my first apartment he disappeared for hours and not even the mention of food would draw him out. when he'd grown accustomed to the place he decided that night-time was cat-party-time. he'd howl songs to the moon, bat at the stereo's speaker wires, and scrape kitty litter out of the box and onto the cold bathroom tile just for fun. all this would routine occur at one o'clock in the morning. at another of my apartments he had a horror of the sound of traffic so close to the house. after all, he'd never heard any before. he would press te bulk of his body against the screen door, squawking like a row until i let him in off the porch. it was funny to see him scared of something because he'd always led such a casual 'fearless' life. even my mother's large German Shepards would give up on Fearless when they realized the large lump of black fur would pay them no mind. Fearless even managed to be home by dinner time the day my mother dumped him off on a dirt road over a mile from home after he'd devoured a bag of deli meat left out on the counter. i sat tearfully at the back window that night until i saw the recognizable blur of black and white fur that was his face march with determination across the back pasture.
Fearless eats his can of Friskies in his usual way. with one white paw he scoops out the meat and eats it. He acts like a person. I wish he could talk. i think he would be a riot, witty and sarcastic, commenting sardonically on his failing faculties.
he always seemed so ageless, but age has caught up with him this year. he is an old and decrepit cat now. he seems deaf to anything other than the sound of an electric can opener. his arthritis makes him look like he is walking on eggshells. Fearless has slowed down, if indeed that is possible.
But what a long, rich life he has led. he's been around a lot longer than most cats. he has lived out his nine lives, i am quite sure. yet his impending death to me is like the end of an era. i cannot imagine life without Fearless.
tonight may be the last night we spend together. i am going to shut out my light and pet my old friend until he falls asleep.
i remember how i cut off his long white whiskers and kept them in an old cardboard jewelry store box so that if he ever died i would have something to remember him by. that was when he was barely more than a kitten, a three dollar cat my father bought for me to replace a cat that disappeared on Halloween night. now the three dollar cat and i are sixteen years older and we are looking at each other over expanse of of my white sheeted bed. i start to cry and Fearless looks at me, his yellow-green eyes rheumy with age. understanding.
he is dying and i no longer have the long white whiskers to keep to remember him by. i lost them years ago, perhaps believing that he would live forever. other cats have come and gone, but Fearless has alwaysbeen here. he's never been sick, never injured, never beat up. he's always been a fat lump of black fur sitting at the edge of the garage, waiting for somebody to let him in and feed him. he's led an ever-hopeful life, walking in his funny stiff-legged way to meet me half-way up the driveway. looking expectantly up at my face as if this was the night he was sure he'd be let in. that fat cat never knew when to stop eating, and when he'd demolished everything within his reach he'd settle his bulk at the end of my bed so that i would have to arrange my sleeping position to lay around him. "Put him on a diet," my family would say as Fearless benignly licked the last of a Friskies Buffet dinner from his lips, his stomach nearly hanging down to the floor. but how do you put a cat on a diet? i took for granted that Fearless would live forever and remain fat even if he were starving.
my opinion is changed now. my poor, ravaged cat sits before me with bones sticking out. his black fur is dull and lifeless. he is dusty looking and constantly shedding. he seems so very old. i lay with my head close to his, talking to him and petting him, telling him how glad i am to have had him for my cat and how i love him. his back ripples and his purr rumbles throughout his body. he loves me right back. he has been my friend for sixteen years, my buddy. a cat so full of personality you couldn't help but like him, even when he drives you crazy.
i remember leaving him at the vet's to be declawed because he was destroying the front of my parents' house. when i went to pick him up the veterinarian and his assistants gathered to say goodbye to Fearless, telling me they could hardly bear to see him go he was such a characer. i wanted to say "well if he was such a joy, how 'bout destroying his bill?"
Fearless would put up with anything as long as i was paying some semblance of attention to him. when we cut wood and brought it in to the house he would follow me back and forth out to the woods, over and over. "stay," i'd tell him, "i'll be right back." but he'd accompany me roundtrip over and over again. he would hobble out to the pool on the hottest days and sprawl his body under the lounge chair i was sunning myself on so he could shield his black fur from the sun. he was happy as long as i talked to him periodically and didn't splash him when i jumped in the water.
i have a picture of him on my bulletin board. he is buried up to his nek in a pile of fall leaves. he didn't mind it any more than he minded being dressed in a doll's dress and bonnet when i was a girl. he didn't mind it at all compared to the time i dropped him in the pool to see if cats could swim. or as much as he minds it every spring when i put the hose on him and lather him up with shampoo. he always submits with resignation, then looks at me in disgust as he stalks across the patio shaking off droplets of water and licking his fur dry.
he is never mad at me for long. he has always adored me even when i ignored him or refused to let him in. he has always been so definitely my cat and i am reminded of this whenever he does anything particularly offensive like use the bathtub as a litterbox. i am always urged to take him whenever i've moved away from home, though i am torn because he is so used to that place and its safety. Fearless doesn't fare well away from home. in my first apartment he disappeared for hours and not even the mention of food would draw him out. when he'd grown accustomed to the place he decided that night-time was cat-party-time. he'd howl songs to the moon, bat at the stereo's speaker wires, and scrape kitty litter out of the box and onto the cold bathroom tile just for fun. all this would routine occur at one o'clock in the morning. at another of my apartments he had a horror of the sound of traffic so close to the house. after all, he'd never heard any before. he would press te bulk of his body against the screen door, squawking like a row until i let him in off the porch. it was funny to see him scared of something because he'd always led such a casual 'fearless' life. even my mother's large German Shepards would give up on Fearless when they realized the large lump of black fur would pay them no mind. Fearless even managed to be home by dinner time the day my mother dumped him off on a dirt road over a mile from home after he'd devoured a bag of deli meat left out on the counter. i sat tearfully at the back window that night until i saw the recognizable blur of black and white fur that was his face march with determination across the back pasture.
Fearless eats his can of Friskies in his usual way. with one white paw he scoops out the meat and eats it. He acts like a person. I wish he could talk. i think he would be a riot, witty and sarcastic, commenting sardonically on his failing faculties.
he always seemed so ageless, but age has caught up with him this year. he is an old and decrepit cat now. he seems deaf to anything other than the sound of an electric can opener. his arthritis makes him look like he is walking on eggshells. Fearless has slowed down, if indeed that is possible.
But what a long, rich life he has led. he's been around a lot longer than most cats. he has lived out his nine lives, i am quite sure. yet his impending death to me is like the end of an era. i cannot imagine life without Fearless.
tonight may be the last night we spend together. i am going to shut out my light and pet my old friend until he falls asleep.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
horses, horses, horses
horses make a fine audience. that is, if you're not looking for cheers and clapping. on the other hand, they will never jeer at your performance. the hayloft, 8 feet off the ground, was my stage and the wood pole end of a hayfork my microphone. i'd bellow "i'm the greatest star!" from Funny Girl from a pyramid of hay bales with the crunch of horse's jaws as back-up. the performance usually began after i'd flung them each a generous slice of hay, a square frisbee smelling of summer fields. my goal the center of each 15 foot square stall. sometimes i missed and the grass frisbee landed on a horse's back, and that was OK because eventually it would fall off into the sandy stall soil. or else the hay might hit a beam and fall, two slices in one horse's stall. annoying, because that meant i had to scramble down the ladder and correct the mistake because there was a hungry, hayless horse waiting in he next stall over. i would often make my exit from the hayloft into an olympic act, taking a couple steps down while facing out at the aisle, then leaping. leaping from the platform of the hayloft itself was always so tempting, but always too dangerous. that could result in broken legs and there was no telling how long i might lay out there like a snapped scarecrow if that happened. i was, after all, usually out there alone with my radio or tape player blaring, and the house just far enough away that no one would hear my screams. sometimes, if i was mad in that teenage i'll get them' way, i imagined doing just that. leap and break my legs. they'd all be nice to me after that, wouldn't they? but i was never quite that demented or self-destructive. so I impersonated Barbra Streisand or sang along with the Top Twenty of the late 70's, happy in the barn because it smelled good and the horses were warm and comforting.
they could be far out in the pasture, grazing mindlessly, until i bellowed "DINNER!" at the top of my lungs. my voice carried well, i could have made it on Broadway. the horses would gallop in, following a silly wormtrail they'd cut into the grass. no wonder the mall pet store called that plastic hamster house a HabiTrail. apparently animals are creatures of habit. hence the saying. the horses wouldn't stray from their trail even with an acre wide expanse of grass to gallop through. single file, dust billowing from their hooves. once in a great while only Chipper would gallop in. fat pony was always hungry. so i'd mount his broad back and run him back out to get his pasture-mates. we'd play cowboy herding cattle, he'd cut circles around the other horses and i'd war-whoop and wave my arms in a show of menace, driving them all in to the barn. i think Chipper enjoyed this go-get-em status. he was raised out west, after all, a descendant of the war ponies plains indians once rode. he was not only a pinto but also an appaloosa and somewhere in his lineage had to have been a draft horse or two. he was as tall as a pony can be and still be a pony, and not at all graceful with those big draft horse fetlocks and wide boat of a back. he was, however, very clever and agile and i could ride him with no bridle and saddle and he understood the squeeze of my knees or a hand waved at the side of his neck. turn left, turn right. he had it down. i could easily pretend i was Cheyenne.
chipper's flexible nature made him my choice for horse tricks. in the winter i would lay a ladder across the 15 foot wide barn aisle and start him with a kick at the barn door. we'd jump the ladder, turn around, and do it over and over again. i wasn't a Cheyenne during this practice. i was a great steeplechase rider. OK, well maybe a combination of the two because eventually i taught myself to take the jump no hands, then arms extended, flying like a plane through the air. it was almost impossible to fall off Chipper's barrel back. still, i considered it quite an achievement. in the summer, outside, Chip would dutifully stand with this ass facing a giant tractor tire laying on the ground. i could count on him never wandering off. my trick was to run, jump on the big rubber tire like a trampoline, and vault onto his back. in retrospect, i am lucky he never kicked me in the teeth. he had ample opportunity. but, like i said, this was a horse with a noble wild west heritage (or so i imagined) and so he did as his Elders would have had him do. which was stand there patiently. at some point in my Indian fetish i asked for and received a plastic bow and arrow, but i could never manage to hit a hay bale from a standstill much less from a horse at a gallop.
Arabess was "my" horse, a three-quarter Arab who'd come to us from North Dakota. only later did we find out she was pregnant with a bonus filly. she and Chipper were our originals. she was much more of an elegant horse, chestnut with a saffron mane, and taller for sure. but she was not the nicest horse and didn't bend to my will like Chip. in other words, she threw me almost every single day i rode her for years. arabs are spooky, so i blamed it on that. cat jumped off a chair, Bess would freak and throw me. it got so i could land on my feet in front of her, still holding the reins. no small feat in and of itself. i liked to ride her because i could ride english hunt seat with my velvet hardhat and satisfy that steeplechase side of me. Chipper just looked silly with an english saddle. like dressing a 300 pound woman in a silky negligee and stilettos. it didn't quite work. he was meant to be western. i rode him english in a 4-H horse show and i'm pretty sure we looked idiotic. side by side, though, he was the better horse. Arabess might have been pretty with the glamour of the Egyptian background, but Chip was a horse you could count on.
you could count on him getting into trouble too. because he was so smart, he figured out how to unlatch his stall with his teeth and somehow breaking into the Tack Room where we kept all the horse grain. he got in there and gorged himself, sometimes bringing the littler pony Misty along for the fun. to avoid colic i'd have to walk and walk him for hours and then he wasn't my best horse. he also opened the pasture gate and took all his cohorts for a walk. we once got a call from Hatfield Beef claiming that if we didn't get our horses out of their yard they'd be horsemeat. eventually an electric fence and it's electric gate cured the jailbreaks although i hated going electric because it seemed i always got shocked. the fence never cured Misty of his jailbreaks though. he was just short enough to scoot under the electric wire and would go off in search of a mare in need of his stallion attributes. poor thing, though. too short to get anywhere near the average local mare's tail. like me, he was lucky he was never kicked in the teeth.
