Thursday, March 25, 2010
so they're not all piss stories and dirty jokes--my last entry/reaction was, I admit, a little harsh--this section feel confusing to me. He moves fast, jumps around in time and place and seems to be in a rush to make sure he fits in all the other important events in his life--there are only about 40 pages of this memoir left--we have now read 206 pages, -sort of amazing.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
VIRGINIA AND JUANITA
March, 1991 + Virginia and San Jose
Sarah, my friend Bob, and I loaded up my van and headed to Texas. The plan was to drop Sarah off at an Ashram in Virginia. She had previously arranged to stay there for four months to continue her spiritual journey and figure some things out. Bob and I would then motor on to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. There I would begin my farm worker attorney job. Bob would go back to Maine.
The trip down was fun for Bob and me. As usual, I was full of myself. I was on the road again, moving into a new chapter of my life. I had come up and out of deep depression. I felt newly revived, energetic, and full of excitement. The trip was uneventful, other than the gloriousness of traveling south through the rebirth of spring. My future looked rich and challenging. Could i make it in Texas? Would I pass the Texas Bar Exam? Would the people accept me?
Sarah seldom spoke. When she did she seemed unsure of herself and apprehensive, like a young, untested recruit facing battle for the first time. I did next to nothing to reassure her or even talk to her. I should have seen the train wreck coming.
We got to Virginia and the Ashram. Sarah became quieter than ever. I remained oblivious. She checked into what seemed to me cool digs. The place was situated in a quiet, rural setting. It resembled a huge and lovingly tended park. There were helpful people about. Sarah's room was clean and neat.
As I was saying my goodbyes, Sarah started weeping and then crying. She was anguished beyond words. She felt she was being abandoned yet again by one of the two people she loved and needed most. "How can you leave me alone in this place, where I'm a complete stranger?" she sobbed. "You left me when you fell, when you went to law school, when you went to the VA. You're always leaving me. I'm you're daughter. I need you. Don't I matter?"
Every word was a stab in my heart. Here we were again. I was leaving the one person on earth I had vowed to give my last breath and whose welfare was supposed to mean the most to me. I felt helpless, weak, and trapped. There was nothing for it but to play out this recurring nightmare to its bitter end.
I tried to explain why I had to leave. My words sounded hollow and stupid. I comforted her as I could. I left her lying on her bed, distraught and sobbing. Sarah had laid out her youthful heart to me. She had been open exposed, and totally vulnerable. She needed the same from me. I wouldn't come out from behind my defenses, take my armor off, as she had done.
She was absolutely right. My initial instinct was to deny, defend, and strike back. Her tears and her words finally reached me. She had seen into and through her youth. Every one of her words rang true. Memories of coming up short as a father and friend poured in on me. There would be a reckoning between us down the road.
RECKONING
July, 1991 + San Juan, Texas
"Oh, I got a letter on a lonesome day..."
The reckoning between Sarah and me came in the form of a letter. Sarah had been doing Inner Child Work at the Ashram. In the process she had confronted her upbringing, her disappointments and failures, and her deepest feelings. She had been empowered to squarely face and hopefully come to terms with the people, forces and events that had shaped her life.
During her stay there we had, of course, been in touch. She wrote breezy letters about the beauty of the Virginia spring and the friends she was making. She would usually add a note or two about the work she was doing uncovering and discovering things inside her. I was very involved in my new life. I was learning Spanish and studying for the Texas Bar Exam. I was busy. I didn't see it coming.
I opened the letter, expecting more of the same. What it said shocked me. Her letter was a heart-wrenching testimonial of her pain. My little girl had become a courageous and articulate young woman. Her letter spoke in plain language.
She confronted the damage years of living in a family that was broken. She was groping, partly in the dark, to come to terms with love gone wrong. She wrestled with her inability to square my deeds with my words. She knew I loved her yet, I had left her time after time. She knew I loved our family yet, I had betrayed Linda and her with Kate. Although i had oftentimes said that openness was important to me, I had grown emotionally distant and inaccessible. She knew I was strong, yet I was weak and withdrawn during her high school years. I has a lot to answer for.
Once I got past my defensive, "No, No, No," I sat quietly gazing out across the Rio Grande Valley landscape, which was flat, parched, and treeless. The years rolled through my mind: Sarah's birth, Wellington, my injury, Kate, law school, divorce, Waterville, Virginia, Texas, to this letter. I thought of all the people along the way. I thought of the pain, ever at hand. Loss, sadness, and shame welled up in me, like a geyser preparing to overflow. As in that Waterville apartment when, "I just reached a place, where the willow don't bend..." I let go. Tears rolled down my contorted face without restraint. I wept until I was out of tears.
I realized then that I had been presented an opening. Sarah had given me an opportunity to reach across the miles and over the years to recover what had been lost. I resolved to be as courageous as she. I could not face knowing i had failed her again. I would not shut her out or go half way.
I wrote her back owning it all:
"Yes many times I have been weak when you needed me strong,
away when you needed me there, cowardly when you needed me valiant,
and self absorbed when you simply needed me.
I made our home a battleground for no reason but my anger.
I fell for another woman. I betrayed our family.
I erected barriers between us."
All of this was true,
"Through all the pain, hurtful words, and failures,
through the dissolution of our family, your Mom,
you, and I were looking out for each other.
We were trying in our own way to take care of each other.
Despite the heartache, we continued loving each other.
Sweetheart, we are still doing this today."
With that, I closed. I felt released. I knew at last the healing had begun.
LINDA, SARAH, AND I
Circa 1989-1990 + Waterville, Maine
Our family had come undone; we each moved far apart: Linda in Texas, Sarah in college in New York, then Costa Rica, and me in Maine. This geographical scheme was a manifestation of a much deeper reality. We were emotionally scarred by five years of anger, resentment, and retribution. Linda, Sarah, and I had retreated to safer ground. As long as we stayed detached, we could try to make sense of how we each felt.
Although Sarah and I lived together during her high school years, we were miles apart emotionally. This is laid out above. Suffice it to say we existed in two armed camps: she struggled with the radioactive fallout while making her way through the minefields of adolescence. I was a father in name only during most of those days. Depressed, I could only with the greatest effort drag myself to the supermarket, deal with bills, and otherwise run our household. This was hardly a recipe for helping my daughter find herself.
She and I did make it through. Sarah graduated from high school and was accepted at the college of her choice. I landed a great job which I came to love. Sarah and I became friends, although a deeper experience was to come.
Wat of Linda? How could we three become a family again?
By 1989 or so, my efforts to punish her had dissipated. I had forbidden her entrance into our Waterville home. I had imposed a frigid silent treatment, which I knew lacerated her gentle and loving heart. The time had come to retrieve our family from the ashes, and our love from the barriers I had erected.
In that year I welcomed Linda into Sarah and I's home. This was a monumental event. Our family was together again. In unspoken agreement we committed to living in peace with one another. We knew this would require mutual love and respect. We succeeded at last. This is what loving families do.
As I write I am happy to say Linda is Sarah's best friend and a close friend of mine. When we are together, it is very sweet to watch we three ministering to each other. We share a profound love for each other and for our reunited family.
Shangri-La has been placed into the hands and care of younger strengths. They are raising a family and living out their homestead dream. Bitter and Sweet.
THE SOUTH TEXAS PROJECT
January, 1991 + Augusta, Maine and Austin, Texas
My job search took a much longer time than I expected. I stayed diligently on it. I loved my position and co-workers at the Maine Commission for Human Rights. The Commission job was not necessarily a lawyer position. Being an attorney certainly helped, but the other four investigators were not lawyers. I wanted to test my mettle in the legal arena.
I dusted off my resume, wrote a letter of interest, and sent them to a host of potential employers. I even considered social work in Africa. The wheel chair got in the way of some, I'm sure. Month after month passed, and I still had no possibilities. A friend told me about a peace and freedom publication that listed job searches on behalf of like-minded folk. i thanked her, thinking it was a waste of time. I didn't bother to try.
All other avenues ended in dead ends. After four months, I decided to send my stuff to the magazine, thinking it couldn't hurt. Several more months went by and I received no letters or calls. I gave up on the magazine.
On a cold, winter Friday, I got a call from Austin, Texas. One of my co-workers said it was about an ad in a magazine. I was astounded. I picked up my phone. My caller was named Jim. The conversation went like this:
Jim: "I read your ad in such and such magazine. I have the perfect job for you."
Me: (getting excited) "Go on."
Jim: "You would be a lawyer for the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez' Union.
