I’ve taken the Jeep again, only because the thought of driving a car that costs more than my annual salary makes me nervous. I’m not up to that responsibility, at least not today. And I wasn’t expressly told to take a particular vehicle. Today I’m going to go shopping. I’m going to see if I can’t dig up a few boutique type places for house wares and if I can find some sturdy plants to put in the hallway and living room. I’ve delivered and picked up at the dry cleaners, and the fresh laundry is on the back seat. I’ve got my lists, my purse with the charge cards and checkbook, and a full tank of gas.
I pretend. I pretend that I’m buying these things for me. It’s just a little game. Mr. M has no discernable taste. I refuse to stay in the heavy, cold, new age, ugly mode he’s adopted as his ‘style’. It doesn’t even suit the Spanish stucco ambiance of the house. No. So I’m going to buy some necessaries and some things I think would look nice. Then I’ll see if he notices it.
And if I see something that strikes my fancy, then I’m buying it for the pool house. I wouldn’t mind a few touches in the place, although it’s probably the most tastefully decorated corner of the ‘manse’ McLean.
That makes me laugh.
It’s so much easier to laugh out of that man’s presence. There’s something about him that makes me sad, makes me feel sorry for him. At least until he’s pissed me off. I think he’s somewhat pathetic. Pathetic in that ‘poor little rich boy’ way that I find utterly obnoxious, and pathetic in a more profound way, too, as if he really and truly doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Maybe that’s part of his problem with whatever it is that’s making him depressed. Or maybe that’s a part of being depressed. I don’t know. I don’t rightly believe that I’ve ever been depressed a day in my life. Not even when things were at an all time low. Not those times I’ve had to swallow my pride to survive. I found out that pride’s not that big a mouthful. Crap happens; you deal with it. You get over it because you have to. Other people are relying on you to get over it and get on with whatever it is you need to get on with. Errol never had any patience with emotionalism. I could talk with him, in the early days of our relationship. I could talk very frankly with him, or so I thought. I also thought he understood the things I was saying without saying them and that was a mistake, so I don’t really know if our talking was all that open and honest, but it felt that way at the time.
But I couldn’t get all over the top about anything. My parents didn’t allow that either. Maybe it suited me, because I never faced anything I couldn’t deal with, and I’m about as far from a hysteric as you can get. And that makes me wonder what Mr. M, what A.J., is facing that he CAN’T deal with. And why CAN’T he deal with it?
You just never know with some people.
When I worked in a sales office for six months, one of my more lengthy terms of employment, I worked with a man named Will. He was the happiest person you would ever want to meet. He rarely had a bad word to say about anyone, even annoying clients who were wrong, but blaming him for their problems. He would just fix the problem. Every day he came in early with a box of the most enormous, delicious baked goods you’d ever want to eat, and every night he left with a few sales under his belt.
It wasn’t until I was about walking out the door that I found out that Will’s wife was mentally unstable. That she had left him for other men repeatedly, during psychotic episodes, and would take off with whatever cash and credit cards she could get her hands on. And time and time again he would bring her back, put her in some clinic, and deal with their only son, who was mentally handicapped and needed constant care, on his own.
The man never had a down day. You would ask him how he was and he was always ‘fine’. I would have liked to gotten to know him better, but we left that town and I never heard from any of those people again, just like I’ve never heard from anyone else I ever worked with. For all I know, he’s still one happy camper.
So why isn’t this little man I work for happy?
You just never know with some people.
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My game is all slice today. I’ve played more in the rough than on the fairway. I can’t concentrate on anything. Not that it’s anything new, but I seem way more out of focus than usual, or maybe I’m just noticing it more. Rene thinks it’s funny, and he’s been laughing at me for the better part of the game we’re playing.
Sometimes I hate Rene. He’s an older guy, touching on forty, but sometimes I think he’s dumber than I am, and that’s pretty damn dumb. He had a wife, a pretty famous one, too, and he blew it with her. Blew it with her like it was nothing, and he’s my sponsor and I kind of got to this place in my head that blowing off a relationship was no big deal. Not that I never thought like that before, I’ve blown off relationships, but not the heavy ones, not the ones that counted for something to me. Seeing him be free and easy, I don’t know, he pissed me off about it, but it put a sort of idea in my head, or made an idea I had sort of already had, grow and seem acceptable.
His problems were prescription drugs of the painkiller, downer varieties, and drinking. I shouldn’t say were, he’s been on and off the wagon more than I have. In fact, last time I used, it was his shit that I took and we both fell off . A few Vicodin and some weed he had laying around. I just ‘checked out’ for a while there. One time deal, no big thing, that is SUCH a lie. I spent a weekend at his place stoned out of my mind. Right before last Thanksgiving. I think that was the lowest I’d ever gotten, up until the all time low this January.
It’s one thing sneaking around and cheating on your woman. It makes you feel kind of shitty, but it makes you feel like you don’t care anymore, and I didn’t want to care anymore. It made me feel independent of Sarah, my own person again making decisions just about ME. And I really didn’t want to care. The wedding was pressing down on me like a two ton weight and I just couldn’t get into it. The plans were being made, and I was right there, making them. But people kept asking about it, about what it was going to be like and did I get my suit and all this shit. I finally started making things up, saying it was going to have this theme, that theme, that it was going to be like a costume party, that everyone would be wearing masks. It kinda occured to me that I was describing a Halloween party, and that the idea of marriage was one big nightmare, but not until way after we cancelled the whole deal.
