You won’t be defamed,
But it’s your first rule of defense.
You say “I’m a target”
but transfixed by a gun.
Calling everyone crazy,
to a shrink that concurs.
You’re always the victim,
But who’s on the attack?
He’s ruthless and huge
and looks oddly like you.
Sending away "the enemy" you once called "friends"
So they run -
from love,
to still caring,
to gone - no forwarding address.
So go on your way,
marching to your own drum.
Heading off to your narcissist’s party,
putting your spin on events.
Or jot it down in a letter,
send it off to your friends.
The list growing shorter,
And it’s always on them.
You write so eloquently
with the pen that bleeds out.
The wound self-inflicted
etched in black on your chest.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
MCDONALDS AND THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR
She had insisted every night for the last two months that we had to work late, usually until ten-thirty, eleven. Elizabeth was my boss, I looked across at her, just letting her speak. We were in the basement of McDonalds, again, I was watching her indulge in her nightly Big Mac and large fries, the tears starting to run down her perfectly made up face.
I really liked Elizabeth. She was bright, articulate and funny, but she was sucking the life out of me. She could sure nurse a Diet Coke, late night there in that Micky-D’s where we usually had the basement all to ourselves.
She was my direct boss, she was supposed to be my creative director. Her job was to partner me, the writer, with an art director and oversee our work - but early on she’d snatched me up for herself. She nicknamed me “Crafty,” always generous with the praise; the fact was, I enjoyed working with her immensely during normal business hours. But around 4PM each day her office phone would start ringing off the hook. Soon her cell phone would pick up the slack. “Oo. That’s Pauls,” she called her husband ‘Pauls’, “Just ignore it.” But it was difficult. The two phones would ring back-n-forth solidly for about an hour before he would finally give up. I heard her on the phone with him one day, explaining to him how he just didn’t understand her dedication, actually hanging up on him mid-sentence, turning to me. “He said ‘it’s only ADVERTISING’,” can you believe it?” I was kind of on Pauls’s side, we were selling underarm deodorant, for God’s sakes. And it wasn’t like we weren’t churning out about eight storyboard ideas a day during regular office hours. Yet, if I dared to pick up my bag around seven she’d stop me, “where ya going, Crafty!” Around eight she’d ask if I was hungry, and even though I was pretty sure my dog had peed and pooped my apartment and was starving to death, I’d accept her dinner invitation – a table for two in the basement of the McDonalds across the street for a dinner of burgers, fries, and sobbing over her failing marriage. Pauls was a drinker. He’d agreed to a 12-step program, he had been doing better as of late, but she had received phone calls from strangers at bars, asking her to come pick him up. He’d lost his job, had a couple of DUI’s under his belt; she had to retain an expensive lawyer to manage the damage. She’d tell me these stories that almost always ended in tears, sometimes sobbing to the point where I would have to fetch extra napkins for her from atop the garbage receptacle so she could wipe away her tear-streaked mascara.
I usually ordered the kid’s meal, I was sure my cholesterol was topping off at around 550 by now from our now every night tradition. I’d finish my Jr. meal in short order but would have to sit there patiently for at least an hour, sometimes more, waiting for her to finish her straggling fries and stories. A lone worker would come down to wipe tables, gravely pull a mop across the floor – he’d nod at me sadly, we were regulars.
Weeks went by. I’d overhear her talking to Pauls on those rare occasions when she would pick up the phone, often at my urging. He had been sober for two years except for his benders that would happen every four months or so. He sounded so sweet, I could often hear him pleading for her to come home, he’d made a nice dinner. I’d have a glimmer of hope that I could make it home before the sun set that night, before my dog had pooped and peed and starved to death as we “worked” the night away, but that night never came. Elizabeth always took my hand and walked towards the soft glow of the golden arches.
