Mother of Earth

I just finished a couple’s session. I gathered my thoughts while giving the bread a second rise and chopping shrimp, spring onions and some BBQ pork I had around for some fried rice I’ll make later. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just write until it feels like it’s all out and then play some Minecraft. Maybe I’ll just fuck around in my opulently tooled garage pretending I actually make chefs’ knives just a fleck more than I daydream about making them. I imagine a lot. I can see huge vast worlds of creation and love. Worlds where I’m some other guy with someone who waits all day for me to come home and make stuff for her. I want a girl who loves that I can make anything. That I can do anything. That I can do Every Thing for and to her. I think she lives in New Mexico now. I can’t remember. I know she’s not here anymore.

              I think the wife of the couple I just saw feels this way. She feels like he’s gone or at least moving to some arid, flat place. Always a flat place. The husband wasn’t actually in tonight’s session. He’s in Alaska where he’ll likely drink himself to sleep and wake up on a boat looking for salmon. He’s in HIS place. She’s home and talking to me. She thinks he cheated on her for a year while they were in “The Apartment” and before they moved to “My House.” What do you think Mike? I mean really, do you think he slept with that woman?

              Man, they don’t teach you about these moments. I mean, actually, they do. They teach you to deflect and “hold space.” Let her just wriggle there in despair and smile the smile of “I know it’s hard.” And just wait. Wait until she looks down and says, “I know you can’t answer that.” That is what it seems therapists are taught to do. Don’t put your neck on the line. Don’t get involved. Cover your ass. Proceed with detachment and authority. Little, slivers of authority but authority nonetheless. But I guess I fucked up. I guess I went in an entirely different direction.

              And so I told her a story.

              “Here’s the thing about alcoholism and addiction that people who’ve never known it has such a hard time understanding. And I’m not making any sort of excuses here; all of us are absolutely responsible and will be held accountable for everything we do, but here’s the deal. It’s entirely possible to be in a perfect moment for sex and be so enthralled with getting loaded that sex is the last thing on you your mind. Years ago, a long time ago..”  She watches with attention and a shred of new, cautious hope on the other end of the Zoom connection…” I was all strung out, and I had this friend Rodney, and he had this crazy hot girlfriend. She was just 114 pounds of pure sex.” I can at least read a room, and she got this, she liked it, she understood, she nodded. “He was out of town somewhere and I was over there with her getting high and looking for more drugs. We drove around downtown and got some crack. We’re literally parked and lying behind some bushes near downtown LA at about 3 AM. I remember that she was just wearing a t-shirt and panties and the t-shirt was ripped and tattered around her waist. I mean, Jesus. But sex literally never entered my mind. It does now, Jesus! It does now, for sure, but in that moment, we were intent on one thing and one thing only. It’s so hard to imagine for a lot of people.” She actually exhales a short breath of relief. And I’m telling her God’s honest truth. I’m not making this up for her benefit.” I’ve been in so many situations that seem to call for sex but I’m just so happy to be able to get high with someone who gets it and isn’t going to browbeat me about it.” She nods again, ‘Thank you for that. That really helps.” “Look, I don’t know if they had sex or not, and ultimately you’ll never know either. But truly, There come moments where getting drunk or high far surpasses the natural urge to fuck.” Thank you! I can believe that. I feel the urge to temper her enthusiasm as I’m not fully going to bat for her husband. But I do want her to know the possibilities. And I told her the truth. Twenty years later, looking back on that night, I think, Jesus, what a schmuck. But, what are ya gonna do? My loss is her gain if only for a moment.

              We talked for a bit longer and I started with my whole, “We’re going to have to end at 7:30 tonight.” 7:30 is 40 minutes more than the usual 50-minute therapist session. I can’t even imagine just cuttin’ someone off on the dime like that. Maybe if I had more clients, it would be easier. “So what do you think? Do you think we’ll stay together?” Another time-honored question from a client to dodge. “I think it must be apparent by now, or at least I’d hope it is, that I love you guys…as individuals and as a couple. And I know that one of my deep failings as a therapist is that I’m overly trusting. Maybe even naively so. So know that this is the framework from which I’m answering. I certainly hope you stay together but only in a way that both of you are at peace and in love. That’s what I hope for. And if I can feel hope for something, then I can imagine it and then I can see a possible path to it. So yes, I think you absolutely can stay together but it’s going to involve a lot of discomfort for both of you. But, you can both do that. And if any of it is built on lies and the fear that all lies are built on then no, I don’t see how it can happen. I realize I dodged your question but I can certainly imagine you guys together forever. Plenty of people I know I can’t. I can’t see a path.”

              We talked for a little while more. My thoughts had started to wander to how’d I’d cook the eggs for the fried rice. Add the egg mix to rice and violently work it in or cook the eggs first, put them aside and add them at the end? So many decisions. She’s having a very hard time letting me go. I’ve been there. I just wanted someone to tell me, someone with authority, and how the fuck did I become an authority figure for a rich Santa Barbara housewife?! But I feel that this description denigrates her. Feels like I’ve cast some weight upon her for her means and where she lives. She’s no worse or better than you or I. We all just land. We land and look around and wonder who in this crowd makes up our family, our childhoods, our lives, our trauma, our love. We look around and wonder. I don’t want to lessen anyone. Not anyone. Not any God or ghost or man or woman or racist or rioter or Republican or Democrat or Judge or janitor. If you truly think you’re better than a single cell of anyone else, I smile and pat your 4-year-old head. You little idiot.

