– for N.M.S.

 

 

“I feel a real responsibility to the images I get attached to.”

-Patti Smith, Edie: American Girl

 

It would be so easy to begin with something humorous about Bruce – his calf tattoo, say, or how when we met he was living temporarily with his mother while the mother of his children – I will resist the urge, here, to use the phrase baby mama, though this is the phrase I use when speaking to friends and family members about the situation - occupied his home with their ten-year-old twin daughters Loni and Loatia – to try to establish right away my understanding of his position in the world, I.e. beneath us – you and me – anyone reading literary fiction, any editor of a magazine or journal that would pay an author for a short story, anyone in academia, us. It would be equally easy to use Bruce’s blue collar status to try to make myself, by extension (as someone who would willingly seek out and date a working class dude!), seem cool; to relay to you what he told me about working twelve hour days, seven days a week, the last decade, since the birth of his daughters, because Saturdays are time and a half in the auto factory in which Bruce works, and Sundays double time (“How can you say no to double time?”). In fact, in another version of this story I wrote (in third person) about how she had always maintained a ‘fierce disinterest in dating anyone still living with his mother, anyone with a calf tattoo’. I can assure you it was very cleverly worded (for maximum humorous effect; something following about her friend inquiring of her, “how did you not notice it? if you were naked, having sex?” and her replying, “I don’t know; I guess I didn’t look down.”), that I worked on that wording for days, restarting that opening sentence about Bruce’s calf tattoo over and over until I was satisfied with my level of fun-making. It was so easy. After all, who amongst us (aforementioned literary circle devotees, fiction editors of magazines, academics, social media influencers, cult members) hasn’t seen someone at a state fair or in an Home Depot and leaned close to the person beside us to make a keen, witty observation about said tattoo, particularly if said tattoo is on a male and on a calf and is a poorly rendered version of an iconic childhood cartoon character? Bruce’s calf tattoo isn’t of the Tasmanian Devil (I know that’s what you’re probably thinking because that’s what I would think if someone told me a man had a calf tattoo), it’s of a cross, I’m not sure what kind of cross, Celtic? I don’t know my crosses. Bruce claims not to know, either. He claims, when I ask him, not to remember the genesis of having gotten it. But the truth of the matter is I am genuinely fond of Bruce (I may even love him!) and to make fun of him or to paint him here in any manner that causes you to laugh at his expense or to think less of him or to think him an asshole or douchebag, or to think me cool by association or by comparison, in an attempt to slicken my literary persona or elevate my sense of coolness in your eyes, to elevate my literary status, is what sickens me about being a writer, an artist, a narcissist, you name it, me. The real challenge is to make fun of ourselves, to show how we are the assholes, isn’t it? That used to be the goal of literature, I thought. Maybe I misheard or misremember. I can be dumb like that.

 

Anyway, this story isn’t really about Bruce, of course. It’s about me. And Harry Houdini. Not the real Harry Houdini who died famously from an unexpected punch to the stomach, but a man I’m choosing to call Harry Houdini for the purpose of this short story.  Maybe that’s been done, too. An overused style tactic: naming a literary character after a famous real life person. Anyway, Harry Houdini, to my knowledge, doesn’t have a calf tattoo. Harry Houdini does have a poke and stick tattoo he may or may not have gotten while incarcerated, though I can’t remember what it is, only that he told me, once, he has one, because I had to ask what that meant: poke and stick. I can be totally ignorant like that. I only learned recently what gaslighting is. But then, soon as I did, I realized it’d happened to me several times, this gaslighting business. Not by Harry Houdini or Bruce ... If I were going to attempt to write a short fiction in which I depicted myself as a victim of a bad man, as the trend goes, the ‘bad man’ wouldn’t be Harry or Bruce or either of my ex husbands. In fact, I don’t know who the bad man would be. I’m not really one for regrets. Bruce and I were watching a movie in another side-of-the-freeway, one-story motel room recently and in this particular movie an older, more established man (read: a cop) says to a younger, less established man (read: a junior cop), “Nobody told you to smoke that thing. You made the decision. Live with your decision. Aint like I put a gun to your head,” after the older, more established man (cop), clearly, by today’s standards, used his power to influence the younger man (junior cop) to take drugs. (“Why’d you do this to me?” had been the younger man, the junior cop’s question.) And it reminded me of that one actor-singer (female) who basically accused her singer husband (male) of using his power over her to keep her from making records/singing for years and years …

 

I guess I just live with my decisions. Whatever.

 

But, also, it is about Bruce. This story. I said it wasn’t really about him but now that I think about it, it is.

 

“Give me liberty or give me death!” I said to Bruce with abject seriousness a month ago when I thought maybe there was a chance he might kill me. (I swear, I’m not making him the bad guy here. Bruce is not Ryan Adams. Oops. I said it. Neither is Harry Houdini. No one in this story is Ryan Adams, not even “Ryan Adams” is Ryan Adams, I swear.)

 

We were sitting on the couch in my basement, Bruce and I, the disgusting one that my late cat Theo tore apart in his younger years. The one Bruce and I fucked on the first time we fucked, when it hurt like hell, like losing my virginity all over again if I could remember losing my virginity which I can’t because I’d drunk so many wine coolers that night in ’87 at age 17, but I didn’t let on, to Bruce, the pain, in 2020 at age 51, because I was just so grateful to be fucking again after a year and a half of not fucking, after seventeen years of once-a-month fucking a man who never once initiated fucking (“we just need to break you in like a baseball glove,” Bruce said after we’d fucked two more times and I’d finally came and then I’d come again, with Bruce; we’d been discussing the extreme tightness of my vagina, which isn’t so much a humble brag as the source of months of worry and anxiety (by me) and the cause of my having purchased numerous female gynecological products – a variety of lubes, graded dilators, moisture replenishers, suppositories, tiny metal ‘balls’ – none of which, I am happy to report, Bruce and I have had to use, Bruce preferring to spit in his hand, and my vagina regaining elasticity and moisture after so much fucking; wetasspussy, hallelujah, praise jesus or allah or who-the-fuck-ever, “use it or lose it,” as my mom always says). There is a spider living under the cushion. Of that couch. At least there was last time I lifted the cushion to vacuum a week ago. That’s when you know you’re not a clean person like everyone thinks, like everyone who enters your house remarks on. What they don’t know is there is a spider living under their butt where they’re sitting. Fuck. Anyway. When I said that to Bruce – the thing about giving me liberty or death, that famous quote by….I forget who (I’m dumb), I meant it. I’d spent the whole morning pacing the house working on that speech in my head before he got here. I was fucking worked up. I was worked up as fucking hell.

 

Wait, though. Let me go back.

 

Six months earlier, Harry Houdini and I had spent eight hours together inside a music producer’s studio where HH was approved through some government bureaucracy or judicial agreement involving his celebrity lawyer – he’d told me more than once he shared an attorney with a famous female rock front woman, an actual longtime hero of mine - to work, or to make some pretense at working, after his release. He was still sleeping, at that time, in another government-mandated residence with approximately thirty other males in similar transitional situations, on the bottom bunk of a bunk bed, so I could see him only during daylight hours between ten and seven, and only in the music producer’s office, which consisted of a long conference table surrounded by several swiveling chairs where HH spent his days painting or sketching or lying on the floor on a yoga mat when inspiration alluded him, while awaiting staggered calls from his parole officer whose job it was to verify his whereabouts throughout the day.

There are several photographs of HH from this time period standing outside the studio, cigarette in hand, in front of the Personal Apocalypse Records signage, which have about them the look of photographs contained within a punk anthology or history; which is to say, HH has the look of a 70s punk musician, despite being an artist rather than a musician in a time period forty years post the punk movement.

            That I am an artist, also, albeit one who looks more of my own time, is important to note only in that it is how HH and I met, through common friends, fellow artists. And this too, this commonality of peers, is likely the reason we will never be far removed from one another, even as we distance ourselves geographically or emotionally or in any of the number of ways people attempt to distance themselves from their past (read: each other).

