The World According To Anne Arky

Just about everybody but my mother is on Facebook nowadays, and if she were still alive, she probably would be, too. (She did have a computer and used the internet before she died.) I have to admit to having less-than-honorable motives for joining – I saw that Mike was on there, and I decided to join. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been commenting on the same newspaper as he has, on random articles, and I’ve been submitting info and such to the same columnist he favors. MOST of this started out being my way of throwing myself in Mike’s path repeatedly, in attempt to elicit some kind of response from him. I knew I would never contact him first, no matter what might be at stake, and I wanted him to contact me, at which point I was hoping to get some answers that were some twenty-five years overdue. Sure enough, he finally took the bait and contacted me through Facebook last spring. I made all nicey-nice with him, giving him enough rope to find out what he was really after and, with any luck, enough left over with which to hang himself. For about two weeks, we wrote back and forth daily, and no matter what I told him about myself and my life, he never asked any further questions, like, “Really? YOU became a bartender?” Since I am notoriously a tea-totaler, for me to have gone to bartending school was a little like sending Helen Keller to proofreading school, and that alone should have elicited some shocked reaction. And then there’s, “Really? YOU published a book? Wow – you always wanted to be a professional writer.” Everything was all about him, from beginning to end. Then he told me why he had “retired early” – he had attempted suicide on his son’s 17th birthday over some convoluted idea that he (Mike, not the son) had been responsible for the aunt’s murder, so now he is retired on disability and says he will be in mental health treatment for the rest of his life. (My take on it is that he will be in SEARCH of mental health for the rest of his life – you can’t treat someone for what they don’t have!) He told me that it was at this point in his disclosures that people usually “walk away”, and that he has had old friends desert him because of this.

To say that I was a bit freaked out over this is an overwhelming understatement, and it took me a few weeks to figure out exactly how I would proceed. I hoped that my not having answered him right away would incite him to make some remark about he guessed I would be like the others and desert him, too, because as soon as he said that (assuming he did), I was going to slam dunk his ass into next summer. He didn’t bite, at least not right away. I did answer him back a few more times (rope to hang oneself with, remember?), albeit not as lengthy or quickly as I had previously done. In two of his replies, he made some remark about how I ought to come up there to his hometown and go to a drive-in movie with him. Yeah, RIGHT! In his last email to me before I slam-dunked his ass, he wanted to know if he had done something to upset me – this year. After all, this all is a bit hard to take, and long-time friends had deserted him over all this (“all this” being his current medicated post-suicide self). He also came right out and said he'd "really like to see you sometime". Again, yeah, RIGHT! That was just the opportunity that I had been waiting for to remind him that in the first place, I am NOT a long-time friend, I am his first ex-wife, and he taught me everything I ever needed to know about walking away. Also, if he thought a good old-fashioned suicide attempt and being officially diagnosed as crazy was the only reason ANYone could have for walking away from him, least of all ME, he was more seriously delusional than I had previously thought. My email to him went on for six pages like this, and I decided to send it to him on my birthday, as a cosmic birthday present to myself. Throughout the entire correspondence, I got some answers to some questions I didn’t even have, but when I asked him point blank for answers, he dodged the questions once again, which came as no surprise to me.

I didn’t expect him to have the balls to write back, but surprisingly, he did – only three hours later. Naturally, he side-stepped every question I had, direct or indirect, but I still came away with more closure than I ever hoped to get.

Now on with the Facebook Funnies.

I have actually enjoyed Facebook. I am not the kind of person who likes getting cyber hugs and cupcakes and stuff from friends – I find that so 12-year-oldish that it makes me ill when adult women do it, although I think it’s a great function to be available for the 12-year-olds. I am not likely ever to get into Farmville or Mafia Wars or Jewelapalooza or whatever other games they have on there. I am, however, a very keep-in-toucher, and I’ve been able to reconnect with people via Facebook that I hadn’t been able to locate via Classmates-dot-com or any other reunion-type service, so I’m enjoying the heck out of that.

I am, however, absolutely bumfuzzled and genuinely puzzled over some of the people who have tried to connect with me on Facebook – besides Mike, I mean. First, a girl I was in high school with “friended” me early on in my Facebook career, to my everlasting surprise. She was a “tough” girl who scorned my goody-two-shoesness (which is still intact, even though I can outswear three battalions of marines) and who ran with a rough crowd who liked to go around beating up other girls; she never had anything to say to me that wasn’t said with scorn, and I couldn’t figure out why in the name of yesterday’s lunch she wanted to “friend” me – ME, Goody-Two-Shoes 1972-1975. But I accepted, because I was afraid if I didn’t, she might beat me up.

I have had other people – some people at work, among others – “friend” me, and the only reason I can figure out that they would ever have for “friending” me is to beef up their numbers, because some of them haven’t spoken to me at work in two years or better. (That they haven’t spoken to me bothers me not at all; that they are not speaking to me but hypocritical enough to use me to beef up their numbers alternately pisses me off and amuses me.) I have no status that would make "friending" me a status symbol in any way whatsoever.

On the other hand, I have seen people I’ve wanted to “friend”, but who I haven’t because I feared their rejection. I can’t believe I have just skipped past them and kept going, especially since a couple of THEM later “friended” me. Go figure!

So today I got “friended” by someone who helped to make the end of my freshman year in high school horrible in stellar proportions, and I seriously don’t remember speaking to her for the rest of our entire high school career or ever again. I have verrrrrrrry mixed feelings about this, because I also know that she left her footprint in my Classmates-dot-com account as well, and I’m trying really hard to remember that I am fifty-plus years old, not fourteen, and I know I’ve changed; maybe she has, too. But maybe I don’t care. I dunno. What I really feel like doing (but won’t) is replying, “What the hell do you want, anyway?”

My niece “friended” me, right after I told her father (my brother) that because she hasn’t been able to give me time of day, up to and including coming to Atlanta (probably more than once) over the past few years and not being able to bother to call me, and climbing over me like I’m so much furniture to get to my sister (after I spent way more time with her during her childhood than my sister ever did, but never as much money), I have no intention of leaving her anything in my will – it all goes to my nephew. (This is not really going to make HIM happy, because he’s married to a minimalist, and when he shows up with all my stuff, she’ll divorce him! Or they’ll have the world’s biggest yard sale in the history of mankind.) I thought that was quite a coincidence, and I accepted it, but then went back a few weeks later and “unfriended” her. She probably hasn’t even noticed. I never did figure out her motive, because it isn’t like I am the eccentric millionaire aunt whose estate is heavily sought after. If I had enough money, I could be eccentric, but I’m just a working class girl who works two jobs to hold body and soul together, so being eccentric is not an option – I’m just peculiar (which is still just “weird” dressed up a little bit).

