Youtube link to audiobook of Chapter 13 and the rest of the book!

Chapter 14

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it

Marcus Aurelius (121-180)

From:

Subject:  Da Regulatah

To:

Dear Lori,

Lord, I miss you. I just realized that it’s been 12 days since we exchanged any messages, which I think is by far the longest time since we started this computer relation. I apologize for that. I don’t know why I’ve been in such a reclusive zone for so long, but I think some of it has to do with the fact that my roommate is a bit of a nosey bastard, so every time I’m doing anything on this computer he’s looking over my shoulder saying “Whatcha doin? Who are you writing to?” And I LIKE the guy too much to say “Hey… PISS OFF! It’s PERSONAL!” That’s no excuse, actually. I guess it’s because I’ve been having bizarre mood-swings lately… like sometimes I’m all zippy-wippy and optimistic, but most of the rest of the time I’m just frustrated and pissy-wissy and I don’t feel like doing anything except drink beer and smoke weed and listen to very loud music with my headphones on. I’m lost in a zone of meager employment, a small circle of good friends, and a demonic propensity for self-annihilation. Wow! That was a pretty cool sentence, eh? Jesus … I wish I had something interesting to say, but I don’t. The only thing on my mind right now is that I wish I had some chocolate milk and a couple of twinkies, believe it or not, but I’d rather not confront my complete apathy for existence by indulging in fat and calories. Twinkies are awesome, though, aren’t they? And chocolate milk doesn’t suck either. 

I’m gonna get out of here. Let me know what’s happening with you and your classes and all that. Even though it’s only been a couple of weeks since we “spoke,” I feel like you’re slipping AWAY, which is largely my own fault, of course, but it still bugs me. I’m having Lori withdrawals. It’s kind of like delirium tremors, but without the fever and the shakes and the anxiety and the massive auditory and visual hallucinations. We should at least TRY to make plans to hang out or at least talk on the phone sometime, regardless of how microcosmic the odds are of that actually happening. 

I’m outta here. I needCHEESE.

Rutherford (a.k.a. Francesco de brebis au lait cru) 

“So Lori,” Angela began. Her tone of voice over the phone was serious, yet in somewhat of a somber way. “This’ll make you feel better. A lot better…”

“What?” Lori asked, hesitantly. She felt that there was very little at this point that could be offered to her in the form of uplift or support, except perhaps a very expensive and stylish Victoria Secret’s padded bra.

“I was doing my midday newscast when Nick was running the board, and I got the chance to talk to him over the line feeds. First of all, his girlfriend left him.”

“Huh?” Lori was startled by the strange turn of events in light of everything that she had experienced.

“His girlfriend apparently had had enough and walked out on him. And the ridiculous thing was that I had to ask him about her first, before he said … almost as an afterthought, Lori, something like, ‘Oh yeah… we broke up.’ Can you believe that? He was living with her, and his attitude was like, ‘here today, gone tomorrow, oh well.’”

“Huh,” Lori said, only able to utter caveman-like grunts of acknowledgement. She was weak and numb from her steady liquid Ensure diet and her depression, and Angela’s intensity seemed to be more than enough to sustain the two of them throughout the conversation.

“So I asked him if he would miss her. And you know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said something like, ‘the one thing I’ll miss will be not being able to get some anytime I want!’ Can you believe him? He lived with her!”

“Jesus,” Lori said, hoping that she could help enrich the soul-less overtones of the situation by bringing some religion into the picture, even if it wasn’t her religion per se.

Angela went on. “So I asked him how he could be so cold about all of it. And do you know what his response was?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘Look, this is the way I am. This is the way I always have been, and always will be. If ‘they’ can’t accept that, then it’s out of my hands. I can’t help it if‘they’ get hung up on me.’ Do you believe the arrogance?”

“Hmmm,” Lori said.

Angela continued. “He said, ‘I refuse to let my heart get in the way, I refuse to get attached because I don’t wanna get hurt.’” Angela paused to take a deep, overly-excited breath. “So I said, ‘Nick.  How old are you? You’re twenty-one? You sound more like a thirteen year-old!’”

“Huh,” Lori said, somewhat intrigued, yet not sure she completely understood Nick’s reasons for being as noncommittal as he was coming across. Was it really just profound immaturity? 

“Then I said, ‘And what about Lori? Do you even like her?’” She drew a Thespian pause.