You would be the Director of the South Texas Civil Rights Project."
Me: (very excited) "Where is it?"
Jim: "The Rio Grande Valley of Texas, across the Rio Grande River from Mexico.
Are you interested?"
Me: (very, very excited) "Yes, I'm inters ted."
Jim: "Good. Fly down to Austin. We'll talk. Then you go south to be interviewed
by the people you will be working with. If all goes well, we'll all know
before you return to Maine."
Me: "When should I meet you?"
Jim: "As soon as you can get here."
Me: (very, very, very excited) "I'll see you tomorrow."
Just like that! I landed the perfect job because Jim happened to glance at my ad in a magazine I hadn't known existed a few months prior. The position was for a full time attorney who would be Director of a Civil Rights Project in South Texas representing farm workers and other low-income folk and marching with the UFW and Cesar Chavez' people. maybe I could get to meet him. Talk about PERFECT!!
Within a few days I was in Austin. Jim and I got on right off. Soon I was in the Rio Grande Valley. This is a story in its own right:
HOME IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
January, 1991 + San Juan, Texas
This was all happening very fast. I loved it. The following day Linda, Sarah, I drove from Austin due south to the Rio Grande Valley and arrived at the UFW center. I was to be interviewed pronto.
I made my way into the lobby of the UFW (United Farm Worker) building in extreme South Texas (and I do mean extreme). This was a long, long way from Maine. The land was almost perfectly flat and treeless. The population was approximately 85% Latino. Spanish was spoken everywhere. This was a land apart.
I had resolved to move from Maine where it was always winter and never Christmas. I had, had enough of pushing my manual wheelchair through ice, snow, sand, and salt. My fingers were always so cold I could hardly use them. For me it seemed a relentless, never-ending winter. Maine could be cool in July.
I had been working in Augusta continually from February, 1986-1991. Every work day I drove thirty miles each way to and from my job. On one occasion, I was on an AAA tow truck hook from Augusta to Waterville with me in the vehicle. I went through one winter in my old van without a heater.
Day after day I felt like the cold was freezing my nuts off. I was getting home so chilled it took all evening to warm back up. Next day, I would be up early and back on the tundra for yet another Arctic day. It was time to head out, west or south, but definitely not north or east. I even went so far as to consider Africa. The unending unpleasantness just got to be too much. A brief digression will make my point:
[Brief Digression: January, 1990, Maine Legislature, early afternoon--This was a classic winter day in Maine--weather dominating everything. It was cold with a howling wind. Heavy wet snow flakes poured down from the slate gray sky.
I had prepared an address to a committee of Maine legislature on a disability discrimination issue. After parking my van, I got down to the ground on my electric lift. I had landed in the teeth of a blasting, frigid headwind blowing snow in horizontal sheets directly into my face. This was a nor'easter of Maine Yankee proportions:
"Now, I rememba the winta of nintey, why it blowed
so haad, the snow come right through the baan wall,
I'm a tellin ya,
froze Chesta right theya, it did"
Fifty feet in front of me was the mammoth State Office Building, with its myriad windows. The place was full of the faces of warm, dry, and happy State employees looking in my direction. I wore only a dress shirt and tie. I had no coat or jacket on because it was a short and quick roll into the building and out of the weather. As I was maneuvering my chair off the vehicle's lift platform, the right front tire got badly stuck on the platform lip. I mean, I was jammed. I couldn't move forward and I couldn't move backward. The harder I tried to move, the stucker I got. I had to get help, and fast. I sat there freezing and becoming rapidly obscured by the snow.
I thought, 'Not to worry, there is a host of State workers looking right at me.' I waved, gestured, and gesticulated. I mimicked my dilemma and their rescue, as if I were a French mime. The people at the windows, who had witnessed the entire episode, waved back. They smiled at me, as they watched me frantically struggle. I was disappearing under a blanket of snow. Just then--I decided to move south (or west or both). Eventually someone came from somewhere (else) and released me, buried and frozen.]
Meanwhile, back at the Texas interview:
You recall that I was being interviewed for the South Texas Legal Rights Project Director/Attorney position. Other than myself, there were three people present: Juanita (UFW represenative), Barbara (former Project Director), and Dr. Nelson (local activist/professor).
Barbara was a lawyer in her mid thirties. She wore thick glasses and squinted, as though searching for something she had lost. She was thin and angular and fidgeted. She asked a lot of legal questions. Dr. Nelson, who was in his mid fifties was tall and thin. He said he was a political activist and organizer and that was about all he said. The interviewer was Juanita.
She was the star of the show. She very easily and naturally commanded respect and attention. Juanita was in her early forties. She had olive colored skin, like many Latinos and Latinas everywhere. I would soon come to see that she was a combination Cesar Chavez, Carmen Miranda, and Madonna. She had flowing, long, jet-black hair. Her soulful brown eyes were bright and piercing. her manner was firm yet gentle.
Over the next ten years I would come to admire, respect, and emulate her as the living incarnation of all I strived to be. She was really something--a person who would add immeasurably to my life. She did this simply by being herself, without more.
I looked around me. The Rio Grande Valley UFW hall was a low level, one storey, plain cement block building. This community center was set on ten acres fifteen miles from Mexico. We were in the lobby, which measured fifteen by twenty foot. The entrance led directly to a long and unadorned front desk. Folding chairs, a large sofa, and one overstuffed easy chair welcomed farm workers and visitors. Pamphlets, posters with the UFW motto, 'VIVA LA UNION', placards, and pictures were everywhere.
Colorful English and Spanish notices decorated the walls. This dusty room was replete with bright colors. The decor seemed to be thrown together with liveliness the motif. Movement, progress, hope and passion were proudly on display.
When I set foot in that lobby, I felt I was home. I felt it instantly. I knew beyond doubt that this place was for me. It exuded low-budget, political funk. I loved it!
I chattered on about something or other, trying to sell myself. Then, apropos of nothing, Juanita looked straight into my very soul with her piercing, Madonna eyes that held me spellbound. Straight from her heart, she said, "We really need you here".
"OK, THAT'S IT. SHUT IT DOWN. NO MORE NEED BE SAID. I'M IN. SHOW ME WHERE TO SIGN". From that instant I was there. I didn't care about money, working conditions, how I'd get there, or living arrangements. All of that didn't matter now. Juanita had said the magic words. The incantation had been spoken. Words fall woefully short, now that I've come to the heart of it all. Juanita's five word statement convinced me how right this job in this place with these people was for me. Juanita had cleanly cut through the clutter and gotten right to my need to be needed and valued.
Sarah, my friend Bob, and I loaded up my van and headed to Texas. The plan was to drop Sarah off at an Ashram in Virginia. She had previously arranged to stay there for four months to continue her spiritual journey and figure some things out. Bob and I would then motor on to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. There I would begin my farm worker attorney job. Bob would go back to Maine.
The trip down was fun for Bob and me. As usual, I was full of myself. I was on the road again, moving into a new chapter of my life. I had come up and out of deep depression. I felt newly revived, energetic, and full of excitement. The trip was uneventful, other than the gloriousness of traveling south through the rebirth of spring. My future looked rich and challenging. Could i make it in Texas? Would I pass the Texas Bar Exam? Would the people accept me?
Sarah seldom spoke. When she did she seemed unsure of herself and apprehensive, like a young, untested recruit facing battle for the first time. I did next to nothing to reassure her or even talk to her. I should have seen the train wreck coming.
We got to Virginia and the Ashram. Sarah became quieter than ever. I remained oblivious. She checked into what seemed to me cool digs. The place was situated in a quiet, rural setting. It resembled a huge and lovingly tended park. There were helpful people about. Sarah's room was clean and neat.
As I was saying my goodbyes, Sarah started weeping and then crying. She was anguished beyond words. She felt she was being abandoned yet again by one of the two people she loved and needed most. "How can you leave me alone in this place, where I'm a complete stranger?" she sobbed. "You left me when you fell, when you went to law school, when you went to the VA. You're always leaving me. I'm you're daughter. I need you. Don't I matter?"
Every word was a stab in my heart. Here we were again. I was leaving the one person on earth I had vowed to give my last breath and whose welfare was supposed to mean the most to me. I felt helpless, weak, and trapped. There was nothing for it but to play out this recurring nightmare to its bitter end.
I tried to explain why I had to leave. My words sounded hollow and stupid. I comforted her as I could. I left her lying on her bed, distraught and sobbing. Sarah had laid out her youthful heart to me. She had been open exposed, and totally vulnerable. She needed the same from me. I wouldn't come out from behind my defenses, take my armor off, as she had done.