I guess the only other thing that perplexes me about Facebook (or maybe it’s just perplexing about me, and Facebook is the vehicle) is how it is that I seem to attract a huge number of people who want to Jesus at me or at the world at large. I have never been like that, even when I was at my religious most, and I don’t understand people who feel moved to do so. I do know that large numbers of people in this world (on AND off Facebook) seem to think I am Godless and tend to throw lots of Jesus at me, which I deeply resent. (I would have the same reaction if their proselytizing involved oatmeal, Elton John, Stephen King or anything else, whether I liked or disliked it in the first place.) Last year, I went back to my hometown for an event that reconnected me with some old friends who I haven’t seen in some 25 or 30 years, and I hadn’t been talking to one of them for five minutes – FIVE MINUTES, for the first time in 25-30 YEARS, mind you – before he looked at me with deep seriousness and asked me if I was right with the Lord. I have spent more time as a church-goer (but not as a religious, holy-rolling Bible-thumper EVER) than 99% of my family, especially my siblings, and I cannot for the life of me imagine anyone asking that question of either my brother or my sister! I really must try to remember to ask my sister if anyone ever asks her that or anything like it. Meanwhile, back to Facebook. I am just blown away by the frequency with which the people in my circle flaunt their religion before the world at large, and I can’t help but wonder what is behind such behavior. I know that one of the people in my circle has been uber religious in all the time I have known her, and she and her family don’t flush their shit before they bless it heavily first; up to a point I can understand that after having been under the influence of heavy laxatives to the point where giving a shit became a blessed event, but even so, there are a lot of people in my limited circle from whom I would never have expected this behavior. I am sure that I must be Godless, because I can’t imagine billboarding my religion (or occasional lack thereof) for the world to see. To me, that is a very private thing, and I can’t help but wonder what it is they are hiding behind theirs. With some of them I have some suspicions, especially some I’ve known since preadolescence, and while as I said, people do change, I do think some of these people are not going to have changed THAT much, if you know what I mean. If not wanting to advertise my religious fervor makes me Godless, then off I go, Godless, into the world, a target for people who are dying to have something or someone to Jesus at.

Facebook sure is fun, isn’t it?

I have so much updating to do, it isn’t even funny. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll sit down and write the end to the Mike saga. Yes, there really has been an end to it, once and for all, with a surprise ending. (No, the butler didn’t do it.) Meanwhile, I have something else important to talk about. Meanwhile, this post was actually written about two months ago and I am just now posting it because...well, because.

I honestly can’t remember if I have ever mentioned it here, and if so, to what depth, but to put it bluntly, I was sexually abused as a child. In many cases, that in itself brings the huge trauma, as it brings to mind night-time forceful visits by someone who is bigger and stronger and a damned sight meaner than you are and rape and worse result, all of which are real and for damned sure qualify as sexual abuse. The things that happened to me were not like that – there was no violence, there was no force (just molestation and some heavy coercion), and there were no middle-of-the-night visits by anyone – but they far and away still qualify as sexual abuse. They began when I was eight years old, and my brother (the primary perp) was twelve years old. Yeah, he was just a kid, but he was damned sure old enough to know better and knew that this was wrong, by anybody’s definition of right and wrong. We were both in a domestic squalor known as our family, with a lot of bad things going on and not so many good ones. I had epilepsy and my childhood was playing out like a years-long episode of the movie “Carrie” (the original with Sissie Spacek, not the remake which I haven’t seen and likely won’t see). My parents were mismanaging all of us on an intergalactic magnitude (and it wasn’t until many years later that I realized that they were doing the best they could at the time); my sister was doing her best to distance herself from all of us while still living in the same house, and doing a lot of pretending that she didn’t even know us; I was having seizures and behavioral problems resulting from same, all the while trying to survive having a bulls-eye on my ass and being the primary target for every bully in school and a few hundred other kids at any given time; and my brother was falling through the cracks and trying to keep his head above water. (My mother went to her grave convinced that the only problems in our family were caused by my epilepsy, but the dysfunctionary roles were cast years before the seizures started.) For a long time, I felt like his sexual abuse of me resulted from all of these things coming together at the same time, fueled partly by his newly-emerging adolescent hormones. He wasn’t hurting me and he wasn’t forcing me, and he was offering me some positive attention at a time when I was getting more attention than I knew what to do with, not one iota of it positive, and I greedily accepted it, having no idea what kind of can of worms I was allowing to be thrown at me. But this was before I was aware that sexual abuse is often a hand-me-down issue, and in this case, I believe very strongly that it probably is here, at least in part. I will (probably) get to that later.

I was what is known as a child prodigy, with an IQ that went almost off the charts. You know – one of those super smart kids that can read college-level in second grade and knows things most average adults don’t even know, but can’t tie their shoes or tell time. I was that kid – I didn’t learn to tell time or tie my shoes until I was in third grade, because there were all kinds of people around me who could tie my shoes or tell me what time it was, and I had important things to do and worlds to explore and conquer. So I was used to existing in a whole different orbit from the rest of the world and not knowing the most mundane things that the mere mortals around me knew, all the while knowing things they couldn’t begin to comprehend. Yeah, I know – the ego has landed – but seriously, that was the way of my world at that time.

We “played” in my brother’s bedroom, upstairs away from our parents. Our sister’s room was right next to it, but she was busy escaping from the melee in any way she could and not paying much mind to what was going on around her if she could possibly help it. We lived in this house for about a year, and when we moved to the next house, the basement was the staging area for most of these incidents. I performed my first oral sex in that basement when I was nine years old, on my brother, in exchange for which I would receive ten of his comic books. (Dammit, I don’t think I ever did get any of those comic books, the lousy bastard!) I absolutely hated it, but I liked feeling like we were “buddies”, even if we had to keep it a secret and fight like cats and dogs in front of Mother and Daddy so they wouldn’t get wise. At the next house a year later (yes, we did move every year for about four years running, and it was a bitch!), his bedroom was once again the site, and this was when he began including some of his friends.

That year, I was ten, and I discovered that what we were doing was not just some game that my brother liked to play. It was something that GUYS like, and by the way, everybody is doing this, not just me. The whole process had a name – sex – and apparently everyone else had been doing it the whole time. It was as if I had discovered that while I was out exploring my distant worlds, everyone else had known about this all along and I was just now getting it, so I decided to go independently of my brother and try to catch up with everybody else. I could get positive attention from not just my brother, but from a whole bunch of people – yippee! It didn’t help things that, in addition to becoming friends and coming under the influence of an “older” (by two years) girl, Kathy, who had recently discovered her own sexuality and its many uses (which I suspect might have also been rooted in sexual abuse, but I will never know for sure), I suddenly developed breasts along the scale of Dolly Parton, which looked really strange on my skinny little body (those were the days!), and my chest entered the room a full five minutes before the rest of me did. Talk about attention getters! Between my attention-getters, my history and Kathy’s influence (she was beautiful and heavily-sought-after by the boys, and I wanted to be just like her), at quite a rapid little clip, over about four months’ time, I logged in about a half dozen close and brief encounters to my credit.

Most girls who have been sexually abused come away from it with this same notion and become promiscuous, at least for a time, and I was no different; some of them stop that and become completely disinterested in sex, and some of them remain promiscuous to some degree for the rest of their lives, equating sex with positive attention which they inevitably mistake for love and usually chasing after it to the detriment of the structure of their lives. As a prime example, the above-mentioned Kathy has been married about five times now. I was “promiscuous” for about an 18-month period starting at age ten and ending halfway through my eleventh year. Kind of hard to say “promiscuous” and “sexually abused” and still be able to state honestly that I still managed to remain a virgin until I was 16 – still too young to be offering up my virginity, but under the circumstances, it’s a wonder I kept it past the fifth grade. (This also explains my almost yelling out in shock and horror in 9th grade sex ed class when I finally “got” it, “You mean he sticks it IN you?!”)

