About the time Jimmy got out of rehab, Sammy leased a space in Alameda that would become Tiger’s Blood Social Club. I had gotten in the habit of taking Jimmy to see Sammy in the hopes that maybe he’d decide to stick it out with his recovery. At first I’d drop Jimmy off and figured the two of them would talk. As time wore on it became clear that that wasn’t happening, so I went with him.
Truth be told, I missed Sammy. I missed my conversations with him. From the day I met him he became one of the few people in the world with whom I felt compelled to be completely honest. He didn’t judge me. He made me feel safe. The first time I met Sammy, Jimmy had had me call him to join us at the sober living facility where he was living then, introducing him as his sponsor.
Sammy drove up in his brand spanking new black Camaro, wearing the old-school punk uniform. Jimmy had come up with a sponsor from my world. It turned out that not only was Sammy a member of my extended punk family, but one they’d all revered. I mean, we’d listened to a whole lot of Fang back in Goleta. Over the years Sammy had met a lot of my people and befriended some. Of course he knew Bruce and Fraggle. Although Jimmy had known Sammy longer, Sammy was in my corner.
By the time I walked into Tiger’s Blood for a tour it was really close to opening. I fell in love with the space immediately. It was beautiful. It had huge skylights, a wide-open space in the middle with white and black squares in the linoleum flooring, punk music blaring, and some fantastic art on the walls.
I had just started thinking about renting an office space for myself. Working from home wasn’t working anymore. Having my art studio in the kitchen was getting messy. But more than that, I was living almost entirely in isolation with the exception of my visits to Beer Revolution.
There were two empty offices inside Tiger’s Blood. I’d always wanted a space to make art and now I needed an office for my business too. It took me a while to figure it all out. The first thing was that Sammy wouldn’t give me a key to the office unless I broke up with Jimmy. He was pretty standoffish about the whole thing. But once Jimmy and I broke up, we quickly came to terms on a rental fee and he installed some track lighting. I was in.
Not long after I moved in, he caught me at a burrito place around the corner and asked to join me.
“Of course. Have a seat.”
“I promise I wasn’t stalking you.” And he grinned at me. I laughed a little.
“Okay.”
“You know you can do a lot better than Jimmy.”
“Yeah, like someone with an actual job.”
“Well, among other things. It’s possible that Jimmy will never recover. He doesn’t want to be clean. He doesn’t see any reason to do so.”
“And he sure doesn’t want to stop breaking into places either. He thinks he’s too smart to get caught. Mostly he’s right.”
“People like him don’t think they can learn from anyone. They’re the ones who rarely make it.”
“I get it, I really do. It makes me sad, but I get it.”
I’d spent years dancing around psychiatrists myself, never letting them in. And right then, right after breaking up with Jimmy, my guard was up so high that the best anyone could do was say a word here and there and hope I was listening, maybe give me a hug.
For the first year I had my office in Tiger’s Blood, I hid. I had picked up a sales role that had me commuting to Burlingame a few days a week. The other days I spent holed up, office door shut.
I’d wander out to the shop floor from time to time, as unobtrusively as possible. Whenever I felt as though I was the least bit in anyone’s way, I’d apologize, pull my hands up to my chest, curl my shoulders and drop my head as though I could disappear if I tried hard enough.
Tommy was the first to break through that wall. He was my age, my height, and going through what looked to be a pretty traumatic breakup.
He’d run into my office, shut the door behind him and look around as if to check out my desk before crawling underneath it and toying with the idea of eating me out. The thing was, I knew he wasn’t serious. Even though it was totally inappropriate, it made me feel a little bit better. It made me feel as though maybe I wasn’t completely undesirable. Those days I barely recognized myself in the mirror. I was too disgusted with my body: the way it looked, felt and smelled to masturbate.
I’d crashed my own business trying to rescue Jimmy from himself, carrying myself along with serving, sales, and teaching jobs as I maintained the few clients still willing to work with me. I’d quit caring about my appearance. I’d let the gray grow into my mousy, dark blonde hair. My foot still hurt too much from the foot surgery to walk let alone run, so I drank instead. I blocked out the voice in my head that loved me along with the voices of all my friends and family.
I doubled-down on self-destruction in every way except for one. I decided that I needed to be celibate for a year. I recognized that my relationship with myself was bad enough that I had no business bringing anyone else in.
For the first time in my life I knew that maintaining celibacy was a matter of life and death. I’d even chosen to move to a studio apartment with very questionable privacy as insurance against my baser instincts. Now it feels a little stifling, but it was without a doubt necessary at the time.
Even with that, it didn’t mean I didn’t need a little bit of attention. Every now and again I’d realize some guy was flirting with me on the shop floor and I’d run into my office and hide.
But the people in the shop were nice to me. Over time, the little smiles, kind words, and lack of judgment drew me out. The people in the shop showed me kindness and compassion. All of them, this motley group of tattoo artists and piercers, mostly guys. But there was a young woman in the shop too, Casey.
Casey was in her late twenties and had a very distinctive art style that featured mythological figures and the symbolism of tarot decks with her own raw pain and vulnerability.
And yet, I don’t remember what she said the first time we talked, just the feeling that she cared. It felt really, really good.
I saw so much of myself in her, even though our lives had been very different. Mostly it was because of the way she carried herself. She frequently hunched over and held her hands across her stomach. She wore giant sweatshirts that covered most of her body, but short skirts and revealing tops. It was all very familiar.
