Most people who know me well, know that I have an odd range of interests. Stephen King, in a foreword to one of his books, explained it pretty well--it's like everyone has a series of filters in their heads, which all your thoughts and all outside input has to go through. Some ideas pass through the filters and other ideas get caught in them. And what catches in my filter, might pass right through yours, and vice-versa.
When I was much younger, I was a nearly-obsessive keeper of pop music statistics. Every New Years' Eve, I would hunker down in my bedroom with a transistor radio and a portable cassette recorder--this was before boom boxes--and listen to the entire "Big 89 Countdown" on WLS Radio. I would painstakingly write out the list, song by song, as they were played, and I would record the ones I liked, sitting in motionless silence so the tape recorder wouldn't pick up any unwanted noise. At the end of the song I would play DJ, reading off the title and the artist with a sense of deep gravity. I dreamed of a career in radio.
During the other fifty-one weeks of the year, I was no less obsessive. I would pick up the WLS weekly countdown sheet, with the top 45 singles and the top 33 albums, every time I went near a record store, and follow my favorite songs' progress up and down the charts. But even that wasn't enough; though I couldn't afford the $100 for a subscription to Billboard, but I had the next best thing; each Sunday, the Chicago Tribune printed the Billboard Top 10 in their "Arts and Fun/Books" section. I would snip the Top-10 chart out (I left the Country and the Adult Contemporary charts alone--who wanted THOSE?) and add it to my collection.
It was on one of these Sunday-afternoon chart-snipping expeditions that I first encountered the story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels school. I was about twelve years old, and on the same page as that week's charts, there was a review of a book called The Fire That Will Not Die, by Michele McBride, who had survived the fire. I read the review, and somehow the story really hit me hard; maybe because I was twelve years old myself, it caught my interest, and so I mentioned it to my parents, who told me the story.
The story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels is one of those tragic stories which every big city seems to have. Back in 1958, before fire drills were mandatory for schools, and during a time when Catholic schools were mostly filled beyond capacity, a fire broke out in the school basement on a Monday afternoon, about forty-five minutes before dismissal. There was a rule that only the principal could pull the fire alarm, and so was some delay before the Fire Department got there; rather than risk an unauthorized evacuation, the nuns who were teaching the classes told their students to stay in their seats and pray until the firemen came to rescue them. It was the 1950's; children obeyed their teachers, especially Catholic children, especially when the teachers were nuns; in the end, 92 children and three nuns died as a result of the fire.
I was horrified, when I heard the story; I was an obedient child, for the most part, and I couldn't imagine how hard it must have been to stay there. I always wanted to read "The Fire That Would Not Die", but that was awfully harsh reading for someone so young, and so my parents never bought it for me. I tucked the story away in my subconscious, and there it sat for another thirteen years.
Unlike my parents and the rest of their generation, I was fairly uninformed about the Catholic geography system of Chicago--in my parents' day, you were not identified by what neighborhood you came from--Beverly, Marquette Park, Logan Square--but by what parish you lived within--St. Barnabas, St. Rita, and so on. My parents and grandparents could tell you where ANYTHING was, as long as they knew the parish name. I, however, had grown up without that system of landmarks, and so I had no idea, really, where Our Lady of the Angels was located...
...until a late-winter afternoon in early 1995. JP had heard from someone that there was a really incredible heroin spot at Chicago and Lawndale, and so we drove over that way. As usual, we circled the block a couple of times. We pulled around the corner, and on a wall of sky-blue tile, I read the words: Our Lady of the Angels. "Oh my God," I said. JP, of course, had never heard the story; he was the first of several people to whom I'd tell it. It felt strange, to me, circling around the block where so many innocent lives had ended; it felt a little profane, even, to be buying heroin within sight of the building itself. (It wasn't the actual school building as it had stood in 1958; that building had been torn down and rebuilt.) But of course, we continued to do what we were there for; it was just another way the past and the present were dovetailed together.
A few months after JP died, when I was still living at my mom's house and had about four or five months sober, I found that someone had finally made an effort to tell the whole story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. A book--"To Sleep With the Angels"--was a definitive account of the disaster. It was written by a former fireman, and filled with recollections from people who were actually there, who had survived, or who had lost family members or friends.
Needless to say, I bought the book. Bought, and devoured, and analyzed, and in some cases memorized. My collection of "disaster" books expanded from that point onward, but OLA, as it was called by its students, was always the first story, as far as I was concerned.
December 1st was the 50th anniversary of that fire. In some ways, fifty years seems like an impossibly long time ago; then I consider: The children who were involved in that fire were between 8 and 14 years old. This would make them between 58 and 64 years old now; the survivors, the friends and siblings of the ones who died--even the parents of some of the younger children could conceivably still be alive. Suddenly fifty years isn't that long ago.
We had our yearly fire drill at work this week. As hundreds of people filed out of the building, I heard one of my co-workers say to another "Hey, did you know last week was the 50th anniversary of that fire?" The person to whom he was speaking had no idea what he was talking about, so between the two of us we went on to explain: this is why we have fire drills, fire stairs, panic hardware on the doors. Most of the things we take for granted about fire safety came in part from that fire. There are children in schools in California and New York who have no idea why they have fire drills; fifty-one years ago they wouldn't have had anything to wonder about, because there were no laws mandating such things. (My colleague was unimpressed. "Government intervention at its finest," he concluded, but then again he's a contrarian; we've learned to expect these kinds of comments, from him.)
I don't think about "government intervention", though; I think about ninety-two children and three nuns; about their ninety sets of parents, untold numbers of siblings. I think of the two families who each lost TWO children in the fire--I cannot imagine losing ONE child, let alone two. I think of Mr. Raymond, the janitor, who was blamed for "shoddy housekeeping"; I think of the nameless twelve-year-old boy (now dead) with a history of firesetting, who was widely believed to have set the fire in a trash-barrel in the basement so he could get a day off school. I think of the ones who escaped with burns and broken limbs, and the scars they carried for the rest of their lives; I think of the ones who escaped with no visible wounds, who still panic when they smell smoke, or hear a siren. I think of the hundreds of children who were told "God took them to heaven to be his angels," or "only the good die young"--and who spent the rest of their childhoods wondering why, then, they were left behind.
Many of the friends and families who spoke years later said that the fire was the beginning of the end for that neighborhood. Grieving families moved away, and those that stayed seemed set-apart. Then, of course, the 1960's intervened, and the same scare-tactics which led to the so-called "white flight" on the rest of the West Side were repeated in the OLA neighborhood. By the time JP and I made our circuits of the neighborhood, it was indistinguishable from any of the rest of the West Side--unless you knew the story, of course.
People who know me well, know that I don't make a profession to any particular religious faith. I don't think, despite what Tim says, that I'm an atheist; I'm more a "recovering Catholic" with an unhealthy level of skepticism as regards the afterlife. I try not to get my hopes up by thinking of an eventual reunion with our lost loved ones, for reasons I'm sure will be fairly apparent; likewise, I'm not willing to embrace the concept of reincarnation, for much the same reasons.
But....IF I believed in such things as reincarnation, or remembering past lives, or such-like...I would be inclined to postulate that in some previous life, I was somehow involved in the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. Between my early interest in the fire itself, and my almost-immediate love for the neighborhood (when I started house-shopping, my original intention was to buy in the square mile surrounding OLA. Unfortunately I was priced out, at that point--but that was where I wanted to live)--plus a few other things I haven't mentioned, like my lifelong fear of fire...I can't explain it, and if someone else claimed such a thing, I would probably quirk an eyebrow at them and wonder at their sanity, but it's one of those unprovable thoughts that have come to roost in my strange little brain.
The school was rebuilt after the fire, but once the real-estate vultures and the crack epidemic had blighted much of the neighborhood, sometime in the 90's the parish was combined with another, and the parish school was likewise shut down in the mid-90's sometime. I believe the building now houses a charter school--but to those who know, it's still OLA, still hallowed ground. For many years there was no memorial anywhere to the victims of the fire; now, recently, they've dedicated a memorial...several miles to the south and east, at Holy Family Church--in a "revitalized" neighborhood, where those who would want to see it wouldn't have to travel to some "scary" part of the city. It makes me sick, honestly; I hope someday the memorial will find its way back to the neighborhood where it belongs.
And if I ever buy another house in the city, I have promised myself that it will be somewhere in the area of OLA. Whether it's real or not, whether it's memory from several years back or the memory of another lifetime--I love that neighborhood, and even though I've never lived there, it feels more like "home" than any of the places where I -have- lived. I can't explain it, but that's nothing unusual; there are a lot of things that I can't explain.
Showing posts with label mercilessly long. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mercilessly long. Show all posts
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Yeah, That's Kinda What I Thought
I hadn't been in my doc's office five minutes today when she suggested that I go back onto anti-depressants immediately. "I haven't seen you like this in a long time," she said. "And since nothing happened to precipitate it, it sounds like this is just the depression talking--something biochemical, which can be fixed."
I'm not thrilled about it, of course--the side-effects are Not My Favorite Things--but I'd take the weird dreams and the muscle twitches any day, over feeling like this. I was in the grocery store today, and the background music started playing a Gin Blossoms song with significance to me from long ago--normally I could have handled it, but I pretty much had to stand there for three-and-a-half minutes staring as hard as I could at the orange juice, just to keep it together. I'm usually waaay more resilient than that.
It was a beautiful day today--sunny and "warm" ("warm" by Chicago standards--a whole balmy 40 degrees!) so after I dropped off the I-Go car, I went for a walk around the neighborhood and stopped to get myself a sandwich. I'm trying to like this neighborhood--there's certainly nothing to object to about it, other than the appalling lack of grocery stores--but I don't feel the level of attachment to it that I felt about West Garfield Park, or even Rogers Park, for that matter. I actually feel less-safe here than I felt in the 'hood; I was safe there because I was different, because any attempt to mess with me would have brought the wrong kind of attention, but here...here, I'm just another probable University student, or wealthy Hyde Park homeowner. Just another white person, not to put too fine a point on things, and it's been my experience that where people of widely-disparate socioeconomic status live in close proximity, it's much more likely for the tensions to erupt. In the 'hood I was "the white lady", true enough, but it was obvious from the way I was living that I wasn't wealthy by any means...although "poor" for me was "well above average" for most of the neighborhood. I always felt bad about that, especially since it wasn't because of anything I'd DONE differently--it was because of how I was born, who I was born to, and what my parents were able to do for me. If I'd had anything to do with it, maybe I would have felt better about it.
