Certain
things you see and read can trigger you. Suddenly, you’re back in time, in a
place, in your mind, at a time you thought you had left far behind on your
journey. And sometimes it makes you wonder --- your journey toward what?
I’ve
been triggered a lot lately. The suffering this country is inflicting on people
seeking asylum here right now has been horribly upsetting to me, and enraging. The
strain of every day waking up in a world grown so uncertain so quickly brings
up long-buried personal fears. As a 2Gen, the news has taken on a dystopian
cast that reminds me of my father’s stories of life in Europe just before World
War II. The upset and the rage have opened a kind of wormhole into my past
experiences.
The
sight of a bottle of Orange Crush the other day brought tears to my eyes,
because it reminded me of a time when I was very young and I was with my
parents, safe and protected in a world I thought was more innocent. Of course,
it wasn’t, but I didn’t know that at age six --- I had yet to understand wars
and Shoahs, and the plain hatred some people feel for other people who look
different or speak differently, or think in ways not usual.
This
story comes full circle at a place called Aruba. A bar in Fort Lauderdale, not
the island. It was the last place that I went on out a Saturday night before my
life went topsy-turvy, and I haven’t really been out on a Saturday since.
It
was there the other day that I met my friend Jaime in person for what was
really the first time. We’ve been friends at a distance for a long while,
separated by a continent. She has been especially kind since my mother passed
away. My mother liked her --- the two exchanged some notes --- and Mom thought
much of her, always speaking of her “good heart.” So I knew that my mother
wouldn’t mind if I gifted Jaime with some of her jewelry. That way it could
live on, my Mom could live on, bringing some happiness to someone she cared
about.
It
was a little trove of earrings and necklaces and rings, and almost immediately
Jaime plucked out a little pearl ring that she slipped onto her finger. “It
fits perfectly like it was made for me!” she exclaimed. I smiled. I didn’t tell
her that it had been one of my mother’s favorite pieces. She’d worn it every
day for months at a time. “It was meant for you to have it.” I said. Later that
evening, Jaime’s friend Marissa looked at the ring and said, “Your mother is
all over this ring.” Yes, she is. Wear it well, Jaime, for I really believe she
loved you. You were not strangers to one another. You are meant to have it.
Jaime has been writing a series of posts she calls #AuthenticJune, and the most
recent one resonated with me in places I rarely look anymore. It had to do with
the complex interplay of sexuality and emotion in her life. Sexuality is a
complex issue. It should be more complex for most people, but our culture,
though it trades on images of sex, is not really interested in sexual
authenticity. So I admire her immensely for going there with such honesty and
openness and gracefulness.
In
one of our conversations (prior to meeting) she remarked that a friend had told
her that she “oozes sexuality.” Admittedly, I was curious to see if it was an
accurate description. It is not. Jaime radiates personality, and that is a
different thing altogether, though it includes sexuality within it.
I
have been around women who literally do ooze sexuality primarily, and for most
of them that is all they have; shaped by experiences of constant diminishment
they’ve learned to be hypersexual, how to use themselves as shields and weapons
against men. Men are, for the most part, not so very bright when it comes to
the issue of how to behave with women. Including yours truly.
Women
who ooze sexuality generally seem to make themselves beautiful not because they
feel beautiful but because they want validation by others who think they are
beautiful. Most men see them as a collection of desirable parts and say so,
often vulgarly. In the midst of validation, such women are constantly feeling
invalidated as people, if not as objects; and they will continue to look for
validation, ironically rejecting it when it is honestly offered because they’ve
been objectified so many times.
Such
women are extremely attractive. They can be great fun to be around. They do have
personality. But they are never quite comfortable within themselves, and I have
found that relationships with them are bright at times, though brittle and
painful and full of exploitation. On both sides of the equation. There is sex
there, but there is no deep love nor respect. Never. I’ve never found it with
such a woman. Not me for them, not them for me, not them for themselves, nor me
for myself when I’m with them.
Reading
Jaime’s post made me realize that she respects herself and is well on the way
to loving herself.