More time passed and nothing much had changed until one day I had a blow out with our big boss, Juliani. He had moved to the United States from Italy over 30 years ago, but clung to his accent, I supposed he thought it gave him an air of creativity. He had a mouth full of marbles delivery, waving his hands, shaking his long bangs out of his eyes, giving the impression that he was saying something of importance, though you could never actually make out any words let alone sentences – just a bunch of “you know’s’ between garbled, unintelligible creative directorship. He had come this far by his good looks, designer suits, an expensive watch, and not much else. I knew because I used to partner with him, back when I was just a kid, and he was mid-career. Our arrangement was simple. I would come up with the ideas, and he would present them, the client often calling him a “genius” – praise he would wave off with euro-mumbles of feigned humility. Years later we were at the same agency again, he was now a big creative director, me, still a lowly writer. My insistence on wearing Hanes men’s undershirts and jeans to the office, coupled with my call-‘em-like-I-see-‘em je ne sais quoi had kept me permanently planted at the bottom of the agency food chain. Two days after he brought me into his group he started parading my ideas upstairs to his boss claiming them as his own. He was kind of a genius after all – a master thief who had honed his skills in disparaging everyone around him. And on that particular day he had launched an email campaign blacklisting an illustrator who happened to be a guy I was also dating. The boyfriend/illustrator had a hard time translating Juliani’s mouth full of marbles Italian and he’d made a mistake on one of the frames. Juliani was angered, muttering in Italian, as he composed a letter blackballing the gifted illustrator to the entire creative department. “He eez STOOPEEED, I doon’t like dees guyz.” We had worked with him for months, he’d always done a great job, but Juliani was angered that the communication breakdown had resulted in making him late for his 5:30 tennis match. I begged Juliani not to send the email, to think about it overnight. But he hit the “send” button like a virtuoso hitting the final chord of a concierto. I told him to go fuck himself, and a week later I was called into HR and “laid off” due to the company’s “financial hardship”. I packed up 20 years of crap into 5 cardboard boxes that were left outside my office and I was gone by midnight.
I spent the next three weeks living the life I’d always dreamed of. Nowhere to be, buzzing out to the beach in my Beemer, music blaring, windows down, sunroof open, the agency had cut me a check that would subsidize screwing around for at least two months. Yet, everyday my cell phone would ring. “Hey, Crafts. I miss you,” it was Elizabeth, about to make up for lost time – our late night McDonald’s rendezvous were now history. She was going on about Pauls like no time had passed, about Juliani, and what a thief and asshole he was, how her sister’s dog was sick, and would probably have to be put down to “sleep”. She would often catch me when I was in the “zone” – cruising back from the beach, from eating a lobster tail, or sipping a nice glass of wine on the water. Yet, every time she’d call I would pull over, often driving behind a shopping mall in a parking lot to get better reception, to lend an ear. I didn’t have the heart to cut her off. And she had some good news. She’d been interviewing for a big job at another big agency on a very glamorous account and wanted to share her excitement with me, telling me every detail about the interview process, I would give her my undivided attention, parked there in a reception sweet spot, next to a dumpster at the back of a Stop n Shop. A week later she called to say she’d gotten the job – it was the last time I ever spoke to her.
I was sure she would take me with her; the job market was worse than I had expected. Agencies wanted younger, edgier creatives, luring them away with bags of money from smaller, more creative agencies where they were poorly paid. It was a rude awakening, but Elizabeth was my ace in the hole, after all – I was her “Crafty”. And now that she was running a huge international piece of business, surely she would have no time to cry over fries and Diet Cokes. But I would never find out. I called her several times at the new agency, left her cute voicemails, but she never took my calls, or returned a single message.
I recently thought about Elizabeth, what had become of her? I wondered if she was still at the big agency, if she had lured another young writer into the depths of a different McDonalds. Was she still married to the precariously sober husband? Had there been a funeral for her sister’s dog? A recruiter friend of mine had done a search and found she had not only left the big agency, but had left advertising all together. She’d up and moved to Seattle, and started a clothing company with her sister who was a wealthy lawyer who had a penchant for painkillers and red wine. She had told me all about her – and their strict Catholic upbringing, how their father had walked out one morning and never returned only to shame them all by making a fortune in the porn business, how their mother worked hard to support them and then would cry herself to sleep at night. So many stories, so many lost nights, there, in the soggy, subterranean warmth of the McDonalds – the one across the street from the ad agency where we worked.
I really liked Elizabeth. She was bright, articulate and funny, but she was sucking the life out of me. She could sure nurse a Diet Coke, late night there in that Micky-D’s where we usually had the basement all to ourselves.
