Still, I was shaking, up here and alone.
The next day, it was the same—no news, still shaking, in Seattle and alone—and I had to be at work. I was working at a derelict publishing company in South Seattle, producing really crap trade magazines, and that Monday, I was in trouble.
Or, rather, everyone else was.
I don’t know why I even showed up at work. In a matter of minutes, my boss, David, who was this huge, paternal Chicano from San Diego, saw I was in the shit and—given our nature—even though it started in a shouting match with both of us squaring off, chicken-chested and about to fight (and he would have killed me, because he’s huge), it ended with his arm around me and me crying my eyes out and telling him the whole story, and him telling me how he’d lost his own brothers and one of his sons. Mexicans in crisis.
By noon, he told me to get home and take some time off, but I decided it was finally time to find help. I couldn’t do this anymore.
I needed therapy.
Fuck that; I needed hospitalization. There are some doors you can’t go through alone, and I’d already been through ten. Couldn’t do the macho shit and endure on my own anymore.
I started seeing a therapist because she was in both my neighborhood and coverage, and I didn’t realize until our third or fourth meeting that she specialized in “coming out,” making the transition from a heterosexual to homosexual identity.
Fantastic, I thought. Not only did the Derek thing happen, now I have to dress better.
And that’s where Steph came in.
PART II THE UNWEDDED
CHAPTER 11 It Was Just One of Those Things
I met Steph during my recovery from sinus surgery, about a year after Derek’s accident. Derek’s accident had opened me up in a way that I had never considered possible, exposed a vein of fragility that was still open to the elements. He had recovered, physically, from the fall and the surgery, but he was still listless and undefined as a human being and refused to talk to anyone even more resolutely. Mom and Robert took him back to Houston to recover, and he spent three months sleeping all day and watching HBO all night until Robert finally had enough, said it was time to get to doing something: either return to school or get to work.
Derek, of course, tried to get back to school, against all of the family’s wishes and sense of doom, and for a few months, he tried to insinuate himself back into the curriculum, but of course it never worked. For a while he was lost once again in the same lifestyle, but by then, even his “friends” were wary of him, afraid of his capacity for self-destruction. In the end, Derek wound up in San Antonio, living with Dan, working at a Starbucks and a liquor store, part-time. He was miserable, different.
He was suffering from an undiagnosed traumatic brain injury, but no one knew it then.
We all thought he was just terribly ashamed of himself, how far from grace he’d fallen.
And me, personally, being left out the way I was, being so far away in Seattle, I felt a heartbreak like I’d never known, my neurology half-fried and my ache to see and talk to my brothers like a naked wound.
It didn’t help that I didn’t sleep for a year, suffering from polyps and allergies that were finally diagnosed and, because I finally had the health insurance, slated for removal.
My mother and sister Marge insisted on coming up and taking care of me for the surgery, and initially I resisted—I’d gone this long doing things on my own; I would do this, as well, I figured, but no: They insisted on being here, and dear God were they correct. I was as weak as a newborn joey, that morning after the surgery. And the kindness and caring they gave me for two days, it really broke me open because I hadn’t been around family for so long, and after the incident with Derek, I had no idea how much I had been missing it.
So, a week later, after they’d left, there I was, bundled up on my couch in my apartment in Seattle and high on Vicodin and Percocet, and the Three Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s, answering ads online out of boredom on a borrowed computer and someone else’s unsecured Wi-Fi. This had been a bad time, as I’d been living in Seattle for more than fifteen years, and it felt like one day I looked around and everyone had just gone. Normally never at a loss for friends or work comrades, I suddenly found myself having less and less in common with the people I worked with in the print publishing industry as a graphic designer. Although I had moved to Seattle to become a writer, I never developed enough courage to write for the many publications I designed. Eventually, publishing became polarized: Magazines and newspapers shrank into mudpools of rednecks and old-school blue-collar printers while electronic publishing scooped up all the young kids who were enthusiastic about learning Internet design, and I became stuck in the middle. My closest work associates were now unlikeable working detritus, geoplanarians tired and broken down and uninteresting—not exactly the sort of people you’d want to grab a pint with after work. I had loose networks of other friends, good friends, but no one I saw regularly, since we no longer worked together. So I was often alone, and I was becoming quite lonely when I met Steph, online.
We could never bring ourselves to admit it to anyone that we’d met online, that Craigslist had been our method of introduction, but it was. Or at least I had sense enough to be ashamed about it; Steph never was. Caveat emptor should be Craigslist’s coat of arms.
The problem with dating people online, at least as I had seen it, was the lack of context, like a dependent clause dropped in the middle of a sentence without punctuation. It’s disruptive, creates nonsense. Where does it belong? It’s going to mess everything up because it doesn’t fit anywhere. You need the punctuation to set apart the dependency, tell you where it relates. You meet someone at work, or through mutual friends, and there’s a decorum involved: You know the same people, so you have a level of social responsibility to both the person you’re dating and the people you know in common. There’s a framework within the social contract. It’s John Locke.
Not so, when you meet someone on a dating site. There’s no framework. So you can be the most terrible person in the world, and there are no consequences, except you never see that person again. Or, if they’re a schmegegge, then they ask you out again.
