Any Woman's Blues (15 page)

The speaker, who introduces himself as Lyle from New York, begins his monologue.

“If you really wanna know how I was drunk versus how I am sober, all I have to tell you is that I used to live on an island off the coast of Maine with my first wife and my seven kids. There was no way to get to the mainland but a little speedboat. My idea of fun was to take the speedboat and take off for weeks, leaving the family stranded. Whenever my first wife complained of this treatment, I would deck her. I’m not proud of it, but I’d come home, punch everybody out, and take off again. They were my prisoners—see?—and I figured they
had
to take it, because I paid the bills. I’m not proud of the fact that I treated them all like my property.”

Dart listens intently, but I can’t figure out what his response is.

Emmie whispers, “Stop trying to figure out what Dart is feeling—what are
you
feeling?”

“Angry,” I say. “Disgusted.”

Lyle goes on with his saga of wife abuse, child abuse, psychological abuse, mental abuse. The world is so full of abuse of all kinds. If I were God, I’d wipe ’em all out and start again. I am furious, listening to this drunkalogue. I can identify with nothing in it. The men in the Program are such
thugs,
I think. The women are victims and the men thugs. And what am I? A little of both?

Lyle’s story concludes with his sobering up at an expensive funny farm, his leaving his first family and starting a second, his ten years in the Program and how they made him into if not a better person then at least a rotten person who no longer gets drunk and hits women and children.

At the sharing, I am dumbfounded by the number of men who claim to identify with Lyle. I hate him, hate his violence, his self-righteousness. This hatred is an excruciating emotion in the nonjudgmental atmosphere of the meeting. But does confessing to rotten behavior make it all okay?

Dart raises his hand. “I’m Dart, a drug addict and an alcoholic,” he says, “and this is my first meeting. Your story made me think of the way my father once held my face under water and tried to drown me because I talked back to him. I’m full of conflicted feelings, but I’m glad to be here. I want to get sober with all my heart.” People look at Dart as if his confession has triggered something powerful in them. How many drunks in this room have struggled through drownings and beatings just to arrive here, at this church basement in rural Connecticut? I think of the odds against all of us, and my eyes fill with tears.

I hug Dart. “Darling, I’m
so
proud of you,” I say, suddenly revising my opinion of Lyle’s story. If it can bring out this response in Dart, it must be worthwhile. I even decide to reserve judgment on the human race and not kill them all off.
Yet.

Apparently, I still think I’m God. And my sane mind, far off and barely audible, whispers: “Leila, you’re lovable, you really are. You don’t have to put up with this shit.”

 

Isadora: I don’t really like the chapters where you get into AA. AA is basically impossible to write about. What happens there
sounds
banal but really isn’t. Group process
cannot
be captured on paper.

Leila: Then what do you suggest we do? Leave our heroine drunk, despairing, hopeless? AA helped
me
.

Isadora: I
know
. After all, I sent you there. It’s only one of many roads to self-knowledge. As long as one learns that the answer is within . . . as long as one stops blaming other people . . .

—
Bessie Smith

 

 

D
art got sober with a vengeance—at least for a little while. The Program became his raison d’être. He stayed in the country with me all week, going to at least two meetings a day, talking Program, Program, Program—like a convert to some new religion—and neither drinking nor drugging.

He also milked it for all it was worth. In the name of his new “conversion,” he got me to put him on the payroll of my company for a thousand dollars a week and to get him an American Express platinum card in his own name. It was not that he actually asked me for these things openly—it was that in my new delirium about his actually
being there,
I
offered
them, and he, at first reluctantly, accepted.

I was thrilled about our new life. We were going to meetings together, working together, reading AA books together. We were not, however, sleeping together. Or rather, we were sleeping together, but we were not fucking. In sobriety, Dart’s indefatigable cock went limp. In sobriety, Dart, who never was listless (or lustless), became both. In sobriety, Dart wept and raged and screamed and soul-searched, but he did not screw.

Dart impotent was not a pretty sight. He was convinced his life was over. All men perhaps identify themselves with their cocks, but in Dart’s case the identification was total. He lay on the bed as limp as his organ. He cried real tears. He blamed me.

I tried everything. Black garter belts with bikini underwear; black garter belts with no underwear. Tongue tricks, finger grips, baby oil. Erotic videos, erotic books, magazines from
Hustler
to
Puritan
—there really is such a magazine!—from
Penthouse
to
Screw.
Nothing availed. In my mouth, Dart’s cock felt limper than my tongue. I held my baby boy in my arms and rocked him.

“It happens to everyone from time to time,” I said, starting to feel bored with my role.

“Never to me,” said Dart, “not even when I was a baby.”

“I promise you, darling, it will get better.”

“How do
you
know?” Dart asked petulantly.

And in my heart I was more on his side than on my own. If I could have “cured” him by bringing home a bimbo, I would have.

He hung in with me—so to speak—for a week, and by the end of it he was off on the motorcycle again, taking the platinum card, the paycheck, and his limp cock with him.

That was when I really crashed. That was when I wanted to drink, to throw myself under the wheels of a train, to incinerate the cowboy canvases and the film stills. Emmie reappeared to prevent me.

“I don’t want to live anymore,” I told her. “Sobriety has taken everything from me that I care about—sex, my work, Dart. . . .”

