Editor’s Note: Freeline Media contributor Joseph Aisenberg has been thinking a lot lately about memories; the memory of one trip with some troubled friends to Tulsa still burns a searing hole in his psyche. But memories can be fascinating, he noted, since they tell us a lot about how we tackle The Long Run called life.
By Joseph Aisenberg
Filth and Alienation: an essay at memory
1
Thinking of me as I was in my early twenties is a study in distance. Emotions which once raged through my soul as I flopped around on a stained yellow sheet stretched over the foam mattress of my being for an unconscionable length of time are now utterly alien to me. Yet while these viscerals have been mostly diluted by the passage of time still they can be accessed through memory’s insufficient, inefficient mechanisms, like those super eight films once used by families to record milestones. Feeding celluloid strips through bulky projectors, putting off faint electrical odors, crude images would flash onto makeshift screens, a sheet, the underside of a quilt, showing how one had looked, obese, sloppy, curly dark hair topping a bloated face whose mouth spoke soundlessly to a relative at a picnic, wedding or reunion; the image would then go out of focus across time’s neutral gulf and clear back up only to endure a shocking snap when the spliced strip jerk-jumped to another era, another color tint. Perhaps between such cuts, abrasions and deletions exists a realm truer than patchy memory, the place where emotion turns to metaphor.
My childhood was a grease-brown smear across the dull countertop of Norman Oklahoma, part village, suburb and college town. On Main Street, a few blocks from the crappy house where I grew up, there used to be a drive-in Dairy Queen restaurant, now a bank. The paved alley behind it listed down to a drainage ditch, and still does. Each summer the alley’s potholes would be patched by a tar-like substance which became gooey on hot days, sticking to the soles of one’s shoes. Directly across from Dairy Queen’s peeling backside, where cars stopped to make orders, there brooded a huge dumpster, ripped and gouged over the years by careless trash trucks; behind that a saggy chain link fence ambled alongside the alley, separating it from the grounds of a boarded up, red brick elementary school my mother had attended as a child. The dumpster’s odors, well-cooked by summer sun, enveloped one in a pure rich rot as one passed it. For some reason the stink always made me look down at the asphalt gliding underfoot, wondering if the smell would soak through my clothes and skin. The smell was so intense I could just about taste the aroma of Dairy Queen’s putrefying remains, evidenced by numerous Blue Bottle flies buzzing the receptacle’s in-crumpled gape. And that special combination — heat, asphalt, dumpster, blue flies, a dead school hovering in the background — emblemized perfectly my state of mind, circa 1991.
That phase of my life, long since boxed up and donated to a local thrift store along with my grandfather’s old film projector, wasn’t as bad as it seemed. I weighed nearly four hundred pounds, was jobless and smoked any cigarette I could get my hands on, but I had friends, books, the occasional pet; collected many good memories even if I don’t much miss them: rainy nights spent reading in bed, long conversations had on a series of cheap phones, those rare pregnant moments in which a well-furnished future (if not this one) felt as if it were merely waiting for me to hurry up and get there. Back then, Life as a venture had seemed ruined in advance; I told myself it wasn’t my fault. If I’d been born someone else, somewhere else, smarter, better looking; if I’d had money—well, I might have made good, which is the quitter’s lament. Truth is I had no “hustle,” as my deceased grandfather might have put it. Instead of doing something I cultivated a seedy form of self-pity, which went on for months, years, as time’s film spool continued to unroll.
Here in a second I’m going tell a story. Before I do, though, a little context is needed; in a way this whole thing is context. I don’t know if the small quotient of story behind it justifies such elaborate explanations or means anything; certainly doesn’t have a lot to do with the subject of my introductory remarks, but it tastes of who I once was — in ways pathetic, absurd, tragic.
2
That April I was 21 and living with my mother. Well, I was living off my mother since I wasn’t working. Emotionally adrift, I kept myself shut up in a trashed-out back room of her dilapidated house, sprawled on a yellow-sheeted bed I hadn’t changed for an unconscionable length of time. I would read and smoke and watch a 12-inch black and white television. I loved especially reruns of the prime time soap opera Knot’s Landing (hey Donna Mills! Wherever you are, hey! You made life back then a little bit brighter). There I first saw Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver; even on a small TV, all fizz and fuzz, the movie’s hyperbolized world of filth and alienation, as represented by Robert De Niro’s crazy-obsessive Travis Bickle, pulled me right in. Though he was a nutso racist freak, vegetating in squalor, I yet identified with his isolation. He saw the world as I did, a stinking cesspool waiting for God’s judgmental rain to wash away its scumminess, of which I was only another smudge. And he too liked bad television.
Question: how did I get here?
It started with my parents’ bitter divorce when I was 5, which prompted my mother to upchuck her marbles. Shortly after the divorce was finalized, she collapsed on the floor of the gray factory where she felt she was being forced to work to support us kids, me and two siblings, whom she did not wish to support. Over the next year she amassed an impressive collection of electro-shock treatments, as well as various and variously useful medications, in an awkward attempt to grope her way back to the publicly acknowledged world, more or less. This not only blasted giant holes through her memory, and made her very fat, one of the great themes of my life, but narrowed her nearly physical despair down to the glow of a cigarette. I remember the way it smolder-floated back and forth in the dark front room of our house, whose length she would pace all night, crying and singing along with a radio stationed in the kitchen. I still can hear it droning continuously through the house, awarble with terrible, upbeat pop songs of the period.
But what about my father? Well, he also went to pieces. Crumbled away over several years, lost somewhere in Oklahoma City. Going through job after job, moving into and out of numerous flops, he transformed from the smart Jewish New York accountant my mother had married into a shaggy homeless man who claimed he was able to subsist entirely on sunlight, after a long period of having eaten nothing but peanut butter. He took me out for ice cream once. He tried to kidnap me; disappointingly, my grandmother stopped him, insisting he wouldn’t have taken care of me. Another time he kicked in our front screen door, my mother shouting she was going to call the police, as he accused us of not being his real family — we were, he claimed, quite obvious fakes. Not long after that, due to his terrible diet, he contracted Scurvy and had to be sent back to New York, where he’d grown up, to live with his mother while he recovered. Then the summer I turned 13 he made a secret return to Oklahoma for a last look at his family, now thoroughly lost to him, after which he wandered over to the east side of town, near the college campus, and committed suicide by sitting on the train tracks (I walk by the spot many times a week as of this writing). My father’s body was so damaged by the train’s brisk, brutal impact, the police could only identify him by finger prints they had on file from a summer several years earlier, when he was arrested for shoplifting candy. I remember that day, waiting outside the jailhouse in the backseat of my late aunt’s blue Volkswagon Beetle, suffering a miserable bout of Poison Ivy; being assaulted by the song “Afternoon Delight”, while my mother, inside, pushed on my father an unwanted bible. His body was shipped back to New York, where he was buried. Due to our poverty my grandfather considered the idea we children might attend the ceremony, which I’d asked about, completely absurd.