She was my direct boss, she was supposed to be my creative director. Her job was to partner me, the writer, with an art director and oversee our work - but early on she’d snatched me up for herself. She nicknamed me “Crafty,” always generous with the praise; the fact was, I enjoyed working with her immensely during normal business hours. But around 4PM each day her office phone would start ringing off the hook. Soon her cell phone would pick up the slack. “Oo. That’s Pauls,” she called her husband ‘Pauls’, “Just ignore it.” But it was difficult. The two phones would ring back-n-forth solidly for about an hour before he would finally give up. I heard her on the phone with him one day, explaining to him how he just didn’t understand her dedication, actually hanging up on him mid-sentence, turning to me. “He said ‘it’s only ADVERTISING’,” can you believe it?” I was kind of on Pauls’s side, we were selling underarm deodorant, for God’s sakes. And it wasn’t like we weren’t churning out about eight storyboard ideas a day during regular office hours. Yet, if I dared to pick up my bag around seven she’d stop me, “where ya going, Crafty!” Around eight she’d ask if I was hungry, and even though I was pretty sure my dog had peed and pooped my apartment and was starving to death, I’d accept her dinner invitation – a table for two in the basement of the McDonalds across the street for a dinner of burgers, fries, and sobbing over her failing marriage. Pauls was a drinker. He’d agreed to a 12-step program, he had been doing better as of late, but she had received phone calls from strangers at bars, asking her to come pick him up. He’d lost his job, had a couple of DUI’s under his belt; she had to retain an expensive lawyer to manage the damage. She’d tell me these stories that almost always ended in tears, sometimes sobbing to the point where I would have to fetch extra napkins for her from atop the garbage receptacle so she could wipe away her tear-streaked mascara.
I usually ordered the kid’s meal, I was sure my cholesterol was topping off at around 550 by now from our now every night tradition. I’d finish my Jr. meal in short order but would have to sit there patiently for at least an hour, sometimes more, waiting for her to finish her straggling fries and stories. A lone worker would come down to wipe tables, gravely pull a mop across the floor – he’d nod at me sadly, we were regulars.
Weeks went by. I’d overhear her talking to Pauls on those rare occasions when she would pick up the phone, often at my urging. He had been sober for two years except for his benders that would happen every four months or so. He sounded so sweet, I could often hear him pleading for her to come home, he’d made a nice dinner. I’d have a glimmer of hope that I could make it home before the sun set that night, before my dog had pooped and peed and starved to death as we “worked” the night away, but that night never came. Elizabeth always took my hand and walked towards the soft glow of the golden arches.
More time passed and nothing much had changed until one day I had a blow out with our big boss, Juliani. He had moved to the United States from Italy over 30 years ago, but clung to his accent, I supposed he thought it gave him an air of creativity. He had a mouth full of marbles delivery, waving his hands, shaking his long bangs out of his eyes, giving the impression that he was saying something of importance, though you could never actually make out any words let alone sentences – just a bunch of “you know’s’ between garbled, unintelligible creative directorship. He had come this far by his good looks, designer suits, an expensive watch, and not much else. I knew because I used to partner with him, back when I was just a kid, and he was mid-career. Our arrangement was simple. I would come up with the ideas, and he would present them, the client often calling him a “genius” – praise he would wave off with euro-mumbles of feigned humility. Years later we were at the same agency again, he was now a big creative director, me, still a lowly writer. My insistence on wearing Hanes men’s undershirts and jeans to the office, coupled with my call-‘em-like-I-see-‘em je ne sais quoi had kept me permanently planted at the bottom of the agency food chain. Two days after he brought me into his group he started parading my ideas upstairs to his boss claiming them as his own. He was kind of a genius after all – a master thief who had honed his skills in disparaging everyone around him. And on that particular day he had launched an email campaign blacklisting an illustrator who happened to be a guy I was also dating. The boyfriend/illustrator had a hard time translating Juliani’s mouth full of marbles Italian and he’d made a mistake on one of the frames. Juliani was angered, muttering in Italian, as he composed a letter blackballing the gifted illustrator to the entire creative department. “He eez STOOPEEED, I doon’t like dees guyz.” We had worked with him for months, he’d always done a great job, but Juliani was angered that the communication breakdown had resulted in making him late for his 5:30 tennis match. I begged Juliani not to send the email, to think about it overnight. But he hit the “send” button like a virtuoso hitting the final chord of a concierto. I told him to go fuck himself, and a week later I was called into HR and “laid off” due to the company’s “financial hardship”. I packed up 20 years of crap into 5 cardboard boxes that were left outside my office and I was gone by midnight.