(to be continued shortly!)
they could be far out in the pasture, grazing mindlessly, until i bellowed "DINNER!" at the top of my lungs. my voice carried well, i could have made it on Broadway. the horses would gallop in, following a silly wormtrail they'd cut into the grass. no wonder the mall pet store called that plastic hamster house a HabiTrail. apparently animals are creatures of habit. hence the saying. the horses wouldn't stray from their trail even with an acre wide expanse of grass to gallop through. single file, dust billowing from their hooves. once in a great while only Chipper would gallop in. fat pony was always hungry. so i'd mount his broad back and run him back out to get his pasture-mates. we'd play cowboy herding cattle, he'd cut circles around the other horses and i'd war-whoop and wave my arms in a show of menace, driving them all in to the barn. i think Chipper enjoyed this go-get-em status. he was raised out west, after all, a descendant of the war ponies plains indians once rode. he was not only a pinto but also an appaloosa and somewhere in his lineage had to have been a draft horse or two. he was as tall as a pony can be and still be a pony, and not at all graceful with those big draft horse fetlocks and wide boat of a back. he was, however, very clever and agile and i could ride him with no bridle and saddle and he understood the squeeze of my knees or a hand waved at the side of his neck. turn left, turn right. he had it down. i could easily pretend i was Cheyenne.
chipper's flexible nature made him my choice for horse tricks. in the winter i would lay a ladder across the 15 foot wide barn aisle and start him with a kick at the barn door. we'd jump the ladder, turn around, and do it over and over again. i wasn't a Cheyenne during this practice. i was a great steeplechase rider. OK, well maybe a combination of the two because eventually i taught myself to take the jump no hands, then arms extended, flying like a plane through the air. it was almost impossible to fall off Chipper's barrel back. still, i considered it quite an achievement. in the summer, outside, Chip would dutifully stand with this ass facing a giant tractor tire laying on the ground. i could count on him never wandering off. my trick was to run, jump on the big rubber tire like a trampoline, and vault onto his back. in retrospect, i am lucky he never kicked me in the teeth. he had ample opportunity. but, like i said, this was a horse with a noble wild west heritage (or so i imagined) and so he did as his Elders would have had him do. which was stand there patiently. at some point in my Indian fetish i asked for and received a plastic bow and arrow, but i could never manage to hit a hay bale from a standstill much less from a horse at a gallop.
Arabess was "my" horse, a three-quarter Arab who'd come to us from North Dakota. only later did we find out she was pregnant with a bonus filly. she and Chipper were our originals. she was much more of an elegant horse, chestnut with a saffron mane, and taller for sure. but she was not the nicest horse and didn't bend to my will like Chip. in other words, she threw me almost every single day i rode her for years. arabs are spooky, so i blamed it on that. cat jumped off a chair, Bess would freak and throw me. it got so i could land on my feet in front of her, still holding the reins. no small feat in and of itself. i liked to ride her because i could ride english hunt seat with my velvet hardhat and satisfy that steeplechase side of me. Chipper just looked silly with an english saddle. like dressing a 300 pound woman in a silky negligee and stilettos. it didn't quite work. he was meant to be western. i rode him english in a 4-H horse show and i'm pretty sure we looked idiotic. side by side, though, he was the better horse. Arabess might have been pretty with the glamour of the Egyptian background, but Chip was a horse you could count on.
you could count on him getting into trouble too. because he was so smart, he figured out how to unlatch his stall with his teeth and somehow breaking into the Tack Room where we kept all the horse grain. he got in there and gorged himself, sometimes bringing the littler pony Misty along for the fun. to avoid colic i'd have to walk and walk him for hours and then he wasn't my best horse. he also opened the pasture gate and took all his cohorts for a walk. we once got a call from Hatfield Beef claiming that if we didn't get our horses out of their yard they'd be horsemeat. eventually an electric fence and it's electric gate cured the jailbreaks although i hated going electric because it seemed i always got shocked. the fence never cured Misty of his jailbreaks though. he was just short enough to scoot under the electric wire and would go off in search of a mare in need of his stallion attributes. poor thing, though. too short to get anywhere near the average local mare's tail. like me, he was lucky he was never kicked in the teeth.
(to be continued shortly!)
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
just one more....
i didn't like my brother before he was even born. i demonstrated this when my mother was on her back in bed 9 months pregnant. she asked me to bring her a large encyclopedia, which i delivered and dropped unceremoniously on her stomach. i was 12. i wasn't an evil child, honest. but i didn't like the idea of that thing coming into our lives. i was by then the oldest of 4 children so i felt i'd tolerated enough already. my mother had divorced and re-married and i suppose my step-father wanted one child that was all his. it seemed the 4 of us weren't enough. my 'accidental' drop didn't stop the inevitable and he was born anyway. to tell you the truth, i didn't do it with actual murder in my heart, it was more an act of resentment than anything. here, brat, take that. my sisters thought the little baby was so cute but i don't remember wanting much to do with it.
you couldn't ignore that one for long, though. he was, i am convinced, the most high maintenance child in history, and still is. at least we moved to a place where we had horses and all kinds of farm animals not long after he was born. i could escape him, there was plenty to do in the barn. let my sisters play babysitter, i didn't want any part of it. he demanded everyone's complete and utter attention at all times, which bored and irritated me. i stewed on ways to get him back. as i write this, i am reminded of the lyrics to 'Up All Night' by the Talking Heads:
"sister, sister, he's just a plaything.
i wanna make him stay up all night."
and even to this day when i hear the White Stripes sing 'The Hardest Button to Button' i think of my little brother:
"He had toothache
He started crying
It sounded like an earthquake
It didn't last long
Because I stopped it
I grabbed a rag doll
And stuck some little pins in it"
he thrived and i found tolerating him much more of a challenge than the other 3 had been. one summer one of my sisters went away with a friend for the entire summer and he decided that he had to carry every single one of his toys at all times. i believe there were about 12, from dolls to a push-toy i called the poppity-corn-popper because of the way balls would bounce in a plastic bubble as its wheels turned. picking him up became no easy task and of course there was no refusing his will. you either did it or suffered the consequences. when my sister returned home he dropped all of the toys. then he went through his Hat Phase, which meant that he had to go through and pick the special hat he absolutely needed to wear and nothing, nothing could happen until this hat was chosen and placed upon his precious head. one of the hats was at least amusing - a yellow hard-hat with a red spinning siren/light on top. but a child with a siren and spinning red light on his head is only amusing for so long. especially in public.
and then of course there was the phase when he would open no door with his bare hands and had to use his elbows. since elbows do not come complete with opposing thumbs this little task was not easily achieved. i didn't know whether to smack him or laugh at him. i wasn't allowed to smack him, so laugh it was.
even though i couldn't smack him i found there were other ways to torture him as payback for the way i considered he tortured all of us. these torture sessions usually occurred when my parents weren't home. one night he sat at the dining room table by the big sliding glass doors, coloring with my sister or something. so i snuck outside with a white sheet over myself and suddenly leapt at the window, flailing and moaning. i do believe he peed his pants. another evening, same setting, i had him put on the giant headphones attached to the stereo cabinet. there was a song by Pink Floyd i wanted him to hear called 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene". the song's name gives you a pretty good idea of what one might expect. the song rose up slowly with a slow, persistent, and monotonous beat. he looked at me in boredom after a minute of this, trying to remove the headphones, but i insisted he keep them on. the good part was coming. one of the Floyd people started whispering in his ears and his eyes widened. i could tell he was getting wary.
careful, careful with that axe, eugene
then the blood-curdling screams. i made sure to wrench the sound to full volume for the screaming part. he leapt out of the chair, ripping the headphones off and shrieking.
"but i thought you'd like it. it has your name in it, eugene."
and i laughed and laughed.
i can't remember what it was he did the next time i decided he required torture. was it when he rode his skateboard into the base of the staircase and punched a hole in the wood? my parents were out, so naturally i was sure i'd get the blame for not watching what the brat did. or was it the time he tied a rope from the living room door handles to the shelf on the wall where my father's prized glass-domed clock resided ... then closed the door. i'd run to answer the ringing phone when i heard the horrible sound of glass shattering. either one of them will do. i told him that when mom & pop got home and saw what he'd done they would give his precious tricycle away to brian brown up the street. oh yes, absolutely. he wailed in abject misery.
that'll teach you, you little shit.
of course they didn't take away his tricycle. he never seemed to have to suffer much for his misdeeds, even years later. when i drove a $300 1968 Plymouth Satellite, he had a $300 three-wheeler ATV. he shot my sister's friend's car window out with a bee-bee gun and suffered little consequence other than the pain of a bee-bee imbedded in the palm of his hand later that day when he stuck his hand out as his friend shot. i thought that was pretty good payback.
odd thing, though. i was his 'favorite sister'. the crazy, fun one. after all, when he decided to run away from home when he was about 7 i offered to help him. packed all 2 runaways would need for a night in the woods and drove my Pinto up onto Horse Mountain by the reservoir. i was counting on him having second thoughts when we stopped in the moonless woods and scuffed through dried leaves. a 7 year old who has never spent a moment outside the comfort of 6 other people wasn't liable to find a lot of comfort with his questionable sister, however fun, with nothing between him and the night woods' danger but a sleeping bag.
despite his cherub face and head of golden banana curls, it was impossible not to continue resenting him, though. sort of a love-hate thing. where i, as first born, had to train my parents on what it was like to raise a teenager, he got away with murder years later when he reached his teens and the golden angel turned into a dark devil. by then my parents were weary of doing battle with the little monster. i was a virgin as long as i lived in their house, i never smoked a cigarette, a joint, or even tried a beer. he came home with pierced ears. he came home tattooed. he smoked pot and drank beer and painted his room with hellish black spray-paint. he bought more and more snakes and lizards and spiders. mysterious, because i don't recall him having a job. he was consistently in trouble in school for doing things like, say, spraying "Fart Spray" through the halls. he had loud sex with his girlfriend overhead while we ate dinner downstairs. and he's gone on to do so much more.
they just had to have one more kid, didn't they?
see....i had the right idea with the encyclopedia. i knew it.
you couldn't ignore that one for long, though. he was, i am convinced, the most high maintenance child in history, and still is. at least we moved to a place where we had horses and all kinds of farm animals not long after he was born. i could escape him, there was plenty to do in the barn. let my sisters play babysitter, i didn't want any part of it. he demanded everyone's complete and utter attention at all times, which bored and irritated me. i stewed on ways to get him back. as i write this, i am reminded of the lyrics to 'Up All Night' by the Talking Heads:
"sister, sister, he's just a plaything.
i wanna make him stay up all night."