            We have written ourselves into an oral history, of sorts, whether or not one is ever officially published. And since HH once told me that all any of us has is our image and so we should make an attempt at projecting coolness, I don’t think he will be too upset to see me attempting just that here, with this piece. (Don’t worry, Harry, I am doing my best to ensure we both come off looking cool.)

            Anyhow, HH has taken up with Mulan Rouge, as you probably already know, if you have any interest whatsoever in pop culture or social media influencers or the call girl art scene or (what used to be called) groupies.

            BTW, did you ever read in PLEASE KILL ME: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk, how Jim Carroll talked about meeting Nico, how he was so blown away and intimidated by her beauty, but then she recited for him some of her poems and they sucked, they totally blew? Ha Ha Ha. Those are his words, not mine: “Ha ha ha.”

 

 

***

 

Bruce, by contrast, has spent the past two decades – since the week of his high school graduation – working in an automobile factory in Warren, Michigan. Bruce, if you haven’t yet figured it out, is the true hero of this story. Bruce, who actually works for a living, climbing/crawling inside large industrial-sized furnaces, the temperatures of which can reach/exceed a thousand degrees F, to repair them, Bruce, who spent four years as a millwright’s apprentice, while HH and I play at something we call work but more accurately resembles the Sunday afternoon activity of an upper middle class, only-childhood.

 

Bruce is every stoner/hood/burn-out boy in high school on whom I harbored a secret, unrelenting crush, who I believed was too cool for me, who I never talked to but studied, instead, in the hallways and lunch room, on busses and in classrooms, taking mental notes on the way they shook rather than combed their collar-length, shaggy hair, on the color suede of their lace-up, moccasin boots, on the 666’s and pentagrams they penned onto their jeans and arms. Bruce is every actor whose picture I hung on a wall of a bedroom in some city over the years: De Niro, Penn, Cage, smoking his cigarettes like an actor between takes, leaning back in a chair on my balcony, my feet in his lap, exhaling each large drag skyward so that his cigarette is vertical, pointing at the moon, after which he tells me stories of doing massive amounts of cocaine and hallucinogens, copious amounts of alcohol, handfuls of pills, the numerous women he’s banged, who banged him. “That was just pleasure,” he says of the sex with them, in an effort to distinguish me from them. He tells me of fucking one woman on his boat with a beer bottle, the same woman to whom years before he lost his virginity in junior high. I am envious of this woman, of their yearslong fucking. I am envious because I know I’ll never have these random hookups with Bruce at a bar, the pleasure of spotting him from across the room, knowing, once our eyes met, we will probably fuck on his boat later tonight, that an American beer bottle might enter/be introduced into my vagina.

 

If only I could figure out if Bruce has the potential to kill me… Sometimes, Bruce reminds me of Tennessee Williams’s young lover, Pancho Rodriguez, an inspiration for Stanley Kowalski. Tennessee dated/fucked/lived with Pancho off and on for two years, being alternately drawn to and turned off by his (Pancho’s) unpredictable emotions, his passion which bordered on violence, his tenderness and accusations. Once, Tennessee slept in Eli Kazan’s hotel room in avoidance of Pancho (and his threats of violence). (In the morning they carried on, Kazan noted, as though nothing had happened.) Ultimately, Tennessee left Pancho, choosing his art over his young, unpredictable lover, tranquility over passion. (He wrote, at this time, in his journal and to friends – of Pancho: “Most of all, I want and now must have – simple peace.” “I still care for him but right now I hunger for peace above all else.” “ … he is too capricious and excitable for New York especially when I have a play in rehearsal.”)

 

(Blanche, scene 4, of Streetcar: “The first time I laid eyes on [Stanley] I thought to myself, that man is my executioner! That man will destroy me.” Blanche…seeking to punish herself for the suicide of her young homosexual husband years before…but what am I seeking to punish myself for? Being an artist, a narcissist, choosing my art over my ex-husbands, over HH, and now, maybe again, over Bruce, if he allows me…)

 

In the original staged version of Tennessee’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella stays with Stanley. It is only in the filmed version that she leaves, a trade off for keeping in the rape scene with Blanche, a trade off with the producers (read: censors). Stella cannot stay, they reasoned, with a man who raped her sister. But in the original version Tennessee wrote, she does. She believes, or chooses to believe, Stanley’s lie. (Again, the audience is supposed to understand how from the beginning Blanche sought Stanley’s destruction of her, as an easement for her never-ending guilt.)

 

Once, Bruce accused me of ridiculing his emotions. This was after he’d asked me to marry him for the umpteenth time. I guess I laughed. I can’t remember ever having been so physically attracted to a man. Maybe that’s why I laugh. Maybe I am a pyromaniac, playing with fire, fanning the flames. Maybe I am Tennessee, seeing how far I can take things with my much younger, much more passionate, unpredictable lover; my Stanley Kowalski.

 

After a critic said to Tennessee that a woman like Stella would never be with a man like Stanley, Tennessee thought to himself, “[Stella] had never had a good lay.”

 

A biographer of Tennessee’s (John Lahr) said of him, “…like Blanche taunting Stanley, Williams pushed Pancho near to murder.”

 

Pancho, himself, is quoted as saying, “I felt that [Tennessee] was exploiting me. He used me as an inspiration for his work, to put me in positions where he wanted to see how I would react to certain situations, and out of those situation, write his own version of it.”

 

Gore Vidal: “Stanley Kowalski changed the concept of sex in America. Before him, no man was considered erotic.”

 

Image, as HH says, is everything.

 

Bruce is the hottest guy I have ever been with times a zillion; Bruce is the best lay of my life. Bruce says he would never hurt a hair on my head. Bruce sobs on the phone when I tell him a woman has to worry for her safety, that she can’t merely think of how in love she is, but must consider and calculate – at all times - the potential for danger, for her life to be ended at the hands of a lover, premeditatedly or accidentally, it doesn’t matter which.

 

(Bruce has twice left work early to turn up in the driveway of my house, after dark, without warning!)

 

This was the source of our conversation on the couch in my basement, also; the source of so many conversations and considerations on my part, the source of this story, to be honest; my reckoning, my weighing of the odds, my attempt at better understanding the situation, my future, my fate, my chances of being murdered (by a man who greatly loves me) vs my chances of being happy, of growing old (with a man who greatly loves me).

 

(Bruce once called and texted my phone sixteen times (each!) over the course of an evening when I turned off my phone and went to bed early!)

 

Try explaining this sort of thinking (read: a woman’s) to anyone else (read: a man). Good luck. Let me know how it goes!

 

***

 

I’d known as soon as HH was let out of the government-run facility and into his own house, one the music producer (who also, somehow, manages HH’s art dealings or money or something I’ve never entirely figured out) had long ago bought/stocked with furniture and food and alcohol/prepared for him in every conceivable manner, he would find a woman whose chief attribute would be a willingness, nee an excitement, for doing drugs. After all, drug possession and distribution was the main reason for HH’s incarceration, and I knew, via our letters while he was still inside, drug use doesn’t stop just cuz you go to prison. It was only later I found out it was Mulan Rouge, though the specifics didn’t matter as much. At least not to me, and I’m not sure they mattered much to HH, either. Any mildly good-looking woman with a penchant for pharmaceuticals would likely do. If not Mulan Rouge, then Pepper Mintz, then Gran Marnie A. There was a gaggle of these city women who made ‘art’ and sold their bodies and bought drugs, and I’m certain any one of them would have been happy to suck HH off free of charge, given his art-world notoriety, his ex-con status which they could wear like a designer handbag, a Birkin they could later burn like a famous actor’s spoiled daughter, just to show they didn’t give a fuck, just for the social media likes, the reposts, the video that would surely go viral.

 

I wasn’t jealous. (yeah, right)

 

I had no interest in doing drugs. (I had the interest but not the courage)

 

I wasn’t, am not, on social media. (big whoop)

 

I don’t own a single designer handbag. (cool!)

 

I had to explain to HH what a Birkin is, its mentions in current hip hop songs, after he got out. (la-ti-da!!)