But back to the neighborhood...It's a beautiful place. Come spring, when I can explore more, I'll probably learn to love it. But right now, with ice and slush and doggie-poopsicles everywhere, gray old snow and construction and bare trees...I think you have to love a place already, to find beauty in it during the last few weeks of winter.
I had a bit of an epiphany last night. (I realize that any epiphany experienced in the midst of an episode of depression is....suspect, to say the least, but this one makes sense anyway.) Part of my unhappiness, even when I was much younger, has been the constant awareness that in the end, there's not going to be much left from my life when I die. The things that mean everything to me will not mean much to anyone else; even my closest friends will only understand bits and pieces of it. Somehow I've insulated my life so completely that there is literally no one who knows everything about me; I get the sense that that isn't the case for most people. I feel like most people have one or two friends who could, in case of emergency, know who to call and what all the names in their little phone-book meant--or even just basic stuff like how they spend their time, what an average day is like, what shows they'll stay home to watch. I don't have people like that in my life. A lot of it is because of distance; Firefly, who knew me the best when we were younger (and probably still does) lives far away, and I realized the other day it's now been five years since I've seen her last! And Debbi, who lives close by and who I've known longer than anyone, has a lot of friends; besides that, there was a gap of about five years where we didn't talk at all, from the end of college til I was about 25, thanks to some misunderstandings and miscommunications.
Most of all, though, I think it comes from the way I've lived my life. The last new friend I've made is Tim; he and LJ are the only people I've kept in contact with of all the people I've met since college. That's not entirely been my fault; there have been some people I've tried to keep up with, like the Brit, or Stella; they just haven't wanted to keep in touch with me, for whatever reason. But mostly, it's just been a case of not making any new friends, and I think I understand why, a little better.
I have been living my life not with the intent of enjoying myself, or accomplishing something great, or creating something--I have been living my life with the intent of staying out of trouble. I'm sure the roots of this are back in my childhood, but I can pin down the adult manifestation of this to the point at which I moved back home, after JP died and my addiction was first exposed. From that point on, my relationship with my mom has been a subtle but constant rebuke--I don't know how much of it is her doing and how much of it is mine--to everything I believed while I was with JP. (I realize also that the things I believed with him were obviously there inside me to begin with, or else he wouldn't have recognized them--they wouldn't have been there to BE recognized. But since our relationship was the thing that enabled me to really express them for the first time, that's the point of reference I use.) Since I moved home, since she took me back after all my opposition and rejection of her values, somehow the message has been sent and received: See? This is what happens when you try to stand out. This is what happens when you try to be "different". (Ignored: the fact that I wasn't "trying to be different"; I was being me, and making some poor decisions at the same time.) Ever since then I've been trying to keep out of "trouble"--"trouble" in this context meaning "any situation that results in drama, conflict, opposition, tumult, or anything other than perfect calm". Well, last night I realized: the more "trouble" I stay out of, the less I actually DO. In trying to avoid getting hurt, in trying to avoid drawing any attention to myself, in trying to avoid conflict and drama and inconvenience, the way I'm "supposed" to...in trying to do all those things, I'm basically doing exactly NOTHING. I have no conflict or emotional upheaval, true--I also have no happiness, no activity, no accomplishment-- no point to living, basically.
I don't know how I'm going to handle that knowledge, what I'm going to do about it. Right at the moment, I think I'm going to wait and see what the meds do, and try to force myself to do the things I "want" to do, but have no motivation toward (the main manifestation of this depression right now--I have a million things that I want to do, and no impetus to move in that direction). And I'm going to try to keep this new understanding in the front of my mind--that I have to stop trying to make up for being myself--something that wasn't wrong for me to do in the first place. I've largely been able to accept my own mistakes--I'd say "forgive" but I'm not sure I've done that, entirely--but I have this pervasive sense that my mom, at least, has forgiven them, maybe, but still hasn't accepted them. I have to stop living as though that's MY problem.
I'm not thrilled about it, of course--the side-effects are Not My Favorite Things--but I'd take the weird dreams and the muscle twitches any day, over feeling like this. I was in the grocery store today, and the background music started playing a Gin Blossoms song with significance to me from long ago--normally I could have handled it, but I pretty much had to stand there for three-and-a-half minutes staring as hard as I could at the orange juice, just to keep it together. I'm usually waaay more resilient than that.
It was a beautiful day today--sunny and "warm" ("warm" by Chicago standards--a whole balmy 40 degrees!) so after I dropped off the I-Go car, I went for a walk around the neighborhood and stopped to get myself a sandwich. I'm trying to like this neighborhood--there's certainly nothing to object to about it, other than the appalling lack of grocery stores--but I don't feel the level of attachment to it that I felt about West Garfield Park, or even Rogers Park, for that matter. I actually feel less-safe here than I felt in the 'hood; I was safe there because I was different, because any attempt to mess with me would have brought the wrong kind of attention, but here...here, I'm just another probable University student, or wealthy Hyde Park homeowner. Just another white person, not to put too fine a point on things, and it's been my experience that where people of widely-disparate socioeconomic status live in close proximity, it's much more likely for the tensions to erupt. In the 'hood I was "the white lady", true enough, but it was obvious from the way I was living that I wasn't wealthy by any means...although "poor" for me was "well above average" for most of the neighborhood. I always felt bad about that, especially since it wasn't because of anything I'd DONE differently--it was because of how I was born, who I was born to, and what my parents were able to do for me. If I'd had anything to do with it, maybe I would have felt better about it.
But back to the neighborhood...It's a beautiful place. Come spring, when I can explore more, I'll probably learn to love it. But right now, with ice and slush and doggie-poopsicles everywhere, gray old snow and construction and bare trees...I think you have to love a place already, to find beauty in it during the last few weeks of winter.
I had a bit of an epiphany last night. (I realize that any epiphany experienced in the midst of an episode of depression is....suspect, to say the least, but this one makes sense anyway.) Part of my unhappiness, even when I was much younger, has been the constant awareness that in the end, there's not going to be much left from my life when I die. The things that mean everything to me will not mean much to anyone else; even my closest friends will only understand bits and pieces of it. Somehow I've insulated my life so completely that there is literally no one who knows everything about me; I get the sense that that isn't the case for most people. I feel like most people have one or two friends who could, in case of emergency, know who to call and what all the names in their little phone-book meant--or even just basic stuff like how they spend their time, what an average day is like, what shows they'll stay home to watch. I don't have people like that in my life. A lot of it is because of distance; Firefly, who knew me the best when we were younger (and probably still does) lives far away, and I realized the other day it's now been five years since I've seen her last! And Debbi, who lives close by and who I've known longer than anyone, has a lot of friends; besides that, there was a gap of about five years where we didn't talk at all, from the end of college til I was about 25, thanks to some misunderstandings and miscommunications.
Most of all, though, I think it comes from the way I've lived my life. The last new friend I've made is Tim; he and LJ are the only people I've kept in contact with of all the people I've met since college. That's not entirely been my fault; there have been some people I've tried to keep up with, like the Brit, or Stella; they just haven't wanted to keep in touch with me, for whatever reason. But mostly, it's just been a case of not making any new friends, and I think I understand why, a little better.
I have been living my life not with the intent of enjoying myself, or accomplishing something great, or creating something--I have been living my life with the intent of staying out of trouble. I'm sure the roots of this are back in my childhood, but I can pin down the adult manifestation of this to the point at which I moved back home, after JP died and my addiction was first exposed. From that point on, my relationship with my mom has been a subtle but constant rebuke--I don't know how much of it is her doing and how much of it is mine--to everything I believed while I was with JP. (I realize also that the things I believed with him were obviously there inside me to begin with, or else he wouldn't have recognized them--they wouldn't have been there to BE recognized. But since our relationship was the thing that enabled me to really express them for the first time, that's the point of reference I use.) Since I moved home, since she took me back after all my opposition and rejection of her values, somehow the message has been sent and received: See? This is what happens when you try to stand out. This is what happens when you try to be "different". (Ignored: the fact that I wasn't "trying to be different"; I was being me, and making some poor decisions at the same time.) Ever since then I've been trying to keep out of "trouble"--"trouble" in this context meaning "any situation that results in drama, conflict, opposition, tumult, or anything other than perfect calm". Well, last night I realized: the more "trouble" I stay out of, the less I actually DO. In trying to avoid getting hurt, in trying to avoid drawing any attention to myself, in trying to avoid conflict and drama and inconvenience, the way I'm "supposed" to...in trying to do all those things, I'm basically doing exactly NOTHING. I have no conflict or emotional upheaval, true--I also have no happiness, no activity, no accomplishment-- no point to living, basically.
I don't know how I'm going to handle that knowledge, what I'm going to do about it. Right at the moment, I think I'm going to wait and see what the meds do, and try to force myself to do the things I "want" to do, but have no motivation toward (the main manifestation of this depression right now--I have a million things that I want to do, and no impetus to move in that direction). And I'm going to try to keep this new understanding in the front of my mind--that I have to stop trying to make up for being myself--something that wasn't wrong for me to do in the first place. I've largely been able to accept my own mistakes--I'd say "forgive" but I'm not sure I've done that, entirely--but I have this pervasive sense that my mom, at least, has forgiven them, maybe, but still hasn't accepted them. I have to stop living as though that's MY problem.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Cross...Everything!
Ladies and gentlemen--barring the intervention of a vengeful deity who would CLEARLY have to hate me--I am losing my roommates.
That’s a fairly-optimistic assessment of the situation, since they’ll still be around—but according to the arrangements discussed over the past few days, they will no longer be LIVING with me. Per those discussions, here’s how it’s gonna go:
1. Tim is going to talk to Betty about that condo. I’m pretty much over that idea—for one, I’m fairly sure it will be expensive as hell; and for another, I really don’t have time left to wait on Betty’s schedule.
2. If the condo thing fails, we’re going to see if Betty wants to get a different place with me. Again, not my absolutely favorite idea, but if it will cut costs, I’ll deal with it. She shouldn’t be difficult to live with…though I hope to hell that’s not Famous Last Words.