Reading
her post made me remember things in myself that I have packed away, musty
things, but things that need to be aired out:
Being
sexual with even a minor disability can be difficult; no matter what, you don’t
fit the idea of what is attractive in this culture. Being disabled, being in a
very obvious way a “one of a kind” person is isolating.
All
my life I’ve felt loneliness. As an adult I’ve realized that most people do on
some level, but for years I felt like I was alone inside a bell jar, excuse the
Sylvia Plath reference.
I
can’t recall in my teens and twenties how many women --- girls, really, in
retrospect --- I was attracted to, who were attracted to me but ruined any
chance of an evening together not to mention anything more, by asking me if I
was even capable of having sex. No need to say that they might as well have
dumped an ice bag in my lap. First of all, and less relevantly, the answer is
yes, but more relevantly, what they meant, bluntly put was, “Can you fuck?” Yes
again, but is that your sole measure of sexuality? Some porn-boring humpfest?
Now, I realize how stupid that all sounds, but at the time I reacted with the
insecurity only a young man can feel. I
set out to establish my masculinity, or at least what I thought was masculinity
in my twenties. And it was pretty much of a disaster. Bad choices made my
partners and me casualties of casual sex.
I
don’t blame myself entirely, for in this culture men have no guidelines for
intimate behavior. I had two deeply loving parents, but the language of the
greater culture reduces sex for men to football idioms --- “Did you score?” To
which I ask, “Is she a pinball machine?”
In
my 20s I went out of my way to --- let’s use the word seduce --- women.
Sometimes it was strictly for sex, and usually of the one-night-stand variety, but
sometimes it was just to attract them, a kind of “catch and release” game where
once I had their attention and was involved in a conversation or even a
make-out session, I would intentionally let my attention wander. Onto the next
one before I’d finished --- or even started --- with the first one. I’m sure
there is a small army of women out there who still think I am a complete
horse’s ass thirty-some years later. The
truth was, I was rejecting them before they could reject me.
Still, I suffered enough rejections to make me feel freakish. Even when I was
rock star thin, and there was a time, and I had hair brushing my shoulders (I
come out of the Big Hair Eighties, kids) I felt terrific body dysmorphia. I
thought I was grossly fat, and I was probably far more self-conscious of my
gait than I should have been.
Not
that there weren’t reasons. Walking into a bar, asking for a drink, and being
told, “Haven’t you had enough, buddy?” before I sat down sounds funny, but it
did affect me. Having strangers walk up to me on the street to say, “I pity
you” or “I’ll pray for you” screwed with my head --- just how monstrous am I? Your
own local John Merrick --- “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” Noticing
that people are staring when they thought I wasn’t looking felt a little
bizarre. The prettiest girl in the place turning me down for a dance because,
“You might fall on me,” sounds absurd, but she didn’t stick around long enough
for me to even answer.
And
through all of this I really just wanted to be loved. Not appreciated. Not
liked. Not “just friends.” The irony is that despite my rather noxious twenties
bar-hopping I actually get along well with women, maybe too well, because I
always found myself getting locked down into the Friend Zone. There is nothing
wrong with being friends with a woman, but when you love her in a romantic way
--- or think you love her in a romantic way --- that isn’t where you want to be.
The worst thing you can do in that situation is stick around hoping it will
change, because it won’t. And even if it does, even if there’s the
stereotypical night with too many drinks and a backrub, the whole fragile
edifice is bound to collapse. I know.
I fooled myself in relationships too many times, thinking that the girl felt
what I did. The truth is, looking back, I’m not sure what I felt most of the
time. I was in love with the idea of being in love, which is not love at all.
Being in love with being in love means that the other person was there strictly
to fulfill my expectations and my fantasies of what I thought love was. Being
in love with being in love sounds good, it sounds like the basis for a romantic
comedy, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the girl, really. I wasn’t in
love with the person, I wasn’t even in love with my image of the person; I was
miles away in my head, enamored of the idea of some Hollywood happy ending in
which she was just a supporting player, never the co-star. The fantasy was so
much more satisfying than the reality that I became the architect of nearly all
the castles in Spain.
