So much of the drive is long stretches of flat road that it’s hard to concentrate. The mind drifts. The mind plays tricks. I swear that we’ve passed through areas that we’ve already been through. All of the landscape looks familiar be it corn fields, wheat fields, livestock or the occasional thrust of skyscrapers in the distance. Probably because I’ve lived in or around so many of these places. The corn belt, the Bible belt, prime stomping grounds for my early years. Military housing is generic, looking about the same no matter where we were.
I try and push those memories aside. They aren’t bad, they aren’t good; they just are. It was a life that I wanted to get away from, but here I am, almost twenty years after the fact and still a gypsy. With my gypsy child. I’m still poor, I’m still wondering, when I have the time to wonder, when I just might pick up those college courses.
When I said that Tish was the only thing in my life that was my choice, I wasn’t kidding. I think I already knew that my marriage was a bit of a failure at that point. Errol and I had been on the road for years, both of us working then. Him with his carpentry and me doing whatever I could with my high school education: bagging groceries, waiting tables, a little retail, a little wholesale, and sometimes, if I was lucky, some temp work in offices where the people were civil. I was young. I didn’t try to save much, splurged more, and kept hoping that some day we would find a place to our liking to settle in and raise a family. What I found out was that waiting for just the right set of elements to fall into place meant that I would never have children if I just didn’t have them. It was never going to be the right time, or a safe time, or the best time. So just as I was edging out of my twenties I got pregnant and, well, here we are. There were never any more after Tish. I may have been dumb but I wasn’t stupid. I figured I might as well get one good thing out of the marriage, but I wasn’t about to saddle Errol, or myself, with more than we could handle. Hell, we couldn’t handle Tish with me not working and the constant flux of moving.
I’m tired of being destitute.
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I’m a practical person most of the time. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but I am. Right now is one of those moments I’m not.
We pulled into a small motel in the Texas panhandle today. Nothing fancy, but decent. They have a clean, tiny pool that Tish took a dip in, and a cafe where we ate an early supper. I just got tired of driving and it looked like a safe, okay place to pause.
Tish is asleep now, but I’m restless. There’s an old lawn chair out in front of the small unit we’ve rented for the night and I’m sitting in it listening to the drone of the television in the background and the hum of traffic in front of me.
The sky is enormous here. There’s nothing to get in its way. It’s filled with stars and has a deep, purple hue to it that comes with a prolonged sunset in a flat area. I know that ahead of us are the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and then the desert areas of New Mexico and Arizona and, eventually, California. I took the longer, southerly route because I wanted the heat; I wanted the build up to the inferno that the southwest can be. Tonight it’s sultry, though, dry and clear and as pleasant as a night can be. This is the kind of night that I don’t mind being on the road. I don’t feel like the fugitive from my life so much, I feel comfortable in my skin and that I’ve made the right decision. A clean sweep. A simplification. There’s no other way to feel but simplified when presented with a sky that never ends and makes a person feel small, but a part of it. It’s an epic moment and I’m enjoying the experience of it.
For a second, I tinker with the idea of staying put, but that’s not a practical thought and it’s rejected. The dry beauty of the place is fleeting and I know that. I understand the impermanence of ‘the moment’, and I’m learning, or at least trying to learn, that it’s okay if ‘the moment’ doesn’t last forever. In fact, I guess that if it did, you wouldn’t appreciate it half as much as you should, as I do. I’m grateful right now for ‘the moment’ because it helps to take away some of ‘the fear’.
I’m afraid. That’s something new for me. I’m not afraid of people, or new places, or having to adjust to a new environment. I’m not afraid of being broke, I AM broke, I’ve been poor; I’ve been on relief, taken what the government will give. It can be humiliating, but it’s not the end of the world. For the first time I’m feeling scared because this is all on me now. Even though it felt that way with Errol, that the onus was definitely on me to make our lives run smoothly around our erratic movements, there was that living, breathing, snoring safety net in my life. There was another person to bounce things off of even if nothing ever seemed to bounce back. Now there’s just me and Tish and if anything goes wrong, it will be my fault.
That’s hard, knowing that as much as I didn’t love Errol in the long run, that as much as I ended up not even liking him, it was easy to stay with him and let things slide along no matter how difficult it was just for the sake of not being alone. I’m not even sure that I would have thrown him out after Doris Hanney if he hadn’t walked out the door himself. There’s so much comfort in that little bit of familiarity.
Now how lame is that? Pretty lame, if you ask me. There’s nothing wrong with being on your own. Not a darned thing. In fact, I could get used to it, to having things my way on my terms.
I reach into the pocket of the denim shirt I’m wearing over my T-shirt. There’s a pack of cigarettes there. A luxury that I’ve mostly done without for years. I like to smoke, but I basically couldn’t afford to. Not that I can now, but it’s part of the Doris Hanney settlement fund and at the last stop we made at a convenience store I bought them along with the pop and chips and coffee Tish and I need.
I need this right now and I light my Marlboro Light, sucking in the smoke until I want to cough it back up again, then muffling that cough so as not to wake Tish or break the stillness of the night. It feels good. I’m not going to get into the habit, though, it IS a luxury that I still can’t afford, but it makes me feel like I’m my own person, something I haven’t felt in so long that I can’t remember the last time I did.