3. If Betty doesn’t want to get a place, then I’ll get a studio or one-bedroom on my own. This is my favorite option.
4. And no matter what—Tim and Squeaky are getting THEIR OWN PLACE.
:::dance of unrestrained joy!!!:::
I’m sure they’ll still be a part of my life—Tim said as much, though I think he meant it in a good way, as in “we’re not abandoning you”—and he also made it very clear that this whole Squeaky interlude, while it has taken all our collective time and energy, does not mean that he’s abandoned all the plans we made before she showed up. (“Plans?” you ask. See, Tim and I had a long talk several months ago, probably a month or two after he moved in. We’ve pretty much accepted that we’re one of the world’s great celibate old married couple, and we’ve decided to just be happy with that, and work together on our assorted goals, and eventually be like, eighty years old, living in a little house in Wisconsin, still bickering about whether you should use a nonstick or a regular pan to make grilled cheese. I know I get frustrated with Tim, and a lot of people in my life question why I keep him around—well, in a nutshell, it’s because he’s good company. He has his quirks, but so do I, and our quirks seem to fit together well. As he said last night, up til the drama started, this was basically the best summer either of us had had in a long time.)
So Tim and I are still good friends...which doesn't mean I don't want to strangle him, at least three times a day. I can't believe the way he's doing things, and how much of it sounds like he's using ME as an excuse for all the stuff that he's not doing. He couldn't go out looking for work Saturday...because I had my bus pass and he can't find his. He hasn't been working hard on getting a job...because he knows how much help I'M going to need with getting things together for the move, and he's not comfortable taking a job under those circumstances. Jigga-WHAT? If he and Squeaky don't both have jobs within the next couple weeks or so, there's no way they're going to be able to get a place! Squeaky, at least, has a couple of good possibilities--Tim's got basically nuthin'. And basically, all they've both been doing for the better part of a week now has been sleeping all day and puttering around watching movies all night. I'm in NO way implying that I'm in any way superior--when I didn't have a job, that's largely what I did too--but the difference was, in my field, I could at least put in applications online during those middle-of-the-night rambles. Restaurant staff don't have that luxury--they need to pound the pavement. And for the most part, these two aren't doing that. They've even gone looking at apartments--again, jigga-WHAAAAT? And you were going to get these apartments with WHAT, exactly? Champagne wishes and caviar dreams?
Then there's the whole Betty debacle. (Keep in mind the following: Tim is not affected by the Betty situation--he already knows that if I DO live with Betty, there's ZERO chance she'll put up with Squeaky even temporarily; and if I DON'T live with Betty, I'll probably get a studio and there's ZERO chance of him and Squeaky staying with me, even temporarily. So it's not like putting it off benefits him in any way, nor does it hurt him. Also, Tim is the main one advocating this living-with-Betty idea; I've been willing to say "forget it" for WEEKS, and go find something for myself, but Tim keeps telling me to keep an open mind about it, because he knows she's having a hard time right now too--and I have, as a favor to him.) Tim is basically my main contact with Betty. We have each other's phone numbers, but for most of last week, Tim's and my cell phones were turned off for late payment. So all last week, I was asking Tim to go up to the bar where Betty works and find out what the situation was. Monday they didn't go anywhere because his shoulder hurt and his sleep schedule was messed up. Tuesday they didn't go because he and Squeaky were putting out applications, and they were too far from the bar, and anyway he couldn't just walk into the bar with no money. Wednesday, I left him $20 so he couldn't use THAT one anymore--and when I got home, the $20 was gone, but he hadn't gone to see Betty because they were dealing with Squeaky trying to get a job, and getting some clothes to wear if she gets one, and blah blah blah. And Betty only works thru Wednesday, apparently, so there would be no point of going on Thursday or Friday--and Thursday morning there was a note on the fridge, asking if I could leave him $8 for cigarettes.
Now, all this mess doesn't screw me up at all--aside from the $28, it doesn't cost me a damn thing--but it slows down my progress, makes it harder for me to plan, and annoys the holy crap out of me. I told Tim that if I don't have a concrete answer from Betty as far as housing plans by the end of this week, I'm considering the matter closed. I also texted Betty, telling her to call me as soon as she can so we can get things settled. That's all I can do--and to be honest, I'm really hoping I DON'T hear anything. I would honestly rather live by myself; I'm only going along with this because Betty seems like a decent person and Tim has asked me to consider it as an option. But we got a letter from the lawyers last week, and if that letter is to be believed, time is running VERY short. I can't control what Tim and Squeaky's situation will be when time runs out; I can only control MY situation, so that's what I'm going to do. But as I do so, I'm going to make it VERY VERY clear to Tim: I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself, and I will not accept it if he, finding himself and his passenger in an uncomfortable situation in the future, attempts to put any sort of responsibility for that situation on ME. He has lived here for eleven months, and I have given him ample opportunity to improve his situation during that time; he chose not to take that opportunity, and that was HIS choice, not mine. If he and Squeaky find themselves homeless because they don't have jobs, or haven't had them long enough to save for an apartment, that's entirely not my fault, and entirely not my responsibility to rescue them again.
(Firefly thinks it's going to go differently; she thinks I'm gonna end up with these two on my hands just the same as they are now. As I told her, I plan to get an apartment small enough to make that an impossibility; I'll gladly give up some space in exchange for peace, quiet, and an end to the eternal, hell-begotten SINGING.)
I love Tim to pieces, and in past times I've seen him act like a responsible, mature adult; I know it can happen because I've WITNESSED it. When he's on his own and not involved with anyone, he can work hard, save money, and pay his bills on time. That's why I took him in this last time, because I knew he COULD do it. And when Squeaky came into the picture, he'd just started at a job; he hadn't made much, but he was WORKING. Then comes the Squeakster, and poof-- Responsible Tim is replaced by this other guy, who's making no money, no progress, nothing but excuses. And this is the worst possible time for THAT Tim to show up.
I hope he makes it all work out for himself, but I have my own problems right now. I'll help him where I can, but I also have to take care of myself.
That’s a fairly-optimistic assessment of the situation, since they’ll still be around—but according to the arrangements discussed over the past few days, they will no longer be LIVING with me. Per those discussions, here’s how it’s gonna go:
1. Tim is going to talk to Betty about that condo. I’m pretty much over that idea—for one, I’m fairly sure it will be expensive as hell; and for another, I really don’t have time left to wait on Betty’s schedule.
2. If the condo thing fails, we’re going to see if Betty wants to get a different place with me. Again, not my absolutely favorite idea, but if it will cut costs, I’ll deal with it. She shouldn’t be difficult to live with…though I hope to hell that’s not Famous Last Words.
3. If Betty doesn’t want to get a place, then I’ll get a studio or one-bedroom on my own. This is my favorite option.
4. And no matter what—Tim and Squeaky are getting THEIR OWN PLACE.
:::dance of unrestrained joy!!!:::
I’m sure they’ll still be a part of my life—Tim said as much, though I think he meant it in a good way, as in “we’re not abandoning you”—and he also made it very clear that this whole Squeaky interlude, while it has taken all our collective time and energy, does not mean that he’s abandoned all the plans we made before she showed up. (“Plans?” you ask. See, Tim and I had a long talk several months ago, probably a month or two after he moved in. We’ve pretty much accepted that we’re one of the world’s great celibate old married couple, and we’ve decided to just be happy with that, and work together on our assorted goals, and eventually be like, eighty years old, living in a little house in Wisconsin, still bickering about whether you should use a nonstick or a regular pan to make grilled cheese. I know I get frustrated with Tim, and a lot of people in my life question why I keep him around—well, in a nutshell, it’s because he’s good company. He has his quirks, but so do I, and our quirks seem to fit together well. As he said last night, up til the drama started, this was basically the best summer either of us had had in a long time.)
So Tim and I are still good friends...which doesn't mean I don't want to strangle him, at least three times a day. I can't believe the way he's doing things, and how much of it sounds like he's using ME as an excuse for all the stuff that he's not doing. He couldn't go out looking for work Saturday...because I had my bus pass and he can't find his. He hasn't been working hard on getting a job...because he knows how much help I'M going to need with getting things together for the move, and he's not comfortable taking a job under those circumstances. Jigga-WHAT? If he and Squeaky don't both have jobs within the next couple weeks or so, there's no way they're going to be able to get a place! Squeaky, at least, has a couple of good possibilities--Tim's got basically nuthin'. And basically, all they've both been doing for the better part of a week now has been sleeping all day and puttering around watching movies all night. I'm in NO way implying that I'm in any way superior--when I didn't have a job, that's largely what I did too--but the difference was, in my field, I could at least put in applications online during those middle-of-the-night rambles. Restaurant staff don't have that luxury--they need to pound the pavement. And for the most part, these two aren't doing that. They've even gone looking at apartments--again, jigga-WHAAAAT? And you were going to get these apartments with WHAT, exactly? Champagne wishes and caviar dreams?
Then there's the whole Betty debacle. (Keep in mind the following: Tim is not affected by the Betty situation--he already knows that if I DO live with Betty, there's ZERO chance she'll put up with Squeaky even temporarily; and if I DON'T live with Betty, I'll probably get a studio and there's ZERO chance of him and Squeaky staying with me, even temporarily. So it's not like putting it off benefits him in any way, nor does it hurt him. Also, Tim is the main one advocating this living-with-Betty idea; I've been willing to say "forget it" for WEEKS, and go find something for myself, but Tim keeps telling me to keep an open mind about it, because he knows she's having a hard time right now too--and I have, as a favor to him.) Tim is basically my main contact with Betty. We have each other's phone numbers, but for most of last week, Tim's and my cell phones were turned off for late payment. So all last week, I was asking Tim to go up to the bar where Betty works and find out what the situation was. Monday they didn't go anywhere because his shoulder hurt and his sleep schedule was messed up. Tuesday they didn't go because he and Squeaky were putting out applications, and they were too far from the bar, and anyway he couldn't just walk into the bar with no money. Wednesday, I left him $20 so he couldn't use THAT one anymore--and when I got home, the $20 was gone, but he hadn't gone to see Betty because they were dealing with Squeaky trying to get a job, and getting some clothes to wear if she gets one, and blah blah blah. And Betty only works thru Wednesday, apparently, so there would be no point of going on Thursday or Friday--and Thursday morning there was a note on the fridge, asking if I could leave him $8 for cigarettes.
