1985-1988
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
January 10, 1985
Los Angeles
Dear Deidre,
Ten years ago this month we were in our squalid basement apartment together, getting ready for another semester of university, more than enough More to Milton.
Recounting the details it sounds a somber January. There was life underground and airless. There was you on your mattress deposited like a derelict Buddha beneath a light bulb forever illuminated and surrounded by dirty clothes. The image is indelible. There was me trailing around the rest of the premises leaving hairs in the sink, making toast and tea and Campbell’s soup. Vainly decorating with disintegrated leather-bound Dickens editions on the mantelpiece I’d dragged in from used book stores.
We were there together, holding one another’s hands in unspoken
ways trying to resurrect from old patterns that were crushing
something inside. I was emerging from my unhappy days hating my
family but living their life and you had just made the penultimate break with Alex. When was it we lasted until? March? Then we both returned to the untenable lives we’d temporarily deserted.
Also ten years ago, in the summer of ’75, you beat me to the punch by leaving abruptly for Europe impelled by emotional
circumstance; while I saved and planned and waited and planned and finally left in November. It was another emotional blow, a death in the family, that sent you back to a desolate winter while I endured a different kind of loneliness in that London hostel. There were periods spent in a kind of wilderness where the security of major touchstones, including one another, were absent. We had our own means of traveling to those
emotional recesses, similar to our means of getting to Europe: yours was unexpected, unplanned, fueled by a sudden sweep of emotion; mine was self-imposed, not with enough comprehension to know why or what would really happen but chosen nonetheless. I needed to seem to control my course, you needed to seem to be hurled by fate.
Ten years later my compulsion to feel in control has waned. I roll more easily along, generally, even with the punches. But I am not transfigured. I retain a taste for independence like I do for red meat.
Every once in a while it’s a gut gripping thrill to sink my incisors into some fleshy situation, rip away what I want and retire to a protected place unchallenged to devour the reeking reward. Sound tasty? It can be a vile time to be around me. Sometimes innocents come sniffing around inquiring after my health and get their throats ripped out for their charity.
Not too long ago one of our neighbors crawled through our open living room window at three in the morning and stole my coin collection. Which was twenty pounds less to haul around and so in a way a blessing. The coin collection was about the last physical link in the heavy chain of my past which I’d been dragging through my twenties. Absence from all things stowed in my mother’s basement didn’t lighten the burden of still possessing them.
love George
February 8
Los Angeles
Dear Deidre,
I’ll be within easy commuting distance to you during the week of February 23 – March 2. I am going to New York for a business trip of all things.
I haven’t any idea what my schedule will be, but I expect that it won’t be too heavy. I could probably leave one morning from New York for Philadelphia, stay the night and return to New York the next day. Logistically it’s possible. Emotionally, is it feasible?
I want to see you. I am also afraid of it. Maybe we’ll have to part agreeing to disagree. That gives me a chill. Listen I don’t know why I feel the apprehension, obviously it’s not predicated on what I know is there. It’s just brewing in my mind. Right alongside it however is a wonderful excitement which ultimately overrides any caution I have.
And now your postcard has just arrived. You utter normalcy has made my bogeys seem misplaced. If grad school is preventing a good sit down letter from you, you mightn’t have time when I come to New York.
Love George
March 5
Los Angeles
Dear Deidre,
Appreciated the postcard. I left N.Y.C. the evening of March 2nd so the one weekend possibility didn’t work for me. I didn’t phone – I wasn’t sure there was anything to say on the phone; it’s an instrument I use more for fast, necessary conversations rather than visiting.
Thank you for reassuring me that your prohibitive schedule is NOTHING PERSONAL. I am afraid of being rejected, am apt sometimes to misconstrue signals apropos of this insecurity and am happy you thought to think I might be in this sorry little bout. Having gotten the goods straight from you, it’s easy to understand.
love you Deidre,
George
June 11, 1986
Los Angeles
Dear Deidre,
Personally I’ve got no time to reunion anywhere with anyone right now. I guess seeing one another isn’t important for the time being. I’m in no way indifferent to you though. My connection with you is still there though unresolved right now. Ultimately I respect you, like you, and love who you are while at the same time frightened by your judgment of me.
Write me, please.
George
June 23
Los Angeles
Dear Deidre,
I got a letter from my mother recently to which I’m trying to frame a reply. In this process I’m reliving an enormous amount of life and death hostility. My being feels like a depiction of Medusa’s head when I think about my relationship with my mother.
I remember you were the first person that made me aware something was afoot between she and I, something that went back a long way and that was double-sided. I was neither fully to blame for her pain nor was I entirely her victim. That observation of yours opened up a heavy door in my consciousness but I hadn’t realized it until this last year or two. I had accepted the possibility but had not felt the truth of the thing until recently.
So I want to know if you’ll tell me who you think I am, or was. Considering the time that’s elapsed in our relationship, and sort of put on hold, I won’t ask you to speculate on who I am. I want to hear your perception of the person you knew through high school and university and after, till just after San Francisco, which is the last time we tried for serious contact.
