Indie's Inanities

Gus​

It's the first thing I notice: how childlike and fledgling he is. In brown wool slacks too short for him he folds into himself, drowns in the blue-lined button down shirt that looks new; but its seams are worn. I’m sure he's had it since Nixon; he just knows how to use things. A tree-root hand gnarls around a dark varnished cane, the rubber cap on the end angled, grated off by the empty tennis courts he walks through every night on his way home.

Trash: papers, empty ball cans and Gatorade bottles that everyone else has left during the day; in silence he shuffles his way over the courts in the ochre dusk, collecting. He cannot hold it all. Pieces fall, he fumbles after them. Sometimes he'll make five trips to the orange garbage bins with disheveled, generic Hefty-equivalent bags chained to the pavilion columns in attempt to deter the neighborhood’s rampant criminal preteen element.

At the nearest column, a young teenage boy – who looks awkward even through the large, baggy clothing he wears to hide in – has freed one such bin from its captivity, and proceeds to twirl it around in some sort of victory dance. His enthusiasm too much, the poor bin hurls its contents all over the dirty cement and cheap picnic tables. The boy cackles, punting an empty root beer bottle at a passing cyclist who swerves to miss it. Upon hitting the curb, the cyclist gives boy, and bottle, a stout Scotch blessing.

Meanwhile the Panama hat, of the small old man who has crossed the street, falls as he stoops to collect the now-crushed bottle. A heron, he is precariously balancing. The hat he replaces also balances; what once was a rakish tilt has settled into habit. The hat conforms to his head in both pressure and defeat.

The boy scowls, tinged with guilt as he watches the old man struggle to stand again – root beer bottle clutched tightly in his birdlike grip. Rebelling, the boy kicks a plastic ball can toward the man. The bottle glances off an old knee. Its owner also glances, for a piercing second, at the young man who’s become suddenly aware of his feet, shifting uncomfortably. Again, the old man stoops, retrieving an empty container from the warm asphalt. The boy swears under his breath, pulls his bike from the park lawn and retreats in the twilight.

It is dark, the night still warm. Crickets creak far from the glow of the streetlamps. An elderly man places the last scrap of paper in a now-upright bin. I watch as he hobbles carefully away from the park, an empty ball can in his free hand.

Like a bonsai, he is tiny, but he is huge in his minutiae; he occupies his space. For the first time, I see the very world as it sits on the backs of his shoulder blades. It is this that folds him.

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My intangibility. The way I hung - just so - behind such real doors. Like some born-again god, I was his omnipresence. Everywhere without consequence - an inability to measure the real stature of his devotion. I was idea. Accommodating. I hung behind doors, so well...suited...for his purpose. I could be inanimate. I could be. You were. Who doesn't pick their dreams at night?

He spoke more. He poured himself into the cup beyond ears. I was his backdoor escape. I was host to verbal soirees sans repercussions. My rhythm, basslines, the perfect seat for the shredding amped high-voltage rock plane he feared unleashing on you. You were a groupie for his emotions. I was the band. The crack habit. The toilet bowl, stained fingers, needles in the dark, forged prescriptions, his trips, his highs, his genius. I amplified his energy. You channeled it. I hit him in the face. He liked it. He hit you in the face.

I was the one to come. I was through the looking-glass. A tawdry, elusive, seductive reflection of what he showed himself. I was an obsession merely because I was a possibility untamed. I was his hunger. He ate you.

You were a ship that passed in the night. I sunk you behind the horizon at sunset in the rushing waves of all that he'd have me believe. Blissful in the ignorant wash of opaque tides. If the long boy with the endless piebald side had been a woman, had not wanted to devour - I would have been his. I only thought he was spending all his time in Booya Moon, Lisey.

We laughed at the gimmicks any group of friends would have heckled. Never about intentions, about things inherently you. Only the farce of action, of life's bloopers. It was to commune a sense of endearment, not a ridiculing or stoning. I was, occasionally, one of the guys. Always have been.

Have you never made plans late at night to chase after the impulsive? Of course there were plans. Cloud-castles. It was always a good dream.

I couldn't see anything. I was blind, groping for the way he reached at me in the dark. I propped my blindness on the truth of the way he was so willing to hold me. Will you really decry, and fault me, for my faith? It was a devotion. Who doesn't love the things they repose on in the dark?