But everything about the shop was familiar. I’d chosen to move in there because it was the closest thing to the compound I’d lived in with the skate punks in Goleta after Jimmy and I had broken up the first time. There was always the sound of a tattoo gun, punk rock playing, and lots of punks in and out of the shop. Except the punks here were sober. And even a few of my former housemates (now sober) showed up from time to time. I was home.
I often wondered if they knew how and why I’d ended up there. My best guess was that they’d assumed Sammy had met me in rehab or at a meeting or something. That was pretty close to the truth, but my recovery was from so much more than drugs or alcohol or my eating disorder. I was broken, my identity shattered into so many pieces I wasn’t sure how to put them back together or if it was even possible.
One night, after a long day of working, maybe three months after I’d moved in, I walked over to Casey and Tommy. “Thank you for making me feel welcome.” And I got teary-eyed and could barely finish my sentence before I choked up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry.” And Casey gave me a hug. I cried some more, but then backed away and took off.
After that, every now and again I’d talk to Casey a little, but mostly I still kept to myself. She treated me kindly, as though I were a good person with something to offer. As if I was one of the cool kids I’d always wanted to be.
Every now and again there’d be a humorous interlude from Tommy, popping in my office and crawling under my desk to make sure it was “okay.” Still inappropriate, but completely safe and flattering. If I said stop, he’d walk back out of my office and shut the door. No one had looked at me like that in an exceptionally long time. Or maybe I’d stopped paying attention.
One day Casey was sitting in the back of the shop on the big blue leather sofa, writing. She told me she was writing her sexual inventory, to which I quipped, “If I ever decide to do that, I think I’m really going to write it. As a book. Sex sells.” And Sammy just kind of looked at me and grinned, “Yep.” As much as he’d heard Jimmy’s stories, he’d never heard any of mine. Neither of them had any idea I might actually be serious about the book, let alone going back into recovery and writing an inventory.
Writing about my sexual misadventures had a fair amount of appeal, in an inventory or any other format. Beyond that, I thought it just might end up being profitable in a way that my writing about bulimia probably wouldn’t be. I had no idea how painful this book would be to write. But I am glad I started writing anyway.
The good news was that I was surrounded by people in recovery. They seemed a whole lot happier than I was, with my eating disorder raging in the background. Not that I wasn’t doing some things right: I wasn’t having sex. I hadn’t dabbled with meth in months. I barely drank. Mostly I was bingeing and purging and taking laxatives and diet pills. I even tried going on a diet for a month before I finally took a leap of faith.
The day I gave it all up I was sitting in my office at Tiger’s Blood looking at bottles of diet pills and diet books. I had a giant blank piece of wood and started laying everything out on top. Most of the diet pills were brown, so the first thing I did was paint them pink. Then I took some of the gummy diet candies and coated them with glitter. Then I took a stack of women’s magazines and started tearing them up before I hit the mother-lode of images of Barbie puking into toilets, doing drugs and fucking up, right there in Cosmopolitan.
The only things I was missing were chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax, enemas, and my personal favorite, cocaine. I walked across the street to CVS and bought a little mirror, some white eyeshadow, superglue and a box of Ex-Lax. For the enema, I printed out a JPEG of an ad for a Fleet enema. The cocaine I made with the eyeshadow, adding a rolled-up dollar bill on the mirror for good measure. When I was done, I spelled out the word “Stop” in pink-painted diet pills across the entire piece.
That piece of art is my marker of the day I stopped. I quit drinking Diet Coke and energy drinks and didn’t buy another bottle of diet pills. I didn’t measure another meal or count calories again. It’s been a couple of years now. It might not sound like a lot after 28 years of bulimia, but it’s what I have. I’ll take it.
No one knew that I was doing this. I was in a recovery group where it would have been appropriate to talk about this, but the only thing I did was share the art piece. I was too afraid of telling anyone. I rarely talked about my eating disorder to begin with, not with my therapist or in one of the meetings with my fellow recovering bulimics, except to state that I was walking away from the one thing that had always been there for me, the one internal struggle that was totally and completely mine. I didn’t want to fail publicly. My relationship and breakup with Jimmy had been performed with a huge audience: our neighbors had witnessed our shouting matches, my professional peers knew about his multiple arrests and everything I’d done to help him, and worst of all, my friends had seen me crying: obsessed and afraid of his rejection up until the day I finally broke up with him. I never wanted to face that shame again. Plus, there were always people who told me nothing was wrong with me. They’d take one look at me and assume everything in my life was hunky-dory.
I did finally open up a few months later. To Casey, my tattoo artist when she tattooed a giant rose on my left ass cheek. It was a gift to myself for my forty-second birthday. As a fan of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” I viewed forty-two as the meaning of life. This would be my meaning-of-life year. To me, the meaning of life would be all about stepping into myself and being the wonderful, intelligent, charming, and loving person I knew I could be.
I wanted a rose tattooed on my ass as a reminder to bloom. But not just any rose. I wanted the rose from the Mutiny In Heaven album cover by the Birthday Party. My life had come full circle. I’d hit bottom twice, dating the one man most like my father. Except that this time, I knew I could recover. I replicated the circumstances to the best of my abilities, but this time, there were people in recovery, including many of the friends I’d left behind when the heroin had rolled in over twenty years before. The experience back then had been very much like being cast out of heaven. The song that came to symbolize that whole period for me was “Mutiny in Heaven”. My friends and I had become the fallen angels, imperfect, or maybe totally fucked up, but ready to fight to keep the rest of our extensive punk family alive.
