Long Distance Breakdown

May, 1997. She looked at me quizzically, her face half hidden in the shadows. Then sadness, disappointment; finally, resignation. “I trusted you – and I can’t anymore.” We were sitting across from one another, lunch at Outback in Conshohocken a month and continent removed from my drunken, jealous explosion in San Diego on her birthday. A birthday ruined by a river of tequila overflowing my reservoir of self-loathing and suspicion, finally bursting the dam and fueling the outburst that precipitated our breakup.

So ended a torrid long distance relationship played out across six months of extended hotel sleep overs. We managed to manipulate things at work such that she’d travel to my city or I’d travel to hers on a nearly constant basis. It was easy enough to do: the company we worked for had us making the trek into each other's neck of the woods anyway; we just accelerated the frequency, stretched out each stay and coordinated travel schedules. It was hot and heavy and loaded with hysterics.

She started in the Philadelphia office right out of college while I had already been entrenched there for a decade by that time. I relocated to California just weeks after she came onboard so we didn't get to know one another until I traveled back east on business later that year. It was at an annual company outing during one such trip in September that we connected, when we were paired together as canoe partners on a little river run drunkfest. She made the first, second, and third moves and I didn’t recognize any of them. Finally she simply threw herself at me and that was that. Except "that" to her was something fun but to me it was something more.

My insecurities are always on the look-out for the acid rain lurking in puffy white clouds. The glass might very well be half full, but in my worldview it's probably half full of cyanide. All that to say I'm a bit pessimistic.

Due in no small part to a crippling shyness and social retardation, serious relationships seem to come along only every decade or two for me and tend to last not more than a few months, once it's clear we're operating at different speeds with divergent needs.

Usually the girl has to make sufficient moves to wake this idiot out of his emotional stupor and I don't exactly sport the Johnny Depp-caliber looks that might inspire such actions very often from the women I meet. But unless and until this occurs, my passionate side tends to go into a hibernation of sorts. To paraphrase George Costanza, "I'm a sexual camel." It takes a seismic event by a determined gal to jog me out of this slumber, but when it happens I awaken with force.

I identify in a sense - though not proudly - with the protagonist played by James Caan in the movie Thief. Caan's character gets out of prison after a lengthy stretch and methodically plots to romance and marry in very short order to make up for all the lost time. For me, the prison takes on a different form but the effect is the same. In brief, it doesn't work out all that well for him. In short, it doesn't work out all that great for me either. But this comparison isn't truly apt. Really I identify most completely with the 1970's Woody Allen persona: Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable... The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life ... The miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable ...

All of this whining background is meant to frame the emotional volatility seething under the surface on her birthday, six months into a relationship that had been on its last legs for at least the last two of them. It was a good crowd gathered at one of the cantinas we frequented for such revelry, the Old Town Saloon. Most of the group was on travel from our Philadelphia office save for me and a couple of others who were based on the west coast.

The margaritas flowed for all but they went down especially easy for me. As I got more intoxicated, I began to fixate on the fact she had seen some movie with another guy; it didn't matter what flick or dude, jealousy rained down on me like a tsunami. She caught that vibe and started peppering me with pin pricks through continued allusions to her boys back home. The long distance thing was really getting to me. She was on occasion dating other guys when back east and I couldn't handle the competition, figuring I'd lose out to whomever else might be around. It was a self fulfilling prophecy.

She was staying at the Best Western Hacienda Hotel across the street from our cantina and although I lived in San Diego, I was as usual staying with her. The rest of our crowd remained blissfully unaware of the tension between her and I; for the most part, they were unaware of the relationship itself. Unfortunately for those on travel staying at the hotel, they wouldn't be ignorant of it for long.

The tension between her and I during this birthday drink-fest grew as taut without snapping as could be, mixing the tequila-laced salt into unseen wounds in my psyche. She was largely unaware that the barbs thrown my way were being compounded and magnified in my mind through the booze; however, it seemed very much the opposite at the time to this soused and beaten clown. On the contrary, it seemed that each zinger thrown was more calculated than the last, calibrated with my intoxication to deliver maximum damage. Finally I could take no more and excused myself, stumbling out into the night with fear and rage burning my brain.

