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8:44 a.m. - 2005-06-29
Exchanging Paradise for Paradise Rant
And so it is no surprise that I preferred the rub of dirty socks against my bare feet there under the covers with the love I could no more have than he could have me. Giggling, we sang along with the Simpson's theme. Joe shook his head and smiled quizzically. He knew I loved Rick no matter what. The fact that he loved other men was, strangely, just more safety for me. I would never be replaced by another woman. Never have to compare myself with his chosen partner and wonder why. It was true that I loved my independence, my apartment, my gruff landlady with the impotent pitbull, my bent willow, my busy walls, my privacy. But I guess I loved Rick more than all of these. And he tended to get what he wanted. That's just how it was. One random day, he decided that I should move in. Not as a lover, but a companion. A playmate there at the ready. He emptied a bedroom for me that looked out onto the yard made of dirt and holes. Holes personally dug by the "puppy girls", as I called them. The holes were so big that once, when Samantha stood looking forlorn having lost her ball to one of the mysterious tunnels, Rick pushed his pudgy body so deep that not a part of him could be seen above ground. Buried alive, he retrieved the ball. Rick tended to get what he wanted, nevermind the cost. And so I agreed to move in. When I told Anna Mae, she betrayed no emotion either way. She stared straight at me with her mean stare and I felt a longing for her to somehow stop me. Forbid me to go. Sic her pal on anyone trying to take me away. Make it all stop. I loved Rick, but I was trying to learn to love me. That had been the whole point of the parental exile, the frozen burritos, the Charlie Brown tree. Freedom from the demands of another. That illusive, golden prize, the ability to 'come and go'. So hard won and so easily surrendered. But again, I was compellingly confronted with someone actually wanting me. Believing I had something of value to offer. Here again, I was faced with the eyes of a broken man whose fragile heart I held. Rick had been beaten by his father, abandoned by his mother, tortured by his older brother. He had run away from home at fifteen, selling himself on Santa Monica Boulevard just to survive. And he survived. He had joined the military to escape his fate, when it was discovered that he and a buddy had that new disease that hadn't yet a name. His buddy had hanged himself for the shame. Rick survived. He survived with the disease just as he survived alongside everything else good, bad or neutral. He simply co-existed and dominated by sheer will. Rick had a bravado so convincing that gang members would flee from the crazy white guy there in the barrio, in that delapidated shack behind the terra cotta house on Gilmore. And so I moved into that shack on Gilmore. Left my clean, tidy refuge in which every wall reflected some treasure recovered from the depths of my consciousness, each mermaid representing some reclaimed part of me. Moved in with Rick and Joe and a troop of water bugs so huge they cast shadows as they strutted across the living room floor, so entitled you'd think they had kicked in for rent. Part of the deal was a cast of characters that included Tory, a young flamboyuant blond who crashed there between tricks and Lee, a sullen introvert who would french kiss his pet rat just to gross me out. We would all cook together, watch reruns of the Munsters and Bewitched, take turns guessing the right answers on Jeopardy and then one by one everyone would fall asleep wherever they fell. I would pick myself up half asleep and stumble into my bed, wedging myself between Punky and Samantha, the puppy girls that kept me safe and warm. Sometimes my strange new family would awaken in the night and I would find myself drifting off once again to the sound of laughter and fighting and Johnnie Carson low in the background. I can't exactly explain why this felt like home, but it did. All of those voices, loosened by Tanguaray and beer and whatever else I didn't know, defied the world to show them anything worse than they had already lived through. They were like a band of paisley marauders sharing what spoils remained of their stolen youths. Collectively whistling past the graveyard. And I was accepted as one of them. Me, whose scars didn't even show. They saw them and called me their own. Mornings, I would leave for Ward I, waving goodbye to the puppy girls until they shrank to nothing in my rearview mirror. I would watch the clock all day, eager to return to my new paradise. These presumably dying men were more full of life than anyone I had known. I found a vicarious strength in their company. A belonging I had never felt. On weekends, Rick and I would sit in a huge plastic wading pool, playing hangman and sipping homemade lemonade while the neighbors stood watching us, the crazy gringos who dared to live in this dangerous neighborhood and flaunt it right in their face at that. Rick charmed all the ragamuffin kids, though. They would come to play with the dogs and, in broken Spanish, he would tease and make them laugh. They easily recognized his heart, no matter what their parents told them. His heart that contained more pain than I could ever imagine. One night, I had a headace and had fallen asleep with headphones on, listening to some subliminal relaxation tape. I will never forget the tenderness with which Rick touched my shoulder. "Listen, honey, it's raining", he purred in my ear. The rain was our secret covenant. Whenever it rained, wherever we might find ourselves, we would think of the other and know for sure that we were in each other's thoughts. I removed the headphones to hear. Together, we lay on my bed there in the dark, listening to the soft patters on the windowsill. One of those moments in life so sacred that you must speak of it in whispers. His touch had been more like the soft breath of a baby, deep in dreams. Or maybe an angel's wing accidentally bridging time, inadvertently brushing mortality. His voice was like the last strains of a lullaby just before tiptoing away. A soothing sustained note just beneath the incessant clammor of my mind. A comforting heartbeat intuited by the child that was me, resting still against his chest. The scent of Gray Flannel, his cologne, on my clothing long after he had retreated to his room. Coaxing me home.

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