I
remember some silly Playboy questionnaire that started with (1) Do You Have a
Girlfriend? (2) Does She Know She’s Your Girlfriend? The truth is, I could have
answered “No” to number two any number of times, and answering “No” to two is
of course “No” to one. But loneliness exists in your mind, not outside of you,
and loneliness can drive you to do some strange things. Or drive me, anyway.
And
so, rightly, I got battered down more than once and my heart got broken into so
many sharp little shards so many times I couldn’t count them. I rarely got
angry at the women. There was a part of me that knew I was only playing a game
with myself.
That
game was no help though, when something more real came along. The rejections
still hurt. One girl told me she “didn’t want to be a caretaker.” Today, in our
fifties (we are still friends) she says she realizes that that just comes with
the job in any committed relationship. I’m glad she learned that lesson, but it
isn’t me who benefits from it.
In
the end and for years I always ended up with women who were not emotionally
available. More than once I dated women, or had long-term relationships with
women, who were dating abusers or married to abusers, substance or
otherwise. They came to me for comfort.
That I could provide. That was, in a word, authentic to me. They weren’t always
even sexual relationships but it was being with someone for some time, and
that’s what mattered at the moment. One of these women, who I genuinely loved a
lot, with whom I still think I would have had a future, finally did get up the
gumption to get divorced --- and when she left him, she left me too. Reeling.
Since
my younger years I’ve learned that being a “nice” guy isn’t enough. Women
“like” nice guys, but they rarely love them romantically. Women have a penchant
for bad boys --- they don’t have to be outwardly bad, just “bad” on some level
--- because every relationship needs something fierce every so often. Not
aggressive. Not abusive. Fierce. Men need that too from their women. If you
aren’t willing to burn like the sun every so often for your partner you’re not
deserving of her.
And then there’s Hope. I can say a lot about Hope, both good and bad, but in
retrospect, mostly sad. She was a woman everyone found attractive. It didn’t
matter; she stopped traffic, and she knew it. She was a woman who really oozed
sexuality, and it was like a thick, dark paste.
Her
given name was Rebecca Hope Murphy. She was a girl who’d been raised in a
conservative church by naïve conservative grandparents who’d let her be exposed
far too early to her birth parents, their daughter, a runaway teenage
prostitute, and her father, a mobster who owned most of the strip clubs in the
Old Northwest.
On
the light side she’d been a Revlon model and done a few bit parts on TV and a
couple of commercials, but that career had been stunted by bad choice after bad
choice. One of her brothers once said, “If you always had three choices Hopie,
good, bad, and worst, you’d always pick worst.”
At
fifteen she ended up pregnant and kept the child. At nineteen, pressured to
work but with no real skills, she asked her father for a job as a waitress in
one of his clubs. He put her up on stage, fully nude. His daughter. She was
raped several times, once by a group of men. She learned to survive by taking
up with men I can only describe as low. They usually beat her, one so badly
that she suffered seizures throughout the rest of her life. He died in a crack
house, shot, and in a bloody heap on the floor. Sometimes there’s justice.
To say she didn’t trust anyone would be an understatement. Our relationship
began with lies --- she was divorcing, supposedly --- I’d found her at a
particularly vulnerable time. She had lost her friend Angie to a terrible car
accident and was mourning. Our first conversation, which took place in an
upscale strip joint among the cigarette butts, the beer bottle rings on the
table, the strobes, and the musky smell of female perspiration, was about
whether there was life after death.
She
gave me her number. I called, got a man on the phone, hung up. When I went back
to the club to see her she told me that she and her soon-to-be ex were still
sharing the apartment. I wanted to believe her. We went out a few times. We
began talking on the phone, sometimes for hours. We went out a few more times.
I met some friends. She described me as her “boyfriend.” Time passed. She would
tell me how much she loved me. I told her how much I loved her. She said she
would never leave me, that we would have a future. One night she called me up
after a knockdown-dragout with her supposedly soon-to-be-ex-husband. I went and
got her. She had a red mark on her face. That night we decided to be lovers.