She was absolutely right. My initial instinct was to deny, defend, and strike back. Her tears and her words finally reached me. She had seen into and through her youth. Every one of her words rang true. Memories of coming up short as a father and friend poured in on me. There would be a reckoning between us down the road.
RECKONING
July, 1991 + San Juan, Texas
"Oh, I got a letter on a lonesome day..."
The reckoning between Sarah and me came in the form of a letter. Sarah had been doing Inner Child Work at the Ashram. In the process she had confronted her upbringing, her disappointments and failures, and her deepest feelings. She had been empowered to squarely face and hopefully come to terms with the people, forces and events that had shaped her life.
During her stay there we had, of course, been in touch. She wrote breezy letters about the beauty of the Virginia spring and the friends she was making. She would usually add a note or two about the work she was doing uncovering and discovering things inside her. I was very involved in my new life. I was learning Spanish and studying for the Texas Bar Exam. I was busy. I didn't see it coming.
I opened the letter, expecting more of the same. What it said shocked me. Her letter was a heart-wrenching testimonial of her pain. My little girl had become a courageous and articulate young woman. Her letter spoke in plain language.
She confronted the damage years of living in a family that was broken. She was groping, partly in the dark, to come to terms with love gone wrong. She wrestled with her inability to square my deeds with my words. She knew I loved her yet, I had left her time after time. She knew I loved our family yet, I had betrayed Linda and her with Kate. Although i had oftentimes said that openness was important to me, I had grown emotionally distant and inaccessible. She knew I was strong, yet I was weak and withdrawn during her high school years. I has a lot to answer for.
Once I got past my defensive, "No, No, No," I sat quietly gazing out across the Rio Grande Valley landscape, which was flat, parched, and treeless. The years rolled through my mind: Sarah's birth, Wellington, my injury, Kate, law school, divorce, Waterville, Virginia, Texas, to this letter. I thought of all the people along the way. I thought of the pain, ever at hand. Loss, sadness, and shame welled up in me, like a geyser preparing to overflow. As in that Waterville apartment when, "I just reached a place, where the willow don't bend..." I let go. Tears rolled down my contorted face without restraint. I wept until I was out of tears.
I realized then that I had been presented an opening. Sarah had given me an opportunity to reach across the miles and over the years to recover what had been lost. I resolved to be as courageous as she. I could not face knowing i had failed her again. I would not shut her out or go half way.
I wrote her back owning it all:
"Yes many times I have been weak when you needed me strong,
away when you needed me there, cowardly when you needed me valiant,
and self absorbed when you simply needed me.
I made our home a battleground for no reason but my anger.
I fell for another woman. I betrayed our family.
I erected barriers between us."
All of this was true,
"Through all the pain, hurtful words, and failures,
through the dissolution of our family, your Mom,
you, and I were looking out for each other.
We were trying in our own way to take care of each other.
Despite the heartache, we continued loving each other.
Sweetheart, we are still doing this today."
With that, I closed. I felt released. I knew at last the healing had begun.
LINDA, SARAH, AND I
Circa 1989-1990 + Waterville, Maine
Our family had come undone; we each moved far apart: Linda in Texas, Sarah in college in New York, then Costa Rica, and me in Maine. This geographical scheme was a manifestation of a much deeper reality. We were emotionally scarred by five years of anger, resentment, and retribution. Linda, Sarah, and I had retreated to safer ground. As long as we stayed detached, we could try to make sense of how we each felt.
Although Sarah and I lived together during her high school years, we were miles apart emotionally. This is laid out above. Suffice it to say we existed in two armed camps: she struggled with the radioactive fallout while making her way through the minefields of adolescence. I was a father in name only during most of those days. Depressed, I could only with the greatest effort drag myself to the supermarket, deal with bills, and otherwise run our household. This was hardly a recipe for helping my daughter find herself.
She and I did make it through. Sarah graduated from high school and was accepted at the college of her choice. I landed a great job which I came to love. Sarah and I became friends, although a deeper experience was to come.
Wat of Linda? How could we three become a family again?
By 1989 or so, my efforts to punish her had dissipated. I had forbidden her entrance into our Waterville home. I had imposed a frigid silent treatment, which I knew lacerated her gentle and loving heart. The time had come to retrieve our family from the ashes, and our love from the barriers I had erected.
In that year I welcomed Linda into Sarah and I's home. This was a monumental event. Our family was together again. In unspoken agreement we committed to living in peace with one another. We knew this would require mutual love and respect. We succeeded at last. This is what loving families do.
As I write I am happy to say Linda is Sarah's best friend and a close friend of mine. When we are together, it is very sweet to watch we three ministering to each other. We share a profound love for each other and for our reunited family.
Shangri-La has been placed into the hands and care of younger strengths. They are raising a family and living out their homestead dream. Bitter and Sweet.
THE SOUTH TEXAS PROJECT
January, 1991 + Augusta, Maine and Austin, Texas
My job search took a much longer time than I expected. I stayed diligently on it. I loved my position and co-workers at the Maine Commission for Human Rights. The Commission job was not necessarily a lawyer position. Being an attorney certainly helped, but the other four investigators were not lawyers. I wanted to test my mettle in the legal arena.
I dusted off my resume, wrote a letter of interest, and sent them to a host of potential employers. I even considered social work in Africa. The wheel chair got in the way of some, I'm sure. Month after month passed, and I still had no possibilities. A friend told me about a peace and freedom publication that listed job searches on behalf of like-minded folk. i thanked her, thinking it was a waste of time. I didn't bother to try.
All other avenues ended in dead ends. After four months, I decided to send my stuff to the magazine, thinking it couldn't hurt. Several more months went by and I received no letters or calls. I gave up on the magazine.
On a cold, winter Friday, I got a call from Austin, Texas. One of my co-workers said it was about an ad in a magazine. I was astounded. I picked up my phone. My caller was named Jim. The conversation went like this:
Jim: "I read your ad in such and such magazine. I have the perfect job for you."
Me: (getting excited) "Go on."
Jim: "You would be a lawyer for the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez' Union.
You would be the Director of the South Texas Civil Rights Project."
Me: (very excited) "Where is it?"
Jim: "The Rio Grande Valley of Texas, across the Rio Grande River from Mexico.
Are you interested?"
Me: (very, very excited) "Yes, I'm inters ted."
Jim: "Good. Fly down to Austin. We'll talk. Then you go south to be interviewed
by the people you will be working with. If all goes well, we'll all know
before you return to Maine."
Me: "When should I meet you?"
Jim: "As soon as you can get here."
Me: (very, very, very excited) "I'll see you tomorrow."
Just like that! I landed the perfect job because Jim happened to glance at my ad in a magazine I hadn't known existed a few months prior. The position was for a full time attorney who would be Director of a Civil Rights Project in South Texas representing farm workers and other low-income folk and marching with the UFW and Cesar Chavez' people. maybe I could get to meet him. Talk about PERFECT!!
Within a few days I was in Austin. Jim and I got on right off. Soon I was in the Rio Grande Valley. This is a story in its own right:
HOME IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
January, 1991 + San Juan, Texas
This was all happening very fast. I loved it. The following day Linda, Sarah, I drove from Austin due south to the Rio Grande Valley and arrived at the UFW center. I was to be interviewed pronto.
I made my way into the lobby of the UFW (United Farm Worker) building in extreme South Texas (and I do mean extreme). This was a long, long way from Maine. The land was almost perfectly flat and treeless. The population was approximately 85% Latino. Spanish was spoken everywhere. This was a land apart.
I had resolved to move from Maine where it was always winter and never Christmas. I had, had enough of pushing my manual wheelchair through ice, snow, sand, and salt. My fingers were always so cold I could hardly use them. For me it seemed a relentless, never-ending winter. Maine could be cool in July.
I had been working in Augusta continually from February, 1986-1991. Every work day I drove thirty miles each way to and from my job. On one occasion, I was on an AAA tow truck hook from Augusta to Waterville with me in the vehicle. I went through one winter in my old van without a heater.
Day after day I felt like the cold was freezing my nuts off. I was getting home so chilled it took all evening to warm back up. Next day, I would be up early and back on the tundra for yet another Arctic day. It was time to head out, west or south, but definitely not north or east. I even went so far as to consider Africa. The unending unpleasantness just got to be too much. A brief digression will make my point:
[Brief Digression: January, 1990, Maine Legislature, early afternoon--This was a classic winter day in Maine--weather dominating everything. It was cold with a howling wind. Heavy wet snow flakes poured down from the slate gray sky.
