For Steve
Blurb #1
Originally published on Fictionalized
Hi, friend. Really appreciate you reading all of my stuff. It’s a lot, I know. Sometimes heavy, sometimes crazy and sexual, then some really angry stuff, but always lots of humor. What would I do without my writing? And the humor? I’d probably be dead. Better question: What would you do without it? Read bitches gotta eat, I hope.
I do need someone to read this stuff, though, or it means nothing. So, thank you for that, Steve.
This I know: a lot of my writing is good. Quite a few people read it, and they seem to find it interesting, which I’ve always found a bit surprising. I would describe my style as oddly polished in its unconventionality. I’m going to attribute this to a lack of formal training, a voracious appetite for reading (mostly the really good stuff), and a desire to do everything perfectly. I really get off on perfectionism, or as I like to call it, perfectionasm, which as you might have guessed is like the difference between organism and orgasm. Perhaps I didn’t need to point that out.
I was always an aspiring snoot about literature — from the first grade on — thanks to my friend Kit’s parents, Sally and Bill, and to a slew of really great teachers I had over the years. Thank you, all. I noticed a few of you, Mrs. Dorner and Sally in particular, wrote your own obituaries. Who does that? Damn! They’re good! FYI, Ethel Dorner was absolutely the best teacher, ever, although I really liked Mr. Adrian, too, and he’s still alive. Note to self: drop him a line. Mrs. Dorner lived to be a perfect 100 years old. But of course she did. That was exactly the kind of person she was. An exact person.
Ethel, as I’d like to call her now that I’m considerably older than she was when she taught me the facts of life, helped me to understand something really important: it didn’t really matter what other people thought of me. I could just be my crazy self, and that was cool. “Go for it” was her message, even though that wasn’t an expression at the time. Sometimes, though, when my crazy self got too crazy, I did have to pound erasers out in the snow. Without a coat.
Truth be told, I don’t really give a shit what people think of me, even to this day. I seem to have gotten mired in this developmental phase, and I’m not sure I want to move on to anything else. One of my readers called my writing “sophomoric,” as if that was an insult.
I’m quite good right here, where I’m at. I think most women don’t achieve this state of nonchalance (or that slightly elevated version: “indifference”) until they are well into menopause. Me, I was solidly settled into my whateverness by ninth grade. I figured out very early on that not caring what others thought of me was powerful stuff. More people should give it a try. If they did, they’d probably find themselves making much better decisions all-around, and they’d quit feeling guilty about writing people off who really deserve to be written off. Same goes for those who deserve flipping-off. Or those who take issue with my cooking with Trader Joe’s sauces rather than making curry from scratch.
It blows my mind, all the energy people expend trying to impress so-and-so and what’s-his-name. I’m like, wow, we could have solved world hunger by now. Or just had a damn nice curry, fuck you very much. You know who you are.
FYI, no one cares you were a cheerleader, Brenda. Or homecoming queen, Connie.
I equate my writing to a really great tent in the middle of a homeless encampment; a sanctuary in the middle of fucking chaos. You get to watch people working it out, while you quietly sip kombucha in your low-profile folding camp chair. You’d have to make at least one friend at the camp, preferably someone without an addiction issue, so you could take turns watching each other’s shit. And when it rains, there’s that lovely sound on your tent, and of course, I would have made a point of pitching my tent higher up so it wouldn’t get flooded. I did think that through.
It could be a decent life, you know, “living rough,” as the English call it. You just need to make sure you have plenty of warm clothes and a sturdy cot. Also: water and a good can opener. In fact, once you got into the life, you might start thinking, “Hey, I could get used to living like this.” It would certainly be more interesting than your average existence. My goal has never been to live up in the hills. Nah. Too boring.
Until I moved in with my current beau, I was quite set on living in a camper. In fact, my #1 financial goal was to save up for said camper. I dreamt and dreamt about living nomadically, and I’m sure it had nothing to do with that Frances McDormand flick, Nomadland, that I’ve watched about 17 times. In the dream, I sometimes parked in my daughter’s driveway, sometimes in my son’s, but most of the time I’m parked in the woods at a KOA campground in Cloverdale.