Lori swallowed hard. She cringed at the thought of what his response might have been at this point, as he was either being brutally honest with Angela or putting up a defensive barrier and lying through his teeth. Either way, she knew he had nothing to lose by saying something guarded, something less than flattering. She felt her ego blink its blood-shot, watery eyes before shutting them tightly to block out the impending blow. 

Angela coughed, as though her throat was lacking moisture from her uninterrupted monologue. “So he paused, Lori, as if he had to think about whether or not he liked you, and then he said, ‘… Y-yeaaaah. I like her.’ And then I said, ‘But no better or worse than anyone else?’ And he paused again and said, ‘Y-yeaaaah. I guess you could say that.’ What a jerk!”

Lori felt her heart dive off its perch and land on her cement-hard stomach, shattering into many pieces and taking pieces of her stomach with it like a suicide bomber. Why did Angela do this? Why did she throw all of these rhetorical questions out, scoop up the ridiculously predictable answers, and then shove them into Lori’s face? Was there some kind of ulterior motive behind this Barbara Walters/academy award-status vulture attack?

“Lori,” Angela said, reading into her silence. “I hope this makes you feel better. I mean, how could it not? The guy is a loser! All you’re guilty of is getting caught up in his crap!”

“Uh-huh.” Lori said, monotone.

“I told him he’d better not come onto me or to you anymore. I told him that you realized that you made a huge mistake, and that we’re more than onto his shallow, one-track, get-a-piece-of-ass-at-all-costs game,” she said.

“Thank you.” 

“The only thing that I’m concerned about,” Angela said, taking a deep breath, “is this…”

“What?” 

“Sharon Warsaw at the station, who’s a good friend of mine, told me that Nick was boasting to her, as well as to the entire station, about your Desiree Jones masquerade.”

“He … what?”

Angela made a tsk-tsk noise before saying in a lecturing tone, “The downfall with doing pranks like this, Lori, is making yourself look like some kind of unstable, psycho stalker… I mean I’m sure in time it’ll all blow over. But for now, I would just keep a really low profile.”

Lori thanked Angela for being such a concerned friend by going to great lengths to get all of this information to her. And then she hung up the phone and contemplated the grossest, messiest form of suicide she could think of. 

From:

Subject:  It makes its own sauce when you add water

To:

Lori,

Don’t worry about being the object of gossip. People can gossip about ME from now till next Tuesday and I wouldn’t give a crap. SCREW ‘EM! I guarantee you that sending Nick those “Desiree” e-mails gave him a good ego-stroke though. You like that guy, don’t you…

I got a message from Jill telling me that she’s going to get MARRIED to that androgynous dyke she’s been shacked up with for the last year. They’re going to have a “commitment ceremony” in Provincetown, Massachusetts this summer. There’s no way in HELL I’m going to miss that! Wonder if she still wants my sperm. 

Anyway… I’m laughing too hard to be serious right now. I mean… What should I buy Jill and Gina for a “commitment” present? A fondue pot?  Or a double-sided dildo?

WEEEEE!!!

Rutherford 

The following day, Lori phoned Angela at her workplace, where she caught her in the middle of an over-the-line feed discussion with Nick. Lori could hear him boasting to Angela over an intercom about his adeptness in pleasing the ‘ladies.’ She also heard him mention Lori’s name, and the fact that she had loved everything he had ever done to her.

“Lori,” Angela said to her over the phone. “Nick wants you to vouch for him that he’s good ‘down there.’”

“Down where?” Lori asked, coolly.

She could hear Nick say, “Tell her to come over here. I’ll show her.”

Lori wondered if his short-term memory had been completely destroyed by the excessive amounts of heavy-hitting hallucinogens he had taken throughout his life. She suspected that they must have been robust enough and consumed at a high enough frequency to cause such striking brain damage. Brain damage that would cause him to forget that he had sadistically sucked the life force out of another human being only days prior to wanting to mount the same putrefying carcass he helped create. 

Who was he? 

The weeks passed sluggishly by, and Lori was weary. Her weariness came from sadness. She was exhausted from fighting off feelings that she did not want to have. She was weakened from trying to steer her mind away from the same inane thoughts that served no purpose other than to frustrate her.  Yet the upside of her emotional exhaustion was that it made her harmless; it kept her at bay. It was the stainless steel armor that was keeping her palace chaste, unsullied and serene. A slowly blossoming apathy was the sword that was stabbing the beating heart of the raging beast within.