In the absence of anyone else then, my irked grandfather tried to be a dad to me and my siblings, whom frequently he lectured as spoiled brats. He took us fishing, hunting; he built for me bicycles that never worked, radios which went out almost at once — but as I entered gross adolescence he could not conceal his disgust at what I was becoming. We ended finally, pop and me, as strangers, each disappointed by the other’s immovable presence, my grandfather certain I’d never achieve anything, as he’d been assuring me regularly since I was 5; me resenting him mightily for making me feel a failure from the get go.
I think now, though, that the morose apathy of my early 20s really began with my realizing God didn’t exist, at the age of 14.
It happened simply. I was sitting around my backyard one day, closely examining the death throes of an insect I’d squashed, and reasoned myself right out of a faith I’d taken for granted from earliest childhood. God as presented in the bible did not match the brute facts of nature. My own death, I sensed, would be received with the same objective indifference as the bug’s — something I’d observed already at the pro forma funerals given elderly relatives. My mother, who’d become extremely religious before she broke with my father, and reality — religion in fact had hastened their divorce — had fervently tried to instill in myself, my brother and sister, a deep superstitious belief in the Baptist God, Jesus, and The Holy Ghost. This Orwellian Christly dogma had made of me the priggiest, most self-righteous church mouse imaginable, virtually devoid of humor or any boyish traits. Solemnly, I prayed over lunch in the school cafeteria, terrified Secular Humanist teachers would rush over and shrilly put a stop to my earnest worship! When eventually I shrugged off this idiocy my mother, furious, claimed I had done so merely to justify watching R-rated movies and masturbation, a not entirely incorrect assumption.
Meaning that, losing Big Brother was pure liberation. No longer did I have to live in the intellectual equivalent of a straw hut, muttering charms and incantations at some bugeyed monster in the sky. I could try to be a whole person like other people. But by the end of High School the implications of a godless universe began to make themselves felt. If everything was allowed, nothing mattered. Why try to do anything if all of it got stripped away? Life collapsed to the certainty of bodily dysfunction, death. One’s unlovely remains would, as I’d seen, be blithely discarded in some forgotten grave, forever and ever. And that forever, the actual and only forever, was not some gold-paved afterlife promised by quacks in weekly sermons but a complex, ever-churning system of pre-ordained biological processes founded on a network of things mindlessly eating, defecating and reproducing — that is, evolving, a concept my mother thought to be a modern day fairytale. What I knew and she didn’t was that eventually our world would burn itself out; whatever animate energy remained would roil over into another iteration of life or else float off like so much dust, destined to drift cold and unused throughout eternity. I know I know I know! How many many many dreary adolescents have undergone just this same annoying brand of teen angst? The Albert-Camus-What’s-It-All-Mean-Mindedness of the cosmos seen explored in fancy Ingmar Bergman movies. But in my case, it was paralyzing.
At least I never considered killing myself. Whatever pattern linked me to my father’s fate, suicide wasn’t part of it. The reason being that, if nothing mattered, the only thing we had going for us was this one-way life our biology had fitted us out with. Probably too, my amateur-hour morbidity functioned less as a philosophical position than a limp way of protecting myself from the future failure which my grandfather had long predicted awaited me. Banally, I really did want success. I wanted to live, travel, love etc. — only I suspected I wasn’t going to do any of those things, so had reflexively tapped out before starting even to fight.
Still, in that existential marathon they call The Long Run my juvenile nihilism proves to be more or less correct. Life doesn’t and never can mean anything; “coming to terms,” as they say, with the paradox of caring for things and people already lost to us, gone even before having acquired or met them; behaving as if the whole dumb melodrama of our day-to-days really counts for something is a mixture of necessary delusion and imaginative daring. Only when one finally accepts the unvarying law of total loss does one at last become adult. Which is only to say however screwed up I was, my friend Virginia existed on a different plane of crazy altogether.
3
We met in eighth grade. I was 14, Virginia 13. She had black eyes and high-carved cheekbones; long glossy brown hair framed her dark-complected features, synthesizing those of her Latino father and Native American mother. Virginia was quite pretty but didn’t make much of it, because she was far too busy balancing a chip on her shoulder. Later that sourness softened to a goofy, open, easygoing bohemian attitude I link to her energetic voice. Spirited and burbly, it had almost a chocolate flavoring, forever poised on the cusp of becoming deeply sexy without ever quite achieving the effect; could also be quite hard and phlegmatic when she pronounced the word “fuck” as “fock” or when with demonic intensity she laughed at things whose funniness was not always apparent.
Vividly I recall Virginia crossing her arms over her chest, taking a giant step forward in her favorite purple jeans and lunging rhythmically from back leg to front, over and over as if rocking in a standing position. This nervous habit she lost sometime after high school. What else? She was a voracious reader. Her favorite fare was popular trash, Robin Cook, Stephen King, Gothic Romances and what now are commercially termed, young adult novels. She was a great keeper of notebooks, filling one after the other with “deep thoughts” gleaned from songs, poems, novels. Any bit of wisdom rattled off by a waitress or joke she’d overheard a tired football player crack was thus “immortalized.”
Poor, strange, fearless. Virginia’s courage or heedlessness derived from a turbulent “domestic situation,” as experts might describe it. Her mother and father divorced when she was young, but the father continued to live with and support the mother, keeping the family together. Virginia was extremely hostile toward him, this slim, sensitive-eyed man, despite or perhaps because her mother, whom she loved blindly, used regularly to beat her and her siblings. The woman once whipped Virginia with a lamp cord; took a baseball bat to her younger brother whose little body’s response to the blow Virginia once described to me in chilling detail. I couldn’t quite reconcile her mother, a small, polite, wizened woman (later to die from complications having to do with Diabetes) and the brutal monster she apparently was in private. And because Virginia loved her so much it was easy ignoring everything, in effect collaborating in the family’s dysfunction. I know now I ought to have done something, shown a little courage, cut the woman dead by making a point of leaving any room she entered — but I didn’t.
Virginia rebelled officially against her mother’s abuse only once. She complained about it to the Department of Human Services, but when a social worker questioned her siblings they denied everything. Virginia then was placed into juvenile detention purgatory, pending further investigation. After a few weeks of nothing much, she recanted her story and was released. Next Virginia went through a phase of running away that ended with her coming back home on condition she be allowed to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, which meant walking all over town alone, day or night, thumbing rides.