Soon after we moved into this new house, I met Jerry. He was the most popular boy in class, and a bit of a “bad boy” even at the tender age of 12 (he had flunked a couple of years and was that much older than the rest of us). On a snow day when everyone was home from school, he was building a snowman and I happened by just as he was turning it into a snowwoman with snow implants. Hey, he knows about this! Cool! I could warm up to this guy and have a new friend. I didn’t have many old friends, so new ones were always welcome – read embraced in a stranglehold! – and I was pretty much willing to obtain them in any manner I had at my disposal. And boy did I have a new manner at my disposal! I had been in this new school for about five months by then, and Jerry, of course, by this time knew what my social standing was – three stories below rock bottom – so he suggested that we could be “secret friends” and have some “fun” together. As we were entering into this new friendship agreement, Jerry put forth the theory that for us to be able to maintain this little arrangement, we would have to continue to be “enemies” in public and I would have to let him continue to pick on me so no one would suspect what we really had going on on the side. Sound familiar? My brother had lured me in two years earlier with the same deal, and it had worked then, so why not? Desperate as I was for friends at the time, I readily agreed, willing to sell my soul, my body or whatever just to have such a really great friend as Jerry, even if I had to give up bragging rights for it. Pretty soon, he brought along his friend Gary, who was also in our class at school. Gary was a tall, quiet boy with a shy smile and kind of goofy-looking, and he had never gone out of his way to befriend me, but to the best of my recollection, he never joined in the teasing and bullying that were part and parcel of my daily life. So he joined us for these meetings, and meanwhile, he continued not to join in the teasing, while Jerry jacked up the whole thing and teased me more when other people were around – a lot more.

Most of our “secret friendship” meetings consisted of Jerry and Gary taking turns feeling me up and then climbing on top of me and, with all parties fully clothed, humping me until they ejaculated (thank God, in their pants!). Once, when some of our peers (I can’t say friends, since they sure as shit weren’t my friends) happened by as we were leaving that day’s meeting place, Jerry saw them and came running back and said, “Uh, oh! We’re caught! Quick – pretend that I hit you and we were beating you up.” Just to make sure there was a note of authenticity in the whole charade, he knocked me in the back of my head with a tree limb he found handy. The “friends” bought it and even offered a brief show of sympathy before moving on with the rest of their day, and I went home, secure in the knowledge that I still had my secret friends. I had no idea that what this was really about wasn’t fear of our “arrangement” being found out. Mister Cool didn’t want anyone to know that we were “friends” on any level – God forbid!

Halfway through the sixth grade, after this secret friendship had been going on for about a year, just after Jerry had had his turn at me, during Gary’s turn, he kissed me on the mouth (which Jerry had never done, and Gary had never done before) and said, “I just wanted to tell you that I’m not like Jerry -- I really am your friend, no matter what, and it isn’t pretend just for this.” I was quite puzzled and went home thinking about what he had done and said. I didn’t care much for the feeling up and humping part of what we were doing, so all I had gotten out of this up to now was two “secret friends”, but one of my favorite things in the world was (and remains) kissing, which I had acquired a predilection for in some of my other promiscuous encounters, so I was all silly and dreamy about Gary’s having kissed me, and thinking harder and harder about what he had said about really being my friend. Finally, after I was well on my way to having the worst reputation in town and had even bragged about some of what was going on (with Jerry, Gary, my brother and more) to some friends (and I use the term loosely), I figured it out and learned what it really means to be used. Used and abused, as it were. That was the last day. The very last day.

I began realizing that what I had been doing was shameful. Wrong. Bad. Trashy. Nice girls don’t, as they say, and I was a genuinely nice girl, so from that point on, I didn’t. Period. One “friend”, Tina, told me she had asked her mother if you could get pregnant if you “did it” with your clothes on. When her mother said, “No,” she said, “Whew!” Seeing the look on her mother’s face (I can only imagine!), she said, “Oh, I mean good – for Anne.” Lovely – I can well imagine what her mother must have thought of me forever after that.

Ironically, not to mention fortunately, a month or so later I had brain surgery, the epilepsy was cured, and so were many of the behavior problems. I didn’t turn into Nancy Cheerleader and Miss Popularity, but from then on, I had a few friends (earned the right way, by being a good friend), and I was no longer a walking target. Mostly I was just one of the kids. But I had learned the hard way that someone’s friendship was not worth having if you had to do something to earn it (something other than being a good friend and someone fun to be around). It was a damned hard lesson, but the good news is that it was a lesson I learned well and it stood me in good stead for many years. I was (and pretty much remain) the biggest goody-two-shoes in the universe – at least, not counting those who carry and thump bibles. When drugs came along and all my friends were trying them, I didn’t – not even so much as one puff off of one joint. “Everyone is doing it” ceased to have any influence on me whatsoever, and I never drank or did drugs just to be part of the crowd, or for any other reason. Never ever did drugs, and didn’t drink until I was in my mid-twenties, despite the fact that I was allowed to drink at the age of 14 if I had so chosen. From that point on, if people were going to like me, they were going to like me for me. If people were doing something and I wanted to do it, I would do it, but my motivation was never, not once, because So-and-So will like me if I go out and dye my hair green. So-and-So would have to like me blonde or otherwise. I was used to doing things by myself (after so many years without friends and doing my own thing), so anyone who wanted to join me in doing my thing was welcome to do so, but I was just as happy to do things alone.

The next school year, I had a boyfriend – a real live, go-steady, go-to-dances-and-public-places-together boyfriend – and I was head over heels in love with him. Some of my earlier exploits had been spread around town two years earlier in the upper level schools, and when one of my boyfriend’s older friends heard my name, he asked my boyfriend, “Is she the one who…?” I was absolutely mortified to have to admit that yes, I was the one who, and had to promise him faithfully that I don’t do that any more and never would again. It didn’t matter – the damage was done, and a few weeks later he broke my heart and broke up with me. (I had no idea at that age that I wasn’t a full-fledged jezebel and the villain in the piece, and therefore didn’t deserve his scorn and judgment, and that if he had heard the whole story some ten years later, he might have been more understanding and supported me and stayed with me a little longer, at least until we broke up for a better reason.)

That next summer, a year and a half after I had shut down the “friendship” business, just before we moved yet again (but this time to another town), I encountered Gary again, and we went out in his back yard and he kissed me. He didn’t try anything else, just kissed me. I’d like to think that if we had stayed in that town, he and I might actually have become friends – real friends, not secret ones – and maybe even dated for a little while, but it could be that there was too much sinister history between us. I never saw him again after that, and I never saw Jerry after that school year, either. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure I ever even exchanged another single word with Jerry after it was over, despite our having continued to go to the same schools for another year and a half. But I have always had a soft spot in my heart and memory for Gary, and a deep and abiding hatred for Jerry.

For many years, I railed at Mother and Daddy for uprooting me and making me move to another town, and I still have an unnatural attachment for this town that I haven’t lived in for almost forty years, but I did finally get that in the long run, it was a good thing that we did leave town when we did. My reputation in the high school grades had been trashed by an older boy and his cousin, and I never would have been able to live it down if we had stayed there. I had a chance to start over. Unfortunately, it was in a town I hated, so my fresh start was inauspicious at best, but at least it didn’t come with a reputation that would have clung to me like stale cigarette smoke.

