Sometimes I skim through the works in progress folder and stumble upon something I never finished. This is from that folder, started in 2004.
They make the best friends, and you never have to wonder what it’s like to make love to them… lovers from the past are not forgotten, and if they are, then they were not true loves, they were just flings. In my life, lovers have remained in my heart in a separate compartment, just as their letters, and photographs and mementos are kept in separate stationary boxes in my trunk.
Some lovers keep in touch with me, and others vanished after the break-up. Last month two former lovers contacted me. One from 1977, and one in 1984. I have always said one man is not enough; I need three or four circulating my life. Even if I was married, my mantra of ‘the more men the better’ would not be negotiable, and today, that holds true. I’ve been advised by Rudy, that men will read this and assume that I am intimate with my men friends; and I said not all men will, and he said, oh yea, that’s how men think.
This is a story of lovers reuniting, in different cities than where they met, older, refined in sentiment, and loved in a capacity greater than they once were, as lovers. To be continued.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
The sky is brush stroked with rivers of grey clouds interceding the passing blue of the day. I feel breathed, my heart exhausted, and my spirit is groping for remission, like an Advil into a hangover.
I remember my childhood, my first kiss, the day I announced to a class of fellow writers that I was a writer too. Our teacher, Emily, instructed all of us to stand up and say it. I resisted internally, andafterward the effect was as she promised, it became second nature.
I don’t know how I will remember the dragon episode, which turn in the labyrinth will remain most vivid; until now, imagining a folder and how I would label it, The We of Me, the phrase borrowed from Carson McCullers short story, “The Member of the Wedding.” I read all of Carson’s books when I lived in Saratoga Springs, NY. Carson spent several seasons as an artist in residence at Yaddo Art Colony in Saratoga, and was known to escape at night down to Congress Street, and sit in a saloon sipping brandy. The story is entwined around Frankie, a young girl in love with her brother, who has just married and is moving to Alaska. Frankie wishes to go with them. “A sweet momentary illumination of adolescence before the disillusion of adulthood,”[4wikipedia “It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”
Last summer, I was not hanging around looking out at the world, I was on the porch, serving wine and crispy chips, while Rudy loaded Pete Rodriquez in the CD player,” Can I play it one more time?” he shouted, and John basting chicken over the Barbeque, draped in my William Sonoma apron, and I am drifting through the epilogue unaware that these moments will turn into sculpted memories, of a summer in Santa Fe. But for then, we lasted until the sun melted in the horizon and Rudy ran out of Kelly’s Cove stories. We were joined, we had our own club. Sometimes Jewels joined us, or LimoLoren, and there was a ribbon around the house, all of us were tied to the harmony of the we of me.
John won’t be coming back; there is too much brittleness, and astonishment in my life. As before, but not the same, Rudy is here, he just appeared in the doorway, “Come see what I did in the garage.” Our garage was transformed into a movie theater after I mistakenly poked the wrong button on the gate remote, and the automatic doors crashed into Rudy’s van. Yesterday, he strung red lights along the perimeter of the adobe building. He does these things to cheer me.
A lot of people I know are falling out of love, or have been asked to stop loving someone they thought they loved. There’s a group of us at La Posada; Victor the Cuban singer just broke up with Ruth, “ I’m going crazy–I’m Latin, without a woman—I cannot do it.” And Eddie, who just broke up with his girlfriend, “Two years-Oh well, I just move on. What can you do?” and Tobey; who has figured out how to forget his girlfriend’s fatal fall from a hillside where she was hiking, he is now the master of mingling. Then there’s Sam Shepard, whose pain is transparent, without a spoken word, it’s in his vigilant Mustang eyes, and in the angle he looks at the world. There are a lot of us; who have fallen from grace with someone who thought they could love us. Then, comes the reoccurring incident; whether it is about money, lovemaking, or the act of communicating with anger or restraint, that suddenly bloats up to the size of a thunder cloud, and bursts through all the promises and collective dreams.
After my burst with John, I went over to La Posada to escape the chattering in my head. My pal, White Zen, who I’ve named for her constant calm joined me at the bar. Raul was on duty, he’s been there since before all the Anglos discovered Santa Fe. He’s seen the white lightning of movie stars, and the Indian Shamans with feathers and folklore. Raul takes all of us in his stride; which is slow as molasses. Don’t try and rush Raul, because he will ignore you, and your drink will be watery by the time you get it.
