One night I was standing in the vestibule of my apartment on 5th and A in Manhattan. The pizza box Jake had just thrown at me lay on the floor between us. The line in the sand so to speak.
“I cannot believe you fucking just did that,” I screamed amidst my tears.
“Fuck you!” Jake yelled at me across the hallway.
“You don’t throw things at me.”
“Sorry, little Miss Princess. You’re such a righteous bitch. Go do some more lines.”
“Fuck you. Go smoke some more crack.”
We stood there. Pizza scattered all over the floor. Jake looked down, and I could see a smile begin to form. I began to feel one spreading across my own face.
I laughed, “I can’t believe you just threw away your favorite pizza.”
“I know. That was dumb.”
And we went about our way upstairs to more codependent sex and fighting. And that is the heart of addiction—of all addictions. I don’t know if I was born with this sad, fat hole in the middle of my being, or if it grew through the years from a daddy who wouldn’t come home and a mommy who worked too much and all my fears that I would never be or get or have enough. But that hole is there, and it’s real. At first, Jake One filled it up. But then he tried to take it away, and I couldn’t have that. In a matter of months, I went from being the bright, boisterous blonde who wanted to play Bonnie and Clyde to a shrunken fearful replica of myself. Even when the fights began to get physical, it was like any drug—the longer you stay hooked, the lower you’re willing to drop the bar.
Eight months into the relationship, I moved to L.A. Many of my friends thought I ran to California to get away from him, and maybe I did, but they didn’t understand the power of addiction. I was a wreck within eleven hours of leaving his side. And within a month, he had moved to Oakland, where he lived on a sinking sailboat, and we took our battles to the Bay.
One of the last fights we had, we had gotten into an argument at a bar because I had talked to someone while having a cigarette outside, and Jake accused me of flirting. This is what our relationship had become. Brief glimmers of lightness and laughter, but more often than not, it was me living in the fear that he would turn at any moment. We couldn’t find cocaine in the Bay area, the drinking had only gotten worse, and when Nana told me that Jake had become a “cancer on my soul,” I understood because he had. He was rotting me away from the inside, and all my good parts had become eroded by the fear that I was going to lose him.
The night he accused me of making a play on a man who had simply asked me for a light, I reacted the only way I knew how: I punched Jake in the face. I knew I was going to get it, and by the look in his eyes, I knew I had better run and fast. I took off down the street and somehow found the sailboat on which we had sailed to the bar. He found me there, and the fight escalated. The next thing I knew I was backed up against the v-berth, Jake’s hands around my throat. I think I was screaming, but between the booze and Jake’s grip, my vision was sliding dark, and then I saw them. The classic sign that for all my good breeding, my fine education, my carefully taught lessons about respect and decency, I was becoming someone I was not raised to be. Red and blue lights flashed outside the boat. Two policemen boarded the deck, and I watched as Jake backed away from me with hatred in his eyes.
We tried to patch things up; we tried to make nice. We spoke of buying a house together and growing tomatoes, as only crazy people would think they could do at that point. What really happened is that Jake stole a thousand dollars from me, started sleeping with a methhead he met in Oakland, and gave me herpes. I broke up with him and went through three tortuous months coming off one of my strongest drugs of choice. Recently, I had to send him an amends letter. I could not do it in person because Jake One has spent the better part of the last four years in San Quentin.
Jake Two would not know what to do with a woman who has lived that life. As I talk about the horses and my work at the nonprofit and my writing and my funny uncles and my kooky grandma, I know that I am not for this man. I am too much of a story, and he only writes them. Jake One used to say that I was better at pretending to live my life than actually living it. And though he was an asshole, he also wasn’t entirely wrong. I know I can lose myself in who I think I am. But Jake One never really knew who that was either. He just saw a scared and angry girl desperate for his love. And though initially my brightness attracted him, he refused to see that there was real light in it. He hasn’t been the first to make that mistake, and he certainly wasn’t the last. But the Jake I am sitting with tonight won’t be the next.
17
Date Seventeen: Cadillacs and the Two-Headed Snake
I am getting ready for work when my phone rings. Once again, it is a number I don’t recognize.
“Hi, Dad,” I answer.
I haven’t spoken to him in weeks. The last time we talked, he was still in Tallahassee, still in the halfway house, still threatening to run. I had received some missed calls from various unidentifiable numbers, but whenever I called back, I would always hit an out-of-service message or a motel clerk who had never heard of Dan McGuiness.
“Kris, you shouldn’t mention my name to people.”
“To motel receptionists?”
“To anyone. I don’t use my real name anyway but just in case.” He continues on, telling me that he has been traveling along the East Coast. Telling me what an amazing world it is that we live in, telling me how you have to squeeze every drop out of this life. How it is so precious and so beautiful, and that he is living it. I understand the sentiment. Not a day goes by that I don’t think those exact same words, making me ever more his daughter, but I also know that his way of living it is very different from mine. In fact, it’s illegal.