Jerry died yesterday. It was in the paper today. Yesterday, I was writing to a friend back in that town, and the wife of another of our friends recently died; after I mentioned that, I came to within a hair of asking her if she knew whatever had happened to Jerry, but didn’t because I remembered that she doesn’t keep up with people, even the ones that are still living in that town (as she also does). Had I mentioned it, it would have been the first time I ever asked anyone about him – ever. This morning, I opened the online paper and checked the obituaries, and there he was. If I hadn’t been sitting in a chair that had arms on it, I would have fallen on the floor for sure. I felt like someone drove a mack truck through my solar plexis. From all accounts (including the fact that I had seen something on line about him in the “concerns” section of his church bulletin), he died a slow, painful death, diabetes related, with for sure dialysis and maybe some other fun stuff like amputation and blindness. Well, you know what? It couldn’t happen to a more deserving fellow!

Tina, the afore-mentioned “friend”, lived a few houses down from our house during the time I knew Jerry and Gary, and she and I were friends – when she didn’t have anyone else to play with, and when no one else would see her being friends with me. As far as I can remember, she never initiated any of the group torture to which I was subjected, but if someone else did, she joined right in there. For some reason, probably in effort to provide my own continuity to compensate for all the moving around I’ve done in my life, it’s my nature to keep in touch with people or go back and look them up. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes not. In any case, I had stayed in touch with Tina off and on over the years, and after she was married with children, I was visiting her at her home while her kids were downstairs watching television. She had three children, and while the younger two were cute, the oldest one was knock-your-eyes-out gorgeous. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, she was so beautiful. She made Jon-Benet Ramsey look like a dog. Sadly, she had some physical handicaps.

As we were sitting at the kitchen table talking that day, Tina said something that just absolutely flummoxed me. She said, “Annie, the kids tease my little girl and make her life unbearable, and now I realize what we did to you. I have lied awake so many nights regretting the way I treated you and all the things I did to you back then, and wishing so much that I could take it back! I am so sorry!” Nobody had ever apologized to me before, at least not for their part in my being terrorized, and I was completely dumbstruck. I only hope that I was gracious and accepting of her apology. We are still friends – no, I mean really – so I must have said something right, but I have to admit that while my mind was still reeling over her apology, the first complete thought that went through my head was that I hoped Jerry had seven of them. Yes, I actually wished that Jerry had seven kids with handicaps or something that would cause them to be the target of every kind of personal torture children could invent.

Why did (and does) Jerry receive more of my wrath than Gary or any of the other encounters I had during those self-degrading times? Primarily, in his own way, Gary was a knight in shining armor, if not mine, by virtue of the fact that he ultimately saved me from myself. Jerry, on the other hand, was a snake oil salesman of the first order. He and I actually entered into an agreement that he would be my secret friend in exchange for some adolescent wet dream treatment, and he had no intention of being any kind of friend to me, secret or otherwise. Other boys who jumped on this particular bandwagon (as it were) offered no such agreement – our friendship was implicit, as Jerry had taught me well. Jerry had enough friends and didn’t need to bribe people to be his friend, yet despite that, he took full advantage of a lonely, desperate and yes, pathetic, young girl who was too young to know the price of “friendship”. He was the first in a fairly steady little stream of boys whose main job it was to provide enough fodder for me to endure years of guilt, humiliation, shame and self-recrimination, and he taught me everything he knew about using people; unfortunately, he only taught me how to be the usee, not the user (although the latter I wouldn’t have wanted to know anyway, but that’s beside the point). So yeah, I would have liked for him to have seven of them.

By the newspaper accounts, he had one daughter, three grandchildren and no spouse listed, although that little girl had to come from somewhere, and being as how he was a preacher’s kid (steadfastly upholding the PK stereotype for preacher’s kids everywhere), and continued living in our small town where his parents also live, I feel sure that the girl was born inside the sanctity of wedlock. Since he was what he was, I suspect there might have been a string of ex-wives along the way somewhere, but none were listed (they usually only list a current and sometimes the mother of one’s child, even if they are no longer wed) – just his current “special friend” was listed.

I briefly wondered if he sexually abused his own little darling and perhaps later on, her children. I almost rather doubt it, because what he was doing wasn’t pedophilia per se, since we were both kids at the time; just lascivious opportunism at the expense and total disregard of a young girl’s fragile feelings. I have no doubt that he continued merrily cutting a path of emotional and predatorial destruction in his wake, blithely unaware of the devastation left in his path, and unconcerned about it if he had known of it.

Yeah, I wish he’d had seven of them.

We had old home week a few weeks ago in what’s left of my family. In this case, though, it didn’t mean getting together with people you haven’t seen for a long time, which I actually do on a regular basis with people other than my family. In this case, it means we sold Mother and Daddy’s house. We didn’t even begin trying to sell it before July, and when everything came together so that we could begin trying to sell it, we didn’t even have to put it on the market. It is an old house, built during the Civil War, and although it has a lot of problems (the home inspection would have scared Stephen King, and he could probably write three novels based on it!), it is structurally sound and just a great old house. My sister (the oldest, upon whom all of the estate settlement fell as executrix) had gotten word of a couple of people in the town who buy, restore and flip old houses and who might be interested in the house. She got in touch with two people and was told yes and then no. Quite as a fluke, one of them knew someone else who knew someone else (it’s a small town, and I’m probably related to everyone in it some kind of way) who might be interested in the house. They and my sister somehow got connected and they were more excited about the possibility of getting that house than a spinster would be if Brad Pitt asked her for a date. They were ready to sign on the dotted line almost immediately, even after the home inspector found six bats in the attic. (My sister did manage to refrain from saying, “Only six?” We’ve known they were there and tried repeatedly to get rid of them, even though they are an endangered species. I frankly don’t get that they are an endangered species, which is what I thought was a term applied to some species that had only a few of their number left on the planet – like manatees, for example. Bats can be found in the thousands in various places on the planet, to include an underpass out west somewhere where they number in the tens of thousands.) We addressed the bat situation and they STILL wanted the house. We never even had to put it on the open market.

I had some real sadness when we were still in the talking stages. The three of us kids had never lived in that house – my grandfather left it to my dad in 1968 when he died, and my folks didn’t ever live in it until we were all grown and gone – but it was, to me, the last nail in the coffin, if you will pardon a really bad analogy. It was the final tie to Mother and Daddy, and all my mental games of halfway believing that part of them was still there in some way so long as we still had it were blown to bits in the face of selling it. It was the only place we ever had to call “back home” after moving around all over the place, even though, as I said, we kids never lived there. Mother and Daddy lived there longer than anywhere else they ever lived during their marriage, and it was the place where Mother lived the longest in her whole life, before or after she married Daddy. I spent several days psyching myself for the finality of it all, which I assumed would be in a matter of days.

So between the Marx Brothers attorneys and the Laurel and Hardy lawyers, it only took slightly over two months to do the closing. By then, I was so tired of it, I just wanted it over.

Every day I woke up sure in the knowledge that something was going to happen today to cause this sale not to go through. I imagined every possible obstacle known to the modern world, and every day the lawyers and bankers were coming up with new silly shit to throw in the way. Then the national economy got in on the act and Freddie Mae blew the mortgage business out of the water and then this bank caved and that bank collapsed and so on and so forth. Then we finally got ALL the nitnoy obstacles ironed out and solved and settled and finally set a date for the closing. My sister, a most capable individual (she wrote the book on capable individual), left her husband at home and went to Mother’s hometown for the closing. In advance of all of this, to hasten the process (a waste of effort, obviously), my brother and I had already signed and had notarized our power of attorney to our sister so she could do this without having to send this copy there and get that signature and send another copy somewhere else and say an incantation over it (an anti-bat one, no doubt) and send it somewhere else and so forth. Before she left, she asked the lawyers if there was anything she needed to bring with her from home, which was about 350 miles from Mother’s town. No, ma’am, everything is in order, just come on down.