Now, all this mess doesn't screw me up at all--aside from the $28, it doesn't cost me a damn thing--but it slows down my progress, makes it harder for me to plan, and annoys the holy crap out of me. I told Tim that if I don't have a concrete answer from Betty as far as housing plans by the end of this week, I'm considering the matter closed. I also texted Betty, telling her to call me as soon as she can so we can get things settled. That's all I can do--and to be honest, I'm really hoping I DON'T hear anything. I would honestly rather live by myself; I'm only going along with this because Betty seems like a decent person and Tim has asked me to consider it as an option. But we got a letter from the lawyers last week, and if that letter is to be believed, time is running VERY short. I can't control what Tim and Squeaky's situation will be when time runs out; I can only control MY situation, so that's what I'm going to do. But as I do so, I'm going to make it VERY VERY clear to Tim: I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself, and I will not accept it if he, finding himself and his passenger in an uncomfortable situation in the future, attempts to put any sort of responsibility for that situation on ME. He has lived here for eleven months, and I have given him ample opportunity to improve his situation during that time; he chose not to take that opportunity, and that was HIS choice, not mine. If he and Squeaky find themselves homeless because they don't have jobs, or haven't had them long enough to save for an apartment, that's entirely not my fault, and entirely not my responsibility to rescue them again.
(Firefly thinks it's going to go differently; she thinks I'm gonna end up with these two on my hands just the same as they are now. As I told her, I plan to get an apartment small enough to make that an impossibility; I'll gladly give up some space in exchange for peace, quiet, and an end to the eternal, hell-begotten SINGING.)
I love Tim to pieces, and in past times I've seen him act like a responsible, mature adult; I know it can happen because I've WITNESSED it. When he's on his own and not involved with anyone, he can work hard, save money, and pay his bills on time. That's why I took him in this last time, because I knew he COULD do it. And when Squeaky came into the picture, he'd just started at a job; he hadn't made much, but he was WORKING. Then comes the Squeakster, and poof-- Responsible Tim is replaced by this other guy, who's making no money, no progress, nothing but excuses. And this is the worst possible time for THAT Tim to show up.
I hope he makes it all work out for himself, but I have my own problems right now. I'll help him where I can, but I also have to take care of myself.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
"Weird" Is Not Even the Word
Aaaaaaand it gets weirder.
I'm having a difficult time wrapping my brain around this situation, so I'm going to relate the facts as I understand them.
At 6 this morning, I awoke to a tap on the leg from Tim. We'd both stayed up late last night, drinking beer and just generally relaxing; I'd finally fallen asleep around 4, so I was apparently pretty difficult to wake.
"Um, can you give me a ride? Squeaky's in the hospital again," he said.
We drove to the hospital--not the same one we'd taken her to the other night, but one a fair bit closer to home--and I dropped him off. We were both assuming it was Squeaky's stomach again.
I stopped at McDonalds and picked up some breakfast and came home. There were a couple of messages from Squeaky's dad, asking if she was here; just as I finished eating, he called again, and I told him what I knew--that she was in the E.R, probably with her stomach complaint again. He said she'd gone out last night with his upstairs neighbor--a woman he's apparently known for about a year--and that she hadn't come back. I assured him that I knew where she was, and that she'd probably call him soon. I sent a text message to Tim for him to call Squeaky's dad, and then about 8 AM, I went to bed. I set my alarm for 10:40, since I had a noon appointment with Dr. J on the north side of the city.
At a couple minutes after 9, the phone rang. "Hey, um..." said Tim. "Listen, I don't have my bus card, and anyway they wouldn't let Squeaky on the bus because she doesn't have any shoes, and they're gonna discharge her in a few minutes....she's really fucked up..."
"What, did they give her pain meds or something?"
"Nah," he said. "She got raped by them Kings over in Humboldt Park. They drugged her up, too. Drugged her up and raped her."
"Holy shit," I said. "Damn. Yeah, I'll be there in a little bit."
I pulled up to the hospital and Tim and Squeaky walked out. Or rather, Tim walked; Squeaky leaned on him. She was moving very slowly, obviously in pain. While we drove home, she made a couple of phone calls; from what I overheard, I gathered a little of what had happened. She told someone "Yeah, I relapsed last night," and made arrangements for her dad to pick up some of her belongings from a friend's house, which Tim was supposedly going to get later. I dropped them off--Squeaky needed substantial help from Tim to get out of the car and up the steps--and went to my appointment.
I came home, fixed a sandwich, and went straight to bed. I slept like a stone for quite a while, and came downstairs around 8 PM. Around 9, as I heated up some leftovers, Squeaky emerged from Tim's room, on her way to the bathroom.
"How you doin', lady?" I asked.
Her voice was hoarse. "I have bruises all over my body and I feel like shit," she said. She showed me her arms; they were covered with bruises, like big finger-marks, all the way from the upper arm to her hands. "And I can't use this hand because it hurts so much. Do you have some ice I could use?"
I fixed her an icepack, and she went back into Tim's room for a while. When she came out, she started telling me what had happened.
The story she told was so crazy-sounding, so fantastical, that she said she knew nobody would believe her. It started out normally enough--she had left her dad's place with his upstairs neighbor. "My dad trusted her, so I figured I could trust her too, right? He was okay for me to go out with her..."
At one point last night, around 10 or 11 PM, Squeaky had called and said she was on her way over--that this woman was going to give her a ride over here. Then that plan changed, and Tim said she wasn't coming after all because "the girl who's driving wants to go see her baby-daddy," Tim said.
What neither Tim nor Squeaky knew was that the baby-daddy in question lived in Humboldt Park. *note below When they arrived, Squeaky protested, repeating that she really, really wanted to come over here and see Tim instead. "No, no," the girl apparently told her. "These guys are cool."
This is the last point at which the story makes perfect sense. From here, it gets dodgy. Not that I disbelieve her--I want to make that clear. I don't doubt that she THINKS some of these things happened, but...
I'm ahead of myself.
There were apparently several people in this place the neighbor took her, and at one point one (possibly more) of the guys wanted Squeaky to come for a ride with him. She didn't want to go but the neighbor said he was okay, that she should go with him and just relax, and that nothing would happen because if anything happened, Squeaky's dad was going to blame HER (the neighbor). Squeaky resisted, saying she still would rather go to see Tim, but the neighbor was adamant and said that if she didn't go, it would mess up her (the neighbor's) relationship with the baby-daddy, and blah blah blah. So against her better judgement, Squeaky went with the guy.
ALSO against her better judgement (she claims), she was persuaded to have a couple of drinks. She says she really, really didn't want to drink--she's been sober for a couple of months now--but that the guy pressured her. She said that after the drinks, she started feeling really strange--like her limbs were going numb, and her brain was fogged, and all sorts of other uncomfortable sensations. (I'm thinking the guy slipped her something in her drink.)
THEN, she says, he started trying to make a move on her, and she told him not to touch her--that if her "man"--meaning Tim--found out that he'd done anything to her, Tim would kill him. She fought him off, she said. Later, she says, he stopped to get some weed, and she took two hits.
This was where things got really, REALLY weird.
She claims she jumped out of the car at a stop sign, because she had called the neighbor to tell her to come rescue her, and when she asked the guy where they were, his answer didn't match the street signs she could see, so she got out of the car to check for herself. She claims she passed a cop car, but when she told them she was in trouble they said "I don't give a shit" and "Don't make me shoot you" and such; that they were in marked police cars but wouldn't show her a badge and wouldn't help her....
The story went on like this for a long time. At one point she was in a church that wasn't a church, because there was one white person speaking English and a lot of black people speaking in tongues, and they tied her down and put some sort of liquid on her which made her skin numb, and some guy made her repeat something after him...and there was an ambulance, except the people driving it weren't paramedics, and she said they were going to set it on fire...and on and on.
My suspicion here is that either her drink, or the weed, or both, contained some sort of hallucinogens--PCP, maybe, is Tim's guess. I'm pretty sure that all sorts of seriously-disturbing things happened to her, but that the cult/church and the fake cops and fake paramedics and being chained to the rails inside the ambulance...that all of that was the result of her seriously-altered perceptions. (Even when she was staying here before, I'd commented to Tim on her seeming inability to tell fact from fiction and reality from unreality; I'm sure THAT little quirk of personality is involved here as well.) She swears up and down that all of these things happened, and I'm sure, in her mind, that they did.
What is NOT called into dispute, though: the girl is COVERED in bruises. She was clearly hurt, and she clearly gave a good fight. She said she was combative in the hospital when she finally woke up, even to the point of yelling at Tim, when he arrived, that HE was part of this big conspiracy too. (She had convinced herself, at some point, that there was a small group of people who were in on this plan to hurt her; she says that the people she saw at the house when she arrived were the same people who were supposedly paramedics and police; that this same group was in the "church" and on the streets in the area. I don't know WHAT to make of that.) I'm sure some of the bruises were from the medical personnel trying to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else. She also says it took them a couple of hours to get her name and contact info out of her, because she was convinced that the people in the hospital were part of the plot as well. She says she thought they were going to kill her, and that she also thought they were going kill Tim, and she begged them not to kill Tim, to kill her instead.
She's absolutely devastated, to say the least. She's scared to be alone, and claims she's never going anywhere alone again, ever. She's very obviously been traumatized--there's not the slightest sense that she's faking. I don't know how much of what she says is true; the bulk of the story, as far as I can see, is the result of horribly-distorted perceptions caused by whatever these assholes spiked her drink or her weed with. She swears they're not--she is absolutely SURE that everything happened exactly as she remembers--which, to me, would be enough reason to be traumatized all on its own! But it's very obvious that she was victimized in some manner. I didn't press for info about the rape--whether the hospital had done a rape kit or anything--but I did ask if the police were called, and she said no. She has no recollection of how she even got to the hospital; my guess is that the "fake" ambulance, supposedly part of the plot, was actually real.
The hell of this? According to Squeaky, her father is still defending the upstairs neighbor--the one who brought her into this situation. Tim, of course, is livid. I'm hoping HE doesn't do something stupid as "revenge".
I told her I'd give her a ride up to her dad's tomorrow, so she can collect her stuff; before this happened, Tim had approached me with a request: that Squeaky be allowed to stay here til we move, to make it easier for her to get to the job that's waiting for her (downtown) and so that she can give a Chicago address to the social-services agencies; apparently some programs are only available to city residents, and her dad's address is in the suburbs. I told him yes, but SOLELY ON THE CONDITION THAT her residency with us ends the moment we move, and that any attempt to extend it beyond that point will be considered a dealbreaker as regards the continuation of our roommate-ship. He agreed to that condition--and several others, such as "she has to bring her own toiletries, because I'm tired of her using all my shampoo".
This new development, as I told Dr. J today, will not shake my resolve. (I was proceeding on very sketchy reports of what had happened, but I'd seen enough to know, even before I got the story, that something bad had clearly taken place.) She can stay til we move--which will be happening by the end of October at the VERY latest--but once we move, if Tim wants to live with her he'll have to get them an apartment together, because I'm not going down that road. That's what I told him in the first place, and that doesn't change because of what happened to her.
