25 May 2014
0941 hrs
Good Morning to you, Patient Reader;
Well, it's time for the next installment of The Heidi Story, so I will not waste any time. Are you ready? Splendid!
Heidi and the Cunning Fennec Fox
part II
Thanks to the odd bureaucracy of the
U.S. Military, or maybe it was just the Pacific Theatre of War . . . or
maybe it's just how Department of Defense schools work, or maybe even all of
the above- you tell me- I was always at least a full year younger than my
classmates.
I was 15 years old my sophomore year in
HS, and while everyone in my class had a driver's license, I was driving
illegally. I would not turn 16 until the next October, when I would be a
junior.
Because I was lost, I thought LSD would
find me. I did not realize that all it was doing was obscuring even more
the tools that would help me find my way. So I dosed and dosed and a dosi
doe . . .
Six months after I met Heidi my Old Man
pulled me out of public schools, ostensibly to help him care for my sick
mother. Mom had suffered a stroke, a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage wherein an
artery in her brain exploded, and left me with
the fury of an insane father. As it turned out, I ended up, in quite the
roundabout journey, taking care of the three of us. We three fucking
bears. The closest thing to a Goldilocks
I had was Heidi.
The Old Man’s beatings would get worse, and the words he used
on me became more caustic, and the burnings with cigarettes began.
But not yet, not here was any of this
happening; not at this part of the Heidi narrative.
Heidi had handed back that pencil, gazing into my eyes, pupils
surely the dilated black holes through which all matter in the universe is
crushed under a great weight, gazing into my eyes with her eyes, truly
as deep and blue as the sea. How many, I wondered, ships had sunk there .
. . how many men had and would yet drown in the warm blue . . .
There was the "I love you," and there was her laugh,
sincere mirth all over her face, in her eyes, her mouth wet with it. Yet
that laugh never mocked me.
- Jesus . . . s'just a pencil . . .
Before there was Madonna and the
lacy undergarments worn over the clothes scene she made so popular, before the
Vampires left Sunset for Murray-Holladay Boulevard, there was Heidi.
Heidi was the one who wore black tights
with those lacy, white ankle socks. Shiny and tiny were the Mary Janes
she clopped around in turning her from 5'3" to 5'6", little buckles
gleaming . . .
She
wore tatted, lacy fabrics, always black, over the tights, and what could be
generously called a camisole over a black bra that held tightly the breasts of
a ballerina.
Her
blond hair was streaked with a black as black as kohl, which I swore she
wore around her eyes like an ancient Egyptian slave or Ptolemaic Pharaoh.
Atop all of that sat a pork-pie hat, just
skewed to the side like a question.
We tried for months to be better than
friends. She knew my secrets- my sick mother and even sicker Old Man.
She knew about hurting hearts and she kissed mine whenever her lips touched my
chest. We could both feel it beating, but for whom, only she knew.
Our fumblings and our murmurs . . . our nervous giggles .
. . these, our teachers. We explored in ships made of flesh and fear and
sorrow and compassion. Of kisses, and our hands were the waves that
caressed our stony shorelines.
I feared her body, which was both dream and mystery. Her
body and mind were the same- tender and sharp and sexy, and it was never about
lust, but about loving her mind through my sense of touch. Her body was
unequaled, but there was an equal to her mind, and my mind did not fear hers.
Without her brain, her body was ordinary . . . magical, sure,
but it was her mind that brought thrill. And at that level we stood eye
to eye.
But it was one another's hearts with whom we were in love. But
all I knew about I love yous was that they last about as long as it
takes for a pencil to hit the floor.
Still, Heidi never forgot that “I
love you,” and she never let me forget it either. She would say it instead of
“thank you” every time I did something for her.
Come
to think of it, maybe she meant it after all . . .
She dropped acid with me once, she
who before had never even drank a beer in her life.
I would drink a sixer of stolen beer before I even crossed the school's threshold. She said I did it to dumb myself down for school . . . its environs, its people- teachers and students alike. Maybe this was true. I do know that it dulled the pain. It feels good to feel nothing at all.
