45-Ton of Bricks

Our new place was smaller, cleaner, and female-dominant, with only one adjoining wall and ceiling. That may not seem like it matters, but after five years of snoring and peeing on both sides in a mostly-couples complex, upstairs and down, it almost felt like we had the apartment to ourselves. It smelled better, too.

Our neighbors were Caucasian and Hispanic, very few Blacks, a couple of Asians, but a much denser population in all, with lots more kids for my daughter to play with, a plethora of single mothers, one or two single fathers, and a handful or so of folk like Tom and me, married with children. Our carports ringed the development, so moving Tom’s equipment in from and out to the van was a hellova schlep.

By the time we had the cash to relocate, Tom had partnered up with the slimy misogynist drummer who I’ll call FA (Fucking Asshole) from this point on. I’d never had access to raw hatred before, but if ever I came close to despising another human, it was FA. I guess I should be grateful he helped me reach that previously unattainable emotion. I didn’t like it, and I sure as hell hope I never have cause to experience it again, but if’n one intends to live a full life, one (i.e., me) must needs accept the bad with the good. Promotes character. Makes ya stronger. Goody, goody.

Fact is, I’d disliked him from day one, when he sat in on my beautiful Yamaha chrome-wrapped kit and out-played me as if I didn’t exist—and treated me the same. He wasn’t a great drummer, but he’d been pro-adjacent for decades, playing behind the Righteous Bros., I think, and a couple of other famous groups in his younger, surfer days. Dropped lots of names, non-recall them all; sometimes my non-remembery is an out-and-out blessing. To hear FA tell it, he was the power behind every throne. I couldn’t help but wonder why some of that power hadn’t translated into money, as he and his current wife lived in the Huntington Beach equivalent of our new apartment. But I didn’t daren’t ask; he was the first true white-supremacist, gynophobic, sad-excuse-for-a-human-being I’d ever met, and I wasn’t up to any more dismissal or rejection.

Back in the day, men like FA were called male chauvinist pigs, but he was more than that. He was an all-around fucking asshole who relished making people feel small. He’d purposely make me wait on his leisure to collect Tom’s weekly pay—and I don’t use that word with non-due cause. He once explained his version of the Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules. Oh, not to me—he seldom deigned to grace me directly with his words or wisdom. No, he made a show of starting to hand Tom an envelope, then pulled it back, once, twice, three times between assertions of his power. And he performed his gambit in front of me and his wife, so we’d all understand he was “da man.”

I’m not positive but I think it was during said demonstration that he sneered at Tom for “letting” me handle our finances, for “letting” me emasculate him. FA expected Tom to be the one who met him at his bank every week and cool his heels while His Lord High Eminence took his time first showing up, then calculating how much to withhold from my husband’s cash pay for the product FA had supplied that week.

A nasty little middle-management tyrant, the kind who kicks the dog and beats his wife after a bad day at the office.

But he didn’t know my husband. Tom was bombastic on the outside, gentle on the inside, but had inherited a core of steel from both parents. He wasn't about to get out of bed and spend forty-five minutes in rush-hour traffic for anyone unless he was on the clock as an airport-shuttle driver, and those days were long gone. Besides, he didn’t math. He could count the same stack of bills three times and come up with three different totals, a bewildering reality that had already destroyed his earlier attempts at a bartending career.

It wasn’t a matter of masculinity; it was a matter of numbers. Oh, he had no problem with the thirteen tones on a scale, but his eyes literally swam when he tried to read though our 1040 Schedule C. He couldn’t balance a checkbook even with a calculator, and he only occasionally remembered to note a check’s number, amount, and payee in the register.

For the record, our daughter was just the opposite. She had a heck of a time with math unless there was a number sign in front of the figures. Then she was a whiz. As one of my aunts used to say, “It all depends on what’s important to you.” For Tom, it was music. For Baby, it was money, not unusual for a child raised in poverty. For me, it was organizing receipts, paying bills, and getting our Federal and State tax forms in by April 15, one day after his natal celebration. No, we didn’t actually pay any taxes, but we damn well acknowledged our debt on time every year.

All that said, FA really didn’t understand a key aspect of the keyboard player who was reestablishing his upward music-club-career trajectory: Tom always had another dealer. Always. Why did he think my husband kept SOB around? For intellectual discourse? Gimme a break.

Core of steel, gentle soul, bombastic personality, semi-virtuoso hands, scholarly brain, street-smart Chicago cab driver. FA could play him—he did—but Tom always landed on his feet and finished at the top of the pile.

On the brighter hand, I was meeting non-SOB or asshole folk whose life outlooks rattled my cage with an entirely different rhythm. Fancying myself a writer now that I’d penned and sold a single title—stupid, I know, but don’t forget, I was still dumbasfuck—I met my very first real adult friend at a writer’s something-or-other, and together we attended the very first Orange County meeting of Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC).