Eventually a fat middle aged nut picked her up in a tiny orange car. He drove her over to The Duck Pond near the college campus, pulled a gun and attempted to rape her. Virginia screamed, fought back. The man shot her in the side and through a defensively raised arm. Somehow Virginia got herself out of that car. As the man sped away she was left to stumble across The Duck Pond’s vacant sloped parking lot in search of help. Finally she fell and passed out from the pain spreading over the right side of her body; she woke in the hospital a day later attached to various tubes, her mother sitting devotedly at her bedside, where the woman remained for the entirety of her stay. I visited several times. Her mother and I had a few pleasant conversations over Virginia’s unconscious body too; she would kindly offer me cigarettes when I ran out.
A day or so after the shooting I heard two girls in French class blithely discussing the incident, under the impression Virginia had died. I corrected them. One of the girls — hair permed and puffed with fried blonde streaks, lips slathered a glossy orange — said coolly that Virginia’s running around at night by herself was just asking to get killed, and worse. This idea I found appalling and said so. Besides, Virginia was hardly flaunting a whorish contempt for propriety. If she’d been doing that I’d have respected her bravado far more. No, she was just operating under the naive assumption that everyone was mostly okay so why not drive to the ends of the earth with them, if given a chance? That made her vulnerable and it made her weird. She didn’t care, though. Weird she flaunted. During class once, she’d noticed a rip in her jeans, which for some reason inspired her to tear the seams from both pant legs. All the rest of that day she’d wandered around school with long denim strips flapping about her legs like a clown. Virginia to a T.
Anyway, toward the end of high school, while I was busy wallowing in existential angst — about which enough has been said — Virginia plunged into a romance with a 22-year-old guy named Kevin. She’d met him through me and an ex-friend of mine, Dale. And we’d met Kevin at an AA meeting the year before, when Dale was wrapped up being an alcoholic in order to expand his social life. He’d gotten so deep into that bullshit he’d even pushed me to join Al-Anon. Dutiful co-dependent I was, I complied and found myself listening with fascination to the war stories of hardened wives and girlfriends of the loser-addicts in the other room, who kept coming back though the program didn’t much work. What weirds me out about all that now is how many of the adults we met in those groups seemed eager and willing to hang out with geeky sixteen year olds like me and Dale. One guy in his mid thirties, who occasionally gave us rides, would ask us how much pussy we were getting (none); eventually he pressed on Dale several VHS tapes of depressingly dated porn, concerned that our sexual appetites be trained in a healthful fashion.
Enter Kevin. Virginia wasn’t the first underage friend of ours he dated. He’d spent a month or so screwing my chum Leslie, a complicated girl with problems of her own. The only reason she’d gone out with him was because she had nothing else better to do and because he was old enough to buy her booze, which he did despite all the AA crap. When even that was no longer enticement enough for Leslie, she dumped him and he switched right over to Virginia, a match made not so much in heaven or hell as a novel by Theodore Dreiser.
Kevin was a cokehead not a boozer and he’d been sober a year when Dale and I met him. What happened was he’d gotten caught embezzling from the snow cone business he and his father owned jointly, and used the money to buy blow of course. That was his so called “bottom,” something I believed because Kevin looked the absolute definition of “nice,” blonde and handsome in a waspy blonde way with soft green eyes and delicate pink-white hands. Dressed and cologned in preppy precision, he wore always a long-sleeved plaid shirt, padded khaki vest, khaki pants and boat shoes. He just was not what one pictured when one thought of a drug-addled criminal.
Other bits and pieces didn’t go with his prep boy schtick either: he drove a pickup not a sports car and sported liberal politics. He cared about stuff when most preps I knew were concerned with being well dressed dicks. Partly it was a family thing: his sister, whom he idolized, was a judge. She’d been a state House Representative or something. Plus he loved having all the inside dope on whatever was going on everywhere. Often he would take frustratingly compromised “positions” on issues because that was supposed to be the mature, “pragmatic” thing to do — none of which I now recall because I was entirely ignorant of policies while having passionate opinions about them. Virginia, echoing Leslie, came to find his politics incredibly boring, mostly because they always came back to his sister, and Virginia loathed his sister. I gather the loathing was mutual. The other big fact about Kevin concerned the family legend of how his ultra brilliant older brother committed suicide when Kevin was young. A death which shattered Kevin and which was thought to have switched the addiction knob on in his brain. Virginia, however, directly blamed Kevin’s parents for the brother’s death, though she had no reason for this cruel assertion other than that she disliked them, because they snooted down their noses at her. Calling them bad parents was an easy way to turn that around. The single time I minimally argued with her on the subject she got mad, demanding to know why I thought they were such great parents (I didn’t) since one kid had killed himself and the other wound up a drug addict. Kevin’s good boy appearance and whatever ideology probably fit together in some calculated underhanded way central to his personality, yet I really believe if Kevin had licked the coke and never met Virginia, he’d have got himself together and ended up eating a nice steaming plate of middle class hypocrisy every night for the rest of his life.
Instead he fell in love, and lost everything. At first I figured he was slumming his way through Virginia, but he wasn’t. He had it bad, so bad he was swept away by the tide of Virginia’s messy, teenage whims—certainly that was how Kevin’s parents viewed the relationship. Virginia’s modus operandi with him was to be difficult. She’d learned from her horrible home life, and having to scrounge to survive, that a girl simply must keep all her options open. She couldn’t afford having any rights or privileges reined in simply because she was romantically involved. Still, Virginia liked the perks of an official boyfriend. Kevin was a gentleman. He paid for things; was someone she could hang out with, if there wasn’t anything else better to do; someone who willingly acted as her chauffeur, dropping her places and picking her up again at two in the morning, when he got off work, along with whatever weirdo friends she’d acquired during the course of the evening.
Right away Kevin reverted to cocaine. Virginia insisted this did not concern her, though she let slip she’d gotten off with him on a few occasions. I remember running into them at a lame party given by a lame-o gay guy Virginia and I knew late that summer. A couple months since I’d last seen Kevin — he hadn’t been to any AA meetings of late — and I was shocked how gaunt he’d become, eyes sunken, black-ringed, haunted. He thought I was giving him a judgmental stare…because I guess I was, and he asked me not to think ill of him. I felt bad.
The rest of that August slipped away and then the years got going. Virginia, Kevin and I bumped into one another rarely, though I did speak to Virginia on the phone a few times. She visited me once during a six month period I lived in Tulsa. Meanwhile she and Kevin shacked up; to make a little extra money, Kevin decided he’d try dealing drugs with a friend. Instead of selling the stuff, though, they Anti-Pfieffered their supply and paranoia moved in. Each became convinced the other was holding out. Kevin’s solution was to shoot his friend in the leg. Virginia, irritated by the whole incident, insisted he’d merely been trying to wound the man, not kill him. “I’m so glad,” was basically my response. Virginia said it was fine, the friend had forgiven Kevin all, but who knows since her tone describing these events was one of minimization for my benefit. Whatever the truth, Kevin went to jail.