Closing day…guess what? My sister’s husband’s signature was needed for the whole process. You remember him – she left him 350 miles away at home!!!! Whoops. So she went home the next day, with the papers in hand, met him at the bank, had his signature notarized and fed-exed it to Laurel and Hardy --- er, the lawyers. So Harpo opens the envelope, and lo and behold if the notary public didn’t have to add her two cents of fuck-up to this situation already fraught with fuck-ups beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. She failed to write her name and date of notary license and whatever other notary information is required beside the stamp, which she DID somehow manage to apply. So we have to get the damned thing fed-exed BACK to my sister and go BACK to the notary (and try not to wring her stupid neck) and get her to write in her information, etc., and then fed-ex it back to the Laurel and Hardy lawyers. Then they had to do a little more paper finagling and then they would get it ready and prepare it and think about getting ready to consider trying to start making plans to get it to the Marx Brothers bankers and then the Marx Brothers bankers would disperse the funds from the sale (minus Mother’s mortgage and other things) to the three of us by bank draft. I was absolutely convinced that they were going to deposit the money in the wrong accounts.

Meanwhile, later on that next day, I’m driving to work and my car, which has a full tank of gas (a luxury here at that time), starts refusing to go uphill faster than 5 miles an hour, if that. Oh, goody – on level ground it’s going okay, so it isn’t the transmission, right? Okay, let’s get the thing to work and see if we can get it to the mechanic. Nope, at the next major intersection, while waiting for the light to change, I got to listen to this car roar like a mad grizzly and lurch like a hippo with a severe case of hiccups. I decided that rather than nursing the thing to work and then to the mechanic’s, I’d just go back home and take care of it from there. While the desire was great, that didn’t include hiding under the bed, no matter how much I wanted to do so.

I had to go to work, because I had to do payroll, and I had to work that night at my second job, so I had to rent a car. The good news was, Triple A came and got my car; the bad news was that while I could get a rental car, they couldn’t find any place to get gas for it. I got it with half a tank of gas FINALLY and ended up working about an hour and a half that day. The worse news was that my fuel pump had to be replaced AND my timing belt had to be replaced. All things considered, it’s still better than a dead transmission (been there and done that already, but not with this car, thank goodness), and you might wonder what this had to do with closing on the house. Well, if the Marx Brothers bankers and Laurel and Hardy lawyers had gotten their shit together two months prior, I would have traded cars by then and it would have been someone else’s problem.

It took a whole nother week for the Marx Brothers bankers to screw things up a little bit further, just for good measure. I mean, who doesn’t like an extra verse of a really good song, just because you hate for it to end so soon? My brother and sister got their money on Wednesday. Nope, mine’s not there yet. Nope, still not there. Any guesses? Yeah, you got it – they deposited mine in…the wrong bank account!!!! Off by one number! Fortunately, they didn’t have to go to the owners of that bank account and explain to them that they really can’t have that money, it belongs to someone else. (I seriously doubt it would have still been there anyway – just watch how fast I can get the hell out of Dodge when someone inadvertently dumps a huge sum of money in MY bank account!) So okay, let’s try again. What? Still not there? Miss Arky, I just don’t understand it. Let’s read off the account number again. Oh, we accidentally omitted that six. I don’t know how that happened. Let me try again.

Okay, Harpo, here’s the deal. If it doesn’t work THIS time, I want you to take out the cash from your bank, go to the nearest branch of my bank, walk in and get one of their blank deposit slips and call me on the cell phone and I will read each number to you sloowwwwwwwwwwwly so you can put it in the right blank and go to the nice teller and make the deposit up close and IN PERSON.

I’m sorry, Miss Arky, it doesn’t work that way. Well, hell, Harpo, it sure as shit ain’t workin’ THIS way!

So finally, with no more drama and trauma, they showed me the money. THANK GOD!

The next day, when the “pending” cleared and I sat down to pay my bills as I always do on my “big” payday (the one from my main job), I paid off my credit cards in full, and I’m sure three different banks fell over in a state of shock. But when I wrote the first check that actually cut into the money, I cried like a baby. Yes, right there at my desk, in front of God and everybody.

Mike is back in the newspaper again; apparently he took his ID down so he could modify it, and his profile (which was blank) now says something to the effect of "Proud dad of two and now retired…". I guess when one wants to change one’s profile, one has to disappear and ruminate for several weeks to be able to come up with a 10-word description of one’s life.

Retired, huh? So retired is what they call it when your employer won't let you take two weeks off without notice to go to Disneyworld, eh? In my neighborhood, they always called that “fired” or some synonym thereof.

When the subject of baby names came up in the newspaper, he posted, “I had a son in the late 1980s, soon after Hurricane Hugo struck the Carolinas. We had already decided to name him Mike Jr, but I got the bright idea to name him Hugo instead. However, because I had been married before, I cleared this with my wife before taking action. Mike Jr. is 19 now and is getting ready to go into the military. The punchline is, if it seems like a great belly-laugh-producing notion, but you have to approach your wife with, “Hey, why don’t we…” STOP!”

I had to laugh -- especially since I got honorable mention in that post, if not by name (I'm the "because I had been married before" one). I'm not sure what that had to do with anything, unless it was a veiled reference to the fact that he wanted to name our first son Superman and I told him he could name the dogs and I would name the children. I think I mentioned that once before. Hugo -- give me a break! I wish he had done it -- then she would have killed him!

I am continuing to read our hometown newspaper, along with my other hometown newspapers, and continuing to make comments where I feel so moved. On at least two occasions, Mike has replied directly to my comments, once even addressing me, “Ms. Arky, blah blah blah.” All very nice and cordial, once even telling me about his mother’s death in 1993 and his children’s ages (all of which I already knew through prior sleuthing).

Yesterday, when I went in to read replies to articles, I noticed an article to which I was sure Mike had replied, and yet I didn’t see his reply. I went to his profile, where you can click on “comments” and see all comments made by that person, just to see if I had dreamed his reply to this article (not an article to which I had replied or planned to do so). Surprise – when I went to his profile, it was no longer there – gone were his posts and his photos of his kids and himself that he had posted previously. However, I later went back and recalled having seen some posts that had no name or identity of any kind on them, only the posting date and time, and lo and behold, they were him – or he were they, or whatever. The one post I went looking for is actually gone, but others previously made are there, including the one that he addresses to Ms. Arky, but anonymously.

I haven’t decided whether he has gone stealth or been suspended for making some kind of no-no remark. Watch and wait, I guess. I just couldn’t believe he would leave without saying “goodbye”. I mean, what kind of piece of shit would do that? O, but wait – he already did that. Been there, done that and got the t-shirt – 25 years ago in November, to be exact. This adventure has been amazing and, frankly, amusing as hell. I just can’t wait to see what happens next!

