“Well, you’re certainly seeming wretched.”
“I should have moved in with Roxy—”
“With her roommate? You’re both too old for that. Richard, she is not the answer to everything, not anymore. She made that choice.”
“I should have figured something out.”
“How’s your shingles?”
“I should be a roofer. Actually, it’s clearing up, finally.”
“That olive leaf extract is amazing. It helps with blood pressure, too. It’s also supposed to help with cognitive decline, though I see no evidence that it’s helping you with that yet. Seriously, you have to deal with your stress. One step you could take would be to let Roxy go and move on.”
“I can’t.”
Ally’s too angry at Roxy to discuss me having any hope. She doesn’t buy that couples can get back together successfully after a breakup. You don’t know any who have? They can. End of conversation.
I’m not supposed to be thinking about Roxy somehow? I can’t change my feelings. I can’t move anything. In fact, the Greek philosopher Zeno pointed out that in order to get from one place to another, one first would have to get halfway there, but before getting to that initial halfway point, you’d have to get halfway to an earlier halfway point—and so on—in constantly divisible halfway points through minuscule infinitely. Since we can never get halfway to any halfway point because there’s always a newer halfway point, then we can never move to any new space. That is my heart.
8:30 PM
Just fed them. It’s like trying to catch a roach with greased chopsticks. I’m keeping their bowls separate so that I know they’ve both eaten. But by the time I’d gotten food into one bowl, they were both at it, pushing each other, and when I got food in the second bowl, they both rushed to get to that bowl. Then one would decide to rush back, and this would start a whole series of the two of them chasing after the food bowls and pushing each other out of the way as if battling for a salt lick rolling in the dirt at a Soviet gulag. They are expending so many calories with this feeding system that it’s burning off its own usefulness. I don’t know whose bowl is whose, and, for that matter, there were two different types of dry dog food, and I didn’t know which food was for which, so I might have been the cause of the frenzy. But still, they were totally undignified. I yelled at them to settle down, but after taking one deep breath with which to shout, I had to get outside for fresh air.
That’s it for tonight. I’ve done my duty. They can shit and piss all they like in their feral zoo. I don’t want to touch them. As barbarian as they are when they’re eating, they might be even more wild with me if I try walking them. I’m sure Irene will be back tomorrow or the next day, and everything’ll be back to abnormal.
December 28, 10:15 AM
Put some food in their bowls, fresh water. So gross I can’t take it. It’s hell inside Irene’s.
Speaking of hell—Will correctly predicted that “Johnny Cash moment” in the jail, Sheriff. I did write a song about that Richard Ramirez visit. It’s called “Lawyers and Mothers.” It’s on my album. The style of it, we think—or hoped—was kind of like if Eddie Vedder mixed with Bono and Neil Young and made a solo album. Man, I played every club in town back then, got so close to record deals with A&M, Geffen, and Virgin, despite my lousy managers. It felt great—for Roxy, too—who energized me every note of the way. The retail chain Tower Records picked up my record. I even did an in-store acoustic concert at their famed Sunset Boulevard location. They wheeled the racks of CDs around to make room for a stage and an audience. Put up huge photos and posters of the album, my name on the marquee outside. I played guitar and sang. My producer, who was the accordion player with Oingo Boingo, played. My friend Scott played tenor sax, and I had a percussionist. So many friends took the day off to be there. Roxy took two personal days because she knew we’d be celebrating late into the night.
Turned out to be my last gig ever, however, though I didn’t know that at the time. That Tower Records store sat right across the street from Geffen. So many times, they’d promised to come see me play—but this gig meant for sure. During every song, as I played and sang, all I did was look past my friends and fans, trying to see if the dude from Geffen had shown up. That’s not where I wanted my head to be. Geffen didn’t show—again.
Tower Records is gone now. Their dream ended, too. That spot is now a clothing store.
