My 6'5", Italian, ex-boyfriend Dyami was reared by a lesbian, who apparently had sex with a man one time in her illustrious life. That man pulled out. She turned her potential cautionary tale, and an obvious reason for a liberal, pro-choicer to bud-nip, into one of the greatest pieces of art in her life's work. Dyami's in Washington, working for Conservation Corps and brewing beer. I asked (playfully) on Facebook if he had kids. Maybe when I'm 35, he said. (And who knows what tugged on his mother's heart, who gave him a rich and playful, rather migrant life?)
A beautiful girl I vaguely know, B., got pregnant, three years ago & in her teens, by my friend L. at a time when she said she was on the Depo shot (and it's possible she was). L. told me a wonderful, haunting story about making love to her in a cabin in the woods. It was pouring rain and after they finished she ran outside and started puking violently. He said at that point he knew but didn't admit it to himself. I remember seeing her weeks before she gave birth. She looked haggard in mesh shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. I remember wondering whether or not she was fat, since her limbs were thin but there was an indeterminate bulk to her. I decided she was just out of shape, as she smoked a cigarette outside looking exhausted. Apparently she told no one - not even her sister or mother whom she lived with- drove herself to the Lewiston hospital (good call, the Augusta hospital is a disturbing mess) when labor started, went at it completely alone, then called her mother and said she was coming home with the baby. For some reason Gilmore and I were among the first to know about this and that L. was the father. I remember we told L. at the apartment we (Gilmore & I) were tragically sharing: it was tense and strange and exciting and even slightly funny (one can't deny that these difficult situations are rife with humor, the reminder of how little we're in control, or how easily we lose the little bit we have). L. had meanwhile impregnated his new girlfriend, since B. had left him heartbroken. A few months later, and right before I was shot, I ended up living with L. for a time in a huge apartment on Sand Hill. At this point he started sleeping with a tiny gangster-ish, yet undeniably gorgeous girl named Rita. F. used to always sing, "You say your name's Rita / but it sounded sweeta / the night before," or however it goes, which was a great source of fun for us (we also bonded trying to push F's car out of the sloped driveway next to the laundromat on a very regular basis. I kicked L. out for bad living and not paying rent, had Hale move in, and it was only a few weeks of him mostly sleeping all day, playing video games, smoking in his room, and dying his hair before we all moved out after he crippled me with that rifle, which is nothing compared to a tale I'm leading up to.)
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My stepmother used to know when she was ovulating and avoid intercourse on those days. She forgot to factor in the way sperm live on and lurk, waiting for the egg (we've all heard, and sometimes witnessed, how biology strains towards life), plus her periods were irregular, not so good for cycle-charting. She went for medical treatment for the irregular periods when her first pregnancy was discovered. The 18 year old father split and she found sub-ideal shelter in her ex-boyfriend, who left college to come home to her, and could possibly have been the father (he wasn't, though.) She went on to have a second daughter with this man, whom she married at like 19; he started to cheat on her, she left him (she described watching their obvious discomfort when they were together, she was a woman from work, he denied it), but the first girl grew up believing he was her biological father and he had partial custody.
When this first daughter, J, was twelve my stepmother married my father and became convicted about the lie she was living. A DNA test was performed and J's father, miraculously, stepped up to the plate, and wanted to be a huge- and quite delightful - part of J.'s life. In this sense, she says she got two fathers the year she turned twelve: my father and her biological father, who now stays the night at my dad and stepmother's home in PA when he brings J home from visits in Maine, and goes to church with the family. She plans to have them both walk her down the aisle. Lest it seem too Kodak-sational, bio-Dad (I hate how flippant that sounds, but it's clear enough) still chain smokes, and his great passion is a DVD collection. But man is J his spitting image! And boy do those two get on. They didn't skip a beat.
It's no secret that women often sleep with more than one man during a given cycle. One of my mom and dad's friends from the days when everyone partied at the camp in Hartland, a run down little shack with a wood stove and a dusty, mothy loft on Moose Pond (not Moosehead Lake) with a few motor boats and a hoop nailed onto a tree with a fishing net attached on which the adults and older children used to play "HORSE" for many accumulating boozy hours with deflated beach balls, the place where I spent an entire summer in my youth (I remember being woken up once at midnight to go cat-fishing) when my mom was in rehab, I think the woman was one of my dad's cousins, but anyway: she wasn't sure if the baby would be black or not. In interest of loyalty (to her boyfriend), not at all racist missions, just the pragmatism of loving who you're "with," she hoped it wouldn't be, and it wasn't.