I mean, I loved the woman, I still love her, but I didn’t want to marry her.
So, I had the affair and it was moving right along. Hooking up with her on meeting nights, going to MORE meeting nights, even cut out on some things that were pretty special to Sarah to go to meetings. Or to walk the dogs, that’s a laugh. When I think back on it, how that wasn’t a tip off to her beats me. But I was way into this woman and I liked it on the down low, I liked it all being behind closed doors and a secret. The only thing was there was all this pressure about THAT, too. The sneaking around, the keeping tabs on myself and my excuses. Trying not to get caught, making time when I didn’t have time. And in the middle of it all, all the running around and the wedding prep, my mother drops the bomb that she’s not coming to the wedding.
In an e-mail.
Not face-to-face, not even a fucking phone call, but an e-mail.
Sliced THAT ball. I head off into the rough to look for it while Rene laughs. Just thinking about that gets me insane angry. An e-mail. That’s about the coldest thing THAT woman has ever done to me. I understand it now, now that we’re past that, and the wedding is off and things have sort of calmed down and we’ve talked about it, but it still hurts that she did that, and did it that way.
So I got ripped. Just took off for a ‘golf weekend’ and went across town to Rene’s instead and blew my mind for three solid days. He joined me, and I ended up back in AA and NA at ground zero while he lied his ass off and kept his coins and badges. Months of clean and sober and I’m back where I started. And I did it with my sponsor, and that made it seem okay, because he was my sponsor; that it was a ‘controlled situation’. And that woman, she was there for me then, at the meetings, holding my hand and letting me know that it was okay, that it happens. And she was there after the meetings, holding more than my hand and telling me that THAT was okay, too.
And Rene knew about it. He knew about the affair and covered for me and even let me hook up at his place so we didn’t have to go the hotel/motel route where I might get seen and recognized. I was grateful to him, then. I was grateful to him for all of it, even the drugs and booze when I really wanted it, even him sliding with me, so I wouldn’t slide alone. It’s fucked up, but it made sense to me then.
Only now, sometimes I hate him. I hate that he can just go in and out of using as if he didn’t have a problem with using at all. I hate that he knows things about me that I really never wanted anyone to know. I hate that he knows how low I’ll go, that he was okay with me cheating on Sarah, that he was okay with all of my shit behavior and never was that mentor I thought he was supposed to be. I hate that he can let me hating him roll off his back and still be with me as if none of that happened. I hate that he finagled to still be my sponsor by lying about HIS using and I hate that I don’t have the balls to blow his cover or even just move on from him, because it would mean another change and I don’t want another change.
I’m connected to this asshole because of things I’m ashamed of, and I still can’t let him go.
And it’s one thing to be sneaking around and cheating and not feeling real good about it and living with the pressure that it makes you feel, but its a WHOLE other thing to get caught.
You know, to this day, I’m not so sure that I DIDN’T set myself up to get caught. I’ve been around and around and around with this, with every shrink I see, and as much as I liked that woman, and I liked what we were doing, I knew that I wasn’t gonna be serious about her. She made me feel good. She made me feel like a man instead of like a little boy, which was how I was beginning to feel with Sarah.
When things weren’t a hundred percent with me, if I was moody or having some damn side effect from all the pills I’m taking, she just held me. I spent hours with her just being held and accepted as I was. Hours. And she never made me feel like I was less of something, or not the way I was ‘before’. She didn’t know me from before. She never looked at me like I was a stranger. She never treated me like anything other than Alex McLean, every day guy, which was something I hadn’t been in so long I didn’t recognize myself. And she made me feel good about myself when I wasn’t feeling good about myself at all. She was something to concentrate on other than the fucking wedding, or playing house, or dogs, or all that regular, boring, everyday shit I hate to think about. She never wanted to go out, she never wanted to ‘be seen’, she just wanted to be with me. With ME. WITH me. It had been about ten years since anyone just wanted to be with me and didn’t give a damn about what I did for a living or what I could do for them beyond hold them back.
Fucking ball, it won’t go anywhere I’m hitting it today.
I miss her, too, that woman. She was a sweetheart, and I’m sick that I even had to mention her to anyone, to explain about her, to say anything about her at all. I never heard from her after I did that interview about the wedding being off. It was better that way, I think, because I never knew if there was someone else in her life that she was escaping, too.
That’s what it was, that affair. It was an escape. It was an ‘out’. It got me what I wanted in every possible way at every possible point. The only thing it didn’t do was make me happy. I thought I was, but now I know I wasn’t. I wasn’t happy with her. I wasn’t happy with Sarah. I’m not happy alone.
Rene is happy. He’s happy he’s winning this game, he’s happy I’m playing so bad, he’s probably happy that he doesn’t have to have dinner with my sorry ass tonight. I wish I could get charged up about things like that, but I can’t. It just doesn’t seem possible. When I tell Rene stuff like that, he just laughs, smacks me on the back, and tells me I’m too goddamned serious.
Me. Serious. There’s a word for that, and I don’t know what it is, but I know that if some people I know could hear Rene say that about me, they’d be laughing, too.
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© 2003 Chandrah, Inc.
© 2003 (*> Baby Bird Productions, Inc.
