Youtube link to audiobook of Chapter 11 and the rest of the book!

Chapter 11

God gives the nuts, but he doesn’t crack them

German Proverb

The slowly unfolding days and weeks should have begun to heal Lori’s wounds, forming scars. Yet she continued to lick them as though they were freshly seared into her skin. She was almost completely blind to the present and only able to focus on the past, and it kept her walking backwards and stumbling into things that she otherwise might have avoided, if her eyes had only been open. 

One such thing that planted itself in the midst of Lori’s path was Pista Bakfark. Still not sure about changing her major to communications, she decided to do a summer internship in a Drosophila lab in one of the Springfield campus research facilities. It was there that she met Pista, a libidinous Hungarian M.D., who had taken temporary leave of his clinic back home to do research in the lab she was studying in. This buzzing, circling, single synapse-firing predator playfully draped itself over any and every female that dared step within the boundaries of its rather large personal space. Pista’s extensive book-marked list of Internet porn on two or three of the laboratory computers, as well as his relentless lewd and inappropriate remarks, caused the laboratory head to tongue thrash him on more than one occasion behind his closed office door. Yet Pista carried on, undaunted, drinking two to four beers every night in front of still shots of fat, naked Hungarian women doing disgusting things with their private and not-so-private parts.

The hours Lori was spending in the laboratory during the weekdays stretched well into the evenings, as did Pista’s.  The surprisingly deep philosophical and political discussions Lori and Pista had during their late night coffee breaks were in sharp contrast to the carefree playboy image Pista had been working so hard to sustain among his colleagues.  Yet it was when Lori had tried to get him to disclose his feelings about women or relationships that any hint of sobriety would fall by the wayside, and she would be faced with the same demented prepubescent antics he so promiscuously shared with everyone else. 

“You are so hot,” he would say to her, smiling lasciviously with his beady green eyes flashing devilishly from behind his wire-framed glasses. “I want to do you. I want to bang you so badly.”

Lori had heard him say those words so many times to so many women that she barely heard him when he said them to her. She sometimes wondered if he said these ridiculous, senseless things just to keep in practice of speaking the English language, since much of the time it seemed as though there was no real thought or emotion behind any of it. Another summer intern, Marta, from Italy, would laugh off his inane propositions the same as Lori would, and the two of them ended up treating him more as an intriguing oddity than an actual person.

Lori’s growing affinity toward Pista as a friend, and his growing affinity toward her, was hastened by their mutual disdain toward Pista’s co-worker, Ulf Fucher, arrogant and unapproachable and far more concerned with his own professional advancement than with being at peace with his colleagues. Fucher’s sociopathic ruthlessness and pathological territoriality led to the first of many anesthetically void colonoscopies that Pista would receive from him during his stay in the lab.  Despite the fact that Pista eventually fell into promising work that was completely independent of Fucher’s, feelings of isolation and powerlessness gave birth to a longing for an ally and a dire need for support.  

From:

Subject:  taxation without representation

To:

Ulf obviously needs to get his ass TAXED.  If you’d be willing, I’d be happy to tax him on behalf of your friend Pista for the meager sum of perhaps a nice bottle of olive oil and some fine cheese and a good rack of lamb. The bottom line, however, is that Ulf sounds like a positively miserable human being.  He probably hates himself and everything about his own life, and is thus projecting that self-loathing onto other people.  If I were a true Christian, I’d say pity him; if I were a true Buddhist, I’d say the same.  However, I’m NEITHER, so I think you should kick him in the nuts and then stick your tongue out and say “Nah, nah, nah-nah, nahhhh!”

I don’t know if I mentioned this to you or not, but right now I’m living in a cottage on a lake that my parents own. Last night, I made a campfire outside and sat there staring at it until about 4 AM, when I finally drained my last bottle of Wachusett Beer and stumbled inside to go to sleep.  I want something bizarre and unpredictable to happen, damn it! I need action! 

Why is life so god damned tedious!

It’s hot and muggy here.  Terrible! I have no air conditioning and no FAN either.  Fortunately I DO have a lake in my back yard that I can jump into to cool off, but unfortunately I can’t SLEEP in the lake.  Trying to sleep in this hot muggy crap is about the worst form of torture I’ve ever experienced; aside from discussing politics with my sister. Did I ever tell you that I’m highly suspicious that my sister is a lesbian?

Oh well, whatever. I’m sweating bullets just from typing.  I’m going to go jump in the lake, so to speak. It’s late, and it’s dark, and nobody else is around… so I might even remove my shorts! Hooray!

Rutherford (a.k.a. Rutherford)

On one particularly hot and sultry summer day, Pista sat in front of a computer, brooding over a confrontation he and Ulf had just had. Lori sat down at a computer next to his and began quietly surfing the Internet.

“What happened between you guys?” she asked, peering at him out of the corner of her eye.

Pista groaned. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. He stared hard at the computer. 

“What’s with this friggin’ thing?” Lori asked. She angrily slid her mouse over its pad and started randomly clicking on icons.