She stayed awhile longer at the cantina while I stewed and seethed pacing her hotel room. By the time she left the bar and I heard her keycard in the door, I was at the apex of my anger. Little of this was about movies and boys back home. It was all about expectations and reality annihilating one another. But there was no clear-headed analysis going on, just six months of frustration about to pour over her and then back over me again.

We ended up in a yelling match that spilled out of the room. I said some things that I couldn't take back, that made taking back beside the point. I spoke them again, I screamed them. Taking them back was beside the point. She threw my things out the door, over the balcony and onto the ground outside. So I did the same to her things. The bar was clearing out and the others arrived on this scene, her and I both in fits and tears.

One of the guys led me back to his room - I couldn't go back to hers. It quickly became clear that my words were a one way ticket out of the relationship and the plane was already in flight. But I needed to make things right in my delirium, so I tried to call her. No dice. I managed to slip out of my new prison, reel up the stairs and began knocking on her door. "Get out of here!" She called my new roommate/guard to walk me back down. I slept in his bathtub until I sobered up and then drove jittery/sobbing home the next morning to an apartment I had grown used to not living in. An apartment that would now become my prison once more.

I didn't go into work the next day. It was hell on Earth. It was the worst day of my life. I was hung over, I'd lost it and I'd lost her. I paced my apartment/prison. I threw up. I made calls to colleagues to try and figure out a way to fix it. Perhaps now that she's slept on it, things might be okay? Perhaps not. I met with the others that evening. She did not accompany them. They'd been at work with her, they knew her fury. I was truly fucked.

When I saw her the next day at work we talked quietly in a corner. Her deadpan tone and lost eyes destroyed me and I lost it, dissolving in this dissolution. It was over.

I ended the evenings for the balance of that spring screaming into my pillow until the noise quieted the silence of being alone again. Until the anticipated emotional hibernation took hold. The winter once more of my discontent had arrived and it's with me still to this day.

A winter of my own making, to be sure. I'd like to think I've grown some in the twelve and a half years since this meltdown in SoCal. I moved back to Pennsylvania only a few months thereafter and we became friends again even before then, in fact not long after our lunch at Outbacks where she finally aired her feelings at our breakup (my breakdown). Where she finally aired her feelings all along.

Friends and no more. That's where we kept it, likely it should have never become more. After all, we had nothing in common except misguided passion in the dark, fumbling at cross purposes and rubbing vulnerabilities raw.

1992 Heartbeats a Second

August, 1992. I lay on the couch with my heart pounding like a jackhammer.  The last of the coke gone and no alcohol in my hovel, panic had me in its grip. Boom, boom, boom.  Teeth chattering, freezing cold sweat, eyes all pupil. Boom, boom, boom.  Where were my car keys?  My eyes darted around the room, out of focus.  It was Sunday night, I needed to find a bar with alcohol somewhere, take-out beer to slow my heart down.  Boom, boom, boom.  I was living just north of Wilmington in Delaware but had just moved into this apartment from Media, Pennsylvania 30 miles to the North.  I wasn't familiar with what might be open on a Sunday in the immediate surroundings - my mind could only conjure up the Media establishments.  Boom, boom, boom.

I drove shaking, sweating, jittering raw nerves up I-95 and I-476 to Media.  Jack's bar, open every Sunday.  All pupil and sweating, jittery I pulled into the bar's parking lot and looked in the rear view mirror.  Jesus!  Like something out of Night of the Living Dead.  Thank God Jack's interior is good and dark.  Still, I needed to clean myself up a bit, comb the hair, get my squinting down pat to hide the wild eyes.  Slow the heart palpitations.  God, did I really drive here?  It's drizzling rain and I'm so wired out of my skin I can barely see let alone operate heavy machinery.  The force multipliers adrenaline and fear bring to the table are nothing short of amazing.