It seemed idyllic but it wasn’t. It was maybe a month or two later when she
created a confrontation between us. In retrospect, I see she had allowed
herself to go too far with our relationship, but at the time I was devastated. I
never have been quite the same. Childhood’s End.
Eighteen
months later she called. She had left her husband for real, returned to Indiana
with her children, and now wanted to come home to Florida. She needed money and a place to stay. I
obliged. I still just wanted to be loved. I’d have paid any price for that. And
I was about to.
I
speak well of Hope and her memory largely because in the last six months of her
life we were able to heal the wounds we inflicted on one another, and she was
able to come to terms with her abusive past and her own behaviors. She was in
Indiana, dying, and we were voices on the phone to each other, but I consider
those more than daily phone calls, some three hours long, precious, for they
helped us heal and mourn, and maybe for the only time in this life, to have a
healthy relationship. As she lay dying she said, “I love you very much.” The
last words she said to me. That’s my legacy with her, the legacy I have chosen
to honor.
I
won’t speak much about the years of Borderline behaviors, the bipolarity, the Xanax
dependency she suffered through, the multiple suicide attempts, the destruction
of property, the compulsive and destructive lying and deception on subjects
minor and major, nor the physical and mental abuse she inflicted on herself and
everyone around her. I won't detail the hundreds of thousands of dollars I spent on legal fees and moves and buying her way out of trouble, trying to fix things that she simply would break again, and again, and yet again. If you know of such things you know. If not, you won’t
understand.
Hope
wanted “unconditional love,” which she mistook to mean freedom to act as if
nothing she did would affect the giver of that love. I was the giver, and I paid a heavy price.
Most of the time, emotionally, sexually, she treated me like a stray dog. She
would tell me time and again that we “had no relationship.” It was a patently
absurd thing to say on every level, but she seemed to need to say it for
reasons I still don’t completely understand, despite the fact that I housed
her, fed her, clothed her and was “her rock” (as she often said) in her frequent times of crisis, her bed
partner when she was as lonely as she’d ever be. Otherwise, I was a fine
placeholder until someone else took her attention. I don’t have any idea how
many men and women she slept with during the twenty years of our relationship,
I can only say that our sex was largely limited (in retrospect) to the depths
of her Xanax binges when the drug blanked her mind. Often enough. Too often,
since it marked her self-destruction.
It
was miserable sex, too, most of the time, when it happened at all. It felt like
being with a junior high school girl in the back seat of a car or down in the
basement on the couch in her parents’ house. Despite all this, I remained
monogamous, and as time went on, increasingly celibate by choice even when she
offered herself. She was too irresponsible with her body. I felt there was just
too much risk involved in being sexual with her.
As
I’ve said, she oozed sexuality like a river of darkness; she let everyone swim
in that river; people used her and tossed her aside. Most of the time they
didn’t even turn their backs. They just threw her out. Afterward she’d sink
into despondency. And I was always there
to lift her up. It was exhausting.
I
suppose her denying me sex could be seen as a warped sign of affection and
respect since she was otherwise virtually indiscriminate. At the time, it
simply hurt. I was “fat” (even when I attained rock star thin again), I was
“bald”, I was “old” (seven years between us), I was “not her type”, I was
“pathetic”, I was “worthless”, she only “loved me for the money,” she told me
one particularly nasty day that she had “no respect” for me, one time sinking even
lower: “You’re a cripple,” that I “embarrassed”
her when we were out together. Every painful thing she could say was said, and
yet I knew it was all only evidence of how much she hated herself.
I
knew I was being punished because I was Everyman who had ever hit her or groped
her, or put a buck in her garter, or had fucked her just for the sake of
fucking her. I was her father who’d put her up on stage.
In
a touch of whimsical karmic irony, the last place Hope and I had a night out
was the very place I met up with Jaime and her friends. Some circle has been
closed. I suppose that’s why I can write this now.
