Good Times at Pottersville
The Bat Light's busted.
Packing up my books today, I was struck by how many pages I've written toward my novels just since 2009 when I first moved into this apartment. The Carson trilogy alone comes to about 1300 pages and comprises about 504,000 words. Of course, that doesn't include countless tens of thousands of words toward other Carson novels that I'd started but haven't finished or the short stories I've written and published featuring Carson. It also doesn't include the other five novels I'd published since 2010, one totaling 175,000 words.
That's a lot of words and it doesn't include probably a million words I'd written toward this blog at the same time. There was a common denominator in all this output since 2009: Barbara.
For many months, ever since it became screamingly obvious that Barbara would never see the inside of this house again, I've been dreading this day. Because today is the one year anniversary that I had to call an ambulance for my beloved Barbara for the first, last and only time. One year ago today, it was plainly apparent that Barbara was having a bad day and couldn't get out of bed. I still had errands to do but when it was obvious I couldn't even get her safely down the stairs to come with me, and since I had no one to help me, I had no choice but to leave her alone for the hour and a half it took me to do the banking, the laundry and food shopping.
When I returned an hour and a half
later as promised, I saw that she'd taken a turn for the worse. She was having
difficulty breathing and when she looked up at me, I saw fear in her beautiful
blue eyes for the first time. Since she'd battled bacterial pneumonia several
times in the past, I knew how it presented and I knew she needed medical care.
I almost hate to say it but it was a decision I had made with great
ambivalence. The reason I was ambivalent was because I knew the hospital would
pull the shit they indeed had immediately after her intake- Contact Family
Court in Lowell, Massachusetts and have her taken away from me.
The conduct of the court, the hospital, their legal counsel, the nursing home, Barbara's sisters and her so-called guardian ad litem was nothing short of criminal yet no lawyer wanted to go to bat for us because there was simply no percentage in it. They stuck her in the nursing home I predicted they would, the one at which, ironically, I worked back in 1996. (I predicted everything down to the last detail because, Goddamnit, I never accurately predict anything good).
A few weeks after I put her in the hospital, I had my second coronary. This time, they put two stents in my artery. The doctor told me that one nearly killed me. I just stared at him impassively. Yeah, my heart nearly killed me but, damnit, my heart didn't have the heart to do what needed to be done. My cardiologist told me last November to avoid stress. I laughed in his face.
So I've lived alone these past 366
days and I think I've cried most of those days. I try to keep the drama out of
my Facebook feed and here and stick to politics and books but there is a real life, a
life in unimaginable pain, behind these posts. Many of us can say the same.
Just in the last few months, several of my Facebook friends have died (Diana Jepperson
and Les Edgerton, just to name two). Others have lost spouses, children and,
always, always, always pets. This is my pain, my story, the only one I've been
able to tell since I finished my last novel, Hollywoodland, in December 2020.
It was the last book I ever finished and the first one that Barb wasn't able to
read on her own. I had to read her the whole thing one chapter at a time as
they came off the printer and, when that stopped working, right off the
monitor.
Since last year, I've lost
everything and now I'm about to lose my home of 15 years because, as with the
heartless cunts last year, no one told my slumlord she couldn't do this. As if
losing half my income, my fiancée, my identity and very reason for living
wasn't enough, the universe and its sociopathic agents decided I still hadn't
lost enough, "You still have a roof over your head, don't you? Yeah, we'll
have that, too, you fucking loser."
I've lived in this state, with brief
excepting intervals, for going on 47 years. That's my entire adult life and
I'll leave under a cloud akin to scandal because I committed the unpardonable
sin of not being rich. I haven't said anything publicly, only a few details to
a few trusted FB friends via DM, because I've been looking like crazy for an
alternative that would keep me here.
But, with eviction day approaching,
in a little over two weeks, it's time to start pulling up stakes. It'll involve
leaving behind literally about 95% of my property and almost everything Barbara
brought up from Florida in 2009 because the always voracious universe can never
be fed with enough loss to me.
My only chance of evading the
ultimate indignity of homelessness is moving to Phoenix, Arizona, a desiccated,
right wing hellscape to which no sane person would ever move unless they had a gun
literally to their head or if their first born male child was being held
hostage. It'll involve about a week's driving, first to Florida then Arizona in
which I'll just supplant one right wing hellscape for another. Most of my
books, all the files I've accumulated since 1975, including correspondence from some famous writers, virtually everything Barbara
thought enough to bring up from Vero Beach, will wind up in a landfill
somewhere. Our legacies, the sum total of our material lives, all destined for
the dump.
It's the perfect symbolism of the
disposable way in which we treat those who get old and don't have lawyers and
money with which to defend ourselves. This is what your future looks like, people,
unless you're rich and have lots and lots of lawyers. The world is indeed a vampire.
The pictures below are from
Christmas 2017, one of the last good ones Barb and I celebrated before the
dementia began setting in. As usual, she got lots of books she was still able
to read and we made a dinner that was up to our usual standards. Popeye the cat
got the usual toys and catnip and who knew what awaited us down the road and
just around the bend? Who saw ass wipings, diaper changes and endless loss?
But these are the things the bloody
cocksuckers can't take away from me- My memories of Barbara opening her
countless presents with the gleeful abandon of a small child, of Popeye,
hammered on catnip, going after his new toys with a murderous frenzy, of Barb
and I having a quiet, dignified holiday dinner with an excellent pork loin, all
the trimmings and a great bottle of Riesling wine.
And that of going to bed that night
with the unjustly smug satisfaction of having dodged yet another bullet for yet
another year. (Yes, we'd actually say that to each other.)
So, I'll be leaving the only home
I've known for almost exactly 15 years, against my will, after having done
nothing wrong. People have told me to look at this move as a new adventure, a
chance to reinvent myself. Well, easy for them to say. But no one should HAVE
to reinvent themselves at the age of 65, certainly not against their free will.
People are telling me what I need to do for the rest of my life. Go fuck
yourselves. Like Jimi Hendrix once wrote, "I'm the one that's gonna have
to die when it's time for me to die. So let me live my life, the way I. Want.
To."
Reuniting with Barbara was always
the end game ever since I got that horrible, shitty little blank email last
September 23rd. It was always the end game. Everything else was just treading
water, folks.