Not long though. (I do love a suspenseful one-sentence paragraph).
Out of the slammer after less than a year, he inserted himself right back into Virginia’s life, saying he just wanted to be friends. Virginia was amenable so long as he accepted the terms and conditions of that friendship: she was allowed to do and act however she wanted; he had no say. Once more Kevin was paying for stuff. Once more he drove her and her makeshift entourage around, without strings. It didn’t take Kevin long to want all those strings back, though, and he laid down an ultimatum. Either she re-become his girlfriend or he wouldn’t see her anymore, because, he told me, being around her if she wasn’t his and only his was simply unbearable. By then Virginia had become emotionally, materially dependent on him again, and so agreed…then got pregnant.
It was probably inevitable. With a baby on the way Kevin decided they should move to Tulsa and make a fresh start—there were, he explained, no job opportunities for him in Norman, though I think really he just wanted to pry Virginia out of her milieu so she’d have no option but to stick with him. It’s those damn options which make women such slippery prospects in the end, isn’t it?
4
A week after the move Virginia called me, asking me to come visit her for a couple days. As I didn’t have a car she said Kevin would drive me there and back. Since I wasn’t working I couldn’t claim to be busy, so honesty seemed my only out. I told her I thought her relationship with Kevin was weird and that I wouldn’t feel “comfortable” without a means of escape should things go badly while I was there. Virginia insisted everything would be fine, promised she and Kevin wouldn’t fight while I was around. I thanked her, but refused.
The next day a knock on the front door of my mother’s house startled its squalid musings — Kevin. Standing on the porch he proceeded to beg me desperately to come to Tulsa with him right that second. He said Virginia was incredibly depressed, lonely, bored, because she didn’t know anybody in Tulsa and he was always at work. That Kevin had driven from Tulsa to Norman on a whim, willing to schlep me two hundred forty-eight miles just to keep his girl occupied ought to have struck me as the disordered act of a very troubled soul, but all I thought was: Why is Virginia so goddamn stuck on having my unhygienic corpus for company? Probably I was the only person she knew for certain had free time. Oddly, the one thing that never occurred to me was: Hey dumbass, maybe it’s not a good idea going somewhere no one can find you with an ex-con drug dealer who served time for shooting somebody! To me, the whole thing seemed more an irksome imposition than a sinister situation in the making. Plus, I was dying to ask Kevin what awful thing had been going through his mind when he shot his friend. I never did, of course. Wouldn’t have been “appropriate” and I’m nothing if not a polite depressive.
I should say here something about Kevin’s appearance. In only a few years he’d undergone an unsettling metamorphosis. He still wore the same long-sleeved plaid shirts, khaki pants and boat shoes of yore, but the handsome grace had been laid to rest under a thick layer of new flesh. His complexion was waxen, yellowish; he’d lost a great deal of hair. Worst of all his lip had secreted a colorless mustache. At the age of 27 he now looked as I imagined the plump rapist murderer who’d picked Virginia up in his orange car years before must have.
Naturally, I went to Tulsa with him.
He waited in his car while I explained the trip to my mother, well medicated with anti-psychotics and TV, hoping she’d object to the thing. She did not. Didn’t even ask where I was going! Probably she’d sensed I didn’t want to go and that was enough to kill any interest. Had I been enthusiastic I’m sure she’d have made a fuss. So I threw a couple changes of clothes in a sack, crammed my fat ass into Kevin’s bulky car and settled in for a drive of placid blue skies while he reeled off his side of The Kevin and Virginia soap-opera. When we arrived in Tulsa a couple hours later it was early evening. I have no idea the location of he and Virginia’s apartment, only that it was the usual generic complex near some busy overpass, with a pool and a couple of courtyards; a maze of sidewalks led one through breezeways up gray steps to concrete landings devoid of any Escherian mystery. The couple occupied a place on the second floor. They still hadn’t fully unpacked, which gave the 1970s-ish, paneled interior the feel of a cheap motel room. This was to be a recurrent motif in my relations with Virginia. Everywhere I visited her always had an air of impermanence: sort of Holly Golightly meets Cops.
Virginia still was the same pretty, long-haired girl as last I saw her. She foisted on me an enthusiastic hug. After which we began to get reacquainted. Kevin worked the night shift at a pancake place. He showered, left. I asked to use the phone but they didn’t have one. Virginia directed me to a pay one on the first floor, stuck to a wall facing the building’s vast parking lot. I stood in a blaze of orange electric light against a dirty wall, visible to any passerby in the noisy black beyond, attempting to call my friend George at his workplace. He didn’t have a home phone either. George and I had been roommates when I lived in Tulsa the previous year and I figured I’d catch up with him while I was around. That way the trip wouldn’t be a total loss. Since it was after hours, though, I couldn’t reach him.
Virginia and I quickly bored of TV. I thought we should tramp over to George’s apartment on foot and see what he was up to. According to the phone book’s map it didn’t seem like much of a hike. This was an incorrect assessment. We trudged what would stretch into many miles before George’s building finally detached itself from the inky dark of an elderly neighborhood, where we made our way up three flights of stairs to knock on his door. No answer.
Being tired, I decided we should sit and wait. Crouching on the stairs, looking around, I thought how much I’d forgotten about living there: the mirror which greeted one in the foyer, dirtily reflecting things above a set of busted mail boxes; the light yellow coloring of the wood stairs; a transom window across the stairwell from us. I wondered if maybe we’d picked a bad time for a surprise visit, especially since we were hoping to get a ride from George afterward, back to Virginia’s.
An hour crept by, two. I have no idea anything Virginia and I talked about. What I remember is how much I dreaded the walk back to her place. Glancing at the night-black window (which now I think about it may not in reality have been there), I willed my friend to come home. Every so often the door down in the foyer would open, like a gaping hole between dimensions, and I’d think: Please be him! Invariably the footsteps would come only so far up the stairs and halt; keys would jingle into a lucky lock, opening an unseen door that then shut with a definitive clack. Eventually a young man minced past us sprawled on the stairs. One or two steps above, he turned and prissily asked if we needed help, like a salesperson. I told him we were waiting for George, who lived on the same floor as he. The man said George had moved out over a month ago, without paying rent.
