Courting Destiny

I’m not sure about this. I did it quickly and it began going one way and went into an entirely different direction I feel uncomfortable with yet need to explore

The fear that has gripped her tightly refuses to abandon both her body and her mind. She wants to scream. What would that do? Anybody who hears her would just think she’s crazy. Really her scream would be similar to the sound of one hand clapping.

Once she had a good life. A great life really. She remembers the days of champagne and music. Men crowding around her. Wanting to make her laugh. Her low giggle would turn into a contagious roar she was incapable of stopping. Tears would come from her eyes. Somehow that was attractive.

She never really understood that. There was a lot she never really understood, she thinks, as she reaches for a cigarette in the overflowing crystal ashtray on the glass and sterling silver vanity; vestiges of the life she used to have.

He walks into the room. He’s like every damn cliche she can imagine: unshaven dark hair, half bald he makes up for that by dying his hair with shoe polish, she thinks. A wife beater showing his hairy chest and grungy white boxers that don’t quite hide the parts of his body he forced on her last night.

“You’re late for work,” he says in that accent that’s a combination of uneducated and illiterate.

What would you know about work? she thinks but doesn’t say. Instead she smiles. “I changed shifts. Doing the lobster one.”

It was a gamble to tell Mavis she would be happy to change so that Mavis could be home when her husband comes home from his cross country truck run. She didn’t know how Eddie would take it. Didn’t really care at that moment. For once she wanted to do something good for somebody.

Eddie’s cigarette manages to look like a baseball bat:
“I told you, you can’t change shifts without checking with me. I’m having the guys over for poker.”

“I didn’t know you changed nights.” It’s her job to serve the food, clean after the game, go into the bedroom and be available for any friend who might want her. Though really she’s getting so old. Then again so are they. Sometimes there are young ones. They really like her. For an old broad she’s hot.

Every morning Eddie watches her when she goes on the scale. If she gains anything he won’t let her eat all day. During her breaks and lunch at the factory she eats exactly what Eddie tells her to. She thinks figuring out her diet is the high point of his day.

She sits by herself, during breaks, at the factory. Eddie has his spies everywhere. Sometimes she talks to Mavis, who is new, in the ladies. Mavis doesn’t realize she’s persona non gratis. Mavis likes her educated accent and her look that is as defeated as anybody there but still has a hint of her former life.

She tries to remember how this life happened. It was all so gradual. Except for being fired from the publishing company during the dot com bust. She was an editor with nothing to edit. Nothing personal. Yeah right. For some reason she couldn’t work past the firing and would spend hour upon hour at the bar Eddie hung at mooching drinks off her and everybody else.

One day they drove to Point Hell as all the locals called the town that Eddie’s family had lived in forever. She didn’t remember much about that time. Once she had a great memory. “The memory of an elephant,” people would say as she would give a precise recount of some adventure that had happened years before.

Somehow they ended living in an apartment in a 40′s court. Eddie went back to New York and brought back what he liked of her furniture. He threw out everything that was personal and that she truly cared about.

Her parents had died years ago. Her brother lived somewhere in California. He wasn’t really the family sort. Her friends must have wondered but not cared enough. Or maybe they did and just couldn’t find her.

Eddie brought her out of her reverie. “Call your friend now and tell her you can’t do it.” He brought the cell to her. Usually it was locked along with other things he didn’t want her to get. He stood and watched her make the phone call.

She wished she had the nerve to tell Mavis to call the police. She wanted to be saved. Jesus she wanted to be saved but she didn’t have the strength.

Remember the pink and the pinup? Miss it? I do but want it more sophisticated and can’t afford a custom design right now.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Lianna had to run from the beach and then the field as fast as she could. She wasn’t a very fast runner but adrenaline kicked in and—she tripped.

She looked at the sky with more dread than she could ever remember feeling. To her distant right she could see a large funnel cloud. She couldn’t help but stare as she had never seen one before. To her left were more familiar lightening bolts she had been running from all her life.

Yet the sun was blinding. None of this made sense. She pulled herself up and fast walked to the beaches edge. The field, though a protected bird sanctuary, was filled with cars. Many were turned over; some were on their sides. The people, ohmygod, what had happened when she had been in the water?

She wanted to grasp the people and breath life back into them but she was scared. Should she go back into the ocean? Was that the only safe place?

One person. One live person. That’s all she needed to see. One person; alive, walking and talking would pacify her, but there was nobody.

