Faith of fallacy? August 2, 1985
After ten letters, two stories and two magazines sent, Mary
Ann has yet to respond.
I suppose at 35 years of age, she has the right to hide,
cutting ties to those of us in the east.
Maybe I’ve given her reason, offending her with my letters
and stories, although I get the nagging feeling that it may well have to do
with the company she currently keeps.
While I may have offended her sensibilities, I keep hearing
Johnny’s rasping voice complaining about Mary Ann’s books.
“I won’t have the devil influence our child,” he said.
Even Mary Ann seemed to believe her move west would be best
for all concerned; she could not pass up this opportunity to help her husband
and her child.
Yet the feeling she’s been snagged persists – not just by
Johnny, who had miraculously converted from a down-and-out Junkie into a
husband, but by his mother who has insisted on tagging along.
The mother seems to see Mary Ann as a prize she fears her
son might spoil without her help to retain it.
I’m not putting Johnny down. On the surface, he seems a genuinely
sincere person. But underneath, there are other Johnnys, less honest, less
well-meaning, each of them feeding off the equally multiple personalities Mary
Ann has.
There is the innocent Johnny, who loves eating candy while
watching Conan movies. There is the drug addict Johnny, who professes to have
given up his habit, yest smokes dope like a fiend.
As much as Johnny professes his faith in God, he seems to
have a deeper faith in the needle, consumed by its deeper spirit.
Not much got said in the days leading up to their departure
last spring; but Mary Ann hinted that over the last four years since that hell
year of 81, Johnny still drank an occasional draught from that glass of wine –
a scary thought since it suggested he’ll be carrying that weight with him wherever
he goes.
He might slip back into the old pattern at any time, faith
in God or not, and strangely, stringing these occasional draughts he strings
Mary Ann along out of fear and sympathy – feeling she will always need to save
him from himself.
Johnny’s mother has always struck me as a bad apple, hiding real
evil behind her faith, manipulating everything from behind the scenes,
whispering polluted words of wisdom in the ears of both Johnny and Mary Ann.
Her vibe scared me the first time I met her and only got
worse since.
The woman didn’t like me either, though always smiled and
pretended she did. I think she hated my alternative influence on Mary Ann, someone
who might give conflicting advice. Or perhaps, she was me as competing with
Johnny for Mary Ann’s affections.
She always clutched her Bible whenever I showed up, glaring
at me when I departed.
Mary Ann saw her help as invaluable, not the invasion I saw,
as Johnny’s loyal companion, the babysitter for their child, and a constant companion
for that small family.
But the more Mary Ann leaned on her, the more control she
had over Mary Ann.
When Mary Ann went back to work, she could not get by
without Johnny’s mother’s help.
Now, with the family isolated in the west, she has told control,
and could possibly be discouraging continued contact with those of us back east
she fears, feeding Mary Ann tall tales about how sinful her old life was, and
how she needed to give it all up completely.
Mary Ann is a romantic, explaining how she got sucked up
into this mess, seeing what she wanted to see in Johnny and later his mother,
rather than what was.
She almost seems bewitched, at first, by Johnny’s romantic
letters to her from jail, and now by the illusion that she can make up for a
bad decision by isolating herself from anybody and anything that disagrees with
that fantasy, hiding the truth behind a mask of religious faith – a faith I
attacked with my art.
No wonder she isn’t writing me back.
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