I was sitting there, with a glass of wine, when I recognized the man next to White Zen. At the same moment, the juxtaposition of reckoning beckoned us off our stools and we hugged. Dancing Bear, I’ve missed you I said, or something like that. Dancing Bear is a New York Santa Fe success. Unlike so many people I’ve met, he lives here, works globally, and he’s in big demand right now.
Dancing Bear smiles even if his mouth isn’t smiling, you know he is inside. He’s in the tidal wave of dreams coming true, but not without their own claim ticket on your soul. Someone is always disposed if you’re catching big tuna. Now this night, goes like this.
“ Look if I don’t fuck up this dance–if I don’t fuck it up; it’s going to be something I’m really proud of.” He emphasizes this with one hand, raised eyebrows and a slight bend in his neck.
“And you won’t. How long have you lived here?”
“Do you know how I ended up in Santa Fe? I was living in Los Angeles, driving on that freeway all day, and a friend said, ‘ Hey, you otta come to Santa Fe.’ Never even heard of it, so I came, that was 1983(I think it was 83) and bought a house, and moved here permanent a few years ago. I could live in New York–in a minute, I love New York, Los Angeles, no- what for, my daughter’s not growing up in the Palisades.” He looks at Raul, they share another story, because they’ve known each other years, then Dancing Bear slaps the wooden bar with one hand, his face creases into a private memory; “El Farol!” he shouts. “Those are the memories, everyone was there, it was the most amazing time.”
“John and I used to go every Tuesday,” Dancing Bear wasn’t listening; he was swept into the memory. His eyes looked right through the mirror behind Raul’s bar. I wished I had seen it then. I didn’t get to El Farol until 1998.
“ Now—okay–I mean right now, after all these years,
I have my ex-wife-ex-wives, and their children, husbands, whatever, and they are in my life-okay–they are in my life.” I tried to speak, but his bear mouth wiped me out.
“They are in my life.. forever.”
“What does Dancing Dora say about that?”
“I’ll tell you what she says; they all sit down to her table at Thanksgiving. All of them. And it’s cool. Not all the time… this one with that problem, the kid with that, but in the end it works.. it works.”
“ It didn’t work with John and me.”
“ You got nothing to be ashamed of.. okay. A lot of people cannot handle it.. my friends think I’m crazy.”
“So do mine.” I said.
Lula Carson McCullers adapted the book, A Member of the Wedding to stage in 1950, then to film in 1987, and into television in 1997. Lula wrote until her body failed her, and her hands crippled. She dictated her unfinished autobiography “Illumination and Night Glare” (1999) just before she died. She wrote her first book at twenty-three, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Carson’s major theme; the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love.” – Tennessee Williams.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
This is an excerpt from the memoir I’ve been working on many years. The first manuscript was 800 pages; about three of them were worth reading. The book mutated about 2000 times.
“What’s it like knowing your father is a gangster? Did you know when you were a teenager? Did your father kill anyone? Did you ever meet Bugsy? Aren’t you afraid of his friends? You know they kill people.”
I was thirteen years old when my best friend told me my father was a gangster. She didn’t mean any harm. We told each other everything. We were standing in the Brentwood Pharmacy one day in 1966, and we turned the book rack around until we found ”The Green Felt Jungle.”
“That’s the book, let me look first and see what it says.” She whispered. I waited while she flipped trough the pages.
“Oh my God, there he is,” she said grasping my shoulders. We hunched over the book and read the description of my father beneath his photograph.
“Allen Smiley was the only witness to the murder of Bugsy Siegel.”
“What does that mean, who is Bugsy Siegel?” I asked.
“Shush, not so loud, I’m afraid to tell you this Luellen, it’s awful. I don’t believe it. “
“What is it? Tell me.”
“Bugsy Siegel was a gangster, he killed people. Your father was his friend.”
I don’t think I should read this, “I said replacing the book on the rack.
“Don’t tell your father I told you,” she warned.
“Why not?”
“My mother told me not to tell you, swear to me you won’t tell your father.”
“I swear, come on let’s go.”