 

Mulan Rouge wasted no time referencing HH in her social media ‘stories,’ in photographs and videos, wherever she could fit his name and likeness beside her own.

 

I had several common friends text me on a particular Sunday evening when, from the room of a famous New York City hotel where her john had left her, she relayed details of her and HH smoking drugs together, causing a small rug fire, calling 911 when HH’s kidneys failed, the whole iconic weekend, the entirety of their Bobby and Whitney 72-hour-binge, every intimate detail of their first role-playing sexual encounter: Mulan Rouge in pigtails, Mulan Rouge feigning virginity, Mulan Rouge as school girl, as teen-ager, as an unlawful, underage high school fuck. Details I never wanted to know but now I do so here they are (for further public consumption).

 

***

 

A week or two ago, Bruce texted me, “I’m in the plant hospital,” and my first thought was of an actual hospital for plants. I pictured stems in traction, branches in slings, bandaged buds …

 

I visualized Bruce walking through the plant hospital as one walks through a conservatory: slowly, hands clasped behind back, eyes cast downward, serious/pensive brow, though, with Bruce, of course, there’d be the ever-present cigarette dangling from his mouth, causing the already perhaps asthmatic chrysanthemums and violets to cough gently so as not to lose any petals.

 

Then he sent a follow up text, something about being hit on the head by a large falling piece of metal, the possibility of a concussion, and I realized my mistake. I wondered if this might account for some of Bruce’s more off-kilter behavior: past injuries to the head, CTE, etc.

 

Explanation for what is viewed in the current culture as ‘red flags’: the calling/texting me sixteen times in one night; referring to his ex, to his baby mama, in not the most respectable of terms, in terms that could be construed as threatening, misogynistic, nasty; confessing that the reason we met on Bumble rather than Tinder was because he’d been banned from Tinder for some infraction he would not disclose (“I was hacked, babe!”); sitting, smoking, waiting for me in my drive at ten o’clock at night -another unplanned visit - as I returned from walking my dog; expressing jealousy over my past relationship with HH (“You’re still in love with him!”) and my current platonic friendships with several male artists (“They’re probably jacking off to your photos right now!”), most notably, my friend Vincent, who lives in an artists’ commune in Detroit, who I visit from time, which I made the mistake of telling Bruce (“Of course, he wants to fuck you, baby, don’t be naïve!”); telling me, once, that if I up and drove to Florida without telling him – as I joked I might, as I had been known to when married to my second husband - he’d report me as a missing person to the police.

 

It was all very dramatic and in stark contrast to how my former husband and HH had acted with regard to me (read: not so much giving a fuck).

 

It wasn’t so much that I ignored the red flags but that I questioned the viewing of Bruce’s characteristics and behaviors as such, as the dehumanization of a person in talking about him in such clichéd, women’s magazine, true crime podcast terms. What, for instance, might my red flags be? (I might ask HH.) Surely I, if anyone does, have a few. It’s far harder to dehumanize oneself, though, I’m finding. This is the greater challenge. One I’m not sure I’m up to, frankly …

 

Red flags, red flags… my studio filled with portraits of the men I have known, biblically, or been obsessed with, emotionally/carnally/psychotically, in the past; portraits that, taken in, side by side as a whole, resemble a line up of victims of a serial killer, or the collective muses for a young, female pop star’s discography.

 

 

***

 

I was in the process of drying out (which is to say, for the third or fourth time in a year I had emptied all alcoholic bottles from the house down the kitchen sink and placed them self-satisfactorily in the recycle bin in the garage, going so far as to make the clichéd criss-cross cleaning of one’s palms gesture after doing so) when the latest letter from HH arrived. It may, his letter, in fact, have been in my mailbox some matter of days, as I had been neglectful in checking it, the box, since my second divorce, and since the pandemic had, as we say, begun. I was also, at this time, overwhelmed by my newly-budding relationship with Bruce, and the combined endeavors of drying out and starting something of an intimate nature with a fellow human being who a month and a half prior had been a total stranger to me, while living under the panic of the pandemic, had left me feeling, at best, uncertain, and, at worst, questioning the validity and necessity of every one of my thoughts, feelings and actions … and here was HH making some sort of apology, for Mulan Rouge or for neglecting me for a time when he first started fucking Mulan Rouge…the apology was vague but repeated two or three times in various incantations, and I read them each two or three times, failing to follow the logic, the meaning, each time I read them.

 

HH had made a single attempt at fucking me. Or, HH and I had made one attempt at fucking each other. It wasn’t really in fashion at that time for a man to make more than one attempt if the woman seemed disinterested. “Your heart’s not in it,” HH observed at some point, which was on the surface true but deep down, below the surface, false. My heart wasn’t in it only so far as I knew his wasn’t; not really. He had just attempted to enter me, I folded over the conference table, pants at my ankles. It was then HH articulated my biggest fear, “You’re not wet?” and rather than spitting onto his hand, as Bruce does, HH sort of gave up and so I gave up, falling to my knees on the office carpet, sobbing, symbolically, at his feet. Had he gotten me a bucket and some water, I would have washed them, so bereft/embarrassed/ashamed was I.

            I guess we both felt a little like failures that January afternoon, for it was an hour later HH drove us to the Walgreens down the street for shoe polish, after which he spent a good twenty minutes polishing and shining my boots as I sat in a chair opposite him, watching and grinning with the attentiveness of a school girl observing her crush’s carving of their initials in a tree, stick and poking the letters of her name into his arm. 

            In some ways, I think this day unfolded in an appropriately unique manner to us, to HH and myself. Later we ordered Chinese food – by this time everyone else had left the office and we were the only two people still there, adding an air of intimacy to an unintimate environment.

 

 

I’d been so worried with HH that I wouldn’t be able to get wet or that something wouldn’t work; that I wouldn’t be able to come, that my genitalia would remain dry, shallow. I was fifty by then. By the time HH got out. There was a very brief, very embarrassing twenty seconds in which we tried… .HH and I… in an office, people outside the door…. I was bent over a table, pants at my ankles…we were sober… I couldn’t get wet; my worst nightmare. HH literally said, “You’re not wet?” I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Later, HH got us Chinese food and shined my boots. I thought that was something like the height of romance till Mulan Rouge came along. “I didn’t think you’d be so emotional,” HH had said that day in the office. Which was funny cuz my ex-husband had had a habit of telling me I was so cynical. I guess we all are truly different people with the different people we’re with, which was another thing HH told me. I guess I could fill a bag of fortune cookies with all the things HH said, and that’s probably what I should do, if I was smart. Then again, the fortune cookie fortune I got with HH the day he shined my shoes said something like, “when you stop looking for what you need you find it right in front of you.” So maybe all fortune cookies are full of shit just like I always thought. Not that that particular fortune cookie fortune isn’t still tucked somewhere in my wallet. I’m just sayin’.

 

 

We did in that office as much as two people can do in such circumstances in such time constraints: ate two meals together, attempted sex, wept in each other’s laps by turn, made a trip to the Walgreens down the road for the shoe polish HH would use to shine my boots, smoked innumerable cigarettes (each of which HH lit for me) and read aloud our fortune pulled as it were from the single cookie enclosed with our meal…and I left the studio that evening believing in our special friendship,

            And after HH, in his silver BMW earned by his one sold, record-breaking, iconic painting painted while still incarcerated, turned toward the highway, I continued past my hotel, driving around the small Southern town in circles for an hour, my window down, smoking more cigarettes, listening to music and trying/attempting to figure out what feelings, if any, I had for/possessed toward HH beyond friendship…

 

 

He had made the observation of me, “your heart’s not in it,” when I sat on the floor and cried instead of fucking him. I wasn’t very punk rock, after all. And it’s a hard pill to swallow, realizing such a thing about yourself.

 

 

Is it a lie now to say I never believed? ….two days later, after my exhibit at a gallery in nearby Louisiana …I offered up my esophagus to HH and he took it…we ate dinner out that night, after - after I’d washed down his semen with the hotel provided bottled water - at the restaurant next door, despite the fact HH would have been swiftly returned to the original institution in which he’d spent four years, had he been found out, caught, out, with me.