Inside, Jack's is dead on a mid-summer Sunday evening.  I manage to maneuver to the take-out case, grab several six-packs of brew and pay for it with minimal social interaction: head down, pass the barkeep sufficient cash, let him bag the beer and keep the change and motor on out into the night.  A half hour of terrifying action southbound behind the wheel of my shitty little black Mazda 323 with heart beating wildly caught in my throat and I'm back into Delaware, to my apartment.  I didn't kill myself or anyone else on the road this time only through undeserved dumb luck.  Boom. Boom. Boom.  But relief from the pounding and palpitations is at hand, thanks to Adolf Coors - at least that''s how it's always worked in the past.

But this time the booze did not keep up its end of the bargain.  This time, no matter how much I drink my pulse just keeps racing.  Did my heart skip a beat?  Two beats?  Boom. Boom. Boom.  I pace my apartment, gulp for air.  Fuck!  The alcohol has no effect.  I lay down on the couch, stare up at the ceiling fan, sweating/dizzy.  How long have I been up?  Two days, three?  Shit.  Boom. Boom. Boom.  My heartbeat echoes through my sinuses, up into the frontal lobe.   Looking around the apartment - torn drapes, faded carpet, TV unwatched on some random channel, blue walls into the white light of the kitchen.  My toes feel tingly, numb.  Boom, boom, boom.  My heart is - if anything - racing faster.

I make the decision: I need to go to an emergency room.  Shaky / dizzy, I jump back in the car and head down south to Wilmington Memorial.   At this point I'm gasping for breath.  Perhaps this addiction thing isn't all it's cracked up to be?  Are we having fun yet?  Then it's twenty minutes of chilly sweats and my ticker doing double-time at the pump station before I'm finally led in to see a doctor.

I describe my symptoms and beat around the bush to the ER resident for just a few minutes before letting on that - funny coincidence - I just might have ingested a very small amount of cocaine that evening.  Think it's related?   The doctor in fact is pretty sure there's a strong causal relationship between my heart nearly exploding and the Bolivian Marching Powder coursing through my veins.  You see, it's a stimulant.  Condescending smirk.  But isn't alcohol a depressant? I deadpan, ignoring his snide bedside manner.  Booze didn't work this time, doc!   Long story short, the rest of the conversation boiled down to a variation on Doc, it hurts when I do this!  Well then - don't do that!

The doctor gives me some valium and sends me home with written instructions to "stay away from cocaine."  Of course I will, Herr Doktor.   I follow those instructions to the letter just a bit more than two years later.  After all, I'm a bit slow.  But Deja Vu is a bitch in this context and even the slowest among us eventually grow wise to the weary.  Or we simply grow weary and die.

George and Arlene

George and Arlene Warfield were the Burns and Allen of our block growing up, but unwitting and without the humor. Their kitchen seemed to swallow the rest of the house whole, the action in their hovel centering on their breakfast nook at all times. Mom and Dad visited often back in my formative years.  My sister and I occasionally in tow, they lubricated their friendship with the Warfields around the table there with the aid of strong drink interrupted only by muttered mundane conversation (much of it forgotten before it was uttered).  I spent many an hour observing this ritual from my vantage point as a toddler in the corner, soda pop in hand and their cigarette smoke swirling around my head.

George was both deliberate and reserved with a working man's gait to match his garb while Arlene loomed loquacious, her cartoonish features drifting somewhere between Eve Arden, Lucille Ball and melting candle wax.  I remember with horror the times she bent down to kiss me on the cheek, the gobs of excess lipstick smearing across my face and the stink of her perfume burning my sinuses.  I can think back across forty years and smell it still.

In my earlier years our family made the trek down the block three houses to George and Arlene's place for New Year's Eve.  My sister and I watched the tube in the living room while the adults boozed it up in that kitchen, then we'd all rendezvous at midnight to bang pots and pans on the front porch.