and even to this day when i hear the White Stripes sing 'The Hardest Button to Button' i think of my little brother:
"He had toothache
He started crying
It sounded like an earthquake
It didn't last long
Because I stopped it
I grabbed a rag doll
And stuck some little pins in it"
he thrived and i found tolerating him much more of a challenge than the other 3 had been. one summer one of my sisters went away with a friend for the entire summer and he decided that he had to carry every single one of his toys at all times. i believe there were about 12, from dolls to a push-toy i called the poppity-corn-popper because of the way balls would bounce in a plastic bubble as its wheels turned. picking him up became no easy task and of course there was no refusing his will. you either did it or suffered the consequences. when my sister returned home he dropped all of the toys. then he went through his Hat Phase, which meant that he had to go through and pick the special hat he absolutely needed to wear and nothing, nothing could happen until this hat was chosen and placed upon his precious head. one of the hats was at least amusing - a yellow hard-hat with a red spinning siren/light on top. but a child with a siren and spinning red light on his head is only amusing for so long. especially in public.
and then of course there was the phase when he would open no door with his bare hands and had to use his elbows. since elbows do not come complete with opposing thumbs this little task was not easily achieved. i didn't know whether to smack him or laugh at him. i wasn't allowed to smack him, so laugh it was.
even though i couldn't smack him i found there were other ways to torture him as payback for the way i considered he tortured all of us. these torture sessions usually occurred when my parents weren't home. one night he sat at the dining room table by the big sliding glass doors, coloring with my sister or something. so i snuck outside with a white sheet over myself and suddenly leapt at the window, flailing and moaning. i do believe he peed his pants. another evening, same setting, i had him put on the giant headphones attached to the stereo cabinet. there was a song by Pink Floyd i wanted him to hear called 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene". the song's name gives you a pretty good idea of what one might expect. the song rose up slowly with a slow, persistent, and monotonous beat. he looked at me in boredom after a minute of this, trying to remove the headphones, but i insisted he keep them on. the good part was coming. one of the Floyd people started whispering in his ears and his eyes widened. i could tell he was getting wary.
careful, careful with that axe, eugene
then the blood-curdling screams. i made sure to wrench the sound to full volume for the screaming part. he leapt out of the chair, ripping the headphones off and shrieking.
"but i thought you'd like it. it has your name in it, eugene."
and i laughed and laughed.
i can't remember what it was he did the next time i decided he required torture. was it when he rode his skateboard into the base of the staircase and punched a hole in the wood? my parents were out, so naturally i was sure i'd get the blame for not watching what the brat did. or was it the time he tied a rope from the living room door handles to the shelf on the wall where my father's prized glass-domed clock resided ... then closed the door. i'd run to answer the ringing phone when i heard the horrible sound of glass shattering. either one of them will do. i told him that when mom & pop got home and saw what he'd done they would give his precious tricycle away to brian brown up the street. oh yes, absolutely. he wailed in abject misery.
that'll teach you, you little shit.
of course they didn't take away his tricycle. he never seemed to have to suffer much for his misdeeds, even years later. when i drove a $300 1968 Plymouth Satellite, he had a $300 three-wheeler ATV. he shot my sister's friend's car window out with a bee-bee gun and suffered little consequence other than the pain of a bee-bee imbedded in the palm of his hand later that day when he stuck his hand out as his friend shot. i thought that was pretty good payback.
odd thing, though. i was his 'favorite sister'. the crazy, fun one. after all, when he decided to run away from home when he was about 7 i offered to help him. packed all 2 runaways would need for a night in the woods and drove my Pinto up onto Horse Mountain by the reservoir. i was counting on him having second thoughts when we stopped in the moonless woods and scuffed through dried leaves. a 7 year old who has never spent a moment outside the comfort of 6 other people wasn't liable to find a lot of comfort with his questionable sister, however fun, with nothing between him and the night woods' danger but a sleeping bag.
despite his cherub face and head of golden banana curls, it was impossible not to continue resenting him, though. sort of a love-hate thing. where i, as first born, had to train my parents on what it was like to raise a teenager, he got away with murder years later when he reached his teens and the golden angel turned into a dark devil. by then my parents were weary of doing battle with the little monster. i was a virgin as long as i lived in their house, i never smoked a cigarette, a joint, or even tried a beer. he came home with pierced ears. he came home tattooed. he smoked pot and drank beer and painted his room with hellish black spray-paint. he bought more and more snakes and lizards and spiders. mysterious, because i don't recall him having a job. he was consistently in trouble in school for doing things like, say, spraying "Fart Spray" through the halls. he had loud sex with his girlfriend overhead while we ate dinner downstairs. and he's gone on to do so much more.
they just had to have one more kid, didn't they?
see....i had the right idea with the encyclopedia. i knew it.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
words that burn
i have decided to dredge my closet for boxes of my old writing. old writing does not equate bad writing. perhaps there is something of substance, something workable in there. if i could make the old presentable then perhaps it would make my new presentable. if i had true ambition i would dive into my antique trunk full of 100+ journals written over the course of my life. but i know they were only written to vent, rarely creative, and probably some very embarassing and painful to read. particularly during my Drunk Phase when my writing often seemed profound ... if i could only make out my drunken scrawl. there again, those may have something of substance in them. they are, after all, the thoughts of a lifetime. never meant for anyone else's eyes. instead, my fantasy was to be burned on a funeral pyre of those journals. i guess that means i have to write more. a pyre must be impressive in size.
Monday, September 1, 2008
the energizer bunny
i turned my new-found roof repair skills to the bunnies' winter condo today. all summer they reside under the pear tree in the shade, catching breezes. all winter they live closer to the house in a wood & glass rabbit hutch with a whimsical rabbit shaped window facing south.
bob built both condos probably 15+ years ago when i had my first bunny, elliot, a dwarf dutch bunny. fur the color of a fawn with white wrapped around his shoulders. ellie lived 10 years, long for a rabbit, until he succumbed to some bizarre brain parasite that first made his head tilt then took him away entirely within a week, to die in my arms. i took his death hard and never came to peace with it until perhaps a year later when i lay on my back in the dark, in 'corpse pose' in yoga class. i'd begun to feel that familiar sensation of floating. you know the feeling when you just barely put your palm to water. that sense of being barely connected to surface. when suddenly out of the darkness elliot hopped, not bound to earth in any way, and slipped into the rabbit hole of my heart. from that day on i continued to miss him, but never again felt i'd lost him. instead he'd become a part of me.
then came pippy & gonzo, twin brothers who looked like elliot but unfortunately loved each other more than they'd ever come to love me. they did, however, accept petunia. i inherited petunia when my mother's other rabbit petie's cage had been torn open by some predator. as was petie. thus petunia came to be part of a threesome, and she liked it. the boys loved her and snuggled on either side of her slender body, and i called it a 'tunie sandwich'. collectively they were known as 'the Pippies'. less impersonal than 'the rabbits'. one by one, however, pippy & gonzo eventually died over the years. bob said they ate themselves to death. they were quite fat. finally only petunia was left. she was a happy and loving white bunny with brown/black ears and nose. her red eyes were preternatural and ruined her chances of being a bunny beauty queen. but we loved tunie.
one day i discovered a lump on her belly which turned out to be breast cancer. if female rabbits aren't spayed early on, and live long enough, they are good candidates for this. my parents had never spayed her. when i took her to the vet they removed not only the tumor, but also gave her a hysterectomy since she appeared to have cancer in her uterus as well. they handed her back to me with the warning that she'd probably only live about 3 months despite my best efforts. a year and a half went by. then i found another lump. breast cancer again. as she recovered from her second surgery i thought tunie should be the poster bunny for breast cancer. she deserved a pink ribbon. bob and i dubbed her 'the energizer bunny' because it appeared that nothing could kill her. even the predator who'd taken petie had spared her.
finally, a few months after bob succumbed to cancer of his own, i discovered yet another lump on tunie, this time on her side. by this time she was living with a smaller version of herself named violet. that is until i realized violet was peeing on her and therefore wasn't the girl bunny we thought. and so violet, now a boy and then a eunuch, is what i call my 'transgender bunny'. i had to separate him from his beloved tunie. at 10 years old and stricken again with cancer, she had no energy for the likes of him beyond touching noses through cage walls. this time the news was bad. this cancer had already invaded her lungs and there was nothing they could do. i asked 'how long?' and they shrugged. 'just bring her in to be put down when she appears to be in pain'. i don't know how to tell when a bunny is in pain. they are masters at hiding their weaknesses. how would she let me know? every chance i got i would let tunie hop around in the yard, free in the grass. sometimes it was harder and harder for her to get upright and at last i put her in a box and called mom to please take us to the vet. it was time. i waited for mom on the front lawn and as the SUV pulled up, tunie leapt out of the box and went hopping - as if she hadn't a care in the world - around the front yard. even escaping my attempts to catch her.
it wasn't her day to die.
mom left and i spent the weekend giving tunie the run of the yard under my watchful eye, expecting i would find her dead in her cage every morning. i did battle with myself. was it up to me to decide when she should die? it turns out the leap from the box and the escape from euthanasia was tunie's last hurrah. like bob, she rallied fully to life before death. as with bob, i was there for her death. as with elliot, i held her in a towel in my arms and watched it come. i don't know how she told me it was time, but i knew, and i held her. my energizer bunny's heart stopped beating as she lay next to my own.
and then it was only violet. but not for long. some irresponsible child lost interest in its black & white dwarf bunny and its irresponsible mother was going to set it loose in the woods to fend for itself. my friend called me to spare its life and, sucker that i am, i took it home and named it Gianni. naturally it too was not neutered so that cost me a nice piece of change, but i wasn't about to have violet or gianni succumb to testicular cancer. not after all i'd been through in the bunny department. violet had never lost his Dominant Bunny standing and wouldn't hear of gianni sharing his cage. bunnies may appear to be sweet, but really they are both cruel and gentle things. without my intervention gianni would have been murdered by violet's hand. or teeth, as it were. they are content to sniff one another through the cage wire, close enough company for either, which is unfortunate because they will never know the warmth of a 'tunie sandwich' on a cold winter day.
it is september 1 and before i know it fall will be here. violet had eaten the plywood roof of the bedroom of his condo last winter, perhaps from boredom, and so i set about repairing it today. it looked like the ruins of Katrina, but on a manageable scale for a lone woman and her table saw. i ripped off the old shredded plywood and replaced it with leftover kitchen countertop cut to size. then i screwed leftover roof shingles to the top, triple level! no wind, rain or snow will breach my roof. it took a hammer and nails, a measuring tape and heavy duty scissors, my trusty cordless drill (one of my last gifts from bob) and the Workmate 400, which i hauled up out of the basement with much difficulty. the last step will be the final seal with roofing tar. but i am far too exhausted at this point to carry a huge can of tar down a ladder from the porch roof.
i know it was mostly my labor and ingenuity that resulted in a beautiful new roof for violet, but i also thank bob who taught me how to do these things. maybe i should offer myself up to Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans. but in my world animals come before humanity, and my humane society (2 bunnies and 6 cats) is hungry right now. as their keeper, slave and recipient of their boundless love, i must obey their call! this energizer bunny is done for the day.