I spent the next three weeks living the life I’d always dreamed of. Nowhere to be, buzzing out to the beach in my Beemer, music blaring, windows down, sunroof open, the agency had cut me a check that would subsidize screwing around for at least two months. Yet, everyday my cell phone would ring. “Hey, Crafts. I miss you,” it was Elizabeth, about to make up for lost time – our late night McDonald’s rendezvous were now history. She was going on about Pauls like no time had passed, about Juliani, and what a thief and asshole he was, how her sister’s dog was sick, and would probably have to be put down to “sleep”. She would often catch me when I was in the “zone” – cruising back from the beach, from eating a lobster tail, or sipping a nice glass of wine on the water. Yet, every time she’d call I would pull over, often driving behind a shopping mall in a parking lot to get better reception, to lend an ear. I didn’t have the heart to cut her off. And she had some good news. She’d been interviewing for a big job at another big agency on a very glamorous account and wanted to share her excitement with me, telling me every detail about the interview process, I would give her my undivided attention, parked there in a reception sweet spot, next to a dumpster at the back of a Stop n Shop. A week later she called to say she’d gotten the job – it was the last time I ever spoke to her.
I was sure she would take me with her; the job market was worse than I had expected. Agencies wanted younger, edgier creatives, luring them away with bags of money from smaller, more creative agencies where they were poorly paid. It was a rude awakening, but Elizabeth was my ace in the hole, after all – I was her “Crafty”. And now that she was running a huge international piece of business, surely she would have no time to cry over fries and Diet Cokes. But I would never find out. I called her several times at the new agency, left her cute voicemails, but she never took my calls, or returned a single message.
I recently thought about Elizabeth, what had become of her? I wondered if she was still at the big agency, if she had lured another young writer into the depths of a different McDonalds. Was she still married to the precariously sober husband? Had there been a funeral for her sister’s dog? A recruiter friend of mine had done a search and found she had not only left the big agency, but had left advertising all together. She’d up and moved to Seattle, and started a clothing company with her sister who was a wealthy lawyer who had a penchant for painkillers and red wine. She had told me all about her – and their strict Catholic upbringing, how their father had walked out one morning and never returned only to shame them all by making a fortune in the porn business, how their mother worked hard to support them and then would cry herself to sleep at night. So many stories, so many lost nights, there, in the soggy, subterranean warmth of the McDonalds – the one across the street from the ad agency where we worked.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
FOLLOW ME INTO NORMALCY
The inception of claudtalks coincided with the beginning of a relationship with a biker. No details were off limits, dicey content drove my viewership over the top. Sex in the bushes on the side of the highway, S&M costumes, dicey evenings tweaked by mental illness, and much, much more. After I awoke from the cloud of excitement and compromised sanity that was my relationship, I was left holding an empty pen.
Is a story worth reading without sex, drugs, and dirty words? The content waxed and waned. I went from writing entries almost every day, to once a week, then twice a month, until I got to – whenever.
My views quickly went from triple digits, to 15, to 9, and sometimes 3. People searching the word “sex” in blog search windows would no longer find me. Could I write a piece about riding an Italian scooter and somehow work in the word “anus”?
I spend mornings looking out my window at the stunning view of the Verrazano Bridge, and contemplate new story ideas. I jot down a myriad of ideas over coffee - some of them sordid, some sweet, none of them making it on to the blog. The truth is, the validation wasn’t there. If a blog falls in the forest and no one is around to read it, does it even exist?
“No one cares,” I told my man friend when he inquired about my lack of writing. Even he had stopped reading after being traumatized by my indiscreet details about relationships with other men. Other readers had drifted away in the blogosphere.“No one cares” was not a self pity-party, it was simply fact.
I hadn’t bothered to check my blog in a few weeks until today, and much to my surprise I’d steadily gained a few followers. No crazy through the roof numbers, but a few solid followers nonetheless. All without so much as a mention of a spanking, or an eightball of coke. The new stories were about nothing in particular, the small stuff. A ride on a motorcycle, a visit to my mom’s assisted living residence, the this-and-that of everyday life. No saucy key words to entice, just simple stories about the pretty quiet life of a middle-aged chick, and interestingly, it seems to be enough to my new friends. My mind still accesses those extreme tales of my past as I look out my window every morning, but I’m feeling a want to stay in the present right now. My ponderings lack the bravado of 2009. They ring in an era of honesty - stories around sadness, boredom, hope, and occasional glee. And now that I see that a couple of strangers are watching, I might be inclined to jot a few of them down.