Lori wondered if passion was always fleeting, and if the knowledge of it being fleeting was what drew so much anger out of people. Why was it that the people in Lori’s life, including Lori herself, could only feel deeply when provoked? Why were those she thought the least about so solid and stable? Why were the ones she thought the most about uncontrollable and unpredictable? Was passion fueled by mistrust, or the anticipation of resentment? Was it fueled by the angry resentment that follows feelings of hurt or betrayal? She wondered if she could only picture herself clawing and tearing at the flesh of those who had wounded her, biting hard and hungrily into the skin of those who had wronged her, just so she could feel the sweet revenge of momentarily gaining their submission. And she wondered if passion was, in its most heightened form, a kind of sweet revenge.

New Year’s Day would soon arrive, and Lori was set on spending it with her two best friends, even though both of them hadn’t been in touch with each other for months. Each seemed to have enough to preoccupy them during the time they hadn’t spoken for the harsh feelings to subside. Rutherford’s nightly cuddling up to frosty cans of Wachusett beer apparently served to tame any residual emotion he may have still harbored toward the situation. Similarly, it seemed that time had washed away a lot of Angela’s anger toward Rutherford, especially with fate having dropped “Ted” into her lap, the latest man to aggravate the hell out of her. 

“You’re an ass, Ted!” Angela had screamed drunkenly into the phone as Rutherford stood in the front doorway of Lori’s apartment, tightly clutching his overnight bag.

“Friggin’ass!” She twisted the extension cord around her waist and walked backward through a shuttered door leading into a guest bedroom. 

Rutherford hesitantly stepped inside the apartment, watching quietly as Lori swept dust balls away from the radiator in the front hallway.

“You don’t have to do that on my account,” he said. 

“This place is gross. Let me just get some of this crap cleared away.” 

Rutherford heard a light scratching sound against the entrance behind him, and he turned around to see an exotic-looking girl with a nose piercing and purple-dyed hair leaning her head against a mezuzah nailed into Lori’s wooden door frame. 

“Hey, Lori!” the girl said.

“Natalie!” Lori dropped her broom and ran over to her former neighbor, whom she had met a month or so earlier, on the day Lori’s gray long-haired hamster, resembling at the time a Bubonic Plague-infected rat, had crawled through a crack in the wall and ended up on a living room snack table two stories down. She knew there was only one reason for Natalie to have visited her, uninvited.  And it had little to do with auld lang syne, at least in the wholesome sense.

While Angela worked herself up to the point of near regurgitation with her castrating over-the-phone rants, Natalie sat on top of the window seats that lined the bottom of Lori’s living room bay window and stared wistfully out at the snow-covered streets. It was there that she waited for Ben, her ex-boyfriend as well as ex-roommate, to appear in the walkway leading to the basement apartment they had recently shared.  

“I wonder if he’ll bring a girl back,” Natalie said.  “I miss him so much …” 

Rutherford had quietly moved onto Lori’s bed, where he leaned his back against a wall and balanced a cup of orange soda on one leg.  He glanced briefly at Angela, whose reddened face was still hurling obscenities into the phone receiver, and then his eyes moved shiftily to Natalie, who was sticking her head under a stiff, brittle window shade.

“Ben is like God,” Natalie said suddenly, hopping off the window seat and walking over to Rutherford.  “Ben is God.  He’s so beautiful.”

Rutherford took a slow, cautious sip of soda, and wiped some off of his re-grown beard with the back of his hand.

“I want him so badly,” Natalie groaned, kneeling down on the floor and throwing her upper body over the edge of the bed.  “I need him.”

Angela suddenly slammed the phone down, stumbled into Lori’s bathroom, and shut the door behind her.  Lori could vaguely hear her murmur more obscenities over the sound of water gushing from a spigot.

“Oh, God, why did he have to leave me!” Natalie wailed.  “I love him more than anyone will ever love him in his whole life!”

Rutherford traced the rim of his glass with his thick, calloused finger. He cleared his throat and softly said, “Natalie?”

“What?” She had started sobbing.

“You’ve got … a …” He cleared his throat again.  “Problem.”

Natalie blinked hard several times. She started shaking her head violently.  

