Drama Slowing Down

Tim got out of the hospital Wednesday noontime and promptly, per Squeaky, disappeared. Throughout the six days he was hospitalized, I listened to Squeaky making it HER ordeal. SHE had it bad because SHE missed him. She essentially came out and said something to the effect of "I mean, he's locked up, but it's just as bad for ME because he's not here!" So she was just rabid to have him come "home" on Wednesday and be all domestic and worshipful with her.

So Wednesday night, for the entire night, she called me repeatedly to ask if I'd heard from him. I hadn't; I'd left one calm message on his voicemail and gone about my business, figuring he'd call when he was ready to call.

Not Squeaky. She called me about four or five times, each time calling to tell me he hadn't answered her calls, or her text messages, or her voice mails--and worse yet, when he stopped back at the house right after he'd been released--rather than putting on his smoking jacket, picking up his pipe, slipping into his slippers, and patting Wally and the Beav on the head before settling down to the evening paper--you know, like a dutiful boyfriend would--he'd just taken a shower, changed clothes, and left. The nerve.

So--fine, whatever, he's a Great Big Meanie and everyone's out to get poor Squeaky. Each of Wednesday's calls ended the same way. "I'll call you right away if I hear from him," I told her. "And if YOU hear from him, please let me know, okay?" "Oh, I will," she said.

I didn't really care what he was doing or who he was with; I was worried, though, that either a) he'd ended up back in the hospital, after trying to finish what he'd started; or b)(far more likely, in my opinion) he'd ended up in jail for some type of drunken idiocy, or for running his mouth at a police officer, or whatever. I wasn't hovering over him--I was WORRIED about him.

Wednesday night slipped by without a word from Tim. Thursday, I tried to call him around lunchtime, figuring he'd be awake by then, wherever he was. No answer. I was getting more and more worried. Finally, at about 8:00 Thursday night, I called Squeaky.

"Have you heard from Tim?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah...he's right here!!" she bubbled.

That was when my head completely exploded.

Let's try this again, shall we?

Hypothetical situation, Squeak: Your recently-suicidal boyfriend is missing. You call his friend, asking if she has information. She has no information. She promises to call if she hears anything. She asks you to call if YOU hear anything, and you agree.

YOU want to know where he is so you can feel slighted that he's not with YOU, worshipping YOU and hanging on YOUR every word and just BASKING in how much you supposedly love him. (This despite the facts: the main reason he was hospitalized in the first place is that his living situation--including you--has become so toxic that he sees no other way out.) His friend, however, is concerned about his safety, and wondering if there is anything that she can do, or needs to do, to preserve his well-being and freedom.

So eventually, the Prodigal Boyfriend comes home. Even though he has been there for several hours, and even though you promised to do so, YOU DON'T CALL TO TELL HIS FRIEND that you've found him??? When, had the tables been turned and the friend was the one who heard from him first, not calling you would have been a MONSTROUS, UNFORGIVABLE SIN????

I simply cannot STAND this girl. From talking to Tim, it's become apparent that a goodly portion of what I was told during his hospitalization--about things he said, about the "threatening" phone calls from Betty "for no reason", and so on and so forth--were either greatly exaggerated, deliberately misinterpreted, or flat-out invented. (He did, however, admit that I had done the right thing by calling 911, even if the source of the information that led to the call was....faulty. "Honestly--not exaggerating?" he said. "I had about...50, 60 pills in me. I took a LOT of narcotics that night--I pretty much took some out of every bottle they had in the house. So yeah...I WOULD have been dead," he said. That, for him, is a hell of an admission; in the past, he's minimized any and all of his self-harming behavior, so for him to acknowledge the likely outcome of his actions...well, that's big.)

He's worked out a plan for himself, which seems like a good one, at least in the short term: he's going to rotate staying with various friends who have expressed a willingness to let him stay for a day or two. He'll end up at Squeaky's maybe one or two days a week; he'll be here a couple of nights, and with other friends the rest of the week. Then, he said, as soon as they can make arrangements, he and Betty are going to move out of state; he's got two friends out East, each of whom has offered him a place to stay and leads on a few jobs, and who don't have an issue with a tag-along. (Betty, of course, was who he was with on Wednesday when he wasn't calling Squeaky or me; actually, he said, he was ignoring Squeaky's calls and mine was just collateral damage. Anyhow, he said, he and Betty had what he referred to as "a 'moment'...or actually, a couple of 'moments'." And then he went on to wax rhapsodic about all of Betty's wonderfulnesses, to the point that I was actually feeling a wee bit jealous. Not of the "girlfriend" thing--Tim and I are NOT meant for that--but because he makes her sound like the most awesome person in his life, the one who keeps him together, and having heard all that, I feel a bit...unappreciated. Ignored. Dismissed. Like he's so willing to sing her praises for changing his whole life just by existing, but I, who have done quite a bit for him in terms of concrete, quantifiable actions, am nowhere near as lauded. I'm sure he doesn't mean it like that, but ::::snarl:::: anyway.)

I'm glad he's seriously considering moving away. I'll miss him, but I think it would be the best thing he could do for himself. Betty's inclusion...well, if it makes him happy and gives him something to strive towards, so much the better. I hope the jobs work out, wherever he goes, and that he takes the opportunity to turn over a new leaf in regard to his drinking.

