Hide and seek June 15, 1985

 

Back in Jersey from a short, frustrating vacation that proved nothing.

Louise is hidden somewhere around a lake surrounded by houses, and my luck wasn’t good enough for me to find her.

I didn’t have nerve enough to ask too many questions of too many people, scared she might find out, scared more that I might learn too much about who she is living with and what her current condition is.

The woman at the post office looked at me as if I was a racist when I asked her to put a note in Louise’s post office box.

I regret the note because it may spook Louise and cause her to flee again, perhaps as far as Portland the way she did last time.

She’ll move quickly to change her location and will suspect if I make a second trip of Moscow, I might actually find her.

She knows me too well. I’m always tempting fate, just as I did back in 78 when she pulled this crap the last time, when I had to go to court to win visitation, when she panicked, I might steal our kid away from here and fled to Portland.

I just don’t know how close I’ve come, and it hurts to think we’ve lost all the progress we made since those bad old days, back to the old mistrust, back to making me feel guilty for things I haven’t done.

This is all part of an ugly pattern I am desperate to break, she hiding, me searching aimlessly without luck.

She told me she got religion, and once mentioned a church, so I went there assuming she would come to service as some point, but after hours of standing around nearby, she never showed.

I suspect that without her cooperation, I might never find her, and certainly, won’t win her trust by hunting out her hiding place.

I’m scared that this pattern will plague us both until we’re old and gray, a child’s game of hide and seek we can’t give up on, she needing me only as someone to blame for how badly her life turned out, me needing her for reasons I can’t explain.

Maybe I’ve never been honest with her, going back to when we met at Nevins, and I liked about my age – she being a year and half older than I was – because I thought she would not take me seriously if she knew I was still 17. I also made up stories about myself to impress her, childish tales that painted me into something I was not and could never be, no matter how much I wished I could be.

She, on the other hand, told me real stories that horrified me, how she lost her virginity in a sleeping bag while sleeping out on Garret Mountain, how she as a cheerleader did more than cheer on the boys in high school when they took her under the bleachers, or how all her dates to the dark of the movie theater ended up the same way, and later, how shocked I was when she plunged deep into the LA porn industry and I was helpless to stop her.

She has always been too real to me. And I have always been a threat to her.

Last fall, when I took my daughter for a week, I found she was a stranger, someone I knew nothing about, only getting brief glimpses of her from the occasional visit to see her.

This scared me to death. This made me realize that if I do not do something soon, I might never know her at all.

And so, I search and search, hoping fate will make up for all my life long mistakes.

 

 1985 menu
email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An old nemesis December 11, 1985

Image
    Surisky hated me from early on in grammar school, although “hate” may be too strong a word to describe his reaction to me. I was simply available to him for abuse, Third grade was pivotal for both of us. Prior to that, we were simply feeling our way through Catholic School routine, emerging eventually as whole personalities from the muck of early childhood. He came across as a thug, trying to convey the image of a tough guy. He wore a leather jacket and spiked boots, and snuck into see James Dean movies. Third grade was tough on everybody, including the teachers, who considered us the worst class in the history of the school – even in the safe grades of Kindergarten, First and Second. Two of the three nuns retired after passing us on. But it was in the third grade that we began to work our magic, driving even the stout-hearted nuns crazy. Later, the nuns tried to break our spirit. But we fully represented our age and had the full impact of the 1960s behin...
Read more

The clock is ticking July 18, 1985

Image
  We’re talking love here – silly fictional love with all the connotations of disaster. I seem to be on the meat chopping block with Safire looking for qualities in me that are lacking in her husband. The fact that there is a husband in the first place greatly disturbs me. All this said, I’m uncertain as to why I haven’t ended this already, except to know she is too much like my ex-wife to pass up without a closer examination. Even the way she thinks: slow, methodical, going from point A to point B. It has only been a week since she blurted out drunk that she wanted me in bed. It seems like much longer. And she hints of something more permanent, suggesting that I might fill in for her husband for a much longer duration. The night before last she suggested I come see her in her trailer, as if she is legally separated from her husband, when in fact she is supposed to be biding time until he finds them both a place to live in Baltimore. This is the same kind of smoke and...
Read more

Pauly leaves Passaic for the final time July 24, 1985

Image
    Pauly is leaving Passaic again. This comes after two years of us rubbing shoulders after he had been cast out of paradise in Towaco, after his goddess, Jane, went and married that man Pauly calls “a bum.” This has been a tough two years, filled with Pauly’s typical manipulation, his usual shaping of reality to his own needs often at other people’s (mine) expense. When Pauly first came I had Fran’s cultist brother as a temporary guest and Pauly spent most of his time trying to push me into getting that guest out. A few months later – in November – Fran got the ax from her ex and changed her mind about moving in with me after I had committed the spare room to Pauly. He assumed she meant more to me than he did and was already packing when I told Fran no. She had no place to go except for her father’s house, a father she had a love/hate relationship with, and she held it against me, even though we continued to see each other romantically. Pauly being Pauly drove ...
Read more