Still,
to be told you are worthless, unattractive, fat, and even stupid can’t have any
effect but to erode you on the inside. It’s like drinking a steady diet of
acid. You start to wonder if you really are just as worthless as that woman,
the woman you ironically value most, said you are. Why bother with yourself if
no one will want you? Why take care of yourself? After I while I just gave up and
sank into a morass of unhappiness. I am still undoing that damage.
I
can’t say she didn’t love me. She did, even at her worst. But it was a love
based on the neediness inside both of us, a codependent maze in which she was
the lost errant child and I was forever the rescuer trying to find her. It
wasn’t healthy for either of us, and time has shown me that. Still, I could see
more in her than she could often see in herself.
I
believe that’s why I never gave up on her. There was a soft center of kindness
in her. She loved dogs and kittens and puppies and rescued wounded ducklings. Hope
was always trying to find “Becky Murphy” inside herself; I knew Becky, the girl
who loved her collector Barbies and getting surprise flowers, and singing in
the mirror into a hairbrush, was still there. One day she told me, “That girl
is dead.” I said that she wasn’t, that I talked to her every day at least for a
few minutes. Becky Hope broke down crying.
Hope
died in 2013 of a genetic blood disorder, just weeks after my best friend and
cousin Keith who knew her well and might have worked me through the loss. He
was taken by a coronary at 54. Now they were both gone at once, and I spent the
next two years mourning. The first year I cried every day. The second year I
cried every other day. My father had died in 2010 of Alzheimer’s and I spent
the next years looking after my mother, who developed breast cancer in 2016.
Now that Mom is gone, ironically now that
nearly everyone is gone, I am finding time for myself. Although I’ve always
known better, I have treated my body like a pickup truck for the last few
years, just calling on it, forcing it even, to do things at times I shouldn’t
have. Sleepless nights, daily runs to doctors and hospitals, a slipshod diet, and
all of it for everybody else, almost nothing for myself. I can see the results
in the mirror. I am beginning to show a little age. Thank God a little wisdom
has come along with it.
Caring
for myself has meant recognizing that it is OK to let go of the past, of all
those things that drove me, of the pain, of the loneliness, of the loveless
loves. It’s taught me that I do have that fierceness in me still, that I too
can radiate personality, that I can burn like the sun when the sun must shine.
The codependent compulsion “to be loved” to pay any price to be loved is part
of my past. I will not reject love when it is well and truly offered, but it
doesn’t drive my motivations anymore. I won’t see it where it isn’t.
Casual
sex for the mere sake of sex is out. There has to be something there that’s
worth both our whiles. If that means staying celibate for a good long time
that’s what it means. At
the same time, I’ve been able to remain friends with most of the women I have
known over the years, and that is a small but wonderful miracle. I don’t think
it happens most of the time. It proves that there has always been respect
between us, that our mutual and differing feelings are valued, and that we
share the past and the present, and what future comes. If that’s “love” then I am glad to have it.
These women form part of the foundation of who I am. I would not be the man I
am without them. And I hope they feel the same way about me.
I think they do. Years ago, I published a small book of poetry to no acclaim,
and I gave my friend Sandi a copy of the original typed manuscript. She called
me recently, having found it in a pile of papers from the 1980s, and we read
together “The Key Is In The Sunlight In The Window,” one of my better poems.
She’d kept them all through years of separation and silence. That says much.
I
know I won’t ever substitute sex for affection again or settle for mere
affection when it is not what I want, or pretend that affection is love in and
of itself. Openness means to be willing to enter into a relationship where She
is willing to make a full commitment to whatever we have. It doesn’t have to be
“love” or a permanent commitment. But if we both decide to do the work, maybe
so. If there’s no work to be done, then
not, and that’s fine too. The Friend
Zone is not a tiger trap anymore. To be available to all possibilities is to
be.
I
don’t value myself by someone else’s measures any longer, only my own. Finally,
nearing 58, I have nothing left to prove to anyone except myself by being the
best man I know how to be. I feel like
it’s just the beginning of things.
