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A Casket Called Love |
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I felt strange being that close to the dead. It was a closed-casket service but I knew he was in there. An eighty-six year old man who died of stomach cancer. A friend's father. I met him twice while he was alive. And now we were meeting again but he was sealed up inside a box. He was dead. The toughest part was when we were placing the casket on the straps over the fault. I'm sure you've seen those mechanisms they use to lower the caskets into the vault. You set the casket on these straps and then the staps unwind from around these horizontal poles running parallel to the long sides of the coffin. And the coffin sinks slowly down into the earth. The three other pallbearers and I were gingerly moving the casket onto the straps and I stepped up onto the astroturf covering the opening of the vault and I looked down. I got really frightened. I looked down and thought of myself in that hole in the ground, inside that box. with dirt all around me and my flesh rotting and worms burrowing through me. I thought of premature death, about going before your time, about what you've done with your time, what you leave behind, your legacy, your accomplishments in life. I didn't know the man in the box too well. I knew a little about him. I knew he was a World War II veteran, was wounded in batttle when a Jeep overturned. He has a Purple Heart. He ran his own business for many years. He has two sons. But I wondered if he felt he left his mark on the world. We all want to leave our mark on the world. We all like to think we'll be remembered somehow after we're gone. Some of us have children. Some of us become artists and seek to create works that will outlive us. Some of us seek out public office. There aren't many of us who are comforable with the thought of leaving nothing behind, nothing that says, "I was here and this is who I was." I thought all this crap in the space of two, maybe three seconds. There I was in South Jersey, in a rundown little village, very white trash, lots of dismantled cars in front yards and collaspsing porches and dirty kids running around improvising toys out of garbage can lids. I arrived maybe an hour earlier. The friend who had come down with me parked his car in the lot and we waited for our other friend to arrive, the one who's father we were burying. He arrived with his wife and we stood in the parking lot trying to make jokes and forget why we were there while the nearby pig farm, the wind and the warmth of the day conspired to bring the unique note of pig crap (described by one of our party as "Crap with bacon on top" constantly to our noses). I was too caught up in my own thoughts to try and sniff out the bacon. My thoughts have been the same since last Friday. I think about my girlfriend - my ex-girlfriend - and I am amazed at the arc of our time together. We were shot out of a cannon and almost achieved orbit, But we hit our apogee and it wasn't high enough. Then there was the descent back to earth. I didn't want to but had been thinking about our failed relationship constantly, whether moving or being still, lying down or standing up, attending a funeral or eating a sandwich. The failed relationship overtook everything, made everything the same. Despite trying to replace her image with something else, my ex's face came to me clearly at all times. It's ike those TV channels you get when you're adjusting the rabbit ears, the ones that come in real great are never the ones you want to watch. In my head my ex is smiling and laughing or pouting or being angry or grimacing or something equally severe. Her face is never just in repose. Like our relationship, I suppose. It was always way the hell up or way the hell down and only had a few moments of relative calm, of smooth sailing. And when I think about it all, about how we said we loved each other and would be married someday and would have kids and ahouse and a nice life together I can't - for the life of me - reconcile all that with where things now stand. Since I did that radio show last Friday - you might remember it if you were listening - my future has dissipated. The future I envisioned for myself, with this woman, is gone. And I find myself walking through a crowd in Manhattan or getting on the bus or driving in my car or standing at a gravesite and unable to think about anything else but her and just what the hell part I played in ruining everything between us. I'm hefting a casket called love. When she broke up with me she said she still loved me, that I am a great guy and she would like to be friends but just doesn't think we should be together. She said we were having a stupid relationship and neither one of us is stupid. I don't know if I agree. We're both stupid. We both made promises to each other - or what sounded like promises - and then we found we couldn't keep them. And we both thought there was something about our coming together that was significant, something at the core that would hold us together through anything. But we were stupid. Or delusional . I suppose everyone is delusional when first taken over with a new love. I suppose we all wish for the best and say nice things to each other, make pronouncements and proceed on faith. But I have been a faithless son of a bitch most of my life. I don't believe in much I can't see or feel or taste or smell. Faith is a component that has been entirely missing from my life. This relationship, the one that just ended, was my first atempt to have faith. Even when things were going horribly wrong I thought if I just trusted in the way I felt about her, if I had faith that anything could be worked out between us 'CAUSE WE LOVED EACH OTHER that it would be okay in the end. That we would weather what ever came down the pike. Even last Friday, when she suggested for (what seemed like the umpteenth time) that we should just break up, I kept the faith and said "No". I told her she should sleep on it, that I didn't want to break up. But she called back and left a message saying that she felt terrible and she was breaking up with me and it was final. She repeated it several times in case I didn't get the message. Her earlier message, the one that came immediatedly after my show, displayed a degree of anger I'd yet to see in her. She called me a coward and a pussy. She told me I wasn't honest, that I blamed her for what happened, slanted the show so as to paint her as the villain. She said I'd made it so she never wanted to see me again. I should tell you here that my ex - by her own account - is a difficult person to deal with. She once read to me from a Chinese Astrology book and it said she's an egotist and doesn't really have compassion and is very independent and focuses on the erotic aspects of sex and not the emotional and so on. And she agreed with much of it. She also once told me that she tends to push people away and is afraid she'll end up an old maid. So I