 

 

It was, it might be worthy of noting and which I am noting now in a very self-conscious and probably annoying manner, the second letter I have received from HH since his release, the other postmarked some five months earlier when for reasons I shall not go into here, we had a momentary lapse in communication, and it arrived, this second post-release letter, as such letters or text messages or phone calls often do, on a night in which I had been contemplating my life, my future, my downward spiral, my obituary, my doom, for I didn’t see any other way around or aside Bruce, if I may be so dramatic.

 

Bruce, you see, has a habit of asking me to marry him. The first time he asked it was our third date and we were in a motel and playing a game we’d named Truth or Truth, out of some laziness regarding dares, or out of a greater interest in ‘truths’ – anyway, I was sitting up on my knees on the bed in bra and panties, facing the TV, and Bruce was behind me, resting back against the headboard with a cigarette. It was my turn to ask a question. I couldn’t think of anything, which is what I told Bruce. “I’ve got a question,” Bruce said. “Will you marry me?” I didn’t know what to say to that. I turned around and said something like, “You can’t ask that!” Which is when he said, “What if I told you I love you, then?”

 

It was all a bit disconcerting, if sweet, or sweet if disconcerting, after a month and a half of dating (had I made a mistake in disclosing to Bruce that my first marriage had begun four weeks after the groom’s and my introduction?). It was all a bit claustrophobia-inducing, also, all the proposals, asked at the most random of times – in the middle of a game of Parcheesi, in the middle of Home Depot, in the middle of cunnilingus – each time with seeming sincerity, not down on one knee but with elongated eye contact, a serious mouth. I’m certain that to Bruce, in Bruce’s mind, it was a romantic gesture, a way of conveying to me his seriousness with regard to our newly-budding relationship, his seriousness with regard to me. But to me, as someone who had only recently managed to extricate herself from a long marriage – something that had taken me years to pull off, to gather the courage  – as someone who had not yet even celebrated the one year anniversary of her independence (from that marriage), his proposals felt more like inquiries into the purchasing of land, a desire to own property. Each new proposal, then, left me a little more lightheaded, a little more gasping for air, surveying the room for a paper bag into which I might blow.

 

Of course, it goes without saying I’d never once felt claustrophobic or… with HH, seeing as how HH had never once asked me to marry him or never once told me he loved me or never once… all his never-onces left me feeling light and free and …and given that I had not spoken with HH in much longer than a month and a half and so was a bit, shall we say, overjoyed to hear from him again, I immediately, at eleven thirty at night, set about writing him back, which, I see now, was probably a mistake. I might have benefited from taking longer to reply, to more fully form my thoughts, to mask, somewhat, my emotions, which, in that moment and in most moments since the onset of the pandemic, felt rather naked and exposed.

It was conceived on a typewriter – the body of HH’s letter, as most of the letters he had written me while incarcerated had been (Image is all we have)  – and I could discern, also, that he had signed it with the same old-fashioned ink pen he had sent me for our shared birthday some three months earlier. But I was lazier than HH. Or I was less conscious of or tied to the romance of out-dated means of correspondence, of the historical ramifications of such art world communications. I grabbed my laptop and began typing easily on it while the gold-plated ink pen he sent me remained tucked away in a drawer in my bathroom, separated from the metal box which contained the entirety of the letters he had written me in the last twenty months, which was somewhere in the back of my bedroom closet next to a row of boots and heels of varying degrees of punkness and preppiness, for I have tendencies toward bipolarity in my wardrobe/attire, as well.

 

***

 

In vast contrast, the first time Bruce came to my house we ended the night, me on his lap, dress pulled hips-high, knees on either side of him, him reaching under and around to grab the top of my underwear and pull them tightly upward, so that the middle material rubbed my clitoris, him whispering, “Come for me, baby,” and I dutifully, momentarily, obliged him.

            The best/worst thing about Bruce was/is he didn’t/doesn’t give me an opportunity to say no. I have more to say about that. At some point, in the future (of this story).

 

            ***

 

I kept meaning to break things off with Bruce but then he would show up at my house, cigarette unlit in mouth, and spit the cigarette out, onto the ground or floor, and go down on me wherever I happened to be standing. He reminded me of that one actor in that one movie who dances around a chair a cop’s strapped to before cutting the cop’s ear off. What is that song, he sings and dances to? Anyway, I kept meaning to break things off, and one of the chief reasons I kept meaning to break things off with Bruce is, as I said, I had this funny idea in my head that he might, someday, try and kill me. This idea wasn’t based on anything Bruce had said – nothing direct - nothing concrete I could point to in a court of law, say - at least. There was just this one time, in another one-story motel room somewhere in the northern industrial side of Detroit near Bruce’s work where we met to fuck on Fridays, after he got off his shift (he still living with his mom, still waiting for his BM to move out), he’d sort of casually mentioned that if anything should happen to me – say, a car crash or cancer - he would commit suicide. I quickly pointed out that he couldn’t commit suicide because he’s a dad, on account of his kids, his daughters, who are still in elementary school, and he said, “They’d understand – Loni and Loatia would understand: I’d be heartbroken.”

            It was this comment, spat out spontaneously, without premeditation, as I assumed the vast majority of things Bruce told me were spoken, I’d been thinking of the night I discovered HH’s letter in my mailbox, which most likely is the reason I started crying when carrying it, HH’s letter, still sealed, into the house. Something about Bruce terrified me. It was my belief, then, that he loved me in a way men love women they kill, figuratively or literally, eventually. HH, by contrast, loved me in a way men love women when they keep more than one of them around. HH would never try to kill me, I mean. On that much I can rest assured. For one, he is, like me, too Buddhist or nihilistic or self-involved a person to think enough of another person to murder them. And, for two, he was too busy handling Mulan Rouge to focus on me longer than it took to craft a letter on a typewriter and drop it in a mailbox. Prior to receiving the letter it’d been a good couple of months since I’d heard from him, after a steady eighteen months of communication.

I’d known all along, of course, had predicted as much to a girlfriend from the moment I found out about her, that HH and Mulan Rouge would marry. If image is indeed all we have, they, admittedly, made an interesting pairing (think: the elephant man and Dr. Treves, think: the curly-haired child star from the depression and the famous tap dancer, think: Henry Ford and the automobile), and I’m certain they both knew it; thus, reading about the nuptials on an art scene gossip site offered me nothing in the way of surprise, nothing in the way of pain, either, only a minor, momentary chuckle as I read several quotes in which Mulan Rouge referred to herself in the third person, as though she truly were a character in an animated children’s series, or perhaps, a character in a video game, rather than a human woman. (Is this how I choose to dehumanize her in order to feel superior, to quell any sense of betrayal? Snooze. Boring. Fuck.)

            Anyhow, I couldn’t stop visualizing myself tied to a chair like the cop in the movie and Bruce dancing around me with a knife, some sort of hazy accusation, most likely related to HH or Vincent, on his lips or in his head or both. I didn’t know how I’d gotten myself into this cinematic situation, which is precisely what I wrote HH that evening, tears still flowing (“I don’t know how I got myself in this situation.”). I wrote him, also, that I still had the gold pen, that I’d attached it to a chain, that I occasionally – when Bruce wasn’t around – wore around my neck, the pen dangling somewhere between my breasts, which are large, but not as large as Mulan’s, which, along with her backside, have had some sort of professional intervention. (Another veiled attempt – by me - at dehumanization?)

            A couple days later, after I’d dropped the letter to HH in a mailbox, Bruce told me he’d been joking when he said that about killing himself. I didn’t know if I bought that or not, the idea he’d been kidding around, that it’d all been a big joke I didn’t get. It’s hard to get an idea out of your head once it’s in there, especially if that idea involves your potential murder, a double suicide, helter skelter, redrum.

