confessionals 1 - passivity is a knife

“Babe!” I look up from my drink at Sara across the patio table. It’s late and we’re eating a slice of pizza under a perfect sky. The night is cool, for the first time in days. “You don’t love me anymore,” she says with half mocked exclamation. “C’mon, that’s not true. You know what I’m doing; Thinking.” Stories bubbled by and I wasn’t writing them down. Or more accurately, specific phrases passed through consciousness and I felt anxiety about losing them. I just sat there remembering. “Baaaaabe!” She repeats. I smile. She knows better but this is our game. Goose (Dick Balls) is with us. He finds a rat and goes after it, up the nearby stairs, through the railing post and runs out of leash so he just kind of dangles there by his neck, Sara attends to it and I’m left thinking.

A few weeks back I slapped her across the cheek and bloodied her lip. I didn’t even know until the next day and then I felt embarrassed and ashamed. Sort of. It’s our agreement to hit each other, actually it’s probably the reason why we’re still dating. The idea is, we get drunk and hit each other in public. Hard. She initiated the behavior and I liked it. It worked well in the beginning when everything was new and I honestly believed these were my last days of life, might as well feel it. Seemed a perfectly natural response to life in Rochester. It worked except for the occasions when we’d show up at a friend’s place and shit went down. We didn’t get invited back very often except to the bikers’ place, no problems there. As long as we awoke and left sometime the next day and even then we never really put it to the test. These were the early days when she couldn’t get enough sex or danger. That was our path to love I suppose, which seemed a better bet than my former attempts which included unnatural anxieties, unrealizable dreams and extended courting. Yuppie dating just plain doesn’t work for beasts and we’re beasts. Most of us are, if not all. Agreements are all that is necessary and this we had. Somehow our agreement faded as Sara’s sobriety increased. The courts have this affect on anarchists but that’s another story.

Once, while living in Wyoming, shortly after my nows faded and debunk marriage began, I was left by my wife to transport our belongings across town to a new apartment solo. She had been out of town for a performance and decided to stay some extra days in Utah after. I was far too permissive and there were no agreements so that’s what happened. When she finally did get back to town she immediately fell into a depression about the move and clammed up, no discussion, no explanation, no sex. The kind of depression that clearly has a source but isn’t processed as such. The kind of depression where no resolutions are possible. She has this type of depression, the unaccountable kind and I felt, at the time, that I did too with additional doses of pureform anxiety. My response to this perceived injustice, after many similar like it, was to trash the place like a brutish cyclone. I piled everything high in the center of the open studio and poured our good white wine all over it. Most of ‘it’ was books, my books. I wanted to slap her but didn’t, no agreement, so I hit myself instead, nasty surgical jabs to the jaw and torso. I had no clue what I intended to accomplish but it’s safe to say that ‘plans’ were not a part of the process. There were tears of frustration, the psychologist was called, who arrived promptly to the vision of me cowering in the tub with hands on temples and the whole damn place smelling like stale chardonnay. In small towns word gets out and rightly so. She left for a week and I felt ten times worse. The whole event left me so traumatized that I decided never to trash property again. I apologized to her and dealt with my shit, moved on. It’s likely the most shameful moment of my life. I learned then that no one human is ever right. I try to keep this in mind while tossing insults. Clearly something was justified, it just wasn’t this. Goal not accomplished, damage done. It probably should have ended there but we were married and I was entirely committed, faults and all. It never happened again nor will it. When we busted up for good she cited this as an excuse to kick me out and keep me out. I honored it but I know it was simply a device she used to mask her affair. I’ve often thought, I should have beaten the shit out of her, but again, no agreement. Can’t accomplish much without agreements. Passivity is a knife.