You knew I would return to the scene of the crime eventually, right? It’s been a strange – but not altogether bad – day today. I’ve had two vastly different internet connections today. The first one left me feeling like I’d been kicked in the teeth. For a history on the subject of the fate of the men in my past, see “Killer Queen 3/24/06” in Anne Arky Ology (someday I’ll learn to hyperlink, but not today). I just found out I have another victim to my credit: a guy I dated when I lived in Washington, DC, named John. I know I have expressed my passion for red-haired men, but I can’t remember if I’ve noted that I am also a fool for very tall men. John was 6’7”, with red hair, and he was best friends with the guy who was the manager of the bookstore where I worked part-time in DC (as opposed to the one where I work now). He also was a manager of another store in that same chain. Now let’s see – red-haired, excessively tall, manages a bookstore – a PERFECT MATCH, wouldn’t you say? Well, I certainly thought so. I was quite smitten, even though some of the other people in my store warned me that he was hopelessly geeky. But I LIKE geeky! He was also a science fiction fan, and I have always been surrounded by sci-fi people, although not because I are one. As a matter of fact, I aren’t one. I have no interest in science fiction whatsoever, and never have had, but I have always attracted people who are – friends AND lovers – and the only thing I could figured was that either I’m a latent sci-fi freak and getting everything else out of the way first before I start reading that genre, or the science fiction people are the only ones freaky enough to appreciate someone who is as far outside the universe as I am, and I’m so far-out that only the science fiction people can even believe I exist!

Anyway, this morning I was talking to a friend of mine and telling her about John and how in 2001, at the bookstore where I now work, I found his name in the inventory data base of our bookstore as an author. I hunted him down then on the internet and found an email address, wrote and asked if it was him. He wrote back and said yes, it was him, and with a name like his (John is one of his names, but not the one he goes by or publishes under), it isn’t likely it would be anyone BUT him. I wrote back and told him about the day I found someone with my name in the obituary column locally – same first name, middle initial AND last name, and only three years younger than me, so a lot of people thought it WAS me. Anyway, we wrote back and forth a few times, and then it kind of dropped off. After I hung up this morning with my friend, I went in search of John’s email address and thought I’d drop him a “catch-up” email, which I did, and it immediately came back “invalid email address”. So I googled him. (See? I’m shameless – I go and track down everybody I’ve ever known at some point or another.) I found him in Wikipedia…dead! No, he didn’t die in Wikipedia – but he himself had written the first part of the Wikipedia entry about him, as evidenced by the fact that it is fraught with his crazy brand of humor. When I got to the part about his having died, I thought maybe that was just some of his macabre sense of humor coming right to the surface, but several other sites that came up under his name also showed death notices and eulogies. He was only 51 years old, and died of a massive heart attack in 2006.

Damn!

John and I didn’t date very much or for very long, for which I was really sorry, but I always felt a certain fondness for him. Our first date was a Joan Jett concert, and he really got into the music, rocking out. So much so that he tore the stadium seats from their welded-in concrete slab they were attached to! When we talked that night, he prefaced a dozen or more sentences with “Until three years ago, I had never…” fill in the blank with “gone to a concert”, “gone to a movie”, or whatever your imagination can compose. I forget whether he told me or someone else had told me, but until “three years ago”, John had apparently been a humongous force with which to be reckoned – fucking enormous, from all accounts – and had pretty much been that way all of his life and been devoid of any kind of social life, for the most part.

In writing about my mother’s death and subsequent funeral, I mentioned that I am a “weird” magnet, which is true. I am also a virgin magnet (men only, please), which is not only true, but VERY weird, especially at my advanced age of 51. I vowed when Mike and I split up that I was done dealing in virgins, as I had been a virgin magnet for my entire love life up to that point, and I was tired of being stuck with the dubious task of teaching males how to behave on dates – not to fart or pick their noses, etc. – and how to treat a girl right, and then either watching them go off and be model boyfriends to some other girl or getting stuck with them interminably for remedial training (see “Marriage – Mike”). God, I hate that! Nothing worse than a man on training wheels, for Christ’s sake! So while the virgins I have magnetized may not necessarily be virgins in the strictest sense of the word, they have almost never had a real relationship with a woman, or whatever, and I decided at the tender age of 27 that I was only going to date men who were no fewer than five years older than me, figuring that if he isn’t deflowered by the age of 32, he never would be, so he wouldn’t be bothering with me anyway. WRONG!

John was exactly 32 when we started dating, and I can only swear to two dates that we had. If we had a third one, I can’t remember it, which is really sad. Anyway, he was 32 and I was 30, and at no time did he ever hold my hand, put his arm around me or anything at all other than escort me and pay my way. It was a refreshing cry from the “I bought you dinner, now you owe me”, but a girl likes some skin now and again, don’cha know. (My prudish aunt featured in “Fine Lace and Dirty Linen” on 5/9/07 told me so herself.) Every time we went out, when he took me home, he slowed down to 35 MPH and tossed me out at the door, and I referred to our dating as “drive-by dating”. That’s pretty much what it felt like. I couldn’t decide whether he just really wasn’t interested, or he just didn’t know how to proceed beyond asking me out, escorting me and paying my way. I always had a feeling that his “Until three years ago I had never…” could very well have included “…gone on a date” or beyond. For that matter, I wasn’t sure if he EVER beyonded, three years ago or otherwise. I guess because I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt of being insecure and not just another asshole in a long list of many (as much because I was generous to him as to assuage my own ego), I always remained fond of him in spite of the fact that our relationship was on a slow (but brief) track to nowhere. The last time I can remember seeing him was in my bookstore, where his best friend was my boss, and the only thing I can remember him saying was something about how he guessed I wore a lot of jewelry EVERYWHERE. Guess he figured out that all my jewelry wasn’t just for show for him. (It’s all costume, mostly cloisonné.) For some reason, he deemed that significant. Maybe he thought I was some big city vamp (see “I Love Lucy” episode of Cousin Ernie’s visit) out to snare him with my baubles and bangles. Yeah, right. Anyway, at some later time, I will discuss the 42-year-old guy who crossed my path in the 1990s and became known as the Cincinnati Virgin. But that’s another story.

None of John’s obituaries or post-mortems listed a wife as a survivor, and no kids were listed, so I don’t know if he never had a wife or just no longer had one. He didn’t mention it in his emails to me, and I never could figure out how to broach the subject with him in our emails.

The second internet connection was the result of my emailing a guy who writes for my hometown paper, about an article he’d written. I complimented his article, and gave him a couple of additional facts and a correction (Miss Know-It-All here). He wrote me back today and asked if I was the person who had written such-and-such a book and if I still lived in Georgia. I wrote him back and said yes, I am, and yes, I do. (Yes, I did have a book published in 1997.) He wrote back and said he LOVES that book – his wife gave it to him for Christmas some years ago, and he even has it in the bibliography of HIS book, and gave me the title. WOW! That was a big ego boost! I’ve been bibliographied, and I never even knew it! I know that paper mentioned my book in an article they published on a local subject (the book itself is nonfiction and written about the local area), and that was an ego kick; my mother sent me the article; now I may have to go find it to see if HE wrote THAT article, too! My book, which is out of print now, was the second one of its type to be written about that area, and several more of the same type have been written and published about it (same publisher, too – thanks a heap!), so for anyone even to remember mine, much less with such enthusiasm, is quite flattering. We’ve exchanged several emails today, and my ego is so boosted, I may not come down for days! Yippee!