I did not imagine you. Period. I scrawled dark mental lines over you any time he presented you to me. You were selfish, desperate, friendless, pathetic, gnawing at the legs of the only thing I could stand on. I hated you for it. I pitied you and the holes you dug for yourself. The holes you crouched and whined in. I blew energy into expending you. I simply did not allow you to exist in the places I did. For 6 months. It's a hard habit to break... I will admit, it itches and irks me to have you here. This is my world. In this one, I was here first - and in my absences I still garner the sense of you supplanting me. But these are my own selfish demons. They will be burned, purged. Until them, we are opposing forces, and I have not the current means of laying claim to my territory. My days, my life, my emotions, my words, my friendships are imbedded in these halls you romp through now. Surely you can sympathize with the way this grates me. Can understand the reasons I avoid you. You are taking a whole of the only half I have.

For now, that is enough to say.

I was not naivety. It was wool-covered. It was a heedless sabotage. It was betrayal. I adamantly refuse to blame myself. All I did was love. He misused it.

Have you never asked him? Has he never told you of the way he crawled, begging? Of his grandiose promises of your immediate, impending dismissal? Of the hours he sobbed on the phone while I set my jaw, stoic, resolute, hammering the blame into him; setting the responsibility, the wrong of it squarely on his shoulders? Of how he disgusted me and how I told him he was an even bigger fool to trash two relationships?

Did he tell you I told him that if he was with you, he was never with me? That my time with him was nothing. And that I didn't him to make a mockery of my 6 months by wasting them and not allowing them to make a difference, to turn a new leaf? To tell you everything and to be a better man?

...No, he didn't. A coward, he shrank in his skin. Told you I was the compulsive liar. Urged you to dismiss me the way he did. I loathed him. I was furious. And finally, I realized I never really loved him. I loved that he loved me. I loved the way he needed me.

I did not cry. I always cry, but I did not cry. Not when I found out, and not when he was sobbing in my ear, trying to rationalize his reasons for what he did and why we could still work.

My love cut its losses. My heart withdrew. My obsession, my addiction, my habit of him did not. After the murderous end of our emotional affair, we were pared down to a drug habit. An addiction. We were users and there was no rehab. Weak, wretched, drained... cold turkey, the only option, wasn't feasible on our state of dependency. I tried to substitute other drugs. Never got the same high; I did the drug he wanted to. It didn't last. You were his coffee and cigarettes. We dealt eightballs in the back alleys of our days. Cut lines together when no one could see us. It was miserable, selfish, but it was compulsory. We cut our lines in silence. We cut our lines alone. They just happened to be the same lines.

I forgave him for being himself, not for what he did. But forgiving him for being himself was something I had been doing since it started. Forgiveness was nothing new. It was what let us work.

He never censored himself after that. He always told me what happened with him. I slid myself, intrigued, into his shoes. I said whatever I needed to, to get him to say what he wanted. I didn't trust him. I never trusted him after his initial treason. I still don't trust him. But I know him. And I stayed very good at letting him trust me. You see, I've always listened. And I've told him the answers to things he'd ask me to listen to. They weren't - aren't - always my answers. But they were answers. You learn a lot about someone when you let them talk, only pausing to hear you agree with them. I wasn't lying to him because I wanted him back, or because I was trying to perjure him. I only lied to him because I was curious about what he said when I did. He fascinated me. And I realized he didn't love me. He loved his idea of me, just as I loved the fact that he loved me. We had always been so accommodating that way.

I still didn't think of you. Not in the sense of "the other woman." You were just the half of him that didn't particularly interest me. Your story - the two of you - fascinated me, but I only studied his half. I talked to him because for some reason I felt compelled to mentally log and calculate and observe him. His personality. His state of self, if you will. Conversation ended in January when I hit a plateau in my findings. The proverbial bedrock. It had been a fascinating study, but every researcher comes to a point where they can dig no further. I was done with him. Adequately and completely detached. On bad terms, but detached. A month later, I called for a follow-up. No new developments confirmed my diagnosis. I ran a test or two. Readings were the same. Progress was as anticipated. I watched him leave once more - at least from this book, this thesis. I end it with a sense of completion. A sigh of relief that finally it is done.

He is as he is as he is.

Finally, I have solid proof of that. He is done. He is nothing to me. He is a finished piece, another novel. A thing to be shelved. Dusted off occasionally, but put in a place to be forgotten.

Just because I learned from my experience with him, it doesn't mean he taught me anything.

I have a new profession, a new life, anyhow.

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It was, after all, a stupid accident. We’d been playing racquetball in P.E., my sophomore year of high school at Mountain View, and I’d gotten myself hit in the eye with the ball. Who hasn’t had that happen to them? I think racquetball is the only sport where one can be looking straight at the ball and it simultaneously hits them in the back of the head. 


