Youtube link to audiobook of Chapter 6 and the rest of the book!

Chapter 6

There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not

Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

From:

Subject:  mac and chizeese

To:

I am just beginning to realize that all I do is work, get buzzed often, and watch a worthless world fly by me. All I ever come home to are a computer screen, a plate of cheese, and a bottle of beer. I conduct my love/sex life more like a series of isolated commando missions than anything normal or healthy. I see a target, I STRIKE, and I go back into hiding. I have NEVER been involved with a girl that I actually gave a damn about, although I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise. It’s always about ME. I’m starting to wonder if I’m even CAPABLE of giving a damn about anyone. This, of course, has major advantages, like the fact that I’ve got a bulletproof emotional construct. Unfortunately, it also means that I am depriving myself of feeling anything “beautiful” in the interest of self-preservation. I’m afraid that I’ll meet someone I actually like, and when she ultimately finds out what an irresponsible, immature, and self-centered BASTARD I am, she’ll tell me to take a hike, and wise she would be to do so. I can’t even figure out who I am. I’ve got this big ego, and yet I’m consumed with self-loathing. I think everyone else is so screwed up, and yet I’M the one who probably needs therapy. I used to think I was detached from the world, but in fact, I am detached from myself. 

I’d like to meet Angela at some point. Tell me more about her. Can she appreciate the beauty and stench of a perfectly aged Alsacian Munster cheese? Does she smoke weed? What have you told her about me? Hmmmm… Did you tell her that I’m a self-taught culinary genius and a badass on Pac Man? I’m no slouch with Donkey Kong, either. Believe me.  I know girls are turned on by guys my age who do nothing but cook and drink beer and play video games, right? WHOA!

Rutherford Gimby

Lori had never been one to indulge in self-help books, spiritual enlightenment seminars, vibrational metal tong and puck soul healing workshops, Disciples of Jesus Jew bashing gatherings, Tantric sex orgies, group hugs, or anything else that the few or the many seemed to be drawn to as attempts to pull meaning into their lives and achieve inner peace.  Angela had apparently nibbled at some of these options from time to time, much in the same way as a rat samples a crumb before engulfing the entire morsel of food for fear it is a toxin that it would be unable to regurgitate.  She made sure to regularly give Lori the synopses of any interesting and relevant Cosmopolitan magazine articles she’d come across, like those on repeatedly attracting and becoming attracted to retards, or the latest of her self-help purchases: a forty dollar, hard-covered, Ph.D.-scribbled, “Women Who Love Women Who Love Men Who Have Mothers Who Did Not Love Them and Who Screw Over the Women Other Women Love but Shouldn’t as These Women are Screwed and Hopeless.”  And she was also good about letting Lori in on the priveleged details of her most recent, and most disappointing, ten dollar, health insurance-covered session with some “impartial” stranger with a personal code of ethics that Angela believed could easily spill over and turn a supposedly objective view point into one potentially damaging, sorry ass line of brain tenderizing garbage.

Lori, herself, just couldn’t bring herself to lean on any one crutch on any regular basis and believe that this was what would exorcise the seemingly unyielding angst that came with believing one was hopeless and fated to a lifetime of complete, irreparable mayhem.  Her feeling was that once any good vibes from shared anecdotes inevitably dissipated, she would still be left with her own very unique demon-spawn foibles that only shared a skin-deep resemblance to the foibles of others.

And yet, she still found herself in times of woe drawn to her friends like metal to a magnet, and she salivated like Pavlov’s dog every time they opened up their lives to her and dished out the same level of intimacy that she would freely and gladly dish out to them. It was true that in essence they were all most likely co-enablers of each other’s mayhem serving only to mask their pain in a misery loves company kind of way. And perhaps by masking the pain they were actually inadvertently perpetuating it. But they continued to look very much forward to exchanging their stories and digging their philosophical heels deep into the quicksand of their dysfunction. After all, it was far cheaper than therapy, and a hell of a lot more fun.