That night, trip night, had been on
the books for weeks. Weeks of assurances and reassurances. Telling her that Things
Would Be OK, that Nothing Would Ever Happen To Her . . . I Wouldn't
Let Anything Happen To My Heidi.
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I had brought to her basement with me
the records that had saved my life:
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“Revolver,” “Rubber Soul,” and “The White
Album,” by the Beatles. The Alan Parsons
Project's “I, Robot,”
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Genesis' “. . . and Then There Were
Three . . .” “Who's Next,” by The Who . . .
I
was the Captain and I drew the
chart on this voyage into her Unknown. I
knew the treacherous strait that lay between the Scylla and Charybdis . . . I
had done this before . . . I was The Expert.
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Later, in the deep darkness of her
mind we found the doors and windows, and I so very eruditely spoke of the
colors that thrummed behind them, she nodding in astonished agreement.
But there was one door behind which
lay only our regrets. Her regret for what lay therein;
mine for turning the latch.
Heidi said that her father only spoke
to her in monosyllabic voice-over. Mumbled
at her exceptional grades and that he never saw her eyes. Pretended not to hear
his screaming wife.
Heidi's mom . . . the Horrorshow of
the house. “Nothing I do,” Heidi
explained, “Is ever good enough . . . done right . . . she's an effing witch .
. .” Then she pulled up her tights and I saw for the first time the secret
places where she cut herself. Deep and
ragged those scars through which her demons fled, and
this was the sad thought that ran through my mind like a fault line.
Should
I show her my own scars? My own bruises?
I
wondered there in our dilated dark. No, this pain is all about Heidi. This
Hell is hers.
Her mother used words and fists every
bit as well as my Old Man did. Parental
Boxing School . . . Join Now! Two for
the price of one!!
and
Fear, the ever-present, lurking spectre in this fucking house.
"I cry myself to sleep most nights,”
she whispered then, and there I was, holding her to me, overwhelmed with acid
and admissions, and I managed still to keep my stupid mouth shut.
How many more times, I wondered
then, would I be holding her just so? And
it was then I realized that I had broken my promise: Something did happen to her that night,
and I wasn't able to protect her from it.
I wanted to ask Heidi to run away with me,
to run away that night, take her away to some new place where she could start
over, where we could start over. Where we could be whoever we
wanted to be.
But she would never have done it, even
fully knowing that she would only suffer through this life. Samsara suffered from IT’s own inertia, as
well.
I left school at the end of Third Term,
just as the Old Man promised. Heidi dropped out soon after. “Eh,” she told me over the phone, “school was boring
after you left . . . just not the same without you . . .”
“Can you help me?” soon became the
phrase that defined us. “I love you” long ago forgotten.
Heidi moved away from home and into some
guy's apartment. I moved out of my own Hell, but in addition to being
alone, still, I was also lonely. The Last Straw was when the Old Man
pushed me through the glass shower door. I was picking little glass slivers out of my
long hair for days. Then I turned 16.
I had finagled a job at the Medical Center
on campus earlier that summer. “Sure I'm going to get my diploma . .
. Sure I'm going to night school . . .” I said in my
interview. “I just need a job to help my Dad take care of things at
home . . .” I was hired on the spot.
I made enough to make the $210 dollar rent
on a one-bedroom, and I bought a Kawasaki 900 that got me from A to B.
Heidi left the dirt bag she was with,
whatever his name was. She called him a “Shit,” and I wondered just when
it was exactly, that she began to cuss.
“Can you help me,” had changed our
roles, just four little words that shifted our duties, and I did not realize
that this tiny phrase, geological in its speed, was the Calving-of-the-Iceberg
beginning of our aching, insurmountable rift. Samsara was breaking through, and neither of
us interpreted this as pain.
0200 hours and she's calling me from some party. “Creepy guy keeps eye-fucking me . . .
can you help me?” and I'm on my bike, ready to fight off a pack of wolves for
her.
“Can you help me?” and the cat to the vet,
the three of us on the Kaw winding down the streets.