So we would be forced to walk back after all. Why hadn’t George written or called me about the move? And where in hell had he gone? Because I was incredibly fat and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, the return journey presented a terrible prospect, what amounted to a torturous trek through the Underworld, and not Don DeLillo’s. Virginia suggested we instead got to the pancake place where Kevin worked, mistakenly believing it to be nearer than her apartment. Once we got there, she said, she’d have Kevin drive us right home. But wasn’t he working? I asked. Would he be able to take off in the middle of his shift to ferry us around? She seemed to think this a trivial concern. She always was brushing aside any practical obstacles only to be shocked later when her little schemes didn’t work out. Since I wanted, needed to believe her we waded off into the night.
Everything felt gloppy, slowed down. Deserted parking lots seemed to float beside us for blocks; set after set of traffic signals beckoned in the distance like ever repeating hallucinations. Across the street from us a huge hospital laboriously flowed down a slope in graduated sections, before dispersing around the corner into dimness—while a sparse slish of cars kept coming onto the scene and departing. God how I wished I was in one of them!
The trip slowed further. We felt our way around a duck pond shaped like a huge raindrop, imprisoned within an elegant wrought iron fence. I remember having to drag myself up mild hills as if they were huge existential mountains. At their peaks my ankles would gnash hellishly. A cold sweat erupted over my entire body and my feet blazed as raw blisters formed on them. Then my back began to ache, seize at the base. Breathing hard, I sat down on a curb to rest and looked silently at the stars and trees, shuddering around us. A luscious breeze tore apart smooth beams of frosty light shooting from hooded lampposts between branches and leaves up and down the street. Everything seemed cool, clear, serene, peaceful — while I was in agony. Sighing, I made myself stand back up.
And the journey was resumed. Soon, though, I was taking a break every block, half-block. Virginia, a veteran walker, was surprised by my need for so many gasping pit stops, even a bit impatient. After awhile she became concerned; embarrassed. Certainly I caught a distinct whiff of pity coming from her, which I resented since I was only here because of her. Around 5 in the morning our phantasmagoric journey at last came to an end, when we arrived at the fabled pancake place.
Of course Kevin couldn’t take us home, because he was too busy getting ready for the breakfast crowd. He told us we’d have to wait until his shift ended at seven o’clock, if we wanted a ride. As the apartment was further away than ever we plumped down at a sticky brown table, my quivering gut pressing against it, to begin our wait. Kevin brought us a plate of biscuits. We, mostly I, devoured them. Then it was back to waiting, almost as difficult as the walk had been. My eyes were sandpapery with exhaustion. Out the window beside our table ugly Tulsa’s cityscape slowly retracted night’s shadows and re-asserted its industrial-commercial blankness: trucks, billboards, crisscrossing power lines, birds dropping down and taking off again; bunches of brick and mortar splats. I nearly fell asleep staring at this junk, an urge I had to fight as I was a hideously loud snorer — the last thing needed was me performing a symphony of gasps, wheezes and groans for a roomful of disgusted breakfasters.
Somehow, some way the clock hanging over the entrance — heedless of my strained mental prompts — at last got its hands onto the 7 and 12. We returned to Virginia’s and Kevin’s apartment. I fell asleep on the living room floor, where I remained until early afternoon.
5
Day two of my “vacation” would turn out to be even more spellbinding than the first as unnoticed motifs and thematic designs began to emerge. But I have to be careful here. From the vantage of more than 20 years. it’s likely that what happened back then — fuzzed, fudged, truncated — is casting a negative shadow over the words I write now, nagging me to trick out my account with a few false concrete details behind the elegantly turned back of conscientious contemplation. That prig Honesty, though, keeps sternly insisting I weed out any artificial, seemingly life-like details: specific items of clothing, the layout of Virginia and Kevin’s apartment or locations at which this or that event occurred, things in fact misplaced by memory long ago. I do not, for instance, recall once having used the bathroom in Tulsa, though I clearly see a deep silver sink surrounded by green plastic counter, a large mirror above that and matching shower stall reflected directly across it. Until I began writing these unstructured notes the payphone I used to get hold of my friend George hadn’t been accessible in years, yet narrative need with its requirement I move smoothly from one incident to the next, has retrieved the device and put it in my hand.
I called George first thing after coming back to life. The wall on which the phone hung was ablaze with harsh sunlight as I listened to George telling me why he’d moved. His roommate, the guy who replaced me the year before, had gone to live with a rich lover. Unable to cover mounting bills, let alone meet rent, George had therefore had to abandon the place one night, taking only what he could cram in his car, and had shacked up with a boyfriend of his own. The existence of this boyfriend shocked and unsettled me since George hadn’t mentioned him in previous conversations! He suggested picking me up for dinner after work, to explain.
Whatever happened between the phone call and dinner is hard to get at through the sun’s blinding effects on that glaring wall beside the phone. Me and Virginia spent time sitting at an umbrella table by the apartment’s swimming pool and she either introduced herself to a girl or a girl introduced herself to Virginia, I can’t remember which; maybe I wasn’t even around for that. All I know is, somehow or other, this skank invited Virginia to hang out with her later on, and after 6 o’clock I waddled down to the parking lot where I got in George’s blue, oval-shaped car. He’d had it since I met him five years earlier, living in Norman as a faltering college student. Seeing the thing again, gave me a sense of continuity. George’s lank, brown-blonde hair had grown out somewhat since I last saw him, but his trademark old man glasses were the same. Their thick, black, pointy frames provided his nose ample intellectual severity, though this was mitigated by a large, sensuous mouth, perfect organ for impudence, not much on display that visit.
George motored us to a fast-food place where we consumed warm, paper-wrapped items from white bags, seated in his car. I realized after awhile that George wasn’t going to produce the new boyfriend. I asked why not. George got an awkward expression on his face, told me he didn’t think it was a good idea. I pushed and he surprised me by saying that the guy was just a very hateful person, a liar, an alcoholic and much worse. Ain’t love grand! But based on the way George was beating around this particular burning bush I felt, really, that he was afraid the guy would make fun of me to my face, comment how fat and disgusting he thought I was. It hurt too. Partly because I suspected George was as much embarrassed of me as for me; I felt from him, I thought, the same thing I’d sensed coming off Virginia the night before, the ambivalence of love. One never quite gets used to the funhouse reflections one catches of oneself in others’ eyes.
I’m pretty sure I asked George why he would let himself stay with somebody if they were as awful as this phantom boyfriend he described. George answered simply. He couldn’t afford to live on his own. Eventually talk moved to friends we had in common. He asked me about my mother whom he always referred to by her full name; and my sister, whom he also referred to by her full name. We spent an hour or so together that night, exchanging a good but forgettable amount of chat; smoking several cigarettes—it was practically a ritual with us. And though I loved seeing him again, also it was unsatisfying. I never could escape feeling that the important things never got said between us, or between me and any of the people I genuinely cared about. The moment always slipped away and I was left with the same old shallow see-you-soon-ever-afters. But really, how could I tell George I loved him, that he was like a brother to me, that I missed him and was sad because I felt trapped away from him; that I could very well see he was trapped too and I had no way of helping him? It was an awkward sort of conversation to try having in a sky-blue, fuel-efficient car while the sun started draining off.
