Wrenched

I don't know what I did yesterday, or at least I think I don't know. Last night it was evident something had happened, as I tried to sleep with a knife-blade stuck in my hip bones. Or maybe it was an axe. I don't usually get this sort of thing - oh, maybe once in a while. I hate to admit to arthritis or anything else, as secretly I think of illness (all illness) as "weakness". "Sickness is for mortals," my husband once said - no, he says it all the time, sending me up.

Now I sit in my not-so-great office chair, but at least better than the last one, with an ancient heating pad jammed against the vicinity of my left hip. It's too well-upholstered (the hip, not the chair) to do much good. The chair has a huge gap under the arm where, if it had something solid, the heat would go exactly where it needed to go. I have to hold it there with my left hand, constantly.

How did it happen? I'm not sure. I went to Erica's Christmas extravaganza yesterday, perhaps the sweetest moment of a grandmother's year - little kids in Oliver costumes, an 8-year-old girl playing Silent Night on a 3/4-size violin. This year, unlike other years, a little bit of (actual!) Christmas music snuck back into the proceedings. Last year there was just nothing, no Frosty or Rudolph, just a winter festival with completely unknown songs. Still nice, but unfamiliar, an obvious bow to political correctness.

Maybe there were complaints, who knows, which brought about the changes this year. In any case, there was Erica in the very front row, singing songs from Oliver: Food, Glorious Food, and Consider Yourself. Though these aren't strictly Christmas songs, all the sooty plate-banging Dickensian waifs somehow fit in beautifully. I had never seen my gorgeous granddaughter with her blonde curls all braided up, wearing a grey gingham dress and scuffy old tie-ups like something out of a storybook.

At the end of the concert I felt a rush of icy air, looked around, and saw double doors opening out to a very rare scene in this part of Canada: SNOW! I could practically hear Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney singing White Christmas. Then the girls, let out of school early, ran out into the playground. There was NOT ONE KID there - maybe it wasn't allowed, who knows - so they had the run of the huge place, dotted with giant snowballs and half-snowmen (can you believe kids don't know how to make them here?). When they finally hightailed it out to the play equipment, it was so slippery from frost that they shot out of the end of the slides as if forcefully ejected. Lauren (whose concert is today - double joy!) couldn't get up on the swing. The seat of her snow pants was too slippery.

"Nanny, lift me up," she said, and I did. Was it then that something snapped, or went out of alignment or what? I lifted her, gave her a few pushes (she's six and does not normally need such help, but bundled up like the Michelan Man, I had to get her going). I didn't notice anything until I got home, then -

Jesus! Or whoever! Someone was shoving a hot blade between two bones, and twisting. I knew taking any kind of pain medication would be futile, though I did it anyway, and I was right. I had "done something to my hip", the hip that tended towards arthritis that usually didn't register more than a twinge or a low-grade ache.

So I sit here now. I just went on Facebook, damn it - one of the worst habits I formed this year, after swearing I wouldn't use it. It had something posted like 25 Questions You Should Ask Yourself At The End Of The Year (That Will Probably Make You Feel Really Lousy For Not Accomplishing Any Of Your Personal Goals).  I see I have not taken adequate care of my body, have in fact said screw it most of the time while I try to cope with other things.

Losses. Some gains. Each stressful in their own way. Having to cut loose from a  formerly-close friend whose communications had devolved into boredom and bile. Worse, her integrity had failed, and she was sneaking around planning to leave her husband while insisting it was her grim duty to stay with him until he dies (he has Parkinson's, and she makes him feel bad about spending time with a buddy because my friend does not like the buddy, and wants to separate the two of them for reasons of her own. This means he can't go sailing any more, one of his favorite activities.)

Though we used to say we were sisters in all but blood, I find, to my shock, that I just don't like her any more, that her empty distress calls and perfunctory phone calls to make up for the abyss of her silence ("and how is so-and-so, and how is so-and-so," once asking after my DOCTOR whom she knows nothing about) leave me drained and disappointed. Those so-called conversations were no more intimate than talking with a stranger at an airport. Except for her huge dumps of venom, the whole thing had gone dead for me.