From:

Subject:  golden shower with self-proclaimed moral fiber

To:

I’m drunk.  It’s almost four in the morning.  I got your e-mail about calling here, but my roommate is a complete MORON about not giving me my messages.  He never mentioned a WORD about it.  He just erased it from the machine.  That’s unbelievable.  Anyway, one reason I’ve been playing the “absentee” role lately is because I’ve placed some ads in various “personals” sections online, looking for girls to talk to, and I’ve gotten so many responses that I am positively OVERWHELMED.  The screwed-up thing, so far, is that the ONLY girl that I’ve been “chatting” with, and that I’m the most interested in and intrigued by, lives in Kansas City, which is not a geographic advantage for making any kind of “love connection.”  We’ve just been talking about life and all that. She’s a very interesting and intelligent girl, and we’ve got so much in common that it’s downright frightening.  I’d better just drop it, now, lest I start to sound like the shortsighted, ignorant clown that I am. 

I will speak with you shortly, of course, and I may need your womanly advice about how to handle some things.  I actually saw my ex tonight, very briefly, and I thought about askingHERfor some advice, but screw that.  She’s got a new boyfriend, who I’m told is a complete dick.  Unbelievable. You see, Lori, THAT’Sthe problem.  No matter HOW much you try and deny it, the fact is that MOST girls are NOT interested in guys like me.  I’m not saying ALL girls. I’m just saying “most” girls.  I’ve never met any of your boyfriends, Lori, but just let it be known that, not to stroke your ego, I’ve always felt that you were way too smart and perceptive to fall into that “jerk-lover” syndrome, so I’m not saying that YOU like jerks, but MOST girls do, and don’t even think about denying it …  If I’d have treated my ex like a piece of trash, I’d be in bed with her right NOW, and that’s a FACT, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.  I’m just kidding about the pipe, but NOT about the way that girls are largely attracted to DICKS.  I don’t care what anybody says … Nice guys always DO finish last, and you can take THAT to the bank. It never ceases to amaze me when I think about how many stupid, arrogant, self-absorbed asses I’ve known in my life that had girls falling all over them… some girls I actually respected.  Can you tell what a frustrated, lonely, angry bastard I am becoming yet? 

Anyway, I’m tired, I have a headache, and my feet are beginning to stench.  I haven’t washed these socks in a week.  Showering seems futile and tedious and ultimately conformist.  Lord, I’m pathetic…

I’ve got to go, but we’ll talk expediently. Just don’t bother leaving me any messages, because there’s only a 50/50 chance that I’ll get it, anyway.

Yours,

Rutherford (a.k.a. Johnson Longwood)

Lori flocked to Rutherford’s apartment in Portsmouth to seek solace amongst his proudly displayed pile of belly button lint in the corner of his shower, petrified clumps of black bearded growth lining his entire bathroom sink basin, and ten week old fungus- and mold-covered coffee cake in the center of his kitchen table.  He loosely tied the back of his cooking apron while she talked, and hunched over a kitchen counter covered with recipe books and an array of pots, pans, spices and vegetables.  He began to lightly dust an ensemble of chicken strips with pan searing flour, making sure to nod every so often to let Lori know that he was paying attention to her. With a spray of olive oil weakly smoking in a pan behind her head, she talked to him about meaning, and how it seemed as though some people didn’t seem to have a need for it when it came to relationships. Where was the meaning, she asked, in a union that was strictly of the physical nature, propelled mostly by ego, sustained primarily by hormones? A union that was more analogous to a killing by camouflaged hunters in deer-infested woods; a union that could very well end up torn apart, its vulnerability jutting out as a prized capture on a whitewashed wall?

“Lori,” Rutherford said. “The pathologies involved here aren’t important. And my theories are so twisted that even I don’t understand them.”

Lori looked quizzically at him. What?

  “The important thing,” he continued, carefully setting the chicken slices on the pan to cook, “is that you obviously get rather turned-on by guys who aren’t afraid to shower you with sexual commentary and bold-faced aggressive behaviors, right? Correct me if I’m wrong about that.”

She remained quiet.

“Look,” he said. “It all boils down to ‘I want to get screwed like a dog, and Paul isn’t doing that.’  Right? Of course I’m right!  As for an insight into the ‘male mind,’ you’d better sit still, as what I’m going to say may offend you.  Nick Warren has no concern for you whatsoever.  He doesn’t care!  He, I guarantee you, is lying around his home and thinking about how easy and bizarre it was to get between your legs by simply flashing his weenie at you.  That’s the way guys think, Lori.  You showed him vulnerability, and he simply capitalized on it.”