She opened car doors and grabbed cells. This was no time to be a lady. The fourteenth or fifteenth cell worked. When she tried making calls to those few numbers she knew by heart: her mother, boy friend, best friend and sister, the calls went straight to voice mail.

Now she tried radios. Nothing. Lianna became crazed.

Somehow she made it into town and saw people frozen on the streets and in stores. Would they come back to life she wondered as the lightening kept just missing her and the funnel cloud hit something far away.

Was she the last survivor? She didn’t want to live in a world alone. No she sure didn’t.

I long for the weightless summers of youth before the fear became omnipresent and I could ignore the subtle individual problems that taken all together would become huge.

Once I was filled with pure potential.  It didn’t matter that somethings were too hard.  But the fear became so great that I began to ignore important things and now I’m scared it could be too late.

Or not.  I could be taking everything way out of proportion.  Letting the nightmares  take over the day.  Even dreams that I’m weightless and flying seem to have sinister connotations.

Last week I faced the past despite my fear.  I learned that I missed the friends of today who live in the city I was visiting.  Still they are there for me.

Here I have a good life.  But not one I’m totally comfortable in yet.  I’m scared that if I continue to ignore certain things the good life will become shallow and weighted with problems I have spent too much time imagining and problems I have not yet begun to think about.

It’s beautiful today and I plan on doing what gives me pleasure and thus makes me productive.  My life.  My dreams.  My way.  I care way too much about pleasing others.  If I learn to only please myself the fear will go away and I won’t ignore the important.

I know.  Most people learned this lesson in high school!

I had to make a decision today about something that seemed good for me and was for awhile.  But now it’s only depressing–nobodies fault and the right decision was to end it.  But  get into the “you can’t quit,” mindset and sometimes that’s exactly wrong.

I really hate getting up at 4AM too tired to do anything but think and/or write.  Not able to fall back to sleep.  Forgive this post.  The words bore into me.

We’re having an uncontained large fire. It’s on the other side of the intercoastal and so far on the other side of North Myrtle. It’s a little exciting and very scary.
Day 2) They’re almost downplaying the fire on the news I live north of it. I would put an article from the New York Times in but unfortunately it’s the best I could find

This is for 3WW Here are parts one and two
Is deceit a vital part of growing up? Between ages fifteen and 24 there were many times I did set out to deceive my parents. By the time I was 25, in 1975-76, I was tired of playing word games with the truth. At 25, I wanted to indulge my long suffering father.

I had been “living” at my parents house for six months by January 3, 1976. I put “living” in quotes as most nights I would stay on my friend Shelby’s couch or in some guy’s apartment. I remember the first time I saw cable TV. I can’t describe the guy but I still remember the building, and his living room where WNEW-FM (my radio station then) played in the background while Reuters News scanned the picture tube. It was, I thought, a miracle. I can’t say the same for the sex as I don’t remember it.

When I came “home,” it would usually be two or three in the morning. My parents couldn’t and wouldn’t say anything as they had raised me without a curfew, and I made it to the train to the city and work each morning. They didn’t know about the little envelope of white powder I sometimes used. I never liked coke as a party drug but as something to keep me functioning I loved it.

When I indulged, which was most nights and many mornings and afternoons for I worked at a hand painted tee shirt company where my boss was a junkie; the art director an alkie, and I the coordinator between departments and assistant to the president, I would indulge in my drug of choice–pot. I tried keeping it to a manageable level.

So yes I was deceiving my parents but they were silent partners to it. I “lived” at their house so I could save my money for an apartment. My father insisted on paying for my monthly train ticket.

Years before after I dropped out of college, lived in Stuyvesant Town, and saved my money for an open ended ticket to Europe and Israel, I went to the travel agency to pick my ticket up:
Oh you’re just a few minutes late. A very handsome older man bought it for you The woman squealed. She thought I was horrors of horrors living off an older man. And I was.
Did he have a large nose, too long hair for somebody his age and a moustache?
Yes
That’s no man, that’s my father.

Whenever we went to restaurants and they tried to seat us in the lovers banquettes I made that distinction clear. I didn’t want my father mistaken for my lover and I didn’t want him to buy me things. I wanted the privilege of paying my own way.

I took a silent oath saying I would return anything he gave me. I tried returning the ticket. He was beyond insulted and told me that I could put the money in an Israeli bank account he had set up for me.