Is a story worth reading without sex, drugs, and dirty words? The content waxed and waned. I went from writing entries almost every day, to once a week, then twice a month, until I got to – whenever.
My views quickly went from triple digits, to 15, to 9, and sometimes 3. People searching the word “sex” in blog search windows would no longer find me. Could I write a piece about riding an Italian scooter and somehow work in the word “anus”?
I spend mornings looking out my window at the stunning view of the Verrazano Bridge, and contemplate new story ideas. I jot down a myriad of ideas over coffee - some of them sordid, some sweet, none of them making it on to the blog. The truth is, the validation wasn’t there. If a blog falls in the forest and no one is around to read it, does it even exist?
“No one cares,” I told my man friend when he inquired about my lack of writing. Even he had stopped reading after being traumatized by my indiscreet details about relationships with other men. Other readers had drifted away in the blogosphere.“No one cares” was not a self pity-party, it was simply fact.
I hadn’t bothered to check my blog in a few weeks until today, and much to my surprise I’d steadily gained a few followers. No crazy through the roof numbers, but a few solid followers nonetheless. All without so much as a mention of a spanking, or an eightball of coke. The new stories were about nothing in particular, the small stuff. A ride on a motorcycle, a visit to my mom’s assisted living residence, the this-and-that of everyday life. No saucy key words to entice, just simple stories about the pretty quiet life of a middle-aged chick, and interestingly, it seems to be enough to my new friends. My mind still accesses those extreme tales of my past as I look out my window every morning, but I’m feeling a want to stay in the present right now. My ponderings lack the bravado of 2009. They ring in an era of honesty - stories around sadness, boredom, hope, and occasional glee. And now that I see that a couple of strangers are watching, I might be inclined to jot a few of them down.
Monday, June 6, 2011
THE GROOM
Tomorrow,
in a church filled with flowers and clenched smiles
they’ll all come together for the secret hating of the groom.
Over pie,
the family share their hopes for their daughter
to get away from him, but she’s already gone.
Earlier,
he dragged her out before dessert
the car ride home, he rattles, berates, degrades.
In hours,
she’ll say, “I do” over the inner thoughts of every person in the room.
Forever,
hold your peace at the secret hating of the groom.
in a church filled with flowers and clenched smiles
they’ll all come together for the secret hating of the groom.
Over pie,
the family share their hopes for their daughter
to get away from him, but she’s already gone.
Earlier,
he dragged her out before dessert
the car ride home, he rattles, berates, degrades.
In hours,
she’ll say, “I do” over the inner thoughts of every person in the room.
Forever,
hold your peace at the secret hating of the groom.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
THE DEALBREAKER
He asked me for my number right from the seat of his Harley that Sunday in Coney Island, it was mere seconds into our phone conversation the next day before my devil-may-care decision was shadowed with regret.
“I hope you ain’t a crazy or a total retart like the last few women I dated,” that was his opener. Was it too early to end the conversation? I was dumb struck, I barely got out my “Nooo, no retart here” before he picked up the baton and ran with it. “This one, right? She’s a whale, and she’s wearin’ these spandex things, and her legs are FAAAT like I’m in Vinnie's Sausage Factory.”
“Hmn, that sucksss,” I replied, politely. He continues “So, I decide, what the f*ck, I’ll give it a shot, her face isn’t bad so I take her to dinner a few times,” he pauses to cough up last night’s pack of Camels, then threads his next thought on the tail of the expectorated phlegm, “long story short I broke up with her and THIS is why you have to call me from an unblocked number so I know it’s not her callin’, she keeps callin’ wantin' to git back wit me.” Now I was intrigued, why, after feeding her sausage thighs on several proper dinner dates, would he suddenly call it quits? He explained, “She got this kid, right. He’s 5, and she brought him on our third date so we could get acquaintit and I’m like WO, I din sign on for this so I tell her that I don’t see myself raisin’ some kid, plus she lived right under the Williamsburg Bridge, you ever been ‘round there, what a SH*Thole.”
I took my opening for my exit, “Goodness, that really is unfortunate,” but my gentleman caller put my plan on hold. “Wait – it gets better - so she begs me to go out wit her one more time to break up wit her in person or whatever - so I go and tell I’m not wanting a kid like I told her before and she says ‘no problem’”
“Great! It's good you were clear...” I say, attempting to end our session on an up note, again I'm interrupted.
