I was there a year ago. Looking at homelessness. No toilet paper in the house. Rent not paid. Fighting the urge not to fight anymore. Fighting a depression so deep I imagined (and later realized it was a dream) that the reflection of any shimmering water, on the lake, on the Sound, in a puddle, was just obscuring the cobbled bottom of a well that would drown me. All directions I looked were downward; that there were no good solutions, that I was dried up and spit out and had few options. That I was just fucking tired of it all.
and I'm still a full-time working, full-time parent who has to keep an even head when there is a teenage crisis and act like I'm doing okay, because there's only so much drama even a teenager can handle, and there's no milk, mom, well, there won't be, dear, for a bit until I find where I put the jar of pennies that we can take to CoinStar, and there's still some Ramen in the cupboard and I bought those Michellina's dinners for 10 for $10 the other day at the store, you'll just have to suck it up and eat carbs again, and yes, there's still some tortillas left. Toilet paper? Shit. We're out.
Today is gonna be the day – July 6, 2006
It's astounding
Time is fleeting
Madness takes its toll
But listen closely
I was there a year ago. Today, it's not so much better financially – in fact worse – but I have a decent job that I consistently get up in the morning and go to. I laugh when I say it pays the bills, because all it is paying is old bills, not new. But that ability is better than it was last year at this time. I find reasons to continue where last year there were none. I stay on my thyroid medication. That must be part of my change in mood. I attempt most days to eat properly. I get plenty of exercise and I still do not sleep much, but I'm energized enough to tackle most daily stresses without falling apart. And there have been a few stresses lately...
Rose of Sharon (on cancer)
When bridges break apart
Paso Doble
Denouement - mixing memory and desire
This is not so much a revisitation of my year-long diaries, as it is a reflection on how life changes and how it stays the same. Or maybe the stage is the same and the actors change. I'll set the backdrop of such reflection against another ongoing drama now inhabiting my living room.
My best friend has now spent the past six weeks living on a rollaway bed in the cramped living room of my 1000 square foot apartment. His house was repossessed on May 10th and we spent the next week and half moving his furniture and belongings into pod storage and a garage. He brought with him four cats and the brother Pomeranian to my pom Leopold. I now have two teenagers, each with their own room, one adult (me) in my bedroom, and my friend – I'll call him Andrew for anonymity – in the major room of the apartment. Add to this my own two cats and three small dogs. Have I set the physical stage? Six cats, four dogs, two teenagers. Heavy Victorian furniture, my last remaining Persian rugs not sold for money for bills, and three hundred pieces of china left over from a more expansive life. A thousand footsteps a day that echo along the somewhat damaged pathways of both of our minds. We are finding that the ties that bind may be ties that break.
Allow me to tread a little deeper into the maelstrom.
And the void would be calling
Let's do the time warp again
Let's do the time warp again
Andrew is bipolar and can't afford the meds, but one. He has high blood pressure, Diabetes Type II which he has just started insulin for around three weeks ago, when his blood sugar hit and stayed over 400. Andrew is gay. Andrew weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 pounds. He is also one of the most capable, congenial, intelligent, and resourceful individuals I know. He and I have worked at some four different companies together over the last twenty three years – he was the one who submitted my resume to the company I now contract with and who we were both fulltime employees with for some sixteen years between us, off and on; he for ten years and I, well, I lasted shy of six years. He and I have both contracted at this same company for the balance of the years we were not employed fulltime. Andrew got "RIFed" last year from his second fulltime employment around March 2006 and started contracting again in another group at the same company. By December of this last year, his severe burnout was painfully and critically apparent – most of all to his manager, who allowed him every last cushion and excuse of absence from work. Until the week in January when he just didn't call in to work. His manager called me to find out if he was still alive and I drove over to his house when I couldn't reach him by phone and luckily found that he was. But Andrew was fired from his contract job, with no access to unemployment; his manager had no recourse after his flagrant abandonment of the job. February of this year to now has been a continuous slide to the bottom for Andrew. Which, I suspect he will admit, he greased consciously and in some ways deliberately. And of course, there are very good reasons and rationales, both medical and emotional.