There are a lot of those KOA campgrounds. Ya gotta move around because they don’t let you stay permanently at any of them. They have great showers, toilets, and proper hookups, and they’re cheap — maybe 1000 bucks per month — if I were part-time with my kids. I’d just rotate sites all year, sticking close to Northern California. There are like 15 of those campgrounds between Watsonville and Mount Shasta. Perfect. This would give me the opportunity to check out the world in small doses, while continuing to live like a hermit, dining nightly on my favorite tuna salad on multigrain and assorted canned beans. OMG I love beans. Every fucking kind. And they’re cheap because people are idiots and they eat stupid shit like bacon and filet mignon instead.
Not gonna lie. I also love dorm food and hospital cafeteria food. I am positive that some of my friends wished they could take back the rude comments they made about the cafeteria — like around the time they were trying to juggle toddlers and full-time work. Yeah, bitches. Bet you wish you could just go down to the cafeteria and load up your tray with Hungarian goulash, coleslaw, and buttered lima beans. Those were the days, baby.
Steve — I’ve been doing this storytelling thing since I was a kid. You’ve only known me for what, 2 years? I just wanted to point out that I tell stories in a number of ways — through my writing, sometimes off the top of my head at the dinner table, other times through my flute playing. Some of the stories are real, every detail exact, every sensation, every smell, every color; some are not. I call those made-up shit. Usually those stories are not as good, at least in my estimation. And it’s seriously painful to write them. All that fucking pretending and not saying exactly what you mean. I’m just not good at it. If I want to call Brenda a bitch, I want it to be the real Brenda, not “Belinda.” All of this is the same reason I hate Disney animations.
Other stories of mine have super fuzzy details and are disorganized, like a meandering dream, with asides that seem to have nothing to do with the main plot. Sort of like those awful ballets they used to insert between acts of Italian opera while they hosed down the lead tenor during costume changes. Some stories are deeply satisfying, I know because I make myself cry at the end, while others seem to cause my readers great unease. Sorry, Hannah. I can assure you that neither of those two variations in emotional effect is intentional. I’ve not got that much skill.
By the way, Laura, when you read a run-on sentence in one of my pieces, 99.9% of the time it’s intentional. I do this when I write stories or when I tell them at dinner. My goal: prevent someone else from cutting in and fucking things up, even if it’s just in their mind. Also, run-ons give the impression the character is coming unhinged, a common theme in my work. But, perhaps, these grammatical issues point more to the writer’s becoming unhinged. Another whatever moment.
The one thing you can count on as one of my readers: I am writing whatever I feel, and whatever I feel like. Is there a difference? I need to take a walk and think about that.
And if the story I’m writing is a little too close to home and I know I’m heading into a potential lawsuit with my ex, well… let’s just say there’s a reason I have called this section of my writing “Fictionalized.” Come to think of it, it might be good to call all of my writing “fiction.” That feels very liberating to me, because truth be told, I have a very hard time writing about things I’ve not actually experienced. And while I am, by nature, a shit disturber, I’m thinking I’d rather just say stuff and not have to worry about the consequences. So, going forward, let’s just call all of this “fiction.”
And sometimes, I’m really not positive that what I’m putting out there is 100% non-fiction when I am trying to write non-fiction. You know, it’s hard to recall every single detail accurately. Especially when you were going through huge hormonal changes at the time the events were occurring.
So, let’s keep it simple and call everything I write going forward “fiction.” I like that.
By the way, do any of you ever forget which hand is left, which is right, now that you don’t have a callous on your middle finger anymore?
Lately, I’ve been trying to imagine my way out of this nomadic existence I’ve been stuck in most of my life — the one where I’m moving from place to place with my mom and dad, then my stepmother and dad, and then I am living in someone else’s space and someone else’s community, or in an institutional setting (music camps, universities), or with another person’s family, or in a house mostly paid for by in-laws. You know, all those fucking places where I’m not really an owner of the actual space or part of the community or family. Or I’m only “allowed” to be there temporarily. Thanks for nothing, Jim. You prick.