“What’s the problem?”

“This stupid program. It’s got all these … kinks.”

“Let me see,” he said. He softly placed his large, solid hand over hers and gently guided her through the program. She felt a sudden, disquieting yearning as he did this, and she quickly withdrew her hand.  Pista continued to manipulate the mouse and fix his gaze on the computer screen as though Lori had already left the room.  She looked up at the clock hanging over the doorway of the office, and she rose to leave.  

“See you tomorrow,” she said, weakly.

“See you,” he called out.  He was still ogling the computer.  “I squeeze your boobies,” he said, absentmindedly.

Lori had to walk several blocks from the research facility to her car.  A joyous smile crept across her face as she quickly darted over crosswalks, the warm, humid air massaging her neck and arms. She was feeling something very similar that night to what she had been feeling for months for Nick, except for the first time in so long, it was someone other Nick drawing this feeling out of her. She had a strong, sweet craving for something perverse, something new. It reminded her of her need to break free from the mundane, to revitalize her soul in some way. It tapped right into the restlessness that had become so unshakably apparent in her.

But her desire seemed even more complex, borne out of a need to break through a superficial barrier, to sneak past a thin, opaque flap of absurdity and catch a glimpse of the truth. She wanted to be able to look into Pista’s eyes and see the soul behind them instead of the travesty.

She slowed down her pace and soberly stared down at the darkened concrete sidewalk beneath her feet. A light mist moistened her arms and the backs of her hands and made the night air thick and heavy. She continued walking, robotically now, past an alternating display of elegant eighteenth century Gambreled homes and Georgian saltboxes, each veiled by dense shrubbery and overgrown weedy grass interrupted by purple violets and hydrangeas.

Was her curiosity about Pista as frivolous as wondering if door number three would reveal a brand-new Porsche or a cart-carrying donkey? Or did she sense in Pista a shade of the overt elusiveness of Nick? It was elusiveness that never failed to awaken the demons of mayhem deep inside her bowels. It was elusiveness that lit the fire of passion, the fire of fleeting passion.

“Dare me to?” Pista asked the following day in the lab.

“Dare you to what?” Lori asked, rhetorically, having played along with this game more times than she could remember in one sitting.

“You know,” he said.  He grinned at her, removed the flaps of his lab coat from his thighs and pointed toward the thin fabric that masked the great uncircumcised, Hungarian mystery that lie beneath it. “Would you like to see it?”

“See what?” She expected to call his bluff, as she had so often in the past.  She stifled a yawn.

“This.” He unzipped his fly and made some quick, blurry motions with his hand. 

“I just saw it!” Lori said, turning her head away from him and covering her eyes with the palm of her hand.

“What?” he asked.  Pista laughed nervously and tugged on his zipper. “You did?”

“Yes! I did!”

“I … I didn’t mean to … I mean, I didn’t think I … You did?” He stood up and started shoving his shirt into his pants.  Beads of sweat glistened on his large forehead. 

Lori sat in her chair, staring at him helplessly. 

He walked over to her and said, “Lori! I … I … I take you out for a beer. Come. Let’s go for a beer.  We discuss this over a beer.”

“I’m not of age,” she said. “I can’t order alcohol.”

“It’s okay. I take care of it. No one will know.”

Tugging desperately at her elbow, he guided her to the local galleria where they sat down at a tall, wooden table near a restaurant bar. He smiled awkwardly at her while the waitress acquiescently fetched large glasses of Guinness. 

“All right,” he said, taking his first sip of beer. 

“This has to stop, Pista.”

“I know, I know.  I am very sorry. I honestly didn’t know I would … ex- expose myself.”

“It’s not just that,” Lori said, waving her hand.  “It’s how … comfortable you’ve gotten around me in the lab lately. I guess that’s the best way I can put it.”

He nodded his head as though he knew exactly what she was talking about, and continued to drink his beer.

“You and I have gotten a lot closer over the past few weeks. You know that,” she said.

He nodded again.

“All of your … moves. Like the little shoulder rubs when I’m sitting at the culture hood or the microscope.  They’re … they’re … getting to me. I’ve been feeling kind of uncomfortable all of a sudden.  Something’s … changed.”

He stopped nodding and looked into her eyes.

“I’ve been feeling differently around you lately. Maybe it’s because we’re working so closely together for such a long time. I don’t know.”  Lori gulped some of the acrid beer down, feeling suddenly very light-headed.

“It’s all right,” he said. 

She shook her head. “I think we’ve got to distance ourselves from one another a bit.  You know?”

“All right.” He tipped his glass back into his mouth and finished his beer. 

She swallowed another quarter of her own drink, and felt a soothing peripheral numbness that made her wobble when she stood up. Guinness was one of the few beers that could lobotomize her if she drank enough of it; and very rarely because of its potency and bitter taste could she even get through a full glass of it.