George wore his blue collar like a priest's vestment, central to his being.  That being said, I wasn't exactly sure where he worked or what he did.  If George was reserved, Arlene was aggressively kind and this quality frightened me no end. I stayed over at their home for several days on one occasion when my folks went out of town and it was a surreal experience, much of that owed to this smothering affection, very different from my home life in ways even now I couldn't qualify.  It wasn't that my parents weren't affectionate (that wasn't one of their failings); rather, it was that the folks were specifically affectionate while Arlene (and George) did it as a general part of who they were.  They seemed alien to me, the Warfields; consequently, I felt ill at ease around them.

My parents grew apart from George and Arlene after my Mom's stroke immobilized her and my Dad's alcoholism spiked, his body abandoning him to the couch and the bathroom and stumbling distance between the two.  The Warfields liked to drink just fine but they weren't part of my Dad's bourbon brotherhood, weren't fellow travelers on his bullet train to Cirrhosisville (though maybe they occasionally rowed a slow boat on the journey in that general direction).

One of the things I found odd in this relationship was that I don't recall a single time the Warfields made the trek up to our house.  I'm sure they did, but the relationship didn't flourish in this setting. They were merely background fodder in our domain; others took center stage here.  No, the relationship was rooted in a single direction - south, down the block, their place.  And my folks just couldn't make the journey anymore.

George and Arlene have surely since gone on to their great reward but are forever frozen in time for me, suspended in the animation that was our neighborhood in early 1970's North Everett.   They represent that time and place in my mind along with a select few others, as surely as 8-track tapes and Lincoln Logs.

I might have been closer (in aspiration) to the Dwyers but they were practically another species on the evolutionary scale of families.  Foreign yet familiar, the Warfields were more within striking distance. The missing link up from our prehistoric depths of dysfunction.

Family Guy

Family Christmas Party. Washington St. 12/12/2009.

I had a fascinating time with more of my relatives than I think I've been under one roof with before, discounting 1970s funerals. Dozens. Perhaps appropriately, those disco days included more than one close relation slipping off this mortal coil, including dear ol' Dad. My father is the reason most of us under said roof are alive. He's the memory that binds us together, and at least indirectly the reason some like me are damaged.

Most of those in attendance I'd never met before; of those I had, the previous get-togethers had been brief, mainly at funerals - there's that word again - one/two/three decades removed.

Everyone last night was very nice and down-to-earth, approachable. Kids of every personality, inclination and age abounded. Oh, and those kids brought their children too. :-). You can glean a lot about people through the behavior of their offspring and the young ones last night were each one terrific, many wise beyond their years and all filled with joyful life.

I had some great conversations with nieces and nephews and their families. I also talked at length with siblings I'd never gotten the chance to know growing up. That was fantastic and illuminating. Perhaps "talked at length" is a bit strong; however, I did a lot of gabbing for me. I'm generally pretty quiet at the parties I've attended sober, having never mastered the art of small talk.

Mostly I watched and listened, soaking everyone in. As the evening wore on, the holiday cheer took hold maybe just a bit, and conversations grew more animated, certainly the subject matter was eclectic and ran the gamut from the routine to the revelatory. Details of such things shall always remain out of bounds here (I spill my guts all across these pages but will leave it to others to do likewise in their own forums or to do it not at all, which is probably the smart move). Suffice to say this slice of my bloodline is as pleasantly screwed up in the ways all us human beings are (I would have been pretty suspicious if they weren't; I've been around "perfect" people putting on airs and for some reason that never fails to turn my stomach). Through all that, though, this crew seems to share a basic normalcy I've heretofore only seen en masse from people outside my family tree.

The fruits of the labor that forged that normalcy can be seen in the faces and body language of the next generation happily coloring and playing hide 'n seek last night in the back bedrooms, seemingly carefree from the entanglements I remember as a kid. And make no mistake: it is labor, real work put in over the long haul. That's a force multiplier across time as sure as dysfunction snowballs in the other direction.