bob built both condos probably 15+ years ago when i had my first bunny, elliot, a dwarf dutch bunny. fur the color of a fawn with white wrapped around his shoulders. ellie lived 10 years, long for a rabbit, until he succumbed to some bizarre brain parasite that first made his head tilt then took him away entirely within a week, to die in my arms. i took his death hard and never came to peace with it until perhaps a year later when i lay on my back in the dark, in 'corpse pose' in yoga class. i'd begun to feel that familiar sensation of floating. you know the feeling when you just barely put your palm to water. that sense of being barely connected to surface. when suddenly out of the darkness elliot hopped, not bound to earth in any way, and slipped into the rabbit hole of my heart. from that day on i continued to miss him, but never again felt i'd lost him. instead he'd become a part of me.
then came pippy & gonzo, twin brothers who looked like elliot but unfortunately loved each other more than they'd ever come to love me. they did, however, accept petunia. i inherited petunia when my mother's other rabbit petie's cage had been torn open by some predator. as was petie. thus petunia came to be part of a threesome, and she liked it. the boys loved her and snuggled on either side of her slender body, and i called it a 'tunie sandwich'. collectively they were known as 'the Pippies'. less impersonal than 'the rabbits'. one by one, however, pippy & gonzo eventually died over the years. bob said they ate themselves to death. they were quite fat. finally only petunia was left. she was a happy and loving white bunny with brown/black ears and nose. her red eyes were preternatural and ruined her chances of being a bunny beauty queen. but we loved tunie.
one day i discovered a lump on her belly which turned out to be breast cancer. if female rabbits aren't spayed early on, and live long enough, they are good candidates for this. my parents had never spayed her. when i took her to the vet they removed not only the tumor, but also gave her a hysterectomy since she appeared to have cancer in her uterus as well. they handed her back to me with the warning that she'd probably only live about 3 months despite my best efforts. a year and a half went by. then i found another lump. breast cancer again. as she recovered from her second surgery i thought tunie should be the poster bunny for breast cancer. she deserved a pink ribbon. bob and i dubbed her 'the energizer bunny' because it appeared that nothing could kill her. even the predator who'd taken petie had spared her.
finally, a few months after bob succumbed to cancer of his own, i discovered yet another lump on tunie, this time on her side. by this time she was living with a smaller version of herself named violet. that is until i realized violet was peeing on her and therefore wasn't the girl bunny we thought. and so violet, now a boy and then a eunuch, is what i call my 'transgender bunny'. i had to separate him from his beloved tunie. at 10 years old and stricken again with cancer, she had no energy for the likes of him beyond touching noses through cage walls. this time the news was bad. this cancer had already invaded her lungs and there was nothing they could do. i asked 'how long?' and they shrugged. 'just bring her in to be put down when she appears to be in pain'. i don't know how to tell when a bunny is in pain. they are masters at hiding their weaknesses. how would she let me know? every chance i got i would let tunie hop around in the yard, free in the grass. sometimes it was harder and harder for her to get upright and at last i put her in a box and called mom to please take us to the vet. it was time. i waited for mom on the front lawn and as the SUV pulled up, tunie leapt out of the box and went hopping - as if she hadn't a care in the world - around the front yard. even escaping my attempts to catch her.
it wasn't her day to die.
mom left and i spent the weekend giving tunie the run of the yard under my watchful eye, expecting i would find her dead in her cage every morning. i did battle with myself. was it up to me to decide when she should die? it turns out the leap from the box and the escape from euthanasia was tunie's last hurrah. like bob, she rallied fully to life before death. as with bob, i was there for her death. as with elliot, i held her in a towel in my arms and watched it come. i don't know how she told me it was time, but i knew, and i held her. my energizer bunny's heart stopped beating as she lay next to my own.
and then it was only violet. but not for long. some irresponsible child lost interest in its black & white dwarf bunny and its irresponsible mother was going to set it loose in the woods to fend for itself. my friend called me to spare its life and, sucker that i am, i took it home and named it Gianni. naturally it too was not neutered so that cost me a nice piece of change, but i wasn't about to have violet or gianni succumb to testicular cancer. not after all i'd been through in the bunny department. violet had never lost his Dominant Bunny standing and wouldn't hear of gianni sharing his cage. bunnies may appear to be sweet, but really they are both cruel and gentle things. without my intervention gianni would have been murdered by violet's hand. or teeth, as it were. they are content to sniff one another through the cage wire, close enough company for either, which is unfortunate because they will never know the warmth of a 'tunie sandwich' on a cold winter day.
it is september 1 and before i know it fall will be here. violet had eaten the plywood roof of the bedroom of his condo last winter, perhaps from boredom, and so i set about repairing it today. it looked like the ruins of Katrina, but on a manageable scale for a lone woman and her table saw. i ripped off the old shredded plywood and replaced it with leftover kitchen countertop cut to size. then i screwed leftover roof shingles to the top, triple level! no wind, rain or snow will breach my roof. it took a hammer and nails, a measuring tape and heavy duty scissors, my trusty cordless drill (one of my last gifts from bob) and the Workmate 400, which i hauled up out of the basement with much difficulty. the last step will be the final seal with roofing tar. but i am far too exhausted at this point to carry a huge can of tar down a ladder from the porch roof.
i know it was mostly my labor and ingenuity that resulted in a beautiful new roof for violet, but i also thank bob who taught me how to do these things. maybe i should offer myself up to Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans. but in my world animals come before humanity, and my humane society (2 bunnies and 6 cats) is hungry right now. as their keeper, slave and recipient of their boundless love, i must obey their call! this energizer bunny is done for the day.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
anarchy
(i wrote this many years ago)
The William is attempting sleep on a plywood plank under the rock overhang . Crude four-poster bed in our pseudo-cave, protection from the sun's murderous glare. I'm careful to be quiet. I want him to sleep. I want to be alone.
There's no silence in the desert, but the closest you'll get is at noon. No wonder they dueled to the death at High Noon in the Old West. What more suitable time to die out there. What more likely time. Me, I don't need a siesta. I welcome the time to myself and, like a lizard, bask in the sun. Sit with thighs sticking sweatily to a faded blue plastic 60's chair by the cooking grate. Must remember to disengage slowly or I will yelp in pain, wake him, lose my solitude. He never mentioned a cooking grate or I would have brought hotdogs. Instead we're surviving on raisins and pull-top cans of beans. My appetite has abandoned me anyway. The act of eating performed only to fuel the body. I've slipped into some subsistence state in which the food I love has become meaningless. The growling of my stomach perplexes me. Doesn't it realize my mind has rejected food as unnecessary? Water is all I need. My body has become the desert.
We are on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land just over the Arizona border in Utah. We crossed thirty-five miles of nothingness to get here. I think wistfully of the azure expanse of Lake Powell not so far away. But we are isolated. It's what we wanted. The road out was hardly more than dried up river bed winding between forbidding buttes the color of decaying ship's hulls long sunken in this arid sea. One cloudburst and we'd be cut off. But the pristine sky above breeds no clouds and that danger is only my fantasy.
This is Church Camp. The Zen Anarchist Sanctuary. A bizarre cove of vague toothpick civilization in the infinite desert. And it feels as infinite as the sky. I feel so small. The silver underbellies of planes glint occasionally and I think in a small voice, "Hello. I am down here. No one knows I am here. You can't see me from your cockpit I am so small. You look down here and you think 'there couldn't possibly be anyone down there.' But I am here."
The William found this place quite by accident during his wanderings in the Flying Skull, his midnight blue Jeep. The top of which has never come off. And I can't understand that. To me, a Jeep in the desert screams to be topless (as do I, come to think of it). We should have been caged only by the gut-spattered windshield and rollbars. But he has his CD player and his gear to protect, not to mention his fair skin, and so he's never unscrewed the lid and just driven with the wind in his hair. No need to tell me to fasten my seatbelt on the trip out. The manic jouncing of the Jeep left me feeling so vulnerable that I wanted to be battened down. His driving is demented. He is a show off and for that I spent two hours jerking like a marionette in my seat, nails pinching my thighs as he spun donuts in soft sand.
Ranchers (where do they live?) lease vast tracts of land out here to graze cattle (what do they eat?). Invisible creatures, bread crumb trail of dung to the creek that's long since gone underground. I had a vague fear of crashing head on into the grill of some pickup truck as we rounded a boulder out of control, but the chances of that were minimal, considering the desolation. The William had temporary squatter's rights at the makeshift camp. He recounted an ominous story of men arriving at the camp one time months back, demanding to know what he and his friend were doing there. (They were tripping their brains out). Did they work for the rancher? (I had a secret laugh at anyone mistaking the William for a cowpoke) and making threatening noises about tourists being unwanted in these parts. The William made it sound like we could be killed by these modern-day outlaws for trespassing. Images of my skull bleaching in the Utah sun gave me pause. I'd learned to take his truth and cut it in half, however, and then I'd have something closer to fact. At least I counted on that when it came to sinister ranchers. In the worst case scenario, I figured I could rely upon my charms to spare my life and to hell with the William.
The camp comes up like some wished-for truck stop. A stand of ancient cottonwoods sponging off the creekbed, home to four owls that swoop from limb to limb, mystified by the humans. Just beyond the trees, an incongruous swamp in miniature, complete with reeds and bullfrogs, encircled by a fence to keep cow and horse dung out of the fresh water source. Beside it is a giant's step of rock, waterfall gone dry. I look at it and picture the Flying Skull airborne as the William wonders where the road has gone.
The site is inviting to humans. It's surrounded by rock ledges and one of the blue retro plastic chairs perches up there like a throne. The Birth Canal is behind the cheap throne, where the William had once shoved his head in drug-addled curiosity and got stuck for a time in the tight crevasse of rock. Fool. I figured one trip through a birth canal is enough for anyone in a lifetime and besides, it was strewn with dried mouse droppings. No Hanta Virus for me, thank you. I sometimes wonder how he's survived. Below the ledge is a corral spattered with horse droppings and strewn with old straw. A long pipe from the mini-marsh feeds the horse trough and spills in a lackadaisical trickle onto the thirsty ground. The trough could fit two humans easily in its depth, provided you don't mind the layer of rusty silt and algae on the bottom. And in this sun, you won't. Hunched amid the bushy sage sits a plastic port-a-potty. It's got toilet paper. Someone didn't think much of squatting in the bushes, ass bared to passing rattlesnakes. I love them for it.
When we arrived, the William parked the Skull in front of a small trailer which surrenders its paint to the harsh environs. Stovepipe jutting from its round airplane hangar body. Not even fit for a trailer park, this thing's about as homegrown as they come. But the trailer does have a sad charm. We declared it home and tossed our belongings on the bunkbed inside, stashing our meager food supply atop the stove. The William insists upon closing the split wooden door tight between visits, oddly convinced that the trailer is inpenetrable to vermin. I point out mouse shit on the mattress. The ceiling is a planetarium of frightening psychedelic verse and scrawled names. This could have been home to Jim Morrison, Charlie Manson.
Outside, in the silty dust shaded by the rock overhang and the trailer, we set up the tent. A space-age thing I'd seen only in outdoorsman magazines. A trained monkey could have set it up. We'd forgotten to level the ground beneath it, or clear it of foreign objects that would later wreak havoc on our spines. At first I wasn't sure I liked the site. I inspected the area thinking it might be nicer beneath the cottonwoods (although no doubt spattered with owl shit). However, that meant setting up in the creek bed and even if a sudden flood seemed ludicrous, it wasn't totally out of the question. I preferred not to drown in the desert. The William spoke of moving camp later into the open desert but I balked, preferring even these shreds of civilization.