was a little confused listening to her message. I kept thinking. "How bad was it really? Did I really make her out to be the villain? Did I really leave myself out of it? Was it all just a bid to avoid responsibility for what was happening?" Then she told me to tell the truth and it stopped me dead in my tracks. The truth between two people who think they're in love is never an easy thing to locate. It's entirely subjective and depends on where one stands and what one wants. There were things I didn't talk about last week because they weren't my truth. When I talk on this show my truth is the only thing I can accurately tell you. I can tell you what someone else thinks, report how they feel. But I can't tell you their truth. Even, so I wanted to set things straight and not be a coward or a pussy. When I called my girlfriend back - after she said not to - she initially hung up on me. I called a second time and we spoke. It was a horribly strained, unbelievably difficult conversation. While I was talking with her I kept seeing her first letter to me. She heard me on the radio and wrote me a letter. Ironic, huh? The radio giveth and the radio taketh away. I saw all her letters to me. And I thought about our early phone conversations. And the first tiime we met. And there we were talking on the phone and not being very nice to each other and I asked her if I could play her message on the air. She didn't think that was funny (I don't know if I was trying to be). She said she didn't feel the need to make a circus out of our relationship. That really hurt. I've spent almost nine years doing this show and I've never thought of it as a circus. I've heard lots of radio shows in my day and most of them could be described as a circus in that they exist purely to entertain you. But this show isn't about putting on a few good acts in the center ring so you can feel you got a really good show for your money. I don't want to do stupid shows about how pitbulls are vicious dogs or throw some guest at you who's going to talk about some silly thing or another. I want to do personal shows. I want to show you mine so you can show me yours. I want to use radio in a different way, in a way that's real and is about what goes on between people, the miscommunication and the ways we hurt each other and help each other. I wasn't talking about my relationship to talk about my relationship. I was trying to find some common ground, get some answers on stuff I'm really confused about. It might make for an uncomfortable ride occasionally. But I asked my girlfriend - ex-girlfriend - if it was okay to talk about us on the air and she said "yes". That was back when things were good between us. I probably should've realized things were different since we went off the rails. I probably should've kept my big mouth shut. But there I was five minutes before showtime with nothing on my mind at all but how much I love this woman and how I had seemingly shot myself in the foot and it was all I wanted to talk about. That's the way it goes sometimes if you want to do something spontaneous. It wasn't any different than a hundred other shows I'd done in that it was about what I was thinking at that particular moment. All this is an elaborate rationalization, though. Because I hurt her and didn't mean to. I owe her an apology and - despite my difficulties with sincerity - I sincerely apologize for going public with the whole thing. I tried to do so in what I thought was a balanced way, a way that would not be placing blame. That's not the way she heard it. She heard me focusing on her, avoiding any blame for what happened, withholding information from the audience. The way the pitch of her voice rose and fell while she cursed me out via voice-mail was downright scary. She was enraged to say the least. She kept talking about the truth. Her truth is different than mine. I want to honor her truth and tell you what she said I left out. But I don't know how to do that without causing more pain. I'll try, anyway. My ex said our relationship foundered because of my insecurity and because I wasn't truthful with her. She wanted me to tell you that my power and electricity were shut off because I've been down and out lately. I have been exceedingly broke and it's having a profound effect on my self-esteem. And my ability to think clearly. When you are out of work and there is no money coming in and the bills are piling up and you can't afford anything it makes you feel like crap. Like a failure. In my better moments I'm comfortable with that. I know it's only temporary and things will swing back. I know I have to persevere because I have no choice. But I also know you can't subject a relationship - especially one in the early stages - to so much pressure. You can't ask another person - no matter how much you may love them - to have that much patience and understanding. I know that. My ex deserves better than I'm currently able to offer her. That's all I was trying to say last week. I wasn't trying to cast aspersions on her character or imply that she's looking for someone to support her. I was trying to say it's not too much to ask for your partner to bring something to the table besides debt. I'm sorry if the message got lost because my mind was nothing but dark. My ex said that poverty is not a sin and that I've acted like a prince in the past because I thought there was some work that was beneath me. She said I went off to a party when I should've been working. That I haven't been very responsible and that it's no way to act when your heat and electricity are off. She went off at me in the past about my sense of entitlement. At the time I told her "Sometimes I think I deserve the world. Sometimes I think I'm a worm." My ex also wanted me to tell you about this other woman that (seemingly) came between us. But I can't. It's just too ludicrous, the whole thing. Suffice it to say I did a really stupid thing by symbolically interjecting this other woman into our relationship. It's too complicated to really dig into but the aftermath was simple: my girlfriend got VERY upset with me. The freefall which had started slowly weeks before was kicked into overdrive. Things went from bad to worse. But - like I said earlier - I still had faith that our underlying feelings for each other would carry the day. I was wrong. Sometimes you can love someone and it isn't enough. There's too many problems that crop up and you would rather be problem-free. Love doesn't save the day because you don't want difficulty in a relationship. You want smooth sailing. This is only a partial accounting of everything that happened between my ex and I. There are other parts of the story that I could never tell you about because even I know where to draw the line. But I wanted to free myself from this stigma of being a coward and at least tell you what my ex's truth was. There's a whole other truth that doesn't belong to eitther one of us. That truth will probaly be left unexamined. That truth is far too painful. |