It was nearly dark when George dropped me back off at the apartment complex. All was dim, bluish. That moment before night becomes official. I lumbered up the thick concrete stairs jutting from the side of the building and started down the wide landing toward Virginia’s and Kevin’s apartment. Before I got there, Kevin emerged and came straight at me. He’d been waiting. His eyes were inflamed. Clearly he’d been crying; the muscles of his cheeks sagged from spent rage.
Before I said anything he pelted me with a question. “Did Virginia ever tell you Dale is actually the father of her baby?” Dale, my no-longer AA friend, who wasn’t even in Oklahoma. The idea Dale could have fathered or better say mothered anything outside some weirdo drag queen persona verged on the ridiculous.
“I don’t think so,” I answered. Kevin said he didn’t either, but insisted he had to know for sure. He’d even called Dale out in San Francisco before I returned from dinner, to ask if he was the daddy! Dale of course hadn’t known what in hell he was talking about. I got a pathetic image of Kevin in my head, tearful, furious, calling Dale on that damn payphone downstairs and almost laughed.
What had happened was that, while I was out, he and Virginia stumbled into one of the worst fights of their entire relationship. As Kevin explained this to me I had a horrible feeling — a pulp writer might call it a “sinking” one — that his story was going to end with him saying he’d killed her. I mean, Kevin had shot someone before, hadn’t he? I cannot emphasize how weird the whole scene was. His swollen eyes were piggy-red. Beyond him the green-brown door of his apartment stood ominously open. As we approached I really did think I was about to be shown a bloodbath. Dull reality, however, had the situation under control and was hard at work normalizing things. Virginia, in the bathroom, was drying off after a quick (and suspicious) shower.
She told me later the whole thing had started as one of their usual arguments — about how she found life in Tulsa boring — and that it morphed into a full blown fight as to whether or not Kevin had any rights to their child. Virginia had said he didn’t. Things escalated until Kevin threatened to sue her for sole custody of the fetus once it ripped its way out of her. To which Virginia bitchily responded, “Oh Kevin, what makes you think the kid’s really yours?” Kevin demanded to know what she meant. All of us wondered what she meant. Virginia became vague, backtracked. Kevin refused to get off the subject. She then tossed out the first name she could think of, Dale, as potential father of her child. She wasn’t referring to annoying gay Dale though, rather some white trash friend of hers who also sported the name. She’d talked about him before, one of those guys she always kept on hand for favors. Kevin tried forcing Virginia to take back the blurt, assure him he was her spawn’s true progenitor. Virginia became totally furious and screamed at him to leave her alone, but he wouldn’t so she locked herself in the bathroom, as she would seven months later, the day she gave birth to their daughter all on her own, trying to elude a couple of vigilant nurses determined to make her stay in bed and follow hospital protocol. Undeterred by any concrete or societal barrier Kevin took a screwdriver and simply removed the bathroom door from hinges and frame. The big green thing was still leaning against a paneled wall of the living room when I walked in. While I’d intuitively known this would happen, because Virginia is Virginia and I had no way of escaping, I hadn’t realized just how blatantly unashamedly sordid it would get, and was genuinely shocked. Also pissed. Kevin calmly re-hung the bathroom door, went to his bedroom and remained there until leaving for work a couple hours later.
After toweling and brushing her hair Virginia donned a robe, came out to the living room, turned on the television, flopped down in front of it — there was no furniture — nd pulled a notebook from somewhere, in which she started a written conversation with me, because she didn’t want Kevin overhearing. She concluded her version of everything described above by saying how she was specifically proud she’d thrown a hairbrush at Kevin after he took down the bathroom door. Was I supposed to applaud this? In my angriest scrawl I reminded Virginia she’d promised me before I came to Tulsa, that there would be no fighting!! Exclamation point! Second exclamation point! She apologized, but went right on scribbling about her and Kevin’s relationship. Also showed me a letter Kevin’s sister had written her.
As I recall, the distinguished judge smarmed something or other about how she of course welcomed a new addition to the family, but no one would be able to celebrate until everybody was fully satisfied the baby was really Kevin’s! No offense was intended, she soothed, though if Virginia refused the judge’s very simple reasonable request for proof of patrimony how could anyone in the family be certain Virginia wasn’t just trying to use Kevin to get a dose of relative affluence? The lady rounded things up quite professionally by saying she was convinced any momentary unpleasantness could be settled rationally to everyone’s satisfaction, sincerely yours.
Wow, I thought as I handed those pages back to Virginia, that is one condescending-ass letter. What made Virginia particularly angry was Kevin’s having taken his sister’s side in the debate, saying the request really did seem valid and most understandable. Well, Virginia didn’t understand and had no intention of proving anything. Frankly, she was glad Kevin’s family didn’t believe the baby was his, because she didn’t want Kevin having any sort legal connection to her child. I wrote in the notebook that eventually they’d want it and she’d be forced to let them be involved, because they were rich, powerful, not to mention white. Virginia, none of those things, said I was wrong. The law, she wrote, sided entirely with mothers in these matters when documentation was scant.
By the time Kevin left for work it was night, thank goodness. Virginia, still seething, seemed intent on defying Kevin in some way, so she insisted we go out.
6
Through the fog of gappy memory Virginia and I approached a blank door answered by a large, shirtless man. He had long dark hair and a thick beard; his bulging gut was unpleasantly fur-dusted. Virginia asked if the girl she’d met earlier at the pool was around. Looking bored, if not slightly contemptuous, the man left us on the doorstep, to get her. The unoccupied living room before us was lit by a blue bulb positioned somewhere out of the door’s sightline. A hot reek of instant mashed potatoes belched out at us, suggesting The Manson Family had dined recently. I seem to remember a black-and-white zebra-striped couch against the back wall and, on the end table beside it, a dead lamp with leopard spotted shade. But surely this ludicrous décor was merely the product of my imagination?
A girl with shiny black hair, in her late teens, joined us after a longish wait, languid and dull as the man who’d answered the door—were they brother and sister? Lovers? I never found out. Rather than invite us in the girl took us on a tour of the apartment complex, down walkways, around the swimming pool. She gossiped nastily about people who meant nothing to Virginia or me, gesturing at this and that building, where presumably terrible things went on behind closed doors. Her copious, casual biliousness was made laughably repellent by a hard country twang. Without breaking the flow of chatter she asked us, mostly Virginia, if we “liked to party,” saying she knew a guy who lived nearby, though he was pretty strange if that kind of thing bothered us. Virginia was game. The girl led us on yet another sweep of the complex, across a courtyard streaked with window-light, up a stairway to another bland door—home of the strange “partier.”