But oh, my god, do I feel bad for that poor girl. All my animosity towards her has gone; I just feel really, really bad for her. Nobody should have to live the life she's had; no matter what percentage of the bad decisions have been hers, that doesn't excuse the bastards who have taken advantage of her. Like everyone else, when she said "No" that should have been respected; like everyone else, no matter if she'd made a bad decision, she's still a human being and should have been treated as such. I can't begin to describe how sad her story makes me, or how angry--or how lucky I feel, to have had the life I've had, because no matter what has happened in my life, it's mostly stuff I've brought on myself--not stuff that other people have inflicted on me.
And again: she's only nineteen years old. I know some EIGHTY-year-olds, and not ONE of them has had HALF the bad things happen to them that have happened to Squeaky in those nineteen years. No matter what part she's played by making bad decisions--nobody, NOBODY, deserves the things that have happened to her.
*Non-Chicagoans--Humboldt Park is a neighborhood in Chicago, about a mile to three miles north and two to four miles east of where we live. It's predominantly Hispanic; though it's been in the process of gentrifying for about fifteen years now, there are still very rough patches here and there. JP lived in Humboldt Park when he and I first started seeing each other, back in 1994, and when my ex found out where I'd been going every night, he referred to it as "a demilitarized zone". Tim has an instinctive fear of H.P., because it's predominantly Latin Kings territory and Tim affiliates himself with a rival organization.
I'm having a difficult time wrapping my brain around this situation, so I'm going to relate the facts as I understand them.
At 6 this morning, I awoke to a tap on the leg from Tim. We'd both stayed up late last night, drinking beer and just generally relaxing; I'd finally fallen asleep around 4, so I was apparently pretty difficult to wake.
"Um, can you give me a ride? Squeaky's in the hospital again," he said.
We drove to the hospital--not the same one we'd taken her to the other night, but one a fair bit closer to home--and I dropped him off. We were both assuming it was Squeaky's stomach again.
I stopped at McDonalds and picked up some breakfast and came home. There were a couple of messages from Squeaky's dad, asking if she was here; just as I finished eating, he called again, and I told him what I knew--that she was in the E.R, probably with her stomach complaint again. He said she'd gone out last night with his upstairs neighbor--a woman he's apparently known for about a year--and that she hadn't come back. I assured him that I knew where she was, and that she'd probably call him soon. I sent a text message to Tim for him to call Squeaky's dad, and then about 8 AM, I went to bed. I set my alarm for 10:40, since I had a noon appointment with Dr. J on the north side of the city.
At a couple minutes after 9, the phone rang. "Hey, um..." said Tim. "Listen, I don't have my bus card, and anyway they wouldn't let Squeaky on the bus because she doesn't have any shoes, and they're gonna discharge her in a few minutes....she's really fucked up..."
"What, did they give her pain meds or something?"
"Nah," he said. "She got raped by them Kings over in Humboldt Park. They drugged her up, too. Drugged her up and raped her."
"Holy shit," I said. "Damn. Yeah, I'll be there in a little bit."
I pulled up to the hospital and Tim and Squeaky walked out. Or rather, Tim walked; Squeaky leaned on him. She was moving very slowly, obviously in pain. While we drove home, she made a couple of phone calls; from what I overheard, I gathered a little of what had happened. She told someone "Yeah, I relapsed last night," and made arrangements for her dad to pick up some of her belongings from a friend's house, which Tim was supposedly going to get later. I dropped them off--Squeaky needed substantial help from Tim to get out of the car and up the steps--and went to my appointment.
I came home, fixed a sandwich, and went straight to bed. I slept like a stone for quite a while, and came downstairs around 8 PM. Around 9, as I heated up some leftovers, Squeaky emerged from Tim's room, on her way to the bathroom.
"How you doin', lady?" I asked.
Her voice was hoarse. "I have bruises all over my body and I feel like shit," she said. She showed me her arms; they were covered with bruises, like big finger-marks, all the way from the upper arm to her hands. "And I can't use this hand because it hurts so much. Do you have some ice I could use?"
I fixed her an icepack, and she went back into Tim's room for a while. When she came out, she started telling me what had happened.
The story she told was so crazy-sounding, so fantastical, that she said she knew nobody would believe her. It started out normally enough--she had left her dad's place with his upstairs neighbor. "My dad trusted her, so I figured I could trust her too, right? He was okay for me to go out with her..."
At one point last night, around 10 or 11 PM, Squeaky had called and said she was on her way over--that this woman was going to give her a ride over here. Then that plan changed, and Tim said she wasn't coming after all because "the girl who's driving wants to go see her baby-daddy," Tim said.
What neither Tim nor Squeaky knew was that the baby-daddy in question lived in Humboldt Park. *note below When they arrived, Squeaky protested, repeating that she really, really wanted to come over here and see Tim instead. "No, no," the girl apparently told her. "These guys are cool."
This is the last point at which the story makes perfect sense. From here, it gets dodgy. Not that I disbelieve her--I want to make that clear. I don't doubt that she THINKS some of these things happened, but...
I'm ahead of myself.
There were apparently several people in this place the neighbor took her, and at one point one (possibly more) of the guys wanted Squeaky to come for a ride with him. She didn't want to go but the neighbor said he was okay, that she should go with him and just relax, and that nothing would happen because if anything happened, Squeaky's dad was going to blame HER (the neighbor). Squeaky resisted, saying she still would rather go to see Tim, but the neighbor was adamant and said that if she didn't go, it would mess up her (the neighbor's) relationship with the baby-daddy, and blah blah blah. So against her better judgement, Squeaky went with the guy.
ALSO against her better judgement (she claims), she was persuaded to have a couple of drinks. She says she really, really didn't want to drink--she's been sober for a couple of months now--but that the guy pressured her. She said that after the drinks, she started feeling really strange--like her limbs were going numb, and her brain was fogged, and all sorts of other uncomfortable sensations. (I'm thinking the guy slipped her something in her drink.)
THEN, she says, he started trying to make a move on her, and she told him not to touch her--that if her "man"--meaning Tim--found out that he'd done anything to her, Tim would kill him. She fought him off, she said. Later, she says, he stopped to get some weed, and she took two hits.
This was where things got really, REALLY weird.
She claims she jumped out of the car at a stop sign, because she had called the neighbor to tell her to come rescue her, and when she asked the guy where they were, his answer didn't match the street signs she could see, so she got out of the car to check for herself. She claims she passed a cop car, but when she told them she was in trouble they said "I don't give a shit" and "Don't make me shoot you" and such; that they were in marked police cars but wouldn't show her a badge and wouldn't help her....
The story went on like this for a long time. At one point she was in a church that wasn't a church, because there was one white person speaking English and a lot of black people speaking in tongues, and they tied her down and put some sort of liquid on her which made her skin numb, and some guy made her repeat something after him...and there was an ambulance, except the people driving it weren't paramedics, and she said they were going to set it on fire...and on and on.
My suspicion here is that either her drink, or the weed, or both, contained some sort of hallucinogens--PCP, maybe, is Tim's guess. I'm pretty sure that all sorts of seriously-disturbing things happened to her, but that the cult/church and the fake cops and fake paramedics and being chained to the rails inside the ambulance...that all of that was the result of her seriously-altered perceptions. (Even when she was staying here before, I'd commented to Tim on her seeming inability to tell fact from fiction and reality from unreality; I'm sure THAT little quirk of personality is involved here as well.) She swears up and down that all of these things happened, and I'm sure, in her mind, that they did.
What is NOT called into dispute, though: the girl is COVERED in bruises. She was clearly hurt, and she clearly gave a good fight. She said she was combative in the hospital when she finally woke up, even to the point of yelling at Tim, when he arrived, that HE was part of this big conspiracy too. (She had convinced herself, at some point, that there was a small group of people who were in on this plan to hurt her; she says that the people she saw at the house when she arrived were the same people who were supposedly paramedics and police; that this same group was in the "church" and on the streets in the area. I don't know WHAT to make of that.) I'm sure some of the bruises were from the medical personnel trying to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else. She also says it took them a couple of hours to get her name and contact info out of her, because she was convinced that the people in the hospital were part of the plot as well. She says she thought they were going to kill her, and that she also thought they were going kill Tim, and she begged them not to kill Tim, to kill her instead.
She's absolutely devastated, to say the least. She's scared to be alone, and claims she's never going anywhere alone again, ever. She's very obviously been traumatized--there's not the slightest sense that she's faking. I don't know how much of what she says is true; the bulk of the story, as far as I can see, is the result of horribly-distorted perceptions caused by whatever these assholes spiked her drink or her weed with. She swears they're not--she is absolutely SURE that everything happened exactly as she remembers--which, to me, would be enough reason to be traumatized all on its own! But it's very obvious that she was victimized in some manner. I didn't press for info about the rape--whether the hospital had done a rape kit or anything--but I did ask if the police were called, and she said no. She has no recollection of how she even got to the hospital; my guess is that the "fake" ambulance, supposedly part of the plot, was actually real.
The hell of this? According to Squeaky, her father is still defending the upstairs neighbor--the one who brought her into this situation. Tim, of course, is livid. I'm hoping HE doesn't do something stupid as "revenge".
I told her I'd give her a ride up to her dad's tomorrow, so she can collect her stuff; before this happened, Tim had approached me with a request: that Squeaky be allowed to stay here til we move, to make it easier for her to get to the job that's waiting for her (downtown) and so that she can give a Chicago address to the social-services agencies; apparently some programs are only available to city residents, and her dad's address is in the suburbs. I told him yes, but SOLELY ON THE CONDITION THAT her residency with us ends the moment we move, and that any attempt to extend it beyond that point will be considered a dealbreaker as regards the continuation of our roommate-ship. He agreed to that condition--and several others, such as "she has to bring her own toiletries, because I'm tired of her using all my shampoo".
This new development, as I told Dr. J today, will not shake my resolve. (I was proceeding on very sketchy reports of what had happened, but I'd seen enough to know, even before I got the story, that something bad had clearly taken place.) She can stay til we move--which will be happening by the end of October at the VERY latest--but once we move, if Tim wants to live with her he'll have to get them an apartment together, because I'm not going down that road. That's what I told him in the first place, and that doesn't change because of what happened to her.