Lori shifted uncomfortably in her chair, her elbow brushing a piece of petrified, once-buttered toast lying on a nearby plate. “I think there’s more to it than that,” Lori said. She forcefully pushed the plate away from her end of the table. 

  “No there isn’t!” Rutherford looked at her incredulously. “Trust me, Lori, you’re completely wasting your time and emotions worrying about ‘closure’ from any guy that you’ve ever taken as a partner only for the purpose of sexual liberation,” he said.  “They don’t care who you are.  It might sound simplistic, but I’d gladly debate any mother like Nick on the matter.” He removed the pan of caramelized chicken from the stovetop and sprinkled some parsnips around it before placing it inside the heated oven below.  “He might rant and rave about this crap and try to save his face in mixed company, but once any ladies were out of the room, he’d giggle and nudge me in the ribs and say ‘Yeah! It was so easy! You know!’  I’ll bet every cent that I have in the bank that that’s what would happen.  Now, I’ve only got like six dollars in the bank, but that doesn’t diminish my conviction.”

Lori sat quietly, watching Rutherford obsess over the lumpy consistency of a tub of chicken gravy. He carelessly bustled about his kitchen as though there was no one there but him and his organic food and seasonings and cookbooks, and Lori continued to watch him without saying a word. 

“The only advice I have for you,” he continued, “is to learn how to get Paul to pull out the dog collar and give you a good animalistic screw. Right? Tell him that you don’t care about the cuddly-wuddly crap.  There’s nothing wrong with that!” He removed the chicken from the oven and placed it back on the stove next to a bottle of basting oil.  “As for Babette, I’ve thought a lot about what she is up to when I’m not around.  I’m not stupid, and I’m not naïve. With Babette, I don’t trust her, but the irony of my mistrust is that I do trust that she’d tell me about it immediately if she was with someone else. And the ultimate irony is that I don’t care!” 

Lori was home again, mindlessly thumbing the pages of an assigned chapter in her sixth edition microbiology textbook. She wished its contents were more personalized, more of the type of subject matter she could relate to. She didn’t want to think about bacterial flagella and prokaryotic versus eukaryotic cells. She wanted to think about life, and death, and love, and lust, and pain, and angst, and emotion. Maybe she’d switch her major to psychology.

Her phone rang.

 “Hey.” 

“Who’s this?” she asked.

“Nick.”

It had been weeks. 

“Oh, hey,” she said, her fingertips numb against the receiver. “What do you want?”

“So uh … I was … wondering what you uh … meant by a certain … joke you wrote on one of the logs at the station.” 

“What joke?” she asked. Her heart was rapping violently inside of her chest, shaking her ribcage. The last thing she had remembered drawing on a radio log was a series of arrows with teasing phrases like “turn the page for a surprise,” and “keep going,” and “you’re getting warmer.” On the last page that was preceded by another arrow and another tease was the word “SUCKER!” 

“You know,” Nick said, his voice getting softer. “No more Dick on Sundays,” he whispered.

“I wrote that a long time ago.” She found herself suddenly having difficulty catching her breath. “Just white it out.”

“So what did you mean by that?” he asked.

“Well…” She swept a sweaty hand through her hair and tossed her textbook onto a bare couch cushion.  “I was producing Dick Soho’s call-in dating show on Sundays, it got cancelled because there were no callers, and I felt badly about it.”

Silence.  After stumbling and fumbling for what to say next, he finally said, “I just figured I’d call to harass you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Look, I have to go.” 

“Okay.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

From:

Subject:  Guess who’s coming to dinner

To:

Dearest,

Nick has no regard for you.  I guarantee you that you have not heard the last from him, nor will you ever hear the last from him, as long as you entertain his overtures in ANY way whatsoever.  When you heard his voice on the phone, you should have hung-up immediately.  However, you didn’t do that.  Don’t you see how predictable this is? Jesus, woman, wake the hell up! I’ll tell you right now, point blank, what I think of this.  I think that this guy has absorbed such information about YOU and your interpretations of sex and relationships to fulfill his own lecherous end.  Lori … Wake up.  Nick sees you as a horny little honey that he can keep on the side to manipulate for his own personal pleasure.  This crap is as easy as two-plus-two.  Wake up, god dammit, you can’t possibly be as foolish and gullible as you’re sounding.  You can rant and rave all you want about wanting to be done with those encounters with Nick, but the fact is that you are still excited about it all, and on some weird level you want them to continue.   Tell me I’m wrong.  Go ahead … TELL me I’m wrong. 

