In 1984, a few days after Sami and I had our fracas in the bathroom, I returned home, tail tucked, to my childhood home, and arch nemesis, Mom. Sami, my EX gay-best-friend turned husband-for a-green card locked me out of our home by changing the locks on the door, withdrew the few thousand dollars from our joint bank account, gave away my possessions, and sued me for alimony. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was return home to the witch, er Mom, but having nothing more than the clothes on my back, I had no other choice. 12 years later, I had to get the hell out of there. Her constant scrutiny, negativity, invasions of privacy, snooping through my things, dictating who I was “allowed” to entertain in the place where I paid the rent, and ever watchful eagle eyes and ears, were driving me nuts.
“I don’t know how you do it,” said my sister Joy, shaking her head when I told her I needed to move out of our mother’s apartment and find my own place. “I would’ve killed her already! I don’t know how you could stand her voice, all day and night. She doesn’t ever shut up. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she had something nice to say once in a while”
“I have valium running through my veins. But I’m out of it now, and have to get the hell away from her.”
In January 1997 I moved into a large one bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, in a building that my sister Susan lived in. The apartment on 92nd street had high ceilings, large rooms, and the pre-war charm that I loved. Arched doorways separated the 18×25 foot living room from the 8×20 foot foyer. When we met, Alan put a desk in the foyer, opposite the 9×15 eat in windowed kitchen. The king size bed nestled perfectly between 2 night stands, with two walls flanked by dressers and drawers.
My desk sat between 2 of the 3 windows overlooking someone’s backyard, and still had enough room to lay down 2 yoga mats in the center of the room. My bathtub was pink porcelain, and I had to step onto a platform to enter the 4 foot square tub. Original art deco black and white tiles were inlaid to the floor, and I sponge painted the walls with dusty mud colors to give it the feel of a third world throw back to the thirties.
I loved my apartment. I loved living alone for the first time in my life. I took a workshop in fiction writing that winter, and started to write a lot. My writing was strong, but fiction was not my thing. I wrote everywhere I went, and filled up notebooks with stories I’d made up about people, in trains, buses, in the streets, about their hair, what they wore, their antics as humans. I wrote clever observations from my rabid people watching in the heart of New York City. I met an interesting collection of other writers in the workshop, and we socialized a bit here and there, and after the class had completed, we didn’t stay in touch.
But something happened to me one day, in my apartment, in the spring, and all I can say about it is that I had an epiphany of some sort. A lifetime of anxiety and tension, everything that had been bottled up inside me, silently slipped away, leaving a feeling of lightness never before experienced. At night, without trying, I became very present to my third eye, didn’t have to meditate to see it, it was always there, looking at me, through me, past me into eternity. Looking at life through the lens of that single all-seeing eye, I woke up from the lifelong sleep of the numb.
I felt connected to the trees, the sun, all living things. I know it sounds corny, and if I was a religious person, I’d say I found God. Maybe that is exactly what I found – the divine nature of my own being. It’s like someone flipped a switch in me, that had been there all along, but had never once been turned on.
Awake is the best way to describe it.
I’d always been spiritually aware, and was a detractor of organized religion. I quit hebrew school studies after the teacher told 11 year old me that jews could not be friends with schvartze, black people. My 2 best friends were black. Even as a kid I knew, when one group of hated people starts hating other people, the hypocrites can keep everything they’re selling.
I had a different flying dream every night for many months, and even wrote some of the incredible exploits down in journals. When I woke up in the morning, I’d swear that I had actually been out flying in the night. Without a broom.
I felt clean and clear for the first time. My mind wasn’t polluted. My heart didn’t yearn. I had peace and gratitude. The noisy racket of my mother’s internal garbage dump, which made its way into the world through an endless stream of bitter words, had prevented me from finding serenity as long as I was exposed to her. I took a sage smudge stick and purified and blessed my new apartment. When I moved in, the poison was not welcomed, and having no home, it left me.
I worked in the Rockefeller Center neighborhood, which was, and still is, in close proximity to the Broadway theater district, and the then-about-to-become Disneyfied 42nd street. I rode the r train for 75 minutes twice a day, or travelled between Brooklyn and Manhattan by express bus, which I much preferred.
My Bay Ridge neighborhood was typically residential, and a desired area of Brooklyn. My building was within easy walking distance, on tree lined streets populated by modest homes with small front and back yards, to major shopping, services, restaurants, movies, schools, churches. I had a block long walk to Shore Road which ran parallel to the ocean as it narrowed into Verrazano Narrows Bay and New York Harbor. I loved to sit along the water, under the VZ Bridge, watching kids fly kites, and write. Life was suddenly perfect.
My mother told me she had met a “nice young man” at an AA meeting she attended. He read a poem, and Mom, deep thinker she is, immediately thought we could be copacetic, because I write, too! Now Mom had attempted to play matchmaker on several other occasions, and those had all turned out to be horrific experiences.