This lively group is rooted by the children of my Dad's first marriage. I've been lucky enough to have gotten to know the youngest child of Dad's first family over the past few years as she lives in the Phoenix area where the sister I grew up with also resides (she and I represent the offspring of marriage #2, if you're keeping score). So I visit there often. But until last night, I hadn't really got the chance to catch up with my other two sisters and my brother, and certainly none of the children they've subsequently raised (now I've got great nieces and nephews to boot).

The stigma and pain of a crumbling marriage, infidelity and divorce in the early fifties with the subsequent bad blood between our father and their mother led to the circumstances of our unintended estrangement. I'm sure there were feelings of abandonment on their part. That's unfortunately a part of any breakup to some degree but here it was further fueled by the rancor of parents spilling over onto the kids and the manner in which it occurred. This too, unfortunately, is all too common but no less painful or affecting. I don't pretend to understand the depths of their pain related to this.

From my vantage point as the youngest of Dad's second family, born over a decade past the aftermath, I simply didn't know much about them. My "other" siblings (I hate the term "half sister" or "half brother") weren't talked about often in my presence and when they were, it was always using indirect, coded language meant to shield me from the confusion and unpleasantness of divorce (or so I surmise). I only wish my parents had chosen instead one of the litany of 800 pound gorillas squatting in our living room if they'd had a hankering for forging protective parental guardrails. "Shielding" a kid from the circumstances of a previous marriage with all the far larger gorillas hanging out in our particularly dysfunctional mist is like bringing your kid to a porno film shoot and covering his ears because one of the actors utters an expletive.

So I digress once again but what else is new?

Anyway, this has run on too long. In short, I had a great time and plan to make it back to the Seattle area again for the sibling get together next year, if possible. I've never been a real strong family guy but it's gotten its hooks into me just a tad as I get older. It would be nice to have (grand) nieces and nephews to buy Christmas and birthday presents for, absent any of my own (kids, not presents; the prospect of offspring grows dimmer each year). I do have my maternal cousins, who I love dearly, and little Leila, the newest addition there (she's adorable). Still, it never hurts to have too much family, they say. Of course, that's not a universal truism. Sometimes just a single family member can turn your life into turmoil in ways that friends just can't. I hope for me such turmoil remains in the past where it belongs.

A Snow Blind Samurai (Tracking Hell through Aramingo on the Road to Oblivion)

1989. Summer.

My mind is screaming but my body is quiet, stomach churning.

And my brain is baking.

Parked and conspicuous on the side street of a neighborhood decimated by poverty, drugs and crime, menacing shadows seem to surround me as they pass by, turn/look, and finally, thankfully, move on.

I'm trying my best to blend into the driver's seat, scrunching down, wishing I could vanish. And fervently hoping it won't be too long even while logic and reason clue me into the futility of that. Then again, if logic and reason were my guides I wouldn't be here now. Somewhere west of Aramingo, a handful of blocks east of 3rd and Indiana. West Kensington. The Badlands. Waiting. Visions of the Velvet Underground's Waiting for the Man buzzing through my mind's eye.

My little Suzuki Samurai jeep is a bright blue beacon floating in the sea of the dirty gray that permeates the streets up here. Christ, I might as well have a big spot light shooting up from the vehicle into the sky, spelling out my intentions to the thieves and the cops alike.

Unlike the other bubble-gummers who dare to swing up into this area for their recreational party favors, I haven't arrived here as an outsider. I have my Sherpa, my guide. So no waiting in a line of cars at one of the outdoor drug bazaars catering to Joe and Jane Suburbanite for me. Those traffic jams are further east, closer to I-95. Instead, we pull into a dilapidated side street, kill the engine and lights, I give my Tenzing Norgay the money fresh from an ATM withdrawal, and he disappears into the hood while I sit there, alone.