But oh, my god, do I feel bad for that poor girl. All my animosity towards her has gone; I just feel really, really bad for her. Nobody should have to live the life she's had; no matter what percentage of the bad decisions have been hers, that doesn't excuse the bastards who have taken advantage of her. Like everyone else, when she said "No" that should have been respected; like everyone else, no matter if she'd made a bad decision, she's still a human being and should have been treated as such. I can't begin to describe how sad her story makes me, or how angry--or how lucky I feel, to have had the life I've had, because no matter what has happened in my life, it's mostly stuff I've brought on myself--not stuff that other people have inflicted on me.
And again: she's only nineteen years old. I know some EIGHTY-year-olds, and not ONE of them has had HALF the bad things happen to them that have happened to Squeaky in those nineteen years. No matter what part she's played by making bad decisions--nobody, NOBODY, deserves the things that have happened to her.
*Non-Chicagoans--Humboldt Park is a neighborhood in Chicago, about a mile to three miles north and two to four miles east of where we live. It's predominantly Hispanic; though it's been in the process of gentrifying for about fifteen years now, there are still very rough patches here and there. JP lived in Humboldt Park when he and I first started seeing each other, back in 1994, and when my ex found out where I'd been going every night, he referred to it as "a demilitarized zone". Tim has an instinctive fear of H.P., because it's predominantly Latin Kings territory and Tim affiliates himself with a rival organization.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
No Good Deed...
You know how that proverb ends, right?
Yep--so do I.
(Note: this post was written over the space of three days. I started it Sunday; it is now just after midnight, which makes it Wednesday. I would say the three posts in a sequence--this one, the "OMFG..." post, and the "Disclaimer-ish" post--give a pretty accurate picture of the state of this house from Saturday evening til the present--to say nothing of the state of my mind.)
So Saturday evening, I get home from my first Saturday of work. I arrive with a 12-pack of beer, to find the house empty, and, expecting an evening of peace and quiet based on this fact, put the beer in the fridge and turn on the TV.
First problem: the cable is off. I calculate the date in my mind, then realize yeah, shoulda paid that one about 2 weeks ago. The bills in this house are in total disarray; basically, the squeakiest creditors get the cash, and anyone who can shut something off will be paid before someone who can't. Once we move, I will change that; I plan to be the...
pause.
This pause in my blog has been inserted because in light of the story I am about to relate, I need to add this interruption to show you all what I'm up against.
*************************************************************
(written Sunday night) I was writing this post, here in my living room where the computer desk is, at 11:00 PM--even though I have to be up for work before 6 this morning--because Tim and Squeaky had gone into their room at last and FINALLY, for the first time ALL FREAKING WEEKEND, I was reasonably assured of some privacy.
As I wrote the sentence just before the pause, they came out. Tim came over and whispered gibberish at me, to make it seem like he was talking about Squeaky. It's a game, I guess, that they play. Then, he went to the fridge for some ice cream. They sat down on the sofa, talking to me all the while. (Actually, Tim was mostly silent; Squeaky was yammering on about some TV show or something.) I listened for about three sentences and went back to reading whatever page I'd brought up when they came out--neither of them, as you might imagine, know about my blog.
After about ten minutes, Tim said to Squeaky, "Okay, leave her alone and let her read. She gets cranky if you don't let her read." (True enough.) After some more jabber, she followed him into the room, and I brought my page back up.
NOT TWO MINUTES LATER, from the room: "Gladys!!!"
I put my head in my hands. "What?"
"He called me fat!" Door opens. Squeaky and Tim emerge.
"Leave her alone," says Tim.
"I AM leaving her alone," she tells him. "He called me fat! Make him stop calling me fat!"
"Will you LEAVE HER ALONE!" Tim said.
"I AM leaving her alone!"
"Actually," I piped up, "you're really not. Actually you're sorta...still talking."
"I SAID, leave her the fuck alone!" Tim said. "I swear to God, I'm gonna smack you..." (He's not. We threaten horrible lingering death to each other a million times a day; I know of exactly one incident when Tim has hit a girl, and that was fifteen years ago and he was blackout drunk. So that threat, though it's obnoxious and dickheaded and all the rest, is not anywhere near as threatening as it seems--and what's more, Squeaky knows this.)
"I AM leaving her alone!!!!" To me: "Did you hear what he just said to me??? You're supposed to save me!!!"
I put my hands over my face again. "Okay, actually? No I'm not. That's what all that bullshit was about last night. I'm so totally NOT supposed to save you."
After some more squawking and yammering, and the background sound of a vein in my forehead throbbing, they finally went back into the room. The odds of them staying there long enough for me to complete this post are roughly nil.
end pause
****************************************************************
As I was saying:
Once we move, I plan to be the soul of order and punctuality as regards the payment of bills; now, however, it seems to be too Herculean a task to even contemplate the masses of unopened and opened mail which has accumulated on every available desk, much less to undertake to pay it all. I will continue to dwell on this shoestring, and take it as a lesson learned.
Anyhow.
As I was on the phone with the Automated System of the Damned, paying the Comcast bill, the door opened and in came Tim. Since my back was to the door, I didn't realize Squeaky was with him til she came out of the bathroom a couple of minutes later.
Here's the thing, though: Tim wasn't speaking to her. He went into his room, leaving her in the living room, and slammed the door and turned his music up loud. She made several forays into the room, and every time emerged looking crestfallen.
As I heard the story from her: apparently she was supposed to be staying at her dad's house. (Not her stepdad the sexually-abusing asshole; her real dad, who I guess is a wee bit of a jerk but otherwise mostly harmless.) Tim apparently had a long talk with Squeaky's dad a week or so ago, affirming that they both care a lot about what happens to her, and making an agreement that she could alternate between staying at her dad's and staying here. (In case you're wondering--no one asked me, no.) And it was that agreement that touched off the whole conflagration.
Apparently she'd stayed a day or two at her dad's, then gone to visit a "friend" of hers on the South Side. "Friend" gets quotes because it's a guy, and because her choice of "friends" in the past has led her into all sorts of situations. This was no exception; apparently, as she got off the Red Line at 95th to meet him, she was followed by a guy she knew, a guy who had raped her in the past, who she'd seen several weeks ago in a public place and who she'd apparently told off, made brave by the fact that he couldn't do anything to her while there were people around.
Well, this time, she wasn't so lucky; he grabbed her and choked her, telling her "This is for last time--you think you're so tough?" According to her, that was all that happened; she has bruises all around her neck, so either she's telling the truth or something else happened that she isn't mentioning.
She didn't want to tell Tim about getting choked, allegedly because she was afraid Tim would get mad and insist on finding and killing this guy. (Do I believe this story? Not entirely.) All she told Tim was that she left her dad's and spent the weekend with "a friend".
That's HER story. Tim's story--which came out after four hours of the silent treatment, during which I was left to entertain Squeaky and listen to her kvetch about Tim's treatment of her, all while I would have MUCH rather been relaxing with my Coronas, my onions-and-beef over rice, and my NASCAR race--Tim's story was: she was supposed to be staying at her dad's, and then all of a sudden she calls him and leaves him a message that she's staying with a friend--a GIRL, in the original story. And then halfway through her story, that girl becomes a guy. She claims she has no recollection of telling him she would be staying with a girl. She claims she was stung by a bee and because she's allergic, she took Benadryl and it made her sleepy and she doesn't remember that phone call because she was half-asleep.
I wasn't sure who, if anyone, was telling the truth. I didn't like, though, the way Tim was talking to her--like the ONLY places she was permitted to stay were either here or at her dad's, like she had no say-so and she wasn't allowed to change her plans. That was MY main objection--that he was talking to her as though he owned her, and that regardless of how angry he was, it was NOT okay for him to bring someone to the house and ignore them, leaving them as MY responsibility. "She's not your responsibility, though, G!" he said. "You shouldn't even be mediating this situation."
He claimed, after the fact, that the sentence "You shouldn't even be mediating this situation," meant "please stop mediating the situation." I didn't take it that way. So when he started yelling at her about her "friends" and her changing stories and her general lack of trustworthiness and consistency, I tried to calm the waters.
Big mistake.
At one point, he said something about Squeaky having no job. Now, she had told me that she'd just gotten a job, at a coffee shop, and would be starting in a week or so. I mentioned this, and he scoffed. "What, after waiting around for six months for a job?"
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Tim," I said quietly, "You really shouldn't judge people for making the same kind of decisions you made." He wasn't listening; apparently something in my expression showed my amazement that he would even have the nerve to say such a thing, because his voice started getting louder as he started talking about jobs she'd apparently turned down.
I was running out of words, not to mention patience, and so I just pointed at him. And apparently, this was exactly the worst thing I could have done, judging from the explosion that followed. The sum of what he was yelling--in my face, at the top of his lungs--was that he could have three or four jobs, and yeah he'd turned down a job, because he was entitled to do whatever he wanted if he thought a job wasn't worth taking, and don't you point at me, and blah blah really loud and ineffectual and probably at least somewhat guilt-ridden blah.
And he'd been drinking, and I'd been drinking (and yes, you are all entitled to crawl up my ass for the decision I made immediately thereafter, but I was, SERIOUSLY, not drunk) and Squeaky was in the background talking about "fuck it, I'm getting out of here, I'm going back to my dad's" and Tim was yelling at her about "no you won't, if you leave this house you'll just go right back to the South Side to fuck around some more," and I had now officially had ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY ENOUGH, so I said "C'mon, Squeaky, I'll give you a ride to your dad's house." And I grabbed my bag and my car keys and walked out the door, got in the car and started the ignition.
And waited.
And waited.
No Squeaky.
About five minutes later, I called the house number on my cell phone. "Squeaky," I said. "I am outside in the car waiting for you. If you want a ride, you need to come outside, right now."
Five minutes after that, out came Squeaky.
"Tim says to tell you that no way are you driving and no way am I getting into a car with you in your condition. He wants you to come inside."
"Oh," I said, turning off the car and getting out. "So now I get to look like the idiot for stepping in and trying to help somebody else. Good. That's wonderful."
"I think he's gonna apologize," she said.
"I don't give a fuck either way," I replied, largely because I know Tim well enough to know that an apology was not forthcoming, at least not for an hour or so. As I walked in the door, I repeated that sentence, and added "I really have nothing to say.'
"Ohh," said Tim. "So if I don't want to talk, that's terrible, but if YOU don't want to..."
"I don't use it as an everyday strategy!" I said, walking up the stairs. " 'I don't wanna talk about it!' 'I just want to be by myself.' 'Leave me alone--I don't wanna talk,'" I said, doing my best (and, might I add, extremely childish) imitation of Tim whenever he's faced with some negative consequence to HIS actions. "Well, now it's MY turn: I don't want to talk."