 

***

 

The other night I tied Bruce’s wrists to the bed, got out my blindfold, got out a whip I’d recently purchased specifically for the (sexual) domination of Bruce. I did a shot of vodka and then another and tightened Bruce’s wrists and removed my robe. I was imitating the man in the movie, the one who danced around the cop tied to the chair. The bottle of vodka was on the floor beside the bed and I drank from it again while smoking a cigarette. I’d given up on sobriety the night I received HH’s most recent letter. I was wearing black garters and heels and Bruce started saying shit like, “Oh my god, I love you so much” and “Oh my god, I’m so fucking in love with you” and “oh god, I love it when you touch me” and “fuck, shit, fuck me,” and I was whipping his inner thighs and his inner arms, his nipples and his ass, while alternately sitting on his face/sitting on his dick/sucking on his titties, and he was begging for water, begging for me to kiss him, begging in a way that made me feel safe. Begging in a way that made everything easy (for me).

            I gagged his mouth while I called Vincent; forced him to listen to my conversation with my friend. I’d never dominated Vincent, never had sex with Vincent, never sat on Vincent’s face; with Vincent I watched movies outside, projected onto the side of the communal house in which he lived, drove to the park with a vegan pizza, discussed art, discussed race in America, discussed politics, discussed the class war that was erupting all around us … I talked to Vincent over an hour. Bruce didn’t have much to say; Bruce had a ball gag in his mouth. After I hung up, I took the gag back out and let him lick me, let him eat me, sat on his face a final time.

            Sex with Bruce was the easiest thing. We’d fuck four or five times every time we saw each other. We’d say we wouldn’t, that we were going to give my kitty-kat a rest – especially after we found out about the Chlamydia, the yeast infection … and then next thing you’d know we’d be slobbering all over each other again, making out like high school teens in a car, groping each other’s private parts, and then we’d be fucking and staring into each other’s eyes, saying how much we loved each other, how it’d never been like this, how we’d never fucked anyone else this much, this emotionally, this intimately, with this much passion …we dutifully took our antibiotics, wore condoms, urinated after sex, washed our genitals.

            And I did feel, despite my fears, which came and went, like the STDs, like thoughts/memories of HH, as though I was falling in love with him, too.

            Then Bruce would ruin everything with his jealousy. The child part of his man-child, his Stanley Kowalski, his inner Brando, Pancho, whoever. I’d be sitting outside on my front porch, talking with him on the phone, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, honky dory, and at some point I’d casually mention seeing Vincent on an upcoming weeknight or an upcoming weekend evening and Bruce would flip out, flip the fuck out, he gave no fucks. I didn’t have my whip; he was no longer tied, gagged.

            “I mean, I don’t fucking care,” he’d say. “Dance naked on Belle Isle, stay the night, fuck whoever you want, I really don’t care.”

            “I’m not going to be dancing naked,” I’d say, annoyed.

            “I don’t care if you do!”

            “But I’m not going to.”

            “Well, whatever! Like I said, I don’t give a fuck! If that’s what you want to do, do it! Go for it!”

            And I wouldn’t let on, just as I hadn’t let on about the pain the first few times we fucked, but I’d go up to bed shaking, crying, scared as fuck that my boyfriend might show up and murder me. Double suicide or it’s not love, was something a fellow artist I knew liked to say/had printed on tote bags, hats, shirts. I figured murder/suicide wasn’t an uncommon activity of factory workers, of those without graduate degrees, without PhDs, without verified social media presences. Maybe that’s biased of me. Elitist. Probably. But I couldn’t help it. Being made to feel afraid in my own home is sort of a pet peeve of mine, after seeing so many women I knew – my mother, my sister, my aunt, my great aunt, my grandmothers, my best friend - bludgeoned by/humiliated by/demeaned/beaten/held hostage by boyfriends/husbands/coworkers/classmates/stalkers – and, without a gun, without hired security, without a ten-foot fence/trained dogs/cameras on every window/door/room, how could a woman feel otherwise? I figured a man telling you he was willing to die for you (suicide) was also telling you he was willing to kill for you (murder: yours). I also figured a man willing to die for you wouldn’t be willing to just let you go back to not dating him if not dating him was something you felt strongly you wanted to do.

I didn’t own a gun and Bruce knew this.

            Bruce kept a gun in the trunk of his car. (I wished I didn’t know this.)

            He’d shown me, once, for reasons I can only speculate regarding but which might include: intimidation, warning, a love for and boastfulness regarding the possession of a firearm, the outright, and therefore ignored, hint of a murder weapon.

 

Bruce cried like a baby any time I hinted at breaking things off with him.

 

Bruce told me the night I tied him to the bed, blindfolded him, whipped him, bit him, was the single best sexual encounter of his life.

 

Bruce had an unfortunate habit, learned most likely from witnessing similar behavior in family members, learned, also, I guessed, from interactions with other women (read: baby mama, et al.), of screaming obscenities and accusations at me before he broke down and cried.

 

Once, after our first mini road trip together, our first shared vacation, after a joyous and incredibly bonding three days of hiking, biking, and sex in the hotel hot tub, he suddenly began yelling at me as we pulled in my drive, as we exited the car: “It’s sick – stringing people along like that, stringing me along, just to get yourself off!”

 

Later, he confessed he was just sad to leave me after being with me every minute for those three days, after holding hands and eating every meal together, fucking twice or three times a night in our squeaky hotel bed.

 

After he left, I kept thinking how everything would be alright if I was always in heels and garters and Bruce was always in handcuffs, blindfolded, begging for the infliction of pain. It was all the minutes I wasn’t wearing heels, a whip or paddle not in my hand, that terrified me.

 

After he left, I speculated whether or not things would have turned out differently if I’d been as (sexually) confident/adventurous/dominant with HH, rather than breaking down in tears at his feet. I was too emotional, when it came to HH. I couldn’t envision tying him to a chair, encircling the chair to a funky musical soundtrack, instrument of punishment in hand. Instead, I envisioned sitting outside a music studio smoking, side by side, on the tops of overturned buckets, smirking sideways at HH while ashing on my newly-polished boots.

 

***

 

Bruce had a history of opioid use, pill-popping with his BM, before he traded one addiction for another - Vicodin for Suboxone - after his Vicodin-prescribing doctor went to prison. I was realizing I was always the square in every situation.

 

I didn’t wear false eyelashes or own lip kits. My art was traditional in its sleaziness, this is something like what the critics wrote.

 

I’d seen photographs of Nessa, Bruce’s children’s mother. She’d worked as a model, an auto show girl in Detroit. She’d been a local rock star’s groupie, backstage at his shows, over at his house for the after-party with her girlfriends to entertain the local rock star’s friends. She had purchased eyelashes and tits, too.

 

I was the square. The anti-capitalist.

 

My art might have benefited, been less traditional, had I been less square, had I just once ingested a pain pill for the pain I could no longer muster regarding anyone, not even myself.

 

 

***

 

The winter prior, after my second divorce, I spent a year and a half focusing on three things: drinking, my art, and HH. I stopped eating anything that wasn’t a frozen toaster waffle or a frozen microwavable burger. I drank cheap Kentucky bourbon mixed with cherry Kool-Aid, smoked menthol cigarettes or non-menthol cigarettes, whatever I could find. I woke in the middle of the night feeling nauseous, made vows with God that I wouldn’t drink for a week, ten days, once - fourteen, if He would spare me the shame of throwing up, for I knew if I did – vomit – I would be forced to face my own addiction. But I never did; I kept down my food. I kept my vows to God. I ate rice cakes smothered in peanut butter in the middle of the nights I forgot to eat. I was diagnosed anemic. I tried to eat meat. I waited, nightly, for HH to text or call me. I drank extra on the nights he said he was going to call, in preparation; his voice made me exceedingly nervous, something about my quiet fangirl worship of him. I drank to quell my feelings of longing and disappointment, my insecurities re not being cool by comparison. I spent hours in my garage listening to 80s new wave and progressive rock, working on my sleazeball paintings, my juvenile delinquents, teenaged prostitutes, runaways, kids I’d known in town when I was an artist-in-residence in the public and private school systems, before the backlash, the social media blacklisting. I watched as HH’s first, and, so far, only painting sold for over a million dollars, eclipsing the totality of money I’d made off hundreds of paintings over the past fifteen years. I masturbated while reading profiles of HH online, while listening to his voice recorded over the pay telephone inside an institution in which he’d lived some five years, masturbated after we hung up at midnight, on the calls he made me after he’d been moved from one institutional bed to another, when he’d finally been allowed the purchase of a cell phone, when he told me to call him anytime I felt like it, anytime I wanted, anytime I had the thought …

            But I was too shy, too in awe of him, to ever call.