I had prepared an address to a committee of Maine legislature on a disability discrimination issue. After parking my van, I got down to the ground on my electric lift. I had landed in the teeth of a blasting, frigid headwind blowing snow in horizontal sheets directly into my face. This was a nor'easter of Maine Yankee proportions:
"Now, I rememba the winta of nintey, why it blowed
so haad, the snow come right through the baan wall,
I'm a tellin ya,
froze Chesta right theya, it did"
Fifty feet in front of me was the mammoth State Office Building, with its myriad windows. The place was full of the faces of warm, dry, and happy State employees looking in my direction. I wore only a dress shirt and tie. I had no coat or jacket on because it was a short and quick roll into the building and out of the weather. As I was maneuvering my chair off the vehicle's lift platform, the right front tire got badly stuck on the platform lip. I mean, I was jammed. I couldn't move forward and I couldn't move backward. The harder I tried to move, the stucker I got. I had to get help, and fast. I sat there freezing and becoming rapidly obscured by the snow.
I thought, 'Not to worry, there is a host of State workers looking right at me.' I waved, gestured, and gesticulated. I mimicked my dilemma and their rescue, as if I were a French mime. The people at the windows, who had witnessed the entire episode, waved back. They smiled at me, as they watched me frantically struggle. I was disappearing under a blanket of snow. Just then--I decided to move south (or west or both). Eventually someone came from somewhere (else) and released me, buried and frozen.]
Meanwhile, back at the Texas interview:
You recall that I was being interviewed for the South Texas Legal Rights Project Director/Attorney position. Other than myself, there were three people present: Juanita (UFW represenative), Barbara (former Project Director), and Dr. Nelson (local activist/professor).
Barbara was a lawyer in her mid thirties. She wore thick glasses and squinted, as though searching for something she had lost. She was thin and angular and fidgeted. She asked a lot of legal questions. Dr. Nelson, who was in his mid fifties was tall and thin. He said he was a political activist and organizer and that was about all he said. The interviewer was Juanita.
She was the star of the show. She very easily and naturally commanded respect and attention. Juanita was in her early forties. She had olive colored skin, like many Latinos and Latinas everywhere. I would soon come to see that she was a combination Cesar Chavez, Carmen Miranda, and Madonna. She had flowing, long, jet-black hair. Her soulful brown eyes were bright and piercing. her manner was firm yet gentle.
Over the next ten years I would come to admire, respect, and emulate her as the living incarnation of all I strived to be. She was really something--a person who would add immeasurably to my life. She did this simply by being herself, without more.
I looked around me. The Rio Grande Valley UFW hall was a low level, one storey, plain cement block building. This community center was set on ten acres fifteen miles from Mexico. We were in the lobby, which measured fifteen by twenty foot. The entrance led directly to a long and unadorned front desk. Folding chairs, a large sofa, and one overstuffed easy chair welcomed farm workers and visitors. Pamphlets, posters with the UFW motto, 'VIVA LA UNION', placards, and pictures were everywhere.
Colorful English and Spanish notices decorated the walls. This dusty room was replete with bright colors. The decor seemed to be thrown together with liveliness the motif. Movement, progress, hope and passion were proudly on display.
When I set foot in that lobby, I felt I was home. I felt it instantly. I knew beyond doubt that this place was for me. It exuded low-budget, political funk. I loved it!
I chattered on about something or other, trying to sell myself. Then, apropos of nothing, Juanita looked straight into my very soul with her piercing, Madonna eyes that held me spellbound. Straight from her heart, she said, "We really need you here".
"OK, THAT'S IT. SHUT IT DOWN. NO MORE NEED BE SAID. I'M IN. SHOW ME WHERE TO SIGN". From that instant I was there. I didn't care about money, working conditions, how I'd get there, or living arrangements. All of that didn't matter now. Juanita had said the magic words. The incantation had been spoken. Words fall woefully short, now that I've come to the heart of it all. Juanita's five word statement convinced me how right this job in this place with these people was for me. Juanita had cleanly cut through the clutter and gotten right to my need to be needed and valued.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
another piss story--organizational oversight--should be with the others in a nice little grouping--although this book was 'done' as I continue to transcribe I see how very rough/unedited and incomplete it still was when he stopped actively working on it--as I mentioned before most of what you are reading I am transcribing and reading for the first time myself--this is not the picture of my father I would have chosen to paint--these are not (mostly) examples of his highest, deepest, most enlightened or even accurate depictions of his life--they are frozen and embellished stories of events he found amusing or touching or seminal, but they lack in the telling the fullness of context. He parades follies as though humiliation were a tonic and I find it sad, embarrassing, pitiful even that he thought that this is the 'stuff' from his life, from him--that others would be interested in hearing, as opposed to the nuanced, subtle, complex musing of his mature and poetic mind. It leaves me exhausted and bored and ultimately disappointed because honestly what he was doing was not putting down a memoir for posterity, for his family to read and remember but telling a dirty joke at his own (and others expense) so as to render himself the entertaining center of attention--kind of par for the course, really.
Monday, March 22, 2010
WHEN YOU JUST HAVE TO GO
June, 1990 + Augusta, Maine
The Governor of Maine had invited a cross-section of disabled or handicapped or challenged or otherly abled or crippled folk to the State Mansion for a photo op. He also wanted to speechify about all the great things he had done for us, such as allowing seeing eye dogs on brewery tours. He had accomplished embarrassingly little.
I hated these contrived and artificial settings and still do. It's too much like being a trained seal. I went at my much admired and respected boss' request.
I was late of course, fashionably so. I could barely push my chair on the exquisite, deep pile, cream colored, wall-to-wall carpet. I found my spot at the back, close to the exit. The twenty by thirty foot room was beautifully appointed with huge, light-brown, velvet curtains. Seats matched the decor and were placed in neat, evenly spaced rows. Ample room was provided for wheel chairs and other nobility devices.
I looked around at the people in the room. There were a number of greeters, seaters, and self-important, officious aides hurrying about, as if the sky were falling. These aides wore dark hued suits, ties, and rather severe blouse-skirt combinations that bespoke 'business only'. This group was mostly young go-getters who were the legislator and governors of years to come.
There certainly was a wide variety of people in that place. Present also were two elderly gents, each of whom could be one hundred years old. These guys lounged in hospital beds. One of them kept trying to cough up fur balls the entire time. This was one of those Michael Jordan moments when I'd be hanging with my blind, crippled, and crazy homie. The last category of participants was closely watched. Those suit and tie people policed this event so nothing embarrassing occurred. Can you imagine the panic if one of the invitees shouted, "Satan speaks; get thee behind me Governor"?
The Governor began his self-congratulatory, prepared speech. He was framed behind two eight foot windows encased in oak and sumptuous velvet. This was no accident. The room and all were set up so listeners' attention focused on the speaker.
I distractedly listened to part of it. The other part I spent wondering what that attractive redheaded Aide knew about quadriplegic sex. After fifteen minutes of trying to pretend I gave a shit, I began to get a subtle whiff of processed uric acid, or piss, as it's known in the vernacular.
'Some poor bastard's leg bag or foley or night bag is starting to stink', I thought' Probably that toothless old dude half asleep near the front'. The longer the speech droned on, the less subtle the odor became. I was amused at the thought that this politician was being subjected to the dank fragrance of urine in his own, albeit temporary, home. The smell got worse. Like the dawning awareness the offensive odor is not in the dream, but in waking reality, I began to entertain the notion that the essence of eau de urea was mine. This was not so amusing a prospect.
I knew without doubt who the culprit was. I leaned over and looked down to confirm. Just as I had known, I saw and smelled a spot the size of a basketball under my leg bag. I watched the steady drip, drip, drip enlarge this spot by the second. 'Uh, Oh' I thought, 'I've got to get the fuck out of here'. I cast my glance about and saw that no one was on to me. So as not to raise suspicion, I sidled slowly back and out.
One of the helpful young aides pushed my chair, complete with the unabated trickle to the door. I thanked him and lowering my head to keep a very low profile. I finally made it outside to freedom, like E. T. from his pursuers. I chuckled a bit on the way back to my office. I felt smug to have left my mark on the whole vacuous affair. Like a male cat, I had marked my territory. 'I showed that political hack what it means to invite me to his Mansion', I mused.
When I got back to work, my Boss asked me how it went. That Governor was not her favorite either. I felt free to say, "Oh, it went OK, except someone or other stunk up the place by urinating on the carpet".