It's just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right
He has not only lost his house and his job; his car is out for repossession and so there is his repo dance. Perhaps you are not familiar with such a dance and the music you have to listen to. First Andrew parks his car where it can't be seen so that the repo man doesn't find it. Andrew doesn't answer calls that are tagged "Unavailable" or "Restricted" or anything with an "800" before the number. Andrew doesn't open mail. Andrew waits for a letter stating that he is being sued – or he constantly assumes that is what will happen. Andrew lets another month go by without paying his car loan, and another, and another. Andrew has no money coming in that doesn't go to bills for belongings in storage or meds if he needs them, and then only the cheapest meds are the ones Andrew buys.
I've got to keep control
I remember doing the time warp
Drinking those moments when
The blackness would hit me
Andrew applied for food stamps and the state gave him a month's worth only - $164. His diabetes and his bipolarity apparently don't qualify him for any kind of disability unless he has the stamina to submit to state psychiatric examination and that takes weeks and weeks to schedule. At this point it's all too much for him to contemplate, though it is what he needs to do to help himself. In the meantime, Andrew sits on my couch and watches television. He makes the occasional, sometimes daily, attempt at sending out resumes to jobs on craigslist. I cannot tell if he follows up with letters or calls to the companies he posts to. He refuses to work for the Evil Empire again. I understand this completely, but I cannot sympathize – I was in a similar state of mind two years ago and nearly lost my mind in the attempt to find other work outside the biggest technology employer in the Seattle area – outside work is just not as stable or plentiful here. I still have a family to support and I cannot afford the luxury of turning up my nose at a job I can do and do well. Self-righteous bitch, aren't I? And I'm compelled to try and pretend I have to be an active role model for optimism in the face of defeat of a middle class lifestyle. My kids are watching. So, not so surprisingly, there are times on certain days – usually Monday mornings – when I resent Andrew's hell-bent insistence on not ever trying again or returning to a similar job at the same company. He's likely correct, anyway, in that he's burned his bridges and there will be no going back across that divide. But the existence of both his frustration and burnout and my impatience with his lack of flexibility create a roiling stew in such a small space. Within the small lives we lead.
And I know Andrew tries not to eat the food in the refrigerator, though he's welcome to what he needs; not that there is much food, because I don't ever buy much at any one time. But he's a big guy. I'm in a similar financial boat, though working. I let my own car go back to the car company in March when my transmission died and I couldn't scrape together the thousands of dollars for a replacement tranny. And most of my paychecks are still, after 9 months nearly fulltime contract work, going to back debt and utilities. I have very little, if any to spare even two days after each payday. I'm still catching up after taking nearly two weeks off in April during the course of my sister's terminal illness and subsequent death by the end of that month. April was, indeed, the cruelest month,
So Andrew is stuck. And I am stuck.
With a bit of a mind flip
You're into the time slip
And nothing can ever be the same
You've spaced out of sensation
Like you're under sedation.
We've known each for so long, he and I. His mother nannied my two oldest children when I was still married to their father and they were very young at 3 and 1 years of age. I worked as a bookkeeper for his father's business, a medical lab in NW Portland that inevitably went bankrupt after poor management and high debt carried by his father. Andrew's folks, too, went through difficult times in the eighties and they mortgaged everything they owned on the business and lost it all in the lab's failure. Andrew has seen dreams die before. His mother died less than a year after my mother did, of the same congestive heart failure – and both suffered broken hips in their final year of life.
I taught computer software applications to the Air Force and Air Force Reserve for a year in the eighties and I worked with both Andrew and his sister at the same company. We traveled across country on one trip from St. Louis, Missouri back to Portland in five days with a van full of obsolete computers, driven from a storage location near one of the Air Force bases our company contracted with. I took along my then 18 month old daughter for the trip, because I was wary of leaving her for so long. Together, we three have seen the St. Louis Arch, the muddy Mississippi, pointed Westward Ho! from the start of the Oregon Trail at that tiny Truman Courthouse in Independence. I wish I could find the sweet picture to show you of a precocious 18 month old in a sun bonnet and polka-dotted jumper pointing westward in front of the courthouse. But it is an image lost to time and too many moves.