My part, I think, was to let it go on too long. Which I did, still hopeful. Contrary to conventional non-wisdom, hope is NOT the best thing in many situations. I did however land a book contract for Harold Lloyd, amazing to me, but also full of anxiety because now I am hearing that it is almost impossible to get any attention for a book, particularly literary fiction. But Rich Correll called, he really did, after years of futile attempts to get hold of him. Somehow-or-other he got my samples of The Glass Character and seemed to like what he saw, or at least the idea of it. I made the mistake of sending him the whole manuscript, which must have been overwhelming. After the editing process, I realized it wasn't even the same book and that the post-edited version was 100 times better, but by then. . .

So I don't know what to do here. I never do. Phone him again? In the new year? Ever?  I have a tendency to wear out my welcome after two calls. People don't want to deal with me, I guess. I lost Kevin Brownlow that way, after sending him an impulsive, gleeful link to my blog post.

Bad idea. But no one told me.

I can't write about all the rest of my life because this is probably boring enough. Part of my dream came true, but the rest of it looms and creates anxiety, terrible anxiety. I may still lose this dream, it may just drop into the abyss like everything else I've done. I don't know what I expect to happen, or how to handle what MIGHT be tiny little specks of hope that someone will notice it beyond the Canadian literary wilderness.

So I sit here wondering where I got wrenched, how, and why it's so hard for me to bend and straighten and walk. There will be no running around in the snow after the concert today, not for me anyway, no heavy lifting. What I've been given in my life has rained down from the heavens (supposedly, though maybe I did have something to do with raising kids who turned out to be wonderful parents). What I want: I feel like I have these pliers in my hands and am trying to pull out the back tooth of a hippopotamus.

It's not good to be ambitious, unless you are hard enough, unless you have the right stuff, and it looks like I don't. I always hang on too long. But if I let go, would there not be an even more formidable abyss below me? Would I ever stop falling?

These are the festive thoughts I have, at this festive time of year.

Nothing but a raving bitch (and she shows her tits!)

Nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time. All the time.

This went as far back as she could remember and she could never find out why or even how it got started. Mostly it involved men, although she could remember a very few times when it had happened with powerful women, women whose attention she craved for some mysterious reason.

In the schoolyard, she was a pariah from the start, as if the other kids could just smell something on her which made them jerk violently away. She knew even then that it happened in the animal kingdom too, causing chickens to be pecked to death, or young eaten. She had seen a YouTube video, a really gross one, of a hamster eating its pink, squirming newborn offspring just as casually as if it had been a rabbit pellet.

In the past, I jumped and jumped after people and panted and bounded like a dog begging for attention, and the other person would totally ignore me, making me leap and bound and wag my ass even more, until finally they would slap my muzzle hard, causing me to yip in pain and slink away to hide under the bed with my tail between my legs. And then it would start all over again. These were called “relationships”.

Well, you have to take what you can get, don’t you? Aren’t you grateful to have people’s attention? What’s the matter with you? But in some ways, this masochistic pattern was beginning to seem to her like a case of “kiss the whip”. The kind of loneliness that was thrust on her in childhood bent and twisted the natural health of her soul into an impossible corkscrew that would never be straightened, like the spine of the Elephant Man or those wretched ancient bones of King Richard III.

It always started out well. It started out with at least a degree of mutual interest, with a frisson of excitement, a bouncing back and forth of energies. Often, years back, it all happened through the mail, scintillating handwritten letters exchanged with other writers, some of them even a little bit famous. There was a tinge of eroticism in these, at first.

Then it began to “turn”. It was at this point that I’d step up my activities.

In some cases the person moved, and moved, and I had to keep scrounging up forwarding addresses, at newspapers or literary mags or wherever. Sometimes it occurred to me that if I didn’t hold up both ends, the whole thing would come crashing down.

How long can you run back and forth on the tennis court, trying to hit the ball from both sides?

Oh, but there was one.  A musician, so she was a goner. God, he was beautiful, and he was friends with her, and he encouraged her music, her singing, even describing her voice as “gorgeous”. It was bait, and she snapped at it ravenously.

Then he moved away, and the emails began. Freed from social constraints, they began to flirt madly, skirting around the edges of sexuality. This man was an electronic Lothario without the courage to try anything face-to-face.

Plus he was lonely, teaching music in some northern outpost. Then the messages began to coolly pull away, tripping off that whining, salivating  dog syndrome once again.