And thinking that, I feel my fear dissolve. Maybe it’s only for a moment, but it’s a good moment and I’m going to savor it like I’m savoring the smoke. Savor it, and the night and ‘the moment’ and the lingering.
My terms. My life. Alone is fine. Alone is good. Simplicity.
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Juliette, my PA, is not having much luck in finding me a housekeeper. Apparently the word on the street is that I’m too difficult to work for. She said that she interviewed a few people that had an interest, but none of them were, uh, appropriate. Too old, too young, didn’t speak English, wouldn’t work nights, didn’t seem trustworthy; all the usual problems.
This house is too big for me. I don’t know why I bought it, well, yeah, I know why, but there’s no need for it now and maybe I should just unload it, but I haven’t owned it for a year and it would be a huge loss. Not that money is that tight, but the outgo is more than the income right now. Nothing new with that, either, it’s just not a good time to be trying to unload real estate.
That’s a lie. I don’t want to let this house go. I don’t have another one to go to. I sold the one I owned in Florida, lock, stock, and barrel. Everything. Didn’t keep the flat screen TV’s, not a stick of furniture, not nothing. Not even a lot of the clothes. I think my mother has those. I think she took all the CD’s and DVD’s and things like that and she’s got them stored somewhere. Honestly, I don’t know because at the time, I didn’t care and it’s only been recently that I’ve even thought about it. So I have no place to go other than to hotels or friend’s houses or my mother’s. I’ve already worn out my welcome with some people out here, I mean, how long does anyone want a houseguest that’s going through a lot of shit? Not real long. I guess I could have stayed there, with Rene, my sponsor. I guess he wouldn’t have minded. I guess I minded. It seemed so stupid to have a house in the same town and not to be in it. But the house was empty and I don’t like living alone. Never have. I never have lived alone, either. It’s been my mother, my grandparents, or girlfriends. I’m not alone when I’m out on the road, hell, you’re lucky if you can cop a shower by yourself. And I like it that way.
I like convenient company.
It’s one of those cool nights in Los Angeles, well, Malibu. My house is above the water and it’s breezy up here in the hills. Breezy from the valley, breezy from the ocean, breezy enough for me to need a sweatshirt out in the yard. The dogs are running around and rooting through the bushes, God knows what they’re gonna find in there, but other than that it’s deadly quiet up here. I guess that’s how it’s supposed to be in these places, all private and quiet. Secluded. Guarded. I hate it. I hate that I’m alone up here and that I can’t hear anything, not even the neighbors. It’s spooky. Even in Florida I could hear the neighbors on the lake or next door.
I could go out. I could lock up the dogs and go out, but going out isn’t fun anymore. Used to be, but that was before my ‘lifestyle’ change. Trying not to drink, trying not to do drugs. Trying. I was going good there for a while, I really was. But I wasn’t trying alone, and I thought I had motivation and reasons for staying sober, for staying out of trouble. I thought I had it covered until I screwed it all up and now here I am and I’m alone, just the way I don’t like it. Locking up the dogs isn’t the best idea in the world, either. They get pissed off when they’re left alone. They wreck thing. They eat sofas and clothes and pee all over the place.
Now, if I had a housekeeper, I wouldn’t be alone. There would be someone else here, in the house. Not that I would have to talk to them, or anything like that, they would just be here. And they would be the ones trying to drag these impossible dogs back into the house where they belong, too, instead of me having to struggle them through the doors. In fact, if I had a housekeeper here they could stay at home with the dogs and I could go out.
I have to turn my back to the wind to light a cigarette. This is like the fifth one I’ve had in an hour. Smoke, pace around the pool, smoke, look out down the hill, smoke, and listen for signs of life, smoke. I’ve given up everything else but the smoke. Well, okay, I’ve TRIED to give up everything else. I’ve TRIED. Hard. It’s just that tonight is one of those nights when everything seems too big and I seem too small and the need is there, this need to lose myself IN the night instead of having it press down on me the way it does.
It does, you know. It presses. I’ve told people about it, well, not people really, my shrinks. Here. There. Back there in Arizona where the sky was so friggin’ huge that it scared me. We were up so high in that place. Up high, and it was hot, hot, hot; the middle of the summer in the middle of the desert. At night it was more like this, cool, sometimes cold, and they would make us sit outside under this big, huge sky and even then, with people all around me, I felt lost under that deep, black sky. Even with the stars. Even with the moon. Lost. Small.
I’m afraid. I’m so afraid that I’m going to be left out here, alone, under this empty sky, in that empty house, that I can taste it. It’s like metal in my mouth, like sucking on a penny. I’m feeling lost tonight. Lost and very alone, and if I don’t move from this place, even from this yard at least, I’m going to lose it. Then I WILL drive down the hills and into town and I WILL find a small, out of the way bar. I WILL go into it and I WILL sit in the kind of enclosed dark that I can handle and drink something, anything, to make this lost feeling go away. I have to move, to go into the house, to pick up the phone and call someone, anyone, just to hear a voice, so that I don’t do that. I have to call for the damn dogs and drag them into the house and get on the phone right now, or it’s back to day one for me at AA tomorrow, and I don’t feel like humiliating myself anymore.
At least not tonight.
Juliette better find me a housekeeper like, now.
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© 2003 Chandrah, Inc.
© 2003 (*> Baby Bird Productions, Inc.