My dad's mother had a son named Dan Bigley, named after his father, possibly conceived in Alaska. My aunt and uncle say Dan Bigley Sr. is a mystery. It's unclear whether they were ever married and my grandmother (a conservative Catholic with not a little liquor-drinking, chain-smoking, solitaire playing flair) never spoke of him. She was wild about her late husband James "Jim" Johnson, however, a fairly handsome man with a glass eye. I forget what he did, but Dan Jr. was entering his teens when they commenced having four kids, one right after another. My dad was born when my grandmother was 42 and may not have been the last except my grandfather died of a heart attack in his sleep before his first birthday. The oldest of the four kids, my Uncle Joe, walked in right after he died. According to his mystical Rasti friend Matal, whom he works with at the post office, in a certain parallel universe, Joe walked in during the heart attack, but in this version, he didn't want things to be so difficult for his six year old self (he had different, perhaps gentler lessons to learn, I suppose?) so he entered after. Matal also knew about Joe and Robin's eight week miscarriage, Sarah, and drew a picture of her, and said her spirit remained in the house. I'd love to tell my dad that these card-carrying (an asinine qualifier? well, perhaps in this case, I doubt that it's true) Episcopalians go to table tippings, but it would stir unnecessary drama. My grandmother worked full time, stayed in that house on Royal Street in Winthrop until she died at 86, and never remarried. She was blessed with visits from relatives her entire life, and towards the end ate little but Saltines and corn flakes. I lived with her the year I was seven and was very close to her, though she confused me by speaking ill of my parent's relationship and particularly- though very delicately- my mother. When I was six my family and I lived in Woodstock, New York and Grammy and I used to write letters back and forth. Once she wrote “Because you love to read, you'll never be lonely.” Not an original, but it's always original how an idea is transmitted from one generation to another.
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Gilmore's parents were 17 (Julie) and 16 (Aaron) when they conceived him. She had been diagnosed with endometriosis and told she would be unable to have children. As a treatment she took birth control pills. Aaron's stepmother gave them to her than told her to stop taking them. Apparently in a woman with endometriosis this starting then stopping triggers fertility like nothing else. She scheduled an appointment to "take care of it," but that never took place, for whatever reason. Some women just can't do it, I think is how she explained it to me. Aaron's parents were devastated by the pregnancy and his mom lured him into taking a lucrative, exciting sailing job when Gilmore was six months old. Left alone, Julie cursed him every day (and though they are still together, and rather happy, still doesn't let him forget this), and got pregnant with someone else, who Aaron has raised as his own his whole life; paternity was "discussed" in family counseling years later, but seems to have little bad effect on Gilmore's little brother, who is temperamental sun to Gilmore's, well, whatever.
Julie is an only child. Her mother, S., a 400 pound, diabetic, Communist, time-bank activist psychic, conceived her as a love child with someone who had witnessed some gnarly conspiracy goings - down, but shortly after Julie was born, S. came to the apartment to find her lover in bed with a man. He split.
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RF was with his much older girlfriend for awhile, had gotten into an altercation with her 13 or 14 year old son, with cops visiting, and he believed they had nothing in common (he likes Noam Chomsky, or pretends to; she's all about People magazine, and, in her mid-thirties, has worked retail her whole life). He'd moved into his grandparents' house and essentially cut off contact when she called him one day and said, "I'm three months pregnant." He said he'd call her back, got a six or a twelve pack (I forget which), drank it, and called her back. His French, Catholic grandparents told him to do the right thing, which in this case meant moving in with her and being a stay-at-home Dad for a long time. His life seemed to take a pleasant shape in some ways, with lucrative work, a house with the down payment made by those grandparents, and the grandparents paying his tuition for his librarian degree, almost complete. I can't say he seems particularly transformed, though.
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And now, since life is not only about being born but dying, I stumble across something very dark in today's newspaper, which exacerbates my nausea and makes me want to retreat from existing. The Kennebec Journal, A6: “Testimony begins in sex-and-guns death trial.” I suppose there's no point in rewriting the whole article, but it involved three men who had been “having sex and taking drugs for nearly 12 hours in [a] basement.” They regularly transformed this home basement into a “so-called 'dungeon,'” “a fantasy world filled with sex toys and videos that gave the men an escape from their everyday lives, jobs and … HIV,” which infected all of them. In the confusion and haze and dark lust of this, and many hard drugs, one of them put a gun up to another one's head for heightened eroticism, thinking it wasn't loaded. “In an instant, the party ended.”