The Governor of Maine had invited a cross-section of disabled or handicapped or challenged or otherly abled or crippled folk to the State Mansion for a photo op. He also wanted to speechify about all the great things he had done for us, such as allowing seeing eye dogs on brewery tours. He had accomplished embarrassingly little.
I hated these contrived and artificial settings and still do. It's too much like being a trained seal. I went at my much admired and respected boss' request.
I was late of course, fashionably so. I could barely push my chair on the exquisite, deep pile, cream colored, wall-to-wall carpet. I found my spot at the back, close to the exit. The twenty by thirty foot room was beautifully appointed with huge, light-brown, velvet curtains. Seats matched the decor and were placed in neat, evenly spaced rows. Ample room was provided for wheel chairs and other nobility devices.
I looked around at the people in the room. There were a number of greeters, seaters, and self-important, officious aides hurrying about, as if the sky were falling. These aides wore dark hued suits, ties, and rather severe blouse-skirt combinations that bespoke 'business only'. This group was mostly young go-getters who were the legislator and governors of years to come.
There certainly was a wide variety of people in that place. Present also were two elderly gents, each of whom could be one hundred years old. These guys lounged in hospital beds. One of them kept trying to cough up fur balls the entire time. This was one of those Michael Jordan moments when I'd be hanging with my blind, crippled, and crazy homie. The last category of participants was closely watched. Those suit and tie people policed this event so nothing embarrassing occurred. Can you imagine the panic if one of the invitees shouted, "Satan speaks; get thee behind me Governor"?
The Governor began his self-congratulatory, prepared speech. He was framed behind two eight foot windows encased in oak and sumptuous velvet. This was no accident. The room and all were set up so listeners' attention focused on the speaker.
I distractedly listened to part of it. The other part I spent wondering what that attractive redheaded Aide knew about quadriplegic sex. After fifteen minutes of trying to pretend I gave a shit, I began to get a subtle whiff of processed uric acid, or piss, as it's known in the vernacular.
'Some poor bastard's leg bag or foley or night bag is starting to stink', I thought' Probably that toothless old dude half asleep near the front'. The longer the speech droned on, the less subtle the odor became. I was amused at the thought that this politician was being subjected to the dank fragrance of urine in his own, albeit temporary, home. The smell got worse. Like the dawning awareness the offensive odor is not in the dream, but in waking reality, I began to entertain the notion that the essence of eau de urea was mine. This was not so amusing a prospect.
I knew without doubt who the culprit was. I leaned over and looked down to confirm. Just as I had known, I saw and smelled a spot the size of a basketball under my leg bag. I watched the steady drip, drip, drip enlarge this spot by the second. 'Uh, Oh' I thought, 'I've got to get the fuck out of here'. I cast my glance about and saw that no one was on to me. So as not to raise suspicion, I sidled slowly back and out.
One of the helpful young aides pushed my chair, complete with the unabated trickle to the door. I thanked him and lowering my head to keep a very low profile. I finally made it outside to freedom, like E. T. from his pursuers. I chuckled a bit on the way back to my office. I felt smug to have left my mark on the whole vacuous affair. Like a male cat, I had marked my territory. 'I showed that political hack what it means to invite me to his Mansion', I mused.
When I got back to work, my Boss asked me how it went. That Governor was not her favorite either. I felt free to say, "Oh, it went OK, except someone or other stunk up the place by urinating on the carpet".
Friday, March 5, 2010
SEX MATTERS (PART III)
December 1990 + Waterveille, Maine
This vignette stars those disreputable, yet most readibly desired, facets of human behavior: (1) lust for sex, (2) anticipation of sex, and (3) sex itself.
Shortly before Christmas, a totally unexpected gift landed in my lap, so to speak. Perhaps 'on my lap' is more to the point. Connie had come in due course along the stream of life; Tania arrived in a torrent. Like the unanticipated rapids that swamp even the most experienced rafter, she suddenly appeared.
This is how it happened, I think. It is common knowlegde that there is more than one way to skin a cat. That old saw duly noted, let me say right up front for the animal lovers among us (me included) that no cat has been skinned, hung, harmed, or otherwise molested in this story. Or this entire book. Well, one cat broke a nail, but that's it.
She was Tania, Tanney to me. She was thirty or so, of medium height, and not a particulatly beautiful woman. Tanney was not hard to look at either. She was a little heavy, as if she had recently lost some, but not quite enough weight. She had reddish-brown hair and deep brown eyes that seemed to smolder with scarcely hidden passion. She was like a volcano that was always ready to do the Mount St. Helen's thing.
What drew me to her was the instant awareness that here was a hot blooded bomb shell, an explosion sure to happen. With the right fuse, that is. She had something of the Victoria Secret's model about her, the look that said, 'I can bring you some fabulous sexual thrills or I can eat you alive'. I felt that in my stomach. It was as if she had asked me to come along on a world-class roller coaster ride sitting on white hot coals.
We met in Augusta where I worked for the Maine Commission on Human Rights. Tanney was a Complainant, someone who had filed a discrimination complaint against her employer. I was the investigator assigned to her case. Investigators were forbidden from getting involved with clients while their cases were pending. With her I may have overstepped the line.
Tanney had a penchant for tight-fitting, revealing clothes. This was a bit out of place in that rather informal, yet professional workplace, where dressing like Britney Spears was most unusual. Her legs were shapely and came together in a place I very much wanted to visit. She had big breast which she generously displayed when leaning toward me in her typically low-cut blouses. She caught me eyeing her more than thrice. It didn't take long for us to make progress toward each other. Fortunately, her complaint settled, so the runway was clear for take off.
(1) Lust of sex: We would make up excuses to be together. These seemed innocent enough: a ride home, trips to the food store. After awhile she would spend some time in my apartment, leaning over me. Her hot, sweet breath torched my skin when her chest was all but in my face. She wore cheap perfume that reminded me of a low-rent Mexican hooker of my Army days, when sex was more important than the clap, or worse.
One Sunday morning we were completely alone. Sarah was away at college; everyone else I knew was out of town or caught up in personal buisiness. We spent three hours together, she in a Marilyn Monroe-like outfit: tight black skirt, fishnet hose, low-cut white blouse, and heels. Wow! That get-up on a Sunday morning. The message was clear and I was getting more impatient by the hour. "You've got to get your hands on those hooters," I thought. To say, as President Carter had, that "I had lust in my heart" was an understatement, like saying Mount Everest is tall.
(2) Anticipation of Sex: It was about then that I got a new idea. I would pay her to help me take care of my small apartment, Hitler's Bunker, you recall. My place was very ordinary, except for one feature that proved very handy: a walk in closet that had a wide, smooth, and strong wood shelf at wheelchair level. I had been able to keep my apartment tidy enough without assistance for several years, but suddenly the need arose for more help.
We self-consciously acted our married couple roles on these Saturday and Sunday morning interludes. When the work was done Tanney would hang around my place. We made sure the door was locked, curtains were drawn, and phone off the hook. It was as if I were a sexually oriented male magnet in a very small room feeling myself irrestisably drawn to a powerful female magnet in hot pants and a halter top. The anticipation was exquisite.
My imagination ran wild. My heart was close to all-out fibrillation, like waiting breathlessly for the Pecker Checker on nights gone by. I pictured scenes of the most outrageous sort. These invariably ended in mutual sexual collapse, like San Francisco after the quake. I had to move this affair up a notch and consummate or implode into ashes. You can only get to the brink so many times before you lose interest, as Kissinger's brinkmanship diplomacy proved.
(3) Sex itself: One Saturday morning, we food shopped and came back to my apartment. I felt tension in the air stronger than usual, as if I were watching a fuse burn closer and closer to the dynamite in my bedroom. No one else was around. The door was locked, curtains closed, phone off.
The apartment was quieter than a morgue on a holiday, like the stillness of the wind before the hurricane begins. Tanney walked toward me; she was about six feet away. I put my hands out to her beckoning her ever closer. We were two sub-atomic particles drawn together by the all-powerful strong nuclear force.
At about the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), I removed the sides of my chair. She was on my lap. We were lip-locked and throwing clothes here and there. Our hands moved all over each other. Those magnificent hooters were all I had hoped for. I felt I was in a free-floating dream state, as we touched, fondled, kissed, and panted. "This is great"' I thought after a while, "but it can't stop here". My Eureka moment arrived just in time. "The closet!"