As he sleeps, I abandon my chair for the huge boulder that has enticing hollows. I'm certain I can find comfort on it. The curve of my ass fits neatly into one hollow, the spread of my shoulders in another. A small lizard, subtle iridescent beauty, skitters over my brown belly. It doesn't know me from the rock and has no fear. I'm at a luxurious lounge chair angle and bask in the sunlight, flicking pellets of dried grey mud off my legs, ecstatic to be a living highway to a small creature. He cocks his head amusingly, pinhead eyes examining my movement. But I realize it's not me who holds his attention, it's a careless beetle flying spasmotically in our small rock realm. Too close to the earth. I'm captive to the lizard's predatory grace. With psychic accuracy, he knows where the beetle will dip in flight, and swallows it whole.
I'm already so dirty and it will be days before a shower. Earlier we'd gone on an excursion out to some pillars of mud and caves of mud. Desert sexuality, dried and cracked like geriatric genitalia. Touch the pillar and its crust crumbles beneath your fingers. Mother Earth has a sense of humor, giving birth to this erect phallus that dwarfs us in dimension. I offer it a Lilliputian embrace, paying perverse comic homage to the penis. The William leads me to the cave. A slit almost invisible in the haunch of a butte until you're on top of it. I eye it dubiously. He's already inserted his body into its mouth with gymnastic flexibility. He insists I am no bigger than he is and can fit without a problem. He forgets, I have breasts and hips. I watch his luminous white skin swallowed by the crumbly grey mud cave, shimmery white-blond head plunging into a womb of darkness. I'm really not so sure I want to go in there. I look up at the rocky mass overhead and imagine it choosing the moment of my exploration to cave in. The William is persistent, however, and to prove I am no coward, I gingerly thrust a leg into the jagged mouth of the cave, twisting gracelessly and struggling for footholds.
--You know, this looks like the perfect home for rattlesnakes.
--Well I've never seen one in here.
--It only takes one time.
--We'd hear it rattle before we got to it.
I'm not particularly reassured. But at least he's in the lead. He'd disturb the venomous resident, after all, not me. As my fingers bite into talcum walls and my feet test and cling to dried outcroppings of mud, my imagination invents a scenario where we hear the tell-tale rattle, amplified in the small space, and he screams and plunges into the narrow slit. Pinned. Twin pricks oozing blood. How do I drag him out when I can barely maneuver my own body? And if I get him out, will he remain conscious to guide me out of these confusing look-alike canyons? My mind divides, dwelling on these ominous visions while contemplating the best route through the curving rainwater spout, dry as chalk and crumbling as my body scrapes its walls. It is a thankfully short cave, opening into a chalice of rock. I crawl out with relief, yet immensely pleased with myself for daring. However, there's one more challenge. We're still in a pit about six feet deep. In a moment, it's just me. He's scrambled out with land crab mobility and peers down at me from the lip, offering a hand. I'm completely unconvinced that he could tug me out. He may be agile, but still appears somewhat frail and I am a solid woman. Over and over I attempt to use my upper body to pull myself out but I lack the power and my muscles are shaky from the cave-crawl. It's just beyond my capacity. My foothold never seems sure enough and it would be a hard fall. Now I know how it feels to be trapped and a vague panic begins to curl round my throat. I could exit the same way I entered, I suppose, through the mud cave. But that's not appealing either. And so I grab and hold and stretch and pull and climb and scrape and finally, every muscle and sinew singing, I breach the rock lip. God, it feels good. Twin escapees, we survey the hole, and I see how the cave was formed. We'd traversed ancient depths, the drainpipe of a mountain. Perhaps the path of least resistance for water, but not so for humans. Exhilerating to have wriggled its length and be born again into sunlight.
No wonder the William is beat. We didn't slept much last night and we'd driven north from Flagstaff the day before. I insisted on opening my window despite his complaint that the Jeep didn't drive well when catching air. Upright square vehicles are just not aerodynamic, open windows or not. Deal with it. Besides, we had two jugs of gasoline in the back and I figured a little air circulation would be useful. And it just wouldn't do to smoke a cigarette in an enclosed space with gasoline, would it? An open window only made sense and he had little choice but to bend to my will. I needed the window open to see anything. He thought that never washing the windshield would make the Jeep look somehow more 'rugged', like it had been places. Frankly, I found splattered bug guts at close range vaguely nauseating and spent many miles pondering why he didn't go cross-eyed. We had the CD player cranked on the trip up but the rugged roads had Beck's Stereopathetic Soulmanure skipping so insanely we had to make do with conversation.
--I'm tempted to find out where Beck lives and knock on his door and tell him 'I'm Beck too! Don't you get it?'
I didn't get it, but I nodded as if I did. I'm sure Beck would be delighted. Everyone loves a stalker. Particularly one with the apparent delusion that he too is you.
As he slept, looking like some crumpled angel with scuffed up knees, I rose from my rock and sought shelter from the sun beneath the gnarled cottonwoods, alighting between dried owlshit splatter on a ledge of rock. A jackrabbit rustled behind me and the owl posse exchanged tree limb perches above. Glorious solitude. I will him to sleep for a very long time.
My canteen smells bad. Backwash, I suppose, or mildew taking hold of the insulated pouch that is never quite dry. I slosh the water thoughtfully in my plastic Army canteen. It's one of the favorite things I own, the best four dollar investment ever made. A small pocket on the front of the olive drab pouch holds a small brown bottle of water purification tablets which I regret never having occasion to use. It's got metal hooks that I clamp the the back pocket of my low-slung jean shorts and if I get any skinnier the weight of the water will drag the pants right off me. There was a time when I had no idea how to properly drink from a canteen and would sip in a ladylike manner. But then an Army vet set me straight. I had to wrap my lips completely around the mouth of the bottle, he said. I tried it. Problem solved, no longer would I suffer water-spattered breasts. I guzzle now like a good ole boy tipping back a cold one. The William brought along several odd black canvas pouches he calls 'Ant Babies' (and to his dismay, I bastardize it into Beanie Babies). I declare their inventor an idiot. What sense does it make to color a water pouch black so it can suck up all the sun's heat? The water inside is rude, hot and noxious. I decided that the Ant Babies made better pillows and we needn't use them since he's also brought a huge plastic, spiggoted jug of the stuff. If nothing else, the William is an ample supplier of water and although I may starve, I shall not die of thirst.
Something rustles behind my rock perch and I turn to find our Friendly Neighborhood Jackrabbit. He'd spent the last evening near the Skull grazing off a shrub of sage, one big dark eye fixed and unblinking in our direction. We were transfixed by the rabbit's eye. How long we sat there staring silently back at it, who knows. For him, we were apparently some novel dinner show and he seemed quite unfazed by our presence. I thought perhaps he'd like a change of pace from the sage diet and crept forward with offerings of bread and Wheat Thins only to find he was unmoved by my gifts and let them go stale in the dust overnight. He has ears of Mule dimension, perhaps more alert than those jet bead eyes, and it's hard to believe he's a rabbit as he hops - no, you can't even call it a hop - he very nearly lopes like a coyote.
The lizards investigate me more thoroughly and fearlessly than any other creature and I begin to recognize and identify them. One by his crooked tail, another by half moon mark in black round his throat. I love the way they bob their heads in puppetlike greeting. They appear territorial and menace one another until diverted by a possible meal of bird. Restless, I walk to the bottom of the dry falls where a green rivulet feeds a small pool and strange small wriggling creatures fight for survival. Some, I am astounded to see, are tadpoles and I imagine the others mosquito or some bug larvae. There are other small alkaline pools in the ruts of the road. How long do they have, I wonder? Who knows when it rained last and when it will rain again? They valiantly try to reach adulthood before their tire track world goes dry. And I guess they pray that another tire doesn't roll over them.
There is only one creature in this wilderness that I resent. Or one flock of creatures, rather. The crows.- or are they ravens? I never get close enough to distinguish the tell-tale difference in beak. Monstrous in size, they have vocal chords to match, and I awoke at some hellish dawn hour to their rusty shovel cries. Toss and turn, sandwich my head with an Ant Baby and a balled up sweatshirt, I could not muffle the godawful racket. No choice but to get up and make instant coffee by balancing the camper's pock-marked tea kettle atop the propane flame. The birds simply traded fence posts, never halting their demented symphony until I began to believe that their sole purpose in haunting the corral was to let the humans know we were not welcome. Only when I strode through the dust toward them did they relent and flap off in a Hitchcock show of menace.
I'd somehow managed to exit the tent without waking the William, despite the loud rip of the zipper. The clothes I'd worn to bed the night before and wriggled out of in the heat of daybreak were too filthy to consider again. I balanced at the mouth of the tent and inserted my feet into my Nike hiking boots (or sneakers, I've never quite figured out what they are) for it's unwise to tramp unshod in the desert. With no audience in the world, I rose like Venus. Utterly and magnificently nude. With an exquisite thrill, I shook loose my hair and gathered up a towel and toothbrush and strolled through the camp wearing nothing but my boots. I imagined myself the original homo sapiens sapiens, feral and primitive, unaware that any other such creatures existed besides ourselves in this vast sunlit world. The morning sun was gentle on my skin, unthreatening to the pale moons of my buttocks and breasts. The silence (now that the crows had flown the coop) absolutely breathtaking. For that time nothing else existed, all had been stripped away. Well except for my boots. I was Eve, Lady Godiva, Mother Earth. I unraveled my hair like Rapunzel, studied the tranquil water of the horse trough like the Lady of Shallot. And I pondered if a Prince or a Frog lay slumbering in the tent. I had not yet reached a conclusion.
Fucking the William had been a curious and novel experience. If you're looking for the Big O, sex is better approached sober because a DXM hallucination is serious competition for an orgasm. And it doesn't discriminate between the sexes. One can and will fuck for hours with no resolution, but fortunately it's only vaguely frustrating at the time. There's so much else going on inside your head it's hard to care about the gratification of your clit. Even when I concentrated on coming it was irritatingly elusive, so I would console myself with the impossible length of time we were able to fuck. I confess to more amusement than compassion for the William's lot - a penis that would forget its purpose, hang its head in confusion, then rise back up to the challenge repeatedly.
We were sprawled on a blanket on the plywood platform. When I sent him into the tent for condoms he forgot why he was in there and I had to stifle my laughter. The only reason I knew why he was there was because I'd secretly halved my dose. I couldn't fully surrender in this wilderness. Still, I can't be sure how long it was before I even noticed he was missing. I wanted to say hey, this is next to impossible, let's just forget it. But he was so intent upon fucking. That is, when he remembered that was what he wanted to be doing. Me, I didn't care. The night sky teeming with stars and the bats swooping for bugs above our guttering candle were as captivating to me as a good round of sex. When I was alone on my back on my personal boulder I took huge delight in the exquisite close encounters I was having with my beloved bats. I could see their mud colored underbellies and hear the magnificent flap of their wings millimeters from my ear. No fear that they would become hopelessly entangled in my hair. The black sky was encrusted with more diamonds than a Romanov's crown. I watched in childlike delight as they'd take turns falling, arching past Orion's Belt and then fizzling into nothingness.
