laboring under a dark and twisted star

Up too early after a fitful night of sweaty half-sleep.
Fortunately, I have a steaming mug of coffee to snap me out of the fog I'm in.
But, wait just a minute...my coffee tastes...strangely foul.
Upon checking the milk, I realize that our brand spanking new fridge - the one
we had to rush out and sell our souls to get after the old one died on one of the hottest
days of the year - is not working. On another of the hottest days of the year.
But while F#@* all annoying, this is not the worst thing that could happen.
And it is not, in fact, the worst thing that has happened today.

My oldest sister called this morning to tell me that my nephew had been having
dizzy spells, possibly related to some hypoglycemic issue.
A few days ago, as he was walking from the street to a friend's house, he fainted.
He fell straight backward, hitting only his head on the concrete curb.
His skull is fractured from the back of his head around to the orbit of his eye,
and there is another fractured area at the base of his brain.
There is bleeding in his brain, and blood and cranial fluid in one of his ears, and he has
lost the majority of his hearing, as well as his sense of smell.
He also has short term memory loss, speech issues,
and they are continuing to test for additional problems...

This is just devastating news for my entire family.
Even though it has been 21 years since my brother J's accident, the words 'brain injury'
still pack an enormous wallop, and bring back memories that are traumatic and sickening.

But, it's still early.
Who knows what the day will bring.


bs

"I think everybody's nuts" - Johnny Depp

Whew.
The past few days have been utterly hellish.

105 to 99 and not even the hint of a breeze.
At home, even though we are up in the woods,
it has been miserable and hard to sleep at night.
And in town, especially up in the Inferno, it has been brutal.
Mercifully, today promises to be much cooler, which should
help prevent the meltdown that had been threatening our
fragile peace there at The In.
Speaking of threats to the peace, we had an uncomfortable
experience over the weekend at my workplace.
A friend of the tweaker-neighbors
came over to our house and tried to make trouble.
There is an outdoor area that connects our place
to the one next door, but the boundaries are well known
and have always been respected.
So when this big guy showed up in our area, drunk and high,
we were all a little on edge -but we were trying to enjoy
the tepid night air and did not want to be driven back
into the soul sucking heat of our building.
Long story short - the guy was agitated and became more so,
making derogatory and threatening statements
and trying to physically intimidate me and the other women.
He kept getting up close to my face and saying things like, "Oh yes,
I'm just so sure this is a clean and sober living facility...why?
Why are you like this, I just want to know. I mean, that makes you like,
like fucking vegetarians... or fucking Mormons or something."

After asking him 8 or 10 times to please leave, I got annoyed and called 911.
When two officers arrived, the guy became ridiculously angry.
He started mocking the cops and arguing with them
every bit as stupidly as he'd been arguing with me earlier.
At one point, when one of the cops told him he could be arrested for criminal trespass,
he said, "That's ING man: tres- pass-ING. Watch your tense, man."

After putting up with a full load of his shite, the officers escorted him away,
and we were all relieved to have him gone.
His absence however, was brief - in under 5 minutes he was back - this time
coming through our front door, up our stairs and into our kitchen area.
He sort of chuckled and was in the process of saying, "Ooops, wrong house..."
when the cops (he thought he'd ditched) slapped some handcuffs on him.
If he shows up again, maybe I'll lock him in my office - five minutes in that
sweatbox and he'll be a stain on the floor.

In other news,
the girlfriend from hell wants to have my brothers' baby.
Only problem: she's barren.
But don't despair my friends, Maylene has it all figured out.
She's going to have some of her DNA harvested and then transferred into a
donor egg, which will be fertilized and implanted in a surrogate womb.
I know,
I can feel you -
and believe me when I say that I am thinking the very same thing...

I swear, I don't know when I climbed aboard the AssHat Express,
but I want to get off.
Now.

Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.
- Rabindranath Tagore




Godspeed Aunt.
I hope now you can forgive me
for throwing Peppy off the balcony.
Thank you for soup and chips
and that shady spot in your back yard.