My father called himself Allen Smiley. The FBI tagged him “armed and dangerous.” The Department of Justice referred to him as the “Russian Jew.” I called him Daddy. e had salty sea blue eyes blurred by all the storms he’d seen. When I said something funny, his eyes crystallized and flattened like glass, smoothing out the bad memories. He was always a different color, dressed in perfectly matched shades of pink, silver and blue. My small child eyes rested cheerfully on his silk ties, a collage of jewel tones. The feel of his fabric was soft like blankets. He was very interesting to look at when I was a child and open to all this detail.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
The course we choose to study doesn’t begin in school; it begins the moment we recognize that life is our teacher. I chose the course of love between a man and a woman. Yet all I’ve learned from Anais Nin, Joan Didion, and Lawrence Durrell, about love isn’t guiding me. I have to start over, and develop wisdom based on my own experiences.
The morning is crisp as iceberg lettuce, a day of clarity and stillness. Outside my bedroom window, the light illuminates portions of the pine tree, and the walls of our neighbor’s home. On my side of the glass, there are shadows and dissonance. It feels like months since the last column, and unwinding what events took place since, is going to be as piercing as the southwest sun when it shines in my eyes.
A few days before Christmas, I was in the kitchen with two friends, visiting from Boulder. Aaron, whom I’ve not seen in four years, and Lilith, whom I’ve just met. Aaron was the subject of one of my columns, the lone man standing on a mountain top, climbing the rocks of life and nature, as he ascends to the distant and dangerous vistas of life. Lilith, an angelic petite woman, with eyes wide as moons, and uncontrollable affection for what is reachable. I am preparing dinner, and our discussion is about love, about me and John, and about Rudy, whom Aaron has rendered a mentor since we all met in Saratoga Springs, 2000. We celebrated Aaron’s twenty-first birthday with him. He was ignited by individual far from conventional thinking even back then.
“Remember the time you and Rudy moved the farm table outside the window, over the second story roof, and down to the porch. How did you do that?” I said.
“Ropes. I couldn’t believe this guy– half my size and he’s carrying this eight foot wooden farm table over one shoulder. “
“ Yea, and now he’s carrying a Dragon. Oh Aaron, those were innocent days weren’t they? ”
“ Yea. Was that really eleven years ago; it feels more like a century.”
“ That’s because you live without any boundaries.”
Lilith picked up the camera and started shooting a video. I put on a hat and sunglasses for the camera, and began using the pots as instruments. They frivolity reached a high note, just as the phone rang.
“ Hi, it’s me. I’m coming back. It’s over.”
“ I’ve heard that before Rudy. “
“ I’m almost in Flagstaff, I’ll be there tomorrow.”
I sat down on the stool, and looked to Aaron for something wise and assuring to settle my spoon-stirring anxiety.
He was expressionless. The intervention of Rudy, who moments ago I was raking with hopelessness was on his way here, arriving the first night of Chanukah, which had a similar mystical tune to it.
“ John’s coming in on Friday — Oh God! I don’t know, this sounds too much like a Hallmark movie. I don’t believe this. When is it going to end?”
“ Lue, you amaze me. “
“ I wish I’d stop amazing people.”
Lilith and Aaron took off the next day and I busied myself with brooms and sponges; the activity most relied upon when life is messy. I did not want to shell-shock John with the news, because he was in the final stages of his script, and Rudy was on the road, where at any point, the Dragon might reappear, and whisk his tail back to her nest. Until he drove up, there was still a screen of fuzzy details.
I’d just come from Luminara Lounge where I’d met Jewels, my confidante and baby-sitter through the last four months of Dragonfaire.
“ Is he here?” She said breathless from rushing.
“ I saw him pull in the driveway. I left earlier and drove around until I could reach you. I don’t want to be in the house when he arrives.”
“How are you going to handle things with Rudy?”
“ Beats me. I know I have to suppress my anger; that’s like suppressing my appetite after a week of starvation.”
“ Which reminds me, are you eating?”
“ More or less?”
” LouLou. You have to eat! How do you think he’ll feel?”
“ Like a turkey on Thanksgiving.”
“What do you think John will say?
“ He’ll be speechless.”
Jewels lifted her thirty pound life jacket that a mother of two children, wife, business owner, and adventurer swings with the ease of a dancer and wrapped her arms around me.
I returned to the garden path at La Posada and in the moonlight, paced the icy walkway waiting for John to answer the phone. “ Hi baby.”
“ Hi sweetheart–how are you?”
