Where the Hell is Bobbie Gentry?

Today I have provided beginning students of physics a perfect example Of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. Really simply put, there is no net gain or loss in the universe. There are mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies that are equal and opposite.

Yesterday, I had a lovely visit with a friend I haven’t seen for a long time. It was good. It was easy. I didn’t feel like I had to pretend to play host. We just were. And that’s a very cool thing. I encourage you all to do the same. You’ll thank me for it, and you’ll rest easier to boot.

This was all great until after several hours of honest-to-god energy and genuine enthusiasm flagged like a car on empty. Then, I have to try real hard to maintain some verve (I like thinking I have verve. Yummy word, that one. Verve. I’ve never had any need to use it in the past and that’s what popped up when I thought about how mine just withered away.)

Dudes. This is three and a half years since I took ill. Is this all that I’m ever to expect? Today (back to physics 101), I pressed the PTSD button.
Everything fucking thing frightened me. This is extremely annoying and horribly unproductive. The stretching and shit I do every goddamned day to maintain a normal looking body was one hundred times harder than it usually is. (FYI, my other choices, if I don’t try and stay fit, are becoming a super-fat load who is unable to get up from the couch or the other, camp survivor chic chica. I don’t like either of them.) Wasn’t that Peggy Lee? Is that all there is? But at least she could keep dancing.

All the love from Saturday turned to fear on Sunday. My inability to get a hold of myself made it so much more difficult to breathe. I finally asked Chip, after I’d spent the entire morning in bed feeling queasy, if I could I put my head in his lap and conk out. Bless him, he said yes honey. An hour and a half later, now awake (but shaky). He had taped Sixty Minutes which he knows usually absorbs my attention. (But not as much as Real Sports. That show fucking rules.) We watched. It helped.

So I thought I’d whine about it to you. And don’t you get all high and mighty about Sir Isaac. Hey, all my love on Saturday turned 180 degrees on Sunday. The universe is behaving as it should. No space-time continuum problems here. My feeling especially rotten today proves it. Physics 101.

Let’s talk about cutting. I saw a week or so ago that Secretary was being aired on one of the 10,000 HBO channels. I never saw it when it came out, and a friend I love whose tastes very often dovetail with mine, liked and recommended it. In it, Maggie Gyllenhaal is an unhappy young woman whose means of comforting herself is by making cuts in her skin (Or painful burns on it.) Either choice, same goal, relief. No, this isn’t a preamble to suicide, because I grok that. I know that. Suicide is something else entirely. Cutting is to provide relief from the otherwise unrelievable. Suicide is just cutting loose.

So as I looked at the many Band-Aids on Maggie’s legs, I found a kindred spirit. No, I didn’t cut. Nor did it ever occur to me. Even it had, I don’t think I could ever achieve the sense of relief, because I think that cutting is way to out of control for me. Maggie should have been a surgeon. I not.

But I could scratch off every scab, bump, mosquito bite, as well as anything else I’m forgetting. And make them bleed. This provided me with that very same relief. I also chewed my cuticles like crazy. If there was a piece of skin to pull, I pulled it. Sure, the first part didn’t hurt. (It was already no longer a living part of my body.) But what it pulled with it was quite alive. Just regular old flesh doing it’s quiet flesh job. I tore it. And boys and girls? It bled. Of course it did, my pets. And in the strange minds of people who have nowhere to turn, this was comfort. This was control. I controlled my pain. Not somebody else who had power over me. (Usually teachers, occasionally fellow classmates in the Port Washington Union Free School District.)

Now, we cutters, pickers, bleeders are ashamed of ourselves. And god forbid anyone see the evidence of your work. Here it was, bright and bold- youaresopatheticlookattheshityouhavetoresorttogethroughtheday. When other girls were “cute as a button,” I was so damned ashamed. Of myself. That I had no power to stop doing It. That no one would ever love me if they knew how sick I was. That It actually made me feel better. Oh, this is all wrapped up in shame. Not so easy to have be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I needed to make myself bleed to cope. What am I, some monster? Shameful.