“Wait - then she gets real serious and says to me ‘it's no problem, I been thinking. I'll just give him up for adoption.’”
I couldn't have heard him correctly.
“Right??!!," he said translating my silence, "I was like who the f*ck does that?? So I dropped her off home and she's been calling me ever since. Her mom called me up yesterday and wanted to know why I broke things off and I told her it wasn’t the kid, it was the whole puttin' the kid up for adoption that was it for me, right?” That was his dealbreaker, he said, before he inhaled deeply through his deviated septum to prepare for what would never materialize into the rest of his life's story. “So. Whadelse you wanna know about me.”
“I hope you ain’t a crazy or a total retart like the last few women I dated,” that was his opener. Was it too early to end the conversation? I was dumb struck, I barely got out my “Nooo, no retart here” before he picked up the baton and ran with it. “This one, right? She’s a whale, and she’s wearin’ these spandex things, and her legs are FAAAT like I’m in Vinnie's Sausage Factory.”
“Hmn, that sucksss,” I replied, politely. He continues “So, I decide, what the f*ck, I’ll give it a shot, her face isn’t bad so I take her to dinner a few times,” he pauses to cough up last night’s pack of Camels, then threads his next thought on the tail of the expectorated phlegm, “long story short I broke up with her and THIS is why you have to call me from an unblocked number so I know it’s not her callin’, she keeps callin’ wantin' to git back wit me.” Now I was intrigued, why, after feeding her sausage thighs on several proper dinner dates, would he suddenly call it quits? He explained, “She got this kid, right. He’s 5, and she brought him on our third date so we could get acquaintit and I’m like WO, I din sign on for this so I tell her that I don’t see myself raisin’ some kid, plus she lived right under the Williamsburg Bridge, you ever been ‘round there, what a SH*Thole.”
I took my opening for my exit, “Goodness, that really is unfortunate,” but my gentleman caller put my plan on hold. “Wait – it gets better - so she begs me to go out wit her one more time to break up wit her in person or whatever - so I go and tell I’m not wanting a kid like I told her before and she says ‘no problem’”
“Great! It's good you were clear...” I say, attempting to end our session on an up note, again I'm interrupted.
“Wait - then she gets real serious and says to me ‘it's no problem, I been thinking. I'll just give him up for adoption.’”
I couldn't have heard him correctly.
“Right??!!," he said translating my silence, "I was like who the f*ck does that?? So I dropped her off home and she's been calling me ever since. Her mom called me up yesterday and wanted to know why I broke things off and I told her it wasn’t the kid, it was the whole puttin' the kid up for adoption that was it for me, right?” That was his dealbreaker, he said, before he inhaled deeply through his deviated septum to prepare for what would never materialize into the rest of his life's story. “So. Whadelse you wanna know about me.”
Sunday, May 8, 2011
ALWAYS REMEMBER - a letter to my Mom
Dear Mom,
We were all in denial about what was happening to you. You started repeating things a lot, and became increasingly disoriented. I remember walking along the water in La Jolla when you still lived there, it was the first time I noticed a vacant look in your eyes. Now that I look back, this was when I probably realized something was wrong. I put both my hands on your shoulders, as if to wake you and said, “Mom! Mom!!” so we could laugh it away. You mirrored me with a vague giggle, but said, “I’m tired Honey, let’s go home.”
It took Kath, Mike’s wife, to say we should bring you in for testing. We resented her for bringing it up, nothing was wrong with our Mom, you were going to the gym twice a week, delivering meals to people with AIDS, going to dinner with friends. But on our visit, you said we were going to meet your friend, Belle, at that big burger and nacho restaurant with the Surfboard logo and Belle never showed up. I said we should call her but you waved it off and ordered enough food for an army and finished it off, and then ordered dessert. You used to get an appetizer and say it was way too much food. I was leaving for New York the next morning, you asked me over and over and over again what time my flight was, I tried to wrangle the pullover you’d been wearing for a week straight away from you to throw it in the wash, but you became so stubborn about it so I just let it go. A couple of weeks later Rob said the two of you were taking a drive up to the top of Mount Soledad and you turned to him and asked if you were in California or Connecticut.