All of a sudden I was hobnobbing with people whose lives didn’t revolve around the latest whatever-was-on-the-radio, who talked about books and literary agents and the debatable benefits of self-publishing, ala Dan Poynter and Jan Nathan, instead of backstabbing music agents and Billboard charts and greedy club owners. The no-longer-a-drummer part of me had finally discovered a new, non-musical Pathways Through Realities, my brain’s reinterpretation of Mortimer Cohen’s Pathways Through the Bible, which I’d been forced to read and reread every Sunday School year through eighth grade. It had been full of the mythology I could never swallow as real because it felt like so much… nonsense and fairytales, just as my mother dubbed it… even as she insisted I study and learn it down pat.

But now I was coming face-to-face with some of the other beliefs she’d dismissed or held as fact, and finding they, too, were not as claimed. Our next-door neighbor, for instance, had a loving mother-teenage-son relationship such as I’d never seen. She called the boys she didn’t want him hanging around with “B.I.s,” Bad Influences, and talked to him about the potential consequences of things she didn’t want him to do. Didn’t yell, didn’t threaten, didn’t put her foot down—talked to him. Mind-blowing to a marionette like me. When the son started to argue or rant, the way my brother used to do, that mom would say, “Hang on a second—I’ll look up the number so you can call the authorities.”

This was possible?! Mothers and sons could joke with each other, have rational conversations, work things out without anger or dire consequences or either walking away feeling like a piece of stepped-in-dog-poop?

Could I do the same with my own daughter, with my husband? Could I apply the lessons I was learning from clients and their books to my own life? No. Which, of course, was my fault. I didn’t know why, but it was the only logical conclusion, having not yet figured out why I was so dumbasfuck. Still watching my neighbor-and-son’s real-life interactions was more educational than anything I’d ever read, heard, or ghostwritten.

Even more astonishing, she eschewed fashion! She wore only comfortable clothes. She’d appear in public—out of her house—in a cable sweater she’d tugged at until it reached just above her knees, sans skirt, pants, or even stockings. She’d leave for work in baggy sweatpants-and-shirt ensembles. OMG, how did she do it? I’d considered myself a free spirit when we were on the road, but this—combining orange and blue, pink and purple, or simply wearing all black—this was beyond any liberty I could even imagine. I was sooo jealous!

As if in calculated contrast, the woman living above us always dressed in color-coordinated perfection. If her tailored suit was blue, so were her shoes and eye shadow. Tan matched with brown, yellow with amber highlights. Flawless makeup expertly applied; I never spotted her face naked. A bit overweight, sure, but she held herself with a beauty queen’s straight-backed composure. Not someone to emulate—my interest in fashion and makeup remained at sub-girl, even sub-boy levels—but certainly a posture to admire. Where did she get all that confidence? And why I couldn’t I have any?

I dressed to hide the five pounds I’d put on and couldn’t seem to shed, the ones my husband blamed for our deteriorating sex life. If I’d had a quarter ounce of self-esteem, I might have connected the dots between his ever-changing excuses and my mother’s still-continuing, always out-of-the-blue explanations for why she’d sent my two cousins back to live with our grandfather. I never cared about the latter except to wonder why she kept bringing it up, and I simply accepted blame for the former since, after all, Tom had warned me before we wed to never put on weight.

Was that even half-a-smidgen rational? Of course not, I admit now, older and wiser. But I was so drenched in worthlessness at the time, it didn’t even occur to me I was once again non-entity-ly catering—my brother would later call it coddling—to my controller’s wants and needs.

So it shouldn’t have, but it certainly did, come as a brick-ton-revelation when our neighbor across the way casually told her children, “You better learn to play together without fighting, because you’re the closest relatives either of you will ever have.”

OMG. What undeniable logic. You’re the closest relatives either of you will ever have.

“Where did you learn that?”

“Learn? What are you talking about? That’s the way I was raised; that’s the way everybody I know was raised. Didn’t you ever read a parenting book?”

Not then, but my mother always insisted she’d raised Bro and me on Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, her parenting “bible.” I guess it was as effective as any other “scripture.”

Seven pounds overweight, my turtle shell stuffed with confusion and self-derision and horror and guilt—oh, let’s not forget the guilt that comes with even questioning a puppet master’s authority!—I logically concluded all my growing problems were caused by my weight gain. A friend talked me into seeing a non-allopathic doctor who could, theoretically, cure anything with nutrition and supplements.

Cutting to the chase: said Dr. Quack, PhD’s cure for having the opposite of AIDS—what did that even mean?—was a macrobiotic diet. But every follow-up visit showed me a few pounds heavier than the last weigh in. “That’s not normal. Are you sure you’re following the plan correctly?”

Probably not… obviously not. He assumed that being girl, I knew how to cook, so his recipes were ingredients lists sans prep instructions. But I’d been persona non grata in my kitchen and never acquired the patience to follow any but the simplest recipe. I knew how to make food, not cook.

While I dutifully swallowed the prescribed gruel variations, healthily eating my way to enormity and enormous MS fatigue, Tom took Baby to Naugle’s, precursor to Del Taco, for a decent meal almost every day, or took her to the park to throw frisbees, paddle-boat around the lake, and picnic on KFC.

I stayed home and worked. After all, I had a family to support.