And he was weird. He had a black eye-patch, wore his denim jacket with fleece-lined collar even indoors, as well as a black cowboy hat. We were taken to a back room with a couple chairs, a bureau, a shelf. Stacked in front of the room’s single window were a bunch of plastic-wrapped cardboard flats, as if straight from some warehouse. They contained cans and cans of ether. On top of them lay a pair of binoculars trained directly at the courtyard where Virginia, the girl and I had been only moments before. Did he suck down massive amounts of ether while spying on the neighbors?
Again, though, in the present, as with the furnishings in the girl’s apartment before, I can’t help wondering if all this was for real. The ether and binoculars are absolutely there, I’m certain, perfectly set in memory’s preservative, but it’s possible that the man’s eye-patch is my lurid contribution. And I have a nagging feeling his fleece-lined jacket and cowboy hat may be derivations of high school experiences, substitutions borrowed from the backs of “Goat Ropers”, as we called the surly baby red necks whom my group sometimes butted heads with in the Smoking Section, allotted us students in the permissive 1980s. Perhaps over time Ether Man somehow had fused in my head with images of those innocent hicks who, in my teenage years, had seemed such an annoying reminder that I was trapped in Nowheresville Oklahoma.
Everyone sat down. Virginia and I both went to the floor (I tried never to plump down on people’s furniture for fear my immense weight would break it); the twangy teenage girl took a chair against the wall. Ether Man sat in a stuffed black arm chair directly across from the girl (putting Virginia and I between them) and brought forth the implicitly promised marijuana. I didn’t like to get high, or drink for that matter, so I passed the joint to Virginia. Issuing a “what-the-hell” shrug she raised the spliff to her childishly curled lips, simultaneously bending her head toward it as if to meet the thing halfway. Her approach, I noticed, was marked by a slight awkwardness, despite her cheerful expression, suggesting that though Virginia was trying to convey a sense of casual cocksurity, deep down she was pretty uncertain about the situation. Reminded me of Virginia at thirteen, so different than Virginia a few hours earlier, after that fight with Kevin, looking very grown up as she stared herself down in the bathroom mirror, yanking a brush through her shower-moist hair.
Once she started to feel inebriated the self-consciousness vanished. She grew loud, excited; brayed at bad jokes or flakey comments which might not have been intended as jokes. It wasn’t embarrassing exactly, but her act was a little off. She was working too hard at having a good time. It was strange to me since, usually, Virginia didn’t care what people thought of her behavior. Feeling expansive, exhilarated even, Virginia hoisted herself up on her knees and twisted around, so that she seemed to be kneeling at the feet of the teenage girl we’d come with. Teasingly, she began then carefully to inspect the girl’s ripped jeans. High school rebels never change. The girl had scrawled various symbols and words all over each leg in black marker: the names of rock bands, an ankh and tortured faces; a banal, Motley Crue-style pentagram, etc. Virginia ran a finger over each bold slash or curlicue, saying how much she liked the pentagram.
“I’m a very open minded person,” the girl responded. “I hope this doesn’t bother you but … I’m a Satanist?” The way she raised her voice uncertainly at the end of what ought to have been an intimidating assertion, combined with her near bored country accent, made this admission so whoppingly trash-girl dumb I wanted to fall over laughing. Obviously she’d just gotten that symbol off some dumb hair metal band album cover and wished to come off super hardcore, hoping it would impress Virginia, whom absurdly the girl assumed must be sophisticated. After that I wrote the kid off completely. Virginia didn’t though. Nor did Ether Man; and probably for similar reasons. With a face far straighter than her interest could possibly have been Virginia said she wasn’t the least bit bothered by the girl’s worshipping The Dark Prince and seemed to quiz her seriously about her beliefs. I wish I could remember the hilarious details of that surely lesbian-tinged exchange — the tell being how the girl kept flip-flapping her lush, singularly unwitchy black hair — but it’s gone now.
Unfortunately, I can’t remember anything else about the scene either. I know, it’s ridiculous bringing on colorful characters like one-eyed Ether Man and Satanist Girl only to have them suddenly fade out, but such are memory’s fickle machinations. Virginia and I trudged back to her apartment not long after and I couldn’t stop ranting about how stupid that teenage girl was with her vicious gossip and fake Satanism. Noncommittally, Virginia said she thought the girl was okay. Seemed annoyed I refused to get off the subject. At the time I had thought she was irked because she was attracted to that idiot, which I didn’t say, but I suspect the real reason was because she couldn’t afford to burn a bridge unless it was unavoidable: Satanist Girl represented a contingency plan should Virginia and Kevin’s troubles prove irresolvable, which was likely. It never occurred to me then to consider how important having a way out of situations, any way out, might actually be for her.
7
The next day Kevin drove me home. Virginia wanted to come too, but Kevin wouldn’t let her. He was afraid that once we got back to Norman—where she had family, friends — she’d leave him. Lamely, I said it wasn’t right leaving her all by herself when basically she was being held hostage. Kevin didn’t care. I know I ought to have insisted, but I was desperate to get back to my crappy bedroom and I just didn’t feel like I was the person to fix her situation.
Also, I was mad. Virginia had involved me in her sordid domestic problems after a vow of No Drama. Part of me wondered if she’d done so on purpose, used my being around in order to make such scenes extra mortifying; maybe for kicks. Thinking it over now, through countless layers of remembering and re-remembering, I feel certain she wouldn’t have had things any other way than they were. After her big blow up with Kevin over the parentage of her baby, when she and I were scribbling back and forth about it in one of her damn notebooks, I suggested many times that she end things and get as far away from Kevin as she could, but Virginia kept insisting how much she loved him, how he wasn’t only some convenient shelter from the ongoing storm of expensive grownup responsibilities. I’ve come to feel that even if somehow I’d gotten her out of Tulsa that day, the liberation likely wouldn’t have taken; she’d have found her way back to Kevin eventually, because she enjoyed the turmoil; the messiness was love to her.
After hugging Virginia goodbye I gladly put a big bunch of sunny miles between us, contemplating the whole drive back what a hilarious story this would be to tell other friends.