After taking you to the doctor, they took away your car keys. Mike packed a bag for you that day and brought you back to Portland with him. It was as if you had your life on Wednesday, and on Thursday you would never have it back again. They found a lovely place for you, and bring the grandkids by on Sundays. You found a boyfriend, who would have thunk it, you’re no Spring chicken, but he’s so handsome, and funny, a retired Marine that looks at you like you’re the most precious treasure in the world.
And you are. Even now, more than ever – you are a great inspiration to me. “I never let things get me down,” you say every day when I call. You never did. You had a crazy mother, she used to drive me insane but you would tell me, “she doesn’t get to me, it all goes in one ear and out the other,” you’d say – matter of factly. Then you’d get back to unpacking the van after coming home from whatever antiques show you were doing that weekend.
I thank God you still remember who we all are, one time I called, you sounded confused, I said, “Mom, this is Claudia.” You snapped, “I know!” As though it was an absurd thought that you wouldn’t know the sound of your own daughter’s voice. But one day this could very well be the case. So I’m telling you now, dear Mother, on today - this Mother’s Day: always remember how very much I love you.
We were all in denial about what was happening to you. You started repeating things a lot, and became increasingly disoriented. I remember walking along the water in La Jolla when you still lived there, it was the first time I noticed a vacant look in your eyes. Now that I look back, this was when I probably realized something was wrong. I put both my hands on your shoulders, as if to wake you and said, “Mom! Mom!!” so we could laugh it away. You mirrored me with a vague giggle, but said, “I’m tired Honey, let’s go home.”
It took Kath, Mike’s wife, to say we should bring you in for testing. We resented her for bringing it up, nothing was wrong with our Mom, you were going to the gym twice a week, delivering meals to people with AIDS, going to dinner with friends. But on our visit, you said we were going to meet your friend, Belle, at that big burger and nacho restaurant with the Surfboard logo and Belle never showed up. I said we should call her but you waved it off and ordered enough food for an army and finished it off, and then ordered dessert. You used to get an appetizer and say it was way too much food. I was leaving for New York the next morning, you asked me over and over and over again what time my flight was, I tried to wrangle the pullover you’d been wearing for a week straight away from you to throw it in the wash, but you became so stubborn about it so I just let it go. A couple of weeks later Rob said the two of you were taking a drive up to the top of Mount Soledad and you turned to him and asked if you were in California or Connecticut.
After taking you to the doctor, they took away your car keys. Mike packed a bag for you that day and brought you back to Portland with him. It was as if you had your life on Wednesday, and on Thursday you would never have it back again. They found a lovely place for you, and bring the grandkids by on Sundays. You found a boyfriend, who would have thunk it, you’re no Spring chicken, but he’s so handsome, and funny, a retired Marine that looks at you like you’re the most precious treasure in the world.
And you are. Even now, more than ever – you are a great inspiration to me. “I never let things get me down,” you say every day when I call. You never did. You had a crazy mother, she used to drive me insane but you would tell me, “she doesn’t get to me, it all goes in one ear and out the other,” you’d say – matter of factly. Then you’d get back to unpacking the van after coming home from whatever antiques show you were doing that weekend.
I thank God you still remember who we all are, one time I called, you sounded confused, I said, “Mom, this is Claudia.” You snapped, “I know!” As though it was an absurd thought that you wouldn’t know the sound of your own daughter’s voice. But one day this could very well be the case. So I’m telling you now, dear Mother, on today - this Mother’s Day: always remember how very much I love you.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
SUMMER GIRL ROMANCE
I messed around with a girl once. Well, to be honest, maybe it was more than once. She seduced me on my terrace one summer night, long black hair falling around my face as she leaned in and kissed me, after she slipped her hand up my shorts. We’re just the kind of gals that rub lesbians the wrong way. Bi-curious, or just human, it happened a couple more times. I think she was bipolar or something, she woke from a nap on my sofa one day and went berserk. Screaming in my face that I should have woken her up, that she was late, to where, I knew not. She stormed out, slammed the door and that was the last time we spoke.
Now she’s married with kids and a nice husband. She moved to Omaha, put on a few pounds, and makes a nice dinner every night for the family. I wonder if she ever thinks about those days way back when, when she used to dance in her bra and panties to Janet Jackson in my living room.
Now she’s married with kids and a nice husband. She moved to Omaha, put on a few pounds, and makes a nice dinner every night for the family. I wonder if she ever thinks about those days way back when, when she used to dance in her bra and panties to Janet Jackson in my living room.
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