It's not about me, it's about them, but reading this article my arms feel weak and I grow woozy. I can't quite connect with the part of me that ought to be grateful to have avoided such a dark place, and I am not condemning anyone's sexual practices, or even the sadism or masochism that lives in all of us. I just think it's horrible that this happened on this Earth, like many things that happen here, and it makes me sad just to share the soil with such tragedy, and seemingly preventable (we see dimly, and don't really understand cause and effect in the larger sphere) evil.
I think it's very possible that the man did not consciously think the gun was loaded. I also think that there are subconscious forces, which perhaps have little to do with the judicial system, but play out in spiritual law, whatever that means. My boyfriend confessed he consulted tarot.com and it drained him of all hope so he intends to avoid it. The eery part he said was that it was kind of accurate, which I think W. & I relate to. Oh, well. I think even when divination tools (or psychic mediums) ring accurate the conclusions are largely projections, reflections of our own hopes and fears. And not, as my former flame and I used to say, irredeemable.
Tarot.com said what surrounded D's current situation was mostly negligence, and negligence is a lesser-known form of evil. And I think of another gun-that-was-loaded, the one that landed all hot and bursting, in me: though it was much, much less dark a situation than the instant death of Fred Wilson in South Portland on April 18, 2009. (Although it is impossible to say. Perhaps Wilson was spared, and perhaps I've been reserved for unimaginable sufferings, either in terms of absorbing and/or inflicting them. But why think like that? I swear my imagination is distorted and assuredly afflicted; “To be hyperconscious is a disease,” declares the narrator of Dostoevsky's “Notes from the Underground.”)
I remember what D. said, a couple months ago (who can say exactly when, though I'm sure there is a record of it somewhere), as we sat stoned across the Kennebec from the crumbling mills, beyond the little park at the bottom of Sand Hill (a park never used except for when the carnival comes once a year in the summer: I swear it was more whimsical as an empty lot; my family and I used to live in Augusta and wander around like hipster pioneers, all too conscience of the joke in our “outing,” our contrived making-of-lemonade). It was a starry night and there was a couple sitting in a car in the parking lot above us. We were right by the water, and he said, with unusual force, about Hale shooting me, “The reason that happened is because he wasn't awake.” I got a jolt in my chest when he said that, and reading this article, again, steals my prana.** It is stepping into another world, it is tasting Hell on Earth. It's just insane how thin the veils can be, when one is reckless. The defense argues that the man who asked for the trigger to be pulled was the only one who could have loaded the gun; the man up for manslaughter checked it three times, then went to the bathroom. Either way, argues the prosecution, it is a reckless act. Who can peg the force of energy, and what it manifests, on any one person? (My beloved, fundamentalist father asked a few times with some concern what I actually meant by “energy”; I reduced it to subtle body language cues, tried to euphemize - not a verb according to spell check - with the formerly hip slang of “vibes,” the universally relate-able “wavelength.”)
Life is incredibly fragile, and who knows what it's for? I don't know what to do about my weird, lanky, self-absorbed, morose mate,:but at least I don't think any guns are going to be pointed at each others heads, and I ought not to ashamed of him I chose, especially since he consistently warned me he was unable to care even for himself. So, now, though we made a choice that lacked good sense from many angles, we must make the best of it, and I for one grow giddy imagining the uteral (not an adjective according to spell check) kicks, and wrapping the baby into a bundle for warmth and comfort; hooded blankets and sponge baths and the onset of language. Where I should be and who I should be with, during this, is a mystery. It could be mostly immaturity and/or denial, but I long to give birth and spend the early stage(s) in the south. Though I love central Maine, I feel constricted by it in this context and limited by many people I know. I'd like to complement the journey with a literal shape and it seems likely, though that's an intuition figure.
One time my mom, quite drunk, told me as though it were a confession that when I was very little she left me in the care of her good friend Mary Hobson (my mom was lucky and had many lovely and artsy friends with kids when my brother and I are were little), who had also just given birth. Mary had plenty of milk and so nursed me. My mom giggled like a child caught in mischief, but in some places this is very common—wet-nurse used to be a legitimate occupation for poor women, though I can't quite understand the logistics, only that rich women considered nursing beneath them (the outcome for the children of the wet-nurses seems potentially sad.) And there. Not artful, but nonetheless swinging from tragic to light and back again. Imitating life, poorly.
** “life force”