I don’t want to ask; everything in me says it’s better not to ask, but when he starts complaining about the Cadillac he’s driving having too many gadgets, I can’t help it. The last time my dad was arrested after bailing on a halfway house in Florida was in a Cadillac, and the mere mention of the car creates an instinctual kick in me so strong I want to vomit.
“Dad, where are you right now? What are you doing?”
“Nothing, K. Just visiting friends upstate.”
He is referring to upstate New York, and I know from the last stint what that means. He once told me how they had buried a thousand pounds of pot in a van outside of Poughkeepsie. That they were waiting for his next release to sell it. He told me that they were going to make a fortune. And as much as I hope I am wrong, I cannot help but question, “What kind of friends?”
“Oh, Kris, don’t ask, don’t tell, please.”
The next thing I know I am screaming in the middle of my kitchen. I am issuing ultimatums (“I will not be your daughter anymore if you do this”), I am threatening jail time (“You know where you’ll be by the end of the year if you keep this up”), and I am begging (“Please, Daddy, please try to do the right thing. Please.”). My dad tries to issue some half-hearted explanation, like covering a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid. He tells me, “K, I am working with the Feds. I’m all covered. I gave them enough information to get here, and now I have a chance to make some real money. The kind of money that will buy us a boat. We can sail away. Anywhere in the world, we can sail away.”
I don’t know if my father has any sense left, or if the “sail away” escape plan is so embedded in the mind of all prisoners, it is pointless to argue. I wonder whether they play Shawshank Redemption on rerun in there, fighting over who gets the latest maritime news, waiting, waiting for the day that they all get to sail away, leaving behind the disappointed children and the angry ex-wives and the worlds of pie crust promises they have created in their wake.
I try to breathe, “Dad, I don’t want to sail away. I just want you to be normal. I want us to have a normal life.”
“K, a normal life?” he moans. “Oh God, what’s happened to you?”
I sniff my last sob and try with all my strength to say, “I grew up, Daddy.
So should you.”
My Shaman Lidia sits across from me, and I think she might be slightly stunned.
“Wow.”
“I know,” I agree. This is my second date with Lidia today. And like all second dates, I find myself much more at ease.
She smiles at me, “Although you do know, right? You know there is no such thing as a normal life?”
“I know, Lidia, but there’s got to be one where my dad isn’t playing the FBI so that he can smuggle drugs on the side. I mean there’s got to be something out there more normal than that.”
Lidia agrees, but as she explains, my father might not know how to find it. In recovery, we have a tendency to be wary of therapy because it allows for almost too much self-analysis. And self-analysis can easily lead to self-pity, which is next door to despair and pretty much in earshot of fucking shit up. My experience with therapists is that they were no better than mental prostitutes. I paid them to listen to my shit. They nodded and made me feel that all of my problems were of the world’s making, and I would leave feeling more righteous in my mistakes but not necessarily better and certainly not different.
I think Lidia might be well worth her $120 an hour. Because instead of telling me that I am right, instead of telling me about how I probably suffer from one disorder or another and that my father is a sociopath and my mother is a codependent, instead of telling me all the things I have heard before from people with fancy degrees on their walls and much more formal clothing, Lidia tells me about Sach’amama—the great two-headed snake that the Incan shamans believe is the Goddess of the Jungle. Sach’amama, Lidia explains, is our great god spirit of the South. She is the guide who shows us how to shed our skins, how to learn new ways, how to find a different path in the jungle when the old one no longer serves us.
“It sounds like, by the way you stood up to your father, you have already met her,” Lidia says and smiles. I have. I know that. I know that as confused as my last month has been, as painful as it has been, I feel like I am on a new path, even if I’m not quite sure where it is going. Lidia stands up and removes the small glasses from her face. The long skin of a dead snake decorates her walls, along with many pictures of a large black cat. She pulls her hair into a ponytail, and I watch her strong arms as she moves the pillows off the couch to create a place for me to lie on the floor. I want to help her, but I don’t know how. I don’t quite know where I fit in this space yet.
The night before I had a dream that I was twelve again. I was at the house of a friend that I had during that time. Her name was Beth, and I always had a crush on her older brother. In the dream, I have just hooked up with that brother in their parents’ bed, and all I remember is seeing his face as he stands up and backs away from me.
“Because up until that moment, he had thought I was his age,” I explain. “And then he sees that I am a child, and I can see the fear and shame and horror on his face.”
Lidia is laying out her sacred stones as she asks, “And what were you thinking?”
“That I have seen that same confused look on so many of the men I have dated. It’s like they think they’re getting a woman, and then they wake up the next morning only to find this twelve-year-old child lying there.”
“Scared,” Lidia says.
“Terrified.”