1920 - 2006

Part Two

The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.
-- Carol Matthau


For most of my adult life, the standard for awkward social situations
has been a hideous weekend with a friend of D’s way back
in the late seventies – and I would have been more then happy
to keep it that way.
However, life had other plans for me, and those plans arrived a few
weeks ago in the form of one Maylene Throckton: girlfriend from hell.
My brother J (either in spite of or because of his brain injury)
has an eerie ability to attract women - women who are, in one way
or another, needy, dysfunctional and very, very strange.
In the 21 years since his accident, he has gotten quite involved with
a number of these women and - because I am his sister/mother/
life coach/counselor/warden/herd boss/legal guardian - so have I.
First there was the high school sweetheart who felt that their love would
magically bring about a miracle, and punished us all when it did not.
And the nurse who had known him before his injury; she stuck around
until she realized that having a late-life baby with a profoundly disabled
guy was probably not a workable plan.
Next came the angry 460-pound social worker and her 87-year old mother,
followed by the 18 year old in a wheel chair and her angry mother.
Beth from New Jersey actually moved in with J, after creating such misery
with her incessant outbursts and complaints that he was evicted from his
former place. She brought with her a service dog the size of a pony, a boatload
of issues related to her brain injury, and a penchant for calling her lawyer
anytime things didn’t go her way (“He’s a shark I tell ya, a New Jersey shark!”)
Following Hurricane Beth, there was a merciful drought, interrupted only briefly
by Saralee, a retired forensic pathologist involved in animal rescue.
I met her only once, and after sharing with me her passion for dogs,
she returned to the tiny home she shares with 10 of them – never to be heard from again.
Lulled by the calm that usually precedes a storm, I allowed myself to think
that J had finally had his fill; that maybe we were finished with the awful meet-
and-greets that are de rigueur once he begins another doomed affair.
And I held fast to such wishful thinking until one recent night, when he phoned
around 11 pm to tell me that he was ‘entertaining company’ again.

According to J, the story goes like this:
He met her at the library, and after lunch and some coffee, they went
to his house and spent the rest of the day in bed. She is a movie producer
and director, currently filming a thriller she wrote about the ancient
Egyptians and some deep-space aliens.
She presently lives with her sister and her niece (who she is helping to raise),
but she is looking for a big old house where she can raise her own foster daughters (2)
as well as the triplets she recently went to Canada to adopt.
Total bullshit? Uh, yeah…however, (in part because of J’s short term memory deficits)
I was willing to try and suspend my disbelief, at least until I had a chance
to speak with Maylene herself.
I did finally manage a few conversations with her, and each was weirder than
the one that came before. Her voice sounded rather babyish and she spoke
in a singsong manner that made me long to get away from the phone and
rinse out the inside of my head. She echoed the stories J had told me, adding
more fantastic details, and then she made some assertions and assumptions
regarding J that I found a bit alarming, given the brevity of their relationship.
In the end, everything she said seemed slightly off, leaving me absolutely
certain of only one thing: we had a flaming nutbag on our hands.

Last week, my husband D and I decided it was time to face the music,
so we went to see J and meet his ladylove. It was J’s birthday, so we
brought along some gifts and an offer to take them both out to dinner.
Things were scary right from the beginning.
For starters, Maylene was behind the kitchen door when D and I arrived,
and she came out very slowly, like an animal emerging from a cave.
She whispered hello and thrust a folder toward me, saying brightly in her
tinny voice, “Here, I brought a copy of my script for you.”
Then she sank into J and began nuzzling and petting and cuddling him
as though they were alone in the bleachers at the junior high.
We gave J his gifts, and she grabbed them from him, opening each one
and chirping, “Thanks, we needed this.” And when we finally got in the car
to go to dinner, she continued her strange canoodling, while simultaneously
finishing all of J’s sentences for him and regaling us with stories about
meeting celebrities. “Johnny Depp, he’ll either talk to you or he won’t.”
And “When Steven Spielberg read my script he said go for it – so I am!”
Dinner was downright ludicrous, with Maylene cutting J’s food into
little bites and continually caressing him with her pudgy, pale hands.
She sat across from me and, while she looked fairly benign (think
bloated, middle aged Mia Farrow), every once in a while I saw her
taking my measure in a feral way that left me jittery and chilled.
At one point, when Maylene was gassing on about the “huge factory
high in the Ozarks” she bought so her brother would have a job, I
leaned over to D and whispered, “Hey, remember the Silver Pear?”
He nodded, and then he whispered back,” I’d do that ten times in a
row before I’d ever do this again.”