A few years ago, six months before my father died, my friend’s mother died. From the time I found out about her death, I was constantly on the phone with my friend (who lived and still lives several states away), trying to keep up her spirits and help her get used to life without her mother. She had lived with her mother, whereas my folks lived a couple of states away from me and I didn’t see them but a few times a year. Meanwhile, I went to my friend’s mother’s funeral (which was a few months later for the convenience of one of her family members), using the last of my tax refund to get there. A little over a month after her mother’s funeral, my father died. My friend sent me a card.
I continued for the next three years constantly on the phone with this friend, trying to make sure she didn’t feel alone and lonely (she moved to a new area where she didn’t know many people, and had not kept up with many friends back home for some years). I tried to help her deal with moving forward and situations involving other family members, among many other things. Some of our conversations were spent covering the same ground over and over and over for hours on end, and led me to so much frustration that I almost got a new ulcer for it, but I persisted. Because of my venting to another friend about feeling like I was talking to a brick wall, I was led to the book, “When Helping You Is Hurting Me”, and while I never actually got hold of the book, the very title of it got my attention enough so that I stopped letting her lead me down the same alleyways of conversation that caused me to gnash my teeth to little nublets.
If you have read any of my previous entries, you already know that my mother died two days before this past Christmas. I can only assume I have clearly conveyed what a devastating loss this has been to me, without dwelling on it too heavily except at the time of her death. Well, in case I failed to do so, trust me – I have lived through sexual abuse, a childhood that played itself out like the movie “Carrie” (minus the telekinesis), the marriage from hell followed by the divorce that seems ever on-going, and medical issues abounding, and I have never, ever had anything harder to deal with than the loss of my mother. My friend sent me another card. I miss my mother so much, sometimes I can hardly stand it. I’m past the point where the first thought in my head when I wake up is “Mom’s dead. Mom’s dead. Mom’s dead.” But the worst times are the weekends, when my phone seldom rings. It may ring off the hook during the week (sometimes yes, sometimes no), but just about the only time it rings on the weekend is when my friend Fran calls on a Sunday morning, and my friend David might call. I used to spend a lot of my weekends on the phone with Mother, and that is when it hits me the worst. (That’s also the time when I am least busy and have the most time to think about things I can usually run from when I’m busy.) By an hour after I’m out of bed on Saturday, I start getting depressed because I know I can’t call Mother, and by Sunday night, I’m so depressed, I haven’t been out of the house or out of my pajamas all weekend. Getting out of bed on Monday morning has always been hard, but it’s getting harder and harder after weekends spent like that. Mind you, once in a great while, this friend might call me, and she sent me a birthday card with a generous check as a gift, but besides the occasional pass-it-on email, we don’t seem to talk too much, and if we do, it’s usually at my initiation. (Lest anyone think my friend’s not calling or absence of action might be financially motivated, let me assure you that her mother left her in very sound financial condition – a hell of a lot better than my financial condition is, believe me – so that is not a driving force here.)
I don’t do things for my friends and keep score with the expectation of everything I do being met with an equal action in return, but when you reexamine something and things are so blatantly lopsided, sometimes it’s hard not to notice. I really wish this whole thought had not occurred to me, but it did last weekend, and now I’m really bummed that this friendship is obviously so one-sided. That doesn’t mean I intend to discontinue the friendship – it takes a lot more than this for that to happen – but it does mean that I won’t be putting nearly as much effort into it as I have in the past. I’m not really mad, just disappointed – and really, really hurt.

When you tell someone you are in Limbo, it usually means you are riding a fence of some kind in a state of indecision, or you are in a state of flux due to someone else’s indecision. I am in another state of Limbo that is more in keeping with Chubby Checker’s song “Limbo Rock”, as in, how low can you go? I’m thinking, pretty low.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I read my hometown newspapers on line (yes, newspaperS – multiple hometowns, multiple newspapers), mainly to keep up with what’s going on there and with people I knew from when I lived there, and a strange by-product that resulted was that I inadvertently discovered a way to shadow Mike, so to speak. Also as I’ve mentioned previously, I have never had a desire (beyond the first weekend after he disappeared) to contact Mike in any way, and had I desired to do so, I’ve known where his parents lived and I could’ve contacted him via them if I’d really had any burning desire to do so. What I mainly wanted to do was just to keep tabs on him, and know where he was and more or less what he was doing. When I started seeing his presence in the local on-line newspaper, I decided to have a little fun with it and yank his chain from time to time. The company I now work for fired him before we were married, and the one place we always planned to live at some point in our future (limited though it turned out to be, and we never got there together) was Atlanta, so a few years ago (2005, I think), I had a chance to throw in his face via the online newspaper, “ha, ha, I work for these people, and you don’t” and “ha, ha, I live in Atlanta and you don’t”. Juvenile? You betcha. It was, however, never meant to be an exercise in “here I am”.

One of the features of this paper’s online version is a place where readers can make comments, and I’ve seen some of Mike’s comments go by and made a few of my own, as well. Some comment he made awhile ago made me think perhaps he was not in Georgia any more, but back in Tennessee.

Another feature offered is a place for readers to post their pictures – either pictures of themselves or pictures they’ve taken or all of the above. I see lots of “the first snow” or “boating on the lake” or “us at the barbecue” pictures go by, and I always look at them and look to see who submitted them, in case it’s someone I might know. Until now, it never has been. Last week, however, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw a prom picture of a young girl posted, with the name, say, Pahttryccia His Last Name, and it was posted by Mike His Last Name, with his name highlighted. I clicked on his name, and four more pictures had been posted in his profile – three pictures of his son Michael Patrick His Last Name (indicating that the boy goes by Pat), and one picture of Mike. The girl looks just like her father, but the boy doesn’t look like he’s even remotely related, and I wouldn’t have recognized Mike if I’d seen him on the street. He looks so different from how he looked when I knew him, and he doesn’t even look like the same person. Yeah, I know, it’s been almost 25 years, but even after 25 years, I still look like the same person, just older and fatter. Make no mistake about it, he looks quite a lot older and quite a lot fatter, but not like him at all. Funny enough, though, he looks like he is supposed to look, somehow. He always did look like his father spit him out and he was totally unrelated to his mother, but his dad was slender, and in all the time I knew him, Mike looked like the Pillsbury doughboy, to varying degrees. Now Mike looks like someone stuck an air hose in his father’s mouth and inflated him.

When Mother died, Mike signed the online guestbook from the funeral home, and that was the second time in recent years (or for the past twenty-five, for that matter) that he had tried to contact me, either directly or indirectly. It’s been suggested to me that those and the posting of the pictures where he knew I would see them (I don’t make my presence on that site a secret) were his way of “fishing”, and since he had posted pictures of Papa Bear and the Baby Bears but no Mama Bear, I began to think the same thing, and also that he and the Missus might be divorced, especially since he might be back in Tennessee. A friend suggested that I could try to find some legal records here in Georgia to find out, but I thought that was an awful lot of trouble to go to, no more than I really cared. Anything that I had to do more than click my mouse or surf the net for, I just didn’t give enough of a damn to make the effort. It’s not like I have a dog in that fight, anyway – or anything else more than idle curiosity.

The girl’s name is not really Pahttryccia, and the boy’s name is not really Patrick, but the spelling of the girl’s real name is just about as weird, and it struck me as very strange that they gave both kids the same name, feminine and masculine, the shortened version of which is pronounced the same, but they spelled his in the common way and made hers look like a cure for hay fever. I had gathered previously that the mother’s first and maiden names seemed to be of German origin, so I put the girl’s first name on the internet by itself to see what would come up, if perhaps it came up in an on-line baby name site that showed that spelling to be of German origin as well. From what I can gather, though, what it shows it to be is that it’s the only one in the world like it, because when I googled it, the only sites that came up – and there were bunches – were sites relating to her. I decided to play snoop and read through some of them to see what she was about and – let’s be honest here – to find out what I could glean about her father, his situation and his whereabouts.