            I failed him in this way, too.

            There are so many ways in which I have failed (HH).

            So many ways in which my selfishness won out.

 

***

 

The first time I attempted to distance myself from Bruce, he again showed up at my house, as he had each time previous he’d perceived us as being in a fight. (Later, I saw he had texted me: “Keep ignoring me and I’ll drive over after I drop the girls off.” I tried explaining to him how a woman could read this as a threat while he stared at me, dumbfounded.) I was working on a painting in my garage, a rendering of HH but in the abstract so I didn’t think Bruce could detect it was HH, or he wouldn’t be able to say for sure, to accuse me, anyway. I first heard and then saw his car through the garage windows, though I pretended I didn’t, though I forced him to use the doorbell. I made him wait outside on the porch while I did any number of things to pass the time, a few of which included: urinating, flossing my teeth, brushing my hair, locating a knife.

 

“You’re not respecting me,” I said, finally, as I stepped out onto the porch.

 

“I’m sorry,” Bruce said, sucking a cigarette down to its filter. “I know I shouldn’t have come but I had to see you.”

 

I did my best to avoid making eye contact. He reminded me too much of home. He spoke with a working class accent. He mispronounced genre. He had to ask me who Robert Mapplethorpe was, who Basquiat was, who Edie Sedgewick was. The only writer he could recognize by sight was Hunter S. Thompson. When I referred to ‘the left,’ I had to explain to him I meant liberals. When I said ‘liberals,’ I had to explain to him I meant Democrats.

 

He smoked six cigarettes while waiting to see how or if I would reply. The power he was offering me was intoxicating.

 

He reminded me so much of myself (when I had waited all those months on HH to decide things about me; I’m still waiting).

 

I forced up a large loogie and hocked it into the drive the way I had heard – years ago, on a popular radio talk show - a (then) young actress advise women to do when confronted by a man who wishes her harm. I resisted the added advice to make the gesture of grabbing at a set of imaginary testicles. Bruce didn’t seem to notice, in either case.

 

Eventually, I let him come inside. I’d made the dreaded mistake of looking at him. He was so fucking hot; had that Brando mix of tough guy brawniness and vulnerability, physical strength and emotional fragility. He could accidentally kill you with his hands but not if you first destroyed his soul, murdered his heart, with a harsh, thoughtless word.

 

An hour later he was coming inside me; we were coming together. Ten minutes after that we were back on my porch, smoking, and reading about the Nation of Islam on his phone, reading about Gide and Wilde, reading about Alice Walker, Keith Haring, Halston, James Baldwin; whatever sprung to mind that one or both of us had questions about. I liked that he, like me, had an insatiable curiosity. I liked that I could teach him everything I knew and together we could educate ourselves on more.

 

But there was still the ever-present, lingering worry for my safety, still the search to determine his potential for killing me and himself.

 

Double suicide or it’s not love.

Image is everything.

 

I knew HH and Mulan fancied themselves the modern-day Sid and Nancy.

 

How ironic, then, would it be, if I were the one who ended up dead/in the gossip columns/in another oral history at the end of this story? Knifed, shot, strangled; gutted like the deer Bruce told me he hunted, showed me pictures of on his phone, upside down, blood/guts dripping into grey slush, sleet. 

 

If this turns out to be my last published story, RIP, me, “Elizabeth Ellen”; let this serve as exhibit A in court, in the history of our movement, in the argument for women learning to shoot and own firearms. In defense of women’s lib, Lorena Bobbitt, the extremes of feminism, J. K. Rowling … in opposition to marriage, toxicity, men.

 

Exhibit A.

 

Me as Nancy Spungen.

 

Mulan still alive.

 

 

***

 

 

HH, too, had his moments (forgive me, Harry), if I’m being totally honest, completely forthcoming, though they were fewer and farther between; a potential for violence, if words are, as they claim today, truly, and inherently, violent. (For the record, I don’t believe that they are.) It might be stated that HH even more than Bruce had a sort of quiet rage burning inside him, borne of a fear of encroachment, a fear – not unlike my own - of being owned, whereas Bruce’s fears revolved around his idea of abandonment, of loss, of being left, a motherless child.           

After it was brought to my attention HH was seeing Mulan and I addressed the rumor with him head on, he suddenly, but determinedly, uncharacteristically, swung into an attack on me, on my character, on what he saw as my attempt to make a claim on him (“You act like you bought me!”) - though that wasn’t what I was doing, or wasn’t what I thought I was doing, at all … I’d thought I was merely asking a question, asking for clarification, confirmation or denial – calling me (of all things!) narcissistic (one fish accusing another fish of having scales. D’uh!), accusing me of having used him for his name, of attempting to gain some sort of notoriety or fan base through his reputation, his infamy. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry - so I did neither; I didn’t reply.

A couple weeks later, after a painting of mine was hung in a gallery in L.A. and someone took a photograph of it, sent it to HH, he emailed me again to chastise me some more, in a new way. I had promised – he reminded me - I wouldn’t portray him in my art. But he had made promises, too – promises not to be owned, promises regarding our friendship being eternal, ceaseless …

I think HH resented me for making him feel pedestrian, a cliché to himself; the male artist requesting a sort of self-censorship of the female artist on his behalf. (Image is everything and/but he wanted to control his; I had no right to it, to my version of it/him, in his male mind.)

This amused me, since, again, all my paintings were abstract and unnamed and no one but he and I would know any of them had anything whatsoever to do with him, with the great Harry Houdini.

At the same time, in New York, Mulan was writing his name all over the walls of her social media as well as her person - sporting a shirt onto which his name had been embroidered, a tattoo of a hummingbird, a symbol he’d used in his infamous, record-shattering, million dollar painting, etched onto her forearm.

I thought it wholly unfair and a bit of a sham, his calling me out for what I saw her as doing. I knew, then, that it wasn’t a matter of what I was doing to which he was opposed or objected, it wasn’t some sort of ethics, or moral misstep, but to myself, my lack of coolness, a lack of iconicity, in his eyes. Mulan – with her drug taking and sex work and new york city yuppie art – was much cooler a person with whom to align himself.

 

Image is everything!

 

Fuck off, Harry.

 

If each of us died tonight, it is my, perhaps, entirely delusional, belief we (HH and I) would be viewed equally by art historians of the future. such is my belief in myself, in my art. One fish accusing another of having scales, Harry. I’m trying to make us both come off as cool here. Jean Stein. Andy Warhol. Legs McNeil. George Plimpton. Et-fucking-al.

 

…

 

(full) Mulan disclosure:

 

One of my friends sent me a video of Mulan Rouge yesterday, and in the video Mulan is in her boudoir, sitting up in her bed, silky, satin, lace, like one of the anorexic socialites of past eras, famous little rich girls, eccentric housebound pill-poppers, dolls in valleys, women who left their beds solely to make cameos in films by/luncheons for Andy Warhol and John Waters, Liza, Halston, Liz … Mulan Rouge in her 18 mm Siberian mink lashes, her twenty-six inch extensions, breathing out one opioid or another, one of Tennessee William’s lesser characters speaking with a baby addict’s voice into an old-fashioned telephone (image is everything, he must have taught her this, too)… Mulan Rouge, in her bed, drawing single words onto canvases with experimental materials (lipsticks, lipglosses, lip kits) and exclamation points. I did my best not to judge Mulan Rouge for her choice of words, her lip colors, her exclamation points.

 

            WITCHYWOMAN!

 

            ASTRALPROJECTIONISM!

 

            EVANGELISTA!