So what happened, right? Well, I never saw Kevin again. Shortly after my visit to Tulsa he reverted to drugs and lost his job at that pancake place, by which point he was too fried-out to get another; and Virginia sure wasn’t looking. Things got so bad with him he resorted to having teeth extracted in order to get meds, further destroying his once handsome face. When money got truly tight he attempted holding up a convenience store, but was stopped by the armed clerk whom, somehow, Kevin managed to convince along with the arresting cop called to the scene, was a crime he’d only committed out of sheer desperation, because he was jobless with a child on the way. Amazingly, according to Virginia, they’d felt sorry for him and no charges were pressed!
But he landed in prison again anyway. Was inevitable. He stole a book of checks from his grandmother for a defunct bank and forged a streak around Tulsa, nicely echoing the embezzlement theme of years before. His sentence this time was quite lengthy, because by then Kevin’s luck had run out. Not long into his incarceration he had a dispute with another inmate over a candy bar and was killed. He didn’t even live long enough to mourn missing the birth of his child, a girl.
The baby, by the way, obviously was Kevin’s. She had his green eyes, blond hair, sharp yet somehow snub nose. Unsurprisingly, Kevin’s bereaved parents suddenly were anxious to claim the child. Before it had seemed a terrible blight on the family name, now she was all they had left. Or so Virginia said after moving back to Norman and resuming her old life. Sitting in my mother’s living room she’d explained to me, between smiles directed at the baby stalled in its stroller, that because Kevin’s parents hadn’t been interested in the baby before his demise, she had no intention of sharing her with them after. Snootily, she’d suggested she wasn’t sure she even wanted her child around such a trashy family — after all, one son had offed himself; the other, a drug addict, had died in prison. What kind of track record was that? And Virginia figured she was legally allowed to cut them out, because she hadn’t listed Kevin as the father on baby Cordelia’s birth certificate. I tried telling Virginia it wouldn’t work. If these people were determined to get a piece of that child they’d get it. They were rich, she wasn’t, end of story. Besides, I continued, grandparents were a pretty good thing for babies to have in any case. As with everything Virginia wished not to hear the matter was breezily dismissed. But it came back to haunt her. Kevin’s parents refused to be brushed aside because of mere paperwork. They took Virginia to court and she was forced to have the baby’s patrimony tested, getting them basic visitation rights. Told her so.
Baby Cordelia in tow, Virginia began couch-surfing her way through the weeks and months ahead. Kevin’s parents, who now had an official say in the way their grandchild was raised, were appalled. They considered the shady hoods Virginia socialized with a bad if not dangerous influence; complained that Virginia was putting their dead son’s child at risk. At least Virginia had obtained a home base due to qualifying for Section Eight housing, though she rarely holed up there. I remember a fun summer afternoon I spent with her the day she moved in. Everything was scattered throughout the rooms, still in boxes. Unfurnished, the place seemed large. Its built-in dresser drawers, closet doors and kitchen cabinets were painted glossy black, which I thought gave the place a touch of sophistication. We ate fast food standing around a chairless table while the baby shouted at us from her crib. Such a blue, airy day. I had felt filled with a sense that “real life” had finally started for both of us. I told her this. She wondered if she was going to be a good mother. I said I was certain she would be, and meant it. Virginia obviously loved Cordelia more than anything, was her only topic of conversation. What made me optimistic was her fierce denunciation of corporal punishment, because of her mother. Whatever else, that represented progress.
Kevin’s parents, though, didn’t think she was anything like a good enough mother, and soon went on to pry Cordelia out of her grip. First they sued for joint custody, claiming Virginia could not be fully trusted to care for the child without mature oversight. Then they got the whole shebang. To Virginia, the legal process was positively unreal. She refused to show up for appointed hearings; seemed to believe nothing bad could happen, because the rights of the mother were absolutely sacrosanct. But when she got arrested for possessing marijuana she found out otherwise. Full custody was coolly transferred to the grandparents. This too was probably inevitable. But was it fair? Sure, Virginia hung around with a lot of questionable characters—such as me—but their son Kevin was sleaziest of the lot! The only difference between Virginia’s and Kevin’s parents was a little white-polished wealth, which in the eyes of the law and everybody apparently was monumental, the sign of true moral authority. Of course I got all this from Virginia, so who knows if it’s the absolute truth or some self-serving version of it? I mean her own father, so she said, supported the other grandparents’ getting custody of Cordelia.
Virginia and I spoke a final time on the phone, a decade after that trip to Tulsa. I told her I didn’t think we could be friends anymore, for reasons unimportant to these jottings. I said I hoped she understood. “I think you’re crazy,” was her response and she hung up. Irony of ironies: she thought I was crazy. It’s strange imagining Virginia’s daughter Cordelia today, whom I last saw as a toddler. She’s a full grown woman. Did she go to college? Get married? Have kids herself? Does she see her mother? Does she love Virginia with the same blind devotion that Virginia had loved her own mom? I’ll never find out.
In the two gruelingly swift decades since then my yellow bed sheet, as well as the worn foam mattress it covered, were lost. And something has happened to my memories. A stark line has emerged between Then and Now. Things from back Then no longer seem solid. Every particle has been altered by the aging process, blunting events to a mere gauzy film of what they once were. Virginia, Kevin, George — hell, even Satanist Girl — I see Now as colorful representations of ghosts I have been, noxious projections of aspects of myself. For how true can my glib account of these people really be in the end? Portraits filled with gaping holes, like life. Any part of what I’ve told you could have gone wrong in the telling. A slight distortion here, a second party’s lie or mistake there, blithely used by me to solder one bit of information to the next — and my entire work collapses into fiction. It’s all right, though. That way the real people behind the bars of my prose are granted a kind of reprieve, a chance to remake themselves without me around to spoil things.
And even I finally managed to escape myself or parts of myself anyway. I lost weight. I started running. I quit smoking. I became an employed, taxpaying citizen of these United States. I stopped running. I started again; re-gained weight and lost it once more. I paddled away from youth’s stagnant shallows and glided into the sunny, wide, blue-green vista of middle age. Beneath me, through crystalline water, the past’s vivid flora and fauna undulate with balletic grace, mixing together — the pettiness, cruelty, black comic horrors — ll that strange into Shakespeare’s coral and pearls, those miraculous signs of space-time’s fumbling attempts to animate itself.
I feel now that I’ve come to understand something essential: memory as self-invention, rendering the rememberer both above the past and one with it, melding him to its constituent parts. In other words I’m the car driving along a highway. I’m Virginia’s damp hair, the blue light emanating from a stranger’s apartment. I’m a serial rapist waiting in his tiny orange car as well as the dead criminal lover. I’m a pair of binoculars near a window sill, the gleam in a fragmented foyer’s lost mirror. By merging with these displaced, free-floating items I nearly am able to sustain the illusion that I’m experimenting toward a life truly aligned with the values of a humane consciousness; gaining on an immortality which, in the long run, may not even be to my taste.
Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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