When I first got to L.A., I happened to meet Ray Manzarek, keyboard player from the Doors, at an Armstrong Home Improvement store. I stood behind him in the checkout line trying to figure out how to start a conversation, while he paid for three hanging plants. He was very friendly. In the parking lot he told me, “You can’t wake up every day, Richard, and say, ‘I hope I become a rock star today.’ You have to say, ‘I’m going to write a great song today.’ That’s what Jim and I did.” And that’s what I tried to do, Sheriff. That’s what I tried.
I walked away from teaching after seven years, inspired to pursue my music career. I’d been teaching kids to pursue their dreams, but I hadn’t fully committed to my own yet. Now I’m a “former musician”—only in L.A. can you become a “former musician.” If you don’t make it big, there’s no way to make decent money.
I’m a “former teacher,” too. Former dreamer. Former boyfriend. Former sane person. Current nothing. Certainly, choosing fonts and moving triangles around a backlit screen for people as a graphic designer isn’t what I’d pictured for my life.
What can I do for money now? I was a damn good teacher. But I’m not going back. Bottom line: the kids are great, the adults suck. Year after year they hand you a new, stifling curriculum, the result of weeklong conferences in Palm Springs or Santa Barbara, each just another political ploy to keep downtown and state administrators’ positions rationalized and well paid with no thought of teacher innovation.
Besides that, a lot of the teachers were awful—lazy, often not educated in the fields they were teaching, entirely untrained for the classroom atmosphere, too many with their own personal or political agendas, with no sense of how to teach, or inspire, or empower via the subject matter at hand.
A school system that can’t even keep the restrooms maintained—or safe—is not somewhere one wants to invest one’s life unless it’s a divine vocation. Yes, I left for music, but I also considered myself a conscientious objector.
On top of it, my teaching assistant that year, Luis, was murdered outside of his apartment building. Gang members followed him home from an ATM and shot him seven times in the chest when he got out of his car. His mother was visiting from Panama, her first time in the United States. She heard the gunfire. His funeral totaled me. I’d had a student die in each year that I taught. Then Luis. Life is very brief. It isn’t the length of the candle, it’s the fight of the flame against the whims of the breeze.
Roxy totally supported my decision to leave teaching at the time. Even she is working on her doctorate because she wants to move up to higher education and out of the K–12 system.
Was I right to leave that path, Sheriff? Do you think that our teachers are any better now than when you were young? Are the children safer? Are they better served now with regard to the basic knowledge necessary to strive and succeed? Are your kids in public school or private?
So . . . anyway, one of the songs is about the prison visit. You can hear it if or when we meet.
3:00 PM
Just got an e-mail from Roxy. Seeing her name in my inbox was like stepping out of the shower and being tasered. I have such fear of her saying that she doesn’t want to work things out or, worse, of her being condescending with friendliness. God. I don’t want to be pitied by anyone but myself.
Wasn’t good—a bunch of hairsplitting fuss about a New Year’s party we’d both been invited to, about how maybe we should attend at separate times so that no one’s uncomfortable. Who gets midnight? She does—because I wasn’t going to go anyway. No one would miss a sorry sack like me right now.
Not going to a dumb party shows how broken I am. But I don’t want a new year. And I can’t handle seeing her face, her eyes—like a drowning man’s last glimpse upward at the rippling sky.
I didn’t respond. Stasya told me not to. “Don’t be small,” she said. All I want to discuss is how we can try to work things out, the value of our seven years together, not the minutiae of our new social comings and goings. I’m cutting off all goings anyhow. Does she miss me? She did contact me, right?
December 29, 11:20 AM
Played it smart today. Before I went to Irene’s, I put on a painter’s mask and latex gloves that I had from when Roxy and I did my kitchen. I also put plastic grocery bags from Ralphs over my sneakers so I don’t have to clean my shoes after every visit anymore. The mask convinces me that the smell isn’t forming directly into a mass of cells that will encrust in my nasal passages, only to await the best moment to snap apart and shoot into my brain. I’m making a path for myself through the living room into the kitchen so that I can walk without having to step over crap or knock over piles. I also cleaned a small square of the kitchen floor near the sink where I can stand to wash their bowls and get their food and water together without feeling the living sludge slithering beneath my shoes.