I was wearing my contacts that day – gas permeable, a.k.a. hard, contacts, since they were cheaper than the soft ones – and my contact had slipped and cut my eye with the force of the racquetball, it hemorrhaged under the conjunctiva. Mom checked me out of school and we went to see the ophthalmologist, who said I’d be fine, the hemorrhaging didn’t look bad at all, and it would clear up on its own in a few days.


That was how it started. 


Fast-forward two years. Senior year of high school. Band Tour.


We were going to San Francisco. Originally, I hadn’t planned on attending. School trips were always expensive because we never earned enough at fund raisers. I couldn’t afford to go because I didn’t have a job. (Or, rather, school was my job, my parents insisted.) I felt bad hitting my parents up for five hundred-something dollars, and told Mr. Bowman, the band director, that I wasn’t going. 


It turns out, however, that Mr. Bowman did the begging for me. He’d served his mission in Taiwan, the same as my parents and knew both of them. They needed more students to go, or there wouldn’t be enough to cover the trip. My brother Jonathan, two years younger than me and a sophomore, was also in band. Mom and Dad agreed to pay for both of us to go. I was thrilled.


We bussed all over San Francisco, from Fisherman’s Wharf, to Alcatraz (okay, we ferried to Alcatraz), to the Golden Gate Bridge, from the Winchester Mansion to Ghirardelli Square. It was exciting and busy and I learned that I actually could spend more than the hour of class with those people and still stay sane. (Band class was not a favorite.) 


Our third day by the bay, we were slated to spend at the Great America theme park. And spend it we did. My friends and I rode every rollercoaster they had, most of them more than once. The last one we went on, Stealth, was terrifying and exhilarating. 


Stealth was actually the world’s first “flying” roller coaster. Riders board the coaster standing up as they’re harnessed in – straps across shoulders, chest, legs, almost like a skydiving harness – the coaster then starts to move up the giant hill. Suddenly, you’re on your back, looking up at the sky, thinking “this is dumb, I can’t see anything.” It climbs higher. You think surely you’re going to drop any second, but it doesn’t, it goes even higher. It stops, and instead of dropping, it turns. Turns and drops. And you and the rest of the passengers are hanging in your straps, headed toward the ground like so many Supermen. If you can reclaim your mind from the paralyzing terror of having nothing solid between you and the ground, you throw your arms out in front of you and stick with the Superman idea, going around loops, corkscrews, and drops. It stops and you’re standing again, lucky that there’s like a built-in seat and you’re still harnessed, because your knees are weak and you’re trying to process what just happened. You blink. 


I blinked. 


Something was wrong with my contact. My eyes were too dry – or were they too watery? I blinked again, thinking my contact was suctioned onto my eye, which happened on occasion. We got off the coaster and I hurried to the nearest restroom, desperate to take my contact out and rinse it off and put it back in right. Stupid amusement parks and their gross bathrooms with impossibly long lines. It was fifteen minutes before I got to a sink, barely registering my gratitude for drains that wouldn’t lose my contact in case it slipped in the stream of water. I popped my contact out – it wasn’t suctioned on after all – and blinked while I rinsed it off. Augh! I had taken out the wrong one, the weird look was still there. I put it back in and took the other one out. Nope. Maybe it was the first eye. Maybe I’d just been wearing my contacts too long and my eyes were protesting. Maybe I hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night and my eyes were just tired – not an absurd hypothesis, when one’s spending the night with 5 other girls in the same hotel room. 


It’s hard to describe the difference in my sight. I’m an artist. I’ve always been someone who observes things. Pebbles in asphalt. The veins on the undersides of leaves. The difference between crimson and vermillion and just plain red. It was like my sight was suddenly a camera lens. Hyper-focused, or not focused enough. The edges of things were different. The lines, contours of things, weren’t lined and contoured right. I was annoyed. 


My friend Seth and I realized that we were going to be late for the awards ceremony they were having in one of the pavilions. We rushed to meet the other band members and have dinner. It was a boring affair, silly plaques for every band who participated in the festival so we’d have something to mark the occasion. To commemorate hours of practice on songs we wouldn’t remember a year from now that we didn’t really play all that well either. 