I headed there at NASCAR speed, with Tanney on my lap. She seemed a little bewildered, especially when we got to the shelf. I stopped, locked my brakes, and gently helped lift her up and onto that shelf. I thought that that magnificent wooden shelf had been constructed in that location with that much holding capacity at that exact height by some knowing crippled carpenter. Tanney needed no help, once she was there she saw where this was going. She was a quick study.
In less time than it takes to say it, Tanney removed her remaining clothes. I pulled up under the shelf between those fleshy thighs. She grasped the shelf with both hands, leaned back and held on tight. I could hear her gasp for breath as I got ever closer to her nest of spicery, to quote Richard III.
Tanney moan like a cat in heat. Her body quivered, her breathing grew faster. Her moaning became louder and more urgent. Like Connie, Tanney got God mixed up in the business. Her prayers appeared to be answered.
What of your salacious author?
I managed to complete our shelf activity more or less intact. I had all I could do to keep enough oxygen in my lungs, so an not to do brain damage.Sensing that the bulk of the work had been accomplished, I backed up and we resumed our sexual alligator wrestling. As our passion subsided, Tanney whispered repeatedly, "yes, yes, yes" I felt proud and manly, like with Connie. Only this time there was no papaverine or other aid (unless you count the closet).
I had been planning to move to Texas in February. Arrangement had been made. I had accepted a lawyer job there and could not go back on my commitment. A flaming fling was about the last thing I had imagined. I knew I had to tell her about Texas. Her solution was enthralling, "Well, we'd better have our fun before you go".
I thought I was hearing things. Perhaps I was a sex-starved guy hearing what I wanted to hear. No, I heard what I heard. Tania was serious about having fun. It was written all over her face and maybe other parts of her as well.
The next couple of months were a thrill ride. We were eager to please each other. It was hard to tell who was more committed to our roller coaster. When it came time to move to Texas, it was very difficult to say good bye to her. I sincerely cared for her, as I had Jean and Connie. We had become friends as well as lovers. Tanney I wrote this one for you:
Tanney gal, I miss you still,
I think, my dear, I always will,
our days were always thrill by thrill,
and happy times in Waterville,
you opened for me that safe deposit,
hidden away in my very own closet.
This vignette stars those disreputable, yet most readibly desired, facets of human behavior: (1) lust for sex, (2) anticipation of sex, and (3) sex itself.
Shortly before Christmas, a totally unexpected gift landed in my lap, so to speak. Perhaps 'on my lap' is more to the point. Connie had come in due course along the stream of life; Tania arrived in a torrent. Like the unanticipated rapids that swamp even the most experienced rafter, she suddenly appeared.
This is how it happened, I think. It is common knowlegde that there is more than one way to skin a cat. That old saw duly noted, let me say right up front for the animal lovers among us (me included) that no cat has been skinned, hung, harmed, or otherwise molested in this story. Or this entire book. Well, one cat broke a nail, but that's it.
She was Tania, Tanney to me. She was thirty or so, of medium height, and not a particulatly beautiful woman. Tanney was not hard to look at either. She was a little heavy, as if she had recently lost some, but not quite enough weight. She had reddish-brown hair and deep brown eyes that seemed to smolder with scarcely hidden passion. She was like a volcano that was always ready to do the Mount St. Helen's thing.
What drew me to her was the instant awareness that here was a hot blooded bomb shell, an explosion sure to happen. With the right fuse, that is. She had something of the Victoria Secret's model about her, the look that said, 'I can bring you some fabulous sexual thrills or I can eat you alive'. I felt that in my stomach. It was as if she had asked me to come along on a world-class roller coaster ride sitting on white hot coals.
We met in Augusta where I worked for the Maine Commission on Human Rights. Tanney was a Complainant, someone who had filed a discrimination complaint against her employer. I was the investigator assigned to her case. Investigators were forbidden from getting involved with clients while their cases were pending. With her I may have overstepped the line.
Tanney had a penchant for tight-fitting, revealing clothes. This was a bit out of place in that rather informal, yet professional workplace, where dressing like Britney Spears was most unusual. Her legs were shapely and came together in a place I very much wanted to visit. She had big breast which she generously displayed when leaning toward me in her typically low-cut blouses. She caught me eyeing her more than thrice. It didn't take long for us to make progress toward each other. Fortunately, her complaint settled, so the runway was clear for take off.
(1) Lust of sex: We would make up excuses to be together. These seemed innocent enough: a ride home, trips to the food store. After awhile she would spend some time in my apartment, leaning over me. Her hot, sweet breath torched my skin when her chest was all but in my face. She wore cheap perfume that reminded me of a low-rent Mexican hooker of my Army days, when sex was more important than the clap, or worse.
One Sunday morning we were completely alone. Sarah was away at college; everyone else I knew was out of town or caught up in personal buisiness. We spent three hours together, she in a Marilyn Monroe-like outfit: tight black skirt, fishnet hose, low-cut white blouse, and heels. Wow! That get-up on a Sunday morning. The message was clear and I was getting more impatient by the hour. "You've got to get your hands on those hooters," I thought. To say, as President Carter had, that "I had lust in my heart" was an understatement, like saying Mount Everest is tall.
(2) Anticipation of Sex: It was about then that I got a new idea. I would pay her to help me take care of my small apartment, Hitler's Bunker, you recall. My place was very ordinary, except for one feature that proved very handy: a walk in closet that had a wide, smooth, and strong wood shelf at wheelchair level. I had been able to keep my apartment tidy enough without assistance for several years, but suddenly the need arose for more help.
We self-consciously acted our married couple roles on these Saturday and Sunday morning interludes. When the work was done Tanney would hang around my place. We made sure the door was locked, curtains were drawn, and phone off the hook. It was as if I were a sexually oriented male magnet in a very small room feeling myself irrestisably drawn to a powerful female magnet in hot pants and a halter top. The anticipation was exquisite.
My imagination ran wild. My heart was close to all-out fibrillation, like waiting breathlessly for the Pecker Checker on nights gone by. I pictured scenes of the most outrageous sort. These invariably ended in mutual sexual collapse, like San Francisco after the quake. I had to move this affair up a notch and consummate or implode into ashes. You can only get to the brink so many times before you lose interest, as Kissinger's brinkmanship diplomacy proved.
(3) Sex itself: One Saturday morning, we food shopped and came back to my apartment. I felt tension in the air stronger than usual, as if I were watching a fuse burn closer and closer to the dynamite in my bedroom. No one else was around. The door was locked, curtains closed, phone off.
The apartment was quieter than a morgue on a holiday, like the stillness of the wind before the hurricane begins. Tanney walked toward me; she was about six feet away. I put my hands out to her beckoning her ever closer. We were two sub-atomic particles drawn together by the all-powerful strong nuclear force.
At about the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), I removed the sides of my chair. She was on my lap. We were lip-locked and throwing clothes here and there. Our hands moved all over each other. Those magnificent hooters were all I had hoped for. I felt I was in a free-floating dream state, as we touched, fondled, kissed, and panted. "This is great"' I thought after a while, "but it can't stop here". My Eureka moment arrived just in time. "The closet!"
I headed there at NASCAR speed, with Tanney on my lap. She seemed a little bewildered, especially when we got to the shelf. I stopped, locked my brakes, and gently helped lift her up and onto that shelf. I thought that that magnificent wooden shelf had been constructed in that location with that much holding capacity at that exact height by some knowing crippled carpenter. Tanney needed no help, once she was there she saw where this was going. She was a quick study.
In less time than it takes to say it, Tanney removed her remaining clothes. I pulled up under the shelf between those fleshy thighs. She grasped the shelf with both hands, leaned back and held on tight. I could hear her gasp for breath as I got ever closer to her nest of spicery, to quote Richard III.
Tanney moan like a cat in heat. Her body quivered, her breathing grew faster. Her moaning became louder and more urgent. Like Connie, Tanney got God mixed up in the business. Her prayers appeared to be answered.
What of your salacious author?
I managed to complete our shelf activity more or less intact. I had all I could do to keep enough oxygen in my lungs, so an not to do brain damage.Sensing that the bulk of the work had been accomplished, I backed up and we resumed our sexual alligator wrestling. As our passion subsided, Tanney whispered repeatedly, "yes, yes, yes" I felt proud and manly, like with Connie. Only this time there was no papaverine or other aid (unless you count the closet).
I had been planning to move to Texas in February. Arrangement had been made. I had accepted a lawyer job there and could not go back on my commitment. A flaming fling was about the last thing I had imagined. I knew I had to tell her about Texas. Her solution was enthralling, "Well, we'd better have our fun before you go".