For me, the most pivotol scene in Secretary which made me teary is when James Spader showed his cards. He knew what she did, and he didn’t judge her for it. He says to her, to paraphrase, “Lee, you are to never, ever to cut yourself again.” After that, she then goes to a bridge (the Tallahatchie? Sorry, couldn’t resist) and throws her neat box of sharp instruments into the river. (Like when I finally figured out that the critical scene in Gone With the Wind is when Scarlett makes it back to Tara and finds her mother dead. It is at that moment, when there no longer Mommy’s arms to run into, Scarlett begins to become the tough, unlikeable Scarlett many of us love to watch over and over again.)

Believe it or not, through my bout with hell, I’ve been able to control my urge to comfort myself with controlled pain. Maggie, as narrator says “Each cut, each scar, each burn, a different mood or time. I told him what the first one was, told him where the second one came from. I remembered them all. And for the first time in my life I felt beautiful.” I got there too. No more shame. Even with my crapass life.

By the way, Jill Sobule has a great song on her latest album, “Where is Bobbie Gentry?” It’s denouement:

Yeah I was the baby

Thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge

Postscript: D- It really was a horror suffering from a desire for self mutilation and having no way to stop it. I was so ashamed of it; I couldn't talk ever talk to anyone about it even though my mother was well aware of the problem. But she was stymied as to what to do about it. How do you tell a kid to take control of something that was uncontrollable? That requires that this problem be a logical one. (Like using the Gaussian Number System to solve the square root of negative one, remember? On our math field trip in tenth grade?)

My little problem came from some place in my person to which I had no access, let alone Mom. (No fucking way.)

One of the most mortifying moments of mine was when a high school (Paul D. Schreiber High School of the Port Washington Union Free School District) friend of Eric's asked what were all those spots on Franny? Now this was elementary school Franny. Covered with every damned place I had picked at it, especially then, when I really had absolutely no will power to stop it. I was crushed. (Eric, thanks for sharing.)

The older I became, the more intelligent I became in "hiding the evidence." I assumed, like Lee in Secretary, no one would ever find me beautiful after seeing my shockingly mutilated body.

Oops. As you get older, you learn things. If young, eager college guys are going to get some, they don't give a shit about a scar here and there. (And by then, those horrific bloody spots had long healed any faded into history.) And if a boy loves you, you're beautiful. Period.

But yeah, when I'm stressed, I find something to pick at. And I no longer feel the need to draw blood. I'm content to remove an ingrown hair. Now that's what I call progress.

The Wonders of Prostitution

So what’s next? I’m a teary mess post massage. The damn thing not only helps a soul from physical pains, it also often purges toxic emotions. So I’m a teary mess. And this is with a tranquilizer. (Yeah, let’s fuck around with my medication now to resuscitate my sex drive. Not a chance.) If I insisted on making changes to my medications now, I’d being a fully-functioning woman except for one teensy, piddling fact also I’d be a corpse. But boy, could I get it on! (If I could.)

I’m teary under the skin. I need some honest out and out sobbing. I think I have what to release, but I can’t imagine how awful it will be the day subconscious me decides to go for it. Yes, I know that massage is a perfect tool to make this happen. I just feel so damned sad. I hate sad. I don’t do well with sad. I get morose. Morose is bad.

I suppose all tearyness, sadness and such means is that I may be ready to handle the truth. (“You can’t handle the truth!”) I look at the photo of the girl (really the middle-aged lady) on this blog, and I don’t recognize her anymore. (Chip took the shot fall 2006. I was 44. Sounds middle-aged to me.) I have an idea what I’m not anymore, but I’m really clueless as to what I am. Anyone? Scared, miserable (to live in, to be with). Sounds about right.