Let's do the time warp again
Let's do the time warp again
We meandered around one hot and humid Civil War era cemetery that I begged to stop at on the way west through Missouri and we chased large grasshoppers in an empty street on a lazy hot, hot day in the warehouse district of Topeka when we pulled over to readjust the old computers in the back of the van. We both nearly fell asleep driving across the flat and yellow plains of Kansas where the buzzing of bees and crickets thundered in the hot August dusk. We've sped through Colorado and stumbled through the sleepy town of Vail at midnight in the middle of a summer week in 1989.
Andrew and I have driven through Utah twice together in our friendship – most recently in 2002 when Andrew moved back to Portland from Phoenix. After quitting the Evil Empire the first time in the summer before 9/11, he moved to Phoenix for a year. By May of 2002, he was ready to return to the west coast. I flew in, helped him pack over the course of five days, and we drove back in his SUV across four states in a day and half with four cats in carriers in the back of the vehicle, air-conditioned and howling. We never thought of hosing them down. We were racing to beat the moving van driver, a maniac who said he could make it in a day to Portland from Phoenix. And he did. It was a memorable, crazy, sleep-deprived trip and there is no other individual on earth than Andrew that I could have driven that far with four caterwauling animals through a dead-straight and flat territory of rock and sagebrush and mostly Mormon white people. What better companion to have than a gay man who will sing "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and any musical number from "Phantom of the Opera" at the top of his lungs with you through Salt Lake City, windows rolled down, in the middle of the night? Especially when you know you are returning to a home with a husband who is ready to call it quits on your marriage?
There are other stories, other songs; a replicated catalog of tales possibly mirrored in like fashion and scribed on the brains of all best friends over time.
I could draw analogies to political situations here so easily. Inviting temporary guests who stay too long (Bush, Gonzales, Cheney) – hence the old Danish saying about guests and fish. How absence makes the heart grow fonder and why you should never let a friend live with you. I'll leave that analogy alone for now. I knew all this time-proven wisdom so well. But it turns out, I am an optimist. I actually think a Democratic candidate will win in 2008. Politics is a Ferris wheel, isn't it?
As for analogies, or at least cautionary alarms, on a societal level, we don't support those who have critical health needs when jobs fail for any reason. We have no structure pre-emptive to bankruptcy that covers the cost of any sort of indigent health care – especially for those who have no family safety net, or friends who can help. Short of bankruptcy and repossession, there is hardly a way to get out of significant debt if you are an individual and not a large corporation with the avenue of restructure. Bankruptcy itself is too expensive for many to even initiate - I know this because I certainly can't afford it. With the new laws, there are now nearly mandatory middlemen who take a wedge of profit for every bankruptcy filed – attorneys and mandatory debt counselors are a necessary part of the process and the costs for a simple Chapter 7 are no longer simple.
And, for all our cultural advances, we don't suffer diversity gladly, even the most diverse of us do not – consider how tough a world it is for an obese gay man.
You bring your knees in tight
But it's the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane
Let's do the time warp again
Let's do the time warp again
Sadly, also, we have lost our families. In Andrew's case, his one attempt to reach out for help from one of his siblings, a cardiologist, was met with disdain and a small handout. And Andrew was given much grief over the choices he has made in his life, most of which have been reasonably sensible choices up to the last two or three years.
I'm a best friend, but I fail Andrew, too. The impact of his depression and inactivity, his continuously being there day and night, the near-constant maelstrom of animals and hair (and I am an obsessive, therapeutic vacuumer) and cleaning multiple cat boxes and, dammit, even lowering the toilet seat when I am not used to it (a small thing, that) – all of these are compounding the stresses on my own self-acclimated, self-generated chaos. An existence in which I once again see hope. But hope is a Ferris wheel after all.
I have set a benchmark, if you will ,with Andrew. On Friday night, we had the "come to Jesus" talk. It was necessary and much too painful. There are things you shouldn't have to say to your friends, things that in the past were issues easily discussed and almost telepathically intuited on many occasions. The subtleties are gone now. The Ferris wheel is on its final descent to the end of the ride.
I'm sorry, Andrew. I'll do what I can, but it won't be enough. I'm so sorry.
Well I was walking down the street just having a think
When a snake of a guy gave me an evil wink
He shook-a me up, He took me by surprise
He had a pick up truck and the devil's eyes
He stared at me and I felt a change
Time meant nothing, never would again
Let's do the time warp again
Let's do the time warp again