This was the rose I wanted. It captured my story as nothing else could. And Casey was the woman to do it.
I had to come clean with her. I told her, “I hate my ass.”
“But you have a perfect ass.”
And once she drew up the cover artwork and placed it against my skin, I saw what she meant. My ass was the perfect canvas for the tattoo. It was perfect. It still is. I’ve learned to love my ass and every memory that piece of art represents.
Monthly Archives: April 2018
The Second Time’s the Charm
My only way out of Chico was to move to Alameda in 2012. I didn’t want to go back to Los Angeles. I felt as though that town had chewed me up and spit me out. It was the town of my failed attempt at the American Dream – my condo sold, my marriage ended.
Aside from the joy I received from mentoring my employees and spending time with my cat, George, my life in Chico was pointless and isolating. Once I’d decided to quit drinking, I started writing again. I wrote “A Shame for Shame” and “Please Forgive Me.” I edited a lot of the old stuff and started posting all of it on Facebook.
I posted “More” with a reference to a poem that Jimmy had written twenty years before, crediting him. And that’s how he found me.
I’d looked for him online over the years, always wondering what had become of him. Had he joined a band? Written a book? I never took it all that seriously. I halfway expected to learn that he’d died. Or left the country. When I posted my writing to Facebook, I didn’t expect anything would happen. I mean, I had maybe twenty people reading my posts.
He sent me a Facebook message. This happened a few days after I’d negotiated a six-month consulting gig with my employer in Chico. I was about to move to the East Bay, which was – surprise, surprise – where Jimmy was living. And he was single. We talked on the phone for hours, texted, and messaged. He sent his latest recordings.
And then I drove down to see him and to start looking for an apartment on my birthday, August 24, 2012. I had a room at the Oakland Marriott Downtown. After I checked in, I went to pick him up in Ghost Town. I was standing outside of my car when I saw him. I ran over and jumped on him, wrapping my legs around him as we kissed. I remember it so vividly, the aqua of my jeans against his dirty black ones, the way he smiled at me. I hadn’t seen a smile like that directed my way in a long, long time.
We got back together. Right then and there. I mean, we spent one night apart. He was off for a night of “work” – in his case, breaking into a vacant building to remove anything that could be sold or scrapped.
At the time, I was okay with it. I mean, I’d short-sold my condo. I’d watched as the banking industry stole the American Dream out from under so many hard-working people. The thought of Jimmy ripping the insides out of these vacant, repossessed buildings gave me no shortage of satisfaction.
After he left, I was off for a night of wild sex with a guy I’d met at the Phoenix a few weeks before. I’d set that up before I’d made the date with Jimmy. Besides, Jimmy didn’t judge. If anything, he would think it was hot.
Two days later, he sent me an email that read, “I love you, and it fills my heart with unaccustomed joy that you love me in return.” I was completely swept up into the illusion of our love.
That I fell in love with Jimmy a second time around doesn’t surprise me. I thought Jimmy was my soul mate. The very first time we made love back in 1992, he’d taken the rose he’d bought me and broken off the petals, laying each one down on his sleeping bag in a tent way up in the Berkeley Hills. He read me some of his poetry, played me one of his songs. We watched the sunrise over the bay, the sun glinting off the BART cars.
Jimmy knew how to seduce. He made dramatic gestures. If we walked into a place with a piano, no matter how out of tune, he’d play me a love song. He held my hand and kissed me in public. No one had done anything like that since my husband, and even then, only at the very beginning of our relationship.
Jimmy hand-carried every single item from the apartment in Chico to the apartment in Alameda. He even drove the U-Haul truck. We talked about my book, his music. He composed and recorded songs while I wrote. I told him that this time when I wrote about him I would say nothing but good things. I lied, but mainly to myself. I wanted so much to believe in our love. We would finish writing the book together. It would be an amazing love story, even though I hated the romance genre and the cultural significance placed on it.
For the first time since my divorce, I made a home of that apartment in Alameda, complete with an area for him to compose and record music, and an area for me to write. He brought furniture and sculptures and art and books. He even got me a drafting table when he learned I wanted to start creating art again. We filled the apartment with everything we needed to pursue our creative endeavors. We filled the apartment with love, and it was everything I imagined it could be.
Jimmy helped with the cooking, the cleaning, and even the laundry. He snuggled with my cat, George, and bought him cold cuts. He loved George as much as I did.
Of course, Jimmy smoked meth, but it didn’t bother me so much, probably because he mostly kept it together around me. I was grateful he wasn’t a drunk. And he supported me in not drinking, which seemed like a good thing, at least at first. He slept most nights, occasionally borrowing my car to go “work.” After a few weeks, though, he started disappearing, first for a few hours, then a day, then for days at a time.
He wouldn’t answer the phone or return my texts. I went to Beer Revolution, got drunk, and hooked up with some guy I’d met a few times. The next day, Jimmy came back with gifts. He always brought gifts, thoughtful gifts like books of transgressive fiction or classical music CDs. I didn’t want to know too much about how he spent his time. I figured he was getting high and breaking into buildings. I didn’t think he was starting a family with someone else while screwing yet another woman he’d introduced to me. I also didn’t think he was breaking into places where people lived and worked.
Jimmy knew everything about me and loved me anyway. He accepted and encouraged my rage toward my father. He’d met him and even ripped him off once. I loved him for that. More than that, I loved the detailed, philosophical, moral, and literary tangents we went on. We were at the same level intellectually, which is something I’d rarely experienced in dating. In friendships, of course, but never in romance. It was a huge turn-on for me.