I can’t even dream of a healthy desirable me. Aprés massage, I crashed on the couch as is my wont post-massage. Ninety minutes of being beaten up, I think I deserve it. During one of those moments when you’re not quite asleep and not quite awake, I dreamt I was being sexually molested. In a public restroom no less. The molester was some anonymous white guy, middle-aged, and wearing a suit. He derived pleasure by sticking his hands into his victim’s underwear. The horror of the “twilight sleep” dream is that I liked it. And looked him up for more of the same. Now, we’ve all had sick sex dreams…and if you don’t fess up to it, you’re kidding yourself. But I thought this a pretty sick one given my current state of mind. I don’t think I could dream about being desirable anymore unless it’s somehow twisted and demented.

As I lay one the couch in my half sleep, I recalled a movie I saw umpteen years ago. A Russian woman and her son fly to the U.K. where her fiancé supposedly waits. He isn’t, and she’s stuck in immigration limbo. In some self-contained little town, and no way out. An British “entrepreneur” asks her if she wants to do some porn for the web. She’ll be paid handsomely for it. She’s desperate for money. (As are his other actresses in immigration hell.) She agrees. The entrepreneur has her dressed like a little girl, and I guess she’s supposed to do lurid things in front of the Web cam. Instead, she just bursts into tears and is unable to stop crying. I guess after a bit more of this, she is removed from the stage.

Weeks later the entrepreneur tells her he’s been looking for her for weeks on end. His phone calls, his emails have skyrocketed. Money poured in. “Where’s the crying girl?” She didn’t have to take off a damn bit of clothing. She just had to sit on the bed and cry, and the crowd called out for more. Bless the entrepreneur. He gave her a fat wad of money, “You earned it.” And told her to find him if she ever changes her mind and chooses to resume her acting career. (She didn’t.) As I lay on the couch half conscious I thought, “Hey, I can do that. There must be scads of weird men out their who would be more than happy to jack off to a woman hooked up to machines with a mess of tubes. During my light dozing, this seemed to me to be sensible and perhaps even lucrative to boot. And I’d know I’d be turning some people on just as I am. Not as I was. That’s the crux of the whole problem. I need to be desired as I am now. Period. Anything else just doesn’t cut it.

As I’ve mentioned more than once, for the most part (I can’t really speak for all), tubing isn’t sexy. A cousin of mine said that he used to take a relative who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s Disease (the actual disease, not the one from uber-concussions) to a brothel, because that’s the only way he was ever going to get laid. I thought that very sad, but also very resourceful.

I still think that the people I speak to most about my crapass health (besides my poor Chip who hears everything. What an incredible man for every reason you can imagine) are the people I pay to spend time with me. My fantastic therapist around whom the earth orbits, Tamar: the best P.T. on the planet, Laurie my darling and wonderful chiropractor. I love them, and I think they me. Tamar, the best P.T. on the planet, are on our way there. In an odd way, on my side, it’s not a far cry from prostitution. I’m the john. Get it however you can. Even if you have to pay for it. “It,” in this case, is a friendly face, fantastic advice with a pair of ears trained on you. And there is no guilt involved, because it is, bottom line, a transaction. (Ooh, this is getting funky, but I’m on to something.)

By jove, I think I just had a tiny epiphany sitting here at 3:20 a.m. Maybe they’re (my fantastic therapist, Tamar: the best P.T. on the planet, and my wonderful chiropractor) who I need to focus on during my moments of doubt regarding my usefulness on this planet. And my right to take up space on it. Sure I pay them to care for me. But it doesn’t mean we haven’t made real, honest-to-god human connections. Granted, I’ve been wrong about this kind of relationship in the past. (Pay to play.) The over-the-top magazine reps who are always ecstatic to see you, hang on to your every word, and then drop you like a hot potato when you switch accounts. And a couple of them I actually thought had become friends. Oops. But I think I can recognize love when I feel it. (My god, I most certainly don’t feel that way about any of my doctors.)

Let me continue to love them back for all they give me.

And boys and girls, how the hell can I let Chip down? My husband. The man who kept me alive as I teetering on the edge in the ICU. And has given me more loving care than I deserve for all the hell I put him through How can I fail him?

Love the man who loves me more than anything in the world. The man I was smart enough to marry. Just love him.

Perhaps if I follow my advice, I can avoid seeking out sexual molestation in public restrooms or becoming a worker ant in the Web cam porn industry.