I knew then I was bought and paid for. It wasn’t until recently that I understand the pride a parent takes in being able to give. Fortunately I always knew how much my father loved me. Even in the years between fifteen to 25 when we our language was clocked and fraught with many different meanings.
Life’s too short to spend bitching

My house renovation blog. I was surveying my property; (my tenth or so of a very irregular acre) looked at something and began squealing. “I’m officially a Redneck. Yahoo–Mountain Dew.” Actually I didn’t put that last part in. My coming out as a Redneck made Eldin One and Bone both very happy. They’re Southern so….
I can’t remember the last time I did 3WW I should be moving, into my house, in a week or three and hope to have the mental energy and physical time to truly participate occasionally in blogging things.

Alana practiced smiling in the mirror. She wanted her smile to appear genuine but not as glowing as her normal smile. A slightly tipsy though highly functional Mona Lisa was the effect she desired. After half hour her mouth hurt but she thought she had it down. Burt’s Bees Wax applied liberally to her teeth and gums kept her lips from drying out and more importantly her mouth moist enough for her to talk normally. She didn’t want to have dry mouth this morning. No that would be almost as bad as no smile or her 100 watt one.

Fortunately nobody was in the elevator. She smiled and waved at the doormen as if she were too busy to speak to them for she was. Idly she wondered when her building would become a one doorman one, instead of two most hours. Union rules precluded a reduction in hours. About one tenth of the building residents weren’t paying their monthly charges; another 20% were becoming chronically late and none of the luxe two to five million dollar apartments for sale were moving.

It only took her 22 minutes to walk the 33 blocks south and four avenues east. Being oblivious to people she bumped into helped. Alana ran into the ladies room that didn’t look as if it belonged in the gorgeous art deco office complex. Her face wasn’t too red, but she put some more rosacea cream on. It wasn’t as if Alana had rosacea; her best friend did. Alana’s motto had always been: “you could never have too much make up or skin care products.”

Oh life, why was she going to have to change a lifetime of habits? Could she? Fortunately she still looked great in red lipstick. She had bought many Chanel reds over the years and kept them fresh in her dressing room tiny fridge. Yes she liked this affect. Pale skin, red lips, dark eyebrows and lashes. Alana knew she looked very 40′s retro.

She wondered what would happen in the auditorium the meeting was going to be held in. Would there be a ramble? No, unfortunately, the others, like her were too civilized to duke it out.

Do you call a large room with seats and a stage in an old classy complex an auditorium? The meeting notice had called it a conference room but it sat 500. The meeting was supposed to begin at ten AM. Alana arrived at 9:45, smiling her Mona Lisa type smile. The room was packed. Her sister and cousins were sitting in one of the front rows. Her cousin Tony waved frenetically at her and pointed to an empty seat next to him. Oh Tony, was he going to be a drama queen to the end?

The murmur going through the room was becoming louder and louder. Promptly at ten, her own lawyer, walked onto the stage. Hal looked so dignified with his slightly too long hair, custom made suit, Italian loafers. She remembered from the days she knew him more intimately his penchant for silk socks or no socks. Oh half the women in the room had slept with Hal and another quarter wanted to. In the end, he had been too easy for Alana. Still she was proud of him as he began to speak:
Ladies and gentlemen. The wheels of justice have been moving too slowly for you. I can’t tell you what to do or what not to do but I can present Bernie Madoff.”

As one, the formerly dignified people in the audience moved to the stage. “Yes,” Alana thought triumphantly, “we’re going to avenge the loss of our fortunes.”

I don’t live in NY anymore but am a New Yorker through and through. Bernie Madoff perpetuated the largest fraud ever, the Ponzi of Ponzi schemes. To be Madoffed is to be swindled out of your money. Some of us wish we had that excuse but nobody wants to lose their money that way. I and many people I know are overly fascinated with him. He’s so sick among his many many victims were Eli Weisel and his foundation. Not that anybody deserved… I’m so thankful for what I have left–I’m being audited and am preparing my taxes for this year. It’s very sad. Humor is the only weapon
This is the NY everybody dreams of and that sort of existed for me until the 90′s. Coincidentally I lived three blocks and two avenues from The Apthorp; it’s my favorite building and I’m a too well known customer at the Apthorp Pharmacy. Hooks you because it takes insurance and then you buy $60 candles, home perfome, body lotion. OK. Not you. Me. I couldn’t afford my five and ten dollar prescriptions anymore.
Bone wants it known that it’s a great article and the older O’Neal owns my boat basin. Yes I have a personal boat basin in Riverside Park cum cafe that we no longer eat at often as there’s a place at the 70th Street that makes great hamburgers and has sometimes incredible concerts.
Recession blogs are big.