I’ve spent a lifetime investing my sweat equity and talent into making everyone else’s life better, or at least easier. Invariably, at the end of the day, week, month, or year, I personally have zero to show for all my effort. Lately, I find myself stepping back and thinking: “What is mine, actually?” An existential question, right? After all those fucking years solving everyone else’s problems, making their lives nice, helping their kids get on in this world, what’s left for me? Well, that’s easy: my kids. That’s all. Two youngish people, sturdy, healthy and good-looking. Yeah, I know. Shut the fuck up — that’s a lot — a lot more than many can say they’ve got in this world. I do wish I had something to leave them when I’m gone, however — something besides stories. But the reality is that’s all I’ve got when everything is said and done. There’s no money. None.
But there are lots and lots of great stories. Insert smiling emoji. I’ve had quite the life.
And somehow, I continue to have a satisfying existence, even though nothing is mine. Every morning a great cup of coffee and beautiful views from the breakfast table. Fresh air, a million hiking trails I could explore if I felt like it, soft clothes and a cozy bed. And a really wonderful man, who is gentle and won’t eat anything spicy. And then there are those beautiful kids. Not sure I deserve all of this. But I’ll take it.
And for the time being, this is my kids’ reality, too. Maybe we’re all better off this way, not having things. Probably not, though.
Yeah, yeah. Judge away, readers. I don’t really care what you think about any of this. I believe I mentioned that above.
There is nothing, really, that I’d like more than to know that my children, if they felt inclined, could sit all day and paint — something beautiful or ugly — or spend a weekend hiking with friends on the Lost Coast, and know that at the end of any given day, they would have a roof over their heads and a warm bowl of beef stew on the table. This is why I always include a subscribe button at the bottom of the page.
Hey Steve, I can see from my Substack dashboard that you’ve been there for me, checking out nearly every article and post. Know that every time I put pen to paper (even though I don’t really put “pen” to “paper”), I’m thinking of you. Every time I write — knowing you are a reader — well, that makes me up my game. Seriously. I consider whether you’ve likely had enough of one bitchfest or another, and then I try to think of something else to write about. I like that imaginary challenge. I also let Grammarly take a third and fourth swipe at my piece so you won’t get tripped up on grammatical errrors, which can be so annoying when you’re OCD. I was reading Maigret mysteries last week, and found one of the books riddled with typos. I found at least five, at which point I had to put the book down. It was driving me nuts.
No. I want you to fall right down the rabbit hole and land gently on a pile of sticks and leaves. Then off we go on an adventure together.
Today, I’m here at my standing desk looking out the window onto the bullpen at the ranch. It’s surrounded by a thick, 5 ft. high rock wall that was built about a hundred years ago by Portuguese immigrants. Beyond it are the remnants of their fruit orchard and lots of olive trees. They were pretty smart — they knew where things grew well. Sometimes you can see the horses chowing down on the low-hanging apples. Hard to believe trees that old can still produce fruit. Very cool.
It’s a very dry California landscape right now. August. Crispy. And here I am, looking out the window, typing.
Sometimes when I’m writing, I fantasize I’m staying in a hotel in Seattle, and that it’s raining and raining, and the words and the tears, they all come together and flow down the hill into Pike Place Market, where at some point in the day I’ll go in search of smoked salmon. There’s a lot of moisture in this Seattle fantasy. Thoughts of having to stay cuddled up indoors or walking in the rain somehow get me to say what I need to say. Usually it’s the really difficult stuff I’m writing about when I’m in my pretend Seattle. And at the end of a long stint of writing, I get a pretend table for one at The Pink Door, and I order the cioppino.
A little aside — it’s a fucking miracle I can type right now, as this was something I couldn’t do six months ago. Not even a little bit. I did wonder whether I’d reached the end of the line. It sure felt like it: that final fall at the end of an agonizing year of Graves’ Disease. There were twelve fractures. I was bruised, scraped up, a huge mess; I couldn’t walk or use my arms, and I was in excruciating pain for over a month. But then my beau reminded me I damn well better hang on. I had promised to take care of him, and I had two kids who should really have a say in the matter. “You bitch! You don’t get to give up!” All of this was said humorously, of course, though there was a good dose of real in those words.