After a few months, he tired of me. I didn’t share his love of commercial burglary or meth. And I wasn’t a skinny brunette with big tits. His friends were quick to point that out: how different I was from all his other women.
I got to know his type and I attempted to become more like it. I met one of his girlfriends, Cindy, who was perfectly styled, slender, and had freshly manicured gel nails. After he made fun of my nails a few weeks later, I started getting my nails done.
I started obsessing about my weight, again – with vigor. Enough so that I decided doing small amounts of meth would be okay since I couldn’t find a reliable source online to purchase phentermine. No doctor in his or her right mind would prescribe that for me, and I knew it. I hated meth, but I wanted to be thin. I’d do the tiniest amount first thing in the morning when it was around. I had to be able to sleep at night. And when it wasn’t around, I used laxatives, over-the-counter diet pills, anything to destroy my digestive system so I wouldn’t eat. I was so afraid he’d leave me if I wasn’t pretty or thin enough. The same fear my dad had put in me.
I lost ten pounds and got my look together. I was way off emotionally, but I was managing to maintain my business. I was mostly isolated, but had a psychiatrist. Seroquel got added to the Effexor-lamotrigine mix. Seroquel is an antipsychotic that also happens to be a marvelous counter to meth, reducing some of its more pronounced side effects. No doubt the psychiatrist had noticed the time or two I’d shown up high.
Come February, I went to New York for a series of meetings. I was on my way to my room at the Pod 51 Hotel when I got a call from one of my clients letting me know it would be my last month consulting for them. They’d already hired my replacement.
I called Jimmy. He didn’t answer. I sent him a series of texts, including a few nudes, hoping to get a response. Nothing.
After settling into my room, I walked down and around the corner to Dos Caminos and ordered a Cadillac margarita, texted again. I ate dinner, drank a few more margaritas, then went back to my hotel room and called.
“Hello Cat.”
“Why didn’t you call me back? I lost my consulting gig in Chico. I could use your support right now . . .”
“You’re drunk.” And he hung up on me.
I spent the next hour calling him, he’d pick up the phone, yell into the receiver, then hang up.
When I landed in San Francisco, he was a few minutes late getting to the airport. He helped me put my suitcase in the trunk, but then, when I got in on the passenger side, I spotted lotion and mascara that were not mine. He turned the engine off.
“Who does this belong to?”
“Oh, I had to give Cindy a ride.” Cindy was a beautiful brunette with whom he frequently texted. Once Jimmy got to Santa Rita jail, I found all kinds of nude photos of her on his laptop mixed in with our videos and such. They’d been an item throughout our entire courtship period, and even now, now that he lived with me, depended on me.
“You sure you only gave her a ride in my car?” I wondered if he’d taken her back to our place too, fucked in our bed.
“Look, Cat. Fuck you. She needed a ride.”
“No wonder you wouldn’t talk to me.” I started crying.
He jumped up out of the driver’s side and walked back to a truck that had pulled up behind my car, driven by a friend of his.
I was sobbing as I ran back to him, “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Oh, poor you. I’m playing the world’s tiniest violin for you and your personal pity-party.”
And they drove off in the truck. I called and called and called and he wouldn’t answer. I sent him texts. I threatened to end it, then asked him to meet me in the City for dinner. Then I told him to get his shit out of the apartment – and he did.
I was greeted by George when I got home, but I couldn’t stop crying. I held him in my arms and let him lick my face, but it wasn’t enough. Jimmy had become my everything. And now, with the loss of my main client, my business was fucked as well.
I look back and think that if I could only have handled that week of isolation better, been strong enough to stand alone, I might have made it through. But I talked him into getting back together with me a week later. We met up at the hotel room he’d rented when I kicked him out, one of those weekly rental spots off MLK in Oakland. We lay down on the bed and he held me and told me he loved me. He said that his relationship with Cindy was ephemeral, while I was the real deal. I bought it, even though I saw many of her things in that room, a scarf thrown across a lamp, various toiletries in the bathroom.
At least I didn’t let him move back in, but we were together. He’d come to see me maybe once a week, take a long bath, and sleep for a day. I was so happy for the little crumbs of love he shared with me, the time we spent reading in bed together, the books he brought me, the songs he recorded. I loved watching him sleep, nude, with George curled up against him. I loved hearing him record, and watching as he mixed his music.
After not communicating for a week, I texted him and we met up at an Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph. He was an hour late and had no appetite, but he made it. He was exhausted and you could see the pain on his face. When I was done eating, I asked him to come home with me, take a long bath and spend the night. He was being sweet and told me how much he missed me.
We were driving back to the apartment when his phone rang. A friend of his was in the hospital and needed his help right away. I asked who it was, offered to give him a ride to the hospital.
“No thanks. I’ll get there myself.” He said it angrily, as though I’d done something wrong.
“You run along to your own private little fantasy world.” I stopped at an intersection and he jumped out of the car, slammed the door, and took off running.
I called after him, crying, circling around the block after him. He ignored me and disappeared for a few days without calling or texting.
A few days later a friend of his posted a note on Facebook: “Congratulations on the birth of your beautiful daughter, Abigail.” He’d run off to the hospital to bring his daughter into the world with his supposed ex-girlfriend.
I opted to like the post. I wanted Jimmy to know that I would be supportive. I wanted him to know that my love was large enough. I called him, but he didn’t answer. The post was taken down.
