IMAGINE THIS

I was profoundly grateful the day John Lennon died.

As I stood in the center of my own hell absorbing the news from the scrambled and faint signal of our battered, borrowed television, my immediate shock and despair were quickly displaced by a clean wave of relief.

It was not that I celebrated his death.  I was as stunned and devastated as anyone else.  It was a gratitude for the promise of a slight respite from the abusive fists of my husband of four months and of the terrifying isolation housed body and regret in the small home we had rented deep in the verdant woods of a remote Vermont enclave.

This news would find my new husband disturbed and distracted.

This news would turn his attention away from his now routine need to flesh out his demons without marring his own skin.

This bitter fist of calamitous news would loosen the hate balled tightly in the center of his angry hands and give me a moment to think, to recover, to justify.

John Lennon was my favorite Beatle.  Like me, he was a Libra.  Like me, he first set out to become a visual artist.  Like me, he employed an often acerbic wit to trim the edges off his innate vulnerability; and like me at the time,  there was not a drug or mode of cerebral transport he would not try if it fostered an escape from his barbed encounters with reality.

I wondered in the confusion of the moment and without benefit of the complete backstory of his death, if perhaps it was his particular and public version of chasing happy that led to his violent demise; just as I knew with certainty that it was my own need to escape the grim destiny of ordinary which led to what could now potentially be mine.

John Lennon and I were both artists; both of us in mad flight to a plane of existence that was far away and well above humanity's declivitous stride towards the indifference it seemed hell-bent to reach.  I watched the approach for decades and mourned the collective thrashing of society as it heaved in the death throes of compassion.

 I recognized anger and experienced the consequence of unacknowledged familial violence and neglect in fierce blows against skin and bone.

My skin.
My bones.

This was the price I now paid for seeking escape in the folly of bohemia and the marital promise of a fierce young man who was anything but ordinary.  


Much like John Lennon, I quested peace and the tenuous distinction of unique;  and like him, what I ultimately found was the brutality of envy and the dangerous estate of the scapegoat.

His end came at the hands of a deranged assassin whose transference exited through the bullet of a small handgun.

Mine would likely come shrouded in the silence of the surrounding woods at the grip of a man whose self-loathing could only be purged through the fisted arc of his meaty hands as they bludgeoned the face and body of someone whose will and promise he believed exceeded his own.

John Lennon once said, "A dream you dream alone is only a dream.  A dream you dream together is a reality."


Being an impulsive and reckless altruist, I took his words at face value not bothering to first learn that a dream is no match for unyielding bitterness and that without dual wills and much effort it would not heal or erase the consequential brokenness of childhood neglect nor harvest compassion from within the deep roots of misogyny.

I was a lone dreamer.

Then John Lennon was shot and killed, and I became a fighter.

I had given peace a chance long enough.  I was not going to risk dying for the wealth of a dream I alone held.

"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."  This was perhaps his most well-known and oft-quoted saying.   I doubt he knew what end life held in store for him when he uttered those words.   I doubt anyone did.

But this was not my life, and I was not going to let the barbed edges of my husband's chronic dsyfunction control and consume my dream.   God damned plans were going to be made.

The random and frequent battering continued, but after December 8th, 1980, it was met with strong resistance.  Of course, this precipitated only greater abuse until blood was being drawn on both sides.

By the middle of February I had managed to mastermind our move away from the protective solitude of the mountains to the public and familiar territory of a small Long Island community where neighbors lingered in yards and on porches long after dusk.  We stayed in the summer home my parents owned in a town I had known since childhood.  I was visible and would be heard there.

By the First of May and at my urging, my husband was gone; seeking employment out of state while I readily agreed it was best that I remained behind until he was settled.   Happily, I doled over the keys to my car, although he still left with my favorite sweatshirt and all of my cash; both taken without my consent.

The following day I found a job managing a cookie shop, as well as an attorney willing to accept payments over time, and I filed divorce proceedings.