I do hate breaking a promise, and my guy knew that. I also felt this in my gut — the need to carry on for my kids, especially given the way things are in the world right now. A fucking nightmare. I had not prepared them for any of this. So, I was going to have to fix that. That meant I was going to have to find a way to get well. And I did.
I’ve always believed that things and people, events, jobs, bad habits, good habits — they all wear you out over time. There’s only so much you can endure or that you can do. Life is abrasive. Bones weaken, and joints start scraping against one another. Synapses in the brain quit connecting.
How many times can a person work 18 hours straight on their feet, carrying things, righting chaos, making things beautiful and perfect, being nice, saving people from themselves, then closing up for the night and making sure everyone has gotten off safely to their homes and families? My job, that was it, in a nutshell. All of my jobs were like that, in fact. I was somehow, always, the person who was in charge. And I was really good at that. Congratulations, bitch. No, shut up.
Being in charge is a huge burden, in the same way being good at difficult things is not a gift. You’re rewarded, then punished, all in one fell swoop. Exhilarated when you’ve accomplished the thing, then exhausted for a month. Then there is the hubris, which according to AI “is considered the worst and most fundamental of the seven deadly sins.” Got that right, bitch. Sometimes I was so damn proud of myself, but then, a moment later, I would feel horribly diminished. The realization: all of that good stuff I’d done, it was for someone else’s benefit. Not for myself. Not for my kids. Fucking pride.
Steve. Don’t do this to yourself.
In the end, I just got tired. Very, very tired. I wanted to go back to tasting my food and feeling the tepid water dissolving the oily, salty sweat. I wanted to feel refreshed again. But I was so numb. I couldn’t feel anything. Nothing. The water might have been boiling hot and burning my epidermis. I wouldn’t have noticed.
That’s pretty much what was happening to me.
A little synopsis here, so you have an idea of where all of this is going. This is a story about my ex, whose name I cannot bring myself to say out loud. I do hate him that much. He was horrible to our kids and to me. You need to know how very difficult it was for me to type “our kids.” I so wish I could take that connection away from them. It was immeasurably damaging. Of course they wouldn’t be here without it, but I do wish they could have had just about anyone else for a father. For nearly two decades, it felt like he was killing us.
My crazy work life continued on as I’ve alluded to for years. There were no days off, no real vacations, at least not for me. We’d go to the boardwalk in Santa Cruz for four days and I’d let the kids each bring a friend, then it was passes for everyone, except me. Off they’d go, and off I went — to a coffee shop. Then we’d meet up for Mexican mid-afternoon after I’d spent five hours cranking out emails to customers and vendors. We did this year after year, though sometimes we’d do the Russian River instead. Back then, I was putting in 65-hour work weeks.
For nine months of the year, Fridays and Saturdays were my event days, and they typically started in the early morning, with me finally getting home around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. I’d peek in on my kids, check on homework progress, throw in a load of laundry and do a few dishes before giving myself permission to collapse, which, more often than not, I did fully dressed, with my shoes still on. On those nights, I had not one ounce of energy left. Not one.
My end-of-event ritual, without fail, was allowing myself a single bottle of sparkling water, a large Pellegrino, which I pretty much put back in single draught. I’d needed much more than that in the way of water throughout the day to replenish all I’d lost in the way of sweat, but there was never enough time. Everyone depended on me.
By the end of one of those long events, my body felt wrung out; I was so dry. Sometimes it felt like I was dying. Even then, I couldn’t stop. I had to keep going. Keep going. Keep going. If I didn’t do the job as was expected, the job I’d been paid to do, how was I going to put food on the table and pay the rent? So, I just kept going.
In the mornings after one of these events, the kids would be starving. They’d had to fend for themselves the whole 24 hours prior, and they weren’t very experienced at it. So I made myself get up, and I put breakfast on the table. A huge, tasty breakfast, though my hips — omg, they were killing me. I could not lift my feet off the ground. Seriously. I could only shuffle. It was an embarrassing sight, which fortunately no one ever saw — that, and me trying to get into that damn clawfoot tub shower. I had to use my right arm to lift my leg in. It really felt like at some point, my legs weren’t going to work anymore. I did think about that quite a bit. How much longer before my legs would just give way beneath me? They were threatening to do it, big time.