When the drug took absolute hold and I was again entangled with the William, I became the night sky.He lay on his back beneath me and I rose over him. Stars fell from my fingers. I became infinite and celestial. He was the desert below me and I spread out over his expanse, my fingers deconstructing into the wind that caressed every arroyo and and boney crag of his wilderness. In slow motion I swooped like a freetail bat over my world with nothing nothing nothing tying me to the earth. He seemed so solid and grounded below me while I seemed to have shed any human form. I was nothing, insubstantial, and yet I was everything. I fucked him. Amazing to be so big and know no limits. Entranced, I fell in love with the sensation. And I fucked him. Before, the very concept of infinity frightened me. Too big, too inconceivable to grasp. How can there be no boundaries? How can something never ever end? Yet, when I was infinite it was achingly beautiful. No fear. Only delirious and endless fucking. But eventually even infinity had to end. The world telescoped again into our small place. Where our inept bodies struggled to come together. When there was no hope that we ever could.
The William is attempting sleep on a plywood plank under the rock overhang . Crude four-poster bed in our pseudo-cave, protection from the sun's murderous glare. I'm careful to be quiet. I want him to sleep. I want to be alone.
There's no silence in the desert, but the closest you'll get is at noon. No wonder they dueled to the death at High Noon in the Old West. What more suitable time to die out there. What more likely time. Me, I don't need a siesta. I welcome the time to myself and, like a lizard, bask in the sun. Sit with thighs sticking sweatily to a faded blue plastic 60's chair by the cooking grate. Must remember to disengage slowly or I will yelp in pain, wake him, lose my solitude. He never mentioned a cooking grate or I would have brought hotdogs. Instead we're surviving on raisins and pull-top cans of beans. My appetite has abandoned me anyway. The act of eating performed only to fuel the body. I've slipped into some subsistence state in which the food I love has become meaningless. The growling of my stomach perplexes me. Doesn't it realize my mind has rejected food as unnecessary? Water is all I need. My body has become the desert.
We are on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land just over the Arizona border in Utah. We crossed thirty-five miles of nothingness to get here. I think wistfully of the azure expanse of Lake Powell not so far away. But we are isolated. It's what we wanted. The road out was hardly more than dried up river bed winding between forbidding buttes the color of decaying ship's hulls long sunken in this arid sea. One cloudburst and we'd be cut off. But the pristine sky above breeds no clouds and that danger is only my fantasy.
This is Church Camp. The Zen Anarchist Sanctuary. A bizarre cove of vague toothpick civilization in the infinite desert. And it feels as infinite as the sky. I feel so small. The silver underbellies of planes glint occasionally and I think in a small voice, "Hello. I am down here. No one knows I am here. You can't see me from your cockpit I am so small. You look down here and you think 'there couldn't possibly be anyone down there.' But I am here."
The William found this place quite by accident during his wanderings in the Flying Skull, his midnight blue Jeep. The top of which has never come off. And I can't understand that. To me, a Jeep in the desert screams to be topless (as do I, come to think of it). We should have been caged only by the gut-spattered windshield and rollbars. But he has his CD player and his gear to protect, not to mention his fair skin, and so he's never unscrewed the lid and just driven with the wind in his hair. No need to tell me to fasten my seatbelt on the trip out. The manic jouncing of the Jeep left me feeling so vulnerable that I wanted to be battened down. His driving is demented. He is a show off and for that I spent two hours jerking like a marionette in my seat, nails pinching my thighs as he spun donuts in soft sand.
Ranchers (where do they live?) lease vast tracts of land out here to graze cattle (what do they eat?). Invisible creatures, bread crumb trail of dung to the creek that's long since gone underground. I had a vague fear of crashing head on into the grill of some pickup truck as we rounded a boulder out of control, but the chances of that were minimal, considering the desolation. The William had temporary squatter's rights at the makeshift camp. He recounted an ominous story of men arriving at the camp one time months back, demanding to know what he and his friend were doing there. (They were tripping their brains out). Did they work for the rancher? (I had a secret laugh at anyone mistaking the William for a cowpoke) and making threatening noises about tourists being unwanted in these parts. The William made it sound like we could be killed by these modern-day outlaws for trespassing. Images of my skull bleaching in the Utah sun gave me pause. I'd learned to take his truth and cut it in half, however, and then I'd have something closer to fact. At least I counted on that when it came to sinister ranchers. In the worst case scenario, I figured I could rely upon my charms to spare my life and to hell with the William.
The camp comes up like some wished-for truck stop. A stand of ancient cottonwoods sponging off the creekbed, home to four owls that swoop from limb to limb, mystified by the humans. Just beyond the trees, an incongruous swamp in miniature, complete with reeds and bullfrogs, encircled by a fence to keep cow and horse dung out of the fresh water source. Beside it is a giant's step of rock, waterfall gone dry. I look at it and picture the Flying Skull airborne as the William wonders where the road has gone.
The site is inviting to humans. It's surrounded by rock ledges and one of the blue retro plastic chairs perches up there like a throne. The Birth Canal is behind the cheap throne, where the William had once shoved his head in drug-addled curiosity and got stuck for a time in the tight crevasse of rock. Fool. I figured one trip through a birth canal is enough for anyone in a lifetime and besides, it was strewn with dried mouse droppings. No Hanta Virus for me, thank you. I sometimes wonder how he's survived. Below the ledge is a corral spattered with horse droppings and strewn with old straw. A long pipe from the mini-marsh feeds the horse trough and spills in a lackadaisical trickle onto the thirsty ground. The trough could fit two humans easily in its depth, provided you don't mind the layer of rusty silt and algae on the bottom. And in this sun, you won't. Hunched amid the bushy sage sits a plastic port-a-potty. It's got toilet paper. Someone didn't think much of squatting in the bushes, ass bared to passing rattlesnakes. I love them for it.
When we arrived, the William parked the Skull in front of a small trailer which surrenders its paint to the harsh environs. Stovepipe jutting from its round airplane hangar body. Not even fit for a trailer park, this thing's about as homegrown as they come. But the trailer does have a sad charm. We declared it home and tossed our belongings on the bunkbed inside, stashing our meager food supply atop the stove. The William insists upon closing the split wooden door tight between visits, oddly convinced that the trailer is inpenetrable to vermin. I point out mouse shit on the mattress. The ceiling is a planetarium of frightening psychedelic verse and scrawled names. This could have been home to Jim Morrison, Charlie Manson.
Outside, in the silty dust shaded by the rock overhang and the trailer, we set up the tent. A space-age thing I'd seen only in outdoorsman magazines. A trained monkey could have set it up. We'd forgotten to level the ground beneath it, or clear it of foreign objects that would later wreak havoc on our spines. At first I wasn't sure I liked the site. I inspected the area thinking it might be nicer beneath the cottonwoods (although no doubt spattered with owl shit). However, that meant setting up in the creek bed and even if a sudden flood seemed ludicrous, it wasn't totally out of the question. I preferred not to drown in the desert. The William spoke of moving camp later into the open desert but I balked, preferring even these shreds of civilization.
As he sleeps, I abandon my chair for the huge boulder that has enticing hollows. I'm certain I can find comfort on it. The curve of my ass fits neatly into one hollow, the spread of my shoulders in another. A small lizard, subtle iridescent beauty, skitters over my brown belly. It doesn't know me from the rock and has no fear. I'm at a luxurious lounge chair angle and bask in the sunlight, flicking pellets of dried grey mud off my legs, ecstatic to be a living highway to a small creature. He cocks his head amusingly, pinhead eyes examining my movement. But I realize it's not me who holds his attention, it's a careless beetle flying spasmotically in our small rock realm. Too close to the earth. I'm captive to the lizard's predatory grace. With psychic accuracy, he knows where the beetle will dip in flight, and swallows it whole.
I'm already so dirty and it will be days before a shower. Earlier we'd gone on an excursion out to some pillars of mud and caves of mud. Desert sexuality, dried and cracked like geriatric genitalia. Touch the pillar and its crust crumbles beneath your fingers. Mother Earth has a sense of humor, giving birth to this erect phallus that dwarfs us in dimension. I offer it a Lilliputian embrace, paying perverse comic homage to the penis. The William leads me to the cave. A slit almost invisible in the haunch of a butte until you're on top of it. I eye it dubiously. He's already inserted his body into its mouth with gymnastic flexibility. He insists I am no bigger than he is and can fit without a problem. He forgets, I have breasts and hips. I watch his luminous white skin swallowed by the crumbly grey mud cave, shimmery white-blond head plunging into a womb of darkness. I'm really not so sure I want to go in there. I look up at the rocky mass overhead and imagine it choosing the moment of my exploration to cave in. The William is persistent, however, and to prove I am no coward, I gingerly thrust a leg into the jagged mouth of the cave, twisting gracelessly and struggling for footholds.
--You know, this looks like the perfect home for rattlesnakes.
--Well I've never seen one in here.
--It only takes one time.
--We'd hear it rattle before we got to it.
I'm not particularly reassured. But at least he's in the lead. He'd disturb the venomous resident, after all, not me. As my fingers bite into talcum walls and my feet test and cling to dried outcroppings of mud, my imagination invents a scenario where we hear the tell-tale rattle, amplified in the small space, and he screams and plunges into the narrow slit. Pinned. Twin pricks oozing blood. How do I drag him out when I can barely maneuver my own body? And if I get him out, will he remain conscious to guide me out of these confusing look-alike canyons? My mind divides, dwelling on these ominous visions while contemplating the best route through the curving rainwater spout, dry as chalk and crumbling as my body scrapes its walls. It is a thankfully short cave, opening into a chalice of rock. I crawl out with relief, yet immensely pleased with myself for daring. However, there's one more challenge. We're still in a pit about six feet deep. In a moment, it's just me. He's scrambled out with land crab mobility and peers down at me from the lip, offering a hand. I'm completely unconvinced that he could tug me out. He may be agile, but still appears somewhat frail and I am a solid woman. Over and over I attempt to use my upper body to pull myself out but I lack the power and my muscles are shaky from the cave-crawl. It's just beyond my capacity. My foothold never seems sure enough and it would be a hard fall. Now I know how it feels to be trapped and a vague panic begins to curl round my throat. I could exit the same way I entered, I suppose, through the mud cave. But that's not appealing either. And so I grab and hold and stretch and pull and climb and scrape and finally, every muscle and sinew singing, I breach the rock lip. God, it feels good. Twin escapees, we survey the hole, and I see how the cave was formed. We'd traversed ancient depths, the drainpipe of a mountain. Perhaps the path of least resistance for water, but not so for humans. Exhilerating to have wriggled its length and be born again into sunlight.
No wonder the William is beat. We didn't slept much last night and we'd driven north from Flagstaff the day before. I insisted on opening my window despite his complaint that the Jeep didn't drive well when catching air. Upright square vehicles are just not aerodynamic, open windows or not. Deal with it. Besides, we had two jugs of gasoline in the back and I figured a little air circulation would be useful. And it just wouldn't do to smoke a cigarette in an enclosed space with gasoline, would it? An open window only made sense and he had little choice but to bend to my will. I needed the window open to see anything. He thought that never washing the windshield would make the Jeep look somehow more 'rugged', like it had been places. Frankly, I found splattered bug guts at close range vaguely nauseating and spent many miles pondering why he didn't go cross-eyed. We had the CD player cranked on the trip up but the rugged roads had Beck's Stereopathetic Soulmanure skipping so insanely we had to make do with conversation.
--I'm tempted to find out where Beck lives and knock on his door and tell him 'I'm Beck too! Don't you get it?'
