UNDER THE RUG... The Water Under a Bridge - by BobKat

Making much ado about nothing may be your opinion about my previous post - "Reflections".

In part, I feel, since it lacks a history. My John Miller series describes some of the crucial points, but as BobKat, I haven't yet disclosed much of what led up to events that night, my response, and why the event traumatized me so much. It's the notion that as people we need to have hard shells, like turtles. But this is my blog, my story, and yes I did the "hard-shelled turtle" routine... but under the right amount of pressure, a turtle's shell can be as fragile as an eggshell. And my shell broke...

The clash was not between my mother and myself, but rather, the culture she lived by, and the culture I grew up in. I don't hate my mother for what she did. I could fault her with several basic flaws - lack of communication, lack of interpersonal boundaries/recognition of them, inability to "think outside the box", prejudice... but it's really not the point, to find fault with her... the point, is given the culture clash I experienced at the most crucial time of my life, I was left devastated and broken, when in truth, I'd discovered my true self, had excelled educationally, discovered untold wonders of life, experienced the best of times, and a once shy, underacheiving, lone introverted youth grew into a dynamic, popular, inspired, twenty something success story. An impossible story, that was in fact true... and the thing that most stunned me was based on the clash of cultures, my mother wouldn't open herself to may discoveries in life - convinced she was that I had left the short road, which is the only road in life, and I'd gone to the dark-side.

My father... he was my best friend during those days, but there was nothing he could do, or was willing to do to open my mother up to the possibility her son was truly happy and prospering. She was stuck in her ways... and that meant, during the best years of my life - the years that could have made me a star for life, my mother became my unfortunate antagonist of the story. And given my dependency on my parents growing up, my mother had a lot of power over me, then, and it became a battle of epic proportions.

It ended when I found what i needed in life, when I found me, myself and I, when i was moving to a new world to use the knowledge I'd gained from a little more than 3 intense years of education and experience. It ended during one phone call home the night before i was to leave on my new journey, a night where over 3 years of battle was put to an end in the method of a curse - a mother's curse to her son.

It isn't right, and it isn't fair... and it isn't something someone should carry with them for life! It also isn't physical violence, which many people carry with them through life from growing up. But what it is, is a violence, let any violence, that's unjust, and wrong. There is an age of transition where as children, we become adults. As the child it hard to see the "forest through the trees", but as an adult, it should be clear. My father saw it, and was encouraging... the only reason I survived. But even he had to admit, "the town is too small for your mother and you", and by town he meant the state. Which is why I made plans to move west.

It was the perfect storm, that night on the phone with my mother.

I begin there, in that time, because, it became that point in my life where my future was severed from my past... for all the bad and good that may or might have come from it, there is now what there is. The purpose of my blog, this topic - "Under the Rug", is the one story that needs to be told.

It needs to be told just as the life of many person's need be told... not only because I made the mistake of letting go several very good friends, unintentionally, by moving away, following my "plan" which was more being made for me, as I would have/should have stayed.

Within a month after I returned from AZ to move back in with my parents at age 24, defeated, I was out with my friend's Earl and Joni, at around 11PM we stopped at a coffee shop, and to my surprise my intimate friend Diane was working there. I hadn't seen her in almost a year, and she was a sight for sore eyes... but it didn't last long. The curse was soon to be etched in stone - a tombstone.

In several short-stories I've written about Diane, I call her Germaine. There's actually a story somewhere out there from those days I wrote to a woman bar-tender, that I really liked. I called it "Echo's of Germaine", a 40 page story. I also have my own originally story, in a spiral notebook, also 40-50 pages, titled, "The Story of Germaine Echo".