Yes, it was time to start worrying about my health, but I simply didn’t have the luxury of doing that. I was going to have to find a way to shelve all this pain temporarily — hide it from my kids and my customers. I mean really… who was going to hire someone to run their events when they were limping all the time? Not gonna happen. And I could not be the mom who couldn’t walk. How embarrassing for my kids. It was bad enough I looked (and was) older than all the other moms. So I pretended I was fine and made myself do what felt impossible.
On those Sundays after two days of events, I had to suck it up. My kids had to come first — they needed me. They needed some fun and to get their homework done, and I’d promised we’d go rock climbing and get tacos, and that their friends could join us. I couldn’t not do that stuff. Right? So we did. Sometimes I fell asleep at the picnic tables at Rockzilla. Right there, under the fluorescent lights. I’d wake up and find that Dwayne, the owner, had set a chilled Diet Coke next to me. And he never, ever let me pay. I kind of knew why, but we never went there. Who had time for that?
And then there were Mondays, always looming just around the corner; another day in court, fuck me. The thought of it lingered over our Sundays like gathering clouds. I was having to appear in court again, and I’d not had time to write a response to the latest summons and complaint. A huge whatever.
I’ve lost count at this point. Was this the twenty-third time he’s filed a motion for child support or to change the custody schedule or to publicly accuse me of ruining everyone’s lives? These court appearances had become an ugly thread that ran through our lives every single week, all year, or so it seemed. My ex, he was just so fucking horrible. It didn’t matter that I was asking him for nothing. It didn’t matter he got the car, the house and everything in it, minus my laptop and flutes. He couldn’t help himself. He needed to harrass me. He needed to hurt me. He needed to win. Always needing to win. For what? I just wanted to be left in peace. That’s it. Keep your fucking money. Just go away.
Mondays would arrive, as they always did, and then there were all those stairs at the courthouse. I saw them, and my legs felt like rubber. How was I going to get up to the third floor? If I took the elevator, I was sure to run into him or his cocky attorney. I really didn’t want either of them seeing how weak I’d become. They would turn it into an excuse to take the kids away.
For years, there was this rising feeling of burning every time I drove past the courthouse. It would start in my chest, then rise up through my neck and into my cheeks. I would turn crimson — it felt like my face was on fire. My flushed face was hugely embarrassing, and something I couldn’t control. It was so noticeable, in fact, that everyone would ask if I was OK, including whoever was the judge du jour. Now I know — it was cortisol. It was all that fear, anger, frustration, worry, and despair. Cortisol. Years of it. It nearly killed me, and it’s probably what fried my thyroid.
My ex and his antics — this was one huge knot I couldn’t unravel, and it was growing more complex every time we went to court. I’d get served papers, then a flood of horrible thoughts would pollute the most beautiful summer day, triggering memories of all the other years of sadness, hardship, and worry I’d had as a child. And he knew this. He loved it. Throughout the year, he’s make sure to serve papers on a day we had an outing planned or on my birthday or on Mother’s Day. You could count on it. And if we had people visiting from out-of-town, well surely that was going to be a week I had to be in court. He had this down — the ex parte hearings for imaginery emergencies.
And then there was his sitting on a bench outside the courtroom in his fucking Mr. Rogers zip-up sweater and his obscenely expensive Mephisto shoes, always smiling and cheerful, ready to bring me down a peg, in front of a judge, publicly. A beautiful day in the neighborhood. And never did he present a single shred of evidence I’d actually done anything wrong, short of my using profanity in his presence.
But then malignant narcissists don’t need evidence, do they? Everyone knows they are right. They are the deciders, they are in charge. And they are more intelligent than everyone around them, including the lawyers and those ridiculous judges. He would fill them in on what was really going on. Surely they would see he was right. It was so clear. So logical. She was unhinged; look at her red face.
If he’d had his way, I would have been reduced to nothing. Dead. Never mind how this would have affected our kids.
This is the story I promised you, Steve, and which I have kept to myself until now.
Keep in mind, this is fiction.