“ I’m still working.. but it’s going really good. I got the latest storm report, and it looks like I’ll have to drive out Christmas Eve day.”
“ I made reservations for five, is that too early?”
“ I’ll be there way before that. Got to get up early and load up the car with presents.”
I grinned, and kicked the stones in the pathway.
“ John… Rudy’s here. I didn’t want to tell you until he actually arrived.”
” John. Are you there?”
How do I word his laughter, a long winded guttural explosion without pause, that struck my humor and I joined him, and our laughter sort collapsed into one, like making love or something, and it felt so good, I didn’t want to stop.
“ Never a dull moment at Gallery LouLou.”
“ I haven’t seen him yet, he’s in the house. “
“ Call me later, I need a drink.”
You couldn’t cut the tension with a semi-truck head on, as Rudy and I stood feet away in the Staab House at La Posada. I was leaning against the bar, observing his new leather Puma’s.
“ Well, I’m here.” His crooked smile faded when I didn’t step forward or greet him with a smile.
“ Yes, you are.”
Then the staff engulfed him in warmth and greetings and I just about threw my head back and howled from the absurdity, and the bedazzlement I felt lifted me out of myself, because I couldn’t really stand there and be a part of the abstraction of life.
“ Can we have dinner together?” He uttered.
“ I’ll be here.”
I got through half the dinner, and then suddenly felt the drum beating in my rage cage and dashed out. The next few days were like waiting for a frozen chicken to thaw out. I poked at him, and he was solid, I poked a day later, asking questions, and he released a mumble of words, “ I can’t open up yet. I will in a few days. Just tell me what we need to do.”
“ John’s not coming out. He changed his mind.”
“ Why?”
I glared at him with blade sharp eyes.
“ Because of me. That’s not what I want to hear. I’ll call him.”
“ NO. Do not call him. You have no idea what your … dragon episode did to us. Are you sorry Rudy? Are you truly sorry or are you still pining for the Bird. And I would like to know the chances of you going back before I get any ideas about smiling or laughing. ”
“Yes, of course I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ll go back.. but I have to be honest.”
I turned my back and kept walking. The next turn came from John, “I’m coming out; I just pray that we’ll have a chance to be together, and have a peaceful Christmas.”
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
A woman’s heart is fluid in her body, and a man’s heart is In his sexuality. That is why there is a headache, and a mood, and an exhaustion of feeling. We have to express this to our man so he understands.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”
Anais Nin. 1931
Expecting snow, expecting pleasure… we are all in some range of expectation. Where you may be hunched under an umbrella waiting for the light to turn green, so you can find shelter inside a café, a shop, where someone else waits for the arrival of a friend, the death of a loved one, the offer in writing, the publication, the house to sell, the decision to resonate, the pain and suffering to subside.
I think of something my father used to say, “You made your bed, now you lie in it.” And another one, “It’s your lot in life.” I began writing Smiley’s Dice in 2002 from a desk in a Solana beach rental. Maybe in two years I’ll have a column in a newspaper or magazine, and maybe I won’t. It’s my lot: to not give up.
Santa Fe is blistery cold, the street dry and the sidewalks baking sheets of white snow. Out my window is a metallic sky that hints of more snow. This sky slows the rhythms of the body and mind; it invades the hurried motions of pedestrians, vendors and hotel staff. There is an absence of light that intercepts outward vision, so we turn inwards. I do anyway. And because I gorge myself on the emotionalism, and interior life, I have not slid into home base.
That is why it has taken me longer to launch my writing for worldly consumption. Some of us are not in a rush to wave the “I made it” flag. Some favor holding back, until the other elements of our character life are lived; our destructiveness, fear, pettiness, falsity, greed, so many steps to climb.
You and I have to trust in the pattern of our lives, the invisible thread that taunts us, teases us, and even torments us. My lot, postponed progress, maturity, development.
I was an A cup until college, without direction, a major in English, Art, and Psychology, before dropping out. My major interest was the countryside beyond Sonoma State campus walls, the roaming cows, and flock of geese over the swamps, the crooked paths winding through eucalyptus woods, the poetry pasted on bulletin boards in the coffee house, the farmers in the pasture.
“When are you going to start taking your life seriously?” My father asked this question every few years, and every few years, I lied.