I went upstairs and put a sign on my door: DO NOT KNOCK. I put another sign on a string at the top of the steps: I WOULDN'T. And I went into my room, got out my yarn, and sat down in front of the TV to crochet.
It took about half an hour, but Tim came upstairs, ignoring all notices to the contrary, and knocked on my door. And A Conversation was had; I explained to him that yelling at me was a very, very, VERY bad idea, for a myriad of reasons including but not limited to: if you're yelling at me, you're not hearing my point. (I managed, with Herculean effort, not to add "...and you'll never see another cigarette, can of beer, dollar added to your bus pass, dollar 'loaned' to you, meal shared, personal-care item purchased, cell-phone bill paid, or financial obligation ignored EVER AGAIN." Never let it be said that I have learned nothing from my mother's money-is-power issues.) "And my point WAS," I added, "that you shouldn't judge people for doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING YOU DID."
He conceded the issue, but added, "Yeah, but when you point your finger at me like that...."
"Yeah, I know. That was maybe not the best way of expressing myself," I told him.
We talked some more, and he did apologize; I told him that I really didn't appreciate a lot of the stuff that had been going on, and he told me that he would really, REALLY appreciate if, in the future, I didn't take it upon myself to mediate their arguments/bickering/complaining/disputes/whatever. "It's not your job," he said. "Don't put yourself in that position."
"I DON'T put MYSELF there," I reminded him. "SHE comes to ME when she wants to bitch about you."
"Well then, shut her down," he advised. "Tell her 'Look, I'm not going to put myself in the middle of this--if you have a problem with Tim, go talk to Tim.'"
"And then when you don't want to talk, and YOU shut her down TOO...?"
"That's between her and me, though." Which...okay, yeah, he's right, but it's tough to see a person with a problem, who's TRYING to talk to the other involved party about the problem, but the other person doesn't want to talk and so the wounded party is left with no recourse than to just deal--and it's very hard for me NOT to try to help, under the circumstances. Especially when I know that--for the most part--I can usually manage to remain objective...
...until people start yelling, and not listening to me, and claiming that true things are false, and the sky is green, and rain falls up, and they could have three or four jobs ANY TIME THEY WANTED THEM. Apparently that's my breaking point.
Anyhow, Tim and I worked it out, and had a hug, and the problem was mostly solved...
Mostly. As the other posts in this sequence will show.
Yep--so do I.
(Note: this post was written over the space of three days. I started it Sunday; it is now just after midnight, which makes it Wednesday. I would say the three posts in a sequence--this one, the "OMFG..." post, and the "Disclaimer-ish" post--give a pretty accurate picture of the state of this house from Saturday evening til the present--to say nothing of the state of my mind.)
So Saturday evening, I get home from my first Saturday of work. I arrive with a 12-pack of beer, to find the house empty, and, expecting an evening of peace and quiet based on this fact, put the beer in the fridge and turn on the TV.
First problem: the cable is off. I calculate the date in my mind, then realize yeah, shoulda paid that one about 2 weeks ago. The bills in this house are in total disarray; basically, the squeakiest creditors get the cash, and anyone who can shut something off will be paid before someone who can't. Once we move, I will change that; I plan to be the...
pause.
This pause in my blog has been inserted because in light of the story I am about to relate, I need to add this interruption to show you all what I'm up against.
*************************************************************
(written Sunday night) I was writing this post, here in my living room where the computer desk is, at 11:00 PM--even though I have to be up for work before 6 this morning--because Tim and Squeaky had gone into their room at last and FINALLY, for the first time ALL FREAKING WEEKEND, I was reasonably assured of some privacy.
As I wrote the sentence just before the pause, they came out. Tim came over and whispered gibberish at me, to make it seem like he was talking about Squeaky. It's a game, I guess, that they play. Then, he went to the fridge for some ice cream. They sat down on the sofa, talking to me all the while. (Actually, Tim was mostly silent; Squeaky was yammering on about some TV show or something.) I listened for about three sentences and went back to reading whatever page I'd brought up when they came out--neither of them, as you might imagine, know about my blog.
After about ten minutes, Tim said to Squeaky, "Okay, leave her alone and let her read. She gets cranky if you don't let her read." (True enough.) After some more jabber, she followed him into the room, and I brought my page back up.
NOT TWO MINUTES LATER, from the room: "Gladys!!!"
I put my head in my hands. "What?"
"He called me fat!" Door opens. Squeaky and Tim emerge.
"Leave her alone," says Tim.
"I AM leaving her alone," she tells him. "He called me fat! Make him stop calling me fat!"
"Will you LEAVE HER ALONE!" Tim said.
"I AM leaving her alone!"
"Actually," I piped up, "you're really not. Actually you're sorta...still talking."
"I SAID, leave her the fuck alone!" Tim said. "I swear to God, I'm gonna smack you..." (He's not. We threaten horrible lingering death to each other a million times a day; I know of exactly one incident when Tim has hit a girl, and that was fifteen years ago and he was blackout drunk. So that threat, though it's obnoxious and dickheaded and all the rest, is not anywhere near as threatening as it seems--and what's more, Squeaky knows this.)
"I AM leaving her alone!!!!" To me: "Did you hear what he just said to me??? You're supposed to save me!!!"
I put my hands over my face again. "Okay, actually? No I'm not. That's what all that bullshit was about last night. I'm so totally NOT supposed to save you."
After some more squawking and yammering, and the background sound of a vein in my forehead throbbing, they finally went back into the room. The odds of them staying there long enough for me to complete this post are roughly nil.
end pause
****************************************************************
As I was saying:
Once we move, I plan to be the soul of order and punctuality as regards the payment of bills; now, however, it seems to be too Herculean a task to even contemplate the masses of unopened and opened mail which has accumulated on every available desk, much less to undertake to pay it all. I will continue to dwell on this shoestring, and take it as a lesson learned.
Anyhow.
As I was on the phone with the Automated System of the Damned, paying the Comcast bill, the door opened and in came Tim. Since my back was to the door, I didn't realize Squeaky was with him til she came out of the bathroom a couple of minutes later.
Here's the thing, though: Tim wasn't speaking to her. He went into his room, leaving her in the living room, and slammed the door and turned his music up loud. She made several forays into the room, and every time emerged looking crestfallen.
As I heard the story from her: apparently she was supposed to be staying at her dad's house. (Not her stepdad the sexually-abusing asshole; her real dad, who I guess is a wee bit of a jerk but otherwise mostly harmless.) Tim apparently had a long talk with Squeaky's dad a week or so ago, affirming that they both care a lot about what happens to her, and making an agreement that she could alternate between staying at her dad's and staying here. (In case you're wondering--no one asked me, no.) And it was that agreement that touched off the whole conflagration.
Apparently she'd stayed a day or two at her dad's, then gone to visit a "friend" of hers on the South Side. "Friend" gets quotes because it's a guy, and because her choice of "friends" in the past has led her into all sorts of situations. This was no exception; apparently, as she got off the Red Line at 95th to meet him, she was followed by a guy she knew, a guy who had raped her in the past, who she'd seen several weeks ago in a public place and who she'd apparently told off, made brave by the fact that he couldn't do anything to her while there were people around.
Well, this time, she wasn't so lucky; he grabbed her and choked her, telling her "This is for last time--you think you're so tough?" According to her, that was all that happened; she has bruises all around her neck, so either she's telling the truth or something else happened that she isn't mentioning.
She didn't want to tell Tim about getting choked, allegedly because she was afraid Tim would get mad and insist on finding and killing this guy. (Do I believe this story? Not entirely.) All she told Tim was that she left her dad's and spent the weekend with "a friend".
That's HER story. Tim's story--which came out after four hours of the silent treatment, during which I was left to entertain Squeaky and listen to her kvetch about Tim's treatment of her, all while I would have MUCH rather been relaxing with my Coronas, my onions-and-beef over rice, and my NASCAR race--Tim's story was: she was supposed to be staying at her dad's, and then all of a sudden she calls him and leaves him a message that she's staying with a friend--a GIRL, in the original story. And then halfway through her story, that girl becomes a guy. She claims she has no recollection of telling him she would be staying with a girl. She claims she was stung by a bee and because she's allergic, she took Benadryl and it made her sleepy and she doesn't remember that phone call because she was half-asleep.
I wasn't sure who, if anyone, was telling the truth. I didn't like, though, the way Tim was talking to her--like the ONLY places she was permitted to stay were either here or at her dad's, like she had no say-so and she wasn't allowed to change her plans. That was MY main objection--that he was talking to her as though he owned her, and that regardless of how angry he was, it was NOT okay for him to bring someone to the house and ignore them, leaving them as MY responsibility. "She's not your responsibility, though, G!" he said. "You shouldn't even be mediating this situation."
He claimed, after the fact, that the sentence "You shouldn't even be mediating this situation," meant "please stop mediating the situation." I didn't take it that way. So when he started yelling at her about her "friends" and her changing stories and her general lack of trustworthiness and consistency, I tried to calm the waters.
Big mistake.
At one point, he said something about Squeaky having no job. Now, she had told me that she'd just gotten a job, at a coffee shop, and would be starting in a week or so. I mentioned this, and he scoffed. "What, after waiting around for six months for a job?"
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Tim," I said quietly, "You really shouldn't judge people for making the same kind of decisions you made." He wasn't listening; apparently something in my expression showed my amazement that he would even have the nerve to say such a thing, because his voice started getting louder as he started talking about jobs she'd apparently turned down.
I was running out of words, not to mention patience, and so I just pointed at him. And apparently, this was exactly the worst thing I could have done, judging from the explosion that followed. The sum of what he was yelling--in my face, at the top of his lungs--was that he could have three or four jobs, and yeah he'd turned down a job, because he was entitled to do whatever he wanted if he thought a job wasn't worth taking, and don't you point at me, and blah blah really loud and ineffectual and probably at least somewhat guilt-ridden blah.
And he'd been drinking, and I'd been drinking (and yes, you are all entitled to crawl up my ass for the decision I made immediately thereafter, but I was, SERIOUSLY, not drunk) and Squeaky was in the background talking about "fuck it, I'm getting out of here, I'm going back to my dad's" and Tim was yelling at her about "no you won't, if you leave this house you'll just go right back to the South Side to fuck around some more," and I had now officially had ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY ENOUGH, so I said "C'mon, Squeaky, I'll give you a ride to your dad's house." And I grabbed my bag and my car keys and walked out the door, got in the car and started the ignition.