There was Karen, a lonely single woman roughly my age, who was struggling with sobriety. My mother thought she just needed a friend, someone to watch basketball games with, or play softball with, and other fun, feminine follies as such. As a fortyish woman, I had no interest in any of those things, though I can’t say I didn’t enjoy an occasional trip to the Garden to watch the Knicks. I loved, loved, loved to shop, watch foreign films, dine at the latest celebrity restaurant. I enjoyed cooking and the beach, and Karen also liked cooking and the beach. I agreed to meet her once.
Karen was quite emotionally needy, but she had a keen sense of my type of snarky humor, and she was pleasant enough to be with in short doses. I never learned a lot about her, other than she had once been a drug addict who had throttled down to booze and pot, and now was trying to notch it down to milk. She was also recovering from a long term committed relationship with someone else, and still fragile. Our friendship lasted through the basketball playoff series, and then Karen went off to keep a work commitment at a Catskills Camp. The day before she left, she had a meltdown.
“Can I come over before I leave? I have to see you. Can I come now?”
“No, Karen, I’m about to meet a friend in the city. I’m heading to the train.”
“Please. I have to see you. I can’t go until we talk. Please.”
Karen was a bit of a drama queen, and I’d already figured out that her M.O. was to create some big something when she wanted attention. Since was leaving the next day, I thought I’d see her and tell her the friendship wasn’t really working for me anyway. We arranged a time and place to meet. I called my friend and postponed our dinner, and she got pissed. I drove to Sheepshead Bay to meet Karen.
“Thanks so much for coming.” She leered at me, hungrily. Uh oh.
“So what’s the emergency?” I asked her. She got up from her side of the booth and walked around to sit beside me on my side of the booth. She put her arm on the top of the seat, not quite around me in a hug, but close
“I have to tell you something. It’s important.”
“So spit it out.”
“I like you,” she said. “I really enjoy the time we spend together.”
“I’m happy for you. What’s so important?”
“I’ve been thinking how to say it. How to tell you. I think I love you.”
“I think you are just grateful for my friendship. But, I don’t know how to quite say this, either, it hasn’t been so great for me. This.” I pointed between her and myself. “I’m not finding this relationship to work for me.”
We sat and looked at each other in silence. Karen’s lip started to tremble.
“Do you have something against gay people?” she asked. I burst out laughing.
“You’re gay? Well, that sure explains a lot. Hardly, Karen, I do not dislike gay people. I was married to my gay best friend, and went to 32 memorial services for dear friends who succumbed to the plague before it had a name. I don’t find this relationship to be reciprocal or satisfying. It’s not your fault, you didn’t do anything wrong. I am not looking for a love relationship. I’m not having fun in whatever this is. And I’m not gay, sorry.”
Karen didn’t stop calling me on the phone. I never answered. She showed up in front of the building one day, bawling, hysterical, “but I love you.”
“What happened to camp?” I asked.
“I didn’t make it. I can’t. I want to be here with you.”
The woman would not take no for answer. I had to threaten her with a restraining order. I’d been guilted into doing things I didn’t want to do for most of my life, and this was a pivotal moment for me. I could cave into her tears, or stand up for myself, even if that meant I’d be the cause of her pain. Her neediness made her pathetic in my eyes. I did not want to be around her.
“Karen, please, just go home. Do yourself a favor and leave now before I do or say something ugly, and then we’ll both regret it. Leave me alone.” I entered the building and went upstairs.
I asked my mother to do me a favor, and not introduce me to anymore of her friends. Of course, she couldn’t help herself. There was Roy, a 50-ish man with most of his front teeth missing, who though good natured, was boring as hell. Mom had invited him over for Sunday dinner as her friend, but I knew what she was up to.
“Mom, I do not appreciate this. I don’t need your help finding a date, if I want one.”
“But he’s nice.”
“Then you date him.”
She wouldn’t leave it alone, and invited him for Sunday dinner every week for a month. I was polite, and Roy and I went to see a movie together once. I couldn’t stop yawning the whole time we were together. You’d think a guy would take a hint, but no. He called and asked me out. I declined. I began to think I was being tested by the universe.
All these situations caused me to have to be firm, sometimes even mean to a slew of people I had no interest in knowing, who were forced on me by my mother, who could not stop herself from interfering in my life. I’d always hated confrontation, didn’t like saying no or hurting people’s feelings, but after that summer, I got pretty good at playing the bitch card.
In the spring of 1997, my mother told me about Alan, the nice young man.
“Do not give him my phone number, do you hear me? Do not give him my address. You can give him my email address only, understand? I will be really pissed, Ma, if you don’t abide by my wishes. I am a grown up woman.” Who managed to grow up without any help from you, I thought, but didn’t say.
Alan emailed me. I was cautious, but had fun with our daily emails. He sent me poems each morning, some he had written, some written by inspiring others.
If only I had known…
