8:02 a.m. - 2005-06-02
Freedom Rant
Privacy was a luxury I had never experienced. I had always been scrutinized, monitored and tracked, yet had remained strangely invisible. It was as though my physical presence was under constant surveillance while my soul floated undetected through the hostile landscape of conditional love. My attempts to please, to appease, to win approval and the illusive stamp of acceptance on my very personhood was consistently met with suspicion and sideways glances by those that professed to have my best interest at heart. I carried this image of a bad western in which suddenly the frame would freeze and everyone would casually exchange hats. The obvious hero, fresh-faced and broad-shouldered, would reach for the black hat while the villain, thin sinister mustache and beady piercing eyes, would end up wearing the white. It seemed I could never be sure of who was who in my life. The foreshadowing was fiercely not to be trusted. The dramatic irony proved only to be a joke on me. It was Central Casting out of control. I didn't know what to believe or who to trust. And so, over time, I tended to be overly cautious of the conventional and naively trustful of the bizarre. The program for my life was replete with typos and defrocked heros insidiously replaced by understudies with their own dark agendas. The one thing I kept reminding myself through all of this chaos was that I was finally free. Free to make my own mistakes and suffer my own consequences. And so, I held court in my own green corner of the big, big world. Making so many choices that, knowing what I now know, I would never have made. And yet, I do not believe in wasted steps. So I will bravely report what I know to be true for the very first time to no one in particular and everyone who might actually care. Like Max in the wonderful children's book "Where The Wild Things Are", with bravado and a haughty crown I mounted the beast within as the walls of my little apartment "became the world all around". Gardens have been known to harbor serpents and I entertained my share. On weekdays, I spent my mornings as a teacher's aide. Afternoons, I played with my son and took him to the marina for corn on the cob and pushed him on swings and swam in the apartment pool with the tricycle rusting deep below the surface of the warm water while latchkey urchins yelled "Marco" and "Polo". It was summer and we were free. But weekends found me pulling on the faded jeans I had rhinestoned myself and the crocheted tops that barely covered. I was off to the clubs where I would be dancing with one and smiling over his shoulder at another, insuring the next dance. Even the band played, "Who's That Lady", smiling lacivously at me. I would come home with scraps of paper stuffed in my pockets. Rather than give my phone number, I would take theirs. That way, I could choose who I actually called. Never having allowed myself to choose anything, I felt powerful and in control. I told one bewildered guy, "Too bad you didn't meet me last week. This week, I'm off guys". It was like that, then. It wasn't really about sex or even feeling desirable, although that was heady stuff. It was all about choice. And, given my prediliction for black vs. white hats, I was predisposed to choose some very unlikely companions. There was a barely legal Cuban who stole a car to come and see me. There was someone tall and delicate from Thailand who arrived bearing a bowl of sweet cherries. I can taste them still. There was one they called "Cowboy" who showed up with a baggie of cocaine and I said in my cockiest voice, "Boy, have you got the wrong girl!" after which he walked away shaking his head. There were comedians and busboys and art students and tall ones and short ones and, well, you get the idea. I would post their pictures on the bulletin board in my kitchen like a hunter proudly displaying the severed heads of her prey. I invited my parents to dinner and shocked them with blatant traces of my escapades strewn carefully throughout my apartment. And I was thrilled that they were shocked. "You will never be happy living like this", my mother offered. And I wanted to say that I had never really been happy anyway and that they did not have the first idea of who I was or what might make me happy or why their attempts to turn me into themselves had produced the very person who now embarassed and disappointed them. And I especially wanted to talk to them about those hats of theirs. Those hats they had worn since my childhood. Those hats that misrepresented everything they claimed to stand for in life. And I wanted to freeze the frame and show them how everything looked from where I stood. But instead, I just smiled somewhere inside. And, after they left, I lay my head on the crisp cotton pillow with the none-too-bright Noah and the ridiculous menagerie and slept the dreamless sleep of the innocent. And I was happy.
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