Can you help me, and her poor,
oft-battered heart, broken yet again.
Can you help me, holding her hand at
the hospital as she lost the baby. A little boy she planned to name after
me because, “You know my heart best . . .” and there I was, feeling my own
stony heart rent into jagged pieces.
Can you help me, and her
OD.
Can you help me . . . Can you
help me . . . Can you help me . . .
I remember thinking about her, in Algebra
class at the time, giving me her hand-written lyrics of “The End,” by The
Doors, her calligraphy as crisp and moving as her eyes.
My heart beat softly in her hands, our
dreams, hers and mine, really not so different. We both wanted her to be
happy. We were supposed to change the world, not the other
way around.
But the world was stronger than our
collective will, and we bent beneath its unrelenting weight.
“Can you help me?” and the January after my
16th birthday. I'd gotten a better job at the hospital, moved
into a $269 a month apartment with a
balcony and fireplace, and I even bought a truck so I wouldn't have to ride the
Kaw in the snowy months. My ass had grown tired of chewing bubble gum,
you see. And believe me, riding a motorcycle in the snow will make your
ass do just that.
I even got to wear suits and a white lab
coat. The real kind that went down to my knees and had slits in the sides
so I could reach into pockets without having to unbutton it.
“I need a witness
to sign the Marriage License,” she told me. “Sure,” I said,
surprised. I am never surprised.
I didn't know she was even seeing
anyone, let alone some lame named Karl. She said she wanted me there
because I knew her heart the best. And it seemed that, though I did know
her heart the best, I knew less and less of it as time rolled onward.
Three months later, the Can you help me
was the ride to the pharmacy. Her arms about my waist, two-up on the bike
and the wind in our hair, and her promise to brush out my long locks and braid
it when we got back to her trailer.
The home pregnancy test was negative, and
the crisis was averted. As promised she braided my hair, first into three
braids, then plaited those into one fat one. I have to admit, I even
thought it was kinda cool.
I played her a song on her beat up acoustic guitar in trade.
Three days later and another motorcycle
ride to the drugstore, this time to pick up some birth control pills.
When I was a little kid, my mother, a Shinto-Buddhist from the
Old Country warned me that my role was to be that of Bodhisattva.
For those of you unfamiliar with that term, a Bodhisattva is someone who
is enlightened enough to attain Nirvana, but forgoes this bliss in order
to stay behind to help others achieve it.
I always thought that Mom was
bat-shit crazy. I did not want that kind of responsibility. Even
at seven years old I knew that the responsibility was far deeper and solemn
than I wanted to bear. I did not ask the IS for this. I
asked the IS, if it be Her will, to take this cup from my lips.
Could I ever be that wise? Would
I ever be that compassionate? I was already drawn to and in the
healthcare field. Wasn't that enough, and how so? Could I really be
more? There I was with all of this to ponder as I watched Heidi not watching
me. I was 16 fucking years old and I
drank like a fish and smoked weed like a DEA raid fire and I dropped acid like
my hero, John Lennon.
Was I even helping Heidi, or were we just
spinning this fucking dharma wheel like a worn-out tire in red clay
mud?
Karl wanted her pregnant.
Heidi was going to keep the pills a secret. “Why don't you drive?”
I asked her. I had taken her to get her license even before I had my own.
“Karl,” she said, “doesn't want me to.”
Can you help me? And the divorce a few months
later. Can you help me? And the string of men and
heartbreak. Can you help me? And Karl was on his way from the bar
over to the trailer . . .
August, now. Long ago, she
told me, she had stopped calling the cops. “They're useless,” she said,
and I agreed. Besides I lived closer to her than the cop shop was, and knew all
the shortcuts, too. I had a quicker response time. She trusted
me. And I knew her heart best.
I withheld from her nothing she ever
requested of me. Denying her was denying my own heart. My heart, pinned
and bleeding at her feet was hers to devour, and she drank from it, thirstily.
And now Karl was on his way. And
Karl liked to hurt her.
end part ii; part iii to come, Patient Reader
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