I’m asking you because I basically trust you. Like I said in my change of address card I’m still afraid of your judgments but it’s because I’m afraid of everything not because your judgments are terrible. Necessarily. I know you respect me or did and love me or did and could not in your rational
moments consider hurting me vengefully. You’ll deliver up the truth as you honestly feel it because that’s who you are. So will you write and tell me who you think I have been, in your experience anyway. I hope you take the time, I realize it won’t be a breezy and effortless thing. But I’ll appreciate it.
I’ve also been wondering if I’m stuck in this quagmire with my mother am I meeting her again and again in all relationships I have with women? Certainly there are little beasties I come repeatedly across that ignite me in the same way that Mom does but there are others that I genuinely like. As much as I like anyone male or female.
It occurred to me that you might have been the first Other Woman in my life. By which I mean someone female who I was not in a relationship with that repeated the one I had developed with my mother. Something developed between us that was quite strong, deep, mutual, unsexual, and though there was an intellectual exchange this was really a verbal expression of our hearts where the real link was. If you will do it, I’d appreciate you thinking about your perceptions of me and writing them down.
Love George
Tuesday February 4, 1987
Los Angeles
Dear Deidre,
While there are currents of things that I want to say I hesitate over them all for fear of alienating you. Then again things are fairly alien as they stand. Estranged perhaps.
I decided against just a sentiment or two within the convenient confines of the Valentine’s Day card for the sake of ‘staying in touch.’ On my side I know I very much want to stay in touch but what I only value at the moment is the brass tacks approach. Personally I feel that there are a glut of agendas of unfinished business between us. Very emotional stuff that needs to be worked through before we can go on to whatever the next step in our relationship is. If that be a definitive separation I guess I could handle it. I don’t frankly know. I’m only aware that the current estrangement is a result of many things left unexpressed and so unresolved. I speak for myself.
Yet I’m sure I speak for you too. I just know that, as regards the situation between us anyway, there is a simultaneity of experience. That you’ve been banking emotions around us since 1982 was apparent from our last telephone conversation. What an earful I got. What a ride. Suddenly you cracked open a little and began to release your feelings. Instead of the strict and polite conversation, albeit friendly that we had been using, I sensed a thrilling shift to a fast toboggan run. My heart accelerated and I was off again with my wild friend hurtling so furiously I had no opportunity to think. On the whole a good thing.
By knowing you I have been introduced to a thundering world of emotion that I had no opportunity to explore in myself before. Those toboggan runs that I’d unexpectedly find myself on with you slapped me awake to an experience of emotion I had no idea I was capable of. Eventually, it seems to me, I had to break away from you though (just as the same must have happened for you) in order to BE that part of me I was introduced to by knowing you. Otherwise I might have gone on thinking that the fury was you and I was essentially phlegmatic. An easy comparison and worthless.
Since Gianni and since not having you in my life to compare myself against, I have increasingly cracked open the lid that seems to have entombed my beastliness. I begin to understand how old legends about vampires, werewolves, you name it get started. They are our own everyday experiences.
I am by turns hostile, violent, mean and embittered. Full of uncontrollable hatred. Entombing these and not having a good look at all of me is what I think lent me that notorious iciness. Looking more and more steadily at who I am and who I can be I see that EVERY DAY I live, I live in fear. Active fear I move in and out of but it’s always there and my most popular option. I sometimes wonder how this little body can go on accepting such a gruesome burden. It’s astounding. Then I move out of the active fear and go into a precarious remission where I’m at least able to breathe freely. This is such a relief that it can easily slip into an excited high; when that happens the recurrence of the fear is devastating and while it’s consolidating its grip on me, so I can’t look anybody in the eyes or accept any gesture of love, I always imagine that the pain will be everlasting and always this unbearable. You don’t have to be Christian to go to hell. I punch in and out every day.
Love George
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
Friday July 31
Los Angeles
Dear Deidre,
I’m always glad to have something from you I realize. If what you reveal about yourself these days is confined to a postcard so be it. Even though a piece of me, a niggling malcontent piece of me, a piece of me which is my mother lived anew in a second generation, wants to be unsatisfied.
Whatever power the niggler, the malcontent, the whiner possesses in the multi-voiced phenomenon that I am, in truth, in sooth I am touched, gladdened that you write at all and that somewhere you feel tenderness for me. It’s a blessing. Thank you.
George
Saturday March 12, 1988
Dear Deidre,
Oh god here I am confining myself to the back of a humorous greeting card after all my subtle admonitions that you should write me a letter. Which you did do, so long ago now. I really appreciated the effort I know you made and to satisfy me. I got your Christmas card too. I just haven’t been writing to anyone. In one way I have so little to say. In another I have the entirety of my experience to communicate. I don’t know where to begin or how to express it. To tell truth with the tool language is, is vain.
Thursday September 1
Dear Deidre,
I am thinking that you at least want an update as to where I’m living as of this year should there be anything you need to get hold of me for.
George
