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.)