A few days passed before he called me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“I wish you had felt like you could tell me. I love you.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
But he did hurt me. I learned from a mutual friend that he’d been taking care of his “ex” throughout the pregnancy. He was doing the right thing by her, I thought. Except that it turned out they’d never stopped seeing each other and had sex up to and after the pregnancy.
A few weeks later, Jimmy was arrested. He called to tell me he was in Berkeley Jail. He’d been caught breaking into cars. And, he’d been shooting up. I rushed to the jail before visiting hours ended.
“Cat. Thank you for coming.” He was high as all hell, but happy to see me, grinning widely, eyes so full of love.
“Of course. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Cat. They’re going to move me to Santa Rita soon.”
“I’ll come visit you.”
And I did. It took a bit of doing to figure out the lottery system at Santa Rita, but I got my visit scheduled and the day came for me to go see him.
Jimmy was happy to see me.
But he was high. He seemed as if he’d been high for days.
“You said you’d quit using if you got arrested.”
“Fuck that. You know I have no desire to quit using. Fuck you, Cat. You’ll end up fucking my shit up. You’re so stupid.”
“Really Jimmy? Well, fuck you too.”
And he got up and asked to be taken back to his cell. I cried all the way to Beer Revolution. Bruce was there to comfort me over numerous Belgian quads. Beer didn’t make it any better, but talking to Bruce did a little. It wasn’t as though he knew what to say, but he was kind.
I didn’t bring the subject of rehab up with Jimmy again until after his next court appearance. It was on that day that his sentence was read. He would be serving at least another six months. Jimmy didn’t want that.
I saw my in. I could get him six months of rehab. I believed it could fix him. When I went to visit him the following week, I was prepared to bring it up, but he beat me to it. It felt like a miracle. I posted as much on Facebook. And then I reached out to his public defender.
The next time I went to court, I was prepared. I always dressed carefully when I went to court. I had been raised by an attorney, after all. I knew the drill. I didn’t break out the full monkey suit, but I wore a blazer and scarf with my jeans. I looked and acted in a professional manner. I was put together. The public defender was taken aback.
“Usually my clients don’t have someone like you,” was what he probably said. “You know that to make this transition to the drug courts, with nothing on his record about drug use or possession, you may be called upon to testify.”
“Yes.”
“And you have seen him use?”
“I have. Thank you so much for working with me on this.”
“There are no guarantees.”
“I know. It’s the one thing I can do.” And it was. I hadn’t been able to do this for Josh, but here I was doing it for Jimmy. I had the opportunity to redeem myself. I could save love.
It took a few court appearances before the public defender was able to get Jimmy’s case transferred and to get him into rehab. But it happened. Jimmy called when he was on his way. I was so excited. I would get to see him, even if only for a moment.
I drove to the rehab facility with his hooded robe and a bunch of toiletries. I’d taken the time to read the labels to find products they would let him have, mostly Neutrogena and Dove for men. Nothing cheap was alcohol-free. I wanted him to know that I loved him. I bought him the best damn toiletry products I could afford.
And I caught him just before he was taken upstairs to his room. We hugged and kissed before one of the counselors separated us. He would be okay. We would be okay. Six months of rehab and we’d be together again. He’d be sober.
Our love didn’t seem quite so crazy anymore. I quit sleeping with other guys. I worked on my own sobriety, slowly going off my psych meds and learning to meditate. He was writing short stories and sharing them with me. I was holding down a handful of part-time jobs and representing a few clients to make ends meet. He’d be home soon. He promised to help so I could get back to writing too.
Then he finished rehab and moved home. He frequently asked for money. He yelled at me whenever I asked him about his job search. He never went to meetings. He said he was fine and was around less and less.
He’d been home about a month when I finally went to see my doctor about a lump in my belly. It was uncomfortable, but I didn’t figure it was anything major. I went in for the ultrasound to investigate the lump on the same day I went in for my first mammogram.
I lay there on the table as she rubbed jelly on my tummy and started moving the wand over it.
“You poor thing. You must be in so much pain.”
“What do you see?” And I expected there might be a small benign tumor or a cyst.
“There’s a mass the size of a football. She handed me the wand to the ultrasound so I could see it.
And there it was, an enormous, amorphous mass.
“Do you have a gynecologist for me to send these images to?”
“No.” I had to hop on the phone that afternoon to find one. The pain hadn’t been much, but now that I’d seen the image, I was scared. I found a gynecologist within a few hours and was booked for surgery on the following Tuesday. I’ve always had that kind of drive. If someone needed a person to go push boulder “x” up the hill like Sisyphus, I was the one to come recruit. But I rarely did it for myself. It was always for some guy or other. My dad, Jimmy, Dick, whoever.
The day of the surgery, I gave Jimmy money to buy me a dozen pink and yellow roses. I told him exactly what to buy for me, and he did. He added a card that said “I love you” in kanji. It was the little things like that that I loved so much about him. Never mind that I was back to buying gifts for myself, acting out the same charade I’d played with my husband.
I attended yet another tradeshow in Las Vegas, the biggest show of the year for my industry. I was representing five clients and had my business partner, Pamela, with me to help with all the meetings. Business wasn’t great, but it was good. It was paying the bills, a suite at Vdara and plenty of fancy client meals.
Around midnight on the first night of the convention, I got a text from a friend of Jimmy’s. He’d been arrested. My car had not been impounded, but was parked in one of the tougher parts of Richmond, about fifteen miles away from Alameda. His friend was going to get it for me, and, since Jimmy would still be in jail, she’d come pick me up at the airport.