And waited.
And waited.
No Squeaky.
About five minutes later, I called the house number on my cell phone. "Squeaky," I said. "I am outside in the car waiting for you. If you want a ride, you need to come outside, right now."
Five minutes after that, out came Squeaky.
"Tim says to tell you that no way are you driving and no way am I getting into a car with you in your condition. He wants you to come inside."
"Oh," I said, turning off the car and getting out. "So now I get to look like the idiot for stepping in and trying to help somebody else. Good. That's wonderful."
"I think he's gonna apologize," she said.
"I don't give a fuck either way," I replied, largely because I know Tim well enough to know that an apology was not forthcoming, at least not for an hour or so. As I walked in the door, I repeated that sentence, and added "I really have nothing to say.'
"Ohh," said Tim. "So if I don't want to talk, that's terrible, but if YOU don't want to..."
"I don't use it as an everyday strategy!" I said, walking up the stairs. " 'I don't wanna talk about it!' 'I just want to be by myself.' 'Leave me alone--I don't wanna talk,'" I said, doing my best (and, might I add, extremely childish) imitation of Tim whenever he's faced with some negative consequence to HIS actions. "Well, now it's MY turn: I don't want to talk."
I went upstairs and put a sign on my door: DO NOT KNOCK. I put another sign on a string at the top of the steps: I WOULDN'T. And I went into my room, got out my yarn, and sat down in front of the TV to crochet.
It took about half an hour, but Tim came upstairs, ignoring all notices to the contrary, and knocked on my door. And A Conversation was had; I explained to him that yelling at me was a very, very, VERY bad idea, for a myriad of reasons including but not limited to: if you're yelling at me, you're not hearing my point. (I managed, with Herculean effort, not to add "...and you'll never see another cigarette, can of beer, dollar added to your bus pass, dollar 'loaned' to you, meal shared, personal-care item purchased, cell-phone bill paid, or financial obligation ignored EVER AGAIN." Never let it be said that I have learned nothing from my mother's money-is-power issues.) "And my point WAS," I added, "that you shouldn't judge people for doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING YOU DID."
He conceded the issue, but added, "Yeah, but when you point your finger at me like that...."
"Yeah, I know. That was maybe not the best way of expressing myself," I told him.
We talked some more, and he did apologize; I told him that I really didn't appreciate a lot of the stuff that had been going on, and he told me that he would really, REALLY appreciate if, in the future, I didn't take it upon myself to mediate their arguments/bickering/complaining/disputes/whatever. "It's not your job," he said. "Don't put yourself in that position."
"I DON'T put MYSELF there," I reminded him. "SHE comes to ME when she wants to bitch about you."
"Well then, shut her down," he advised. "Tell her 'Look, I'm not going to put myself in the middle of this--if you have a problem with Tim, go talk to Tim.'"
"And then when you don't want to talk, and YOU shut her down TOO...?"
"That's between her and me, though." Which...okay, yeah, he's right, but it's tough to see a person with a problem, who's TRYING to talk to the other involved party about the problem, but the other person doesn't want to talk and so the wounded party is left with no recourse than to just deal--and it's very hard for me NOT to try to help, under the circumstances. Especially when I know that--for the most part--I can usually manage to remain objective...
...until people start yelling, and not listening to me, and claiming that true things are false, and the sky is green, and rain falls up, and they could have three or four jobs ANY TIME THEY WANTED THEM. Apparently that's my breaking point.
Anyhow, Tim and I worked it out, and had a hug, and the problem was mostly solved...
Mostly. As the other posts in this sequence will show.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
I Just Remembered Why, Part One
I just remembered why I stay home on Saturday nights.
So when last you heard from your intrepid blogger (other than a momentary interlude of NASCAR-related angst), she was leaving for the night to go take the bus to Tim's favorite bar, to catch up with Tim and a potential roomie.
The first inkling that perhaps staying home might have been a good idea: the RFK project.
The RFK project has taken over downtown--mysterious signage everywhere, odd street closures, random helicopters--and it's only if you've read the paper, watched the news or otherwise related to the city of Chicago in the past few weeks that you would know what RFK is.
RFK--abbreviation for "Rory's First Kiss"--is the code name being used for the filming of the latest "Batman" movie. The official title of this film is "The Dark Knight", but to many Chicagoans I suspect it will forever be known as "...Fucking 'Batman'".
I am now one of those Chicagoans. After a long wait while something was filmed in the path of my bus, I finally gave up and started walking. The walk eventually led me to the Red Line subway station at Jackson, which experience I shall shortly contribute to http://www.ctatattler.com/ as "When Busking Goes Wrong".
I first heard the singer as I descended the stairs. He had a very good voice--something along the lines of R.Kelly--and he was singing freestyle lyrics over R&B instrumentals. And that's where things started going bad...The lyrics were, to put it bluntly, cliched R&B dreck of the worst sort. Now you all know me by now; I loooooove me some hip-hop and some R&B--but oh, man. Many many repetitions of "she's my queeeeeen" and "she gets me...Poppin...." (lifted directly from the Chris Brown song of the same name), and lots of references to "we gotta stop hatin'" and name-drops of everyone from Michael Jackson to WGCI-FM to (of course) Jesus. All strung together with no regard for lyrical coherence or fluidity...though again, to give credit where it's due, the singer had an EXCELLENT voice. It's just his lyricist that needed killing.
And then things went from bad to....Well, to SOMETHING, anyhow.
In the midst of this string of lyrical free-association, somewhere into the song insinuated the idea of "callin' my baby". And he inserted the requisite "ring....ring...." sound effects, to convey the idea all the more thoroughly...
And the instrumental stopped.
What follows is my best recollection of what came next.
"Rrrriiiinng.......rrrrriiing.....(click noise, falsetto voice) Hello?" (pause)"Hello?"
(raspy evil voice) "I know what you did last summer!"
(pause, then falsetto) "Um.....uh.....You do?"
(raspy evil voice) "Yes...yes i do. And you wanna know what?"
(falsetto) "What?"
(r.e.v) "I've got a girl in my car, and her mouth is taped shut with duct tape, and I've got her tied up and I'm gonna drive my car into the river!"
There was more, but I was laughing too hard by this point to adequately follow. The raspy-versus-falsetto conversation went on for ten or twelve more sentences, and finally the raspy evil voice finished off with "And you know what else? I'm gonna finish singing my song now."
The instrumental resumed, and back we went to "she's my queen....she gets me poppin..."
Later--it took twenty-five eternal minutes before the train arrived--there was another "phone interlude", this one conducted with the background music still playing, in which Disinterested Manly Thug Voice informed Falsetto Hopeful "Female" Voice that no, she could NOT come to his house, because she had "bumps all around her mouth". "Don't be talkin' about me," Hopeful "Female" Voice warned Disinterested Manly Thug Voice, to which DMTV replied "You talked about me first. I gotta go." (click)
Fortunately, it was around this time that the train appeared in the distance.
Part Two, and possibly Three, to follow. It was a seriously long, weird night.
So when last you heard from your intrepid blogger (other than a momentary interlude of NASCAR-related angst), she was leaving for the night to go take the bus to Tim's favorite bar, to catch up with Tim and a potential roomie.
The first inkling that perhaps staying home might have been a good idea: the RFK project.
The RFK project has taken over downtown--mysterious signage everywhere, odd street closures, random helicopters--and it's only if you've read the paper, watched the news or otherwise related to the city of Chicago in the past few weeks that you would know what RFK is.
RFK--abbreviation for "Rory's First Kiss"--is the code name being used for the filming of the latest "Batman" movie. The official title of this film is "The Dark Knight", but to many Chicagoans I suspect it will forever be known as "...Fucking 'Batman'".
I am now one of those Chicagoans. After a long wait while something was filmed in the path of my bus, I finally gave up and started walking. The walk eventually led me to the Red Line subway station at Jackson, which experience I shall shortly contribute to http://www.ctatattler.com/ as "When Busking Goes Wrong".
I first heard the singer as I descended the stairs. He had a very good voice--something along the lines of R.Kelly--and he was singing freestyle lyrics over R&B instrumentals. And that's where things started going bad...The lyrics were, to put it bluntly, cliched R&B dreck of the worst sort. Now you all know me by now; I loooooove me some hip-hop and some R&B--but oh, man. Many many repetitions of "she's my queeeeeen" and "she gets me...Poppin...." (lifted directly from the Chris Brown song of the same name), and lots of references to "we gotta stop hatin'" and name-drops of everyone from Michael Jackson to WGCI-FM to (of course) Jesus. All strung together with no regard for lyrical coherence or fluidity...though again, to give credit where it's due, the singer had an EXCELLENT voice. It's just his lyricist that needed killing.
And then things went from bad to....Well, to SOMETHING, anyhow.
In the midst of this string of lyrical free-association, somewhere into the song insinuated the idea of "callin' my baby". And he inserted the requisite "ring....ring...." sound effects, to convey the idea all the more thoroughly...
And the instrumental stopped.
What follows is my best recollection of what came next.
"Rrrriiiinng.......rrrrriiing.....(click noise, falsetto voice) Hello?" (pause)"Hello?"
(raspy evil voice) "I know what you did last summer!"
(pause, then falsetto) "Um.....uh.....You do?"
(raspy evil voice) "Yes...yes i do. And you wanna know what?"
(falsetto) "What?"
(r.e.v) "I've got a girl in my car, and her mouth is taped shut with duct tape, and I've got her tied up and I'm gonna drive my car into the river!"
There was more, but I was laughing too hard by this point to adequately follow. The raspy-versus-falsetto conversation went on for ten or twelve more sentences, and finally the raspy evil voice finished off with "And you know what else? I'm gonna finish singing my song now."
The instrumental resumed, and back we went to "she's my queen....she gets me poppin..."
Later--it took twenty-five eternal minutes before the train arrived--there was another "phone interlude", this one conducted with the background music still playing, in which Disinterested Manly Thug Voice informed Falsetto Hopeful "Female" Voice that no, she could NOT come to his house, because she had "bumps all around her mouth". "Don't be talkin' about me," Hopeful "Female" Voice warned Disinterested Manly Thug Voice, to which DMTV replied "You talked about me first. I gotta go." (click)
Fortunately, it was around this time that the train appeared in the distance.
Part Two, and possibly Three, to follow. It was a seriously long, weird night.
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