The World According To Anne Arky

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.