I spent the next two days in between meetings trying to figure out if I needed to bail Jimmy out. Every little opening, I’d find myself on the phone – with my mom, with a bail officer, with Jimmy’s friend – trying to sort out what I should do. Everyone told me to let Jimmy go. But I didn’t. In the end, I didn’t bail him out either, which was a good thing because he was let go the day I got back in town. Just in time to help me with another surgery, this time on my left foot.
What they do in a bunionectomy is break a bone or two, attach them with a small screw, stitch you up and send you on your way until the cast is ready to come off.
Except that, with mine, they needed a much larger screw because the bones refused to reset. And then they had to remove a bunch of tissue around the second toe because it had developed hammertoe from all that extra pressure. Walking was extremely painful. I’d had to quit running entirely. I missed the running the most, that feeling of flight coming down the slightest incline as one foot barely touched the ground before the other came gliding down.
The podiatrist told me he’d never seen a bunion so pronounced. It was obvious to him that my foot had started to deform itself when I was about twelve. I wondered if it had developed from all the years I’d spent hunched over, walking pigeon-toed with my arms wrapped around the front of my body, afraid to reveal myself. The podiatrist said it was genetic. I’d worn boots so many years, I knew it wasn’t the footwear.
After my surgery, I needed a lot of help around the house, with laundry, grocery shopping, and cleaning. At first Jimmy was good about helping, but as the weeks wore on, he stopped. He was busy getting high and breaking into buildings.
Then he started spending time with his ex. Though Abigail had been adopted, the two of them visited her together. After the first visit, they started scrapping together. It was something they both loved. They’d always been a team. And when it was all done, of course they fucked and smoked meth. That was their reward, the point of the whole exercise.
To Jimmy I’d become boring. And needy. I knew our relationship was over when he stopped sharing music with me. He’d never forgiven me for the two weeks I couldn’t have sex with him after the first surgery. He no longer called me “honey” or “sexy” or “Cat,” but instead “sexless drama.” And I had lost interest in having sex with him. Sex with him was something I did because he forced me or guilt-tripped me into it. I’d lie there doing everything I could to get him to come quickly. We never kissed anymore. There was no foreplay. Fuck, there wasn’t even lube. It was painful – emotionally and physically.
I became glad when he didn’t come around. My friends urged me to break up with him. They didn’t like him. They didn’t like seeing me so distraught, especially Carrie.
Jimmy looked bad. Carrie was the first to tell me so. He’d lost a lot of weight in the few months since he’d gotten out. He had that horrible oniony cat-piss stench that meth heads exude. He rarely showered or brushed his teeth. And when his ex was arrested, he asked me for money to put on her books and I gave it to him. I was literally out the door to another tradeshow in Vegas when he asked. He was my ride to the airport.
While I was in Vegas, I tried to call but he wouldn’t answer. I had taken our shared iPad, loaded up with the decks for my meetings, plus my emails. When I went to check for my emails, there were several of his mixed in. He’d left his account on there. There were emails between him and Abigail’s grandmother going back and forth, talking about music, his “recovery,” how much he loved being a father. It was painful to read such elegant lies.
Jimmy showed up at SFO on time, but was high as hell. Maybe he’d been high since he dropped me off a few days earlier. His driving was erratic and terrifying. We almost hit a few cars merging from the right onto the Bay Bridge.
We got to Alameda somehow, when I finally confronted him about the emails. He yelled at me about how jealous and crazy I was.
“Everything’s fine, you’re just fucking crazy.”
Then he jumped out of the car and started walking down the middle of the street. I yelled at him for a few minutes to get back in the car, but finally left him there, wandering down the street, facing oncoming traffic.
He made it home a few hours later, kissed me on the cheek, and immediately passed out. I was far from okay, but happy to see him sleeping at least.
A few days later, my cast came off just in time for a giant memorial celebration for Fraggle that Sunday, the day of my forty-first birthday. Throughout the entire time that Jimmy was in jail and rehab, Fraggle had been there for me with bottles of fancy beer, silly facial expressions and always, always an abundance of metal chains around his neck. He introduced me to all his friends. And they were all there: Carrie and Bruce and the rest of Fraggle’s posse. I spent the whole day at Fragglefest, soaking in the love and support of this community that had so willingly adopted me. And then, when it was over, I left to go see Jimmy.
I wanted to have one last night together before I broke up with him. I was rather drunk. My judgment wasn’t necessarily the greatest.
We got a room at the Waterfront Hotel in Jack London Square. It was the worst room I’d ever gotten there, off to the side in the new wing: handicapped shower, no tub, and fluorescent lighting throughout
“Wanna take a shower with me?” That had once been a treat in our sexual routine.
“No. Not really. Go ahead.”
It was the first time he’d ever turned down sex. I felt naked under the stark lighting, cellulite blossoming on my thighs as I glanced in the mirror, the feeling of some invisible disease oozing from my pores that would never come clean no matter how much luxury body wash I used. I was ugly, disgusting, hateful.
I had found my bottom. There was nowhere that I could go from here but up.
(With apologies to Ben Mendelsohn – he looks like a cross between Jimmy and my father.)