Heebie-Jeebies

Today I went to see a chiropractor. The chiropractor I love and adore is away on vacation this week. I see her because she makes me feel better physically. But her presence, her aura, is one of comfort and nurture. I love her.

But for me, it requires a feat of Herculean strength to get to her office. This all sounds pretty silly when you explain what makes the damned act of getting there so Sisyphean. (Excuse me y'all,what the fuck is with me tonight? Did someone add something new to medication that makes me even more pretentious than usual? I'm not down with this one bit. It's not fitting for a Queens girl.)

She has moved her office from the Upper West Side to Washington Heights. I actually got to enjoy the hour or so it took to get there. I got a lot of reading done on the A train. All right, I had to accept that a visit up there was a day outing. Worked for me. and it was nice up there, right by Fort Tryon Park.

Then, I became ill. And a year and a half after that, I became significantly worse. (If I lose more lung function, who the hell knows?) You know that's the guarantee I want. I want to be told that I won't die from this. Oh you could all tell me I'm not going to die, but the cat, unfortunately, is already out of this bag. I sure can. Die or perhaps lie to myself, "Oh you silly girl! Everything is going to be fine, just fine. This thing can't kill you!" That would be positively delightful. Oh come on. Pretty please with sugar on top? Doesn't work, does it? So, life's delightful in your dreams, you numnutz.)

Okay, I've got that out of my system for the next ten minutes, so we can talk about getting up to Washington Heights post-illness. Chip, angel that he is, drives up there. (Late afternoon appointments only. I am now constitutionally unable to get out of bed before noon. It is impossible. For real. I also need an hour (or more) nap in the middle of the day, or I crash about mid-evening. So, my waking hours are few. I'm more like a cat, except they don't seem too perturbed by much of anything. All their needs are met. What do they have to fret about? I fret a lot. Too much.

The hour-long drive to Washington Heights isn't too much of a problem. The car seats provide very nice lumbar support. It's what I have to face after the drive that makes me a nervous wreck.

Now let's get this straight. I'd much prefer to use utterly perfect Yiddish words I've heard all my life to describe my inability to cope at that moment in time. Why use the vanilla, unexpressive "nervous wreck" when there's a perfect expression that connotes all my angst and sheer nuttiness in one neat little package?

Because I can't find a goddamned transliteration anywhere on the Web. Dad was the one who grew up speaking Yiddish, my mother grew up speaking Hungarian and her Yiddish is just the every day, run-of-the-mill New York Yiddish (but infinitely better than mine) Hell. Chip's New York Yiddish vocabulary has really become quite good. And you know, I think Roy would think twice now before he tells Chip he looks like a Nazi storm trooper.

No. He wouldn't. But that is neither here or there. I'm very proud of my honey. (And yeah sweetheart, in that raincoat of yours, you really did have that aryan thing going.) So I'll take a crack at it on my own: Physically entering my chiropractor's building and negotiating the ridiculously high steps make me a nervosa hilaria. (Already, I feel better.)

The steps scare the crap out of me, because after I go up these measly few stairs, I can't breathe. I hate it when that happens. (Don't you?) It feels like eons before I can breathe like a regular person. (I'll have to wait eons for me to breathe like a regular person. I settle for my version of normal breath intake. As Chip would say, "Quel drag."

So today, I went to the chiropractor who gives me the heebie jeebies but as my girlfriend, the doctor says, "She's a good practitioner." And she is. she's really good. Better yet, I no longer have searing pain in my back that has put me fairly close to the edge as of late. I think I may have to go on the combo plan and visit the two: my Washington Heights darling for her great work on my pathetic body and just as important, the great work she does for my soul, and the Great Practitioner who really is awfully good at what she does who's right in the neighborhood. What else can this girl do?

P.S. I knew I was crazy wrong. I'm miserable with Yiddish transliterations. The "correct" spelling is "nervouse chahlairya." And I still am one today, by the way. ("Correct" spelling via telephone through mother courtesy of Leah in Florida.) xoxo