 

The joke was on me: new york city businessmen were paying a lot of money for those canvases … for Mulan Rouge’s lipstick-kissed signature on the bottom of them, for the opportunity – real or imagined – to fuck her in one of the iconic hotels in an iconic city in her iconic butt.

 

Admittedly, I’m just sour. Jennifer Aniston to Mulan Rouge’s Angelina Jolie. The mistake, of course, is in choosing one of those women to identify with, one to make a villain. Where the fuck does Brad Pitt get off, one might ask oneself.

 

The truth is I am no Jennifer Aniston, unless Jennifer Aniston also used a kitchen knife to carve a mathematical equation into her inner left thigh in an effort to prove something to Brad. (I’m not Angelina, either; that’s not what I’m trying to say.)

 

I don’t know what I was trying to prove, mathematically or otherwise, to HH.

 

I don’t know fuck about/how to astral project.

 

I have never identified as a witch, either, though I have always loved Stevie Nicks.

 

 

***

 

Bruce had his own use for exclamation points. Texting me on my hour drive east to another one-story motel.

            “Baby! I got us the honeymoon suite!”

            “Baby, theres a hot tub right in the middle of the room!”
            “Baby, do you like brisket?!”

He was standing in his work jeans and boots when I walked in; he was smoking a cigarette.

            “Baby, you can smoke in here!”

            He was holding up an ashtray as proof; he was ashing on the floor.

            “Baby! I’m going to get you all dirty! I just got off work! I haven’t showered yet!”

            His arms were around me and he smelled like tobacco and motor oil and grease. He knew I fetishized his work, his blue collar job; that I’d swiped right because of the hard hat he was wearing in his profile pic.

            I walked around the place while he showered. The hot tub was heart-shaped and in the middle of the room. There were three reviews of the motel online and each gave a single star and said things like “blood on the sheets” and “drug deals going on outside.” Later, when Bruce ran out to his car for another pack of cigarettes, he told me there were prostitutes and cop cars in the parking lot.

            I was slumming. (Image is everything.) I was painting the room in my head, fetishizing the scene: the heart-shaped hot tub, Bruce’s balls in the water, brisket in white, leaking Styrofoam containers on the bed, a blond actress Bruce told me I looked like in black and yellow, fighting men and women, on the TV screens, while we fucked first in the hot tub and then on the bed.

            In the morning, my hair was frizzy and matted to my head. Leaving the motel room I felt nineteen again, reeking of come, reeking of cigarettes, dirty, nasty, wet-ass-pussy.

            I was grateful to Bruce for this. For months, I’d worried I’d never again get fucked. I had failed to fuck HH. I had failed and failed and failed. I was so grateful to Bruce.

            “Turn this in and get me back my twenty dollar deposit, okay, baby?” Bruce said, placing the TV remote in my hand. I was still in bed; I was half asleep. I was slumming.

I was just so happy - at age fifty-one - to be fucking again!

I never turned in the remote, never got Bruce back his twenty fucking dollars.

I had to get to Urgent Care.

It burned like shit when I pissed.

            I glamorized this, too.

            My mom got crabs twice; the honeymoon disease more times than I can remember.

            Use it or lose it.

            Like she always said.

 

***

 

I began a campaign of panic once I saw the text from HH on my phone. I was scared what Bruce might do if he knew HH had texted me, if I didn’t delete it, if I saved it, instead, for sentimental reasons, if, God forbid, I wrote back. 

 

Redrum. Redrum.

 

 

***

 

The first time Bruce texted me “olive juice,” I had to look it up online, on urban dictionary; I didn’t have a clue what it meant, what he was referencing. 

            After that, I got at least one ‘olive juice’ text a day.

            Occasionally, I got as many as six, seven, eight.

 

Redrum. Redrum.

 

***

 

I don’t know what happened the time I was at my friend Nadine’s house, sobbing, telling her Bruce was most likely going to kill me if I didn’t sell my house and leave town immediately.

 

I terrified poor Nadine that afternoon at her lake. (HH’s text was still on my phone: tell-tale heart.)

 

The two of us had been sitting side by side in lounge chairs, enjoying a sliced cucumber, tzatziki, observing her dog’s interactions with the neighbor’s dogs, when I suddenly blurted out my inner running monologue about Bruce and my fears concerning him: my fears amounted to me wanting (maybe) to break up with him and him wanting (maybe) to kill me.

 

“You need to break things off, Elizabeth,” she said. “Stop having sex with him immediately.”

 

“Stop having sex?” I said, wide-eyed, astounded.

 

The sex was the last thing I wanted to stop. The sex was the only justification for the continuation of the fear.

 

I thought, inwardly, like Tennessee after hearing the critic’s complaints about his play, that this character (read: Nadine) probably had never had a good lay. (Nadine was reading a horrible book – Mating in Captivity; I’d seen it on the back of her toilet the last time I’d been inside. I knew it wasn’t true. I knew she’d had a good lay; that’s why she was reading this horrible book, because she remembered.)

 

I couldn’t make eye contact with Bruce without wanting to fuck him.

 

I couldn’t make eye contact with Nadine after she suggested I stop having sex with Bruce.

 

I dried my eyes after that, stood atop a paddle board while Nadine took my picture, trying to exemplify strength, trying to exemplify resiliency, intelligence, the type of woman who wouldn’t let a man take advantage of her, emotionally abuse her, control her, intimidate her into ‘good behavior.’

 

The next morning, I sent Nadine a text telling her I’d been all wrong, that it was just my past which had confused me (my BFE, Ohio past which included an assemblage of masculinely-toxic men), made me question Bruce’s intentions, made me (unjustifiably!) fearful of his potentials. I knew I sounded like every victim of abuse ever, making excuses, justifications.

 

But I didn’t want to stop having sex with Bruce.

 

Tennessee kept Pancho around two full years.

 

Bruce and I had only known each other three months so far.

 

***

 

I concocted a plan that night, on the way home from Nadine’s. Admittedly, it was a sick plan, and yet I was proud of myself for coming up with it, for the genius-level brainstorming it required, the craftiness and pure desire/determination for self-survival it was borne out of.

            I wouldn’t stand for being afraid in my own house.

            I refused to cower.

            I was pissed the fuck off, humming, ready for battle.

            I had a friend who lived in the basement of his parents’ house.

            My friend was, in many ways, in the ways that count for this story, feral.

            My friend’s parents had not socialized him. He had a master’s degree but couldn’t get a job. No one would hire him due to his feralness.

            My friend was completely devoted (to me), loyal like a once-feral, now-owned dog, willing to do whatever I asked. Also, he had an eagerness for violence. He’d confided in me. You know the type.

            My plan was to in some manner offer him money upon my death (though I knew I wouldn’t have to; I knew he’d do the job for free), in exchange for the killing of Bruce’s daughters. If my death was proven by his hands, of course! Whether or not Bruce killed himself  – wouldn’t matter. Death to the children! (Here, I feel compelled to note, the ‘real life Bruce’ doesn’t have two daughters; he has a single son. Could I potentially bring violence to more females? Even in an attempt at ensuring my own survival? I could not.)

            This was all I had to negotiate with.

            To explain to Bruce.

            How if he hurt me, the twins would be hurt – an eye for an eye.

            I knew Bruce didn’t value his own life enough to care if I threatened it.

            I knew the only way to get Bruce to take me seriously, to cause Bruce the same fear he was causing me, was to threaten his children.

            It was fucked up.

            Desperate.

            Sick.

            But it was all I had.

            And it made me feel better. Safer. I shook less in bed that night.

            I grinned, instead.

            I had something to work with.

            The same level of sickness.

            I was infected, now, too.

            I still wanted to fuck Bruce, but I refused, on feminist principle (!), to feel scared in my own. fucking. house.

 

***

 

Admittedly, I was guilty, on occasion, when bored, when feeling neglected by Bruce, when he hadn’t done anything crazy in a while – wept or acted out of jealousy or insecurity - of pushing his buttons, of creating drama. Like the time I sent the text I knew would upset him and then shut my phone off and went to bed.