I’m So Proud of Your Sex Life
Those words from my father’s mouth flash over and over in my mind like a strobe light, and I can’t see past them. My sex life: that chain of one-night stands coiled tight around my throat. That sleaziness, the poisoned sweat streaked over my grotesque flabby flesh and the smell, the feeling that won’t come off my skin no matter how hard I scrub and burn myself under the shower nozzle. Going home with anyone. Fucking anyone who acknowledges my presence, glances over my body to measure its worth and takes it anyway.
I violently grind up food in my mouth and vomit, emptying myself into the toilet, imagining that I can make myself disappear, force myself to forget. I want to be pure but his words mark and scribble over me. Blood swells within me. My feet and fists slam into the walls, against the side of the bookshelf until it crashes down onto the linoleum, nails jutting out its back like a wounded animal. I wish I could stick his face on those rusty nails.
The image haunts me: my father sitting there across the table from me in at Cafe Roma in Berkeley, mouthing those words between sips of coffee while the memories from a dozen one-night stands claw their way inside of me. I am poisoned, ruined. I sink down into a rumpled pile of bones and worn-out muscles. Worthless.
I had hoped this visit would be different. I really did. He and my stepmom would be here for a day. One day, too much damage. My shrink put me on Prozac just before he came to visit, to somehow get me through it. But there is no barrier large enough to keep him from penetrating, implanting himself in my mind.
His words are like a virus. They enter on soundwaves, swelling out into my thighs and abdomen. At first I almost felt safe this time. Things even started off well. Throughout breakfast, there were no comments about my weight. No judgments. He seemed proud of me. And he was. Those words crawled out of his mouth in his calm, stoned-out drawl. They sliced through me: “I’m so proud of your sex life.”
With his words, these images flashed through me like a video on MTV: Tall, blond, nice-guy Todd painfully taking my virginity and leaving me the next morning. Randy, the cross-country star, my first love, sleeping with me and placing me under the shadow of his ideal dream woman, the sister of a friend of mine. Steve forcing my head down onto his penis at four in the morning in a room of guys, friends of mine, criticizing my lack of technique, commenting on the shape and size of my breasts. My friends wouldn’t speak to me for a month. It was my fault, not Steve’s. I had stained our relationship, fouled them with my excessive sexuality. The video ends with a still image of my body, fat rupturing the seams of my jeans, protruding over the top of my belt.
I’ll never be one of the beautiful people who glare down from the billboards, walk past me on the street, acting as if they own the world and I’m a pathological reject woman sullying it. My own words play over in my head like a broken record: “You’re so ugly, out of control, a disgusting fat slob. How could anyone love you?” I violently shovel food down my throat with my hand clenching my thigh, but the words won’t go away. The food tastes horrible: dried-out institutional cookies, extra-salty potato chips, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It’s hard to swallow. I can never get enough. My stomach is about to burst. I hate myself. “How could anyone love you?”
I lock myself in a bathroom stall on the first floor of the dormitory, near the entrance. There’s no one else in the room and I’m relieved. I guzzle half a can of Diet Coke and then pull my arms hard against my stomach to force the food out as I bend over the toilet. I watch the food shoot out of my mouth, the back of my throat going numb. I punch my stomach over and over again. I have to get all of the food out.
I hate my body.
“You are so ugly. You are disgusting.” It’s impossible to empty my body, to become pure. I get to the point when I can’t throw up anymore, so I go up the seven flights of stairs to my room, take a scalding hot shower, brush my teeth and curl up in bed, groggy from vomiting, skin pink and irritated. I want to forget but the room reminds me of the visit. The bookshelf broken on the floor with all my books sprawled out forms a barricade at the side of my bed.
Near the top of the pile is a letter from my dad telling me about his first year in college: crying and masturbating in his room to the image of his girlfriend back home. He is trying to help me. He means well. He tells me I should fuck around, an echo of his own words 10 years ago. What am I supposed to feel? “They are only words,” I think. They push me over the edge into a labyrinth of food and one-night stands. Nothing to hold onto. All I want is for those words to go away. They multiply, open up gaps. I learn to make them up myself. I tell myself the same stories until there is no one to blame for my anger except myself and my body. I bring to life a monster inside of me. That self-destroying, shouting creature ripping his way through my silence, forcing food into my mouth, giving away my body to strangers. I don’t eat for pleasure, only to satiate this huge beast, to make his stories go away. If only I could get high enough to numb myself, insulate myself from his torture, slit my wrists and feel the blood flowing out. Then my body would be mine. I could make it mine.
Maybe that would be pleasure.
I look at my body in the mirror. The flesh expands, skin becomes blotchy as I stand there. I am losing myself. I don’t know what I look like. I see myself as my father sees me – rounded and sexualized. A huge ugly mass of fatty tissue. A walking orifice. I cut myself off from him and he assumes different shapes, appearing distorted in other faces, other bodies. Each time, I think it’s new. Each time, I imagine that this is not my dad. Someone will protect me. He will wrap me in his arms and take me into another world where I am beautiful and loved and whole. The words are different but in the end they all turn out the same. I give him my body and he leaves me with nothing. He leaves his shame and guilt on my body. And I can never be pure or clean again. I become a whore, a fat disgusting whore. Serpents for hair and poison in my blood.
Maybe I asked for too much. Back in high school I remember a Sunday that I was away on a weekend with John. He and I and a bunch of our other friends were drunk and smoking pot -my first time ever getting stoned. It was strange. I had a hard time getting words out of my mouth. They came out all jumbled. I sat in the back of a jeep in a McDonald’s parking lot with this guy, Ron, smoking a cigarette. He kept touching me, and it made me feel kind of attractive so I blew smoke in his face, flirting, I guess. He said it meant I wanted to sleep with him.
