I guess that I wanted her to hurt, and now that I admit that to you, do you stand in judgment of me?
I wanted her to hurt like she had hurt me, as if that could ever solve anything. I wanted her to lay awake every night because I couldn't sleep, and I wanted her to toss, and I wanted her to turn, and to pull her hair out every waking moment she could no longer be with me. But I knew that she didn't. I wanted to be as important to her as she had told me that I was. But I knew that I wasn't.
I wanted her to feel, firsthand, the pain she had caused me with hollow words of admiration, empty promises and broken trusts. I wanted her to feel the ways in which she had cut me as if she had cut herself. But I knew that she wouldn't.
I wanted to think that somewhere in her subconscious mind, I was a splinter that could never be removed. That every so often a song on the radio or a phrase randomly uttered would evoke a memory of me to her mind and that she would want to cry, or that she would call to tell me that she had been wrong all along and that she still loved me.
But she never did.
In Southern California, I had admitted to Amy that I was a deeply vengeful person who felt the need to administer consequences personally to those I felt had wronged me. And no one had wronged me as I believed Katherine to have wronged me. This was the baggage I had been carrying with me then, and that I still shoulder from time to time.
"That is very dangerous," she had told me, "and uniquely human. It's the sort of logic that allows us to preemptively invade foreign countries and bomb babies."
Amy had a way of cutting through the bullshit.
What I needed then was a friend, and I found it. The first night I spent in Oceanside, I rolled up my sleeve and showed her the abscess I had gotten in San Francisco. She tried to the best of her ability to conceal her nausea at the sight of it, but the look in her eyes screamed "This is very, very bad and I am not sure if this will be the last time I will see you with that arm."
"Holy Jesus Mother Of Fucking Mary, we need to get you to a hospital, now."
"Really? It's that bad?"
"Your entire inner arm is swollen to the size of a small grapefruit. Yes, it really is that fucking bad. Come on, finish your beer. Let's go."
Explaining to everyone at Amy's house why we had to rush to the emergency room suddenly was a comical attempt at spraying cologne on a turd.
"Woah, what the FUCK happened to your arm, man?" Bill had said then, and looked at me. John was sitting next to him, and as we had been speaking for some time, he had already surmised the problem. He was silent. I gave him a small look of gratitude and our eyes met. He showed no signs of emotion: John normally never did. His short, dark hair cropped close to his head, and his face that completely blank poker face that never changed. They called him "the real scum", for reasons that I will someday revisit, but we all let him get away with whatever he wanted. We tolerated it because, although John with a thief and a con, he was at his heart a sincere and dedicated seeker of truth.
"Spider bite, Bill. Those things can be really nasty."
"What the hell kind of spider does that? How long have you had it?"
"A few days."
"A FEW FUCKING DAYS. Jesus CHRIST, man. Shouldn't you be fucking dead by now?"
I blushed. Amy shot him a look. "Come on, let's go," she said, and she pulled me by the arm and we walked to her car together in the darkness.
I apologized to her enthusiastically. "I know we have only personally met once before, and it was in New York City, and this is my first night staying with you in your mother's home, and I normally don't have pus oozing infected abscesses on my arm" and etcetra etcetra.
"Listen, you don't have to apologize to me for anything. I want you to be OK. I just want you to get taken care of and be OK."
And then, in her eyes, the strangest emotion I hadn't seen in anyone I had met along the road for what seemed like aeons: Genuine warmth, genuine human compassion and empathy. It felt familiar and yet so strange, and somehow welcoming.
We drove to the ER in near silence. Not much was spoken between us then, and there was little risk involved. It was two relatively unfamiliar people, riding together in the dark to do that which needed to be done. Nothing more, nothing less. Periodically, she would look over and give me the slightest of reassuring smiles, but the sadness and genuine concern was welling up in her eyes and right then I felt an idiot impulse kick up inside of me to kiss her and tell her it would be OK, but I did not.
When we arrived at the emergency room, we were pleased to see that somehow we were the first in line. This surprised me, as even in smaller towns I had been known to wait for hours, just to throw a fit and wince my face in pain and demand a fix. Hydromorphone was what they gave you then, if you claimed the pain was severe enough. And at times, for me at least, it was.
As I was being checked in, the doctors asked the usual questions. Drug history, mostly. I sat down in a chair and held my head in my hands, somehow strangely ashamed although I knew I had no real reason to be. Amy rested her hand gently on my shoulder.
"You know, I don't judge you. You will see... One of the things I have yet to tell you, what I am going to tell you now... Maybe we are more alike than you would think."
And what she told me was not much different than many of the other women I had loved. She had been unfaithful to all of the men she had dated, many of whom she didn't seem to like in hindsight. She was running from her father's death, and had been. She avoided intimacy, she couldn't handle it. She acted out sexually. She betrayed lovers, friends and family and lied to them. It was on impulse. It was an addiction. She was now celibate, and had a plan to be celibate until Easter had arrived.
The only thing about it that struck me was the brutal honesty, the integrity and accountability with which she had faced the music and her self and shadow. Her face portrayed a certain tenderness, a genuine sense of understanding that was hard won and snatched from the jaws of defeat. It was real.
And still, somehow, the cognitive dissonance of hearing that in the state of mind I was already in, immediately post Katherine affair, was something that I was not yet ready to hear. I didn't judge her, and I knew that she had been trying. But somehow the very act of the confession, there in the sordid and dimly lit ER waiting room, felt maybe a little too candid and raw and real: Real reality TV, high def. The bipolar liar junkie, the lying borderline sex addict. "Well, we are more alike than otherwise," I thought to myself. "Oh dear, oh dear. What a mess."
But it was a beautiful mess, somehow, and I think maybe that was the first moment I realized that it would be OK.
Amy stood behind me, resting her head on mine and cradling it with her hands, when she wasn't rubbing my back and shoulders. And only now do I realize I had to force myself to not fall in love with her in that waiting room that night, with her broken down confession and earnest eyes, somehow betraying more age and wisdom than I knew she should have possessed at the age of 23. It was the kindness of it. The brutal truth shining through the darkness there as a guiding light. I saw it, and quickly realized to know the truth is preferable in all ways to the fear of having your illusions shattered.
Like Marlowe, I too had come to learn that there was nothing I hated more than the stench of a lie.
After about ten minutes, they came in to take me into the emergency room proper. The emergency room attendants were horrified, but they told me that I probably wouldn't lose my arm.
"You should really learn to just smoke more pot," one of them told me.
I laughed. "Well, if you can't laugh at yourself... Ha Ha Ha."
When the doctor finally came in to lance it, the pain was unbearable. Amy watched by my side the whole time, eyes wide in fascination and awe. They made a slit in the abscess after injecting a numbing agent directly into its swollen aperture. Pus and blood oozed out of my arm like an erupting volcano, and I nearly fainted from the pain while Amy held my hand and squeezed it tight. I squeezed tighter. After they had finished, Amy played the Ukelele and serenaded the ER staff with Dan Bern's "Jerusalem".
"When I tell you that I love you, don't test my love,
Accept my love,
Don't test my love.
'Cause maybe I don't love you all that much."Every man in the entire ER ward had fallen in love her her by the end of the night, and I was no exception- Although I was the last to know it. And although all of this had been enough to spark off the renewal of my confidence and faith in others, the wound over the Katherine affair was still raw and bleeding. And I wanted her to feel it for herself, still.
Does that make you think less of me?
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