I wanted to get back to the hotel. I wanted to take my contacts out and put on my glasses. I wanted to go to sleep and see if things would line up right in the morning. I maintained a futile blinking vigil until we got off the bus at the Residence Inn; by then, I was irritated and genuinely tired. I’d been quiet and distant the whole evening and my friends noticed something was wrong, but were too caught up in the excitement of the day and of the tour in general for it to register, and they left me alone. 


Up in our room, after Jenny and Cammi had finished using the bathroom, I took my contacts out and washed my face. I blinked at the mirror. It still wasn’t right. I covered my left eye. I stared down my reflection; she looked back at me concerned, holding her hand up to her face. She slid her hand to the other eye, the shadow of her arm crossing over the Alcatraz Penitentiary Swim Team t-shirt she was wearing for pajamas. I looked at the lettering on her shirt, the edges of the letters there and yet, not there. The contour of her arm, there and not there. Her hand fell and she glanced at me, a mixture of fear and uncertainty in her hazel eyes that, also, were there and not there. Lined and contoured in an out-of-focus sort of focus. I pitied her. I was her.


I put my glasses on, knowing against a now-crippled wish that they’d do no good. Sleep was the only recourse I had left to find an answer in, here on the edges of things. I fell to the mattress on the floor and woke up early the next morning, forgetting for a moment that anything was wrong, until I’d gone into the bathroom and noticed my contact case on the counter. I put it away in my bag. 


We had another performance that day. Somewhere a bit up the coast from the main hubbub of the city, in the hills. It was green; I can’t remember the name of the place. It was like a concert hall in the middle of some botanical gardens. It had rained and everything was wet. Glistening. The added glare off the raindrops, instead of filling me with that familiar ache of something beautiful, annoyed me because they made were blurring the lines of things even more. 


As we clamored out of the buses to go assemble our instruments, stretch our legs, and wander around the gardens until it was our turn to play, I heard familiar voices and turned to look. My parents were there, with my brother Joseph (the baby at the time) in the stroller. 


Mom and Dad had decided to surprise us and fly out with the baby to come hear us play and to have their own mini-vacation, leaving our two sisters with the neighbors. In the excitement of having them suddenly there, I was distracted from the annoyance of my sight. My friends and I hauled the baby around, joked with Dad. 


The problem with my eye settled to the background until we were sitting under the bright lights of the stage. My bass clarinet was glinting, the flutes in front of us twinkling silver and fast, the saxophones to the left glared gold just as the trumpets on the right did. I was anxious and discontent. I kept shifting in my seat, turning to avoid the glare. I pulled out our sheets of music and groaned inwardly. The black and white of the lines and the dots on the page – so many lines – made whatever was wrong with my eye start screaming. I couldn’t look at the lines. 


Mr. Bowman raised the baton and I tried to play, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t look at the music. I fingered blindly, not playing a note. Which didn’t really matter, anyway. I was only a bass clarinet, a last-minute position I had been pushed to. The unsung limbo of the band world. Every symphonic band is supposed to have one, and yet no one ever notices them. Even when they play, because they mostly just follow the tuba or baritone sax parts. Steve, my cohort in said limbo, looked askance at me, raising an eyebrow in question. I shook my head slightly and turned the page for him. I closed my eyes.


The next day, Mom and Dad took me and Jenny to go tour the Winchester mansion and I told them about my eye. Mom was worried and Dad said they’d schedule me an eye appointment when they got home so that I could go see Dr. Donaldson (the ophthalmologist from my racquetball injury) as soon as the band got back to good ol’ Utah Valley. 


As we finished the last two days of concerts, I noticed my eyes getting worse. Instead of the lines of things being out of focus and not out of focus, I now noticed in the center of my field of vision in my left eye a round area of distortion. The best way I have been able to describe it is with comparisons to that old Windows screen saver, where the 3D ball or lens bounces around your screen, twisting and distorting the image on the screen as it goes. However, in my eye, the ball was stationary. And right smack in the middle. 


I tried to have fun with my friends, to ignore what was happening to my eye and just have a good time. There was nothing I could do to fix it without the doctor, so I might as well enjoy myself. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway. Inside, I was distraught. I was ignoring things as a way to cope with them. If I didn’t think about it, it wasn’t really happening. God knew me. God knew that my art, my perception of things, was a pivotal center of my existence. He knew that I’d always said I’d rather be deaf than have anything happen to my eyes. 



Upon arrival in Utah, and after a visit to Dr. Donaldson, we learned that things were not well with my left eye. Apparently the racquetball injury had done far more damage than originally suspected – not only had my conjunctiva been damaged, but the impact of the ball had somehow caused a scar on my retina. And, as luck would insist on having it, the blood vessels in the scar had hemorrhaged on that exhilarating roller coaster ride and detached my retina from the back of my eye. Dr. Donaldson decided to pass me on to a retinologist. 