Later that evening I learned on the news of the proposed plans by Yoko Ono, the widow of Lennon, and some of his many fans to designate a quiet section of Central Park as a commemorative garden to the man and to his music.

They would call it Strawberry Fields.

I listened, and I still believed.

That night I slept.

And I dreamt.

And I continued to live.

"You may say I'm a dreamer.  But I'm not the only one."


And I am not.

Thank you, John Lennon.

No Where Is Here

Writing is not at the forefront of my days right how.  There are too many images burrowing deep in the grooves of my brain.  I'm going with the flow....or the manic state.  Whatever works.

An editor from Rootspeak, another online magazine, contacted me last week and asked me to contribute some pieces of writing.  Evidently, they canvass sites like Open Salon for writers.

They are running the series of posts I wrote about my son.  The first one went up yesterday.  I'd give my life not to have such a thing to chronicle.  The situation, not the person.  I adore him.

Working with an editor in this way is sweet.  They proofread, edit and post.  I don't have to do anything but write.  Nice.

I'm working on a series of drawings.  I don't know where they are going yet.  But that is par for the course....and I don't play golf.

There is a great deal of attitude in the air.

Only K. would understand that.

Other than that, I'm not saying.

I've been ill.  The left side of my head has been on fire since Thanksgiving with a fever on and off.  My gland is swollen on that side, as well.  I finally went to the doctor yesterday.  Turns out I have shingles.  It takes a month to go away even with these massive antibiotics. Evidently it is stress related.  Stress?  Really?  

And I thought I was doing so well steeped in denial and escapism.  

Darn.

But another day will still come.

And I will be here to greet it.

I AM A WRITER. RIGHT?

I am a writer.

In the seventh grade when Mrs. Spangler, my bespectacled English teacher, announced to my parents that I had a "gift with language"and predicted I would go on to do "great things" in the world of literature when I was grown, I heaved a sigh of relief. My quest for greatness and purpose had been resolved. I would become a writer.

But what if Mrs. Spangler was wrong?

What if I exposed my gift to public scrutiny and discovered I had no gift?

If Mrs. Spangler was wrong, I had no back up gift.

If Mrs. Spangler was wrong, that meant I was ordinary.

As long as I never tested her theory, I could mythologize this interior muse, this special something that allowed me to feel set apart and to get through the ensuing years of creative compromises and through the eventual, hapless mediocrity endemic to child rearing, toilet scrubbing and aging with at least a modicum of interior respectability.

Whether I was motivated by intellectual and creative hubris or by a need to effectuate a bohemian standard is not clear, but in my only year of college I enrolled with a double major in both art and English. While the professor in my creative writing class greeted all of my efforts with much enthusiasm, this was not so in the other more technical and rigorous English classes where I failed miserably. What is the point of diagraming a sentence? I could see the relevancy in breaking down the visual landscape if we were preparing for a bank heist, but these are words.  If you lay them out in a sentence and they don't sound right, you simply reorder them until they do.  Isn't that writing?

Evidently, I was alone in my approach to the craft and also soon realized, inflated in my belief that I had skills as a visual artist because on the dreaded evaluation day at the end of the year the head of the Art department suggested I stick with my English major. This was terribly depressing since I had just come from being told the opposite by the head of the English department.  I took this as a sign that I was simply not meant to go to college.

But that was okay. I was still a writer.

I moved to New York City and worked as an administrative assistant to the Vice President of Hardcover at the New American Library. I typed letters, filed pending book proposals, ferried endless vats of coffee to my boss and to the boardroom and learned that almost all authors of decent standing crave thin-sliced pastrami on rye with Russian dressing.

At some point during my brief tenure there and in an inexplicable fit of confidence, I sent some of my poetry to The Yale Literary Magazine. The upshot from that came as a visit from the editor and while he did not consider the poems I had submitted to be worthy of publication,  he felt differently about those he read during our visit and offered to publish one of them.  He also felt I should be writing full-time and sent a pleading letter to my father in Connecticut attempting to solicit his financial support on my behalf.