It's plain to me that addiction does at least as fine a job eradicating judgement as it does dignity, money, a life, and the rest of what it takes. Even with all that, what it provides me, sitting here in 1989, is singular and compelling: glimpses of happiness or at least escape from my head for a few hours. In 2009, fifteen years clean of that particular indulgence, I've yet to find its equal. So, I sit there alone. Waiting.

Ten, fifteen minutes. Shadows and staring, aggression and hatred. Clearly, I'm not welcome.

Then suddenly Norgay emerges from the shadows, stupid smile and stoned shimmer virtually radiating from his being, already high on a large chunk of what should be mine. But that's the price I pay for his guidance up the mountain. I fire the ignition and we head out. Now comes perhaps the most terrifying part of this adventure through the looking glass: snaking my way through the burned out buildings and numerous patrol cars, an out-of-phase vehicle with an out-of-place driver and right-at-home junky sidekick nodding out beside him, a couple of bags of felonious powder in their pockets. Not a recipe for a happy ending. One slip and it's down the icy ravine, into the abyss.

Yet I always slip the noose and make it back down from the treacherous summit into base camp again, back to the comfort of suburbia. I drop off my guide, head back to my hovel, and drift off into sweet dreams of wide-eyed wired wakefulness. Fleeting happiness and escape. Only to repeat the cycle ad nausem, addicted as much perhaps to the russian roulette surrounding the hunt as I am to the consumption.

My tunnel vision eventually closes in on the fading point of light at the other end so completely that normalcy warps into the strange and this kind of shit into the norm. I even rope others into these kamikaze missions, keeping them blind to the destination and purpose until past the point of no return. A friend I hadn't seen in years arrives from out of town to catch up, hit the bars, have a few drinks and reminisce about the old days in the Navy together. I meet him at the airport with my Sherpa in tow, explaining we need to first take "a short road trip" before hitting the town. Great to see ya! It's been awhile! This'll just take "a few minutes." He's pretty shaken after the 20 minute Badlands park-and-sit scene. Afterward, I drop him off at the apartment and he's left to fend for himself while I drift off to wired island. When I get up the next afternoon, he is gone. And I haven't talked to him since.

Good times.

What tips the scale back to the land of the living for me? Enough mornings after. Enough afternoons after. Enough three days after. When the wired dreams morph into jittery, heart-palpatating waking nightmares. When the ATM is empty and the Sherpa goes missing in action. When the bills come due and the collection calls start at work. When the Samurai is repossessed. When my credit becomes truly fucked. When the blood from my nose turns my white pillowcase red, when it soaks through and covers my mattress in blotchy maroon patches. When my phone is turned off for non-payment. When booze no longer calms the shaking coming down. Coming down. Finally, the coming down. Finally, the coming down is simply that much more painful than the wired dreams are freeing. When all this comes to a head, I finally come to my senses. Four years after it comes to a head, anyway. After all, I'm slow to learn and a great procrastinator (I'll completely upend my world in the fight against any change to it, wise and at the same time oblivious to the irony of it all).

Then a year of living clean, 14 months, dissolves into a week back into the wood chipper when I spy my Sherpa "by chance" one weekend just prior to my 32nd birthday. But that week was my last, over 15 years gone by now. To be clear, that week busy getting my nose dirty included plunging my liver back into the briny deep as well. After all, it was the only way I knew to come down, slow the pulse to sleep. And keeping my nose clean thereafter didn't translate to pulling the liver back out of the river. In fact booze became a ready-made substitute for escaping the bonds of myself and I dove ever deeper across the span of the next nearly one dozen years. Time spent on the high seas before I nearly drowned making it to shore.

For those of us missing whatever it is we're missing, finding it even for a moment, and especially in concentrated bursts of what we imagine happiness feels like, is pretty fucking compelling. It carries with it a lot of weight, requiring that much more on the down side for us to run in the other direction, moving the scale back again toward the breathing end of life.

Many of us never get it righted and just keep going, going, going into oblivion.