They returned to the laboratory office. She felt proud of herself; proud that she could thwart desire in the face of danger. And she had faced down far too much danger in her recent past to let something as malleable as desire lead her again into its clutches. As she learned in one of her courses, in the Buddhist world desire was perceived as a standing ticket to calamity, as it could breed only attainment, which could breed only loss, which could breed only despair. Lori most certainly did not need to attain Pista, as there was nothing even remotely substantial about him to grab hold of. There was no “soul” behind his eyes, at least no soul that he would ever give Lori the chance to see. And for her to set herself up to lose mere pretense would undoubtedly brand her a fool. 

Yet again.

She sat quietly in an office swivel chair, rocking herself at 30-degree angles to her left and right, staring bemusedly at a hypnotic computer screen-saver.  Even if there were something more tangible there inside him, something that only she would have the privilege of touching and tasting and inhaling like no one else would dare, it was still a stopgap. No depth, no permanence, and no meaning other than a passing of the here and the now without any concern for tomorrow. 

She figured she would get ready to stagger her way out of the laboratory and go home. She pushed her chair a few inches away from the computer and started to stand, when Pista swung her seat around to face him. He quickly thrust his muscular arms up through the tight elastic holding her skirt. Months of mounting tension exploded like the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius as the two of them climbed drunkenly on top of one another and clawed ferociously at whatever body parts were most easily accessible.  They moved as a huddled mass of entangled and partially clothed flesh into their supervisor’s darkened office, two stopgaps momentarily filling a permanent void.  

From:

Subject:  voy a fumar marijuana y crack cocaine

To:

God, I’m hot.  It’s HOT.  It’s muggy, too, and I’ve got all the windows open and there are little buggies swirling around in here like some sort of aero-bug-armada. 

I’ve got a good one for you. My friend Jill came over yesterday with her “girlfriend” Gina. Gina was a very nice person, and pretty interesting to talk to, but I have to say that I have NEVER seen a female human being that was so completely devoid of anything feminine at all! This girl looked- I kid you not- like a 13-year old boy with a crew cut. She must have weighed about 85 pounds with not a solitary TRACE of what you’d call “breasts” or the typically shapely female “heinie.” Like I said, she seemed like a great girl with a friendly attitude and everything else, but her appearance really threw me. Anyway, they were supposed to just come over for a few hours and then go back to Redhook, but they wound up staying overnight here. We bought a bunch of beer and before I knew it Jill and I were both out in the lake NEKKID while Gina stayed on the shore with her clothes on because she was too cold. Now, being in the water is one thing, but Jill kept walking up onto the shore to try and convince Gina to go swimming with us, so she’d be standing there totally naked by the light of a campfire and all I could do was hover in the water with my engorged weenie sticking up through the surface like some kind of obscene periscope. It was really kind of funny, if not annoying. I mean, there’s Jill standing on the lawn naked with her big breasts hanging down and ME in the water with my phallous harder than titanium alloy and all Jill is interested in is pleading with her androgynous “other” to come join us. They went to bed shortly after that, and I stayed out by the fire trying to focus my concentration on Mickey Mantle or Pedro Martinez so I could finally soften up enough to be able to put my shorts back on without breaking my Johnson in half.

I’ll let you go. My friends gave me these odd little pills that they said would “mellow me out.” If I get any “mellower” I’m going to wake up three hours from now with my face pressed into this keyboard and QWERT pressed into my left cheek. I’ll talk to you later.

Rutherford (a.k.a. Crafty Lombardo)

Pista had decided to leave the lab within weeks of a Chernobyl-like radioactive spill that contaminated the entire laboratory as well as surrounding rooms and three quarters of the adjacent hallway leading to the departmental elevators. He stood admiringly in the doorway of one of the sullied rooms, watching Lori as she kneeled over a screeching Geiger counter with sneakers covered in blue, disposable slippers. She sulked while she scoured a ³²P -covered floor with paper towels saturated with distilled water and detergent.

“Could you … come here?” Pista asked

“Huh?” Lori looked up at him, dizzy and nauseous. She threw a soaked pile of radioactive towels into a plexi-glass container and carefully removed her latex gloves from her hands. She gently peeled off her slippers and tossed them in the trash as well, before tiptoeing across what she hoped was a clean patch of floor toward Pista.

He pulled her into the laboratory office from the hallway, turned off the light, and hugged her so tightly that she was lifted several inches off of the boarded-up, still-radioactive floor. He kissed her hard on her lips and squeezed her again until she could not breathe.

She stood, paralyzed in his tight clutches. She didn’t know quite what to make of his sudden fervor, but decided at long last not to think too much about it. After all, it would be gone, and he would be gone, well before the last trace of spilled ³²P, with its several week half-life, disintegrated to mere background level counts.  

Lori pictured herself as a flame that flickers on a dying wick for a while and eventually burns itself out. And this would not be such a bad thing if she could just learn to enjoy the brightness and heat of the fire while it lasted. But she longed for a flame that was eternal. And there just didn’t seem to be nearly enough fuel to fire a passion that would last. At least not in Lori’s world.

(stay tuned for chapter 12…)

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)