Mostly, though, I hope that Squeaky won't take his eventual departure--if in fact he DOES decide to move away--as an excuse to call me and get all dramatic about his absence and her consequent misery...because if she does, my personal balance will shift from "well-intentioned-if-slightly-pitying polite dissimulation" to "complete, damn-the-torpedoes honesty"--and THAT transition will not be a pleasant one. Not for her, not for me, not for anyone. And it will very likely end with an equation of the form "I'll call you sometime,"--where the value of "sometime" is roughly equal to "towards the beginning of the next Blagojevich administration" (or, for non-Illinoisans, "when Jessica Simpson wins the Nobel Prize for Physics".)

Oh, Yeah--I Forgot...

(See, this is what happens when I don't post in a long time. Things get overlooked.)

I didn't mention the BIG FREAKING DEVELOPMENT:

Tim and Squeaky are mostly-broken-up and (shocker) once again mostly-homeless. AND: Betty (Tim's friend who used to be a bartender at his favorite bar til she got fired several months ago) is apparently travelling with them.

The order of events, as I understand it, went something like this:

Tim and Squeaky had been living with Squeaky's dad for the past year. Squeaky's dad (hereafter abbreviated to SD) has his own issues; he's apparently schizophrenic, along with a bunch of other diagnoses, and so he lives in an apartment subsidized by some church group with which he's affiliated.

Meanwhile, Betty had been staying with her boyfriend, but they got into a huge fight and she left, and SD told Tim and Squeaky "sure, why not, what's another one?" So Betty was staying with Tim and Squeaky.

One night, after some trivial slight, Squeaky just basically flipped the fuck out. (I have this on the authority of both Tim, whose version of the story would be open to doubt, and Betty, who would have no reason to varnish the truth.) She started screaming at Tim "I'm gonna fucking kill you!" and pounced on him, scratching and clawing and strangling and just generally losing her mind. Betty, at the time, was sitting in the living room watching TV with SD, and SD said "What's she doing to him NOW???" (Both Tim and Betty claim that Squeaky's attacked Tim before. I don't entirely doubt it...in fact, I don't doubt it at all.) Betty ran in and pulled Squeaky off Tim, and the screaming and yelling and the rest continued.

Meanwhile, SD had had enough. Now, normally, when people have Had Enough, they yell and make ultimatums and so on. Not SD. SD, when he's Had Enough, checks himself into the hospital for a break. And that's what he did in this case--he left, and went to the hospital, and checked himself in as a psych patient.

Betty and Tim managed to calm Squeaky down, and Tim was of course properly pissed--as who wouldn't be...Anyway, Tim told Squeaky that he was pretty sure that they were all in serious trouble, now that SD had gone to the hospital, and that the next few days would be critical.

Enter the Church Guy. The Church Guy (now CG) is apparently SD's caseworker or whatever; anyway, CG showed up at the hospital and heard SD's story of why he was there, and CG--quite rightly--said "oh HELL no; out they go, the lot of them." And so there they were: Tim, Squeaky, Betty, and two cats, out on the streets two weeks before Thanksgiving.

The first I heard of it was the first day of my vacation, when Tim called. "Um, G?" he asked. "Could me and Betty maybe crash at your place for a day or two?" He told me the story, told me he had "suggested" that Squeaky find somebody else to stay with among HER friends (oh, wait, that's right--she didn't really HAVE any, but fortunately someone she knew from the old days was willing to let her crash there anyway) and emphasized that it was only for a couple of days, that they were working on several other options. That was at about 8 PM, and they said they were "on their way".

They arrived at 4 AM, after several stops and missed buses and pauses at bars and et cetera; they told me the full story, which lasted pretty well til sunrise. Throughout the story, and in fact through the next two days, every conversation was interrupted with the BEEP of either Tim's or Betty's phones, with text messages from Squeaky. She was DETERMINED to get back into their good graces, which--from what I was hearing--was totally NOT going to happen.

Anyway, they stayed three nights, at the end of which it was determined that they REALLY needed to get Betty out of my apartment before her entire head exploded--Betty is HIGHLY allergic to cats!--and so they actually left. They've since been staying here and there, and apparently Squeaky has some roommate situation developing, and though Tim is adamant that he and Squeaky are broken up, apparently they're going to be staying in the same place--all three of them, plus the cats (the cats had been living with SD, and getting fed by CG when he wasn't around--Tim was more worried about the cats than Squeaky, really, and I can't blame him) and Tim may have a job in the works, at last.

Mostly I'm just happy he and Squeaky broke up; I'm pretty sure it's for keeps, too. I have heard Tim at various points in most of his breakups, and I can pretty much tell when he means it and when he doesn't; then, too, Betty is a helpful reinforcement in several ways. One, she loathes Squeaky; two, Tim has had a crush on Betty for quite a while, though it's not reciprocated; three, Betty is pretty much an exemplar of all the qualities which Tim admires and which are completely lacking in Squeaky: Betty is down-to-earth, has street-smarts, is self-sufficent (well, when she has a job!), has a life outside her relationship...I would say "isn't annoying" but...well, Betty is kinda loud and brash, but in a fun way, and she has enough other good qualities that it can be forgiven. And she's smart, too. She actually READS--in fact, she left here with a couple of my books, and when I talked to Tim a couple of days ago I heard her in the background saying "Tell her I need more books!" It's been so long since I've had people around me who READ...like, at least ten years, maybe more. I don't think Tim and Betty will end up together, but it wouldn't be a bad match, if they did.

Really, I'm just glad they're figuring this out on their own, for the most part. Tim, when they were here, made some remarks about how much I've done already, and how he doesn't feel comfortable asking me for any more, in the face of all that; not that I mind helping him, but I'm impressed that he seems to want to handle it without asking me for help. That--like dumping the Squeakster--is a step in the right direction.