“That simply isn’t true,” she says. “You only feel that way now. Feelings are not facts.”

“Emmie, I hate my life. My life sucks. I am totally fucked. Or not fucked. I hate the dumb meetings. I hate the crummy smoke-filled basements and the stale Oreos and the Styrofoam coffee. The best thing about the Program was giving me Dart back, and now it has even taken Dart away. I can’t bear it. I am in such pain.”

“I know you are,” says Emmie. “Nothing can eradicate that pain, but if I tell you that a year from now your whole life will look different, will you believe me?”

“No.”

“Well—it will. I can only ask you to go to meetings and wait. Try to live one day at a time. Try not to anticipate. All of this will change you in ways that are so amazing you won’t believe them. Remember your maenads and crystal? It will be maenads and crystal from now on.”

But it wasn’t. It was horniness and emptiness and tears. I felt like an orphan. I missed Dart in my gut. He was a part of me—the crazy, irresponsible part maybe—the part that wanted to run, to bolt, to drink, to drug, to be Donna Giovanna, Doña Quixota, the madcap picara with no fixed address and a million aliases. Dart was precious to me because he
was
me. Or at least—a part of myself I couldn’t freely express—the bad boy roaring inside me.

I would get all dressed up and go to AA meetings and sit there, crossing my legs in a miniskirt for my plumber, the old lady who sold antiques on Route 7, the former actress who ran a gourmet shop in town. I would look longingly at the spacey thirty-year-old equine veterinarian who made barn visits all over the country (I was hoping he would visit
my
stall) and at the balding guy who sold nails in the hardware store and at the raspberry-nosed limo driver who now called me Leila rather than Ms. Sand because we were both in the Program. I would be thinking about fucking all these guys, but instead we would go out for coffee and talk Program.

I became a regular in the coffee shop in town where everyone went after meetings, and I even got to
like
the feeling of sitting and talking with a man without sizing him up as a sex object. I started to listen to men, hear what they had to say about their lives, their wives and ex-wives, their fathers, their frustrations, their cocks. I learned that if you stopped looking at a man as someone to give you an orgasm or a baby or save your life, you could really be friends with him and find him quite as human as yourself. I realized that my whole life I had regarded men as both enemy and prey—entirely without being aware of it—so therefore they must have regarded me the same way. I also realized that life without sex was not the worst thing in the world. It was like fasting. The first three days were wretched, but after a while you got high and even came to like it. As I gave up expectations from men, I found myself learning things I never could have anticipated.

The highs were high—and the lows were lower than low. Sometimes I would drive through the countryside in DART, singing at the top of my lungs, and other times I would collapse in my bed feeling like holy shit, looking desperately for my sane mind and not being able to find it. I would look at myself in the mirror, pinch the skin under my chin, and decide that I was going through menopause and was drying up for want of a good fuck. I am not the sort of woman who goes without sex without a protest. I will not go gentle into that good night. I have always regarded a stiff cock as a health and beauty aid—and here I was, living without my main beauty treatment, health food, and sleeping potion. I considered suicide in various forms—self-immolation with my paintings, carbon monoxide poisoning, driving off a cliff in Dart’s car. (I couldn’t do sleeping pills or tranquilizers, because I was in the Program!) But then I would see in my mind’s eye the distraught expressions on the faces of my sweet little twins—their horror, their betrayal, their lostness—and I would change my mind. There was no way I would do that to my girls. I was beginning to understand that all my actions had consequences.

Understanding the consequences of one’s actions is not the same thing as guilt. Guilt is useless. So is self-flagellation. But understanding that your acts have consequences and that you have choices is another matter altogether. This was the main thing the Program was starting to teach me. I began to realize that I was an energy field, whose motions left reverberations through the universe. And I began to take the responsibility—and the credit—for those reverberations, to realize that I was not a victim of “fate.” Yes, God, Goddess, the Higher Power, the Holy Ghost, worked
through
me; I was a human vessel for a divine energy force. But to be a vessel was not the same as to be a victim or a pawn. Life flowed through me, and therefore my body and mind had to be respected. They were temples of spirit. They could not lightly be thrown away.

 

Isadora: I must admit I get very itchy when you fall into all this Shirley Malarkey stuff about Higher Powers, Temples of Spirit, healing crystals,
und so weiter.
The sex slop is bad enough, but all that
spiritual
shit adds insult to injury! Do you think it’s what the age demands?

Isadora: In other words, “It’s what’s happenin’, baby”? Leila: For one who started the whole thing, you really are
close
-minded.

Isadora: I’m
sorry
I started it, really I am. I think we’d all be better off in crinolines and chastity belts.

Leila: You don’t
really
. . . .

 

I began to meditate—my own form of meditation, in which I sat alone on my hillside (the grass blades tickling my knees and ass, the little ants crawling harmlessly over my immobilized legs) and focused on the middle distance (a humpbacked cloud, a silver silo glinting in the sun) and blessed God for my life.

I began to notice things I had never noticed before: the red raspberry brambles growing alongside my driveway, the water lilies in my clogged pond, the golden lichen covering the stones at the perimeter. I began to thank God for the lichen, for the raspberries, for the clouds. I began to praise.

One day, sitting in the grass, gazing into the middle distance, I began to repeat like a mantra: thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you, and with each phrase I felt more and more grateful, more and more alive.