“Just ‘cause I love someone, I got a problem?”  She stood up and walked back over to the bay window to continue her stakeout.

Angela tugged the bathroom door open. She stomped hard across the floor, and frantically fumbled for a pack of cigarettes in her purse.

An hour or so later, Natalie, who had been sitting frighteningly quiet at the window, gasped.  She quickly stood up, backed away from it, and turned to face Rutherford and Lori.  Her bare, pierced belly inflated and deflated rapidly from underneath her beaded halter top, and she swept a shaky hand through her long, straw-like hair.

“Oh, my GOD! I don’t believe it!” she yelled.

“What?” Lori asked.

“Ben! Ben’s back! And he’s with someone!  He’s got a girl with him!” She covered her mouth and raced into the front hallway, her tight leather bell-bottoms flapping wildly as she approached the entrance to her old apartment.

Lori soon heard Natalie knocking hard on Ben’s door at the base of the stairs.  Lori looked over at Rutherford who had laid himself flat on the bed and had begun to breathe loudly into a pillow.  Angela had called her ex-boyfriend again behind a wooden, shuttered door in the adjacent room and was grumbling furiously into the receiver.

“I went on the pill for you!” Natalie’s voice spanned the length of the outside stairway leading down to the ground floor apartments.  “For you, Ben! I went on the pill!  For you!”

Lori heard a high-pitched wail, followed by a thump.  She sat frozen, uncertain and disoriented, partly waiting to hear what would happen next, and partly wanting to jump in vigilante-style and right whatever wrongs were no doubt being committed.  She finally stood up and walked toward the open front door, when she heard the sound of heavy footsteps bounding up the stairs.

Natalie rushed into the apartment, her once-tame, thick head of hair wild and unkempt, and her eyes misty and smeared with black mascara.

“He threw me like a doll!” she hollered.  “Like a little doll! He just picked me up and threw me across the hall!” She pushed past Lori and stumbled into the room where Angela was still mumbling curses with gritted teeth.

“I have to use the phone!” Natalie panted.  “I have to call 911!”

“Why?” Angela asked, starting to lower the receiver.

“I’m gonna send that bastard to jail! He just threw me … across the hall … like a little doll!”

“Ted, I’m going,” Angela hissed. She angrily slammed the phone down and handed it over to Natalie.

“Like a little doll,” Natalie repeated. She started to dial the emergency help number.

The police arrived and carted Ben away to spend First Night in jail.  Natalie sat in stone cold silence on the wooden storage compartment under the bay window, and stared thoughtfully out at the street.

“You’ve got to move on,” Angela said. She knelt down at Natalie’s side and breathed plant-wilting alcohol fumes into her face.  “Just like I have to move on.”

Natalie continued to stare outside the window, focusing on gleaming icicles dangling from the gabled roof like sleeping albino bats.

“My father was abusive,” Angela slurred.  “Just like Ted.”

Natalie shifted her position on the window seats and tried turning her head away from her, almost as if in an attempt to make her disappear.

“You’ve got to stop letting the dickheads run and ruin your life,” Angela said, her voice getting louder.  “You keep inviting the dickheads in, I keep inviting the dickheads in. ‘Cause they remind us of all those other dickheads who were there before them.  And we think we can change them and we try to change them because we never had the chance to change the other dickheads and by having a new dickhead to change we’re being given another chance.” She refilled an empty glass with peppermint schnapps.

“Would you stop yelling?” Natalie said.  “And … spitting on me?”

“I’m just saying …” Angela began.  She placed a toothpick between her lips, and when she started to try to talk again, it fell out from between her lips and into her filled glass.

“You’re driving me crazy,” Natalie said, standing abruptly and walking away from her.

Lori had almost fallen asleep on her bed, sitting up against a wall, when she saw Natalie approaching her.  She opened her itchy eyes widely and blinked hard to get some moisture flowing into them.  

 “Are you leaving now?” she asked as Natalie drew closer to her bed. Rutherford had woken up only long enough to remove his face from his own saliva to tell a police officer that he heard and saw nothing during the ordeal.  He had fallen back into a deep, restful sleep next to Lori, with an empty carton of milk perched upright between his two thick hands.

“I guess so,” Natalie said.  “Lori?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think Ben might still be willing to take me back … after tonight?” She paused.  “Do you think he might give me another chance?”

(stay tuned for chapter 15…)

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)