A Pair of Brown Eyes
It was like being in Middle Earth, that place of hobbits and elves and wizards, this little stone-walled cemetery sighing behind an even smaller stone church just outside Mullinahone, a tiny, often happy Irish town in County Tipperary. Fainche and I had come here for Christmas to bury her Mom’s ashes with the rest of her family and listen to stories of her and what a wild girl she was. A loved but wild girl. Fainche’s aunts and uncles gathered around us with their children and their loves, and we stood in the cold grey Irish winter while the priest said his thing. A beautiful thing but at times hard for me to understand. It wasn’t raining and that much felt like a gift. When it was over, we all walked slowly away and hugged and looked down at the ground and into the sky and into each other’s eyes, but only then for a second.
***
Fainche and I and Calvin, our dog that we’d found running up and down Alvarado street one AA meeting Monday night found this house I’m typing in right now, on a busy feverish Saturday. We’d been together for a couple of years and were still in the West Hollywood bungalow apartment where decades earlier Pam had welcomed in Jim and his 20,000 microgram eyes. Out of those nights “LA Woman” emerged. We’d been looking to buy a house, something that seemed so wildly fantastic to me. Before Fainche, the very notion of ever owning a house was non-extant. But we met in Art Dept and when I first saw her, I exclaimed “I’m going to marry that girl” as she pulled out bags of set dressing from her black Ford Explorer. I gazed at her from out of the front window of the house in which we were cobbling together another TV commercial world. She was gorgeous. I fell in love immediately and while we never got married, I did buy her a ring in some Capetown diamond emporium, and we stuck it out for eight years. Today she’s a friend whom I don’t talk to enough but love with the fury of seven suns.
Fainche had crooked front teeth. Perfectly crooked front teeth. I’d sometimes call her “snaggletooth.” I was able to call her this and make her laugh and sometimes kiss me because she knew I absolutely adored those perfectly, better than normal front teeth. Those teeth were the front door of her face and those beautiful eyes and little nose hung above them like Christmas lights over a front door. Perfect. Just beautifully perfect. And at times I did things to turn off the lights and I’d be without those beautiful teeth. Over those eight or so years I’d continued to struggle….” struggle”…such a word we use for utterly selfish, uncaring and wholly awful choices we make to feel comfort. She never made that choice. She endured. She felt. But I wasn’t given her strength and so I chose comfort in the form of heroin. Those perfect teeth were her armor I bet. I bet that’s where it came from.
Eventually, I’d get sober again and we always decided to move forward. Jesus, what a risk she was taking. Buying a house with someone like me who was perfectly capable of burning everything down at the first sign of discomfort or of life itself. We carried on and then on one Saturday in 2003, we saw, after many, many other houses a little green house in Eagle Rock. We loved it although it was beyond our budget. And to add to that, we were told we’d have to offer substantially more if we really wanted it. We were well beyond our common sense line in the sand. And by Monday they had forty offers. Such was buying a house in Los Angeles in the early 2000s. And so, we said a prayer and I touched her teeth, and we pet Calvin and picked up the nearest cellphone and told the soul on the other end to offer $500,000. The voice told us ok but that we should write letters to the owners telling them how much we wanted their house and how much we’d look after it. And so, we did. I mentioned the big backyard and how we wanted to rescue many dogs and that it was perfect for this future herd (and we did). Monday night came and that same phone rang, and we were told we had a house. Somehow Fainche and I had crossed paths and fell in love while we were both, or at least I was at my peak earning potential. Fainche’s star was still rising, and she had more heights to climb but everything aligned, and we pulled it off. We bought this house that I’ll probably and happily die in. A little craftsman bungalow with a huge flat front and backyard. We were mesmerized by the possibilities.
The next few years we lived in this little house and the stars saw us go to Africa, saw me go to rehab, watched me shuffle off to friends’ couches after other moments of selfishness and we welcomed in a parade of dogs who’d been through the worst of what horrible humans are capable of and we loved them back. And they’d pass and we’d collapse, and we’d let another one in, and the cycle continued. This little green house contained it all.