So I did.
We tumbled out of the jeep and walked around the parking lot looking for a “safe” place. Underneath the dumpster was too visible, behind the car was too obvious. So we climbed over a wall and lay on the ground. There were houses up above us on the hillside. Anyone could’ve seen us. He yanked down my shorts and underwear. I was too messed up to do anything, and in a few minutes it was over. I pulled my shorts back on and walked into McDonald’s to wait for my ride back to school.
Afterward I thought I would feel beautiful. Someone wanted me at least. My drunkenness saved me from terrorizing myself that night, but over the next couple of weeks I began to see myself differently. Shame crawled under my skin. I convinced myself that I was some kind of nymphomaniac. I slept with another guy the following weekend to establish this truth. I became proud of my sexual exploits. I thought that was what I wanted. I drank more and more so I wouldn’t have to think. And for the few minutes each guy took to seduce me, to drag me onto a bed or some other flat surface, I was beautiful in his eyes, or at least attractive enough to touch. I gave my body away because I thought that was what they wanted. Then they would love me.
Flash forward to my present in Berkeley, I pull on a pair of jeans and a sweater, walk out into the orange fluorescent twilight until I am surrounded by people I recognize from the dorm. My friend Shani and I crash some party and I start taking swigs off a bottle of tequila that’s being passed around. I drink about half the bottle. A hand pulls me downstairs and I’m lying on the floor with this guy’s tongue shoved down my throat before I realize what’s going on. His body is pressed tightly against mine. I can’t move.
The lights come on and my friend Shani walks in, sees what is going on. Maybe she saw him drag me down there.
“Hey, Cat, you want to go? Do you want to be here?”
“No.”
She pulls the guy off me and shoves him out the door, not without resistance from him.
“You fucking asshole, you stay the fuck away from her!”
She helps me to my feet and I lean up against her. She wraps her arm around me, holding me up.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay.”
We leave to go to another party. We end up at a fraternity house across the street from the dorm. I sit down on a couch and while Shani went back to the kitchen to grab some beer.
She hands me one.
“What an asshole. What did he think he was going to get away with?”
“I don’t know. It’s my fault. I let him take me down there. I let him.” I feel myself starting to cry, but squelch it by drinking my beer.
“Hush, it’s okay. It’s all over. It’s not your fault. He was a nothing.”
Just then, he walks into the room. We are all sprawled out across the couch and he sits directly across from me. A gorgeous woman glides onto his lap. She’s so much thinner than I am. I slam down the rest of my beer before I stumble out the door, trying to drown out the realization that I mean so little to this guy. I made no impression on him. The memory of his body trapping me, forcing me onto the bed, will be forever imprinted on my mind. And no matter how many times Shani tells me it isn’t my fault, I still feel the guilt living, breathing, expanding in the flesh of my stomach, hips, and thighs.
I fall asleep wondering when this will end. In my drunken haze, I imagine a day when I can look at myself in the mirror unashamed and unafraid. I’ll be beautiful and respected like that other woman who was sitting on his lap, like the models in Vogue. A day without vomiting when I can ignore my hunger, ignore my anger. A day when my body is mine. I imagine models aren’t really happy either. Their lives are probably just as fucked-up as mine. But at least their bodies are worth something even if they lose ownership of them. I wonder what it would be like to be the ideal woman, magnificently clothed and perfumed, sexualized in the photographs but admired, idolized, acting out this cultural fiction. They look safe, as though no one would ever hurt them. They can’t feel the way I do. I’d do anything to live out that fantasy of power and pleasure – no matter what it would take. Maybe then someone would love me. People would have respect for me.
Even my dad.
He shut up about my weight once, when I was skinny. I got thin enough that I could have been a model. I was skinnier than most of them. That year, dad bought me a bikini. He said he’d buy me one every year. He was so proud of my body, as if it were an extension of his own. My weight seemed to affect him personally. It was an affront to his ego when I was overweight, and the ultimate flattery when I was thin. My stepmom hated me for that. She still hasn’t forgiven me, but now she’s as skinny as I was.
My eyes are swollen from crying in the night, my hands shaking from all the beer and tequila. The sun soaks through my black down comforter, leaving a thin layer of sticky, toxic sweat on my body. I get up and throw on the extra-large sweatshirt my dad bought for me. At breakfast, I gather as much food as will fit on my tray, grabbing doughnuts and sausage and eggs and Coca-Cola. I can feel people’s eyes following me through the dining commons. They watch me. All they see is this out-of-control body sucking up food like a high-powered vacuum cleaner. “No self-respect.” I go back again and again to gather more food, cramming it down my throat with a violence no one can imagine. “You are such a fuck-up. It’s written all over your body.”
This time, there is someone else in the bathroom and I have to sit and wait in the stall until she leaves. I have to keep this dark secret, the horrible monster that lurks within. In boarding school everyone knew. I used to throw up in the sink in my room to try to keep it a secret, until one day the sink filled up with this gray, mucky water that spilled out into my room and the room next door. No one ever spoke to me about that. I could feel their judgment through the walls of my room, in their whispered conversations.
Here, I am an anonymous bulimic – filling the bathroom with the stench of my vomit. Until they connect my face with the sounds and smells emitting from the bathroom, at least no one will know that I am crazy. Sometimes that makes it even lonelier. No one knows how much I want to be thin. If only they could see me now, the time and energy I spend throwing up. I have no time for anything else.