In the days since we endured our dinner with Maylene, I’ve had time to
read her ‘script’ and ponder the claims she’s made.
And while I’ve laughed about how totally bizarre she is, I am also concerned
that she could be a danger to J.
At best she’s a whack job, needy and sad; at worst a pathological liar and con.
Her conversations are peppered with dark comments about her mother,
who she refers to in the past tense much of the time, and vague statements
about the progress of filming her movie.
To date, J has never been to her house or seen where it is.
And even though she says things like, "The triplets just LOVE J - my foster
daughters are always asking when they get to go meet him!", J says he has
never met them- or anyone else in her life.
Her script is a jumbled, pathetic mess – it looks (and reads) like a 5th graders’
rush-job report. There are misspelled words (like ‘seen’ for scene and ‘rapped’
for raped) on every page and an angry, juvenile violence that seems much more
like memory than the plot of a sci-fi flick.
Yesterday J told me that Maylene hates her mother and wouldn’t speak to her
if they passed on the street. Then he told me that they have the same name –
and a little warning flag popped up in my brain. He also told me that she is
pressuring him about marriage, and suggesting that they keep it a secret from me.
I am trying to get some dirt on her – but so far that has proved impossible.
And though I want to try and warn my brother, I have to move cautiously,
because if I even hint that I do not like her, he is likely to find her irresistible.

stay tuned.............


bs

Ground Control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on...

Once upon a time back in 1977 - before D. and I were married - he got a phone call out of the blue from an old friend he hadn't seen in 4 or 5 years. This guy had tracked D. down, and wanted to get together to "share some big news". Plans were made, but when the day of the visit arrived, D. discovered that he had to work, so I was left alone to greet his long lost buddy.
When the knock came at the door of my tiny apartment, I was a little uncomfortable, but D. had told me enough about the guy that I figured - hey, what could go wrong? We'd hang out and shoot the breeze and everything would be fine.
Except - when I opened my door, there was a 500 pound guy standing there.
I panicked, because noone had said a word about the guy being bigger than Andre the Giant, and my apartment was two rooms and a closet with nowhere to sit except the bed - which had a large wicker chest full of fragile stuff crammed underneath it.
The guy and I milled around for a bit, making really small talk in my really small kitchen - until he asked, "Can we just sit down?"...which we did, avoiding eye contact as the sound of breaking glass filled the silence in the room.
The visit went downhill from there; it was a 24 hour binge of bizarreness that included
meeting the guy's mistress in the evening, and his 18 year old fiancee the next day.
His mistress was 57 or 58 (he was 23); she was ravaged and hard, like an extra
from that Mickey Rourke movie "Barfly". And his fiancee was 18, straight out of an
ABC After School Special about that lonely girl who keeps making all the wrong choices.
Somehow, D. and I got trapped into an 'engagement' brunch for these people,
at a place called The Silver Pear - which is really where this post has been heading all along.
That dismal engagement brunch, featuring D., me, the fiancee and the giant,
took place in a dusty, dimly-lit place that felt more like a funeral parlor than
"the place you'll want to be when it's time to celebrate."
Hideous foiled wallpaper glared from every wall, and there was enough
gaudy silver plate to sink a battleship. Fake ivy, festooned with (you guessed it)
silver pears was draped and wrapped and crawling all over,
and I swear that even the grains of salt in the shakers were engraved
with a cloying plea to "let us create YOUR silver lining."
Somewhere between the staff's robotic peppiness
and our hosts incessant groping and wedding goo-goo-gooing ,
D. and I realized that we might be the only human beings there.
There was so little common ground (most of which had to be avoided anyway), that conversation began a slow, agonizing death that promised to go on forever.
Sitting there, on our ridiculously dainty wrought-iron chairs, eating damp little triangles
of wallpaper paste and toast, D. and I were like alien abductees; chained together in abject misery, frantic to return to planet Earth.
And until yesterday - that experience has remained my most awkward
social experience.
The pinnacle, bar none.

Tune in tomorrow for part two - Where brown shoes learns a painful life truth:
once an abductee, always an abductee....