              The worst times during those 18 or so months in Hollywood before The Christmas Where Everything Collapsed were always the moments involving sex. As I devolved deeper and deeper into heroin addiction most natural human impulses dwindled as well. Certainly, sex drive diminished. I used to think, and sometimes still do, that the magic of dope was that it erased sex drive. I was free. I was free of this split second by split second focus on sex. Every waking moment was a kaleidoscope of imagined images, sounds, smells, memories, fantasies, what-ifs, if-only, and Christ! Look at her! flittering sparkles and paper stars. A person never crosses my path without me imagining.

Without dope life is sex. It’s a big deal. Maybe I had it worse than some but, come on.

              When you’re in love with someone, and you’re kids, and you live in some faraway sunny place with money and with all your wildest dreams a week away, sex is guaranteed. Fucking each other is a daily sacrament. It’s beautiful. It might be sunlit, it might be in neon-lit midnights, it might be on roofs or on hand-painted sofas. It’s everything. It holds everything together. It’s the ritual of saying, “I still want you.” And along comes dope. Heroin’s only ritual is shooting up. Maybe you can tack on cooking it up and perhaps, sometimes, copping but the real ritual is the injection and it’s so wholly solo it might as well be telling the world to fuck off! I want nothing to do with you.

              When two people in love get strung out, they can pull this off for maybe a week or two longer. But even then, it all winds up in the ritual of telling the world, I’m done with you or, more to the point, I got nothing for you. Two junkies in love who met while not junkies is a fresh hell that I wish upon no one. It’s like a forest of sadness trees. An ocean of crying fish, tears lost forever in the saline. That’s a different night. A different song. Different strings of typed letters.

              I continue to think of Leslie when writing this. So much of what is so intimately remembered is a part of her. I’ve asked her for permission at times. She can only say, “Keep writing!” but fuck, I don’t want to hurt her or even make her feel the slightest tremor of hesitation, of weird squiggling ‘head looking down.’ I care what she thinks. Leslie was my first true love. It took me a summer to win her over, and even then, there was a period where I knew she held thoughts of, ‘um, what have I gotten myself into?” I was still just a chubby, goofy teenager. Leslie was in Art School! Four years older. Surrounded by armies of cooler, sexier, more Quaalude holding upstarts than me. I fumbled. I excitedly scrambled and tried to keep up. I guess I caught on eventually. I was the one to hurt her.

              The days would come when I was completely strung out. Which means that I could only exist in one of two distinct states. I was either very high or very sick. Being strung out is binary. Fuck all that trendy non-binary nonsense. If you want to discuss binary versus non-binary, it doesn’t lie in gender politics it lies in addiction. I’d keep count of how often we were having sex. I know precisely how many days of missed sex for Leslie to feel ‘unwanted,’ ' fat’ or ‘boring.’ I knew. And I never wanted her to feel any of that and so the complex equation involving time, amounts of dope and percentage chance of orgasm came into play.

              Let’s say it was Thursday and we last had sex on last Friday. Seems a while for kids. Stretch it out a little with a junky in the house. I knew today was the day. So I’d steel away and cop. I had to have the dope first. If I was sick I just couldn’t have sex anymore than I could sit up straight. But, if I got too high I just couldn’t come and the whole thing would “soften” out into just so much shame. I had to hit the perfect balance  AND she couldn’t know about it! It was imperative that she didn’t know. She could not help me in this. She could not be an accomplice.

              I bet none of this is news to Leslie now. I feel your little pat on my head like so many silly little stupid children. You had a lot of patience.

              And so I’d slip into the sunlit bathroom and get out the works and the lighter and the cigarette filter and the belt and the …..ahhhhhhhhhhh. Time to fuck. Wish me luck!

              And know this. As God is my witness and God means a lot to me. I don’t take God lightly. He’s here. He’s sitting on this pile of Taschen books and wondering what I’ll do next. I care. I cared that Leslie got off. I didn’t count on it given my state but I tried. I had about 12 minutes before the dope kicked in washed everything way into imagined dreams of Leslie’s saying, what’s wrong with me? And my half heard feelings of ‘ just kill yourself. And sometimes I’d hit it and I’d make it and it was good and we’d kiss and forget that this whole nightmare was washing down around us like thick rain. Rain thick with tears. Rain, bubbling and laughing and patting the little kids on the head. God love you.

              These are things that ‘normal’ people rarely worry about when they marry and plan a family. They rarely worry about this sort of stuff because they aren’t fuckin’ junkies! I sit here typing as if I’m some sort of toy skeleton- 12 feet tall. Christ. To just be home and normal. Just normal things and normal loves.

Let’s fry some rice.

I don’t know if he cheated on you on not, but God, I hope he didn’t.