I’m using Formula 409 “antibacterial” all-purpose cleaner. It brags about killing “99.9% of viruses & bacteria.” I can attest that the remaining 0.1% has a mighty life to it.
With every swirl of the paper towels, vibrations of stench scrape across my face as the linoleum is unearthed. It’s actually eggshell white under there. Of all the people who cannot handle a white kitchen floor. I feel like a cosmetic dentist that’s been airdropped into Appalachia. The dogs run around madly as I get them something to eat from the dog food bags on the counter. I’m careful not to knock over anything piled up there—pots and pans, bags, Tupperware. There’s a defeated stick of butter, fused to its wrapper. The garbage is on the counter, too. I imagine that’s to keep it away from the dogs, though having it sit at the level of the human nose doesn’t make it pleasing. I accidentally drop pellets of food as I move things around, and the dogs scurry to scarf them up like fish in a bowl. I’ve heard that dogs’ mouths have a better ability to protect against infection, but I’m positive that they haven’t yet evolved enough to combat this kind of pathogen stew. Irene will be home at any moment, I’m sure. Until then, they’ll survive.
8:00 PM
Roxy. Love is brutal. Fuck. And without it, it’s all I think about. Love is a servant of abuse. I understand why people shoot heroin. Loneliness. Your heart has disappeared, so you have to manufacture one. My father’s opium den, Chick’s Bar, was three blocks from our house up North Main Street, across from St. John’s church and Merritt Hughes Funeral Home. He was a lonely man. The last time he and my mom had sex was on the night of Ally’s high school graduation. “Cut off,” he always said, with blunt force trauma. “Cut off.” And that’s that for the rest of one’s life? Catholic or not, he had five kids, and, though he showed us more disdain than affection, he wasn’t going to leave his family. Amazing.
Is Roxy right? Am I unable to love anything? I mean, commitment is love, yes, but . . .
I never got a “love” talk. In college when I told my parents that my then girlfriend and I were in love, Dad said, “What is this love shit?” Before that, any kind of sex talk was out of the question from someone who’d been “cut off.” Plus, I went to Catholic high school, so, supposedly, sex itself was out of the question, and we all should have been cut off. To supplant that forced ignorance, my friends Mack, Reggie, Paul, and I used to go to a XXX drive-in theater, the Oak Hill, up in Moosic Township, just south of Scranton. It was right off the exit from Interstate 81. You could see the films going through the vertical slits between the trees as your car sped by down the highway. We called it the Stroke Hill, naturally. They showed the just-one-step-beyond-softcore movies: Jenna Jameson, Savannah, Nici Sterling—these women blew our minds. We weren’t there for a circle jerk. We went there to see sex, to look at it, learn what it was, how women worked, where body parts were. . . . No, we didn’t discuss it like a science lab. We joked about it with false bravado. We’d sneak in a case of Miller eight-ounce ponies, get drunk, and laugh and make fun of everything—on the outside. But individually, deep down, we were fighting against repression. Each of us anticipated future sex like a tsunami warning, and needed to be ready to keep it from becoming a catastrophe. Controversial in the community as it was, and we were certainly blinding ourselves to the dark side of porn at the time, we let the Stroke Hill do us a tremendous service by being there in the pitiful absence of any other options.
The closest I got to a sex talk from Dad was five words: “Keep it in your pants.” He’d caught me masturbating one night against the freezer door in the utility room. I guess I’d made a sound and woken him up off the couch. Earlier that evening, Dawn Lombardeli had been dry-rubbing my crotch like she was kneading dough at her father’s pizza shop, and I couldn’t hold it in.
“Keep it in your pants,” was all he said, and he walked away. Hard to argue the clarity and logic of that advice, birth-control-wise, but as for ever actually pleasing a woman, loving her, understanding her needs and desires, it fell woefully short, like the nights at the Stroke Hill did.