            That was the sixteen-missed-phonecalls-sixteen-texts morning.

            I hadn’t wanted that much attention. I had fanned the flames and the flames had rose higher than I wanted, than I’d expected, than I knew what to do with, how to control …

           

 

***

 

I know I have done a (purposeful) disservice to Mulan Rouge here. (This isn’t an apology.)

            To counter this, I began painting a portrait of her based on the image of her on the phone with HH in her boudoir video, in her bed. It was the largest canvas I had worked on to date. I knew I could do a whole series of portraits just on Mulan Rouge. I knew she was infinitely fascinating just as HH was infinitely fascinating, just as Bruce was, just as I was, also. We were all interchangeably fascinating or not fascinating at all, depending on how you looked at it, your perspective, your appetites. Maybe this whole piece has been a complete bore to you, a real snoozefest.

            Not everyone can read Edie: American Girl or Warhol’s Diaries or Please Kill Me: the uncensored oral history of punk and give two and a half shits.

            I painted Mulan Rouge with care.

            I thought maybe probably Ryan Adams was an asshole.

            But I thought maybe probably I am an asshole, too.

            I thought maybe marriage was impossible, like my acupuncturist claimed: “Love is poison. Don’t love. Cherish.”

            I thought: were John and Yoko toxic? Codependent?

            I thought maybe the only way to be in love or to marry, either one/both, without coercive control of either party, was to live separately, to wake up alone, like Mulan Rouge, to wait expectantly for your lover to call, to remain in bed otherwise the entirety of the day doing opioids and making videos of yourself, art for nyc businessmen, pedophiles, politicians, Bill Clinton, la-la-la.

 

***

 

I always wanted to look like/to emulate Keith Richards until I read that Patti Smith had said she wanted to emulate him years and years and years ago…

            I made Travis Scott my ideal, instead.

            I didn’t have an interest in plumping or smoothing or blurring out lines. I craved sharp angles, sought harsh lighting. I wanted to evoke a person who doesn’t care, doesn’t look in mirrors. Lived. Flat-assed. I wanted to be cool like that. Like Travis Scott, rather than Kiley Jenner, rather than Kim Kardashian, rather than [fill in the blank social media-influencer female].

            It was the easiest, least cost way to be: not giving a fuck, not looking in mirrors.

            Image is everything but you decide the image.

            Kanye West in his MAGA hat on the stage at SNL was the most punk rock event of the last ten years.

 

 

***

 

I spent a year and a half writing letters to HH, taking his monthly phone calls, filling my garage and basement with abstract paintings of him, imagining a world with him. 

            Then he got out and I choked.

            I couldn’t fuck him.

            I froze.

            I wasn’t punk rock at all.

            We ate pizza; made out in the kitchen area of the music studio.

            It was an alright time.

            We smoked a lot of cigarettes, side by side on upside down plastic containers.

            He was still the coolest guy I know.

            My heart was still tender toward him.

            I listen to Elvis Presley songs whenever I think of him.

            I live with my decisions.

            Whatever.

 

***

 

I tried to be as frank and candid as I could. I told Bruce on several occasions I probably never wanted to get married again or even to live with a man again. (Nadine said I had to remove the word ‘probably’ from my sentences.) I told him I’d been with one man, off and on, for seventeen years, and I’d only recently liberated myself from him, from that repressive situation, and I wasn’t about to unliberate myself again any time soon for any man, not even him.

            Everything had been so easy in this regard with HH.

            During our very first phone call after he got out he told me, “I don’t know that I can offer you anything in way of a commitment…”

            And I’d stopped him right there. I’d sort of snickered, I guess.

            I’d said, “Oh, I don’t want a commitment.”
            “You don’t?” HH had said.

            “What would I want a commitment for?” I asked, rhetorically, rebelliously, with a certain level of self-satisfaction, pride. “I don’t need money or a child from a man. I don’t need anything.”

            “Oh,” HH had said.

            Maybe this was my first mistake, telling myself – and HH - I didn’t need him.

            Maybe I was making the same exact mistake with Bruce.

 

“Maybe I have been too cool and reserved – only my work held my heart. And I’ve had a way of evading emotional responsibility with people. The times they might have loved me I’ve slipped away.” –Tennessee Williams, writing in his diary …

 

 

***

 

All the way at the beginning of this story I made reference to my ‘give me liberty or give me death’ speech. I still don’t remember who the fuck said that. Paul Revere? Benjamin Franklin? It doesn’t matter. Another cancelled racist white guy. Who cares.

            We were in my basement on my couch. It was daytime. Three in the afternoon. When I felt safest. Safe telling Bruce my fears. Explaining to him my requirements, what I wouldn’t stand for, how I would make his kids vulnerable in whatever way he made me. I was sick – if demanding my own safety was a sickness; He may as well know it now.

 

            “So if you’re going to kill me, fucking kill me,” I said. “Because I refuse to live in fear. I refused to be scared in my own fucking house. I’d rather die. I’d rather be dead.”

            Bruce was sitting on the couch and I was splayed out on the ottoman, arms raised at my sides like Perry Farrell on the cover of some Jane’s Addiction album, like Jesus on the cross.

            Image is everything.

            I could hear myself. I sounded like a bitch. I didn’t care. That was the point.

            FUCK YOU, I was saying to Bruce, in so many words. HOW FUCKING DARE YOU.

            I blinked and Bruce was off the couch, on the floor, on his knees, at my feet. I couldn’t help comparing this scene in my basement to the one in HH’s office, when I had been the one on the floor, and later, HH.

            I was smoking a cigarette, a stand in for the whip tucked away somewhere in an upstairs drawer. Bruce was on his knees in a wife-beater, his arms bulging with muscle, a visual reminder he worked on his back, arms raised above him, dirty, grungy, sexy - fuck.

 

I tried not to make eye contact.

 

He was so fucking hot. In his wife-beater. His worn jeans. His head sweated. Cheeks flushed. Radiating vulnerability. My formerly cocky Brando now rendered weak, now at my mercy. I didn’t think Nadine had ever had a good lay. I couldn’t help thinking about Bruce’s cock. I wanted to make a cast of it - a parody of the caster cock molds from the 60s, famous rockers’ dicks: Jimi’s. Jim’s. Jimmy’s. Robert’s. Mick’s.

 

“I don’t want to take your liberty, baby,” Bruce said. “I know you are an artist, that you have a career, that you’re an independent woman …”

 

He’d started sobbing somewhere mid-speech.

 

I was dry-eyed, ashing. I felt as dominant as if he were tied to the bed. I circled it in my mind, plotted my next punishment.

 

“I’ve just never felt like this about anyone else in my life ever, baby,” he said. “It scares the fuck out of me, how much I care about you. I feel sick to my stomach when I’m not with you. I’m so sorry, baby. I would never hurt you. I would hurt myself a thousand times before I hurt you.”

 

He was on one knee, balancing, badly. He was wavering, shaking. Still sobbing.

I didn’t necessarily believe him; I didn’t know what to believe.

 

I was conscious, momentarily, of his calf tattoo I looked away.

 

I remembered something else Tennessee had said about being too cold, too committed to his writing, not emotionally vulnerable enough.

 

I didn’t particularly want to be too cold, anymore.

 

Tennessee and Iggy Pop and a million others had chosen their art over their lovers.

 

Patti Smith chose being a wife to Fred Smith, and Bebe Buell sobbed, at the loss of music the world would know because of this choice.

 

I’d already made the mistake of looking Bruce in the eye. My hand, now, was in his hair, as it’d been, once, in HH’s.

 

Bruce looked up at me, eyes wet, hair and forehead drenched, and I slid down onto the floor beside him. HH and I had never been on the floor at the same time. Earlier in the day, I’d deleted HH’s text message, but all his letters were still in my closet.

 

I was on my knees and my head was in Bruce’s lap and Bruce was stroking my hair, patting my head.

 

“Oh, baby,” he said. “Oh, my baby. My baby girl,” and I knew that I would never belong to anyone. And I knew that I was.