In the 5/29/05 Anne Arky Ology blog called “Damn Him”, I asked some questions:
So what do you suppose his new life is like? I know he is married, and I know he has at least one kid and lives here in Georgia. Does she have to wait and wonder if he is coming home? Does she have to worry what kind of fix he is getting them into that she will have to bail them out of, or what kind of fix she will have to fix? I don’t know, but I’m glad it isn’t me. I wonder if she knows the REAL story of his first marriage. I wonder what kind of bullshit story he fed her instead of the real story. I wonder what Junior would say if he knew Daddy was a thief (convicted felon, even) and a first-rate conniving liar?

By snooping in his daughter’s blog, I found some answers. In a very recent blog, according to her, her parents have been divorced for five or six years and Mike has been living back in Tennessee during that time, while the rest of the family stayed in Georgia. The reason they divorced (according to her) is because he has a thyroid condition, and it causes him to spend any extra money he can get his hands on and take off on mini-vacations, usually to Florida, and for this, her mother divorced him. Sound familiar? So she was left behind not only to deal with the absence of her beloved father, but also to be first-hand witness to her mother’s and her mother’s family’s wrath and disdain of him, putting her right in the middle with severely divided loyalties. I have no doubt in my mind that she truly believes the chemical imbalance in his brain, as she says, is caused by a thyroid condition, and I have no doubt in my mind that he really and truly has a thyroid situation (one look at his picture, and the mystery is over). When I was her age (about 20), I didn’t know thyroid conditions from diddly damn, and if someone had told me that, I would have believed it, especially if it were my father who told me and I was a die-hard daddy’s girl, as she says she is. However, it sounds to me like he (or someone) is feeding her a major snow job and he is full-blown five-star bipolar. (Not, to quote Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that.) My friend Not The Mama tells me that “They are miserable, crippled people without a clue who they are and they destroy everybody who loves them, desperately seeking relationships they're just too scared to have lest they be rejected. They are not mean people. They're scared, and they hide behind any lie they think will hide that fact.”, to which I replied, “You may be right about their not being mean people, but I do think a certain callousness must be built into their internal systems, because I don't think they have a clue or a concern about the carnage they leave in their wake or how their actions affect other people.”

Many of the questions posed above have been answered in one paragraph with startling clarity. Yes, she did have to wait and wonder if he is coming home. Yes, she did have to worry what kind of fix he was getting them into that she would have to bail them out of, or what kind of fix she would have to fix. By now, if she doesn’t have any specific details of the real story of his first marriage, I’d be willing to bet she has some strong suspicions. It looks like Junioretta (as it were) still has a lot of illusions about her daddy, though, which really breaks my heart. It also answers some unspoken (unwritten) questions I had – did I make a mistake by not being there when Mike got back from wherever it was he went the last time he took off? Did he outgrow that shit and become a better husband for someone else? I always seemed to break in guys so they were better dates, boyfriends and, I feared, husbands when I was finished with them than when I got them, so I figured the last question was not only valid, but likely to be answered with a positive. Based on the revelations of the daughter, it looks like the answer to both of those unspoken questions is a resounding NO! It also gives me major validation for the decision I made not to have children with this ding-a-ling, and tells me why he and the latest Missus stayed married as long as they did – the children.

Something else in another recent blog of hers brings to mind that old saying about the sins of the father being visited upon the sons (or daughters, in this case). She gave a detailed description about her broken engagement. She wrote about how a few years ago, a guy was supposed to come from up north to visit her and probably get engaged to her, and all the while he was talking on his cell phone to her and pretending to be driving south to see her, he was actually God knows where, and three hours after he was supposed to arrive at her house, she called his cell phone and got his brother “back home”, up north and twelve states away. When she was trying to call him and text him and email him, she got no response whatsoever, as if he had just vanished into thin air. I don’t know whether this guy ever met her daddy, and learned evaporation tricks from him, or if, like many women, she set her sights on a younger version of Dear Old Dad. (I’m guilty of this, also, but Mike was a combination of all the bad parts of both of my parents and none of their good ones. Daddy never left us or lied through his teeth – his biggest sin was being a poor provider and very self-absorbed.) She asked her friends in blogland if any of them had ever felt the same way she was feeling now, and I was tempted to drop a note under yet another assumed identity and tell her that I for one knew exactly how she felt. I would never do anything to disillusion her about her father – she’ll find out soon enough how clayful his feet are – and I would never use her in any malicious way to get at her father, because she has suffered/will suffer enough because of him.

Did I mention she is in college at the same place Mike and I went, and living near him? Sheesh! She didn’t mention anything about her relationship with her mother, apart from having to deal with the mother’s venomous wrath over the father’s actions, or her relationship with her brother at all. I would not have known from her blog that she even has a brother – she’s never mentioned him in the least. She sounds like a very responsible young lady, with an understanding of having to pay her own way and not dependent upon her parents, which is awesome. I like her mother already, because I promise you, she did not get that from her father. My heart goes out to her for the pain she is obviously having, but trust me, however tempting it might be to do otherwise, I will keep a hands-off approach, albeit a voyeuristic one.

How low can I go? I suppose this is going pretty low, snooping around in his daughter's blog to find out about him, but I'm glad I did it. This has just been so weird, but I really do feel like a parking ticket – like I have been majorly validated.

Well, so far I have gotten some decent response to my letters. I had one congressman’s office call and the staffer told me that they cannot help me because this is a matter for law enforcement, and I told her that while I do not expect the good congressman or his staff to go and arrest the bimbo, I was hoping that he would do what he was elected to do, which was to represent me, by putting a little political pressure on the local police to do SOMETHING. She said he couldn’t, so his office is high on my shit list. If he is up for reelection this year, I plan to vocalize my opposition. However, the local police offices have been very responsive to this, and the county sheriff’s office and the city police where I live are “working together” to get something done, although they are telling me they don’t think anything really CAN be done because (once again, and I’m getting so damned tired of hearing about this) she hasn’t DONE anything YET. They have all assured me that any “tips” regarding nefarious activity at my house will be looked at with a jaundiced eye and likely not acted upon, because the narcotics officers “realized within 5 minutes of their arrival that this was bogus and there was nothing to it”. Trust me – my house LOOKS like the house of the poster child for goody two shoes. I finally got someone to listen to the extended dance version of Kristy’s greatest hits (all nine of them), and they and others in the groups of people I’ve heard from have generally decided – drum roll, please – she’s a nut. Well, thank you, but I already had made a diagnosis! They think they may be able to get her committed, but that will be a revolving door process by which they get her in there, get her meds straight, let her out, and in a few months’ time, she goes off the meds, and (as I’ve said before), puts a quarter in her mental juke box and starts playing my song again, and we will have to repeat this process over and over. However, I’m game for that if that’s what it takes.

The GBI sent me a letter telling me that they are not authorized to act on the complaint of a citizen, that they have to be referred by district attorneys or law enforcement, but they were concerned about my allegations, so they sent my package and a copy of said letter to the county district attorney, who I somehow missed in my outsendings for some reason. I got a call last week from that office, and they are pursuing the case, also. Bless his heart, the DA who called me sounds for all the world like Buddy Hackett, and while he seems quite nice and quite willing to pursue this matter on my behalf, it was all I could do to keep from laughing at him! Anyway, his line of thinking is the same as the above, the revolving-door-committal thing, but like I said, I’m all for it. I haven’t told any of these people that they are one among many recipients of my help message, so by all rights, they should start running into each other in their pursuit of a solution – IF they are doing their jobs right, anyway. Keep your fingers crossed!