***
Fainche’s parents meant well as far as I can tell, and they surely loved her, but they orbited around their own suns. Fainche, an 18-year-old crackhead finally said enough and got sober at the age most people are just beginning to shoot towards destruction. Her Dad, who I still love even though it’s been years and years since I’ve heard his somewhat addled and confused Irish brogue, was a doctor and her Mom was just this beautiful wild spirit who somehow escaped her small village in Ireland and found herself to Fainche’s father’s lips in Canada, both of them emigres. Feeling the dread of life in Canada, they moved to California with Fainche and her younger brother and set out to wait for me. Or at least it’s nice to think that.
By the time I’d seen Fainche through that front window struggling with all manner of Target and Bed Bath and Beyond sacks, her parents were split. At some point, and I can’t remember if it was before or after I’d come up with “snaggletooth” her Father moved to South Carolina with his new wife Cindy. Cindy is a book in and of herself and I want to put that book aside and write about Fainche’s mom Catherine, Kay for short.
I don’t remember where Kay was when I first met her, but I remember the feeling. The feeling of being even somewhat, by virtue of loving her daughter, connected to her was overwhelming and exciting. We fit each other perfectly. Both of us were loud and with very few verbal filters and passionate about anything we loved. At least that’s how I remember her. She was passion-made flesh to the extent it virtually ruined her. She hadn’t made out well, as far as I could see, from the divorce to the doctor. But she was always happy or at least on fire angry. Both are beautiful. Passion and safety can not ride in the same car. She embodied this. I could be exactly who I was around her all scars and mistakes and improper thoughts laid bare and she didn’t care beyond a laugh. Eventually, she moved to the desert in Yucca Valley. Yucca Valley the place of a million LA getaway Air Band B vacation homes. I may be the only one of my tribe who doesn’t own a home there. But she lived in what in any other town would be called the “flats” or something like that. Her’s was a small, dusty, sand-encircled house with oppressive heat as a roommate and a million thrift store treasures strewn about the place. She smoked pot and made friends with the local speedfreaks who, despite their afflictions seemed to do their best to help her out. At least a couple of them did; the rest just flittered away to taken apart and unbuilt car engines baking in the hot sun after grams of methamphetamine were smoked.
Fainche and I would make the drive, up past Palm springs and the outlet shops and Hadley’s fruit stand that for miles and miles yelled at us “Fruit!” via billboards only to find no fruit at all when we finally got there, just dried husks of what was once fresh fruit. And nuts. They had a lot of nuts. But never a piece of real fruit. I was always disappointed. We’d turn left at some point and drive up the mountain and into the speed-soaked Yucca Valley. Eventually, we’d turn left at the Sizzler (a really excellent Sizzler by the way!) and roll down the dusty road a few doors and pull left into Kay’s driveway.
I’d be lying if I claimed I was always happy to make these trips. As much as I loved her, love has a hard time standing up to boredom. It was hot and the house was strewn with stuff. Just stuff. And we’d go to the thrift store and get more stuff, Fainche always paying. I’ll admit that at times I held resentment against how much money Fainche gave to her Mom to keep her afloat. I know we had arguments about it. I say this to be fully transparent about my capacity to be small and ugly. Don’t ever tell someone you love, or even hate, to not give their own mother money. You’ll regret it. I do.
***
We kept just moving forward in this little green house. We were slowly drifting apart. It was like no pain I’d ever experienced. To be this close to someone who you loved with all your heart and yet had less and less to talk about was a fresh hell which wrapped around me like a hot lead blanket. I was smothering myself. It’s truly something to love someone and yet have nothing to say to them. I kept gaining weight when I wasn’t shooting dope and everything was so wildly out of balance. I think our only common focal point was the little gaggle of dogs who we always had with us. Calvin and Koufax and Richard Parker and so many more throughout the years. We loved dogs. That much never changed.