That’s what you get online, sometimes. I’ve heard the stories. Online, I would have to woo girls that I felt were beneath me, but who wouldn’t give me the time of day. The first girl I met for a date came back to my apartment for a bottle of red wine after we had dinner at a nearby restaurant, and right in the middle of watching The Exorcist, she excused herself suddenly and left. At first, I thought, Hmm. Perhaps not the best movie for a first date, since it had happened right after the crucifix-in-the-vagina scene, but then I realized she had taken all my prescription medication from my bathroom. Case in point.
So Steph and I settled on an origin myth and stuck to it: We met over work, on a shared project. Like Jesus and Mary. So there.
I insisted on it, and she would always be annoyed with me when I did, felt like I was ashamed of her, because she did most of her shopping and flirting and living through Craigslist, while I knew it for the dangerous electronic flea market that it was, and has remained.
I suppose I should have run away when I heard her ringtone.
Our first date was postponed indefinitely when Steph stalled our electronic flirting with an e-mail telling me that it would never work, and that she preferred women anyway. I remember she phrased it like, “Your parents gave you a chromosome that I’m incompatible with.”
Hunh, I thought. Well, I can stop responding to that one. I thought it was a disguised method of saying she wasn’t fond of non-Europeans. Still, I had a thing for tomboys, then.
Three weeks later, I received an enthusiastic invitation to lunch one Saturday afternoon, no mention of or mea culpa about the prior e-mail, just a completely optimistic and brilliantly happy message asking me to lunch in downtown Seattle.
“Sure,” I said. “I have very little going on that day.” And it was true. In my isolation, I had
taken to drinking far too much with Dougherty. But we didn’t drink so much on Saturday mornings. Not yet, anyhow.
But the severity of Steph’s shift should have been my biggest indication that I was headed into troubled waters; how quickly her mind had changed—and the extremity to which it had changed—was a clear indication of issues. I see that now. I see a lot of things now that I didn’t before.
Still, I was oddly passive back then, told myself I just didn’t have any preferences, which was a half-truth. I was still just a slice of bread, had not yet caramelized my sugars into toast, if you don’t mind the metaphor. Hadn’t reached my transfiguration, like Jesus.
She drove up in a huge green Jeep Grand Cherokee, a sort of SUV that has trouble with the claustrophobic Seattle streets. I have a clear image in my mind of that green behemoth turning a distant corner and doing a slow crawl to the front steps of my apartment block as I stood waiting that Saturday morning, dressed in pinstripe trousers and a T-shirt and light jacket, pacing while I awaited the consequences of my online decision making, embarrassed that my life had devolved to even this.
I was smoking a Gauloises, the French cigarette, but not inhaling, as I have asthma, and after a few serious attempts at developing a smoking habit, I had to settle for the cigarette as an accoutrement and nothing else. In fact, during this whole period, it was all about the smoking accoutrements: My friend Philippe had taken it upon himself to introduce me to the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon and they had left a stylistic impression. I loved the cigarette cases, the Zippo lighters, the Gauloises cigarettes, but I was damned if I could smoke them. So I puffed on them for flavor and held them in affected sangfroid, just inches from my lips, feeling tres, tres cool.
Or, at least pretending to feel that cool. I was taking after my sisters from long ago and reinventing myself as a poseur.
And then Steph rolled to a stop. Her window came down. And a redheaded pixie with bright blue eyes was at the wheel, hair pinned to the side with a barrette, a snaggletooth pressing down on her lower lip as she smiled coquettishly.
Oh, shit, I thought. This is her. That was the trap. The slim-hipped gentile promised to every son of an immigrant family as per the American Dream—Lois Lane for Superman. Diane Keaton for Michael Corleone and Woody Allen. Mary Jane for Spider-Man. Betty for the Hulk.
I needed to be careful.
The interior of her Jeep looked like she lived in it half the time, and I felt uncomfortable clearing a space in the passenger seat but eventually managed to carve an area large enough for me to sit, in the middle of bills, old makeup compacts, cereal bar wrappers, and the discarded indications of a serious coffee habit. When I finally settled in, I navigated her downtown and near a sculpture park she was interested in seeing by the revitalized waterfront, and she found parking. She lived north of the city, and I lived right downtown, so I knew the confounding intricacies of the downtown streets better than she did. As I emerged from the truck, I noticed an old sock in the street and I was unsure whether it belonged there or if it had once lived in the Jeep—such was the nature of her backseat—and argued with myself as to whether I should mention it. Perhaps a second sock existed, inside, equally caked with dirt and soot and pebbles. Maybe I was creating a sock tragedy by not mentioning it. I just didn’t know.
I decided it would go unmentioned, and as we walked away from the Jeep, she received a call on her cell phone, and in a few simple notes, I recognized her ringtone: “Miss Otis Regrets.” I stopped dead in my tracks and stared at her while she silenced the phone and plunged it back into her voluminous handbag, uncertain if that was her idea of a test, or a joke.
“That’s ‘Miss Otis Regrets,’ isn’t it? You know that song? Cole Porter?” I asked her.