I finished and cleaned up with Windex as was my dignified teen protocol. The freezer itself, which stored various meats of London broil, hamburger, and kielbasa—sexy as that was—didn’t particularly make me horny. The sheet steel door just seemed easy to wipe up, I’d thought, and there was no other privacy in the house. Now I’d ruined that, too, because on that night I couldn’t “keep it in my pants.”
My dad had that very distinct car in those years, that red Bonneville. One night when my buddies and I were in seminar at the Stroke Hill, I was taking a moment to look around, giving my brain a respite from the hundred-foot screen of genital wrestling, and suddenly I saw, six rows over, that very something so distinct and familiar, and before I could register the permanent impact that words can have, I reflexively announced, “Hey, there’s my dad.” He was slouched in the driver’s seat of his car, tired eyes staring forward, the metal speaker hung on the door, the same cool blue from the screen falling on his face as was on ours.
The screaming silence of awkward acknowledgment filled the van like sarin gas. Mack broke the hush. “Here’s to the Old Man,” he said, raising his Miller pony for a toast. “He knows how to have a good time.” We all laughed, mine forced. “To the Old Man,” we said, and we clinked our small bottles together and chugged the beers.
Mack must have sensed this to be a good time to leave. He started the engine and the van crept out. No one spoke as the tires crunched over the gravel of the unpaved lot. None of us wanted to be spotted there, though how could my father narc on us in this circumstance?
Looking back, as embarrassed as I was, I think my friends understood. I doubt any of their parents, all still Catholic-together then, were having sex anymore. We’d all been given a lesson on marriage and how drearily long life can be. And my dad still had sixteen years to live after that.
These were my early examples of the joys of love and sex, and the benefits of long-term commitment. Oh, my private trombone teacher showed me his penis once when I was thirteen. God bless him, he was actually a really good guy. He took care of me as somewhat of a surrogate father. We went fishing. He taught me how to work on cars, made me a really good musician. I earned an offer of a music scholarship from Carnegie Mellon because of him. Mr. White cared for me. But that day, after a l
esson at his house, he’d asked if I’d ever seen an uncircumcised penis, which I hadn’t, and before I could say, “What?” I was seeing one. I didn’t like it. He wanted me to touch it “to see how the extra flesh worked.” I just said no, and that was that—really. He put it and its mysterious skin sheath away. Neither of us ever mentioned it again. I’ve never told anybody because he was such a beloved person, and at least he’d respected my response. It didn’t register to me as a sex offense at the time. I’d heard rumors of much worse floating around about the priests anyhow. Love and sex. I think he loved me. His commitment to my happiness never wavered. I studied with him from age nine to seventeen. And I loved him. I did, just not like that.
I’m starting to feel like that psych ward prisoner at the county jail. I have terrible nights on that cot of my own—thinking of Roxy, thinking and thinking—unable to change things, unable to feel good, unable to stop thinking, wishing for a prayer. I want to disappear. If I had a gun, I really think I could put it to my head and squeeze the fuck out of the trigger. It’s been over three and a half months, and I still live with my need for Roxy like a sixth sense. I’ve found a porn star online that reminds me of her—Aria. Geez, I know her name: blue eyes—same long black hair—legs all the way to her neck. Almost similar face somehow, or I make it that way. I look for scenes of her alone. It’s backbreaking. A borderline sickness, this demanding substitution. Or a survival mechanism. A preservation through destructive behavior. I know how bad porn is. I know how cheap and filthy and dangerous and awful and exploitive it is. But I watch them in silence. It’s horrible. I torture myself. But I need to see her moving, talking, even in facsimile, because it sparks specific memories, and I project those memories onto the moving facade, and that orgasm, even tangential through imagination, still feels like no other—when my mind locks onto it, it feels like life. But immediately after, it’s a washout; fifteen seconds is not enough rain of mercy to heal a desert. I shouldn’t. I’d get rid of the Internet if my work didn’t depend on it. It’s there all the time, and the ventral striatum of my brain is itching for its reward stimulation. Ironically, it was Roxy who taught me the most about the biology of behavior while immersed in her grad school work. That was sexier than any lipstick or knee-high boots.
The Dog Log Page 8