I was adulterated when I was first employed at the old Gibraltar Savings & Loan on Wilshire Boulevard. I was serious about how they measured my performance, and was vicariously unconcerned with personal gratification. How excited could I be about trust deeds? I cannot even recall what I was doing; just the name of the department, the Beneficiary Demand department.
All that restrictive training, in punctuality, production, and prudence, exploded late in life. I did not discover my passionate interest in writing until I was forty.I didn’t own a home until I was forty-seven, did not stop biting my nails until I was fifty-four, did not learn to love and trust until last year.
I developed friendships late in life, now I honor a treasure chest of sterling gems that glitter from near and far. Friends that abandon tasks to listen to me talk about moving the furniture again, and consent to my absence because the victor of writing has kidnapped me.
It is a day later, the sky is unchanged; still the cloud cover is nailed to the sky. In random conversations I have heard of people’s hardships, of sacrifice and compromise during this holiday season. No more travel talk about Paris, and the Orient. No more extended vacations or extravagances. We have to give ourselves a holiday from lament, from error, and from exasperation. I tell myself not to be combative, not this year, and don’t polish the guilt and remorse, just let it fade away. Don’t open those links to real estate values, retirement funds and investments; open the link to History. Remember what the greatest generation was handed; remember soup lines, suicides, and World War II.
Mostly don’t reprimand your partner for unrealized expectations; They are most fragile to your voice and touch. The adventure in livingness is to look at your lot; and ride it with amusement and wonder.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
Mace and I returned to San Rafael and rented a little cottage of our own. Mace painted the rooms lemon yellow, and I glided around in dreamy domestic ecstasy. In the sensuous seventies, the preamble to the essentials of living was not a prospering career, and getting ahead. It was with a minimal amount of work, improvise, meditate, and stay high. Some Indian guru coined it, “going with the flow.”
I learned to cook fettuccine, entertain Mace ’s guests, and polish tennis shoes. Above all, I learned how to read adults, in a way I had never considered before. Mace explained the concealed messages in spoken language, and how to recognize the signals of deception, arrogance, racism, and affectation. He was continually pointing out, people’s affectations, while he drove me around in our vintage MBZ 250 SEL.
For money, resources fluctuated between teaching tennis, calling his agent in San Francisco, (he did commercials for Gallo Wine) and working on various deals. There was never one steady job, he was the Rocket Man, and people gravitated towards us. After meeting someone one day, they would be at our dinner table that night.
Amidst all the activity, I was suffering the guilt of watching my college funds vanish. That was the tragedy, but there is always sacrifice in this kind of passion. Just as my father had warned me, Mace did not refrain from spending my money. I withdrew from the College of Marin, and for a while worked part time in a small bohemian cafe in Mill Valley.
One very early morning, while we were still sleeping, the doorbell rang. Mace rushed to the door prepared to admonish whomever was knocking. When I came striding over in my silk Rita Hayworth negligee, I was astounded.
“Luellen, who is this guy, he says you know him?”
“Dale, it’s all right Mace, I know him, he’s a friend of my father’s.
“What kind of friend?” Mace demanded. Dale stood there in the archway, dressed in a wrinkled suit, his sandy hair heavily slicked to appear arranged, and eyes shaded behind rose tinted sunglasses.
“Mace , I’m just here to make sure Luellen is all right.” Dale shifted his weight between both legs. He looked taller than I remembered.
“She’s fine, you can see that.” Mace replied.
“Mace , let Dale in the door.” I embraced Dale momentarily, as I always had in the past. His edginess did not alarm me; he was always burdened by some desperate measures. My father was continually counseling him about his tribulations.
Mace hustled Dale into the living. I went into the bedroom to get dressed. My mind raced between images of my father and Dale, the run-around guy that obeyed orders. He did not resemble a tough guy; he was the Sterling Hayden type, the guy always on the run. Mace appeared in the doorway, and rushed over to me.
“Who is that guy?”
“He’s just a friend of my Dad, don’t worry he’s not dangerous…. I don’t think. ”
“He came to get you, your father sent him Lue,” he looked at me apprehensively.
“Is that what he said?”
“He doesn’t have to. We’ll take him out to breakfast; I want to be in public, just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“Just get dressed quickly.”
“You won’t let him take me will you?” I said panicking.
“NO! I can handle it.” Mace assured.