“You fucking bet,” she replies. This is only our second date, and I know I am in love with this woman.
I lie down, and Lidia tells me to call to that great snake and ask her to lead me where I need to go. And she does, and we do, and I go find that twelve-year-old girl inside. The one who couldn’t create real honesty with Jimmy, the one who didn’t know how to respond when Oliver told me I talked like a teenager, the one who deferred to Jake One because she was too scared to stand up for herself.
I reach out to her, and I don’t even know where I am. Somewhere between imagination and dream, but I see her. I see me. I am twelve years old, and I am the disappointed child waiting on the shore. Waiting for the man I love so much to come and get me, to sail me away to a brighter place. But when I fear he isn’t going to show up for me, I hide that bright place because I cannot trust anyone with it, most especially me. And then I am sucking the light back in, trapping it inside, and all that is left is that wounded twelve-year-old girl wondering why they’re backing away from me.
We are closing up the session. I lie there, my body slack, the energy between my heart and hands, still very much alive.
“Will you do something for me?” Lidia asks.
“Of course,” I reply.
“Do you feel the energy coming from your hands into your heart right now?”
I do.
“Okay, I want you to start holding that heart every day for five minutes and think that you’re holding that little girl. If you give her love, you will have the chance to become one with her, and then you cannot hide from her, just as she cannot hide from you.”
“Okay.”
“And remember, now that you’ve started this work, some of your biggest challenges will come into play. You have asked for an adventure of the spirit. That isn’t always easy.”
“I don’t have a choice, Lidia.” And I don’t. Because that little girl is the innocence and the vulnerability, and ultimately, she is the great gatekeeper for the light. And I kind of want her on my side; I kind of need her there. I don’t know that calling this great snake guide my God will lead me any closer, but I also know that I need to shed some skins. Even if it hurts, even if it’s awkward and uncomfortable, and I just want to hiss and bite as it all falls away, I think I might owe myself that much. And if that means I need to hold my raw and soft-shelled heart every morning for five minutes to help me grow, to help me become the woman I want to be, then just as willingness has served me before, I will pray to Sach’amama that it will serve me again.
18
Date Eighteen: The Well
I met Oliver over four years ago. It was my twenty-sixth birthday, and I was on a job interview. I sat in the reception area of a Westside production company, waiting to meet with the assistant that I was interviewing to replace. She was running late, and I had no clue what was about to happen. I still wonder whether things might be different today had I not found myself on that chair, in that lobby, reading that Variety when Oliver walked in. He wore a sweater vest and a button-down shirt, and I want to say corduroys but maybe that’s just because it seems to fit with the rest of the outfit. And I looked up.
I looked up, and the world slowed. The sun came in from behind him, and though I wasn’t actually around in the time of Christ, I kind of imagine that he had a similar effect because without knowing it or understanding it, my savior had just walked into the room. And apparently, my savior was a Hollywood producer with a sweater vest and brown curly hair.
And Oliver? He looked confused, lost, thrown, as though he knew where he was going, but then he saw me and something flew out. The ground between us shrinking, and all I could think was, “Who? Is? That?” Little did I know, but he was actually the guy with whom I was interviewing, but the job got put on hold, and I never became his assistant. Months later, when I had moved into a new position at another film company in town, we met for drink at a Hollywood bar called The Well, where tonight, I go to meet Rob.
Rob is a new man, provided once again by the incredible menu that is The Onion personals. I stand outside awkwardly waiting for my date, much like I sat in that lobby years before. As with Oliver, I have already been able to tell that my date is fatally smart. With multiple degrees and a cutting sense of his own intelligence, I actually look forward to sparring with this one. Plus, he’s late. And I kind of like it when they’re late. I text him to tell him where he can find me because I understand the pains of searching for someone you’ve never met before. It’s pretty much the motto of my romantic state.
I receive a text in response, “Has anyone hit on you yet?” I begin typing in my reply as a man backs up to stand next to me. I can tell this is Rob. He waits, sta
ring at his phone looking for my text to come through. He doesn’t say anything but he doesn’t need to. I like him immediately.
Rob is an organic nutritionist, which might be kind of tough for me, and for him, considering I am probably the only professional in Los Angeles who still eats McDonald’s. But that’s just his most recent profession. Rob actually has a PhD in political theory from Cornell but gave up being a professor at a small Ohio college to come west and teach rich people how to eat. I walk us through the bar, past the corner where Oliver and I met years ago, and I try desperately not to feel the pang of memory that I know will hit. But for some reason, the energy of the man walking behind me keeps the sensation at bay, and I almost forget. I almost forget how I once walked into that bar four years before and found Oliver standing at the jukebox waiting for me.
“You know some people take being late as an insult.” Oliver turned around from the music he was selecting to begin what would become a tradition of snarky criticisms.
51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life Page 10