“Of course I know what it is,” she replied.
“You . . . you do know what that song is about, don’t you?” I asked, hesitantly.
She gave me another of her big snaggletoothed smiles and thrust her arm through my crooked elbow, my hands deep in the pockets of my coat, and she pulled me along, laughing, with me unsure as to whether I was headed toward my execution, or just a friendly lunch with a bisexual second-wave feminist suffragette, like you sometimes did on the West Coast.
The sculpture park was relatively new at this point, and the groundskeeping reflected this, left quite a bit to be desired. Still, it was a waterfront installation, a part of the revitalization and renewal project for an area of downtown Seattle that had been previously left unused, a no-man’s-land between a rail line and the Puget Sound shore, left derelict and un-touristed.
It was an easy walk from my neighborhood, but, being an ex-pat Texan, I hardly walked anywhere without reason, unless there was booze at the end of it. Certainly not for exercise. Today was no different, and we wandered about the place, which felt half-completed, partially abandoned, or simply badly designed as an urban project, and meandered about in full audition for the other.
She was a secret smoker, as she worked for a medical research firm and felt her boss, whom she held in the highest estimation, would be terribly disappointed in her if she found out her habit, so my smelling like a French gangster bothered her very little.
That afternoon, that audition, was very gentle, witty like a Noel Coward one-act, as we playfully teased each other and tried to sound out each other’s definitions, boundaries, and issues, the usual kittenness of a first date, and something to which I wasn’t much accustomed.
I’d never really “dated,” I began to realize about myself around this time.
My romantic intrusions were usually a result of drunken workplace fumblings, out for drinks with a group of people and hey, here’s an empty room . . . why not? Terribly inelegant, sure, but lots of fun when you’re twenty-five.
Otherwise, my long-term relationships had evolved out of preservation and planning: I like you, you’re a poor artist/musician/craftsperson/painter like me, let’s move in together and see how long we can stand each other. I think the term is bohemian, when the herpes stays within a certain element of the artsy part of a city. So to speak.
Anyhow, here, with Steph, was one of the first times in my life I was making a choice to “date” someone, to meet that person for a ritualized meal, one on one, and flirt and engage and see where it would lead, over coffee or drinks or the soup du jour, because I was finally independent, stable, and secure enough to make a choice, and not have the choice made for me by circumstance or poverty.
That first afternoon, we were both on our best behavior and we were both quite adorable if nervous, and we eventually strolled downtown and had lunch at a cliffside tavern (there are some steep embankments in Seattle), and then, again, in the middle of our conversation I had another indication that maybe things were not quite what they seemed, when I realized that Steph was checking out the waitress.
“Are you . . . are you checking out the waitress?” I asked her.
“What? No, of course not. But she looks great in that A-line skirt and peasant blouse.”
I thought she looked like a sack of blond potatoes, but maybe that spoke to her European root vegetable/famine genetics, the way a good salsa spoke to mine.
Things were quiet for a minute, and I heard Steph mutter, “pink and tan,” under her breath, and I thought she was going to order a drink.
“Great,” I said, “I’ll have a black and tan. What’s in a pink and tan?” I asked, a bit loudly, and Steph hid her face in her menu and I looked over her shoulder to see a tourist that had seen far too much of the inside of a tanning booth, looking leathery and hard-ridden, with Day-Glo pink lipstick to match her tube top, and she gave me a hard look. The man sitting next to her also gave me a hard stare, in case my comment stepped in the way of his possibility for sex because I’d inadvertently wandered into the minefield of his date’s insecurities.
I hid behind my own menu and began giggling, and we had our first true bonding moment, over someone else’s pain.
A minute later, I orde
red that beer anyway, the black and tan, because it seemed to be a knock-off Irish public house that we were in, and I sensed the atmosphere chill considerably. Steph ordered a chai tea for herself, and I had my “beer cocktail,” named after the British occupation of Ireland, as goes one of its origin myths. While I calmed down a bit on the first date, she became quiet and uncomfortable, as the drink order somehow triggered something for her.
We continued to see each other. We developed an odd chemistry that could ignite only between two misanthropes, two outsiders.
We loved e-mailing and texting every bit of cleverness back and forth so that working became a distraction, and I think for a little while there, we were able to break free of the Craigslist curse, the sense of “You’ll do,” and move into the “Wow, I’m really happy I met you” phase, though Steph was unusually secretive about some really strange things in her life.
She considered herself a writer, was rather impressed with my tenacity and dedication in that I kept writing on my own, quietly and in secret, while I continued working as a graphic designer. She ran a writers’ group, she said, and asked if I would be interested in joining.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I tried that once. It’s not for me.”
“Why not?” she asked, genuinely curious. “It helps a lot of people to have a deadline or a goal, some kind of obligation that keeps them writing.”
“I’m not on any kind of schedule, really,” I said. “And the writing is kind of compulsive for me. The stories are just there and I have to get them down in order to quiet the narrative in my head. That’s why I do it at work, or at night. It’s like a humming or a buzzing that doesn’t go away until I ground it.”
“And you can’t share it with others?”
My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Page 9