I didn't get it, but I nodded as if I did. I'm sure Beck would be delighted. Everyone loves a stalker. Particularly one with the apparent delusion that he too is you.
As he slept, looking like some crumpled angel with scuffed up knees, I rose from my rock and sought shelter from the sun beneath the gnarled cottonwoods, alighting between dried owlshit splatter on a ledge of rock. A jackrabbit rustled behind me and the owl posse exchanged tree limb perches above. Glorious solitude. I will him to sleep for a very long time.
My canteen smells bad. Backwash, I suppose, or mildew taking hold of the insulated pouch that is never quite dry. I slosh the water thoughtfully in my plastic Army canteen. It's one of the favorite things I own, the best four dollar investment ever made. A small pocket on the front of the olive drab pouch holds a small brown bottle of water purification tablets which I regret never having occasion to use. It's got metal hooks that I clamp the the back pocket of my low-slung jean shorts and if I get any skinnier the weight of the water will drag the pants right off me. There was a time when I had no idea how to properly drink from a canteen and would sip in a ladylike manner. But then an Army vet set me straight. I had to wrap my lips completely around the mouth of the bottle, he said. I tried it. Problem solved, no longer would I suffer water-spattered breasts. I guzzle now like a good ole boy tipping back a cold one. The William brought along several odd black canvas pouches he calls 'Ant Babies' (and to his dismay, I bastardize it into Beanie Babies). I declare their inventor an idiot. What sense does it make to color a water pouch black so it can suck up all the sun's heat? The water inside is rude, hot and noxious. I decided that the Ant Babies made better pillows and we needn't use them since he's also brought a huge plastic, spiggoted jug of the stuff. If nothing else, the William is an ample supplier of water and although I may starve, I shall not die of thirst.
Something rustles behind my rock perch and I turn to find our Friendly Neighborhood Jackrabbit. He'd spent the last evening near the Skull grazing off a shrub of sage, one big dark eye fixed and unblinking in our direction. We were transfixed by the rabbit's eye. How long we sat there staring silently back at it, who knows. For him, we were apparently some novel dinner show and he seemed quite unfazed by our presence. I thought perhaps he'd like a change of pace from the sage diet and crept forward with offerings of bread and Wheat Thins only to find he was unmoved by my gifts and let them go stale in the dust overnight. He has ears of Mule dimension, perhaps more alert than those jet bead eyes, and it's hard to believe he's a rabbit as he hops - no, you can't even call it a hop - he very nearly lopes like a coyote.
The lizards investigate me more thoroughly and fearlessly than any other creature and I begin to recognize and identify them. One by his crooked tail, another by half moon mark in black round his throat. I love the way they bob their heads in puppetlike greeting. They appear territorial and menace one another until diverted by a possible meal of bird. Restless, I walk to the bottom of the dry falls where a green rivulet feeds a small pool and strange small wriggling creatures fight for survival. Some, I am astounded to see, are tadpoles and I imagine the others mosquito or some bug larvae. There are other small alkaline pools in the ruts of the road. How long do they have, I wonder? Who knows when it rained last and when it will rain again? They valiantly try to reach adulthood before their tire track world goes dry. And I guess they pray that another tire doesn't roll over them.
There is only one creature in this wilderness that I resent. Or one flock of creatures, rather. The crows.- or are they ravens? I never get close enough to distinguish the tell-tale difference in beak. Monstrous in size, they have vocal chords to match, and I awoke at some hellish dawn hour to their rusty shovel cries. Toss and turn, sandwich my head with an Ant Baby and a balled up sweatshirt, I could not muffle the godawful racket. No choice but to get up and make instant coffee by balancing the camper's pock-marked tea kettle atop the propane flame. The birds simply traded fence posts, never halting their demented symphony until I began to believe that their sole purpose in haunting the corral was to let the humans know we were not welcome. Only when I strode through the dust toward them did they relent and flap off in a Hitchcock show of menace.
I'd somehow managed to exit the tent without waking the William, despite the loud rip of the zipper. The clothes I'd worn to bed the night before and wriggled out of in the heat of daybreak were too filthy to consider again. I balanced at the mouth of the tent and inserted my feet into my Nike hiking boots (or sneakers, I've never quite figured out what they are) for it's unwise to tramp unshod in the desert. With no audience in the world, I rose like Venus. Utterly and magnificently nude. With an exquisite thrill, I shook loose my hair and gathered up a towel and toothbrush and strolled through the camp wearing nothing but my boots. I imagined myself the original homo sapiens sapiens, feral and primitive, unaware that any other such creatures existed besides ourselves in this vast sunlit world. The morning sun was gentle on my skin, unthreatening to the pale moons of my buttocks and breasts. The silence (now that the crows had flown the coop) absolutely breathtaking. For that time nothing else existed, all had been stripped away. Well except for my boots. I was Eve, Lady Godiva, Mother Earth. I unraveled my hair like Rapunzel, studied the tranquil water of the horse trough like the Lady of Shallot. And I pondered if a Prince or a Frog lay slumbering in the tent. I had not yet reached a conclusion.
Fucking the William had been a curious and novel experience. If you're looking for the Big O, sex is better approached sober because a DXM hallucination is serious competition for an orgasm. And it doesn't discriminate between the sexes. One can and will fuck for hours with no resolution, but fortunately it's only vaguely frustrating at the time. There's so much else going on inside your head it's hard to care about the gratification of your clit. Even when I concentrated on coming it was irritatingly elusive, so I would console myself with the impossible length of time we were able to fuck. I confess to more amusement than compassion for the William's lot - a penis that would forget its purpose, hang its head in confusion, then rise back up to the challenge repeatedly.
We were sprawled on a blanket on the plywood platform. When I sent him into the tent for condoms he forgot why he was in there and I had to stifle my laughter. The only reason I knew why he was there was because I'd secretly halved my dose. I couldn't fully surrender in this wilderness. Still, I can't be sure how long it was before I even noticed he was missing. I wanted to say hey, this is next to impossible, let's just forget it. But he was so intent upon fucking. That is, when he remembered that was what he wanted to be doing. Me, I didn't care. The night sky teeming with stars and the bats swooping for bugs above our guttering candle were as captivating to me as a good round of sex. When I was alone on my back on my personal boulder I took huge delight in the exquisite close encounters I was having with my beloved bats. I could see their mud colored underbellies and hear the magnificent flap of their wings millimeters from my ear. No fear that they would become hopelessly entangled in my hair. The black sky was encrusted with more diamonds than a Romanov's crown. I watched in childlike delight as they'd take turns falling, arching past Orion's Belt and then fizzling into nothingness.
When the drug took absolute hold and I was again entangled with the William, I became the night sky.He lay on his back beneath me and I rose over him. Stars fell from my fingers. I became infinite and celestial. He was the desert below me and I spread out over his expanse, my fingers deconstructing into the wind that caressed every arroyo and and boney crag of his wilderness. In slow motion I swooped like a freetail bat over my world with nothing nothing nothing tying me to the earth. He seemed so solid and grounded below me while I seemed to have shed any human form. I was nothing, insubstantial, and yet I was everything. I fucked him. Amazing to be so big and know no limits. Entranced, I fell in love with the sensation. And I fucked him. Before, the very concept of infinity frightened me. Too big, too inconceivable to grasp. How can there be no boundaries? How can something never ever end? Yet, when I was infinite it was achingly beautiful. No fear. Only delirious and endless fucking. But eventually even infinity had to end. The world telescoped again into our small place. Where our inept bodies struggled to come together. When there was no hope that we ever could.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
the cat whisperer
i almost lost my standing as the Cat Whisperer tonight.
a friend of mine told me yesterday that his house had been over-run with fleas and immediately my skin crawled. although i have not seen a flea in my house of 6 cats, i was taking no chances. i flew to the Cat Hospital after work and purchased a 6-pack of flea killer for kitties. i will have none of those insect vermin invading my house. my Fear stems from childhood. i don't think my parents had any idea about flea control. after all, they had no idea litterboxes existed. when i was about 9, getting ready for school one morning, i pulled on my kneesocks and could literally see the fleas jumping on and off them. That sight is burned unpleasantly into my memory.
so i rounded up the herd one by one and squirted Vectra on the backs of their necks. most of them were easy to catch and treat, although Big (the 20 pounder) was uncannily suspicious when i sweetly sing-songed his name, hanging out of reach under the kitchen table until i tricked him. food is the trick. he's a sucker for food.
but Mosby was the hold-out. Mosby, if you know your civil war history, is named after major mosby, otherwise known as the "grey ghost". alot more appropriate the Mister Kitty, the name he came with from the shelter. Mister Kitty and his sister, Miss Kitty, lost their home when a foolish woman gave up her cats for the sake of a boyfriend. no human, in my opinion, is worth abandoning your pet. but abandon them she did. they were unceremoniously returned at age 3 to the shelter where they'd come from originally. victims of a woman's insecurity and the ultimatum of a selfish boyfriend. Mister and Miss Kitty had been caught in the wild as kittens, right on the cusp of becoming feral. perhaps Mister Kitty never shed his feral kittenhood entirely, or perhaps he was mistreated by The Boyfriend before he came to the shelter. all i know is that he was unreasonably terrified of people, clinging to his sister and never coming out of the shelter of a cat house during the day. since i volunteered at the shelter, i made him my project.
they dubbed me 'the cat whisperer' at the shelter because i was somehow able to bond with even the most antisocial and frightened cats. even the cats with "STAFF ONLY - Vicious" posted in orange on their cages. i had the time to spend with them, the staff did not. and so i was consistently pleased to report back to them that so-and-so was now approachable. it only took patience, quiet tones, and knowing when it was finally OK to pet. i was only attacked once in all my 7 years there, and that was by a cat in the front room who'd been cleared for adoption! i shudder to think what his fate was after that. once they draw blood there's no telling.
on every visit i would try to assuage Mister Kitty's terror, reaching behind his sister to gently pet him after i'd allowed him to sniff my hand. but every time he acted as though he'd never seen me before and i had to start all over again. as i stroked his fur he lay rigid, eyes huge and dilated. because it was a No-Kill shelter he was allowed to live. for six months i visited him, sometimes dismayed by my inability to bring him around. he obviously could not tolerate the constant comings and goings of people and other cats. the shelter tried to offer the two of them together - two for the price of one, convinced he could not survive on his own without the comfort of his sister. one week, to my delight, they were adopted. the next week they were back. rejected.
finally there was talk of euthanasia. there seemed to be no hope for Mister and Miss Kitty. the shelter could not afford to keep them on indefinitely. i pleaded with my husband, please at least come meet Mister Kitty. they're going to kill him. bob relented and accompanied me to the shelter. the siblings were sequestered this time in a large metal cage and Mister Kitty was, as usual, hidden in a box, peering out of a round hole. bob took one look at those eyes, so full of pathos, and said 'oh OK, bring him home, goddammit.' and so with much difficulty we tugged the frightened cat out of his box and stuffed him into a carrier. Miss Kitty was left to fend for herself and was adopted within the week.