I wrote all these songs, see. It was idiotic, but that’s what I did. I mean, I wrote the lyrics and he wrote the tunes. I must’ve written 30 lyrics, and I thought some of them were pretty good. In fact, I KNOW they were good. He wrote tunes to a couple of them, some of them very strange.  Often he carved up the lyrics, adding his own lines which always seemed nonsensical.

And then: a jazz concert at his school! His band would be performing one of MY songs:

SILLY BOY

You walked into my life

And left your footprints on my skin

I could never tell if loving you

Was joy, or sin

It seems that if I touch you, I fall right in

And so I stay away. . .

Silly boy

I never should have

Set my heart on you

You’re a dream

That has no hope of coming true

When you smile

The angels smile along with you

Silly boy

I thought you meant it when

You said you’d be with me a while

But staying close to someone

Is not your style

It seems I have a habit of self-denial

And so I stay away. . .

Silly boy

I never should have

Lost my mind for you

You’re a dream

That bathes my heart in shades of blue

When you smile

The angels smile along with you

Silly boy

And when you left without me

All my plans just blew away

I knew that my composure

Wouldn’t last the day

It seems it doesn’t matter if I try to pray

And so, I say:

Silly boy

You never should have

Played games with my soul

I’m a fool

Who has no hope of feeling whole

Now you’re gone

My heart’s an empty, aching hole

You stole my joy

You silly boy

Silly boy . . .

Yes. And he actually worked on this one and set it to a tune so the lead singer in his band could perform it!  I couldn’t be there, of course, but he sent me the audio.

The female singer, a picture of whom he also sent me (sooty-eyed, slinky, with shingly black hair and multiple piercings) sang;

“You came into my life

I didn’t know I’d been

Something like

Joy or sin or – um - ”

Suddenly the accompaniment roared up louder to cover the fact that she had completely forgotten the words.

Then there was the “igloo".  Sometime during her mad puppy-scramble around him, wagging the stump of her little amputated tail, she told him a story about her childhood (half-fabricated): about how Hermie Kneuchdel had a crush on her and surprised her by building an igloo for her in his back yard.

Should she have been surprised when he began to write his own lyrics, one of which said “you built an igloo in my heart/now I know we’ll never be apart,” or some inane thing?

Then he came back for a visit and wanted me to sit in his car. (What??) “You have to hear these new songs I wrote,” he said, and turned on his sound system.

The songs were obviously, obsessively about one “girl” that he was madly infatuated with. Many of the  metaphors were snagged out of MY work and casually incorporated. For one wild second, I thought they were about me. How else could he so casually steal all my best stuff?

“What’s all this - ”

“Oh. These are about Alison. She’s – she’s one of my students. Seventeen years old, but she’s a lot more mature than I am! We can’t really be seen together so we have to do a lot of sneaking around.”

That one died a slow death. When was the last email? The last stinging whip on the puppy dog’s quivering nose?

There is this much left. He sends me birthday greetings every year. It's automatic, in his computer. Nice of him.

How many more? Let me count. There was the sour-faced drama critic she corresponded with for years and years, until he suddenly, completely inexplicably, left her this message:  “I won’t ‘friend’ you because I hate Facefuck.  Get lost.” She had no idea what had caused the connection to turn so poisonous. What had she said? What had she done?

When he suddenly died, she posted an angry diatribe on her blog and was attacked from every angle by people who accused HER of being nasty and mean-spirited.  She remembered her psychiatrist saying, “Lonn van Dyke is the meanest, most narcissistic, heartless, self-centred, vindictive. . .” and on and on it went. (She wondered how he knew. Maybe some of his male patients had “talked”.) It was of some help, but not much.

Meantime, she was reamed out, eviscerated by people who refused to see how much truth there was in what she was saying. One blogger found a ridiculous picture of her pulling a weird face, blew it up huge, posted it, and spent 500 words or so stabbing her through the heart, just to be sure everyone knew what a twisted old crackpot she was: "This woman insisted on following him around and harassing, even stalking him. He had probably been trying to scrape her off the bottom of his shoe for years."

Was it really that bad?  She looked at her post a couple of hours later and realized it wasn't much better than Lonn's "Facefuck" remark. So she took it down and deleted it. There was not much use in posting a heap of ashes. How much easier it is to feud with someone when you never see them face-to-face!

