I loved two men

There are strange, strange things that happen, things so inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.

I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.

Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.

Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.

For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual cruelty.

Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in this backwater?

The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all. It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti, where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.

I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same subjects. More or less.

How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple – I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back, except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own, but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would summarily clap it down.

Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not turning right.

As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport. When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.

One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”

After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such treatment, but I did.

In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards – yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.

I will cut to the chase, because this could become book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely, because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”

What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”

I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion, telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day – receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist – said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive, narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the psychiatrist.

I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd  the error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements of intent. Silly, really, but  I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was probably unreachable.

So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention". 

Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had cared about him.

But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit, this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered. The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for 25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.

My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous, which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so similar, it was downright eerie.

Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd, he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.

He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind that unhappy camper known as a ghost.

I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium himself!  But then I sent something that wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.

He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in a stroke.

But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner (also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with his face on it. It was part of the ritual.

But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself.  It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like $200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).

Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.

There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the time.

The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is, can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are completely consumed.

I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self, abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live or die.

POST-BLOG.  A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit. 

Does everything happen for a reason?

For more years than I can count, I carried a little slip of paper around with me with a few lines of what looked like poetry on it. I remember what it said by heart, but cross-checked it on the internet just now. The title is, "I don't know".

I don't know where to start
There are scars I could show
If I opened my heart
But how far, Lord, but how far can I go?
I don't know.

What I need I don't have
What I have I don't own
What I own I don't want
What I want, Lord, I don't know

What I say I don't feel
What I feel I don't show
What I show isn't real
What is real, Lord - I don't know
No, no, no - I don't know

Once in a while I risked showing this  slip of paper to someone, and they read it in blank puzzlement and handed it back to me. One woman - God, how I regret giving it to her - read it out loud in a sweet, querulous, schoolteacherish voice, the final "I don't know" in a fluffy little voice out of a '50s sitcom.

All right, I don't know. I don't know what this piece is going to be about. The quote is from Leonard Bernstein's Mass, a mammoth undertaking that was a cross between a formal Latin mass and the hippie-ish Hair sensibilities of the day. It had only mixed success, and I have never actually heard it.

I got thinking this morning about Fate. God is kind of beyond me right now, though I will blushingly admit there was a time not so long ago when I thought I understood God, or knew what God meant. Now I wonder. Is there a "something" that shapes our ends, rough-hew them though we may (to paraphrase/massacre Shakespeare)?

How many of us get what we want, what we really think we want? Might it be true that on our deathbed, we will suddenly sit up and cry, "That's it!" - then fall back lifeless? (For a long time I had this odd vision of a monk in that situation exclaiming, "I could have had a woman!", then collapsing backwards forever.) Conventional wisdom says things like, "You can do/be anything you want to, so long as you want it enough and work hard enough." But what if one day your doctor calls you up and says, "I'm sorry. It's MS." (Or ALS, or pancreatic cancer, or schizophrenia, or . . . ) What if your lovingly-raised children, hopelessly embroiled in a miasma of drugs and despair, can't look after their children, and you suddenly find yourself raising them instead of retiring to a carefree life of sun and surf?

I'm talking about the curves life throws at us, some of them fatal. I'm talking about a beautiful young woman shot in the back just as her life is starting, with a "loved one" suspected. If this is love, how do we define hate? Almost all murders take place within families. Most of them are perpetrated by spouses, with husbands predominating. What am I trying to say here?

Another trope that bugs me no end is, "Everything happens for a reason". People say this at memorial services all the time, and it makes me want to scream. If a baby has a convulsion and dies in her mother's arms, it happens for a reason. If a person finally commits suicide after 40 years of endless turmoil and failed dreams, it happens for a reason. If the bottom falls out, people whose lives still have a bottom spout this bit of cowardice and ignorance, then, having done their philosophical duty, go home.

What's reason? It's an explanatory thing, isn't it? Or else something logical, almost cerebral. Isn't this just people's way of rationalizing and taming a reality which can be ferocious and terrifying? Does God keep score, have a little abacus up there (and it's always "up there", not inside us or around us), and dole out lessons as per our spiritual needs?

I can think of a worse thing. These tin-plated philosophers secretly believe that because the tragedy has a reason behind it, it's - well - almost deserved, isn't it? It's all part of a mysterious higher reality or karma or Fate, and whether the person has done something in a previous life or just stepped on a crack in this one, God has just decided, well, that's it - I'm really tired of all this transgression, intended or not. For what else could this "happens for a reason" mean?

I also have trouble with angels. The angel fever has died down somewhat, but for a while the books were so stupid, one of them had instructions for finding your wings. I mean it, trying to find the actual spot on your shoulder blades where the wings sprouted out, or would, I assume after you croaked.

The idea was, if someone was falling off a 70-story building and fell on an awning and didn't die, their "angel" must have been looking after them. It came rushing up underneath the person like Superman catching Lois Lane.

OK, then. . . you know where I'm going with this, don't you? How then do you comfort the agonized family of the guy who fell without an awning? No doubt, many would just fall back on the familiar escape clause, "Everything happens for a reason," then go home.

Did September 11 happen for a reason? If it was a lesson, and most Americans are incensed at the very idea, then what was it? For it provoked the same old human reaction that has kept us in chains for millennia: REVENGE.

I have dreams. Yes, I have them, and I've been told from the very beginning that I have potential, but here is a confession. I never fulfilled that potential, because struggle as I might, I just can't do it. There are obstacles in my path that no one told me about because they were too busy saying I could do/be anything I wanted to be if I only tried hard enough.

I have been put somewhere, and don't get me wrong, it's the best place in the world because it is the bosom of my family. But why can't I do other things besides that, why can't I fulfill my dreams without some sort of blood sacrifice?  I see other women doing both. They're not trying to steal it from their families, or from other writers. They just have it, they do it. They sign contracts, they don't sit in the starting gate slowly dissolving from the acid of unfulfilled promise.

This is probably the most personal thing I have ever written here, and I know I take a risk in making myself look like an impotent loser who never got beyond being a housewife. I swear to you, I don't know what I have done or not done to miss  the magic that seems to happen to other writers, the sort of magic that creates "buzz" before their book even leaves the starting gate.

I have reviewed hundreds of books, literally hundreds, many of them wildly successful, but when does it get to be my turn? Am I wearing some sort of invisible pink chiffon bridesmaid dress, now tattered from a few decades of use?

It's fashionable to ignore me, in spite of the sometimes-rapturous reviews I received for both my novels. "Well then, dear, just be happy with that," the sweet little Betty Crocker voice tells me. "East, west, Home is best."

Then take it out of me, God, take it, rip out of my chest the desire and uproot it forever. "What I need I don't have/What I have I don't own/What I own I don't want/What I want, Lord, I don't know/No, no, no, I don't know."

Except that I do know. The "reason" for everything, that mysterious force that orders the universe and every person in it, has somehow or other never happened to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og59KBIu6D0