all day i sat at work pondering names. what to call him? mouse? he was timid and grey after all. then i hit upon Mosby. when i got home bob announced, "i know what to call him - Mosby!" we'd independently come up with the same name. Mosby lived for several days locked in my computer room alone with food, a litterbox, and only my visits for company. cats respond to this treatment. suddenly you are their only living link in the world and they decide you're not so bad after all. i cried with happiness when Mosby sat beside me on the couch and suddenly trusted me so much he laid on his back, baring his belly. almost smiling. within a week we gave him free range of the house and he was soon adopted by Mattie, the big brother cat of the house, who licked him and bonded. we thought it was a milestone when he allowed us to walk by him and he didn't run. we were astonished when he'd rub up against our legs. years went by and he came around of his own accord. everything had to be on his terms, but that was OK. sometimes i could even catch and hold him and eventually his stiff body would relax and he'd purr.
nowadays Mosby has decided i am safest approached while on the toilet. i don't know how he figured out that i couldn't easily catch him from that seat, but he did. so every morning we have the love ritual on the toilet. sometimes on a chilly morning he will leap onto the couch to head butt me and allows me to pet him. on those mornings my heart swells. he trusts me. i've never shown him any reason not to. but old habits die hard in a cat that once clearly had a hard life. he is still far more comfortable in the company of his fellow cats, still a baby enjoying the head-lickings Big gives him since Mattie died. but i've been his accepted human for 5 years now and i've considered it an honor. bob was too when he was alive. but he plied Mosby with bits of steak from his dinner, so he cheated.
getting Mosby to the vet is a once a year chore i don't relish. tonight i just realized that flea treatment is too. like Big, he suspected something was up when i sing-songed his name and tried to corner him. he was having none of it. plump as he now is, he hurdled upstairs and vanished into the spare bedroom. not a sign of him. i closed the door, certain he was in there, and looked under the bed from all sides. i suddenly realized the fabric of the mattress was hanging like a hammock and staring out at me were those big round terrified eyes. i used my best calm-a-cat voice but something about being that cornered made him turn like i've never seen before. i've heard the plaintive howls, but never before were they accompanied by hissing and spitting. and that's what i now faced. i couldn't really take him seriously. after all he's spent his life as a gentle and timid ghost. but when i reached into his dark hammock i discovered a whole new side of him. as if the feral ghost had risen. he lashed out at me with teeth and claws. i stood my ground, however taken aback, and pulled him out by the scruff of the neck and plunked him on the bed. i might as well have been handling a hellcat. only a blanket over his head stilled him and he realized his battle was lost. i still don't understand why there was a battle. flea treatment squirted onto his neck, i let him go. he just lay there looking at me, hurt and betrayal in his eyes it seemed. then i left the room.
Mosby rushed to the safety of the outdoor cat cage where he lay like a meatloaf in a hay box. he wasn't over the ordeal and i knew i had to regain his confidence. i crept into the cage and used my softest cat whispering voice. it's OK, Mosey, i would never hurt you. i didn't mean to scare you. it's just me, Mose. his ears were back and his nose buried in his paws, obviously hoping i'd get lost. as a hummingbird whirred in the trumpet vines nearby i tenderly stroked between his ears. ran my hand over his back over and over, talking quietly. as his ears relented and came forward i tickled under his chin. then i heard it. the purr. i had won his heart and trust again. we sat there in the big cage and i ignored mosquito bites so that a sudden slap on skin wouldn't set him off again. my half-feral childcat came around and looked up at me, his eyes soft now and almost apologetic. his velvety body relaxed under my hand and after i knew he remembered i am "safe" i carefully took my leave. he watched after me and i told him he was very brave. for years he has associated "very brave" with something good.
pink Hello Kitty bandaids now cover my various bite wounds and an impressive scratch runs down the tender inside of my arm. i have a lot more respect for the grey ghost now and i think it would be best if i practiced more togetherness with him so we don't have a repeat performance of terror and pain in two weeks when he's due for a trip to the vet. perhaps i have neglected the velveteen cat and though i won't lick his head, i will bond more with him in the days to come. i have learned the lesson of Siegfried & Roy. the title of Cat Whisperer is a tenuous one.
a friend of mine told me yesterday that his house had been over-run with fleas and immediately my skin crawled. although i have not seen a flea in my house of 6 cats, i was taking no chances. i flew to the Cat Hospital after work and purchased a 6-pack of flea killer for kitties. i will have none of those insect vermin invading my house. my Fear stems from childhood. i don't think my parents had any idea about flea control. after all, they had no idea litterboxes existed. when i was about 9, getting ready for school one morning, i pulled on my kneesocks and could literally see the fleas jumping on and off them. That sight is burned unpleasantly into my memory.
so i rounded up the herd one by one and squirted Vectra on the backs of their necks. most of them were easy to catch and treat, although Big (the 20 pounder) was uncannily suspicious when i sweetly sing-songed his name, hanging out of reach under the kitchen table until i tricked him. food is the trick. he's a sucker for food.
but Mosby was the hold-out. Mosby, if you know your civil war history, is named after major mosby, otherwise known as the "grey ghost". alot more appropriate the Mister Kitty, the name he came with from the shelter. Mister Kitty and his sister, Miss Kitty, lost their home when a foolish woman gave up her cats for the sake of a boyfriend. no human, in my opinion, is worth abandoning your pet. but abandon them she did. they were unceremoniously returned at age 3 to the shelter where they'd come from originally. victims of a woman's insecurity and the ultimatum of a selfish boyfriend. Mister and Miss Kitty had been caught in the wild as kittens, right on the cusp of becoming feral. perhaps Mister Kitty never shed his feral kittenhood entirely, or perhaps he was mistreated by The Boyfriend before he came to the shelter. all i know is that he was unreasonably terrified of people, clinging to his sister and never coming out of the shelter of a cat house during the day. since i volunteered at the shelter, i made him my project.
they dubbed me 'the cat whisperer' at the shelter because i was somehow able to bond with even the most antisocial and frightened cats. even the cats with "STAFF ONLY - Vicious" posted in orange on their cages. i had the time to spend with them, the staff did not. and so i was consistently pleased to report back to them that so-and-so was now approachable. it only took patience, quiet tones, and knowing when it was finally OK to pet. i was only attacked once in all my 7 years there, and that was by a cat in the front room who'd been cleared for adoption! i shudder to think what his fate was after that. once they draw blood there's no telling.
on every visit i would try to assuage Mister Kitty's terror, reaching behind his sister to gently pet him after i'd allowed him to sniff my hand. but every time he acted as though he'd never seen me before and i had to start all over again. as i stroked his fur he lay rigid, eyes huge and dilated. because it was a No-Kill shelter he was allowed to live. for six months i visited him, sometimes dismayed by my inability to bring him around. he obviously could not tolerate the constant comings and goings of people and other cats. the shelter tried to offer the two of them together - two for the price of one, convinced he could not survive on his own without the comfort of his sister. one week, to my delight, they were adopted. the next week they were back. rejected.
finally there was talk of euthanasia. there seemed to be no hope for Mister and Miss Kitty. the shelter could not afford to keep them on indefinitely. i pleaded with my husband, please at least come meet Mister Kitty. they're going to kill him. bob relented and accompanied me to the shelter. the siblings were sequestered this time in a large metal cage and Mister Kitty was, as usual, hidden in a box, peering out of a round hole. bob took one look at those eyes, so full of pathos, and said 'oh OK, bring him home, goddammit.' and so with much difficulty we tugged the frightened cat out of his box and stuffed him into a carrier. Miss Kitty was left to fend for herself and was adopted within the week.
all day i sat at work pondering names. what to call him? mouse? he was timid and grey after all. then i hit upon Mosby. when i got home bob announced, "i know what to call him - Mosby!" we'd independently come up with the same name. Mosby lived for several days locked in my computer room alone with food, a litterbox, and only my visits for company. cats respond to this treatment. suddenly you are their only living link in the world and they decide you're not so bad after all. i cried with happiness when Mosby sat beside me on the couch and suddenly trusted me so much he laid on his back, baring his belly. almost smiling. within a week we gave him free range of the house and he was soon adopted by Mattie, the big brother cat of the house, who licked him and bonded. we thought it was a milestone when he allowed us to walk by him and he didn't run. we were astonished when he'd rub up against our legs. years went by and he came around of his own accord. everything had to be on his terms, but that was OK. sometimes i could even catch and hold him and eventually his stiff body would relax and he'd purr.
nowadays Mosby has decided i am safest approached while on the toilet. i don't know how he figured out that i couldn't easily catch him from that seat, but he did. so every morning we have the love ritual on the toilet. sometimes on a chilly morning he will leap onto the couch to head butt me and allows me to pet him. on those mornings my heart swells. he trusts me. i've never shown him any reason not to. but old habits die hard in a cat that once clearly had a hard life. he is still far more comfortable in the company of his fellow cats, still a baby enjoying the head-lickings Big gives him since Mattie died. but i've been his accepted human for 5 years now and i've considered it an honor. bob was too when he was alive. but he plied Mosby with bits of steak from his dinner, so he cheated.
getting Mosby to the vet is a once a year chore i don't relish. tonight i just realized that flea treatment is too. like Big, he suspected something was up when i sing-songed his name and tried to corner him. he was having none of it. plump as he now is, he hurdled upstairs and vanished into the spare bedroom. not a sign of him. i closed the door, certain he was in there, and looked under the bed from all sides. i suddenly realized the fabric of the mattress was hanging like a hammock and staring out at me were those big round terrified eyes. i used my best calm-a-cat voice but something about being that cornered made him turn like i've never seen before. i've heard the plaintive howls, but never before were they accompanied by hissing and spitting. and that's what i now faced. i couldn't really take him seriously. after all he's spent his life as a gentle and timid ghost. but when i reached into his dark hammock i discovered a whole new side of him. as if the feral ghost had risen. he lashed out at me with teeth and claws. i stood my ground, however taken aback, and pulled him out by the scruff of the neck and plunked him on the bed. i might as well have been handling a hellcat. only a blanket over his head stilled him and he realized his battle was lost. i still don't understand why there was a battle. flea treatment squirted onto his neck, i let him go. he just lay there looking at me, hurt and betrayal in his eyes it seemed. then i left the room.
Mosby rushed to the safety of the outdoor cat cage where he lay like a meatloaf in a hay box. he wasn't over the ordeal and i knew i had to regain his confidence. i crept into the cage and used my softest cat whispering voice. it's OK, Mosey, i would never hurt you. i didn't mean to scare you. it's just me, Mose. his ears were back and his nose buried in his paws, obviously hoping i'd get lost. as a hummingbird whirred in the trumpet vines nearby i tenderly stroked between his ears. ran my hand over his back over and over, talking quietly. as his ears relented and came forward i tickled under his chin. then i heard it. the purr. i had won his heart and trust again. we sat there in the big cage and i ignored mosquito bites so that a sudden slap on skin wouldn't set him off again. my half-feral childcat came around and looked up at me, his eyes soft now and almost apologetic. his velvety body relaxed under my hand and after i knew he remembered i am "safe" i carefully took my leave. he watched after me and i told him he was very brave. for years he has associated "very brave" with something good.
pink Hello Kitty bandaids now cover my various bite wounds and an impressive scratch runs down the tender inside of my arm. i have a lot more respect for the grey ghost now and i think it would be best if i practiced more togetherness with him so we don't have a repeat performance of terror and pain in two weeks when he's due for a trip to the vet. perhaps i have neglected the velveteen cat and though i won't lick his head, i will bond more with him in the days to come. i have learned the lesson of Siegfried & Roy. the title of Cat Whisperer is a tenuous one.
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