NOT!

Rutherford

Lori was called in on a weekday to voice a commercial for the radio station. This was a rarity, as the station mostly used male voices for spots, and there weren’t many spots to voice to begin with. 

Over time, more and more of the original radio staff were being recruited to fill full-time positions for a new business-oriented format that was being launched at the station. Lori sat on a paisley chenille sofa near a maze of newly erected office cubicles in the station, silently marveling at how much more structured, sterile and corporate the building was beginning to look. The office outside the closed production studio door was vacant, apart from Nick sitting quietly at his desk with his back to her. She noticed that he had lobbed off his frizzy ponytail, an obvious attempt to try and blend in better with the highfalutin, impervious social infrastructure of the place, run as it was now by cosmopolitan, suit and tie, Wall Street Journal types. It was the most revolutionary of takeovers by the carbon copy Boston Blue Bloods, with their cappuccino-stained ceramic mugs artfully decorating the edges of their cubicle wall-divided desktops, and their scores of circling, flirtatious, waif-like administrative staff. It was a black and white contrast to Metro West Hepcats like Helga and Burt, who drank from striped paper cups and whose creative, libidinous energies could never be confined to the boundaries of an office cubicle. 

Nick said nothing to Lori as she quietly continued to sit on a thick cushion of the couch, waiting to be called into the production room. He merely maintained a Pompeii frozen posture while staring intently at the screen of his computer and typing. He acted as though she were not even present in the room. But Lori knew that Nick was very much aware of her, perhaps more aware than he had wanted to be.

The game was on. Lori cleared her throat. “Do you want to hear a joke I heard?”

Nick’s head turned, and a toothy smile grew on his face. “You wanna see it?”

“No,” she said, with a laugh. “I asked you if you wanted to hear a joke. What would make you think I was referring to ‘it’?” 

“Well it’s here anytime you want it,” he mumbled casually, returning to his typing.

The production manager’s face appeared in the doorway of the studio, and he motioned for Lori to come inside. She sashayed past Nick’s desk, where he had resumed his veneer of engrossment and importance. She slowed her pace some, but did not look at him. Not directly. He was kept only in her peripheral vision, just as he seemed to be lingering only in the frayed fringes of her life.

She promptly finished her session and emerged from the recording studio. Rounding a corner, she longingly eyed Nick’s empty chair and vacated workstation. She drew a deep breath, slowly let the air out of her lungs, and gently swept her fingertips across the surface of his desk as she made her way out of the building.

Back at home, Lori lay in her bed, just starting to drift off to sleep.  She lifted a Greek philosophy book fanned out on her chest and set it down on some floorspace near her bedside. She turned her body to one side, tucked her legs up in a fetal position, and thrust her arms underneath her pillow. Her breathing deepened and the hum of a digital clock on her nightstand grew fainter and fainter.

Her phone was ringing. She was jolted awake.

“Hello, Lori? It’s Nick.” It was like a creature from a monster movie suddenly coming to life again after looking as though it had been killed sufficiently for the closing credits to begin rolling.

“Hi,” Lori said, her lungs airless from her throat suddenly closing in on itself.

“I just called to see how you were doing.”

“Aw … Really?”  

“And I was wondering if you wanted to drop by the station sometime and keep me company.”

(stay tuned for chapter 7…)

Here is a link to a real-life illustration of a challenging relationship dynamic, entitled “Reeling.”

And here are some other interesting and pertinent links:

DeMars Coaching – YouTube (DeMars Coaching)

Surviving Narcissism – YouTube (Dr. Les Carter)

NARCDAILY- You Are Not Alone – YouTube (NARCDAILY- You Are Not Alone)

Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc – YouTube (Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc)

DoctorRamani – YouTube (DoctorRamani)

Dr. Todd Grande – YouTube (Dr. Todd Grande)

Crappy Childhood Fairy – YouTube (Anna Runkle- Crappy Childhood Fairy)

Donielle Jolie Yanez – YouTube (Donielle Jolie Yanez)