I thought I was hearing things. Perhaps I was a sex-starved guy hearing what I wanted to hear. No, I heard what I heard. Tania was serious about having fun. It was written all over her face and maybe other parts of her as well.
The next couple of months were a thrill ride. We were eager to please each other. It was hard to tell who was more committed to our roller coaster. When it came time to move to Texas, it was very difficult to say good bye to her. I sincerely cared for her, as I had Jean and Connie. We had become friends as well as lovers. Tanney I wrote this one for you:
Tanney gal, I miss you still,
I think, my dear, I always will,
our days were always thrill by thrill,
and happy times in Waterville,
you opened for me that safe deposit,
hidden away in my very own closet.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
SEX MATTERS (PART II)
October, 1990 + Waterville, Maine
OK, so my 'sex as far as the eye can see' thing with Jean didn't work out. Not to worry. Surely there were others out there who would inject papaverine and enjoy some sex in the breakdown lane. I just had to discover one. Hell, I had the potential for the four hour escapade every time I saddled up. The problem was, of course, how would I get over with that? I couldn't say, "Hi, I'm Ray. What do you think about injecting my dick with papaverine and riding me like Annie Oakley for four hours?" Maybe the medical approach, "Are you inclined to syringically inject an anti-spasmodic crystalline alkaloid derived from benzyl-isoquinoline into a sterile, sensitive genital site characterized by its incipient erectile potential so as to maximize coitus 225 minutes?"
Suffice it to say, no approach worked. Thinking that my unusual affliction doomed me to a gelded future I gave up on ever using my little vial again. E and I settled into a relationless and solitary sexless existence, what single life on the Arctic Tundra must be. Weeks and months passed. Every time I opened the fridge, there on my door sat my once upon a merry day alcoloidals, seeming to poetize:
"You thought your woes were at an end,
and I would be your little friend,
but Jean is gone and I'm stuck here,
growing weak, near death, like E, I fear."
What with the tundra and the poetics I was back to Fantasyland and then...along the stream of life came Connie. If you were going to create ideal Papaverine Mama, what qualities would you look for? I'd want a (former) needle freak (for the needle part), cokehead (for the part that just has to be illegal), experienced in offbeat sex (for the offbeat part, and a little crazy (for the 'you want me to do WHAT?' part). That was Connie. We found each other in the Waterville grocery store, absentmindedly perusing the tabloids on a lonesome Saturday afternoon.
Me: "I see Liz Taylor was abducted by space
aliens again."
She: "You mean those weekends with Michael
Jackson?"
That was all it took. We hooked up immediately, like Clyde finding Bonnie finding Clyde. She was Dylan's quintessential 'graveyard woman' a real 'junkyard angel'.
Connie was a junkie's dream. If you asked her, she'd walk barefoot through forty miles of broken glass to lift the dope from an evidence locker at One Police Plaza. She could make a syringe out of barbed wire, safety pins, and rubber bands, and start a fire using nothing but Q-tips. Connie could mix the meth like Betty Crocker, do the boot like Dr. Kildare, tidy up things like the great granddaughter of Mr. Clean, and not leave a clue. Nothing fazed her. I was sure she could handle a four hour, 'this goddamn thing won't go down' papaverine overdose.
She was a combination Florence Nightingale and Janis Joplin: kind and good and very bad. Connie was tall and shapely. She had an inquisitive look, probably because she wore inch-thick glasses. She had a ready, up for anything smile, nice hooters, and a no holds barred sense of humor. I never thought I had to impress her. Her every move seemed easy and natural. I liked her ab initio, as judges say, right from the start. We had a ball together. She was a great date for a night at the track, a quiet evening at home, or a wild-ride all-night blow out. She had range.
Following a few heavy make-out sessions that reminded me of a very bad movie I didn't care much for the first time (Phase One), we got down to Phase Two. This was discussing Phase Three: "You help me into bed, get me ready for the injection, and prepare the syringe (no doctor or detail needed this time). Next, Oh Happy Day, you get your point across and boot that juice." Then Baby, ecstasy, of a kind. As the Velvet Underground put it, we're both 'rushing on our run', feeling 'just like Jesus' son'. Yeah, man, it was going to be a trip.
After an evening in Skowhegan donating to the Racetrack at the Fair Relief Fund, we headed home. Did I say easy and natural? I was crazy with anticipation and worry, like the Olympic skater terrified of the upcoming triple jump. Will it work? How old is that vial? This isn't going to be an 'I understand' scene, is it? What about the four hour thing?
Connie meanwhile is romantically rhapsodizing over some ballad she heard on the radio, apparently unaware of my self-inflicted agony. She seemed to be unconcerned about what came next. We made it into the dark apartment that resembled one of Hitler's underground bunkers, all still, airless, and claustrophobic.
I stole in as if I were a hooded burglar about to heist and heirloom. I was afraid I would get caught and be exposed. I immediately went into clinical mode. I rehearsed Phase Three, sounding as if I were walking an intern through a kidney transplant. Connie was barely listening, thinking someone else was speaking to someone else about something else. It took a little remedial effort, Connie being stuck in that song and all. She appeared to be waiting breathlessly for her severely wounded one-legged but undaunted courageous young starry-eyed soul-mate soldier boy to crawl those twenty five miles behind enemy lines over all those land mines and dead Germans to collapse in her yearning embrace.
When Connie got a look at those hypodermics all cylinders fired. 'Now THIS I can relate to.' Things moved faster. Soon I was in my bed, in that same small blue bedroom where jean had so briefly ruled queen. Night sounds, such as stray cats having sex and moaning in the alley, cars whizzing past into town, wind in the trees, and music, muted from a distance gave us our background symphony. Connie finally had the syringe, the vial, and a very hungry look. She was rooted where she stood, transfixed. Her eyes darted from the works to me to the works.
I was thinking she was thinking, 'Where is the better payoff here: experimental, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, sex with Ray or me and my monkey.' What a scene! I was in bed on my back laid out naked with some pretty fierce hunger. She stood next to the bed, nude herself, gazing off into some coke dream. Connie was softly moaning, stroking the syringe, and humming a most appropriate tune: 'You've got your demons, you've got desires, but I've got a few of my own.'
Remember, Connie was a needle freak. Syringes and glass bulbs were her thing. Sex was, at best, an afterthought. Recalling the Jean fiasco, I knew I couldn't let this opportunity slip by. 'I can't let that happen, I won't let that happen, and I can't let that happen', I vowed to myself. How many more shots at the crown would there be? Maybe none. I had to break the spell.
"Connie!! Get Down to Business!" "Oh", she whispered distractedly, "Yeah, right, I almost forgot". I felt a tad selfish. She was enjoying her sojourn down Desolation Row, fondly revisiting those charming big city OD scenes. Her meth head beau would be fibrillating in the cold water shower while the Riot Squad was about to break down the door. Connie would frantically be trying to flush the dope while Floyd lay on the kitchen floor dry-heaving. We had a goal oriented task of a carnal nature to complete, damn it. Like Agnes, I , too, can get clinical.
The rest was both a climax and an anticlimax. Connie poked, stroked and Lazarus re-arose, though it took a little longer this time to get things up and running. I promised earlier I wouldn't describe the mechanics. Suffice it to say there was the requisite moaning, groaning, swearing and sweating. Connie implored the Divine, who evidently came through. For this once, God's name was not taken in vain. Connie assured me all went real well on her end. I was greatly relieved. I felt manly. The lonesome diner had his fork back. Also, the four hour problem was a non-issue.
The anticlimax part: without genital sensation, sex was like watching a friend doing Debbie Does Dallas. Hooray for him, but how about me? This is one of the unspoken tragedies of most quadriplegia. A perfectly healthy, erotically active man is suddenly deprived of sexual sensation and orgasm. There is no preparation for such a loss. Like most quadriplegics, I lament my condition from time to time. When I do I remain undecided: if I had the choice of only one, would I opt for full sexual function or mobility? The majority of non-injured folk would probably find that strange and take mobility hands down. Fewer spinal chord injured men would be so sure. Freud may not have been all wrong.
I restlessly drifted off to sleep with Connie in my arms. I was puzzled; I felt both satisfied and unfulfilled. 'Just who had done what to whom there,' I pondered. That's what sex in Wonderland must be', I concluded.
Is it even necessary to say what happened shortly after that? Methhead Mike was released from prison and looked up Connie. Almost immediately I heard, "Ray, he needs me; he says I'm his guardian angel. You and I will always be..." I didn't need to listen to the rest, though we did remain good friends until I moved to Texas.