We drove into Larkspur to our favorite café. Mace led us to a table outside in the garden, in the warmth of sunlight. Mace orchestrated the meeting, so it was relaxed and enjoyable for Dale, and slowly Dale began to unwind. He removed his suit jacket and ate heartily after the long drive. They talked, and I confirmed what Mace offered.
“We live modestly now, but not for long, I’m going to manage the Tennis club, and Lue’s going to get her real estate license. Isn’t that right honey?”
“Yes, that’s right.” I acknowledged. Mace had been advising me to get a license.
“Dale, you should hang out with us a while, I’ll take you around. You can see for yourself what our life is about. I’m not hiding anything Dale, I love Luellen, and her father knows it.”
“How is my father Dale?” I interrupted.
“Luellen, your father isn’t angry with you. He just wants to make sure you’re all right.”
“Why didn’t he come with you?” Dale hunched over the table and looking directly at Mace . “He was afraid of what he might do.” Mace stood up suddenly.
“ Dale, I’m not a stupid man. I know about him too.”
Things deteriorated from there. Mace and Dale argued, I pleaded to leave the restaurant. In the car, I managed to dissuade the arguing with a hysterical outburst, and tears. Then I mediated Mace and Dale, whose conflicting assignments were bordering on a hit in an alley.
“I need you both to calm down. Dale has to return without me, and my father is going to be angry. Mace , Dale needs our help.” Mace responded by retiring his grudge and substituting some personal stories along with several rounds of backgammon. When Dale was ready to leave, I took him aside.
“ See Dale, I’m happy here, I can’t go back with you.”
“Are you sure? I can still take care of Mace ! I will not hurt him, just stall him so you can get in the car. I’m not coming back again Luellen.” He said.
“Dale, he won’t let me go. He really loves me.”
“If that’s so, let him prove it. Come with me now, he’ll follow after you when he can handle things.”
“Dale, I just can’t go with you.”
“Luellen, your father’s gonna blame me.”
“I’m sorry Dale, please understand.”
“ He’s going to be furious.”
“Well, you’ve seen him that way before right? He’ll calm down.” I spoke with feigned confidence. I had no idea how he would respond, but I knew he would blame Dale. He passed me his telephone number on a piece of paper, shook hands with Mace and told him to take care of me. Then he took of in his Cadillac.
Mace returned to the living room boasting of his conquest.
“Dale was supposed to threaten me with a gun, but he liked me too much to go through with it.”
“Did he show you the gun?”
“Yea. Lue, I told you-I am not easily intimidated.”
In the next six months, I passed my real estate exam and Mace was setting up a business. Mace had a friend who owned a Mortgage Banking Company in San Francisco. I was going to sell new residential developments and Mace was going to secure clients. We moved into a charming little house in Ross and commuted to the city to have meetings. We dined with successful men and their wives and I tried to read all the signals. Soon my father would see me on the sophisticated side of the street, leaving the hippie hibernating spell for good.
Then one day the meetings stopped. Mace retreated to the tennis court and played the rocket man. He ignored my questions and concern for our future. The car was sold, the guests stopped coming over, and Mace lived in stubborn silence. The day came I had to make the phone call.
“Hi Daddy, it’s me.”
“Yea, what is it you want?”
“I want to come home and start over.” I replied.
“On one condition.”
“What?”
“You never go back to him; you have to be absolutely sure.”
“I’m sure; I want to leave right away.” I said.
Within a week, I was back in my father’s apartment sitting on the blue and green crushed velvet sofa.
“Look now sweetheart, stop your crying, at least you didn’t come back pregnant. There is nothing to cry about now, you made a mistake and it’s over, you got your whole life ahead of you. Don’t bury yourself in the sand, nothing to be ashamed of; you ought to know the mistakes I’ve made. You couldn’t come close.”
Mace continued to pursue me. He was met by my father’s warning, ”If you come within ten feet of her, I’ll scratch your eyes out and stuff them down your throat.” Any dice to throw Email:folliesls@aol.com
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
in progress folder and stumble upon something I never finished. This is from that folder, started in 2004.![[ R ] Man Ray - Jean Cocteau and Wire Sculptur...](https://i0.wp.com/farm6.static.flickr.com/5269/5583267661_4e0e57e625_m.jpg "[ R ] Man Ray - Jean Cocteau and Wire Sculptur...")
LUELLEN SMILEY ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 