At some point, and I can’t remember when or how it came to be, but Kay got sick. Fainche got a call as far as I can remember, and we were in a car and driving towards Yucca Valley immediately. By the time we got there her mom was in the hospital. My memory is that she was asleep. I have no memory of any last words with her. We were told she was suffering from COPD, surely as a result of her smoking as it was almost shamefully told. I remember how empty the hospital was and how long and empty a walk it was to the payphone well down the hall where I’d go to keep Fainche’s family in Ireland apprised of what was going on. Maybe we were there an hour and maybe we were there for days, it hardly matters. At some point, we were told Fainche’s mom and my friend had passed away. Kay was gone and I was all alone with her daughter. It didn’t seem possible. It seemed like Kay would outlive all of us snuggled in secondhand clothes and knick knacks, getting high and making people laugh and smile. Something was wildly fucked up with this world.
Fainche once told me that she was so enamored of how I took control and handled things after her mother passed and how she couldn’t have done it herself. I remember her saying that but I have no memory of doing anything other than crying and holding Fainche from behind while she bent to touch her forehead to her mother’s face and cried a delicate little cry. Just a little cry, a small sad thing.
***
I don’t think that Kay’s passing spelled the death knell for Fainche and I and to be honest, I get confused as to where her leaving us even lands on our own timeline of separation. We kept drifting apart. I’d be at work and while I’d always prayed to go home at 10 hours I now wished for the camera to roll through the night so I wouldn’t have to go home and have nothing to say to this beautiful woman whom I loved but felt such a chasm separating us. And I think she felt the same. We tried so hard to love each other. We really did.
At the end of that year, it was decided that Fainche and I would go to Ireland for Christmas and take Kay’s ashes to have them interned? Buried? At the little stone Mullinahone church. That week cycled between heartbreak and Irish joy. We spent hours in various hotel lobbies which is where people gather in Ireland. Tales were told about Kay by family priests and drunk uncles. We visited all of Fainche’s relatives flung all over that little green island always driving on the wrong side of the road following directions that relied on shades of the moon as markers. At one point, with her cousin who was in the Guarda which here is the police and his lovely young wife we found ourselves in one of the few fine dining restaurants in Dublin. I watched a table of two well-dressed couples across from us; they looked like they were dressed for the theatre. They were served beautiful bowls of delicate pasta on par with Batali and aside each one was a separate bowl of French fries or chips as they call them. I was mesmerized. Where else on earth can you freely and confidently order pasta and French fries in a real restaurant? To this moment, Ireland is Heaven to me.
We carried on, just a little side-step away from each other every day or so. We pretended to want to read each night instead of kissing. We pretended to be busy with work instead of doing things each other cherished. We arranged our days around each other’s absence. But we truly did try so hard to love each other. We truly did. No one can say we didn’t try. We spent the last couple of years just drowning in failed attempts to pull ourselves back together. And the hardest part was realizing that love alone can’t keep two people together. There’s so much more. So many other little sparks that need to be kept safe from the wind. Love alone can’t keep two people in love. If that’s all it took, I’d be touching Fainche’s crooked teeth with my tongue right now while we looked for dogs to rescue. But that’s just not the way things work. Things don’t work well.
One day I walked out of the bedroom and into the family/dining room in this little green house and Fainche was sitting at the end of the Green and Green dining table we’d bought and had refinished. Calvin was outside as always, maintaining his distance from unwanted affection which had vexed us since finding him. We’d coax him into bed with us with treats just to enjoy ten minutes of his presence as we went to bed together. I imagine I said good morning or something like that. I remember stopping in the doorway to the little kitchen across from where Fainche sat. One of us, it doesn’t matter who, finally said it. We’re not happy. I think we should stop. Whoever said it, the other one was silent and just nodded. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the few feet distance between us and yet after it exploded and we’d cried and hugged we felt free.
I’d kill someone for Fainche. Happily, and with a Gerber daisy in my mouth. I don’t love her any less than the first day I saw her. But I guess we were meant to be distant friends. After that moment we still lived together for another year, me on the couch and her in our bed in the room where the mouse once ate through the wall and popped his little head out to our glee. Kay was gone. Fainche was soon to go. Kay and Fainche. You should be so lucky to have two people like that in your life. And now they were gone, and I was on my own in this little green house. Just me and the dogs.