I've missed jean and Connie over the years. Thinking of you, my sweets:
"May your hearts always be joyful,
may your songs always be sung,
and may you stay, forever young."
Lest I slight my little friend, I add this limerick:
I do love you, Papaverine,
when injected by Connie or Jean
your reviving powers
keep me up for hours
making possible matters obscene
OK, so my 'sex as far as the eye can see' thing with Jean didn't work out. Not to worry. Surely there were others out there who would inject papaverine and enjoy some sex in the breakdown lane. I just had to discover one. Hell, I had the potential for the four hour escapade every time I saddled up. The problem was, of course, how would I get over with that? I couldn't say, "Hi, I'm Ray. What do you think about injecting my dick with papaverine and riding me like Annie Oakley for four hours?" Maybe the medical approach, "Are you inclined to syringically inject an anti-spasmodic crystalline alkaloid derived from benzyl-isoquinoline into a sterile, sensitive genital site characterized by its incipient erectile potential so as to maximize coitus 225 minutes?"
Suffice it to say, no approach worked. Thinking that my unusual affliction doomed me to a gelded future I gave up on ever using my little vial again. E and I settled into a relationless and solitary sexless existence, what single life on the Arctic Tundra must be. Weeks and months passed. Every time I opened the fridge, there on my door sat my once upon a merry day alcoloidals, seeming to poetize:
"You thought your woes were at an end,
and I would be your little friend,
but Jean is gone and I'm stuck here,
growing weak, near death, like E, I fear."
What with the tundra and the poetics I was back to Fantasyland and then...along the stream of life came Connie. If you were going to create ideal Papaverine Mama, what qualities would you look for? I'd want a (former) needle freak (for the needle part), cokehead (for the part that just has to be illegal), experienced in offbeat sex (for the offbeat part, and a little crazy (for the 'you want me to do WHAT?' part). That was Connie. We found each other in the Waterville grocery store, absentmindedly perusing the tabloids on a lonesome Saturday afternoon.
Me: "I see Liz Taylor was abducted by space
aliens again."
She: "You mean those weekends with Michael
Jackson?"
That was all it took. We hooked up immediately, like Clyde finding Bonnie finding Clyde. She was Dylan's quintessential 'graveyard woman' a real 'junkyard angel'.
Connie was a junkie's dream. If you asked her, she'd walk barefoot through forty miles of broken glass to lift the dope from an evidence locker at One Police Plaza. She could make a syringe out of barbed wire, safety pins, and rubber bands, and start a fire using nothing but Q-tips. Connie could mix the meth like Betty Crocker, do the boot like Dr. Kildare, tidy up things like the great granddaughter of Mr. Clean, and not leave a clue. Nothing fazed her. I was sure she could handle a four hour, 'this goddamn thing won't go down' papaverine overdose.
She was a combination Florence Nightingale and Janis Joplin: kind and good and very bad. Connie was tall and shapely. She had an inquisitive look, probably because she wore inch-thick glasses. She had a ready, up for anything smile, nice hooters, and a no holds barred sense of humor. I never thought I had to impress her. Her every move seemed easy and natural. I liked her ab initio, as judges say, right from the start. We had a ball together. She was a great date for a night at the track, a quiet evening at home, or a wild-ride all-night blow out. She had range.
Following a few heavy make-out sessions that reminded me of a very bad movie I didn't care much for the first time (Phase One), we got down to Phase Two. This was discussing Phase Three: "You help me into bed, get me ready for the injection, and prepare the syringe (no doctor or detail needed this time). Next, Oh Happy Day, you get your point across and boot that juice." Then Baby, ecstasy, of a kind. As the Velvet Underground put it, we're both 'rushing on our run', feeling 'just like Jesus' son'. Yeah, man, it was going to be a trip.
After an evening in Skowhegan donating to the Racetrack at the Fair Relief Fund, we headed home. Did I say easy and natural? I was crazy with anticipation and worry, like the Olympic skater terrified of the upcoming triple jump. Will it work? How old is that vial? This isn't going to be an 'I understand' scene, is it? What about the four hour thing?
Connie meanwhile is romantically rhapsodizing over some ballad she heard on the radio, apparently unaware of my self-inflicted agony. She seemed to be unconcerned about what came next. We made it into the dark apartment that resembled one of Hitler's underground bunkers, all still, airless, and claustrophobic.
I stole in as if I were a hooded burglar about to heist and heirloom. I was afraid I would get caught and be exposed. I immediately went into clinical mode. I rehearsed Phase Three, sounding as if I were walking an intern through a kidney transplant. Connie was barely listening, thinking someone else was speaking to someone else about something else. It took a little remedial effort, Connie being stuck in that song and all. She appeared to be waiting breathlessly for her severely wounded one-legged but undaunted courageous young starry-eyed soul-mate soldier boy to crawl those twenty five miles behind enemy lines over all those land mines and dead Germans to collapse in her yearning embrace.
When Connie got a look at those hypodermics all cylinders fired. 'Now THIS I can relate to.' Things moved faster. Soon I was in my bed, in that same small blue bedroom where jean had so briefly ruled queen. Night sounds, such as stray cats having sex and moaning in the alley, cars whizzing past into town, wind in the trees, and music, muted from a distance gave us our background symphony. Connie finally had the syringe, the vial, and a very hungry look. She was rooted where she stood, transfixed. Her eyes darted from the works to me to the works.
I was thinking she was thinking, 'Where is the better payoff here: experimental, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, sex with Ray or me and my monkey.' What a scene! I was in bed on my back laid out naked with some pretty fierce hunger. She stood next to the bed, nude herself, gazing off into some coke dream. Connie was softly moaning, stroking the syringe, and humming a most appropriate tune: 'You've got your demons, you've got desires, but I've got a few of my own.'
Remember, Connie was a needle freak. Syringes and glass bulbs were her thing. Sex was, at best, an afterthought. Recalling the Jean fiasco, I knew I couldn't let this opportunity slip by. 'I can't let that happen, I won't let that happen, and I can't let that happen', I vowed to myself. How many more shots at the crown would there be? Maybe none. I had to break the spell.
"Connie!! Get Down to Business!" "Oh", she whispered distractedly, "Yeah, right, I almost forgot". I felt a tad selfish. She was enjoying her sojourn down Desolation Row, fondly revisiting those charming big city OD scenes. Her meth head beau would be fibrillating in the cold water shower while the Riot Squad was about to break down the door. Connie would frantically be trying to flush the dope while Floyd lay on the kitchen floor dry-heaving. We had a goal oriented task of a carnal nature to complete, damn it. Like Agnes, I , too, can get clinical.
The rest was both a climax and an anticlimax. Connie poked, stroked and Lazarus re-arose, though it took a little longer this time to get things up and running. I promised earlier I wouldn't describe the mechanics. Suffice it to say there was the requisite moaning, groaning, swearing and sweating. Connie implored the Divine, who evidently came through. For this once, God's name was not taken in vain. Connie assured me all went real well on her end. I was greatly relieved. I felt manly. The lonesome diner had his fork back. Also, the four hour problem was a non-issue.
The anticlimax part: without genital sensation, sex was like watching a friend doing Debbie Does Dallas. Hooray for him, but how about me? This is one of the unspoken tragedies of most quadriplegia. A perfectly healthy, erotically active man is suddenly deprived of sexual sensation and orgasm. There is no preparation for such a loss. Like most quadriplegics, I lament my condition from time to time. When I do I remain undecided: if I had the choice of only one, would I opt for full sexual function or mobility? The majority of non-injured folk would probably find that strange and take mobility hands down. Fewer spinal chord injured men would be so sure. Freud may not have been all wrong.
I restlessly drifted off to sleep with Connie in my arms. I was puzzled; I felt both satisfied and unfulfilled. 'Just who had done what to whom there,' I pondered. That's what sex in Wonderland must be', I concluded.
Is it even necessary to say what happened shortly after that? Methhead Mike was released from prison and looked up Connie. Almost immediately I heard, "Ray, he needs me; he says I'm his guardian angel. You and I will always be..." I didn't need to listen to the rest, though we did remain good friends until I moved to Texas.
I've missed jean and Connie over the years. Thinking of you, my sweets:
"May your hearts always be joyful,
may your songs always be sung,
and may you stay, forever young."
Lest I slight my little friend, I add this limerick:
I do love you, Papaverine,
when injected by Connie or Jean
your reviving powers
keep me up for hours
making possible matters obscene
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