Diane was 27 when her and I had an intimate connection one night in 1977. I was 23 at the time. It was a Friday night, and on Fridays the Arts Center building was locked down at 7PM. People could still get in, if they had a key, which was seldom, or if they knocked on the door/rang the bell, and one of us custodians authorized there entry. Ahh, power.... But it was true, normally, between 3 and 11PM M-F myself or my half Italian/half Apache co-worker had command of the Fine Arts Center. We had our menial cleaning jobs to do, but we had plenty of free-time too. We also had lots of "projects" we did - both official, and private. It was, for all practical purposes, the end of an era... the end of the period in our current society where "freedom and self-responsibility" were accepted. Where art flourished and the combined power of the 60's hippies and the 70's enlightened brought about enormous changes...

The Viet-Nam war ended... the war that never should have been, but was. The war that defied the voice of the American people. The government coming to terms with racial desegradation, youth, "turned on and tuned out", free-love and recreational drugs... a free for all with Timothy Leary's death being the mantra and the fear... a new age for women, the Equal Rights Era... the origin of tie-dyed clothing, of communes, of Woodstock, Watkin's Glen.... a new age where a twenties somethings person I witnessed the birth of a nation, and the death of a nation.

That night in 1979 when Earl, Joni and I met with Diane at the coffee shop... my life came to an end...

Diane told me that night she was going to kill herself...

This shouldn't have come as a surprise to me... when I met Diane she told me quite frankly the reason she was a nursing student at the college was because she "wanted to learn the correct way to kill herself". Oh, I took her seriously, but I could hardly act on her confiding in me. Lot's of people confided in me. And she wasn't the only person comtemplating suicide. I met her in 1976, and we enjoyed many meetings and shared much.

Myself, I'd understand suicide... but Joni did... and she talked with Diane for awhile...

I pleaded with Diane not to do it... and begged her to come to my apartment after she was done work - we'd work something out.

At 10AM the following morning a mutual friend called. Diane had killed herself in the bathroom at the General Hospital.

Diane was married to a loser, from what she told me. She had two children, Rudy and Mazanna, both between 6 and 8 years old. They lived with their mother, and the husband was mostly gone, which Diane liked... she showed me the 38 revolver she'd kill herself with one day. I tried to understand but couldn't.

I'd met another beautiful young woman during my years as a custodian at the college, the wife of a guy a grew up with. She was model attractive, down to earth, and very smart. She'd never confessed her desire to commit suicide, except to say one day - "it's so awkward being human". She told me she "felt her body was weird", which I listened to, but again didn't understand. She killed herself.

As did Diane. As did several others... and my conclusion - our society and it's rigidity and narrow-minded norms was destructive, and discouraging.

At 25 I was a broken man with a lot of personal power still in reserve. It would take all I had to make it to age 30... I may have felt defeated, but I was still young enough that I could try and be a phoenix...  I moved to Boston... it was the beginning of my self-exile. There was no question I had to make my own home somewhere new. That my past was gone, and my future bleak. To make matters worst I came down with a serious urinary tract infection, and chronic fatigue after a really bad flu. I'd be sick for years, and initially lost 20 pounds... which took years to bring back.

Overall, my years in Boston were very good... I hadn't planned on continuing being a custodian, but as my father said, you need to use what skills you have, and to move to a new place being a custodian was a good move. I was fortunate - I can't name the place, but I got a job at a prestigious Art School and museum in Boston, which included being a security guard. In 1981 I received my BA degree... while working at the school. For awhile there it seemed like I might make a come-back, but I didn't. I was still physically ill. And doctors could find nothing wrong with me, despite my symptoms. Depression became a familiar feeling. My mother continued to be the antagonist in my life, pointing out all that was "wrong" with me.

Moving to Boston meant for awhile cannabis wasn't available to me... but that didn't last long. It lasted long enough that I started drinking a lot - wine. I also did a lot of writing.

I had new family in Boston also... my father's sister's daughter, the oldest one, Wini... my first cousin 3 years older than me, and a Harvard grad... she was a wild one... and you can say, she was and would be a critical part of my life for over the next 10 - 20 years...

Next time... "The Decadent 70's"...