Dr. John Carver is one of the best retinologists in Utah. Lucky for me, his office was only a ten-minute drive from our house. 


I would spend a lot of the next four months in Dr. Carver’s office as we learned that I had a fun condition called cardio neo-vascularization – meaning my body randomly generates new blood vessels, especially around scarred areas, which is why the blood vessels in my eye had ruptured at the scar. 


He watched carefully as I sat with his assistant and had my first fluoroscene angiogram, which consists of being injected with the medical equivalent of highlighter ink to make your blood vessels easier to see and then having them hold your eye open while they shoot bright pictures of the inside of it. No one told me that I'd also be peeing highlighter ink for the next two days. I made my family come check it out before I flushed. Only the first time. I had seven more. Even that novelty wore off.


John Carver was the first and only person to inject a needle not only in my eye socket (twice), but into my eyeball as well. A procedure I was completely awake and cognizant for. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be as kids. I can think of worse things to stick at the end of “cross my heart, hope to die” chants, now that I’ve had the needle in my eye. A sensation akin to squishing a particularly large-abdomened spider in a Kleenex – that slight resistance and then easy pop…

Dr. Carver was the one who burned the hole in the back of my eye to cauterize the blood vessels and stop them from hemorrhaging and detaching more of the retina, when after a month we couldn’t get them to stop. I had cortisone injections behind my eye, which hurt like Hades for a week as I got to march around school with an eye patch and feel like my eye was being pushed out of my head from the inside from all the extra pressure. 


Three months into a then-regular cycle of visit – diagnose – treat – wait – visit – diagnose new problems – treat – wait, we were at our wits’ end as to what was causing the new hemorrhaging every few weeks and I made some off-hand comment about how nice it was being excused from P.E. and it’d be great to be excused from the rest of my classes, especially band. It was Dr. Carver who looked at me and asked what instrument I played. Dr. Carver who discovered that it was blowing my clarinet that was causing the pressure than kept re-rupturing the blood vessels; that had exacerbated the original hemorrhaging from that first night on the roller coaster. Dr. Carver who told me that if I’d stopped playing that stupid limbo-of-the-band-world instrument after I’d gotten off the roller coaster, I wouldn’t have the huge blind spot in the middle of my eye that I have now. 


That was when I got angry. That was when I started to blame God. I had been living right. I had been living better than I had any of my other troubled teenage years, saying my prayers, reading my scriptures, participating in seminary, helping with the family, serving as a stake youth counselor. I had done everything I was asked, was finally living in faith, strong in the gospel, and God had made me – me the artist, the girl who walked staring at the sky, who picked up rocks on the road to look at them closer – blind.


My faith wavered. Sometimes it still wavers.


I still have the blind spot in my left eye. I can read out of my left eye now, with my peripheral vision, if the font is large enough. I still have the same prescription for my left eye in my glasses that I had when I was 17 because every time we’ve tried to update it, the test isn’t ever right. I still have a strange sense of lost focus. Of lines and the shapes of things being right and not-right. Of my right eye compensating for the hole in my left.

I still wonder why it had to happen; still wonder what I was supposed to learn from it all. 


I read about Monet, who had cataracts, of Degas who was partially blind in one eye, and I hope. I read up on the latest technology for people with macular degeneration, which is the closest medical problem in relation to my own condition. 


I keep going. I still have the rest of my sight. 


I still appreciate the tiny things, perhaps even more now. The undersides of leaves. The Douglas firs on the side of Y Mountain that you can see from the freeway. The way the edges of pebbles in asphalt glint in the light, especially after it rains.

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IndieGirl:

Hey kids, sorry it's been so long, thinks are pretty hectic in my life these days.

Anyway, they got even more hectic this week when I was offered a nanny position out in Stamford, Connecticut on Tuesday and then told they expected me on a plane on Saturday morning.

So...yeah. Moving to Connecticut for a year. Good times! More updates once I'm out there and my PC is FedEx'd to me.

Hope all's been well with you!

Always,
IG

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IndieGirl:

This spot is a placeholder for a funny, funny story involving car trouble and blonde children.

But I am not typing any of it until I get a proper IG-length email off to Syddo.

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IndieGirl:

All I find:
the same old fear.

Wish I were here.

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IndieGirl:

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?

Yours was the last face I expectoredzorz to see.

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