That letter alone was worth the price of submission.

It was a full page of gilded accolades, the sort that take your breath away and leave a self-deprecating, underachiever like myself convinced that surely this must be a mistake. It was a letter only another writer, a poet, could write closing with the flourished psalm, "I am doing this for Susan, no, for what she will one day write.   And let us hope that when she writes she mentions both of us -- for those poets mention live forever."


Oh yeah.

As an English major himself, my father was very proud. He made many copies of the letter and sent them out to all of our relatives. He then he sent me back to the city on the five o'clock train. After all, I had work in the morning.

After that I became a wife.

Eventually, I became a mother.

But I was still a writer.

And I did write.  I wrote hundreds of letters, Christmas cards and grocery lists. As a young mother, I wrote glowing accounts of baby's first steps in a scrapbook and reordered the table of contents and topic sentences in countless elementary-school book reports and science projects with the dedication and finesse of a Bronte sister.

After all, I was a writer and as everyone knows, if you don't exercise your gifts, eventually they will atrophy and go away.

And while those around me in the mundane hills of suburbia submerged themselves in the culture of ordinary with mindless but dedicated abandon, I calmly tolerated the tedium and carried out all of my perfunctory duties with the requisite posture of obligatory martyrdom. In spite of the relentless press of mediocrity against my soul I thrived because I would say to myself, "I am not like the others."

I am a writer.

For fifty-six years I have courted inclusion. I have raised three children, sheltered far too many animals and learned to speak husband fluently. I've designed lines of greeting cards, artist rubber stamps, and jewelry, had numerous freelance illustration jobs from corporations to co-ops, and sold my shrines, prayer dolls and paintings in galleries and specialized shops in four states and two countries.

Yet the brightest light shines in the darkest corner of my attic where there are several large boxes filled with copies of correspondences and lengthy emails to friends spanning four decades alongside several others stuffed with poetry, prose, sketches and the ritual notations of an ordinary life recorded on hand-drawn calendars.

I keep solid, leather journals in which I chronicle my exceptional interior delusions with a near pathological obsession. These words, held captive in my brain and assembled onto paper, are all I have with enough potential to distinguish my soul from that of the sodden lump it otherwise might be. I keep them safe and well fed.

My world is full of papers filled with words: handwritten, typed and computerized.

I am a writer.

And in all this time I have never published

one

single

word.

DINING WITH THE DEVIL

For the past couple of weeks I have been quietly ingesting a nightmare.  But because it is not one conjured from the depths of my own subconscious, it has taken me longer to reckon let alone attempt to reconcile; and because it will not go away, I continue to bend it into my every day in a way that might make its reality somewhat manageable.

I am not there yet.

Three weeks ago I received a phone call from my son in the state penitentiary where he has been an inmate for the past several weeks on prescription drug fraud charges.  During that phone call I was relieved to hear a certain buoyancy had returned to his voice, replacing the earlier version of abject fear that was so evident when he had newly arrived at the prison.  As he spoke, I felt my bones settle into a posture of calm to the point where they rallied almost on the cusp of normal.

It was an exhale moment.

I think I even had a smile on my face and laughed a time or two.  But that was before he mentioned in passing that he had been seated at lunch that day next to an inmate by the name of Denis Rader.  A man whom I knew from the newspapers was also known as The BTK Killer from Wichita, Kansas.  A man whose serial killing spree began as far back as 1974 and excluded no one; not even children.  A man who chose his own celebrated acronym as it boldly advertised his favored method of murder:  Bind, Torture, Kill.

I didn't drop the phone, although I felt the blood drain from my face and dip beneath the level of my ears making my son's next words sound far away and barely decipherable.  My son had gone on to talk of other things: the sweat pants he had on order for the coming winter months, the shoes that had just arrived allowing him the freedom to discard the state-issued boots that bound his massive feet like steel cables and caused his legs to ache unceasingly.

He had continued processing the steps toward survival.  I was on hold from a terror I had no vocabulary to articulate.