So what did I think would happen? As with so many of these men, I never met him face-to-face, but I kept pushing at it, inserting little lines in my letters about “meeting for coffee”. Ludicrously, she bought a dress that she never wore, her “Lonn dress”. She joked about it to her girl friend, but she was deadly serious. Sometimes she thought she saw him at concerts and plays, but she was never sure enough to come up to him. She knew he hated people anyway.

She suspected he lived in an emotional cave, had no family  and was close to no one. When he died, the accolades from co-workers (all retired now) were almost apologetic, thinly-veiled versions of “well, he should have written for the New Yorker instead of this sad little backwater rag”.  Weirdly, the "rag" was the only paper that published anything about his death.

Meantime, what had happened to all the bile he had spewed for people's entertainment? His venom had made him famous all over town (if nowhere else). It was supposedly an honor in the local arts scene to be "van Dyked", though people secretly received much more pleasure from seeing other people attacked. They waved the columns around and made their friends read them, and chuckled and sniggered over his evisceration of their  colleagues, reading the choicest sentences out loud. This fanned the flames of  vindictive rivalry in the arts community and made Lonn happy, providing him with the only sense of power he ever had. 

But even this debacle with its train wreck ending wasn't enough; she had to start all over again. 

Oh, don’t count the rest. Don’t tot up the desperation. WHY do I do this, why can’t I just dump it? What might happen? A fuck? I don’t want to fuck these men, and half of them are gay anyway. Do I want fairy-tale magic, do I want to make it “work” just one time, to turn around an immutable fate?

Somebody said to me – sounded pretty lame at the time but maybe it’s true – it has something to do with my father, how he ignored me and emanated a sense I wasn’t welcome, that I never should have “been”. This was between bouts of drunken dining-room buffoonery and table-pounding about the injustices in his life. Incredibly, he once said (and I’m still trying to get my head around this) that everything in his life had been great until I came along. As if I “came along” under my own steam, a virus invading the family, rather than an accident caused by HIS stinking spermatozoa.

He told me, drunk, that it was plain this baby (me) was an accident and completely unwanted (though if I’d been a boy I might have squeaked through). So he told my Mum, “Don’t worry, this one will be smarter than all the other three put together. He’ll be a genius and play the violin like Paganini.” Another time he told me “well, when you’ve lost one baby” (my eldest sister, a crib death) “maybe you have to take on another one.” Something to plug the hole.

It seems to me I was dumped down the chute into a world of impossible expectations. I’ve been trying to buy my way in ever since. Are these men, these men whose sweetness is always tinged with sadism, supposed to be my way in, my key? Why has nothing I’ve ever done been good enough? Why does it magically turn into a slag heap the moment I’ve accomplished it?

And what’s the matter with you, anyway – aren’t you grateful for your life, for all these opportunities to connect with illustrious men?  With nasty infantile musicians, with bitter reclusive faggots? What ARE you, a parasite? You hate parasites, don’t you? What would happen to you if you stopped the ridiculous puppy-frisking and walked away from it all? Would you really be left with nothing?

Nothing?

  

(Blogger's note. Whew. I don't know what happens to me sometimes. I'm not saying there's no truth in this. What happens in fiction is fractal, or should I say fractured, kaleidoscopic pieces scrambled around and reconnected by imagination. If this were the whole truth about my life, I doubt if I'd be around any more. But there are certain issues. They go around and around. I don't know about other people because they don't talk about it. I suspect there are more hidden sinkholes and sore spots than people care to admit.

I found it interesting that I was so viciously attacked for my post on van Dyke, who comes the closest to a "real" person in this story (the others are more like composites). I think it happened because there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in what I was saying. This guy sent me Christmas cards for ten years, for God's sake! What caused him to turn on me so savagely?  I've never quite gotten used to being one of these people who gets attacked. The internet is a veritable playground for predators and sadists, because everyone is wearing the same blank mask.

I'm not much of a dog person - I find them uncomfortably loyal and prefer the idiosyncratic aloofness of cats. (More than two cats, however, is an affliction.) Right now I have a bird. What does that say about me, I wonder?

My original title for this story was either Bird Dog or She's a Bird Dog, but I didn't think people would remember that song (which I've always liked: "hey bird dog get away from my quail,/Hey bird dog, you're on the wrong trail". I think Hound Dog has stuck in people's memory because of Elvis, who was also too doggish for my tastes.) (P. S. I changed it again because I seem to have lost my entire readership. Should I dumb these down, I wonder, or put "tits" in every  title?)