"Back up!"  I said.
"What are you saying?  Are you saying that these sorts of monsters walk freely among the prison populace?  That they are not housed in a separate facility for the criminally insane or remanded indefinitely to some annex or cell?  Are you telling me that they take their meals with everyone else?"

He seemed somewhat surprised by my incredulity and in a matter-of-fact tone responded that of course they did; reminding me that because of his detainers in other counties, it automatically mandated his term of incarceration be held in a maximum-security facility.  

Where else did I think the lifers were held?

Truthfully, I had never given it much thought because in my mind there was such a wide chasm between that level of calculated malevolence and pure evil and the pitiable but muted disgrace of a drug addict, D.U.I. recidivist or even the cunning greed of the white-collar criminal that I ignorantly assumed the legal system was aware of this, too.

"Surely," I thought, "the souls of the damned are considered despicable and vile enough that they require isolation from those whose self-destruction and terrestrial damnation has been the worst of their crimes?  Surely, a man bent on destroying only himself is considered redeemable and worthy of protection from those demonic psychopaths housed beneath blood and bone?  Surely."

I was wrong.

Immediately my mind corralled those darkest concerns, then neatly displayed them in full-color vignettes on that interior screen of potentials; funded as they always are by the sainted, thought-patrons of motherhood who share my best hopes for my children and brood over the possible losses with unquestioning solidarity.

I wondered of the juxtaposition in this Shawshank scenario:  Could their elbows have glanced one another while reaching for the salt?  Were they seated across from each other where the eyes of depravity could capture the image my son's face and retain it there along with the horrific visions it gleefully embraces?  Or worse still, could he have wooed my historically guileless manchild into conversation, disarming him with charity and implied camaraderie?

The suggested possibilities were overwhelming, but I could not bring myself to go there.

Our conversation ended with the usual petitions for letters and photographs from home and my assurance that, as always, they will be forthcoming.  But the words that were forming from my intentions and validating my promise were not the ones my heart begged me to ask.  Those simply would not come.

I have spoken to my son several times since that conversation, and with each phone call I detect a growing tone of cheer in his voice.  I should be comforted by this development, but I am appalled.  On the back of what I now know are the existing conditions of his incarceration, any indication of acceptance on his part terrifies me.

I want to hear in his voice the resonant confirmation of strength, confidence and courage; of resolve, fortitude and commitment to change.  But I also want the sad holdings of discontent to seep into even his happiest hours as long as he remains there.  I want to know that in spite of the routine and redundancy of his days, he has not forged an alliance with the terminally misbegotten and harbors a sense of belonging.

I want him to despise where he is.

To be a mother and yet wish that your grown child be steeped in days lined with despair and feelings of isolation from his surrounding environment is utterly at odds with every glowing principle of that nurturing estate.

To pray that the hunger for home and the company of those whose only interest is in loving him be so searing that it threatens nightly to bring him to tears, would border on criminal pathology were this an ordinary scenario.

But nothing about this is ordinary.   Nothing comes close to acceptable.

My only hope remains that the system, which is so flawed as to place my son and the others like him who are desperately in need of psychiatric and rehabilitative counseling into a cesspool of impenitent iniquity of which they have no likeness to, will at least be able to protect them while in custody.

But who will protect them from themselves?

Today I received a letter from my son.  He has made friends with a "lifer."

"He is a former Hell's Angel and a really good guy in his mid-fifties.  He is an incredibly smart individual, and I don't know whether this is good or bad, but he says he sees a lot of himself in me and often times wonders where his life would have gone had he not made the bad choices that lead to his current state of affairs.  And another crazy thing is that he has got almost identical eyes to myself, which is something I have never seen before.  You know, how they are blue-green with a golden ring around the pupil?  Crazy."


I want to grab his beautiful face in my hands and shout,  "Griffin!  No one has eyes like yours!  NO ONE!  Please!  Keep them focused inward just a little while longer!"

Just a little while longer.